Robert Butler - Tabloid Dreams

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.”