– No. You want to talk about this? I am a businessman and will talk always about an arrangement. But first this job. Do this job and we will talk. Show me there is work you are still good for, and then we will talk. When we are face-to-face in a room, we can talk about this. Not now. Not now.
– OK. OK. Sorry.
– Do not be sorry. Be. Be the man I know you to be. This is a wonderful opportunity. Seize it and we may talk of many things. I have learned in my life that anything may be changed. Anything may be fixed. But now. Now I will go. My family is on the beach and I will join them. I am wearing shorts. I have white cream on my nose. You would laugh at me. You would laugh.
He says goodbye and I say goodbye and we hang up.
But I’m not laughing.
I pick up one of the water bottles, open it and pour it over my head. The water splashes off my face and I catch some in my mouth and I have a sudden flash of memory: the girls out front of the Jackalope dumping frozen blueberry daiquiris over themselves. The image is somehow crushing and I am hit with a childish depression, the kind you get when you see a kid who’s just lost the scoop of ice cream from his cone. I sit, all but naked on the floor, my ever-growing gut rolling over the waistband of my dirty BVDs, pizza on the bottom of my foot, the dripping water bottle held over my head.
This would be a good time for it, but I don’t get up and walk into the bathroom and peel the tape from the broken mirror.
BY THE TIME Branko shows up I’ve managed to get myself in the shower to hose off the two days of pill- sweat I’ve been wallowing in and pick the pepperoni out from between my toes. The Demerol crash is coming on strong and my eyes want to slide shut so I’ve popped a tab of x and that tilts me back the other way. It’s dirty x. The euphoria of the MDMA is cut heavily with speed, which is what I really need right now to keep me on my feet. I’ll drop another one right before I pick up this guy tonight and it might make me slightly more social than a corpse.
I still have the towel wrapped around my waist when there’s a knock on the door. I know who it is, but I observe all the precautions out of habit. First, I peek out the back window to see if there are any guys with
Branko looks at me in my towel, the revolver dangling from my hand, and taps a fingernail against the door.
– Not locked?
I shrug.
– I remembered to look out back.
He steps in, closes and locks the door.
– Small miracles.
I drop the gun on the couch and head for the bedroom to finish dressing.
– The only kind there are.
He makes the little grunting noise that passes for his laugh.
In the bedroom I wiggle into a pair of size forty jeans that I bought a month ago and that are already getting tight on me. That’s another reason not to have mirrors. Most of my life I wore thirty-fours. Not anymore. No gym memberships for wanted criminals. Not that I can fool myself into thinking that I’d go anywhere near a gym if one were available to me. There are people at gyms, and I don’t really know what to do with people anymore. Except hurt them. I suck in my gut and button the jeans.
In the living room Branko has turned off the Cannonball Adderley I was listening to, swapping “Somethin’ Else” for Cameo and “Rigor Mortis.” He’s bent over, adjusting the equalizer on the stereo he gave me when I moved into this place. It had fallen off a truck along with a couple dozen others just like it and he’d scooped up one for me because he hated the sound of the little boom box I used to have.
When I come in he looks over his shoulder at me.
– Your levels are wrong.
I sit on the couch and lace my sneakers.
– Thanks for taking care of that.
He frowns and turns back to the stereo.
– And your gun needs to be cleaned.
I don’t know where the gun came from, but Branko gave me that, too. I was supposed to kill someone with it.
BRANKO SHOWED UP one night and we drove into Paradise, to one of the New Mexico-style housing tracts over there that look just like all the other New Mexico-style housing tracts in Paradise. He parked the car outside a house. We went in and I beat the hell out of a guy who had welshed on one too many bets, or stopped paying his vig, or cheated at cards, or didn’t give a job to somebody’s cousin, or something. Then Branko handed me this little revolver with the numbers filed off. I hadn’t realized it was that. I thought it was a beating: beat the guy, make your point, get out. But it wasn’t. It was a job with a gun.
Branko flipped the guy onto his stomach. I stood over the guy and pointed the gun at the back of his head.
The way you do it, you empty the gun, you wipe the gun, you drop the gun. The gun is a big fuck you. First it says fuck you to the guy who’s getting it. Then it says fuck you to the cops. And finally, it says fuck you to all the guys out there who know why this guy got his head shot to pieces. The gun sitting next to the corpse says fuck this guy, fuck the cops who aren’t going to catch me and fuck all you assholes out there that are thinking about fucking with David Dolokhov.
I’ve delivered that particular litany of fuck you’s three times.
So I stand there with the .22 in my hand. It holds seven rounds. All I have to do is put them all in the back of this guy’s head and drop the big fuck you.
But I don’t. Instead I just stand there. Stand there and flex my trigger finger. But it never moves.
Branko gave it a minute, then he shot the guy with his own gun. Back in the car I tried to give him the little revolver, but he told me to keep it for the next time. But the next time I still couldn’t do it. And then David stopped sending me on jobs like that, and I started feeling more and more that I had let him down, and that sooner or later, I’d have to pay for it.
But they let me keep the gun. A kind of promise to me that even if I have given up on myself, they haven’t.
They know I still have it in me.
Killing still inside me.
I LOOK AT the gun. It’s a Smith & Wesson .22 Magnum. A perfect gun for killing people. It’s very small and very lightweight, but those Magnum loads still pack plenty of punch. I pull the cuff of my shirtsleeve down and use it to brush off the rest of the Comet. Branko straightens from the stereo and looks at me.
– This is what you will wear?
I look at my jeans, sneakers, and long-sleeve T-shirt.
– Is it wrong?
– For later. When you pick this man up. You must look better.
– A suit?
He thinks about it.
– Black jeans. A clean shirt. A jacket. And nice shoes. You have these things?
