When we were barely on the cusp of adulthood, Phillip had the bad luck to fool around with a woman who was spoken for. When the husband found out, he came sniffing around the farm, looking for my brother. The cuckold found Peter instead of Phillip, much to the jilted man’s dismay. Peter lay a beating down on him, but the damage had already been done.
“It’s time you boys got a move on,” my mother said, hauling her girth from one side of the barn to another. “I can’t have you boys fighting and carrying on like that. It draws too much attention. ’Sides, it’s time you boys made your way in the world. It’s unseemly for boys to live with their mama for too long.”
So we left.
That night, after tying our meager possessions up into a bindle, we jumped a train to the city.
*
New Pork was nothing like any place we’d ever been before.
The city was a terrifying and exhausting place. Cars raced along the streets, horns honking incessantly. Buses threatened to mow down unwary pedestrians, and there were people everywhere, clogging the sidewalk, flowing in and out of the buildings like a trail of ants to an overturned soda can. And underneath it all was a current of desperation and urgency that made me anxious.
Phillip, of course, loved it.
“This is it, boys! This is where we’ll make our mark on the world.” His snout wiggled with excitement. “We will make this city bow to our demands. She’ll be our mistress; she’ll cradle us to her bosom, and we’ll make her scream out our name.”
I winced at Phillip’s melodramatic speech, but he didn’t notice. He looked around, adjusting his bow tie and cocking his hat at a jaunty angle, the tip of his pug nose wiggling in excitement. Peter said nothing, just stood on the sidewalk and watched as people tried to inch around him.
I scratched my chin as I considered Phillip’s words. “I dunno, Phil. It doesn’t seem safe here. Maybe we should make a bid for the next town. We aren’t used to city life.” I hated the way my voice sounded: whiny, weak. But I missed our safe, small-town life already. All I wanted was a reasonable facsimile of it, and something told me the city wouldn’t provide that.
Phillip threw his arm across my shoulders and wheezed a laugh. “Come on, Pauly. Give it a go. I bet you’ll love it in no time.”
I looked around, and a girl passing caught my eye. She saw me looking, her cheeks pink and round. But she didn’t look away shyly like the girls back home did. She met my stare dead-on, raising her chin a little in defiance.
I shrugged. “Well, okay. A month. I’ll give it a month.”
Phillip squeezed my shoulders and gave me a grin. “A month. Sounds like a plan.”
*
Our first month in the city was miserable.
We lived in a flat with two other guys, both of them hogs. They drank too much and passed out in the living room, snoring loudly. They frequently left their stuff all over the place and ate all the food in the icebox whether or not it was theirs. It was a terrible place to live, but we didn’t have much choice. It was the only place we could afford.
Phillip had a job as a waiter in one of them buffet-type places called the Trough, but no one ever left him much in the way of a tip. Peter got work down at the wharf, and although he made a decent wage, most of his paycheck went to cover the shortfall from Phillip and me. As for me . . .
I got a job as a bookkeeper in a sketchy office building. It was there that I first got the idea for the straw purchase.
Would that I’d never thought of it.
Firearms were highly regulated in the city. Only certain folks could get licensed, and it all rested on an intelligence test. This had the effect of driving the price of the guns up, even those that were available for sale illegally.
A man in my office, Mr. Crenshaw, began talking wistfully about how he’d like to buy a gun. “I’ve been saving every last grunt I’ve made for the past year. A hundred grunts just to take the test, and another hundred for the gun. But I keep failing the damn thing. I’m almost a thousand grunts into buying a gun, and I still don’t have one.”
That gave me an idea.
“Mr. Crenshaw, why don’t you give me three hundred grunts, and I’ll give you a gun.”
Mr. Crenshaw was an elderly sort, and his eyes watered as he peered at me. “Say what?”
“Well, if I take the test and pass, I can buy a gun. I can buy as many as I’d like, right?”
He considered me. “Well, I s’pose.”
“No one knows who the gun belongs to once it’s bought. No one cares. So if I buy the gun and give it to you, you get a gun and I get enough money to take my girl out somewhere nice.” There was no girl, and the money would go to the rent, but the old man was so happy that he forked over the dough lickety-split.
When I got back to the flat I told my brothers my scheme in a low voice, so our roommates wouldn’t hear us. Peter gave me a slow nod; his way of agreeing it was a good idea. But Phillip had bigger ideas.
“Pauly, why stop at one old man? Why not buy a hundred guns?”
I blinked at him. “What?”
Phillip began to pace. “There have to be dozens of suckers like him in the city, just aching for a chance to get their grubby mitts on a gun. A gun means protection; it means power. Every girl wants to be with a fella who can keep her safe, and every man wants a gun. Nothing makes a man more foolish than a loaded gun.” Here Phillip paused and elbowed me to make sure I caught his double meaning. “And a fool and his money are soon parted. So why not make some grunts? I can chat these guys up, and you take the test and get them their merchandise. It’ll be brilliant.”
I looked at Peter, who was now doing his slow nod for Phillip.
“What’s Peter going to do?” I asked.
Phillip grinned, showing his teeth. “Peter is going to keep everyone honest.”
*
For the next year we lived a life of leisure. The straw purchase racket was pure genius, and all three of us quit our jobs and moved out on our own. Phillip moved to the north end of town, near the poker clubs and bars he loved. Peter met a nice girl and moved with her into a small house on the outskirts of the city.
I moved into a nice high-rise building with a security guard. Although I’d been in the city for a while, it still made me nervous. Especially with our less-than-legal enterprises.
Phillip had big plans for us, and the straw purchase soon grew into a full-fledged criminal empire. I came up with the ideas, and Phillip and Peter implemented them. Prostitution, racketeering, illegal gambling, moneylending. If it paid well and it was illegal, we dealt in it.
And we were good at it.
Phillip was the mouth of the operation, using his gift of gab to cement alliances with other rackets and to smooth the way with the local cops. Peter was the muscle, and whenever a payee was late or someone didn’t want to play nice, he broke into their house and hurt their feelings.
And I was the background guy, the idea man. Phillip looked like he was in charge of things, but I was the one running the show from the shadows. I kept my ear to the ground and applied the rumors and gossip I heard to our business, moving poker parlors before they were raided, paying off minor nuisances, and ending those who were thinking about talking to the feds. We cut a bloody swath through the city, taking what we wanted, killing anyone who got in our way.