He leans against the thick, cold glass of the door and watches Pretzel cross the avenue, the streetlights illuminating the parka he bought him just last week. He could have bought a better one, had in fact planned to, but at the last moment he’d changed his mind. An expensive coat would have put things on a different level. All he really wanted was that the kid shouldn’t freeze. It wasn’t a gift, not really. Just essentials, that’s all. But when he thinks of all the nice coats he could have bought him, an empty feeling scrapes his gut, and he feels tireder still.
When Pretzel has crossed the street, Ronnie comes over to him. “All right, man,” he says, “Let’s do it.”
“I changed my mind,” he tells him.
“You ain’t changing nothing. Where is it?”
“You heard me. I got something to do.”
Ronnie reaches to put a hand in his pocket, but Pretzel smacks it away.
“What’s the matter?”
“Why’d you even come back here?”
“I live here.” Ronnie grins broadly, exposing gums that have begun to recede.
“We got no business.”
Ronnie nods, taking in the situation.
“Don’t even try it,” says Pretzel, turning away.
Suddenly he finds himself thrown up against the hard brick of a building, Ronnie’s hand clamped against his throat. He gasps for breath, forgets the twenty dollars in his pocket, forgets Fishman and Johnny Bigelow and the money orders. His vision clouded by tears, he summons all his strength and kicks out straight and high, aiming right between Ronnie’s legs.
Ronnie falls back astonished, and for a moment the two stand facing each other like wrestlers, each waiting for the other to move. Then Ronnie reaches into his boot and takes out a small kitchen knife.
A crowd has begun to gather, but they keep their distance. Across the street, Pretzel is aware of Fishman’s face, framed in the window, watching. He should run, he thinks, run and keep running, but something makes him stand his ground. An empty MD 20/20 bottle lies next to the curb and he grabs it, busts the end off against the side of the building. The glass cuts the side of his hand, but he can’t feel the pain, only the wetness of the blood on his hand.
Everywhere, people are watching him, waiting. In his state of mind, Pretzel forgets who he is, where he is, the fact that he does not even have the money. Eyes peer out from doorways, from the windows of the burnt-out buildings, and the street is filled with a sound of deeply drawn breath that may or may not be his own. The noise grows in intensity until it is a rumble, then a roar in his ears not unlike the crowd at a Knicks game, or the sound of the ocean. Ronnie comes at him, knife held low. The noise is deafening now, and shouting as loud as he can to drown it out, Pretzel swings high toward Ronnie’s face, feels himself connect with the side of his head, feels for just a moment a wonderful satisfaction, as if he has solved an impossible math problem. Then a bright comet of pain in his side as the knife enters almost effortlessly, his head seems to come untethered from his body, and the sound suddenly goes away.
It takes a moment for Fishman to realize what is happening. He grabs the telephone and dials 911, shouting to the dispatcher to hurry. There have been muggings and fights out here before, even a shooting, and Fishman has always lowered the gates and waited until it is over. But this is Pretzel, and he can do nothing but watch in horror.
Fishman’s view is blocked by the onlookers suddenly moving forward, and it is nearly a minute before he can see again. Pretzel is lying curled on the ground, his attacker gone. Almost as if they knew how long to wait, the police appear, stopping traffic and holding back the people. One of them comes over and knocks on the glass. Fishman unlocks.
“You saw what happened?” asks the cop.
“That’s Pretzel,” he says quietly. “He works for me.” Big Larry has stepped into the office too. He walks around picking up staplers and putting them down.
“The other one?”
Fishman shakes his head. “He tried to mug him. Pretzel was returning twenty dollars to one of my clients. He was protecting the money.” Shaken, he sits. “Twenty dollars,” he says.
“A mugging?” says the cop skeptically. “Sure doesn’t look like a mugging to me.”
“What else?” asks Fishman.
“I don’t know. Just seems like a hell of a lot of trouble to go to over twenty dollars. Your employees really that loyal?”
“Is he all right?”
The cop shakes his head. “Hard to say. EMS are checking him out now. He got knifed, hit his head too. Think your boy might have been on drugs?”
“Not Pretzel, no way.”
“Well, we’ll know soon enough. But don’t fool yourself. These kids, they’re all into something.”
Big Larry drops a stapler and bends to pick it up. The cop points a finger at his chest.
“What about you, old man? You know anything about this?”
“Known ’em both since they was little.”
“OK pal,” says the cop, “You just won a free trip back to the precinct.”
As he is led out the door, Big Larry looks back at Fishman and grins. “I’m a doctor,” he tells him. “I’m a lawyer. I got thousands.”
Across the street, behind the locked doors of his pharmacy, Fishman can see Eps in his white jacket, staring out on the scene.
Fishman sits for a long time in his car before he gets up the nerve to go to the door. Pretzel’s mother answers, and from the expression on her face, he can see that she already knows.
“I’m sorry,” he tells her. He fingers the envelope in his pocket, but does not take it out.
“You don’t have to be, mister. I raised me one bad child. The Lord balance everything out in the end.”
They stand in silence for a moment, and then Fishman asks, “May I come in?”
She nods and he steps inside, greeted by the calming scent of old, worn furniture, varnished wood floors, and a subtle hint of cleaning fluid. Everything immaculate and in its place, a cut glass candy dish full of M&M’s on the table in front of the sofa. He sits.
“I only have a few minutes,” she says. “My girlfriend is coming to give me a ride to the hospital. Would you like some coffee? Or a soda?”
“No thank you.”
“My husband done his tax with you.”
Fishman strains to remember, but cannot.
“Years ago,” she says.
“We’re none of us getting any younger.”
“I want to thank you for the coat you bought my boy.”
“It’s nothing,” says Fishman, embarrassed. “He’s a good worker.”
“He thinks a lot of you, too.”
“Look, there’s going to be hospital bills,” says Fishman. “I want to help.” He pulls out the stack of money from his pocket, the day’s receipts that Pretzel never got to take to Eps.
“No,” she says. “This ain’t no charity case. What those two boys done they done by themselves. You just put that away.”
Embarrassed, he begins to, but a thought strikes him, and he wonders why he didn’t think of it before.
“Pretzel was working for me at the time of the fight—running an errand. He was injured on the job.”
The doorbell rings. “Well,” she says, “I suppose you know better than I do.”
“Technically, I’m responsible.” It is as if a light has been turned on somewhere in his head. He puts the money back in his pocket and takes out a business card. “You’ll send me the medical bills. This is my home number. Please, let me know as soon as you find out how he is.”
Fishman watches Pretzel’s mother drive off with her friend, then gets in his own car. He sits for a minute, watching the drops of water gather slowly in front of him on the windshield, then under their collective weight, slide smoothly down the glass. His body feels tired and battered, as if he himself has been through some kind of fight this evening. Across the street he sees a man in torn and ill-fitting clothes with a tall, knit cap on, coming dru
nkenly toward him. Fishman locks his door and starts the engine, just as the man reaches the car. The man is trying the door as Fishman pulls out, and he very nearly knocks him over. A couple of yards further and a bottle smashes his back window, but Fishman does not stop. He drives as quickly as he can through the blocks and blocks of row houses, and on out to the expressway that will take him home to wait for the news.
ERIN AND MALCOLM
Erin was in her stage clothes. Her black hair hung Chinese-style in a sharp curtain around her jaw, two inches shorter on the left. The haircut was new, but Malcolm hadn’t said anything. The rest of her outfit was what she always wore: tight leather skirt, fishnet stockings, white tank top under a ripped jeans jacket, and enough bracelets to fill a shoe box. From one of her shoulders her pet ferret, Rizzo, eyed Malcolm with apparent contempt.
“I need the keys to the van,” she said.
Malcolm got up and dug them out of the pocket of his other jeans. “Where are you playing tonight?”
“Brothers.” Erin held out her hand, palm up.
“Are they paying anything yet?”
“Four.” She twisted her nose as if this figure were of little consequence to her. “It’s a hundred more than last time.”
He tossed her the keys. “Just be careful. I noticed a scratch on the fender yesterday.”
“It’s not my fault. You know I’m a good driver.”
“I’m just saying be careful is all.”
She reached up and adjusted an earring, Rizzo slinking over to the other shoulder as she did so, then crouched down to Malcolm’s level and looked out across the street at the hotel window he had been watching. A fat man in a T-shirt was standing with his hands on his hips. A woman passed in front of him and out of sight. “You’re awful,” she said. “What are they doing over there?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “What do you think they’re doing?”
“Something strange. The guy is probably some kind of fetish. He wants her to lick his ankles, but she won’t go for it.”
“A person can’t be a fetish,” Malcolm told her. “You can have one, but you can’t be one.”
“All right,” she said, standing. “You know what I meant.”
When she was gone he went into the living room and took out his bass. It was the Fender Precision he’d bought just after marrying Erin, with money her father had given them for a wedding present. The finish was worn to the wood in many places, and it had acquired a lacquer of beer smell and cigarette smoke from fourteen months of nights in roadhouses and rock clubs. That was how long Malcolm had played in Erin’s band while still keeping his contracting business going days. Then, six months ago, when he was renovating an apartment downtown, the circular saw he was using caught something in the wood and hopped into the V between his thumb and left forefinger, spattering blood and severing a tendon. He’d tied his shirt around it and walked, cursing, to the hospital.
The band hired a new bass player. Malcolm, his hand bandaged and unlikely ever really to be the same, had to watch their growing success from the other side of the stage. A friend of his in Vermont who was into some new variant of EST had told him everything that happens to you, you make happen—even little things like busy signals on the telephone, or headaches. Often he wondered what he had been thinking about just before he’d sawed into his hand. He tried to replay the event, but there was just gray space.
Hooking up a strap, he slipped the bass around his neck, plugged in to the ancient Ampeg that stood mute next to the stereo, turned it on and watched its tubes begin to glow. From his usual spot atop the television, curled around the antenna, Rizzo watched. Malcolm didn’t care for the animal, or for the way Erin treated it. She’d bought the thing after the band started to do well, as a kind of lifestyle prop. To Malcolm, Rizzo represented everything about Erin that had changed lately—all the tacky theatrics. It was the same night she’d brought him home that she’d told Malcolm she needed to be by herself.
Something had gone wrong—he could see it in the way she looked at him over her morning bowl of cereal, and the way she didn’t as she peeled herself out of her lycra pants and leopard shirts at night. Without ever actually discussing the problem, or even admitting to one, they’d sought remedies. Erin talked for a while about having a lesbian affair. Together, they’d made a serious attempt at vegetarianism. One Saturday night when the band was idle, they’d rented some porno movies, got drunk, and tried to watch them, but Erin only found them hilarious. Finally, by unspoken agreement, they’d given up. Erin brought Rizzo home and laid down the new rules. So, that’s what they were doing now, living in the same place, being by themselves.
There was no single moment you could trace it to, not even the accident with the saw. Rather, it had been a steady process. It was how things happened, Malcolm thought, as he thumped a string and listened to the sound grow in the speaker. Not suddenly, the way you expected them to, but in increments and shadings you could never quite put your finger on.
Malcolm had about ten grand invested in the van and the PA system, which the band continued to use. In return, Erin paid the rent. Malcolm watched a lot of television these days, sitting coldly in front of the screen with a Big Buckeroo dart gun in his hand, firing point-blank at sitcoms with their smiling husbands and career-girl wives. A teacher of his had once explained the theory of an expanding universe as a raisin cake baking in an oven, with the raisins remaining in one place while everything around them moved outward at equal speed. This was just how he felt—immobile, like a raisin.
He popped a cassette into the tape deck and the room filled with crowd noises, the clatter of beers being set down, a jumble of voices. Then the sound of a guitar string being tuned to pitch, and suddenly the whole band slamming into gear. Forcing his fingers against the strings, Malcolm banged along. He liked playing to these old tapes, but didn’t do it when Erin was around. If he closed his eyes, it was almost like being there all over again. He had the tapes memorized, even the little screwups, the missed beats, the wrong notes. They didn’t bother him anymore. He had heard them so often that when they came up, they seemed like old friends.
Usually, Rizzo left the room when Malcolm started to play, curling himself up on Erin’s bed. But this evening he arced his back and hopped off the television onto the floor, where he stood looking at him.
“Rodent,” said Malcolm. He cranked the volume on the bass, hoping to drive him out of the room. Rizzo traced a figure eight on the floor, then hopped back up onto the television by way of the empty box from the CD player Erin had just bought. Malcolm went over to the amp and turned it up to six. He could hear the thing humming. He shut all the doors leading out of the room and turned off the tape deck, then faced Rizzo and smiled. “How y’all feeling tonight?” he said. “Anybody want to rock and roll?”
He hit an open A that shook the floorboards, and the effect on the ferret was visible. His hair seemed to puff out an inch on all sides, and he drew himself back into a question mark.
Malcolm sang as loud as he could, “I said, Hey, bartender . . .”
Rizzo was now flat against the wall, looking nervously around for an escape. Malcolm began a boogie bass line that was so loud a phantom rhythm section of pots and pans began shivering in accompaniment from the kitchen. The animal hopped back and forth, almost as if to the music, but in obvious distress. It wasn’t enough volume for Malcolm. Backing up to the amplifier, he spun the knob to ten.
“I want you all to put your hands together for this one,” he said. He went over to Rizzo and held the instrument practically in front of his nose.
It was only one note, and it only lasted a second, but the sound was like a bomb going off. The apartment lights flickered for a moment. Then the speaker expired with a tired raspberry, and a panicked Rizzo, fearing for his life, first sunk his teeth into the back of Malcolm’s hand, then hopped up onto the stereo system and from there, out the open window.
“Damn,” said Malcolm, grabbing at his re-
injured hand. He went to the window and looked down to see where Rizzo had landed, but the animal was nowhere in sight. Fifteen feet below was another roof that jutted out from the side of the building, covered with garbage: old boxes, empty cans and bottles, a rotting mattress. From there it was another forty feet or so to the ground, an alley that ran behind the building.
He held his hand under his armpit and wondered what to do. It hadn’t occurred to him that there might be consequences to his actions. He wondered if he could tell Erin Rizzo had jumped for no reason at all. She would never believe it. But it wasn’t necessarily his fault. And besides, the little bastard had bitten him. He was probably going to contract some horrible ferret disease. He imagined his arm swelling up like a long black balloon, the kind magicians twist into animals at parties.
He went into the kitchen, ran hot water over his hand, and taped some gauze over it. Then he hunted through the cabinets, finally settling on a can of tuna, which he opened and brought back to the window. “Here, little buddy,” he said. “I’ve got something for you.”
He waved the can in the air to spread its aroma, then called out again, directing his words to the deteriorating clumps of trash below. “Come on, I’ve got some nice tuna here.” It felt idiotic to be talking this way. He thought of Erin and how she held long conversations with Rizzo as he sat on her shoulder, feeding him morsels of cheese and rubbing his small, weasel nose with her finger.
“I’m sorry,” he tried again. “I was just fooling around.” He looked above him and saw a man standing at a window, watching. Malcolm smiled, then pulled his head back in. He stuck the can of tuna in the refrigerator, pulled on his boots, and went out.
Dangerous Men Page 11
