Read Online Young and Violent by Vin Packer - Free Book Online

• •
    Everybody calls the candy store Dirty Mac’s; and this afternoon as Red Eyes enters, it is like all other afternoons. Everybody is there. Blitz Gianonni stands by the peanut machine; not that he would try to pinch it — he would not, though this is his specialty, swiping them and selling them to a vending machine dealer up on 125th — Blitz would not pull that on Dirty Mac. But he stands by it out of sentiment; looking at it with loving concern, because it is a very new and shiny red peanut machine, and he cannot keep from admiring it.
    He is telling Braden, who stands beside him, how easy it would be to “just vamoose wid de machine. It’s like nothing,” he explains, fondling the little chain attaching the machine to the wall, “you spread de link wid de chisel, take de bolt out, and walk off wid de thing.”
    “How much you get for those, anyway?” Red Eyes asks, stepping up to the pair, looking around at the others in Mac’s. Flash is in a booth with two girls, his leg up on the table, showing off his new blue lizard shoes. Two Heads Pigaro is playing the pinball, punching and jamming himself into it until the red light tells Tilt!
    “How much?” Blitz says. “Fifteen dollars, usual. Can get three on a good night. The outside ones the easiest.”
    “You hear about D.&D., Eyes?” Braden asks.
    “Uh-uh.”
    “He got sent off to finishing school. Came up this morning in lolly-pop court. He got sent off by that horny judge with the lisp. You know him?”
    “Know him? He’s the creep put me on probation!”
    “Yeah?”
    “Yeah. He says to me he’s gonna give me a chance. He says he’s got his eyes on me; I come around again, I go off to college too.”
    “ ‘At’s cause you’re too obvious,” Gianonni says. “You got picked up stealing, dint you? Dint you get picked up on a fire escape wid a pipe?”
    “Yeah. I was just breaking this window, you know-cracking it with the pipe. Lady downstairs hears the noise ‘n starts in screaming.”
    Blitz nods his head sympathetically; then he points a finger at Red Eyes, wagging it as he talks, “Listen, next time remember somethin’. You going to steal by breaking in a window, you take a pillow for your tool, see? A plain old pillow, see? Somebody see you walking along with a pillow, they ain’t gonna suspect, even going up a fire escape. So you’re going to a roof to sit and you brung a pillow, see? Then you take this pillow and break the window, ‘n you got the sound all muffled and somethin’ to catch the glass in, see? It’s a natural. Nobody gonna suspect a guy walking along carryin’ a pillow.”
    Red Eyes shrugs. “Ain’t gonna be no next time.”
    “No?”
    “Naw. I can’t see it. Get sent to Coxsack, someplace — ”
    “If you’re smart you don’t get sent nowhere. You just gotta be smart, Eyes.”
    “Naw, I got interests close to my heart to protect.”
    “I got those too, man, but I learn one thing this world. Them interests get a lot more interested you, you got a little moola to spend. You know?”
    “Yeah, yeah,” Eyes says unenthusiastically.
    Braden grins. “Blitz, ain’t you heard about old Eyes here? He’s struck oil right in his own backyard. He don’t have to cruise.”
    “Shove it!” Eyes snaps.
    “No, I wouldn’t do that,” Braden interrupts. “I’m saving mine for bigger things.”
    • • •
    The three Kings stand there like that around the peanut machine, making small talk and yammering. Despite his denial, what Blitz has told Eyes about the pillow interests Eyes. Eyes needs money. He needs seventeen dollars. As he thinks about it, his fingers unconsciously caress an envelope he carries in the hind pocket of his trousers. Like Gober, Eyes has a letter with him this day, a letter of utmost importance; a letter, which like Gober’s, contains that long-shot link to some world better and bigger and kinder. It is each boy’s ace: the secret something that holds hope, however wild and unlikely,