Doolan reached for his rain jacket, which was hanging on a wall hook, and took out cigarettes. As he did this, straining to get the cigarettes without leaving the barstool, the handle of a small pistol showed from inside the back of his pants. Doolan, the night supervisor of the Post Office substation down the avenue from the bar, was not required to be armed while supervising night mail, and had no means of obtaining a licensed gun. As Doolan imagined himself a stagecoach driver and thus entitled to wear a gun like a real man, he had purchased this weapon in Fort Lauderdale, in a shop that sold air conditioners, television sets, and handguns.
“Whatever,” Sharon said, staring at the gun.
“What’s that?” Doolan said.
“Nothing. I just said, ‘Whatever.’ That’s the story of my life. Even the words I say don’t mean nothing.”
“Things are better than that,” Doolan said.
Sharon sighed. “You know how bad it is? You know what I done last night? I hung around this place in Ozone Park until it closed and then I took a ride out to Long Island to buy beefsteak tomatoes. I drove all the way out to Orient Point and parked there on the road until the guy came out and opened his stand. It was so early he was sleepwalking. I told him I wanted beefsteak tomatoes. He said, ‘You got to come back in about six months for them.’ ‘All right, give me the cauliflower and I’ll come back someday for my beefsteak tomatoes.’ Then I rode all the way back here to my house and went to bed. It was the best couple hours I had all week.”
She took a long drag on her cigarette and looked up and down the bar. “I was so tired when I went home that I forgot to take the cauliflower out of the car. It’s still sitting there on the front seat. A whole big bag of cauliflower.”
Doolan shook his head as he finished his beer.
“What are you doing when you finish?” Sharon said.
“Going home to my wife and family.”
“What about poor Sharon? Are you leaving her alone?”
Doolan smiled. “I’m afraid so.”
“Oh. I wanted to go out tonight,” Sharon said.
As Doolan realized that Sharon suddenly was offering what might be the greatest promise of them all, he stood uncertainly, a man suddenly thrust from the wings and into the lead role.
“You really want a drink?”
“Absolutely. I want you to take me out.”
Doolan swallowed. “I don’t get off until twelve.”
Sharon made a sour face. “I thought you was the boss in there.”
“I’ll be here by ten,” Doolan said.
“That’s good,” Sharon said. “We’ll have fun.”
Sharon chewed gum, smoked a cigarette with her left hand, and kept in front of her a drink that she did not want. The right hand rested on the large bag of cauliflower from Long Island, which was on the next stool. Inside the bag, wedged between heads of cauliflower, was the gun she had taken from Chester Doolan, who was her boyfriend for the night. Now, at eight in the morning, Chester was still asleep in Sharon’s bed and Sharon was in the Green Fields bar with Chester’s gun. Next time he wakes up early, Sharon said to herself.
“Dead,” Sharon said to the bartender.
“Out shopping early,” he said.
“Out shopping early,” Sharon said.
“Where were you?” he asked.
“I don’t know, some store over on the next block.”
“They got good stores on Ninth Avenue,” he said.
“To tell you the truth, it’s the first time I’ve ever been here.”
“I know you’re not from around here,” he said.
“I’m from Jersey.”
“I didn’t think I’d seen you here before.”
“Never. I was out last night and I met this guy. He told me come around here today, he’d buy me a drink. I’m coming for the first time and I seen these stores and I figured, let me stop and buy something nice. Take it home with me.”
“That was good,” the bartender said.
“Yeah. Only now I’m sitting here with nice fresh cauliflower and nobody buying me a drink.”
A smile came over the bartender’s tired face. “Somebody will.”
“Guy said he’d buy me a drink. I’m here and he’s not. O’Sullivan.”
“Oh. Well. I don’t know about him. This is early for him. He stops around late in the afternoon. You never see him before then. When he’s in town, he makes a lot of stops all day. He gets in here late afternoon. Then he goes over to theatres.”
“He in show business?”
“He goes around the stagehands; I don’t know what he’s got to do with them. I know he goes there. He’s got a sister works there, too. Works usher. He always stops by to see her. She was working at the Lyceum, but that play closed. She’s working at another one of them. The one got Sleuth playing at it.”
“What am I supposed to do, sit here all day?” Sharon said. She slid off the barstool and picked up the bag of cauliflower with both hands and hugged it. This caused the heads of cauliflower to rearrange themselves and the gun that Sharon originally had shoved into the middle of the cauliflower was now pressing against her chest.
“If he comes in,” Sharon said as she went to the door.
“I’ll tell him,” the bartender said. “What’s the name?”
“Tell him Sharon from last night.”
She went out into the cold air. A flatbed truck, chains slapping against crates piled too high, rushed by. Next door to the bar, a man opened the door to an old appliance shop and the burglar alarm went off. Sharon flinched at the noise. She stood hugging her package, with the gun against her and an indoor look, the pile of black hair and thick make-up out of place on the morning street. At the corner, Puerto Rican men stood in leather jackets and talked to young women. They waited for the freight elevator doors to open and start them on a day of work upstairs on a factory floor.
Sharon knew that she had many hours to wait. Fair enough, she thought, so I could wait a few hours for him. She remembered how once, going to the first job of her life, a day waitress on Flatbush Avenue down in Brooklyn, she was shoved as she stepped off the bus at Myrtle and Wyckoff in Ridgewood to change to the el. She fell into a deep puddle of slush. The guy who shoved her, a round-faced man who wore a blue jacket with his name, Lou, written over the pocket, went by her without glancing. He ran up the el steps. Two weeks later, he ran up the same el steps. Sharon, waiting on the platform, only had to step out and give him one good shove. The action of the guy running up the stairs and Sharon’s hands moving at his chest caused the guy to give an extra flip as he went backward and started tumbling down the steps.
Now, standing on Eleventh Avenue in Manhattan, in front of the Green Fields bar, Sharon said to herself, And this guy hits me with a baseball bat and he’s supposed to walk around?
Sharon went to her car, placed the bag of cauliflower on the front seat, and drove to a cousin’s house in Astoria. She carried the cauliflower into the second-floor apartment. Her cousin said, “You got for me?” Sharon said, “No, this is special for me. I’ll get something for you next time.”
The cousin watched as Sharon took the cauliflower into the spare bedroom. It was nine-thirty in the morning. Sharon slept, until three. Before leaving the apartment, she looked in the newspaper for the play, Sleuth, and saw that it was at the Music Box on West 45th Street.
At four o’clock, she was back in the Green Fields. O’Sullivan was not there. Sharon never had seen the man. He had hit her with his baseball bat and she went out cold and he was gone. But for the last few months she had repeatedly asked Jimmy Morrison to describe him. Asked so many times she now could do a painting of O’Sullivan.
She went back to the car and chewed gum to the music on the radio. It was almost six o’clock when a car pulled to the curb in front of her. O’Sullivan got out and walked quickly into the bar. Sharon calmly turned off the radio. She juggled the bag and put the gun on top of the cauliflower. She had the car door open and was about
to get out when O’Sullivan came striding quickly back across the sidewalk and got into his car.
Sharon pulled her door shut and followed O’Sullivan’s car. It went down to the parking lot near the Martin Beck Theatre on 45th Street. O’Sullivan got out and started up the block. Sharon put her car in the same lot and walked after him, hugging her package. O’Sullivan kept walking quickly, and Sharon began to run. Past the theater, at the corner of Eighth Avenue, there were two cops. Sharon stopped running. Her mind was not on witnesses, but stopping at the sight of uniforms was a reflex. The first groups of people were on their way to dinner before the theatre, and O’Sullivan weaved through them quickly. Sharon saw him enter the Music Box. As she got up to the theatre, she bumped into a small, dark-haired man who was about to go in the stage door.
“Excuse me, my dear woman,” he said. Then his eyes widened as he looked at the top of the bag and saw the gun.
“Will you tell me what in the name of anything holy you need that for?”
“None of your business,” Sharon said.
“If it goes off in me belly, it would be,” he said.
“In case I get mugged,” Sharon said.
He put his hand on her shoulder and spoke softly. “My dear, lovely young woman. Murder begets murder and always in the cause of honor, peace, and justice. And so it will continue until the gods grow tired of blood and breed a race of better men.”
“That’s very nice,” Sharon said.
“It’s Shaw,” the man said.
“Oh.”
“It’s just my offering to you on a night that I hope will be so much better for you than your day. The idea of your carrying a gun while you shop for food causes my face to become snowy white.”
Sharon nodded and the man said, “All the best.” He walked into the stage entrance and she remained on the sidewalk, waiting.
Ten minutes later, O’Sullivan walked out of the theatre. He was smiling to himself about something. At first, Sharon wanted to say something to him. Then she put her hand into the bag of cauliflower and gripped the gun and held it straight out. The paper bag tilted and the cauliflower bounced onto the sidewalk as she fired the gun inside the bag three times into O’Sullivan’s back. The paper bag caught fire. She smothered it against her chest and kept walking.
She just kept walking. She went all the way to Ninth Avenue and turned the corner and nobody bothered her.
The next morning, Sharon brought a container of coffee and the newspaper into the bar on Jamaica Avenue to start her day’s work. The porter was in the back, mopping the men’s room. Standing at the far end of the bar, hands trembling, eyes desperate, was Chester Doolan. He wore a black raincoat over his gray postal worker’s shirt.
“Chester, you got anything to say, you go home and tell it to your wife. Tell her you slept with Sharon.”
Sharon took off her imitation leopard coat and hung it on a hook. Without talking, she walked past the man, went behind the bar, stuck the newspaper underneath, and opened the coffee.
“Dead,” she said.
“Is he?” the nervous man said.
“I don’t mean anybody else. I mean me. I’m dead. I’m the only one that counts.”
“It says in the paper he’s still alive,” the man said.
Sharon didn’t look at him. “Chester, what are you worried about?”
“Because the guy could be dead by now.”
“Did the paper say that Sharon could have been dead the way he hit me with his baseball bat?”
“The guy could die right now,” Chester said.
“What’s that got to do with you?” Sharon said.
“It was my gun.”
“You told me yourself that you got no license to have a gun on your job,” Sharon said. “You told me you went out somewhere and bought it someplace. What are you so worried about?”
Chester backed away. “You’re acting like someone crazy.”
“I’m acting like someone who got good and fucking even.”
She reached for her shoulder bag on the back bar. “You’re yellin’ so much, I want to give it back to you.”
Chester was about to run. She reached into the bag and took out a pack of cigarettes. “I told myself I never was going to talk about this today. If anybody asks me, I’ll tell them that you did it and gave me the gun to hold.”
She walked out from behind the bar and went to the ladies’ room. “I don’t want to see you here when I come out.”
When she stepped out, Chester was gone. She told herself that she truly would never think of him again. She sat on a stool at the end of the bar nearest the window and smoked several cigarettes and sipped coffee. She thought about turning on the juke box and listening to Sinatra records. Sinatra sure wouldn’t of been so insulted if I took a gun from him, Sharon thought. He would of given me a hug and said, Are you all right, Sharon? That’s what he would of done. In the smoke in the air in the empty saloon, she saw Sinatra rubbing a hand on the side of his face and saying, Well, baby, you got to do what you got to do. Now Sinatra reached out and patted Sharon on her cheek. You’re all right, baby. You’re a stand-up broad. Sharon shrugged. So what do I get around here? I’m sitting here and the best I got is a guy scared to death that he’s in trouble. Never mind Sharon. He doesn’t even mention Sharon. Sharon can’t get a break, she told herself. She grimaced as she saw Owney’s car pull in front and Owney getting out with a face flushed with whiskey.
“What are you up to?” she said as he walked in.
“I just heard on the radio.”
“What did you hear? Pearl Harbor?”
“The guy’s dead.”
“That’s a shame. Who died?”
“We heard on the radio, they found cabbages—”
“Cauliflower.”
Owney stared.
“My radio said cauliflower,” Sharon said. “Cauliflower. Do you want to see what else the woman had in the bag? Do you want to see?” Sharon reached into the shoulder bag and pulled out the gun as if it were the American flag.
She held it to her nose. “It still smells.”
“You used it?” Owney said.
“Did I use it? You know I did. Here, you want to see? Here.” She handed Owney the gun.
“Smell it. You could smell the real Sharon there. Gunpowder. That’s my new name. Sharon Gunpowder.”
Owney sat dazed, with the sour taste in his mouth.
“What was I supposed to do, wait for you people?” she said. She picked up her coffee.
“I hope it’s all right,” Owney muttered.
“You hope what?”
“I hope you’re all right. Are you all right?”
“At least,” she said.
“What?”
“I thought Frank Sinatra was the only one ask me that.”
“What are you talking about, Sinatra?”
“Forget it. Don’t listen to me. I forgot you know your way around, too. You’re good and fucked up, but you got a little style anyway.”
“I’ll take this.” He was befuddled by what she said, but he knew he couldn’t leave the gun with her. Owney put it into his pocket and walked out of the bar. As he got to the car, Sharon stood in the saloon doorway with coffee in one hand and the cigarette in the other.
“Owney?”
“What?”
“He shouldn’t of done that to Sharon.”
Then she smiled at a man passing by on his way to work.
As Owney drove away, he careened around a postal truck. The sides of the street rose and became the sides of a toboggan. Then the pavement began to climb, fall, and twist. He blinked in a futile attempt to clear his vision. He assured himself that what he was doing was right; she had taken over the peril that belonged to his father and him. Now he was taking away the one sure way they could trace a shooting to her and he was going to bury it. He went to the cemetery; but there were too many people—workmen and funeral directors. Instead of throwing the gun into a grave, the way he wanted to, he
took it upstairs and shoved it into his dresser. When he came back down, he knew enough not to drive. He wandered out of the gates and headed for the streets.
On the newsstands the first edition of the Post had a huge headline about the murder. It was replaced, in all later editions by the marriage of a rock star. The murder was not mentioned again anywhere for months.
It was still morning when Grandma opened the door and let Owney into the Gold Key, which was on Palmetto Street in Ridgewood.
“Beer,” Owney said.
“Too chilly in the morning for just beer.” She reached for a bottle of Fleischmann’s. Owney stepped slowly to the bar with his hands rubbing together. Instead of rubbing together briskly, the fingers were slowly braiding, pushing his nerves back into their catacombs. From the other side of the bar, just this least bit hazy, were the spotted old hands of a fight second who was leaning through the ropes and yanking up the gloves on the opponent, alcohol, who stood in the corner and waited for the bell.
The first drink brought water to Owney’s eyes. The second went down easier. Owney took only half the beer chaser and then put the glass down. He never heard the bell as the opponent walked out of the corner. The face was smeared with Vaseline, so punches would slide off. The opponent jabbed.
Grandma poured another shot, then put the bottle in the gutter. Walking on old legs, she went to the dimness at the end of the bar where her latest boyfriend, Louie, sat with his cane hooked onto the bar. She raised her shot glass to Louie.
“I can’t do it, Louie, and you can’t do it, so let’s get together.”
She had a white sweater around her stooped shoulders and eyeglasses hanging on glass beads around her neck. She was seventy-five and was supposed to be the oldest barmaid in Ridgewood.
The el line runs well over Palmetto Street, the city buses barely fitting under the rusting el trestle. Owney watched the big buses crowded with people going to work swing out from under the el.
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