Now he was twenty-five years old, back at the gas station, working the pumps and washing windshields, doing the same thing he’d been doing when he was sixteen. His service benefits would pay for college, but he’d have to tackle high school first. He supposed that he could get that degree if he worked at it, but he knew he wasn’t smart enough or ambitious enough to take the next step.
He hung with Buzz Stewart. Stewart rode him sometimes, but he was the closest thing to a friend Martini had. And there was something else about Buzz, something that was difficult for him to admit. Martini had gotten used to taking orders. He had grown comfortable getting up in the morning and having someone tell him what to do. When Dominic Martini looked at Stewart’s sleeves, he saw stripes.
Stewart had asked if he was in. To Martini, it had sounded like a command.
Martini went under the railroad bridge in downtown Silver Spring. He passed Fay and Andy’s, a beer garden at Selim where he sometimes drank with Buzz and Walter Hess, and hung a right at the Gifford’s ice cream parlor on the next corner. He drove down Sligo Avenue, toward Stewart’s place on Mississippi. He took a final drag off his cigarette and pitched the butt out the window.
Stewart was okay as long as he was sober. Hess was wrong most all the time. Both of them were ugly when they tied it on. Martini listened to their hate talk but didn’t join in. They were all together on some things but not on that. Martini had been that way himself most of his life, but now he was not. While growing up, he had listened to his father talk constantly about niggers, mostly while drunk, and it had infected him. It took a tour of Vietnam to clean the poison from his blood.
It was clear from the start that the men of his platoon were more alike than they ever would have imagined. None of them came from money. None fully understood the circumstances that had brought them to Southeast Asia and put them in the line of fire. All watched one another’s backs. In those ways, and in many other ways, they were brothers.
He had forged deep friendships with blacks and whites. He had thought the bonds would last. But after his discharge he lost contact with them. He was embarrassed to write them letters, as he couldn’t spell for shit. And anyway, what would he say? My life is fucked. I’m pumping gas and getting ready to do a robbery. What’s up with you?
Back in D.C., he was disappointed to find that the old mistrust remained. If anything, the canyon between blacks and whites was wider than it had been before. He tried to make friendly with some black guys who were new to the neighborhood but got limp handshakes and ice-cool eyes in return. Stewart and Hess laughed about this, called him Martini Luther King, Lady Bird, shit like that. They told him that a guy needed to choose which side of the line he was gonna stand on. That even the niggers didn’t respect a man who switched sides. But he had lost the heart for that sort of conflict. He didn’t hate blacks. He didn’t want to hate anyone anymore.
Martini parked his Nova on Mississippi, near Stewart’s Belvedere and Hess’s ride. He walked beside a small brick house to a freestanding garage beside a large plot of plow-lined dirt, recently turned. Buzz did this every spring for his mother; he had done it even when the old man was alive. Albert Stewart had kicked from throat cancer while Buzz was overseas.
Stewart and Hess were in the garage, standing around Stewart’s bike, an old Triumph Bonneville with twenty-four-inch risers. Both were smoking ’Boros and drinking Schlitz out of cans. Both wore Levi’s jeans and motorcycle boots. A radio sat on a shelf under an old Esso sign, taken from the station. “7 Rooms of Gloom” came from its speaker.
A droplight had been looped through the rafters and hung over the two men. It cast yellow light upon their pale faces.
Hess threw his head back to kill his beer. He crushed the can in his fist and tossed it into a trash can, half filled with empties, in the corner of the garage. Martini stepped inside.
He said, “Buzz,” then nodded at Hess.
“Pretty boy,” said Hess.
“Shorty,” said Martini.
“Drop that door,” said Stewart.
Martini pulled the garage door down to the cement floor. Hess found another can of beer and pulled its ring. He dropped the ring into the opening at the top of the can.
Stewart head-motioned Martini toward a workbench set against one of the cinder-block walls. “Check this out.”
Martini followed Stewart to a corner of the bench. Stewart pulled back a tarp covering a lumpen shape. A double-barreled, double-triggered, Italian-made shotgun was set tight in a vise. The barrel and stock had been cut down. A hacksaw lay nearby in a thick film of metal shavings.
Martini hadn’t held a gun since he’d turned in his rifle. He had no desire to touch one again.
“Whaddaya think?”
“It’s gotta be fifty years old. A bird shooter.” Martini could think of nothing else to say.
“It makes its point. A man stares down two barrels of anything, he’s gonna give up whatever it is you askin’ for.” Stewart dragged on his smoke. “Go on, take it out the vise and get a feel for it.”
“I don’t want to,” said Martini.
“I don’t want to,” said Hess in a girlish way.
“Shut up, Shorty,” said Stewart.
“What,” said Hess, “you gonna let him pussy out on us now?”
Martini shook his head. “That’s not what I’m sayin’.”
“What, then?” said Stewart.
“Told you once before. I don’t want to see nobody hurt.”
“Shit,” said Hess, “you didn’t have no problem with greasin’ them pieheads over there, did ya?”
Martini kept his eyes on Stewart. “All I’m tryin’ to say is, I ain’t up for no blood.”
“You don’t have nothin’ against getting rich, though, do you?” said Stewart.
“Course not.”
“Well, you don’t have to worry, then,” said Stewart. “The cut-down’s for me. All you gotta do is drive. Three equal shares, like I promised. Course, you will have to carry a gun, just in case. All for one. But there won’t be no need to use it.”
“When?” said Martini.
“Soon.”
Stewart studied Martini. Martini lowered his eyes.
Hess hit his smoke down to the filter and crushed it under his boot. He looked at the radio on the shelf with something like hate. “Buzz?”
“What?”
“What the fuck is this rughead singin’ about, anyway?”
Stewart turned to Hess. “That’s Levi Stubbs, you dumb shit.”
“So?”
“So it shows what you don’t know.”
“Thought we was gonna do some sportin’ tonight. I ain’t come here to listen to no songs.”
Stewart said, “Let’s go.”
Martini grabbed a can of Schlitz and popped it. Hess casually took a pill from his pocket, popped it in his mouth, and washed it down with beer. Stewart found a small black case in a footlocker, set the case on the workbench, and opened its lid. He extracted his derringer, an American single-shot stainless.38 with rosewood grips, from its place in the red velvet lining. He put one foot up on a stool and slipped the derringer into his boot.
“I’ll meet you guys out front,” said Stewart. “I gotta say good-bye to my mom.”
“WHERE YOUR GIRL at, Alvin?” said Kenneth Willis.
“Back there fuckin’ with that kid.”
“Must not have been back there all day, though.”
“Why you say that?”
“It smells like Charlie the Tuna been swimmin’ through here, cuz.”
“Yeah, well, you know.”
Alvin Jones and Kenneth Willis laughed and touched hands.
Jones sat on a big cushioned chair. He had the smell of whiskey on him but had not offered any kind of refreshment to Willis or Dennis Strange. Both were standing in the cramped living room of Lula Bacon’s apartment.
Dennis looked down at Jones, compact, freckled, with a yellow color to his skin. Wearing a gold Ban-Lon shirt with wide vertical black stripes, black slacks, and hard shoes of imitation-reptile tooled leather. Dennis could see his socks, sheer, almost, except for the solid parallel lines running through them. The slick brothers called these Thick ’n Thins. This was one slick man right here.