Bridge of Sighs

by Richard Russo

  The boy blinked, turned his head away and again spat blood, then turned his fixed, glassy stare back on Perry, who waited a beat, in case he was mistaken and Three intended to speak, before punching him again. This time it was his tailbone that hit the pavement first, then, with a sickening sound, the back of his head, after which he lay perfectly still. But for the blood, he might have been taking a nap.

  Now, at last, other boys from the Hill found the courage to come over, the white kids stepping aside to let them into the circle. “Three,” I heard one of them say. “Wake up, Three.” But Gabriel Mock the Third didn’t stir, and one of the Negro girls began screaming, “He’s dead! Y’all killed him!”

  And for a long moment, I think everyone believed her, including Perry, who looked stricken, as if he were about to curl up on the pavement himself. But then Three’s foot twitched, and we saw him blow a blood bubble. “That,” somebody remarked, “is one dumb jig.”

  If anyone had a different benediction to offer, it remained unspoken, and I felt ill when I realized that this was the story that would be told in the corridors of the junior high come Monday morning. Perry Kozlowski’s terrible beating of a boy who’d offered no resistance would not feature in the narrative, whose thrust would be about the stubborn stupidity of a Negro who didn’t know enough to stay seated on the pavement, who’d been given every opportunity to avoid the beating he took, who’d brought the whole thing on himself. The dumbest white boy in the school wouldn’t have been that dumb.

  By now a couple of policemen had come out of the station and were trotting over, ordering the crowd to disperse. Jerzy, I noticed, was squatting in the midst of the Negro kids and saying something to Three who still wasn’t stirring. Perry had disappeared. I didn’t notice Karen standing next to the fire escape until she spoke. “Cheer up, Lou,” she said, sounding bored even now. “Could’ve been you, right?”

  THE NEXT MORNING, Sunday, I awoke with the vague notion that Uncle Dec had been in the house, that his voice, along with my parents’, had come up through the heat register while I was asleep. Whether he’d been there last night after I fell asleep, or this morning just before I woke up, I couldn’t be sure. Maybe I’d dreamed this. After all, he liked to close the bars on Saturday nights, and it would’ve been out of character for him to be up and about on a Sunday before noon, and more unlikely still for him to pay us a visit when all he had to do was wait for us to show up at Ikey’s.

  Downstairs, there was a note from my mother telling me she’d be back later in the morning. My father was already at the store, getting ready to open. I poured myself a bowl of cereal, wondering sleepily if something had happened but still too groggy to imagine what that something might’ve been. I was staring into the shallow pool of milk at the bottom of my cereal bowl when I heard my mother return, making so much noise I could tell she was angry. In the kitchen she paused at the sight of me, as if I might be the cause.

  “You’re just getting up?” she said, glancing at the clock above the fridge.

  I nodded, not realizing until that moment how late it was.

  “You slept twelve hours,” she said, examining me more closely now. “Did you have a spell?”

  “No,” I told her.

  She nudged my empty cereal bowl. “Are you finished, or do you want to stare at this some more?”

  “I’m finished,” I told her. “What are you mad about?”

  “I’m mad at this stupid town we live in.”

  I was glad it was the town and not me, though as a resident I still felt implicated.

  “I should’ve listened to your grandfather. Stupidity, ignorance and violence. The Thomaston Trifecta, he called it.” And with this she dropped my bowl into the sink where it shattered. “There,” she said, almost pleased, it seemed to me. “Perfect.” She commenced picking the larger shards out of the sink and dropping them into the trash. “That movie you went to yesterday,” she said when she’d finished. “There was a fight afterward. Did you know about that?”

  I was awake now. I acknowledged, warily, that I did.

  “Were you there?” she wanted to know. “Did you see it?”

  I nodded again, confused.

  “That boy’s in a coma,” she said. “He may die.”

  I tried to swallow but couldn’t. Again I saw Three lying on his back, still except for his twitching foot, a blood bubble pulsing at his lips.

  “My God, Lou. Didn’t anybody try to stop it? What did you all do, just stand there watching?” When I looked out the window, pink with shame, at where the Spinnarkles’ house had once stood, she said, “How many of you were just standing there?”

  I shrugged, as helpless now as I’d been the day before. “All of us,” I said. “Everybody.”

  “Everybody,” she repeated. “So it’s okay, because everybody was there?”

  “No,” I said, choking on that single syllable, the full force of my cowardice pressing down on me.

  “I know that boy’s father, Lou,” my mother said, and what entered my mind, unbidden, was He Kissed You.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, tears spilling out now.

  Of course, when she saw that, she took pity, sitting down across from me and taking my hand. “I don’t mean you had a bigger responsibility than anybody else,” she said.

  But her kindness was somehow worse than her fury had been. “Dad went into the Spinnarkles’,” I said. “It was on fire.”

  “Lou, listen to me,” she said, her brow furrowing and her own eyes filling. “Your father’s a man. You’re a boy. You can’t compare what a man does with what a boy does. Don’t worry. When you’re a man, you’ll be brave.”

  “Why?” I said, wondering what there was about me that made her think I’d be brave later when I wasn’t brave now.

  “Look, your father isn’t brave because he went into a burning house. He’s brave because…” She paused here, momentarily at a loss, it seemed, at how to explain my father’s courage. Then, when I’d just about given up on her ever completing the thought, she said, “It’s hard to believe in things, Lou, day in and day out. It’s hard to believe in Ikey’s every day, and it’s hard to believe in the town or the country you live in. You know how your father is, how he loves things? How sure he is that it’s better right here than all the other places he’s never been to? How he never doubts?”

  I nodded, thinking that one of the things he’d never doubted was me. “Louie’s okay,” he was forever saying, and his saying so made me believe it, too. That was why I needed him when I came out of one of my spells, needed him to put his big hand on my shoulder and say, Don’t you worry none about our Louie. Because until he said it, I knew deep down that I was not fine and never would be, not without his help.

  “I gave Karen Cirillo free cigarettes from Ikey’s,” I told her. For some reason I wanted her to know the truth, that I was a coward, not just yesterday but every day.

  But instead of making her even more unhappy, she just smiled that sad smile of hers, the one I always hated because it meant she knew the truth. “Oh, sweetie, of course you did.”

  Which did make me feel a little better. “Does Dad know?”

  “No,” she said. “That’s what I’ve been trying to explain. Your father prefers to see things a certain way. How they really are doesn’t come into it.”

  When she let go of my hand, I said, “Will he die?”

  She looked startled, then realized what I meant. “The Mock boy? I don’t know.”

  “What will happen to Perry Kozlowski?”

  “I don’t know that either,” she said, rising from the table.

  “He didn’t want to do it,” I told her, recalling Perry’s gloomy sense of duty. “He wanted to stop. But with everybody watching, he didn’t know how.”

  I didn’t expect my mother to understand this, not having been there, but apparently she did. “Oh, God,” she said. “If you’re trying to cheer me up, just quit, okay?”

  LATER, at Ikey’s, I learned that the
fight had led to other events that night. Gabriel Mock Junior, “drunk as a lord,” according to Uncle Dec, had turned up at Murdick’s, the West End gin mill, hunting for Perry Kozlowski’s father, who was seated at the far end of the bar and wondering out loud whether his son would have to go to jail for being the only boy in Thomaston willing to stand up and defend the honor of a white girl. The terrible injustice of this became clearer with each gin and tonic. Murdick’s bartender, hearing that Gabriel Mock was waiting outside and perhaps wearying of the maudlin Kozlowski, went out and found Gabriel leaning against the railing for support. “Go home, Junior,” he told the little black man. “I’m sorry about your boy, but you can’t come in here. You know why, too, so don’t make me explain it to you.”

  “Damn straight I know why,” Gabriel replied. “Same reason my boy ain’t allowed into the movies.”

  “That’s not true,” the bartender said. “That’s not what got your boy in trouble. A good dozen of your people were in that movie house, and nothing happened to any of them. So go on back to the Hill now.”

  “I ain’t goin’ nowhere,” Gabriel Mock assured him.

  “You better had, Junior. I mean it, too.”

  “Send him out here so I can cut out his gizzard,” Gabriel said. “Then I’ll go home.”

  “Who?”

  “Johnny Kozlowski. Who you think?”

  “Johnny Kozlowski didn’t do anything to your boy.”

  Gabriel Mock said he knew that. But what was he supposed to do—cut the gizzard out of a thirteen-year-old boy?

  “What you’re supposed to do is go home, before a bad thing turns into a worse thing.”

  “My boy’s lyin’ in the hospital,” Gabriel told him. “Can’t talk. Can’t even open his eyes. Just lays there like he ain’t even inside his own body no more. Only thing could be worse is if he dies. Somebody got to pay, so send the man out.”

  “Go home, Junior,” the bartender repeated. “I like you personally and I don’t want to call the cops after what just happened to your boy, but we can’t have this sort of behavior, so just go on home now.”

  “Send him out,” Gabriel insisted.

  An hour later the scene at Murdick’s had turned festive. Every time a patron entered or left, Gabriel Mock would be framed in the doorway, saying to send Johnny Kozlowski out. The sight of him out on the stoop, according to Uncle Dec, struck people as comical, so if ten minutes went by without anybody entering or leaving, somebody would go open the door to make sure he was still there. “Send him out,” Gabriel Mock would call in, which also struck people as comical, so when the next person entered or left, everyone at the bar swiveled on their stools and shouted, in a mocking chorus, “Send him out?” To which Gabriel, who seemed not to mind being a figure of fun, would answer “Send him on out. I’m waitin’.”

  Uncle Dec had actually been drinking in another gin mill until he heard about all the fun down at Murdick’s. “Hi, Mr. Mock,” he said to Gabriel, joining him on the top step. Not many men had a better rapport with Thomaston’s Negroes than Uncle Dec. “I’m sorry you’ve had such a bad day.”

  Perhaps because he’d been addressed with respect, Gabriel looked down at his shoes and spoke almost in a whisper. “Send the man out.” Uncle Dec said he appeared to be on the verge of tears.

  “Send who out?”

  “Johnny K.,” Gabriel told him.

  “He’s not even in there, Mr. Mock,” my uncle told him, though he couldn’t have known that, having not stepped foot inside. “How about I give you a lift home? My car’s right here.”

  “He’s sitting down there at the end of the bar,” Gabriel said. “You can see the man from here.”

  The door opened just then, allowing some inebriate to stagger out, and sure enough, there was Johnny Kozlowski, right where Gabriel had said. “Send him out?” came the chorus from inside.

  “That’s not Johnny K.,” my uncle said, apparently in earnest. “That’s his brother Jerry. You’ve had so much to drink you can’t tell ’em apart.”

  But Gabriel Mock was having none of this. “Jerry K. lives down to Atlanta. Moved there last year.”

  Uncle Dec had either forgotten this or never known it. “Really? He did?” It was disappointing and mildly embarrassing to have invented such a fine lie under duress, only to have it exploded so effortlessly by a tiny drunk Negro. He’d been confident of his ability to convince Gabriel that Johnny Kozlowski was his brother Jerry, since the two men did look a lot alike, but not if the latter now resided in Georgia.

  Apparently Gabriel didn’t hold this attempt to confuse him against my uncle. “What kind of place we livin’ in, where a Negro boy, all by himself, gets beat half to death and nobody does nothin’?”

  “People are no good,” my uncle conceded. “They enjoy shit like this.”

  Gabriel shook his head in wonder. “Enjoy seeing a Negro boy beat into a coma for goin’ to a movie?”

  My uncle nodded agreeably. “And in about five minutes, when the cops come and shoot you, those people in there will enjoy that, too.”

  “Let ’em come. I’ll cut their gizzard out.”

  Then he showed him the knife he was planning to use, and Uncle Dec pretended he’d never seen a switchblade before. When Gabriel pressed the button and the blade flew open, locking into place, he said, “Hey, do that again.”

  Gabriel, proud of the knife, obliged, folding the blade back into the handle expertly, after which my uncle took it from him. “Give that back here,” Gabriel said, astonished that a man who’d just admitted people were no good would do him like this.

  “I tell you what,” Uncle Dec said. “Let me hold on to it for a while. You can have it back in the morning.”

  Gabriel blinked at him. “How my gonna cut his gizzard out with my knife in your damn pocket?”

  Two police cars pulled up at the curb just then, disgorging angry cops, and a moment later they had the little black man facedown on the concrete, his hands pinned behind him. “Careful,” one of the cops said, “he’s got a knife.”

  “No, he doesn’t,” Uncle Dec told them.

  But the cops had been warned about the knife and couldn’t be dissuaded. They pulled his pants down around his ankles so they could inventory the contents of his pockets, and Gabriel was not, according to my uncle, wearing underwear. By then Murdick’s patrons had begun spilling out onto the sidewalk. “I thought them people were all supposed to have big dicks,” one man said when Gabriel was pulled to his feet before the assembled crowd. One of his front teeth had been knocked out in the struggle, and blood dripped down his chin, onto his shirt.

  Uncle Dec suggested that the speaker drop his own pants for the sake of comparison, but the man demurred. The only person still inside Murdick’s was Johnny Kozlowski, who took the opportunity to make himself a free gin and tonic, after which he sat back down on his barstool until last call, growing more and more convinced that the world was rank with injustice.

  THAT SUNDAY AFTERNOON I rode my bike out to Whitcombe Park, hoping Gabriel might be there, but of course he wasn’t. I knew he’d been arrested but thought he might be out of jail by then. I knew the small outbuilding where he kept the thick black lacquer and found the section where he’d left off, and I set to work painting, first one side and then the other, imagining Gabriel’s surprise when he returned. If he thought about it, he’d figure out who’d been helping and be grateful.

  But by midweek he still hadn’t returned, and on Friday when I arrived home with black paint on my clothes, my mother asked what I’d been up to. Normally, I went straight to Ikey’s after school, but this week I’d barely put in an appearance. When I told her I’d been painting Gabriel Mock’s fence while he was in jail, she sighed and said she wished I’d said something sooner. Gabriel had been let go from his job on Monday, so it wasn’t even his fence anymore. When I asked why, she said, “Because black men don’t threaten white men with knives.”

  “But Uncle Dec had it,” I protested. “When
they searched him—”

  “People saw it, Lou. He’d threatened a white man.”

  “But that’s not fair,” I said, feeling young and helpless and stupid.

  “Of course it isn’t,” my mother said. “Do you think it’s fair that man should spend his whole life painting and repainting a fence that belonged to a white man who owned slaves? Do you think it’s fair that if we hired Mr. Mock to work at Ikey’s people would stop coming to the store?”

  The way she said this made it clear that she and my father had already had a conversation about this, one I had no difficulty reconstructing. She would feel more deeply than he about the injustice done to Gabriel and his son, and she’d want to help if she could. But she was also what she liked to call a realist, and she, not my father, would’ve calculated the cost of offering a job at Ikey’s to a Negro. To some of our neighbors, it wouldn’t matter. Others would claim it didn’t, but then would quietly take their business to Tommy Flynn or drive to the A&P when they ran out of milk or bread. Despite our renovation, my mother knew Ikey’s was still a marginal business, and she understood just how little it would take to tip us out of slender profitability and into red ink. A tiny black man could maybe do it.

  Naturally, my father would disagree with her reasoning on both counts. In the face of her fury, he’d admit that Three and Gabriel had been victims of injustice, but for him it didn’t necessarily follow that it was our particular responsibility to find a remedy, however partial. People like us were responsible for our own families, not other people’s. Sure, the Negro kids had every right to go to the theater on Saturday afternoons, to sit wherever they wanted, next to whomever they wanted. But his more deeply held conviction was that people should get along and not start trouble that could easily be avoided. That had been the heart of what he’d wanted me to understand so long ago when he’d taken me on that milk-truck tour of the Borough. Yes, I had every right to be there. This was America, and I was an American. To him, though, it wasn’t a question of rights or privileges. It was just better all around for a person to know where he belonged. He wanted me to understand that the East End was a good place and ours a good family. Sure, you had a right to want something different, or something you believed to be better, but that right shouldn’t spoil what you already were lucky enough to have. He wouldn’t dispute Gabriel Mock the Third’s right to want what he wanted, but the desire itself would mystify him. What about all those cute little Negro girls? he’d ask my mother. What’s wrong with them? What would possess the boy to want so foolishly? What good did it do you to want what was bad for you?