The Boy Who Granted Dreams

by Luca Di Fulvio

  “Stay out of this this, kid,” said Greenie, and left.

  22

  Manhattan-Brownsville, 1923

  “Hey, pal, is that you?”

  The voice from behind him made Christmas turn around. He was lost in his own dark thoughts, gnawed by a growing anger. He saw a boy who might be a couple of years older than he, hollow-eyed and skeletally thin. He had a quick and knowing air.

  “I bet you don’t remember me, Diamond,” said the boy, coming closer.

  Christmas gave him a harder look. He had a pianist’s long hands, unnaturally shiny, smeared with wax. “Yeah, you’re …” and he tried to remember the name of the boy he’d met in jail after taking Ruth to the hospital. “You’re …”

  “Joey.”

  “Joey, right. The one who lifts billfolds,” smiled Christmas.

  “Keep it down, Diamond. I don’t wanna scare off every sucker in town,” said the pickpocket, glancing around. “How’s it goin’?”

  Christmas flapped a hand in the air, meaning nothing, still distracted by his rage. He shrugged his shoulders. He wanted to be with Greenie, protecting Ruth.

  “I was in the hotel till a week ago,” said Joey, shrugging too.

  “A hotel?”

  “The reformatory up north in Elmira,” said Joey, feigning indifference.

  But Christmas thought he could see that Joey’s eye sockets had grown darker and deeper. That the eyes in their dark hollows looked a bit dim. And when the boy stuck his hands in his pockets, he might have done it because they were shaking. “Was it hard?” Christmas asked. And he too pushed his hands in his pockets.

  “Naw, a vacation,” laughed Joey, joylessly. “You get to eat for free, and they let you sleep all day.”

  Christmas just stared at him, not speaking.

  Joey looked down, embarrassed. When he glanced at Christmas again, he was smiling playfully. “You make a bunch of new pals and you find out what real life is like,” he said.

  Christmas knew he was lying. But still — as with Greenie — he felt a stab of admiration. Joey was trying to make it out of the ghetto, too.

  “I asked some guys at the hotel. They never heard of your Diamond Dogs,” said Joey.

  “Well — we’re kind of new. But we’re getting known.”

  “What you got goin’?”

  “Right now we’re protecting a girl from a killer.”

  “Fuck! A killer! A real one?”

  “He already murdered two people.”

  “Sounds more like a job for the cops. No offense, Diamond.”

  “They pay us okay.”

  “Who?”

  “This Jewish guy. We keep an eye on his factory, too. He’s really rich.”

  “Yeah? Must be a Jew from the west,” sneered Joey.

  “How would you know?”

  “You don’t know nothin’ about Jews, right?” said Joey, with a knowing grin. “Well, I do. From when I was in diapers I heard all about Abraham and Isaac, the Flood, the plagues, the Exodus, the Ten Commandments …”

  Christmas frowned.

  “Get it? I’m a Jew, too, Diamond,” laughed Joey, and for the first time, deep in his shadowed eyes, there was a glimmer of fun. “Joey Fein, only they call me Sticky because lots of wallets stick to my fingers; son of Abe-the-Schmo, a Jew from the East who thought he was comin’ to the Promised Land. By me, he’s a stupid bohunk. Twenty years later, he’s still sellin’ neckties and suspenders in the street, with a cardboard suitcase and holes in his shoes. See why I know all about Jews? The ones from the west get rich; us from the east, we’re starvin’.”

  “I thought all Jews were rich,” said Christmas.

  “No kiddin’? Spend one day with me in Brownsville and you might change you mind.”

  “Where?”

  “Fuck, Diamond, I guess you never leave da East Side, huh?” Joey laughed. “Brownsville, Brooklyn’s dirty ass.” Then Joey stared at Christmas. “Hey, what you got to do today?”

  “Today? Nothin’.”

  “What about ya killer?”

  “I put Greenie on his tail. I can trust him.”

  “Then how ‘bout we go to Brownsville? I got a little job to do for the Shapiros. You know ’em?”

  “No, but I’ve heard people talkin’ …” lied Christmas.

  “Slot machines and some other stuff. They’ll end up bein’ somebody if nobody knocks ’em off first. It ain’t easy gettin’ old in this business,” said Joey with a knowing air.

  “Yeah, it’s not easy,” remarked Christmas, trying to look bored.

  “So? Are we goin’?”

  Christmas felt he was about to enter a new and dangerous world. He remembered all the warnings Cetta had given him from the time he was little. And he remembered lots of stories about boys who hadn’t wanted to listen to their mothers, who’d tried to outwit their own fate. He hesitated. Then excitement won out. I’m getting out of this place, he thought. He shrugged, smiled and said, “Let’s go.”

  Joey whistled, flung an arm around his shoulders and headed toward the Bowery BMT stop. When they were at the gate, Christmas started rummaging in his pockets in search of change.

  “Hey, no, pal,” said Joey. “Does New York give us anything? No, nothin’. And nothin’s what we give it back.” He glanced around, letting his gaze wander through the crowd in the subway. “They’ll do,” he said, moving towards a tired-looking woman dressed in black, holding a basket of wrinkled apples. A little girl, she too wearing black, was with her. Her face was wan, already old. Joey bumped against both of them, as if by accident, knocked over the basket, apologized, helped the woman gather up the apples and refill the basket. He gave her a pat on the shoulder and stroked the little girl’s hair, and then came back over to Christmas, winking as he showed him two tickets.

  “But they’re poor people,” Christmas protested.

  “Is that so? What I noticed was they had two tickets I could reach, Diamond. I don’t know who they are and I don’t give a fuck. That’s how it is, that’s life here in America. Every day a guy like me can get kicked around, beat up and left bleedin’ on the ground. You can be gone in a minute, and the people standin’ around pretend like they ain’t seen a fuckin’ thing. I ain’t gonna get kicked around,” he went on as the train rumbled to a stop. They got into a car and sat at the back. “Take Abe-the-Schmo,” said Joey, disdainfully. “My father,” and in his eyes there was a dull heat, as if from an ember. “He come here and he didn’t have nothin’. He meets up with a woman who don’t got nothin’ neither, same as him. They get married and they keep on not havin’ nothin’, both of ’em. Then guess what, I was born, so finally for the first time, they got something.” He spat on the floor. “Makes you think.”

  And as Joey kept on talking, Christmas peered out the window and the whole city seemed different to him, as if until now he’d been living inside a dream. A dream that had been shattered by his love for Ruth. That impossible love. Because he was a nobody and she was a Jew from the west. Because Bill had left his mark on her. Because now everything around him was dirty.

  “So when Abe-the-Schmo drops dead they’ll toss him in a hole at Mount Zion cemetery and — know what they’ll write on his tombstone? ‘Born in 1874. Died in …’ How the fuck would I know, ‘1935’ maybe. End of story. The End. And you know why? ‘Cause there ain’t nothin’ else, not one other cockamamie thing anybody could say about Abe-da-Schmo,” said Joey, his eyes bright with the same rage that shone out of Christmas’ own eyes.

  I won’t let them write ‘Christmas, end of story’ on my grave, thought Christmas.

  “We’re gettin’ off now,” said Joey. “We still gotta walk a ways,” he added as they came out of the station.

  Christmas looked around. He could see the skyscrapers of Manhattan on the horizon, blurred by clouds. The houses here were low. As if it was another city. Another world. He saw tired men, like others everywhere, poor like the others, coming off the first shift at the mill or the canning wor
ks, looking like ghosts. And on every street corner, gangly boys who glared fiercely at them, trying to look tough.

  “Hiya, Sticky,” said one.

  “How ya doin’, Red?” Joey replied.

  “How ’bout youse?”

  “I’m givin’ my pal Christmas here a guided tour, he’s one of the East Side Diamond Dogs.”

  “Yeah? Feel like doin’ some damage? We got a rat to take care of,” said the young thug.

  “And they think you can take care of it? Must be a bedbug, a rat, that’s outa your league,” said Joey, not even looking as he strode past.

  “Get fucked, Sticky.”

  “Have fun, Red,” laughed Joey.

  “Who was that?” asked Christmas.

  “Aw, he thinks he’s tough.”

  “Who’s a rat?”

  “Some guy got a death sentence hangin’ over him.”

  Christmas and Joey walked for another ten minutes, not speaking. Christmas looked around them. Yes, it was another world. But it was still the same world. Full of folks who couldn’t make it.

  “America don’t give you nothin’,” said Joey suddenly, coming to a stop in front of a small, ramshackle house at the corner of Pitkin Avenue and Watkins Street. “You can’t get what they promise by workin’ for it, like they tell you. You got to be strong enough to take it, even if you sell your soul for it. The important thing is getting’ there, Diamond. Not how you got there. Talkin’ about how to get there — only assholes do that,” and he pointed his forefinger at second floor window in a crumbling frame. “See that? That’s where Abe-the-Schmo ended up,” he said, heading into the house.

  The apartment was wretched, like many Christmas had seen on the Lower East Side. The aroma of garlic had been replaced by peppery spices and smoked beef; and instead of pictures of the Madonna or the Holy Savior there were other symbols, things he remembered seeing at the Isaacson house — a nine-armed brass candleholder, a star that Ruth had told him was the Star of David. Different odors, different images. Nothing new. And even Joey’s mother was a woman exactly like the ones Christmas already knew: a face that showed resignation, felt slippers that dragged across the floor as if there wasn’t enough energy left in her body to bend her knees, or as if she was afraid of breaking loose from the earth only to notice in mid-flight that she didn’t have anything to dream about.

  “Is the Schmo home?” asked Joey as soon as he’d stepped inside.

  “Don’t call him that. He’s your father,” said the woman dully, as if she were repeating a kind of mechanical litany with no hope of a miracle.

  “How ’bout a hunk of brisket, Ma? This is my pal Diamond.”

  Christmas smiled at the woman and held out his hand.

  “Are you Jewish?” the woman asked him.

  “I’m American …”

  “He’s Italian,” Joey broke in.

  The woman had reached across to shake hands with Christmas, but now she pulled her hand back and put it into the deep front pocket of her soiled apron. She turned away and drifted back to the kitchen.

  “Come on in here,” said Joey, herding Christmas into a cramped little room with a bed as narrow as the one Christmas slept in. He pried up a strip of flooring to reveal a hollow space with two switchblade knives. Joey picked up one and started to replace the section of floorboard but changed his mind. He took out the other knife and passed it to Christmas, saying, “Hey, how else are you gonna have fun?” He laughed and closed up the hidey-hole. “I’m goin’ out, Ma!” he shouted, opening the front door.

  From the kitchen his mother intoned something, neither a goodbye nor a blessing, but Christmas thought it might be both.

  “How come we need knives?” asked Christmas once they were in the street, knives in hand.

  “The job we’re sposed to do.”

  They walked a few blocks, hands gripping the knives in their pockets; not talking, until they came to a shabby diner on Livonia. Joey swaggered in and Christmas followed him, his heart in his throat and the hand holding the knife sweaty and numb. Joey nodded to the woman behind the counter and went to sit in a booth at the far end of the room.

  “What’ll it be?” said the fat woman, dark cotton stockings rolled around her ankles.

  “Two roast beef sandwiches,” said Joey, without asking Christmas.

  When the woman had gone back to the kitchen, Christmas looked around. A few customers. All with their heads down. All silent. “So now what do we do?”

  “We wait,” said Joey, leaning back against the tufted dark green seat.

  The sandwiches arrived. Joey devoured his voraciously. Christmas didn’t even touch his. He left it on its thick white plate with one chipped edge. He felt a knot in his stomach. The knife bulged in his pocket.

  “You ain’t eatin’?” asked Joey, seizing the untouched sandwich and taking a bite without waiting for an answer. He was halfway through it when a phone rang in the dark hallway. Christmas jumped in his seat. Joey laughed, spitting out a shower of crumbs.

  The hash slinger went to answer the telephone. “It’s for you, Stinky,” she said, holding the receiver in her hand.

  “Sticky,” Joey corrected her, irritated.

  “So you should maybe take a bath,” the woman said, passing him the phone.

  “Yeah?” said Joey in a soft conspiratorial tone. After a short pause he said, “Okay,” and hung up. “Let’s go,” he told Christmas. “The coast is clear.”

  “You owe me for two sandwiches, Stinky,” called the woman as they went towards the door.

  “Put ’em on my tab, fatty,” said Joey.

  None of the diner customers glanced up or moved a muscle.

  “Hey, how’s it goin, Sticky?” cried a boy who looked about twelve years old. They had just come out into the street. The kid was thin, small for his age, with bright, fearful eyes. He hopped from one foot to the other as if he couldn’t quite balance.

  “Keep the fuck outa my way, Chick,” said Joey, walking straight ahead.

  But the boy tagged after him, zigzagging. “Where are you goin’, Sticky?”

  “I’m warnin’ you Chick, this ain’t the time to bother me …”

  “You got a job, right?” Chick went on. “You’re headin’ on over to Buggsy’s, I bet.”

  “Shut up, Chick,” barked Joey, grabbing the kid by the lapels of his jacket. “How the hell would you know that?”

  “I heard it, is all …”

  “Shit. If you heard it, Buggsy could of heard it too,” muttered Joey.

  “Naw, I’m the only one what knows,” squealed Chick. “Can I come?”

  “Shut up and let me think.”

  “Somethin’ the matter?” asked Christmas.

  Joey took him by the arm and moved away from Chick, pointing a finger at him. “Lemme talk to Diamond. If you butt in I’m gonna bust your ass,” he said. Whispering, he told Christmas that Buggsy was a two-bit lowlife who ran a speakeasy where he didn’t want to put Shapiro’s slot machines. So he, Joey, had waited for the phone call from a lookout who told him that Buggsy was away from his shithole speakeasy, so it was safe for them to slash the tires on his delivery van without getting caught. “But if Chick knows about it, then Buggsy could, too. Maybe it’s a trap,” he said, looking at Christmas.

  Again Christmas had the feeling that he was at a crossroads. He could still refuse, he could give Joey back his knife and go back to the life he’d always had, before it was too late. But he was still gnawed by anger. And he didn’t want to go back to the life he knew. “Let’s go,” he said, clutching the knife in his pocket.

  Joey looked at him silently for a moment. “Yeah, let’s go, fuck it.”

  Christmas put a hand on his arm. “We better bring Chick,” he said softly.

  “Naw, he’s a pain in the neck.”

  “If he stays around here he’ll end up talkin’,” said Christmas. “If he’s with us, he can’t do any harm.”

  “That’s usin’ your gourd, Diamond,” Joey smile
d approvingly. “Us two, we’re a coupla tough cookies, right?”

  “A couple of tough cookies,” said Christmas, his heart beating wildly.

  “Move it, Chick,” said Joey, crossing the street.

  “I can come?” cried the boy, all excited. “Wow!”

  “But if you say one word I’m tossin’ you under a train.”

  “Hey, swell! Don’t worry, Sticky, I’ll keep real still, I swear it on my mother’s head, quiet like a fish, quiet like–”

  “Starting right now!” roared Christmas.

  The boy stopped babbling. There was a flash of fear in his eyes. Joey laughed. They started walking again, Christmas and Joey in front, Chick skipping behind them in silence.

  It was twilight when, three blocks further on, Joey pointed to a low squat building, nothing but a flat-roofed house next to a garage. Joey pointed to the speakeasy. Still in silence, he pointed out a length of wire fencing, supported by two iron tubes. “Da truck is in there,” he said. “There’s supposed to be a hole in the fence.”

  The three boys slipped along the walls until they came to the fence. A chain and padlock held a rickety gate closed. Joey looked around. “Good, Buggy’s car ain’t here. That means he ain’t here neither,” Then he turned to Chick: “Go see how big da hole is.”

  The boy clenched his fists, opened his eyes very wide, and hurried to the place where the fence was attached to the wall of the speakeasy. He moved it and turned back to smile at Joey and Christmas, skipping lightly in place.

  “Here we go,” said Joey, clicking open his switchblade. “You’re gonna do the front tires, I’ll take care o’ da rear ones.

  Christmas felt a knot in his throat that kept him from swallowing. The hand holding the knife wouldn’t move, it was as if it were petrified. Then the anger he’d been holding inside himself boiled up and he clicked the blade open. “Let’s go,” he said, more to himself than Joey.

  They crawled through the hole in the fence the mole had opened, as promised, and found themselves in a kind of dirt-floored courtyard. The van, a small truck with a wooden bed and oilcloth to cover the merchandise — contraband booze, naturally — was in a corner of the yard. Joey went resolutely to the rear wheels. Christmas squatted by the front ones and sunk the knife into them. The whistle it made seemed unbearably loud, like a cry, like a howl. Like the howl he would dig out of Bill’s throat, he thought, attacking the second tire. Once, twice, a third time. With all his strength, as if he were stabbing the knife into the body of a man named William Hofflund. Bill. With the fourth stab, the knife broke.