by John Addiego
Paulster, you let me explain ’fore you kill me? Hiccup.
It was Roger the Lodger, that weird little speed freak who panhandled and stole and begged for a place to crash free in every room in the hotel, including Paulie’s. Paulie was so body-heavy tired he couldn’t move. Get your hand off my dick, Roger, he managed to say.
It’s stuck, man.
Stuck?
Promise you won’t kill me.
Promise. Stuck?
I thought your thing was the bankroll.
What?
I thought your thing was money, you understand what I’m sayin’? Then you roll on your belly and I got stuck.
Roger was a small, wild-haired, white gnome of indeterminate age who sometimes sounded like a streetwise black kid from Hunter’s Point and other times sounded like Grandpappy Amos from The Real McCoys. I’m sorry, Paulster, I didn’t plan to rob you, I come to warn you, man. He hiccupped again. Roll over, man, these Chinamen lookin’ at us like we really strange.
We are really strange, Paulie said. His body was so tired he didn’t know if he was able to roll over yet. His legs felt like wooden posts attached to a concrete torso, at the nexus of which throbbed one piece of flesh with Roger’s hand under it. His beard was damp from his own drool. Were you jacking me off, Lodger?
Oh, man. Hiccup. I kind of, I don’t know. Thinkin’ if I help you make it to the mountaintop, then when you step over into the promised land there be enough room to get my hand out, you understand? Hiccup. Not my preference for the entire situation, but I was tryin’ to make the best of a bad deal. Hey, I’m still stuck, you got to move.
Paulie managed to turn his pelvis enough to free Roger’s hand. What’s this bullshit about warning me?
There’s some mafia out to get you, and I swear to God, on my mother’s Bible, man, that is the God’s fucking truth.
You didn’t come to rob me because it’s the day I get a check from Uncle?
You think I pay attention on your schedule with Uncle Sam? Roger shook his little hand like a rag at the end of his arm and massaged his elbow with the other. I come to warn you, man, I reckon because I care for you. Then when I find you I thought maybe to seize an opportunity, you understand what I’m sayin’, maybe a dollar or two, but you gonna thank me you didn’t walk in on those bad motherfuckers. You owe them some money or something?
Paulie thought about this as he watched Roger pace back and forth and shake his sore hand like a flag of surrender in front of the dignified older men who sat holding tile dominoes at the little tables. Did he still owe money to that guy, Lenny, who’d sold him a few lids of dope last winter? Lenny had a scar like a shiny eraser mark across his nose and cheek where some goons had poured acid as a kind of late-payment fee. Had Lenny fingered him for some reason?
I was you, Roger said, still massaging his arm, I’d keep clear that hotel. Hey, Paulster, could you loan me a couple of bucks? Where you keep it, in your boots?
The third time that day the Cadillac parked in front of the hotel the Lodger saw them and nearly peed his pants running up the stairs to warn Paulie. He found him in bed with Janey. It was late afternoon, and the fog had come and gone, letting jagged lines of light fall across the empty bottles and roach-filled ashtrays from a broken Venetian blind. Roger stared at the obese woman’s exposed breast, which was larger than his head and had a stripe of light crossing its nipple, and decided to touch it by way of shaking her awake. Janey sighed. Roger hesitated. Maybe those old Cosa Nostras are looking for somebody else, he thought as he squeezed Janey like a rugby ball, but she smacked his hand and started cussing. Paulie snorted, lifted his head, and slept on, and Roger gasped about the mafia while Janey cussed him. Rapid footfalls, jingling pocket change, and a few whistled notes of Barbra Streisand echoed from the stairway. A strange harmony, two men whistling contrapuntally in the sonorous stairwell: People, people who need people, are the luckiest people in the world. Both Janey and Roger fled, the obese woman wriggling into her kimono as she made her way down the hall, but Paulie merely lifted his head again and fell back into a stupor until his uncles dragged him out of bed.
The brothers ate breakfast with their little brother and discussed the business and how Paulie was doing under Walker’s supervision. Joe and Paulie hadn’t spoken much since the dishonorable discharge, and although Joe had made several efforts, including a couple of lunches with his son during the work week, he couldn’t connect with the boy’s negativity, he said. He and Sinclair both seemed like the most negative people at their youthful age that Joe could imagine, always angry and sloppy and shaggy, never making eye contact, smelling of smoke and sweat and sour beer. Lu said Paulie was making progress, putting on some muscle again, and for that Joe was grateful.
Paulie discovered another honest thing that week of cold turkey, besides his own poor hygiene and withdrawal symptoms, and it was Johnny Sinclair’s anger, his pure hatred of white people. He didn’t know about all that Black Muslim, Black Power revolution crap and the other political things the guy said, but the hatred was something Paulie could recognize. They were shoveling gravel onto a conveyor belt in a concrete hole somewhere south of hell or Fruit-vale while the old guy, Walker, threw load after load into the hopper with a tractor of some kind. It was maybe 95 in the shade. Paulie’s strength was slowly coming back to his arms after a blur of days of staggering and vomiting and collapsing with brooms and shovels in his hands and getting picked up and handed a canteen by his uncles. He and Sinclair would move their bodies vigorously for a little while, especially the first few days when Lu and Ciso were there, as if the kid were competing with him, then drop back and have a beer in some half-hidden spot. They never spoke about it, except to compare brands and prices, and the old guy didn’t say anything because he kept a flask of brandy on him all day and worked in stony silence between sips, sometimes finishing two fifths by the end of the day. Paulie was outconsumed by the kid, but he added a couple of joints into the mix, which Sinclair only accepted a few puffs from after the fifth day. The methadone addiction ran its course.
In the mornings Sinclair and Paulie hefted the beer-filled cooler into the back of the pickup, where Paulie would ride with his head leaning against the lid to keep it from blowing off even as the morning joint started raising the lid of his skull. He knew that Sinclair couldn’t abide sitting in the cab next to a white guy like himself, and their tacit agreement to ride in separate quarters made Paulie smile for some reason. Even when the young man got hot and started talking like he might need to kick Paulie’s white ass or line up all the white people in the Bay Area and shoot them if he didn’t move out of the way or something, it made him grin. Go ahead, Paulie said finally, kick my ass, Panther Man.
You think I won’t? Sinclair asked him. He was drunk, swaying with his chest puffed out.
Right. I think you won’t.
You think I’m scared of your old Vietnam baby-killer bullshit?
I think we’re both fucked up and in our own movies, Paulie said. This was an idea he frequently called to mind about people’s behavior, overheard at some bar in the city. And your movie is this thing about being a black revolutionary, and my movie . . . Paulie stopped talking and stared at his beer can. His movie had to do with being the only man who could rescue this beautiful woman with three little kids in a dirty apartment in Saigon. His movie was about healing her sadness, taking her distant gaze and the mystery of her other worlds, that blend of French confection and Asian serenity, that attraction he’d always had for older women who knew more life than he, and letting her beauty and the tenderness of her loving heal his horror-filled mind. Bringing her home to the States, to a safe and quiet house in the country, to a life in which they would learn new languages to speak and he could be her protector and lover. He guessed that was his movie, but he didn’t explain it to Sinclair.
The beer can flew out of his hand, smacked into a pile of lumber by Sinclair’s hard hat. The boy’s hands were raised in fists. Paulie dipped into the
martial-arts stance he’d learned in basic. You shouldn’t fly off the handle like that, he said.
Fuck your white devil baby-killer ass, Sinclair said. He moved his feet quickly, aping Muhammad Ali, but he stumbled on a chunk of Sheetrock and fell. Jimmy Walker rushed over and helped the boy up, then slapped him, hard, in the face. For a few seconds the normally stoical older man yelled in his nephew’s face while Paulie stood in his karate stance, watching. The boy had tears in his eyes when he resumed work.
The anniversary of Min’s death found Lu moping and drinking Scotch and getting sick and breaking his bedroom wall with a fist and patching it up with Spackle and walking most of one night and sleeping most of the next day. He stopped by his eighty-six-year-old mother’s place, and the frail old woman told him to stop his moping. Enough of the sad-sack look, Rosari said. No more crying in your beer.
When he got back to his routine he learned that Ciso had bought a boat from Olivera, a boxy-looking red thing with an outboard motor and a shark decal on the hull. Tipped into the grass like some prehistoric herbivore, it reclined on a trailer out in Ciso’s yard next to the bathtub virgin with the Christmas lights.
The three Verbicaro brothers played nine holes before work that morning. Lu smacked two terrific tee shots but skunked all the greens. This left him with a pain in his stomach. Joe hit straight and beautifully throughout, and Ciso was out in the rough as often as the fairway, but he sank one chip shot which ricocheted off a tree and landed in the cup.
Upon their arrival at work Lu noticed Olivera’s door hanging slightly ajar and the glowing tip of a cigar showing in the shadows within. Olivera waved them over. His hanky was on his neck, mopping the sweat. In the dark warehouse Lu could see dozens of steel barrels. Is this it? Lu whispered. Is this our stuff?
No, no, no, this is some other shit. We need to move this pronto, the little guy said. Think you could get the team together? Strictly on the QT?
At day’s end Walker’s speech was slurred, his movements slow and deliberate. He was hosing cement dust off his truck when the Cadillac pulled up. Paulie watched as the older man leaned up to the passenger door to listen to Uncle Lu. He caught his uncle’s eye and came up to get a hug through the window. You boys listen to Mr. Walker here, Lu said. He’s got a deal for you.
Seven hours later the young man waited for Walker and Sinclair at a donut shop on San Pablo Avenue near the flophouse he now lived in on the west end of Berkeley. Olivera and Uncle Lu opened the warehouse door but didn’t turn the lights on. The men groped around for the heavy barrels, carried them to Walker’s truck, and secured them with rope. It took three minutes to load, five times that to drive to some garage in a Mexican neighborhood on the south end of Oakland, where, under Olivera’s supervision, they unloaded. Lu himself did more lifting than anybody else, even though the boys’ combined ages were shy of his by seventeen years. They moved the cargo until the barrels were gone, and on the last trip Paulie fell asleep in the little guy’s Buick while the driver bragged to Paulie’s uncle about the hard labor he used to perform when he was Paulie’s age. What we’re doing is saving a lot of money in taxes, he said. He slapped Lu’s knee and made a sharp turn which jarred Paulie awake. Otherwise I might as well dump this shit in the bay like it was the Boston Tea Party, right? Taxation without reputation or something, right?
Right, Lu said as he massaged his neck. Something like that.
Their ship was coming in. Tuesday night, Olivera said, and it really was a ship. In fact, it would take Ciso’s boat to make the catch. When Lu looked at him askance, the little guy reassured him that he’d done this kind of thing many times, down in Florida. Piece of cake. But we’ll need the team, too.
Paulie and Sinclair were lying in the shade of an old cistern filled with acid wash when Lu and Ciso found them. Shovels, potato-chip bags, and crushed beer cans lay at their feet. A Bic lighter and a slim box of rolling papers rested near Paulie’s stomach. The boys were shirtless, sweaty, and with their faces covered by hard hats and their jeans and torsos dusted with dry mud they looked nearly identical, the same taut musculature and sunken bellies, the same long arms and fingers. Couple of hoboes, Ciso said.
Mutt and Jeff, Lu added. I wonder where the hell Walker is?
A mixer truck pulled up to use the acid, and Lu asked the driver about Jimmy Walker and these boys. The driver had no idea. Sinclair lifted his shell at the noise of the truck and struggled to his feet, but Paulie slept on. The boy picked up a shovel and tossed some gravel into a wheelbarrow. The South Bay was in the middle of a heat wave, and new traces of sweat streaked Sinclair’s back as he worked. Soon Walker’s pickup appeared. The old pitcher was careful to cover a brown sack full of bottles with a sweatshirt before he went up to Lu.
Lu was surprised to hear the older man turn down his offer. I’m trying to keep this young one out of trouble, Mr. Verbicaro. Please don’t think I don’t appreciate it.
They sat together on the fender, a couple of old ballplayers in the dugout, chewing grass stems and spitting. Lu listened and nodded his head. That little guy. I don’t mean any disrespect. I just don’t want my nephew tied up in something illegal. Promised my little sister about that.
Lu pointed with his chin at the cistern and mentioned that he wanted the same for his own nephew. He told Walker that he didn’t think what they were doing was seriously illegal, exactly. More like a way to beat customs taxes. Not like smuggling dope or something.
Huh, Walker said. They were silent a moment, and Lu felt foolish. That little guy, I wouldn’t turn my back on him, Mr. Verbicaro. Keeps a few extra cards in his coat, I expect.
There were things you did that were a little bit illegal, Lu said, but didn’t really hurt anybody. Driving too fast. Getting a tip on the horses. And he thought, but didn’t say it, that it was similar to the way a man might enjoy another woman but not actually full-out cheat on his wife. He was thinking of Narciso. A little kissing and petting with some gal in a casino, maybe even a quickie some afternoon without actually taking all of your clothes off or lying in bed with a woman you didn’t even particularly like or even know. He was thinking of a married woman he’d met at Harrah’s Lake Tahoe.
Walker massaged the elbow of his pitching arm. His breath was rapid and ripe with fumes. Thanks, but no thanks.
The sun was falling toward the Marin Mountains, and the bay glimmered like a playground littered with bottle shards. Ciso smiled behind the wheel of the motorboat while Olivera poured champagne into paper cups, splashing the golden liquid onto his sleeve. Lu declined. He wanted to remain sharp and was reminded of his need for vigilance when Jimmy told Ciso to turn on the navigation lights and the driver sounded the Klaxon by mistake.
Paulie sat facing backward, fishing pole and champagne cup in his hands. The last joint of the day was coming on, and in the shimmering peaks of the water he saw faces, strangers who looked at him with ugly smiles. His line had no bait; it was a piece of theater devised by the little wise guy, who also wore a skipper’s cap as part of the ruse. Olivera yelled over the motor’s growl, some bullshit about finding pirate’s treasure on an island in the Florida Keys and having to throw it overboard when the Coast Guard came to search his boat. Paulie slumped over his pole and giggled at the way his uncles ate it up. It had been a scorcher in the South Bay, but here it was much cooler. They drifted some time with the motor off, and the sky grew darker and fuzzy with a few stars and peachy clouds, and the city of San Francisco glimmered against a scarf of fog. When ships aimed their way Ciso flashed the headlight a few times as if he knew some code of the sea and laid into the Klaxon, which always made Lu jump and curse. All four of them had lines in the water now, and Olivera called out to a couple of party boats that came near, and when people asked how they were biting the little guy made up some wacky fish story, each time increasing the size of the catch.
They ate some prosciutto and sourdough and checked their watches. Once a Coast Guard or shore police boat pulled up and blinded them with t
heir spotlight. Olivera hammed it up about fishing and asked the cops for advice. You’re getting a little too close to the gate, one of the officers said on the bullhorn, for such a small craft. I’d keep her east a ways. Tide’s moving out, and if it takes you out there, you’ll capsize.
Thanks, guys! Olivera said. We’ll start back.
Paulie fell asleep against his fishing pole and dreamed about May. She leaned over him in the apartment, which was now in San Francisco, and asked him to tell her what time she was in. I am always make the wrong time, she said. The problem, Paulie told her, had to do with their being in two different zones. He woke in the dark and heard his uncle’s voice. Lu was squatting beside him, talking about starting life all over again. He was saying something about getting up after you’ve been dusted by a beanball, getting the courage to swing away at the next pitch because there’s always another pitch. You understand what I’m saying?
Paulie grunted yes.
We’re not beat. This life’s not going to beat us. Your Uncle Ciso, he’s got Lady Luck in his goddamned pocket. The two of us, we got to hustle, but we ain’t beat.
That’s it, Olivera said. He was pointing his binoculars at a huge ship that had just crossed under the Golden Gate Bridge from the high seas. Goddamn it, that is it.
Ciso drove the boat, with its boxy cathedral hull, straight for the towering ship until Olivera told him to veer right. He veered and honked and flashed a couple of times, and kept going long after Olivera and Lu told him to stop. The ship passed them not more than thirty feet away, like a city block of small windows and massive walls sliding past along the San Andreas Fault, carving the black liquid surface between them. It hid the hills and the city and the moon for a while, and it took their breath away with its size and speed. The men gaped in silence until it passed.