Kate shook her head again. “Nathan was always stoned, too. You’re just like him. And you’re going to end up the same way.”
“I don’t see where dope had anything to do with what happened to Nathan,” Harry said. “What got him killed, it sounds like he was tryin’ to do somebody a favor, tryin’ to get somebody, somebody who didn’t, to give a shit about him, which is impossible and is not a good habit to get into. But, hey, I don’t have to tell you that.” He broke open a fortune cookie, pulled out the slip of paper with his teeth and looked at both sides.
“What does it say?”
“Nothing. It’s a blank.” He crumpled it into a tiny ball and dropped it on his plate. He burped. “Excuse me,” he said. “That was good. Know what’d hit the spot now?”
Kate shrugged. “Something to drink? A beer? I’ll see if there’s one in the fridge—”
“No.”
“Do you smoke?”
“Uh-uh.”
“What?” she asked, impatient.
“You,” Harry said.
Kate stiffened and pushed away as Harry got to his feet.
“I thought I should mention it,” he said.
Kate looked up at him, saying nothing.
“Well, then, good night,” he said. “See you in the morning.”
Harry heard Kate shut her door and the sound of a chair dragging across the floor. “Aren’t you forgettin’ something?” he called out. “What?” she asked tensely. “What’s that?”
“What I do for a livin’,” he said. “Go to sleep. You’re knockin’ yourself out for nothing.”
He was sprawled on his back with his good arm for a pillow when she came into the room. She coughed once and then again, louder, but could scarcely hear herself above the spastic gasp of his snoring. She pushed back a corner of the foam pad with her instep and Harry opened his eyes. “What’s up?”
“I couldn’t sleep. I need …”
Harry smiled. He edged over to the right side of the pad and raised the sleeping bag with his left hand.
“No,” she said. “I want to talk. I’m afraid.”
Harry dropped the sleeping bag and lay back. “You don’t have any reason to be. They don’t know where we are. They shouldn’t figure it out for a while, they ever do.”
“It’s not that so much, as everything else …” She paused. “You know, having to close the restaurant and put my life on hold. What do I tell Howard? Christ, how do I even face him?”
He had no answer for that. He let her go on.
“And what do I do when … when all this is over. I mean, if I don’t have the Knights, where do I go from here?” The words came hesitantly, as though she was working it out. “I can’t go back to Times Square. I won’t. But what else can I—?”
A grating sound interrupted her. She looked down at Harry and then stepped on the pad. He stopped snoring, opened both eyes wide.
“Wha …?” He lifted the sleeping bag. “Last chance.”
She kicked the pad close to his ribs and went back to her room.
A garbage truck woke her. She twisted her watch around her wrist, saw that it was after ten and hurried into her clothes, went as far as the bathroom before she slipped out of them and stepped into the tub. Fifteen minutes later, when she walked back through the kitchen, she found Harry with one hip cocked against the counter, scraping cold chow mein out of a cardboard container.
“Here,” he said. “Have a little breakfast.”
She tried on a disgusted look, found it fit. “You must have a cast-iron stomach.”
“Well, no, it’s just you get used to havin’ different kinds of things for breakfast. Few years back, I mostly ate salami sandwiches in the morning.”
“Was that in prison?”
Harry stopped chewing, surprised. “No,” he said, but didn’t elaborate. “You sure?” He tilted the container toward her.
Kate took the cardboard and the plastic spoon and deposited them in the garbage bag under the sink. “Comb your hair,” she said. “I know a good place to eat. A place where we can get a real breakfast.”
“Why, what’s the matter with—?”
They came out under a high blue sky and the sun nowhere in sight, damp and salty gusts hurtling down the cheerless streets, the first cold day of the season. Kate took Harry’s arm and walked half a step behind him, keeping him between herself and the brunt of the wind. “I’m turning blue,” she said. “I wish I had something warmer than this dress.”
“Maybe in a couple of days you can go back to Seventy-sixth Street and pick up your stuff.”
“A couple of days?” She shivered. “I could freeze by then.”
“Better’n bein’ shot,” Harry said. “It gives you more time to think. Where we goin?”
She put pressure on his elbow and turned him under the el. East of Ocean Parkway the streets were clogged with late-morning shoppers. Harry stared at thick women in cheap cloth coats deliberating over their purchases at the Korean fruit stands as gravely as if they were in an auto showroom.
“What is this place?”
“It’s called Little Odessa,” she said. “Most of these people are Russian, Russian Jews, born over there.”
“How do you …? You too?”
Kate nodded.
“You don’t look like them one bit.”
“I’m only twenty-two.” She slapped her hips. “Give me a few years.”
He was staring at her, trying to decide if she was putting him on, when she guided him inside a windowless restaurant and to a booth opposite a busy lunch counter. A waitress came with menus and Kate pushed them away and whispered something in a language he didn’t recognize. When the woman retreated, Harry asked, “What was that you ordered?”
“You’ll see.”
“So you’re Russian,” he said. “What’s it like over there, bad as they say?”
“I was nine when I left. There’s not much I remember, except the ice cream was better than it is here.”
“Your family live in the neighborhood?”
“My mother and my sister. My father’s dead. Every month his brother would send him a letter from Odessa, from over there, about how the government was treating the ones who stayed, and he’d just fall apart. My mother says those letters are what killed him. He was a strong man. A laborer. Only fifty-four.”
“You close with your mom?”
“I was,” Kate said. “Then I started dancing on Times Square and she stopped talking to me. If I wanted to communicate with her, I had to do it through my sister. When I still wouldn’t quit, she sat shiva for me.”
“What’s that?”
“When a Jew dies, the family spends a week mourning at their house, sitting on wooden boxes. It’s like she considers me dead.”
“Your mom did that?”
Kate nodded. “Uh-huh.”
“She must love you a lot.”
Kate was wondering how to take that when the waitress returned. Harry grabbed his fork and looked at his plate.
“This is just bacon and eggs,” he said. “I thought you ordered some Russian specialty for me. I can get this anywhere.”
“Anybody who’d eat cold chow mein for breakfast, anything more exotic than bacon and eggs would be wasted on him.”
They walked to the boardwalk along Coney Island Avenue, past the drained swimming pools and moth-eaten miniature fairways of the Brighton Beach Bath and Racquet Club, Brighton Private.
“You never say anything about—”
Kate looked bored. “About Russia?”
“No. Times Square.”
“It wasn’t what you would call the happiest time of my life.”
Harry slipped out of his jacket and tossed it around her shoulders.
“Ow,” Kate said. “What do you have in your pockets, rocks?”
“Rocks ain’t enough. You mind carryin’ guns?”
“I certainly do,” Kate said, and held her hands away from her body. “What guns? Why do you need guns
?”
Harry took back his jacket and worked the cast through the right sleeve. “Do I have to tell you?”
“No,” she said unhappily. “Not really.”
They mounted charred stairs, saw the sun, and Harry shaded his eyes to stare at the green mesh of the Wonder Wheel rising above the boardwalk like the ultimate Tinkertoy. “You’re tellin’ me it wasn’t fun growin’ up in Coney Island? It’s got to be every little kid’s dream.”
“Every kid in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, maybe, every kid who knows Coney Island from old movies and back issues of Life magazine. It’s been a ruin forever. Just wait …”
Beyond the deserted handball courts of a beach park the Wonder Wheel grew larger and more distinct. “Looks good to me,” Harry said.
“You can’t spend your life on a ferris wheel, not unless you like going around in circles. That sounds trite, I know. But it’s true. I always felt like a stranger here.”
“You missed Russia?”
“Forget that,” she said. “No one else wanted to see the circles. Not even my parents. And it’s not like they were idealists, who’d come to America for freedom and were satisfied. They weren’t religious, didn’t really know what a Jew was till they got here and then they found out that being one wasn’t for them. They came here to be rich. Not to work at it, they’d lost that a long time ago, with the religion. Just to be rich. And after ten years, they still didn’t have a pot to pee in …And the thing is, they thought they were well off. I knew better. I went into the city all the time, wore out the sidewalks window-shopping. Christ, I hated being poor.”
“What did you ever do about it?”
“I was in too much of a hurry, none of that delayed gratification the sociologists don’t stop talking about for me. I was living with Nathan when I was sixteen and holding down part-time jobs all through school. I loved being independent and having a few dollars …” The wind eddied up off the beach and Kate covered her eyes and turned her back. “So there was no way I could go to college and be destitute for four years. I took a job in an office, but I felt trapped. I loved to dance, though, always looked good without clo—well, I have a tight body, you know? So I didn’t have trouble finding work on Times Square. The money wasn’t great, but it was better than anything I’d seen before.”
“Times Square,” Harry said. “It’s another place sounds like heaven when you’re stuck in Pawtucket.”
“It’s Nightmare Alley.” The wind changed direction and they started walking again. “I was the only girl I knew who didn’t have needle tracks like the Seventh Avenue Express ran down her arm.” She stopped, self-conscious. “Sorry about that.”
“They’re not my type either.”
“There were girls there who’d do anything for money. Live sex shows. Sixteen a day, not faking it. With animals, even. And liking it, for Christ’s sake, if they were stoned enough.” She shivered again. “All I did was dance.”
“How’d you come to the restaurant?”
“I started belly dancing uptown in addition to the bottomless work, trying to maintain contact with the human race, and I got booked into the Knights. Howard was decent toward me from the start, and—”
“I see,” Harry said.
“No, you don’t. He had enough faith in me to leave me in charge of the restaurant. Business picked up—just luck, I’m sure—and he offered me an interest. It was the one chance I had to put my life together, to make something of myself. And I blew it.”
She looked at him expectantly, waiting to be contradicted. But all Harry said was, “How come he’s never around?”
“He’s in Israel. He’s been gone two months.”
“It’s a lot of faith.”
“He has no choice,” Kate said solemnly. And then the words came like a dam burst. “He’s in jail there. That’s why I wanted you to steal back those electric devices. They’re … I have to have them if he’s going to get out.”
“This is a guy who promised you a piece of a restaurant?”
Kate pushed him ahead of her. “Well, if it isn’t the pot calling the kettle—”
“One thing I know is guys in jail,” Harry said. “About their generous nature.”
“Speak for yourself. Howard isn’t like that, he’s no criminal.”
“He likes bein’ locked up? He’s there restin’?”
“He was … never mind,” she said, “it’s too complicated to get into. But you’re wrong about him. He’d never do anything to hurt me.”
“I didn’t say he would. I’m sayin’ he wouldn’t do anything to hurt himself. He wouldn’t give away a chunk of his business unless he expected something of equal value in return, that’s all. You got anything like that? Besides that tight body you were tellin’ me about?”
It wasn’t worth getting angry about. He was only trying to get her goat. “You don’t know him,” she said.
“I know you. How you’re fuckin’ up again, trusting guys. Don’t you wonder sometimes how come every man you know is always lookin’ out for your best interests and every time you end up further back of the eight ball?”
“Howard’s not like the others. You’ll see.”
“Yes,” Harry said. “I got a hunch I will.”
Who are you to tell anyone how to run her life, Kate thought, with your prison record and your drug habit and your arm and your ribs—no, that was her fault—and your broken-down car and your ugly beard that won’t ever come in right? Get lost, she wanted to say. And would have, too, if she hadn’t seen him looking at her in that touchy, wounded way of his, letting her know that if she suggested the idea he would have to follow up on it, because now his pride was on the line along with hers. And she needed him, or at least wanted him near, though for the life of her she couldn’t see why.
She backed down. “You’ll see,” she said again.
They had nothing more to say to each other. They trudged past the aquarium, and Harry peered inside a wooden stockade at sea-lion pups basking in the chill glare as a company of emperor penguins paddled around a rooftop pool. Kate swung her legs through the backrest of a bench, sat watching him until he came back and announced, “I’m hungry again.”
“You just ate.”
“Must be the salt air,” he said, patting his belt buckle.
“Think you can last another half hour? I want to take you someplace and I don’t know you that well, I don’t know if you can handle it on a full stomach.”
“Where’s that?”
She marched him to a street where a boarded-up freak show still promised the five-year-old mother of twins, Jo-Jo the Lobster Boy, Bigfoot. They stood beneath the Typhoon watching six empty cars rattle around the giant roller coaster’s track. Harry stared at the rickety scaffolding, wondering what was holding it up, deciding that a single passenger shifting his weight would send it crashing down like a matchstick bridge. Kate nudged him through the turnstile and ran for the first seat in the front car. He got in beside her, gripping the safety bar with his good hand. Kate pried his fingers loose. “Only sissies hold on,” she said.
A man in sharkskin pants cut off at the knees released the cars into a tunnel which angled upward so sharply that all the light seemed to have poured out of it. They came into the brightness again at the top of an almost perpendicular drop. Harry stared out over the Lower Bay to the gray shore of Sandy Hook, and then they were falling, plummeting weightlessly as the beach rushed up to meet them. Kate threw her hands over her head and kept them there as Harry let out a mocking “Woooeee.” He reached outside the car and suddenly the safety bar snapped forward and he straightened his knees and began raising himself. Kate screamed, “Don’t,” and wrapped both arms around his shoulders and wrestled him down, held him tightly.
Harry relaxed, watching Coney Island whirl around him. They raced up a second incline, dipped and turned dizzily, and as they rose again he saw another car bearing down on them and yanked back the bar before he realized that it was a D train pulling out of the elevate
d subway station across Surf Avenue. He turned to Kate with a sheepish grin, but she took little satisfaction from it. Then the hills evened out and the cars slowed, and with the black tunnel looming above them she caught her breath and said, “Don’t ever touch that bar again.”
“I was always curious how those things worked,” he whispered in the darkness. “Turns out, it’s like pickin’ any other lock, only easier.” Then the bottom dropped out of their stomachs a second time and the roaring in her ears drowned him out.
“I see what you mean about runnin’ around in circles, about goin’ up just to come down,” he was saying when the man in the sharkskin shorts let them out of the car. “It’s fun, but it doesn’t get you anywhere. I think it’s time we went back to the apartment, figured something out.”
They walked toward Seabreeze Avenue through bombed-out blocks. Junkies had burned out the residents on both sides of the street, stripping the buildings of pipes and fixtures to be sold for scrap metal while the darkened shells were left standing as crack houses and shooting galleries. Harry detoured around an apartment building reduced to a mound of bricks, as though it had imploded, and, having seen enough, picked up the pace to a steel-gated avenue.
Kate asked, “Are you thinking of homesteading?”
“I was hopin’ maybe I’d see a drugstore. That roller coaster sloshed my insides around pretty good. I need to have my ribs taped again.”
“You won’t find one here.” She took his hand and they backtracked to the boardwalk. “You won’t find anything here.”
She sat him on a corner of the bed and took off his shirt and his T-shirt, probed his ribs with her fingers. “How do you feel?”
“I’m makin’ up my mind,” he said. “Do it some more.”
“You’re impossible.”
“Only when you don’t know me. You do, I’m real easy.”
“Oh? Why would anyone bother?”
“Maybe I’m the best they can do.”
“Think so?” Without his answer she reached beside the bed and put a brown paper bag in his lap. “Play with this,” she said. “I’ll be back.”
Little Odessa Page 20