It has all come back to him and it all makes him ashamed. He will leave what he has written about trying to tackle Bob Raines, because it puts a layer of heroic fiction over the truth, which is close to unbearable. He didn’t tackle Bob Raines while Bob Raines was kicking his sister and stepping on her and crushing her fragile chest on which no breasts would ever appear. Billy was supposed to take care of her. Take care of your sister was the last thing Ma always said when she left for her job at the laundry. But he didn’t take care of her. He ran. He ran for his life.
But it was in my mind even then, he thinks as he goes back to the table and the laptop. It must have been, because it wasn’t our room I ran for.
‘I ran for theirs,’ Billy says, and picks up where he left off.
So then I went to tackle him and he push me down and I got up and ran down the trailer to their room at the end and slam the door behind me. He started pounding on it right away, calling me every name in the book and said if you don’t open this door right now Benjy you are going to be one sorry-ass motherfucker. Only I knew it didn’t matter if I opened the door or not because he’d do me like he did Cassie. Because she was dead, even a kid of 11 could see that.
Ma’s boyfriend use to be in the army and he kept his footlocker at the end of the bed with a blanket over it. I pushed the blanket off and open the footlocker. He had a padlock for it but hardly ever used it, maybe never. If he had’ve I wouldn’t be writing this because I would be dead. And if that gun of his hadn’t been loaded I would be dead but I knew it was because he kept it loaded in case of what he called burg-gurg-gurglers.
Burg-gurg-gurglers, Billy thinks. Christ, how it all comes back.
He bust in the door like I was pretty sure he would
Not pretty sure, Billy thinks, I knew. Because it was nothing but fiberboard. Cathy and I used to hear them going at it just about every night. In the afternoon, if Ma came home early. But that was another fiction he would leave.
and when he come in I was sitting with my back against the foot of the bed with his gun pointing at him. It was an M9X19 that took 15 Parabellum rounds. I didn’t know that then of course but I knew it was heavy and I held it in both hands against my chest. He said give that to me you useless piece of shit don’t you know kids ain’t supposed to play with guns.
Then I shot him, dead center mass. He just stood there in the doorway like nothing happen but I knew it did because I saw the blood fly out of his back. The M9 recoiled against my chest
Billy remembers making an uh sound. And burping. And later on he had a bruise there above his sternum.
and he fell down. I went over to him and said to myself that I might have to shoot him again. If I had to I would. He was my mother’s boyfriend but he was wrong. He was a bad guy!
‘Except he was dead,’ Billy says. ‘Bob Raines was dead.’
He thinks briefly of deleting everything he’s written, it’s awful, but saves it instead. He doesn’t know what anyone else might think, but Billy thinks it’s good. And good that it’s awful, because awful is sometimes the truth. He guesses he really is a writer now, because that’s a writer’s thought. émile Zola might have thought the same when he was writing Thérèse Raquin, or when Nana gets sick and all of her beauty rots away.
His face feels hot. He goes back to the kitchenette and splashes water on it, then stands bent over the little sink with his eyes shut. The memory of shooting Bob Raines doesn’t bother him, but it hurts to remember Cathy.
Take care of your sister.
Writing is good. He’s always wanted to do it, and now he is. That’s good. Only who knew it hurt so much?
The landline phone rings, making him jump. It’s Irv Dean, telling him he has a package from Amazon. Billy says he’ll come right down and pick it up.
‘Man, that company sells everything,’ Irv says.
Billy agrees, thinking You don’t know the half of it.
7
It’s not the wigs; even with Amazon’s speedy delivery, those won’t come until tomorrow. What he’s got today would fit in the cubby over the doorway between the office and the kitchen, but Billy has no intention of stowing it there; all his Amazon swag is going back to the yellow house in Midwood.
He opens the box and takes out the things he ordered one by one. From Fun Time Ltd in Hong Kong is a box containing a mustache made of real human hair. Blond, like one of the wigs he’s ordered. It’s a little bushy; when the time comes he’ll trim it. He wants to disguise, not to stand out. Next is a pair of horn-rimmed glasses with clear lenses. These are surprisingly hard to find. You can buy reading glasses at any drugstore, but Billy’s vision is 20/10 and even slight magnification gives him headaches. He tries them on and finds the fit is a little loose. He could tighten the bows, but won’t. If they slide down his nose a bit, they’ll give him a scholarly air.