The Exterminator

by Peter McCurtin

  “Hey Johnny!” they called to Eastland. They liked Eastland, who absolutely refused to let them call him Uncle John, but he was a grown up after all and therefore not too interesting.

  “Go play for a while,” Eastland said. “I want to talk to your mother about something.”

  They ran away yelling and Eastland took Mary’s arm and steered her to one of the stone benches near the fountain that didn’t work. Gently, he forced her to sit down and then took her hand. Jesus, Eastland thought. Life is so full of pain. But the only way to say it was to say it. He took a breath.

  “Michael got mugged about two hours ago,” he said. “Whoever did it injured his spine and the doctors think he’ll be paralyzed for the rest of his life. I’m telling you this now, so you’ll be ready for it when you get to the hospital. I tried to call you at work, but they said you worked through lunch so you could leave an hour early. Then I called you at home, but you weren’t there.”

  “I used the extra hour to go shopping at Alexander’s,” Mary said in a dead voice. She wondered why she was being so precise. What did it matter where she went shopping. She could not have said how she felt at that moment; her whole life seemed to have lost its meaning. Even talking about it, she knew, was a waste of time. A waste of time? Why was she concerned about time? All she had left now was time; a whole lifetime of empty, meaningless time. Somehow it all seemed too funny and she knew she would start screaming in a minute.

  Eastland, sensing this, tightened his grip on her arm; the urge to scream went away and she sagged against him. Eastland put his arm around her and kissed her on the forehead.

  “How did you …?” She didn’t have the energy to complete the question.

  Eastland said, “I was in Smitty’s thinking maybe Michael would show up. Then I heard the sirens and saw the cop cars driving right across the vacant lot. Then a guy who knew Michael from the bar came in and said he’d been mugged behind a building on the way to Smitty’s. Somebody who saw it happen called it in, but wouldn’t give a name. They were putting Michael in an ambulance when I got over to where he was. The ambulance was from Morrisania so I got a cab and went there. I collared a doctor and he told me about Michael. They wouldn’t let me in to see him.”

  Eastland didn’t tell Mary that the doctor said it was about the worst beating he had seen in his life. The worst beating where the victim didn’t die. The doctor was a blond young resident from Dedham, Massachusetts, who regarded service in the Bronx hospital as a unique experience. He thought he had a flair for writing and had several titles picked out for his first book, sure to be a bestseller; and though he hadn’t actually started on it yet, he decided on the spur of the moment to devote a whole chapter to the interesting case of the young Negro man with the cargo hook still imbedded in his spine when the ambulance brought him to Morrisania.

  Barring a miracle, he told Eastland, there was no hope at all. Then he said to forget about the miracle—it was not about to happen.

  Mary Jefferson sat very still, her hands folded, no expression on her face “How about the kids?” Eastland said. “If you don’t have somebody to look after them I can take them to a movie. Or I can take them home and stay with them. Anything you want me to do.”

  “I’ll get my sister to look after them,” Mary Jefferson said at last. “I want you to be with me when I see Michael. He’ll want to see you and I can’t face it by myself.”

  “All right,” Eastland said, pointing to a taxi waiting at the curb. He had given the driver twenty dollars and warned him what would happen if he took off with the money. He helped Mary to her feet and she called the children.

  “You’re going to visit your Aunt Beth for a little while,” Mary said.

  The children made a face.

  All the way to the hospital Eastland found himself praying that they would find Michael dead. Michael had saved his life not once but twice, and he wanted him dead. After all, death was final and you could get used to it; you could adjust. The way Michael was now was worse than death; no one would feel that more than Michael himself. He knew Michael would want to die once they told him his condition was hopeless. The hell of it was that Michael didn’t even have the choice of living or dying. If Michael lived, and the doctor said that was quite possible, he would be a vegetable—a thing! A thing fed through tubes as long as he lived. He would even piss through a tube connected to a bottle; and when the bottle was full, some brisk nurse would empty it, rinse it out, and hook it up again.

  At the hospital some iron-jawed senior nurse tried to keep Eastland out because he wasn’t an immediate member of the family. The argument went on until some weary looking doctor came along and told the nurse not to be such a horse’s ass.

  “Rules are rules,” the nurse protested.

  “For Christ’s sake, Kelly,” the doctor sighed. “What difference does it make?”

  The first sound Eastland heard when he entered the darkened room was the wheezing of the respirator that was keeping Michael alive. He had heard it before in Nam when he had gone to a hospital to see some guy who had caught a small piece of steel in the spine. One thing you had to say about Nam: they had great hospitals over there. When Michael saved his life, that time on the river bank with the VC, he had ended up in a hospital himself. Michael came to see him as often as he could.

  Eastland looked at Michael and listened to his breathing. Michael’s chest went up and down in time with the machine. The oxygen went in and out, as from a bellows. No matter what Michael’s emotions were there would be no quickening or slowing of his breath. The machine was as relentless as life itself.

  A nurse was standing by the bed when they came in, and she was still young enough to have some compassion left. Mary tried to run to the bed; the nurse stopped her.

  “Don’t touch him,” she said. She paused to glance at the clipboard in her hand. “Please don’t touch him, Mrs. Jefferson. His arms are broken. Sit by the bed if you like. He’ll be able to see you if you do that.”

  The nurse moved a chair and Mary sat down. Michael’s eyes turned toward her and they didn’t move except to blink.

  “That means he recognizes you,” the nurse said. “He can hear all right. Tell him to blink once for yes and twice for no.”

  The nurse went out.

  Mary Jefferson leaned forward. “You know I love you, don’t you, Michael? No matter what happens you know I love you?”

  Michael blinked once and Mary looked over her shoulder at Eastland, who was standing in the shadows by the shuttered window.

  “Eastland’s here,” Mary said.

  Eastland came forward and Michael’s eyes moved to him. Smiling would be a bad joke, so Eastland didn’t do it. He didn’t offer sympathy, didn’t offer hope, because sympathy would be resented and false hope was worse than none. But more than anything else, he had known Michael Jefferson too long, and owed him too much, to start bullshitting him at this late date.

  “Hello Michael,” Eastland said.

  Michael’s eyes blinked.

  Eastland said, “I’m going to wait outside while Mary talks to you. Okay if I talk about a few things after Mary gets through?”

  Michael’s eyes blinked.

  Eastland put his hand on Mary’s arm. “I’ll be in the visitors’ area if you need me.”

  Eastland went out without looking at Michael again. Every time he looked at his friend he felt as if his guts were being ripped out. All he could think of was that someone had to pay for this. What had happened to Michael was no ordinary mugging, so it had to be the Ghouls. What was the creep’s name who had threatened Michael? Smiley, that was it. The greasy punk with the black beret and the well kept beard. It was a mistake not to have killed Smiley, and now Michael was paying for it. Suddenly, Eastland was so overcome by horror that he almost vomited. Cold sweat broke out on his face and he wiped it away with a trembling hand. Smiley and his friends had planned this, talked about it, laughed about it, and when they were ready they did it.

&nbs
p; “Are you all right, sir?” a woman’s voice said, and Eastland looked up. A nurse he hadn’t seen before was standing beside him. “I came over because you look so strange. Is there anything I can do for you? You’re with the patient in 5Q?”

  “Michael Jefferson,” Eastland said.

  The nurse nodded. “Terrible,” she said. “How can people do such things?”

  How can people do such things? Eastland thought after the nurse left him. It sounded like a line from a movie; maybe the nurse had heard it in a movie. There was no easy answer, but then he wasn’t looking for answers of any kind. A sociologist would say that Smiley and his friends really weren’t to blame for the terrible thing they had done; environment—Eastland smiled savagely—was the actual villain.

  Eastland thought, The world is full of Smileys and something should be done about them. But right now the only Smiley I’m interested in is the Smiley I know. The more Eastland thought about Smiley, the more he wanted him to stay alive and well. Now Smiley belonged to him, not to the police, not to his enemies. There would be no justice if Smiley got killed by a drunken driver; if he OD’d on drugs. Like the State, Eastland wanted Smiley to be in good physical condition when he killed him.

  How he was going to do it was as yet unclear; for a moment he thought of doing to Smiley what Smiley had done to Michael. The only thing wrong with it was that it might not work. He might botch the job and there might not be another chance to repeat it. Eastland looked at his hands and found that the tremor had gone; the sweat had dried on his face. He found that his mind, unbalanced with anger and grief a few minutes before, was now capable of thinking clearly. For as long as he lived there would never be a day when he wouldn’t think of Michael; right now it was more important to avenge him than to grieve for him.

  Eastland didn’t know how long he waited; maybe an hour. At last Mary came out and said she was going to pick up the children at her sister’s. “The doctor doesn’t want me to stay any longer,” she said. “You can have five minutes with Michael, but you’ll have to leave when the time is up.”

  “I’ll call you later,” Eastland said.

  Michael’s eyes moved when Eastland came into the room. “If you don’t feel like listening to me I’ll come back tomorrow,” Eastland said.

  Michael Jefferson’s eyes blinked no.

  “You know I have to do something about this,” Eastland said very softly. “You know what I’m going to do has to be done. I promise you they won’t get away with this. I know that won’t do you any good, but I’ll feel better for it. You have to understand I’m doing this for myself, not for you. You think I’m wrong?”

  A full half minute ticked by—Michael Jefferson seemed to be thinking—before he blinked no.

  “All right,” Eastland said. “I’ll be in to see you every day. Don’t worry about Mary and the kids. I’ll look after them. Don’t worry about money. I have some money in the bank and when that’s gone I’ll get more. I’ll take care of Mary and the kids like they were my own family.”

  Eastland smiled for the first time. “I’d better look after them—they’re the only family I’ve got.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Eastland knew his fingerprints were on file in the U.S. Army’s record headquarters in St. Louis, so the first thing he did before he hot-wired the car was to buy a pack of thin rubber gloves in a supermarket. The kind that keep ladies’ hands from getting red and ugly in dishwater. They were made for smaller hands than his, but they fitted well enough after he worked them on carefully, taking care not to make any rips.

  Eastland had never hot-wired a car in his life; just the same he knew how to do it. Every kid in the South Bronx knew how to do it. There it was as American as apple pie. After walking around for a while he chose to borrow a battered old ’69 Impala, because the cops wouldn’t bust their humps looking for it if the owner reported it stolen. If he got what he wanted, he wouldn’t need it for more than a few hours. And what he wanted were guns.

  Unlike a lot of guys, Eastland hadn’t smuggled any weapons back from Nam. Other guys smuggled back whole arsenals, especially handguns, but long before he left the army Eastland hoped he’d never have to handle a gun again. Now he needed the best weapons he could get and the man to see about that was Shecky Brill. He was going to see Shecky; Shecky wasn’t going to see him.

  Everybody knew that Shecky was the biggest gun dealer in the Bronx; Eastland had known about him since he was a kid, and if a kid knew then the cops knew. But it wasn’t just a simple matter of paying off the police, though there must have been some of that. Shecky was an old guy who looked like he’d been dressed with a pitchfork and went back to the Thirties. It was said that he supplied the guns that wasted Dutch Schultz in that chophouse in Newark. During his early career he was nothing but a mob armorer; there had been a number of arrests but no convictions.

  Shecky became something of a hero when he was arrested for the last time in 1947. This time it was a federal charge: shipping guns to Israel, then trying to cut loose from the British. There may have been some patriotism involved but Eastland guessed not too much.

  You should have heard the howl that went up when Shecky was charged and released in very high bail. Shecky was feted up and down the length of the Grand Concourse. For once all the Jews could agree about something. Here was a great old guy risking his neck to help drive the fascist British out of Palestine and what did he get for thanks: a heavy federal rap. There were speeches and newspaper editorials about Shecky. You’d never know it to look at him, but Shecky had become a martyr.

  Finally, the right people got to Harry Truman and the charges were filed and forgotten. The blintz eating congressman, not a Jew, who helped to spring Shecky was returned to office with an overwhelming majority at the next election.

  In recent years, Shecky had been shipping Armalite rifles, the weapon of choice, to the IRA through some Irish organization with headquarters on Valentine Avenue. The Irish brasshats in the police department knew all about it, but the word on Shecky was—hands off. After that nobody bothered Shecky because he had such good connections. He was confident enough to be careless: he didn’t even employ a bodyguard.

  Eastland was counting on that. Shecky’s front business was a pawn shop on Fordham Road not far from the Valentine Theater. Eastland knew that Shecky was still in business; in the Bronx Shecky was a legend, and legends die hard. The most recent news about Shecky was that he was buying all the gold he could—with gold at more than $600 an ounce that was only natural—and there was a back room in his hock shop where muggers, chain snatchers and burglars came to sell but not to pawn.

  It was fifteen minutes before six when Eastland parked the old Impala a block from the hockshop. He walked back quickly after putting on a pair of sunglasses and a baseball cap with a long bill. At the hockshop Eastland stopped to look at the display of cameras in the window. There was only one customer in the shop; Eastland walked on before he came out.

  Shecky’s assistant, a young Negro man, left at two minutes to six. The young man ran for a bus and got aboard just before it pulled out. Eastland waited for Shecky.

  The bell in a nearby church was striking six when Shecky came out and pulled down the long steel shutter that protected the front of the shop against night attack. After testing the padlock that secured the shutter, Shecky straightened up with an effort and headed for an old Buick parked in front of a hydrant. Shecky had the thick glasses of the half blind, and he moved like a man who was afraid of bumping into things. He cried out in his old man’s voice when Eastland poked him in the back with a short piece of pipe.

  “This is a forty-five,” Eastland said. “I’ll kill you if you turn around. You know what a forty-five can do, Shecky. All you have to do is walk ahead of me and nothing will happen to you.”

  Shecky didn’t move, not right away. “Take my money, young man,” he quavered. “Take what you want but please don’t hurt me. I’m an old man, you don’t want to hurt me. I have money and a good
watch.”

  “Move it,” Eastland said. “Walk a few steps ahead of me. You can’t run so don’t try it. I can give you half a clip before you get three feet.”

  The car was unlocked and Eastland put the old man behind the wheel. Then he reached over from the back seat and searched Shecky for a gun and didn’t find one. The old man still didn’t know what he looked like; and he had broken off the rearview mirror so Shecky couldn’t sneak a look at him.

  Eastland passed Shecky the car keys but he didn’t move. East Fordham Road was garish in the dying sun. Once all Irish it was now largely Hispanic. Ricky-ticky music blared from loud speakers outside record stores and there was a last minute run on chili dogs and tacos.

  “Young man, maybe you don’t know who I am,” Shecky said. “Young man, what do you want with me? My friends in the police …”

  Eastland told him to shut up and start the car. “We’re going where you keep the guns, Shecky. I want some guns and you want to stay alive. That’s the deal. I get the guns and you go home.”

  “You swear you won’t kill me?” Shecky was so carried away by his appeal that he tried to turn around. Eastland grabbed him by his thin neck and faced him front.

  “If I wanted to kill you, why would I go to all this trouble? You don’t know what I look like. Keep it that way. Now move the fucking car.”

  The old man shrugged, resigning himself to the situation. The car went east on Fordham and in the six o’clock traffic it took some time to get to East 138th Street. There it made a turn and went past the old Gimbels warehouse. Past there was a wilderness of old brick warehouses, gas stations, truck terminals and diners. All but the truck terminals were closing up for the day. The old man drove like a farmer but neither he nor the old Chevy attracted any attention. Finally, he turned the car into an alley at the end of which was a steel swing-gate topped by a roll of barbed wire. A weather-beaten sign on the gate said the place belonged to the Eastern Supply Company. Just what it supplied the sign didn’t say.