So now she’s got me looking at my hands, like two goddamn little bath toys sitting on the table, and I’m getting some feelings I don’t want to think about. “Shut up now, Mama,” I say.
She does. I should like that, but I don’t, exactly. Then she says, real low, “So what will happen if I don’t shut up?”
I don’t have an answer for that. It’s a stupid question.
She says, “Where do you go, Wally? When you’re supposed to be in school. When you go out at night. I can’t watch you all the time. What is it you’re doing?”
I look at her and she kind of backs up a little bit, the can opener wobbling around in the air in front of her. I say, “Don’t talk crazy. You’re my mama.” My voice—I can hear it like it belongs to somebody else—is as tiny as my hands, a piping cute-ass little voice.
“What kind of answer is that?” she asks me.
“What are you talking about?” My head is full of static now, like a radio that’s off the station.
So I do both of us a favor. I get up and go out. There’s a couple of guys jittering around at the corner and I know they just see me as some kid they can cut up easy and I left my heat back in my room, so I go the other way. And I walk around thinking about my dad. He was a big talker. He was always saying, I’m going to make this score, I’m going to make that score. I didn’t know what he was talking about back then. I was just a lad. Four or five. Something like that. I was still playing on the raggedy-ass swings and shit at Tompkins Square Park. I’d swing up and down and the chains would scream like I was killing them and when I was way up high all I could see, all around, was funky homeless people living in cardboard boxes or sleeping under newspapers on the benches, guys that would grab at you when you went by, some of them, guys that would do anything to a little kid. Those guys were everywhere in the place I was a kid, and so were the old Russian guys sitting around playing chess.
Is my daddy going to end up like that, wherever he is? Not like the Russians. He don’t play no games, as far as I know. Like the homeless people. Is he going to end up living in a refrigerator box with a stack of old Sunday Times? I don’t know. All I know is I got his gun. And I figure he was full of shit about all the big stuff he was going to do. To tell the truth, though, I’d like to meet up with him someday and see how he come out. I was thinking about that walking around last night. And I was getting pissed. I was thinking, I got a score to settle with him. I do. I wish I didn’t. I wish it was simple, about him. But what am I going to do? I’ve learned how things have to be.
The first time Ivan sent me to do this thing for him, I was pretty nervous about it. Sure. That was almost a year ago. I’ve got a birthday next week. I’ll be ten, if I live that long. When I just turned nine, Ivan called me in from the dark open door of the social club. I was just passing time in the neighborhood. Kicking a flat Coke can around, trying to make it stop on the sidewalk cracks. Telling other kids who passed by that I was going to kill them. Stuff like that. So this voice from the darkness says, “Hey, little man. Come on in to this place.”
I know the streets, and these guys were pretty new, but I could figure out this social club. It wasn’t a place of perverts. It was a place of business. So I go in. This is when I met Ivan. “You want beer, little man?” he says.
“No,” I say to him, though I like it that he asks me. Now I would’ve said yes, but the first time he asked me, I was straight from punk stuff like kicking Coke cans and I wasn’t ready to say yes.
“You know how to get to Brighton Beach on subway?” he says to me.
Thinking about it a little later that day, I liked that being the first question he had about me. Not do you think you can kill.
“I can find it,” I say.
“That’s good,” he says. “You really want to kill somebody?”
This is when he shows me the Makarov. He calls it a “PM.”
I love that pistol at first sight. I bad-mouth it sometimes, thinking about the 1911. But it’s the first one I knew I could shoot.
I ask him, “What’s that, ‘PM’? You just use this at night?”
“You can use it at night,” Ivan says. “But it is Pistol Makarov. You want to hold this thing and maybe use it for me and then you can buy yourself something nice? You can walk around outside there and know you are big man already?”
My head was spinning from this. I had plenty of worries out there in the street. The guys in the park. The crackheads waiting in your building, in the shadows somewhere to grab you and if you don’t have money to give them, they’ll cut off your balls and sell them to herbal medicine stores for some kind of remedy. Stuff like that. I could use something to get people to pass me by.
“You want me to go blow somebody away?” I ask.
“You look like you could do it,” Ivan says. He’s got a pale face and his cheeks are sunken in and he’s real tall, taller than my dad. He’s waiting for me to answer and he’s not even about to smile. I look for that, for the bullshit, for the tease. But I can see he’s straight.
“Yeah. Sure. I want to hold it,” I say.
He gives it to me and it’s cold and it feels heavy at first. No heavier than a can of whatever dinner is tonight from Mama, but it feels heavier because it’s small. That’s a good way to think about me. I’m small, but I’m heavy. Like those stars somebody was talking about on TV. One spoonful weighs as much as everything in New York City. I held my PM and it was heavy like that and so was I. Any man try to touch me in some way I don’t want, they couldn’t even move me an inch. And now I had a thing that would kill their goddamn ass.
So I said yes to Ivan and he said good and he showed me how to use the PM and how to fieldstrip it and clean it, and it was real simple, only four parts, and I got my hands around it real good and I was hitting the target in the basement of the social club every time and Ivan never once changed how he talked to me, like I was no lad, and he gave me a beer later on and I didn’t like it the first time.
But maybe that’s the way it is the first time you do anything. One day I took the subway to Brighton Beach and it turns into an elevated train down there. I like that. You get to see all along the beach and even down to Coney Island. You can see the big Ferris wheel. I went on that once, but it wasn’t so hot. I think I remember my dad throwing me up in the air when I was little. I’ve seen dads do that sometimes, like in the park and stuff, and the kids laugh and seem to like it, but those dads aren’t so messed up that you just know, even if you’re pretty little, that he’s going to drop you sometime. I think going up in the Ferris wheel felt that same way, made me think of going up and coming down hard.
Anyway, I went to Brighton Beach that day and killed a guy for Ivan. I found myself thinking about my dad on the train and I touched my PM, which was in a little brown paper bag. Like I was carrying my lunch to school or something. That morning Ivan sits me at a table by the front window, though it’s still dark cause the window’s painted green. There’s a hooded lamp hanging over the center of the table and Ivan is sweating from the lightbulb, and he says, “This is that day you will become real man.”
“I’m a real man now,” I say. “That’s why you know I will go and do this thing. You have to be a real man already to waste a guy. Wasting the guy doesn’t make you the man.” I figure if I can think as clear as that in school, all those dumb-ass teachers would stop messing with me. But I just dry up when I’m there with all the little kids. Arguing with a Russian thug in his club, I can do that.
He listens to me careful and thinks a moment and then he smiles at me. “You are too smart already. You turn into good hit man and someday we make you honorary Russian and you go far with us.”
“Thanks,” I say. “What do I do?”
And Ivan tells me about another Russian gang, the Arbat Gang, that’s been pushing Ivan around. Ivan just wants Manhattan. He doesn’t want to get i
nvolved with Brooklyn. But these guys won’t leave him alone. They want to kill him. They’re bad guys, they do their business all wrong. “When we take money from businessman,” he says, “we give him good vodka, make him feel nice and protected. If he does not want to do business, we can maybe talk loud to him, lean on him little bit. But he for sure doesn’t want to do business with those bad gangs in Brooklyn. Those gangs will send their friends in Moscow and murder that businessman’s father.” Ivan pauses to see how bad I think this is.
I don’t bat an eye.
“And they kill his mother.”
I wrinkle my nose at this. That’s pretty bad. I think of my mother in her terry cloth housecoat opening the door of the apartment and she’s been trying to get a goddamn can of something open so she can eat lunch and some guys blow her away. That’s pretty low. But I’m still keeping quiet.
“And all of his little kids. His little malchiki.”
Being a kid can be pretty tough. Gangs like that make it worse. “Look,” I say. “What the hell you think I’ve been shooting your paper targets in the basement for?”
So I find myself on Brighton Beach Avenue and it’s stuffed full of cars and everybody has just learned how to use their horns, it sounds like, and with the el sparking and squealing overhead and guys hustling around in your face pushing sunglasses or knit caps or some kind of heart medicine and all kinds of other shit, with all that noise and action, I start to get a little nervous about what I’m going to do. Ivan says where I’m going, it’s nice and quiet. Maybe one other guy to take care of at this time of day. But I’m starting to wonder.
I go on down the street and I’m passing by shops like Vladimir’s Unisex and the Shostakovich Music, Art, and Sport School and the Hello Gorgeous Beauty Salon and there’s just too many people around, all of them tall or fat or both and I’m getting goddamn tired bumping into belt buckles and saggy tits and I’m keeping my head down but they brush up against you, too, and I don’t like to be touched. It makes me a little crazy sometimes. And I’m starting to worry that I’m going to take out my PM and use it on the next guy who bumps into me. But just thinking about the Makarov makes me calm down a little.
Then I get to the Gogol Cafe and maybe all the shit in the street is good because I’m ready just to do this thing and get it over with and I’m blaming this gang guy not just for killing little kids in Moscow but for making me walk through this goddamn crowded street. So this is his place where Ivan says nobody dares to mess with him and they never have and it should be easy. I don’t know about that. It’s somewhere between breakfast and lunch and the place is dim and it shouldn’t be open but Ivan says to push the door, so I push and I’m inside and it smells like stuff that Chef Boyardee never dreamed of in a million years. And there’s nobody around. All of a sudden I’m alone and if you want the truth, that’s what scares me. Not what I was about to do or what might happen after that. It’s standing there and, like, right away all the bustle is gone and there’s only a dark room and if something is spooky, it’s that. Being where there might be just one somebody else and you can’t even see him.
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.
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