In Sunlight or In Shadow

by Lawrence Block

  “All right,” I said.

  I showed a picture that night that I didn’t watch, or even remember. I was on time with changing the reels, but I spent all my time watching Sally down there under the red light. She looked nervous, kept looking this way and that.

  They said they’d be back next week, and it had only been three days, so I figured for the moment we were fine. I was figuring what to do when next week came.

  After the show closed that third night, Lowenstein said, “I’m going to pay them.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Yeah. I got a good business here. That’s a bite every week, but those guys, I can’t do nothing about them. I called the cops next day, and you know what they told me?”

  “What?”

  “Pay them.”

  “They said that?”

  “Yeah, way I figure it, kid, they have the cops in their pocket. Or at least the right cops. They get money from the businesses, and the cops get a little taste.”

  I thought that was probably true, things I knew about people.

  I walked Sally home again that night, and when I got back to my place, Bert was sitting on the steps. There was a small wooden box on the steps beside him.

  “Damn, boy. I was about to give up.”

  “Sorry. I walked Sally home.”

  “Good. You got a girl. That’s a good thing.”

  “It’s not like that,” I said.

  “She’s the one you told me about, right?”

  “Yeah. But it’s not like that.”

  “How is it?”

  “Well, it’s not like that. I think she wasn’t scared, she wouldn’t bother with me. I mean she’s always nice, but, hell, you know, Bert. There’s me, and then there’s this doll. Smart. She goes to night classes.”

  “Does she now?”

  “Knows big words.”

  “How’s she look?”

  “Very nice.”

  “Big words and nice, that’s fine, kid. You ought to try and touch base with that. You deserve it.”

  I looked at the box.

  “Whatcha got there?”

  He patted the box. “You know.”

  “Yeah. Guess I do.”

  “Asked around, these guys, they’re muscling in on the territory. Giving the cops a bit of their juice. It’s not like a big bunch of them. It’s five guys, like I heard, way I told you. They think maybe they’re going to become big bad business, and you know, they just might.”

  “All right,” I said. “Just five.”

  “That’s still a lot of guys.”

  “Certainly is. Mr. Lowenstein said he was going to pay them.”

  “That’s good, kid. That’s the best way all around. But, I got to tell you, month or two from now, it won’t be one hundred dollars, it’ll be two. They’ll suck the place dry, then end up owning it. That’s how they work. They already own the candy store on the corner. They just do a few places at a time till they got everyone in line, but they’re growing. Pretty soon, all four blocks there, they’ll own them. And then on from there, more blocks. Those kind of guys don’t quit.”

  We were quiet for a while. Bert stood up.

  “I got to go back,” he said. “Told Missy I’d only be gone a little while, and I’ve been gone a long while.”

  “Did she see the box?”

  “No. I was careful about it. What she knows is I had some bad ways before I quit and took to the projector. She don’t know about you and me and what happened. She just thinks you’re a swell kid. She don’t know I got the box. Remember, you don’t keep it, or what’s in it. You get rid of it. I don’t never want to see it again. These guys, they’re up the end of the street. The Career Building. Top floor.”

  “Why’s it called that?” I asked.

  “No idea. But they ain’t so big time they got bodyguards or nothing. They just got themselves and some plans.”

  I nodded.

  “Lowenstein talked to the police,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, I can tell you without you telling me how that worked out. Keep your head up, kid. And remember, there are other theaters and other girls in other places. Ditch the box and take a hound out of here.”

  He clapped me on the shoulder as he passed. I turned and watched him hobble along the street, hands in his pockets.

  That night I lay down on the bed with my clothes on, still wearing my shoes too. I lay there with the box beside me on the bed.

  I remembered how my dad liked to come in with his women when we lived together, how he’d do what he did with them with me laying there nearby, just a kid.

  I remembered that it wasn’t enough for him, and when they were gone, he’d touch me. He liked to touch me. He said it was all right. It didn’t feel all right to me.

  One time I said that. That it was not right, that it was odd, and he pushed my chest down on the stove grate and held me there. I screamed and I screamed, but in that place where we lived, no one came. No one cared.

  Except Bert. Bert and Missy lived there then. He had just started at the theater, doing the projection, and I’d go up there and talk with him, and one time, he sees me bleeding through my shirt. This was the time I was burned. It scabbed and the scabs busted and bled.

  That’s how he knew about me. I kind of spilled it all out when he asked how I was hurt. I opened my shirt. You could see the grate marks from the stove as clear as a tattoo.

  Bert knew my dad. My dad, Bert said, did some work for certain men in the neighborhood that he knew. Work that involved his fists and sometimes more than that.

  I never knew what Dad did until then. I never asked and had never cared. I was happiest when he was gone and I was alone. I liked going to school just to be away from him, but like I said, I had to quit that before I finished.

  I told Bert how Dad came in the night he burned me and tried to touch me, and I fought him. I was bigger by then, but I was no match. He held me down and did what he wanted, way he always did. It really hurt that time. He said it would hurt even worse if I fought him next time. Said I’d end up like Doris. That was my mother. I had suspected something bad happened to her, that she didn’t just run away like he said, but right then I knew it, and I knew he was the one that did it.

  He pushed me into the stove after that. He made me watch him heat it up and when it was hot, he pushed me into it. Said it was a lesson.

  I didn’t want to whine about what happened, but that time I was in the projection booth with Bert, I told him because I was angry. I felt like there was something wrong with me that my dad wanted to do that to me.

  “It ain’t you, kid. It’s him. He’s the one messed up, not you.”

  “I’m going to kill him,” I said.

  “He’ll turn that around on you,” Bert said. “I know who he is and what he is. He’s worse than I thought, but he’s not someone you can handle, kid. You’ll just disappear.”

  I cried.

  Bert put his arm around me, said, “All right, kid. It’s going to be okay.”

  I ended up staying with Bert, which wasn’t all that far from where I lived with Dad. Bert had just moved from the apartments where we were to a place around the corner. Word got around where Bert lived and that I was with him. Dad came by with another guy, a short fellow with a shiny bald head. He wasn’t the kind of guy that wore a hat. You didn’t see that much then, a guy without a hat.

  “I’ve come to pick up my son,” Dad said.

  Dad was standing outside the door with that bald guy. Bert was holding the door open. He had a .45 automatic in his hand, out of sight behind the door frame. There was a screen between them. I was standing back in the little dump of a living room, out of sight. From the angle I was standing I could see them in the mirror across the way against the wall.

  “He don’t want to go,” Bert said. “He’s taking him a kind of vacation.”

  “I’m his father. He has to go.”

  “Naw. He don’t have to do nothing.”

  “I could get
the police.”

  “Yeah, you could,” Bert said. “You could do that. But, the boy, he’s got a story to tell.”

  “That’s what it is, a story?”

  “You think I think that?”

  “I don’t care what you think. Tell my son to come out.”

  “Not today.”

  “What I’m thinking, is we can come in and get him,” the bald man said.

  “I was thinking you might be thinking that,” Bert said. “And I was thinking, you do that, it won’t be such a good idea.”

  “They say you used to be something,” the bald man said. “But now you run a projector.”

  “There’s all sorts of people got opinions about me,” Bert said. “You try and take that boy, you’re able to talk later, you can form your own opinion, tell people, spread it around.”

  “All right,” Dad said. “You keep him. For now. But he’s coming home.”

  “You get lonely nights?” Bert said.

  “It’s best you watch your mouth,” Dad said. “Best you watch yourself altogether.”

  “Unless you’re going to get tough and eat your way through the screen, you ought to go on now,” Bert said.

  “You are setting yourself up for a world of hurt,” Dad said.

  “Am I?” Bert said.

  “Guy like you with a nice wife, and a shitty, safe job at the picture show, that could all get stood on its head.”

  Bert went a little stiff.

  “It’s never good to threaten me,” Bert said.

  “What we’re doing here,” said the bald man, “is giving you chance to make it easy on yourself, or that threat as you call it, it’ll turn into a promise.”

  “Why wait,” Bert said, and brought the .45 around where they could see it. “Come on in.”

  Bert flipped the latch on the screen with the barrel of the .45.

  “I’m giving you an invitation,” Bert said.

  “We got time,” said Dad. “We got time and we got ways, and you have just stepped in the stink, mister.”

  “We’ll see who stinks when it’s all over,” Bert said.

  Dad and the bald man turned and walked away. I went over and stood near the door. I watched them get in a car, the bald man at the wheel. Dad looked out the side window at the house. He saw me. He smiled the way a lion smiles.

  So later I was sleeping on the couch, and Missy and Bert were in their room, or so I thought, but I rolled over and there’s Bert across the way with a wooden box, and he’s taking something out of it and putting it in his coat pockets, and going out the door.

  I got up and put on my clothes and went over and looked at the box. The bottom of it was packed with cloth. Otherwise, it was empty.

  Slipping out the door I went down the drive and looked around the hedges and saw Bert walking brisk-like. I waited until he was pretty far down, and then I followed. It was a long walk and the wind was high and there was a misty kind of rain.

  Bert came to a corner and turned, and when I turned, I didn’t see him anymore. I was out of the housing part of town, and there were buildings. I stood there confused, for a moment, and then I eased along, and when I got to the far side of the big building, I peeked around it. I saw Bert on one of the little porches off the building, in front of a door. He was under a light. He reached up with something and knocked the bulb out, then he took that something and stuck it in the door. I heard a snick, and a moment later, he was inside and out of sight.

  I eased up to the porch, but I couldn’t make myself go in. I waited there and listened, and after awhile I heard sounds like someone coughing loudly, and then there was a yell, and then that coughing sound again.

  After a moment, the door pushed open and nearly knocked me off the porch. It was Bert.

  “Damn, kid. What you doing here?”

  “I followed you.”

  “I see that.”

  He took the automatic and held it up and unscrewed the silencer on the end of it. He put the silencer in one coat pocket, the gun in the other.

  “Come on, fast. Not running, but don’t lollygag neither.”

  “Did you?”

  “Yeah. But not your old man. He’s back at the apartments. That’s what the bald bastard said when I asked.”

  “You asked?”

  “Yeah. Nicely. And when he told me, I shot him. Couple times. There was another guy there I didn’t know about, came out of the toilet. I shot him too. Might as well be straight with you, kid. They’re deader than snow in July. Come on, hustle a little.”

  Stunned is how I felt, but happy too. I mean, those guys back there, they hadn’t done nothing to me, not like Dad, but they were on his side. Probably thought I was telling lies. Probably thought a stove burn was something I deserved. Lot of guys thought like that around there. Your father’s word was the law. And all those guys, they believed in a strict law. You were either for them or against them.

  We came to the apartment where my dad lived, where I had lived with him. There was a hedge row that was never trimmed that led along both sides of the walk that went up to the apartment house. Inside, you had to go down the hall and make a turn to the left to get to our place.

  Standing in the shadow of the hedge, Bert said, “You sure about this kid? Dead is dead. And he is your father.”

  “He’s nothing to me, Bert. Nothing. He gets me back, he’ll just kill me, and you know it. I’m nothing to him, just something to own and use and throw away. Like he did my mother. My mother was all right. I can still remember how she smelled. Then one day she wasn’t there, and that’s because of him. She’s gone. He’s here.”

  “Still, kid, he’s your father.”

  “I’m all right with it.”

  Bert nodded. He took the gun and silencer out of his coat pockets and screwed the silencer into place. “You sit this one out. Go on home.”

  “You used to do stuff like this, didn’t you, Bert?”

  “All the time,” he said. “I ain’t proud of it. Except for tonight. These guys, your father. I’m all right with that. Maybe it’ll make up for some of the other things I done.”

  “I’m staying with you, Bert.”

  “You don’t want that, kid.”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  We went along the walk then and when we got to the door, Bert handed me the gun. I held it while he worked the lock and got it open with a little wedge. He pried the wood loose at the door. I gave him back the gun. We were inside so quickly and silently, we might as well have been ghosts.

  When we got to Dad’s door, Bert started with the wedge, but I grabbed his hand. We had an extra key stuck into the side of the door frame where it was cracked. You had to be looking for it to know it was there. We kept some putty over it the color of the wood. I reached around the frame and took out the putty and pulled out the key. I unlocked the door.

  I could feel him in the room. I don’t know how else to say that, but I could feel him. He was sitting in a chair by the bed, smoking a cigar, and about the time we saw him, he realized we were in the room.

  “It’s best you don’t call out,” Bert said.

  Dad clicked the lamp by his chair. He was soaked in light and there was enough of it he could look out and see us. We stepped closer.

  “I guess I should have known you’d come, Bert. I know who you are. I know what you’ve done.”

  “Shouldn’t have threatened me,” Bert said.

  “Guy with me, Amos, he said you did some things some years back, for some boys he knew. He wasn’t in the racket then, just on the outskirts. He said you were a kind of legend. We saw you the other day, standing in that doorway, you didn’t look so legendary. Yet, here you are.”

  “Yep,” Bert said. “Here I am.”

  “I’m not going to be all right, I yell or don’t yell, am I?”

  “Naw, you ain’t.”

  That’s when Dad grabbed at the lamp and tried to sling it at Bert, but the wire was too short and the plug didn’t come out of the wall. The l
amp popped out and back when the plug didn’t give, rolled along the floor tumbling light, and then Dad was on his feet, in front of the chair, and he had a gun in his hand he’d pulled from the cushions.

  Bert fired his automatic.

  There was a streak of light and stench of gunpowder and a sound like someone coughing out a wad of phlegm, and then Dad sat back down in the chair. The gun he had dangled from his finger. He was breathing heavily. He tried to lift his hand with the gun in it, but he couldn’t do it. He might as well have been trying to lift a steel girder.

  Bert reached over and took Dad’s gun from his hand and gave it to me to hold. He set the lamp up, then. The light from it lay on Dad’s face like it had weight. Dad was white. I looked at him and tried to feel something, but I didn’t. I didn’t feel bad for him, and I didn’t feel good about it. I didn’t feel nothing. Not right then.

  Dad was wheezing and there was a rattling in his chest. I guess the shot got him through one of his lungs.

  “We can watch him die if it’ll give you pleasure, or I can finish him, kid. Your call.”

  I lifted the pistol in my hand and pointed it at Dad.

  Bert said, “Whoa.”

  I paused.

  “No silencer,” Bert said. He traded guns with me. “He can’t do nothing, like you couldn’t when you was a kid. Get up close and give it to him.”

  I moved close and put the barrel of the pistol to his head and pulled the trigger.

  The gun coughed.

  Now I had the box with the gun and silencer in it. Those many years ago, Bert had wiped my dad’s gun clean with a dish rag, and dropped it and the gun on the floor. He had kept his own gun, though, and now I was to use it and get rid of it. I think it wasn’t only about safety, about not getting caught. I think it was Bert’s way to say he was done from then on.

  Back then, when Dad was dead, we walked out of there silently and down the street quickly. I knew and Bert knew what we had done, and that was enough. We never talked about it again. Didn’t even hint such a thing had happened.

  I slept well for the first time in years. I finally got my own place, and eventually I took the projectionist job. Things had been all right until those guys came around.