“Another score for the house,” the counterman said. Everybody laughed.
Angela and Mario ate calamare with number-one sauce and a side order of linguine. The linguine was slick with olive oil, and the bottom of the bowl was covered with clams and parsley. Italians being immune to sauce, they happily swallowed the calamare. The counterman wrote out the check and put it on the counter and Mario reached for the watch pocket. Her hand stopped him.
“Now, don’t be silly,” she said.
“Oh, no,” he said.
“I said.”
She picked up the check and went through her purse and paid. They left and she guided him by the elbow around the corner to Ferrara’s, which has show windows that take up half the block. The windows are filled with speckled cookies and pastries that have cream coming out of both ends. Inside, brilliant lights glare from the ceiling and come off the mirrored walls and spill onto the white tile floor and polished tabletops. The place smells of whipped cream and coffee. They ordered cappuccino, heavily creamed coffee that froths at the top of the glass, and cannoli, which are filled with thick rum cream.
“Now tell me,” she said.
“With the painting?”
“Yes.”
“It must come from here.” He held his hands to his stomach. “It must come from me. There is nothing to put down if it does not come from me. There is no way for this to happen at home. We eat chipmunks in Catanzia. You must spend too much time hunting them to be an artist.”
“Chipmunks! Still?” she said.
“Oh, and dandelions. Or the good grass,” he said.
“Oh, really now,” she said.
“No, it is true,” he said. When he saw how she was reacting, he thought of saying he had a brother who died because he had no food.
“When are you going to do any painting here?” she said.
“Tomorrow maybe,” he said.
“I’d like to see what you do, but I have school all day. Then I have to go right home.”
“You could come another day,” he said. The picture of his hotel room came into his mind again. There were, his instinct told him, great resources in anybody who seemed to like him and was this beautiful. But Mario’s mind operated one step at a time, and his vision of a future with Angela consisted of her in his hotel room.
“What other day?” she said. “You have the race.”
He shrugged.
“I’ll see you at the race, and when it’s all over I’ll come and watch you paint,” she said. “You’ll be at the race?” he said.
“Every night,” she said.
She paid the check on the way out and walked to the subway with him. She pointed to the entrance for the uptown trains. She started to walk across the street to the Brooklyn train entrance and then she turned around and came back. “Do you have change for the subway?” she said.
Mario said yes.
She said, “Let me see to be sure you’ve got the right change.”
He showed her his silver. She nodded and went to the subway. When her head disappeared down the stairs, Mario put his hand into the watchpocket and began looking for a taxi. The hundred-dollar bill was still intact. He decided to keep it that way. When the taxi got him to the hotel, the doorman held the door and Mario took out his change. There wasn’t enough. He looked at the doorman. “You put it on my room bill?”
“We don’t do that here,” the doorman said.
“In Italy, yes,” Mario said.
Mario showed the doorman his key. The doorman and the cab-driver looked at each other. Mario got out of the cab and walked into the lobby and went to the elevators. When the doorman came in and asked the desk clerk for the cab money and told him what room to charge, the clerk shook his head.
“One of those bike-riders they booked in here. The bastards sure come with nerve.”
“They know,” the doorman said.
When Angela got home, Big Mama called out from the kitchen. “You have a nice time?”
“It was all right.”
“Who you meet there?”
“Some boys.”
“Italian boys?”
“I met one. A nice young Italian boy.”
“Young?”
“A kid,” Angela said.
Chapter 10
WHEN THE JOB OF producing a sports event had started, several weeks before, Kid Sally Palumbo and Big Jelly arrived at the 987th Field Artillery Armory with two carpenters named Mulqueen and Keefe. The carpenters had a superior reputation, particularly for their work on the chapel of Attica State Prison, where they each spent thirty months for poor usage of a gun. Big Jelly and the carpenters stood with an armory worker who unrolled the floor plan and went over it with them.
Kid Sally Palumbo walked away. The click of his heels sounded throughout the gloomy armory. Kid Sally lifted his feet up and brought the heels down harder. The sound went high up, to the olive steel beams that crisscross in the pale light coming through the windows. Now Kid Sally started taking big tramping strides and he walked the length of the armory listening to his footsteps making the only sound in the place. Trucks and jeeps, with 105-mm. howitzers coupled to them, were parked along the armory walls. At the far end of the floor a green corrugated-metal sliding door was halfway down from the ceiling. When the green corrugated door came all the way down to the floor it chopped off the armory floor. The area behind the door was the motor pool for the field-artillery outfit housed in the armory. The equipment now happened to be parked out around the floor. But it was always kept in the motor-pool area.
Kid Sally Palumbo didn’t bother with any of this. He just kept walking and listening to his footsteps echo around the building. Big Jelly and the carpenters stood and went over the plans. The carpenters were taking notes and Big Jelly was waving his arm around the empty building like a foreman. The armory worker had gone back to his office. He left Big Jelly and the carpenters to work out the floor plan for the track and bleachers. When they told Kid Sally they were through, Kid Sally said he was tired from all this detail work and he needed a nap. The carpenters, holding paper with floor measurements, said they were going to get the lumber and the workers needed to put together a fine track for bike-racing. Big Jelly looked at his watch. It was 2:30. He was just in time to meet his new girl friend. “She gets off in half an hour,” Big Jelly said. His new girl friend was in her third year in high school.
With three days to go before the race, a final meeting was held in Baccala’s office.
“I don’t know where we stand,” Joseph DeLauria said. He held his palms up. “I do the right thing every day, that’s all I can say.”
“I go to a joint yesterday,” Big Jelly said, “and I tell the guy, ‘Hey, take some tickets,’ and he says, ‘Who tickets?’ I tell him for the bike race, make the waiters go, and he says to me, ‘Hey, believe me, they’d rather get shot than have to go to a bike race.’”
“That’s what everybody says,” Kid Sally Palumbo said. “Axt anybody, they tell you, get lost.”
“So you get two tousan, three tousan people,” Baccala said.
“They all bring money. Be plenty for everybody.”
“Who wins the race?” Kid Sally said.
“Whoever wins,” Izzy Cohen said.
“Why?” Kid Sally asked.
“Because we have six sprints a night. The riders bunch up so’s they’re all even and then we announce odds on each rider over the loudspeaker and then you guys make book in the stands and we run the sprint off. What do we care who wins? We got them bettin’ into our odds. We take off the top. You got to give a man some kind of a shot for his money. If we try to screw them completely, they walk out on us and then where are we?”
“All right,” Kid Sally said.
“One-a thing,” Baccala said.
“What?”
Baccala leaned forward with his chubby hands clasped together. “What about the bike-riders looking to rob us?”
“How could they rob us?” Izzy said.
>
“Never mind, trust in-a only Christ and Saint Anthony.” Baccala’s eyes narrowed. “We make sure. We lock-a them in the cage.”
“What cages?” Kid Sally said.
“We get cages, regular cages with-a bars on them. When the rider is not riding the bike, he goes into the cage. He can no talk to the other riders. When it is time for him to come and ride, boop! Out of the cage. He rides.”
“Where do we get a cage from?” Kid Sally said.
“That’s your job,” Baccala said.
“I got all the jobs,” Kid Sally said. “I don’t like the jobs and I don’t like the whole idea. This race is gonna get us nothin’ but grief. A breadline, we could do better on a breadline than with this thing.”
“Shut up-a you face,” Baccala said.
“I say what I freakin’ please,” Kid Sally said.
“Shut up-a you face.”
“Go screw,” Kid Sally said.
Baccala’s face did not change expression. The Water Buffalo, standing by the door, took his cue from Baccala. He kept his face straight too. Izzy shrugged and looked at the newspaper. Big Jelly looked through his glasses, unblinking.
Kid Sally took out a cigarette. He opened the lighter with a loud snap. His thumb hit the wheel and the flame shot up. He put the lighter away. He took the cigarette in the thumb and forefinger of his left hand and held it to his mouth. Smoke hung in front of his face. He stared at Baccala.
He stood up. “Well, the thing better be right, what else could I tell you?” he said. He and Big Jelly left the room, slamming the door after them.
“Ciciri,” Baccala snarled.
Kid Sally and Big Jelly spent the afternoon in the vending office, looking through the Yellow Pages for cages. Big Jelly finally found two theatrical renting places. Between them they had eleven circus cages which they could rent for two weeks. They needed them back for the Ed Sullivan show. This left the bike race one cage short. There were twenty-four riders, divided into two-man teams. While one rider was on the track, the teammate would be in the cage, sleeping on the cot. A woman at one of the agencies suggested they call Thompson’s, a large pet-supply house in Manhattan which services zoos around the country. The man at Thompson’s said he had one cage he could lease for a week. Sally and Big Jelly drove over to Thompson’s. It was in a warehouse. A man in the office took Sally and Jelly through a triple-locked steel door and into a hot cement room that was smelly and filled with the squeal of birds. In a tall cage at the front of the warehouse, a zebra shouldered against thick bars. Next to him, in another cage, an antelope stood quietly. Cages filled with multicolored birds, were stacked on top of each other. Up against the back wall there was a small cage on wooden blocks. Next to it was a big circus cage. A tan form was rolled up in one corner of the cage.
“Here’s the cage,” the man said, stopping at the small one.
“Not big enough,” Big Jelly said.
“We need it big enough for a guy,” Kid Sally Palumbo said.
“We’re startin’ slavery,” Big Jelly said.
“Well, that’s all I got,” the man said. “If I move the lion next week, you could have the cage then.”
“Who lion?” Kid Sally said.
The man pointed to the larger cage. “That’s a lion in there.” The tan form in the corner stirred and came up on four legs. Wisps of mane, darker than the coat, straggled from its head. It stood on four puppy legs that were too long. The lion had feet too big for the body.
“That’s a real baby, only five months old,” the man said.
Kid Sally slapped his hand on the bars. The lion jumped up and pushed into the corner of the cage.
“What’s a matter with him?”
“He’s scary. He’s only a baby.”
“He looks like he could eat my freakin’ leg,” Big Jelly said.
“You have to put meat in front of him,” the man said. “He’ll be afraid of people for a few months yet.”
Kid Sally yelled at the lion. “Yaaaaaahhhh!” The lion shook. The left side of Kid Sally’s mouth came up in a sneer. His eyes squinted. He began to giggle.
“Yaaaaahhhhh!” Tommy Udo snarled.
“You sell him?” Kid Sally said.
“Sure, he’s for sale. Two hundred and fifty dollars.”
Kid Sally kept giggling and looking at the lion. “Give him the money, Jelly.”
At six p.m. there was a roar and then a scream which ran through Marshall Street. People rushed to the windows. They looked out to see Kid Sally Palumbo, giggling, dragging a lion across the sidewalk from a panel truck. Women, screaming, ran away. The lion had a rope attached to a makeshift leather collar around his neck. Kid Sally pulled on the rope. The lion, head down, fear sounding from his throat, tried to dig into the sidewalk. Kid Sally Palumbo began yelling at the lion and pulling hard on the rope. The lion roared in fear. Big Jelly got behind the lion and pushed. They got the lion into the vending-machine office, opened the door to the cellar, and pushed the lion down the stairs. Kid Sally slammed the door and giggled. Big Jelly went out and waddled back with a paper bag, meat in waxed paper showing at the top.
“Eight pounds of chopped meat, that should fill his belly,” Big Jelly said. He opened the cellar door and ripped the top of the waxed paper. He threw the bag down the stairs. The meat scent hit the lion while the bag was still in the air. Two floppy paws slapped down on the bag the moment it touched the floor.
“Look at that,” Big Jelly said.
“Wait’ll we feed him people,” Kid Sally Palumbo said. He began to giggle.
Kid Sally and Big Jelly locked the office and went out for their night’s business. They drove to a lumber mill. The lights were on. Mulqueen and Keefe were hammering bolts into a section of boards planked together to form a curved section of track. All over the lumber mill pieces like this were stacked or sat on sawhorses. A table in the middle of the floor was covered with a layout of the armory.
“We’re right up to here,” Mulqueen said. He put his finger on a spot in the plans. The spot was even with the doorway for the motor pool. The white lines on the blueprint paper, with long arrows and short arrows and numbers with apostrophes after them, irritated Kid Sally. He didn’t know what they meant. He wanted to go back and play with the lion. “We just have to get the turn done, it goes in here,” Mulqueen said, tapping his finger on the motor-pool area.
“It looks good,” Kid Sally said. “Just don’t let us down.”
He and Big Jelly went out and sat in the car.
“We got things to do yet,” Kid Sally said.
“What?” Big Jelly said.
“Well, we got to do things.”
“I know what we got to do,” Big Jelly said. “We got to go and do things to a couple of girls. Do them certain things to girls, that’s what we got to do.” He started the car.
Izzy sat in the Enchanted Hour from midnight until 1:30 a.m. He had an important appointment with Kid Sally Palumbo. At 1:30 he told the waiter to give him the check. This kid is going to make a good memory of himself, Izzy thought.
At seven p.m. on Friday, January 23, the World Championship Six-Day Bike Race, sponsored by the Americans of Italian Descent Amity Committee of New York, was one hour away from its official start. Only a few people were coming up the brightly lit armory steps. Ticket clerks began to shift uneasily and talk about a small crowd. When Izzy walked into the armory, he asked the head clerk what the advance sale was. The clerk said 1100. Actual attendance usually works out to be double the size of the advance. This would mean a crowd of about 2200 for the night’s racing. Opening night. It all goes downhill after that. The ticket clerk laughed at the ridiculous situation. “Don’t laugh,” Izzy said. “Right now they don’t have enough to pay you.”
Inside, banners from Italian, Greek, French, and Polish societies hung from the balcony. Smoke from the first few black DeNobili cigars came up from the seats and hung in the floodlights. The old men smoking the cigars obviously were bike-race veteran
s. They kept their overcoats on.
In the middle of the floor, directly in front of the center of the grandstands, were twelve red, yellow, and blue circus cages with black bars. Each cage had a cot in it, and a folding tray for eating. The cages were in a General Custer circle. One side of each cage, the side facing the stands, was open. The other side, the side facing the inside of the wagon-train circle, was boarded up. In this way the riders in the cages would be unable to talk to each other through the backs of their cages.
Around the cages ran a beautiful wooden track. Neat, varnished pine wood gleamed in the light. The track had straightaways gently bending into a fine saucer curve. The lip of the saucer was banked high up from the bottom of the track. This was to create thrilling scenes of bike-riders seemingly on their sides, but protected by simple speed while they raced around the curve and came zooming into the straightaway. The straightaway ran the full length of the armory. The other turn of the track was not yet down. The beautiful curved boards that would form the turn were piled atop each other in front of the green corrugated-metal door, which was pulled down to the floor.
Mulqueen and Keefe stood with ten workers. “Get the door up now so we can finish this thing,” Mulqueen was telling an armory worker dressed in fatigues.
The armory worker pressed a large button. Black, heavily greased chains began to make a zzzzzzzzzzng sound. The green corrugated-metal shed door grumbled up from the armory floor. It rose steadily to reveal, foot by foot, first, five 105-mm. howitzers, neatly spaced, canvas tied to the muzzles. The howitzers were attached to five half-ton trucks. As the door rose more, the rest of the scene came into view. Packed together in neat rows, shining dully in the dim light, were the jeeps, half-tracks, ambulances, and trucks of the 987th Field Artillery Regiment, New York National Guard.
Mulqueen spat out curses. “Look at this. It’ll take a half-hour to move this mess the hell out of there.”
“Move them?” the armory worker said. “You don’t move anything in there. That’s the motor pool. Everything in there stays where it is.”
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