Cornelius Sky

by Timothy Brandoff

  He passed the joint and held the smoke in his lungs. Without exhaling he said, "Good stuff," and the kids laughed. He choked and sputtered from deep inside his chest. Finally, he let it go, bent over, and caught his breath. He stood up straight, produced his pint, and took a hit.

  "Who wants a taste, anybody?" Connie said, and they looked at him. "Wow," he said, "discriminating palates." Connie spotted a kid spinning a Frisbee on his finger upstage. "Yo, yo, with the Frisbee and the 'fro!" he called, then broke from the four-pack of kids and started to sprint between the wrought-iron chairs sitting vacant and scattershot before the bandshell.

  The Afroed kid watched Connie break into his long pattern, grinned big, and with a short one-two-three-step release let the Frisbee rip. It flew up and off the stage as Connie zigged and zagged through the wrought-iron chairs. The Frisbee soared and they all watched him work to track it down, calling, "Go, Mr. Doorman, go!"

  A desperation fueled Connie, and something in him, now that he had committed, wanted to make the grab. He felt emotions he had not experienced in years, a single-minded intensity that sport produced, wherein all internal clutter falls away. His head and chest pounded as the rhythm of his stride began to synch up with the Frisbee, they were one and the same, and the bandshell kids picked up on it, calling to Connie with ever greater excitement.

  "You got it, Doorman, you got it!"

  He had to negotiate a few stand-alone garbage cans and a couple of human beings—a homeless man and a bald-headed toddler on the loose—when a wind came, a gust from nowhere, and the Frisbee hovered midair. The kids made noise to guide and direct.

  "Ho, Doorman, wait up! Ho!"

  The Frisbee tried to make up its mind, before it slowly, with coy prerogative, reversed gears and started back toward the bandshell.

  "Back, Doorman, back, back!"

  Connie retraced his path and the Frisbee picked up speed, boomeranging its way toward the bandshell with a fickle change of heart, and with the turnabout Connie caught a second wind, hissing under his breath, "You motherless son of a." He spoke to the Frisbee, gave the thing its own volition and consciousness, he conjured the Frisbee into a supercilious bitch of a human being. "Pull that shit on me," he said. He again negotiated the wrought-iron chairs but the effort less than half as hard now, needing only an inverse take on a course his body had intuitively retained, as the Frisbee descended, descended.

  "Watch it, Doorman, watch it!" the kids cried.

  The Doberman that had taken the squirrel's life galloped at him from a disturbingly obtuse angle. And Connie thought, If it bites me, it bites me, I'm not scared of dogs, never have been, and the Dobie vanished like cowards always do.

  Down the Frisbee came, and with it Connie downshifted—it was going to happen now, the wind had

  dissipated—and the kids smiled for Connie, the grab was imminent, but for no discernible reason he overshot the thing and the kids flashed sad Connie had blown it at the last moment . . . when he took them unawares with a behind-the-back snatch which blew their minds, just as he spun and quick-flipped it back to the Afroed kid upstage, having possessed the Frisbee for no amount of time worth counting, and the upstage kid caught it where he stood.

  They slapped each other five, hugged, and shook their bodies. A tall kid with a soul patch placed a hand on Connie's shoulder and said, "That was so cool." He offered a quart of Olde English and Connie took a victorious guzzle.

  "Later, kids."

  "Come back soon, Mr. Doorman," they called.

  Connie waved goodbye, and he never did return to them.

  * * *

  South he roamed on pedestrian paths, gently swaying this way and that. He stopped to watch a shaft of light infiltrate a canopy of green, the trees leaning, the branches reaching with desire for one another above him. How the light landed on a boulder just off the path. Like a painting at the Met Connie took in on a recent rainy lunch break. But this, the actual sun and trees of the world, and the sight of it spoke to the unschooled artist in him. He considered the stains on the boulder, the mildew, tried to regard the shapes not as some Rorschach for his longings, but something which had nothing to do with him personally, like a painting hanging in the Met.

  He left the park at Columbus Circle. The marquee of the Coliseum read Boat Show, and a few salesmen in loosened, fat-knotted ties and one minidressed woman stood smoking together outside. From their countenance Connie decided they hadn't written much business at all.

  One of Connie's brothers, Patrick, a teamster, worked the Coliseum. Connie rarely spoke to his siblings; even throughout the holidays the last number of years it stayed quiet between them. They suffered such decimation when they were children that the brothers and half sister Ruth seemed to prefer no contact, as spending time together only served to rehash a past better left to wither on the vine. The suicide of their father, the negligent homicide of baby brother Edward, followed by the violence of Pete Cullen, its horror doubled by their mother's inability to protect—all this could not help but flood its way back when they saw one another. When they did get together, the result of some spouse's insistence, it produced in Connie a hangover of shame which lingered for a week that no amount of booze dissolved. Still, whenever he walked by the Coliseum he naturally thought of Patrick, who now lived, Connie believed, in Bronxville with a Spanish wife and kids. He thought of Danny and Ruth as well, and the memories of his brother Edward, and what a kick he used to get as a kid himself holding Edward in his arms.

  He loved to walk the streets of Manhattan, and Brooklyn too (he loved the generous, open skies of Brooklyn, it was always what he first noticed coming up out of the trains). He would hate to consider a day when he could not step out and just start walking, a simple pleasure which had yet to fizzle or fade.

  He headed down Ninth Avenue, passing Port Authority and the fruit stands, when it hit him: he no longer had a place to call home. He managed to put this out of his mind. It happened this morning, did it not?

  A sadness accosted him, as post office drivers in their elevated cabs careened their trucks rudely across his path into the loading dock. His sense of destination abruptly dissolved. Where am I going? he thought.

  He produced his house key, recalling the door's new cylinder, and the memory collapsed over him. He removed the key from its ring and surreptitiously brought it to his nose—the smell rancid, metallic. He crossed the avenue and, as he did, let the key fall from his hand, and he thought, Maybe the sun will soften the pavement and downtown traffic'll punish the key into the tar. And whenever I'm on Ninth I'll see the key embedded in the street and only I will know what door it used to open. I'll remember how I let it slip from my hand, May of '74, and how the key represented my failed shot at love and family.

  His mind revved up for its blunt assault: Never should have tried it. Should have left well enough alone and never brought other people into the mix. Should have stayed a bachelor. A room in a rooming house. Falafels, pizza slices, Chinese takeout and double features in dark movie houses to muscle your way through long holiday weekends alone.

  He cut through what was known in the neighborhood as Bums Park, the centerpiece of the space a free city health clinic, a squat three-story structure surrounded by strange homeless nomads with wild hair who slept on benches. Children were notoriously frightened to enter its confines, the dangers of which had taken on mythological proportions.

  One bearded man in an army jacket talked quietly to himself on a bench across the way: Tommy Dunn. Connie had known him forever. Tommy got kicked out of the projects—not an easy thing to do. How do you lose a project apartment, Tommy? If I had a nickel for every time Tommy made somebody laugh, Connie thought. Don't get Tommy started on you in front of a crowd, watch out! And it was a good humor. Deeply offensive, yes, deeply racist, sure it was, but somehow devoid of malice or vitriol. There is love underneath it, isn't there, Tom? Tommy'd stroll up to half a dozen guys sitting around a concrete checker table and just start riffing. What a natural,
what an athlete. And now? Relegated to a bench in Bums Park, clutching a pint of MD 20/20, a knotty beard of chaos defacing him.

  God Almighty, Tom, what did they do to you?

  They used to shoot the breeze when they encountered each other, spent a good twenty minutes catching up, but now Connie prayed to go unnoticed, as Tommy represented a frightening projection of his own potential future.

  Connie cut past the sandbox and basketball court, the monkey bars and swings, the horseshoe pits and handball courts of Chelsea Park, before he leaned against the fence on 27th Street and peered into the thickening fog of the softball field. He wondered how they could still see the puck, but as the sun had gradually set over the Hudson, the kids developed night vision.

  He spotted Arthur. The informal roller hockey scrimmage had started to dissolve. Kids on opposing teams stopped skating to talk to one another. The goalies stood bored between two garbage cans, hoping for the chance to make one more Eddie Giacomin–style save before calling it a day.

  Connie listened to Arthur teach a younger player how to spear somebody, his words drifting across the field. Arthur told the kid he should only spear a player who messed with him, that the kid shouldn't do it just for fun. Use your spearing skills judiciously was Arthur's point.

  "Say I messed with you all game, so you go digging for the puck and I'm coming up behind you." Arthur produced a roll of electrical tape from inside his glove and let it drop to the ground. "Ready?" he said, and fired a snap-shot against the fence near Connie. The kid dug hard and fearless for it with Arthur bearing down. "Stick in position," Arthur said, and the kid lowered his grip on the butt and centered it behind him in a manner which would prevent a player from crushing him into the boards. "Good," Arthur said, and smacked the kid's stick out of the way and crunched him anyway.

  "Hey," the kid said, laughing.

  Arthur banged him into the fence with a dry humor, not for real, not too aggressive. The kid was smaller and younger than Arthur. Arthur kept playing dumb, saying, "What?"

  "Hey!" the kid said, laughing again, and Arthur continued to crunch the kid, but when he looked up and saw his father, he stopped and skated away.

  "Arthur," Connie said.

  "Hey, Mr. Sky," the kid said.

  "How you doing, son?" Connie said to the kid. "Arthur, come here a minute."

  "What?" Arthur said.

  "Meet me over the hole."

  Somebody had cut a hole in the fence. Arthur skated reluctantly toward it as Connie walked that way, the fence dividing them.

  "Still playing," Arthur said.

  "I know," Connie said, "want to talk to you a minute." He slid through the gap and stood with Arthur, who skated in small, choppy circles. "Come here, can't see you."

  "Yeah, 'cause it's dark."

  "Want to get some dinner?"

  "Can't."

  "Come on, couple slices."

  "Mommy's cooking," Arthur said. "Told her I'd be there."

  "All right, all right," Connie said. "Well then, let's just talk."

  "About what?" Arthur started to skate in faster circles, smacking the blade of his stick down onto the ground harder.

  Connie said, "Stop with the stick, going to crack it," and Arthur obeyed for the moment, almost grateful for the instruction. "Listen. Your mother and me."

  "I know, I know."

  "What do you know?"

  "Separating, she told me."

  "For now," Connie said. "Temporary."

  "Until when?"

  "Until we see what's what is when," Connie said.

  "Yeah, right."

  "Yeah, right, what?"

  Arthur sniffed the air. "Nothing."

  "Say it," Connie said, "it's all right."

  Arthur stayed quiet.

  "What is it?"

  Arthur took a glove off and wiped his face, snorting back a sudden flash-flood mélange of tears and snot and saliva. "Yeah, right, what, okay—and like I wish you were dead already," Arthur said, "that's what's fucking what," and he skated away.

  "Arthur," Connie said.

  Arthur kept skating. "Die already, get it the fuck over with. I hate you. Find a bench, leave us alone already, if that's how you're going to be already."

  "Arthur!" Connie called out. "Artie!"

  "No!" Arthur yelled across the park. "Banging on the door like that! Don't love us! And I'm not going to your funeral either, tell you that shit right now!"

  The sound of Arthur's stick slapping the ground grew more distant until Connie lost him, sight and sound, to the fog. He stood there for a moment, half hoping Arthur would return to do who knows what—apologize, say worse things, or skate into Connie's arms and cry his eyes out.

  Thick white clouds had descended, filling the space, white zeppelins straight from the Hudson, landing in Chelsea Park.

  Connie stood still. There had been words between himself and Arthur throughout the last number of months, but none like what he just heard. The kid had found a strong voice. I hate you, Arthur had said. Wished Connie was dead.

  Connie listened to some kids at a distance skating home for dinner. The fog grew thicker. He stood there, short of breath, strangely exhilarated. A fog-cloaked stillness filled the park, muting the world. So little open space in the neighborhood, on the island of Manhattan altogether, the fog seemed thankful to have found a spot to do its thing. How nice would that be? Scooped up and carried out on a bed of fog, sliding beneath the belly of the Verrazano, right on out to sea.

  Connie listened to the sound of his own breathing, stunned by Arthur's tumult. And with it also a strange pride for his son. He sensed Arthur was onto something, glad the kid had found words for it, managed to fire it out of him.

  He could teach me a thing or two . . . I never got angry, did I? I forgot to get angry.

  What was my father's name again? A wiry man they called Jumbo. But his name—his name was Samuel. Sammy.

  Samuel Sky, the printer. That's what he did, what Connie's mimeographed birth certificate said, the one Connie discovered in a brown file of corrugated cardboard hidden deep in his mother's closet, searching through it as his mother smoked her Salems out on the stoop in her one iconic housecoat of impoverishment. Trying to glean some information about his own father from the shadowed document. My father, Connie thought, the printer. Turned the oven on, late afternoon, January 19, 1951. This side of dusk, first star in the sky. Turned the oven on and took baby brother Edward with him.

  Connie adjusted his cap, and for a moment considered himself a captain on the bow of a ship in the middle of a fog-shrouded ocean. He stepped deeper into the thickening fog, in search of its epicenter. The ground of the softball field rocking slightly beneath him, the cigarette in his hand not visible, save the faint glow of its tip, the glow of a distant lighthouse between two fingers.

  Kid had a lot of nerve, he thought. Little punk. Lucky you got a father. If I took myself out, then maybe. Let me pull a suicide. Then the kid might have something to smack the blade of his stick down on the ground about. Talk to me like that on the street. Pull that shit on me.

  He moved deeper into the field, fog-blinded. Now came the soft toot-toot of a car horn on Tenth Avenue, not a sound of impatience, but a gentle, caring goodbye, to and from a loved one, Connie decided.

  Here I stand, blind to the world. And if I went missing for good, who would mourn me? He surrendered to his pity, took a hit off his pint, let the fog envelope him. He stood captured by it, white and blinding, blinding wet and white.

  * * *

  One day over a round of cribbage John out of the blue said, "What did your father do? You know, for a job."

  "My father," Connie said. "When he did work, he was a printer."

  "In what, a printing plant?"

  "Down the docks of Chelsea." And as he nonchalantly considered the cards in his hand, Connie said, "What'd your father do?"

  John grinned. "My father? Public service. Yeah. Like a family business." He grabbed Connie's Zippo off the tab
le, opened and banged its small rough wheel against his leg in one fluid quick-draw motion, producing a flame toward which he brought a fresh joint.

  * * *

  Steven called Alfonso "Fonso." Nobody's name needed three syllables when you were nine years old, come on. Steven and Alfonso were best friends, simple as that. Alfonso, part Panamanian, had a football-shaped head, small teeth, and large gums. These physical oddities in no way put a halt to Alfonso's vanity. The kid was full of himself and stayed on perpetual alert for a chance at physical self-reflection, often stopping to take advantage of a parked car's side-view mirror, even a puddle in the gutter.

  Steven sat on a bench by the skelsies board Alfonso had meticulously designed with large, round pieces of chalk in the yard of 466. Alfonso ran the board and Steven waited.

  Alfonso possessed substantial skelly skills, and he created superbad caps, mixing and matching his waxes, producing psychedelic results. Both boys stayed on the lookout for new cap possibilities. Lately they had discovered a series of chairs at PS 33, not in the classrooms but in the offices where the secretary lady and nurse lady sat, chairs with particular knobs on their leg bottoms: made of silver, they carried a good, balanced weight, and seemed born to glide. The challenge was to not get busted. Messing with school property—they didn't like that. Steven and Alfonso took turns keeping chickie.

  Alfonso was serious and fastidious and took all kinds of extra time setting up his shots, not a trace of chalk on the kid's clothes. Whereas Steven's T-shirts always had a stain, he could not draw for beans, and the wax in his cap collection was unbalanced and generally unattractive.

  "Daddy!" Steven jumped off the bench and ran like a shot toward Connie.

  Connie embraced and kissed him. "How you doing, son?" A lady up in Harlem who wore a red bandanna and lived across the street had called Connie son. She took his face in her dry, black hands, and Connie always wondered if she knew about Pete Cullen, if that was the reason she showed Connie love, or was it simply who she was?

  They went and sat on the bench and watched Alfonso run the board, his cap slowly sliding to rest smack dab in the middle of each box.