The boy wore a baseball cap that day with the letters N and Y superimposed on the crown, because it was New York and anything else would have seemed exotic, and he had a well-worn baseball glove folded under his arm as though he hoped to catch a foul ball. He was a walking story that day. Anybody who looked would have said, “This is a kid who loves baseball, and his dad is taking him to the opening home game.” Eddie had set it up. “You take the hat off afterward and you’re a different person. As soon as the gun goes off, that’s who you’re going to want to be.”
It all happened fast, and even though he’d known it would, it was still faster than he’d expected. They came up on the man Eddie had agreed to kill, walking up from behind. Eddie stuck his hand out and the boy opened the glove to let him take the gun—a short-barreled .38 DA’s Special. Eddie grasped it and took the shot—loud, bright like a hammer blow—and the man’s head jerked forward and the rest of him snaked downward after it onto the concrete.
The boy accepted the gun back and folded the glove over it. People were already going, “What? What was that?” And Eddie did the rest of the pantomime. “Oh my God,” he said. “He’s bleeding,” and bent to look so that other people would look down too.
The next seconds taught the boy a lot. The target was down and dead. But Eddie was not prepared for the man beside the victim to turn toward Eddie while digging a gun out of his coat. When Eddie had planned the hit, this man hadn’t existed yet.
Eddie was too far away from the boy to snatch the gun back, and he knew it instantly. He stopped looking toward the man and looked at the boy—not a message, just a sad look, a goodbye look.
The boy’s hand went to the glove, came out with the gun, and fired it into the second man’s head. As the man fell, Eddie took the boy by the hand. They walked off together and stepped down into the next subway entrance. Eddie had already bought tokens that would get them back to the hotel. They pushed through the turnstile and made it onto a subway car that was unloading its baseball fans and was now nearly empty. They sat down. The boy sat stiffly, his heart pounding while the train filled. He was looking at people to see if they had followed him and Eddie down. When he saw that they were just regular riders, he silently urged them on, begged them to hurry. Finally the train’s seats filled, the doors closed, and it moved ahead, picking up speed with that clacking and rattling noise that he knew was making them safe. Eddie looked up and saw two women standing above them, hanging onto a chrome-plated bar.
Eddie elbowed him and nodded, then smiled at the women. Eddie and the boy stood, and Eddie offered their seats to the two women. “Please have a seat,” he said.
The more attractive of the two women, who was tall with long blond hair and about thirty years old, turned away as though she hadn’t heard. Her companion slipped right in and slid over to the window.
Eddie leaned close to the blond woman. “Please. As a favor to me,” he said. “I can only keep teaching my boy manners by trying to have them myself.”
She looked at him and gave him a tentative smile. Then she said to the boy, “You should pay attention to your dad. I’ll bet women all love him because he’s so polite.” She slid past Eddie and sat in the aisle seat beside her friend.
“Yes, ma’am,” the boy said. Then he added what Eddie always wanted him to say in these situations. “But he’s not my dad. He’s my uncle.”
“Oh,” she said.
“It’s been just us at home since I lost my parents.”
The woman was pretty enough to have been the target of many lines, overtures, and impostures, so she sensed this might be another. But would it come by proxy from a teenager?
Eddie held on to the chromed bar and made sure the boy had a good grip too. Eddie was too wily to try to expand this interaction into a conversation. He stood straight, stared ahead, and waited.
After a few minutes, the woman’s dark-haired companion half-stood. “My stop is coming up.”
The boy and Eddie stepped backward to give the blond woman the space to let her friend out. She had to lean forward while her friend slid out. The back of the dark-haired woman brushed against the boy—a sensation the boy found much nicer than he had imagined. The woman half-turned to look at him quizzically, because she could not quite ignore the fact that she had pressed her backside against his body to get out. She could see that he’d had nowhere to go to avoid her. “Sorry,” she said, and pushed the moment into her memory of the inconsequential events of the day, and not the outrages and offenses. She smiled at him and then said to her friend, “Bye, Brenda. See you tomorrow.”
Brenda slid into the window seat and looked up at Eddie. “There’s plenty of room.”
Eddie smiled and said, “Thank you.” Then he gently pushed the boy into the seat.
Brenda turned to the boy. “Is he always like this?” She glanced up at Eddie to be sure he’d heard.
“What do you mean?”
She leaned close to the boy, and he smelled her faint, sweet perfume. She whispered, “So nice.”
The boy shrugged. “I guess so.”
She kept her eyes on the boy. “What does your aunt think?”
“I don’t have one. It’s just us.”
After about five minutes the boy said to Eddie, “I’ll stand for a while.”
Eddie said to the woman, “Do you mind?”
“Of course not.”
Eddie took his place, and then the conversation was all Eddie and Brenda. When she got off at the next stop, Eddie and the boy got off too. Eddie explained that the boy was hungry. She told Eddie about a really nice restaurant not far from her stop. He seemed to have trouble understanding the directions, so she walked with them.
When they reached the restaurant, Eddie asked her to stay and have dinner with them. She refused. When he smiled in his friendliest way, she refused. But when he took her aside and, in a whisper, invented the story that the boy wanted her to because he missed having adult women around since his mother died, she said, “Oh, of course. I hadn’t thought of that. I didn’t mean to be insensitive.”
The dinner was as good as she had promised. They walked her home and somehow ended up staying the night in her apartment. He had not heard how that had been arranged, or if by then a story had even been necessary. He fell asleep on Brenda’s couch under a blanket. When he woke in darkness late at night, Eddie and Brenda were beyond the closed door on the other end of the living room.
The reality he woke to was that he had killed a man. He had not exactly forgotten it. Even during the long subway ride, the dinner, and the walk, he had seen flashes of it, but he hadn’t had time to stop to think it through. There had been too many things happening, being said or done. There were too many words in the conversations between Eddie and the pretty woman, Brenda, that he wasn’t supposed to hear, but did. For the next couple of hours in the dark living room, he revisited the whole day, step by step, seeing the sights, hearing the gunshots and the shouting, and then feeling the urgency of walking to the subway platform when his body wanted to run.