Sugar Pop Moon

by John Florio

  I’d love to send a bullet into the bridge of his nose, but I’d be dead before he starting bleeding.

  “Frank, grab his h-heater,” Baldie says.

  Frank takes the gun from my hand and then reaches into my overcoat pocket and snatches my knuckles, too. “He’s got a buddy going around back,” he says as he points the pistol at my forehead.

  Baldie seems unconcerned. “I’m d-d-delighted you took the trip,” he tells me. “I’ve heard such interesting things.”

  There are times that sarcasm is hard to swallow; standing in the woods at the mercy of a stuttering bald goon definitely qualifies.

  “How’d you know I was coming?” I ask.

  “You better teach that boy of yours how to p-pick someone’s p-p-pocket,” he says, walking into the cabin. “Freddy says your boy’s hand is as g-graceful as a horse with five d-d-dongs.”

  He heads into the cabin but stops in the doorway to kick off his shiny black leather shoes and slip his stockinged feet into a pair of red velvet slippers. They look ridiculous with his brown herringbone suit, but I keep my opinion to myself.

  I follow him into the cottage and my eyes are so cooked from the sun that I can’t make out many details. We’re in a front room—I know that because there’s a door on the back wall. I’m guessing the door leads to the still where the moon is fermented. A wooden table with thick legs sits in front of me; it looks like a slab of tree resting on four chopped telephone poles. The walls of the cabin are made of rough, unsanded wood, just like the outside of the place. If I didn’t have a machine gun in my face, I’d find it a decent place to grab a shot or two.

  Baldie rests his gun on the table but doesn’t stray more than a step away. My only hope is that Santi is coming up with some kind of plan.

  “That’s a lot of metal,” I say, pointing my chin at the Tommy gun.

  Baldie nods. “Thanks,” he says, as if I meant it as a compliment. Then he adds, “I see you’ve met Frank.”

  My eyes are still smarting. I’m staring at two Franks and two Baldies. “Yeah, he’s brighter than he looks.”

  “Yes, he is,” Baldie says, wiping the top of his dome with a handkerchief.

  Frank smiles behind my revolver, which he still has trained on my head.

  “Where’s Gazzara?” I ask Baldie.

  Frank laughs.

  “Is that funny?” I ask.

  “It is to me,” Frank says.

  “You’re looking at h-him,” Baldie tells me.

  Something’s not adding up. “I mean Denny Gazzara.”

  “That’s me,” Baldie says. “Denny Gazzara.” He holds his palms in the air as if he were Harry Houdini.

  The door to the back room opens and in walks Santi. He’s got his hands over his head. Behind him, pointing a gun at his neck, is the hood from the Pour House. I now know that guy’s name is Freddy.

  “Sorry, Jersey,” Santi says to me.

  I’m boxed, but I’d like to get that thug off Santi.

  “If you’re Denny Gazzara,” I ask Baldie, “then who the hell sold me the bogus moon?”

  “You’re Denny Gazzara?” Santi asks. He shoots me a look that says I should have given him a better description, as if I would have left out that Gazzara’s as bald as a cue ball, wears a Vandyke, and stutters.

  “There seems to be a misunderstanding about some b-bootleg moon,” Gazzara says to me. “I don’t make bad moon. And I don’t like f-fucking nigger albino gutter freaks like you, no offense, going around telling people I do. It m-makes me uncomfortable.” He leans his elbows on the table and lightly bounces the tips of his fingers together. “Although I do give you credit for balls. You’ve got a pair.”

  “I bought eighty cases of piss off a Joe who said he was you.”

  “And that’s why you’re not dead yet. You’re going to sing, and I’m going to listen. Frank, p-pour some sugar.”

  Two benches run the length of the table. Gazzara points at one and tells me to sit. I do, and Santi takes a seat on the bench opposite me.

  “If you’re telling the truth, whoever the f-fuck is using my name is a dead man,” he says. “But if I find out you’re full of shit, the first thing I’m going to do is k-k-kill your boy here.” He points at Santi.

  “Fuck you,” Santi says, spit flying out of his mouth.

  “He’s got nothing to do with this,” I say.

  Gazzara shrugs, he’s obviously not concerned about nailing the wrong man.

  Frank grabs four shot glasses from the assortment sitting on the table and fills them with sugar pop moon. We each down one, and as far as I can tell, it’s the same stuff the guy gave me on the train. And I’ll say the same thing now that I said then. It really is good moon.

  I just hope Santi lives to drink another shot of it.

  An icy sweat dampened Dorothy’s spine as she stepped off the trolley at Hartford’s Consolidated Railway Station. It was already the fifteenth of October. She’d had no choice but to leave Wellesley—her belly would be blooming by the first of November and she wasn’t about to be grist for the school’s gossip mill.

  She made her way into the station, the tail of her bell skirt dragging behind her. To avoid being spotted, she hid behind three elderly, silver-haired ladies clustered at the ticket window. But once the women had bought their tickets and left for the train platform—all three hunching over canes and shuffling their feet—Dorothy had to step up to the brass bars of the black granite booth and face the ticket seller. Alone.

  “Where to?” the seller said, slumped on a stool and looking up just long enough for Dorothy to smell the liquor on his breath. His face wasn’t familiar, but Dorothy didn’t want to push her luck. If the man gambled—as did half of Hartford—he surely knew her father, and possibly knew her. She pretended to scrutinize the small printed schedule taped next to the window as she slid three dollars across the counter.

  “Baltimore,” she said. “One way.”

  As the seller flipped through a stack of tickets, Dorothy said good-bye to her dreams of becoming a teacher.

  “Here you go,” the seller said, pulling out a greenie, stamping it with a rubber design-maker and sliding it under the brass bars. Dorothy picked it up, hoping her fingers wouldn’t tremble.

  She’d spent the night in a tizzy, her nightdress stained under her arms and damp across her back. For hours, she’d stared at the dancing shadows cast by the flickering candle in her dormitory sconce. In them, she saw her father screaming at her for destroying her future and then beating Ernie to death for violating his only daughter.

  She jumped out of bed at dawn, ate her eggs, and took the first train to Hartford to see Father Jennings. He only confirmed what she had already suspected: there was no undoing the sin she had committed. She couldn’t cleanse herself of the child. Nor could she raise it on her own and remain in God’s good graces. It was against the law for whites and Negroes to marry and a sin to live with Ernie out of wedlock.

  Bowing to Father Jennings’s urging, Dorothy had agreed to have the child and give it to the Sisters of Charity. That’s why she found herself back at the station running to Aunt Ellen’s. She didn’t want to see her aunt any more than she wanted to quit school, but she knew she could have the baby, quietly and shamefully, in the narrow brick row house where she’d played marbles on holiday weekends during grade school.

  Aunt Ellen could be trusted to keep Dorothy’s secret. The woman despised her brother-in-law. She’d been calling Dorothy’s father a gangster since Dorothy could remember, blaming him for the death of Dorothy’s mother even though he’d had nothing to do with it. Everybody knew the story of Harriet Albright: she’d been trampled by a police horse while throwing rocks at Hartford’s City Hall during a protest for women’s suffrage.

  “He’s the one who made Harriet angry in the first place,” Aunt Ellen once told her, nodding at Dorothy with her thin lips pressed together, her tightly curled brownish-red hair capping her bony face, a stack of ungraded English assignments
waiting in her lap.

  Dorothy thanked the ticket seller with her face to the floor, her mumbled words surely lost in the hubbub of the railway station.

  “Good day,” he said, looking only at the series of blue train passes he was marking.

  Dorothy reached into her suitcase, pulled out a Bible, and tucked the green ticket into her bookmarked page—Psalms, chapter 82, verse 3—where she’d underlined the words, “Give ear to the cause of the poor and the children without fathers; let those who are troubled and in need have their rights.”

  Her timepiece read half past noon, which meant she had a few minutes to kill. She walked over to a newsstand where a tiny man with enormous bug eyes was hawking papers. She picked up a copy of the Evening-Star and handed him a nickel. As he reached into his canvas apron to make change, the bottom of the paper’s front page caught her eye. There, next to a photograph of White Sox pitcher Doc White, was the unmistakable face of Ernie Leo, his bare fists held up to his chin, the New Jersey belt draped over his shoulder. Dorothy recognized the wad of gauze on his forehead, just as she did the tiled corridor over his shoulder. Ernie was standing next to his dressing room door at the Third Regiment Armory—the same door she’d slipped out of that night in July, her new skirt rumpled, stained, and wet.

  The large type above the photos announced that the White Sox had beaten their crosstown rivals, the Cubs, to win the World Series. The headline about Ernie was barely the length of a hatpin and contained all of five words: Dalliance to Cost Leo Title?

  Dorothy felt the color drain from her cheeks as she slumped onto a hard wooden bench and riffled through the pages of the paper to find the rest of the article. As she read on, she felt as if she’d been socked in the gut by one of Ernie’s body blows. The commission, appointed by this newspaper, is considering stripping Ernie Leo of the New Jersey Heavyweight Boxing Championship after learning that he may have engaged in a postfight dalliance with an unidentified white female.

  The article claimed that while the commission couldn’t prove that Leo had broken New Jersey’s antimiscegenation law, it retained the right to revoke the title because, according to the commission, the mere act of being alone with a white woman is behavior unbecoming a Negro champion, and therefore a violation of the conduct clause in Leo’s contract.

  Dorothy remembered bumping into the reporter at the armory. She thought she’d left him behind at Higgins’s dressing room, but the little nuisance must have tailed her. Luckily, she hadn’t given him her name.

  She buried her face in her palms as her immorality gushed out of her eyes in large salty teardrops. She’d ruined her life and that of her unborn child. And only God knew what she had done to Ernie.

  Her tongue turned bitter when she thought of her father. He’d gotten what he wanted again. He and his shady friends had been scheming for months, trying to find a way to give Higgins the title he hadn’t been able to earn for himself. They’d all just been handed another opportunity, gift wrapped in Dorothy’s sin.

  Wiping her face with a tissue, Dorothy went back to the window to exchange her ticket. Baltimore would have to wait; she had a stop to make in Newark. She swept her hair up to the top of her head, tying it into a knot over a horsehair rat. Then she took her new ticket, pulled her flowered maroon and black shawl around her shoulders, and carried her suitcase through the heavy doors of the station and onto the platform. Wilkins hadn’t known who she was when they’d bumped into each other at the armory, but he would find out soon enough.

  The sun was still shining when Dorothy’s train pulled into Newark. She hoped she could find Wilkins quickly because she had told Aunt Ellen she would be arriving at dusk and she was already hours behind schedule.

  The Evening-Star occupied a five-story red brick building on Clinton Street. The stately structure’s massive arched windows towered over downtown Newark. Dorothy strode through the lobby and walked up the marble stairway at the far end of the hall. On the second floor she spotted a door of brass with dimpled green glass and gold leaf letters that identified it as the Evening-Star headquarters. The sign wasn’t necessary; the sound of clacking typewriter keys would have been indication enough. She knocked on the door, but when no one greeted her, she walked in unannounced.

  The Evening-Star operated out of a large open room with a single office door in the far left corner. Everything in the place—the walls, the round pillars, and the vaulted ceiling—was painted white. Along the right wall loomed two large black printing presses, each one reaching halfway to the ceiling. The smell of ink was so strong it tickled the lining of Dorothy’s nostrils.

  Four large windows stretched across the back wall. In front of them, six jacketless men wearing suspenders sat at heavy wooden desks, typing, as the fading orange sun lit their backs.

  A lady with strawberry blonde hair, a large nose, and pimply cheeks hunched over a small table to Dorothy’s left, scratching a pencil across a sheet of paper, apparently crossing out an entire page of notes. She seemed to be a secretary, so Dorothy started with her.

  “Excuse me, I’m here to see Walter Wilkins.”

  “Who are you?” the woman asked. When she looked up, Dorothy could see that the long hours at the Evening-Star had begun etching themselves under the woman’s eyes.

  “My name is Dorothy Albright.” It came out a bit terser than she’d intended.

  Her sharp tone sent the woman scampering to the far side of the room, where she huddled with one of the reporters. When he looked up from his typewriter, Dorothy recognized his face even though he wasn’t wearing the brown derby he’d had on at the armory.

  He left his desk and smiled at her as he approached. “I’m Wilkins,” he said. “Do I know you?”

  He didn’t act at all like the heel Dorothy pictured. In fact, he came across as quite the opposite. His face had the same square shape she remembered—he looked as though he was grinding his molars even when his mouth was open. He seemed young and eager. His wide eyes had the excited look of a young boy about to put on his first pair of roller skates.

  Dorothy waited for a wave of realization to pass over his face, but it never came. “We met the night Ernie Leo fought Barry Higgins.”

  Wilkins wagged his finger at her. “Yeah, yeah.”

  He may have recalled her face, but it was clear he didn’t see her duck into Ernie’s dressing room.

  “I read your article in today’s paper,” she said.

  He had the nerve to smile. “Thanks.”

  “I hope you’re satisfied,” she said, not even trying to mask her disdain.

  He looked startled, as if he’d just found out the cute puppy he’d taken into his home had fangs. Then his eyes narrowed. “What’s it got to do with you?”

  “Everything,” Dorothy said, nearly shouting. Then she hesitated, not sure how far she should go, but there was no point in dancing around the truth now that she was standing in the Evening-Star’s office. “I’m the unidentified white woman who had the so-called dalliance with Ernie Leo.”

  Walter started to speak but Dorothy cut him off.

  “You’ve got it all wrong,” she said, her cheeks reddening. “You made it sound sordid, like a backroom fling. You’ve ruined lives with that smut.” Then she added, “I hope you sold a lot of papers.” Her words dripped with disgust.

  She stopped there because she was afraid she’d betray herself. Wilkins had run with the truth, but was he really that far off the mark? He’d accused her of the very thing that Father Jennings had pegged her for: unholy urges of the darkest kind.

  One of the presses started to roar—it was loud enough to rattle every piece of furniture in the room.

  “Look, Sister, I’m sorry if you’re not happy with the story, but the facts are the facts.”

  A reporter wearing brown suspenders over a yellowed shirt ripped a sheet from his typewriter. “Copy!” he shouted over the din.

  A hoarse voice barked from the back of the room. “Wilkins!” A balding, gray-haired man standi
ng by Wilkins’s desk was holding up a sheaf of papers. “This is no time to be socializing,” he said. Then he shook his head so hard his wireframe spectacles came loose.

  Wilkins shouted back to the man but didn’t take his eyes off Dorothy. “Coming, Mr. Glenny.” Then, to Dorothy, he said, “That’s my editor. If you’ll excuse me, Sister, I’ve got a deadline.”

  “Good. Maybe you can print a story that matters. Like the fact that some hooligan threw a chair that hit Ernie Leo in the head and nearly killed him.”

  She felt her voice waver and her eyes well up; she wasn’t sure if her tears came out of love for Ernie or anger at Wilkins.

  “Ernie’s a sweet, kind soul,” she went on, “and he never broke a contract with anybody, especially over a conduct clause. He’d handle himself just fine at a dinner with President Roosevelt if he had to, Brother.”

  Wilkins took a step back. “I did mention the chair,” he said, weakly.

  Dorothy’s anger rose like a blast inside a coalmine. “If you want a story, I suggest you look into the crooks who handle Barry Higgins. That’s the story you should’ve written.”

  Wilkins smirked. “Really? What do you know that everybody else doesn’t?”

  “I know plenty,” she said, poking her index finger toward Wilkins. “My father is Edward Albright. And I guarantee he’ll figure out a way to get Higgins the title even though Ernie won that fight, fair and square.”

  A buzz of enthusiasm lit up Wilkins’s face. “Is that so?” he said, the corner of his lip rising as he tapped his chin with his forefinger. “And exactly how is he going to do that?”

  “I don’t know,” Dorothy said. “But I’m sure it will be sleazy and underhanded, which makes you the perfect person to write about it—assuming you want to write about something that matters.”

  She started for the door but then turned back around when she realized her father would maim Wilkins if he disparaged her in print. “And if you’re smart, you’ll keep my name out of it.”

  “Goddammit, Wilkins!” the editor called over the rumbling engines, this time holding his spectacles as he shouted. “Now!”