One of the closed churches, a red stone building with severe Protestant lines and a spire so high that even people riding on the el trains had to look directly up to see its tip, was so old that the front was designed to receive worshipers arriving by horse cart. A long railing for tethering horses ran on one side of the church, a leftover from the times when Jamaica was a proper German farm town. On the other side of the church was its concession to the new, a cinder driveway that ran in the gloom alongside the church and under a great old maple tree and then out to the street behind the church, Archer Avenue, where an old wooden bar called the Boar’s Head sat in the fumes from trailer trucks and the noise from another set of elevated tracks, those of the Long Island Rail Road commuter lines. It was in this cinder driveway, right under the tree, Dolores remembered, that a man one night had strangled a woman, a waitress from the Loft’s candy store on Jamaica Avenue. The man left the woman on the cinder drive under the tree and Went to the Boar’s Head and sat on a barstool and did not leave until a patrolman walked in the next day to use the men’s room. The guy at the bar said to him, “She shouldn’t have yelled.”
“What’s that?” the patrolman said.
“I said that she shouldn’t have yelled. I don’t know why, but it set me off.”
“What do you mean set you off?”
“I never would’ve put a hand on her, really, but then she started screaming and look what I wound up doing to her. I got that scarf in my hands, I wouldn’t let go.”
The policeman was brought over to City Hall and given an award for dogged investigation. That was when murder was remembered for years—no, more than years, sometimes full lifetimes—after the crime. Someone would point at the spot and say that it was here, a long time ago, that a famous murder took place. All murders were famous. But then, Dolores remembered, the life of the city’s neighborhoods changed, and in Jamaica there was a druggist dead on the floor behind his counter, or a jeweler being carried out of his store with blood dripping from the sheets on the emergency cart and coloring the sidewalk. Only the families of the victims remembered where the crime took place. Murder no longer was rare enough to be famous.
A block from the church was the bus stop, on the side of a corner greeting card shop, where everybody waited for the orange buses that went up the hill to Queens College. For Dolores, it had been one more bus ride after the long one in from Glendale. Most afternoons, she had been able to get a ride home, but she had always used this bus to reach school. When the crime began to change the streets under the el in Jamaica, her mother worried about her taking the bus to school.
“Ma, what could happen to anybody at eight o’clock in the morning?” Dolores asked her.
“If one of them is up, anything can happen,” the mother said.
By the phrase “one of them,” the mother was not referring to Croatians. In order to soothe her mother, Dolores promised that from then on she would take the bus from Glendale to Flushing, although it went on such a circuitous route that the trip to college took at least twenty-five minutes longer. Still, her mother remained wary of the idea of Dolores’s going to college. “You take biology?” her mother said with a sniff. “You get all the biology you need just by living. You get married, you’ll see what I mean.”
One day, when Dolores had gone to school by her unannounced Jamaica route, she stood on the street corner by the card shop and reread one of Owney’s letters. It was the letter in which he sent her a picture of two Vietnamese children, with almond eyes and short faces looking severely at the camera, as if a ceremony were being performed. He wrote that he had found the picture on a body and that there was no one else he could speak to about his pain. He asked Dolores to pray for the children and their mother, wherever they were, and then to beg God that he, Owney, never would have to go through something like this again. Even though she had read the letter many times, she was still shaken by it. Looking around her at the young people waiting for the bus, she found herself in disdain of what they were speaking about: the social impact of a rock concert. She was in love with Owney Morrison, who dealt in life and death and needed her help. His face was so clear in Dolores’s mind that her hand rose for an instant and started to touch him. When the orange bus pulled in and they all got on for the ride to school, Dolores got on, but was concentrating on things other than a class.
Thinking of this now, with her face pressed to the window, she suddenly decided to get off. The bus stopped two blocks up, and she walked back and stood on the corner by the card shop. A couple of older people waited for the orange bus, their eyes looking up a street that reflected the years. A building that once had been a nightclub now was a storefront church. A saloon had its windows soaped. A rock hole was in one window. And here at the corner, the racks of gay cards, with inscriptions to loved ones and children making First Communion, all were under the care of a man with folded arms who stood grimly by a buzzer that unlocked the front door for any customer who appeared not likely to stab him.
She stood on this sidewalk, where she could see her roots by glancing in any direction, and she thought for the first time of being alone in a library again, thinking for sure that everyone around her was so much better, and then simply staying longer and, the next day, or a couple of days later, finding out that she was better than almost all of them. She reminded herself that she had a baby and a husband. For the first time, standing on this familiar sidewalk, she thought about fitting her own life around her home.
“I can do any fucking thing.”
A woman turned and looked at Dolores in surprise.
Dolores, more amused than embarrassed, walked along under the el tracks to New York Boulevard. Gertz’s department store was on the corner. She walked along the side of the store, heading south on the boulevard, which was only a two-lane local street and hardly could be called even an avenue. She walked along the length of the Gertz store, whose windows, once the showpieces of the Jamaica shopping center, were desolate. At the side entrance to Gertz’s, a few people were going in and out. A few doors down the street, hanging out over the sidewalk, with the Long Island Rail Road tracks serving as a backdrop, was the sign for the Sea Grill bar.
A black woman, a bit heavy, stood in the doorway. She smoked a cigarette furiously.
“Dog,” she said.
A voice inside the bar called out, “You say I’m a dog?”
“Dog,” she said again.
“Then you nothin’ but a motherfuckin’ leash!”
She pulled the cigarette from her mouth. The other hand dug into her already mussed frosted-tip hair. She walked back into the bar with the cigarette held up in the air, as if entering a drawing room.
There were, of course, two doors to the bar. Dolores had heard the story many times as she was growing up, particularly when she was of high school age and could listen without becoming visibly upset. When her real parents had fought in the bar, the wife went out one door and the husband went out the other. Billy Kaufhold stayed at the bar and drank his whiskey.
Inside the Sea Grill now there was an eruption and several voices hollering and out of one door, the one closer to the railroad tracks, came a man with a round face contorted with fury. He had on a white knit shirt and he wheeled to the right and headed for the underpass to the Long Island Rail Road tracks.
And stumbling in haste out the door nearer to Dolores—in fact, almost knocking Dolores down—came the woman. Had she been close enough to the guy, she would have used the cigarette on him. This was apparent, for she threw it after him like a baseball. The cigarette dropped yards short, of course, but it was the act that counted. She went after him, her flat shoes pounding on the sidewalk. Along the street the man went, the woman after him. Something made Dolores follow. At the corner, Archer Avenue, the light was red and the man kept going, dodging a bus and a meat truck. The woman broke into a trot, her wide hips going side to side, and there was a splash as her foot went into a puddle. Infuriated, she began to run. They went through the
underpass and out onto the street where the old rooming houses sat atop the grass embankments. When Dolores walked through the underpass, she found the place where the houses had been was now flattened into a parking lot for the Gertz store. The lot was nearly empty. By now, up the street, the woman was back to a walk and the man was outdistancing her with each step. Dolores stood by herself and a loneliness went through her. It was more than twenty years ago that her own mother had stood here, or maybe a few yards from here, and said that whoever wanted the baby upstairs on the bed could have her. Then the mother walked out. Dolores looked down on the sidewalk. The cement had been there a long time. Probably, her real mother had stepped right on this same flagstone as she walked away.
Up on the railroad tracks, a train headed noisily out to Long Island, causing Dolores to turn around and head back to Jamaica Avenue. On the green bus going back to Glendale, she glanced out the window at the card shop on the corner and saw the orange bus sitting at the curb with the route sign saying “Kissena Boulevard–Queens College.” Small white lettering on a black background, so small that the only ones who could read it were those young enough to go to the school. She rode home thinking of her mother walking away from her, just walking down the sidewalk and leaving her, a baby, in the middle of a rooming house bed. She became impatient with the bus and instead of transferring at Lefferts Boulevard, she waved to a cab, for she suddenly wanted to hold her daughter.
Two days later, on an evening when he was home on time and his insides chilled with the glasses of water and tomato juice at dinner, Owney turned on the television, saw the start of the news report on Vietnam casualties, then turned to a local channel, which carried a rerun of Gilligan’s Island. He turned the set off and looked out the window.
“Owney.”
He was silent.
“Owney, look at me.”
She was sitting at the end of the couch with a cigarette.
“What?” He didn’t turn around.
“Owney, I must have been madly in love with you. I used to think of you all day. I can remember walking up the street and not seeing anybody else because I was so busy thinking about you.”
Now he turned. “You don’t do that anymore?”
“I’d like to.”
“You mean you don’t do it anymore? I still love you.”
“I don’t love what you’re doing.”
“I stopped.”
“When was this?”
His hand moved impatiently.
“I stopped and I’ll get you your own car. That’s all I hear from you, anyway, a car.”
“When cornered, attack.”
“I’m answering you, that’s all.”
“Don’t you think it would be better if you thought about it?”
“About what?”
“That you drink so much.”
“I told you, I stopped.” He snapped the words.
“You can’t run away all the time,” she said.
“I never ran in my life.”
“Yes, you do. Whenever I bring this up, you either go out and don’t come back or you hide behind some wall you put up. ‘I stopped.’ That’s your wall tonight. You hide. That’s your way of handling it.”
“How can you say I hide?”
“Because you do.”
“When they were fucking trying to kill me, I didn’t hide. I was right there for them to see.” He put his hand so that it covered the cheeks under his eyes. “They could see my eyes. They tried to put them out. I was standing right there. I walked away and they didn’t. Here I am and here they are.” He pointed to the floor.
“When cornered, attack.”
“What am I supposed to do?”
She kept her voice level. “I would think it would be better to try anything except what we’re doing. If something is malfunctioning and it keeps shaking, don’t you take it someplace and have it fixed? So it works smooth?”
“Go someplace? Where?”
“I would try somebody who counsels people like you. Like us, really. I’m in it with you.”
“We got Navy at work.”
“Do you speak to him?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I got nothing the matter with me.”
“Just talk to him.”
“Never. Let all these guys at work see me like I’m weak? Have to talk to Navy?”
“Then try somebody nobody will know about.”
“Like who?”
“There are psychologists who might be able to help.”
“Psychologists? You mean some shrink?”
She nodded.
“You’d tell me to do that?”
“Don’t you think it would be better than living with this tension?”
“You’d tell me to do that?”
She nodded.
“You’d tell me go to a Jew?”
“Go to a Catholic, then.”
“There aren’t any Catholics doing that.”
“Owney.”
“That’s all Jews, that business. Both sides. The psychiatrists are Jews and the patients are Jews. When you walk in there the first thing the guy says, he doesn’t even say hello, he says, ‘You’re not happy with your sex!’”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Huh. You say. I see things in my sleep at night that I don’t even tell you about.”
“I know you do. That’s why I’m saying that you should tell somebody about it.”
“Who? Some Jew doesn’t know what a fistfight is? I’m going to walk in and tell him about how you got to break somebody’s arm—break the fucking thing!—to make it fit into a body bag. They’re all around the place with their arms stuck up in the air so stiff. I got that on my mind, all your guy wants to hear about is what I’m doing with my prick.”
Dolores shrugged. “When cornered, attack.”
“What do you mean?”
“Because you sound so stupid, and you know that you’re being stupid. But you’ll hide behind anything, even stupidity, instead of correcting something shaking inside of you.”
He turned to the window.
“Owney.”
“I don’t want to talk about it anymore. I stopped drinking and that’s it.”
He turned around and walked out of the living room, throwing her a glance as he left.
“I got to get some sleep.”
She did not look at him. Slowly, she picked up the television guide from the coffee table and began to look for movies that were on late.
In the morning she felt her feet pushing against the arm of the couch, and this woke her up.
The phone rang that day in the middle of those hours she resented the most, when the freshness was gone and the energy was out of the sounds on the streets, leaving her with no sense of accomplishment and with the only challenge in front of her the balancing of her life with that of her husband and with his second person, the one whose life dripped out of him as he sat on a barstool.
“Yeah.” Ralphie Schmidt was on the phone.
“He’s not home yet. This is you, Ralphie, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Ralphie Schmidt said. “You wouldn’t believe what’s happening here.”
“Such as.”
“I got, let me see now, I count four patrol cars outside and two trucks. One big one and one little one.”
“What about?”
“Me,” Ralphie said.
“What is it you’re talking about?”
“It’s over a domestic dispute. Owney could tell them for me. They’re crazy.”
“Ralphie, what dispute?”
“It began when the woman from the phone company called. I just got home yesterday. I been away. You know little girl Cindy? I been away to Keansburg with her last two weeks. I just get in the house and the woman calls me up and says they’re removing my phone right away on account of I haven’t paid. I said, hey, I just got home. The woman, a nigger woman, says, that is no concern of hers. I said, hey, bitc
h! Nigger bitch. She hangs up. So today, I look out and what do I see? The phone company man going up the pole outside. He’s going to rip my wires right out of the box. Well, I don’t have to tell you. I fucking let him know. Put two under his fucking nose.”
“You did what?”
“I fucking put two under his nose. You heard me.”
“You shot at him?”
“Shot near him. Not at him. If I shot at him, he’d be dog meat.”
“And the police came?”
“Yeah, they came. Then this Cindy goes fucking nuts. I try to calm her down. She’s a complete moron, you know. Messed up on mescaline. She goes jumpin’ out the window, probably out telling them now that I tried to kill her.”
“Ralphie, do you have a gun now?”
“You know it.”
“And what are the police doing?”
“They’re nosing around. I got the place all barricaded up. I’m ready to go shot for shot with them.”
“Ralphie. I’m going to call Owney and get him over there as soon as I can.”
“That’s good. They’ll respect him. He can straighten it out.”
“But while I’m getting him, let me at least try to talk to the police myself.”
“When you’re talking to them, you better tell them to remain down. Specialist First Class Ralphie Schmidt got no trouble with weaponry.”
“Ralphie. You sit still. What if your mother comes home in the middle of all this?”
“There won’t be a middle. She won’t be back until tonight late. Nobody gets in before her. You should see how I got the front door and windows all barricaded up.”
“Sit there. I’ll call you back.”
“I’ll sit as long as they don’t move.”
“Do that now.”
“Okay.”
She hung up and dialed 911 immediately. The phone rang once.
Table Money Page 29