One day after work, Owney went into Brendan’s on Katonah Avenue in the Bronx, four blocks from the job. The inside of Brendan’s was a fog bank. Owney’s father and four others from the job, all older men, sat in the smoke with their packs of cigarettes on the left hand, bills in the center, and shot glasses at the right hand. The only sound in the place came from the men sucking on cigarettes and exhaling. Then his father started talking about the job. “You know the only trouble with what we do? The bad atmosphere we got to breathe all day.” He raised his glass in the smoke and threw it down. Then they got into a discussion over how much money the President should be paid.
“Only one of them ever buys a drink with his own money—Harry Truman, I know that,” Owney’s father said.
“He put it right up there,” Turk, one of the men, said.
“Bet a horse, buy a drink right at the bar. Good man,” Owney’s father said.
“Then drop a bomb in the fuckin’ morning,” Turk said.
“He did that.”
“I wish he was around now. You’d know he was around by the noise. Boom! That was the end of Russia you just heard.”
“And we get a little leukemia,” Owney said.
“They just say that,” Turk said.
“Guys got it in Vietnam just from a spray they used to kill trees,” Owney said.
“Well, what could you do?” Turk said. “I’ll take a little leukemia if it means the end of the fuckin’ Russians.”
In the midst of this it began raining outside and Turk stared out the window at the rain beating on the street. He cocked his head and said to Owney, “See them across the street?”
In a doorway were two black kids of about fourteen, faces peering up from under rain hats, measuring the rain before running for the el stairs at the corner.
“What does that make you think of?” Turk said.
“What?” Owney said.
“I think the mother ought to lock them in a closet, prepare them for goin’ to jail. All nigger kids their age is goin’ to jail inside of two, three years. Mother might as well get them used to it, lock them in a closet.”
“Unless they grow a couple of feet and get rich at basketball,” Owney said.
“Did you see those fuckin’ Knicks last night?” Turk said.
“No.” He had been at the Arena Disco with Dolores, dancing with a bottle of beer in his hand, and he could see that she loved him for doing it. He liked that better than this bar full of old men, but if he went out at this hour of the day he probably wouldn’t be able to find anybody he knew to drink with.
“Knicks lost bad,” Turk said.
“How bad?”
“Eighteen.”
“What did Frazier do?”
“Thirteen.”
“Off night.”
“Off night, my prick,” Turk said. “Frazier goes around thinks he’s God. He’s just another nigger who can shoot a basket. To think of the money they give him.”
“What about this Sojourner?” Jerry Malone, in a red cap, said. “Sixth, seventh man on the Nets. What do you think Sojourner gets? Eighty-five thousand. How do you like that? Big nigger cocksucker can’t spell his own name, gets eighty-five thousand dollars.”
“That’s why hockey’s the best game,” Turk said. “White man’s game. Go see a hockey game, you at least got twelve white guys playin’. No niggers. Not a nigger in the whole of hockey. No wonder nobody watches basketball anymore. People sick and tired of watchin’ niggers show off how high they can fuckin’ jump.”
“They’re not jumpin’,” Malone said. “They’re falling out of the trees they were born in.”
“And people think they’re jumpin’,” Owney’s father said.
“They’re falling out of the trees, the nigger bastards.”
“I want to see them ice-skate,” Turk said.
“They’ll shiver to death,” Malone said.
“They’ll be skating all over the place soon,” Owney said.
“You think so?” Turk said.
“Sure. They’ll hump us all. They’ll build indoor ice rinks in Africa.”
They laughed and Owney laughed with them, which was a manifestation of the wavering that always went on inside him with this subject. With the others at the bar, skin color was fairly simple. It was fine to work with blacks—even better than fine, for it enraged the men in the other construction unions. Nor was pity ever offered as a form of courtesy to a black working in a cave. This behavior was altered by the clock’s crawl to the end of an eight-hour shift, for upon leaving the “hog house” each day, the blacks went their way, nobody knew where, and the white sandhogs went into the bars and made derision of blacks a relentless part of conversation, as it is with nearly all American whites wherever they gather. This daily parting of black and white was done in the manner of Southern whites who, at age eleven or twelve, used to leave forever the black friends with whom they had been playing since each was able to walk.
For the white sandhogs, each day was one of halved feelings, respect for blacks underneath the earth and utter contempt for them above it. And always, in the pits of their stomachs, as immutable as the rock they faced each day, was the flat acceptance that the blacks would work at the same rate of pay as the whites, and that in a union of fathers and sons, the black son was a son first and he could be called a nigger kid later, after he had his union card. Causing the sandhogs to become the very thing they hated: liberals.
As this fact is never raised in conversation—although as a contrary point it would do something to relieve the boredom of bar talk: niggers are bad, the reason for this being that they are niggers—the conversations were persistently mindless. On this one topic, Owney had been through so much more than they had that his interest in what they had to say was annihilated. They sat with him in a bar and talked about blacks, and here Owney had wound up in and out of a war because of them.
In the laughter, Owney thought for a moment about the time in Duc Co, with the sand sifting through an opening in the tin roof and this Daniels, an old black sergeant, he had to be as old as thirty or thirty-one, was saying: “I caught it so bad off this ’ho in Germany that they had to keep me in the hospital down by Wiesbaden. Same time, I couldn’t get this one ’ho off my mind. They let me out of Wiesbaden and I go to see this same ’ho again. What do you think happen? Here is this same big old ’ho an—”
“What’s a ’ho?” Owney asked.
“’Ho,” Daniels said.
“What?”
“I said, ’Ho!”
“I don’t know what’s a ’ho,” Owney said.
“A ’ho. A great big ’ho. So I go to see this same ’ho again, right the —”
“I still don’t know what a ’ho is.”
Daniels’s face contorted. “Man, stop that. Stop fucking with my sequence.”
A few nights later, some rural white from North Dakota was asleep when shots were fired and he threw a grenade out of the bunker that hit something on the top and dropped back in and blew off some of Daniels’s leg and almost all of his organs. As they carried Daniels off, he probably still qualified as a nigger in white barroom conversation, but Owney and everyone else in the bunker knew that Daniels was no nigger. Afterward, Owney might sit in a white bar and seem to listen intently to conversations about niggers, but he heard little, and when he spoke himself on the subject his phrases were simply a style of speech. When these others talked—people who hadn’t been in Vietnam and who didn’t work as sandhogs, and therefore in Owney’s mind didn’t do enough to qualify for saying anything—he pretended to listen but he resented them. For when Owney first came home, he became one of the few white American males who semiconsciously, perhaps gracelessly, but nevertheless steadily moved toward a state of soul that permitted the love of somebody different.
Ahead of him, he had all the chances to work out his life as he kept his trade: the third water tunnel would take fifteen to twenty years to build. It began at a reservoir at the Bronx-Yonk
ers line, a place where the water that flows all the way down the sloping land from upstate New York comes out of a reservoir that is 295 feet above ground and rushes under the reservoir gatehouse with such force that the stone gatehouse whines like an old factory. The flow must be kept slow or the water would race through the old water tunnel for the length of the city and at the last street, at the Battery, the water would attempt to rise to the level of the reservoir, 295 feet above ground. Finding cast-iron pipes attempting to prevent this, the water would simply blow up the tunnel and the sidewalk over it and screech foamy white into the sky.
Announced by a morning cough, Owney’s father walked into the kitchen. All parts of him were dressed for labor, except the face, which looked out the kitchen window and measured the start of the day as if it were a wall to be climbed by a fingernail. A fist went to his mouth and he coughed again, this time hard enough to send a wobble into his knees. “They got people out there already,” he said.
“For what?” Owney asked.
“Your friend.”
“What friend?”
“Oh, a real friend. The kid got killed so nobody has to fight anymore. He probably was in college so he wouldn’t get shot at.”
“Oh, that guy,” Owney said. He had seen one mention of it in the paper, some guy from some college somewhere who got himself killed. He had read no more of it because the subject bothered him. They had made an issue of telling Owney not to say anything about war resisters. “You act like a man and let the public see for themselves how despicable the others are,” the colonel had told him. Still, Owney thought, the kid could go and fuck himself.
“They got a big funeral for him in New York,” his father said. “I’d like to see how many would show up for you or for me.”
“They’re getting real good notoriety,” his mother said.
“Why didn’t he worry about the poor woman walks out of St. Fortunata’s,” Owney’s father said, “gets hit right on the head, doesn’t even have the holy water dry on her forehead?”
“I don’t want to hear about it anymore,” "Owney said.
“He should of got killed twice,” the father said. “Once out there and once here. They should of let people torture him to death. The fuck.”
“Don’t curse, that sounds terrible,” the mother said. “You want something?”
“Something cold,” the father said.
“Take a glass of milk.”
“Milk is no good. It puts sludge on your heart.”
“Then have a cup of coffee.”
“Got no time.”
“You got time for coffee. How long do you need to get to work? One cup of coffee. Where do you have to go to, anyway?”
“Somewhere between Westchester County and Long Island,” the father said, which was the answer he gave anytime she asked even an offhand question about the details of his employment.
“Is it nearer to where we’re going to live?” his mother said, sarcastically.
“I don’t know that. I know that we’re going. Out on Long Island. Near the water and near the parkway.”
“You told me that after we lived here three weeks,” she said. “Now we’re here two years. We move around less than the people in the ground.”
The father’s neck became red. “Yeah, well, I don’t mind it here at all, lot of Jews so dead they don’t even try to sell you anything.”
“I heard that when we first moved in here,” the mother said. “Where do you think you can move to at this stage?”
“I see this ad the other day. Exit sixty-eight, Long Island Expressway. A house they call a mother-daughter house. That means you could fit two families in, doesn’t it?”
“How much will that cost?” the mother said.
“Not that much. You’d be surprised.”
“Surprise me then.”
“It was nothing. Eighty-five thousand.”
“I see. How much of this do you have to put down?”
“That’s the problem. They want a whole third. But we’ll get it.”
The father turned to Owney. “All right. Let’s go. I’m not going to get a house sitting around here.”
“When did the house business start?” Owney said.
“When she told me that I never would be able to get one,” his father said. “Get your shirt and let’s go.”
Owney watched the smoke streaming in the light over the top of the can of beer. “Not today.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Can’t make it.”
“I never heard of a thing like this. Guy your age. Once you’re up, who misses work?”
“I do,” Owney said.
“I never did anything like this. I always made work in the morning.”
“I have something to do today,” Owney said.
The father shrugged and walked out. Owney stared out the window.
At ten-thirty, he tried the day again. His mother was in the kitchen this time, and when Owney went to the refrigerator, she said to him, “What are you doing?”
“Taking some beer. I might go to the beach. I get thirsty down there.”
The mother said, “You don’t want beer at the beach. I’ll give you some nice ginger ale. Krasdale’s ginger ale from the store.”
She stood up and went to the refrigerator and held a hand to protect the beer.
“Maybe I don’t want anything,” Owney said.
“That’s good,” the mother said.
“Let me get out of here,” Owney said.
He found her in the middle of the afternoon on a street at the bottom of a hill in the Forest Hills Gardens neighborhood, which is arranged into an English village of Tudor houses with red tile roofs and lawns with no fences. Dolores sat sideways in her Frosted Bar ice cream truck, with her feet hanging out so she could kick pink snowdrifts of cherry blossoms from trees whose branches brushed the truck roof. On the other side of the truck was a gully with trees and the first flowers of the year showing at the top of the gully.
He stood alongside the truck in silence and beauty and looked at the sun on her hair and did not talk.
“Why didn’t you call me since Sunday?” she said.
“I don’t know.”
“I can’t believe you didn’t call me. I waited all day Sunday. And then two more days?”
Owney said nothing.
“That’s the first time in four months that you didn’t call me.”
He didn’t answer. Somewhere in him there was a soundless groan. A young girl with a young heart suddenly issuing commands with the manner of an old housewife. Yet any annoyance was drowned in a fear that what he wanted would escape him. If she was this cool over unanswered questions, what would happen if he gave her a fresh answer? Maybe she drives away in the truck, he told himself. The thing that surprised him was that he never thought of walking away from her first. In the sunlight, she had him afraid.
“What are you thinking about?” she said.
“You.”
“What are you thinking about me?”
“That you look pretty here. Beautiful girl in a beautiful place.”
“I only go to pretty places like this,” she said. “I’m the first woman they ever hired for this job. They told me they knew I wasn’t going to be selling ice cream at some factory.” She laughed. “Besides, I’m the only ice cream truck in Queens that isn’t selling drugs.”
He liked the laugh. That got him out of talking about Sunday. “You’re too pretty for that,” he said.
“You think that?”
“All the time.”
He bent down and he nuzzled her neck. “I always heard your voice, saw your face, and could feel your neck.”
“I know that’s what you wrote me.”
“I meant it.”
“That’s good.”
“I’m thinking about us getting married.”
“When did you decide this?”
“This morning. Now. I don’t know. I just decided.”
“You
said it before this.”
“Said it when?”
“In your letters. You just told me you meant them. Now you don’t even know what you said.”
“Yes, I do.”
“So why do you say that you just made up your mind now?”
“Because that’s what I said. What do you have to say about it?”
“Oh, I have to think,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because I have to think. This is a very serious thing. Now let me think.”
She looked at her feet as they moved through the pink snowdrifts. Then she slid out of the truck and stood up and put her face to his and kissed him lightly. He took her in his arms in the sunlight and pressed his mouth against hers.
She pulled her head back slightly and looked in his eyes. “I’m not leaving school.”
“Who said that?”
“What does that mean?”
“I’ll work. You go to school.”
He put his hand on the small of her back and pulled her against him in a long kiss. He was getting hard against her leg.
A woman in a long green robe who was inspecting the rosebushes on her lawn called to them. “You two behave.”
“Why?”
“You could get married.”
4
BILLY KAUFHOLD HAD DIED a few years earlier, and so, that September, her uncle, Matty Kearns, Sr., an operating engineer, his face and hands wet from nervousness, and also from the colossal amount of weight he carried, gave the bride away. The ceremony was at St. Pancras Church, with the vows as read aloud by the Reverend Edward M. Pfister containing so many phrases such as “I will” and “I will not” that it was a question whether this was a wedding ceremony or a sentencing to prison. Still, the rigidity only increased the power of the moment: a few Latin phrases transformed Dolores from a young neighborhood girl into a woman with the appearance and demeanor of a Queens housewife. Standing in the vestibule of the church after the ceremony, Dolores greeted older women with the ease of an equal.
The wedding reception was held at the Elmhurst-Jackson Heights American Legion Post, and as most people omit the church service and arrive at the reception in high thirst, the crowd in the vestibule of the Legion hall had the doorways blocked as they waited for the affair to begin. When the bridal party arrived, there was pushing to get them inside the hall. Immediately, Matty Kearns, Sr., forced himself and a party of four men, all nearly as large as Matty, into the barroom, where they immediately made a bartender out of the Colombian kid who was supposed to be polishing the bottles. By the time the regular bartender came on duty, the bar was packed with free-swallowing men, most of whom were built like overstuffed chairs. As a member of the wedding party, Matty Kearns, Sr., was the central figure at the bar, waving a hand and ordering drinks and speaking loudly to a cousin, Jimmy O’Mara, who answered with difficulty; in honor of the formal occasion, O’Mara kept his top lip folded down to conceal three missing teeth on the right side. Kearns himself, when laughing, revealed a missing incisor. Construction workers are weak in enamel.
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