by Maurer, Dan
From a standing position on one of the chairs, and with all the strength left in my legs, I sprang at George, pounding my fists into his face.
What happened next made me the luckiest bastard in the world. I fully expected that he would catch me and I’d be done. But just as my weight hit him, George took a step back to brace himself. Instead of the firm linoleum, he stepped on the Namath issue of Sports Illustrated and his foot slid out from under him. With my fists pounding him and the full weight of my body on top of him, George went down hard, his head slamming against the floor.
Heart still racing and body still reacting, I rolled, jumped up and raced for the door. Two seasons of playing both sides of the line in the Blackwater Pop Warner football league taught me to ignore the pain of a big hit and keep going. There was always time to cry later.
With George on the floor, I lunged for the door to throw it open, but it was locked! Frantic, I twisted at the knob, rattled the door, turned the dead bolt key.
It wouldn’t open!
Somewhere in the distance an alarm went off – a buzzing sound. It came from outside, but it was persistent and familiar. There was a buzzing in my head, in my ears. I was screaming. The door was unlocked, but it wouldn’t open, and I couldn’t understand why, and now there was an alarm to match my screaming.
That’s when I saw it; through the window on the outside of the door, there was a new lock, its shackle threaded through a hasp that had been bolted to the door. The landlord had padlocked the door in case the dead–beat Mr. Schneider returned for his equipment. This horrible realization exploded in my mind, but still, there was no giving up. The buzzing disappeared from my head and my ears and a singular thought now flooded my mind.
Break the glass!
I knew just how to do it, too – the flying elbow drop. Frank and I had seen Bruno Sammartino do it a million times in the Friday night wrestling matches on Channel 9. Set your legs, turn your upper body away, raise your right arm above your left ear, uncoil, put your body weight into it, and slam the elbow home. I had suffered plenty of bruises from Frank’s practiced demonstrations.
But as I raised my arm and turned my body, George was on me. He grabbed me by the coat; my feet left the ground. I was weightless, then sailing across the room into one of the barber’s chairs. The arm of the chair slammed into my ribs and both I and the chair went sprawling on the floor. The wind knocked out of me, I gasped for breath as George circled around to stand between me and the back door of the shop, now my only escape. I clawed and scrambled to get off my knees, grabbing hold of the shelf below the barber’s mirror. I pulled myself up, raggedly and blindly, sending the scissors and combs and glassware and Barbicide spilling everywhere. I was holding onto that shelf like a prize fighter using the ropes to stave off a ten count. My back was to George, but I didn’t care anymore. In fact, it was best. That way he couldn’t see what I was doing.
George, too, was out of breath, and his anger was only slightly assuaged by having taken back the upper hand. His confidence was growing.
“You’re done, kid,” he wheezed as he came closer.
I could see him clearly enough in the mirror, a hulking figure in the shadows, inching closer, chest heaving, eyes squinting with pain and exhaustion and fury. As he emerged from the shadows into the pale light thrown by the street lamp, I could see his face clearly for the first time. It was jowly and deeply lined. Beads of sweat gleamed in the lamp light and pasted his shaggy white hair to his scalp. His heaving breaths were sucked in through yellow-tinged teeth with a slight gap between his front incisors.
My body ached, but my head was clear now. Only one thought ran through my mind: I pray he doesn’t hear this.
Snick!
As George extended his hand to grab my shoulder, I wheeled around and brought the blade of Luigi’s ivory handled straight razor across his reaching hand. The razor gleamed as it caught the light from the street lamp and seemed to explode like a white flame. I could see and feel the razor enter and cleave open his flesh as it flashed across his outstretched fingers.
My grip on the handle slipped. As it dug into the bones of George’s fingers, the blade slid back and pushed into my own. A burning pain radiated into my hand. I released the ivory handled blade and it flew across the floor, sliding into the shadows.
George screamed and whipped his hand back like he’d been burned with a torch. Blood spattered across the barber’s mirror in heavy streaks that began to run down the glass. The blood. God, the blood; his and mine. I’d never seen so much blood in my life. Mine was just seeping but his was spraying and gushing. He fell back against the mirror and the shelf and sent the remaining instruments there crashing to the floor.
“Son of a whore! Oh, God!” George shouted.
Something caught my eye, and I realized we weren’t alone. The back of the shop was shrouded in darkness where the street lamp’s light couldn’t reach, but I could tell that someone stood at the threshold to the back hall. Tommy?
No, it was someone else, someone big.
“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhh!” George was screaming. His rage rose to a feverish pitch. He trembled as he used the shelf for leverage to push himself up from one knee. His eyes flashed furor as he finally reached his feet and took a step toward me.
That’s when the large figure in the shadows stepped forward and brought something down hard on the back of George’s head. The blow made George’s brain slosh against the inside of his skull and he went down, lying still among the bloody magazines, the spilled Barbicide, and the broken glass and instruments that littered the floor.
11
I STOOD OUTSIDE THE BACK DOOR OF THE BARBERSHOP. It was over, and Tommy was gone, no doubt having run home. While wiping George’s blood from my mouth with a barber’s towel, I grabbed a handful of snow in my bleeding right hand. The ice was soothing, but the bleeding, though slowed, was gradually turning the snowball in my fist red.
Meanwhile, Mr. Deluca’s driver dragged a groggy George, bleeding and stumbling, past me into the parking lot. As he did, I looked up at the windows of the surrounding apartments; still no prying eyes. After all that screaming George had done in the barbershop, there was nothing from the neighbors; not even a nosy grandmother to peek through the shades.
I should have recognized the driver when I saw him in the Columbia; if not for the crew cut or his barrel-chested physique, then certainly for the ugly Lindsey Nelson sport coat he wore. Surely, that should have set the bell ringing. But I barely took notice of him on the ball field where he always wore dark sunglasses, so I guess it’s no surprise that his face seemed familiar, yet never clicked.
As I stood there, watching him drag George out, a sick feeling overwhelmed me. This was Mr. Deluca’s friend, the one who drove him to our Little League games and practices, never missing one. I began to think there would be no keeping this from my mother, no escaping her wrath.
“Who the hell are you?” George whined to the driver. “Let go!”
But the driver didn’t ease his grip. He just dragged George out to the lot and turned him toward me, making sure his face was illuminated by the sodium arc light that shone down on us. George’s hand was wrapped in a blood-soaked barber towel and held with his other hand close to his chest, like a cradled infant. His complexion was made pale by the combination of blood loss and the yellow tint of the arc light. Deep-lined features cut shadows in his face.
All night I had seen George as large and menacing, but suddenly, now, in the light, he just seemed old.
When George squirmed, the driver wrapped his meaty fist around coils of the old man’s shaggy white hair and jerked his head back hard.
“Let me go,” George said through clenched teeth. “This isn’t your business!”
The driver stabbed his heel in to the back of George’s left knee and the old man went down hard. I don’t know if it was his kneecap splitting, or the ice below it breaking, but I could hear an audible crack when he hit the ground. He let out a short, ga
sping scream of pain, and his hissing and complaining returned to whining and writhing.
“Shut up, you old perve,” the driver said. His voice was calm and quiet, almost disconnected.
Mr. DeLuca’s driver finally turned to me and asked: “You know this guy, Billy?”
Billy. He said my name. I’m not just one of Mr. Deluca’s kids to him. He knows me.
For two seasons the man in the Lindsey Nelson sport coat came to all of our practices and all of our games, but never once did he speak to any of us – not me, not any of my teammates, not a word. But he knew my name, and he spoke it now. Despite probably breaking ol’ George’s kneecap and holding his life in one powerful hand like Rudy’s Pinocchio marionette, he spoke it with the casual tone of an uncle at the family Christmas Party strolling up behind me and asking how the Vikings were doing.
I looked away, not wanting to be a part of this, not wanting to know this man, or have him know me any more than he already did. I wished I could just disappear, just erase everything, just bury it – not only this horrible night, but the driver’s very knowledge of me. That’s what children do. They wish and hope and close their eyes to their fears – parents too, sometimes. But that never makes them go away, not really, not ever.
“Billy?” he calmly asked again.
My hand still throbbed, despite the ice I held. I turned my eyes from the bloody snowball in my hand to the now whimpering and prostrate old man, and finally to the driver.
“No.”
“That’s what I thought,” the driver said. He dragged the old man ten feet across the snowy surface of the parking lot, making a trail in the slushy snow, until they both stopped behind the boot of a Lincoln Town Car. With George’s hair still gripped in one hand, the driver began rummaging in the pocket of his trousers with the other hand. When he did this, his jacket fell open slightly, revealing the fat handle of a pistol nestled snuggly in a leather holster and secured in the shadows beneath his armpit.
This was a night of many firsts; seeing a real gun was another for me. I stared at it, figuring the shiny wet spot on the handle probably came from the back of ol’ George’s head.
He saw me watching him and stopped.
“Billy,” he said. “You should go home and take care of that hand.”
Exhaustion and confusion had stolen my voice; my body, for the moment, was not my own.
“I’ll clean up. It’s what I do,” he added. “Go on, now. I’ll see you next season. And Billy...” He paused to make sure his next words carried weight. “I wouldn’t tell your mom about this. She wouldn’t understand. Know what I mean?”
I nodded.
“Good.” Then he waited, not saying anything more.
I walked past them both and headed toward the parking lot entrance on Columbia Avenue. I glanced back over my shoulder and saw the driver finally fish out a ring of keys, slide one into the cylinder on the trunk and pop open the lid. When it hinged open, the glow from the arc light above spilled in, just a bit. The trunk was empty, and though it was dark, even from where I stood I could see it was lined with a sheet of plastic.
I turned away for good and headed for the street. As I reached Columbia Avenue and heard the trunk of the Lincoln slam behind me, I understood that I had been wrong. My mother would never learn about tonight, not from the driver. As long as Tommy kept his mouth shut, she would never have to know about how I found the boy in the cellar, my encounter with ol’ George, or Mr. Deluca’s driver, or what happened in the barbershop. Even Mr. Deluca might never learn what happened, though looking back now, if he had, he might have just moved me up in the line-up.
12
I DIDN’T GO DIRECTLY HOME. First, I needed a reason for having ignored the dinner bell, an inexcusable offense in our family. Some story would be required, something to assuage my mother’s anger and minimize the yelling and potential punishment that were sure to come. But most importantly, I needed to get cleaned up before my mother saw me. The blood on my face and hands and coat were hard to miss. I looked like an escapee from a Hammer film.
I decided that my best option would be to circle around the block, slip into our backyard and around to the path between our house and the Schneiders’ and hope that our side door – the door hidden by shadows – would be unlocked. It was. I eased the door open, just a crack, and listened. No sound from the kitchen at the top of the stairs; that was good.
I slipped in the side door, shutting it softly, and then toed off my boots; easy peasy when you’re wearing foot condoms. Then I lowered my aching body lightly and silently down the steps into our finished basement. It was empty. I hurried across what had been my father’s man-cave, with its 18-inch color television set and Barcalounger, then through the door to a small, unfinished work room at the back of the basement. This was where my father once kept his tools and his paints, and where, propped in the corner, still stood a bundle of old fishing rods that he hadn’t touched since child number three came into the world.
I used my father’s paint-stained utility sink and some old rags to clean up. First I rinsed the blood from my mouth and hands. Despite swooshing water around in my mouth like Listerine, there were still bits of George’s flesh stuck in my gums and between my teeth. I dislodged them with the tip of my tongue, picked them out of my mouth with my fingertips, and flicked them into the sink.
I ran the cold tap water over my hands and examined them. The cut on the palm of my left hand from the Grandville’s bumper was jagged, but small and superficial. The cut on my right hand from Luigi’s razor ran across three fingers. It was one clean, straight line, but it was deeper and more concerning, and I hoped I wouldn’t need stitches. My hands trembled as I ran water over them. It was soothing and the pain began to fade as the stream sent thin trails of watery blood into the sink to mix with dried streaks of Dutch Boy’s best. On the whole, the cuts on my hands weren’t all that bad to look at, but they were still a little swollen and red. I knew that when I went upstairs I would have to keep them in my pockets when I spoke to my mother, just to be safe.
I soaked an old paint rag and washed the blood from my coat as best I could, then hung my coat on a peg in the basement beside Frank’s and Rudy’s. Once presentable, I headed upstairs. My mind worked to shape a plausible lie for my delinquency, polishing it carefully as I mounted each tread on the staircase up to the kitchen. To this day, I can’t remember what the story was because I never got to spin it.
As I approached the top of the stairs, something felt wrong. A cold breeze came down from the kitchen, along with a strange, but familiar noise that sounded like static from a radio.
When I entered the empty kitchen, I looked out and down the hall where I had a clear view through the living room to the foyer and the front door, which was wide open to the January air. The static-rich chatter of a police cruiser’s radio drifted in from the street, while red and blue beams of light from the cruiser’s rooftop flashed into our foyer in a circular, pulsing rhythm. My mother wore make-up and had her hair done up. I later learned from Frank that she had planned to go to a Catholic Club dinner that night at Bobby’s parents’ house. There was a widower in the group that took a shine to her and she wanted to look good for him. She was wearing her brown knit sweater over a beige dress and her arms were folded across her chest to help cut the cold night air. She spoke to a police officer who stood on the porch just outside the front door.
The officer held something in his hand. It was my tattered knit glove, the one I’d left hanging from the bumper of the Pontiac Grandville down on Woodlawn Avenue.
13
MY MOTHER BEAT MY ASS with every ounce of her strength. She was too angry to waste time looking for the wooden spoon, so I guess she decided her bare hands would do. I just laid there silently on my bed, face down, wrapping my hands around my pillow, clutching it to my chest, burying my face deep inside it, bracing myself. She began with one hand, swinging it high over her head and bringing it down with all her force again, and again.
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“I told you to never go off the block!” she shouted. “Never go off the block! You could have been killed!”
Soon she was putting all her weight into it; then it became two hands; and soon those hands were clenched into fists, pounding fists that landed blow after blow on to my unprotected rear end – Pow-Pow, Pow-Pow.
But I swear to God I didn’t care, not a bit. This one was definitely well-earned; bought and paid for. I had ordered up the deluxe package.
Keep it coming. I deserve this one, I thought as she pounded away on my tail. It’s okay. I’m safe, I’m breathing, I’m in one piece, George is gone, the boy in the cellar is gone, the driver is gone. I’m safe. I’m safe.
Sometimes pain is a good thing. It reminds you that you’re alive.
My mother’s fists were jack-hammering on my rear end. Soon, she was crying. Her tears mixed with her mascara and drew jagged black lines down her face while she flogged me with her bare hands. Her hair escaped the bobby pins she’d used and strands fell about her face. Her unruly hair whipped about as her head bobbed with each successive blow. The yelling was gone. There was only the sobbing and the beating.
In time, she slowed. The tears overtook her; she sat on the floor beside my bed and sobbed. I don’t know how long she sat there because I soon slipped into a deep, impenetrable sleep.
• • •
I woke eight hours later.
Just as I looked over, the Panasonic flip clock on the dresser I shared with Frank turned its leaves. It read 3:00 AM. Frank lay sleeping in his bed on the other side of the room; his breathing deep and steady. Both my hands were bandaged. After unloading all her fear and rage and love and humiliation on me, my mother had returned to wash and bandage my wounds, which she assumed both came from the car accident. I noticed, too, that my pillow felt different. In the soft glow of the night light that had illuminated our bedroom since birth, I saw my pillow case in the corner. It was streaked with blood where my hands had been clutching it and it sat on top of a pile of dirty laundry, waiting to be carried downstairs to the washing machine. My pillow was now covered in a fresh pillow case and it smelled of fabric softener.
