by Norman Green
It was the same thing he got from everyone. “Why would cops be watching Black and White?”
She shrugged. “I doubt if it means much of anything. In that kind of business, someone’s always checking up on you. It’s not that unusual. They’re not exactly subtle. If you hang around for about an hour after quitting time you’ll see them. As a matter of fact, they’re sort of hard to miss. Bunch of white guys, short short hair, suits, white shirts, ties, look like they never go out in the sun. They all pile into your basic, government-issue unmarked sedan and go home.”
“Anybody else notice them?”
“Nobody said anything to me.”
“How about that.” He looked at her with new respect. “How come you picked up on it?”
She glared at him. “Girl’s got to look out for herself. I can’t see any connection between them and your brother. I can’t picture either of the O’Brians doing anything to Noonie, either. Sean is too dopey to get away with much, and his uncle is too religious.”
“The physical man and the spiritual man.”
“You’re mocking them both.”
“You’re right. I’m sorry.”
“You told me before, spiritual didn’t mean what I thought it did.”
“So I did.” He sighed. “Okay. Two monks. Happen to be Zen monks, but it don’t matter, a monk’s a monk, I figure. Anyway, one of them was very holy. Verrry holy.” He shook his head. “You know the kind. Story says, guy is so spiritual, everywhere he goes, the birds stop what they’re doing and start bringing him flowers. You get it?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. The other monk is just a regular guy. Nothing special. So anyway, the two of them, they’re on a little trip, they have to go from one monastery to another, they got to walk through the jungle to get there. Jungle’s got tigers in it, okay? Sometimes a tiger will make a sort of coughing noise, like this.” He demonstrated.
“You ever hear one of them do that?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s it mean?”
“Who knows. I figured it was the tiger’s way of saying, ‘I know you’re there, sucka.’ So anyway, they’re traveling through the jungle, they hear a tiger do that, right next to the trail. The ordinary monk, he’s up in front, and he flinches. He’s afraid, right? And in Buddhism, you’re not supposed to be worried about it. No attachments.”
“Okay.”
“All right, so the holy monk, Mr. Spirituality, he says to the first guy, ‘Oh, I see you’re still suffering.’”
“Oh,” she said. “You mean, like, ‘You aren’t holy like me.’”
“Exactly. Story doesn’t say what the first guy thinks of all this, but you can imagine. Anyhow, they keep going, after a while they stop to take a rest, they find two rocks to sit down on. After a few minutes, Mr. Spirituality has to take a leak, right, he goes off to find a tree. The other guy, he’s sitting there, he takes a piece of chalk out of his pocket, right, he draws the symbol for the Buddha on the rock the other guy was sitting on. Few minutes later, the other guy comes back, goes to sit down, he’s got his butt cheeks like six inches from the rock, he sees what’s written there, he flinches. The first guy is watching him, right, he says to the guy, ‘Oh, I see you are still suffering.’ Story says, when His Holiness hears that, he becomes enlightened. Spiritual for real, not for show. And after that, the birds never bring him flowers again.”
“And that means . . .”
“Story doesn’t say. I figure it means that you can’t see spirituality from across the room. Not when it’s real. And maybe it’s just me, maybe I’m reading into it, but I figure they’re also saying all this other stuff, you know, buildings and statues and priests and all that, it’s all format. Don’t get hung up on it.”
“I have to think about that one. What about the rest of that story you told me? Viet Nam, Japan, boxing, all of that? Was that real?”
“It was real, all right.”
“Well, listen, I’m really sorry about Noonie. I know it’s hard, not knowing. But you can’t do anything for your brother now. Wouldn’t you be better off just going someplace new and starting over?”
“Tried that. Kept feeling like I had unfinished business.”
“This sounds very much like what happened to my father.” He sat watching her, silent. “His people were farmers in eastern Turkey. He was a schoolteacher, the first educated man in the family. He had four brothers. One day when he and my mother were away, partisans massacred them all, brothers, their wives, children, his parents, all of them. He had to decide what was more important, stay and fight, or go someplace and have a life. My mother was pregnant with my older sister, maybe that made it easier for him, but he came here, to the United States, where he didn’t speak the language, where his degree and his skills were no good, where he didn’t know a soul, and he started all over again. I never even knew about all this until after he died, and my mother told me about it.”
“I don’t know if I could do that.”
“Maybe he decided to be a schoolteacher, not a soldier,” she said.
He shook his head. “You don’t always get to choose. Some parts of the world, everyone’s a soldier. Everyone has a gun, and they all know how to shoot. I bet one of the guys on the other side was a teacher himself. One of the partisans.”
“It’s too bad guns were ever invented.”
“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “It’s inside us. We didn’t have guns, we’d kill each other with rocks. Baboons do the same thing, did you know that? They live in family groups. Tribes. Chimpanzees, too. They mark their territories, right, this is ours, stay out. If they catch another tribe trespassing, they go to war. We’re no different. Take away my gun, I’ll hit you with a brick.”
“You know,” she said, grinning, “I had you figured for that kind of guy.”
He looked sheepish. “I didn’t mean you, personally. I’d be afraid to hit you, you look like the type that hits back.”
“Don’t you forget it, either. So what happens now, Silvano? Why are you going around dressed like a wino? I’m not talking to you in public when you’re dressed like that.”
“That’s another long story. If you wanna hear it, I’ll change into my other getup so you won’t be ashamed to take a walk with me. My butt’s falling asleep.”
“All right,” she said. “I’ll go wait by the door.” She got to her feet, not as smoothly as she would have liked, and she noticed that he’d been sitting in half-lotus the whole time. He uncoiled and stood up, started fishing around in the bag. She walked down the hallway to wait by her front door. Elia, she asked herself, are you nuts? Don’t you have enough insanity in your life yet? What do you want with some semi-suicidal ex-soldier head case? You should let him go, you should just open your hand and let him fly away. I’ll do it, she told herself, even though she knew it was a lie. He was like a puppy, you know he’s gonna pee on your rug but you keep him anyway, because you can’t bring yourself to take him to the shelter. All right, she told herself. Just be careful. Be careful how close you let him get.
“Come on back,” he said.
She walked back down the hallway. “Wow,” she said. He was wearing the same jeans, but everything else was different. The ratty shoes were gone, replaced with white socks and sneakers, instead of the brown coat, he wore a gray Police Athletic League sweatshirt with the hood pulled up over a baseball cap, with oversized shades covering half his face.
“What do you think?”
“Well, I already knew it was you,” she said, “but if I hadn’t, I probably wouldn’t have looked at you twice. You look like you’re just another over-the-hill jock on his way to a basketball game.”
“Oh, thanks,” he said, wounded. “What do you mean, over the hill?”
“You had all this in that paper bag?”
“Yeah. Now all the other stuff is inside the gym bag. Including the paper bag. I can go from one to the other in about three minutes.”
“All right,” she said,
“let’s go. And you’re gonna tell me the rest of the story, right? No bullshit this time?”
“Absolutely,” he said. “I promise.”
THEY GOT OFF THE TRAIN and emerged out onto the street on the southern tip of Manhattan. “Staten Island Ferry,” he said, reading the sign. “That where we’re going?”
“Cheapest date in New York,” she said, and winked at him. “You got a dime?” He followed her through the terminal and onto the dingy orange ferryboat, then up the stairs, all the way to the other end of the boat and then downstairs again, outside on the stern, just above where the propellers were churning the dirty water, keeping the boat nose-in against the dock. “When I was a little girl,” she told him, “my father used to love to bring me here.” She felt herself getting a little misty and she turned away from him, faced into the breeze, felt its fingers brush softly past her face and through her hair. “He came from the mountains, there was nothing like this where he grew up. No city, no buildings, not like these, no rivers like this one. He never got tired of riding on this boat.” She smiled sadly, but she was back in control. “Poor man’s cruise ship. Have you been here before?”
“Nope.” She watched him put a hand on the rail as the deck shuddered beneath them and the ferry began backing out of the slip. “Born and raised in Brooklyn, never rode the ferry. Never been to the statue, never went to the Empire State Building or Radio City or any of that.”
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, that’s criminal. Why not?”
The boat nosed into the current and began picking up speed. She moved closer to him, took his elbow for support. “My father was a gangster.” He took her hand in his. “Still is, I expect. My mother died when I was six. After she died it was like growing up in a morgue. Even after he got a new wife, even after Noonie and my sister came along, it always felt like my father and his whole crowd were just going through the motions. Just waiting for someone to dig the hole. Every year he pulled in a little more, a little more, like a gardener pruning back a bush until it’s barely there.”
“What happened to your mother?”
“I’m not entirely sure.” He was silent for a minute. “I can barely remember her. She disappeared, no one ever talked about it. I know the cops thought my father killed her, but her body never turned up, and they never got enough to charge him. You know, they teach you the family rules, when you’re a kid. Two of the rules in my house were, don’t ask any questions, and don’t tell anybody anything.”
“Sounds a lot like my family. So your father remarried?”
“Yeah, he married one of the poodle women.”
She blinked at him. “I’m sorry, he married one of the what?”
Silvano was nodding. “Poodle women. You know the type. Ornamental, not functional, except in one or two, ahh, limited categories. Her main jobs, besides servicing him, were getting coiffed and tanned and shined and spiffed. You know, she had to look as stylishly silly as she could manage.”
“Sounds like the two of you didn’t get along.”
“Well, she didn’t like me, because I loused up things between her and my father. I got in the way. And of course, I hated her.”
“Why ‘of course’?”
“I was only six. One day my mother went away, and then the poodle lady showed up. I honestly don’t know if there was any time interval between the two events, I can’t remember. But in my mind, over the years, I came up with the same theory I suppose the cops did, the old Henry VIII ploy, you know, I’m tired of this one, let me throw her away and get a new one.”
“Do you really believe he could have done that?”
“When I was ten or twelve, I was sure of it. Now, I don’t really know.”
“Didn’t you and your father ever talk about her?”
“We never talked about anything.”
“He never told you what happened?”
“No.”
“And you never asked.”
He shook his head. “No.”
“Jesus Christ.” She was incredulous. “Well, are you gonna ask him? Don’t you wanna know what happened to her?”
He thought about it for a minute. “I should have asked before now, right?”
“If he dies before you get around to it, it will be too late. Then what? So who raised you?”
He smiled broadly, she actually saw teeth. “You know, when I joined the Army, my DI used to ask me if I was raised by wild dogs.”
She watched his face closely. He was showing the first signs of affection she’d seen in him yet. She shook her head. “I don’t get it. You didn’t like your father, you hated your stepmother, but you actually liked your drill instructor.”
“I know. They’re supposed to be monsters, but mine was actually a cool guy. He was always real clear on what he wanted from me. ‘Private Alphabet,’ he’d say, ‘climb up that obstacle and knock that man off.’”
“Private Alphabet?”
“He was from down South somewhere, he had a little trouble pronouncing Iurata. But what made you acceptable to him or not was right out in plain sight. You didn’t have to read his mind. ‘Here’s what I need you to do.’ No guesswork.”
“So things were ambiguous, then, in your house.”
“‘Ambiguous’?” He didn’t smile, but she could tell he was amused. “Things were crazy in my house. Between my brother, who was out of his mind, and my psychopathic grandfather, you never knew what was coming.”
“Don’t use a word like that,” she said. “Tell me what he was really like.”
“No, psychopath is the right word,” he said, shaking his head. “That’s what he was. A crocodile on a riverbank was probably capable of more empathy than him. But I was young, you know, and I didn’t understand. I idolized him, because it seemed to me that he knew how to live. He engaged, he stepped on the gas pedal. He used to take me to the opera, right, because nobody else would go with him. We always sat in the same place, first balcony, first row. ‘You don’t wanna see ’em,’ he told me, ‘you don’t wanna know what a fat pig the soprano is, you just want to hear her, you want to believe she’s a beautiful angel.’ He knew the music by heart, you know, and he’d sit there fidgeting, waiting for the parts he wanted to hear. We went to see La Boheme, right, he’s sighing, he’s bored stiff, looking up at the ceiling, picking his nose, then finally the tenor starts into ‘Che Gelida Manina.’” He sung it to her, softly, just the first two lines. “All of a sudden he’s transformed, his eyes are closed, his mouth is open, he’s in heaven. Soon as the guy is done, my grandfather’s at the rail, he’s clapping, he’s bellowing ‘Bravo!’ and all of that. Then he grabs my hand. ‘We’re outa here,’ he says. Didn’t think the rest of it was worth listening to.”
“He doesn’t sound like a psychopath.”
“Hah.” She saw him start to say something, then stop and reconsider.
“Tell,” she said.
“All right.” She watched him work up to it. “When I was seventeen,” he said, finally, “he killed my uncle Angelo, his son, because of something he did. And he made me help him dump the body.”
She held on to him, in shock. “Are you kidding?”
“No. And because of that, you know, he said I had to go away, leave the city, leave my brother. I had always taken care of Noonie up until that. It was my job to fight his battles, watch out for him, get him out of trouble. It was a little like wrestling a gorilla, because no way you’re gonna win, right, and you’re gonna get your ass kicked trying, but it was what I did. After what the old man did to my uncle, though, I didn’t have any choice, so I left. Wound up in the Army, not too long after that. My cousin, Angelo’s son, has hated me ever since because he thought it was all my doing. Little Dom, they call him. He went into the family business. It’s his guys that are trying to kill me.”
“Jesus. So that’s why you’re going around dressed up in these outfits.”
“Please. Men don’t wear outfits.”
“Pardon me. These getups, then. So how long d
o you figure you have before they get you?”
“That’s not gonna happen.” He dismissed the idea with a wave of his hand. “Ultimately, though, if I stay in Brooklyn, my cousin and I are going to have to settle up.”
“So that’s it, then?” She saw it in his face, pictured him living in a vast and sterile emotionless desert. “That’s all you learned, right? You learned how to fight, and that was it. Did anyone teach you how to love someone else?”
“I did love my brother.” He said it quietly.
“Did you ever tell him?”
He shook his head. She took his face in her hands and turned him to her, wrapped her arms around him. “It’s not enough,” she said, feeling her heart thundering in her chest. “It’s not enough just to feel it. You have to tell, you have to show it.” She kissed him then, crushing him against her body, and then she let him go and stepped back, seized by a sudden panic. What if he’s gay, what if he’s not capable, what if he’s too far gone? “It’s better when both people do it,” she said. “Try to get into the spirit of the thing.”
“Yeah,” he said, reaching for her. He’s more fucked up than I am, she thought, but by then he had his hand soft on her face and she felt herself drawn in, sucked under, engulfed.
They rode back home on the train, silent but side by side, maintaining contact, and they didn’t talk during the short walk to her building, either. When they got to her front stoop he detached, holding her just by the hand. “Listen,” he said, his voice husky. “I really . . .”
“No you don’t.” She felt more vulnerable than she could ever remember feeling, but some buried part of her had already decided to risk it all right then and there, even though she was sure if he turned away she would shipwreck and die on the rocks. “You’re coming with me.” All of a sudden they needed no more talk, their gathering momentum swept them up the stairs, it seemed to her that they barely made it inside her door.