Oh, well, my jaw dropped down to my knees! Was this real?
My amazing seventh-grade intellect, wider than the wingspan of the Inca condor goddess Louise, said I’d have to think of something that would completely eliminate coincidence, and then quicker than Hamlet could dream up his play-within-a-play designed to make his father’s killer jump up from his seat in a Perry Mason moment shouting, “Okay, I did it, you fucks! Guard, seize me!”—this followed by a diatribe about the murdered old King Hamlet “stinking up the throne room” with his herring-scented aftershave lotion—I called to mind my seventh-place prize-winning entry in a poetry contest back in third grade and thought to test the kid’s telepathic powers by asking her for its title, but then even before I could pose the question the kid was reciting the poem!
Said Diana to the Phantom, ‘Let’s talk on the level.
Who does your laundry? I know it’s not Devil.’
“Kid, who or what are you?” I gasped.
“Oh, for God’s sakes, Joey! It’s me!”
“‘It’s me?’ Who’s me?”
“I’m Jane, you dumb poop! Your Jane!”
I was stone. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t talk.
“I really am,” she said. “If you’ll just look at me closely you’ll see.”
When the blood had quit pulsing through the vein in my forehead, I stared and, by God! I could almost see it: the freckles, the red hair in pigtails with the smiley-face barrettes at the end, and then, after she pointed to it, the little circle with the X inside it on her cheek!
There’s something wrong with me, I thought.
This was bonkers.
“Oh, come on,” she cajoled in her piping voice. “Gunga Din, Joey? Blueberry pie and chocolate ice cream? Tokay?”
Nonplussed, I could only gape and numbly nod.
She turned her glance to the exit from Steeplechase Park, then stood up and took my hand. “Come on, let’s go,” she said. “Vera’s coming. She’s getting on a big metal horsey right now.”
I stood up and said dazedly, “Who paid?”
She said, “Sister Louise. Sister also offered a reward of a dollar for your capture.” She tugged at my hand. “Come on, Joey. The boardwalk should be safe for a while. We’ll go down to the end where there’s almost no people.”
That time I’d played the hook at Times Square and right after I’d seen another movie plus live on stage Woody Herman’s “Big Band” orchestra with this skinny young crooner Frank Sinatra that these young lolly-dollies in bobby socks were screaming and swooning over with me wondering if all of them were playing the hook too, either that or if they went to some hardcore atheist high school that let them out at noon to get swacked on elderberry juice and celebrate “Stonehenge Day,” right afterward I’d coughed up a shiny new dime to get into an exhibit called “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” where I wound up goggle-eyed watching magicians who did stuff that I thought was impossible, which at the time I thought was good, but then afterward thought was bad, for what I wanted was a world with order and complete explanations for everything in it.
But now a pigtailed miracle was holding my hand.
We were walking past a popcorn stand’s wafting aromas that were calling to me as seductively as the sirens once sang to Ulysses, “Here we are, Joey! Come to us! Come! Be the first in your school to commit the sin of gluttony!” when I stopped and looked down at “Child X.” So the kid was telepathic. So what? That didn’t make her Jane. Okay? It did not. Further, any kid with money could have bribed our sleazy waiter at that cheapo Italian restaurant into spilling his guts about the blueberry pie and chocolate ice cream. Correct? I mean, isn’t that the “scientific method” that’s used by every physicist whose last name is Letterman to argue that creation by a “God” is preposterous, their only answer to the massive number of “coincidences” making it a virtual impossibility that the universe wasn’t designed for the appearance of man being, “Idiots! Has it never occurred to you that there might be an infinite number of universes, in which case there would have to be at least one of them with all these coincidences? I mean, Duuhhhhhhh!” an expression rendered even more unattractive when uttered by someone with severe radiation burns on his hands. In the meantime, and I mention this only in passing, I was almost dumbstruck into near insensibility by the awe in which my hero-worshiping young self, five-time duplicate member of the Doc Savage Club, held the stubbornly dogged and steadfast faith of all those thousands of scientists who believed that evolution was as “guided” as a red Ferrari with a drunken and bitter Ma Joad behind the wheel, and that after millennia of blindly groping, somehow nature and chance produced the first chicken, to which my first reaction was, “Why, for godssakes? Are you kidding?” For a time I stuffed my doubts. Never mind that the answer from my heroes of science to, “Why would a brain or an eye want to form?” was “To help you survive,” with their answer to my follow-up, “Why should I survive?” turning out to be the profoundest and deepest silence since the elderly Rasputin approached Queen Victoria at a palace ball and requested a “private dance.” One day I’d mentioned all of this to Baloqui, who, grimacing, then lowering and shaking his head, said broodingly, “Listen, there’s a much bigger problem here, Joey,” and when I said, “What?” he looked up into the distance with his patented pensively frowning “At least I think it was” phony look, and proceeded to ruminate that without an astounding coincidence as yet unclaimed by the Holy Ghost, specifically the appearance of a fully evolved rooster at the very same time, not to mention the very same continent as the fully evolved first chicken, “Joey, where did the second chicken come from?” he said.
Details. Never mind. Science ruled.
So I dredged for more proof that this really was Jane.
“What was the last thing on the East River walkway that you said to me about my father?” I asked her, and then I instantly threw up an impenetrable wall of white noise around my mind that no telepath could possibly penetrate, a feat that I accomplished by shutting my eyes and mentally reciting over and over the lyrics of the hit song “Three Little Fishies”:
Boop boop dittum dattum wattum, choo
Boop boop dittum dattum wattum—
“Joey!”
The kid snapped me out of it sharply.
“I told you that he loved you and to be good to him.”
Wham! And then of all the dumb luck, who do I see chatting and coming our way but Baloqui and Winifred Brady! When he saw me Baloqui stopped short for a second, maybe thinking of yelling, “Hey, I’ve got him! I’ve captured El Cheapo!” But then the two of them slowly started ambling toward us again. I looked down at Miss Enigma of 1941 and hoarsely whispered, “I thought you said the boardwalk was safe!”
And she hissed back, “Okay, so I thought it was safe! I never said I was a fucking oracle!”
My God! I thought. This really is Jane!
“Hiya, Joey! How ya doin’?”
Baloqui and Brady were now standing in front of us.
I said, “Fine, Baloqui. Fine. Where’s the gang?”
“They’re around.”
“Yeah, I thought so. Good. That’s good.”
For a second Baloqui eyed me inscrutably, then he lowered his droopy, dark gaze to Jane. “Who’s your friend?”
“You mean you see her?”
Baloqui looked up at me, squinting and knitting his brow.
He said, “What?”
I said, “I think she’s something to see.”
Baloqui turned his head to exchange blank looks with Brady, then back to me, his black eyes crammed with suspicion, although of what he as usual had no idea. “You look relieved,” he observed. “Why is that?”
“I guess it’s just the kind of hairpin I am.”
Baloqui shrugged. “Free country.”
He returned his gaze to Jane. “So who is she?” he asked.
“My niece.”
“You got a niece, El Bueno? Since when?”
“Since she was
born,” I replied under color of invincible thickheadedness. “She’s here visiting from Peru,” I then added.
Jane looked down and put a hand to her head and slowly shook it, while, as usual, Winnie Brady continued to say nothing, mutely staring with wide blue eyes, her forte.
“From Peru,” Baloqui echoed flatly. He was staring in a way I hadn’t seen since that time I was ticked at him over beating me badly at Monopoly and to wound him I’d quoted a made-up travel expert writing in Holiday Magazine that Manhattan was “by far a more glamorous, vibrant and exciting city than either Barcelona or Seville,” at which Baloqui had lifted his chin and with a look of glacial ice mixed with lukewarm pity said, “Even the Devil can quote scripture out of context.” It was the single black eyebrow sickling up that was the killer: it would have turned Lot’s wife into a pillar of guava jelly laced with pull-string recordings of her constant “I need my space!” total bullshit, although now she really needed it, you could say.
“Yes, from Lima,” I said. And then, after a pause, I quietly added, “Or thereabouts.” And at this Jane set up a howl of crying and sobbing.
I looked down and said, “What’s wrong, little niece?”
“I have to go baffoom!” she bawled.
His inner vision always turned to an azure sky where puffy cloudlets tinted gold and vermillion by a constantly setting sun framed his pantheon of Apollo, Zeus and Manolete, Baloqui flinched, the corner of his mouth pulling back in a grimace of both fear and distaste at the mention of eliminatory matters, this coupled with a dread of even more to come, such as “ka-ka,” or “DaVinci Dew,” or, worst of all in his mind, “number two,” in the presence of Brady in this halcyon, taffy-scented glow of the day. Taking hold of Brady’s hand and with a stare in which a clear threat of maiming could be detected, he growled, “That dollar reward’s a lot of money, El Bueno. As long as I am silent you are safe. You owe me!” With this he turned and they walked away, and with my eyes on Brady’s back, in the movie screen of my mind I saw the actor Jack La Rue, always typecast as a gangster, standing beneath a lamppost looking menacing—his only look—while flipping a quarter in the air and catching it over and over, which he did in every movie he was in, his movie dialogue now sounding in my head with a boomy echo-chamber effect:
“What about the girl, Baloqui? She’ll talk. Do we kill her?”
“No. I have an arrangement with a white slaver.”
When Baloqui and Brady were far enough away, Jane abruptly quit bawling to look up at me deadpan and utter, “I thought they’d never leave. Listen, Joey, I’m hungry. Can we eat somewhere now?”
I said, “You eat?”
“What does that mean?” she said, glowering up at me, and after telling her that I had no idea, hand in hand we started walking toward a modest little eatery I’d once seen at the end of the boardwalk where I thought there’d be almost no chance of another highly dangerous “brief encounter”—in particular with Vera Virago. I had to take baby steps so Jane could keep up, and as we walked I looked down at her pigtails and curly red mop, still trying to figure out what was happening. The time jumps. Jane. Were I older I’d have thought about bizarre disorders of the brain, like in that book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, but back then I was lost. At times I’d just helplessly snicker and shake my head, and once even wondered if I was just dreaming, except the dream was too long and the Nathan’s aromas too pungent. I mean, I see things and I’ve heard things in my dreams but never smelled them.
This was real.
Whatever that was.
10
“Oh, goody!” Jane exclaimed, her eyes beaming in a face as plump and shiny and round as a candy apple held in bright sunlight. Her hand still in mine, she was staring up at the sign for NOT NATHAN’S!!!, the only kosher hot dog server in Coney Island. The sign’s exclamation points sent a message:
GOYS, FORGET IT! WE HAVE NOTHING YOU LIKE!
“What do you want, children? Tell me. I’m here for you.”
The paunchy little white-haired, middle-aged guy behind the counter—who I guess was the owner—was wiping his hands on his mustard-stained apron and could easily have been the actor “Cuddles” Sakall, who played the soft-hearted waiter at Rick’s in Casablanca. Already his eyes were welling up with forgiveness even before we’d done anything wrong.
He said, “Hot dog? Maybe bratwurst with mustard and onion?”
“You serve any beer or wine?” Jane asked him, her dimpled little face upturned and with her arms akimbo in a classic Shirley Temple mode of challenging sulk. Her voice even had that lispy pout.
The owner’s eyes bugged out, and now he looked even more like Sakall saying, “Honest? Honest as the day is long!” whereas Jane’s defiant comeback stare was more “You played it for her, you can play it for me!” “Only root beer, sarsaparilla,” he finally sputtered. “But also Joe Louis Punch. I forgot. It’s new.” He picked up a greenish colored bottle. There was a picture or decal on it of the bare-chested heavyweight champion, the “Brown Bomber,” in a fighting stance. The owner held it up to us. “We also have War Cards,” he added. These were like baseball cards and came with bubblegum strips, but instead of a photo of Dixie Walker or Cookie Lavagetto on the card there’d be these multicolored comic strip sketches of gory atrocities being committed by Japanese soldiers, things like bayoneting babies in midair and whatever else helped them calm their nerves that day.
“No, no War Cards,” I told him. “They’d make the kid sick.”
“I understand.”
I looked up at a posted menu list with the prices, then leaned over with my mouth very close to Jane’s ear. “Have you got any money?” I whispered. She pulled her head away and looked me in the eye with this deadpan, steady expression and said quietly and colorlessly, “Don’t you?”
“Uh, well, yeah,” I mumbled. “Yeah. Yeah, I guess. I mean, I’m sure. My treat. I insist, in fact. I insist!” I straightened up and we ordered some stuff and then took it outside to a bench looking out to the sea. There was a breeze and these jillions of gulls all circling and squawking forlornly but with great agitation and high excitement as if they were in factions that were blaming one another for the loss of some unspoiled world, some paradise where every automobile was a convertible and where hats and awnings did not exist. Meantime, Jane ate a hot dog washed down with sarsaparilla, perhaps if only to prove that she was real and not a ghost like some future scripture scholars, “The Completely Independent-Minded Seminar for the Truth About the Resurrection Scam,” as they called themselves, would be saying about Christ, as if the twelve apostles were in fact the Twelve Morons who even in the middle of a sunlit day weren’t able to tell a ghost from either Lou Costello or a pepperoni pizza or were just happy to be tortured and killed for what they knew was a lie. The seminar’s leader was a celebrated movie director who got famous with Skyless, a Norwegian film about a nuclear sub on patrol for three years without ever once surfacing and whose crew members never got irritable or raised their voices to one another. Crammed with subliminal advertisements for Prozac, the movie was a monster hit and the director quickly followed it up with Sieve, his controversial “film of supernatural terror” about a condom dispensing machine that’s possessed by the spirit of a drill punch. The seminar group used different-colored painted lima beans to vote on the meaning of various enigmatic statements by Christ, such as “Feed the hungry” and “Visit the sick.”
God knows what else they did.
“Now, then, Joey, I think we need to talk.”
Hands in the pockets of my dashing “genuine Zelan” Windbreaker that I’d whined Pop into buying for me from Davega’s on 42nd Street even after he’d explained to me that “Zelan” was a word that Davega’s had invented meaning “Nylon for Idiot Children,” I turned my soft gaze from the gulls to look down at this pigtailed…What? Hallucination? Apparition?
But Baloqui saw her too. Which meant what?
That he was just another part of my delusion?
Boy, did we!
“Hold on.”
She got up off the bench and with her racing little steps thumping lightly on the wood of the boardwalk, she made a dash to a nearby trash can into which she dumped her napkin, paper plate and the empty sarsaparilla bottle, trotted back to the bench, sat down, clasped her hands in her lap and looked up at me gravely. The bounce of blue light from the ocean tinted her eyes to an aquamarine that seemed much less a color than a memory of seas on some other world.
“Joey, why are you so cheap?” she said.
I almost fell off the bench.
I said, “Huh?”
“You heard me. You’re a cheapskate, Joey. The worst! Haven’t you learned yet that money can’t buy you happiness?”
At this I relaxed a bit, for I was now on familiar ground inasmuch as I was greatly experienced in dealing with “Cliché Experts” and I thought about snappy retorts like, “I presume you are speaking of Confederate money,” but then decided to be prudent and withhold my friendly fire.
“I’ve got a few questions of my own,” I said.
“Such as what?” she demanded in that piping, sulky voice, her lower lip pouting upward like her muppety doppelgänger/aka Shirley Temple in Wee Willie Winkie asking Victor McLaglen why she couldn’t go along with him to fight the naughty Thugee assassins who were busy strangling everyone in sight who wasn’t wearing a dhoti and a turban.
“Well, for one,” I said firmly, “did you or did you not ever float about six feet in the air in front of the refreshment counter at the ‘Supe’ because they’d just run out of Peter Paul Mounds, not to mention did you ever get into a limo containing the Asp and Mr. Am?”
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