“Yes, I’m sure. But I’m not talking about what you might have learned from people who are acting-out neurotics,” Al said. “Mom tells me you came home only to pick up your clothes, and then you moved right out again, that you’re living someplace downtown...”
“Al, I’m twenty-eight years old, that’s a little old for somebody to be living with his mother.”
“Nick, I want to tell you something...”
“Yes, Al.”
“Nick, when a man lives by the gun...”
“Yes, Al, I know.”
“He dies by the gun.”
“Yes, Al, you told me before.”
“And a man who has to commit robberies...”
“Yes, Al.”
“Is a man with a serious personality disorder.”
That particular conversation had taken place just before Christmas. Colley had met Jocko a few days afterwards, and they had done their first job together on Christmas Eve. Colley supposed Jocko had a personality disorder, too. He knew one thing for sure. It had certainly been traumatic tonight in that liquor store. It had certainly been traumatic pulling the trigger of the .38 and watching the back of that cop’s head come off and splatter onto the Seagram’s poster. Yes, Al, that was traumatic. That was probably more traumatic than moving Mom out of this building full of hookers would be.
He began climbing the steps to the third floor. There were cooking smells contained in the building, and they blended with the heat of the day to create an overpowering stench that almost knocked him back down the stairwell. The cooking smells were alien. When he was a kid growing up in this building, the smells were always Italian, promising feasts at best, or at the very least, simple meals that were wholesome and familiar. He never felt at home in any apartment that wasn’t Italian; the cooking always smelled of worlds he could never hope to fathom.
There was this kid he used to work with in the stockroom of a company downtown, this was before he joined the club, before he got busted that time. Colley was just fifteen, he remembered he had to get working papers in order to take the job. The kid was Jewish, he lived down on Hester Street, the Lower East Side. One time, after work, he asked Colley would he like to come home for supper with him. Colley went, and when he got in the house there was an old Jewish man reading his newspaper, and cooking smells in the house, those strange cooking smells. The food turned out to be pretty good, Colley couldn’t figure out how, with all those funny cooking smells.
Later, him and the kid sat on the front stoop and talked. The kid said he wanted to be an opera singer. Told Colley he was studying Italian in high school because lots of operas were in Italian and he wanted to be able to sing every opera there was in the world. They tried talking a little Italian together, but Colley spoke only what he’d learned from his grandparents, which was the Neapolitan dialect, and the kid spoke what he’d been taught in school, the Florentine, so they had a difficult time of it. Colley couldn’t remember the kid’s name any more. He always wondered whether the kid had made it as an opera singer. That had been fourteen years ago; if the kid was going to make it, he’d have made it by now.
Colley knocked on the door to his mother’s apartment.
He waited. He could hear sounds everywhere around him in the building, Johnny Carson’s voice clearly identifiable in the apartment next door to his mother’s, upstairs someone shouting, a toilet flushing someplace; he rang the bell again, and then looked at his watch. It was twenty minutes to one, but this was a Saturday night, and he didn’t expect his mother to be asleep so early on a Saturday night. She’d either be watching television — he didn’t hear anything inside there — or else out playing poker with her friends. He reached into his pocket for his key chain. He carried a key to the apartment only because his mother insisted on it.
“Suppose I’m away sometime, and you want to come in?” she said.
“Mom, you never go away,” he said.
“I went away that time to Daytona Beach.”
“Mom, that was six years ago.”
“So? I could still go away. How do you know?”
“Mom, if you did go away, why would I come up to the Bronx?”
“You might want to use the apartment,” she said. “Take the key, Colley, please. Suppose something happens to me? I’m not getting any younger, you know.”
“That’s right, Mom, you’ve got one foot in the grave.”
“You’d at least have a key, you could open the door and see if I was dead.”
“Mom, you’re only fifty years old. Not even fifty.”
“That’s right, and how old was your father when he died, may he rest in peace?”
“Okay, Mom, let me have the key.”
“God bless you,” his mother said, and kissed him on the cheek.
Colley unlocked the door, opened it, and reached in for the light switch. His mother had a Mickey Mouse lock on the door, you think she’d know better, especially in a neighbor hood getting blacker every day. He locked the door behind him, and then went through the apartment throwing on lights ahead of him. The apartment was a railroad flat, the rooms strung out one after the other so that you had to pass through one room to get to the next. The room he grew up in was at the end of the apartment, the single window in it overlooking the back yard. When he was a kid, he used to look out the window and see the waiters from the pizzeria out there having a smoke on a summer night. Once he looked down and saw one of the waiters dry-humping a girl against the brick wall of the building.
There was maple furniture in his room. A bed, a butterfly chair with paisley cushions, a low dresser, and a higher dresser that had one part of it looked like a wide drawer, but when you opened it the front fell down to become a desk. His mother kept that maple furniture waxed and polished as if she was expecting the queen of England to come there and use the room whenever she was in New York. Surprised his mother hadn’t sent the queen a key. That maple furniture had been a big deal when they moved up from Harlem. His mother had hit the numbers for two thousand dollars, that was the biggest anybody had hit in a long time. When they moved to the Bronx, she’d bought the maple furniture for his bedroom, and also a new couch for the living room. That was a long time ago.
In Harlem, he’d shared a room with Al. When they got up here to the Bronx, Al was fifteen. There were three bedrooms in the apartment, it was really a pretty good apartment and a nice neighborhood in those days. Their mother took the biggest bedroom for herself, of course, the one with the windows overlooking the street. On hot summer nights like tonight, she would put a pillow on the window sill and look down at the street; it was the best entertainment value in New York. Al got the second biggest bedroom — but it was Colley who got the new maple furniture. The furniture still looked brand-new. There was a maple lamp on the dresser, made to resemble a candlestick with a shade on it. Colley snapped on the lamp and took the gun out of his pocket.
He’d never had this particular gun with him here in his mother’s house. Only time he carried a gun nowadays was when he was going to a job or coming off it. Man didn’t carry a gun and risk getting busted for no reason. He didn’t know where to hide the gun now. He went out of the room and down the hall to the bathroom, passing what used to be Al’s room, but what his mother now used for her sewing machine and her card table. That’s where she probably was, out playing poker with her cronies. He thought he might take a towel from the bathroom, wrap the gun in it, and hide the gun and towel on the shelf in his closet, the back of the shelf there. But his mother would probably miss the towel, she probably knew exactly how many towels she had in the bathroom, she’d want to know what happened to the goddamn towel.