Billy Bathgate

Billy Bathgate by E. L. Doctorow Read Free Book Online

Book: Billy Bathgate by E. L. Doctorow Read Free Book Online
Authors: E. L. Doctorow
going past the open windows of people in their summer underwear, to swing for a minute from the last rung before dropping to the sidewalk, which I hit running. And dodging my way across the street and ducking under the grand granite steps of the Max and Dora Diamond Home for Children I went down into the basement, where Arnold Garbage maintained his office. Here the smell was of ashes, and in all seasons there was a warmth of ash and bitter dry air with suspensions of coal dust and also attars of rotting potatoes or onions that I preferred without question to the moist tang upstairs in the halls and lofts of generations of urinating children. And here Garbage was busy adding his new acquisitions to the great inventory of his life. And I told him I wanted a gun. There was no question in my mind that he could supply it.
    As Mr. Schultz told me later in a moment of reminiscence the first time is breathtaking, you have this weight in your hand and you think in your calculating mind if they only believe me I will be able to bring this thing off, you are still your old self, you see, you are the punk with the punk’s mind, you are relying on them to help you, to teach you how to do it, and that is how it begins, that badly, and maybe it’s in your eyes or your trembling hand, and so the moment poses itself, like a prize to be taken by anyof you, hanging up there like the bride’s bouquet. Because the gun means nothing until it’s really yours. And then what happens, you understand that if you don’t make it yours you are dead, you have created the circumstance, but it has its own free-standing rage, available to anyone, and this is what you take into yourself, like an anger that they’ve done this to you, the people who are staring at your gun, that it’s their intolerable crime to be the people you are waving this gun at. And at that moment you are no longer a punk, you have found the anger that was really in you all the time, and you are transformed, you are not playacting, you are angrier than you have ever been in your entire life, and this great wail of fury rises in your chest and fills your throat and in this moment you are no longer a punk, and the gun is yours and the rage is in you where it belongs and the fuckers know they are dead men if they don’t give you what you want, I mean you are so crazy jerking-off mad at this point you don’t even know yourself, as why should you because you are a new man, a Dutch Schultz if ever there was one. And after that everything works as it should, it is all surprisingly easy, and that is the breathtaking part, like that first moment a little shitter is born, coming out into the air and taking a moment before he can call out his name and breathe the good sweet fresh air of life on earth.
    Of course I did not at the moment understand this in any detail, but the weight in my hand did give me intimations of a fellow I might become; just holding the thing bestowed a new adulthood, I had no immediate plans for it, I thought maybe Mr. Schultz could use me and I wanted to be ready with what I imagined he was looking for, but it was a kind of investiture nevertheless, it had no bullets and badly needed cleaning and oiling, but I could hold it at arm’s length and remove the magazine, and shove it back in the handle grip with a satisfying snap, and I could assure myself that the serial number was filed off, which meant that it was a weapon of the brotherhood, which Garbage confirmed by telling me where he found it, in a wet marsh off Pelham Bay, in the far reaches of the North Bronx, atlow tide, with its snub nose stuck in the muck like a mumbly-peg knife.
    And the name of it was most thrilling of all, it was an Automatic, a very modern piece of equipment, heavy yet compact, and Garbage said he thought it would work if I could find a bullet for it, he himself having none, and quietly without dickering he accepted my suggested price of three dollars, and he took my ten into the depths

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