Snatch

by Gregory Mcdonald

  There was a colossal bang.

  On the sidewalk the man’s back curved. His arms rose above his head. His hat fell off.

  There was another colossal bang.

  The man staggered sideways on a colt’s legs, then crumpled. He sank beneath the knee-high wall of snow.

  Robby inhaled, deeply, quickly. His scream rose in volume and pitch. It scraped his throat and vibrated his nose. Tony shot a man! Robby screamed even louder and higher on the exhale. Tony murdered somebody!

  Tony Savallo’s eyes, showing vast white areas around the steady brown pupils, appeared in the window. His face had an expression. It was first the expression of horror, then of rage. His face disappeared.

  Robby screamed again. The van jerked into gear. Robby fell back onto the potato sacks. The van moved quickly, took corner after corner at high speed, its rear wheels slipping. Robby was rolled left, then right, then left again.

  Finally rolling over, Robby spread his knees and his hands wide, got his balance, and worked his way up to the window again. Tony’s right hand worked the shift lever and swung the wheel. His left hand steadied the wheel despite its still having a gun in it.

  Robby saw the van beginning to pull up at a curb of a narrow street. He darted for the back door.

  As soon as the truck stopped, Robby opened the door and jumped out. He slipped on the ice and sprawled on the ground. He saw Tony Savallo’s feet land on the ground.

  Quickly, Robby scurried under the van.

  He watched Tony’s feet step up into the back of the van. He heard Tony kicking and tossing potato sacks around.

  Tony’s sneakers appeared on the street, behind the van. For a moment they did not move. Then lightly, silently, quickly they moved onto the curb, over a low mound of snow. As Tony moved into the alley, Robby could see, from under the truck, that Tony carried the gun in his right hand.

  “Whup, whup,” said Robby. Lying under the truck at first his legs made a running motion but got him nowhere. “Whup!” Robby ordered. His body organized itself and Robby dragged himself out from under the truck. He became upright. He ran across the street and began to run down the alley opposite from the one taken by Tony.

  Robby ran down the middle of the block, across a street and into the next alley. Even though he assured himself no one, not even Tony Savallo, would spot a small, dark figure pumping down a narrow dark alley, Robby ran as fast as he could. Then he remembered the backs of his knees were white and probably as easy to spot as a bunny’s tail in short grass. Then he reasoned that Tony Savallo, being more than twice his size, doubtlessly could run more than twice as fast. Then he recalled from Frankie’s comments, Marie’s comments, his own observations, that one didn’t hear Tony Savallo, one felt his presence. Robby felt the presence of Tony Savallo. Then Robby turned his head.

  Tony Savallo, gun in hand, appearing to lope easily like a young cheetah out for a preprandial turn in the bush—his face expressionless, the brown of his eyes steady in skies of white—was right behind him.

  Robby ran faster than any classmate or games master would ever think possible. However, while running, Robby realized this effort to outrun Tony Savallo down dark, slippery alleys held little future for him.

  He took the closest turning, into a yard where a car was up on blocks. Without slowing even slightly, he headed toward a fence which was at least three times his own height. He had no conviction that he could jump the fence. If he had had opportunity to study the matter more at that point in his life, Robby would have known a human being cannot jump a fence three times his own height, without aid. Being ignorant of such conclusions, Robby jumped. However carefully scientists figure all contingent elements into their measurements and equations, sometimes they are ignorant, too, of the human element, which, in this instance, was sheer terror.

  “Whup, whup!”

  Robby saw the top of the fence pass beneath him and then the ground rush up to greet him. He landed on his feet, knees slightly bent, on cobbled stone.

  Crouching, Robby panted and looked around some householder’s backyard. In the moonlight he could see that the house along one entire side of the square backyard was brick. There were no lights on. The basement door, down a step or two, had an iron grille over it. In the yard were a few odd boxes, small, round objects which may have been discarded flower pots, and rubbish barrels with lids on them.

  In a moment Tony Savallo would clamber over the fence Robby had so astonishingly vaulted.

  As noiselessly as possible, with the aid of packed snow, Robby climbed into a rubbish barrel. He squirmed down, and reset the lid on top. Like a mole, trying not to rock the barrel much, he burrowed down into the rubbish. He tossed some old newspapers, cartons, and bottles over his back, shoulders and head. Scrunched thusly, Robby tried to recall some Resounding Rhetoric, from Church or State, encouraging someone Hiding Under Garbage, but nothing came to mind.

  He heard nothing.

  Until he heard, in almost the exact tone Frankie had used in whispering good-bye to him, “Robby? Hey, Duke?”

  Tony Savallo’s voice, just outside Robby’s rubbish barrel, was calm and gentle.

  Robby tried not to breathe. Considering the stink of the air he had to breathe it was comparatively easy for him to breathe little.

  “Hey, Duke!”

  Something in the rubbish barrel (other than Robby) moved. To keep it quiet, Robby clamped his hand over it. From its contours (although he had never held one before) he guessed (rightly) his coinhabitant of the rubbish barrel was a mouse. Its heartbeat was frantic in Robby’s hand.

  The air improved. Tony had removed the lid of the rubbish barrel.

  “Hey, Duke? You’re here somewhere. I know that. I’ll hurt you less if you give up now, kid.”

  Robby, deciding he didn’t want to be hurt at all, remained silent.

  The lid to the rubbish barrel was replaced. It was not on tight. Robby could feel a draft of air.

  “Duke?” Tony’s voice, intermittently questioning the air, faded. “Robby?”

  Not being able to hear Tony, Robby never was sure when Tony left the yard. After a while, Robby felt less of Tony’s presence and made himself more comfortable in the rubbish barrel. Still keeping some rubbish over him, Robby sat on the bottom layer of newspapers and leaned his back against the barrel’s curved side.

  He brought the mouse to his lap and played with it. He walked it from hand to hand. He tried to hand-feed it some of the commissary from the barrel: eggshells, coffee grounds, cigarette ashes. He could not tell in the dark if the mouse was actually eating the menu, or just investigating each piece offered.

  In time, the mouse’s heartbeat slowed, as did Robby’s.

  * * *

  In the first light of day Robby knelt in the rubbish barrel. He lifted the lid in its center, and, using the rim of the barrel as a turret, had a good look around.

  Tony Savallo was nowhere in the yard. Closely Robby scrutinized the top rails of the three sides of fencing. On one board stood a drooped, bedraggled blue jay, looking as if it had spent the evening with Thadeus Lowry. The bird assured Robby no one else was around. There was no door in any of the three fences.

  Robby leaned the lid of the rubbish barrel against the barrel’s side and stood up. He put the mouse in his overcoat pocket. He arranged the pocket’s flap so the mouse would have air to breathe. Then he climbed out of the barrel and replaced the lid.

  Intellectually, Robby knew that only hours before he had leaped over that fence in a single bound. Now looking at it in the light of day he swallowed hard. If he had done such a thing once, he must be able to do it twice, but he didn’t think so. Backing up across the yard, he contemplated what a running start might do for him and decided not much. Perhaps nighttime terror had taken him over the fence once, but daytime reason would smash him against the fence as certain as the King was English. There were too few boxes to pile up against the fence so he could climb over. He considered a combination of boxes and rubbish barre
ls might build him a stairway over the fence. The narrow brick house was silent. Dragging a rubbish barrel over the cobblestones would be noisy.

  He went down the two steps, put his hand through the grille, turned the handle of the basement door and pushed. It swung open. The basement was pitch black. He pushed the grille and it, too, swung open. Robby stepped into the basement, closed the grille, and closed the door behind him. Then he couldn’t find the handle of the door again, to open it, to let in light.

  Across the basement from him was a live, red and yellow, glowing thing. Robby stared back at it. It grew neither more nor less threatening. Then, suddenly, it did flare, grew bigger, redder. There was a wheeze and a dreadful clanking. The noise crossed the basement to him until it was directly overhead. Heat descended upon him. The increased light from the furnace permitted Robby to see its staunch squatness, its ungainly, octopus arms extending, twisting and turning throughout the basement and into the ceiling.

  It also permitted him to find the cellar stairs.

  On tiptoe he crept up the cellar stairs to the door at the top. Very slowly he turned the doorknob and pushed the door open a few centimeters. He put his face close to the door and peered through the slit between door and door frame.

  A woman, entirely naked, stood in the kitchen with a coffeepot in her hand. Startled, she did not turn her head. Only her eyes darted to Robby, then swelled. She threw the coffeepot and hit the cellar door.

  Then she screamed.

  Robby pushed open the door and ran into the kitchen. He was looking for a door which would let him out of the kitchen. However he was stopped in his tracks, distracted, fascinated by the dance the woman proceeded to do. She began jumping up and down, one leg at a time, as if pedaling a bicycle. Her hands darted from her breasts to her crotch and back again in a great flurry as if she were sending a very urgent message by semaphore.

  Her eyes remained round and staring.

  “Morning, sir, ma’am.”

  She released one arm from its futile duty long enough to reach to the sinkboard, pick up a bottle of milk and hurl it at him. It smashed against the wall just over his shoulder, providing plain evidence that her aim was improving. Still doing her silly dance, she moved forward to the stove and grabbed a frying pan by its handle.

  Robby pushed backwards through a swing door, turned around and found himself in the main corridor of the house.

  A man in a bathrobe, his hand on the bannister, was rushing down the stairs. “Where are my glasses?” he shouted. “What’s happening?”

  The front door was directly in front of Robby. He ran for it, yanked it open, and scurried through it.

  The man, his arms outstretched to grab Robby, dashed into the edge of the open door. “Damn!” he yelled, putting his hand to his face.

  The naked lady, still wielding the frying pan, stood on the other side of the man in the front hall.

  Robby reached in and pulled the door closed with a slam.

  “Damn, damn!” Robby heard through the door.

  “A boy!” the woman hollered. “He came up out of our basement! A thief!”

  Standing on the front stoop of their house, Robby looked left. And he looked right. And he looked directly across the street.

  And directly across the street, leaning against a lamp post, in his green windbreaker, arms folded across his chest, stood Tony Savallo.

  The door behind Robby began to open.

  17

  Taking Stock

  “Thief! You little thief!”

  Robby jumped off the steps and began running along the sidewalk to his right. Behind him, standing on the steps of his house in his bathrobe stood the householder slandering Robby in a loud voice. Across the street, not far behind him, trotting easily, was Tony Savallo.

  “Whup, whup,” Robby encouraged himself.

  Sunday-dressed people were gathered around a newspaper kiosk on the corner. Some were examining their front pages; others were chatting with each other. There were tall stacks of newspapers awaiting quarters. Leaning against the stacks, hanging from a telephone pole, propped against a No Parking sign, were large posters touched up in color—too much color, red! white! and blue!—of Robby looking cold, lost, hungry, forlorn, sitting on his suitcase. The poster line read:

  HAVE YOU SEEN ROBBY?

  Robby’s blodgy face was on the front of every newspaper he saw. Dashing through the crowd he would have liked to have stopped and given the casual strollers on a nice Sunday morning greater opportunity to see Robby but as Tony Savallo was only a few steps behind him Robby decided it was preferable to keep himself a blurred streak. Breathless, the most he managed to utter on his quick passage through the group was “Whup! Whup!” which he knew to be an expression inadequate to his situation. Out of the corner of his eye he did catch the headline of The New York Star.

  $63,000 RAISED FOR ROBBY

  “Whup, whup!” Robby cried out plaintively to no effect, as he darted through the forest of knees. “Whup!”

  Halfway down the block, across the street, there was a church. Its bells were tolling. Its doors were open. People were climbing the steps to it. In the street in front of the church were many, many black limousines.

  Recollecting from his narrow reading, mostly of Robin Hood, that churches universally were regarded as places of sanctuary, Robby quickly decided to attend services. Nearly being hit by a large LaSalle, Robby ran across the street and up the church steps. He received a few sour looks from the parishioners for his shoving them around the knee joints in his hurry, but a few benign looks as well from grown-ups always glad to see the young hasten to suffer unto God.

  An ornate, carved sign in the vestibule identified this as the CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST MATERIALIST. A brass plaque below it notified people that the current pastor was the Reverend John Maple.

  Looking back through silk stockings and striped trousers Robby saw a pair of sneakered feet making its way through the mob at the top of the stairs. Apparently Tony Savallo was not going to hold as sacred the sanctity of the church. Clearly he had not read Robin Hood.

  Robby entered the auditorium of the church, avoided the clogged main aisle, turned to his right, then left, and went down the right aisle. The church was nearly full. He took a seat in a pew just forward of a thick pillar. Two old ladies, one who had a great many chins and the other none at all, made more work of making room for him than was necessary. Their smiles were grimly righteous.

  Catching his breath, Robby looked around him. It was a huge church. In place of an altar was a long table with twelve chairs around it. The pulpit was high. In front of the podium at its top was an iron grille, but not of the sort he had seen in English churches. This grille was more like the grilles he had seen tellers sit behind when he had visited English banks.

  The bars were thin and vertical; under them was a rectangular open space as if for passing things through. The woodwork of the pulpit had a symbol repeated on it a dizzying number of times. The symbol was a vertical “S” with two vertical lines through it.

  Robby recalled that it was Sunday and that a cold, metallic voice had notified Thadeus Lowry that Robby might not live to say his prayers on Sunday. Robby found a shred of cabbage in his hair and dropped it on the floor. The women beside him were beginning to point their noses at him. Robby decided to pray.

  He went forward onto the kneeler, folded his hands, and closed his eyes.

  Oh, Lord! Giver of life, please don’t take away mine while I’m still using it, he began.

  The woman beside him, out loud and with some apparent distress, said, “Oh, Lord!”

  Why bring me through this vale of sorrow and tears to this crazy place where ill-wishers lurk around every corner? For the paths of righteousness in this new land, unless tread upon carefully, surely lead straight to hell.

  Someone else, possibly the man in front of Robby, was heard to say, “Oh, Lord!” Robby also heard a distinct sniffing from the ladies beside him.

  Why not bring a
scourge of locusts upon the houses and down the necks of all those ill-wishers who are trying to dismember me, in particular one Tony Savallo, who I’m beginning to suspect is behind me again?

  Not meaning to question Your infinite wisdom, Sir, but how come I’m a hundred-thousand-dollar Duke made to lie down with mice in a rubbish barrel?

  …Of course, in Your infinite wisdom and mercy I did discover I can run like hell…

  The sound of sniffing was growing in a widening pool around Robby. Peeking through his clasped fingers, Robby saw a great many faces were turned toward him, and there was distress upon each face.

  Oh, Lord, forgive me, your most unworthy servant, for coming into Your house of worship smelling like a garbage pail. Peeking again through his fingers, Robby saw the ladies beside him had moved as far away from him as possible—which wasn’t far. Perhaps it is Your Divine way of making these ladies beside me exercise the tolerance inherent in Your Divine Teachings.

  The sniffing was loud.

  Oh, Lord, not a sparrow falls from a tree without Your gracious Eye upon it.

  I was never sure what Your Grace, in His infinite wisdom and mercy, ever actually did about the sparrow once it clunked to the ground, but I promise to read that passage again, if I live.

  Oh, Lord! Don’t forget your tadpole!

  Robby felt a sharp pain in his ribs. It was caused by the index finger of the lady of many chins sitting beside him. For a bad moment, Robby thought the ladies beside him, flunking Christian tolerance, were expelling him from the pew, having determined he enjoyed nothing akin to the odor of sanctity, and thus were sending him to his certain death. No, the organ was exhaling at a high volume and it was the need of the ladies that Robby stand with the rest of the congregation and raise his voice in song. Perhaps they thought they could be saved by having the air in their immediate vicinity vigorously stirred. They jammed an opened hymn book into his hands. “Silence Is Golden” was on the left page; “The Silver Tongue” on the right.