"You're not going to say you're sorry?"
"Hey." His eyes flicked to the sink, where water pounded, then back to her. "Fuck off, Rosemary. And I'm not sorry about that, either." He winked at her in a way that was worse than the curse.
She sat still for a moment, then took half a glass of wine and flung it at Vic. "Animal!" She rushed out of the house.
The wine looked like blood against Vic's white T-shirt. Connie was all over him, wiping with a wet rag, but Vic caught her wrist.
"Relax, Ma, we'll just soak it." He peeled off the T-shirt and took it to the bathroom.
"What'd you say to her? What did you do?"
"Nothing," Vic said. "She's nuts."
Angie said, "I never liked that girl for him, not for a second."
"You never said nothin' about it," Connie spat.
"I woulda if he tried to marry her."
"Wait till the last minute, why don'tcha?"
I scrambled off the bench. "Hey," Connie said, "where do you think you're goin'?"
"Out!" I called over my shoulder, ignoring further shouts. It was a cinch to catch up with Rosemary. She was so slow I circled her like a bee buzzing a flower. With heavy hands she swatted wildly at me, King Kong lashing out at airplanes.
"Get away from me, Joseph."
I danced on my toes, just out of reach. "Know what, Rosemary? Know what? I know where Mel is."
"You do not."
I recited the address I'd memorized from the backs of her letters. She stopped walking. 'We write to each other," I taunted. "And I'm gonna visit her, too."
"You are not." She began moving again. I faced her profile as I followed, scissor-stepping. "You little worm. That’s all you are. You can't even cross the street unless someone holds your hand! You'll never see Mel again."
My laughter was a series of shrieks. I leapt high in the air, like a ballet dancer. God, how tempting it was to tell her all about my deposit bottle money, how I'd wandered Puerto Rican streets she was too scared to even dream about.
"Stop laughing, worm."
"Yes, ma'am," I mocked. "Yes, ma'am." I saluted her, scooted around behind her, and whacked her horsey ass with a flat hand. It trembled like Jell-O and made the sound of a firecracker. I was off and running before she even had time to turn around.
"Motherless bastard!" she screamed, and instead of rage I was filled with a strange malignant joy, knowing her words would keep me out of trouble, despite what I'd done. If she told on me, I'd tell on her. The perfect crime.
"You're all sweaty!" Connie said upon my return. "Look how he's sweating! Why didn't you come back when I hollered?"
"I didn't hear you."
"You didn't hear me. They heard me in China. Go, go wash. Cold water. Break that sweat."
Like a toll gate a wooden spoon dropped in front of me on the way to the bathroom, Connie's hand at its other end. "Why'd you run after her?"
"She forgot to say good-bye."
"Wise guy." The gate went up and I was allowed to wash.
That afternoon I did a watercolor of Rosemary. I made her hog-fat and put a huge cake in her hands. I gave it to Vic, expecting him to howl with laughter, but all he did was smile sadly and say, "The poor thing." He might have been talking about a dog that had been run over.
The chickens and the tomato plants kept growing. My tiny piece of home, those plants — they were smaller than my father's had been but they smelled exactly the same. Angie and I took a folded tablecloth outside and shook it in the middle of the yard. The birds swarmed over scraps of food that otherwise would have gone into the garbage.
Across the far side of Uncle Rudy's fence we could see the completed hamburger joint. Grand opening, the arrival of the colored, was only days away.
"How are they coming, Angie?"
"Who?"
"The colored. Everybody says the colored are coming when the hamburger joint opens. Are they, like, an army?"
"No! They come like anybody who wants to buy that crap. With money in their pockets. Money is green. That's the only color anybody really worries about."
The colored: you said it in two hard syllables, kuh-lid. Once I was sitting on the sidewalk burning red ants with a punk when a tall, skinny black kid in lime-green pants came striding my way. I expected him to vault right over my head but at the last instant he veered around me, Keds squeaking, an aroma of bittersweet cologne in his wake.
I turned my head from the ants and watched him go, his high, hard buttocks leaping at each step. He was a kuh-lid, and soon he'd be an everyday sight, instead of a novelty.
Opening day at the hamburger joint.
The only Italian from the area who went inside was our tenant. Poor Palmieri was undoubtedly sick of the cold food he'd been prying from cans all his life and thought the place was a godsend. He walked out of there with his chin tucked into his shoulder, ashamed of being seen with a bagful of that crap.
Other Italians ventured as close as the far side of the street, having found reasons to walk long-neglected pets. It was easy to see everything that went on inside, through the huge windows replacing the ones Johnny Gallo and I had smashed. Almost everyone working inside was black. Ammiratti saw us through the crowd, came to the door and waved, beckoning. We dispersed like kids fleeing the truant officer.
Back at the house, they grilled me for details about the place. "Does it look clean?" Angie asked.
"I guess so."
Connie snorted. "If it ain't clean on the first day, when can it be?" She shook a finger at me. "Don't you ever, ever go in there."
"I know, I know."
My promise didn't stop her from telling fast-food horror stories. Men who dropped burgers on the floor and served them anyway, men who fried cockroaches along with the potatoes, and of course her clincher: the man who thought he was eating a piece of fried chicken but in fact munched, in the darkness of his car, a batter-fried rat.
Boom: the sound of the screen door made me jump. Uncle Rudy had let himself in without knocking.
"Where is Victor?" he asked.
Connie's eyebrows knotted. "He's not at the store?"
Rudy shook his head. "One hour ago he spilled grease on his trousers. He said he wanted to go home and change." He consulted his pocket watch. "The trip should not take an hour." He nudged his wire-rimmed glasses further into his fat face.
"Maybe he fell asleep, he was out late last night." Connie's voice was worried. "Check his room."
I raced ahead of Angie and gasped when I got there. Vic's bed was neatly made, but the open doors of his closets revealed empty hangers. The only things inside it were two Johnny Mize bats. Angie yanked open the dresser drawers as if he expected to find Vic in one of them. They were empty, and smelled sweetly of fruitwood.
Connie and Uncle Rudy arrived last, breathing as if they'd just climbed a mountain.
"Look," Angie said, pointing to the wall over Vic's bed. A rectangle of bright paint showed where the Sinatra record jacket had hung, somehow sealing the fact of Vic's disappearance more strongly than anything else.
Connie's eyes filled with tears. Angie hefted the baseball bats, and only Uncle Rudy could find words for the situation. "What kind of boy is that?" he said. "What kind of boy?"
"Shut up, Rudy. For God's sake." Angie put his arm across his wife's stiff shoulders.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Troubled times. Vic’s departure was cause for concern but not worry; I think Connie and Angie were even a little relieved. He'd been away once, he could handle it.
The burger joint did good business and left its mark on the streets. Cardboard wrappers blew down the sidewalk, and rain turned them into dirty-looking salt-and-pepper lumps. Once I saw one at curbside, and for a horrible moment I thought our favorite chicken had been killed.
Soon after the grand opening Freddie Gallo's widow - I never leamed her name, because nobody ever used it - claimed that late at night the colored were using her driveway to take leaks. She pointed out the dark stains on the brick
walls of her house. Connie suggested that they could have come from the German shepherd across the street, but Freddie's widow insisted the dog couldn't possibly pee that high. Besides, she'd heard a radio playing, and no dog carried a radio.
"The rain'll wash it away," Connie said.
"It don't rain every night," Freddie's widow wailed.
One night I heard her scream and ran to the parlor window in time to see Johnny Gallo chasing a man down the street. Later Johnny said he couldn't tell if the man in their driveway had been colored.
"Sure he was," Freddie's widow insisted. "That's colored pee on the wall. Smells like a horse did it."
I asked if there was a difference between our pee and colored pee. Connie said colored pee smelled stronger because they drank so much sweet soda and beer. Angie said nobody's pee smelled good.
Trouble even touched the only truly innocent person on the block, the retarded child known to me only as Louisa.
Some time that summer, in the space of very little time, she became a woman, and a beautiful one at that. She didn't have Down's syndrome: she'd been born in the house she lived in, and because the placenta hadn't broken right away there was a lack of oxygen at birth. She looked like a model, and it seemed incredible that she could spend an entire morning with her mouth open, watching ants crawl over an ice cream stick.
I was afraid of her because she was very affectionate. Besides the rain, another reason I quit drawing on the sidewalks was because Louisa would sneak up behind me and grab me in a tight hug. The last time she did that I could feel the firm points of her swelling breasts through her loose dress.
Three weeks shy of her fifteenth birthday Louisa's mother stood on the stoop of their house, calling her name. Louisa was always within earshot, at the end of the block eating lemon ice or playing with stray cats, but this time there was no answer. Frantic with worry, she came to our door and asked Angie to find her.
I went with him. We came upon Louisa at Highland Park. She was walking aimlessly near the swings and the monkey bars, her open mouth ringed with chocolate.
When we got her home her mother said, "Where'd you get that chocolate, Louisa?"
She ran her tongue in a wide path around her mouth, from her nostrils to her chin. "Boy."
"What boy?"
"Big boy." She bolted for the door. Angie caught her and carried her back, kicking and screaming. "Call the doctor," he said, standing with legs splayed. Louisa's feet plunged the air between them.
The doctor found a red mark on her breast but otherwise, he said, she hadn't been violated. He recommended sending her to live at an upstate facility for "special" young women. The parents, awestricken by the words of a medical man, took his advice.
I watched from the parlor window as Louisa's parents - a gray-faced woman and a thin man who never let you look at his face long enough to remember it, people doing what they thought they had to do - piled her things into their car. Meanwhile, their daughter, not knowing she'd never see Shepherd Avenue again, played jacks until the trunk slammed shut.
Deacon Sullivan was in trouble, too, for the way he'd sided with Frank Ammiratti by letting him talk to a captive church audience, but when he came to visit us one Sunday afternoon after Vic had been gone more than a week Connie politely let him in. I'd seen him coming, through the basement window, his legs flowing in a black cassock he rarely wore. He sat at our table and, with a pained face, accepted a cup of coffee.
Connie broke off the ends of string beans and dropped them into the strainer as Sullivan sipped. Weeks earlier, she'd have sat in his presence with her hands folded in her lap, but now it was all right to get work done during his visits. On the couch Angie read the paper.
"Ahh, my sons," Connie said. "What a world. You raise them right and they wander to the end of the earth anyway." She pointed at me with a bean. "God only knows when this one'll take off. Bing-bang-boom, he won't even say good-bye."
"I'm not going anywhere," I said. "Yet."
"Oh?"
"I don't have enough money."
"You wanna go, I'll give you money," she said listlessly.
"Don't kid around like that," Angie said, not looking up from his paper. He wasn't taking my hints seriously, either.
Deacon Sullivan set his coffee cup down with a gasp, as if it had become too heavy to hold. "I know where Victor is." Angie threw down his paper.
Connie put down the strainer. "Where?" she demanded. "Talk, talk."
Sullivan rubbed his eyes. "I can't say how I know, but he lives on Sullivan Street in Greenwich Village."
"The same name as you," I said.
Sullivan took out a bit of folded paper and handed it to Angie, even though Connie was closer.
"That's the address." Then, more to himself than to us, "I hope I did the right thing."
The three of us walked to the Cleveland Street station and rode the train in silence. We had to transfer once but never paid a new fare, so the truth was plain - Vic had been a subway token away all that time. Connie complained about the bumpy ride but Angie had refused to take the car, claiming the crooked streets of Greenwich Village got him all confused.
We reached our destination at West Fourth Street, and climbing those stairs from the subway was like entering a new and grossly overpopulated world. We crossed Sixth Avenue and were suddenly wandering through narrow, tree-shaded streets. Some were cobblestoned. Connie pointed, the way children do at the zoo.
"Madonna, look."
A black man with an enormous afro sat on a stoop before a blanketful of handmade jewelry. His left ear sported an earring and there was another one through a nostril.
"Hey, woman, no need to point," he drawled. "I ain't gonna bite you."
For once in her life Constanzia Ambrosio was dumbstruck. "Could you please tell us how to get to Sullivan Street?" Angie asked.
The man scratched his head, then his beard. "Sullivan. Two blocks down and bang a right."
Angie thanked him and took Connie by the elbow to lead her away. The man chuckled behind us as if he knew we'd never find our destination and would wander instead into the gaping jaws of a dragon.
"Through his nose," Connie murmured. "Right through his nose!"
"Enough already," Angie said.
"What if he sneezes?"
"Stop."
She shut up, only because she was breathing hard. This was more walking than she'd done in a long time. She moved with her eyes cast groundward but Angie stared all around at the walls and roofs of the snug little buildings, each neat as a dollhouse.
"Unbelievable," he said. "Con, I can't believe we're still in New York."
"This is where the weird people live," Connie said for my benefit. "The people who don't want to work or shave or take a bath."
"Vic takes baths," I said. "He takes more baths than you."
"Well, he don't shave and he don't work. How come you always stick up for him?"
"Connie, I just - "
"Knock it off, the two of you," Angie said. "God, look at that guy!"
A skinny, shirtless man walked in the opposite direction across the street. His hands were jammed into his back pockets and he tilted forward as he moved. His beard and hair made him look like the Jesus Christ I'd come to know from statues at church. Connie was stricken by him the same way I was.
"Right off the cross," she marveled.
I studied his chest, looking for that scar from the soldier's spear Sullivan had spoken of in a sermon.
We found Sullivan Street. Nearby was Washington Square Park, from where the faint wail of saxophones, trumpets, and harmonicas could be heard. Ivy clung to the walls of the brick building Sullivan had led us to. Tendrils crept unclipped over windows.
We entered a dark vestibule and climbed wooden steps. Angie stood in front of a nameless, numberless door badly in need of paint, or at least a scrubbing.
"We don't know which apartment," he said.
"Then we try them all." Connie rang the bell and braced her
self. The door opened. We were hit simultaneously with the spicy smell of incense and the sight of Vic. The growth of his new beard trailed way behind his already lush moustache.
"Jesus," he said. When the initial shock wore off he moved aside to let us in as if we were cops. No attempts at embracing anyone.
The place was a big studio. A tremendous amount of light poured in through a multipaned window that needed a good washing.
"Who was it?" Vic asked coldly. "Johnny? That damn deacon?" He smiled knowingly. "I figured the deacon would tell. They're the only two people I told, in case there was an emergency. Should have known better than to trust that deacon."
Angie said, "You told him knowing he would tell."
Vic ignored him. "Look, I was going to call you all, anyway, and invite you over in a day or two."
"Bullshit," Connie said. It was the first time I'd ever heard her use the word, and she sure knew how to say it. Vic's moustache wilted like a neglected flower. "You never woulda called. You'd have waited till we died."
"Aw, Ma, don't get dramatic." He spread his arms, "But what's the use of arguing? You're here now and I'm glad."
He was forcing his cheerfulness. Connie didn't move. Her shoes might have been glued to the floor, the way she stood there. Besides everything else she was cranky from all that walking.
I poked Vic's belly. "You could have said good-bye to me."
He nodded, rubbed my hair. "I'm sorry, Joey."
"You don't trust me,"
"Oh for Christ's sake." He pulled his hand out of my hair.
Connie found her legs and began walking around, her shoes loud on the unpolished wooden floor. She gazed at a mattress in the middle of the room, a tangle of sheets and blankets at its center. No bed frame, no box spring. She made a tweezer out of thumb and forefinger and, from the midst of the mess, picked up a pair of panties, which she dropped at the sound of a toilet flushing.
The sight of the girl emerging from the bathroom, zipping the last inch of her fly, made the throb of my heart reach all the way to my throat. Her hair, shiny in the late afternoon sunlight, touched her hips. She was a butterfly, a pony, a sunbeam made human.
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