“It must be rough on you,” said Al. “I was a bartender most of my life, so believe me, I know.”
Pete shrugged. “Yeah, it’s hard… but that’s the way it goes. The most difficult part is getting my fingernails clean enough after working on them cars all day. That’s one thing people don’t like to see, a guy servin’ drinks with grease on his thumbs.”
“You figure you’re gonna stay at this place awhile?” asked Al.
Pete nodded. “I have to. You know… the kids are growin’ up, they need clothes, they eat a lot more. There’s not really much choice.” His voice softened. “Tell ya, a couple days ago, I got Kathy a pair of earrings—first present since I dunno when. You know, they were little tiny things, circles… but she went crazy. She loved them.” He shrugged. “That’s worth goin’ up to the Bronx.”
He led Al into the kitchen. Kathy was at the sink, washing dishes. “Kath?” said Pete.
She looked around. “Al! How are you? How you feeling?” She shut off the water, dried her hands with a towel, and came over to kiss Al on the cheek.
“I’m pretty good,” said Al. He pointed to the side of her face. “Nice earrings.”
She smiled. “Thanks. They were a present from a secret admirer.” She paused. “Sit down, I’ll give you some coffee.”
“Oh no, no,” said Al. “No thanks.”
“No extra charge.”
“No, really,” said Al. “I can’t stay too long. I was just walking by and thought I’d stop in and say hello.”
Pete opened the screen door that led to the tiny backyard. “Kevin!” he called, and waited. There was no answer. “Kevin, what are you doing?”
“Digging,” came a small voice.
“Well, get up from there,” said Pete. “Where’s Colleen?”
“On the side.”
“Well, go get her. Uncle Al is here.”
Kevin ran to find his sister, and Pete put his hand on Al’s shoulder. “Al, I’m sorry, but I gotta get outa here now. You gonna stay for dinner? I’m sure Kath and the kids would love to have you.”
“Nah, thanks, not today,” said Al. “I gotta go meet Joe and Willie soon.”
Pete nodded. “Okay. Up to you. I’ll see you then, huh?”
“Yeah, Pete, okay. Don’t work too hard, hear?”
Pete kissed Kathy good-bye, then left the room. At the doorway, Al saw Colleen’s round face peek quickly in, then move away. He pretended not to notice. Again, the little girl poked her head around till she was just in view, then withdrew. Once more, Al feigned oblivon. The peek-a-boo game continued for another minute until Kevin ran in from behind his sister.
“Hello, Uncle Al!” he said, not stopping in the kitchen, but rushing on into the living room.
Shyly, Colleen pushed open the door. Al knelt and opened his arms wide. “How’s my beautiful princess today?”
Colleen giggled, then charged into his loving embrace. “Good,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Uh, huh.”
Al smothered her with hugs and kisses. “Were you teasing Uncle Al before?” he asked.
“No.”
“But you kept peeking in.”
“You saw me?”
“Sure. I see everything. How come you didn’t just march right over?”
Colleen moved her eyes back and forth. “Mmm… I thought you were a monster.”
“A monster?”
“Uh, huh.”
“Naw. How could Uncle Al be a monster?”
“Well, I thought.” She paused. “But then I saw you wasn’t.”
“Thank you,” said Al. “Now, tell me, what were you doing outside.”
“Planting,” said the little girl.
“Planting what?”
“Seeds. Kevin pulls up the grass, and I plant it so it will grow again.”
“I see,” said Al. “Very nice.”
“Will it be grown yesterday?” asked Colleen.
“She means tomorrow,” explained Kathy. “She confuses yesterday and tomorrow.”
“Oh…” said Al. “Well, I think it’ll take longer than tomorrow to grow.”
“It won’t grow?” said Colleen.
“It’ll grow,” said Al. “It just takes time.”
“Why don’t you show Uncle Al the pictures you made?” suggested Kathy.
“I made pictures?” said Colleen.
“You remember.… Think.”
The little girl smiled sheepishly. “I drew them.”
“You did?”
“Uh, huh.”
“You think I’d be able to see them?”
“Nuh, uh.”
“Colleen!” chided Kathy.
“Okay, you could see them.”
“Well, where are they?” asked Al.
“Upstairs,” said Colleen. “And I drew them myself. And Kevin didn’t help me.”
“I believe you,” said Al.
“You want to come with me to see them?”
“Do you want me to?” asked Al.
“Yes.”
“Well, okay, then.” He turned to Kathy. “See you in a while.”
“Follow me,” said Colleen. “Make believe I’m a master and you’re a dog, and you have to follow me.”
“Okay.” Al’s newspaper was still folded under his arm as they left the kitchen. At the staircase, he called quietly up to the little girl. “You go ahead, sweetheart, and I’ll be there in a minute.”
“But you’re my dog and you have to follow me,” said Colleen.
“I will,” said Al. “I have to get something… a leash. Go ahead, I’ll be right up.”
Colleen looked at him suspiciously, hesitated, then went on up. Al checked to be sure that Kathy was still in the kitchen before he moved over to open the basement door. His footsteps sounded to him like thunderclaps as he descended the stairs. At the bottom, he spread his newspaper carefully on a table next to the gun cabinet. Reaching up, his gnarled fingers probed the top surface of the wood and closed finally on the key. In a moment the top drawer was open, and he was peering inside. He removed the pistols one by one, placed them in the paper, and neatly covered them. Fish, he thought. Just like I’m wrapping fish. The second drawer held a confusing mixture of ammunition. Too much. Al dumped the contents of the various boxes out on the table, then placed the bullets in his pockets. He closed the drawers and returned the key to its hiding place. At the top of the basement stairs, as he shut off the light, he called softly up to Colleen.
“Uncle Al is coming,” he sang. “Here comes Uncle Al.”
At the stove, Willie scraped the contents of three cans of stew into a pan. Behind him, Joe and Al sat at the kitchen table. The newspaper with the guns lay spread out before them; a pile of bullets, looking like a new kind of cereal, filled a plastic bowl. Joe lifted a pistol and aimed it at the refrigerator.
“All right, you, where’s the dough?”
The refrigerator hummed softly.
“Oh, won’t talk, huh?” Joe pulled the trigger. “Let’s see how tough you are now.” He pointed the gun at a chair, then the sink, then the stove. “Okay, no nonsense and nobody gets hurt.” He paused, nodded, then placed the pistol back on the newspaper. “I shocked them into silence.”
“Pete had a million kind of bullets,” said Al, who’d been ignoring his friend. “I didn’t know which were for which guns, so I took them all. I figured we’d work it out here.”
At the stove, Willie stirred the stew “Are we gonna use real bullets? Why do we have to use real ones?”
“Because,” said Joe, “if we don’t do this thing right, and we get caught, the bleeding hearts in the city will make sure we get put on probation. ‘How could you send three sweet old men to prison?’ they’ll argue. I’m tellin’ you the knee-jerk liberals are everywhere.”
“I don’t follow…” said Willie.
“The cost!” said Joe. “Don’t you see? The whole thingll wind up costin’ us a fortune in subway tokens going to see some prob
ation officer. We can’t afford it. We gotta make sure they send us to the can.”
Willie seemed unconvinced.
“Don’t worry about it,” soothed Joe. “Like I told these two guys”—he indicated the refrigerator and chair—“if they cooperate, they come out all right.”
“What about clothes?” said Willie.
“After the stickup, we get rid of ‘em. Just wear something you can throw away.”
Al, who’d been studying the bullets, turned around. “You know the best part of this whole thing? We get to wear those disguises. You really picked out good ones, Willie.”
“My big contribution,” said Willie.
“All right,” said Joe. “Here’s how it goes. Al, as soon as we get into the bank, I want you to hold your gun on the guard while me and Willie collect the dough.”
“What if he ignores me?”
“He won’t. Believe me, he won’t. If he gives you any trouble, fire a shot in the air. I’m telling you, he’ll be scared silly.”
“How about other customers?”
“We tell ‘em to lie on the floor. Willie and I will watch ‘em while we get the money. Any new people come in, anyone come back from the bathroom, just wave your gun, yell they should hit the deck.”
“What’re you gonna use to collect the dough?” asked Al.
“We’ll have ‘em fill up that airline bag I got,” said Joe. “I figure that oughta hold a nice couple of dollars.”
“Especially if they ain’t all ones.”
“Then we’ll get outa there fast,” said Joe. “Get back into the gypsy cab.”
“And return to Corona… or here?”
“Neither,” said Joe. “To straight, too easy to trace. We wanna confuse things a little. Instead of taking the cab all the way back, we’ll get out and hop into the subway.”
“Now you’re really talking danger,” quipped Willie. “To chance the subway twice in one week—hoo-ha!”
“Once we get past the turnstiles,” continued Joe, “we’ll transfer the money from the airline bag to a paper bag. That way we dump what somebody maybe spotted or identified, and we ride home on the subway like a bunch of dopey old men. No one’s the wiser, and we’re scot-free.”
Willie looked at Al. “If he wasn’t a personal acquaintance, I’d think our roomie was a professional, you know? I’ll bet we’re livin’ with the brains behind the Lufthansa robbery, and don’t even know it.”
“That was peanuts compared to this,” said Joe.
Willie dipped a spoon into the stew, tasted it gingerly. “One last thing…” he said.
“Yes?” said Joe.
“Suppose we get shot?”
Joe and Al glanced at each other quickly, amazed that Willie could be so obtuse.
“What’s the difference?” said Joe finally.
7
Family Album: Willie
Nineteen oh five, when Willie is born, is a year of the unexpected. A clerk in a Swiss patent office publishes a strange paper; it concludes that the mass of a body increases with velocity, that time can flow at variable rates, that matter and energy are different manifestations of the same thing. The Wright Brothers airplane, first flown two years earlier, has virtually disappeared from the news—what happened to all the predictions of commercial long-distance flight by 1910? Instead, a work-oriented, puritan-minded country now seems preoccupied by limericks. Willie’s father, a tailor, brings home a new one from one of his customers the night Willie is born:
“There was an old man of Tarrentum
Who sat on his false teeth and bent ‘em;
When asked what he’d lost,
And what they had cost,
He replied, “I don’t know, I just rent ‘em.”
Willie’s mother doesn’t get to hear the rhyme; she dies during childbirth. For the first week of his life, Willie has a fever.
He is a withdrawn, moody child. He is cared for by an aunt in Long Island City during the week and sees his father on the weekends. (Since the tailor shop is in Brighton Beach, at the bottom of Brooklyn, a daily trip is impossible; his father sleeps where he works.) Willie is intelligent, but does not do well in school. Dreamy, his teachers say. Academic subjects—English, math, science—hold no interest for him. He wants to be an artist. His paintings are quite good—watercolors, pastels, line drawings of the two cousins with whom he shares a home. He even captures the resentment on their faces.
He gets a job in the art department at Collier’s—layouts, touch-ups, dodging, masking, assorted hackwork of all kinds. The pay is good, and there’s a lovely girl, Helen Fitzgerald, in the typing pool who keeps making eyes at him. They get married in 1925, six weeks after Willie’s twentieth birthday. They are a loving couple; by 1929 they already have two little boys and a new baby girl. To celebrate the arrival of their sister, Willie takes his sons to see an animated feature creatured by someone named Walt Disney; it involves a cute, crazy mouse, and the kids insist on two complete viewings. A month later, along with a hundred other people, Willie is laid off from his job. He goes work hunting door-to-door, finally lands something in Brooklyn at sixty percent of his former pay.
The country staggers in the throes of the Depression. Willie works twelve hours a day, six days a week, at a dusty textile plant in the Red Hook section. His job involves screen printing on bolts of material. He discovers that if he pulls the cloth real tight as it goes through the machine, he can meet his quota and still have a couple of extra yards left over. Willie is normally no thief, but in 1932, when his children are drinking soup made from potato peelings, he cuts the extra material and sells it. The family lives in upper Manhattan, but he walks to work to save the nickel carfare. He, at least, is determined not to be a weekend father. The days, however, seem interminable.
They are not. Two years later, through an uncle of Helen’s, he gets a job driving a cab. It is a big improvement over the textile factory, although hardly the occupation the child-artist dreamed of twenty summers earlier. It is to be his life’s work for the next thirty-nine years. In 1941, when the second World War breaks out, he is bringing home eighty dollars a week, enough for a three-room apartment in the Bronx, occasional nights at the movies, a Philco console radio. His oldest boy, Bobby, joins the Marines; younger brother Edward, despite the fact that he is only seventeen and has many allergies, manages to get into the Navy. Both boys are assigned to the Pacific. In November, 1942, Bobby returns home on leave. He has survived the battle of the Coral Sea, escaping by lifeboat from the sinking, burning USS Lexington. A friend of his has a cousin who has seen Edward. Edward was headed for a pear-shaped island called Guadalcanal.
“I hope he don’t suffer from his allergies,” Willie tells Helen. “Bobby says the place is all jungle, full of plants.”
Edward doesn’t suffer. He is shot in the eye while still wading in the water, dead before he hits the beach. The news reaches Willie and his wife a day after Bobby returns to his outfit. Bobby is not as lucky as his brother. He is captured at Bougainville three weeks before Christmas, 1943. The Japanese troops, enraged at their heavy losses, torture and starve their prisoners. Bobby is later found spread-eagled on adjacent palm tree saplings, along with six fellow Marines. Their bodies have been torn apart.
Something goes wrong in Helen’s brain. Grief, even vast, prolonged grief, is normal, to be expected. Willie himself mourns for two years. But his wife doesn’t come out it. She refuses to eat, to talk, to do housework. She answers questions in one-syllable words. Ten years after her sons’ deaths, past Korea and MacArthur-Truman, past the first hydrogen bomb and the Berlin blockade, she still spends her days in a chair, staring straight ahead.
“Doctor Pendergast thinks Mom would be better off in a hospital,” says Sandra, Willie’s daughter. She has a masters degree in education, has been engaged for six months to a dentist.
“No hospital,” declares Willie. “She stays here, at home, with me.”
But of course, she is not with him. He is out
driving the cab; Sandra cares for her mother during the days. When the Kennedy years come, and Sandra is married, and Helen’s condition worsens, Willie has no choice. He commits his wife to the state institution at Central Islip, visits her there every weekend for twelve years, until she passes away.
In 1979, Willie is seventy-four years old. He has a heart condition and is beginning to go bald on top. He retains a low-key, cynical sense of humor. The occasional watercolors, which he used to do even after he retired, are now a memory. The artist is gone, and his income from Social Security is 237 dollars a month.
8
The Touch of Cold Steel
It is three in the morning. Somewhere on the chilly streets of Astoria a dog barks, and Al looks up. He is in the hallway, having just flushed the toilet in the bathroom. Every night it is the same, urinate three drops, flush, return to his room. He thinks of what a doctor once told him: an old man’s prostate is to a young man’s prostate as a walnut is to an apple. Maybe I’ll get an apple, Al decides now. He heads for the kitchen, passes Willie’s room. Willie, Al sees, is sitting by the window, his face bathed in pale blue light. Deep in thought, Willie fails to notice his friend. Al knocks gently on the door.
“Will?”
“Wha?” Startled, Willie spins round.
“What’s the matter, Willie?”
For the moment, Willie can’t speak. He has been crying an old man’s cry, tearless, as if the body had simply run out of juices to expend on emotion. His throat is constricted. “Can’t sleep,” he whispers finally.
Al moves into the room, puts his arm around Willie’s shoulders. “Hey, come on, tell me. Something’s the matter.”
Willie sighs. His voice is barely audible. “I had a dream.”
“A dream? About what?”
“I dreamed about Bobby, my older son. How I spanked him once when he was little.”
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