The Islands of Divine Music

by John Addiego

  Lu said he had no idea, but he guessed as high as three bucks. Olivera said more.

  More than three bucks? You fishin’ me? Okay, four-fifty.

  Try fifteen, Olivera said.

  Lu was a dreamer and a gambler with physical talents, a small, compact guy, barrel-chested but not muscle-bound, light on his feet even in his fifties. A Coast League third-sacker in his youth, a smooth dancer and loud laugher at a party, and the only one in his family of house builders who knew how to lay a foundation and raise a roof, Lu learned everything with his whole body, with his legs and arms moving. He’d cleared lots with his brothers and his old man, jumped freights during the Depression to pick hops and grapes in Napa, cut steel in a mill in Emeryville until the racket nearly ruined his ears. During the war, when housing was in demand, he cut and pounded planks and told the crew of paisanos what to do while his little brother, Joe, made the bids and the deals. Business talk from Joe at lunch flew over his head or made him close his eyes and think of music or women or thoroughbreds, so he’d usually change the subject as quickly as he could, before he fell asleep in his bowl of minestrone. Just take me to the goddamn site and let me figure it out, he’d tell Joe, and Joe would sigh and raise his eyebrows.

  Lu’s wife, Hen, succumbed to cancer when she and Lu were fifty, and Lu fell into a three-year drinking and gambling project which his daughter helped him overcome. She screamed at him for half an hour and tossed a dozen bottles out the window, including orange juice. One dead parent is enough, she said, and Lu said say-onara to the booze.

  By his late fifties, after decades of crew-bossing and job-dispatching, Lu was barely needed at the family business, and the business had changed so much that he barely identified with it. They worked small pieces of huge tract-house deals, they used staples and pressboard instead of nails and wood, used preformed, precut, precast crap, and there were so many goddamned regulations you needed Perry Mason before you made a decision. Also, they barely stayed afloat, even with Joe running things, because of the big guys in the industry. Lu felt like he was way out in left field most of the time, so he and his older brother, Narciso, got breakfast, read the papers, checked into the office with Joe and Sammy, the bookkeeper, looked things over, found out what their kids were up to that day (their sons drove trucks and forklifts), gabbed with Oliv-era, and, often as not, took off for the horses or a ballgame with him. Unofficially, they were considered the company’s trouble-shooters, which meant that when things were going haywire, if some outfit didn’t deliver the goods or someone was drinking on the job, Joe told his brothers and they took off in Ciso’s Cadillac to take care of the problem, but officially they were nonworking shareholders.

  So it might be that Lu, his stomach on fire with Olivera’s cigar scheme and his recent investment, may have been unconsciously gathering players for the wise guy’s game when he did his troubleshooting that morning. He asked his older brother: Okay, this son of a bitch, Sinclair, staggering around piss-drunk on that Hay-ward job—you know what he looks like?

  The Cadillac with the two nattily dressed middle-aged Italian guys pulled up next to the canteen truck at the construction site. Ciso, you hear what I’m saying? You know this Sinclair?

  Lu, that’s Jennifer with the truck. Narciso stepped out of the car and began talking with the pretty girl at the canteen. Lu could see him rocking back on his heels, laughing at something the girl had said. The big flirt with an angel for a wife and one flashlight battery for a brain. Lu got out, adjusted his tie, yanked on the pleat in his trousers, massaged his neck. The truck and Caddy were on packed clay near some tar tubs and a smelly outhouse. Lu found Pete Russo, the foreman for one of the big boys, who pointed in Sinclair’s direction. One of them colored guys your brother hired, Russo said with a smirk. The wind blew Lu’s tie over his shoulder like a scarf. He whistled for Narciso to follow him.

  The site was vast: skeletal tracts on landfill like a disaster scene, acres of roofless frames where families and furniture might have been swept out by a tornado. A whiff of bay stink mingled with cement dust, plaster, and the occasional smell of turds from the simple wooden privy. Lu and Ciso made a beeline for the two men Russo had pointed out.

  Sinclair saw them. Those two old wop dagos give me any shit, I’ll knock their greasy heads together, he told the old guy, Walker, who knelt beside him and loaded a staple gun.

  Huh, Walker said. The response meant something to Sinclair which didn’t help the young man’s confidence. The Verbicaro brothers were close now, the one strutting like a bantam rooster, the other trying to keep from spilling the contents of two Styro-foam cups.

  Which one of you guys is Sinclair? Lu asked as he approached.

  You’re lookin’ at him. Sinclair belched and wobbled slightly in his work boots.

  Give me a damned good reason why I shouldn’t can your ass right now.

  You guys want some hot chocolate? Ciso asked.

  What? Sinclair stared at Narciso.

  Hey, the man just asked you something.

  Naw, I don’t drink that.

  That what you say to somebody, Sinclair, they offer you something?

  You want some, Lu?

  Lu shot Ciso a murderous glance. Nobody never taught you how to talk to somebody, Sinclair? Maybe show somebody good manners?

  No, thanks, I mean. Sinclair shook his head, clenched and unclenched his fists. His hard hat swayed back and forth on the crown of his Afro. You satisfied?

  What kind of crap do you drink, Sinclair? Smells like beer.

  I don’t drink on the job.

  Oh, hey, I never mentioned drinkin’ on the job, did I, Ciso?

  Jennifer sold me these, Lu. Here. Ciso set the chocolates next to Walker, who laid the staple gun down and thanked him.

  Did I mention drinkin’ on the job? Lu addressed this question first to his brother, who was tying a shoe, then to Walker. Walker chuckled and shook his head. He stood now, a head taller than Lu.

  Young bucks, Walker said. He chuckled again. Ain’t you Lu Verbicaro? Played third base for the Missions?

  Lu gave the man his hand.

  Jimmy Walker. We tussled a few times.

  Jimmy Walker. Wait. Son of a bitch! Jimmy Walker?

  That’s right.

  Ciso, this guy is Jimmy Walker!

  Who’s that? Ciso brushed cement dust from his trouser cuffs.

  Jimmy Walker. It just hit me because I seen that name in the books last week. Who’s that, Ciso? You and Joe don’t know you hired the best goddamned pitcher in California?

  You guys play on the same team? Ciso asked, still working on his cuffs.

  Lu rolled his eyes. A hundred years of Jim Crow could pass under his brother’s nose unnoticed. Hell, Ciso, he had to play in the Negro Leagues. Used to play us exhibition and beat us every goddamned time. This guy struck out the DiMaggio brothers, for Christ sake.

  Vince DiMaggio, Ciso said, as if reciting prayers over the rosary beads. Dominick DiMaggio. Joe DiMaggio.

  Negro Leagues, Sinclair said. He sniggered.

  Lu and Walker sat on a stack of Sheetrock and smoked cigars. Cubans he’d gotten from Olivera, Cohibas with their rich coffee bite and chocolate sweetness, with a spicy tickle on your tongue that made you think of dark women with mischievous smiles. While Lu and Jimmy talked baseball, Ciso yakked with Jennifer and helped the girl close the truck to head for another work site. Then he climbed into his Cadillac and took off.

  Sinclair watched the old guys smoke their stogies, cursed under his breath, then went back to work. Since it was a hot day he finished most of the six-pack of Colt 45 malt liquor before lunch. He sang a James Brown song as he carried scraps of Sheetrock and shingles and tossed them into a gigantic Dumpster, and he staggered and almost fell a couple of times. The other men, most of them Teamsters and old rednecks who worked for a big corporation, gave the young man a wide berth or laughed and shook their heads at him. Like a dull knife, just ain’t cuttin’, Sinclair sang, you talkin’ aloud, bu
t ain’t sayin’ nuttin’.

  They were talking about Juan Maricial’s delivery, his sky-kick and windmill motion, when Pete came by to tell Lu that Sinclair was drunk again, and that Ciso had driven off, some time ago, without him. Walker was poker-faced at the news of Sinclair’s drinking. Of course Lu could smell the liquor on Walker’s breath, but he didn’t know what to do with the information. Lu could hear the singing above the racket of air compressors. It sounded at times like the young man was shouting at somebody. Talkin’ aloud! Huh! Ain’t sayin’ nuttin’! Ain’t sayin’ nuttin’!

  An hour later the idea hit Lu between the eyes, and he started to lay it across the table to his little brother, Joe, at the Topsy-Turvy before he knew what he was about. Joe was preoccupied with a hot pastrami and the details of a contract he was about to sign with a group of plasterers and lathers and didn’t really listen to Lu until he heard his own son’s name mentioned. Joe’s son was a heroin addict, recently, and dishonorably, discharged from the U.S. Marine Corps. Lu knew that dreamers take risks. Joe’s son Paulie was what he’d call a dreamer. He knew that dreamers made mistakes, sometimes very big mistakes, and that was what family was for, to help each other out after we make our mistakes, not to act like you can’t talk to your own kid because things are too screwed up. That was why Jimmy Walker was picking up the beer cans behind his punk nephew, and that was why Lu told Joe that they should find Paulie at that fleabag hotel in San Francisco and force him to work. Somebody had to do it.

  What’s this about Paulie? Joe squinted as if in bright light.

  What made me think of it was that nephew of Jimmy Walker’s.

  Jimmy who?

  Jesus Christ, Joe, you don’t know who you hired last month, do you?

  Walker, the older black guy, I got no problem with him, Lu. It was the young guy, Sinclair.

  Jimmy Walker?

  Johnny Sinclair.

  Jimmy Walker? Retires the side nine innings in a row, exhibition?

  I don’t get you.

  Augie Gallan turns to me and says he’d rather face Bobby Feller? Jimmy Walker?

  Joe’s jaw dropped, and a sliver of marbled beef fell onto his chin. You gotta be kiddin’ me. Why the hell is he workin’ for a two-bit joint like us?

  Laid off, somewhere in Emeryville.

  Christ, Lu, he was probably forty when you played him thirty years ago. You sure that’s Jimmy Walker?

  The great ones, Joe. I’ve seen it. They disappear and nobody gives a flying shit about them anymore. I’ve seen it.

  Lu waited until he was back in Joe’s Lincoln Continental before he returned to his plan. I got an idea, Joe. You listening to me?

  Ciso just took off on you again? Joe laughed. You better get that Imperial running.

  It happens. Hey, Joe, I got an idea for Paulie.

  Joe nosed the luxury sedan onto the freeway and scowled.

  You listening to me, Joe?

  Joe’s son, Paulie, had returned from Vietnam angry and addicted to heroin, and he was now living among derelicts in a hotel south of Market. All Joe knew was that Paulie took something called methadone every day and refused any help or communication from his father.

  What about him?

  Lu’s idea was to have Paulie work alongside Jimmy Walker and Jimmy’s nephew Sinclair.

  Nephew?

  The kid is a drunk which, excuse me for sayin’ it, but I gotta call a spade a spade here, Joe, which is not half as bad as your son.

  You want my son to work with a drunk?

  The kid is like all sorts of them kids now, Joe, he thinks he’s a Black Panther or whatever the hell it is. But I say you let a man like Jimmy Walker supervise the two of them, and you’ll see some results. Get your boy off his ass over there in Frisco. It’s time for him to move on.

  Lu was right that his nephew needed to be forced to move, and that he’d been so injured by the events of recent years that he had forgotten how. Maybe Lu’s dreaming included Paulie in the way men so often include others without consulting them. Maybe Lu and Ciso were able to imagine coercing their nephew into productivity in a way the young man’s parents weren’t.

  Lu knew that there is a time in a young man’s life when the entire world is spread before him, and to play ball and follow a dream, or to slip an arm around a pretty girl’s waist and laugh, seems a birthright. That time had come and gone too quickly for Paulie Verbicaro. He’d done something embarrassing in his seventeenth year, he had caused a local scandal and then left home, and the armed forces, and the Saigon whores who were really little girls or painted crones, and the daily fear that ran through his viscera had erased that hopeful hour of youth.

  Paulie had come home dishonorably discharged, a junkie with little meat on his bones, fewer thoughts in his head, and even less hope in his heart, and now he was a methadone addict on skid row. His clothes, even his bushy hair and beard, were stiff with sweat and filled with tobacco and weed and beer stink. He imagined that his rankness and filth and ideas had about them an air of honesty, a piece of the truth which the suits and ties on Market and the neat college kids playing flower child in their bare feet and cut-off jeans knew nothing about. What it was about had nothing to do with peace and justice or communism or Nixon or all the other bullshit people spoke about. What it was about was death.

  People you love die. Babies and mothers die. People who never smoked or ate a Big Mac, like his Aunt Min, keel over with cancer. Some nice kid maybe steps out into the street to grab her kitty and a fucking Toys “R” Us truck whacks her. There is no reason or plan behind it, except that life, or God Himself, is full of some cold shit, and that was about all that Paulie knew.

  His mother, his father, his sisters and brother, even a couple of old high school friends had come to see him a few times, delivered food or money to his room south of Market, but he knew he scared them off fast. A couple of druggy women were interested in him, probably the kind who need to care for the wounded, undoubtedly wounded themselves, fat earth mothers on acid, drunks and pot-heads who found something intriguing in a full-out junkie, or even a few who were drawn to a man who’d killed, that weird breed of woman who hangs around prisons and barracks smelling the blood, probably girls of mean-ass fathers with a killer’s gleam in their eyes who withheld the love these girls had always craved. Paulie didn’t know, but he needed a woman now and then, that soft creaminess of a woman’s skin, so he prowled at least once a week for a woman’s touch like a dog with an empty belly, but the only one he’d been in love with was unknown to his family, and she’d killed herself last spring in Saigon.

  May was half Asian and half French, and he wasn’t even sure how you spelled her name, but it was pronounced Gway May, and she was about thirty-five and had three kids. He met her at the pharmacy where she sold mostly penicillin to GIs with the clap, and they started sleeping together soon after, and he started proposing marriage days after that. Almond eyes and freckles, auburn hair, and a nose somewhere between the steeples along the Loire and the round huts along the Mekong, and all they could do was make love and hazard words for the things around them in French and English and Vietnamese. He would spend six months out in hell and then a month in her fishy apartment among the kids and the grouchy grandmother, naming things as if they were newly formed on the earth, and clinging as if their bodies might fly away in the night. From what he gathered she’d overdosed on barbiturates and rum about three days before his return from a tour. Always sad, the toothless grandmother told him, Gway May always sad.

  Heroin had seemed the only honest thing since. How could he explain? There was no logic about it. Heroin made him aware of something which had to do with being, which had something to do with May still being. Whenever Paulie tried to put it into words people shook their heads or, if they were stoned, nodded stupidly without understanding, and he knew he sounded just as stupid talking about it. Methadone made him feel permanently stupid and spaced out and kind of mellow, and it kept him from shooting up because the governm
ent knew and he knew that if he shot enough smack to get off now he’d kill himself. Methadone kept him out of the junk market, and only combined with a couple of joints and a quart of pale ale did it come close to good.

  Once a day Paulie stood in line for a cup of orange juice with his narcotic in it. They always gave him a donut and coffee, too. Once a month he stood in line for money from the government which required some blood work and proof of his daily orange juice, as well as a pep talk about how a slowly decreasing dosage would make him clean and ready for work. He always tried to picture himself working, maybe selling tickets at a porno theater, something that took no brains or physical stamina. Paulie had been a talented athlete in high school, but now it took a singular effort to walk to the county office, especially after a couple of joints or a quart of Rainier. He had to climb two hills to get there, and sometimes on the way back he’d buy lunch at this noodle house in Chinatown and stretch out with a quart afterward in that Chinese park where the old men played mah-jongg and the pigeons landed on his paper bag or his foot, and he’d get the best sleep of the month, even if a couple of pigeons pecked and shat on him, right there in the park.

  He was thinking about the girl behind the counter, the way her kneecaps looked so flat and small when she knelt to get something, when he fell asleep in the park in Chinatown. In the dream she reached across the counter to touch his cheek, and soon they were kissing. Full of curried noodle soup and beer and Uncle Sam’s controlled opiate, Paulie drifted under this girl’s dress until a soft hiccupping came to his ear. Somebody was right next to him, practically on top of him. It took Paulie a while to acknowledge this because part of his mind felt too good to let go of the dream while another part was accustomed to the vigilance of war. A face was hiccupping an inch from Paulie’s ear, and a hand was in Paulie’s front pocket, pressed right against his penis. Moving, in fact. Paulie cleared his throat, and the hand stopped moving.