One of them, a mattress salesman named Jim Ralston, moved in and stayed awhile when Louis was thirteen years old. His mother adored him. He too was a drinker: he had a thirst for blended whiskey. Ralston had slicked-back hair and one permanently droopy eye, the result of a sucker punch in a bar that had shattered his cheekbone. To a stranger it made him look gentle and somewhat kind, but to Louis he was anything but. He had no sexual interest in Louis’s mother, though he dutifully climbed on top of her from time to time. He was there for the boy.
Night after night, after Sharon had passed out, he came into Louis’s bedroom, smelling of Seagram’s 7 and Lectric Shave. He’d pull a chair over to Louis’s bed, talk to him softly, and reach into Louis’s pajama bottoms and stroke him until he grew hard. He’d tell Louis to do the same kind of favor for him. By then Ralston had already unzipped his fly and pulled out his long, veined thing. He told Louis to touch it and he told him to put it in his mouth. Louis didn’t like it, but he knew his mother would be mad if he made a fuss and caused her boyfriend to leave. Ralston did leave eventually, after an awful, drunken fight over money with Sharon Smalls. By then the damage had been done.
At fourteen Louis began to notice girls and desire them. He had been worried that he was gay, and his attraction to females proved to him that he was not. He was too young to know the difference between a homosexual and a pedophile. He had almost put Ralston out of his mind when his woodshop teacher kissed him on the mouth while Louis was working alone on a project after school one spring afternoon. Louis didn’t tell on this one, either. He was embarrassed and scared of the potential ridicule and exposure. Why did men think that they could prey on him like this? It had to be his fault.
He began to hang with a crowd of misfits who were rejected by the cool heads, athletes, and scholars of the school. Louis didn’t play sports; he was not particularly bright, and at six-foot-two, one hundred twenty-five pounds, he was scary skinny, a freak. He listened to metal and got piercings and tats. He rejected authority, particularly when it came from older men. He was suspended from school regularly and eventually expelled. He never did get a high school degree.
Years passed and Louis had accomplished exactly nothing. Whatever money he managed to make he spent on vehicles purchased at auctions. He favored big American sedans with V-8s. He moved from weed to crystal meth. He got a girlfriend with a habit, body odor, and brown teeth. Sex was drug-clumsy and quick, but she made him hard, and this told him he was straight. He left his mother’s apartment and moved in with the girl and a bunch of other burnouts in a group house. One night Louis was wired and desperate for money, so he borrowed a .38 with cracked grips and knocked off a convenience store in Laurel. The man behind the counter had slicked-back hair and reminded him of Ralston, and when Louis put the gun in his face, and he showed fear, Louis got excited and swollen. He robbed a couple of other stores the same way, chasing the same sensation. He would have robbed more, but he was only interested in places that were staffed by white men; these were few and far between. He found one in Burtonsville, on 198, but made the mistake of rolling up his sleeves before he went in. He got arrested, convicted by a video camera tape and the tattoo on his arm, and was sent to Hagerstown.
He did his full stretch, got clean of meth, and moved into a halfway house in east-of-16th-Street D.C. He found a job unloading trucks and stocking goods for a discount department store in the Maryland suburbs. It was the best he could do with a felony conviction and no GED. One day he struck up a conversation with a man named Billy King. He’d taken a television set out to the store’s parking lot and put it in the man’s car.
“You like your job?” said King, after he had handed Louis Smalls a five-dollar tip. Smalls, though still thin, had put on weight and grown a beard. His look said School of Hard Knocks, with a touch of shell shock.
“I guess,” said Smalls, eyeing the big, blond-haired man with suspicion.
“Can’t get too far up the ladder, though, after you’ve done time. Isn’t that right?”
“How’d you know?”
“I can spot it,” said King. In fact, he was guessing. What he saw was a damaged young man who seemed utterly lost and alone. “I’m not judging you.”
“What do you want?”
“Why don’t we grab a beer after you get off work?”
“I don’t drink,” said Smalls. He meant, I don’t drink with older men.
“Relax, fella,” said King, picking up on the vibe. “I like women. This is a business proposition.”
“Tell me what it is.”
King and Serge Bacalov had been planning to take off a check-cashing/payroll-advance operation in the District. It would be their first and only retail robbery, but they were missing a key player in the plan.
“Can you... What’s your name, son?”
“Louis Smalls.” He liked that the man had called him son.
“Can you drive a car, Louis?”
“I can drive the hell out of one,” said Smalls.
“I got a partner, little Russian guy. We’re about to embark on an adventure. But Serge never did learn how to drive.”
Since that day, Smalls had been with King. Billy treated him right. Billy never once had anything in his eyes for Smalls except for friendship and respect. Billy was a father. So why had his father left him the night before, the same way his seed-father had left twenty-some years earlier, when Louis was nothing more than a baby? Billy had been carrying a full suitcase with a vague promise to return in a few days’ time. Was he coming back? It seemed to Louis that all the men in his life had either abandoned him or tried to take him off for sex.
Once again, Louis thought: Is it me?
Disturbed and confused, Louis got up out of his chair and disconnected the speaker from his smartphone. He dropped it beside his earbuds on the bed. He wanted a cigarette, but he never smoked in his room, as Serge didn’t like its smell. He decided to have a cigarette out on the porch, then drive to the nearest store for a fresh pack.
He put the phone in the right front pocket of his jeans. Beneath his underwear, in the top drawer of his dresser, he found the envelope of money that Billy had given him from the coin sale. He stuffed the envelope in his left pocket. It contained forty hundred-dollar bills wrapped in a rubber band. He always took his cash with him when he left the place. He didn’t trust Serge.
He slipped his wallet into his back pocket. On his dresser he found his last cigarette. He fitted this behind his ear and threw the empty pack in the wastebasket. He swept his keys and matches off the top of the dresser and switched off the light before walking from the room.
He passed Billy’s bedroom, now dark. As he came to Serge’s room, he looked inside and stopped. Serge was seated on a chair, his feet up on his bed, his open laptop balanced on his thighs. Lying atop the bed was his Glock. Smalls knew that under the bed was an Ithaca pump. Serge liked his guns nearby. It made him feel tall.
The sound from the laptop, synthesized music and a conversation between a man and woman, was loud. From what Smalls could make out, the man in the video was trying to convince a woman that she needed to take off her clothes. “I can’t cast you in the movie until I see what you have,” said the man. “My panties, too?” said the woman, and the man said, “Yes, of course.”
“Where you go?” said Bacalov.
“Out to get cigarettes. You want anything?”
“No. Wait a minute... We need milk.”
“I’ll bring back some milk,” said Smalls.
He left Bacalov, turned the corner of the hall, and went down the stairs, his hand sliding down the wood banister as he descended. He walked through the living room, past the overstuffed couch and the cable-spool table, the chandelier and the dining room table, the stolen computer equipment heaped in a corner, and the paintings, wrapped in brown paper and leaning against the wall. He opened the front door, walked out, then closed it and checked that it was locked.