Part IV, Chapterlet 4

When Tino chickens out and walks back to the car, he sees Kennedy’s skipped. He doesn’t really care. He mostly doesn’t care about much, actually, which is why its interesting that this kid’s got him all riled. He gets in the car and pulls the door shut, sitting in the dark and looking mostly at the apartment complex. The hammer, too. It’s a Vaughan no. 9. Not heavy. Says 10 oz on the side.
Tino’s unsure where he picked up the carrying around a hammer thing. He’s got a bunch of like hammers, now. It’s the kind of thing that mostly just gets carried too far, with everybody having like a signature item. It’s mostly like that, but it’s also like a hammer’s got a use. It’s not just flash. That kid that runs with Billy, Jay something, he uses knuckles. That’s just ignorant. Under the tape, the hammer’s wood is mostly white with the dark parts of the grain running up parallel and evenly spaced.
If the cops find a hammer in your car, it’s not like a big thing. Keep some vise grips and a couple screw drivers and a old ratchet set, too, makes it look like your ride’s a piece of shit and you need to like work on it. Which isn’t stretching it. On the opposite tip, they find knuckles in your car, your going in, just on probable. Suspicion.
His dad’s the one told him how to look for the direction of the grain. He wonders where the Chang kid gets the sheer balls. He remembers picking this one out of a drawer at the hardware store. There was a bunch of the same kind of hammers and he looked through until he found one he liked. And the rest, as they say, is mystery.
He misses Kennedy. She’s good for filling up space, making things less quiet. The radio’s broken or he’d turn that on, and he’s been listening to the same fucking CD for weeks, now, since probably Joey borrowed his cds from the floorboard without checking to see if maybe he wanted to change the CD.
The handles are always curvy in a way that makes him think about them like girls. Not think about them like he thinks about girls, but think about them as if they were girls. Not in a sexual way, he doesn’t think.
Because Chang doesn’t really run with anybody. There’re a couple cars there, now, but that’s like a unique party situation. Chang probably wants to set up a more kind of upscale, people come to him kind of place, instead of having people out on the street pushing. Which to Tino sounds mostly like waiting for cops to kick your door in.
He’s never named one or anything like that, but he mostly thinks of this particular hammer in terms of like how he thinks about a girl, and that freaks him out a little bit. But isn’t it like common to give your item a girl’s name. BB King’s got a guitar with a girl’s name. So it’s not perverted. Billy’s .45’s named Marta, which Tino personally thinks is a stupid name. It’s the lightest hammer he’s got. Maybe he’ll ask the philosopher.
He lights a cigarette, thinks about quitting. Unless, if you buy off the cops. Then it would be way more comfortable.
The thickest part of the hammer is the very end of the handle. Tino thinks of this as the butt. Then it gets a little bit narrower and goes back out in a bulge in the middle that’s not quite as thick as at the very end of the butt, and then it gets really skinny at the neck.
He’s calmer now, seeing the angle. Set up in a more upscale apartment type place in a good neighborhood and give the cops a piece. No more standing out in the cold. No more getting busted for like loitering by cops sure he’s holding as if anybody’s that stupid anymore. The Chang kid used to call him Tin Man in middle school. Like if I only had a.
The neck is so skinny it looks like fragile, like a pencil. On both sides of the tape there’s smut from where the glue of the stickers it came with gets dirt and crap stuck to it. Lighter fluid’d get that smut off. The head has a round sticker still on it that says Proud to Say Made in USA which Tino thinks isn’t very catchy on your scale of one to catchy. He picks at it with his non-smoking hand.
Tino can see the like couple of cars that were probably there to party with the Chang kid are filling with laughing people and about to bounce. He always smokes with the same hand. It was, he’s thinking now, probably not a good idea to yell at the old man.
The front of the handle—Tino knows the front part of the head that he calls the nose is for hitting nails and the back, vee-shaped part that he calls the claw is for pulling them out—the part that’s toward the nose has two places where the grain comes together and makes almost shapes like rings when you skip rocks.
He would’ve known which side of the hammer was forward even if his dad didn’t tell him. You can like feel it when you hold it with the weight all out front. But Tino mostly likes to swing the hammer so that it hits with the claw part. This is good for lots of carnage with little to no work. There’s Chang going back in to his place, alone. It could totally work, but not with two crews running the same game in South Tulsa—too many cops to buy, too many people would know. More people knowing means more people wanting in on the action, more people talking and the like. But more talk means more business.
The weight makes it awkward to hold with the claw forward though, so he always holds it with the nose forward and does like a little spin thing when he pulls back to throw down. No. Better to just have one crew running it. Simple is better. The old man’s mantra.
He looks down. Some ash has fallen on his pants while he’s been picking at the sticker.
Is the old man really out? He shouldn’t have yelled. That’s going to come back to bite his ass. His temper is like his worst enemy. It’s why he hasn’t tried to start his own crew before now. He knows that the temper makes a truly business-like crew difficult to work.
It’s irritating when the hammer slips. That’s why the tape. That and this is like Billy claims no-print tape, but Tino’s not sure he buys it. It’s on all the grips of like Billy’s boys’ guns, but, for real, if the tape worked, wouldn’t cops be out of a job? So it’s mostly for the slipping.
The worst is when the hammer half spins because of the slip, and it comes down sideways like a tee. It goes right up your elbow, and you can feel it in your teeth. Tino throws the cigarette out the window.
“Fuck it,” he says.
He opens the car door and closes it with a creak. His breath puffs out bright in the apartment complex light. He slides the hammer up the sleeve of his coat. The points of the claw poke into his palm, and one cuts him a little making him say fuck as he walks and tries to hold the hammer up his sleeve like he’s not holding anything. The weight makes it difficult.
Sometimes, when he’s pulling back to throw down, the weight makes it feel like the hammer wants to hit him, it comes back so smooth. He dreamed about it once, about the weight shifting in his hand until he lets go, and a little crab like thing with a claw and a cartoon nose jumps at his face, scuttling around on one leg that’s moving too fast to see, kicking little bits of bone into the air that rain down all around with a sound that sounded like hail as it came. He can remember waking up from that one yelling with like sweat all over, absolutely soaked, his head aching and the sheets just stuck to him, and when he looked in the mirror all he could see was that the whites of his eyes were mostly showing, so it looked like his eyes were just loosely hanging there in his head, about to fall out. He had thrown up, shaky and holding onto the toilet with both hands and his face in the bowl making it sound like the ocean.
He holds his coat closed with his smoking hand and adjusts the hammer. Sweat pours into the cut, and it stings like a bitch. He feels adrenaline hit his head so hard it makes his face flush, and that makes it burn and tighten in the cold. His scalp pulls back and he can hear that little tiny creak from his ears being pulled up with the scalp. If you asked him right then, standing there outside Raymond Chang’s apartment about to throw down on him, asked him what he would name the item right then, and said that you would blow his brains out if he didn’t, like if you held a gun to his head, he would probably say to fuck off. But, right then, with his personal blood making little drips on the concrete in front of the door, the name he was thinking was Veruca.