Guns

Four

It had stopped raining by the time he got down to the street again.

He had hung his socks up to dry in the bathroom, and had also left a note for his mother on the kitchen table so she wouldn’t come in the house and drop dead of a heart attack when she saw a pair of men’s socks in the bathroom. The rain had washed the streets clean, washed away the contained heat of the day as well; everything smelled fresh and clean and sweet. He could remember when he was a kid in Harlem, stomping around barefooted in the gutter rainwater. He could remember shooting immies after a summer storm, spanning the marbles in curbside puddles.

He could remember, too... Yeah, it had been raining that afternoon, yeah. This was in the Bronx, he was just sixteen, this was after he’d joined the Orioles, that first summer with the club. It was Benny who brought the girl around. She lived four or five blocks from the clubhouse, she was maybe fourteen. When Benny brought her down the basement that afternoon, she was wearing a miniskirt and a cotton blouse; there was a button missing on the blouse, he could still remember the blouse flaring open over a white brassiere underneath. She and Benny stood just inside the basement door. The record player was going. “This is Laurie,” Benny said. “Laurie likes to fuck, don’t you, Laurie?”

The girl was, well, like a little retarded. They took off her blouse and played with her tits, she had very big tits, and then they took off her panties and one after the other they fucked her on the sofa, her skirt bunched up around her waist, while the Beatles sang their little hearts out. There were six guys in the clubhouse that afternoon. Four of them were virgins, including Colley. It was raining when it got to be his turn. Colley was the third one with her. Ernie, the president, went first of course. Then the war counselor, Benny. Then Colley, who was sergeant at arms, in charge of breaking heads with baseball bats if guys didn’t pay attention, or smoked dope, or chickened out when the shit was on with another club. The girl giggled all the while he was fucking her, and the rain beat against the painted basement windows. Colley felt embarrassed later on.

The girl’s father came down the club the next day, big ginzo could hardly speak English, Colley didn’t think there were still greaseballs like that around. Big wop kept yelling they’d taken advantage of his innocent daughter. “You take anvage my Laura,” he screamed, goddamn sanitation man, still wearing the brownish-green uniform trousers and an underwear top, came there straight from work to protect his daughter’s honor, stopping home first to take off his shirt and grab a quick glass of courage-bolstering wine, which the Orioles could smell on his breath as he stamped around the clubhouse making threatening noises. Ernie told him he should take better care of his daughter if he didn’t want her to get fucked, and then he told the wop to get out of the clubhouse before somebody shot him. Colley was sitting on the sofa, tossing the small .25-caliber pistol on the palm of his hand. The wop looked at the gun and then yelled that he was going to do something about this, and off he went huffing and puffing. He never did do anything about it cause he was afraid the Orioles would come after him, and also he didn’t want it known around the neighborhood that his moron daughter had been gang-banged.

Colley walked through the rain.

He wasn’t sure where he wanted to go or what he wanted to do. It was close to two in the morning, the streets were rain-slick and almost deserted, except for some black dudes shuffling along with that sideways glide they thought was cool, elevator shoes, big pimp hats even though none of them were booking pussy. Thought it looked cool to resemble pimps. Take a man like Benny, he was a pimp, but he looked like your Uncle Dominick come to play the mandolin on Sunday.

It was funny the way most of the guys in the club grew up to be just what you expected. Benny was always bringing girls around, and now Benny was a pimp. Ernie was always looking for a fight — big hands on him, swollen knuckles — and now Ernie was a heavyweight boxer, fought under the name of Ernie Pass, which was short for Ernie Passaro. And Duke, who they’d kicked off the club for shooting dope, he turned into a full-time junkie, later kicked the habit cold turkey and began pushing the stuff. He got busted just after Rockefeller changed the laws in New York State; you ever saw Duke again, he’d be eighty-five years old with a long white beard. Duke’s mother still went up to see him every month in Sing Sing. Some fuckin trip up there, Colley’s own mother used to come up when he was doing his three-to-seven for...

There.

There it was.

Exactly what he meant about guys turning out just the way you expected — including himself. On the Orioles, he’d made his rep with a gun. Reason they’d come around kissing his ass was because he’d stuck that gun up Benny’s nose and was ready to pull the trigger. Would have done it, too, anybody’d given him any shit that day. First time he got busted was because of a gun. That was January, the winter after he’d joined the Orioles. The shit was on with another club named the Dragons, bunch of spies who could hardly speak English, they had these silk jackets made up with a dragon curling all over the back, you’d think it was a fuckin Chink gang instead. Kid on the club was named Macho. He gave himself the name, it was supposed to mean he had balls. Macho came around one day, said something to one of the girls. Sounded her. Petie was sitting right on the stoop, this was in front of the clubhouse. He heard what Macho said to the girl, he jumped up off the stoop. “Hey,” he said to the spic, “watch your mouth, you hear me?”

Macho didn’t say a word. Macho pulled a blade and stuck it in Petie clear up to the handle. They had to take Petie to the hospital, put seven stitches in his side. After that, the shit was on, and the one they were especially looking to get was Macho.

That January, Colley was still carrying the .25 he’d bought the summer before. It wasn’t a bad piece. You got some of those Saturday-night specials, they fell apart in your hand first time you used them, or they blew up in your face, whatever the hell. That’s because they were made so cheap. This one wasn’t a bad pistol. It was called an Astra Firecat, and it was made in Spain and imported by Firearms International. It cost about thirty dollars brand-new; Colley had bought it secondhand from the black kid who was stealing band instruments, but it cost him thirty dollars anyway. On the grip, down near the bottom, the word FIRECAT was stamped into the metal. It wasn’t a bad name, and it wasn’t a bad gun, either. Or at least that’s what Colley thought at the time, when he was still a kid and getting used to guns. It was the Firecat that Colley had shoved under Benny’s nose. It was the Firecat that he’d tossed in the palm of his hand the day Laurie’s greaseball father came down the club yelling. It was the Firecat he used to shoot Macho in the throat one January night.

Colley was sixteen years old; he had turned sixteen in July. July the fourteenth, that was his birthday. He told everybody he met that he was born on Bastille Day. Hardly anybody knew what the fuck he meant. Only one guy in prison, guy named Brenet, whose mother and father had come here from France, knew what Bastille Day was. They were in the laundry working, Colley had this job in the laundry at the time, he mentioned to Brenet that he was born on Bastille Day. Fuckin dope started singing the Marseillaise at the top of his lungs, pig comes over, says, “Hey, what’s going on here?”

“It’s a code,” Brenet tells the pig. “We’re planning a break, and we’re singing about it in code.”

“What are you, a wise guy?” the pig says, but his eyes are slitted and there’s a suspicious look on his face. He doesn’t know whether to believe Brenet or not. Brenet nudges Colley in the ribs and says, “Seven o’clock, pass it on.” Colley takes a chance on the pig having a sense of humor. “Seven o’clock,” he says to the pig, “pass it on,” but he doesn’t nudge him in the ribs. Nudge a pig, he’s liable to nudge you back with his stick and throw you in the shifter for a month. “Very funny,” the pig says.

Sing Sing was always a barrel full of laughs.

Colley missed going to prison when he was sixteen only because a judge took pity on him. Peered down from behind his bench and his spectacles, saw clean-cut Nicholas Donato in his blue-serge Communion suit, looking up at him out of his baby browns, decided to suspend sentence instead of sending him away. The crime they’d charged Colley with, rightfully, was second-degree assault. If he’d been a bona-fide adult, the crime was punishable by five years in a state penitentiary, or a fine of a thousand dollars, or both. But Colley was a “young adult,” defined in the Penal Law as someone who was more than sixteen but not yet twenty-one, and if he’d been convicted of second-degree assault, he would have been sentenced instead to a reformatory for “a period of unspecified duration, to commence and terminate as provided in PL 75.10.” In such a case the court would not have fixed a minimum or maximum sentence. That was good. Even better than that, Colley’s lawyer thought, would be for him to plead guilty to the lesser charge of third-degree assault.

The assistant district attorney prosecuting the case was of Hispanic heritage, just like his client Luis Josafat Albareda; Colley learned Macho’s real name only after he’d shot him. The assistant D.A. told Colley’s lawyer that whereas criminal law was most assuredly the bargain basement of the legal profession, he would not allow Colley to cop a third-degree assault plea, not when a weapon was involved, not when a .25-caliber pistol had been used to shoot poor Luis Josafat in the throat, causing him to lie bleeding in the snow for three hours without proper medical attention — that was because Colley had planned his ambush well, catching Macho in a deserted alleyway that ran between two apartment houses.

“Hey! Macho!”

Macho turned and was already reaching for his blade when Colley opened up. He fired twice. The first shot missed him. The bullet hit the alleyway wall and sent a piece of brick flying into the air, and then went ricocheting, zing, zing, zing, and Colley pulled off the second shot and blood began spurting out of Macho’s neck.

The assistant district attorney argued that poor Luis Josafat had lost part of his larynx because of the shooting, and now spoke through a voice box — “this fine boy who is only seventeen years of age will have to go the rest of his life in this handicap position,” the assistant district attorney said, sounding very much like Pancho Villa, and actually getting a laugh from Colley’s attorney, who quickly covered his mouth with his plump little hand. When it was pointed out to the assistant D.A. that poor Luis Josafat was a kid who’d himself been arrested many times for crimes ranging from possession of narcotics to attempted rape to burglary to assault, the assistant D.A. decided to forsake Hispanic fealty in favor of job security, and promptly agreed to the lesser charge.

The judge was Italian; that didn’t hurt either.

“Colley? Is that you?” the voice said.

He stopped stock-still in the center of the sidewalk.

“Colley?” she said.

“Yes?”

“Colley?”

It was getting to be like one of his grandfather’s operas. All right already, he thought. It’s Colley. So who the fuck are you?

“Terry,” she said.

He looked. Tires hissed against the rain-slick asphalt.

“Terry,” she said again.

In the neon stillness, steam escaped from a curbside sewer. Jesus Christ, he thought. She looked... Jesus Christ. The last time he’d seen her was four years ago... was it five? The year before he got busted for armed robbery when the fuck was that? How could he forget the year, the month, the day, the exact hour and minute, the squad car pulling to the curb as he ran for his own car, “Hold it, motherfucker,” nice language for a police officer. “Hold it!” and they threw him up against the wall, and tossed him, and one of them found the pistol where he’d thrown it in the gutter the minute he heard the cop yelling at him. Four years ago this September eleventh. And a year before that, Teresa Brufani had left for Vermont. She’d been twenty at the time, he’d been twenty-four. He looked at her now. He knew she was Terry, she had just told him as much. Otherwise, he would not have known her.

He remembered her hair as brown and soft; he would cradle her face in both hands, and she would lean over him and her hair would cascade over his own face, and she would bend her lips to his. The hair was blond now, clipped close to her head in a mannish cut. Huge gold earrings on her ears. Blue eyeshadow on her lids, lipstick gash on her mouth. She had never worn makeup when he’d known her years ago, not even lipstick.

She was wearing a black trenchcoat, the collar high on the back of her neck, the belt pulled tight at her waist. She had on platform shoes that easily added two inches to her height; he felt short in her presence when always before he had felt much taller. She was smoking a cigarette, and she dropped it to the sidewalk at once, and stepped on it even though it hissed out immediately against the wet pavement. He remembered that once, long ago, he had objected to her smoking, and she had given it up for him. He himself smoked two packs a day. But she had given it up for him. He remembered everything about her in that instant.

“Hello, Terry,” he said.

They stood some four feet apart from each other, looking at each other, the steam from the sewer drifting across the sidewalk between them. They had been intimate for close to three years, and then she had gone to Vermont, and he had continued doing what she said she could not bear, and eventually he’d got busted for doing it. Seven years, the judge had said. Tough shit, next case. Now they stood four feet apart from each other on the sidewalk, five years apart, a century apart. They would not touch, they would not move toward each other, they stood looking at each other like strangers, which they were, looking at each other through the steam.

“Hey,” she said.

“How you doing?” he said.

“Great,” she said. “Great.”

“I thought you were in Vermont.”

“No.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“I’ve been back since May.”

“Well,” he said.

“Boy,” she said, “running into you like this.”

“Yeah,” he said.

“You want to buy me a drink, or...”

“Yeah, sure,” he said, “sure.”

“Or you want to just stand here all night?”

“No, yeah, I want to buy you a drink. Hey, how about this, huh?”

He took her by the elbow and they walked up the street to the Blue Moon. There were three black dudes on the sidewalk, they looked Terry up and down. This was the old days, Colley’d call the Orioles out, those fuckin niggers’d be in the hospital in a minute. He gave them a dirty look. One of the niggers laughed as though his buddy had cracked a joke. Colley gave him another dirty look, and he turned away. Inside, the juke box was going. A rock song, Colley didn’t recognize the tune or the group. You grow up, you don’t know who’s playing what any more. There was a mixed crowd in the place — white, black, a few Puerto Ricans. Colley found a booth too near the kitchen and too near the juke.

“This okay?” he said.

“Yeah, sure,” she said.

“It ain’t too near the kitchen, is it?”

“No, no, it’s fine.”

“Cause I hate cooking smells,” he said.

“Yeah, but I don’t see anything else, do you?”

“No,” he said.

“So fine,” she said, and grinned, “What’re we gonna do? It’s the only game in town.”

“Right,” he said, and returned the grin, and helped her out of the coat. He was surprised at what she was wearing underneath. She was dressed like for a party. One of those clinging synthetic fabrics, cut very low in the front and high on the knee, scalloped edge to the skirt, long sleeves. Green.

“You been out?” he said.

“Huh?” she said.

“You’re all dressed up.”

“Oh. Yeah,” she said.

He hung up the coat, and they sat opposite each other in the booth. Colley looked around for a waiter. A black guy was leaning against the juke box, looking over the selections. In the booth across the aisle, a black girl was sitting with two black dudes. She waggled her fingers at Terry, and Terry waggled her fingers back.

“Who’s that?” Colley asked.

“Friend of mine,” Terry said.

“You living around here now?”

“Yes,” she said.

“How was it up there in Vermont?”

“It was pretty good.”

“So why’d you come back?”

“I got tired of it.”

“What were you doing up there, anyway?” he said, and tried to catch the waiter’s eye.

“We had a shop,” Terry said.

“Who’s we?”

“Me, and two other girls, and three guys. We made things and sold them in the shop.”

“What kind of things?”

“You know. Rings, enameled pins, and necklaces...”

“Oh, it was a jewelry store,” Colley said.

“No, no, we sold other things, too. Place mats, you know, and silk-screened T-shirts, and sandals. We all made things and sold them in the shop.”

“What’d you make?”

“Me? I made these— There was this boy came through with beads he’d bought in Iran. We bought the beads from him and I made necklaces out of them.”

“Was there money in that?”

“Not a lot of money, but enough to live on.”

“But you got tired of it, huh?”

“Yeah,” Terry said, and nodded.

“Hey, over here,” Colley said, and snapped his fingers at the waiter. The waiter came over to the table.

“How’s it going?” he said to Terry.

“Not bad,” she said.

“What do you want to drink?” Colley asked.

“The usual,” she said.

Colley looked at her.

“How about you?” the waiter said.

“I’ll have a Dewar’s and water,” he said. The waiter walked away. “You come here a lot?” Colley asked.

“Since I been back,” Terry said, and nodded. “So what’ve you been doing?” she asked. “When did you get out of jail?”

“Just before Christmas.”

“You on parole, or what?”

“Yeah, I’m supposed to be on parole.”

“What does that mean, supposed to be?”

“Well, I don’t go see the parole officer.”

“Can’t you get in trouble for that?”

“Sure,” he said. “But you can get in trouble just crossing the street, am I right?”

“They could send you back to jail, though, couldn’t they? For not going to the parole officer?”

“Yeah.”

“So why don’t you go?”

“I don’t want to,” he said.

“You really should go.”

“This sounds like old times,” he said. “When was it — four, five years ago? You were always bugging me to get out of it.”

“You should have got out of it.”

“Sure, sure,” he said.

“You got busted, didn’t you?”

“That was just a bad break.”

The waiter brought their drinks. Terry’s “usual” was a shot glass of whiskey with a tumbler of water on the side. She lifted the shot glass, winked at Colley over it, and then tossed back the shot.

“You drink it straight now, huh?” he said.

“Yeah,” she said, and picked up the water tumbler.

They were silent for several moments. Colley was finding it difficult to think of anything to talk about. Last time he was with her, she’d told him she was going up to Vermont. He’d wanted to know why she was going all the way up there, and she’d told him she wanted to get away from him. If he quit what he was doing, she wouldn’t go. But if he continued... Listen, he’d said, go, stay, do whatever the fuck you want, I ain’t changing my life style for nobody. He looked at her now. She smiled at him over the water tumbler. Then she put down the glass, opened her bag, and took out a pack of cigarettes.

“I see you’re back on the weed,” he said.

“Yeah,” she said, and struck a match and held it to the end of the cigarette. She blew the smoke up at the ceiling, and then leaned back in the booth, one arm resting on the leatherette top, the other bent, her elbow on the table, the cigarette trailing smoke. “How was prison?” she said.

“Lousy,” he said. “How you think it was?”

“Where were you, anyway?”

“Sing Sing.”

“That’s supposed to be a good one,” she said.

“There ain’t no good ones,” he said.

“That’s where Di Santo got sent,” she said. “He told me it was a good one.”

“Di Santo got sent to Attica.”

“No, Sing Sing.”

“Attica, don’t tell me. It was Attica.”

“Where’s that?”

“That’s in New York, too.”

“Well, wherever. Di Santo said it was a good one.”

“It’s worse than Sing Sing. That’s where they had all the riots, few years back. Where a lot of guys got killed.”

“That must’ve been while I was in Vermont,” she said. “I hardly even read a newspaper while I was up there. We didn’t even have a radio in the house.”

“Who’s we?”

“Me and the other kids. We all lived together in this old run-down house we were renting.”

“What were you, like hippies or something?”

“No, no,” Terry said, and shrugged. “We just lived together, is all.”

“Three guys and three girls,” Colley said.

“Yeah.”

“What did they have, these guys? Long hair?”

“Yeah.”

“Beards?”

“Yeah.”

“So they were hippies, right?”

“Look, call them what you want, okay?”

“I’m calling them what they were. Hippies is what they were. What’d you do up there all the time? Smoke dope all the time?”

“Yeah, we smoked dope all the time,” Terry said, and sighed. “And had orgies.”

“What?” Colley said.

“On Tuesdays,” she said.

“What?”

“We had orgies on Tuesdays,” she said. “All day Tuesday. That was the orgy day.”

“I’m trying to be serious, and you’re kidding around,” he said. “You left the Bronx, you were a nice girl, you didn’t even know what the fuck a marijuana cigarette was. So you go up there to Vermont with those fuckin hippies, and all of a sudden you—”

“I went up there because you wouldn’t stop what you were doing.”

“You can’t expect a man to change his way of—”

“You were a crook, Colley,” she said.

“That’s right. I was a crook,” he said. “I still am, you want to know. Right.”

“Right. And I didn’t want to be around when they busted you. It was as simple as that. The way you were going, I knew it was just a matter of time before they busted you. So I went to Vermont. Because I loved you,” she said, and the table went silent, the bar went silent, the street went silent, the entire world went silent.

“Well,” he said.

“Yes,” she said.

Their voices were softer now. She had reminded him that she had loved him, and perhaps it no longer meant anything to him, perhaps people do not want to hear that once they were loved, perhaps all they want to hear is that they are loved, here and now, in the present, never mind the fuckin past; but she had loved him, she had just told him she’d loved him once upon a time, long, long ago.

“I loved you, too,” he said. The words sounded strange to him. The moment they left his mouth, he wished he hadn’t said them. He felt suddenly in danger for having said them. He did not even know this blonde with the butch haircut and the dress cut so low you could almost see her nipples. Green eyeshadow on her eyes, lips a bright painted red, cigarette smoke trailing up past her face. “That was a long time ago,” he added quickly.

“Yes,” she said. “People change,” she said. “But I can still remember.”

“Sure,” he said, and nodded. His glass was empty, he wanted another drink. He signaled to the waiter, and when he came to the table he ordered a double this time, and asked Terry if she wanted anything, and she said she wouldn’t mind. They were silent until the waiter brought the drinks, as though neither of them was willing to explore the territory that had just been opened. The moment the waiter put the drinks down, they reached for the glasses. Terry again swallowed the shot in a single gulp and then picked up the tumbler and sipped at the water. Colley took a large swallow and then set his glass down.

“Do you remember the time we went to Coney Island,” she said, “and the Ferris wheel got stuck, and we were up there for close to three hours? Do you remember that, Colley?”

“Yes, I remember that,” he said. He sipped at his drink and listened to her as she described a sky full of stars, the lights of the amusement park below, the sound of music from the calliope, the breeze blowing in off the Atlantic. They had held hands and talked about the future. Trapped on the Ferris wheel, he had promised for perhaps the tenth time that he would quit doing robberies. The promise had moved her to tears, and they had sat there swinging in the chair at the top of the wheel, and had talked about when the wedding would take place, and what kind of straight job Colley might get, and where they would live — should they stay in the Bronx, or maybe move to Mt. Vernon or even further up? He was lying even then. He had planned and cased a job for the very next night, and he knew he would go through with it, whatever he promised her tonight on this wheel. He wanted to reach up and touch the stars.

He had stolen her from Ernie, she used to be Ernie’s girl. Ernie was already boxing by then, this was two years after the club broke up, the Duke had already turned junkie, and had kicked the habit, and was pushing the stuff; everybody said he had Mafia connections, but Colley doubted it. Benny already had himself two girls by then, both experienced pros who were bringing in enough cash every week to keep him living pretty good. His ambition, he told Colley, was to have a string of twelve girls, be a gentleman of leisure. Colley told him it’d take a better man than Benny to control a dozen girls, and Benny threw him the arm salute. Colley himself had already done a dozen or more robberies and was beginning to make a good living at it. He sounded Benny about coming in with him, said he could use a good driver. Benny said he would rather stick to his girls. That was how the situation stood when Colley met Terry.

He met her when she was seventeen and he was twenty-one; she was engaged to Ernie Pass at the time. They were all calling him Ernie Pass by then because he was boxing professionally, was in fact on the road all the time, fighting in tank towns, which was how come Terry Brufani was alone so much of the time. Colley met her at a confirmation party, a big ginzo affair, ham sandwiches and beer in a hall on Westchester Avenue, one of his cousins three or four times removed. The Brufani family had been invited, too, and there she was — Terry Brufani, seventeen years old, ripe as a Sicilian olive. They danced together the whole night, but when he asked her if she’d like to go see a movie or something next Saturday, she told him she was engaged to Ernie Pass.

“Do you know him?” she said. “Ernie Pass, the prize fighter?”

“Yes, I know him,” Colley said, “I once broke his head.”

He checked with the guys the next day, and they all told him it was true; she was engaged to Ernie, they planned to get married in the spring. Colley said, “That’s very interesting to know,” and he went to the candy store and looked up her phone number and called her up. Her mother told him she was at work. He asked where she worked, and Mrs. Brufani said in the bank on Fordham Road and Jerome Avenue. Colley looked at his watch. It was two o’clock. When Terry came out of the bank at three, he was waiting for her on the sidewalk. That night he took her to bed with him in a motel on the Post Road, up past Parkchester. She wasn’t a virgin, he didn’t know anybody who was a virgin. She told him Ernie would kill them both if he found out.

He didn’t wait for Ernie to find out. In Colley’s experience, the guy who picked up the marbles was the guy who made the first move. You went into a grocery store to rob the place, you didn’t wait for the guy behind the counter to pull out a shotgun. You stuck the pistol in his face, you told him shut up or he was dead. That was the way he’d done it the first time, and that was the way he was still doing it. The first place he’d held up was a pawnshop on Tremont Avenue. He went in there thinking he would get himself a good camera. This was when he was nineteen. He had got off with the suspended sentence on shooting the spic in the throat, and he had met all his obligations, and the record was clean. They still had the club, but there wasn’t much bopping any more, and the younger kids were beginning to take over. By the time him and Benny and Duke and Ernie were nineteen, twenty, the younger kids were beginning to think of them as old men. Some of the guys — Jimmy Giglio and Petie Sanero — were already married. One guy, Angelo Di Santo, was doing time in Attica.

Colley decided he needed a camera, and he also decided he was going to go into a camera store and shove a gun in the man’s face and steal the camera. Then he decided instead he would go in a pawnshop, and he picked the one on Tremont Avenue. When he got inside there, he told the man to shut up, this was a stickup, but for some reason he didn’t ask for a camera, he instead asked the man to give him all the money in the cash register. He came away from the job with eight hundred dollars and some change. He never knew why he’d done that first robbery, or why he continued sticking up places.

When they had the club, they occasionally shook down kids for nickels and dimes, and of course they were always shoplifting in this or that store. But Di Santo was the only guy in the club who had really been into it, you know, into real crime. Not bullshit stuff like pushing dope or running a stable of hookers or taking numbers bets, like Jimmy was doing even though he was already married. Di Santo had been doing burglaries before he got busted and sent to Attica. What they got him for was burglary one, he was going to be up there in Attica a long, long time. Colley often tried to remember how he’d felt that day of the first robbery, what had gone through his head before he’d done it. His motivation, you know. All he could remember was that he really wanted a camera bad. And he’d decided to steal one. And he’d decided to use a gun. But then, why had he picked a pawnshop instead of a camera store? And why had he taken money instead of a camera? He couldn’t figure it out. He never could figure it out.

The thing with Ernie Pass came to a head when Ernie got back from some town upstate where he was on a double bill with a black fighter named Tornado Jackson, who incidentally had belonged to a club named the Scorpions, which the Orioles had gone up against many times in the past. Colley didn’t wait for Ernie to come to him. He knew Ernie would have heard about him and Terry by now, so he went straight up to Ernie’s house. Mrs. Passaro was in the kitchen, standing at the stove, roasting peppers over the gas jets.

“Hey, hello, Colley,” she said. “You never come around no more.”

Mrs. Passaro said that to all the guys who used to be in the club. She took it as a personal insult that none of the guys stopped in to talk to her or have a glass of milk in her kitchen now that Ernie was a boxer and on the road all the time.

“Where’s Ernie?” Colley said.

“In his room,” Mrs. Passaro said, and gestured with her head toward the doorway leading out of the kitchen. Colley knew where Ernie’s room was; when they were kids he’d go up there early in the morning, wake Ernie up, then both of them would go around getting all the other guys.

Ernie was awake now and listening to the radio. This was maybe ten o’clock in the morning, a shaft of sunlight was coming through the window next to Ernie’s bed. There were pictures of him all over the wall, boxing pictures — Ernie with his gloved left hand tucked under his chin, right hand cocked to deliver the knockout punch, Ernie posing with the big bag, Ernie with his arm around the guy who was his manager, Jew named Oscar Holmes, who had changed it from Horowitz. There were also three-sheets on the wall, printed in red and blue, announcing the bill wherever Ernie happened to be fighting. The three-sheet in the center of all the others announced Ernie at the very bottom of the bill in St. Nicholas Arena. That was probably the biggest fight he’d ever had. He’d lost it, incidentally.

Colley got straight to the point. “Ernie,” he said, “I want to tell you this before you hear it from any—”

“I already heard it,” Ernie said.

“About me and...?”

“You’re doing me a favor,” Ernie said. “You’re welcome to her. I been racking my brain trying to figure how I could ditch her. I met this girl in Albany, I’ve been going with her for three months now.”

“Well, okay then,” Colley said.

He’d been expecting trouble, but everything was cool. He never did find out whether Ernie really did have a girl in Albany, or whether he was just shining it on, trying to avoid trouble himself. Either way, Terry was now officially his. It was just like taking money from some guy’s cash register. Before you stole it, the money was his; after that, it became yours. Terry became his the morning he went up to Ernie’s house; that made it official. On the way out, Mrs. Passaro said, “You want some chocolate pudding? I made some nice chocolate pudding.”

He sat down at the kitchen table and had some chocolate pudding. From Ernie’s room, he could hear the radio going. He had the feeling something was ending that day.

The black girl sitting in the booth across the way from them came over to the table, interrupting Terry’s story about the night they were trapped on the Ferris wheel. She whispered a few words to Terry, and Terry nodded, and the black girl went back to sit with the two black dudes in the booth.

“I have to go now,” Terry said, putting her cigarettes in her bag, and closing the bag, and sliding out of the booth. “It was nice seeing you again. Say hello to your mother for me, will you?”

“Hey, where you going?” Colley said.

“Thanks for the drinks,” Terry said, and went over to the other booth.

“Hey!” Colley said.

The black dudes were standing now. One of them was looking Terry up and down, Colley felt like going over and punching the guy out. The black girl introduced them to Terry, and the dude who’d been looking her over put his arm around her, his fingers spread on her hip. Colley looked at the black girl, trying to place her. He suddenly realized she was the hooker who’d made the kissing sound in his mother’s doorway earlier tonight.

He watched as Terry and the black girl went off with the two black dudes.

Jesus, he thought.

No, he was wrong.

Jesus.

He ordered another drink and sat there drinking alone in the booth, listening to tunes he couldn’t remember, imagining things that probably weren’t true — she probably just knew the girl to talk to, but the girl was a hooker, the girl had made kissing sounds in his mother’s doorway. And the dress Terry was wearing, a party dress, this was Saturday night, true enough, but she’d been alone on the street at close to two in the morning, wearing a long-sleeved party dress — were the long sleeves covering tread marks on her arms, was she a junkie like almost every other hooker Colley knew in the world? No, he thought, hey, come on, she ain’t a junkie, she ain’t even a hooker, she probably just knows that girl, she’d told him up front the girl was a friend, hadn’t she? When the girl waved to her? Sure, she had. Hell, his own mother had black ladies in for coffee, so why shouldn’t Terry know a black girl, the whole fucking neighborhood was turning black, it was only natural to know black people if you lived around here. But the girl had made kissing sounds.

He suddenly had to take a piss. He got up from the table, surprised to find his legs unsteady under him — had he had that much to drink again? There were three black guys in the men’s room. He always felt nervous when he went in a men’s room and there were other guys in there leaning against the sinks smoking or talking — especially when they were black. He went into one of the booths and locked the door behind him, and unzipped his fly and took out his cock. Standing there with his cock in his hand, he began pissing into the bowl, and he began weeping because Terry was a whore, Terry was a junkie whore, and oh, Jesus, he stood there weeping and pissing, and he continued weeping long after the stream of urine stopped, stood there with his cock in his hand, looking down into the bowl and weeping.

At last he shook out his cock and put it back in his pants, and zipped up his fly, and wiped his eyes dry, and thought Jesus, Terry’s a hooker, Jesus, she went off with those two guys, Jesus. He washed his hands and face at the sink, and he thought again of Terry back when they were kids — but no, we couldn’t call ourselves kids, he thought. She was twenty and I was twenty-four, and that wasn’t kids, but Jesus, how did I get so old so fast?

He went out of the men’s room and over to the bar and climbed up on a leatherette stool alongside a black girl who was probably a whore just like Terry and her friend. He didn’t say a word to her. He ordered another double, and when it came he sipped at it slowly. He didn’t want to get too drunk. He suspected he was already too drunk, but he didn’t want to get any drunker. The girl kept looking him over as if she was trying to decide whether he wanted a piece of ass or not, and then finally she said, “You got a match?”

He looked at her, and he said, “What are you, a hooker?”

“Yes,” she said. “You got a match?”

“You want a match, or you looking for a john, which is it?”

“Right now, I want a match,” she said.

“Here’s a match,” he said, and he took the book from his pocket and struck a match and held it to the tip of her cigarette.

“Thanks,” she said.

“You know Terry Brufani?” he asked.

“No, I don’t know Terry Brufani,” she said. “Who’s that?”

“A hooker,” he said. “Like you.”

“No, I don’t know her.”

“What the fuck do you know?” he said. “You don’t know nothin. What are you?” he said. “A junkie?”

“What difference does it make?” she said.

“No difference. Whole fuckin world’s full of junkies and hookers and fuckin armed robbers, what’s the difference?”

“No difference,” she said.

“None,” he said. “Right.”

“Right,” she said.

“And burglars,” he said.

“What?”

“In the world. Burglars.”

“Right,” she said.

It occurred to him that this was the second time he’d been drunk in four or five hours, six hours — who the fuck was counting? But that was because he’d killed a cop. Kill a cop, man’s entitled to get drunk. Maybe he was entitled to change his luck, too, knock off a fuckin piece of black ass.

“What’s your name?” she said.

“Colley,” he said, “and for Christ’s sake don’t ask me what that’s short for.”

“What’s it short for?”

“Nothing. What’s your name?”

“Barbara,” she said. “Don’t ask me what that’s short for.”

“Listen,” he said, “would you mind if I told you something?”

“What’s that?”

“I have never been to bed with a black girl in my life.”

“You’re missing something,” she said.

“It’s good, huh?”

“Oh, my,” she said.

“It is, huh?”

“Oh, my, my, my,” she said.

“Well, maybe I’ll give it a try,” he said. “Listen,” he said, “how much would it cost me?”

“Police officer,” someone at his elbow said.

Colley automatically reached into his pocket for the gun, and then remembered the gun was up his mother’s house, in the closet, the back of the closet. He turned, his fist clenched, ready to put up a fight, he had killed a cop tonight. But the cop here in the bar wasn’t even looking at him; he was holding up his shield to the bartender. Another guy stood to his left, another fuckin plainclothes cop; his eyes were on the bartender, too.

“Yeah, what is it?” the bartender said.

He was a white bartender in a neighborhood going black, Colley figured he had cops in here every day of the week. Half of them were on the pad, probably bugging him about one bullshit violation or another — you didn’t put out the garbage, your toilet’s leaking, your napkins are dirty, your fuckin fly is open.

“Know anybody named Nicholas Donato?” the cop asked.

Colley froze.

“Nicholas who?” the bartender asked.

“Donato. He lives up the street, his mother does, anyway. Upstairs from the pizzeria. You know him?”

“Why do you want him?” the bartender said.

“You know him or not?” the cop said.

“You want some prices, huh?” the girl said.

“Yes,” Colley said, and turned on the stool, and looked the girl straight in the face. She was the ugliest fuckin woman he’d ever seen in his life, blackheads all over her face, the kind of complexion only niggers had, wearing a blond wig that was lopsided on her head, pair of gold teeth in the front of her mouth, no bra under her dress, tits sagging to her navel.

“Yes, sweetheart,” he said, “let’s talk price.”

“You saw the shield, or didn’t you see the shield?” the cop asked the bartender.

“I saw it.”

“Okay. Do you know a person named Nicholas Donato, and don’t give me any bullshit about why we want him. Okay?”

“Why do you want him?” the bartender said.

The cop looked at his partner. “Wise guy,” he said.

“Yeah,” the partner said.

“All right, wise guy, he killed somebody, all right?”

“You want to spend the night with just me alone?” the girl whispered.

“What do you mean?” Colley said.

“You could also spend the night with me and my girl friend together.”

“So you know where we can find him?” the cop said.

“Who’d he kill?” the bartender asked.

“A detective,” the cop said.

“That’s a shame,” the bartender said. His tone made it clear that it wouldn’t bother him if every detective in the city got killed tomorrow, together with the entire uniformed force. “That really is a shame.”

“Did you say somebody killed a detective?” the hooker asked, leaning over Colley to address the cop.

“Yeah,” the cop said, turning to her. “Liquor-store holdup on White Plains Avenue. We got a positive make from the other officer who was in there. So what do you say?” he asked the bartender. “You know him, or not?”

“No, I don’t know him,” the bartender said.

The cop turned to the hooker. “I hope you’re not soliciting in here, sister,” he said.

“Brother,” she said, “I don’t know what you mean by the word soliciting.”

“Yeah, okay,” the cop said, and he and his partner turned and started for the door. Over his shoulder, to no one in particular, the partner said, “Keep your nose clean.”

“So what’ll it be?” the hooker asked Colley. “Me and Cynthia for the night?”

“What?” Colley said. “Who’s Cynthia?” In the mirror over the bar, he was watching the cops cross the room. “Cynthia. My girl friend.”

“Right, right,” Colley said. His forehead was covered with sweat. He took out his handkerchief and wiped it. The cops were opening the door, the cops were going out onto the sidewalk. He got off the stool, hastily patted the hooker’s hand, said, “Some other time, honey,” and was walking away from the bar when the bartender said, “Hey, there’s a check, you don’t mind.”

“Right,” Colley said. “Sorry.” He took out his wallet. The hooker was scowling at him. “How much is that?” Colley asked the bartender.

“Frank, what’d he have at the table?” the bartender yelled to the waiter.

“What do you mean, some other time?” the hooker said. She sounded like Flip Wilson doing Geraldine. “Whutchoo mean, some other time?”

“Some other time,” Colley said. “Really, I’m busy tonight. How much is that, huh?” he said impatiently.

“Hold your horses,” the bartender said. The waiter was standing at the service bar now, looking through his checks. He finally found Colley’s and handed it to the bartender. “And you had a double here at the bar,” the bartender said.

“Right,” Colley said. “And take out for whatever the lady’s been drinking, okay?”

“Thanks,” the hooker said. It sounded like “Drop dead.”

The bartender made change for a twenty. Colley pushed a two-dollar tip across the bar.

“Big spender,” the hooker said.

Half a dozen police cars were in the street outside, and uniformed cops were all over the sidewalks, walkie-talkies in their hands, stopping people and asking them questions. He had never seen so many cops in his life except that time when he was still a kid living in Harlem, and a spic was holed up in an apartment in Spanish Harlem, somewhere between Park and Madison. He’d walked over with a friend of his and there was a regular siege going on, the cops with bullhorns and tear gas and shotguns, all of them wearing bulletproof vests, the spic in the apartment up there shooting down into the street. They finally got him out. The crowd in the street seemed disappointed. Here was a guy holding off what seemed like the whole damn police department, and these people in the street weren’t too fond of cops to begin with, and they wanted the spic to stay up there forever, show the cops who was boss. But of course the cops killed him, and that was that, the party was over; the crowd began to disperse even before the ambulance attendants came out with his body on a stretcher, rubber sheet thrown over it.

Colley was beginning to understand the enormity of what he had done.

Rape an old lady, cut out her heart, hang her from a lamppost by her thumbs, police department got officially outraged. “Heinous crime,” the Chief of Detectives said. “We are putting on it not only our Homicide Division, but we are pressing into service detectives and patrolmen from all over the city, including Staten Island, not to mention off-duty and vacationing policemen, be they plainclothes or uniformed.” Next day, if they didn’t catch the guy, the whole thing began to cool. By the third day the cops were yawning and asking each other how the Yankees were doing. But kill a cop? Kill one of their own? If you had a race riot here on this street, you’d get a handful of cops telling everybody to calm down while bricks were flying from the rooftops. But kill a cop? Look at the bastards. Had to be at least fifty of them going up to people and asking...

He stopped in the middle of the sidewalk.

The cops in the street here had something the detectives in the bar didn’t have a few minutes ago. Colley saw now that a man in plainclothes was leaning against the fender of a ’74 Chevy, handing out flyers, and he didn’t have to guess what was on those flyers, he goddamn well knew. One of them had got away either from the detective who was handing them out or from one of the patrolmen who’d been given it. The escaped flyer was sticking to the wet sidewalk not three feet from where Colley stood, and staring up at him was a picture of himself as he’d looked four years ago, when he’d got busted for holding up that tailor shop. They’d taken him first to the Forty-sixth Precinct, where he’d been booked, and then downtown to a cell in the Criminal Courts Building, where they’d snapped his picture the next morning. In the pictures, there were numbers across his chest. His hair was longer then, and he had sported a mustache in those days; he had begun growing the mustache right after Terry left for Vermont. But the face was unmistakably his, a little fuller perhaps, he’d lost a lot of weight in prison. All a cop had to do was subtract the mustache and a few pounds, trim the hair a bit, and there was Nicholas Donato himself in person — right here in an armed camp of policemen who’d love nothing better than to shoot him dead on the spot.

A cop was approaching him, possibly because he was standing there in the middle of the sidewalk looking down at his own picture plastered to the cement. The cop had a walkie-talkie in his right hand, and in his left hand the flyer. They were keeping in close touch on this operation because they were dealing with a mad cop killer here. They wanted to make sure this fiend didn’t shoot all of them in the back while they were asking people in the street if they had seen Nicholas Donato, this man here in this mug shot taken four years ago.

“Excuse me, sir,” the cop said.

Colley looked up. He did not have his gun with him; his gun was in his mother’s apartment. If he’d had the gun, he would have opened fire at once, and then run — take his chances, what the hell.

“Yes?” he said.

Another cop was coming up to where Colley and the first cop were standing on the sidewalk. “You get one of these flyers, Mike?” the second cop said.

“Yeah,” the first cop said.

“Ugly son of a bitch, ain’t he?” the second cop said, and laughed.

“Sir,” the first cop said, “we’re looking for a man named Nicholas Donato, he lives on this street with his mother. Would that name mean anything to you?”

“No,” Colley said. “It don’t mean nothin to me.” He took out his handkerchief and blew his nose, and then he kept wiping the nose, cleaning it, practically polishing it, just so he could keep the handkerchief covering the lower part of his face.

“This is a picture of the man,” the cop said. “It was taken four years ago, he might not have the mustache now. Would you recognize him?”

“No,” Colley said, and blew his nose again. “I don’t know him.”

The second cop was staring at him.

“That it?” Colley said.

“Hold it just a minute,” the second cop said, and looked at the flyer in his hand.

“Mike,” he said, and was reaching for the gun holstered at his side when Colley broke.

He was used to running from cops in these streets. Years ago, when they had the club, he ran from trouble on the average of twice a week. The cops knew him by sight in those days. They knew Ernie, who was the president, and Benny, who was the war counselor, and Colley, who was the sergeant at arms. The big three. The ones who ran the Orioles. More than a hundred members in those days. Two dozen here on the block, another seventy-some spread for a radius of half a mile. One time, when the shit was on between the Scorpions and another Italian gang near the parkway approach, the leader of the Italian gang asked Ernie could he lend some help for a rumble supposed to take place in the park Saturday morning. Ernie said he could put a hundred guys in that park just by snapping his fingers. That Saturday they wiped up the street with those Scorpions.

There were shots behind him; they cracked with brittle precision on the cool early-morning air. The night people were out, they sat on stoops and congregated on street corners, they moved apart to let Colley through. The shots sounded unreal. After those shots fired in the liquor store, after those shots that had killed one cop and wounded another, none of these shots splintering the air sounded genuine. They served to alert the other cops, though. Cops hear shots, they see a man running, they don’t have to ask if he’s the victim or the perpetrator, they know automatically the guy running is the guy who done something wrong. Colley was running, and people on the sidewalk were stepping aside to let him through, ducking away, actually, because they could hear guns cracking, and they knew that meant bullets were flying, and bullets didn’t always hit who they were intended for. There were cops behind him firing, and cops ahead of him beginning to get the drift of what was happening; they were only here looking for a man who’d killed a cop, they were only here with flyers and walkie-talkies and half a dozen police cars and half a hundred uniformed cops, and Christ alone knew how many plainclothes bulls, and they were confronted now with two cops firing at a fleeing man, but they were still looking puzzled. A pair of cops, in fact, parted to let him go by, and then shouted, “Hey! Hey, you!” after he’d passed them and gone around the comer.

He knew these streets, he knew running these streets.

There were more cops ahead of him, they didn’t know what had happened around the comer, but they had heard shooting and enough time had elapsed now for them to have drawn their guns. They were in fact running toward the comer as he made the turn, and he wheeled sharply to his left, his leather-soled shoes skidding out from under him, he wished he was wearing sneakers like in the old days. But he didn’t fall, he caught his balance at once and began running for the vacant lot alongside the grocery store.

There were no cops ahead of him, now they were all behind him, and they were all shooting. A bunch of black kids wearing gang jackets were standing under the lamppost, their eyes opening wide as they heard the shots and doped out something big was happening, not your penny-ante street-gang bullshit, man, but something tremendous, some thief running here in the night, some desperado, some crazed and demented killer. The jackets they wore nowadays looked seedy and faded and cheap, nothing like what the Orioles used to have when the club was riding high, nothing like what even the Scorpions had. And the Dragons — you had to admit those spies had some fancy jackets, the blood spurting from the throat of Luis Josafat Albareda, onto the front of the yellow silk, the name Macho in green thread over his heart.

Colley was in the lot now. There were rats in the lot, they scampered over the garbage, scaring him half to death, squealing, scurrying away noisily as he ran for the fence. The cops behind him were yelling different directions and orders and swearing and stumbling and generally behaving like the dumb bastards they were. “This way,” or “Hold your fire, there’s civilians,” or “In the lot, he’s in the lot,” or “Get a car, we need lights,” a babble of sound behind Colley as he ran over the familiar terrain toward a fence he’d scaled a hundred times or more in his youth.

He was smiling when he reached the fence. He knew that once he scaled this fence, the cops behind him were out of luck. He knew that beyond this fence was a maze of back yards and alleyways, basements in abandoned buildings, stairways to roofs that joined other roofs, shaftways to leap, roof leading to roof leading to roof, until he would emerge a block away and cross a street to enter yet another labyrinth of alleyways and back yards. In ten minutes he would be in a different neighborhood entirely, in what used to be Scorpion turf. The cops would be up the creek once he scaled that fence.

He jumped for it. He skittered up its wooden face like a cat with a thousand claws. He straddled its top as bullets whined around him, ricocheting off the brick wall of the abandoned building on the other side, and then he deliberately turned his head and looked back at the cops. He was giving them the edge, daring them to knock him off the fence with their popguns, knock off the cop killer, you bastards, and win yourselves a Kewpie doll on a cane — that night at Coney Island on the Ferris wheel, the promises he’d made, Terry turning out to be a hooker. Coming home had been a bust, all of it had been a fuckin bust except for this moment, this exhilarating moment with the cops running toward him over the garbage in the empty lot, the rats scrambling away, the guns popping against the night, tiny flashes of yellow, the bullets humming past his head: he was Superman, he was able to leap tall buildings, he was able to outrace speeding locomotives, he was invincible, he was indestructible.

He burst out laughing.

The laughter froze the policemen in their tracks.

The firing stopped.

In an instant Colley was over the fence and safe.