Mercy by Bill Littlefield

Author:Bill Littlefield [Littlefield, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Published: 2022-07-27T22:00:00+00:00

. . .

Late that night, lying awake in his single bed, Gibby listened to the traffic in the street below his apartment. A public works crew had been working outside his window for most of the day. They’d left an enormous steel plate over the hole they’d made in the street. A car going over the plate wasn’t too bad, but when a truck hit it, Gibby thought he could feel the building shake. He knew how some people who grew up in the city got so accustomed to the noise that they couldn’t sleep when they went anywhere else. Chattering squirrels or rippling streams drove them nuts.

They needed the sirens, the shattering bottles, the kid upstairs telling his father to fuck off.

It had never been that way with Gibby. He’d wake at the squeal of a taxicab’s brakes. Sleep through a helicopter overhead? Forget it.

Now he could hear the biggest trucks rumbling along blocks before they’d hit the steel plate, and he’d tense a little and wait for the bang-slam of the plate on the street as the tires left it to fall. Between trucks he thought about some of the stories he’d forgotten, or never heard. Then he thought about a time when, assuming he lived long enough, he would have forgotten lots of other things.

“Like how to brush my teeth,” he said to himself.

He thought about Arthur Baladino, old enough to be let out of prison, never mind what he’d done. He thought about what Francis had told him about Arthur Baladino’s children, one dead of some disease that killed you quickly, the other the victim of a crazy accident, neither of them likely to be remembered, unless somebody wrote a song or a long poem about Arthur Baladino, dead and gone.

“Stranger things have happened,” Gibby thought. He fell asleep for a few minutes, and then another truck, an eighteen-wheeler, he thought, caught the steel plate just right. The building shook, or seemed to, and Gibby wished he had somewhere else to be, and he found he was still thinking about Arthur Baladino and his dead children.

“It could happen,” he thought, because he remembered a song about Joey Gallo and how it made the gangster out a hero because he said he wouldn’t carry a gun, because he was around too many children. Then there was Pretty Boy Floyd, the outlaw Oklahoma knew well. Gibby couldn’t remember Floyd’s last name, but he remembered that Floyd was said to have provided Christmas dinners for families on the dole. He remembered that somewhere in the same song there had been something about men who robbed you with a six gun, and some with a fountain pen. Gibby considered himself fortunate. Nobody’d robbed him with either one, though he’d been threatened by men with guns, or men who led him to believe they had guns in such a way that he did not doubt them when they were telling him what he should do next.

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