Bronx Noir

by S. J. Rozan

  “Ma, I’m so sorry,” I lied again.

  “I can’t get over it,” she said, sitting down in a recliner that still had the same crocheted throw I’d last seen who knows when. She stared at me, as if I were an apparition of the sort she prayed against. “What are you doing here?” Her tone had shifted quickly, as if she realized it was me, and not my brother come back from the dead.

  “I’m from here.”

  “Not for ages. Not since you left. The only time you came back, there was trouble.”

  “I’ve been through a lot. I’ve changed.”

  “So have we all.”

  “I wanted to see you.”

  “What is it you need?” Sharper now, again. I could never fool her. “Is it money? What are you doing? When did you get out?”

  “Ma, it’s not money.” Though it was, it always was, in the end. And at the beginning. I noticed on the little table next to her recliner a photograph of Jimmy and me, from our reckless teens—when weren’t we reckless though?—taken at our cousin Patty’s wedding. I had hair, Jimmy life. My mother saw me eyeing it. Tears had begun to shine in her eyes. “Last night. I came right here.”

  “We never knew anything about you.”

  “I was safe there. As safe as you can be. In there.”

  “That’s not what I meant.” She paused. “You were never safe.”

  “I was though, on my own.”

  “I’d already lost one son.”

  “There’s no excuse. I know.”

  “And after that night, after you come back for one day, you and Jimmy—”

  The phone rang. Mom stopped sniveling and picked up the receiver. “Of course I’m crying. Yes. Yes. No. Not that. Davey’s here. Yes. No, don’t come. I don’t know if he wants to—no. He didn’t. I’m fine. Yes. No. Alone. I will. But…no. I’ll try.” She put the receiver down and kept her eye on it for a second, as if expecting it to spring to life again.

  “How’s Bella?”

  “Oh, she’s angry she isn’t here.” She turned her face to me.

  “That’s nothing new.”

  “Don’t start.”

  “I haven’t. I just came to see you.” Bella was a necessary by-product of the visit, like gas.

  “Do you expect to stay here?” Not unkindly. Not motherly.

  “No. Don’t worry. I thought I’d spend a little time with you—”

  “Before moving off again.”

  “You don’t want me here.”

  “You don’t want to be here. You never did. Ever since your father died.”

  “That wasn’t it.”

  “And what have you found on your travels, your wandering? What great insights have you uncovered? We’ve been in the dark for, what, twenty years? You’ve been here and there and shut up without a word. Except for that one time, that one night, that one day when everyone knew. But since. It’s like we’ve been dead.”

  “You could’ve considered me in some friary somewhere if that would’ve helped put your mind at rest. You always wanted me to be a priest. And I didn’t want to bother you.”

  “Bother? Bother us? That’s like a suicide thinking he’s helping others by shooting his face off. That’s a lie. You know it. It’s cowardice. And it’s wrong. It’s wrong. Oh, Davey.” And she began to weep, her head falling onto her arms, her bony back contorted with her sobbing.

  I watched her cry. I couldn’t ask her to stop. I couldn’t comfort her, certainly. I couldn’t demand anything of her. I just needed to wait there until dark, so I could leave, retrieve the stash from the church, and be on my way wherever. I looked around at the room, different from what I’d remembered, but when you remember only in decades, some things lose focus. The sofa was new. To me. And the big television. But the picture of Jesus, that famous painting that graced every Irish household in the Bronx and Queens and every damn borough, the Lord looking nothing so much as a film star, like a schoolmarm’s dream of the savior, that was there, in laminated eternity on its own little easel on the buffet table. There were palm fronds from Easter, dry behind the painting of a thatched house in County Cork, a generalized scene of whimsical poverty. Those hadn’t changed. The furniture was new, from what I remembered, but then, that was not to be relied upon.

  My mother calmed down after a few minutes, and we sat there in relative silence for fifteen minutes or so. I was reluctant to speak further, and I thought Ma was too rundown by her outburst. But I was wrong. She’d been waiting.

  The latch turned in the door. My mother and I looked toward it. Bella bustled in, older, wider, white-clad, wrathful.

  “What have you done to her?”

  “Bella.” I stood. She pushed past me, in her best busynurse mode.

  “Ma, is everything okay?”

  “We were just sitting here.”

  “Has he done anything?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Hello, Bella.”

  “Never the courtesy of a reply in ten years and you show up unannounced. You. You never changed.” She glowered at me. “Sit, Ma. And you—sit where I can see you. And don’t move. I hope you hid your purse, Ma.” She went into the kitchen, returning with a glass of water and a pill, giving them both to our mother. “Drink.” She sat on the sofa facing me.

  “So. You must have used up all the money I sent you.”

  “Thank you. I never thanked you.”

  “You didn’t. But I didn’t expect you to. When did you get out?”

  “Yesterday,” Ma said.

  “And you’re here now. For how long?”

  “Not long. Just a visit.”

  “So you must have something planned.”

  I didn’t answer that, but assumed an expression of surprise.

  “You might fool Ma, but you can’t fool me. You may think we’re dummies here in the old neighborhood, those of us who never left, too stupid to get out, but then, you thought everyone was stupid except you, didn’t you?”

  “All I’m here for is a visit, Bella,” I said. “I know I was wrong.”

  “You have never been right. Ever. And you and Jimmy together, I don’t know which one was worse.”

  “Bella,” said Ma.

  “Oh, Ma, cut it out. He was no saint. He’s dead and buried, and it’s been ten long years, but for heaven’s sake—”

  “I didn’t kill him.”

  “I have never believed that.”

  “What? That I didn’t kill him, or don’t you believe me?”

  “I have never believed you.”

  “Bella, I’m not here to explain myself—”

  “Then why are you here, Davey?”

  “—but to try to make things right. I even went to mass, for God’s sake.”

  “They’ll never be right while you’re roaming the streets. And you’ve never believed anything long enough to make a go of it. Mass. Hah.”

  “It was all Jimmy’s idea.”

  “So you said. So we heard.”

  “That was the truth!”

  “So you say.”

  “I didn’t kill him. He told me to get away. He didn’t expect we’d run up against anyone else.”

  “You left him there, bleeding.”

  “It was an accident.”

  That was the thing: It had simply happened. We had not counted on evening services, the sodality of tiresome bleating women leaving just as we’d arrived, the priest closing up, finding us at the statue, panicking at the sight of us at a time when the neighborhood had transitioned downward and dangerous, shouting, hitting me with the bronze candlestick he’d grabbed from the nave. Jimmy had hit him in turn after grabbing the candlestick from him, and being stronger, had brained him. I could see the screaming, leaching gash on the priest’s bald skull, and Jimmy, not realizing I was dazed, had thrown me the gun, which slipped and revenged the priest right there, the shot resounding like a chorus through the church. “Run,” he had said, always my protector and often my temptation, pushin
g it amid his shock and gasping, hot and smoking to me, and I did run, hoping to hide it, and myself, and had stumbled back bruised and bloody up the aisle toward the chancel where we’d just broken in and hidden the stolen cash. I’d tripped at the altar rail, like Cagney stumbling through the bleeding snow in The Roaring Twenties, and fallen finally in the sanctuary, victim at last to the ferocious bashing the priest had inflicted upon me. The adrenaline had kept me aloft until then, but at last I had collapsed, unconscious, while Jimmy lay dying and the priest lay dead. I was supposed to have kept watch while Jimmy hid the key under the statue for us to find later, I was supposed to have prevented the priest from finding him, I was supposed to have made sure the church had been quiet. No one was supposed to die.

  “You two together were an accident.”

  “You were always led astray,” Ma said.

  “As if Davey needed coaxing. Always the easy way, always too smart to work.”

  “I told you. I’ve changed.”

  “If you’d changed, you’d have stayed away. You want something.”

  “I had to make amends to you.”

  “Don’t, Davey. Just don’t. Spare us having to believe you and regretting it later. I’ll fix you something and you can be on your way. I’ll give you some money to tide you over, how’s that? I’m sure you’ve got some chippie stashed away somewhere, or some prison pal’s pad you can crash at, right?”

  “I don’t want your money, Bella. You’ve been too generous already.”

  “I know. I shouldn’t have sent you a thing. You might have never come back. How stupid I was to soften even for a moment.”

  “I’ve never had a chance to tell you how sorry I truly am. About Jimmy. About what happened.”

  “Apology accepted.” Which meant it wasn’t.

  “It’s been a long time,” Ma said.

  “We’ve gotten used to the peace, Ma and me, haven’t we, Ma? We’ve gotten used to knowing where you were, and not being a danger to us.”

  “So then. I see. Look, I never hurt you, or never meant to. And you’ve never left.”

  “You don’t just leave, Davey. Oh, you do, but I like it here, all of the mix.”

  “It was getting rough.”

  “We lasted though, didn’t we, Ma, didn’t we? The Bronx is in our blood, just as it’s in yours, along with something else.”

  “Jimmy hated it.”

  “Jimmy was a fool. A criminal like his father.”

  “Bella!”

  “Ma, enough. A criminal like you. I expected more from you, after the scholarship to Prep. But a little learning is a dangerous thing. It gives you ideas.”

  “I always had ideas, Bell.”

  “You had a fool for a counselor, Davey, and that was your brother, and when it wasn’t him it was yourself. Things came too easily. You never had to work for them.”

  “You think prison was easy.”

  “Maybe you learned a little about yourself.”

  I had. That didn’t mean I’d actually changed.

  “You can sit there proud, Bella, and look down on me from your moral mountain, but I don’t hear you. I served my time. I did my obligation to society. I regret what happened, but we all make mistakes, some of them larger than others. You’re no one to talk about Jimmy. He can’t defend himself against your slander. He had more life than you’ll ever have, dead though he’s been these ten years. So we took a few easy steps. It wasn’t as if you hadn’t left hints about all the security problems at that cheesy job of yours. Jimmy told me you were going on so about the idiotic systems there—you were practically begging us to rob it, you might as well have given us the key to the front door and the combination to the safe, which both were easy enough to find, and you think you’d be more trusting, wouldn’t you? But you’ve got more there going on underneath your stuffed shirt than you let on, don’t you? You’re your father’s daughter too, you know. So don’t act all high and mighty with me.”

  “Unlike you, I worked for every penny I’ve ever got.”

  “And resented every minute of it too. So I’m a dreamer.”

  She snorted.

  “So sue me. I’m sure Jimmy did his magic on you too. Don’t say he didn’t. You look for someone to blame, and never look inside.”

  “Oh, please, you with your holier-than-thou act—you’re a con, and you always will be.”

  “Ex. And at least I owned up to my part in things.”

  “Don’t fight, Davey,” Ma said. “Don’t. Don’t come home after all this time and start fighting. But stay for dinner. Bella, let him be. For me, now. It’s been too long.” She hauled herself up and headed to the kitchen.

  As soon as she was out of earshot, Bella leaned toward me. “I don’t trust you, Davey. I don’t believe you’re here to make amends, as you call it. In twenty years, you’ve shown up exactly twice, and the second time was a total disaster. So forgive me if I think there’s a fifty-fifty chance of things not working out so great now that you’re back.”

  “I can’t control what you think, Bella. I’m not here to hurt you, or Ma, or take anything from you or expect anything of you. I don’t know what I’m doing, where I’m going, but it won’t be here. I’ve always hated here. I don’t want a home. I don’t want a home here.”

  “And yet, you are here.”

  “Not for long. Listen—I know I hurt Ma, but it was killing me here. It was better that I disappeared. It was better. Jimmy stayed, and look what happened to him. He went job to job, hating every single minute. Only he told me he had a way out.”

  “He did. Thanks to you.”

  “And so I was the sucker. I showed up for him. He asked me to. He said he needed me. He was my brother. He said he was breaking out of here. He wanted my help. He needed money. He knew where to get it. So I came.”

  “And saw, and conquered. I got it. Davey, I’m not going to argue with you. I want you out of here, because you’ll drive Ma crazy like Jimmy did, with his drinking and drugs and thievery and scheming. You’re the same, with your lying and acting as if you know everything that’s going on, acting like because you read a few books you know more than anyone. What did you think would happen after you helped Jimmy? That he would reform? That you would become upstanding? You always spoke like someone who knew something about the world, but you never got beyond the sound of your own words, you never really made sense. I don’t think you believed yourself even, what you said. And like I said, I can’t argue anymore. I want to make sure Ma is all right—and let her have a memory of you where you’re not getting someone killed.”

  “And what did you think you’d do, once they found out we’d used your key?”

  “I knew nothing about that, and that was proved in court. The money was never found.”

  “Sometimes the dice falls the right way.”

  “And don’t start with your accusations. I was never in on your scheme, and I won’t have you saying that.” Her voice had been rising. She turned toward the kitchen and back to me. “And I don’t want you hanging around anymore. Giving Ma ideas that you’re going to change. It’s been hard enough, goddamnit, getting her stabilized all these years without you giving her false hope again about whatever. I don’t know what you’re planning, but you wouldn’t be here if you weren’t after something.”

  “I promise. I’ll be out of here tonight.”

  “And going to mass. As if you believe in anything. Stay away from church.”

  That wasn’t going to happen. But the rest of the afternoon and early evening passed without too much palpable rancor on Bella’s part or too much uncertain regret on Ma’s. I told them in so many words about prison life, about tutoring cons, about escaping the drudgery by reading, about keeping my head low. I didn’t tell them about the money, or the plan, or why Jimmy and I had thought that we’d escape the police by running into the church after we’d tripped the alarm like the rank amateurs we really were. Churches don’t offer sanctuary to petty thieves. But we’d managed to stay ahead
, and since both Jimmy and I had been altar boys, we knew the layout of St. Nick’s, the stashing places in the chancel, and one particular cabinet behind the vestment closet that had a trick bottom, which one of the older boys had told us about in secret years before. It had been a hiding place during Prohibition, where a generation of miscreant boozy clerics concealed their illicit hooch and extra altar wine. We’d stored comics there and, in our gormless Catholic way, porn of the lamest kind, succulent pouts and ballooning breasts, along with the odd pint of Night Train to glaze the eyes and heighten the erotic possibilities of marginally naked half-beauties. But the priests had long since cottoned on to our feeble depravities, and had nailed the compartment shut so that it could no longer be a repository of half-baked filth and vice. Yet both Jimmy and I had remembered the drawer down the years, and he’d told me to come back and retrieve our stuff when things had cooled down, in case he couldn’t get to it first. I’d opened that false bottom that night, and then replaced the nails carefully, so it would remain closed and not tempt a new breed of clerics, altar boys, or minor thieves. We’d planned to break through at a later date, weeks perhaps. That date had dawned ten years on.

  I left my mother and Bella’s apartment with no promise of anything other than an effort to let them know where I might be, how I might be reached, what I might do. In the end, I almost regretted—almost—my leaving, as Bella had lost some of her hostility and Ma had become less alternately weepy and accusatory and more resigned and benign, like the flock of women in the window captioned Mary Sodality.

  Dusk had crept in and settled over Devoe Park when I left the Oxford. The white El Rancho van had moved on for the evening, and the ball courts were quiet. The church shadowed the trees below it there, and I walked around the building in shadows myself. Someone was exiting the side door. Good. It was still open. I dashed up just as the door swung closed behind her.

  “It’s over,” she said to me. “The service just ended. You missed it.”

  “Just a quick candle,” I said. “My Ma’s sick.”

  She nodded, as if it were the most reasonable thing in the world for a far-too-skinny middle-aged bald man wearing shabby clothes to pop into church and say a prayer for his mother. The baleful predator’s ex post facto atonement. But the door had shut behind her, and it locked with a thunk. I pulled on the handle, but it stayed. No way in here. But no mighty fortress was our Lord: I’d remembered that the windows of the vestibule were sometimes kept ajar on hot nights, like this one, and the priest might not yet have gotten around to locking them. I hurried around toward the front in the growing gloom and spied a window cracked open to let in the city air. This side of the church was quiet, abutting the rectory. The tined fence was designed to keep thieves from getting over, but nothing prevented me from leaning against it to get my balance. I managed to shimmy myself up a bit, gripping the granite ridges with my fingers as my feet perched on a small crossbar between the rails. Leaning over with one hand on the outside wall of the church, I pushed the window further open with the other, but it stuck just six inches above the sill. I took a breath and, more forceful—and desperate—I pushed again. This time it unstuck and shot up with a rumbling clack. I heard it echo inside, but I pulled myself over the sill, and squeezed in before I was noticed. I stood in the vestibule, calming myself, wiping a trace of sweat from my forehead, and pushed open the door to the main part of the church, as quietly as possible, its hushed creak sounding like a screech to my ears. But I was in.