A Cool Breeze on the Underground nc-1

by Don Winslow

  He set all this on the kitchen counter and then stood on his toes and inspected the top of the refrigerator.

  “You have to clean up here,” he said.

  “You’re the only one who ever looks.”

  “I brought you presents.”

  Neal checked out the items on the counter and said, “I’d rather have Playboy?

  Graham unwrapped the football cards and set aside the two rectangles of flat, powdered bubble gum. He dealt five of the cards out, facedown, like a poker hand, and then handed the five to Neal.

  “Look at them,” he said.

  “I’m too old for football cards, Graham.”

  “You too old to get paid?”

  Neal examined the cards.

  “Now hand them back.”

  Neal shrugged and gave him the cards. Graham merged them back into the rest of the pack, played with them for a minute, dealt out five cards, and handed them to Neal.

  Neal looked at them and asked, “So?”

  Graham opened the refrigerator. “You got no milk in here, no eggs, no orange juice. So, one of the cards was in the first and the second bunch. Which? Don’t look.”

  “I’m gonna go shopping this afternoon. I think maybe Roosevelt Grier.”

  “You ‘think maybe Roosevelt Grier’?”

  “It was Roosevelt Grier.”

  “Roosevelt Grier is correct. Let’s play again.”

  “Why?”

  Graham didn’t answer, but he shuffled the cards, selected five, and handed them to Neal. Neal had looked at them for maybe five seconds before Graham snatched them out of his hand, regrouped the cards, and handed them back.

  “John Brodie?”

  Graham shook his head.

  “Matt Snell.”

  “Three more guesses, you might get it.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Right answer, but not good enough. It was Doug Atkins.”

  Neal grabbed a small spiral pad and pretended to carefully write out a shopping list.

  “Okay,” he said, “it was Doug Atkins. What difference does it make? What’s the point?”

  “The point is, in our business, you see somebody more than once, you better know it. Point is, in our business, you better develop an eye for detail. Quick and accurate. The point is-”

  “In our business-”

  “You need a memory.”

  Graham resumed his inspection of the kitchen. “I’ll do the shopping. You stay here and memorize these cards.”

  “What do you mean, ‘memorize’?”

  “Gimme your shopping money.”

  Neal went into the bedroom and came out with five dollars.

  “Where’s the rest of it?” Graham asked.

  “What rest? The cost of living here-”

  “Soda, candy bars, magazines… What happened to that budget we made up?”

  “It’s my money.”

  “Give.”

  Neal came back with another seven dollars and slapped them into Graham’s hand.

  “I’ll be back,” Graham said.

  “Yippee.”

  Graham set the two large grocery bags down on the counter, put the perishable items in the refrigerator, took the cards from Neal, and sat down. He opened the roll of medical tape, cut ten small strips, and taped them across the names of the players on the front of the cards. Then he held up a card in front of Neal.

  “John Brodie.”

  Graham held up the next one.

  “Alex Sandusky.”

  Another one.

  “Jon Arnett.”

  He got all ten, first try, no mistakes.

  “Not bad,” Graham said.

  “Not bad?”

  “Take another look at them,” Graham said, and he gave Neal a couple of minutes before taking them back. Then he taped over everything but the eyes. He held up a card to Neal

  “George Blanda?”

  “‘George Blanda?’” Graham mimicked.

  “Alex Sandusky?”

  “It’s George Blanda.”

  “Tricky.”

  “Your first guess is usually right.”

  They went on this way most of the day. Graham would place the cards in various groups, flash them, and have Neal recite them in order; or show him five different groupings and then ask in which group a particular card had been. On and on, backward, forward, and sideways-until Neal could answer correctly. Every time.

  Next saturday. Neal‘s place.

  “Jimmy Orr,” said Graham.

  Neal closed his eyes. “Five eleven, one eighty-five, eighth year, Georgia.”

  “Gino Cappelletti.”

  “Six flat, one ninety, sixth year, Minnesota.”

  “In the picture on the card, was he wearing home or away?”

  “Home.”

  “You sure?”

  “Home.”

  “Home is right.”

  “Yeah, I know. Look, Graham, I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but football cards are getting boring.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Right.”

  Next saturday. Graham‘s place.

  “Miss April.”

  “Thirty-six, twenty-four, thirty-seven. Brown hair, green eyes. Likes sunbathing, swimming, and water polo. Wants to be an actress. Turnoffs: tan lines and narrow-minded people.”

  “Miss October.”

  “Thirty-eight, twenty-five, thirty-eight. Blond, and blue. Five foot five. Hails from Texas. Likes horses, mellow music, and picnics. Wants to be an actress. Turnoffs: pollution, world hunger, and narrow-minded people.”

  Graham got the tape out. “Who’s this?”

  “Janice Crowley. Miss… some winter month…”

  “Which winter month?”

  “February.”

  “You guessed.”

  “But I guessed right.”

  “How did you recognize her?”

  “Modesty forbids.”

  A few saturdays later. Neal’s place.

  “I have a new one,” Neal said to Graham as he came through the door.

  “A new what?”

  “Memory game.” Neal held up the Saturday New York Times. “The crossword puzzle.”

  Graham looked at it. There was nothing written in the squares.

  “So what, you’re going to do the puzzle?”

  “I already did.”

  “Cute, Neal. Now let’s get to work.”

  “It was tough.”

  Graham plunked himself down in the decrepit easy chair. “You asked for it, kid. Okay, twelve down.”

  “Apse.”

  “Where are the answers?”

  “Monday’s paper.”

  “Thirty-one across.”

  “Kipling.”

  And so on and so forth, Graham wrote the answers in and checked the papers on Monday. They were all right. Graham told Ed Levine about it, and he told Ethan Kitteredge. Ethan Kitteredge phoned a friend at Princeton, who came up to New York with a bunch of tests. Neal didn’t want to take them until Graham held up three hundred baseball cards and offered the alternative, Neal took the tests and did pretty well.

  8

  Neal and graham had finished a particularly easy job one night, an over-and-out surveillance on a visiting toy salesman who had found his own Barbie doll in the Roosevelt and who should never have ordered room service.

  “When his old lady hears these tapes…” Neal said as they strolled up Broadway.

  Graham shook his head. “No, we’ll just file the report and use the tapes as backup.”

  “You’re no fun.”

  Graham slowed his pace, tipping Neal off that he had something on his mind. He wasn’t long getting it off.

  “Neal, remember those tests you took?”

  “That you made me take? Yeah.”

  “You did good.”

  “Swell.”

  Graham made a point not to look at him as he said, “So you’re going to start Trinity School in the fall.”
>
  Neal froze. “Bullshit, I am.”

  Graham shrugged.

  Neal turned to face him. “Who says? Who says I start Trinity in the fall?”

  “The Man says. Levine says… I say.”

  “Yeah? Well, I say no way.”

  “Nobody’s asking you.”

  Neal was angry. “It’s a prep school! Kids wear jackets and ties! Rich kids go there! Forget it!”

  He started to turn away, but Graham grabbed him by the wrist and held him still.

  “This is a great opportunity for you.”

  “To be a fag. And leggo of me.”

  Graham released his wrist. “You’re thirteen years old, Neal. You have to start thinking about your future.”

  Neal stared at the sidewalk, “I think about it.”

  “Yeah, you want to be me.”

  Graham saw the tears begin to form. He pushed on, anyway.

  “You want to be me, son. But you can’t be.”

  “You do okay.”

  “I do fine, but you can do better.”

  “I don’t want to be better than you!”

  “Listen, Neal. Listen. You’re smart. You have brains. You don’t want to spend your whole life sniffing people’s sheets, peeking through windows-”

  “We do other things. The time we found that old lady who inherited the money… the lawyer we caught ripping off that guy… that kid that ran away we found-”

  “I’m not saying you can’t work with me anymore. I’ll always want you to work with me. But you have to go to school!”

  “I go to school.”

  Graham laughed. “When you feel like it.”

  “Okay, I’ll go to school, I will. But not that school!”

  “The Man wanted to send you to one of those boarding schools in New England. I talked him out of it.”

  “Talk him out of this!”

  “I don’t want to.”

  Neal spun around and walked away-fast. Let Mr. Wizard follow me if he can, he thought. Ain’t going to any rich little snobby fag school.

  Graham let him go. Let him hide out for a while and think it over. He pointed his own nose to McKeegan’s for a cold one and a shot.

  Neal showed up there two days later. He found Graham sitting on his customary stool. Neal sat down at the other end of the bar.

  “Those schools cost a lot of money,” he said.

  “A lot,” Graham agreed.

  “Time you add in books, fucking uniforms, all that shit.”

  “Very expensive.”

  McKeegan brought Graham his pastrami on rye, fries, and a fresh beer. “The kid want anything?” he asked Graham.

  “The kid doesn’t work for me anymore.”

  “The kid has money of his own,” Neal said. “Give me a Coke.” He would have ordered a beer, but knew that failure would be a disaster.

  “Diamond Jim will have a Coke,” McKeegan responded.

  “So these books and stuff,” Neal continued, “where would I get the money? You won’t let me steal.”

  “The Man will pick up your tab. Plus your usual pay for jobs. Also something he called ‘a modest allowance.’ You steal, I break your wrists.”

  “Here’s your Coke,” McKeegan said. “Shall I keep the change?”

  “Gimme.”

  “You’ve been associating with Graham too much.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  Graham took a break from his pastrami. He knew he should have had the corned beef. “The Man said something about ‘grooming you for better things,’ whatever that means. At first, I thought he was talking about a horse.”

  “Maybe he was.”

  “Maybe.”

  Neal sipped his Coke and set it down-an expansive gesture. He was pleased. “Tell you what. I’ll come back. Same pay. No school.”

  “McKeegan, isn’t this kid underage?”

  “You’ll never get anyone as good as I am.”

  “Probably not, son.”

  “So?”

  “So, it comes to this.” Graham turned on his stool to face the boy. “You go to this school or you go your own way.”

  Neal threw the Coke back as he’d seen the men do with the real stuff. “See you around,” he said, and headed for the door.

  “You know what I think?” Graham asked as he inspected the pastrami for fat. “I think you want to go to this school but you’re afraid, because you think the other kids are better than you are.”

  Problem was, the other kids thought so, too. Neal felt stupid enough anyhow, wearing the blue blazer, khaki slacks, and cordovans. With the white button-down shirt and brand-new old school tie. White fucking socks.

  Then there was that assignment in Mr. Danforth’s English class about your life at home. Neal had scribbled something straight out of Leave It to Beaver and the class had laughed its collective head off at him and Danforth got pissed at him.

  What am I supposed to write? Neal thought. That my hophead hooker of a mother has split, and the nearest thing I got to a father is a one-armed dwarf whose idea of a father-son outing is breaking into somebody’s office and lifting files? So don’t ask me for real life, Mr. Danforth, because I don’t think you can handle reading it any better than I can take writing it. Settle for June Cleaver and be happy.

  Or how about the usual jokes? Your mother’s like a doorknob. Everybody gets a turn. Your mother is like the Union Pacific. She got laid across the country. When these made the rounds, Neal was the only kid in school who knew for a fact they were true.

  And when the talk turned to family vacations, Christmas presents, brothers and sisters and crazy aunts, Neal had nothing, flat-ass nothing, to say, and was too proud and too smart to make things up. Nor could he invite other kids over to his place, because it literally was his place-no mom-and-pop combo, cookies on the table-and his place was a one-room slum.

  Neal was a lonely, miserable kid. Then that son of a bitch Danforth made him read Dickens.

  Oliver Twist. Neal devoured it in two all-night sessions. Then he read it again, and when it came time to write about it… Boy, Mr. Danforth, can I write about it. Your other students may think they know what Oliver feels, but I know what he feels.

  “This is excellent,” Danforth said, handing him back his paper. “Why don’t you talk in class?”

  Neal shrugged.

  “You liked Dickens,” said Danforth.

  Neal nodded.

  Danforth went to his bookcase and handed Neal a copy of Great Expectations.

  “Thank you,” Neal said.

  Neal went straight back to the neighborhood, bought himself a jar of Nescafe and a half-gallon of chocolate ice cream, and dug in to spend the weekend with Pip.

  The reading was great. The reading was wonderful. He was never lonely when he was reading-never cold, never afraid, never alone in the apartment.

  He returned Great Expectations with a small essay he’d written, and received David Copperfield in exchange.

  “Did you like it?” Danforth asked.

  “Yeah, I liked it… a lot.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. It made me feel…” He couldn’t find the word.

  “I know what you mean.” Danforth smiled at him. “You’re okay, Carey, you know that?”

  Parents’ night was hell. Neal dreaded it with a near-tangible fear: exposure. He could hear the taunts that would follow him around the hallways the next day and ever after: bastard.

  That night, he sat in the back of homeroom as the parents drifted in, smiled their dull smiles, shook their wooden handshakes, feigning interest in their daughters’ dumb pastels and sons’ stupid poems.

  He looked impatiently at his watch every few seconds and frowned a “Where the hell are they?” frown for the benefit of anybody who might be watching, awash in the adolescent conviction that everyone was watching. He was slumped so low in his chair that he didn’t see her come in, but he sure as hell heard her. Her rich voice dripped class.

  “Hello, I’m
Mrs. Carey, Neal’s mother. How nice to meet you.”

  She was beautiful. She made Mrs. Cleaver look like a carhop. Her auburn hair was perfectly coiffed. Her gray dress was letter-perfect for the occasion. Brown eyes sparkled at the teacher, and as she held her hand out, the poor man almost kissed rather than shook it.

  She strode to the back of the room, displaying a warm maternal smile as she kissed Neal on both cheeks and subtly hauled him from his seat. “Show me everything,” she said.

  They walked the school together, pretending fascination with the various displays. She oohed proudly over his prize essay on Dickens’s London. She charmed teachers and parents, sipped punch, and nibbled cookies. She apologized for having to leave so early and swept, yea verily swept, out the door.

  Neal found Graham at McKeegan’s later on. “Where did you get her?” he asked. “She was perfect.” Graham nodded. For two hundred bucks, he thought, she’d better be perfect.

  “You’re faginesque, you know that?” Neal asked Graham. They were in a dark staircase in Neal’s building.

  “What do you mean? I like women. Don’t tiptoe. You don’t make noise stepping on the stair; you make it stepping off.”

  “That’s what I mean. Fagin was a character in Oliver Twist who taught boys how to steal and stuff.”

  “I don’t teach you how to steal.” Graham didn’t have much patience at the moment for this Fagin shit. He was trying to teach the kid something important. “You plant your foot-not heavy, but firmly. You step off lightly, like you don’t weigh anything.”

  “Yeah, okay, not steal. But stuff like this.”

  Neal planted his foot on the edge of the step. The result was an awful screech.

  “You want to wake the whole building?” Graham asked. “Always, always step to the butt end of the stair. That’s where it’s the most solid, least likely to squeak. Also you can feel your way. You can feel where the next step is. ‘Faginesque.’ I’ll give you ‘Faginesque.’ Get to work.”

  Work this evening was learning how to climb stairs without making any noise. Work was doing it with your eyes closed. Work was realizing that you make more noise going downstairs than going up, so, generally speaking, you sneak up but run down.

  “Christmastime,” Graham said as Neal practiced his step technique, “I run out and buy presents for those people who put carpet on their stairs.”

  “Nice people,” Neal agreed.

  Going downstairs was a genuine bitch, mostly because you can’t find the butt end of the step with your toe and you’re afraid of pitching forward and breaking your neck. So observed Neal to his tutor about the fortieth time he’d fucked up the maneuver.