Table Money

by Jimmy Breslin

  The bike fell as Salvatore raced upstairs. Owney’s foot kicked the orange soda over as he ran to the curb, pulled and ripped at a car aerial, and then began moving on the sidewalk, moving on his toes, the aerial switching back and forth in front of him.

  “We down, you motherfuckers,” Big Cheese said.

  “Nigger shit,” Tommy Clarity said.

  Clarity was pulling on the door of the pizza stand. He wanted to get inside and get knives, but the man who owned the stand, Mario, had the door locked and he was trying to hide behind the counter.

  “Open the door!” Tommy Clarity said.

  “Who hit Lester and his kids last night?” Big Cheese said.

  “Lester got his ass kicked, same as you get yours kicked, nigger,” Jimmy Reilly said.

  The black closest to Jimmy Reilly swung the machete crazy in his right hand. Jimmy Reilly ducked. The black took the machete in both hands and brought it up over his head and then the machete came down and dug into Jimmy Reilly’s skull.

  “Shooooo!” The blade passed three feet from Owney’s face. “Shooo!” Still three feet. The black coming around the car swinging his machete was afraid of the car aerial. The black kept swinging his machete, hoping to strike the aerial and shear it. But Owney held the aerial down and then up and he timed his swish with the passing of the machete blade through the air.

  He caught the black once. Just grazed him on the corner of the mouth. It must have stung the black because he made a gargling sound and came at Owney with the machete slashing back and forth, forehand, backhand, and Owney jumped into the green doorway next to the pizza stand, jumped over the bike and started up the stairs. The black came charging in and tripped over the bike. Owney came crashing down the stairs to jump on the hand and grab the machete, but the black pulled back. Owney went halfway up the stairs. The black started up, then hesitated—could he go up the stairs without getting trapped? Now there were car doors slamming out in the street and the black turned and ran. Cops always are close in a neighborhood like this. Owney went up the stairs; the last time there had been a fight, Owney was at the movies when it broke out and he never made it; the cops arrested everybody, whites and blacks. Fuck that. Owney went up to the roof, walked over three rooftops to the corner building, went all the way down to the cellar and out the back way and ran home.

  Jimmy Reilly died that night in the hospital. Tommy Clarity was in serious condition. He had been caught in the doorway and held up his arms to protect his face and the machete blows went chunk-chunk-chunk into the meat part of his forearms. Four others were seriously cut. The black from the park was in a coma. Crazy Carl told everybody that he was going to get guns and blow the niggers away for real.

  Two days later Owney came into the park wearing a sports jacket and fresh shirt.

  “Where you goin’?” his buddy Ralphie Schmidt asked him.

  “I’m going to join the Army,” Owney said.

  “Why?”

  “All I’m going to do is get in trouble around here.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Ralphie said.

  They met two others on the corner and the four of them went to the Army recruiting office in the Post Office on Tillary Street in downtown Brooklyn. The year was 1967.

  Owney trained in three hot Army camps, after which he was given fifteen days home in Queens and a voucher for a flight to San Francisco and then to Vietnam.

  At the end of his leave, he met Dolores Kaufhold, who was a year younger, had long brown hair and brown eyes, and whose walk, a swing that suggested more of shoulders than hips, was an announcement of her determination.

  A second-grade teacher, a nun at St. Matthias School, noticing that Dolores was left-handed, tried to turn her around. Dolores wrote with her left hand when she finished second grade, and she wrote with the left hand when she graduated from the school.

  At St. Barbara’s High School, she took the commercial courses demanded by her mother, but she spent hours in the library in Glendale reading science books. She never learned to type. She complained her fingers got in each other’s way. The only thing she learned in shorthand was to take a number two and put a big tail on it, which transformed the number into “Dear Sir.” She told her mother one day, “Do you call this something to learn? I call this stupid that I can take a good number and make it into something stupid.”

  She soon added so many academic courses that in May of her senior year she was accepted at Queens College. Where, in typing papers in her first year, her fingers suddenly darted across the keyboard. Biology was her best course. She took the new words from the course and made them her own. She lived at home in Glendale with her mother.

  One afternoon, Dolores went up to Myrtle Avenue to buy curtain rods for her mother. She wore blue Landlubber hip-hugger denims from Revelation on Austin Street in Forest Hills, and a blue work shirt. On the way home, she stopped into Oting’s, the soda fountain on Myrtle Avenue, which the owner, an Italian, kept as if Norman Rockwell was not a reason for throwing up. The owner sat behind a candy counter along one wall in the front of the store and watched the Mets play baseball on television while mostly high school students sat in booths in the back and listened to an all-Motown juke box that was so loud that the owner many times winced at the high notes. The juke box was the reason why Dolores and most of her friends had just started going into Oting’s.

  She sat at the counter and ordered a Coke.

  There was a cardboard display on the fountain counter on which were pasted the pictures of the customers who were in the service. There were ten of them. The young guy behind the counter, Glenn Paulson, who wore his black hair in a ponytail, looked at the pictures and rocked his head to the Temptations, who wailed out of the juke box.

  “They’ll have my picture in the Post Office,” Glenn said.

  “You going to rob banks?” Dolores said.

  “No way. I’m going to be the most famous draft dodger in Ridgewood. They’ll have my picture over the special delivery window. In a big heavy coat with a fur hood. Where I’m going to in Canada, the dogs won’t even come out.”

  Three days before, she had been in the crowd at an antiwar rally in the quadrangle at Queens College. The rally had ended when the students running it had to take down the sound equipment and get to a lecture. Just as well. It had been an hour of arguing against the air, for nobody at the school would get any closer to a uniform than at a discount store. Glenn was real. At nineteen, just as most everybody else in Ridgewood and Glendale, he was one mail delivery from a war. “No way to get a deferment?” she asked him.

  “Nope.”

  “What about college?”

  “What about I get a job as a lead singer in the opera?”

  “College isn’t as hard as you think.”

  “I had trouble in grammar school.”

  “It’s the best way to stay out of the Army. Go to school.”

  “My best way is to put on heavy clothes and do what I have to do.”

  The owner looked up from the Mets game and waved to a guy walking into the place. “I got it right up there,” he said, pointing at the cardboard display.

  “Let me see,” Owney Morrison said. “Excuse me,” he said to Dolores. He looked at the board and picked out his picture. Serious, chin high.

  “That’s it. They told me it was here.”

  Owney was standing at the fountain counter. His auburn hair was cut short and his face, neck, and arms were dark from long weeks in Louisiana swamps. Only the bottom of his neck, as white as milk in an open shirt collar, showed that his color was not gained sunning himself at Rockaway. He had a small, square chin and amused brown eyes.

  “You look good,” Glenn said.

  “I’m looking at where they’re going to put your picture soon,” Owney said.

  “I have to tell you the truth, we were just talking about it. I don’t think you’re ever going to see it.”

  “No?”

  “Not me.”

  Owney looked at Dolo
res. “What do you think?”

  “I’d hide him in my house.”

  “Is he your boyfriend?”

  “No. I’d hide you, too.”

  “I don’t want anybody to hide me,” Owney said.

  “Then I won’t hide you.”

  “Hide Glenn if he wants.”

  “Do you think Glenn is scared?” she asked him.

  “I don’t talk like that. Glenn is my friend. He can do anything he wants. Run, hide, fight. Whatever he does is fine with me. We’re cool.”

  “The only reason I won’t hide is I’d get bored staying under the bed,” Glenn said. “I’ll go up where there’s tundra.”

  “All right with me,” Owney said.

  “I’ll send you letters,” Glenn said.

  “Where from?”

  “Wherever there’s ice.”

  “Who wants to hear about some glacier? I want her to write me.” Owney was looking at Dolores.

  “I’ll write,” Dolores said. “Where to?”

  “I don’t have the address yet.”

  “When you have it, I’ll write. I know you. You used to play ball in the park down from my house. I live on Sixty-sixth Street.”

  “I live on Central. We used to come over to that park to play ball. Were you one of that mob of girls used to watch?”

  “Sure.” Dolores often walked down to the park in the early evenings to watch them play softball on the asphalt for ten dollars a man. She was not about to say that she used to stand outside the fence and look over the fronts of each of them.

  “I don’t remember seeing you,” Owney said.

  “I was there.” She remembered seeing him, all right.

  “How could I miss hair that pretty?”

  “Thank you.” She knew that the neon in the fountain window put points of light in her hair.

  “They shouldn’t’ve taken me in the Army if I couldn’t see you.”

  “How long have you been in?” she asked him.

  “Almost a year.”

  “So you’ve got a year to go?”

  “Right now, I’m in my last two days at home.”.

  “Where do you have to go back to?”

  “To Vietnam.”

  Her hand rose involuntarily and touched Owney on the arm.

  “What do you do, work?” he asked her.

  “No. I go to Queens College.” She had her water buffalo sandals up against the next stool.

  “That’s pretty good.”

  “I think so.”

  “That’s a good way to beat work, go to school.”

  “What kind of work could I get? Make sure everybody in an office has coffee?”

  “Then you don’t work in a place where they do that.”

  “My friend Kay Seibert got a job in the city. She thought it was the greatest thing in the world. Do you know what she does? Every morning she has to go into the boss’s office and fix the flowers. She has to make sure the flowers are fresh and they have water.”

  “But how old is she?”

  “Same age as I am. We were in high school together.”

  “Then she’s just starting at a job.”

  “Starting what? To be a slave?”

  “And what do they have you taking up in school?”

  “Regular courses. I like biology.”

  “Oh, that’s different. You’re going to school to become a nurse.”

  “I’m not so sure of that. Maybe I can go past that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Why can’t I be a doctor? Or something else. Let somebody bring me coffee.”

  “That I like. You got to think you can do anything.”

  “Absolutely. I had to talk my mother out of making me go to work. I’m not going to college because somebody thought it would be nice, the family could talk about it and all. I know I don’t want to be another woman on the block. Standing there. That’s all they do. Stand. Anyway, I’ll figure something. I’m beginning to think you go to school to find out something about yourself.”

  “What’d you find out so far?”

  “I’ll let you know when I hear something.”

  “Tell me ahead of anybody else.”

  “I will. And tell me what you’re going to do.”

  “The day I get out, I go to work with my father in the sandhogs.”

  “Digging tunnels.”

  “That’s it.”

  “Isn’t that dangerous?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Can’t you think of anything else?”

  “I like the union work. My whole family helped run the union. I want to get into that.”

  “That sounds better. I was afraid you were like everybody else around here. The family tells you go out and get money and be glad that the boss is nice enough to pay you.”

  “That doesn’t happen with me.”

  “Good. Now what do you do in the Army? I’m afraid to ask.”

  “Nothing special. I guess they want me to kill a lot of people,” he said. Then he asked, “What are you doing with yourself all day?”

  “Taking these home,” she said, touching the curtain rods.

  “Want to go to the beach for a while?”

  “It’s three o’clock already.”

  “I want to catch some waves.”

  “Surf?”

  “Sure.”

  “Yeah, but until what time?”

  “I don’t know. Six, maybe.”

  On the way home, they got as far as the Grassy Point, which is a bar in an old wood house on the road right after you come across the bridge from Rockaway. She was sipping the first beer, as always bitter to her mouth, and he had half of his gone with one swallow. He smiled and swallowed the rest of it. He put the glass out and the bartender snatched it.

  “What are you going to do about school if you get married and have kids?”

  She didn’t answer. Whenever she thought of how she was going to be different, she never put children into her mind. There was, of course, no way you could have any other kind of life then except a mother’s. Just think of your own life, how you got here, she would tell herself.

  “Then I’ve got my arms full,” she said finally.

  He swallowed the beer and said he wanted just one more and he had that. On the way home, Dolores said, “I forgot the curtain rods. I left them at Oting’s.”

  When they got to the place, it was empty and Glenn was sweeping the floor. “The curtain rods are behind the counter,” he said. “I’ll be right with you.” He bent down and picked something up. “Look at these.” He held out two orange pills.

  “Downs,” Owney said.

  “Are they?” Dolores said.

  Glenn nodded. “Last year I swept the floor here, all I got was Marlboro butts. Look at what we got now.”

  “I’ll take beer,” Owney said.

  “Where do they get them from?” Dolores said.

  “That old bastard sells to the whole neighborhood,” Glenn said. “Old Jack. You heard of him?”

  “No,” Dolores said.

  “I have,” Owney said.

  They got back to her house around nine. She got out her keys and opened the front door and then went into the vestibule, spun around and faced him, and he took her in his arms and kissed her softly.

  “Am I going to see you again?”

  Owney laughed. “I sure hope so.”

  As she realized what she had said, her hand involuntarily came up to her mouth. She pulled it down.

  “I mean, you told me you had two days.”

  “That’s right. Today was one day. And then tomorrow I go to San Francisco. I have to be there by six.”

  “That means I won’t see you?”

  “I’ll write you,” Owney said.

  Dolores went into her purse and took out a sheet of paper from a small pad and wrote down her address. She leaned out and kissed him again and then shut the door and ran upstairs quickly and flew to the front window so she could watch him walk up the street. He
went two streetlights down, and then he turned around and looked up at the house and Dolores stood at the window and her arm waved back and forth and Owney’s right hand came up and then he turned and was gone.

  When she woke up in the morning, she ran across the street to Nancy Lucarella’s house. Dolores burst through the open front door into the Lucarella apartment. Nancy was in the back, sitting at the kitchen table with a Tab, a cigarette, and a stack of paper.

  “I just met a boy I’m in love with,” Dolores said.

  “I already finished writing my book,” Nancy said. “You’re too late.” She placed a hand on the stack of paper. With the other, she brushed uncombed black hair out of her eyes. A face as pale as newsprint contained large dark eyes and a small, thin, colorless mouth. A loose black T-shirt and black pants that were even looser did little to hide the fact that spaghetti goes to the hips of even a twenty-one-year-old. Nancy was the sole woman who tried to live with the calendar and not with the trolley tracks on Myrtle Avenue, which stood for so much of everybody’s lives.

  In 1949, the trolleys on Myrtle Avenue had been replaced by buses and the tracks were covered by asphalt, with tar over the asphalt, and it was supposed to be this way forever, but then snow water seeped into the tar and froze and expanded and the tar eroded and the asphalt under it cracked and in the spring the old shiny trolley tracks gleamed in the sunlight. Steamrollers would arrive and fresh asphalt would be thrown over the tracks and rolled tight and then the winter would crack the new asphalt, and in the years that followed, the city workers did less repairing and finally there were places on Myrtle Avenue where the old trolley tracks showed their silver spines permanently. And on the blocks running off Myrtle Avenue, the ways of life being taught by old women to young women were as old as the trolley tracks. Let the people in Manhattan have their loose lives and multiple marriages; here in Queens, the man still works and the woman is raised to get married and then walk children to school and come home to fix dinner. Through the ’50s and ’60s and later even into the ’70s, paste over the Glendale housewife a thousand magazine covers proclaiming the changing role of woman in society, and steam from a teapot wilts the covers while, in an opening, there appears a hand gripping a potholder.