Cornelius Sky

by Timothy Brandoff

  At Grant's he had produced the manila envelope. Took it out, made a show of studying its pages on the bar.

  He pushed off the bed, took a few hobble-steps with a semiswollen ankle, apparently, and a semiload in his pants, to the piece of mirror above the room's midget sink. Experience taught him it was never as bad as it looked, and he kept in mind the marvels of a shower and shave. Blood clotted his face here and there, but all was mostly intact.

  He had stood outside the bar. He lit a smoke and knew he should make a left, back to the rooming house, just leave it alone, but also knew it wasn't going to happen, the check of his inebriated brainstorm had already cleared. He got it in his head to go see her and that was that. An order of restraint delivered at the job. When did she decide on such a move? He crossed 25th toward 466, deciding to knock, just knock.

  He got in the elevator and through the scrim of intoxication practiced a sensible posture, wanting his body to communicate ease and comfort. Let's reason this situation out, let's come to terms.

  Connie went to the door. He knocked and waited, no big deal. He waited. And then he thought, Maybe I didn't knock loud enough. He stood there another moment, and then he thought, I'll use the whatchamacallit, the knocker. Knock, knock, Connie went with the knocker, then knock knock knock, and waited. He waited with what seemed to him substantial patience.

  "Who is it?"

  "It's Con, Maureen, I—"

  "No," Maureen said. "Didn't you get the thing?"

  "I got the—"

  "Just go away, Con, please. Believe me, enough now."

  Connie waited a moment. "Maureen? Maureen." He stared off, then used the knocker again. And again.

  He started with the flat of his hand against the door, four times hard. He waited a moment, and now came the pounding, simply to get to the bottom of this nonsense once and for all, when the door shot open.

  "Wasn't locked, knucklehead, could have walked right in."

  The sight of the man struck Connie dumb, and he wondered, despite having just heard, he was pretty sure, his wife's voice, if he had wandered off to the wrong apartment, floor, or building. The man wore a T-shirt and dungarees and sneakers.

  "What's it going to take?"

  "Who?" Connie said.

  "She doesn't want to see you, doesn't want to talk to you. That's what the restraint order's about."

  "Fuck you doing in my house?"

  From inside Maureen called, "Raymond, don't, just leave it alone when he's like this."

  "Like what, Maureen? Let this pig in my house."

  Raymond Pacheco, the housing cop, placed his hand to Connie's chest and shoved him away from the door.

  "Fuck off me, piece of shit."

  And they started to have a strange fight. Whereas Connie's frame would be categorized by insurance companies as small to medium, Pacheco's was extralarge, and he spent time with the barbells at the Y. He pushed Connie away from the door. Connie flung himself back toward Pacheco, saying, "My wife, my home, my kids." Pacheco deflected Connie's sloppy swings with simple moves learned at the academy.

  "You don't listen, do you?" And he started to manhandle Connie, putting him in a full nelson and marching him toward the elevator as if they wore the same pair of pants.

  "This how you do your job, fucking pig?" Connie said. "Go around banging all the project women?"

  Pacheco yanked open the outer door and shoved Connie inside. When the elevator started down Pacheco took the opportunity to give Connie a few short socks in the mug, then grabbed him by the throat. He let the back of Connie's head slam into the wall of the elevator. And now, as Connie relived it, standing before his mirror: Pacheco held him by the throat with one hand and with the other slapped Connie's face, hard and deliberate. The outlines of Pacheco's imprinted hand-grip at Connie's throat still visible in the reflection. And the slap ended all struggle. Not the pain of it, which to a sober person would have been severe enough, but the shaming facet. Connie stared at Pacheco and fell silent. The elevator arrived on the first floor. They both stood there, silent tears at Connie's eyes.

  "Wait," Pacheco said. "Come on. I'm sorry. I'm sorry," he said, and Pacheco hugged Connie awkwardly. He had done something he didn't mean to do.

  Connie cried silent tears down his face, bowed his head. The slap seemingly continued to resound off the candy-apple walls of the elevator. Pacheco himself almost cried, slapping a drunk man who, wrong and nasty with the mouth as he might be, still had a case: Maureen his wife, the kids his kids.

  Pacheco went back upstairs briefly, came down, and saw Connie sitting on a bench in the yard. "You all right?" he said.

  Connie stared off, his face blood-marked, one eye swelling up a bit.

  "Can I give you a lift somewhere?" the cop said. Connie stayed quiet. "It doesn't look too bad, just a mouse."

  "Slapped me, what you did," Connie said.

  "I'm sorry," Pacheco said. "Seriously. I apologize."

  Connie took a breath, shot a glance at him. Pacheco turned and walked away, his movements cloaked heavy by remorse. Connie watched him get into a powder-blue Dodge Dart on 26th. Connie watched the cop bump and grind his way out of the tight space, giving the wheel full spins. It looked a little silly, a big man like Pacheco in a small Dodge Dart, and something about the sight already contained a sliver of forgiveness.

  * * *

  He showered and shaved and went to see Manny on Ninth. Connie sat in the back, engulfed by the clicks and hisses of dry-cleaning machinery. Through clothes draped in plastic he spied a customer waiting to be served, a ring on the man's entitled hand smacking the front counter with metronomic impatience. Manny, from the neighborhood, zapped Connie's uniform and shirt, tossed the cap into a stainless steel box, and flipped a switch, zapping it as well. Perched half-naked on a stool, Connie checked his schedule. Friday: a three-to-eleven on the front car.

  Manny mentioned a hockey game of Arthur's in Chelsea Park the following morning and encouraged Connie to attend. Connie thanked him, tried to give him money, but Manny refused and Connie left the way he came, out the back, onto the alley adjacent to the Greek church.

  He stopped into his 34th Street Blarney Stone. He had befriended the Irish barman, Shane, who had more than once unlocked an early-morning door for Connie.

  A lunchtime crowd of white- and blue-collar workers and others less fortunate drank and ate boilerplate from the steam table. Connie sat by the window perusing the paper. Nixon was on his way out. In South Los Angeles the FBI had torched a house to the ground in search of Patty Hearst. The US Army finally admitted causing the torrential rains in the skies over Vietnam through a process called cloud seeding. The view out the window looked like a Ben Shahn painting. Across the street a group of people gathered in a line that curled around on itself like a question mark, before a boxy green crosstown bus swooped down curbside and carried them all east, question answered.

  A homeless woman rolled slowly by the Blarney Stone. She parallel parked her shopping cart carefully against the large plate of glass. She entered and slowly approached Connie at his table. She stood over him not saying a word. She wore a plastic trash bag as if made of the finest cashmere. Her short hair looked like a disturbed barber had taken a butter knife to it. There was something regal in her bearing. She wouldn't look at Connie—to do so would be common, improper. She looked off and away, toward the sun, the better for Connie to admire her profile. Her posture spoke of royal lineage, and it appeared as if she had been so kind as to enter this establishment if only to allow Connie a moment's appreciation of her beauty.

  Connie picked up the change on the table before him, thirty-five cents. The woman extended her hand in a manner that said, Yes, I bequeath you permission to make an offering, if it will help you to do so, before she slowly turned to exit. Connie watched her pull her cart westward, out of sight.

  A little later he found himself walking east on 34th, the still air of spring leaving him vulnerable and weepy, without a witness.

&nb
sp; The six months in Harlem had included the spring. The woman with the red bandanna cupped Connie's nine-year-old face in her hands and told him how she loved the springtime, as she worked a small plot of dirt in front of her building across the way.

  His father had turned the oven on. Edward taken by accident became the story. Thought himself alone in the house, Sammy did. Edward, asleep on a bed in the back, hands folded in silent repose, ready-made for his child coffin.

  His father pulled a suicide, how people spoke of it, as if to say his father had pulled a fast one, suicide a thing you got away with, a number you pull.

  505 West 132nd, two flights up facing the back, and there in the bedroom with his mother now, Pete Cullen. They had apparently married. He wore green work pants and boots. A troubled man, Cullen, and no answer would ever arrive as to why Connie's mother married him, or why he married her, a woman with (now only) four young children.

  Connie one day sidled up and asked if he could call him Dad. Pete Cullen said, "I'll put your fucking head through that wall." Pointing with terrible violence, punctuating his words with a forefinger.

  Of all the kids, he got beat most, Connie did, whipped and slapped, pushed and shoved and lifted straight up by the hair of his head from one end of that Harlem apartment to the other. Pete Cullen's big black garrison belt, which he wore with his green work pants, in which he never seemed to do any work.

  Connie the scapegoat who caught the brunt of it, given he was the oldest, the only way Connie figured it. Beat for his own failings and the failings of his siblings, infractions large and small, depending on Cullen's state of mind, and with it went the bond between the children: Ruthie neglected to hang a wet towel up and Cullen took the strap to Connie.

  And his mother at the kitchen table, holding onto her teacup with both hands, face turned away toward the window.

  Those months in Harlem occupied a lifetime's worth of consciousness, a period his mind sifted over obsessively, attempting to puzzle out, decipher, glean, interpret Pete Cullen's motives. Typical of children of alkies, Connie went far out of his way to make sense of and justify somebody's heinous conduct, or better yet outright dismiss it as no big deal given the far harsher atrocities to be found in the world, just pick up the paper. It's not like I'm waiting for a rice drop beneath a hovering helicopter, and so who am I to complain?

  * * *

  He came back to his body moving down the house's side street, west of Madison, wondering how he arrived uptown. Did he walk? No. Okay, yes, he had taken the 6 train. Got off and, based on a tap-tap to his hip pocket, picked up a pint from his spot on Lex. Or someone had taken the train, someone picked up a pint.

  "How you doing?"

  Larry sat behind the wheel of the Datsun parked in the middle of the block, reading a paperback. He turned to look up at Connie on the sidewalk. "You drunk?"

  "This what drunk looks like in California?" Connie said. "Let me ask you a question. Because I thought we were friends for a second there."

  "We were friends, far as I'm concerned."

  Connie slowly shook his head. "Nah, no way. Friends don't bullshit each other like you bullshitted me. I trusted you, Larry. I enjoyed talking to you."

  "Me too!"

  "Yes, but how can I believe you now?" Connie said, the betrayed wife. "Every word, tainted by deceit. There's no place for it in my life!"

  "No place for what?" Larry said.

  "The lies, the treachery!"

  A man with a dog walked past Connie, keeping his head down, embarrassed to have eavesdropped on such intimate accusations.

  "You used me," Connie said loud enough for the dog-walking man's ears, and they both laughed, Connie and Larry, and Connie lit a smoke. "I miss our times on the bench together."

  "Me too," Larry said. "How do you think I feel?"

  "Tell me," Connie said. "I'm listening."

  "I'd rather be on our bench—it doesn't feel the same when I sit there by myself." Larry got out of the truck and leaned against the hood. "Give me a smoke."

  Connie tapped one out, gave him a light.

  Larry said, "I know you think I'm this two-faced person."

  "Can you blame me? You flat-out lied. All you wanted was info on the family so you could get your pictures, to go ahead and do what, sell them to some cheesy-ass magazine? What the hell do you want to bother with this family for anyway, with your talent?"

  "What do you know about my talent?"

  "You showed me," Connie said, "on the bench."

  "Did I?"

  "That whole series on your brother Gerald."

  "Oh, that's right!"

  "All the shit you had to do to the house, you know, to make it livable."

  "I remember," Larry said, his voice softening.

  Black-and-white photographs of a young man in a wheelchair in and around a Craftsman house, in a section of Los Angeles Larry called Silver Lake. The pictures, unsentimental, nonmanipulative, took you to the edge but wouldn't indulge you. Their power had stunned Connie.

  "This," he'd told Larry on their bench last fall, holding up the pictures, "is the real McCoy. You have an eye. A gift. Why are you looking at me like that?"

  "How am I looking at you?" Larry said.

  "Like I'm the only person who ever mentioned one good word about what you manage to capture with a camera."

  "You might be," Larry said softly. "Just might be."

  "Are you kidding me?" Connie said. "Don't you have any idea how good you are?"

  Shot: Larry's older brother Donny picking Gerald up in his arms, both of them laughing, putting him into the shower, the new stall built to specs according to Gerald's limitations. Shot: Gerald on the porch, taking aim at a palm tree with a .357 Magnum, the fallen leaves in clumps at its base. Shot: Gerald on a daybed in the darkened living room, his body at its still-young age already atrophying, his extremities gnarling up.

  Larry told Connie on the bench last fall that Gerald loved pussy, and dirty jokes, and that his brother had found a way to transmute his tragedy. "He never rolled over on himself." And that same day Larry had made what felt like a significant revelation to Connie: "Sometimes I think it's me who's paralyzed."

  "How so?"

  Larry stayed quiet, and Connie left it alone. And the real motive for Larry's presence got exposed soon thereafter, John pointing him out one day from the mouth of the service entrance.

  "There he is."

  "Who?" Connie said.

  "The guy who's been taking my picture."

  Henceforth Connie dismissed Larry as a charlatan, and everything about him grew suspect. Did Larry take those pictures of a guy in a wheelchair? Did he even have a brother named Gerald? And yet Connie also knew the connection was genuine, and even though he wanted to dismiss Larry as a fake, he really did find his photography truthful and compelling.

  "You're a real artist, Larry," Connie said.

  "Thank you."

  "I mean it." Then: "The mother, by the way." Connie floated the information out with a thought to reconcile the friendship. "Down in Washington."

  "Until when?"

  "Tuesday."

  "Not upstairs?"

  "Just John and the governess."

  "Okay."

  "So you know."

  "Appreciate it."

  "Tell you the truth, if it was just the mother you were after, it wouldn't be a big deal. She's a big girl."

  "When's Caroline coming back?"

  Connie stared at him.

  "What?" Larry said.

  "You don't get it. What are you—"

  "Why do you have to get on your high horse about it? They're just photographs."

  "The kids, they need to be protected, and you don't seem to get that. Their privacy is sacrosanct," Connie said.

  "Sacrosanct? Hate to burst your bubble, but those kids aren't all that innocent. Trust me, I got shots of them doing things I could have sold for a lot of money already, but I didn't, all right? I'm not looking to rat anybody out, okay—"


  "Listen—"

  "No, you don't understand! I have to make a living. Like you—you're a doorman, right? To pay the bills. I need to do the same thing. I'm not wealthy like these fuckers around here. I know how to use a camera and this work came up and I took it."

  "Go ahead," Connie said, "be a prostitute."

  "Listen to you—sacrosanct—who are you?!"

  "Cut your own talent's throat if you want, but I'm telling you, don't take pictures of John. He's a friend of mine."

  Larry gave a short laugh. "Friend of yours? You're a doorman. You polish the brass. You collect the garbage." Larry watched him. "I can't tell if you're serious."

  Connie glanced around before he produced his pint and took a hit. "Let me ask: what would brother Gerald think about you betraying your talent like this?"

  Larry locked eyes on him.

  Connie said, "Take a picture, it'll last longer."

  "Watch your step."

  "Point a camera at the kid again and see what happens," Connie said, and as he crossed the street he held up a hand to stop an approaching car like he owned the block.

  * * *

  Connie gave Carlos a good break, letting him go at 2:35 p.m., and Carlos in gratitude slapped a fresh pack of Chiclets into Connie's hand.

  "Thank you, Carlito."

  "To keep you breath fresh."

  No sooner did Connie get set up than the elevator rang. He rode up to fifteen and swung the door open onto the apartment's oval-shaped vestibule.

  John stood there, a grin on his face. Next to him, leaning on its kickstand, a bicycle.

  "Son of a. What the. Let me. Hang on a," Connie said. He hooked open the inner gate and stepped into the vestibule to take a three-sixty stroll around the bicycle beneath the oval-shaped chandelier. "Son of a b.i. biscuit. What's this, a—Bianchi?"

  "Italian," John said.

  "Check you out. Wait a minute now, this derailleur."

  "I know."

  "Ten-speed?"

  "Yeah."

  "Whoa. And this color's called what?"

  "Cobalt. Octavio around?"

  "Octavio's day off."

  "He said he could help me put the rack on."