Andrew Vachss - A Bomb Built in Hell

“Because baby-rapers bring the law—they always do, just like the dope fiends bring it. So he had to go. I thought he was cutting on a kid out there, but after I hit him it turned out to be the dog.”

“How’d you know where to look for him?”

“I learned in prison. If I was a cop, there’d be a whole lot of sorry motherfuckers out there.”

“How’d you hit him?”

“With the target pistol, at about fifty feet.”

“That don’t seem right to me. Like you showing him too much respect, you know? You maybe should of slashed his fucking throat.”

“He’s just as dead this way. You think they’d pin a fucking medal on me for whacking him out?”

“No, I know they don’t do that.”

“They used to do it, right? I got a couple of medals in Korea for shit like that ... stupid.”

“For giving you the medals?”

“Me, for doing their fucking killing for them.”

“You did Carmine’s killing for him....”

“Carmine made it my own killing.... And even if it wasn’t, I had to kill them so I could do my own.”

“At the racetrack?”

“No. I thought that was it. But, if it was, I’d go on this Norden thing, right? In fact, that’s the one thing been on my mind for a long time.”

“Why just that?” the kid asked.

“Meaning...?”

“Why just killing—there’s other things.”

“That’s all I know how to... Look, you got a woman?”

“No, not right now. I mean, there’s a girl I go and see sometimes, but I can’t make anything regular out of it....”

“But you can have one if you want, right? You can talk to them? Talk to all kinds of people out there,” he gestured with a wide sweep of his hand to encompass the city. “Right?”

“Just some kind of people, really....”

“What kind?”

“Guys that have been Inside, women on the track.... I don’t know ... maybe you’re right. I could talk to anybody I wanted, probably.”

“I can’t.”

“Can’t what?”

“Have a woman, talk to a man, be around people and not have them know about me.... I did it when I went out to see Norden but that’s not because I fit in. I was invisible to those people. In Times Square, they all knew. And when they don’t.... You believe that three punks tried to take me off in a parking lot on the Island?”

“Heeled?”

“No!” he snorted. “Three punks and one little knife between them ... and I’m already sitting in the car with the engine running.”

“Jesus! They must of been...”

“They just couldn’t see, kid,” Wesley explained. “I could walk right up to them and they’d never know ... but I couldn’t talk to them.”

“The women ... maybe I could...”

“No. I left that ... I left it in the jail, or maybe before.”

“You could get it back.”

“It would cost too much now—what would I do with it? I know what I have to do ... just not who to do it to.”

“I don’t know either,” the kid said.

“Well, you better fucking find out. Carmine sent me to the library to find out how —I guess you’d better start going to find out who .”

“I haven’t had a woman since I moved in here.”

“You better stay in touch with that too, kid. Stay in touch; stay close to it all. After I go, you don’t want to be all alone.”

“Wesley...?”

“Carmine and Pet were always together, right? I was alone until I had them. When Carmine checked out, he left Pet behind. And Pet left me behind for you, right? When I go, you’ll be alone ... and we don’t have enough bullets for them all, kid. It was all for fucking nothing unless you can make it happen—I know that now. I came out to avenge Carmine. I did that. Why aren’t I dead and home with him?”

“I don’t know, but...”

“Pet wouldn’t have gone unless he knew that I was okay to leave. I can’t go either until you are.”

“I’m not ready ... you’ve still got stuff to show me.”

“Show you what? I’ve taught you just about everything I know about how to kill.”

“But...”

“But there has to be something more, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, that’s the mystery, kid. The part I don’t know about. But I’m going to figure it out before I leave.”

“Politics?” the kid asked.

“Politics? I don’t know. I know this—when I was overseas I learned some things. Say it takes thirty grains of rice a day to keep a man alive ... what happens if you give him forty grains?”

“He’s happy?”

“Enough not to kill you, anyway. What happens if you give him twenty grains?”

“Then he comes for you.”

“Okay, sure. But why the fuck should he spare your life for thirty lousy grains of rice? Why shouldn’t he want the whole thing for himself and grow his own damn rice?”

“People own land....”

“Is that right? And where’d they get it from?”

“They bought it?”

“From who? You keep going back far enough, kid, what you find out is, they fought for it.”

“So?”

“So why don’t the sorry motherfucker getting the thirty grains of rice fight for it too?”

“The law—”

“Was written by the motherfuckers who got the land now , see?”

“Yeah. And they got the police and the army and everything else to protect that land.”

“That isn’t all, kid. What you think the Welfare Department is all about? Or the fucking methadone ... any of that giveaway shit?”

“I don’t see how it’s the same. If—”

“The Welfare, that’s the thirty grains of rice. You can live off it but you can’t live on it, you understand? And the methadone, to a dope fiend, that’s the thirty grains.”

“Dope fiends don’t vote, Wes.”

“The fuck they don’t—winos vote on election day, right?”

“Yeah, for a bottle of wine.”

“So the dope fiends...”

“I get it.”

“Yeah. So what? Even I can see that.”

“What do you mean, Wesley?”

“That kind of crap just plain hits you in the face. They got to have systems , you know? Like in the joint. Just a few hacks ... and a fucking regiment of cons, right? But nobody ever walks over the Wall.”

“The Man has the guns.”

“Bullshit! He don’t have the guns in the blocks, on the tiers, right? The guards are unarmed, but we let him lay, because we don’t even trust each other. It’s real easy my way—black and white, us against them, period. I did it for Carmine ... but now I don’t know who to do it for. It can’t be for me....”

“Why not? If you risk your life like you do, then...”

“I’m already dead. I’m tired. I don’t want to be here anymore, kid.”

“I don’t understand that.”

“I know. That means you can still be here, you see? It can still be for you.”

74/

Wesley went upstairs and focused on the fourth-floor wall for a long while. Then he went down to the kid’s room in the garage.

“I saw on the news last night that Poppa Doc’s faggot son is coming to this country.”

“From Haiti?” the kid asked.

“Yeah. That fat, greasy nigger is running the show down there his way. I knew a guy in the joint that lived under his old man— he said Poppa Doc was the Devil, straight up.”

“So?”

“I’m going to blow him up.”

“Why? I don’t get it, Wesley. You call him a nigger, right? And all that’s going to be getting anything behind you wasting this cocksucker is another bunch of niggers....”

“Like Carmine said ... that maggot is a nigger, right? An ugly word for a black bastard with a greedy heart and bloody hands. But the others he’s got locked up there, they ain’t niggers, kid— they’re people like us, right? Like you, anyway.”