Brotherly Love

by Pete Dexter

  Peter never sees him again with any woman he doesn’t pay.

  When things go wrong, Michael always goes back to what worked for him before.

  The man on the television set keeps saying Michael has “reputed ties to organized crime.”

  He takes off his glasses and looks directly into the camera and reports that the shooting resulted from a power struggle between Michael and reputed mob boss Salvadore Bono for control of the union pension funds. He puts his glasses back on and begins a recitation of the long history of labor and organized crime in the city while the camera plays over Ninth Street and the broken window, settling finally on a few drops of blood beneath the window.

  Chicken blood.

  “Police were unable to question the president of the Council of Trade Unions,” the man on television says, “who is now in guarded condition following surgery on his hip. No suspects have been arrested.”

  The television sits on top of Jimmy Measles’s cooler. Jimmy sits beneath it at the bar on a stool next to Peter’s, looking sore-eyed and grim, drinking champagne through clenched teeth. He hardly looks at the customers as they come and go, he kisses nobody’s cheeks, pats no fannies. He leans close to Peter to speak, his lips pulled back from his even, white teeth, which are still locked.

  “I take this personally,” he says, “people shooting my friends outside my club.”

  Peter doesn’t say a word. There is no one in the bar except Jimmy Measles himself who does not know what Michael was doing in front of the place at six in the morning.

  “Flood’s father, Phillip,” the man on television says, “was assassinated in 1974 as he stood on the porch of his home in South Philadelphia.…”

  Peter waits, but the usual details of his uncle’s death—which always seem to follow the mention of his name on television or in the papers—are missing tonight. He feels Jimmy Measles looking at him, and turns in that direction, thinking he has finally begun to wonder what Michael was doing in front of his place.

  But there is nothing like that in Jimmy’s expression. “His hip, that’s it?” he says.

  Peter shakes his head. “What the doctor said, a piece of buckshot stayed, more or less—I can’t remember the word—it homogenized the head of his dick.”

  Jimmy Measles takes this news as if the wound were his own.

  When Peter arrives at the hospital the next morning, Michael is connected to half a dozen tubes. A machine is squeezing his legs every ten seconds to prevent blood clots, and even with a fresh shot of morphine rolling through him, he is talking between breaths and sweating.

  “If I could, Pally,” he says, “I’d just shoot the fuckin’ thing off. This minute.”

  He isn’t sure if his cousin is saying that because his penis hurts or because it gets him in trouble, but he doesn’t ask which way he intends it to be taken. Lying on your back in the hospital, you don’t want somebody asking you to explain what you mean, especially about wanting to shoot part of yourself off.

  Peter pats his cousin’s shoulder and thinks of the effort it takes to be clear. He studies the length of Michael’s legs under the sheet.

  “So what did the doctors say this morning?” he says.

  Michael shakes his head. “You won’t fucking believe it,” he says.

  The buckshot has torn away most of the hip socket and taken the head of the femur with it.

  Two doctors come in the door while Peter is still in the room. They report that they are in agreement that Michael needs a new hip. Michael listens to them and then turns his head. He does not care for the idea of manufactured parts, even though the doctors have brought the artificial joint along to show him how it works.

  The thing comes in two pieces. There is a plastic socket that screws into the joint and a piece of chrome a foot long that fits into the bone.

  Michael studies the two parts and then hands them back to the surgeon. He closes his eyes and drops his head onto the pillow. “It was up to me,” he says again, “I’d just shoot the fuckin’ thing off.”

  The doctor holding the parts smiles in a comfortable way, feeling good about being a surgeon and about not being Michael Flood. He says, “You already tried that, Mr. Flood.”

  Michael opens his eyes and stares at the doctor. It seems to Peter that for half a minute there is no sound anywhere in the hospital, that even paralyzed people are afraid to move.

  And then Jimmy Measles comes through the door, carrying pasta from his restaurant that is some shade of green that shows even through the Styrofoam container, and the moment passes.

  Everyone in the room is relieved to see Jimmy Measles.

  Ten days later, they give Michael the new hip. The operation takes all day—the doctor with the sense of humor explains to Peter afterward that it is easier when the surgeon removes the femur and socket himself than when the patient does it for him.

  They keep Michael in the hospital five weeks, and for five weeks Jimmy Measles sends over lunch and dinner every day, and visits in the afternoon, which is when Peter visits too.

  Just once he brings Grace.

  The moment Michael sees her he begins checking his sheets, making sure he is covered. She walks past Peter to the window; her eyes never glance at the bed.

  Jimmy doesn’t notice. He checks Michael’s toes, has him move his feet, and when he is satisfied he doesn’t have a blood clot, he begins a story about his second wife, Rhonda, the one from Vermillion, South Dakota, who tried to have him committed.

  Grace is in a chair near the window, all to herself.

  “So I been married to Rhonda two weeks,” Jimmy says, “and I stay out a few nights to celebrate, end up early one morning in the lobby of the bank at Chestnut and Broad, waving their fire hose around, you know, like it’s my dick, and when I wake up again I’m in a hospital for observation, the doctor’s outside talking to my wife and she’s sayin’ she wants me committed. Married two weeks, and she wants me locked up, and I hadn’t even been home yet. I guess that’s the way they treat people in South Dakota.…”

  Michael isn’t listening. He is preoccupied; he looks everywhere in the room but at Grace.

  Jimmy gives up the story and checks the bottles overhead that feed the tubes, making sure the doses haven’t changed. It seems to Peter that he knows as much about the operation now as the doctors, nearly as much as the nurses.

  “They said your white count’s all right?” he says.

  Michael doesn’t seem to hear him.

  “Leg cramps? You got a good pulse in your feet?”

  Michael shakes his head and looks at Peter. “It was up to me …” he says, and those are the last words out of him until Jimmy Measles takes his wife and leaves.

  When she is gone Michael sits up, trailing tubes, and eases his leg off the side of the bed. He reaches for his walker.

  “Where you going?” Peter says.

  “This place is gettin’ on my nerves,” he says, but something catches him then and freezes him to that spot, and that moment, until Peter can get him back onto the bed.

  The next day they take the drainage tubes out of Michael’s leg. Peter watches that, and does not return to the hospital afterwards.

  He has Bobby the Jap and Monk take turns at the door and calls once a day, usually in the afternoon from the gym, to see if there is anything Michael wants him to do.

  A week after the doctors pull the drainage tubes out of Michael’s leg, two detectives walk into the gym to talk to Peter.

  They do not introduce themselves, they just begin to talk. “We been thinking,” one of them says, “how funny it is that you was in Atlantic City the night Michael gets shot.”

  Nick hears that and turns his back on the cops and moves to the other side of the room.

  The detectives smile at each other, young cops in plain clothes. Peter is half undressed, standing in his underwear. He looks at them a moment, then pulls his pants back on and walks down the stairway without a word. The two cops look at each other, confused, an
d then follow him down.

  The first one outside is grabbed by the shirt and thrown into the garage door. The door shakes at the impact. Nick sticks his head out of the window, then goes back inside.

  Peter turns to the other cop, furious, putting his finger in the middle of his chest. “I don’t have any trouble, you want to ask me the question,” he says, sounding calmer than he is, “but not here. This isn’t my place.”

  The detectives look at each other, not knowing what to do. “Hey, Peter,” one of them says, “lookit, we’re just doing our job.…”

  “This isn’t the place,” he says. “You don’t come here anymore. This place’s got no connection to Michael.”

  There is a call one night from the Italians, the ones who own the streets.

  The man says, “I understand you’ve got medical problems in the family, you might be thinking of takin’ over the business.”

  He doesn’t answer.

  “You need some business advice,” the man says, “you know where we are. Maybe something can be worked out.”

  The man hangs up.

  Peter goes to the gym, he reads the papers, once in a while he drives to the little house his mother left him in Cape May and gets a night’s sleep.

  It is the only place he can sleep through till morning.

  Other nights, he stops at Jimmy Measles’s club. Grace is still at her table, as if nothing has changed. He wonders how the shooting looked to her, the shotguns and the glass and Michael lying in the street.

  He saw that she didn’t like Michael much, even when she was running him across the street two, sometimes three nights a week.

  She’d used him up early.

  Being shot changes Michael. He hardens and narrows; he gains weight, he stays out of Jimmy Measles’s club. He has no patience for business.

  He sees the change himself and knows that something has been taken away from him, and sometimes, he finds himself staring at his cousin, wanting to take something away from him too.

  They are sitting in the living room together early in the afternoon, Michael’s leg elevated by a footstool, his crutches lying across the floor.

  Peter is looking out the window to the park, thinking, for no particular reason, of the children who found little pieces of his uncle in the trees over there, and sold them, encased in plastic bubbles they stole from the ring machines at the grocery store, for ten dollars each during the Mummers’ Parade.

  “You know, everywhere I go,” Michael says quietly, “people tell me how funny it is that you was in Atlantic City when this happened.”

  Peter turns to look at him.

  Michael smiles and holds up his hand. “I ain’t blaming you,” he says. “I know what you was doing there, I don’t mean that. But still … it is funny, ain’t it?”

  Peter doesn’t answer. He feels Michael studying him.

  “Jimmy tells me Nick’s kid is something,” Michael says a few minutes later.

  Peter turns and looks at him again. “Jimmy doesn’t know anything about it,” he says.

  He had taken Jimmy with him to the gym one afternoon and he sat in the corner in his yellow bikini underpants and new tennis shoes, telling stories and smoking cigarettes. Nick thought he was funny, so Peter brought him back a few times.

  “So is the kid good or not?”

  “He’s good enough,” Peter says.

  “Why don’t you talk to him, maybe we get him out of his old man’s garage.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with the garage.”

  “Not for the old man, what else’s he got to do?”

  Peter stares at the backs of his hands. Michael watches him.

  “He’s got a nice life,” Peter says.

  “He does the same fuckin’ thing every day.”

  Peter feels himself rising to that, but in the same moment a spasm grabs Michael’s leg and he squeezes his face almost shut, trying to squeeze off the pain, and hisses through his teeth. Peter waits. Michael’s thick hands encircle half his thigh—as much of it as he can get his hands around—and then the spasm passes, and the mood between the cousins has changed.

  “It ain’t nothin’ personal about Nick,” Michael says. “But what is he, fifty-four, fifty-five?”

  “He doesn’t sit out on his steps yet nursing his grudges,” Peter says.

  That is what the retirement years in the neighborhoods are about. The loneliest people are the ones whose enemies have died. They sit in front of their houses in folding chairs, spring to fall, reframing old arguments, saying it the right way this time, saying all the things they should have said, with nobody there to hear them.

  Peter knows that Nick is sometimes lonely for enemies, but it’s only that he misses having someone to fight. Sparring with Harry or Peter isn’t the same thing. He misses hating someone for a little while, not knowing how it will come out.

  But hate moves further away from Nick DiMaggio all the time; he understands too much. And what he understands, he forgives.

  “He’s a nice-looking white boy,” Michael says.

  Peter nods. Harry could fight main events right now in Las Vegas or Atlantic City, but it doesn’t matter. He has no use for those places, or the people in them.

  The old man fought up and down the East Coast back in the fifties and knows where it leads, and his son seems to know it too.

  They are the same person, thirty years apart.

  Michael says, “He could make some money now that ain’t going to be there forever. That’s all I’m sayin’. Maybe you talk to him, let him know we help him if he wants it.”

  “They don’t need us to make money,” Peter says.

  He is angry now, and his cousin sees that and smiles.

  Sometimes Jimmy Measles wonders out loud why Michael has quit coming to the club. He looks his place over—the bar, the empty restaurant, Otto, his wife—and it isn’t enough. “It must be bothering Michael,” he says, “getting used to his leg.”

  Peter tells him the truth. “It ain’t too bad, Jimmy.”

  “Is he pissed at something?”

  Peter shakes his head, also the truth. Michael likes having Jimmy Measles around, but there is something left between himself and Jimmy’s wife that makes him scared to come in.

  Most of the time, Jimmy Measles sits at the bar with a shot glass and one of the bottles off the top shelf, and looks out the window onto Catherine Street. Still regretting what happened there.

  Some nights Grace takes a few hundred dollars out of the cash register, and then is gone for the evening. She likes the bars on South Street; Jimmy doesn’t seem to care. She kisses him on the cheek and smiles at Peter on the way out, and the sight of her from behind, going out the door, stays with him all night.

  On one hand he wants to take her away from Jimmy Measles, on the other hand he doesn’t.

  It seems to him that Jimmy Measles causes it.

  One night while Jimmy is missing Michael out loud, Peter turns in his seat, suddenly furious at him for being helpless.

  He says, “What are you, a fan club? You want a fucking autograph or what?”

  Then he sees he’s hurt his feelings and wants to smack him for that too.

  He says, “Jimmy, what I’m saying, you got enough right here to make anybody happy.”

  But he is talking about Grace now, and when he thinks of the conversation later, lying in bed at the house in Cape May, he sees that he doesn’t know anything about what Jimmy Measles has at all.

  A car rolls quietly to the south curb of Passyunk Avenue, in front of the Rosemont Diner. A man of Chinese extraction named Robert O’Meara—the police report will say a.k.a. Bobby the Jap—has just stepped out of the place and is walking west toward Broad Street, working a toothpick in the gaps separating his front teeth.

  The car moves in front of the man and stops. The back door opens and the man stoops to see the faces inside. The toothpick rolls as he smiles. There is a moment then, which no one on the street can see, when something small ch
anges in his face. A look of recognition.

  The toothpick drops from his lips and Robert O’Meara gets in.

  An hour later the car stops again, on an access road near the airport. The same door opens and a full garbage bag is wedged out, catching in the opening like something being born, and then, free of the car, slides into a shallow gulley. Inside the bag, Robert O’Meara is tied at the wrists and ankles with wire, and shot behind the ear.

  The body is left there, where someone will find it, as a courtesy.

  The door closes and the car leaves.

  An airplane passes a hundred feet overhead, shaking the sky, and the package lies motionless beneath it in the road.

  The news of Robert O’Meara reaches Michael and Peter in the private office of City Councilman Benjamin Taylor.

  Recent newspaper stories have revealed that nineteen of the councilman’s relatives—including his ninety-two-year-old mother—are now on the city payroll, and the councilman, sensing trouble, has called Michael to see if he can arrange jobs for some of them with the trade unions instead.

  Peter and Michael sit quietly, listening while Benjamin Taylor lays out the problem. “It would be extremely helpful,” he says, “if these people were viewed as immediately employable in other avenues of life.”

  There is new carpet in the office, snow-white and three inches deep, which comes up around the visitors’ shoes like something that lives on the floor of the ocean. The city councilman finishes speaking without mentioning what he might offer in return, and Michael takes his feet out of his loafers and runs them over the floor.

  “You fuck on carpet like this,” he says, “you don’t walk on it.”

  The man behind the desk smiles.

  There is a wet bar in the corner, mahogany, and a long table by the window that appears to have been made from the same tree; leather chairs a foot or two apart all the way around.

  The councilman lives with the fear that someday a constituent will leave this office with the impression he is not stealing as much as the mayor.