It seemed to Colley that Benny was sounding him about something, but he didn’t know what. Finally, Benny started talking about the Orioles, and Colley figured he was trying to find out whether or not he’d be interested in joining the club. The club was just a bunch of guys who’d got together because they liked hanging around with each other, Benny explained. And also for protection.
“Against what?” Colley said.
“Against whoever wants to start up with you.”
“Nobody ever starts up with me,” Colley said. This was true. He was small in comparison to some guys his age, but he’d begun lifting weights when they moved to the Bronx and he was muscular and hard, and guys thought twice before they picked on him.
“You never know,” Benny said.
“Well, nobody bothers me,” Colley said. “Really.”
“You still might need protection sometime.”
“What for?”
“How do I know what for?” Benny said. He seemed irritated all at once. “Guys could jump you for no reason at all.”
The next day, on his way home from school, half a dozen guys jumped Colley for no reason at all. They were all wearing Oriole jackets. They knocked out two of Colley’s teeth and closed one of his eyes. That night he went looking for Benny in the street, and found him sitting on a stoop two blocks from the pizzeria. There was a wrought-iron railing to the right of the stoop, and steps leading down to the basement of the building. The basement windows were painted over with green paint, and you could see the brush strokes where the lights from inside were shining through. A record player was going, a rock group singing a doo-wah, doo-wah, doo-wah riff. A girl laughed.
Benny was smoking a joint. Sitting there all alone, wearing the black jacket with the orange cuffs, his name stitched in orange over the heart, Benny. Puffing, holding in the toke, letting it out at last. Joint down to a roach already. “Hey, man,” he said, “how you doing?”
“Not so hot,” Colley said. “Some of your friends knocked out two of my teeth.”
“That right?” Benny said.
“Yeah,” Colley said. “Also, they closed my right eye. See it here?”
“That’s a shame,” Benny said.
“You suppose they’re downstairs in the basement?” Colley asked.
“Maybe. Why?”
“I don’t like getting jumped for no reason,” Colley said. “I’m limping. Did you notice I was limping? They hurt my ankle, too.” He was limping, that part of it was true. But nobody had hurt his ankle. He was limping because he had a baseball bat inside his pants, running the length of his left leg. “Are they down there?”
“I guess they’re down there,” Benny said, “but I wouldn’t go down there if I was you.”
“Why not? I got a question I want to ask them.”
“Like what?”
“Like who told them to beat me up.”
“I did,” Benny said.
“Why?” Colley said.
“To teach you respect.”
“For what?”
“For the Orioles.”
“So you had them knock out two of my teeth, huh?”
“That’s right,” Benny said.
“And close my eye, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“Benny,” Colley said, “there are going to be some cripples,” and he pulled the baseball bat out of his pants.
Benny was slow getting off the stoop; the pot had reached him and his eyes were a little glazed and he was grinning from ear to ear because he was so fucking pleased with having taught Colley respect for the Orioles, S.A.C. Colley brought back the bat as if he were swinging at a ball coming in very low over the plate. Benny let out a yell when the bat connected, and four or five guys came running up out of the basement to see what was the matter. They were surprised to find Benny lying on the sidewalk with a bone splinter showing through his pants leg, and they were even more surprised to see Colley coming down the basement steps toward them, the bat in his hands.
You didn’t have to tell anybody raised in the slums that a baseball bat was a deadly weapon. The guys saw the bat and recognized Colley as the kid they’d beat up that afternoon, and they saw Benny writhing in pain on the sidewalk, and they did an almost comic bunching-up in the doorway, some of them back-pedaling, some of them still running forward, all of them too late to do a goddamned thing about Colley or the bat. Colley started laying that bat into them, swinging that fuckin thing like a machete, doing just what he promised himself he’d do when he looked in the mirror and saw those two teeth missing in the front of his mouth and that big swollen purple sunset of an eye. All the while he was swinging the bat, the girls kept screaming inside, and some guys — he never did see who they were because they were afraid to come out of the basement — kept swearing and crying (it sounded like), and telling him they’d get him for good, he’d never be able to walk the street again.
It was Benny who didn’t get to walk the street. Not for six weeks, anyway, because that’s how long his leg was in a cast. And one of the guys in the club, a big musclebound jerk named Ernie, was wearing a bandage on his head for almost a month, and one guy had a broken wrist, and another guy had his forefinger and his middle finger together in a splint. Wherever Colley went, he carried the baseball bat with him. Even to school. Teacher in one of his classes told him he was going to report Colley to the principal if he continued bringing the bat to school with him. Colley said to the teacher, “Mr. Gersheimer, if I don’t bring this bat to school with me, I’m going to get killed. Would you like my blood on your hands, Mr. Gersheimer?”
“Nobody’s going to kill you, don’t be silly,” Mr. Gersheimer said. But his face went pale, and he never mentioned the bat again.
Just before school ended for the summer, the doctors took the cast off Benny’s leg. That was when Colley bought the gun. He bought it from a black kid who was on the high school band. The kid was stealing instruments from the band room, and then trading them for handguns, which he sold to whoever could pay the price; apparently there was a bigger market for pistols than for trumpets or clarinets. The guns were cheap crap; Saturday-night specials. The one Colley bought was a .25-caliber pistol. It was the first gun he ever owned. To pay for it, he stole money from his mother’s pocketbook. She never even found out the money was missing, but if she’d asked him about it, asked him if he’d taken it, he’d have told her yeah, it was a matter of life and death. The day after he bought the gun, he went around to the Oriole clubhouse again.
Two guys were on the front stoop, they went running down the basement the minute they saw Colley. Benny came out a minute later. No cast on his leg. Lost a little weight, too, but still fat as a pig and black as a nigger.
“I have a gun in my pocket,” Colley told him at once.
“Yeah?”
“That’s right.”
“What do you want here?”
“I want to tell you anybody starts up with me, I’ll kill him.”
“There’s already a warrant out on you,” Benny said.
“Don’t give me any of your bullshit gang talk,” Colley said. “Warrant, shit! I’m telling you I’m going to use this if I have to,” he said, and pulled the gun from his pocket and stuck it right in Benny’s face. “You the president of this asshole gang?”
“No,” Benny said, and looked at the gun.
“You told me you were the one...”
“Put up the gun, man,” Benny said.
“Had me beat up.”
“That’s right, watch the piece, will you?”