Straight Man

like us, who grow up wanting to be anything but. Neither group ever succeeds.
    “Where was I?” Angelo wants to know.
    “Three,” I remind him.
    “Right,” he continues. “So here’s big LeBrother and here’s me, and neither of us back off an inch. This much I learned as a cop. If you aren’t going to use a gun, don’t even take it out. You aren’t going to use it, it’s worse than useless. I know better, but this is the situation I’ve got myself into with this seven-foot Negro. Truth?” Angelo pauses here, as if to suggest he’s about to reveal something shameful about himself. He can barely bring himself to say it. “I don’t want to shoot this kid. I don’t know what he’s doing still standing there, but there he is, big as life, after I’ve said three. The two eight-footers are now flat on their bellies on the sidewalk with their hands over their ears, praying out loud. They’ve gone from give-us-the-money-you-crazy-old-bastard to Sweet-Jesus-Sweet-Jesus-Sweet-Jesus in the amount of time it took me to say a Hail Mary after confession during baseball season, and I’m thinking, There’s two things I can’t do here. I cannot cut this stubborn, confused LeBrother in half. Don’t ask me why. I just can’t. I’m taking my life in my hands if I don’t, but I figure, so be it. I mean, maybe the world won’t stop if there’s one less giant Negro kid in it, but on the other hand, I don’t see it slowing down all that much if Angelo Caprice stops breathing all of a sudden. The same thing applies to me as to him, the difference being that I’m seventy-three next year and this kid is—what?—twenty? I mean, if I’m twenty or thirty years younger, maybe I look at it differently, right? Even if I’m fifty, I got good, useful years left. At fifty, I’m still strapping on a forty-five and going out in the morning and coming home at night if I’m lucky. But I’m seventy-three and I’m kidding myself if I think I’m still useful. Most days I get up, I don’t even shave. Her mother would be ashamed, but I figure, Who the hell’s gonna see me? If I go out, I shave, if I don’t, fuck it.”
    “Finish your story, Dad,” Lily says quietly. “We’re almost home and we’re not bringing this story into the house, okay?”
    “Whatever you say, little girl,” Angelo agrees. “The judge says I gotta do as I’m told or go back to jail, so boss your old man around allyou want. Go ahead. Only not too much, okay? Jail wasn’t so bad. Anyhow. On the one hand, I can’t shoot this kid. On the other, I know I can’t
not
shoot this gun. I’ve said I’m going to shoot it, I’ve gone back into the house to get it, I’ve brought it out and showed it to them, I’ve stressed its importance. Not shooting this gun is no longer an option. You tell somebody you’re going to count to three, by the time you get to three, you better be prepared to do something very like what you said you’d do, or the next time you say you’re going to count to three, you’re going to have a hard fucking time getting anyone to take you seriously. So I don’t have a lot of room to wiggle here. Maybe I never should have counted to three. I don’t know. But now that I’m here, now that I’m at three, I no longer have what you’d call a wide range of options. Also not a lot of time to consider the ones I do have, because after you say three, you got exactly one beat, the same amount of time it took you to get from two to three is the time you now got. The next sound you hear after three is not supposed to be four. It’s supposed to be bang. You don’t hear bang, all bets are off.”
    We have arrived at Allegheny Estates now, and Lily makes the turn up our hill. There’s no cop directing traffic, no traffic to direct, no sign of the media. The William Henry Devereaux, Jr., story has run out of gas, now that the true duck slayer has been identified. “Go slow,” I say to Lily. There are several newly planted spring gardens in our neighbors’ yards. Maybe I’ll spot Occam excavating one of them.
    “So,” Angelo says, winding down now. “In the time I was given, I arrived at an imperfect solution.”
    “Oh, God,” I hear Lily say, and at first I think it’s in response to her father’s characterizing as “imperfect” his lunatic compromise—his raising the shotgun and discharging it into the porch roof, bringing the whole decrepit structure down on himself and LeBrother, so that the neighbors had to