The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner

Author:Rachel Kushner
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Literary, coming of age, General, (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯), Fiction
ISBN: 9781439154175
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2013-04-02T00:00:00+00:00

12. THE SEARS MANNEQUIN STANDARD

It was simply our night. People were mugged every night of the week in SoHo, where the streets were dark and empty—no streetlights, no open stores, just deserted loading docks.

We’d walked with a kind of pall over us, Sandro annoyed at Talia for letting Ronnie goad her into punching herself in the face, annoyed at me for announcing to him that I was going to Monza, which was what I said on the street, outside Rudy’s, drunk and pushing the limits.

“I’m going,” I said. “I was invited and it’s not about you. It’s about me.”

“Great,” he said. “That’s great. Maybe for your next act you can show them your tits.”

“That’s nice,” I said.

“It’s as nice as the Valera Company gets,” he said. “Actually, it’s nicer, because it’s a region of human qualities. Of females. But never mind.”

We walked along in the dark, our silence thick with two minds that were not going to reconcile easily. He wanted me to forgo the trip, and I thought it was unfair to pretend that my driving the Spirit of Italy was nothing. It was not nothing, it was actually incredible. And yet I was being forced to choose, now, between a genuine opportunity and Sandro. The more I thought about it the angrier I got, and then our mugger emerged from a doorway.

He was holding a knife out in front of him like it was something hot, flashing it at us in jabs. He demanded our wallets.

Sandro reached for his, in his back pocket, and instead withdrew the cap-and-ball pistol.

“Drop the knife.”

The mugger didn’t.

“You aren’t going to shoot me,” he said to Sandro. “What the fuck is that man—”

He reached toward Sandro. Sandro pulled the hammer back and fired.

A ball of smoke went up. The knife clattered to the sidewalk.

The mugger shrieked, holding his hand, his body folded around it. He looked up at Sandro from his crouched position, clutching his hand.

“You fucking shot me! I can’t believe you fucking shot me!”

I felt the mugger’s horror as mine, too.

I said I was going to call 911 and get the guy an ambulance. We were only a block from our loft. “You better wait with him,” I said.

“Sure,” Sandro said, and shrugged like I was making a minor and fussy request, asking him to retrieve a candy wrapper he’d just dropped on the ground.

I was on hold, 911 flooded with calls on a Saturday night, New York so full of emergencies that the wait was ten minutes.

“Did you see the gunman?” the operator asked me.

“The gunman?”

“The person who shot the victim,” she said.

The victim?

“Hello? You’re going to have to make a report—”

I hung up the receiver. Cooked old spaghetti, and as the water boiled I heard the ambulance.

I kept expecting Sandro. He didn’t return. I wasn’t sure what to do. I ate the spaghetti and drank a glass of warm white wine because these were what we had and it was late and there had been a lot of drinking and I was hungry for a second dinner.

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