Эд Макбейн - Guns

It was Benny who didn’t get to walk the street. Not for six weeks, anyway, because that’s how long his leg was in a cast. And one of the guys in the club, a big musclebound jerk named Ernie, was wearing a bandage on his head for almost a month, and one guy had a broken wrist, and another guy had his forefinger and his middle finger together in a splint. Wherever Colley went, he carried the baseball bat with him. Even to school. Teacher in one of his classes told him he was going to report Colley to the principal if he continued bringing the bat to school with him. Colley said to the teacher, “Mr. Gersheimer, if I don’t bring this bat to school with me, I’m going to get killed. Would you like my blood on your hands, Mr. Gersheimer?”

“Nobody’s going to kill you, don’t be silly,” Mr. Gersheimer said. But his face went pale, and he never mentioned the bat again.

Just before school ended for the summer, the doctors took the cast off Benny’s leg. That was when Colley bought the gun. He bought it from a black kid who was on the high school band. The kid was stealing instruments from the band room, and then trading them for handguns, which he sold to whoever could pay the price; apparently there was a bigger market for pistols than for trumpets or clarinets. The guns were cheap crap; Saturday-night specials. The one Colley bought was a .25-caliber pistol. It was the first gun he ever owned. To pay for it, he stole money from his mother’s pocketbook. She never even found out the money was missing, but if she’d asked him about it, asked him if he’d taken it, he’d have told her yeah, it was a matter of life and death. The day after he bought the gun, he went around to the Oriole clubhouse again.

Two guys were on the front stoop, they went running down the basement the minute they saw Colley. Benny came out a minute later. No cast on his leg. Lost a little weight, too, but still fat as a pig and black as a nigger.

“I have a gun in my pocket,” Colley told him at once.

“Yeah?”

“That’s right.”

“What do you want here?”

“I want to tell you anybody starts up with me, I’ll kill him.”

“There’s already a warrant out on you,” Benny said.

“Don’t give me any of your bullshit gang talk,” Colley said. “Warrant, shit! I’m telling you I’m going to use this if I have to,” he said, and pulled the gun from his pocket and stuck it right in Benny’s face. “You the president of this asshole gang?”

“No,” Benny said, and looked at the gun.

“You told me you were the one...”

“Put up the gun, man,” Benny said.

“Had me beat up.”

“That’s right, watch the piece, will you?”

“If you ain’t the president...”

“ I’m the president,” a voice said. “What the fuck you want around here?”

Colley turned. Ernie was coming up out of the basement room. Ernie was the one whose head had been in bandages for a month.

“Well, well,” Colley said, and laughed. “You’re the man whose head I busted. Well, well.” The gun made him feel very cool and very tough. “I didn’t know I was busting the president’s head,” he said. The president made one funny move, he was going to be the ex-president. The former president. The late president.

“If you’re the president, how come it was Benny gave the order to have me jumped?” Colley said.

“Benny’s the war counselor,” Ernie said.

“The war counselor, huh?” Colley said, and laughed again. “Well, well.”

“He told us you were putting down the club...”

“I didn’t say nothin about your fuckin club,” Colley said. “You told Benny you was safe. You told him you didn’t need no insurance.”

“Oh, are you insurance salesmen?” Colley said. “I didn’t realize that.”

The gun was still pointing right at Benny’s nose, and everybody was getting nervous. Not as nervous as Benny, who was expecting to get shot any minute now. But pretty damn nervous. They had guns of their own in the gang armory, but the armory was six blocks away, at Concetta’s house, and right here was a guy with a .25 under Benny’s nose. They kept looking up the block for fuzz, and then looking back at the piece under Benny’s nose. Benny kept his eyes on Colley’s face. He was figuring he would know when Colley was about to squeeze the trigger; if only he kept watching Colley’s eyes, the eyes would telegraph, and then Benny would duck away in time. Faster than a speeding bullet, that was Benny Gallitelli.

“He came home and told us you thought you were hot stuff,” Ernie said. “So he’s the war counselor, so I told him to get up a raiding party...”

“You guys always talk like this?” Colley said. “Man, I never heard such shit in my life. War counselor, raiding party... what the hell is this? An Indian tribe?”

“That’s the kind of talk got you in trouble the first time,” Ernie said.

“Ernie, do you see this gun in your war counselor’s left nostril?” Colley said.

“I see it, I ain’t blind,” Ernie said.

“Don’t get him mad,” Benny said.

“If I pull this trigger, your war counselor’s going to be breathing from his nose up on the roof while he’s still here down in the street. Now what I’m going to do, Mr. President, I’m going to ask you whether you want a war counselor without a nose, or whether you want to call off this fuckin warrant shit and make peace. Because if you don’t want peace, then, man, you’ve got war with a crazy guinea, I’m telling you. The first thing I shoot off is fat Benny’s nose, and the next thing I shoot off is your balls, Mr. President. So what do you say?”

“You’re holding the cards,” Ernie said. “Right now you’re the one holding the cards. So okay.”

“Ernie,” Colley said, “what you say right now sticks forever, you dig? You don’t say you want peace now, and then tomorrow I get jumped. No way, Ernie. I want your solemn word, or else lard-ass here will be chasing his nose over the rooftops. Swear on your fuckin mother, Ernie.”

“I swear on my mother,” Ernie said.

“ What do you swear, you cocksucker?”

“I swear we won’t try to hurt you.”

“Never. Say never.”

“Never. We won’t try to hurt you never.”

“You swore it on your mother,” Colley said. “You heard him swear it on his mother.”

He put the gun away, and turned his back on them, and went up the street. The next day Benny came to him and asked if he would like to become a member of the Orioles. Colley said he would think it over.

A week later he told them yes.

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?”