Blind Moon Alley

by John Florio

  I start to tell him why I’ve come, but before I can get a word out, he sees my face and winces. The rain is still prickling my skin and the blotches on my face are probably the color of a candied apple.

  “You’re here for what?” His eyes meet mine, and he stares me down. Maybe he doesn’t like albinos. He should only know what I think of prison guards.

  “I’m here to see Aaron Garvey.”

  He straightens up when he hears the name. It hits me that I’m still relying on Garvey to be taken seriously.

  Milmo tells me he has to pat me down.

  “I’m not stupid enough to show up here packing heat,” I tell him as I unbutton my raincoat. “But you’re gonna find a flask in my back pocket.”

  He’s bigger than I am but that’s not saying much. I’m barely six feet tall and weigh a buck-sixty-five. My midsection is soft and my shoulders are so bony they look as if a miner could use them to chisel stone.

  He frisks me. Once he’s satisfied I’m clean, he reaches around my waist and pulls out my flask. Then he opens it and takes a sniff of Doolie’s best whiskey.

  “Smells illegal,” he tells me.

  “It is,” I tell him. “But I was invited to dinner and didn’t want to show up empty-handed.”

  He takes a healthy slug and screws the top back on as his cheeks flush. Then he slips the flask back into my pocket. For a cheap shamus, he’s sure got the swagger of a real cop.

  He ushers me into the gatehouse, where three other guards are sitting on folding chairs and listening to Eddie Cantor on the radio. I turn away from the bright lamps they’ve got burning, but it’s no use, my eyes shimmy. Milmo stares at me with the same confused expression I get from the rumrunners who say I’m too white to be colored, and too colored to be trusted. I could save him four years of medical school by telling him that albino eyes go haywire every once in a while, but I skip it.

  “If you don’t pick up the pace,” I tell him, “I’m going to miss the appetizers.”

  He grabs a stack of papers on his desk and has me sign one that says I’m Jersey Leo. Then he gets a short, bald guard named Flanagan to join us on our walk to cellblock one. They open an iron gate and we make our way through the empty, fencedin grounds. It’s a desolate, flooded square, even starker than the schoolyard Garvey and I played in back in Hoboken.

  I follow them down a dim, muggy corridor lined on both sides with matching doors. The doors are solid wood—no windows—and I wonder how many guys have childhood friends locked up here and don’t even know it. We stop at a door marked forty-two. Milmo and Flanagan draw their nightsticks and stand on opposite sides, Milmo on the left and Flanagan on the right. Milmo reaches over and slowly unlatches the door, then motions with his head for me to go on in.

  For the first time since I arrived, I wonder if I’m about to see the warm eyes of my old friend or the cold glare of a ruthless killer. Milmo’s waiting at the door and I won’t give him the satisfaction of seeing me blink. My throat goes dry and my ears go hot, but I walk into the cell without breaking stride.

  The cramped room has a high arched ceiling with a small hole exposing a patch of gray sky. Rain spits into the cell, sprinkling the back wall. In the center of the space is a square table with two meals waiting; on the far side of it sits my old buddy Aaron Garvey. When he sees me, he flashes one of his schoolboy grins and I’m immediately back at Elementary School Four.

  “Hiya, Snowball,” he says, standing up and shaking my hand.

  His lopsided smile is tainted by a mouthful of yellow teeth; a front tooth is broken and nearly as brown as his skin. He looks weaker than I’d imagined—Adonis’s chest is now at least three inches smaller than his stomach—and when he shakes my hand, his bony grip manages only a light squeeze before it relaxes. People think Garvey is losing his life tonight, but it’s been getting sucked out of him since he walked in here three years ago.

  “Look at you,” he says as he gives me a pat on the back. “Y’look just like in the paper.”

  I don’t bother to comment that newspapers print in black and gray. “Thanks,” I say.

  He shakes his head in disbelief. “Hard to believe it’s been so long.” When his last couple of words pass that broken tooth they’re accompanied by a faint whistle.

  Garvey sits back down and the spirit drains from his face. His dark cheeks are drawn, but in his reddish-brown eyes I spot a glimmer of the twelve-year-old kid who fought for me. That kid needs help, and I’m sorry I can’t be the one to give it to him.

  Milmo stands in the corner of the cell, his nightstick at his side, and I hear the door shut behind me. I realize that he’ll be with us until I leave, which means Garvey and I won’t be talking about a number of things during dinner—including him.

  “Have a seat,” Garvey tells me, pointing to the open folding chair as if he were sitting in a real dining room. I throw my coat and jacket over the back of the chair and sit down. The chair is uneven—it rocks from leg to leg. The air is saturated and my shirt collar clings to the back of my neck. I try my best to look comfortable.

  “I brought you something,” I say as I pull out my flask.

  “Hopin’ you would,” he says. The grateful tone in his voice is as much a part of my old friend as the way he rubs his ear with his thumb.

  There are two empty coffee cups sitting on the table, so I fill each one halfway. He lifts his.

  “Old friends,” he says and downs his whiskey.

  Milmo coughs and I know why. He’s not about to watch us finish off the booze without getting a taste. I hand him my cup; for this meal, I’ll be drinking straight from the flask.

  Satisfied, Milmo walks behind Garvey to the back of the cell, where he sits on the corner of the cot and sips his hooch.

  I refill Garvey’s cup and then down a slug.

  “Glad y’showed up,” my friend tells me. “I’m on my own here. I might be alone later tonight, too.”

  He must know that the execution is open only to the press and immediate family, so I don’t bother explaining why I’ll be back at the Ink Well when he says his final good-byes.

  “It’ll be fine,” he says with a sarcastic chuckle. “What could go wrong?”

  “Nothing,” Milmo says from behind Garvey.

  Garvey’s shoulders stiffen and he flips his thumb toward Milmo. “Thinks I’m a fuckin’ butcher.”

  I’m wondering if Milmo is wrong, but I won’t put my friend on the spot, especially since he’s only got a few hours left to live. I must be wearing a troubled expression, though, because he volunteers an answer.

  “Oh, I done it,” he says, tugging on the cuffs of his gray prison garb. “But I ain’t what they think.”

  Then he wipes his forehead with the crook of his arm and starts talking about the old days. I let him talk, but I’m missing half of what he’s saying. We must be closing in on seven-thirty. That gives Garvey thirty minutes before he’s driven over to Rockview and strapped to Old Smokey. As he rattles on, I pick at the dinner he ordered for each of us: a boneless steak, two fried eggs, a baked potato, a wedge of lettuce with blue cheese dressing, a slice of cheesecake, and a chocolate milkshake.

  I’m sawing away at my steak with one of the state’s butter knives when Garvey asks me if I remember playing hooky to watch the Giants at the Polo Grounds. He’s wasting time. I wouldn’t care, except he’s fidgeting in his seat like a twelve-year-old itching for recess.

  “Hey, Milmo,” I say.

  “Yeah?” the guard says, not bothering to stand up or turn his head my way.

  “Don’t you need to check on your buddy outside?”

  “I’ve got a job to do,” Milmo says. “And it’s to watch the two of you.”

  I saw this coming from the minute Milmo took my hooch. Reaching into my overcoat, I pull out the envelope with my father’s name scratched across it. A pang of guilt bites at me as I picture the champ trying to meet the Hy-Hat’s rent with nothing but a cashbox filled with IOUs.

  I rip o
pen the envelope, pull out a pair of sawbucks, and jam the rest into my pants pocket. Then I walk over to Milmo and extend the bills between my index and middle finger. “I’ll bet you twenty dollars nobody will ever know if you were here or not.”

  It’s a fat offer, but Milmo doesn’t budge. Maybe he gets greased more often than I thought.

  A grin twists the side of his mouth. “In here freaks pay double.”

  I stare him down. “In here I’m not the freak.”

  Garvey gets up from the table. “Damn right.”

  My friend is a bit shaky when he walks—I wonder what kind of beating he took before dinner tonight—but the loose skin under his eyes has gone tight. For a split second, I see the kid who stood up to those heartless teachers back in Hoboken—and the man who squeezed that trigger at the Red Canary.

  “It’s okay, Garv,” I tell him, motioning him back to his chair. He doesn’t sit down, but at least he stays quiet.

  Milmo looks up at me. “Well?”

  The clock is ticking, so I reach back into my pocket for the ripped envelope. I pull out the last of the money I’d earmarked for the Hy-Hat.

  “Thirty bucks,” I tell Milmo as I hold out my entire week’s pay. “Split it with your boy outside, however you like.”

  “Sold,” he says and takes the cash. He slips it into his breast pocket, underneath his badge.

  Before he leaves, he finishes off his booze and puts the empty coffee cup on the table. Then he leans in front of Garvey and takes the flask, passing it under Garvey’s nose before heading for the door.

  I block his way. “You can’t take it all, Milmo. Christ, even a Fed would leave a taste.”

  Milmo chuckles and splashes some of the brown into the two coffee cups, making a point to spill a bit of Garvey’s onto the table. Then he tells us, “You’ve got three minutes.”

  Finally, he disappears, shutting the door behind him and leaving me alone with my friend.

  I sit back down, my neck soaked with sweat. It’s hot as Doolie’s kitchen in here and dealing with Milmo hasn’t exactly cooled me down.

  “Owe you one,” Garvey says.

  “Not the way I see it,” I say. “You saved my ass more times than I can count.”

  “Not true,” he says. “But I’m glad you think so.” Then he leans forward and whispers as if Milmo were still sitting behind him. “’Cuz I need a favor.”

  I nod, figuring I can handle pretty much anything he asks.

  “You remember Myra Banks?” he asks me.

  “Sure do,” I tell him.

  Myra and I were the two misfits of Elementary School Four. She was a sad, quiet kid; she took a lot of guff because she had a club right foot and dreamt of being a Ziegfeld girl. She’d spend most of her time alone in the school library, her face buried in Photoplay magazine. She was my first crush, my first kiss, and, I suppose you could say, the only girlfriend I’ve ever had. We ran into each other in New York five years ago. It was late November, a week after Thanksgiving, and snow was coming down in lazy flurries. She didn’t have a penny, but she’d come to see the Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway. I was making decent money rolling kegs in Hell’s Kitchen—I’d just dropped out of City College but I told her I was still studying there—and I bought her dinner on the West Side. We ate pot roast at a place called Rosie’s; then we took the A train up to the Hotel Theresa and escaped into each other’s arms. We spent the night under a quilt, doing things we’d never heard about in elementary school. She’d grown into quite a looker; her skin was a light tan, her eyes the shape of large almonds, and her wavy hair as long and loose as Mary Pickford’s. But what I remember most was her foot—how it looked out of its shoe—twisted and mangled, with a red bony bump sticking out where the instep should be. Looking back, it makes sense we found each other.

  “What’s become of her?” I ask Garvey, my mind flashing dusty images of her crooked front tooth, soft pink nipples, and tender red ankle.

  “You won’t believe it,” he says with a light chuckle. “She owns a piece of the Red Canary.”

  “Are you joking with me?”

  Garvey doesn’t say anything, but his lack of response is answer enough.

  “How the hell did that happen?” I say.

  It just doesn’t fit. The Red Canary is where Garvey gunned down that cop. The owner is Otto Gorsky, a twisted killer who goes by the name of Mr. Lovely. I don’t know a lot about him, other than he’s connected to Chicago mobsters and has a chauffeur drive him around in a burgundy Packard town car that’s dressed up with fat whitewalls and has a gleaming serpent on the hood. But the details don’t matter. A guy like Lovely isn’t about to partner with a Negro dame who’s broke and crippled, I don’t care how good she looks. I’ve heard the rumors that he’s near death, that he’s got some kind of weird disease, but word on the street is that he’s still the same cold-blooded reptilian bastard he’s always been. He’ll make you rich if you do him right, but he’ll butcher you like an animal if things go wrong. Just last week, he supposedly sat in an armchair, laughing and munching on jelly beans as his triggermen sliced up a two-timing rumrunner named Floyd Rumson with an ice hook and a pair of rusty hedge clippers.

  Myra can’t stand up to that kind of depravity. I remember the bullies riding her; they laughed at her clumsy black shoe, her limp, and the way her thick upper lip trembled when she was frightened. They called her a gimp. They threw stones at her. They stole her shoe right off her foot and loaded it up with a fresh, steaming pile of horseshit. She was an easy target. And she took it all without fighting back.

  Garvey’s looking at me. “I know what you’re thinking,” he says. “But it’s true, she owns a chunk of the place. Why else would I have been there?”

  “Okay,” I say, still having trouble putting the broken girl with the quivering lip and oversized tears in the same room as Lovely. “I guess I’ll buy it. Myra owns a piece of the Canary. And?”

  He leans forward and lowers his voice. “And she bought it with my money. Twenty large.”

  “You gave her twenty thousand?”

  “Loaned her,” he corrects me, still in his hoarse whisper. “She was supposed to pay me back.”

  “Forget it, Garv.” I’m not about to yank twenty grand from a woman who was naked and moaning that she loved me the last time I saw her. “Let Myra have her piece.”

  His jaw is tight. “You’re not getting it. The money’s gone—Myra used it to buy into the Canary. The problem is the dead cop’s partner, Reeger. Since I landed here, he’s been on her back, raiding the joint, locking her up for weeks, really swinging his hammer—all because she knows me. If I were on the outside, I’d take care of this myself.”

  His eyes go so cold they send a chill up my spine. I put my elbows on the table, leaning forward so my armpits can breathe. I want to help my friend, and there’s no question I owe him, but he’s desperate and I’m not exactly sure what he’s asking.

  “What do you want me to do, Garv?”

  “He’s sending me a message,” he says. “I want you to send one back.”

  Garvey’s got to realize that Reeger isn’t going to walk away because a bleached bartender shows up in the name of a dead man. The only way to end this is to plug Reeger, and I’m not about to gun down a cop, I don’t care how long I’ve known Garvey. My friend must know somebody with bloodier hands than mine.

  “Why me?” I say.

  “You always cared about Myra. And from what I’ve read, you’re the man for the job.”

  “I’m not. And I haven’t seen Myra since the sixth grade.”

  I’m lying and I’m not sure why—it’s not as if Garvey will be around long enough to sing. But I remember Myra asking me not to give her up; she was worried about a guy she called Jonesy, the latest in her list of soul-sucking cretins. This one had moved into her place, promising his love but delivering nothing other than a left hook and fractured cheekbone. I still wonder if it was her fear of Jonesy that pushed her to crawl under the blanket
for one more go-round with me that night.

  “Let’s leave and never come back,” she said when we’d finished, picking up a Life magazine and pointing to the photo of the Hollywoodland sign on its cover. Her hazel eyes were alive with possibilities, but all I did was sit there wondering which one Jonesy had blackened. “We can get on a train right now,” she said.

  It wasn’t the first time she’d brought it up—she’d talked about running off to Hollywood for as long as I could remember. But that night her dream was raging. Had I said okay, I just may have found myself tending bar on a beach in Santa Monica. But reality has a way of taking the fun out of life. I had kegs to roll and rum to run, so I said no. I didn’t realize what I’d done to Myra until she buried her face in her hands, hiding the shame of another rejection behind her shiny, wet fingers. I wanted to add that I’d never felt more at home than when we were under those hotel sheets, but I stayed mute, and still curse myself for doing so. She deserved to hear it. As things turned out, we never spoke again after that weekend, although I did send my thoughts her way that Christmas. They arrived in the form of two local triggermen asking for Jonesy. I doubt the bastard ever touched her again. If he did, it was with ten broken fingers and a shattered kneecap.

  Garvey is still waiting on my answer, no doubt hoping I’m softening. “You’d be pulling Myra out of the fire,” he says. “She might even toss you a few bucks.”

  I’m sure the Hy-Hat could use the dough, but if my father doesn’t like taking the cash I earn bartending, he’s certainly not going to want any money I boost from a speakeasy.

  “Sorry, Garv.”

  “You’d be helping the Canary, too,” Garvey says. “Reeger keeps showing up, making a scene, can’t be good for customers. Charge the joint in hooch,” he says. “Or women.”