Эд Макбейн - Guns

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.