It was funny the way most of the guys in the club grew up to be just what you expected. Benny was always bringing girls around, and now Benny was a pimp. Ernie was always looking for a fight — big hands on him, swollen knuckles — and now Ernie was a heavyweight boxer, fought under the name of Ernie Pass, which was short for Ernie Passaro. And Duke, who they’d kicked off the club for shooting dope, he turned into a full-time junkie, later kicked the habit cold turkey and began pushing the stuff. He got busted just after Rockefeller changed the laws in New York State; you ever saw Duke again, he’d be eighty-five years old with a long white beard. Duke’s mother still went up to see him every month in Sing Sing. Some fuckin trip up there, Colley’s own mother used to come up when he was doing his three-to-seven for...
There.
There it was.
Exactly what he meant about guys turning out just the way you expected — including himself. On the Orioles, he’d made his rep with a gun. Reason they’d come around kissing his ass was because he’d stuck that gun up Benny’s nose and was ready to pull the trigger. Would have done it, too, anybody’d given him any shit that day. First time he got busted was because of a gun. That was January, the winter after he’d joined the Orioles. The shit was on with another club named the Dragons, bunch of spies who could hardly speak English, they had these silk jackets made up with a dragon curling all over the back, you’d think it was a fuckin Chink gang instead. Kid on the club was named Macho. He gave himself the name, it was supposed to mean he had balls. Macho came around one day, said something to one of the girls. Sounded her. Petie was sitting right on the stoop, this was in front of the clubhouse. He heard what Macho said to the girl, he jumped up off the stoop. “Hey,” he said to the spic, “watch your mouth, you hear me?”
Macho didn’t say a word. Macho pulled a blade and stuck it in Petie clear up to the handle. They had to take Petie to the hospital, put seven stitches in his side. After that, the shit was on, and the one they were especially looking to get was Macho.
That January, Colley was still carrying the .25 he’d bought the summer before. It wasn’t a bad piece. You got some of those Saturday-night specials, they fell apart in your hand first time you used them, or they blew up in your face, whatever the hell. That’s because they were made so cheap. This one wasn’t a bad pistol. It was called an Astra Firecat, and it was made in Spain and imported by Firearms International. It cost about thirty dollars brand-new; Colley had bought it secondhand from the black kid who was stealing band instruments, but it cost him thirty dollars anyway. On the grip, down near the bottom, the word FIRECAT was stamped into the metal. It wasn’t a bad name, and it wasn’t a bad gun, either. Or at least that’s what Colley thought at the time, when he was still a kid and getting used to guns. It was the Firecat that Colley had shoved under Benny’s nose. It was the Firecat that he’d tossed in the palm of his hand the day Laurie’s greaseball father came down the club yelling. It was the Firecat he used to shoot Macho in the throat one January night.
Colley was sixteen years old; he had turned sixteen in July. July the fourteenth, that was his birthday. He told everybody he met that he was born on Bastille Day. Hardly anybody knew what the fuck he meant. Only one guy in prison, guy named Brenet, whose mother and father had come here from France, knew what Bastille Day was. They were in the laundry working, Colley had this job in the laundry at the time, he mentioned to Brenet that he was born on Bastille Day. Fuckin dope started singing the Marseillaise at the top of his lungs, pig comes over, says, “Hey, what’s going on here?”
“It’s a code,” Brenet tells the pig. “We’re planning a break, and we’re singing about it in code.”
“What are you, a wise guy?” the pig says, but his eyes are slitted and there’s a suspicious look on his face. He doesn’t know whether to believe Brenet or not. Brenet nudges Colley in the ribs and says, “Seven o’clock, pass it on.” Colley takes a chance on the pig having a sense of humor. “Seven o’clock,” he says to the pig, “pass it on,” but he doesn’t nudge him in the ribs. Nudge a pig, he’s liable to nudge you back with his stick and throw you in the shifter for a month. “Very funny,” the pig says.
Sing Sing was always a barrel full of laughs.
Colley missed going to prison when he was sixteen only because a judge took pity on him. Peered down from behind his bench and his spectacles, saw clean-cut Nicholas Donato in his blue-serge Communion suit, looking up at him out of his baby browns, decided to suspend sentence instead of sending him away. The crime they’d charged Colley with, rightfully, was second-degree assault. If he’d been a bona-fide adult, the crime was punishable by five years in a state penitentiary, or a fine of a thousand dollars, or both. But Colley was a “young adult,” defined in the Penal Law as someone who was more than sixteen but not yet twenty-one, and if he’d been convicted of second-degree assault, he would have been sentenced instead to a reformatory for “a period of unspecified duration, to commence and terminate as provided in PL 75.10.” In such a case the court would not have fixed a minimum or maximum sentence. That was good. Even better than that, Colley’s lawyer thought, would be for him to plead guilty to the lesser charge of third-degree assault.
The assistant district attorney prosecuting the case was of Hispanic heritage, just like his client Luis Josafat Albareda; Colley learned Macho’s real name only after he’d shot him. The assistant D.A. told Colley’s lawyer that whereas criminal law was most assuredly the bargain basement of the legal profession, he would not allow Colley to cop a third-degree assault plea, not when a weapon was involved, not when a .25-caliber pistol had been used to shoot poor Luis Josafat in the throat, causing him to lie bleeding in the snow for three hours without proper medical attention — that was because Colley had planned his ambush well, catching Macho in a deserted alleyway that ran between two apartment houses.
“Hey! Macho!”
Macho turned and was already reaching for his blade when Colley opened up. He fired twice. The first shot missed him. The bullet hit the alleyway wall and sent a piece of brick flying into the air, and then went ricocheting, zing, zing, zing, and Colley pulled off the second shot and blood began spurting out of Macho’s neck.
The assistant district attorney argued that poor Luis Josafat had lost part of his larynx because of the shooting, and now spoke through a voice box — “this fine boy who is only seventeen years of age will have to go the rest of his life in this handicap position,” the assistant district attorney said, sounding very much like Pancho Villa, and actually getting a laugh from Colley’s attorney, who quickly covered his mouth with his plump little hand. When it was pointed out to the assistant D.A. that poor Luis Josafat was a kid who’d himself been arrested many times for crimes ranging from possession of narcotics to attempted rape to burglary to assault, the assistant D.A. decided to forsake Hispanic fealty in favor of job security, and promptly agreed to the lesser charge.
The judge was Italian; that didn’t hurt either.
“Colley? Is that you?” the voice said.
He stopped stock-still in the center of the sidewalk.
“Colley?” she said.
“Yes?”
“Colley?”
It was getting to be like one of his grandfather’s operas. All right already, he thought. It’s Colley. So who the fuck are you?