by Pete Dexter
He goes into the kitchen and makes himself a jelly sandwich. As he eats it, he remembers one of the reporters who stood in the front yard pointing at the house, arguing with the photographers.
“Get a picture, get a fuckin’ picture.…”
Time passes. Outside a car engine races and stops, not his father’s. A door slams. Peter goes to the window and sees his uncle on the sidewalk. The streetlight throws a shadow across half his face and makes the pockmarks deeper in the lighted side. He imagines a pain which could cause such marks.
His uncle knocks as if he were in a hurry to get inside. Peter opens the door and he steps through it without a word. He looks around the room—a familiar gesture, but this time he is not thinking he would like the place for himself.
“He ain’t home?”
He shakes his head.
His uncle closes the door as if it were his own house and walks inside. “How come you got it so dark?” he says. He smiles, but something is strained in his voice.
Peter shrugs. “It doesn’t matter to me,” he says.
His uncle goes to the wall switch and the room is suddenly filled with light.
“I think you spent too much time alone,” he says. Peter understands that is a joke, he doesn’t know what kind.
He shrugs again and his uncle bends over the television set, and the sound of voices fills the room. Ralph and Norton, planning to get rich. He knows the words by heart.
His uncle sits on the davenport and lights a cigarette. “You got a beer in the icebox?” he says.
Peter nods.
His uncle watches him in a way Peter has seen before—never when his father is there with them, though. “So?” he says, “you gonna get me a beer or what?”
He walks into the dark kitchen and opens the refrigerator door. In the light he sees the jelly knife lying on the counter, the open bag of Wonder bread. The bottles of beer are on the bottom shelf, where the icebox is coldest, and he takes one of them out. He finds the church key in the drawer next to the icebox, holding the door open with his knee for light. He takes the bottle and the church key to his uncle, and then wipes his hand against his shirt.
His uncle lays the cigarette on the end of the coffee table, the ash suspended over the edge, and opens the beer. In the moment just before the glass touches his lips, Peter sees the trembling in his hand.
“You got something to do?” he says after a while.
Peter shakes his head. His uncle picks the cigarette up between his thumb and middle finger, carefully choosing a halfway spot, as if the ends could hurt him.
The boy sees it again, that his fingers are trembling. He draws on the cigarette and holds the smoke inside a long time, and then a trace of it appears under his nose and hangs there for a moment like fog. He puts the cigarette back on the table and stands up, taking the beer, and walks to the window to look at Victor Kopec’s car.
“They said the guy’s head was cut halfways off,” he says. There is a tone of admiration in that, but it passes even before the words are finished.
Peter thinks of the sounds from the house:
“Fucking God,” the man says. Something falls and breaks, and then it is quiet. He imagines Victor Kopec’s head, cut halfway off.
His uncle turns away from the window and lights another cigarette. “You can’t tell your old man nothing, never could,” he says.
Peter doesn’t answer.
“He’ll stand there, just like you, listening to somebody as long as they want to talk, and then go do exactly what he was gonna do anyway. You can’t tell him a thing because he thinks he already knows everything you know anyway.”
He feels his uncle pulling him into his side of an argument now; he holds himself out. His uncle shakes his head, then looks again out the window.
“You know what it is?” he says. “He’s got to be the one that decides. He’s always got to be the one decides.…”
He pulls at the cigarette and finishes the beer; the smoke simply disappears inside him. He drops the cigarette into the mouth of the bottle; Peter hears it hiss as it hits bottom.
“You got another beer?”
He gets him another beer; his uncle lights another cigarette. Except for the sounds of the television and his uncle inhaling the cigarette, the room is quiet.
“How old are you, anyway?”
“Eight.”
“You supposed to be up …” He turns his wrist and lifts his hand to check the time. “Nine-thirty,” he says. “You supposed to stay up till nine-thirty?”
Peter shrugs; an ash drops off the cigarette onto his uncle’s shirt. “You’re lucky,” he says. “Your Aunt Theresa don’t let Michael stay up at all.”
Michael is Peter’s cousin. He is a year younger than Peter, and he climbs out of the window of his room onto the roof sometimes while the families are visiting and, holding on to the window frame, pisses onto the sidewalk.
Peter has been farther out on the roof of Michael’s house; he has walked to the edge and unzipped his pants and then looked back over his shoulder at his cousin’s face and seen the excitement inside him.
Michael has tried to get him to jump.
There is a tuning fork going inside his cousin all the time.
“Right after he done his schoolwork, it’s up to his room,” his uncle says. He looks around the room, reminded of something. “You got homework?”
Peter doesn’t answer. He does his work at the school. The nuns go over the same arithmetic every day, the same reading words, and he does the problems they give him to take home while they are teaching; sometimes he even knows what they will give the class to do later. Peter doesn’t memorize things; he sees them, the way they are put together. A kind of second sight that is so natural he hardly notices it is there.
No one knows that, it is one of his secrets.
“You got to keep up with your books,” his uncle says, repeating something he has heard; talking now only because he is uncomfortable with the silence. He looks at the television set and watches Ed Norton making an onion sandwich. “You don’t do your books, you end up like that.…”
His uncle finishes the beer and walks upstairs to the bathroom and urinates without closing the door. The sound stops and starts; he pisses a little at a time, like he was emptying his pockets. The toilet flushes and then his uncle is back on the stairs.
“Your father’s got a nice house here,” he says. He stops on the stairs and looks at the ceiling, shakes his head in an admiring way. “They didn’t built the houses on Two Street like this—there ain’t no cracks in the walls, right?”
Peter shakes his head.
“Big rooms like this,” his uncle says, “a nice park right across the street …” He comes the rest of the way down the stairs and then stops again, looking outside.
“Your father must sleep like a baby,” he says.
Again he doesn’t answer.
“You like your neighbors?” he says. “I bet you got neighbors in this place, you want to borrow a cup of sugar, the lady next door don’t say, ‘Fuck you,’ from behind the door, am I right?” He surveys the room, smiling.
“Dentists live in houses like this.…”
Peter stares at him, thinking of Victor Kopec. The same thought seems to occur to his uncle, but in a different way. “I wonder if that house is still for sale, now the guy’s dead.”
He comes the rest of the way down the stairs and goes into the kitchen for another beer, and Peter hears his father’s car in the street.
The car backs into its parking place. The engine stops, the lights go out. Peter starts for the door, but his uncle comes back into the room and stops him.
“Hey, where you goin’?”
“It’s him,” he says.
“He don’t want you runnin’ around outside this time of night. He’ll be here in a minute.”
Peter stands at the door and waits for the sound of his father’s shoes on the steps. He wants to tell him something before he gets inside. He doesn’t know how to
say it but he would step through the door and try—he is not afraid to disobey his uncle—if his uncle were not there at his side. It is about his uncle. He is here to hurt him.
The door opens and his father steps inside, and it is too late.
“Charley,” his uncle says, “where you been?”
His father does not answer him. “You get something to eat?” he says to Peter.
He nods.
“Go on upstairs,” he says, “lemme talk to your uncle.”
He nods again, but he doesn’t move. His father waits; Peter waits. He waits for him to understand why he isn’t moving.
“You didn’t hear me, or what?” his father says.
“He’s just like you,” his uncle says, “he don’t listen.”
Peter holds the spot as long as he can and then starts up the staircase. “Go on,” his father says. “And I don’t want to look up the stairs and see you sittin’ at the top.”
He goes into his room and closes the door. He stands in the middle of the floor, in the dark, holding himself still and listening. He hears a prayerlike mumbling at first and then, as he accustoms himself to the quiet, he begins to hear the words.
“He ain’t that pissed,” his uncle says, “but what he wants, he wants you to sit down with some people, explain what this Gypsy motherfucker did. That’s all, just explain to these people, cool them down so this don’t come back and hurt us.…”
It is quiet a moment.
“It don’t have to be tonight,” his father says.
“There you fuckin’ go. It’s gotta be tonight because he says it’s tonight.”
“Constantine don’t decide everything.”
“He ain’t unreasonable about something like this, your family was involved,” his uncle says. “He respects you for it; that’s what he said, God as my witness, ‘I respect what the man done.’ But what he wants now, what he’s sayin’, let’s get together with some people tonight, before the police do a number on us all, and explain how it happened.”
It is quiet a long time downstairs; Peter hears the television set, Chester whining at Doc.
“It ain’t like he’s askin’ you to apologize,” his uncle says, “just explain where everybody understands people ain’t started taking people out …”
It is quiet again.
“Where is he?” his father says.
“He’s waitin’ for us right now. We go over somebody’s house and sit down and talk. That’s all.”
“Whose house?”
“A guy’s house Constantine knows. What fuckin’ difference does it make whose house?”
They are quiet again and then Peter hears his father on the stairs, and then the door opens and his father is there in a wash of light.
“I got to go back out a little while,” he says. He leans in the doorway, his feet still in the hall. His face is troubled, as if something in the room were out of place.
Peter feels himself beginning to cry.
“What’s wrong with you tonight?” his father says, staying in the doorway.
Peter shakes his head, denying it. “Nothing,” he says.
“This takes maybe an hour, I’ll pick up a pizza.”
He doesn’t answer.
“You don’t want a pizza?”
“He’s funny today,” Peter says, looking downstairs. He hears himself say the words.
His father peers at him from the door, framed in light. “Phil’s always funny,” he says.
Peter shakes his head. “He’s … fucked up.”
The first time he has ever said the word in front of his father. A cloud moves across his father’s face and when it is gone he suddenly begins to laugh. He laughs in a way Peter has never heard before; something comes out of him that he didn’t know was inside.
“Jesus,” he says, “that’s too good.”
And as Peter looks carefully, he sees his father is not just laughing, he is smiling at him too. Shining.
“I’ll get us a pizza,” he says, and he closes the door and goes downstairs. Peter stands in the darkness, listening to his father and his uncle leave the house; he goes to the window and opens it, and listens to them climb into his uncle’s car.
The engine starts, the lights go on, and they are gone.
He lies on his bed with his hands folded behind his neck, staring at the ceiling and holding on to the sound in the room as his father laughed. Picturing the shine on his face.
He doesn’t sleep or move, he simply lies on his bed in the cold room until morning, when his uncle comes back to the house alone, opening the door with a key, and climbs the stairs to his room to tell him something bad has happened to his father.
The boy walks straight to the window and jumps.
Nicholas DiMaggio is sitting by the window in Ed’s Diner, making circles on the table with the bottom of his water glass. He is holding half a dozen thoughts at once, moving from one to the next, trying at this moment to imagine how the water gets on the bottom of the glass—not the word condensation, he knows the word, but how it works. If it is something you could see with a microscope.
He wishes he had spent more time in school when he was in school.
He thinks of school.
He looks at the circles and then his hands, grease in the lines of the joints. He will scrub that out later, before he goes home. He never goes home to his wife with dirty hands. He thinks of her sitting straight-backed in a slip in front of her mirror, studying her face. He holds her shoulders in his hands; he can feel her pulse.
He closes his hand and opens it, estimating how much he’s aged by the pain in his knuckles, comparing it to what he remembers from last winter.
It’s always the winter that brings on pain.
He feels the cold pressing on the window, feels its breath through the glass, and looking that way, into the street, he notices it has begun to snow.
He hasn’t seen the sun in a week.
Ed moves behind the counter. There is no one else in the place, and he is waiting to close. Three-thirty in the afternoon.
“You want more coffee, Nick?”
“No,” he says, “the kid should be done all the work by now.”
He pushes himself up out of the booth, watching old Ed smile, feeling the plastic seats stick to his pants, and puts a dollar on the table next to his empty cup. It sits off center in the saucer, a little coffee collected in the low side.
“How’s he doin’, anyway?”
“Real good,” Nick says. “I left him today, he’s got a water pump all over the sidewalk, probably won’t take me two, three hours to find the pieces, get it back together.”
“What is he, twelve?”
Nick stops for a moment to think. “No,” he says, “he’s only nine. You’re making me older than I fucking am.”
“Somebody said he was already pretty good.”
Not meaning engines now.
Nick shrugs. “He’s doing all right,” he says. “Come up sometime and see for yourself.”
The old man behind the counter looks down the slope of his apron and grabs his crotch. “I would,” he says, “but you know Annie. I got to beat her off this thing with a spatula.”
Nick opens the door, and feels the wind blowing up from Broad Street. He turns his back into it and zips his windbreaker. Ed’s face appears at the window, smiling a few inches away, and then the shade drops.
He sees the white kids first, two blocks away on the other side of McKean Street, coming home from public school. The short one’s got a behind like an old lady’s—the kind that sticks out so far that walking with it is something you have to think about, like carrying a suitcase—and he’s smoking a cigarette.
The short one, he knows, is Phillip Flood’s son.
The other one is his nephew. Charley’s boy. They all live together in the house across the park from Nick’s that once belonged to Charley. How that happened, he doesn’t want to know. The little girl got killed, the wife went crazy, Charley disappeared …
It seems to Nick that all these things happened a couple of months after they found the cop next door in the trunk of his convertible, but time moves for him in a different way than it used to; the order of things isn’t as clear as it was. He isn’t sure.
He remembers watching the boys in the park—it seems to him they were both riding one bicycle—and feeling bad for the one that belonged to Charley. He never walked over and talked to him, though, the way he would any other kid. He had a house of his own and a son of his own, and did not want the entanglements.
These guys, you did not want the connection.
Nick drops his chin until it rests on the jacket, protecting his face from the cold—everything but the top of his forehead—and pushes through the wind. How many fighters had broken their hands on Nick DiMaggio’s forehead? He goes back, remembering three. He figures that means there were probably a dozen.
It makes him smile, the way his memory blurs. It seems to him that it started about the same time he was beginning to see what things were about. But what he remembers and what he understands are not the same thing, and he knows that, and this part of his life is as good as the part that came before.
The smile is still in his head when he senses the movement from the other side of the street.
Four of them come out of the alley half a block away.
Phillip Flood’s son and his nephew are passing the cigarette back and forth, probably discussing how to get into some girl’s pants—it terrifies Nick sometimes, thinking he might have had a daughter—and they don’t see them until it is too late.
Nick comes to the intersection and looks down the crossing street—Chadwick—to his garage. The door is open, an eight-year-old Cadillac sits underneath it, half in and half out of the shop. Harry is on his tiptoes, bent into the engine.
He wanted to put the water pump in by himself—Nick could see that, so he went to Ed’s for coffee. He wonders if the kid has even noticed the way it got cold.
Nick stands for a moment at the corner, absorbed in the ordinary sight of his garage and his son leaning into the open hood of a car, and then, standing still, he is visited by the feeling that he is watching the place from his old age, remembering it. He moves, turning away, frightened, and looks up the street to see what will happen with the boys.