He went past the bathroom and into the kitchen — he was still holding the gun in his hand — and in the kitchen he put the gun on the enamel-topped table and looked in the cabinet under the sink to see if she had any of those plastic trash bags, but she didn’t have any of those, either. He saw some brown paper bags from the A&P under there, though, folded neatly alongside the garbage pail. He took one of these, and shook it open, and then picked up the .38, and put it in the bag, and folded the bag around the gun. You couldn’t tell there was a gun inside there. For all you knew, it could be a ham-and-cheese sandwich.
He smiled, went out of the kitchen, and walked down the hall again to what he still thought of as his room even though he’d moved out of the apartment eight months ago. He opened the closet door, pulled the light cord, and then shoved the gun way to the back of the shelf. His mother found it, he’d tell her he was holding the gun for somebody. She wouldn’t find it, though; she wouldn’t be searching for it, so how could she find it? He still kept a few clothes here in the apartment, and he took a pair of khakis from a hanger now, and also a short-sleeved sports shirt. He didn’t visit his mother too often nowadays, but whenever he did come up to the Bronx, he liked to make himself comfortable. He’d come uptown wearing a suit and a tie, for example, like when he came up last Easter on the subway, and then he wouldn’t feel like hanging around all day in a suit, so he’d change into a pair of jeans and a sports shirt, like that. Clothes didn’t mean very much to him. You got some guys, they scored on a job, they went crazy buying clothes. Colley spent the money on booze and women and nightclubs. He loved going to the Copa after a big score. Go in there with a blonde on your arm, guys in there knew you were somebody. Throw a few bills around, grease the skids, get a table up front, blonde sitting there with you.
He took off his shoes and socks — he’d have to wash out the socks before his mother got home, there was still some of Jocko’s blood on one of the socks — and then he took off the borrowed sweater and pants. He found a pair of clean underwear in one of the dresser drawers, and then he put on the khaki pants and the sports shirt and a clean pair of socks and the same shoes he’d been wearing on the job tonight — Jesus, how had things managed to go so wrong?
He went down the hallway to the bathroom.
While he was washing his socks he heard a boom of thunder and saw lightning flash against the pebbled glass of the bathroom window. Almost immediately, it began raining.
The club was called the Orioles, S.A.C.
The “S.A.C.” stood for “Social and Athletic Club,” but everybody on the block knew the Orioles was a bopping gang. There had been an Orioles down in Harlem long before Colley was born, back in the forties. When he was still a little kid, guys used to talk about the Orioles and what a great and powerful club it had been, with thousands of members all over Harlem and even in the Bronx. All the clubs died out in the late forties, early fifties; dope killed the clubs. Guys shooting heroin didn’t want to be bothered rumbling in the streets with other clubs. Didn’t want to be bothered about anything, in fact, except getting that glassine bag and ripping it open and cooking the shit in a spoon, man, and shooting it into a vein. Harlem didn’t have any clubs when Colley was growing up there in the fifties.
Harlem — Colley’s Harlem — was the area between First Avenue and Lexington Avenue, stretching from 125th Street on the north to 110th Street on the south. There were two other Harlems: Spanish Harlem, which was just west of the Harlem Colley knew; and Black Harlem, which was all the way over near Lenox Avenue, Colley guessed, somewhere all the way over on the other side of the city. There were Puerto Ricans coming into Colley’s Harlem even then, crossing the imaginary boundary line that was Lexington Avenue, drifting over from Park and Madison, moving into apartment buildings that had been exclusively Italian during the war years, almost filling up the project on 120th Street, bodegas and Spanish restaurants popping up everywhere; the neighborhood was changing.
That’s why Colley’s mother decided to move up to the Bronx. His father had died from cancer two years before, and all of his mother’s relatives had moved either to Jersey or Long Island, so there was nothing to keep her in Harlem any more. Then she hit the numbers for two thousand dollars, and one of the ladies in her poker game mentioned that an apartment was available on her block, so they’d packed up and made the move.
There were no clubs in the Bronx, either. Not at first. It really was a nice neighborhood. But when Colley got to be fourteen, fifteen, the clubs started up again. This was the sixties now. He began noticing guys wearing the Oriole jacket, black jacket with orange cuffs and a picture of a bird on the back, the bird colored orange, the lettering Orioles, S.A.C. in orange just below the bird; the bird was perching on the “O” in “Orioles.” Colley noticed the guys in the jackets, and he asked about them, and learned that they called themselves a club, but he knew they were a gang. He steered clear of them. His brother Al knew all about street gangs because he was six years older than Colley and presumably remembered the gangs in Harlem dying of heroin pollution. He warned Colley to keep away from them. He was still in college at the time, and was learning a lot of new words. “Gangs are full of kids with personality disorders,” he told Colley.
Anyway, Colley did manage to stay away from the Orioles or any of the other gangs until just before the summer he turned sixteen. That was almost a year after he’d had the stockroom job with the Jewish kid; he was in fact thinking of taking another summer job, going down to the employment agencies downtown, looking over the blackboards to see what jobs were chalked on them. He wasn’t thinking of joining any damn street gang. But one day in school this fat kid Benny sat down across the table from him in the cafeteria. Up to that time, Colley had seen Benny around the neighborhood, wearing the orange-and-black jacket and strutting like a fuckin bigshot. He knew he was an Oriole, but he didn’t know his name. Colley was working on a crossword puzzle in one of the books he used to buy; it was Benny who started the conversation.
“You like doing those things?” he said, and Colley looked up. Benny wasn’t wearing the Oriole jacket. Colley learned only later that it wasn’t cool to wear the jacket to school. Teachers got nervous seeing the Oriole jacket, or any other club jacket in school. That’s because most of the teachers had grown up in the forties and knew all about street gangs and were afraid of street gangs starting up again.
“Yeah, I like crossword puzzles,” Colley said.
“You must be a good speller.”
“I’m not bad.”
“I can’t even spell my own name,” Benny said. “Gallitelli. Benny Gallitelli. No wonder I can’t spell it,” he said, and laughed. “Can you spell Gallitelli?”
“I don’t know,” Colley said.
“Try it. I’ll give you a hint, it starts with a G.”
Colley spelled the name on the first try. Benny seemed amazed.
“You got to meet my English teacher,” he said. “She can’t even pronounce it, no less spell it. What’s your name?”
“Colley Donato.”
They went through the whole “what’s-that-short-for” routine, Benny expressing surprise that anybody named Nicholas would be called Colley; his own brother was named Nicholas and he’d always been called Nick or Nickie. Colley explained that he had a cousin named Nicholas, and when they were little kids, all the aunts and uncles and goombahs used to call one of them Nickie and the other one Colley, to tell them apart. That’s how he’d got the name Colley. Benny said he could understand this because he himself had a pair of cousins both named Salvatore, and the family called one of them Salvie and the other one Sally.