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My labors for Trapped and Guilty continued as 1957 drew to its close, a story or two a month. The second for November, 1957 was the neat, nasty “Russian Roulette,” the first of my crime stories to be chosen for anthology reprint. It appeared in the July, 1958 issue of Trapped, under my Dan Malcolm penname, and soon after Donald A. Wollheim of Ace Books picked it up for a collection of juvenile-delinquent stories called The Violent Ones. (I used my own name for the reprint.) The interesting thing was that many of the other stories came from Manhunt regulars like Evan Hunter, Hal Ellson, Robert Turner, Gil Brewer, and Jonathan Craig. I enjoyed seeing a story of mine in such high-powered company. And I wondered whether I, too, could be selling stories to Manhunt, paying two or three times as much per word as W.W. Scott’s magazine. But I had fallen into the rhythm of doing a couple of stories a month for Scottie, dropping them off in person at his cramped little office downtown and getting my automatic check a few weeks later. If I wanted to submit a story to Manhunt, I would have to send it in via my agent and run the risk of rejection, after a wait that might be a month or two. Such was my mind-set then that I preferred the quick and easy check from Scottie.
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RUSSIAN ROULETTE
It was a new and thrilling kick—a gamble with death.
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I guess it was all Joey’s idea, from the start. A new way to get kicks. A new way to beat the damned heat. We were bored and sweaty and half out of our heads from the heat that summer day, and we had tried almost everything there was to try.
“I’m bored, Joey,” I said. We were sitting on the stoop outside his folks’ place. I was sitting on the step in front of him, my head leaning back against his lap, and he was stroking my hair. “I’m bored real crazy. I want some kicks.”
“What do you want to do, baby?”
“I don’t know. I’m tired of drivin’ around in that damn rod of yours. I’m tired of hangin’ around on the stoop. I’m tired of the damn soda-joint. I’m even gettin’ tired of you. It’s the heat, Joey. The goddam sweaty hot heat.”
I swiveled my head to look at him. He wrinkled his forehead like he was thinking, and then he said, “We could play Russian Roulette.”
“Huh? You nuts?”
“Kicks, kid, kicks. You know how to play?”
“Sure,” I said. “You get a revolver and you put one bullet in it. Then you spin the chambers, put the gun to your head, and pull the trigger. You got one chance out of six to blow your head off.”
“Want to try?” he asked. His eyes were gleaming with a funny look. I saw the little droplets of sweat breaking out on his forehead, half from the heat and half from something else, and I felt strange inside myself. Yeah, I thought. Yeah. There would be some kicks in a little game of Russian Roulette.
The big sun hung in the sky, turning New York City into a puddle of grease. Sweat ran down my neck, under my sweater, between my breasts, along my arms.
“Yeah,” I said softly. “Maybe we ought to try some of that stuff. For kicks.”
He looked at me. “You serious?”
“It was your idea, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah, but—”
“But what? You ain’t chicken are you, Joey? I wouldn’t want to be palled out with a chicken.”
“I ain’t chicken, Frannie.”
“So produce the gun. We can have a little sport, you and me.
“Yeah. Yeah.” There was a catch in his voice that sounded funny to me, and his face looked pale even under the tan. I started to have my doubts about Joey. But he got up slowly. He said, “I’ll go upstairs and fish out the gun. You wait here.”
–
So I waited.
One minute, two, three, five, and the stinking heat came down and roasted me. Ninety-nine degrees, the radio said at lunchtime. Fourth day of the heat wave, and no relief in sight. I thought I was going to go crazy in all the heat, and here it was summertime without a damned thing for any of us to do except sit on the stoop. Not even school to play hookey from.
He came down finally. He looked a little green around the gills.
“Find it?”
“Yeah,” he said. He patted his pocket. “Good old Colt single-action .45. Got it right here.”
“That’s the one you bought off Whitey, ain’t it?”
“Yeah.”
He wet his lips. I could tell he was scared, and that made me mad as hell. I didn’t like to go around with chicken-babies. It was the first time I ever saw Joey look real chicken. I didn’t like it at all.
I said, “Where do we do it? Right out here?”
“On the front stoop? You crazy, Frannie?”
I shrugged. “Who the hell cares? In this city you could shoot your grandmother on the front stoop and nobody would come over to bother you.”
“Not here,” Joey said. He laughed in a funny way. “We’ll get into my car and drive over the bridge into Jersey. We’ll go to Palisades Park and do it there. After that we can go swimming.”
“Suppose—suppose one of us loses?”
He shrugged and tried to look nonchalant about it. “Hell, in that case we don’t go swimming.”
He looked awfully green. I bet his knees were knocking together.
We went across the street and got into his car. It was a nice souped-up rod that Joey had built out of an old Mercury he bought cheap. It was funny: only a couple of weeks ago we went rodding on the highways over in Jersey and made some guys chicken out, and though Joey got sweated up a little bit he didn’t seem scared. He was cool as ice. But now he was scared, scared green.
Some guys don’t mind getting smashed up at ninety miles an hour, but they go all wobble-legged at the idea of a .45 slug crashing into their heads. I’ll bet Joey was thinking he wished he’d kept his yap shut about Russian Roulette. But he didn’t dare say anything. The last thing a guy want his chick to find out is that he’s yellow.
I said, “If we’re going swimming, you better drive me over to my place and let me grab a suit. They don’t let you go swimming B.A. in the Palisades Park.”
He laughed at that. He was remembering a time last summer when we first started to go together, when we went down to a beach way out on the Island early in the morning and decided to go for a swim even though we didn’t have suits. We just stripped down and waded in B.A. It was cold as hell, too, but fun—and afterwards we made love on the beach. It was my first time. I was almost fifteen, and around this neighborhood that meant I was getting a late start.
–
The Merc zoomed away from the sidewalk and Joey headed south four blocks to my place. My kid sisters were looking lazy on the stoop—one was nine, the other eleven—and my brother was playing stickball in the street. He’s fourteen. I went inside.
Ma was cleaning up, and the baby was right behind her busy making a mess of things.
I said, “Ma, I’m goin’ over to the Palisades with Joey to go swimming. Be back at suppertime.”
“Yeah. Do whatever you want.”
I knew she hadn’t heard me, just grunted and went on working. She never listened to me. I could have said, Ma, I’m going over to Jersey to play Russian Roulette with Joey, and she would have just grunted and gone on working without even looking at me.
Suddenly I didn’t give a damn—not for Ma or for my sisters or my brother or for Joey or for anybody in the whole damn world. It was a hot, filthy place where nobody seemed to care a hoot for anybody else. I couldn’t care less whether I got my head blown off or not in an hour. All I wanted was my kicks, and to hell with everything and anything else.
I got my blue swimsuit with the peepholes along the thighs, and grabbed up a towel, and wrapped it all up. Then I said so long, and Ma grunted so long to me without breaking rhythm in the floor-waxing job, and I got out of there.
Joey was waiting in the car with the motor running as I got downstairs.
“That was quick.”
“Yeah. They didn’t have much to say to me.”
I tossed my swimsuit onto the back seat, next to Joey’s, and we went shooting away from the curb. Maybe one of us wasn’t ever going to use his swimsuit that day.
Yeah. Maybe.
–
We drove uptown, through the crowded streets full of pushcarts and baby carriages and kids playing stickball or stoopball, heading for 181st St. and the George Washington Bridge. It was the middle of the afternoon, maybe two or two-thirty, the roughest part of a summer day, when you have that long hot pull until nightfall.
Not that nightfall’s any better. So it goes down from 99 to 90. What the hell difference does that make? It’s still 90.
At 181st Street we got on the approach to the George Washington Bridge, and went humming across into New Jersey. Joey drove very very carefully. I knew there were two reasons for this: One, he was scared stiff of what we were going to do in Jersey, and Two, there were plenty of cops all around the bridge approach and the bridge itself, and if he broke a traffic law they’d pick him up and find out his driving license wasn’t any good and maybe they’d poke around the car and find that .45 revolver in the glove compartment and then his goose would really be done to a turn.
We got to the other side of the bridge and he made a right turn, heading for the woody area in Palisades Park where we had gone so many times for other reasons. He drove carefully off the road at our special place, and parked the car a few hundred feet in the woods, between two big pine trees, far enough from the road so nobody could see either us or the car and so the sound of a revolver shot would just seem like some auto exhaust.
He yanked back the emergency brake, shut off the ignition, and turned around to face me. One hand went around my shoulders, the other tugged my sweater out from under my belt and slipped up my stomach to my breasts. I wasn’t wearing a bra in this sort of weather.
I grabbed his hands and pulled them away.
“Uh-uh. Mustn’t touch.”
“Huh?”
“Later,” I said. “Plenty of time for that stuff later, Joey-boy. We came here to get a different sort of kick, remember.”
“Yeah,” he said. He sounded gloomy about it. “Yeah, I remember.”
“What’s the matter? You change your mind? It was your idea, sunshine-boy.”
He looked at me almost pathetically, I thought, as if pleading with me to say I was kidding, that I didn’t want to go through with it, that we should get on the back seat and have some fun and go swimming afterward and the hell with the crazy things like Russian Roulette. Now I could see the fear stand out in his eyes, and sweat roll in bubbles down his face.
But I wasn’t letting him off that easy. I was sore inside that he was showing himself up as a chicken when it counted, with the chips down.
I didn’t like guys with no guts. I didn’t like them to paw me and lay all over me.
I said, “Well? You change your mind?”
“No. But Frannie—”
“Yeah?”
“Uh—nothing.”
“Okay, then,” I said. “I’m itching to play this little game of yours. Get out the gun.”
–
He stuck a finger forward and jabbed it against the button of the glove compartment, and the partition flopped forward. I looked.
Inside, with all the roadmaps and flashlights and stuff, there was a gun. A pretty gun. I had never seen it before, though Joey told me about it when he bought it off Whitey, just before Whitey got sent upstate for pulling a grocery-store job.
I took it out and looked at it. It was cool, real cool. Shiny metal that somebody had taken good care of, and a fancy handle, and the barrel in the middle with spaces for the bullets, just like in the cowboy films. A regular six-shooter.
“You got bullets for this thing?”
“There’s a box of cartridges in the glove compartment,” Joey said. His voice sounded kind of hoarse. I felt sharp and awake inside, keen and primed-up the way I had been after that B.A. swim a year ago, when Joey taught me what sex was. Now I was learning about a new thrill. A better one, maybe.
“Show me how you load the gun,” I said.
He opened the box and took a shiny bullet out, and showed me how to load the gun. Just one bullet in the gun.
“Okay,” he said. He looked funny at the gun. “It’s loaded now. There’s just one bullet in it.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“You better get out and look around and make sure nobody’s wandering around the neighborhood,” he said to me.
I pushed open my side of the car and got out. I looked pretty good, walking a full circle around the car, standing on my tiptoes. No one seemed to be in sight. We were alone.
“Nary a soul,” I reported, as I got back in the car. Joey was sitting slouched-like, staring at the gun in his hand.
“I guess I ought to go first,” he said. His voice sounded like his mouth was lined with cotton.
“That ain’t polite,” I told him. Where’d you learn your manners? Ladies first.”
“Frannie you—”
“This is my kick, pal. I want first go. You don’t look so anxious yourself Joey.”
“This is a crazy thing to do. What the hell do we want to blow our heads open for, Frannie? You ain’t sixteen yet. You—”
“Yeah, but—”
“No buts.” He looked like a miserable puking little coward right then. “Gimme the gun, Joey.”
–
His hand shook as I took it from him. It was the first time in my life I ever handled a real gun, with a real bullet in it. It felt good. Nice to the touch. A current of excitement started building up in me. I felt the kicks coming, and I didn’t feel scared. Not at all. I didn’t even care if I struck it unlucky and got my brains splattered all over the windshield.
That was the trick in not chickening out. I just didn’t care.
“You spin the chambers, put the gun to your head, and pull the trigger? That’s all there is to it?”
“Yeah.” Joey’s voice was breathy, like he’d been running a long way.
I looked at the big gun in my hand.
Then I touched my fingers to the chambers and made them spin, round and round.
When they stopped, I started to lift the gun toward my head. It would be quick, if I connected. One chance out of six. Anyway, it was a quick death. I wouldn’t feel a thing.
I put the gun up at the side of my head, a couple of inches from my ear. I started to tighten my finger on the trigger.
Sweat rolled down Joey’s gray face.
“Frannie! No!”
I pulled the trigger.
Click!
Five chances out of six to live. Good odds. I hadn’t hit the loaded chamber. I was still alive.
The kicks came rolling up over me like white-hot current, up from my legs, sending electric thrills through my body. I was bathed in sweat and shaking a little, but I wasn’t scared, not at all. I felt tremendous. I didn’t even notice the heat.
“Frannie—”
“Yeah,” I said. “It kinda looks like I survived. Well, now it’s your turn.”
“Yeah. My turn.”
You miserable lousy coward, I thought. Big and brave until the chips were down. How I hate you, Joey Aljano. How I despise your yellow guts.
“Now it’s your turn.” I said again. “You better go look around again, make sure nobody’s coming. We wouldn’t want to get interrupted.”
“I’ll go look.”
–
He got out of the car and went walking all around, the way I did, looking. I stuck my head out his window and yelled, “I thought I heard someone on the path up ahead. Go take a look.”
He went to have a look. He came back a couple of minutes later and got back inside the car.
“Nobody here. Just your imagination.”
“Guess so.”
I handed him the gun.
He took it like a live piece of dynamite which in a way it was, and let it sit in his lap without looking at it for a half-minute or so.
“What you waiting for, Joey?”
“I—I —hell, Frannie!”
“What’s on your mind? Don’t you want to try it? It’s a great little game!”
“Frannie, I—”
“You’re chicken!” I said fiercely. “A dirty rotten chicken. A lousy punk who thinks he’s a big-shot. You didn’t open your trap when I was playing, but now you’re turning yellow. Go on punk!”
I saw that got to him, real deep. Nobody likes to be called a yellow punk by a girl who’s just shown him up. I was glad I went first.
“I’m not chicken,” he said. He raised the gun. He spun the chambers hard.
He put it to his head and pulled the trigger.
The explosion was a hell of a lot louder than I thought a gun-shot was. I shut my eyes and put my hands to my ears, and for a second or two all I heard was that great loud roar, like a clap of thunder exploding six inches from my ears.
I opened my eyes finally.
Joey was a mess. He was leaning back, with his arms dangling, and the revolver gripped tightly in his hand. I couldn’t see much of his head, but there wasn’t much to see. Part of it seemed to be blown away. There was a mess on the back seat and windows, and everything.
He had a funny expression on his face—part fear, of course, and then a kind of surprise.
I shuddered and got out of the car and started to walk out of the woods toward the road. There was a gas station a few hundred yards to the left, and I was going to phone the local cops and put on a hysterical act and tell them how my boyfriend had suddenly driven off the road into the woods and gone a little crazy and yanked a gun out of his glove compartment and blown his head off.
Suicide. They’d believe me, because there wasn’t any other way it could have been. The gun was still tight in his hand. They’d ask me some questions, but they’d have to let me go.
After all, I hadn’t done anything wrong.
I hiked up the road toward the station. I didn’t feel any pity for Joey—you don’t pity a yellow punk. I hated him. If I hadn’t hated him, I wouldn’t have done what I did.
While he was out of the car scouting around, I had loaded up the other five chambers of the gun. He didn’t stand much of a chance, the yellow punk. I felt real cool. This was a great kick! The temperature may have been a hundred and three in the shade, but I felt cool and good inside, real good.
Joey didn’t stand a chance. Six out of six is the best odds there is.