Sutton

by J. R. Moehringer

  Head Nurse looks at Joseph, looks at the front page. She inhales sharply. Right, she says, suddenly laughing. I don’t know what I was. Well. But he does look like you.

  I guess. Around the eyes a little.

  He turns back to his mopping.

  Sutton leads Reporter and Photographer behind the women’s ward, down a hill slick with mud and wet leaves. Reporter grabs Sutton just before he falls. Thanks kid. They push through a group of intertwined trees, into a clearing. A spear of sunlight pierces the trunk of an enormous apple tree. Sutton approaches cautiously. He puts on his glasses, examines the bark. He smiles. Carved into the bark is a ragged heart. Inside are three letters.

  What is that, Mr. Sutton?

  Photographer moves closer. S-E-E?

  Boys, you are now standing in Willie’s sacred grove.

  Hold the phone. S-E-E? Sarah Elizabeth—Bess? She was here?

  After the Brinks job the Feds put me on their Most Wanted list. Their first list ever. Kind of an honor. They listed all my aliases, all my women—starting with Sarah Elizabeth Endner. I knew she’d be in a state. I looked her up in the phone book—I remembered her married name. And why did I remember? It was Richmond. And I was living in Richmond. You think that’s not a sign? Sure enough she was in Brooklyn. And just as I thought, she was beside herself. She was panicked. She didn’t know what to do. Reporters were calling her, cops were calling her. A few hours later I met her at the dock. We got in her car, drove to these woods. We only had a few hours before she had to get back. But that’s all you get in life. A few hours here, a few there. If you’re lucky. Mrs. Adams taught me that. She’s buried on the other side of this hill.

  Photographer shoots Sutton, the tree. Was Bess still married, brother?

  Yeah kid. She was.

  Reporter looks at the sky. The sun is getting low, Mr. Sutton. I hate to take you away from your sacred grove, but we’re officially pressed for time. I have to file my story in a little more than two hours. So. We need to get to Brooklyn.

  We’re taking the Verrazano back, Photographer says. It’s faster.

  Okay, Sutton says.

  Just one more stop on your map, Mr. Sutton. Dean Street. Then—Schuster?

  Mm.

  Mr. Sutton.

  Yeah kid. Yeah. Whatever you say.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Willie doesn’t catch the landlady’s name. Something like Mrs. Influenza. She speaks no English and he speaks prison Spanish, so they have a hard time communicating. He tells her that he’s a veteran, that he needs quiet, that his name is Julius Loring. She smiles, bewildered. He peels off two hundred dollars, six months’ rent in advance. The language barrier crumbles.

  The address is 340 Dean Street. It’s a narrow three-story clapboard in the barrio. Landlady gives Willie her best room, third floor, overlooking the street. It’s tiny, but furnished. Dresser, Hide-A-Bed, club chair. He doesn’t need more. The club chair sits by a window that catches the afternoon light. He spends the first few days sitting there, watching the sunsets, thinking. The first order of business, he decides, is his face.

  He prowls the docks, wharves, waterfront saloons, looking for guys he knew in the joint. He finds Dinky Smith, who sends him to Lefty MacGregor, who gives him an address for Rabbit Lonergan, who sends him to an old coffee warehouse, in the back room of which he finds Mad Dog Kling reading a newspaper by a gooseneck lamp. Well fuck a duck in Macy’s front window, Mad Dog says, squinting up through the corona of light. If it aint America’s most wanted.

  The years since Sing Sing have not been kind to Mad Dog. The years have kicked Mad Dog’s ass. Pursed mouth, goggle eyes, he has a bleary, defeated Book-of-Job air about him. He reminds Willie of those black-and-white photos: Dust Bowl Farmer. He wears a baggy brown suit with a frayed blue necktie, but looks as if he should be wearing denim coveralls and watching a cloud of locusts eat his crops.

  Willie tells Mad Dog he needs help. Shrink once mentioned a network of disgraced doctors, guys who lost their licenses but still do back-alley stuff. Abortions, bullet removals, so forth. Willie asks Mad Dog if he has any connections in that network. Mad Dog relights a cigar stub.

  I might, Willie. But those quacks don’t come cheap.

  I’ve got some—savings.

  Mad Dog grins, mirthless. I bet you do, he says. I read the papers.

  Not as much as you think, Willie says. Which brings me to my next question. What are you doing for dough these days, Mad Dog?

  Odd jobs. Bits and snatches. For the waterfront boys.

  Bits and snatches?

  You know. Guy owes, guy can’t pay, I drop by. Goodbye elbow.

  What do you get for a thing like that?

  Fifty bucks.

  Willie looks away. He hates Mad Dog, and he’s pretty sure the feeling is mutual. What kind of life is this, to seek out such people, to need such people? To ask such people for help?

  Fifty bucks, Willie says. Not much.

  Oh, elbows are easy, Mad Dog says, misunderstanding. It’s just a hinge. You bend it the wrong way, snap.

  Willie steps into the light of the gooseneck. What I’m saying, Mad Dog. How would you like to help me take down a few banks?

  Mad Dog points his cigar stub at Willie. That’s like Marciano asking if I want to spar.

  Sutton stands before 340 Dean Street, pointing. I used to sit at that window right there. Afternoons, children would come running out of that school up the block. They saw me one day, sitting there, my face covered with bandages, they about-faced and ran in the other direction.

  Photographer does a back-stretching exercise against the hood of the Polara. Bandages, Willie?

  From the plastic surgery.

  Reporter holds up his hand. Plastic what now?

  He sees patients in the middle of the night, in the office of a legit colleague who gets a kickback for every illegal procedure. Mad Dog sets up the meet, and offers to drive Willie, but Willie wants to do this alone.

  A nervous receptionist shows Willie into a small examining room. After half an hour the quack comes in through a second door. The underside of his chin hangs like an udder, his cheeks sag like bread dough. Willie wonders why Quack hasn’t let one of his colleagues, disgraced or legit, fix his own kisser.

  Hello, Mr. Loring.

  Willie hands him an envelope full of cash. Quack shoves the envelope quickly into the pocket of his white coat, tells Willie to sit on a paper-covered table. Holding up a sketch pad, he draws a giant circle, marks the circle with x’s, dotted lines. The circle apparently is Willie’s face.

  First, Mr. Loring, I’m going to make a two-inch incision in the columella. That’s the tissue just between your nostrils. Then I’m going to peel back the skin. Then I’m going to cut away any excess cartilage and scar tissue and take a grindstone to any protruding or asymmetrical bone. Essentially reshaping the nose God gave you. I’ll need to work faster than normal, because of the, ah, special circumstances. And I won’t have an assistant. So I must tell you, this may not be perfect, and there will be more risks than typically associated with such a procedure. Infection, so on, so forth.

  What were you thinking to do for the pain?

  You’ll be completely under.

  Nah. Give me a local.

  Willie isn’t letting anyone put him under. He has too many secrets, too many memories of Shrink, the slippery hypnotist. Quack opens his eyes wider. Whatever you say, Mr. Loring.

  He sounds tickled that Willie will be awake. He also sounds a little too keen to get down to cutting. He asks if Willie would like him to do the eyes while he’s at it. Give the lids a lift? Stay away from my eyes, Willie says. Willie looks again at the diagram of his face on the legal pad. He’s troubled that Quack has misspelled the word nasal. Willie wishes he’d asked Mad Dog what Quack did to lose his medical license. Watching Quack fondle his blades, Willie thinks it might have been something bad.

  Willie lies back. In goes the needle. The pain isn’t much. It’s the other sensa
tions that make the operation traumatic. Willie can feel every cut, every chip, every grind. Such violent acts on such a delicate appendage. He thinks about sawing the bars of his cells, chipping the rock under Eastern State. He thinks about Father hammering an anvil. He passes out.

  When he opens his eyes the lights are off. Quack is gone, the nervous receptionist is gone. Willie is still on the paper-covered table, still on his back. He feels as if his nose has been removed, the hole filled with a tent stake. He rolls off the table, staggers to a wall mirror. He has two black eyes and across the center of his face are two blood-soaked bandages in a large X.

  His fedora pulled low, he walks home. Landlady happens to be coming down the stairs as he’s going up. She shrieks, babbles. Thank God he’s been brushing up on his Spanish with her grown daughter. Estoy bien, he says. No es nada. Gracias. Me metí en una pelea con unos hombres en un bar.

  For weeks Willie hides in his room. Mad Dog brings him food and books—a bizarre assortment of titles. Willie told Mad Dog to ask the clerk for some great books. The clerk must have thought Mad Dog meant the Great Books. So while convalescing Willie encounters Dante, Woolf, and Proust for the first time.

  Proust overpowers him. The sentences are so long they make his nose hurt. Either this Proust is bughouse or else Willie’s having a bad reaction to Mad Dog’s black-market painkillers. He can’t make heads or tails of the plot. There is no plot. And yet sometimes an interminable sentence will end with an image that brings a lump to Willie’s throat, or a turn of phrase will knock loose a piece of Willie’s forgotten past. Something deep inside him responds to Proust’s obsession with time, his defiance of time. Only a man at war with time would write a million-word book. Willie can’t wait to get to the sixth volume—The Fugitive.

  At Willie’s request Mad Dog also brings him Peace of Soul, by Bishop Fulton J. Sheen. Willie read a review in the paper. He’s been troubled about his soul, he longs for peace—it sounded interesting. In fact it rivets him. He sits up all night, reads the book cover to cover, goes back and rereads the parts about remorse. Whole passages seem addressed to him. Remorse, according to Sheen, is a sin. Remorse is prideful, self-centered. Judas felt remorse. Instead, Sheen says, we must emulate Peter—who felt not remorse but God-centered regret.

  Willie has no remorse, and some days he feels nothing but regret, so he’s comforted. According to Sheen, his account with God is square.

  Then, however, Sheen says something that haunts Willie, that stays with him longer than the memory of Quack’s blades. Along with regretting, Sheen says, a sinner must fully confess. Willie sets the book down, lights a Chesterfield. Regret and a full confession? Pretty steep price for eternal salvation. He looks at the ceiling. Being a fugitive has made him more acutely aware of the Eyes that always see. The One from whom we can never hide. He asks the ceiling of his tiny furnished room if Sheen is right. Confess? Really? And if he doesn’t—what then?

  He feels an answer coming. A judgment. He has a hunch it’s going to hurt. Distracted, he blows smoke through his sutured nostrils, causing a tiny atom bomb of blinding pain.

  A week after the surgery Willie is due to have Quack remove the stitches. He can’t face that ghoul again. Mad Dog brings him a bottle of Jameson and a pair of needle-nose pliers. Willie gulps the whiskey, bites a rag, yanks the stitches himself. Mad Dog holds the mirror.

  After, Willie apologizes to Mad Dog for all the screaming.

  Mad Dog laughs. Please. I’m used to guys screaming.

  Sutton takes one last look at his former window. When you’re a kid, he says, wondering how your life is going to turn out, you never imagine you might end up living under an assumed name, in a furnished room, your face covered with bandages, scaring schoolchildren.

  Reporter fetches his briefcase from the Polara. He puts it on the hood, clicks it open. I saw nothing in the files, he says, about plastic surgery. But now that you mention it, these old photos—there is a difference. They really don’t look like you.

  Maybe we do have the wrong guy, Photographer says.

  Sutton touches his nose, gives it a squeeze, looks up the block. That quack was insane but he did nice work. Then one day I was walking back to my room and right here I met a girl. Right about where you boys are standing she gave me the big eye. I thought that meant my new nose was a hit. But of course she was a hooker. They can spot a lonely guy from a mile away. With just one look she knew who I was, what I needed. Turned out, though, I was what she needed too.

  She has pale white skin, jet-black hair, large black eyes. One eye is slightly larger than the other. Willie tells her it’s cute. She taps a finger below the larger eye.

  This one, she says, was always the same size as its brother. But lately it keep getting bigger, I don’t know why.

  He tells her she should see a doctor. She says she doesn’t like doctors. He insists, but she’s stubborn. Half Irish, half Egyptian, she tells Willie.

  That explains it, he says.

  She was born and raised in Cairo. Her mother was from Dublin, her father was a Mizrahi Jew. During the war, she says, their life was hard. But peace was much harder. Peace unleashed a more localized chaos. Mobs surged into her neighborhood, carrying clubs, torches. They blew up buildings, set houses ablaze, pulled people from their beds. They dragged men through the streets and bludgeoned them in front of their families.

  Why? Willie asks.

  Israel, she says. Land. Religion. Why people do anything?

  The last time she saw her father, he was standing at the front door of their house, waving a carving knife, keeping the mob at bay. He yelled to her mother, Run, run, I’ll find you!

  She and her mother bolted out the back door to a neighbor’s house. In the morning her father lay in the street. Pieces of him, she says. She and her mother fled with the neighbor, overland on foot, then by boat to America. On the boat they had to fight off men, even boys. One night they had to fight off the neighbor.

  Her mother died four days before the boat reached New York Harbor. Grief, shame, illness, maybe all three. When the boat docked she watched immigration officials carry her mother off like a bag of mail.

  She tells Willie her name is Margaret. Willie tells her his name is Julius. They’re in a coffee shop near his room on Dean Street.

  Why you wear these dark glasses, Julius?

  Some people are after me, Margaret.

  Why they after you, Julius?

  I’d rather not say, Margaret.

  You did crimes, she says softly.

  He lights a Chesterfield, looks at the tabletop. He straightens the cutlery. He takes a sip of black coffee. Nods.

  Do you hurt anybody?

  He doesn’t answer.

  She makes two fists, holds them before his face. Do you make harm on anybody?

  I go out of my way not to.

  You promise?

  Yeah.

  Fine, she says. Is all that matter to me.

  Willie doesn’t have a phone, and neither does Margaret, so they arrange their dates well in advance. They only go out late, very late, when there’s less chance of Willie being spotted, which suits Margaret. She already lives in a nighttime world. She comes to Willie’s room, or else he picks her up from her room at the other end of Brooklyn, and they hit an all-night diner, a jazz club, a movie theater.

  They both love movies. Willie feels safest when slouched low in a dark theater, his face in a bag of popcorn, and Margaret feels safest when she can lose herself in a soaring love story. There are many to choose from in 1951. Together they see A Streetcar Named Desire, An American in Paris, The African Queen. Margaret adores The African Queen. As the music rises and the credits roll, as the men and women in the theater crush their cigarettes under their heels and hurry toward the exit, Margaret touches Willie’s arm.

  Please, she says.

  He looks at her, smiles, eases back into his seat. Sure, he says. I guess I can take another trip down that river with Bogie and Kate.

  A
fter the second show they go for coffee. Margaret can’t stop talking about the movie. We are like them, she says.

  Who?

  Humphrey Bogie and Kathy Hepburns.

  Willie looks around the diner, to make sure no one is listening. She chides him. No one care my thoughts about Humphrey Bogie, she says.

  Sorry, Willie says. Force of habit. You were saying.

  They on their leaky boat, we on ours.

  I see. Yeah.

  Is them against the world. Is us too, Julius.

  Which one of us is Bogie?

  She laughs, reaches across the table, takes his hand. You look like Bogie.

  Willie twitches his lips, rolls his cigarette. Here’s looking at you kid.

  Her eyes widen. Julius, you just like him. You should be an actor.

  Nah.

  What this means, she asks—here is looking at you?

  Oh, he says. It’s an expression.

  But what it means?

  It means—here’s to you.

  She squints.

  It means cheers, Willie says. Sort of a toast. Like L’chaim!

  And what it means when Bogie says, Let us go while the going is good.

  Another expression. Figure of speech.

  But what it means?

  It means the bad guys are coming, the bad guys are about to kick in the door, let’s get out of here.

  But this expression—I don’t understand.

  It just means—now.

  Then why he does not say now? It take less time to say now. If he want to go when the good is going—

  Going is good.

  —then why he waste time with all these words? While he is so busy saying let us go now, the bad guys can be coming.

  Willie starts to laugh. A piece of pie goes down the wrong pipe. He coughs, laughs harder. His eyes fill with tears. Now Margaret laughs, and soon they’re both pointing at each other, wiping their eyes with paper napkins.

  Ah Margaret, I haven’t laughed in I don’t know how long.

  The waitress behind the counter stares.

  The waitress is looking, Willie whispers.

  Here’s looking at her, Margaret says.