Tabloid Dreams (8 page)

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.”

I stopped laughing right away. He was teaching me. I leaned against him and we waited for Mama to calm down and then I went and got the spring and I put it in his hand.

Now this morning I'm holding the pistol and it feels heavy, a good pound heavier than the Makarov, and that's a lot if you want to hold a pistol steady to shoot straight. I hold it with two hands and I reach my fingers up and they curl around the trigger. Just barely, but it's okay. That surprises me, but I forget sometimes that I'm still growing. So I've got my fingers on the trigger and the pistol is wobbling around and I'm crying. That pisses me off a lot. My daddy's making me cry now and it's a good thing he's not walking in that door right now cause I know I'd blow his fucking brains out.

I scrunch up my shoulder and dry my eyes on it, never letting go of the 1911, and then I try to just settle down. I pull the pistol up in front of me and it's still a little loosey goosey, but my chest kind of goes up and down and I swallow hard and the tears have stopped and the stuff I'm feeling sort of goes away. I'm supposed to see Ivan this morning, and I think what the hell. I slide my one 1911 magazine into the pistol and put it in my paper bag.

Later, I'm ready to go out and I'm passing through the kitchen and there's my sorry-ass mama sitting at the table in her slip. It's hot and she's fanning herself with a magazine and I stop. She looks up at me and smiles.

“You don't always have to make your own lunch,” she says nodding at my paper bag and her voice is real tiny and she's still staring at the bag.

“I don't ever see you in clothes,” I say to her.

“I ain't got no nice clothes,” she says. “There ain't no clothes stamps.”

“How much you need to buy yourself a lot of nice clothes?” I ask her.

“Need?”

“How much money'd that cost?”

She looks down at her toes and laughs at this. “I got expensive tastes,” she says.

“How much?”

“Ten thousand dollars would about do it,” she says.

“Okay,” I say and I go out.

I go into the Black Sea Social Club and Ivan's in the back of the place shooting pool with one of the other guys I never talk to. A third guy, Nick, is sitting drinking a beer at a table. When Ivan sees me coming to him, he puts his cue down and circles around the table.

“There's the man,” he says.

“Ivan.”

“You have your lunch bag. Good.”

I lift the bag for him. It feels heavy. I think maybe I should go back home for the Makarov before I head to Brighton.

“I have good job for you,” Ivan says and he eases his butt back onto the edge of the pool table. “Important job.”

“Okay,” I say.

“A man at oyster restaurant on Mulberry Street.”

“Mulberry Street? That's not in Brooklyn.”

Ivan stands up again, and he comes to me and my neck is cricked back as far as it'll go to look at his face. I ease a few steps away and he eases with me so I'm still looking way up. I don't like it. “This is not Russian gang,” he says. “This is worse thing. Mafia. You're not afraid, are you?”

“Why you ask that?” I say. “Shit no.”

“Good,” he says. “The Mafia, they eat little kids in their restaurants.”

Ivan hasn't talked like this to me since the first job. I guess he thinks he needs to start from scratch to get me to waste some Mafia don, but he's got that wrong and I'm beginning to get itchy.

“I'll do it,” I say, and I step back from him and he lets me. My neck stops cricking and I'm feeling a little better.

“Good,” Ivan says.

Then the guy behind him says, “You win respect down there, they make you boss of Bambino family.”

Ivan looks over his shoulder at this guy and I think he's unhappy with him, but when Ivan turns his face back to me, he's smiling. I know what a bambino is. But I let it pass. Ivan's been okay to me.

“Look,” I say, “I got no problem doing this. I want ten thousand dollars.”

Ivan's head kind of snaps. Then he gets this thing in his voice. “This is a lot of money,” he says. “You know how much money this is?” And his voice is all stretched and gooey.

“I know how much it is. I want that.”

“I give you three hundred. That's fifty percent raise.”

“Ten thousand or forget it,” I say and I say it hard enough so that he knows I mean it.

Ivan's sunken cheeks suck in some more. “Listen now,” he says. “I give you very good gun. I give you a lot of money for little kid.”

I straighten up and cock my head. “Wait,” I say to him.

“No, you wait for me,” he says. “I am doing good things for you all the time. You are not appreciating me.”

“Fuck you,” I say.

Now his face pinches and he slits his eyes at me. “You can't talk like that to Ivan. You got nothing till Ivan does things for you. You got nobody in world but Ivan. I am father to you.”

This makes sense. So I go into the brown bag and out comes the 1911 and it's in my two hands and my first shot shatters the light over the pool table. We all of us just stand for a second after that and it's real quiet. Then the guy behind Ivan goes into his coat and the 1911 is flopping around in front of me like a goddamn can opener but I see his hand move and I follow it and my next shot is in the center of this guy's chest and he flies back. Now Nick is standing and I take him out with one in the shoulder and he's looking there like he doesn't know whose body this is and the next one in his throat and he's down.