by Richard Ewing

Created on: April 09, 2009   Last Updated: April 10, 2009

Emily Gets Her Button

(Never Give a Gangster Your Library Card)

"I'm drawing a picture here."

"Ange-"

"Now your girl...what's her stupid name?"

"Lookit. I'm telling you again-"

"Name of the girl."

"Miriamne."

"Meer-ee-am-nuh," Licata says, aping a drunken beer slur, playing dumb, on "nuh" drops the empty Schaefer can to the instep of his black boot, makes two attempts at a hacky-sack kick juggle before steel-toeing it into the yard. "Hell'd you get that name?"

"Stole it," I said.

"Hadda have something going for you. Knew you did."

"Angelo, c'mon, last time. You're waving your gun on my porch."

"Yep." He says. "Stole it where?"

"Put the piece away."

He doesn't, won't, not yet, and it is clear from the thin downward line on the right side of his mouth and the "what you gonna do about it?" invite in his eye that my unease is making his night.

This is fun for him. Ange looks uncomfortable himself, though. Preoccupied, something heavy arcing over the horseplay. He keeps juking and rolling his shoulders, tension there, wiseguy's stress, trying to slough it down, off and away.

"It's a tool," he says, and to demonstrate, stalks to where I perch on the railing, and makes a circle with the handgun over my head, dispelling the cloud of gnats that come when the wind dies. Summer starts at the Jersey shore when the gnats arrive. Tourists follow close behind. We locals rate it a toss-up of evils.

I'm scanning up and down Pacific Ave, worrying over neighbors and Waypoint Isle cops on the cruise, who just may be able to suss that what the six-one slab of Italian-American beefunsummery in black from hair to heelsis brandishing on the tiny balcony of my second-floor garret ain't a water pistol.

"I heard a fly..." Licata says, making like a swatter with the automatic through the gauze of barely-see-ums.

"Not the Emily," I say, belatedly having had enough of this, hopping off the railing, giving him a fair linesman's forearm in the diaphragm to back him up. A little token violence from me cracks him up. I'm about as scary as one of these gnats looking down the barrel of the canon he wields.

"'With blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz...'"

"Angelo. Holster the nine. Stow the Emily Dickinson. Or go."

"Hey! My friends are my estate!'" Hubcap-sized palms splayed, "Who-me?" grin wider than a great white's maw. Dorkish homely coed meets stone killer in one hulking body. Cozy stuff.

"Now you're scaring me," I say, "The gun's bad. Emily's worse. At the moment, I mean. You only pull "The Poet" out of your pocket

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