I stopped and leaned against the alley wall, moved my shirt back and looked at where I had been hit in the side. I realized it was a bad hit, worse than I thought. The other wounds weren’t so bad, but they were all bleeding, and I felt as if there was something tunneling around inside me.
I could hear Juan and that girl coming. I thought about running, but my body wasn’t up for it. They knew I was here, and it was a matter of time before they caught up with me. I looked around, saw some garbage cans by some metal stairs. I made my way there and got behind the cans and eased over behind the stairs, watching between the garbage cans as Juan turned the corner, and then the girl.
They spread out, maybe trying to act like movies they’d seen, where the cops search rooms. But this was a big-ass room, this wide spot in the alley. When she went left, Juan came along the wall, then stopped as his arm brushed the bricks. He put out his hand and rubbed the wall. I knew he had found my blood there.
He turned and looked toward the trash cans, and when he did, he saw me between those cans. I knew it. I could tell. I lifted the gun and fired. It hit him and he went down, his pistol skittering across the alley.
Bullets banged around the cans and along the stairs. A light went on somewhere above me, and the girl, panicking, fired at the lit window. I heard glass crash and then someone smartly turned out the light. I stood up and kicked the trash cans over and came out blazing. I fired twice and both shots missed. She fired and hit me in the shoulder-and this one was solid, not just passing through. It knocked me down and I felt as if all the wind was out of me. I couldn’t believe how hard I had been hit.
I lay on my back and she came toward me. She was smiling. She had a revolver. She pointed it at me. She straddled me and pulled the trigger. And it clicked empty. She had shot at me in the bowling alley. Maybe one of her shots had hit me, but now she was all used up.
I grinned and lifted the pistol and shot her in between the legs.
She seemed to jump backward, then hit the ground on her back and made a noise like someone trying to squeeze out a silent fart.
I could hardly get up, but I did. I staggered over and looked down at her. She looked young. Not a whole lot older than the girl I had punched.
“Shit,” I said.
She quit moving, except for one leg that wiggled a moment, then quit.
I went over to Juan. He was breathing heavy. He had his hands on his belly. I got down on my knees by him.
I said, “That boy, whose feet you nailed to the floor. That was my brother. My father committed suicide over it. I don’t like you or any of your gang. I’m glad you hurt bad.”
He tried to say something, but he couldn’t. All of his air was being used to stay alive.
“I just wanted you to know how much I hate you. You fucked up my life, and this sure fucks up yours. And I got Billy too. And the Headmaster. And a bunch of you fucks. You had a plastic Jesus in your pocket, I’d snap it in half. That’s how much I hate you. How you feeling, Juan?”
Juan looked at me, and his mouth came open, like a fish on a dock, hoping for water.
“I could kill you,” I said. “Make it stop hurting. But I don’t want to.”
I stayed there on my knees until blood came out of his mouth and the stink in his pants became too strong for me to take. Then I stood up and looked at him. It was all I could do to stand up. I should have moved on, maybe found a doctor. But I didn’t want to miss a second of it.
I watched until he was dead and his eyes were as flat and lifeless as a teddy bear’s.
I went away then, moving slow, but moving. I dropped the automatic somewhere. I walked until I came to some lights. Down the way I could hear traffic and see people. People who weren’t in gangs. People with lives. People, many of which would live long and die of old age and have families. Stuff I wouldn’t know about.
I leaned against a brick wall, under a streetlight. The first I had come to since leaving the bowling alley. I looked up and watched bugs swarm around the light. They didn’t know they had short lives and didn’t care. They just did what they did and had no thoughts about it.
I grinned at them.
I took the little girl’s wallet out of my back pocket and opened it. It had five dollars in it. I looked through it and found her picture, and a picture of her with a man, woman, and little boy. Her family, I figured. I found a little card behind a plastic window that had her address on it. It said: RETURN TO, and then there was the address. I knew that address, the general locale. It wasn’t far from where I had lived as a kid, back when Dad owned the store and he and my brother worked there, and I hung out there from time to time. On that day my brother was murdered, set on fire, I had been at a theater down the street, watching a movie. It was a good movie, and now, because of my brother’s death, I couldn’t think of that movie without feeling a little sick. I couldn’t think of it now. I thought about the girl again, and that was almost as bad as thinking about my brother or my father.
I thought about her nose. I hoped she could fix it, or maybe it wasn’t broken too badly and would heal all right. I thought about the guy whose knee I had taken out for the lack of payment to the Headmaster. I didn’t really care about him. He was in bed with the skunks, so he got stink all over himself before I did anything to him. He had it coming. Maybe he didn’t have it coming from me, not really, but he had it coming, and I didn’t feel all that bad about him. I didn’t feel bad about any of the gang. I just wished I had killed them all.
I read the address in the wallet again. I knew where that was. I started walking.
I went along the backstreets as much as possible. When I got on a main street, people began to pull back from me, seeing all the blood, way my face looked. I saw it myself, reflected in a store window. I looked like a ghost who had seen a ghost. The shock was wearing off. I was really starting to hurt.
I probably didn’t have long before the police got me, before people on the street called about this blood-covered guy.
I took a turn at the corner and started walking as fast as I could. I felt as if most of what was left of me was turning to heat and going out the top of my head. I went along until I got to the back alleys; then I darted in and went through them. I remembered these alleys like I had been here yesterday, though it had been a few years. I remembered them well because I had played here. I went down them and along them, and somewhere back behind me I heard sirens, wondered if they were for me.
I finally went down an alley so narrow I had to turn sideways to get through it. It opened up into a fairly well-lit street. I got the girl’s wallet out again and looked at the address. I was on the right street. I memorized the number, put the wallet away, and walked along the street until I found the number that fit the one on her little card in the wallet.
A series of stone steps went up to a landing, and there was a door there, above it the number. I climbed up to the top step, and that was about it. I sat down suddenly and leaned back so that my ass was on the stoop and my legs were hanging off on the top step. I could hardly feel that step. My legs seemed to be coming loose of me and sinking into something like quicksand. I had to take a look at them to make sure they were still attached. When I saw that they were, I sort of laughed, because I couldn’t feel them. I pulled myself up more with my hands and put my back at an angle against one of the concrete rails that lined the steps on both sides.
I took out the wallet, put both my hands over it, and put the wallet up against my stomach. I tried to put it someplace where blood wouldn’t get on it, but there wasn’t any place. I realized now that the warm wetness I was feeling in the seat of my pants was blood running down from my wounds and into my underwear. I hated that they would find me like that.