by Pete Hamill
“I wish you could eat something,” she said, sipping her tea, but not pouring a cup for Michael because she knew he could neither eat nor drink before serving mass.
“I’ve got to receive Communion, Mom.”
“Well, hurry home. There’ll be bacon and eggs.”
Usually he was famished and thirsty on mornings before mass, but the excitement of the storm was driving him now. He took his mackinaw from the closet beside the front door.
“Wear a hat, lad,” she said.
“This has a hood, Mom,” he said, “and it’s real warm. Don’t worry.”
She took the starched surplice from the clothesline and covered it with butcher paper, closing the wrapping with Scotch tape. Then she kissed him on the cheek as he opened the door to the hall. Halfway down the first flight of stairs, he glanced back, and she was watching him go, her arms folded, her husband smiling from the wall behind her, right next to the dead president of the United States.
I wish she wasn’t so sad, he thought.
And then, leaping down the three flights of stairs to the street, he braced himself for the storm.
2
As the boy stepped out of the vestibule, into what Jack London called the Great White Silence, he felt as if his eyes had been scoured. Down here, in those first moments on the open street, the snow wasn’t even white; here in its whirling center the storm was as gray as the crystal core of a block of ice. Or the dead eyes of Blind Pew in Treasure Island. Michael blinked again and again, his eyelids moving without his command, as the tears welled up from the cold. He rubbed his eyes to focus and felt cold tears on his cheeks. He rubbed until at last he could see. The only thing moving was the snow, driven wildly by the wind.
He plunged his hands into the mackinaw’s pockets. And his gloves were not there. Goddamn. He remembered leaving them to dry beside the kerosene stove in the living room. Wool gloves, with a hole in the right forefinger. Thinking: I should go upstairs and get them. No. I can’t take the time. I’ll be late. Can’t be late. And wishing he had a watch. I’ll just keep my hands in my pockets. If they freeze, I’ll offer it up.
Then he started to walk, the wrapped surplice under his right arm, hands in his coat pockets. In this block of Ellison Avenue he was sheltered in part by the four-story buildings, and he stepped lumpily through the drifts piled against the tenements, wishing he had snowshoes. As he squinted tightly and saw better, a phrase that he had memorized from Jack London rose in his mind—sole speck of life journeying across the ghostly wastes of a dead world—and he tingled with excitement. These were ghostly wastes. This was a dead world. He was the sole speck of life.
The fallen snow was up over the tops of parked cars. It covered the newsstand outside Slowacki’s candy store, which for the first time in memory was dark. All the other shops on the block were dark too, their doorways piled with snow. There wasn’t even a light in Casement’s Bar across the street, where Alfred the porter usually mopped floors before the start of business. Michael could see no sign of a trolley car, no traffic, no footprints in the snow. Somewhere, the wolves howled. Perhaps, up ahead, he would find the Male-mute Kid. Or Sitka Charlie. He would build a fire on the frozen shores of Lake Lebarge. Up ahead were the wild bars of Dawson. And the Chilkoot Pass. And the lost trail to All Gold Canyon. Here on Ellison Avenue, Michael Devlin felt like so many of the men in those stories: the only person on earth.
He was not, however, afraid. He had been an altar boy for three years, and the route to Sacred Heart was as familiar as the path through the flat he’d just left behind. Wolves howl, the wind blows, there is no sky. But there is no danger here, he thought. Here I am safe.
Then he stepped past Pete’s Diner on the corner of Collins Street and the wind took him. No simple wind. A fierce, howling wind, ripping up the street from the harbor, a wind angry at the earth, raging at its huge trees and proud houses and puny people. The wind lifted the boy and then dropped him hard and tumbled him, whipping him across the icy avenue. Gripping the surplice with one hand, Michael grabbed with the other for something, anything, and found only ice-crusted snow.
He rolled until he was thumped against the orange post of a fire alarm box.
“Holy God,” he said out loud. “Holy God.”
He gasped for breath, sucking in darts of snow, his nose clogged with ice. But if he was hurt, he was too cold to know what part of him was broken. Still holding the surplice, he skittered on hands and knees and braced his back against the leeward side of the fire alarm box and huddled low, where the wind wasn’t so strong. No pain. Nothing broken. He looked around, keeping his head down, and realized he’d been blown across all six lanes of Ellison Avenue. He saw the heavy neon sign above the entrance of Unbeatable Joe’s bar dangling from a wire, tossing and shaking in the wind, then crunching against the side of the building. But he couldn’t see very far down Collins Street, not even as far as home plate on the stickball court. Everything was white and wild. Then he saw that his mackinaw was coated with snow, and he remembered how characters in those Yukon tales always froze to death if they remained still, or if they fell asleep. They huddled with dogs, they held tight to wolves; anything for warmth. Or they rose and walked. I have to get up, he thought. If I don’t, I will goddamn well die. Michael shoved the surplice under his mackinaw, stuffing it into his belt. Then, crouching low, he began to run.
He ran into the wind, and made it across Collins Street, grabbing for the picket fence outside the factory of the Universal Lighting Company. The building rose above him like an ice mountain from the Klondike, one of those treacherous peaks that killed men in winter and drowned them in spring, washing their bodies into the Yukon River. The black iron pickets were so cold they seemed to burn his bare hands, and he was afraid the skin would be torn off his palms. But his skin held, and he pulled himself along until he was free of the hammering force of the wind.
At Corrigan Street he repeated the process: head down, crouched, falling once, then up again, until he reached the shops untouched by the wind. Away off, about three blocks, he could see the ghostly shape of a trolley car. Its lights were on but it wasn’t moving. High above the avenue, the cables that gave the trolleys their power were quivering like bowstrings. Michael paused under the shuddering marquee of the Venus, gazing at the showcards offering The Four Feathers and Gunga Din. He’d seen both at least three times and tried to conjure warm images of India or the vast deserts of Africa, with Fuzzy Wuzzies charging in the dust and British soldiers sweating in the heat. The images only made him feel colder. And for the first time, he was afraid.
I have to go now, he thought. I have to turn this corner and go up Kelly Street, past the armory, past the Jewish synagogue, have to cross MacArthur Avenue, have to turn right at the park. I have to do this now. With the wind at my back. I must go. Not just to serve mass. No. For a bigger reason. If I turn around and go home, I’ll be a goddamned coward. Nobody will see me turn and run for home. But I’ll know.
He turned the corner into Kelly Street. There were three-story houses to his left, the humped shapes of parked cars to his right, and around him and under him and above him he heard a high, thin, piercing whine, the savage, wordless wolf call of the wind: penetrating him, lifting him and dropping him, driving him past the soaring drifts that concealed buried cars. The whine was insistent and remorseless. Who are you, Michael Devlin, the voice said, to challenge me?
Then he looked up and his way was blocked. A giant elm had been smashed to the ground from the front yard of one of the houses. As the tree fell before the wind, it had crushed the fence of the house and collapsed the roof of a parked car, and it was now stretched out to the far side of the street. The branches of the tree seemed to reach toward the white sky in protest. Snow gathered on the dying trunk. The windows of the crushed car had exploded, and snow was drifting onto its seats. The boy thought: If the tree had hit me instead of the car, I’d be dead.
Holy God.
He pushed through loose waist
-deep snow between two parked cars and crossed the street, skirting the murdered tree, until he reached the side of the armory. This was no refuge. Behind its barred windows, the armory housed a boxing ring and dozens of old jeeps and National Guardsmen called “weekend warriors.” But its sheer redbrick walls rose a forbidding six stories above the street, and no doorways offered shelter. The boy saw now that the armory’s copper drainpipes had burst. High above the ground, shoving their way from the ruptured seams of the drainpipes, giant icicles stabbed at the air, defying the wind. They were thick, muscular icicles, a foot wide at the root, sharp as spears at the tip. Michael Devlin remembered photographs in the encyclopedia of stalactites, gray and dead; these icicles looked just as primitive and ancient and evil. And all of them were aimed at him.
He turned his eyes away from the icicles and trudged on, wishing again that he had a wristwatch. Seems like hours since I left the house, he thought, but maybe it’s only been minutes. I don’t really know, and the storm doesn’t care anything about time. He thought: Maybe this is crazy. What if the church is closed too? What if Father Heaney took one look at the storm and decided to celebrate mass alone in the rectory? What if the electricity has failed and the altar is dark? And suppose another tree falls, or a monster icicle, and hits me? Without warning. Nobody to shout: Watch it, kid. It would just happen. And I’d be left here in the drifts, without a dog or a friend or a scout from the mining camp. My mother would have to bury me and she’d be left completely alone. Or I’d end up crippled, a drag on her and everyone else. In one of the Jack London stories, a prospector broke his leg in a storm and his best friend was forced to obey the wisdom of the trail by shooting him in the head. Otherwise both of them would die.
Then, moving over a piled ridge, Michael imagined his father in the snows of Belgium. Many Americans had been killed there by the Germans in what was called the Battle of the Bulge. Thousands of them. He saw his father in full uniform, with a helmet and heavy boots, carrying a gun, and the snow driving even harder than this Brooklyn blizzard, and the wind whining, with the goddamned Germans somewhere up ahead in the blinding storm: as close, maybe, as MacArthur Avenue, as near as the synagogue. Unseen. Hidden. Ready to kill. Did Tommy Devlin think about turning around and running home? Of course not. He wasn’t a goddamned coward. But did he have a friend with him? Or was he alone when he was shot, his blood oozing red into the white snow? Had he lost all feeling in his hands and feet before they killed him? Did he cry? Did he hear wolves? Did he think of Mom? Home in the top-floor flat on Ellison Avenue? His blue suit? Did he think of me?
Suddenly, Michael Devlin heard a voice.
A human voice.
Not the wind, but the first real voice he’d heard since he left home.
He stopped and gazed around at the deserted world.
And then, through the slanting sheets of icy snow, he saw a man peering from a door on the Kelly Street side of the synagogue. A man with a beard. And a black suit. Like the man in black who called to Billy Batson from the dark entrance to the subway. He was waving at Michael.
“Hallo, hallo,” the bearded man called, his voice seeming to cross a distance much wider than the street. “Hallo.” As if coming from another country.
Michael stood there. The man was beckoning to him.
“Hallo, please,” the man shouted. “Please to come over…”
The voice sounded very old, muffled by the falling snow. A voice as plain and direct as a spell. Michael still didn’t move. This was the synagogue, the mysterious building in which the Jews worshiped their God. Michael had passed it hundreds of times, but except for Saturday morning, the doors were almost always closed. In some ways, it didn’t seem to be part of the parish, in the way that Sacred Heart was part of the parish, and the Venus, and Casement’s Bar. The synagogue rose about three stories off Kelly Street, but Michael always felt that one dark midnight, it had been dropped on the corner from somewhere else.
That wasn’t all. To Michael there was something vaguely spooky about the synagogue, as if secret rites, maybe even terrible crimes, took place behind its locked doors. After all, didn’t everybody on Ellison Avenue say that the Jews had killed Jesus? And if they could kill the Son of God, what might they do to a mere kid in the middle of a blizzard in Brooklyn? Michael had a sudden image of the bearded man tying him up, then heaving him into an oven, or bricking him up behind a wall, like the guy in “The Cask of Amontillado.” He saw a headline in the Daily News:BOY VANISHES IN STORM. And started to walk on.
The bearded man called to him again.
“Please.”
Michael stopped. There was a note in the man’s voice as he said the simple word please. The sound of distress. As if a life could depend upon what Michael did next. There was pain in the word too. And sadness. Maybe the bearded man was just that: a bearded man, calling for help in a blizzard. Not some agent of the devil. They were like two men in the trackless Arctic, specks in the ghostly wastes of a dead world.
If I walk away, Michael thought, it will be for one reason: I’m afraid. The Malemute Kid wouldn’t walk away. Neither would Billy Batson. Shit, if Billy Batson had walked away from the man in the black suit he would never have become Captain Marvel. And my father, Tommy Devlin, he would never walk away. Not from a thousand goddamned Nazis. And definitely not from a man who said please in that voice.
The boy crossed the street, struggling again for balance, found the wall of the synagogue in the twisting snow, and inched his way to the side door. The bearded man’s face was clearer now. Under his heavy black hat, he had blue eyes behind thick horn-rimmed glasses. His small nose made his beard seem larger, more solid, as if it were carved from wood instead of made of hair. The beard was dark, with touches of rusty red and gray, but the boy could not tell how old the man was. He was standing just inside the door, a heavy dark tweed coat hanging loose over his shoulders. Everything else he wore was black.
“Please,” he said. “I am the rabbi. I need a help. Can you give me a help?”
Tense with fear, Michael stepped closer. The wind abruptly died, as if pausing for breath. The boy stared at the bearded man, noticing his dirty fingernails, the ragged cuffs of the tweed coat, and wondered again if dark secrets lay behind him in the synagogue.
“Well, you see, Rabbi, I—”
“One minute, it takes,” the rabbi said.
Michael fumbled for words, trembling with fear, curiosity, and the cold.
“I’m an altar boy up at Sacred Heart,” he said. “You know, a Catholic? And I’m late for the eight o’clock mass and—”
“Not even one minute,” the rabbi said. “Bitte.” He pulled the coat tighter. “Please.”
Michael glanced past him into the unlighted vestibule. Wood paneling rose about five feet from the floor, topped by a ridge. The rest of the wall was painted a cream color. He could see nothing else in the gloom. What if he’s Svengali, he thought, the bearded guy in the movie who could hypnotize people? Or like Fagin in Oliver Twist, who made the kids steal for him? No: his voice doesn’t sound like those bastards. The wind suddenly attacked again, like a signal of urgency. Besides, the boy thought, I can always push him down the steps. I can knock off his glasses. I can kick the door open. Or kick him in the balls. One false move. Boom! Knowing that he was talking to himself to kill his fear.
“Okay,” Michael said abruptly. “But it’s gotta be fast. What do you want me to do?”
The bearded man opened the door wide and Michael stepped in, suddenly warmer as he left the wind behind. There were three steps leading down. The boy stood uneasily on the top step.
“A little light, is good, yes?” the rabbi said, waving a hand around the dark vestibule.
“I guess.”
“There,” the rabbi said. “You see?”
Michael moved down a step and peered through the dimness toward the wall to the right. A switch was cut into dark wood paneling. The rabbi gestured nervously, as if flicking the switch, but he did not to
uch it.
“You mean turn it on?” Michael asked.
The rabbi nodded. “Is… uh… it’s dark, no?”
Michael was suddenly wary again.
“Why don’t you turn it on?”
“Is not… permitted,” the bearded man replied, as if groping for the correct word. “Today is Shabbos, you see, and—is simple, no? Just—”
He brushed the air with his hand to show how easy it would be. Michael took a breath, stepped down, and flicked the switch. The space was suddenly brightened by an overhead globe. They were in a small vestibule; three steps up on the far side, there was another door. The creamy ceiling paint was cracked and peeling. The boy exhaled slowly. No bomb had exploded. No steel walls had descended to imprison him. No trapdoor had opened to drop him into a dungeon. The light switch was a light switch. The rabbi smiled, showing uneven yellow teeth, and looked pleased. Michael felt loose and warm.
“Thanks you, thanks you,” the rabbi said. “A dank. Very good boy, you are. Du bist zaier gut-hartsik… Very good.”
Then he pointed to the ridge along the top of the wood paneling.
“Is for you,” he said. “Please to take. For you.”
It was a nickel, gleaming dully in the light.