A Song Called Youth Read Free Page B

“Where’d you get the old Weatherby?” he asked, interested. The boy was carrying a Weatherby Mark V hunting rifle. Gun must be thirty, forty years old, Smoke thought. Bolt action, .460 Magnum. Long, long rifle. Developed for big-game hunting. Anomalous thing to find here, Smoke thought.
    The man with the green eyes chuckled and shook his head. His eyes didn’t change expression when he laughed. They remained flat, hard, candid. “You’re supposed to be scared,” he said, “not asking where I got my gun.”
    “So he knows all about guns,” one of the other men said. Moved to Smoke’s right. He was a big-framed man who had the look of someone who’d been overweight, starved down to sagging folds. He wore a long black coat, open at the front. And to Smoke’s left there was a twitch-eyed vulture of a man breathing noisily through his open mouth. He wore a raincoat and beneath that something so ragged it was unidentifiable. The starved bear carried a .22 rifle, and the vulture carried a sort of mace made from nails soldered to a long pipe. “If he knows about guns,” the bear went on, “he ain’t some wanderin’ tramp.”
    “That logic is questionable,” Smoke said. “A wandering tramp is someone who used to be someone else —and when he was the someone else he might have made guns his hobby. I am, in fact, a wandering tramp. That doesn’t mean I don’t have business. I have business. But I’m not an eye for the Armies. And I’m here unarmed.”
    “What’s your ‘business’?” the green-eyed one asked, jeering the word business.
    Smoke was thinking that the starved bear should have the big Weatherby, and the green-eyed one should have the .22, because he was smaller, and because he was the leader, so he should have known better. But maybe the gun was the totem of power here. And the king should carry the scepter.
    “Here’s where I take a chance,” Smoke said. “I’m going to refuse to tell you my business. Except to say it’s no threat to you.”
    The starved bear took a step toward him, and Smoke closed his eyes and said, “I hope they don’t hurt my crow.”
    Not sure if he’d said it out loud.
    “Jenkins,” the green-eyed one said, not very sharply. But that’s all it took. The big guy stopped, and Smoke, even with his eyes shut, knew the starved bear was looking at the green-eyed one for his cue.
    “Lez go through his stuff,” the vulture said. “Might be food.”
    “Animals,” Smoke said, opening his eyes. “One’s a starved bear and one’s a vulture, and you make me think of a coyote or a wolf.” He looked at the leader. Again the guy made the smile that didn’t travel to his eyes.
    “You’re just a roost for a crow,” he said. “You got a name?”
    “Smoke.”
    “I heard about you, something. Like you barter, black market or . . . ” He shrugged. “What’s to be so mysterious about?” Smoke didn’t answer, so the guy went on, “What’s your crow’s name?”
    “I haven’t decided. We’re of recent acquaintance. I’m wavering between naming him Edgar Allan Crow or Richard Pryor.”
    The green-eyed one lowered his rifle, maybe only because it was heavy. “Edgar Allan Crow is corny. What’s ‘Richard Pryor’ mean?”
    “He was my father’s favorite comedian, and he was black. That’s all I know about him.”
    “We could eat that bird,” the vulture suggested. He looked at the green-eyed leader. “Let’s eat the bird, Hard-Eyes. Fuck it, huh?”
    Hard-Eyes. Quite a monicker.
    Hard-Eyes said, “No. Crows are good luck where I come from.”
    The clouds had congealed into rain and the rain had wormed and nosed and nudged its way into the high-rise’s ten thousand hairline cracks, and it was seeping out of the cracks in the ceiling and dripping with a smell of dissolved minerals into a large bathtub—which someone had dragged from its original mooring just to catch the rain—and into a wooden box which itself was beginning to discolor and