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It’s snowing again, powdery nonsense. Tom doesn’t look up—not now, not as a rule. There are enough eager-eyed skygazers in this corner of the world. On his way out of The Archipelago he’d knocked into a drunk with his tongue poked out, turning a shuffling circle. The sight had undone all the work done by three glasses of whiskey.
The body lands with a meaty slap. Snow puffs, its slowness either agony or serenity, into the air around it. That could be why Tom’s sense of surprise fails him.
He looks left, right, and raises his eyes to the window. The building—a stretch of brick repeating itself like a guest at a dinner party—is dark. Maybe it’s the kind of dark peculiar to places where the last light has just gone out; maybe he’s thinking too much. He should leave before he sees something—a dead man, that’s nothing—but then he’d feel shortchanged.
Scuffling above. A dull noise, a sharp black shape that makes a brief dent in the night. A moon-white face thrusts out the window and hurls down a curse as if the poor sap forgot it upstairs.
Tom lives in back of an antique shop, where there’s enough room to take his boots off before he gets in bed. He makes his money in gambling halls, playing a hand here and there but mostly picking out the cheats. They call him Blue Eyes. Behind his back they call him a tick. He doesn’t ask for much, but in the personal philosophy he revises nightly, that’s not as important as getting what you ask for.
He walks unhurriedly to the corpse. There’s a light dusting of snow over it. Tom strikes a match on the second try, and out of the dark the face flares up: an old man, teeth bared in a grimace. A stroke of blood from the edge of his mouth, artistic. There’s snow trapped in the curled ends of his eyebrows. The eyes are just dead.
Before he knows it Tom’s crouched beside the body, his breath melting the flakes on the old man’s face. The back of the head’s bashed in and his brains are filling the cracks in the pavement. Tom moves the match unsteadily the length of the man’s body. He feels something like nausea welling up within him: the urge to speak.
Light falls across him. “You. Get up.”
“’Lo, gentlemen.” Tom rights himself, shakes out the match. He sketches with his gaze the deceased’s arc from the window. “Some weather we’re having.”
He makes them for a pair at once: one holding the lantern, the other holding the gun. Lantern has a long face and lists to the side. His lips are pursed bloodless. Gun has wavy hair and wears a boyish grin, despite a pinched-up eye that’ll be a shiner by the end of the night. Maybe nobody’s told him about it.
Lantern lunges forward, peering past Tom, past the broken body behind him. His eyes dart wildly from side to side, gauges on a faulty machine. “Kill him,” he says tiredly.
“What do you think you’re doing out here?” Gun says at the same time. He has a voice that can make words jump.
Tom shows them the palms of his hands. He looks at each man in turn, his thoughts edging around the word panic. His gaze holds steady even as he envisions his brains draining out a hole in the back of his head. “I’d stepped out for a smoke and I heard a”—he pauses delicately, instinct telling him to meet Gun’s working eye—“commotion.”
“The longer we’re out here,” Lantern says, cold fury in his soft voice. “And the longer he’s breathing—”
Gun turns to his companion.“Well,” he says, unsheathing his smile, “it was more of a mistake than a commotion.”
“God damn you, Leo,” Lantern says, half sigh, half singsong.
“Is that what happened to your eye? A mistake?” Tom asks.
“That was a punch.” Comes Lantern’s cooing voice. “A punch and a mistake both. Makes you look like you’re winking all the time.”
Gun—Leo—laughs, and turns his head so Tom gets the full benefit of his swollen eye. An hour ago, it would’ve been the most macabre thing Tom’s ever seen. “You ought to put some ice on that,” he says, studying Lantern without being too obvious about it. He’s almost certain the man’s been stripped of his gun, that that’s what the struggle he’d overheard was, but Tom doesn’t make do with almost certain if he can help it.
“Enough,” Lantern says before Leo can reply. “What’s gotten into you? Shoot him, we’ll get out of here, and Brendan can sort through the bodies and kiss everything better.”
The barrel of Leo’s gun lurches away from Tom. A shot rings out. It goes dark. Tom could run but he doesn’t. He falls to the ground, his ears useless. He doesn’t see or hear the lantern shatter, doesn’t feel the nip of glass as it cuts his cheek. He gets up cautiously. As the sound of the shot fades from his ears, it’s replaced with the sound of laughter. Not raucous, not cruel. A low chuckle.
“Are you going to kill me?” he asks, reaching for a cigarette. “Just so I know how long I should take with this.”
“No,” Leo says, and Tom can’t quite pin down his inflection. “Not tonight.”
“Appreciated,” Tom says. After a moment’s hesitation, he lights a second cigarette, offers it to the other man. “Where’d your friend go?”
After a moment’s hesitation, Leo takes it. He drags deeply, still riding high off the gunshot and the broken glass. But there’s a quiver of irony in his voice when he asks: “Which one?”
“Can I ask you something. One last question. What did he die for?”
Leo clasps his shoulder. “That’s a good one.”
*
Tom never finds out why Leo became Leo. He never finds out what Leo might have been instead.
There comes a point, if you can reach it, when a sense of inevitability eclipses everything. The finer workings of a man’s character, his moments of doubt, the miracles of circumstance through which we plot a line called “luck”: these are engulfed by the monstrous dimensions his personality has assumed.
Nobody tells stories about Leo when he was sixteen.
Nonetheless: Leo O’Bannon was sixteen years old.
He had eyes blue as gas flame and legs too long for his bicycle. He was loud in a way that was charming or intolerable, without any room in the middle. His best friend was Robby Whelan, and one night Robby needed a favor. He began by showing Leo a revolver.
It was wrapped in a still-damp dish cloth; Robby unveiled it with a touch of pride.
“Feel that,” he said. Leo felt his heart knock around in his chest. He felt sympathy for the dish cloth, which like him had been minding its own business five minutes ago. He felt, finally, the weight of the gun. He’d seen guns before. He’d never seen any so black. “We’re gonna put a scare in someone,” Robby said.
“So naturally you came to the scariest person you know.”
Robby surprised him by slinging an arm around him, pulled him close. “No.” When he spoke, his breath tickled Leo’s ear. “I came to the only person I know.”
They rode through familiar streets made spindly and treacherous by the thought of what lay at the end of them. Robby glanced over his shoulder more than he looked ahead. They tipped over their bicycles, the front wheels still spinning, in an alley full of abandoned bedsprings and couches that had collapsed like the mouths of old men.
Then they stopped to smoke a cigarette, passing it back and forth. Leo tried to get the question that had been building in his throat out, but by then it was too big. “You should have told me,” he spit out. “Whatever this is about, you should have told me.”
“You’ll hear all about it when it’s over,” Robby said, flinging down the cigarette. He pulled the gun from the waistband of his trousers. “Just stick right with me.”
He marched up to a door, rapped on it with the barrel of the pistol.
“Who is it?” The voice was worn as the cobblestones.
“Never you mind”—Robby hammered on the door—“just open up!”
The door was flung open and Robby stepped back onto Leo’s foot. The man loomed over them, sneered at them. “Uh,” Robby said. He took another step back, into Leo. “You’re not—we apologize—”
The man’s face was darkening, pressing into a glower. He lumbered out of the doorway; Leo staggered back and Robby slipped the gun behind him, pressed it into Leo’s hands. Then he turned and ran.
Leo aimed and squeezed his eyes shut. The gun tried to hop out of his hand. He opened his eyes, and the man was clutching his ear. Blood dribbled between his fingers. Leo gasped: it felt like holding in a laugh.
He looked for Robby, but his friend was gone.
The closest Leo came to reflecting on the subject: “Tell you the truth, Tom, I don’t think I even noticed it happening.”
"That I can believe," Tom had lied.