Макс Коллинз - Road to Perdition

And the toil-haggard men outside John Deere did in fact reach into their pockets for nickels and dimes to read the story of how Danny McGovern had fallen into the machinery at Mr. Looney’s soft-drink bottling plant.

UNAVOIDABLE ACCIDENT A TRAGEDY, a smaller headline said; and Michael had glimpsed in the write-up how Mr. Looney was generously bequeathing the dead man’s family a full two year’s salary, though “nothing but the goodness of John Looney’s heart required it.” The family couldn’t afford a funeral home, so Mr. Looney (“the embodiment of generosity”) was providing his own mansion for the wake.

But the eleven-year-old boy was wise enough in the ways of the local press to know that the Rock Island Argus , Looney’s chief competition in the newspaper business, would present this story in an entirely different light. The Argus called Mr. Looney “a gangster,” among other equally unflattering things, and the editorials in the two papers were like the salvos of opposing battleships.

In under ten minutes, Michael had made a real haul, and he was grinning — despite the bitter cold — when he hopped back on his bike, pockets jingling with change. He pulled on his mittens, threw the scarf over his face, and streaked out of the industrial area to the klik-klik-klik of the baseball card clothespinned to his bike’s back wheel, the card playing the spokes like a brittle harp. He peddled past the Harvester plant (not enough papers left to bother with, darn it!), gliding by one of the soup kitchens where Mr. Looney saw to it that hungry out-of-work men at least got something warm to eat, then ducked down an alleyway between two huge warehouses, the chimneys of industry receding behind him.

Before long he was sailing past St. Peter’s Church, its ominous gothic shape and spires looming behind the iron fence; then he cycled straight down the middle of Main Street’s two lanes, drivers frowning and even cursing at him as, going in either direction, they narrowly missed the boy. This dangerous game of auto tag Michael had played for as long as he’d been hawking papers; he liked the exhilarating feeling it gave him.

Some of the stores were boarded up, even on Main Street — often he had heard his father tell his mother, “We are lucky to have it so soft in such hard times” — but not the drugstore... or any of Mr. Looney’s shops or restaurants, for that matter.

Michael parked his bike out front, and sauntered in, dropping his newspaper bag on the counter. Mr. McGowan acknowledged the boy with a nod but immediately began counting out the few remaining papers. Unwrapping his scarf, Michael dug into his pocket for the change and deposited the coins on the counter, where they danced and rang. White face exposed, the boy drank in the scents of penny candy and pulp paper and tobacco — what a wonderful place a drugstore was.

The druggist quickly counted the coins, then glanced up, an unruly eyebrow raised, signaling to Michael that the books were not balanced. And, with a sigh, the boy again dug into his pocket, found the missing nickel and slammed it onto the counter.

With a humorless smile, Mr. McGowan nodded, and returned to his calculating. While the druggist was counting out the meager coinage that would be the boy’s commission, Michael surreptitiously — so careful even the faces on advertising signs posed around wouldn’t see him — sneaked a pouch of Bugler Tobacco from the shelf below and up under his coat, into the waistband of his trousers.

Pocket jingling with the nickels he’d earned (as opposed to pilfered), Michael strode out of the drugstore, onto the sidewalk, where he wheeled his bike around the corner into an alleyway. Ripping open the pouch of tobacco, he removed the baseball card from its paper wrapper — Rogers Hornsby of the Cubs — and bent down, affixing the card to the back wheel.

Then, glancing around, he withdrew from a coat pocket a battered-looking brown briar pipe with a bit of a Sherlock Holmes shape to it, a smoking instrument that his father had thrown out a few weeks ago. Michael filled the bowl with tobacco, tamped it down, and fished a book of matches from another pocket, lighting up like an old pro.

Two cards clicking at his rear spokes now, puffing the pipe as if that were powering him, Michael cycled out of the downtown, into the nearby residential district, flush with that satisfying feeling known only by a kid who is putting one over on the grownups of the world.

When he finally coasted into the long, tree-lined driveway of the two-story stucco structure that was the O’Sullivan home, Michael grew suddenly cautious. He should put the pipe away, he knew, before getting in range of the windows of the large house, set against an idyllic background of the snowy woods. If his father saw the boy puffing away, Papa would just kill him...

As Michael slowed, contemplating that, an assassin took advantage of this momentary caution on the boy’s part, and a projectile hurled with deadly precision knocked Michael off-balance — and off his bike, onto a pile of white, the glowing pipe flying, dying a sizzling death in a snowbank.

Stepping from behind a tree, in mittens and snowsuit, Peter O’Sullivan, age 10, also small for his age, laughed mercilessly, delighted that his snowball had done such a spectacular job of it.

But Michael had survived many such onslaughts, and was already fashioning a snowball of his own, so deftly, so quickly, that Peter had no time to run: he was doomed to take Michael’s shot in the forehead. The younger boy pitched into the snow and rolled to a stunned stop, staring upward, breath pluming.

Michael too was on his back, also “dead” — the smoke of his breath outdoing the dying embers of the pipe.

Neither boy noticed the woman in the kitchen window, their mother, Annie O’Sullivan, smiling. From this distance, she had not discerned the pipe — or else her smile might have curved into a smirk — and knew only that these daily attacks by the younger boy against his big brother represented affection.

Annie — approaching forty, a petite, quietly pretty peaches-and-cream-complected woman in a quietly pretty blue house-dress — was pleased that the two boys got along so famously. Often brothers could be rivals, even adversaries, and since her husband seemed to favor the youngest boy (who had almost died in childbirth), young Michael might easily have resented Peter.

Right now the rumble of her husband’s Ford sedan was making minor thunder, announcing the imminent arrival of the head of the house. What was Michael, Jr., doing out there? Making a snow angel?

In fact, the boy — still sprawled in mock death — was trying with his foot to bury the pipe in the snow, hiding it (he hoped) from his father, whose face turned rather blankly to the two boys as the big dark green Ford headed toward the freestanding garage at the end of the long driveway.

Peter, of course, chased after his father. Michael just watched. If he were to tag after his younger brother, all that would happen was that Papa would ruffle the younger boy’s hair and smile at him and maybe, maybe if Michael was lucky, he’d get a nod. That he could live without.

In the kitchen, before the table had been set for supper, while their mother was still at the stove, Michael and Peter sat together and did their homework.

Michael envied his brother, who was something of a whiz at school; right now the kid was writing in his notebook like the pencil was doing its own thinking. Criminey, how did he do that? Michael, on the other hand, was slogging through his math problems like he was trying to run in a snowdrift.

The older boy sensed his mother beside him — the fresh-scrubbed smell of her — and when he turned she was at his shoulder, smiling at him like the Madonna, whispering, “Don’t worry — I’ll help you with it later.”