Red-Dirt Marijuana: And Other Tastes (13 page)

“ ‘School Superintendent Adams said that while the damage has not yet been fully assessed it is expected to run close to a thousand dollars.’ ”

In his reading, Nick gave special emphasis to various words, including each mention of the rival gang, as though in the act of reading the item aloud, he alone could successfully identify himself with their exploits.

“ ‘After breaking dozens of windows, desks, blackboards, and strewing ink and torn textbooks throughout the classrooms, the defiant youngsters left their gang signature, Bandits, in several places. See photo.’ ”

Ritchie made a gesture of contempt, but it poorly disguised the envy beneath it. “Let’s have a lookit the pitcher again.” And they all three huddled once more over the paper.

“ ‘Bandits,’ ” said Nick, as though he were still the only one authorized to read whatever might come before them.

“Jerks,” said Vince, spitting. “Couldn’t they do any better than that?”

“You
kiddin’?
” said Nick, “they got the pitcher, din’ they?” He looked down at the photograph again, to make sure of it.

“No, I ain’t
kiddin’
,” said Vince, seething, and he spat heavily on the page.

“Hey I din’finish with the paper yet, whatta you doin’, I din’finish with it yet!”

“Yeah, well, ain’t that too bad!”

They faced each other squarely for a moment, but the nameless, impersonal rage and hatred in Vince’s face was so overpowering that Nick turned away, muttering something, and sat down again, crumpling the defiled page and throwing it aside.

Vince stood glaring after him, then he and Ritchie sat down too, together, some distance from Nick. For the next few minutes Nick turned the pages of the paper very self-consciously, feigning frowns of interest, expressions of amusement, finally even whistling a little, before he managed to speak again, as though nothing at all had happened:

“How come
we
din’get in the paper when we busted up the hunnert-an’-seven?” There was a slight whine in his voice.

Vince, who was still staring at him, merely spat, then looked away.

“Cause they din’know it was us did it!” said Ritchie. “Jerk!”

“You kiddin’?
Everybody
knew it was us did it.”

“I mean the
papers
din’know!” Then, turning to Vince, he went on, “Jez, how dumb can a jerk get, huh?”

“You gotta leave your mark,” said Vince tersely, as though he were talking to himself. “You gotta leave your mark next to somethin’
broke—
so they can take a pitcher of it.”

Out along the sidewalk that bordered the front of the lot, where the two children played at their game of war, a little girl slowly passed, a cloth doll cradled to her chest. She was perhaps five years old and she walked with a vague sort of metronomic motion, putting one foot before the other, twisting her body in that direction with each step, and humming distractedly. Her passing struck the attention of the smaller boy, and he rushed out at once to confront her, lurching forward with the pistol in both hands at arm’s length. “Kow!” he cried, then repeated the movement, point-blank, at the head of the cloth doll. “Kow!” With a haughty gesture of possessiveness, the little girl turned away, covering the doll’s head with her hands, and hurried past. A few steps beyond, she resumed her dreamlike gait, while the little boy stood in the middle of the sidewalk looking after her, still aiming the pistol. “Kow! Kow!” he said softly, almost wearily.

That night, about three hours after supper, Vince and Ritchie were sitting on the curb opposite a small candy and cigar store, sitting just beyond the street lamp’s circle of light. “Naw, that’s out,” Vince was saying impatiently. “The
school
is kid stuff. It’s gotta be somethin’ . . . different, somethin’ bigger than that. We can make them look
sick!
” He glanced menacingly toward the candy store as an old man came out and stacked some papers on the front stand. “And
I
know just what it is,” he said softly.

“You mean old man Kessler?”

“And I know
just what it is.
”

“You mean bust up the—”

“Listen. Suppose old man Kessler din’ come home tonight. Get it? His brother would call the cops, right? As soon as he din’ show up, see, he’d call the cops.”

“You mean
kidnap
’im?”

“Naw, just so it would
look
that way. See? Then it’d get in the papers and they’d have to print it when they found him—that it was a gag . . . by the
Panthers.
But we’d say we din’do it, if they ask us, the police—like somebody else must of done it . . . and
left our mark.
See?”

“But
he’d
know we did it. He’d recognize us, he’d
tell
’em we did it!”

“He won’t know
nothin’!
”

Vince glanced around to see that they weren’t being watched, then he leaned forward and pulled something from inside his jacket, allowing only a fraction of it to show.

“See this? Know what it is? Pilla’-case! Listen, I got it all figgered out. We wait in the doorway next to the store. Okay, when he locks up, he walks over to the car, right? Okay. Now
one
guy slips up behind him and puts the pilla’-case over his head—like that! Quick, you know? Then the other two grab’im—he don’t see
none
of us; and we don’t talk neither—durin’ the whole time we don’t talk.”

“Yeah, then what?”

“Then we tie’im up and put’im in the car, and leave’im there. So when he don’t show up, his brother phones the cops. Like he’s
missin’,
see what I mean? And they put it in the paper: ‘Old man Kessler missin’!’ Jez, it’s a riot! I tell you, it’ll make those jerks look sick!”

Since the beginning of the talk, Ritchie’s face had shown a restrained and devious consternation. At this point, following a pause in the exchange, he seemed almost alarmed.

“How you gonna’ keep’im from
yelling?
”

Vince threw another suspicious glance at the store, then he extracted the pillowcase entirely. It was folded and bulky. He put it on his lap and covertly raised the folded-over part of it. There were two rolled-up pieces of electric-light cord, a necktie and a wad of cotton the size of a man’s fist.

“See this? Cotton. The guy that puts the pilla’-case over his head grabs his mouth, see? That’s all he does. He puts the pilla’-case over his head and then holds his hand over his mouth—hard, you know? One arm around his head and the other hand over his mouth. He don’t worry about the arms, ’cause the other two guys run up, quick, and grab his arms and tie’em behind’im. With this.”

He gingerly indicated the tight twists of covered wire, then touched a finger to the necktie.

“The guy that’s holdin’ his mouth reaches up under the pilla’-case and puts the cotton in his mouth while the other two guys tie it, on the outside, across his mouth, you know—like this—it’s open, see, with the cotton inside it, and the tie across it,
tight
see, it’ll go around twice, pushin’ the cotton down in his mouth so he don’t yell. Then we put’im in the car and tie his feet.”

Ritchie sat staring down at the paraphernalia, fascinated but ambivalent. Vince went on, hurriedly, as if only a certain urgency of voice were needed now to convince Ritchie.

“I got it all figgered out. Know where I got the pilla’-case? Outta the trash. No laundry mark, I tore it off it. They can’t trace it—to
nobody,
see? The tie too. That’s what gimme the idea—when I see the stuff in the trash.”

So saying, Vince lapsed into a sort of silent reverence, perhaps pleasantly retracing the steps that had led to this moment of pure infallibility, while Ritchie continued to gaze down at the things, as though he, too, weren’t already committed.

“We’d have to wear gloves,” he said thoughtfully.

“Naw,” said Vince, “just the one guy, the one that opens the car. The old man keeps all his keys together, you know? So when he locks up, he’ll still have the keys in his hand on the way to the car. I mean we don’t even have to look for the keys. And just the one guy’ll touch the keys and the door.”

Ritchie started to speak, as if to raise another objection, but then, as though having thought of something else, more important, said:

“Where’d we leave our mark?”

“I dunno,” said Vince easily. “I haven’t decided the best place for it yet.”

Both boys looked up to see Nick approaching. He was munching an apple and still wearing his baseball cap. There was a suggestion of youth and naiveté in the way he walked slowly in order to finish all the apple before reaching them. When he arrived, Vince spoke to him before he had a chance to sit down:

“You got any gloves at home?”

“What kinda gloves?” asked Nick, still holding the apple, of which there was almost nothing left but the core.

“
Gloves,
jerk! Like you’d wear if you din’wantta leave your fingerprints someplace.”

“Sure I got gloves at home.”

“Okay, go get’em, and get one of your sister’s lipsticks.”

“What for?”

“
Get’em!
We’ll tell you what for when you get back.”

“Whatta you want the lipstick for?”

“Look, you want in on this or not?”

“Sure I want in on it.”

“Well, get the
stuff
for Chrissake! We’ll tell you when you get back.”

“Okay, okay,” said Nick, with enough inflection to suggest he was simply humoring their unreasonableness. He shrugged and started back down the sidewalk, walking slowly, still toying with the apple at his lips.

The two boys watched his departing figure in silence, until Ritchie nodded sagely and said:

“Lipstick’s good to leave your mark on a car with.”

Halfway down the block they could see Nick pause at the bottom of the steps where he lived and look up at the lighted windows above. Then he threw down the apple core which bounced off the curb and into the gutter—and in this movement there was something abrupt and decisive, somehow like the sudden dropping of a mask—and he bounded up the steps two at a time.

After the deed was done—and, surprisingly enough, it had come off almost exactly as planned—the three boys went down to Nick’s and climbed the fire escape to sit outside his rooms and watch. It was a good vantage point, for from there not only could they see the shuttered front of the old man’s store, but also the rear half of the automobile in which they had put him.

Because of the angle and the distance from where they were sitting, they could not actually read it; but they could see, in darkly iridescent traces, where the light of the arc lamp, falling in a yellow swatch across the back of the car, was caught up in the outline of their mark, “Panthers”—for, at the last minute, and all things considered, that was where they had decided to put the old man, in the trunk.

They watched for an hour, but no one passed, only some drunks stumbling along the opposite sidewalk. Then, at Vince’s suggestion, they agreed to each go home and be in the presence of his family, so that they would all have an alibi, before meeting at the lot in the morning.

Morning.

Vince was still asleep. In a dim untidy boxlike room, containing a double bed and a dresser, with an empty baby crib standing in the one remaining corner, the only light was the gray-washed morning through a small window and it left the rumpled bedclothes and the sleeping boy’s face discolored and wan. It was the room he shared with his older brother, Sid, and their infant sister.

Alone now, in his half-sleep Vince made vague efforts to cover his head with the pillow, but from somewhere voices rising in argument, the sputtering growl of a dozen radios and crash of pots and pans, the crying babies, the blare and screech and wrangle of the streets below—the sounds of the too-close, thin-walled, tenement day—had begun, and he awoke. He sat up and looked around anxiously, as though he had overslept. Then he got out of bed, wearing his undershorts, and quickly dressed. As he sat on the edge of the bed, bent forward in tying his shoes, he pushed open the door to the adjoining room where his father sat, eating breakfast and watching television.

A very large man, he sat squarely in the center of the divan, looking bloated in his tight trousers and fresh undershirt, his face rawly shaved and bleary-eyed from sleep, the hastily combed hair thinly criss-crossed on one side, as he leaned out over the low table, eternally in the attitude of eyes upraised to the set, mouth slightly agape, and fork poised with another bite of dripping egg.

This room was a slightly larger version of the other one, a box with two square holes punched in it for windows. It was the living room, but since the family took most of their meals there, in order to watch TV, it had an even more cluttered and abortive appearance than the big glazed seashell, leather- and glass-framed photographs, novelty plastic electric clock and additional, pathetic, bric-a-brackish attempts at mediocrity would have given it otherwise. Propped at one end of the divan was a year-old child who gazed at the TV screen with unrelenting saucer-eyed attention.

Half laughing, the father did not seem to notice when Vince entered the room, but he scowled when the boy passed between him and the set and even moved his head out to one side so as not to miss any more than necessary while a man on the screen wearing shell-rimmed glasses put a funny paper hat on a chimpanzee, for perhaps the thousandth time. The chimpanzee reached up and pulled off the hat, as he always did, and Vince’s father resumed his show of amusement.

“That goddam monk!” he said, chuckling and averting his eyes long enough to slurp another bite of egg into his mouth.

Vince went in the kitchen. With a large oblong pot of water simmering on the two back burners of the midget stove, the kitchen was very much like a steam closet. His mother was there, wearing a satiny housecoat, her hair up in a kerchief.

“What’d he do?” she called over her shoulder to the man in the living room, then spoke quickly to Vince. “You lookin’ for cereal, cereal’s on the table.”