Shoot the Moon

by Joseph T. Klempner

  “Good night, Daddy,” she says.

  “Goodnight, angel.”

  He phones his mother-in-law to tell her that the test is over and that they’re back at his place.

  “How’s our little girl?” she asks him.

  “She seems okay,” he says. “I just put her to bed.”

  “You think she’s safe there?”

  “Absolutely,” he says.

  “Okay,” his mother-in-law says. “But keep an eye on her, all right? You can never be too careful, you know.”

  “I will,” he assures her.

  In a basement apartment across the street and two doors down, Daniel Riley sits up straight. “Did you hear that?” he asks.

  “What?” Ray Abbruzzo asks.

  “I just put ‘our little girl’ to bed, where she’ll be ‘safe.’ Now if they’re not talking about a load of drugs, my mother’s not Irish.”

  “Could be,” Abbruzzo agrees. “Could be.”

  “You bet it could be,” Riley says. “I’m telling you, Ray - the fucking Mole is back in action.”

  The word in the South Bronx that evening is that a new load of shit has hit the street and that Big Red’s people have got it. It’s being sold in nickles and full loads - street talk for bundles. It’s called “Red Menace” on 141st Street; on 125th, it’s packaged as “Red Devil.” And the talk is that downtown they’re moving the same stuff as “Red Dawn,” and up by the bridge they’re calling it “Spanish Red.”

  By nine o’clock, more than 20,000 bags have been sold. By midnight, except for a few leftovers here and there, it will all be gone, out onto the streets of the South Bronx and Harlem and Washington Heights, into the veins and up the nostrils of the city’s walking dead.

  Goodman spends Sunday afternoon as he always does, with Krulewich, the Whale, and Lehigh Valley. The Giants are playing the Cowboys at Dallas, so the game doesn’t start until four o’clock New York time. In deference to Krulewich’s poor eyesight, they turn the TV volume down and listen to the play-by-play on the radio. The Whale’s not happy about the arrangement, because he really likes John Madden, who’s one of the TV announcers. But the radio guys describe the action in a lot more detail, and are Giants fans themselves, so they let you know whenever the refs give the Cowboys a favorable call.

  On this day, the Giants are no match for either the Cowboys or the refs, and the game’s been pretty much decided by halftime.

  GIANTS 6

  COWBOYS 20

  Nevertheless, the Whale wants to keep watching, to see if the total final score is more or less than the forty-one-point “over/under” line that the bookies have predicted. But he’s outvoted three to one in favor of hearts, the game Lehigh taught them last Sunday.

  Goodman plays cautiously again, all but forgetting to look for an opportunity to shoot the moon. But nobody else goes for it, either, and the final score after five hands is much closer than last time.

  KRULEWICH 41

  WHALE 39

  GOODMAN 31

  LEHIGH 19

  “You guys are gettin’ the hang of it awright,” Lehigh tells them. “But you’re still no match for the champ!”

  They turn the ball game on in time for Goodman to see that at least he did better than the Giants.

  GIANTS 9

  COWBOYS 34

  “I knew they’d be over!” moans the Whale. “I coulda cleaned up! I coulda won a fortune!”

  “The spinal fluid shows a few abnormal cells,” Dr. Gendel tells Goodman over the phone Monday morning.

  “What does that mean?” Goodman asks.

  “It’s hard to say, really. She could have some kind of low-grade infection in the meninges, the lining of the brain. We’ll put her on an antibiotic and see what that does. But what I’d really like to do is another MRI, this time with contrast.”

  A chill runs through Goodman’s body. “That’s where you inject dye into her?”

  “That’s right. It gives us much more definitive pictures.”

  Goodman’s afraid to ask where they inject the dye. He remembers the huge syringe, tipped with its terrible needle; only this time, he pictures it filled with a dark purple liquid, aimed again at the base of his daughter’s spine, or perhaps the back of her neck, or her temple, or the spot between her eyes.

  “You really think this is necessary?” he asks.

  “I wouldn’t be suggesting it if I didn’t,” the doctor tells him. Goodman thinks he detects a note of defensiveness there. “But there is a little problem before we can go ahead.”

  “What’s that?” Goodman asks, dreading more bad news.

  “My office manager tells me that you’ve made no payments on your bill. And when she checked with the MRI facility, they told her it’s the same story with the first test they did. Apparently, there’s no insurance? Anyway, they say they won’t do another one unless they’re paid in full for the first one and up front for the second one.”

  “I’ve had some trouble . . .” Goodman starts to say, but his voice trails off.

  “Well,” Dr. Gendel says, “I’d hate to have to make a diagnosis without the proper tools. What is it you do for a living again?”

  “I’m an accountant, a bookkeeper.”

  “Right. Well now, you wouldn’t want to attack a complicated accounting problem without your . . . your calculator, would you?”

  “No,” Goodman says, feeling patronized. The truth is, he often does figures by hand, trusting himself more than machines, and also because he likes numbers - working with them pleases him. But he knows the point would be lost on the doctor, so he keeps it to himself. “I’ll see what I can do,” he says instead.

  He says nothing to Kelly about the conversation. She’s spent the weekend recuperating. She had a headache most of Saturday, but then again, it might not have been as a result of the spinal tap. Her back is still sore from the needle.

  “Get dressed, angel,” he tells her. “I’ll drop you off at Grandma’s on my way to work.”

  “Can I stay with Carmen instead?” she asks.

  “I’m sure Carmen has things she has to do.”

  “Nothing that Kelly can’t do with me,” Carmen says.

  “Please, Daddy?”

  “I don’t know-”

  “Pleeeeeze?”

  “Go to work, Daddy,” Carmen says. “The women in your life will be just fine.”

  That seems to settle it.

  At work, Goodman uses a double-entry system to hide the check he wrote to Mount Sinai. To anyone looking at the books, the entry will show up as a legitimate operating expense. It’ll be a good three weeks before the canceled check itself comes back with next month’s bank statement.

  Manny’s there but, as usual, pays no attention to Goodman and his work. He’s upset about the price of the new Goodyears and preoccupied with a tire bath that’s suddenly sprung a leak and flooded the back of the shop.

  Around 3:30, Goodman calls home to find out how “the women in his life” are doing.

  “We baked bread!” Kelly tells him. “I never knew you could do that, did you?”

  “No, I never did.”

  “And we’re going to make curtains. Carmen’s going to teach me how to sew.”

  “That’s terrific,” he says, wondering whatever happened to the feminist movement. “Let me talk to Carmen, okay?”

  Carmen says, “Hello,” just as there’s a clicking noise on the line.

  “What’s that?” Goodman asks.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “Sounds like somebody’s tapping your phone. You into something I don’t know about?”

  “Right,” he says. “That’s why I’ve got all that money you see sitting around the apartment.”

  “So that explains it,” she laughs.

  “How you guys doing?” he asks.

  “Great,” she says. “But hurry home. We miss you.”

  After he hangs up, he tries to remember if he’s ever been told that before.

  “Stop playi
ng with those buttons!” Ray Abbruzzo yells at Daniel Riley.

  Riley takes his hand away from the equipment. “You hear that?” he asks.

  “Yeah,” Abbruzzo says. “The part about them hearing noises and figuring their phone’s tapped.”

  “That’s nothing,” Riley assures him. “Only somebody who’s doing something wrong thinks his phone’s tapped. Ever hear of an innocent guy thinks that way? And did you hear the bit about there being money in the apartment?”

  “I think he was being sarcastic, like.”

  “No way. This guy made a move over the weekend. I bet you anything he unloaded a package, and we fuckin’ missed it.”

  Abbruzzo yawns. “You hungry?” he asks.

  * * *

  That night, with Kelly asleep on the sofa bed, Goodman and Carmen sit across the card table from each other, sipping the last of their coffee. The last crumbs of homemade bread dot the tabletop.

  He’s told her about his conversation with the doctor, told her about his inability to pay for his daughter’s tests, told her about his pile of overdue bills. She’s placed one hand over his, and now she strokes it softly, the same way he watched her stroke the kitten not long ago.

  “I could go back to work,” she says softly.

  “To the street?” He pulls his hand away.

  “It’s not the street,” she says. “I was a call girl, not a streetwalker.”

  “No way,” he says. “I’ll rob a bank before I let you do that.”

  “I could go back to waiting tables,” she suggests.

  “Your $5 an hour, and my two afternoons a week,” he laughs.

  She takes his hand back in hers, this woman who’s just offered to sell her body to strangers in order to help him pay his bills. He sits there, listening to the hum of the refrigerator motor, until it abruptly shuts off, leaving the rise and fall of Kelly’s breathing from the sofa bed as the only sound in the room. He looks over at her, and for some reason he remembers how upset she’d been at the hospital over the prospect of her naked butt being exposed. He’s struck by just how vulnerable she is, how very fragile. He knows he has to do whatever it takes to protect her.

  And right then and there, Michael Goodman does the unthinkable. Turning slowly back to Carmen, looking her straight in the eye, he does precisely that which he’s promised himself he will never do.

  “Tell me about your brother,” he says.

  Tuesday morning, Goodman makes Kelly bundle up, and they walk to Central Park. They enter at Ninetieth Street and circle the reservoir. It looks full from all the rain they’ve had lately. There’s ice at the very edges.

  “Do people really drink this water?” Kelly asks him.

  “I think so,” he says, though he’s not really sure. He remembers hearing that the city gets its water from upstate somewhere.

  “It looks so yucky,” she says. “All those leaves and allergy.”

  “Algae.”

  “I like to call it allergy,” she says. “How come Carmen couldn’t come with us?”

  “She’s got something she has to do.”

  The thing Carmen has to do is to call her brother. Last night, after Goodman had broken his promise to himself and asked her about him, she’d naturally wanted to know why. So he’d started at the beginning: He’d told her about his discovery of the blue plastic bags in the spare tire down in Fort Lauderdale. He’d described his efforts to turn the drugs in, his decision to bring them to New York, his encounter with Russell, and the disaster in Carl Schurz Park. He’d also included the burglary of his apartment, and the search of it by the police later on. But he’d stopped short of telling her precisely how much heroin there is or just where he’d hidden it, and she hadn’t pressed him for details there. He was grateful for that - he figured the less she knew about those things, the better for her.

  Yes, she’d said, her brother Vincent - Vinnie to everybody but her - had boasted to her more than once that he’d been involved in big drug deals involving both cocaine and heroin. She had no idea if he was being truthful or not, but she’d learned over time not to put anything past him.

  “But Michael,” she’d said, “do you have any idea how dangerous this is? Do you know what could happen to us if we get caught?”

  “Not we, paleface,” he’d said. “I just want you to introduce me to your brother. Then I’ll take care of the rest. I want you to stay completely out of it.”

  “Right. You’ll take care of it like you did when they left you in your undershorts.”

  “I’ll be more careful,” he’d told her. “And if I screw up again, so be it. That way, if I go down, I go down alone. I don’t have to destroy your life, too.”

  She’d looked at him hard at that point and said, “You saved my life, Michael. If this is what you decide you’re going to do, I want to help you.”

  “No,” he’d said. “Besides, all I did was bring you in out of the rain.”

  “No,” she’d insisted, before repeating her words slowly and emphatically. “You saved my life.”

  They’d gone to bed shortly after, she on the bed with Kelly and Larus and Pop-Tart, he on the floor, fortified by her promise to call her brother in the morning. But, explaining that she was now more concerned than ever that his phone might be tapped, she’d told him that she’d do it from a payphone. Just to be on the safe side.

  “Are there fish in reservoirs?” Kelly asks him now.

  “I suppose so,” he says.

  “How come they don’t freeze?”

  “They’re New York City fish,” he explains. “They’re tough.”

  “How come they don’t get sucked into the pipes that take the water to our faucets?”

  “They’re too big.”

  “How about baby ones?”

  “I imagine there are screens to keep them out,” he says.

  “How about their poops? Can’t they get through the screens?”

  “Maybe,” he has to admit. “But then they treat the water with chlorine and stuff before it goes into our faucets.”

  “It still sounds yucky to me,” she says.

  That evening, after Kelly’s asleep, Carmen informs Goodman that she’s succeeded in reaching her brother. As he waits for whatever she’s going to tell him next, Goodman finds himself half-hoping that it’ll be that Vinnie’s interested in the idea, and half-hoping to hear that he wants nothing whatsoever to do with it.

  In fact, the news turns out to be a combination of the two.

  “He’s interested all right,” she says, “but he’s afraid to meet you. Thinks you might be a narc. Are you a narc, Michael?”

  “I think I can safely say that I am not a narc,” he says.

  “I actually took the liberty of telling him that. But you’ve got to understand Vincent’s pretty paranoid. When he heard what I was talking about, he made me give him the number of the pay phone I was at, so that he could go to a pay phone and call me back at my pay phone. I swear, I felt like I was in the CIA or something. Next he started asking me if I was angry at him for anything. He finally admitted he’s afraid I might be trying to set him up.”

  “So-”

  “So, after all that, he said he wants in, but only if he can send someone else to deal with you.”

  Goodman digests the news for a moment. “So what do you think?” he asks her.

  “I don’t know, Michael. You asked me to call him; I called him. He said he’s interested. It’s up to you now.”

  “Who’s this guy he wants to send me?”

  “They call him T.M.,” she says. “I met him once or twice years ago. He went to school with Vincent, taught him how to steal cars.”

  “Hey,” Goodman says. “What are friends for, anyway?”

  She laughs, but it’s not one of her best. It’s clear to him that she has reservations about this business. He wishes he had a choice, wishes he could come up with some other way to raise the money.

  “So,” he says. “Let’s say I want to get together with Vinc
ent’s guy, T-”

  “T.M.”

  “T.M. How do I arrange that?”

  “Vincent’s pay phone is going to call my pay phone at exactly noon tomorrow,” she says. “If you want to do it, you go there with me. If not, you pass. Only, one thing?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Call him Vinnie, okay? Anybody but me calls him Vincent, he’s liable to freak out. Somebody once told him it’s a fag name.”

  “Fair enough,” Goodman says. “Vinnie it is.”

  Abbruzzo and Riley are off duty that evening, and the plant is being manned by the two OCCB detectives, Weems and Sheridan. They’ve been on for almost seven hours, with hardly a single phone call to log in.

  “I’m telling you, it’s too quiet in there,” Sheridan says. “Something’s going down.”

  “Nah, they’re probably in the sack, playing Hide the Salami.”

  “That little fucker?” Sheridan laughs. “He don’t look like he can even get it up.”

  “Don’t be so sure,” Weems says. “Those little guys can surprise you sometimes.”

  But at that moment, the only person Michael Goodman is surprising is himself. He lies on his now-familiar spot on the floor, wondering how it is that he’s so quickly yielded to temptation all over again, barely a week after getting so badly burned the first time.

  For already he knows that he’ll be with Carmen when she goes to the pay phone at noon tomorrow. He doesn’t even allow himself the luxury of pretending that he may yet decide to pass. No, he’ll go, and he’ll take his chances again, even if that means taking his lumps again.

  His hope, as he lies there in the dark of his apartment, staring up at the ceiling, is that this time he’ll manage to be just a little bit smarter about it.

  It’s already ten minutes past noon on Wednesday when Goodman turns to Carmen and asks, “This guy T.M., he’s not black by any chance, is he?”

  They’ve been waiting in the cold at a pay phone at the corner of Eighty-sixth and Third - the same phone from which Carmen called her brother Vincent (“Vinnie to you”) yesterday. Kelly is with them, working on a pretzel they bought from a chestnut seller. The chestnuts looked yucky, she said.