Cornelius Sky

by Timothy Brandoff

  "Nice," Steven said.

  "Good shooting there, Mr. Alfonso," Connie said.

  Alfonso roamed the board's periphery, paving the way for each shot's trajectory, reaching down to pluck away some invisible piece of debris like a golfer on a green.

  Steven's legs swung with impatience, and he gave his father a look and made the smallest cluck sound with his tongue, to which Alfonso stopped and said: "What?!"

  "Take so long! Just shoot, know you're going to make it."

  Connie slept with Alfonso's mother Melba years ago, during a long night of partying. She had large breasts and wore eyeglasses. Melba got on top of Connie and gyrated, and as she did she sucked on one of her own knuckles, which Connie found to be an open and generous display of her sexuality. Baby Alfonso asleep in a crib across the room, back when Melba's mom lived with them. Melba gave him a kiss at the door, and whispered, No more, it's wrong, I like Maureen.

  "Stevie, listen: Mommy home?"

  "Uh-huh. Going up?"

  "Me and Mommy, we're having a few problems."

  "I know."

  "You do?"

  Steven exploded off the bench, saying, "On the line, on the line, on the line," just as Alfonso himself jumped back, saying, "Na, na, na, na," pointing to his cap, saying, "It's in, it's in, it's in, it's in, from here you can, come on," to which Steven said, "Trust you, trust you, trust you, trust you," before plopping back down onto the bench.

  Connie waited a moment and said, "How do you know?"

  "Changed the lock is why," Steven whispered, his voice going hollow at the center. "'Cause your drinking and how you wet the bed, she said, and the fooling around and stuff like that, how she said on the phone to Aunt Carol and all them."

  "Listen to me now: I love Mommy and Mommy loves me, and I love you and Artie, nothing's ever going to change that, bottom line, no matter what."

  "I know," Steven said, barely audible.

  "Period, end of story," Connie said, and waited for Steven to kick in with his part. It was a routine of theirs.

  "Cut and dried, my friend," Steven said, but his heart wasn't in it.

  "Day you were born, that deal went down hard," Connie said, hugging Steven to him. The deal being Connie would love his son forever and always, no questions asked, no doubt about it, the deal gone down, day you were born, cut and dried my friend, my son, my beautiful boy. "Stevie, would you shoot upstairs and let Mommy know I want to pick up a couple things?"

  "Right now?"

  "If you don't mind."

  "Take my place?" Steven said, jutting his face toward the skelsies board.

  "If he gives me a chance."

  "I know, Fonso's good," he said, then jumped up and ran toward the entrance of 466. "My father takes my place, Fonso!"

  Connie lit a smoke and watched Alfonso. The kid had a humorous way about him. So neat. "When's my turn?"

  "If I mess up," Alfonso said, making his way around the board like a pool hall hustler. He had the touch, and after each successful flick-shot he snapped his fingers.

  "You're good, Alfonso."

  "I know," he said, and Connie laughed, and as Alfonso set up his next shot he said: "My father, he was a doorman too," saying it almost as a question.

  "I think he was," Connie said tentatively. "He worked over at London Terrace. A good man, your father, Alfonso. Very talented, like you."

  "Like how?"

  "You name it, like how. Played softball. Some shortstop."

  "For real?" Alfonso said, glancing now at Connie.

  "He could draw too, like you. Always with his pencil."

  Alfonso's father one day up and disappeared, and who better than Connie to know about a father gone missing.

  Here came Steven, and behind him Maureen, splitting off to the middle of the yard, carrying a black Hefty bag to keep it from scraping the ground. She stopped and waited by the Saturn sculpture.

  "She's there," Steven said, pointing. "My turn?"

  "Yeah," Alfonso said, "to warm that bench some more."

  Maureen looked around in anticipation of an ambush. Or maybe she was just beat down by her weary marriage. Something about the language of her body seemed new to Connie, her stride, a defeat in her step. Yes, she looked drained, but also, beneath the exhaustion, signs of something which posed a subtle threat to Connie, and he couldn't pin it down.

  She rested the Hefty bag on the ground and reached for the ring of Saturn with both hands, and Connie noticed her manicure as he approached. She stretched her legs and back as if in preparation for a long run.

  "How you doing, Maureen?"

  "Some of your things in the bag," she said. "Everything from the bathroom, a bunch of your clothes. Want to take a look, see if there's anything else you need for now?"

  "What, I can't come up and go through my own things?"

  "Prefer you didn't."

  "Why's that?"

  "You're not welcome in the house anymore." She shot a mindful look across the way at Steven, who pretended to watch Alfonso run the skelsies board.

  The trees shimmered in the yard. Maureen glanced up at the identical brown roller-shaded windows, smacking of institutional ennui.

  "You don't know what it does to the kids. Pounding on the door like that, middle of the night. I hope you don't know, 'cause if you knew and still did it? Stevie's happy-go-lucky, but when you're out there banging at four in the morning, loaded to the gills? And the other one, forget about," she said. "I'm worried about Arthur, Con, honestly."

  "But you changed the locks."

  "That's right."

  "Why did you—"

  "To keep you the hell out," Maureen said with a mock laugh.

  Connie considered her, her tight jeans and sneakers and sweatshirt. Her hair. The manicure. He thought, She's turned a corner.

  He always thought he had lucked into Maureen for a lover, a partner, a wife. From the start, the softest of spots responded to her in him, their sex a deeply spiritual communion unlike any Connie had ever known. He felt he could not have loved her more. They had once fucked the legs off a kitchen table, Connie watching one of the legs pogo-sticking its way out of the room in fear of further fucking as they hovered midair, a frozen moment on the tabletop like out of some cartoon, before collapsing down onto the floor in a heap together, still connected, laughing in shock and wonder, where they kept on fucking.

  "I mean, who gives a shit, I'm still paying the rent," he said. "So what, I'm a little disjointed."

  "Disjointed altogether, only you don't have a clue. And I'm fed up. For real now."

  Connie reached for her hand, and Maureen pulled away.

  "Hell are you doing?" she said. "Out of your mind."

  "All right, look," he said, "are you saying we're done for good, or what?"

  "Forget for good."

  "Well then, or what?" he said, not knowing what he meant.

  "Been done for good for years, Con. Years. Listen to me."

  "And what about the kids?"

  "Let's keep the kids out of it. Here's the deal: you say, Are we done for good? I say, I don't know. I changed the lock for a reason, not some whim, okay? I'm tired, Con. I can't take it anymore. You got a bad problem, and I cannot sit around and watch you. It's simple: tired of you wetting the bed. Tired of you sleeping around. I don't know another way to say it. Tired of our life together, it's a joke."

  "All right," Connie said, "I hear you."

  "Hear me? This conversation's older than the hills, pregnant with Arthur, you kidding me? Don't get me started. Point is, you say, Are we done for good? I say, Who knows? I'm not looking that far down the road. You go do what you have to do, show up for the kids, get the booze out of the picture. I don't want to tell you what to do, but if you're drinking . . . You just shouldn't drink, Con, honest to God. Forget it, if the drink's still in the picture. You show up as a father, and who knows, maybe we meet up again down the road, who's to say? You might not like me by that point. And I'm not laying it all on you, God kno
ws I'm no angel. But for now I'm done. I can't anymore. You sober up, show up for the kids, and more than that I can't say."

  Connie watched her a moment. He sensed she'd been talking to somebody, a friend, somebody. He knew he didn't have a leg to stand on, yet his mind continued to balk.

  "You need help, hon," she said, and if she'd been on the phone you wouldn't know she was crying. "You need help, I need help. The kids . . ." she said, turning from Steven's eyes. "Find a place to stay?"

  "Yeah," he lied.

  "All right, so take the bag." She turned and headed back upstairs. "And stop walking around in that uniform." She said it over her shoulder, an afterthought, and Connie felt it betrayed a proprietary interest she maintained toward him.

  He went over to the skelsies game, kissed and hugged Steven. He gripped Alfonso lovingly by his football-shaped head, before he strolled through the yard toward Tenth Avenue.

  Steven watched his father walk away, the Hefty bag tossed over his shoulder.

  * * *

  With invigorated purpose Connie moved toward Grant's Bar at the corner of 25th and Tenth. On his lips, the cooling vespers of hate: "Let them all go fuck themselves," his ironic tone that of a lighthearted ditty, and by them he meant his wife Maureen and his son Arthur, but not his son Steven. Also, as to who else might go fuck themselves, his dead parents, Mary and Samuel. And Pete Cullen, of course. This the main cast of characters on whose hooks his mind presently hung its anger, but the sentiment simultaneously held open an invitation to every other cocksucker he had ever encountered, ever glanced at on a subway platform throughout the course of his life. Such was the inclusive nature of his darkness. His talent for hate did not play favorites, his hate talent a bighearted and generous talent. Fuck them, fuck them all, as the slogan went. Go ahead and rot, and as long as you're rotting, why not rot in hell? He saw billows of black smoke chugging out of the rooftop chimney of 466, and with it his mind considered the lock removed from what was now his former front door, the old cylinder which had served so well and long no doubt tossed down the incinerator by some locksmith who would have banged his wife given half a chance, as his wife, Connie knew, was highly desirable, the lock now melting away in the furnace of what used to be his marriage, the incinerator's thick black clouds signifying love's end, and, when you thought about it, what good was a life without love?

  His Rolodex of drunks included full-blown blackouts, wherein days and, in a handful of cases, weeks of the calendar got recessed for good, but more generally he browned out. Come the period following a run he could more or less piece together basic events and chronology, though he could never keep his boroughs straight. Who knew half the time if you were in Brooklyn or Queens anyway? It didn't take a drunk to produce that confusion. It was all the same nonsense out there, though the Bronx somehow remained special, while Staten Island was basically Jersey in his mind.

  Some drunks he walked right into face-first with a vengeance. Others took him unawares, episodes which exceeded his daily maintenance intake, his ubiquitous hip-pocket pint of Myers's, or Bacardi 151, or any decent brand of bourbon, episodes which ended with Connie coming to on a park bench, subway car, or vestibule—or lately a hard-tiled patch of floor on Penn Station's lower level. Which disturbed him. It's one thing to wake up in some miscellaneous spot, another to find yourself retreating to the same location. Was he staking a claim? There was a word to describe such a person.

  Grant's fancied itself a workingman's establishment, but fights rarely broke out. The clientele didn't possess the requisite passion for a good brawl, being largely broken men.

  Whitey tended bar in rolled-up sleeves, the shirt's whiteness making the blotchy glow of Whitey's face glow harder. The bones of his hands barely distinguishable, a walrus in long pants, drinking behind the bar for free all day—isn't that right, you son of a bitch, you, Whitey?

  Longshoremen, mailmen, factory workers, auto mechanics, truck drivers, the unemployable, a couple of wet-brains, a misanthropic PhD or two hiding behind what they hoped people would consider academic beards of distinction, flabbergasted occupants of Chelsea's swankier brownstones because their lives still somehow sucked despite impressive curriculum vitae and substantial earning power—all stood and drank at the bar together.

  On the opposite wall lived an oak-paneled telephone booth with a door which, when unfolded and slid shut on its track, triggered illumination and ventilation from above. The phone itself sported various-sized apertures to deposit various-sized nickels, dimes, and quarters—a pair of brass knuckles reconfigured for the reception of change.

  On an extended ledge of plywood a large Motorola oversaw the front room, its convex screen collecting dust at four soft right angles. The box hovered like a deus ex machina.

  Connie entered with second nature. Whitey set him up with a bat and a ball. Sometimes he couldn't catch a buzz for love or money—other times half a beer put him on his ass. For the next several hours he had a difficult time forgetting himself in the manner he sought, and after countless boilermakers he rapped on the bar as a good night to Whitey, but the gesture rang hollow, and on his exit a barrage of shame captured Connie's mind.

  A light rain fell. He removed his cap and shook wet from it. He watched every move he made, mocking himself with harsh viciousness for a lifetime of fraudulence. The dark beat of self-recrimination kicked in hard. No wonder she changed the lock. Not one, he told himself, not one solitary clue, fucko, how to show another human being any love at all. He walked, suffering desertion and hatred of self.

  He turned right onto Ninth to not even Connie knew where, when he heard a bang. He saw Arthur and three other boys carrying pieces of two-by-four the length of baseball bats. One of the kids had smacked the hood of a parked car. They whooped and sprang like a pack of animals, and as one of them banged the wall of the bank on the corner Arthur swung his two-by-four at a garbage can and knocked it over, the trash spilling into the street. Crossing the avenue, Arthur turned and locked eyes with Connie and snapped his face away, his long hair swinging wild to catch up to his head, before the four kids rumbled toward the projects, out of sight.

  Connie glanced at the clock inside the convenience store owned by Jimmy the Greek, who gave credit, on the corner of 24th. Coming up on midnight and Arthur swinging a two-by-four. Twelve years old. A school night.

  He had to find a way back. Reconcile with Maureen. Be the father he himself never had. A now-or-never vibe galloped up into his consciousness. What's it going to be? something asked him.

  He stopped for a pint at his spot on 23rd, where Herbie the liquor store clerk demonstrated his sexy style for Connie, flicking his tongue toward a case of Cutty, the tongue coming quite close to but never touching the box's cardboard.

  "Do you see," Herbie said, "how I love them?"

  Connie stared at him without judgment, an objective anthropologist.

  Later on Greenwich Avenue, after purchasing on a lark a quart of Olde English 800 in honor of his Frisbee grab, he took a last guzzle and threw the bottle against the wall of a Bing & Bing apartment house.

  A man in a leather jacket whose pinky ring shone beneath the streetlamp yelled at Connie: "What the hell do you think you're doing?" He reached down to pick up a small dog.

  Connie entered four or five bars, from which lingered various images in his mind. He stepped out onto the street at one point late into the night just as the sky was opening up, and he made a dash for the 4th Street station using the Hefty bag as a ridiculous umbrella.

  * * *

  On a dark and motionless CC train, the last of its kind, he opened his eyes and could not remember his own name. The cross-stitching of a wicker bench impressed itself upon his face. He stared at his own hand and wondered for a moment who it belonged to. The subway car dark and motionless; stillness abided. He reached for his bankroll, bottle, and Hefty bag, found all intact. (He had come to on the subway another time to find his pockets slit open by a straight razor.) "Who?" he said, listening for
the sound of his own voice, a lost child trying to purchase anchor on himself. The ceiling fan turning slowly above him, propelled by the breeze from the open windows of the car. He scrambled internally, found a moment's peace in the fan's gentle revolutions and the shadow play it produced. He navigated into an upright position, stood, and looked out over the yard where the train had come to rest. The yard itself terrifying and pitiful, the endless expanse of track, the god-awful industry of it.

  At a distance he spotted a figure, a graffiti writer working by the light of a predawn moon, balancing on the highest rung of an orange Day-Glo ladder. Up on the balls of his feet, arm fully extended, he reached to put the final touches on his whole-car piece.

  STAY HIGH, the tag read. STAY HIGH 149.

  Connie started to weep, and with it broke the spell of alienation. He wept for his own loneliness, his fractured psyche, for all the years of longing and yearning from which he had failed to escape and continued to run. He let his pity find its release, and he wept as well with a gratitude that surprised, moved by the sight of this young man making his mark, doing his thing out here at ten minutes to five in the morning. How could you not admire the guy's desire, his raison d'être? What else but artistic compulsion could provoke such unpaid dedication at this hour? It must be so fulfilling, Connie imagined, such a life to live, that of an artist of one kind or another, so rich inside.

  The echo of the ball's rattle inside the can of spray paint floated clear across the yard as the writer shook the can dry for all its worth. Connie watched him a while, before he heard another sound, that of a Metro-North train speeding toward Grand Central on a set of tracks perpendicular to the yard, and with it Connie moved to find his own way downtown.

  Chapter two

  He stood smoking outside the OTB parlor on 23rd, his uniform in surprisingly decent shape given a night on the trains. He said good morning to a few people from the neighborhood heading to work before he stepped into Bickford's. Customers ate breakfast and read the paper in peace. He took a seat near the elbow of the counter.

  "Morning, Con."