Tabloid Dreams

“Nine-Year-Old Boy Is World’s Youngest Hit Man”

This guy Ivan over at the Black Sea Social Club on Sixth and Avenue A says that when he went shopping as a little boy with his mama in Moscow he’d go to the one big department store in town and he’d stand in line and sometimes it’d be for hours and they didn’t even know what it was they was waiting to buy. Then it’d turn out to be some shit like socks or suspenders or a rubber bowl. A Russian Tupperware party, he says, is four hours in a line with strangers to buy a rubber bowl. But they had so little, you just got what you could. That’s why he does the things he does now in America, because it’s the land of opportunity. And it’s never too early to get in on the action, he says, cause you never had to wait to suffer in Russia. There are no children in Russia, he says.

I like it when Ivan tells me that. Up to this morning. When I’m feeling bad about myself, I say to him, I maybe ain’t no child but I’m little, and he tells me it don’t make no difference. It gives you an edge, he says to me. I know what he means, but I’m always thinking I want my hands to be bigger. I want that right now. I like the Makarov nine millimeter okay and most of Ivan’s buddies at the social club use it, but it’s just a pound and a half and not even six and a half inches long. Just right for me, but that pisses me off. Like being a Yankees fan. It’s right there, up the subway line, but it’s not what you really want. Besides, Ivan and those guys aren’t real Americans yet, and I am, and the one thing I got off my long-gone daddy was his daddy’s Colt.45 pistol. The Model 1911A1. They started making this baby way back in 1911, that’s why they gave it that model number. And nobody’s done any better. My daddy told me that. I stole it from him a long time ago, long before I did these things for Ivan. It was when my daddy was too drunk to see and I got lucky because the next day he walked out and my mama and me never heard from him again and he didn’t even have his daddy’s gun. I did. And it’s like if Babe Ruth was still playing for the Yankees today and he was in his prime. Because this 1911 can still hit. I just can’t quite hold it yet to do the job. My goddamn hands aren’t big enough.

Last night I was sitting at our kitchen table and Mama was fussing around making it look like warming up Spaghetti Os was about a ten-step gourmet thing. She was still in her terry cloth dressing gown, my mama. She hasn’t got a man hanging around her these days. Hasn’t had for a while. And I was just looking at my little hands lying there on the table.

“Wally,” she says to me. “Why you’re always sitting around the kitchen in your undershirt.”

“I’m waiting for you to give me a beer,” I say.

She waves the can opener she’s been struggling with for five minutes. “What are you saying? I never gave you no beer.”

“I can wait.”

“You’re a little boy,” she says.

“Mama, you don’t know nothing about it.”

She goes a little crazy at this, since we’ve had this conversation a few times before and she thinks she knows something about me. “I got eyes,” she says. “I know you. I been around you for only nine years and at the start of that you was about twenty inches long. You don’t think I know what a little boy looks like?”

So now she’s got me looking at my hands, like two goddamn little bath toys sitting on the table, and I’m getting some feelings I don’t want to think about. “Shut up now, Mama,” I say.

She does. I should like that, but I don’t, exactly. Then she says, real low, “So what will happen if I don’t shut up?”

I don’t have an answer for that. It’s a stupid question.

She says, “Where do you go, Wally? When you’re supposed to be in school. When you go out at night. I can’t watch you all the time. What is it you’re doing?”

I look at her and she kind of backs up a little bit, the can opener wobbling around in the air in front of her. I say, “Don’t talk crazy. You’re my mama.” My voice — I can hear it like it belongs to somebody else — is as tiny as my hands, a piping cute-ass little voice.

“What kind of answer is that?” she asks me.

“What are you talking about?” My head is full of static now, like a radio that’s off the station.

So I do both of us a favor. I get up and go out. There’s a couple of guys jittering around at the corner and I know they just see me as some kid they can cut up easy and I left my heat back in my room, so I go the other way. And I walk around thinking about my dad. He was a big talker. He was always saying, I’m going to make this score, I’m going to make that score. I didn’t know what he was talking about back then. I was just a lad. Four or five. Something like that. I was still playing on the raggedy-ass swings and shit at Tompkins Square Park. I’d swing up and down and the chains would scream like I was killing them and when I was way up high all I could see, all around, was funky homeless people living in cardboard boxes or sleeping under newspapers on the benches, guys that would grab at you when you went by, some of them, guys that would do anything to a little kid. Those guys were everywhere in the place I was a kid, and so were the old Russian guys sitting around playing chess.

Is my daddy going to end up like that, wherever he is? Not like the Russians. He don’t play no games, as far as I know. Like the homeless people. Is he going to end up living in a refrigerator box with a stack of old Sunday Times? I don’t know. All I know is I got his gun. And I figure he was full of shit about all the big stuff he was going to do. To tell the truth, though, I’d like to meet up with him someday and see how he come out. I was thinking about that walking around last night. And I was getting pissed. I was thinking, I got a score to settle with him. I do. I wish I didn’t. I wish it was simple, about him. But what am I going to do? I’ve learned how things have to be.

The first time Ivan sent me to do this thing for him, I was pretty nervous about it. Sure. That was almost a year ago. I’ve got a birthday next week. I’ll be ten, if I live that long. When I just turned nine, Ivan called me in from the dark open door of the social club. I was just passing time in the neighborhood. Kicking a flat Coke can around, trying to make it stop on the sidewalk cracks. Telling other kids who passed by that I was going to kill them. Stuff like that. So this voice from the darkness says, “Hey, little man. Come on in to this place.”

I know the streets, and these guys were pretty new, but I could figure out this social club. It wasn’t a place of perverts. It was a place of business. So I go in. This is when I met Ivan. “You want beer, little man?” he says.

“No,” I say to him, though I like it that he asks me. Now I would’ve said yes, but the first time he asked me, I was straight from punk stuff like kicking Coke cans and I wasn’t ready to say yes.

“You know how to get to Brighton Beach on subway?” he says to me.

Thinking about it a little later that day, I liked that being the first question he had about me. Not do you think you can kill.

“I can find it,” I say.

“That’s good,” he says. “You really want to kill somebody?”

This is when he shows me the Makarov. He calls it a “PM.”

I love that pistol at first sight. I bad-mouth it sometimes, thinking about the 1911. But it’s the first one I knew I could shoot.

I ask him, “What’s that, ‘PM’? You just use this at night?”

“You can use it at night,” Ivan says. “But it is Pistol Makarov. You want to hold this thing and maybe use it for me and then you can buy yourself something nice? You can walk around outside there and know you are big man already?”

My head was spinning from this. I had plenty of worries out there in the street. The guys in the park. The crackheads waiting in your building, in the shadows somewhere to grab you and if you don’t have money to give them, they’ll cut off your balls and sell them to herbal medicine stores for some kind of remedy. Stuff like that. I could use something to get people to pass me by.

“You want me to go blow somebody away?” I ask.

“You look like you could do it,” Ivan says. He’s got a pale face and his cheeks are sunken in and he’s real tall, taller than my dad. He’s waiting for me to answer and he’s not even about to smile. I look for that, for the bullshit, for the tease. But I can see he’s straight.

“Yeah. Sure. I want to hold it,” I say.

He gives it to me and it’s cold and it feels heavy at first. No heavier than a can of whatever dinner is tonight from Mama, but it feels heavier because it’s small. That’s a good way to think about me. I’m small, but I’m heavy. Like those stars somebody was talking about on TV. One spoonful weighs as much as everything in New York City. I held my PM and it was heavy like that and so was I. Any man try to touch me in some way I don’t want, they couldn’t even move me an inch. And now I had a thing that would kill their goddamn ass.

So I said yes to Ivan and he said good and he showed me how to use the PM and how to fieldstrip it and clean it, and it was real simple, only four parts, and I got my hands around it real good and I was hitting the target in the basement of the social club every time and Ivan never once changed how he talked to me, like I was no lad, and he gave me a beer later on and I didn’t like it the first time.

But maybe that’s the way it is the first time you do anything. One day I took the subway to Brighton Beach and it turns into an elevated train down there. I like that. You get to see all along the beach and even down to Coney Island. You can see the big Ferris wheel. I went on that once, but it wasn’t so hot. I think I remember my dad throwing me up in the air when I was little. I’ve seen dads do that sometimes, like in the park and stuff, and the kids laugh and seem to like it, but those dads aren’t so messed up that you just know, even if you’re pretty little, that he’s going to drop you sometime. I think going up in the Ferris wheel felt that same way, made me think of going up and coming down hard.

Anyway, I went to Brighton Beach that day and killed a guy for Ivan. I found myself thinking about my dad on the train and I touched my PM, which was in a little brown paper bag. Like I was carrying my lunch to school or something. That morning Ivan sits me at a table by the front window, though it’s still dark cause the window’s painted green. There’s a hooded lamp hanging over the center of the table and Ivan is sweating from the lightbulb, and he says, “This is that day you will become real man.”

“I’m a real man now,” I say. “That’s why you know I will go and do this thing. You have to be a real man already to waste a guy. Wasting the guy doesn’t make you the man.” I figure if I can think as clear as that in school, all those dumb-ass teachers would stop messing with me. But I just dry up when I’m there with all the little kids. Arguing with a Russian thug in his club, I can do that.

He listens to me careful and thinks a moment and then he smiles at me. “You are too smart already. You turn into good hit man and someday we make you honorary Russian and you go far with us.”

“Thanks,” I say. “What do I do?”

And Ivan tells me about another Russian gang, the Arbat Gang, that’s been pushing Ivan around. Ivan just wants Manhattan. He doesn’t want to get involved with Brooklyn. But these guys won’t leave him alone. They want to kill him. They’re bad guys, they do their business all wrong. “When we take money from businessman,” he says, “we give him good vodka, make him feel nice and protected. If he does not want to do business, we can maybe talk loud to him, lean on him little bit. But he for sure doesn’t want to do business with those bad gangs in Brooklyn. Those gangs will send their friends in Moscow and murder that businessman’s father.” Ivan pauses to see how bad I think this is.

I don’t bat an eye.

“And they kill his mother.”

I wrinkle my nose at this. That’s pretty bad. I think of my mother in her terry cloth housecoat opening the door of the apartment and she’s been trying to get a goddamn can of something open so she can eat lunch and some guys blow her away. That’s pretty low. But I’m still keeping quiet.

“And all of his little kids. His little malchiki.”

Being a kid can be pretty tough. Gangs like that make it worse. “Look,” I say. “What the hell you think I’ve been shooting your paper targets in the basement for?”

So I find myself on Brighton Beach Avenue and it’s stuffed full of cars and everybody has just learned how to use their horns, it sounds like, and with the el sparking and squealing overhead and guys hustling around in your face pushing sunglasses or knit caps or some kind of heart medicine and all kinds of other shit, with all that noise and action, I start to get a little nervous about what I’m going to do. Ivan says where I’m going, it’s nice and quiet. Maybe one other guy to take care of at this time of day. But I’m starting to wonder.

I go on down the street and I’m passing by shops like Vladimir’s Unisex and the Shostakovich Music, Art, and Sport School and the Hello Gorgeous Beauty Salon and there’s just too many people around, all of them tall or fat or both and I’m getting goddamn tired bumping into belt buckles and saggy tits and I’m keeping my head down but they brush up against you, too, and I don’t like to be touched. It makes me a little crazy sometimes. And I’m starting to worry that I’m going to take out my PM and use it on the next guy who bumps into me. But just thinking about the Makarov makes me calm down a little.

Then I get to the Gogol Cafe and maybe all the shit in the street is good because I’m ready just to do this thing and get it over with and I’m blaming this gang guy not just for killing little kids in Moscow but for making me walk through this goddamn crowded street. So this is his place where Ivan says nobody dares to mess with him and they never have and it should be easy. I don’t know about that. It’s somewhere between breakfast and lunch and the place is dim and it shouldn’t be open but Ivan says to push the door, so I push and I’m inside and it smells like stuff that Chef Boyardee never dreamed of in a million years. And there’s nobody around. All of a sudden I’m alone and if you want the truth, that’s what scares me. Not what I was about to do or what might happen after that. It’s standing there and, like, right away all the bustle is gone and there’s only a dark room and if something is spooky, it’s that. Being where there might be just one somebody else and you can’t even see him.

So I go upstairs and there’s a big fat guy sitting at a table with a white cloth and this isn’t the main man but I think I’m going to have to deal with him anyway before long, so when he says, “What you doing here, little kid?” I just reach into my bag and pull out the PM and he says, “Nice toy, malchishka,” and I guess I was lucky that he was making it so easy. I put a little three-shot cluster in the center of his chest and he hardly moves, he just leans back like he’s finished his meal and he’s making room so he can brush the tomato sauce off his shirtfront. But he leans his head back and it’s not tomato sauce. I put my hand down low and walk toward the back of the place. From some back room a guy comes out and he’s got a big nose that’s full of bumps and this is the guy I’m here for.

He just sees what he thinks is a little kid walking toward him. He doesn’t see what’s in my hand or think even for a second that I could be dangerous, that I could be somebody he can’t mess with. “What’s going on?” he asks, not to anybody, really, maybe the fat guy, but Bumpy Nose is looking around like he just woke up from a bad dream. I know that feeling. So I put my first shot right in the center of his forehead and he goes straight down.

The place is real quiet again. But I ain’t scared about it now. I know there’s nobody can suddenly appear out of nowhere and put his hands on me. There’s nobody else alive here but me. Maybe some cooks or something, making all those smells. Maybe somebody else. But they’re as good as not there now. I know I’m safe.

I go back to where the fat guy has shut his yap. I look at him for a second, and I think what if he’s like Wile E. Coyote or something. What if he jumps up and comes after me again. But I don’t watch that cartoon stuff anymore. I just pick up my lunch bag and put my PM inside and I go down the stairs and there’s people coming out of the kitchen, but they don’t know who it is they’re looking at going out the door and they don’t mess with me.

That was how all this hit man stuff started. I went down to the boardwalk for a little while after that. The ocean was dirty gray, the color of the streets in our neighborhood, no big deal at all. There were old women out there in a lot more clothes than they needed by the water and there were old men walking along the shore talking to themselves, thinking they were back in Russia, I guess. There’s a lot of messed-up people around. All I was feeling right then was that they didn’t make any difference to me. Nobody did.

Ivan says, “Good man,” when I come back to him that first time. He’s already got the word about what I did. “The PM is yours,” he says. “Here’s the money,” he says, and he gives me two hundred dollars. It feels like a lot. “We talk again,” he says. “Do more business.”

“Okay,” I say.

Then I go home and my mother is watching TV in her robe. I’m standing there with my Makarov in the brown paper bag. She doesn’t ask about it. “Why don’t you dress?” I ask.

“I’m going to take a nice hot bath soon,” she says.

I want to give her some money, but I’m afraid she’ll think I made it dealing drugs.

“You should dress,” I say. “Take care of yourself.”

She looks over at me and kind of smiles. “Well, don’t you sound like the man of the house.”

“No I don’t,” I say. “No I fucking don’t.”

I go on back to the little runt of a room where I’ve got a mattress and a door that closes and I’m real nervous all of a sudden, I feel like going to my Makarov — I don’t know to do what, just shoot it, maybe out the window — and I realize I’ve got to watch out about that. I’ve got boxes of junk in the corner and deep in the bottom one, under stacks of comic books, I’ve got my dad’s gun, and I dig down in there and put the PM next to it, and I guess it’s him that’s bothering me. The man-of-the-house shit.

I lie down on the afternoon of that first time and I think about the weasely bastard. He smiled at me sometimes and that was nice and I wonder what was behind it. Did he think I was his little man? I don’t think so. I was always a little kid to him. Kids get dumped. And after your dad beats it, kids get whatever the man of the house — whoever he is this month — wants to dish out, kids get, you know, whatever some strung-out stranger wants to do, the guy who’s doing all that stuff to your mama’s body since she’s got no real man of the house, those guys do whatever they want to do to her, and if there’s a kid, he has to watch out too, and what’s he going to do about anything a guy like that wants, a guy about six feet tall with tattoos and shit, with a knife and with hands that can juice an apple with one squeeze, guys like that, little kids can’t do anything about that. Little boys can’t blow somebody away if they need to.

Then there’s that guy who’s my dad. I laid there on that first afternoon, and I thought about him and me having a score to settle if I see him again. But he was here all the time, before he wasn’t here ever again. He’d say get the hell to bed and I’d go to bed and I’d close that door even if it didn’t have a lock and he’d sit out there in the other room, I guess, drinking till late, I guess, and then I guess he’d go in to my mama and they’d do all that stuff and he’d be snoring away the next morning. At night when he was tired of me being around, even if I was just trying to watch TV, I’d just go in my room and he’d be outside there somewhere drinking and touching my mama, who loved him, and then he’d be sleeping and he never messed with me, once I was by myself. That’s okay. All that’s something. If he didn’t make any big scores that I ever knew about, he was still thinking about it. All the time. He might be somewhere now. It’s just if I caught up with him somewhere and I had my PM with me, I’m afraid I could get pretty angry at him pretty fast. I was just a little kid back then. I didn’t know nothing then about how things can work.

How things can work is, I go to Brighton Beach three more times for Ivan. That’s how they can work. And after the first time you don’t even think about it. Once on the boardwalk and nobody even guesses it was me. Once in a barber shop and this time a couple of people see me and they can’t believe their eyes, I guess, and I’m glad they can see me, in a way. This is what a man can look like sometimes. Like me. And Ivan says it’s no sweat that they see me. Nobody in Brighton Beach talks to the police. They grew up in a place where you never talk to the police. And once in a car parked under the el pretty late at night, guys waiting for somebody else, I guess, not a little kid. Nobody saw me, but like the first time, there was two guys. They just couldn’t quite figure out what to do when I pull out my PM and after I wasted the first guy, I had plenty of time for the second, who was saying some shit about me being a little kid. So that was four jobs, six guys. I’ve got eight hundred dollars hid away. I haven’t spent a penny of it. It’d be for my mama, except I don’t know how to give it to her. She about killed me after that last hit, I got home so late. She worries about me.

Which brings me to this morning. I wake up and maybe I’m dreaming. I don’t know. I dream sometimes, I think. I just can’t ever remember. But I wake up this morning and something makes me get up from my bed and I go to the cardboard boxes and I dig out my daddy’s pistol. One night when he was drunk and he wasn’t thinking about all the big stuff he was going to do with his life, he fieldstripped this thing while I was there at his elbow. On the kitchen table. He was talking about his daddy, remembering him. Maybe I was dreaming about that.

“This is the tricky part with the 1911,” he said, and his hands were shaking, and it was only the first step. He said, “My daddy told me he was a big hero in the war. He killed a hundred Germans with this gun. But he was a lying son of a bitch about everything else. So he was probably lying about that too.” While he was talking, my daddy was working out the plug at the end of the barrel and his thumb kept slipping. Then all of sudden there was a twang and the recoil spring flew out of the pistol and across the kitchen and through the door and landed in my mother’s lap and she jumped up screaming. One second she was sitting there in her robe watching TV and then she was waving her arms and leaping around the room. I started laughing but my daddy didn’t crack a smile. He turned to me real slow and he said, “The tricky part is not to let the spring fly out. You pay attention.”

I stopped laughing right away. He was teaching me. I leaned against him and we waited for Mama to calm down and then I went and got the spring and I put it in his hand.

Now this morning I’m holding the pistol and it feels heavy, a good pound heavier than the Makarov, and that’s a lot if you want to hold a pistol steady to shoot straight. I hold it with two hands and I reach my fingers up and they curl around the trigger. Just barely, but it’s okay. That surprises me, but I forget sometimes that I’m still growing. So I’ve got my fingers on the trigger and the pistol is wobbling around and I’m crying. That pisses me off a lot. My daddy’s making me cry now and it’s a good thing he’s not walking in that door right now cause I know I’d blow his fucking brains out.

I scrunch up my shoulder and dry my eyes on it, never letting go of the 1911, and then I try to just settle down. I pull the pistol up in front of me and it’s still a little loosey goosey, but my chest kind of goes up and down and I swallow hard and the tears have stopped and the stuff I’m feeling sort of goes away. I’m supposed to see Ivan this morning, and I think what the hell. I slide my one 1911 magazine into the pistol and put it in my paper bag.

Later, I’m ready to go out and I’m passing through the kitchen and there’s my sorry-ass mama sitting at the table in her slip. It’s hot and she’s fanning herself with a magazine and I stop. She looks up at me and smiles.

“You don’t always have to make your own lunch,” she says nodding at my paper bag and her voice is real tiny and she’s still staring at the bag.

“I don’t ever see you in clothes,” I say to her.

“I ain’t got no nice clothes,” she says. “There ain’t no clothes stamps.”

“How much you need to buy yourself a lot of nice clothes?” I ask her.

“Need?”

“How much money’d that cost?”

She looks down at her toes and laughs at this. “I got expensive tastes,” she says.

“How much?”

“Ten thousand dollars would about do it,” she says.

“Okay,” I say and I go out.

I go into the Black Sea Social Club and Ivan’s in the back of the place shooting pool with one of the other guys I never talk to. A third guy, Nick, is sitting drinking a beer at a table. When Ivan sees me coming to him, he puts his cue down and circles around the table.

“There’s the man,” he says.

“Ivan.”

“You have your lunch bag. Good.”

I lift the bag for him. It feels heavy. I think maybe I should go back home for the Makarov before I head to Brighton.

“I have good job for you,” Ivan says and he eases his butt back onto the edge of the pool table. “Important job.”

“Okay,” I say.

“A man at oyster restaurant on Mulberry Street.”

“Mulberry Street? That’s not in Brooklyn.”

Ivan stands up again, and he comes to me and my neck is cricked back as far as it’ll go to look at his face. I ease a few steps away and he eases with me so I’m still looking way up. I don’t like it. “This is not Russian gang,” he says. “This is worse thing. Mafia. You’re not afraid, are you?”

“Why you ask that?” I say. “Shit no.”

“Good,” he says. “The Mafia, they eat little kids in their restaurants.”

Ivan hasn’t talked like this to me since the first job. I guess he thinks he needs to start from scratch to get me to waste some Mafia don, but he’s got that wrong and I’m beginning to get itchy.

“I’ll do it,” I say, and I step back from him and he lets me. My neck stops cricking and I’m feeling a little better.

“Good,” Ivan says.

Then the guy behind him says, “You win respect down there, they make you boss of Bambino family.”

Ivan looks over his shoulder at this guy and I think he’s unhappy with him, but when Ivan turns his face back to me, he’s smiling. I know what a bambino is. But I let it pass. Ivan’s been okay to me.

“Look,” I say, “I got no problem doing this. I want ten thousand dollars.”

Ivan’s head kind of snaps. Then he gets this thing in his voice. “This is a lot of money,” he says. “You know how much money this is?” And his voice is all stretched and gooey.

“I know how much it is. I want that.”

“I give you three hundred. That’s fifty percent raise.”

“Ten thousand or forget it,” I say and I say it hard enough so that he knows I mean it.

Ivan’s sunken cheeks suck in some more. “Listen now,” he says. “I give you very good gun. I give you a lot of money for little kid.”

I straighten up and cock my head. “Wait,” I say to him.

“No, you wait for me,” he says. “I am doing good things for you all the time. You are not appreciating me.”

“Fuck you,” I say.

Now his face pinches and he slits his eyes at me. “You can’t talk like that to Ivan. You got nothing till Ivan does things for you. You got nobody in world but Ivan. I am father to you.”

This makes sense. So I go into the brown bag and out comes the 1911 and it’s in my two hands and my first shot shatters the light over the pool table. We all of us just stand for a second after that and it’s real quiet. Then the guy behind Ivan goes into his coat and the 1911 is flopping around in front of me like a goddamn can opener but I see his hand move and I follow it and my next shot is in the center of this guy’s chest and he flies back. Now Nick is standing and I take him out with one in the shoulder and he’s looking there like he doesn’t know whose body this is and the next one in his throat and he’s down.

And I’ve still got Ivan. He’s grabbing around at his chest, maybe to see if he’s hit, maybe reaching for a gun, which he doesn’t seem to have. He looks at me and he says something in Russian. Probably something about being my fucking father. I put the next shot way up there in the center of his forehead and he flies back and the place is very quiet again and my real daddy’s gun is feeling like it doesn’t weigh anything at all, it’s just floating there in my hands like it’s part of me.

That was a few hours ago. I’m sitting in Tompkins Square Park and off somewhere behind me I can hear the swing chains creaking and I know I’m going to have to make a few plans soon. Some things are tough the first time you do them and then you get used to them. Some things you only need to do once. I figure if I ever meet up with my daddy now, him and me could maybe just talk.