Uncle Janice

by Matt Burgess

  “Oh,” the tan cop said. “Come on, no, don’t worry about it.” He looked to his partner for confirmation. “Right?”

  “Please,” he said. “This is some paperwork we done already lost.”

  After they left, she went to get the vacuum cleaner and found her mother sitting on the staircase. She wore a thin T-shirt and underwear without her robe to go over them. Her knees were pressed together, her feet splayed apart like a pigeon’s, the veins along her hands as thick as licorice. Through the underwear’s sheer fabric, Janice could see the dark sponge of her pubic hair. Nothing made sense. This young woman, who had always seemed even younger, looked suddenly old, as if overnight she’d turned old, old all over her body except for a pair of terrified eyes that would have belonged more rightfully in the face of a child. She gnawed, as Janice would have gnawed, on her finger’s bandage and gauze.

  “Don’t do that,” Janice said.

  “Don’t tell me what to do,” Vita said savagely. “I heard voices. Men’s voices.”

  “The police,” Janice said. “About last night. Mr. Hua. It’s nothing, I took care of it.” As she spoke, the spirit of her mother’s panic shot through her like a chill. She gripped her own elbows to keep herself from trembling. “You hungry? You want me to make you something to eat?”

  “What happened to my finger?” Vita wailed.

  “Oh, Mom,” Janice said and went up the stairs to hold on to her.

  CHAPTER TEN

  For young Mikey Sharpe, a natural taxonomist and lover of lists, there was only one sport: handball, and of that one sport there were only two subsets worth considering: Chinese handball and American handball, in that order, from best to not-quite-as-best. His classification system did not include the so-called team handball nonsense played at the Olympics indoors with goalies and referees. Or the beach version, which Mikey couldn’t even wrap his head around. Or any of the other naked emperors cluttering handball’s Wikipedia page. Handball, real handball, was played outside, without goalies, away from sand, against a wall with an actual—and this should be obvious but apparently wasn’t—handball, of which again there were only two preferred types: the light blue Sky Bounce and the heavier pink Spaldeen. They both smelled like summer and kicked up nicely, but the Sky Bounces were a little easier for him to find. A stationery store on Roosevelt Avenue sold them for a dollar apiece.

  Between American handball and Chinese handball, American was by far the more popular, especially down at the Seventy-Eighth and Ninety-Fifth Street parks, where the older boys wore fingerless gloves over their palms. With American you had to smash the ball into the wall. With Chinese, the ball got bounced into the wall. Rule-wise it was the only difference, but that one difference led to five distinct yet interrelated advantages, in ascending order of importance: Chinese handball did not require gloves, which were more expensive than he could afford on his allowance; it privileged touch over force and angles over aggression; with longer points, more people could play at a time; with more people playing, there was a whole lot less running; and, as in baseball, its slower pace led to a super-hilario insider language of killers, Hindus, egg rolls, babying, watermelons, wormburners, and cobble smashers.

  Mikey’s specialty was the killer, a soft-touch shot that kissed the base of the wall before dribbling back, unreturnable. Unbeatable, he dominated the I.S. 145 handball court from the beginning of recess to the loud-ass bell calling every eighth-grader inside. Actually? Technically? He dominated one of the I.S. 145 handball courts. The playground had a single, freestanding wall: on one side, the side grafittied with a fire-spitting dragon, kids played American style, which Mikey thought unfair because dragons were Chinese; the other side of the wall, his side of the wall, was a pop-art mural of rainbow figures dancing and hugging. Totally lame. He recognized the style from a Keith Haring exhibit, one of the many so-called cultural events his mother dragged him to in an attempt to discourage him from sports and/or turn him gay. Some, though, were not entirely terrible and his top five from best to fifth best were: an exhibit of Richard Avedon photographs, an exhibit of Calder mobiles, the musical Ragtime, the musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and a swing-dance class they took together outside Lincoln Center but had to stop after only ten minutes because he ran out of breath.

  Next September he’ll enter the ninth grade at Newtown High, where his older brother, Chris, was the star athlete. And where the PE department had an actual handball team with an opportunity to win actual trophies like the ones with plastic baseball and basketball players on Chris’s side of their shared bedroom. There was a problem, though, and it was a sucky one. Newton’s PE department, and the Public Schools Athletic League as a whole, played handball American-style only.

  In their bedroom, getting dressed before dinner one night, Chris told him he just needed to build up his lung capacity, that’s all. Mikey asked him what a pothead knew about lung capacity. Their mother was frying sausage and peppers in the kitchen, too far away to have possibly overheard, but Chris still punched him so hard in the arm that Mikey’s fingertips deadened. Mikey couldn’t believe it. Unique among older brothers, Chris had never really hit him before. Afterward, while Mikey cried like a loser, Chris put his arms around him, apologizing into the swirled hair atop Mikey’s head, telling him that he could do anything he put his mind to. Seriously, anything. Mikey just needed to take things one step at a time, to not get ahead of himself. For instance? When Chris was scared of the baseball, he started fielding grounders on his knees after batting practice. See, one thing at a time. Fast-forward a year and he was Newtown’s starting shortstop. He used to have a mad-weak crossover, so he began playing pickup games left-handed, which was probably what he was doing right now over at the Seventy-Eighth Street courts, fighting against the dark on this mega-cold Saturday.

  And Mikey on this mega-cold Saturday? He was playing American handball by himself against the apartment building’s brick exterior. And Mikey’s inhaler? Upstairs on his bedroom dresser. One thing at a time. To keep his lungs fresh, he stopped all his rallies after six shots. Yesterday he’d gone up to five; tomorrow he hoped to do seven. Here we go: with some gangster topspin he sliced the ball for an ill killer, bringing a touch of the Chinese style to this American game.

  The Sky Bounce squirted away from him.

  A few feet away it ended up trapped under the high-heeled boot of a woman who must’ve been watching him this whole time. He’d seen her before, he thought. Earlier in the week maybe, with two dudes on an afternoon much warmer than this one. She looked a little grimier than he remembered. She wore baggy jeans, an orange thug cap, and a gray sweatshirt too small for her, but was still totally pervable. His top-five girls were black girls, obviously, followed by Indians because they all seemed to have nice skin and big ta-tas, then Latinas, Russian girls, and finally Asians, mostly because of Tiffany Chen’s bouncing ponytail, which he sometimes followed half a block behind on the way to school. This lady right here appeared part black, part Indian, a perfect combo. She reminded him of a favorite porno video with brown boobies smushed up against a shower-stall door, an image that came easily to mind during his own afternoon bathroom sessions. He looked away from the woman, embarrassed, as if she somehow knew all the things he’d been thinking about, all the guilty things he’d ever done.

  “You practicing your killers?” she asked him.

  He couldn’t believe it. “You play?”

  She bounced the ball to him, but because he was Mikey Sharpe, loser extraordinaire, he fumbled it and had to go chasing after it. There were whole games, like Suicide and Asses-Up, where now he’d have to face the wall so she could peg him.

  “How old are you?” she said.

  “Sixteen,” he lied.

  “Sixteen,” she said, more to herself than to him. “I’ve seen you around, right? You’re the neighborhood Romeo? The Heartbreak Kid around here?”

  He tried to think of how his brother might answer that. The neighborhood Romeo? A
million years ago Cindy Friedman apparently had a crush on Mikey, but she moved to New Jersey before he could do anything about it. At a birthday party last February he went into a closet with Tiffany Chen for seven minutes of quick pecks—well, more like two minutes of quick pecks—without any tongue even, and she hadn’t spoken to him since and he had no idea why. Him? The Heartbreak Kid?

  “Not really,” he said.

  “Exactly what a player would say,” she told him. “How many girlfriends you got?”

  He shrugged.

  “Too many to count?” she asked.

  He didn’t know what to tell her. He didn’t think his brother would even know what to tell her. She terrified Mikey, and he didn’t want her to leave, both at the same time. He threw the ball up high in the air and caught it one-handed, to show her his earlier fumbling had been a fluke.

  “You live around here?” he asked her for lack of anything better to say.

  “Next thing you’re gonna hit me up for my number,” she said, smiling, pulling out her cell phone like maybe this whole thing might really happen. But nope. She must’ve just been checking the time, or seeing if she’d gotten a text, because the phone went right back into her pocket. “You know I’ve been out here all day?” she asked him. “Up and down all these streets. For hours. I even had a pigeon shit on my shoulder, you believe that?”

  Sure, he believed it. The five worst New York City animals: roaches, pigeons, squirrels, subway rats, and silverfish. He couldn’t see it, though, this shit on her shoulder, but then again it was getting late, getting dark out. With the sun setting, his Sky Bounce was beginning to look more indigo than baby blue.

  “You’re really sixteen?” she asked.

  “Of course,” he said, unable to keep himself from shrugging again.

  “Let me ask you a question. You got your ear to the ground, right? Outside all day? Practicing your killers, hollering at the pretty girls. Where I gotta go to cop some weed around here, huh? Not a lot. Just enough to get a little joint going, you know what I’m talking about? A little party like. I been hitting up people all day, Romeo, and you’re pretty much my last hope.”

  A tiny camera kept him under surveillance as he rode up in his elevator. Padded blankets hung on the walls, protection from possible scuff marks and dings. All week he’d taken the stairs, pausing at every landing to re-up his breath, but he didn’t have time for that now. He worried the lady would leave if he didn’t get in and out of his apartment fast enough. Part of him, the loser part of him, hoped she was already gone.

  The apartment door slammed behind him, startling his mother, who should’ve known better. She sat at the kitchen table with her fabric scissors and tomato pincushion and foot-pedal Singer, making her rainbow-fish quilt for yet another one of the expectant mamas in the building. He waved at her. Since morning, every twenty minutes or so, he’d pit-stopped into the apartment for snacks, bathroom breaks, inhaler hits, and glasses of the powdered Gatorade she had to make by the gallon. There was nothing at all for her to be suspicious about, except perhaps that for the first time in his life he closed his bedroom door softly behind him. A chair went under the knob. The search for his brother’s stash took only seconds, Mikey finding it exactly where he expected to find it: in a VHS clamshell case that on the outside said DAZZLING DUNKS AND BASKETBALL BLOOPERS, but on the inside contained pictures torn out of nudie magazines, a pocketknife, their father’s dog tags, and a little plastic baggie of weed, stems, and seeds. He removed only one bud, not knowing if it would be enough to get a little joint going. He hoped so. If his brother happened to notice any of his weed missing—unlikely, but if he did—Mikey felt prepared to make a full denial and he would be believed, he knew it, because like every criminal in their mother’s mystery shows, he was the least likely suspect. The bud radiated heat in his fist as he walked out of the bedroom. With a strained attempt at innocence and the handball bulging his back pocket, he crept past his mother, who asked him to please not let the door slam, but by the time he’d heard her it was already too late.

  He must’ve taken longer than he’d thought—invisible movers had filled up the elevator with furniture—but the lady was still waiting for him outside the building, on the sidewalk where he’d left her. The loser Mikey felt a little disappointed. And you know what? There must’ve been a loser part of her, too, because she seemed almost disappointed herself, smiling without pleasure or warmth, as if she’d hoped he wouldn’t have come back. Or maybe he was imagining things, overthinking things. Only after slipping the bud into her palm did he realize he should’ve put it in a baggie first.

  “It’s really good shit,” he said, by way of an apology.

  She nodded, still looking disappointed. The bud seemed preposterously small in her hand, unfit for the littlest of little joints, but when two burly white men came out of the building carrying a futon, she shoved that weed deep into her pocket. Her hat came off, her hair shorter than he’d expected. She tried to give him a twenty-dollar bill, but he waved her away.

  “It’s on the house,” he told her.

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “No, seriously.”

  “No, seriously,” she said back at him, a little scary now. “You have to take it.”

  “I don’t even have any change.”

  She patted the pocket where she’d put the weed. “It’s really good shit,” she reminded him. “It’s worth at least twenty bucks.”

  Well, all right, fine, but only because he already had a list brewing of what he could do with the money: since the weed was technically his brother’s, he could sneak the twenty into Chris’s sock drawer (yeah right); or Mikey could hoard it himself for a future occasion; or take Tiffany Chen to see Meet the Browns at the Jackson Triplex; or, most tantalizing, order off eBay a pair of padded Owen 922 handball gloves, which cost exactly $19.95 including shipping. He had money, he had options. After the woman walked away, he whacked the ball off the ground and into the bricks, forgetting for a moment that he was supposed to be playing American.

  Four down. None to go. Now what?

  Later that night, from behind her regal desk, Lieutenant Prondzinski said, “I shouldn’t even be telling you this. It’s not … it’s not the proper way, but I thought you’d want to know sooner rather than later. So you could prepare yourself. Get that anxious brain of yours in the right headspace. It’s not proper maybe, to pass news like this directly, and so early, but I figured I owed you as much after your tenure here in Narcotics. Your entirely admirable tenure, I should add. Next week, not this week upcoming, but the following week, the start of next month, you are to report right here for work, do you understand?”

  Not at first. For an entirely absurd moment Janice thought right here meant right here, as in this office, as in she was getting leap-frogged to lieutenant, but when that entirely absurd moment passed she was able to understand that right here meant the rumpus, as in not patrol, as in she will officially last the magic eighteen months with Narcotics, she’s made it, mission accomplished. And so again: now what?

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “The gears tend to grind slowly, so I’m thinking it’ll probably be a few more weeks before you can get sworn in at Police Plaza. But your pay bump will be postdated from the first of April, that I can guarantee. And rest assured, this isn’t an April Fool’s gag, ha-ha!”

  “Ha-ha,” Janice said.

  “All joking aside? I’m proud of you. I hope that doesn’t sound condescending. I don’t mean to talk down to you, Itwaru, but I am legitimately proud of the work you have done here. I’m serious. You are an asset to this department. But now that you’re going to be a detective, three buys a month just isn’t going to cut it anymore. It just isn’t going to get the job done. As a detective, you’re expected to make better numbers than that, okay? Not from me. I understand how hard it is to bring in three in a month. I get that, Itwaru. But these expectations are coming from up high, understand? The bar has been raised. And I, for
one? I am completely confident you’re going to rise to this new and exciting challenge.”

  “I made four buys this month,” Janice told her.

  Prondzinski looked down at the mess of file folders on her desk without actually opening any of them. “Is that what the buy board says?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it hasn’t gone up yet?”

  “Well, whatever. Three buys, four buys, you’re gonna have to do better from now on.”

  “I’m a little confused,” Janice said. To keep herself from sliding out of the rigged chair, she gripped the sides of her seat, her fingers feeling only wood, no scratched-in initials or wads of gum. “You told me I had to make four buys. You said that. You said I wouldn’t get promoted otherwise. But now you’re telling me you thought I had three? And I was gonna get the shield anyway?”

  Prondzinski shook her head vigorously. “What you’re talking about sounds like a quota system, and we don’t do that here. You’re getting promoted, Itwaru, because of the exceptional promise you’ve demonstrated these past eighteen months. And also? To be real for a second?” Behind her, a shadow play of rain drifted across her paper-covered window. “With this Sean Bell fiasco, with the new hiring standards, with your boy Puffy gone, with recruitment dropping across the department, how the fuck would I find a warm body to replace your ass, even if I’d wanted to? Now, if there are no further questions …”

  Back at her own desk, in her own seat, Janice battled claustrophobia with small sips of air as the uncles surrounded her. Four buys! In a month! With a week to spare! She was a natural, she was a gangster, she made them all look bad, seriously, don’t do that, stop making us all look bad. Fiorella, more excited than anyone, wanted to celebrate at A.R.’s Tavern. Tevis said he’d come for a drink. Klondike and Morris looked up from their Posts—the headline, honest to God, read “Why Sad Women Want Sex”—to offer to buy the first round. At the promise of free booze, Grimes slid jeans on over his pajama pants. Eddie Murphy couldn’t go because he was in a California recording studio doing voiceover work for the next Shrek, and Gonz couldn’t go, either, because he wasn’t invited, although he reassured them he wouldn’t have gone anyway because he had to take a trip to pound town—his words—with the chubby white girl from Jackson Heights. Pablo Rivera kept asking Janice if Prondzinski had mentioned Internal Affairs at all. James Chan of course said nothing, but everyone assumed he’d come to A.R.’s because he always went to A.R.’s. Five miles away, Mikey Sharpe sat in the 115 Precinct’s Youth Office handcuffed to a metal bar as he awaited an overnight transfer to the juvenile detention center in Jamaica. Richie the Receptionist promised she wouldn’t have to pay for a single drink, but she bowed out with the excuse that she’d already called a cab to take her home. The uncles accused her of ditching them for the third night in a row, of acting all uppity now that she was making detective. She said she felt sick.