At twenty yards, the headlights blinded them. Vladdy put his arm up to shield his eyes. Then the headlights went out and he heard a car door open and slam shut. He couldn’t see anything now but heard fast-moving footfalls coming across the gravel.
Vladdy’s eyes readjusted to the darkness in time to see Bob raise a pistol and shoot Eddie point-blank in the forehead, right through his stocking cap. Eddie dropped straight down as if his legs had been kicked out from under him, and he landed in a heap.
“Some fuckin’ nightmare,” Bob said, pointing the pistol at Vladdy. “Where are you boys from?”
Instinctively, Vladdy fell back. As he did so, he raised the metal briefcase and felt a shock through his hand and arm as a bullet smashed into it. On the ground, Vladdy heard a cry and realized that it had come from inside of him. He thrashed and rolled away, and Bob cursed and fired another booming shot into the dirt near Vladdy’s ear.
Vladdy leaped forward and swung the briefcase as hard as he could, and by pure chance it hit hard into Bob’s kneecaps. Bob grunted and pitched forward, nearly onto Vladdy. In the dark, Vladdy had no idea where Bob’s gun was, but he scrambled to his feet and clubbed at Bob with the briefcase.
Bob said, “Stop!” but all Vladdy could see was the muzzle flash on Eddie’s face a moment before.
“Stop! I’ve got the—” Vladdy smashed the briefcase down as hard as he could and stopped the sentence. Bob lay still.
Breathing hard, Vladdy dropped the briefcase and fell on top of Bob. He tore through Bob’s clothing and found the gun that shot Eddie. Bob moaned, and Vladdy shot him in the eye with it.
With tears streaming down his face, Vladdy buckled Eddie’s and Bob’s belts together and rolled them off of the dam. He heard the bodies thump onto some rocks and then splash into the reservoir. He threw the pistol as far as he could and it went into the water with a ploop. The briefcase followed.
He found a vinyl bag on the front seat of the Suburban that bulged with two thousand dollars in cash. It puzzled Vladdy for a moment, but then it made sense. Bob had flashed his lights to see who had taken his briefcase. When he saw two out-of-place guys like Vladdy and Eddie — especially Eddie — Bob made his choice not to pay.
Vladdy drove back through Yellowstone Park in the Suburban, thinking of Eddie, thinking of what he had done. He would buy some new clothes, new shoes, one of those fleece vests. Get a baseball cap, maybe.
He parked on a pullout on the northern shore of Yellowstone Lake and watched the sun come up. Steam rose from hot spots along the bank, and a V of Canada geese made a long graceful descent onto the surface of the water.
He felt a part of it, now.
A setting from a dream of nature, he thought.
James Lee Burke
Why Bugsy Siegel Was a Friend of Mine
From The Southern Review
In 1947 Nick Hauser and I had only two loves in this world — baseball and Cheerio yo-yo contests. That’s how we met Benny, one spring night after a doubleheader out at Buffalo Stadium on the Galveston Freeway. His brand-new Ford convertible, a gleaming maroon job with a starch-white top, whitewall tires, and blue-dot taillights, was stuck in a sodden field behind the bleachers. Benny was trying to lift the bumper while his girlfriend floored the accelerator, spinning the tires and blowing streams of muddy water and torn grass back in his face.
He wore a checkered sports coat, lavender shirt, hand-painted necktie, and two-tone shoes, all of it now whipsawed with mud. But it was his eyes, not his clothes, that you remembered. They were a radiant blue and literally sparkled.
“You punks want to earn two bucks each?” he said.
“Who you calling a punk?” Nick said.
Before Benny could answer, his girlfriend shifted into reverse, caught traction, and backed over his foot.
He hopped up and down, holding one shin, trying to bite down on his pain, his eyes lifted heavenward, his lips moving silently.
“Get in the fucking car before it sinks in this slop again! “ his girlfriend yelled.
He limped to the passenger side. A moment later they fishtailed across the grass past us. Her hair was long, blowing out the window, the pinkish red of a flamingo. She thumbed a hot cigarette into the darkness.
“Boy, did you check out that babe’s bongos? Wow!” Nick said.
But our evening encounter with Benny and his girlfriend was not over. We were on the shoulder of the freeway, trying to hitch a ride downtown, flicking our Cheerios under a streetlamp, doing a whole range of upper-level yo-yo tricks — Round the World, Shoot the Moon, Rock the Cradle, and the Atomic Bomb — when the maroon convertible roared past us, blowing dust and newspaper in our faces.
Suddenly the convertible cut across two lanes of traffic, made a U-turn, then a second U-turn, horns blowing all over the freeway, and braked to a stop abreast of us.
“You know who I am?” Benny said.
“No,” I replied.
“My name is Benjamin Siegel.”
“You’re a gangster,” Nick said.
“He’s got you, Benny,” the woman behind the wheel said.
“How you know that?” Benny said.
“We heard your name on Gangbusters. Nick and me listen every Saturday night,” I said.
“Can you do the Chinese Star?” he asked.
“We do Chinese Stars in our sleep,” Nick said.
“Get in,” Benny said, pulling back the leather seat.
“We got to get home,” I said.
“We’ll take you there. Get in,” he said.
We drove out South Main, past Rice University and parklike vistas dense with live oak trees, some of them hung with Spanish moss. To the south, heat lightning flickered over the Gulf of Mexico. Benny bought us fried chicken and ice cream at Bill Williams Drive-In, and while we ate, his girlfriend smoked cigarettes behind the wheel and listened to the radio, her thoughts known only to herself, her face so soft and lovely in the dash light I felt something drop inside me when I stole a look at it.
Benny popped open the glove box and removed a top-of-the-line chartreuse Cheerio yo-yo. Behind the yo-yo I could see the steel surfaces of a semiautomatic pistol. “Now show me the Chinese Star,” he said.
He stood with us in the middle of the drive-in parking lot, watching Nick and me demonstrate the intricate patterns of the most difficult of all the Cheerio competition tricks. Then he tried it himself. His yo-yo tilted sideways, its inner surfaces brushing against the string, then twisted on itself and went dead.
“The key is candle wax,” I said.
“Candle wax?” he said.
“Yeah, you wrap the string around a candle and saw it back and forth. That gives you the spin and the time you need to make the pattern for the star,” I said.
“I never thought of that,” he said.
“It’s a breeze,” Nick said.
“Benny, give it a rest,” his girlfriend said from inside the car.
Fifteen minutes later we dropped off Nick at his house on the dead-end street where I used to be his neighbor. It was a wonderful street, one of trees and flowers and old brick homes, and a horse pasture dotted with live oaks beyond the canebrake that enclosed the cul-de-sac. But when my father died my mother and I were evicted, and we moved across Westheimer and took up residence in a neighborhood where every sunrise broke on the horizon like a testimony to personal failure.
Benny’s girlfriend pulled to a stop in front of my house. Benny looked at the broken porch and orange rust on the screens. “This is where you live?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said, my eyes leaving his.
He nodded. “You need to study hard, make something of yourself. Go out to California, maybe. It’s the place to be,” he said.