A crunch of bone, like a dry branch cracking.
Bill twisted the ring off and flung the finger away.
Ruth was still screaming when he dumped her out of the van.
Bill started the engine and drove away. Now, once more, he gave a light peal of laughter.
8
Manhattan, 1922
“Mamma! Mamma!” Christmas ran into the little apartment on the first floor of 320 Monroe Street, where they’d been living for five years, ever since they’d left the windowless basement apartment where he’d grown up. “Mamma!” he cried out again, as a lost child might.
It was shortly after dawn.
Cetta had worked late, as she did every night. She was twenty-eight years old now and — given her age — she had changed professions. But not her schedule. She felt her son’s voice filter into her sleep. She turned over in bed, pushed her head under the pillow, pressing it over her ears, so as not to abandon the fantastic dream she was immersed in, a dream that had so little resemblance to her life.
“Mamma!” His voice was full of desperate urgency. “Mamma, wake up, please!”
Cetta opened her eyes in the dim little room.
“Mamma, come …”
Cetta got out of the bed that almost completely filled the room, together with an old dresser and a row of hooks against the wall. Christmas backed away, with his frightened eyes fixed on his mother, who was rubbing her own eyes. They went through the kitchen, where Christmas’ cot was against a half-wall near the stove. On their right was the entry door, which gave directly into the kitchen. Cetta closed it.
“What you want, this time of night? What time is it?”
Christmas didn’t answer; he flung his arms wide and hung his head.
The faint light in the room came from the window of the room that Cetta pompously called the parlor, a square room ten feet by ten feet. And in that feeble light Cetta saw that her son’s shirt was stained with blood.
“What they do to you?” she gasped, her eyes wide, suddenly wide-awake. She flung herself on her son, pressing her hand where she saw blood.
“No, Mamma — look here, Mamma …” Christmas said softly, turning towards the sofa in the parlor.
Cetta saw a pimply adolescent, with a face as frightened as her son’s, standing by the window. A girl was lying face down on the sofa. She had black curly hair and wore a white dress with blue-stripes on the sleeves and hem. All covered with blood.
“What you do to her?” cried Cetta, grabbing her son.
“Mamma …” Christmas’ eyes were full of tears. That he held back. “Mamma, just look at her.”
Cetta came over to the girl, took her by the shoulders, and turned her over. She let go of her for a second, stricken with horror. The girl didn’t have eyes, just two bruised lumps of dark and swollen flesh. Her upper lip was ripped. Two hard dark crusts of blood came out of her nose. She was barely breathing. Cetta turned to look at the other boy and then at her son.
“Mamma, we found her like that.” The childish tremor in Christmas’ voice was still there. “We didn’t know what to do, so I brought her here …”
“Holy Virgin,” said Cetta, turning her gaze to the girl again.
“Will she die?” Christmas asked softly.
“Girl, you can hear me?” said Cetta, putting her arm around the girl’s shoulders. “Bring glass of water,” she told her son. “No, whiskey. Under my bed …”
The girl seemed agitated, feebly pulling away.
“Be good, be good … hurry up, Christmas!”
Christmas ran to his mother’s cramped room and pulled a bottle of cheap whiskey out from under the bed. It was still half-full, purchased from an old lady in the building who knew some Mafia guys.
Seeing the bottle, or perhaps intuiting it through her bruised eyes, the girl grew more agitated.
“Be good,” said Cetta, uncorking the bottle.
The girl whimpered, tried to pull away; it seemed that she wanted to weep, but the tears were imprisoned behind her swollen empurpled eyelids. Slowly she lifted up her hand and showed it to Cetta. It was covered with blood. Her finger had been cut off neatly, above the first knuckle.
Cetta’s mouth opened, she covered her mouth, then her eyes with her hand, and then she embraced the girl, holding her gently against her breast. At last she picked up the bottle with decisiveness. “I have to hurt you, girl. Hurt you bad,” she said in a grave firm voice, and she poured whiskey on the stub of the finger.
The girl screamed. As her mouth opened, the scab on her upper lip broke and it began to bleed again.
Cetta looked lower down, where the skirt was pulled up. She saw more blood inside her thighs. With great gentleness, Cetta held the girl’s bloody face between her hands.
“I know what happen to you,” she said. “Keep still.”
And when she stood up from the divan, in her look there was a sorrow and hatred that she thought she had buried so deeply that she would never be able to exhume them. Her eyes were the eyes of the little girl from the Aspromonte, the child she had once been — raped and deflowered in a field of wheat — and about whom she had wanted to forget everything except Christmas. And her eyes were those of the stowaway passenger who had bartered passage to America for two weeks of rape by the ship’s captain. Now, suddenly, she could recall his face and his filthy hands with awful clarity. Cetta looked out with great ferocity through the eyes of a little girl.
She grabbed Christmas’ arm, and hustled him into her bedroom. She shut the door. Then she pointed her finger at his face. “You ever hurt a woman, then you not my son any more. I cut off your cock with my own hands and I slit you t’roat. And if I die, I come back from Hell to make you life a bad dream that never stop. You remember that always,” she said with such dark fury that Christmas was frightened.
She opened the door and went back to the parlor. “What you name, girl?” she asked.
“Ruth …”
Ruth, Christmas repeated to himself, in a kind of stupor.
“God bless you, Ruth,” and she made the sign of the cross on the girl’s forehead. “My son, he take you to hospital now.” She flung a blanket at Christmas. “Don’t let her get cold. Cover her up, so nobody see, specially down here. Doctor can see, nobody else.” She smoothed his blond forelock and kissed him on the cheek. “Go on, bambino mio.” She pulled him to her again and looked into his eyes. “Leave her at the hospital and come away, nobody believe people like us,” she told him in a serious and worried voice. At last she turned away from everyone and closed herself in her room. She curled up in her bed and pulled the pillow over her head again, trying not to hear the gasps of the men who had raped her so long ago.
Christmas carefully descended the narrow stairs of Sal Tropea’s tenement with Ruth in his arms, wrapped in the blanket, with Santo following.
“Do you want I should carry her for a while?” Santo offered after they’d gone several blocks. He reached out his arms to take the girl.
But Christmas, not knowing why, refused. Immediately, instinctively. “No, I found her,” he said. As if she were a treasure. And he kept walking. In his head he kept repeating “Ruth, Ruth,” as if that name had a special meaning.
A few blocks further on, Santo said worriedly, “You mother she say leave her in front of hospital …”
“I know,” gasped Christmas.
“… or else we could get in trouble …”
“I know.”
“Maybe somebody think we—”
“I know!” shouted Christmas.
Ruth whimpered.
“I’m sorry,” said Christmas to the girl, softly, confidingly, as if he’d known her forever. “Move her hair out of her face,” he told Santo. “But be gentle.”
He began to walk again. The sidewalks were crowded with working people on their way to jobs; young hoodlums who were already loitering; street vendors offering their trashy wares; grimy boys who were shouting out the headlines of the early morning papers. T
hey turned to look at the strange trio, with the curiosity of their natures and the detachment of their experience. A quick glance before they looked away again.
Christmas felt his arms growing stiff. He was sweating. He grimaced with effort, his lips parted and tight, teeth clenched, eyebrows meeting in a frown, and his gaze fixed on his destination, which by now was in sight.
“Lay her on the steps and then we go,” said Santo.
“Yeah, yeah …”
When he reached the first step, Christmas was afraid he was going to drop her. He didn’t have any strength left in his arms. “We’re here …, Ruth,” he murmured to her, bending his face close to hers and pronouncing her name with a special emotion, as if it meant something beyond itself.
Ruth smiled faintly. She tried to open her eyes.
Christmas thought they were green, like two emeralds, in the middle of all that clotted blood. And he thought he could see something inside them that no one else was able to see.
“Aw, put her down, come on, we gotta get outa here,” Santo pleaded.
But Christmas wasn’t listening. He was looking at the girl who was looking at him and trying to smile. The girl with emerald green eyes. “My name’s Christmas,” he told her and he let Ruth look into his own black eyes. He wanted to show her what he’d never let anyone else see.
Ruth opened her mouth slightly, as if she wanted to speak, but no words came. She moved her hand out from under the blanket and pressed it against his chest.
Christmas could feel the emptiness where her finger had been amputated. Again his eyes filled with tears. But he smiled. “It’s okay, Ruth, we’re here.”
“Oh shit, set her down and run for it!” moaned Santo.
“And now why would ye be runnin’?” asked a voice behind them.
The cop put a whistle to his lips and blew into it, hard, seizing Santo’s arm.
Christmas climbed the last steps as two nurses hurried out of the hospital. They tried to take the girl, but Christmas seemed to be defending her from an attack. Suddenly he seemed to have gone crazy, as if all the accumulated tension were exploding out of his throat. “No!” he shouted. “I’m carrying her! I have to carry her! Get her a doctor!”
The nurses blocked him. Another two nurses rushed out and lifted the girl in their arms. Another came out of the hospital with a stretcher. They laid her on it and disappeared inside.
“Her name is Ruth!” cried Christmas. He tried to follow her inside but was stopped. “Ruth!”
“Ruth what?” asked the policeman, a notebook in his hand.
“Ruth,” said Christmas, turning to him. The fury of a few minutes ago had left him suddenly — just as suddenly as it had come — and now he felt empty and exhausted. He saw Santo being loaded into a police car.
“What did ye do to her?” the cop asked him.
Christmas looked back at the hospital, not saying a word, as the policeman shoved him towards the car.
“We didn’t do nothin’,” cried Santo, on the verge of tears.
Christmas kept looking at the hospital as the car pulled away.
They were put in a cell to wait questioning. This was a slow day, not too crowded, one of the deputies told them, laughing. There were two black men in the cell. One of them had a deep knife cut on his cheek. In one corner, with a mad fixed stare, a blond guy who looked about thirty reeked of something like ammonia, and kept muttering incomprehensible words in an incomprehensible language was curled on the floor. And then there was a boy a couple of years older than Christmas, skeletally thin, with a pianist's long hands. The skin was unnaturally shiny, and he had two black eyes. He looked quick and knowing.
The boy pointed to the man in the corner and, “A Polack. He killed his wife. And five minutes ago he pissed himself,” then he shrugged and laughed.
“Why are you here?” Christmas asked him.
“Me? I’m a pickpocket. You?”
“Nothin’!” cried Santo, terrified. “We ain’t done nothin’!”
The boy laughed.
“We saved this girl from an enemy gang,” said Christmas.
“Well that was real nice a’ you. See what you got outa it.”
“If anybody hurts a woman, I’ll cut his prick off with my own hands and then I’ll slit his throat. That’s the rule in my gang,” said Christmas, taking one step towards the boy. “And if they kill me, I’ll come back from hell and make their life a nightmare that won’t ever end. Guys who beat up on women are cowards. That’s why I don’t give a fuck about bein’ here. I ain’t scared.”
The boy stared at him without speaking. Christmas didn’t blink, and then, carelessly, he rubbed a hand on his bloodstained shirt.
“What’s your name?” the boy asked him, with a trace of respect.
“I’m Christmas. He’s Santo.”
“Call me Joey.”
Christmas nodded, silently, as if that meant something, a sign of approval.
“Your gang got a name?”
Christmas jammed his hands in his pockets. It made him look arrogant. In his right pocket he felt a big nail he’d found in the street that morning; he’d picked it up to fasten the kitchen clothesline better. “You know how t’ read?” he asked Joey.
“Yeah.”
Christmas turned to Santo and gave him the nail. He tilted his head at the graffiti-covered wall. “Write our gang’s name,” he told him. “So they remember us. Write it big.”
Santo took the nail and dug it into the wall, scratching the letters. They showed white against the brown paint.
“Di … am … ond … D … ogs …” Joey spelled out painfully and then said it again, “Diamond Dogs.” He looked at Christmas. “Great,” he said.
9
Manhattan — Coney Island — Bensonhurst, 1910
Two things in this new world made a special impression on Cetta: the people, and the sea.
The city streets, especially in the poor neighborhoods, were constantly jammed with people. Cetta had never seen so many persons together. Two tenement buildings here could have held everyone in her village. And there were hundreds of building like that, just on the Lower East Side. People lived stacked up in houses, in rooms, on the street.
She couldn’t help touching them as she brushed past, or hearing what they said, or smelling the odors that came from their bodies, and their clothes. Cetta had never dreamed there were so many races, so many languages. She’s had no idea that men and women came in so many varieties — tall and short — in so many hues of eye color and hair. There were strong ones and feeble; innocents and cheats; great wealth and rank poverty, all mingling together. It was like Babel, just the way the priest had described it back in her village. Sometimes Cetta was afraid that the towers of this city, too, would someday crumble and fall. She had arrived in the city, she was learning to find her way through it, but sometimes she feared that all its people were going to go crazy, all of them, all at once, and that they’d start shrieking incomprehensible words no one would understand.
And now she was beginning to speak this difficult and fascinating language, so soft and rounded. The only language her American son would ever know.
“You mustn’t talk Italian with Christmas,” Tonia and Vito Fraina told her. Nor did she herself speak her own language with the old couple who more and more seemed to be her family. The world beyond the ocean didn’t exist for Cetta. She had erased it with a simple act of will. With a thought. There was no longer any past. There was only this city, this new world. This would be her son’s homeland.
There were days when the streets frightened her. And there were other days when Cetta wandered aimlessly, mouth agape, watching cars blare their horns at horse drawn carts, gazing at her own reflection in the windows of dress shops or bakeries; tilting her nose to the sky, looking with amazement at the pylons and arches and steel cables of the newly built Manhattan Bridge rising out of the water, linking island mainland, miraculously suspended over the East River. Sometimes she felt suffo
cated in the narrow dark alleys strewn with trash, where people stank of garbage; or she might feel the intoxication of the great avenues where women gave off the scent of exotic flowers, and men smelt of Cuban cigars. But wherever she went there were people, so many people that no one could count them. So many that you might never meet the same person twice even if he lived in your building. So many that the city didn’t have a horizon.
And maybe that was why, after so much wandering and exploration in the city, with Christmas in her arms — because he needed to get used to this new world as soon as possible — Cetta had been surprised to discover the sea.
Surely she knew she was on an island; she must have known the sea was there, she of all people, having come there on a ship from across the ocean. The city had made her forget about the sea. Perhaps it was the endless noise, or the cement that was everywhere she looked. Or perhaps, the sea seemed unimportant compared with the city and its swarming inhabitants.
One minute there were buildings all around; the next thing she knew there was an open prospect. She was in Battery Park, with its tidy flowerbeds. And just beyond them was the sea. From there she’d followed a vociferating crowd, and she’d seen the ferryboat landing. Sailors, and women and children were all buying tickets. And across there — the posters and the signs said so — beyond the water, beyond the other endless world known as Brooklyn, was the amusement island. Without even knowing why, Cetta found herself standing in line, waiting to buy a ticket to Coney Island. She paid for it and, swept along by the crowd, looked out over the sea wall as an enormous ferry came noisily into its berth. Other people were shoving past her into the belly of the iron whale. Suddenly Cetta was fearful. What if she couldn’t find her way back to the Frainas’ windowless room and the brothel where she sold her body to strangers? She stood off to one side, with the ticket in her hand; watching the hawsers fall back into the water. She’d heard the roar of the ferryboat’s engines as they sent up bright heavy foam. And as the ferry moved off, another one came to the landing. The two metal monsters exchanged sounds, making their sirens howl, greeting one another, almost touching. Now a new noisy crowd was already gathering. Cetta looked at the sea one last time. It wasn’t really blue or green, but dark and iridescent like petroleum. It didn’t look like the sea. She hurried away, full of fear and excitement, clutching Christmas, and the ticket to Coney Island.
The Boy Who Granted Dreams Page 5
