Blue Eyes

by Jerome Charyn

  In five minutes Coen was sitting on his bed, his ankles itching from the number of confrontations he’d had. He smiled when the phone rang. César called him prickless and gutless. “Manfred, you don’t have to pull on Boris to find me. Why shame a man in his own territory? He won’t enjoy his blintzes any more.”

  “Zorro, you shouldn’t have made the Chinaman bring back Spanish’s fat shoe.”

  “Crazy, do I interfere with the chink’s personal business? He has a mind. And since when am I Zorro to you?”

  “You’re the one who wants me for an enemy. Why are you dogging my wife? César, I promise you, that Chinaman shows up at her playground one more time, I’ll kick you far as Boston Road. What’s the matter? You can’t stand me fraternizing with Odile? Don’t worry. I didn’t taste her sandwiches.”

  “Look who discovered America,” César mumbled into the phone. “She’s wide.”

  “What?”

  “I said she’s wide. The virgin queen. She puts it in your face, and runs to Vander Child. I couldn’t care a nigger’s lip how much you’re getting from Odette. Schmuck, she works for me.”

  “Then what’s bugging you, César?”

  “You know, you miserable shit. Papa gave you the farm. He let you sit on his own toilet seat. You took his food. You burned his candles on the holidays. He trusted you with Jerónimo. He put you next to him, on his left side. He forgave you for being a Coen. I could see you turn. Manfred with his sketching pad. The boy from the Manhattan high school. With his fancy report cards. I told Papa to throw chocolate syrup in your eyes. But Papa liked you, so he blinked the other way.”

  “That’s twenty years ago. What’s it got to do with planting the Chinaman near my wife?”

  “Ask your sweetheart, your old Chief.”

  “Isaac? He’s your Papa’s man.”

  “Baloney. Boston Road’s one big wire, with plugs going from our mouths to the Chiefs ass. Isaac doesn’t miss a word.”

  “So why did Papa take him in?”

  “Because if a rat comes sniffing around it’s better to keep him where you can find him, so he won’t feed off your guts in the dark.”

  “César, the last time I was in the Bronx Isaac put the wall between me and him. He closed the toilet door in my face.”

  “We showed you Jerónimo, we showed you Mordeckay, we got Vander’s kid for you, and you turned around and went to the Chief.”

  “I’ve been nursing a ping-pong bat since I’m home. Nothing more.”

  “That’s not how Isaac tells it. He taunts Papa with your name. You’re his ‘principal bait’ You dangled yourself on Isaac’s line. Manfred, you got to be a cuntface and a snot from your mother. She took sunbaths in Papa’s orchard, she made sure Jerónimo could see her from her nipples down, and then she complained that the baby was spying on her.”

  Coen remembered the orchard table, Papa’s humpbacked trees, Jerónimo playing with a bow too weak to hold an arrow, Albert and Sheb off the farm looking for country eggs, jumbos to take with them to the Bronx, Coen with his mother on the table, begging her to wear a blanket, walking around the table like some scarecrow with stretched arms whenever Jerónimo blundered near them trying to retrieve the arrows that spilled off his bow.

  “César, my mother’s not here. Ask Papa how much my father owed him before he died? Tell me why it took so long to locate my address in Germany? Did you all add my father’s bills up to the penny? How much was the egg store behind?”

  “Manfred, wake up. Papa could have carried the egg store on his finger. Why should he need your father’s little grubs?” And he hung up on Coen, who couldn’t get the whiff of strawberries out of his nose or forestall the image of his mother stooping in the fields, putting strawberries in the bandanna that ought to have been on her chest. Did she ever strip like this with Albert around? Was she defying the Guzmanns or showing off? Who else peeked under the bandanna? Is that why Albert wouldn’t send them to the farm any more? Coen stuck a pillow on his head and chewed near the wall.

  Boris Telfin, the Boris Telfin of cherry blintzes and quarter cigars, was a dice steerer, a man who sat for gamblers, not a message boy. It was bad enough that he was owned by Marranos, a family of pig-eating Jews, the Guzmanns of Portugal, Lima, and the Bronx, who mumbled paternosters into their chicken soup, who put crosses on their graves, who were Christians 80 percent of the time; but he didn’t expect to be a permanent liaison between Zorro (the most variable of his masters) and a Chinaman. Still, it wasn’t entirely César’s fault. The First Deputy men were keeping him indoors, patrolling his dice cribs (the apartments where the games were held) in green cars, and César couldn’t risk a ride into the Chinaman’s territories. So Boris had to go.

  He met the Chinaman in a lot on Prince Street. The fool wore suspenders that could have marked him a mile off. Boris couldn’t get familiar with such a person (at least the Marranos had a distaste for violence and open warfare). He knew about the Chinaman’s career, the skullings of cab drivers and other chauffeurs. No hackie could be safe around this chink.

  “Sweetheart, tell Zorro I dumped the shoe. It was my choice. It’s a whore’s boot. It was bringing me hard luck.”

  “Mister, that’s old news. I mean about the shoe. Zorro asks you a favor. Concerning the gentleman Coen. Enough is enough. Personally I wouldn’t mind a little brain damage. His head could use a few more holes. But that aint César’s wish. He wants you to lay low. Madam Coen is free to think her Christian thoughts unmolested in the park.”

  “Boris, he touched my face. Twice. Once at the stationhouse, once at Bummy’s. He gets blown away for that, but I’ll pick the hour.”

  “Mister, he touched me too. He pulled my coat Imagine, he molests you on the street, the tin cop. All my brother-in-laws were watching.”

  “Boris, I’ll remember him for you. I promise.”

  The steerer was getting to like the Chinaman. “Chino, you have my approval, but please, don’t mention it to Zorro. He’ll pack me to Queens, in a box.”

  “I’m no fink,” the Chinaman said.

  “Chino, what can I do for you? Just ask.”

  “Boris, there’s a man, Solomon Wong, he used to scrape plates for my father in Cuba, an old man, I want him protected. He won’t take money from me.”

  “How much of a cosh?” Boris asked, being practical.

  “Maybe ten a week.” The Chinaman went for his money clip. Boris shook his head.

  “Ten a week? César will pay.”

  “No. It’s gotta come from me. Else it won’t work.”

  Boris accepted the Chinaman’s money. He was ready to drive off. The Chinaman grabbed on to the limousine.

  “Don’t you want to know where to find him?”

  “Who?”

  “The dishwasher. Try the other lots. Or the flophouses.”

  “Mister, how many Solomon Wongs can there be?”

  Chino let go of the car. He was hurting for a gun. The bouncers at The Dwarf had his Colt They’d dropped it in a water pail when he rushed the joint for Odile. He would slap those two huskies after he finished with Coen. He couldn’t buy a gun off one of his regular suppliers. The market was drying up with police agents everywhere; only the niggers would sell you a piece, and he couldn’t go uptown that far. He missed his shoe, that humpbacked strip of leather. But he’d been getting touchy pictures of his father lately in his head each time he wore the shoe. The Chinaman was a believer; he had no compunctions about the credibility of ghosts. He was accountable to them, for sure. His father had mud in his scalp (a sign of unrest). To appease the ghost Chino hoped to make provisions for Solomon Wong. Perhaps his old father was destined to walk with a muddy head until Solomon, alive in this world, could be rescued from the lowly state of dishwasher and bindlestiff (a Cuban vagabundo), and given a definite income, no matter how small. But he couldn’t locate Solomon these days. And the ghosts had to be fed. So he got rid of the shoe. Heeding the growls in his stomach, he marched to Grand Street for canno
li and Sicilian almond water. Blue-eyes would come, only not this afternoon.

  12 His ring-around-a-rosy with César and the Chinaman must have puffed out his heart. Coen, who swore he never dreamed, was dreaming three times a night. The dreams didn’t involve the Guzmanns, the egg store, or the farm. Most of them were about his marriage, Coen redraping his fights with Stephanie, tucking under her crying spells and his tightmouthed, mummied looks with nothing more durable than spit, love-making spit, Coen crazied with the notion that if he penetrated his wife long enough their differences would dissolve. But the last of the dreams drifted off Coen’s marriage and occurred in the stationhouse. Coen, a bachelored Coen, was called into the long and narrow yard at the side of the stationhouse (such yard serving as an outdoor gym, a mustering place, and a temporary morgue), to identify two bodies found on precinct turf. The bodies were housed in makeshift coffins (wicker baskets from a hospital laundry room padded with old blankets from the horse patrol). Coen recognized the baby fat through the wicker plaits. The girls had blue disfigured chicken necks and thickened tongues. The wickers had creased their flesh. Their eyes were swollen over with brown lumps. They bled from their teeth. The captain’s man must have crossed their fingers and bent their legs together; they couldn’t have died in such a benign position. Coen touched Judith first He didn’t want a scrubby horse blanket on his girl. There were bugs in the basket, water beetles. Coen injured them with his thumbs, but he couldn’t go far enough, and the beetles turned over on their backs and made disgusting noises through the cracks in their shells. Coen undressed in the yard. He put his coat under Alice, and stuffed Judith’s coffin with trouser legs. The morgue wagon arrived, purring gas. Coen still hadn’t determined who called him into the yard. The squad commander? Brodsky? Pimloe? Coen’s sometime partner, Detective Brown?

  He woke spitting Isaac’s name. His nose was stiff with mucus. It was three in the morning by his own clock. He got out of bed in a shiver, with unreliable knees. He had involved Stephanie in his own dreck. But he couldn’t slap the Chinaman again on account of one lousy dream. He wore his detective suit (herringbone, gray on gray), shaved the pesty hairs under his nose, and went to Stephanie’s block. He badgered her night doorman, sticking him in the ribs with his gold shield. “Mrs. Nerval needs me. I’m a relative of hers and a cop.” The doorman didn’t like cops in his building after midnight. He dangled the plugs of the intercom with a nervous fist. He got Charles. “Dr. Nerval, sorry Dr. Nerval, a gentleman here, says he’s connected to your wife. He’s holding a badge on me.”

  Coen heard Charles sputter through the plugs. He put away his shield. “I want Mrs. Nerval, not him.”

  “Dr. Nerval, the gentleman asks for your wife.”

  Coen stuck his mouth near the wires. “Charlie, don’t be such a shit. It’s important. Let me up.”

  “Coen, it’s four o’clock. You think dentists never sleep? I have two girls in the other room.”

  Charles wore his slippers for the cop. He wished Coen would chase his wife during proper hours. He was in love with both of his dental assistants, Puerto Rican girls with delicate moustaches and narrow waists. But Charles was too shrewd to shake up the equilibrium at his clinic. He wouldn’t pursue Rita or Beatriz until they left him for a better job. He confined himself to hurried squeezes of a thigh whenever his patients, mostly old men, fell asleep in the dentist chair.

  Stephanie came out of her bedroom in a clumsy wraparound showing a good deal of skin. She had enough sense not to fool with Coen. “Freddy, sit down.” Charles looked once at a pocket of veins on Stephanie’s thigh and considered how lucky he was to have Rita and Beatriz.

  “Steffie, wake up Judith and Alice, please.”

  Charles clutched his pajamas. “The captain’s giving orders. Stephanie, meet your men friends outside the building from now on. The guy downstairs will call us gypsies soon.”

  “Charlie, let him finish. Make some toast for us or go to bed.”

  Coen tried not to stare at his old wife; it was the crooked fall of the wraparound, the puffs of cloth, that roused him, not the bared skin. “Take the girls to Charlie’s mother. Get them to Connecticut. Right away.”

  “He’s simple-minded,” Charles said. “He’s demented, that’s what he is. He thinks we run a shuttle for little girls. Stephanie, tell him to find other people to annoy.”

  “Fred, does it have something to do with that Chinese boy?”

  “Chino Reyes was hired to do a tickle job. I offended his master. The Guzmanns say I’m a spy.”

  “Is Isaac in the middle of this?” Stephanie said. She still had a grudge against the Chief; Isaac was the one who had stepped into their marriage, manipulated Coen, masterminded plots that kept him away from her.

  “Who’s the China boy?” Charles said. “Why can’t the girls sleep in their own beds?”

  “The Chinaman has funny rules. Hell slap anybody who’s close to me. He’s been sneaking looks at Judith and Alice in the park.”

  Charles wandered around the parlor, grim-faced, his teasing manner gone. “It’s Coen’s fault. A cop who lies down with crooks. Stephanie, why’d you divorce him if you meant to bring him home? He’ll get the babies killed. I’m going to call the police.”

  “Charlie, you’re looking at the police.”

  “You? You’re no cop. I know about Isaac Sidel. He dressed you, he made you up, and left you with your finger in your ass. You can’t cross the street without Isaac. I hear it plenty from detectives in the Bronx. You were perfect for wagging a chief’s tail. Stephanie, bundle up the girls. I’ll drive them to mama. Coen, do me a favor. Don’t come back.”

  “They’ll only be in Connecticut a few days,” Coen muttered. He was ashamed to tell Stephanie that all his suspicions came from a dream. But the image of Judith and Alice in straw coffins seemed perfectly valid to Coen. There was too much pulp in the wickers for him to ignore. Charles fixed Alice but Stephanie lingered with Judith’s sock so she could talk to Coen. “Be careful, Freddy. Make peace with the Guzmanns, and get out.”

  She hugged him in front of Charles and the girls, held him in a wifely way, without shifting her tongue, and Coen felt his nervousness go but he couldn’t get rid of his dread; lost father, lost mother, lost Coen. Stephanie perceived the animal sharpness of his body, the twitches in his chest, and she wished she could have two husbands instead of one. Charles began to nag. “Coen, she’ll continue the massage tomorrow. Damn it, Stephanie, can’t you hate him, just a tiny bit, for bringing your daughters into his stinking life? I’m only their father. I don’t count.”

  Hunching past the doorman, Coen made the street. He walked with his eyes deep in his head, spooking cab drivers on Central Park West; they saw a herringbone man with a hard stare. Now, facing Columbus, five blocks down from Stephanie and Charles, he could consider how relieved he was to find the girls still alive. Coen wouldn’t attribute any wizardry to his dream. But the straw coffins outside the stationhouse shoved him closer to his father’s oven, made him peek into the stove. Stuffed with Albert, it was easy for him to credit Judith and Alice with chicken necks. Approaching his corner, he had to choose each of his steps to avoid a tangle of elderly women and men. They were pummeling a cubano into the ground, an SRO from Spanish Arnold’s hotel. Coen recognized their leader, the Widow Dalkey, his neighbor, who was also the captain of the block. The cubano’s arms were covered with fists and claws. He was hugging something against his belly. He had scratches around the eyes. Coen pushed himself into the war party. He took Mrs. Dalkey’s fist off the cubano’s cheek. She wailed and spit until she saw it was Coen. A Pomeranian with blood in its nose dropped between the cubano’s legs. Mrs. Dalkey blew hot air at Coen. “We caught him, Detective Coen. We caught the filthy bum. He won’t murder dogs no more.” She pointed to a cracked dish near one of the trees that she had planted for the block. “He fed Mimsey poison in a lump of steak.” The Pomeranian could no longer raise her head. Her nipples had begun to swell.

 
Coen stood between the cubano and Dalkey’s people. He didn’t have enough ambition to march him to the nearest stationhouse with Dalkey on his toes, petting the dying Pomeranian, and holding it as evidence. The cubano could answer “Yes” and “No” in English, and nothing more. He shivered up against Coen, preferring to show the side of his face to a few old men rather than Mrs. Dalkey. He was wearing stale perfume. “Beast,” Mrs. Dalkey hissed through the wall of old men. When she decided that Coen couldn’t satisfy her, she summoned a rookie cop from Broadway. The rookie was thick in the pants with paraphernalia; handcuffs, holster, club, cartridge belt, memorandum book, and pencil case. His name was Morgenstern. A pin from one of the fraternal orders for Jewish cops was tacked to his blouse. Coen had the same pin, but he never wore it; during the time of his marriage the Society of the Hands of Esau had informed him that it could not provide burial space for non-Jewish wives. Coen and Stephanie would have to lie in different cemeteries, according to the society’s bylaws. Coen turned over his future grave to an indigent Jewish cop who hadn’t kept up his premiums and wanted to be buried on the society’s grounds.

  “You take the collar,” Coen said. “It’s your beat. But be sure these ladies and gentlemen don’t tear him to pieces before you get to the house.”

  The rookie insisted on shaking Coen’s hand. This was only his third arrest. The bulls at his precinct were much stingier than Coen. They didn’t give “collars” away. And they wouldn’t talk to him on the street.

  “Officer Morgenstern,” Mrs. Dalkey said. “He’s the lipstick freak, I bet. I can tell a pervert by the sweat in their eyes.”

  The rookie dug for his memorandum book. His pencil snapped on the “f” of freak. He got one from Mrs. Dalkey with a better point.

  Coen shouted his telephone number. “Call me after they bring him upstairs.”

  “What should I do with the dog, Mr. Coen?”

  “Give it to Dalkey. And don’t forget the dish.”