01 The Big Blowdown

by George Pelecanos

  Soon they found themselves on D Street, at the edge of a rockstrewn field. The boys from Southwest stood in the middle of the field, four of them, an even match, if numbers made things even. Perry Angelos felt his stomach flip at the sight of them, while Recevo and Karras experienced a kind of satisfaction at the recognition of their own fear. Boyle’s palms sweated, and his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth.

  “That’s them,” said Recevo.

  “I heard they were Bloodfield boys,” said Angelos.

  “We said we’d meet ‘em,” said Boyle. “So let’s go.”

  They walked towards them across the field. Joe Recevo took his newsboy’s cap from his head and tossed it to the side.

  “I’m gonna take the skinny one,” said Karras to Recevo.

  “He ain’t the strongest,” said Recevo, “but he’s the quickest. Remember?”

  “I remember.”

  “I got the tall one, with the high-buttoned shoes.”

  “He likes to wave his right above his head to get your attention. But he’s gonna strike with his left, Joey. Hear?”

  “I hear ya,” said Recevo.

  They were moving fast now, almost running to the group of boys who stood still and glaring in the middle of the field.

  “Perry—” said Karras.

  “Don’t worry about me, Pete.”

  The tall Negro boy with the high-buttoned shoes yelled, “Southwest!”

  Recevo laughed and screamed, “Northwest!” His laughter inspired them, and they followed Recevo’s charge.

  They were all mixed together then, grabbing and pushing and punching at each other close in. The first to fall was Perry Angelos. Karras let his guard down to rabbit-punch the wiry boy who had knocked Angelos to the ground with the first blow. He was tackled at chest level by the skinny boy, who rammed the top of his nappy head into Karras’s stomach and pushed him to the ground. Karras felt a rock dig in above his buttocks on contact. Recevo ran over and kicked the skinny boy off, and then Recevo was grabbed by the tall one, and then he was standing toe-to-toe with him, trading blows, both of them yelling loudly with each one. Boyle and his opponent were on the ground, rolling and flailing at each other in a rising cloud of dirt and dust. Karras got to his feet.

  “Come on, boy,” said the skinny one, both his hands up, wiggling the fingers of one hand at Karras.

  Karras came in, took a punch in the gut from the skinny boy, brought his elbows in and took two more on his arms. He felt a little dizzy, breathed, felt better for it, uppercut at the second the next punch came in. That one caught the skinny boy on the chin, pushing him back. Karras went in, saw the shape of Angelos on the ground, the wiry boy on top of him, pummeling him with weak blows. The distraction made the skinny boy go for Karras’s legs and knock him off his feet. They both went down, rolled twice, with Karras coming out on top. He sat on the skinny boy’s chest, grabbed the front of his ripped shirt with his left hand, made a tight fist of his right, and prepared to bring it down in the boy’s face. He looked in the skinny boy’s eyes, and the skinny boy looked back with blank and unafraid acceptance of what had to happen next. But Karras noticed then that there was little sound around him, and that the other boys—his and theirs—had fallen away and were lying on the ground, some of them holding themselves where they hurt, all of them at rest. Karras released his grip on the skinny boy’s shirt, lowered his fist.

  Karras stood up, brushed himself off. The others did the same. Eight boys stood there with winded lungs and cut lips, and the beginnings of bruises which they would hide from their parents later that night. No one had won.

  The white boys from Northwest began to move out. Then the skinny one said, “Hey, you with that black mark on your face.” Karras turned around.

  “Yeah,” said Karras. “What d’ya want?”

  “What’s your name, anyway?” said the skinny boy.

  Karras softened his glare. “Pete Karras. You?”

  “My daddy’s name is Oliver. Around my way, they call me Junior Oliver.”

  Karras nodded, and the one called Junior Oliver blinked his eyes. They turned, and joined their own. The Negroes walked back towards Southwest. The boys from Northwest went in the direction of their homes.

  “You all right, Perry?” said Karras.

  “Fine,” said Angelos, smiling a little in relief, blood smudged pink on his teeth.

  “Jimmy?”

  “Yep,” said Boyle, brushing dirt from a scrape on his cheek.

  “Those nigger boys could fight,” said Recevo.

  “Yeah.” Karras put his hand on Recevo’s shoulder. “Thanks for watchin’ my back, Joey.”

  “Count on it, Greek,” said Recevo. And Karras had no doubt.

  “Where we goin’ now?” said Boyle.

  Recevo picked up his newsboy’s cap where he had left it, slapped the dust off on his trousers. “Let’s find Nicodemus,” he said. “Maybe we can get in on that soapbox deal.”

  Karras shook his head. “I can’t.”

  “Why not?” said Recevo.

  “Gotta pick a chicken up for my ma,” said Karras. “She’s makin’ a soup.”

  Chapter 4

  To Peter Karras, the long days of summer seemed to drag. Yet soon enough they had passed, and he and his friends found themselves in school, daydreaming about the season gone and looking to the one ahead.

  At St. Mary’s, Karras spoke to the nuns only when called upon, and responded to their lessons with barely masked inattention. Often he looked through the smudged glass window next to his desk at the oak that grew alongside the church, watching the gradual turn of its leaves. His grades were only adequate, better than Recevo’s, and on par with Nicodemus’s and Boyle’s. Perry Angelos, who already talked about college as the clean path to making a buck, placed far ahead of the rest.

  “Hey, Pete,” said Recevo one morning, as Jimmy Boyle entered the classroom, a gaping rip in the knee of his trousers. “Looks like Boyle just checked out of a Hoover Hotel.”

  “His old man got his walking papers at the morgue,” said Karras. “He’ll get his job back, once things get better. My pop says Roosevelt’s gonna turn things around. Says he’s gonna put the men back to work, the ones that wanna work and even the ones that don’t.”

  “Your pop says. All you Greeks are in bed with Roosevelt.”

  “Yeah,” said Karras. “I guess.”

  During the lesson, Recevo set fire to a book of matches, then quickly blew out the flame. Their teacher. Sister Cumilliana, asked who had done the deed, and a girl named Linda McCabe pointed to Joe. Sister Cumilliana walked over to Recevo, stood over him, and rolled up the right sleeve of her habit.

  “Hold out your hand,” she instructed.

  Recevo, his eyes fixed on the right hand of the nun, did not comply. The nun’s left hand slashed out of nowhere, slapping him sharply across the cheek. Recevo rubbed the red mark as the children laughed. Sister Cumilliana walked back to the head of the class, a smile in her eyes.

  You shoulda watched the left, Joey, thought Karras. You shoulda watched out for the left.

  The days went on like that, with Recevo and Karras in and out of trouble and getting little from their schooling. Perry Angelos applied himself and concentrated on his studies, though he could not fail to notice that the girls of the class admired the antics of Recevo and Karras more than his own academic accomplishments. But it was not in Angelos to misbehave. Boyle and Nicodemus talked big out on the playground, but remained quiet and virtually invisible within the walls of the church. Outside the smudged window, Karras stared at the branches of the oak, now stripped bare.

  * * *

  An early snow came the second week of December. On the Sunday morning after the storm, Karras went to church service at St. Sophia’s, on 8th and L. It was usually Karras and his mother in church, while his father slept off his Saturday-night drunks undisturbed. Karras sat there, listening to the nasal chanting of Father Papanicolas, watching the other families in the
pews through the heavy haze of incense, thinking, as he tended to do in church, of how he did not belong. He had always felt apart from the rest of them, with their large numbers of relatives and their brothers and sisters. Years ago his mother had given birth to a little brother, Theodoros, who had died in his crib just after his sixth month, and Karras had remained and would remain an only child. As for relatives, his father had broken off relations with his own sister and cousins in D.C. long ago. Peter Karras could not see himself as an adult, with his own wife and children. It was not something he could picture in his mind.

  After church, Karras met his friends at a garage in the alley, where they had hidden an air rifle they had saved for and bought together in the fall. They knew the man who sold it to them had stolen it himself, and they used that knowledge to bargain out a good price.

  “You pump this baby up, say fifteen times,” said the man, “and what you boys got here is as powerful as a twenty-two.” The boys knew that the man was selling them a load of baloney, but they wanted that rifle awful bad.

  The day was not warm, but the sun had come out and the snow had melted from the streets, though it hung in the pockets of the branches and capped the roofs of cars. Walking across town, the boys took turns carrying the rifle in their pantslegs, which afforded each one of them the opportunity to affect the tortured movements of a cripple. This provoked a new joke within the group each time the rifle changed hands, jokes at which Peter Karras could not laugh; he had seen a cripple once, a real one, begging for money downtown, and the sight of it had caused him a series of tortuous nightmares. He would rather be anything, maybe even dead, than that.

  It took a few hours for them to make it to the other side of Northwest. In Georgetown they lost direction, and asked help from a man who was dumping something chunked and brown from a pot behind a restaurant. He pointed them to the bridge. Boyle, who smelled the roasted meat coming from the back door, could not resist asking the man for a bite of food.

  “I’m workin’ for my dinner my own self,” said the man. The boys went on their way.

  They walked over the bridge from Georgetown to Virginia. It was all field and forest there, with woods at the edge of the field. The sun hung weak and pale yellow against the sheeted gray sky.

  Karras looked back at the city as they walked off the bridge through the snow and to the middle of a field. Though this was not the country, it was close enough, and he did not like to be away from the car sounds and restaurant smells, to be without the solid feel of asphalt beneath his feet. He had gone with his parents into Maryland one summer day, driven in a friend’s borrowed car toward a place called Soloman’s Island, and they had tried to find a beach where they could sun themselves and where his father could swim. His father had been turned away at the gate, where a sign said NORTHERN EUROPEAN WHITES ONLY. Karras did not like the feeling he had when he left D.C.

  “Give me the rifle. Perry,” said Boyle, whose feet stung from the cold and who wanted to get on with it. Boyle had worn two pairs of socks but the snow had entered a split in the leather of his shoe.

  Angelos grabbed the butt, which protruded from his waistband, and slid the rifle out. The sight had caught him on the thigh and made the spot raw. Boyle took the rifle, loaded it with a pellet, and pumped it several times.

  “My dad shot a rabbit out here with his pistol,” said Joe Recevo. “We ate the stew. My dad says there’s enough rabbit runnin’ around here to feed a family all year.”

  “We ought to be able to see ‘em good,” said Nicodemus. “Against this snow, I mean.”

  Karras rubbed the back of his hand across his lips, wiped off snot that had dripped down from his nose. “They gotta come out for us to see them, though.”

  “Good target practice for you, Jimmy,” said Recevo to Boyle, “for when you go to be a cop.”

  “My uncle’s one,” said Boyle. “I’ll be one, don’t worry.”

  “Maybe you’ll just end up washin’ off the slabs down at the morgue,” said Recevo, “like your old man. When he still had his job, that is.”

  “I’ll be a cop,” said Boyle. The comment about his father hurt him deeply, but he bit on his lip and let it pass.

  A rabbit dashed across the field. Boyle took aim, and missed.

  They did not see another rabbit for some time. Joe Recevo pulled a rolled cigarette built of Bull Durham tobacco, which he had stolen from his father, out of his jacket. He lighted the cigarette with a straight match, and the tobacco went around the group. Soon they began to fire the rifle at birds and at trees, and when they became bored with that they fired the rifle at each other, the pellets bouncing off their heavy jackets and stinging at their legs. Then, while Billy Nicodemus held the rifle, a rabbit appeared from a hole at the beginning of the tree line, and Nicodemus aimed and fired. The rabbit fell over on its side.

  They ran to where the rabbit had fallen, and stood grouped around it. The rabbit, brown with irregular white spots, lay there breathing heavily, one fading brown eye staring at the snow in front of it, the pellet embedded and showing behind the eye. They could see the heart beating in the rabbit’s chest.

  “1 didn’t mean to hurt it,” said Nicodemus.

  “Gimme the rifle,” said Recevo. He took the rifle from Nicodemus, loaded a pellet into it, and pumped it ten times.

  “I didn’t mean to,” said Nicodemus.

  Recevo put the barrel to the rabbit’s head and pulled the trigger. The pellet made a steaming hole near the rabbit’s mouth. The rabbit kicked a little, its eye filming over.

  “It’s still breathin’.” Perry Angelos spread his fingers wide. “What are we gonna do, Pete?”

  “It ain’t dead,” Boyle said. “We ought to just kill it.”

  “The joker who sold this rifle to us said it was just like a twenty-two,” said Recevo. “But this here is no twenty-two. A twenty-two woulda killed it.”

  “Pete,” said Angelos, “you gotta do something.”

  Karras took the rifle from Recevo’s hands. He raised it up, and smashed the butt down into the rabbit’s skull two times. He wiped the butt of the rifle off on the ground, leaving a chunky streak of red and brown in the snow. Then he slid the rifle inside the leg of his trousers.

  Recevo smiled at Karras. Billy Nicodemus wiped a tear from his cheek as Karras looked away. A wind came through the woods, rustling the few leaves that remained.

  “I’m gonna be late for dinner,” said Angelos.

  “Come on, then,” said Karras. “We better be gettin’ home.”

  They walked along the edge of the field toward the bridge. The sun behind the trees made crawling shadows at their feet.

  TWO

  * * *

  Leyte, The Philippines

  1944

  Chapter 5

  Peter Karras had the first man he ever killed in his sights for ten minutes before he managed to pull the trigger. The man was a sniper who had taken out a Marine in Karras’s unit, a private named Slocum from Apple Valley, Minnesota. Slocum had tried to bolt from his foxhole to the L-shaped trench that ran to the division’s 55mm gun, when the sniper’s slug caught him in the chest. A medic had gotten to Slocum and had begun to administer the morphine that would quiet him down. But Slocum’s lungs had rapidly begun to fill, and Slocum knew that he was done.

  Karras noticed the sniper resting in the crook of a coconut palm at the edge of the jungle when the sun flashed off the sniper’s cartridge belt as he moved to reload, a quick wink of white light against the wall of green. Karras hefted his M-1, leaning out of his foxhole. He got the soldier in his sights.

  A soldier, just like him. The uniform different, maybe—khaki, they called it, though it looked more to Karras like dirty yellow, the color of the mustard he had squeezed on the hot dogs at Griffith Stadium all his life—but a soldier, just like him, the difference a color of uniform.

  The day, like every day, hung wet and hot. A drop of sweat snaked down from beneath Karras’s helmet and stung his eye.


  Karras could remember watching war movies, working as an usher at the Hippodrome at 9th and K, after classes let out at Central High. Movies set in the first war, dogfight movies mostly, smiling, long-scarved flyboys with Errol Flynn moustaches whose women waited with patience and bright-eyed admiration on the ground. He always wondered, watching the pictures, what about the ones they shot down, the ones who wore the different uniform? Didn’t they laugh, too? Didn’t they have women who waited, who admired them and loved them too? Didn’t they have mothers who held them as babies once, too?

  Karras knew that Slocum had a mother. Slocum had talked about his mother and her cooking constantly, until the other men in the unit had to walk away. Slocum, who was yelling abusively at the medic now, obscenities at first and then begging the medic to stay.

  Karras took one hand off his rifle, and nervously fingered the checkered handle of his father’s Bowie knife, which he kept sheathed to this hip. The blade of the knife, double-edged stainless steel, could cut paper in midair; it was a knife to show off in times of boredom, one that the other men in the unit would talk about and admire. Dimitri Karras had burned his son’s initials into the handle before he shipped it overseas.

  Peter Karras wiped at his face, then curled his finger back inside the trigger guard of his gun.

  You could talk about Corregidor and Bataan, and all the things they had done, things too terrible to repeat. Well, we had done some bad things, too. Everything came out in the wash, and in the end it was just two groups of men fighting and killing over a piece of land that everyone but the dead would walk away from when the shooting was done.