Reckless Endangerment

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  “Why? Because you cook macaroni and go to church? I don’t see you out there throwing rocks at abortion clinics.”

  “Don’t raise your voice. Abortion clinics have nothing to do with it. It’s not my fault you’ve cut yourself off from your own people—”

  “My people! Since when did we get so biblical around here?”

  “… your people, if I could just finish, and it’s not really your fault either. I have this big, warm, intact family, and in spite of my speckled past, I’m connected to my childhood, which includes the Church, and you’re not, mainly because of your family, who you don’t get along with, and who are also barely Jewish anymore.”

  “What do you mean, barely? My brother Richard is so Orthodox he gets re-circumcised once a year just to make sure.”

  “That’s his reaction to the situation—burrowing in. Maybe your reaction is just as extreme in the other direction. Look at the situation, Butch. Your mother dies when you’re just a kid, your father marries a …”

  “Bimbo?”

  “I was going to say uncongenial and not very motherly younger woman,” said Marlene, driving on like a psychic bulldozer. “So all three of you go away from home. Your brother Dan becomes a clone of your dad, Richard marries a rabbi’s daughter, you marry a nice Jewish girl, just like Mom, whom you ignore, and she runs off, and then you marry someone as little like your mother as you can find, who nonetheless has a great big family that you can slide into without having to think much about it, and in which no one expects much of you because you’re like a permanent guest. Perfect, except I get these sly digs about my religion from time to time. …”

  “I don’t—”

  “Shhh! Occasional sly digs, which I ignore, but which, if you notice, Lucy takes more seriously, and now this rabbi gives you a hard time and you come to me for sympathy. Which I would be glad to give, if I understood anything at all about your spiritual life, which I don’t because that’s all a kind of joke to you and you never talk about it.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Freud! What’s to talk? I don’t believe in that stuff, Marlene, I never have. And I don’t believe in clans either, these little groups—this one’s inside, the other one’s outside. It pisses me off.”

  “Too bad for you, then,” said Marlene. “They exist. It’s like not believing in gravity. Oh, I’ll just jump off this building, doesn’t affect me, no, sir…”

  “What’re you getting at, Marlene?” Karp snapped, more violently than he had intended. “You want me to convert? You want me to lay ts’fillin in the morning? What? I don’t understand.”

  Marlene finished her coffee, rose, and placed her cup and pot on the drain board.

  “My point,” she said, as if explaining something to a dull child, “was that although you yourself are miraculously free of the ethnic problems that affect the rest of us, it is a fact that you got yourself canned last year, from the only job you ever really liked, largely because you got yourself involved in a racial situation that was over your head, and now you’re in another mess with this rabbi, who they sent you to see presumably because they figured you had some special understanding there. Everybody’s on a team, Butch. People start getting anxious when they can’t read the letters on your chest.”

  A long, uncomfortable silence. Marlene tilted her head to fix him with her real eye. Karp glowered at her, but as always, that tilt of her head, birdlike, interested, the symbol of her damaged body and its resident courageous spirit, charmed him and drained any resentment from his heart. “Well,” he said dryly, “you may have a point. I will strive to do better in that department. And how was your day?”

  “Oh, a day like all days, filled with those events that alter and illuminate our lives, as Walter Cronkite used to say. Girls and guns. Oh, and lest you think you’re the only member of this family who doesn’t live up to expectations, I got a tongue-lashing from Mattie about what a shitty feminist I am. Yes, you may well be amazed. She’s got this goddamn woman who can’t be made to understand that her husband is going to hurt her, that he’s always going to hurt her, and every time we help her out she ends up getting back with him. I think she calls him, in fact, or lets it out where she is so he finds her. So I say there’s so many woman desperately trying to break away, we don’t have time to fuck with an idiot like this, cut her loose”—she made a helpless gesture—“but you know Mattie.”

  “Yeah. I wish I didn’t.”

  “Oh, she’s all right, really. I guess you have to admire her. She never gives up.”

  “Neither did Hitler,” said Karp. “Marlene, she’s a vigilante.”

  It was an old argument that Marlene did not at this moment wish to pursue. She shrugged off the comment and said, “You have to work with all kinds of people, and you have to take them for what they are, not for what you’d prefer them to be. That was Marlene’s daily spiritual advice nugget, and I expect you to take it to heart.”

  “I will. You could put out a calendar.”

  “I could. The feminist failure date book.” She stood and stretched. “What I need, and what I intend to have, is a long, perfumed, luxurious tub. Care to join me?”

  “That’s definitely the best offer I’ve had all day.”

  “Well, I should certainly hope so,” said Marlene.

  Hassan Daoud had been in the United States for ten years, since shortly after the Six Day War, in fact, when the famous lightning victory of the Israelis had convinced him that the Arab armies were never going to push the Jews into the sea and get him back into his grandfather’s land in the Jezreel. He had a cousin in America. Transportation was arranged, he worked double shifts in a warehouse for seven years, saved every penny, and was able to send for his wife, Rima, his son, Walid, and his daughter, Fatyma. He started baking the flat bread of the Middle East, as his father had before him, in a borrowed oven, in a space rented in a friend’s garage. He would bake the night through and then deliver the loaves before dawn to a string of Arab grocery stores in Brooklyn and lower Manhattan, using an old Pontiac station wagon, also borrowed. Again, every penny saved, until he had the down payment on the storefront off Atlantic Avenue he now occupied, and saw the lettering in real gold, in Arabic and English inscribed on the window, Ahsen Foruhn, BEST BAKERY (for it was nothing less), and his own name beneath it. A proud day, second only to the day his first son had been born.

  The bakery prospered. Hassan worked like the devil, and Rima worked silently beside him, as a woman should, like a donkey. They had three more children, of whom only one, thank God, was a girl. The bread was in demand, not only among the Arabs, whose population in Brooklyn had exploded in the last decade, but also the specialty-food stores in Manhattan were buying, even some of the local supermarkets. He bought a large white GM step-in delivery truck. Each package of a dozen he sold for the equivalent of a day’s wage in Palestine. He was rich, which was only to be expected. In America everyone was rich; why else live in so godless a nation?

  What weighed him down, and made him curse, and stamp, and pull on his mustache, and beat his wife (although only with a very small stick) was the two older children. Walid, his firstborn, was involved in some stupid political thing, running with a group of worthless hoodlums who fancied themselves fedayin. This had attracted the attention of the police, and Hassan was waiting for the inevitable visit demanding a bribe. The boy had been beaten, of course, and given extra work to keep him out of trouble, but a father’s eyes could not be everywhere. Still, politics, however stupid, was not disgraceful. Hassan could sit with the men and sip coffee and lament his worthless son. Many of the other men, of course, had worthless sons too, and it was pleasant to compete as to who had the hardest lot as a father, whose son was more ungrateful for the many benefits showered upon him. But of the other thing, the daughter, he could not speak. He could barely let it flow through his mind.

  The fact was that Fatyma, at fourteen, was already a whore, or the next thing to a whore. Her head was filled with thoughts of fornication. She list
ened to the music of fornication on her radio (before he had smashed it) and went to American films (that were all fornication and blasphemy) and would have gone out of the house dressed as a whore, with a painted face (and had he not found actual whore’s face paint where she had hidden it under her mattress?). He had stopped that for the time being by chaining her ankle to a radiator at night, on a long chain that enabled her to visit the toilet. This, however, was not a permanent solution. In the old country he would have paid a woman to slice out her sinful parts with a razor, as was done with uncontrollable girls, but the rules were different here. Hassan did not want to go to jail. Already he had a stack of letters from the truant officer, wanting to know why Fatyma was not in school. He did not think the truant officer would comprehend the problem. Americans had no idea of honor or of the responsibilities of a father. No, the solution was to marry her off while she was still marriageable, before she got with some boy and lost her honor, in which case he would have to kill her, jail or no jail.

  So he had written letters and had found the right man, a prosperous importer in Baalbek called Zaid al-Habashi, who was fifty and looking for a younger wife to add to his household. The match was made by post, contracts were signed, passport and ticket purchased. In two days she would leave, escorted by a family going back to Beirut on a visit.

  Naturally, when Hassan had announced this news, Fatyma had wailed, and cursed, and even an exceptionally severe beating had not stopped her noises. She was wailing still. He could hear her upstairs from the back room of the bakery where he worked, even over the rumble of the kneading machine. Eventually, he knew, she would stop crying and accept her fate, as all women did. But he was glad that it was only two more days.

  In the night, in the short time between the preparation of the dough and the time the baking must begin, while the family slept, Fatyma worked. The chain that bound her to the iron radiator leg was long enough to reach the bathroom in the hallway, but was also long enough to reach into the next bedroom, where her brothers slept. She knew where Walid kept his knife, a long, curved dagger, old but sharp. It had been in the family for years, always in the possession of the oldest son. Walid was snoring like a pig and did not stir as she removed it from his bureau drawer.

  Back in her room, she frantically scraped the soft, old wood upon which the radiator leg rested. It took her nearly two hours to chisel away a depression deep enough so that she could slip the loop of chain beneath it. Free now, she went to her closet and used the knife to pry up a floorboard. Beneath it, tightly rolled, were two pairs of jeans and four T-shirts, forbidden garments that she had shoplifted from stores in downtown Brooklyn. She dressed in jeans and a red T-shirt, pulled on socks and her cheap sneakers, and her ugly, knee-length gray tweed coat. The two suitcases her father had provided for the journey were packed with the clothes needed for her new life in Lebanon as the second wife of a fat old man. Choosing the smaller of the two, she spilled out the embroidered gown, the slippers, the headdress, the veil, and put in her scant American wardrobe.

  “What are you doing, Fatyma?”

  Her breath stopped in her throat. Leila, her little sister, was sitting up in bed and watching her. The child’s eyes were wide and confused in the faint gleam from the street. Fatyma sat on her sister’s bed and stroked her hair.

  “It’s late. You have to go back to sleep.”

  “But what are you doing?” the child insisted.

  “Well, you know I am getting married, right? Well, my new husband is waiting outside for me. I have to climb out the window and meet him, and I have to be very, very quiet, because if anyone hears me, then I can’t get married. That’s why you have to be quiet and go back to sleep.”

  “But why do you?” asked the child.

  “It’s a tradition,” Fatyma said, an answer the child had heard before.

  “Will you come back?”

  “Oh, sure,” Fatyma lied. “I’ll see you tomorrow. I’ll wear my wedding dress for you, okay?”

  When the child was settled under the covers again, Fatyma put her brother’s knife in the pocket of her coat. She placed in the suitcase a plastic bag containing the lipstick and blusher (also boosted) that her father had not found, some underwear and toilet articles, and two paperback books, both heavily thumbed. One was called Fountain of Desire. These words were printed on the cover in swirling pink letters, over an illustration of a darkly handsome man embracing a woman in an old-fashioned dress. The other book was Norma Jean, a biography of Marilyn Monroe. Fatyma had stolen them from the public library. She believed they contained nearly all of what she needed to know to survive in her new life. Slowly, carefully, she forced up her window and slipped onto the fire escape, clanking faintly. She descended and walked quickly toward the Atlantic Avenue subway station. She stood on the IND platform for what seemed like a long time, with her hand on the knife in her pocket. A D train for Manhattan arrived, and Fatyma boarded it. When the train doors swished shut, she sighed and relaxed somewhat. At last she was bound for America.

  Although El Chivato had never actually been imprisoned, he had visited jails many times, in Nogales, Tucson, and various places in Mexico. Many of his clients were incarcerated and wished still to conduct their businesses or to deal with difficult witnesses. The James A. Thomas Center, one of Rikers Island’s ten facilities, was the largest jail he had ever visited. Passing through visitor clearance, the youth was conscious of a small uneasiness, which stemmed not so much from the precise venue, but from being in a crowd of strangers and unarmed. The guard who passed them in with the other visitors was, for example, staring at him insolently, and he could do nothing about it under the circumstances. This made him cross.

  The guard had seen a good many odd couples pass through his metal detector, but even so, this one stood out. The woman had a big mane of blond hair done in the current Farrah style, or maybe it was a wig, and she had a coarse, lively face, with the eyebrows plucked into fine geometric parabolas and the wide mouth greased a shining reddish purple. She had on a wild jungle-print blouse with the top two buttons open. The guard didn’t mind taking a look, and saw she had a red lace bra on, brim full of tan flesh, on which trembled a petite gold cross. She also wore shiny aquamarine slacks tight enough to show the slice of her vulva, tucked into white boots trimmed with fur, and had over her shoulders a fake fur coat of a bluish color not found among the furry creatures of the wild. Whore, was his thought, although she had signed in as the prisoner’s wife. Maybe she was both—not an unfamiliar combo on the Rikers visiting list.

  The kid was definitely in a different class of weirdness, however. He was a little guy, a Latino of some kind, and the guard was glad he was not an inmate, because he had the kind of girl’s face and lithe body that would have had knife fights breaking out all over the joint on the first day. The hat was the first thing, a tall white cone with a wide brim, the kind cowboys used to wear in the old movies. His shirt was black and embroidered and had pearl buttons, and his neatly pressed whipcord trousers just brushed the tops of elaborately worked cowboy boots in black and white, which had tooled silver tips on them. He wore a peculiar loose pale coat, like a raincoat but made of a heavier material like canvas, that hung down nearly to the top of his boots.

  People in the line were looking at him and some were making comments, and the guard could see the kid didn’t like it. He passed them through with only a cursory examination of the woman’s large leather bag. It was late in his shift, and he didn’t want any trouble.

  By the time El Chivato and Obregon’s woman, Connie Erbes, were seated at the visitors’ table, and Jesus Obregon was staring through the glass from the other side, the young man was in a foul mood. He had looked into a number of the faces of those who had mocked him, and should he ever encounter them again it would be too bad for them. Obregon greeted him effusively in Spanish, asked after his uncle and the rest of his family, uttered compliments and congratulations on hearing that they were—thank God—quite well, inquired abou
t his flight, asked if he had encountered any trouble in getting to the apartment in Washington Heights and meeting Connie.

  Then to business. El Chivato listened in silence to the story of the deal, the man Lucky, the betrayal, the lost product, the arrest, the failure of the bribe. The youth had heard such stories before. As the suspicious lump is to the surgeon, or the leaking pipe to the plumber, they were the basis of his trade. He listened further while Jesus Obregon explained what he wanted done.

  “I understand,” said El Chivato. “I find this man and I tell him, you must confess to the police that you have killed the lahara and not the Obregons. With them, I tell him, you go to jail, but if not, something worse.”

  “You will feed him his little chile chopped up in a tortilla,” said Obregon.

  “A taco,” said El Chivato without inflection, as if correcting a minor point of technique, and then asked, “And suppose he does not confess, or dies somehow? Also, it may be that I can’t find him. What then?”

  “What then? You understand that while this is a comfortable jail, I would still rather be outside. So the most important thing is to get our release from the false charge. I would naturally prefer to combine this with fucking that pendejo, but if not, then not. There is the prosecutor. Perhaps a judge. You understand how these things are done.”

  “Yes, I do,” said El Chivato, and for the first time he gave Jesus Obregon the favor of his remarkable, glittering smile.

  The man who had murdered Ali al-Qabbani and thrown his weighted body off a Brooklyn pier was the product of a desert society and could therefore not have been expected to know much about tides and currents, especially the peculiar ones present in New York harbor and its various rivers. For the same reason he also was not overly familiar with the great increase in buoyancy attendant upon decomposition of the human body, or that to make sure a corpse does not float, you must make sure that the internal cavities are well punctured. Bloated like a young whale, Ali’s corpse easily dragged the trivial weight of the concrete blocks that were wired to his ankles (which in any case soon fell away as the flesh softened and stripped off) and set boldly off upon the broad waters.