All I Did Was Shoot My Man

by Mosley, Walter

  And I had an ulterior motive.

  “So?” I asked the killer.

  “She’s the kinda woman take your life and still you’d have a smile on your face.” He was talking about Tatyana Baranovich, the woman Dimitri was moving out to live with. She was from Belarus and would give Twill a run for his money when it came to working the system while avoiding the consequences.

  “Tell me something I don’t know,” I said.

  “Until the end of the season all aphids are born female and pregnant.”

  “Something pertinent.”

  “She cares about your boy.”

  “You think she’s into anything?” I asked.

  Hush was deft and perceptive; he had to be. An assassin deals in absolutes rendered in shades of gray. One slight error could mean his demise.

  “I don’t know if she is right now,” he said, “but she will be. No question about that.”

  “Yeah,” I said with another world-weary sigh. “I know.”

  “You want me to kill her?” It was a joke. But if I had said yes, Tatyana wouldn’t have seen another week.

  “I’ll get back to you on that,” I said.

  I patted the murderer’s shoulder and headed for the front door.

  7

  KATRINA AND I had lived in that apartment for more than twenty years. Most days I walked the ten flights to the eleventh floor. That was both my Buddhist and boxing training.

  The Buddhists tell you that you have to be mindful of every act, and acquiescence, in your life. They say that life, everything you do and don’t do, is an action that must be brought into the light of consciousness.

  For the boxer it’s simpler—all you have to do is keep in shape.

  So I rushed up the hundred and forty steps, looking around at nooks and crannies that I did and did not recognize while concentrating on the increased intensity of my only slightly fevered breathing.

  THE DOOR to our apartment was ajar. I had installed one of the world’s most sophisticated locking systems on the titanium-reinforced portal. The lock was both mechanical and electronic. When the door closed a metal rod was anchored in a slot in the floor below. Only the signal from the family’s keys, or turning the inside knob, would release that bolt.

  But what use was it if the door was left open?

  I entered the small foyer, closing the door behind me. There were half a dozen boxes stacked in the corner, with a pile of rumpled dirty clothes dumped on top.

  The clothes belonged to Dimitri. The fact that they were unwashed and not folded spoke volumes about the drama that I could hear playing out all over the large prewar apartment.

  From down the hallway where the bedrooms were I could hear the deep bark of Dimitri’s voice. He was talking to someone; you could tell that by the silences between his rants. He was angry, shouting. This was odd because the only time my blood son ever raised his voice was against me, usually in defense of his mother.

  Not that I ever attacked Katrina. It’s just that there was a tight bond between the young man and his mother—a bond much stronger than she and I ever had.

  From the dining room came the sounds of argument and shushing. I recognized the contestants by their voices and was about to intrude when Mardi Bitterman came out of the bedroom hallway. She was wearing a dress whose hem came down to her ankles; a faded violet shmata, loose and threadbare—the young woman’s version of Twill’s T-shirt and jeans.

  Mardi was five-seven, with pale hair, skin, and eyes. She was slight but had a will tougher than most. There was a midsized cardboard box cradled in her arms.

  “Hi, Mr. McGill.” The wan smile she gave me represented greater hilarity than I had guffawing down on Tenth Avenue.

  “Mardi. What’s goin’ on?”

  My office receptionist and general passe-partout put down the box and sighed. You couldn’t hear the exhalation, only see it in her expression.

  “Mrs. McGill is upset that Dimitri’s moving out. I don’t think she likes Tatyana. And Dimitri is mad at his mother, saying all kinds of terrible things down in his room. Twill and I have been doing most of the packing but that’s okay.”

  For Mardi, whose parents sold her to a child molester before she even had the defense of language, the war between mother and son must have seemed like happiness.

  “ What about Shelly?” I asked.

  “She’s spent most of her time trying to calm Mrs. McGill down.”

  “Really? What kinda miracle is that?”

  Mardi smiled. She never spoke unless she had something to say—a rare quality among Americans of any age.

  I headed for the dining room as Mardi made her way back toward the ruckus my eldest child was making.

  I stopped at the doorway and listened before entering.

  Old habits die hard.

  “THAT BITCH has stolen my son’s soul,” Katrina wailed.

  “Don’t say that, Mom,” Shelly, ever the middle child, said. “D’s twenty-three years old. It’s time for him to move out.”

  “My whole life is shit. Dimitri is, and you are too. Sluts and bastards, is all you are.”

  “Mom,” Shelly pleaded. “You just had too much to drink, that’s all. Dimitri loves you. I do too.”

  I never thought I’d hear Michelle say those words to her mother again. When Katrina left me for an Austrian/Argentinian banker Shelly wrote her off. Things had to be really bad for her to find forgiveness now.

  “Bullshit,” Katrina was saying. “Bullshit. You’re just like your father. He sent that monster to help so nobody could stop my baby from leaving.”

  “Twill called Mr. Arnold, not Daddy.”

  Arnold was not Hush’s real name but one of his many aliases. What’s in a name anyway?

  “He’s a piece-of-shit killer, and your father is too.”

  “Daddy didn’t do anything, Mom.”

  I walked in then. Regardless of the rancor between Katrina and me I didn’t want to see Shelly punished over accusations that were closer to the truth than a loving daughter could ever believe.

  Katrina was sitting at the large hickory dining table, my private crystal decanter of fifty-year-old cognac unstoppered before her. I didn’t see a glass.

  My wife of twenty-four years had passed the half-century mark but maintained a good deal of the beauty of her Scandinavian youth. That beauty was marred by the sour sneer on her face. Her hair was the blond of a young girl and her eyes blue like the North Sea. It was no wonder that Katrina had so many young lovers.

  Shelly was dark-skinned in the way people from Southeast Asia are. Her eyes were Asian also but modified by her mother’s bloodline. Her father had been killed in a natural disaster before Katrina got the chance to leave me for him.

  My daughter was on her knees next to her mother.

  “ What’s going on in here?” I said in a strong voice.

  Both women looked up, startled by a genetic memory.

  Shelly smiled and stood up.

  Katrina’s left nostril lifted. “Fuck you,” she said.

  “Mo-om,” Shelly complained.

  “ Why don’t you go help your brother, baby,” I said to my daughter. “I’ll take over here.”

  “Yes, you little slut. Move out with him. See if I care.”

  Near tears, my little girl ran from the room. The fever flashed back and I clenched my hands into fists.

  “Are you going to hit me?” Katrina asked, putting her hands up in false fright.

  She was surprised when I took two steps forward and grabbed her by both wrists.

  “ Wha?” she cried.

  “Calm down now, Katrina. You know I’m not happy with D movin’ out and dropping out of school. But he’s a man now and there’s no way to stop him.”

  “As if you cared,” she said, a little cowed by my speed, strength, and uncommon willingness to use them.

  I let her go and pulled a chair up next to her. I then offered my hands for her to hold. She didn’t take up the offer, but at least her
belligerence ebbed a bit.

  “ What’s wrong, baby?” I asked.

  After decades of marriage it took only a few words for a sermon’s worth of communication. I never called Katrina baby. The fact that I did meant I was ready to do whatever I could to assuage her pain.

  But she was still angry.

  “ What do you want me to say?” she spat. “That not one dream I ever had came true? That my children are all disappointments and you were never there when I needed you? And after all that even my own body betrays me and there’s nothing left, no one left.”

  “D’s only movin’ six blocks from here,” I said. “And Shelly’s a good girl.”

  “Huh,” Katrina grunted. “Ask Seldon Arvinil about that.”

  “ Who?”

  At that moment the dam broke and she reached out for my proffered hands.

  “Oh, Leonid.”

  I leaned over and picked her up, lifting her into my lap.

  She put her arms around my head and squeezed.

  “I’ve lost everything,” she whispered, “everything.”

  “Not me. You still got your bad penny.”

  She patted my bald head and hummed. I could smell the brandy on her breath—it was good stuff.

  She put her cheek against mine and exhaled in the way I knew foretold sleep.

  “Your skin is hot,” she said and then nodded off.

  8

  “. . . THAT BITCH is always tellin’ me that she wants me to be happy and she wants me to be a man, but the first thing I do on my own and she’s actin’ like the world’s comin’ to an end and, and, and . . .”

  These words came from Dimitri through the closed door of his room.

  I was carrying his mother down the hall to our bedroom.

  Negotiating the doorway without banging her head, I put her down on the bed as gently as possible. We have a big bed, custom-made, one hundred inches square. I considered undressing her, but that might prove a problem if she woke up and came running down the hall to yell some more.

  So instead I put a pillow under her head and sat next to her a while, trying to understand how I came to that moment, that place.

  As I considered, Katrina’s breathing deepened.

  She was a beautiful woman, and brilliant in her own way. For many years she searched for a man who would take her and Dimitri away from me and the other kids. It wasn’t that she didn’t love Twill and Shelly but that they loved me too much.

  We didn’t love each other, at least not like man and wife, but we were tied together by a knot of blood, children, and history.

  When she began snoring I knew that Kat would be unconscious for hours. I shifted her so that she was sleeping on her stomach, to make sure she didn’t drown in her drunken repose. After that I headed out the bedroom door and back down the hall.

  “. . . I MEAN, what have I ever done to her?” Dimitri was saying as I walked in. He looked at me, hesitated, and then went on. “Taty has only tried to be nice with her. And Mama won’t even say a word if she’s in the room. She just stands there with that look on her face.”

  Dimitri had a child’s baseball mitt in his hand. I wondered if he intended to take it to the new apartment. Tatyana, the svelte former prostitute, was on her knees, rolling socks, while Mardi and Twill picked around in the mass of detritus that filled D’s deep closet.

  Shelly was sweeping the floor.

  “ Why you doin’ that?” Dimitri asked his sister.

  “I’m cleaning up so Mom doesn’t have to after you’re gone.”

  “ Why? You don’t even like her.”

  “She’s our moms, Bulldog,” Twill said. “Only mother you ever gonna have.”

  “I wish she was dead,” Dimitri said.

  “D!” Shelly cried.

  Tatyana kept rolling socks.

  “That bitch just wants to—”

  “Stop,” I said in a voice that I hadn’t used in fifteen years.

  Dimitri, cut off in midsentence, stared at me.

  “Come on out in the hall,” I said to my only true son.

  I turned to leave the room. He had no choice but to follow in my wake.

  WE STOOD there face-to-face, but Dimitri was looking down at my shoes. D snorted now and then, his shoulders hunched—waiting for the attack.

  “I want to ask you something, son,” I said.

  “ What?”

  “ Why do you think your mother is so upset?”

  “Because she doesn’t want me to grow up and be my own man, that’s why.”

  “It’s because she’s afraid.”

  Dimitri lifted his head to look me in the eye.

  “Afraid of what?” he asked.

  I didn’t have to answer.

  “That was a long time ago,” he complained.

  “Two years isn’t all that long. And she was living with that gunrunner in Russia less than a year ago.”

  “She didn’t know.”

  “That’s why your mother’s afraid,” I said. “Because Tatyana has lived an outlaw’s life. But you’re so in love with her that you deny the truth.”

  Dimitri and I look a lot alike. Our faces were not made to express powerful emotions. Our people carried heavy loads and looked into the wind. But right then there was unbridled passion in his eyes and a quiver coming up from his neck.

  “So what are you sayin’, Pops? You don’t want me to go?”

  “That would be like me tellin’ a gosling not to migrate down south his first mature season. You got to go. Got to. There’s gonna be snakes and foxes, and in your case, with Taty, there might even be men with guns. All I need you to do is think about that.”

  “So you agree with me moving?”

  “Honey, I know what that girl means to you. I look at her and even my blood pressure gets dangerous. Just understand that your mother can only do what a mother can do, like you doin’ what you need.”

  “And you understand why I dropped out of school for a while?”

  “She’s got a good gig at that Columbia program. It’s the man in you workin’ to help her make her way through. But what you got to remember, D, is that it’s a gift, not an investment. Tatyana is not a bankbook.”

  That last bit of wisdom put a new wrinkle in my son’s brooding brow. It was one of the longest talks we’d had in a dozen years and carried more meaning than anything we’d discussed since he passed puberty.

  There was a question brewing behind his furrowed eyebrows. He even took in a breath to expel the words.

  “Hey, Bulldog,” Twill said at just the wrong moment.

  “ Wha?”

  “Come help us bring all these boxes downstairs.”

  Twill, Mardi, and Shelly all came out, carrying boxes. From long experience they all knew how touchy things were between me and Dimitri. I was sure that they meant to help, to get him working, so that I didn’t lose my temper and knock him to the floor.

  “Okay,” the man/boy said.

  He stomped back into the room, grabbed three boxes, then followed his siblings and Mardi down the hall.

  I went into the room to see Tatyana, sitting comfortably on the floor, working with D’s clothes and smaller items. She was wearing thin cotton pants the color of beached coral and a sky blue blouse that was loose and yet still somehow appreciative of her figure.

  I hunkered down easily, part of the boxer’s side of my daily training, and looked at her.

  “Not a very pleasant induction into the family,” I said.

  “She loves him,” Tatyana Baranovich explained, shrugging her left shoulder.

  “Even still, it must not feel too good.”

  “It is not my business about what happens between a son and his mother. I can only be here for him if he wants me.”

  She was working with the socks and watches, cuff links that D had never used and scraps of paper that he was always making notes and little drawings on.

  “He’s been making those little doodles since he was a child,” I said.

&nb
sp; “He has great talent.”

  She stopped working then and looked straight at me. There seemed to be an accusation in the words.