What About Reb

by What About Reb (retail) (epub)

  ‘You’re a regular patriot, ain’t you, Reb,’ Chub said. ‘Supporting the economy like it says in the papers. And getting way over your head with debts.’

  ‘Listen to him,’ Reb said. ‘The guy who tried to join the Marines.’

  ‘You could of been over there now, Chub,’ Wiggy said. ‘Dead.’

  ‘Huh,’ Vinnie said. ‘Could of. They might try calling him again.’

  ‘Can’t,’ Chub said. ‘I’m IV-F.’

  ‘That don’t matter.’

  ‘It matters, it matters.’

  ‘How they got you classified, Sal?’ Teo said.

  ‘I got four kids,’ Sal said. ‘Can’t touch me either.’

  ‘What about you, Reb?’ Lee said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Reb said.

  ‘He don’t know. What do you mean you don’t know. Look on your goddam draft card,’ Chub said.

  ‘I don’t have a draft card.’

  ‘Everybody’s got one,’ Wiggy said.

  ‘He supports the economy,’ Chub said. ‘They don’t draft them guys.’

  ‘I mean it,’ Reb said. ‘I really don’t. The minute they handed it to me and I got out on the street I tore the fucking thing up in pieces. It said on it this must be kept on your person at all times. I keep on me what I want to.’

  ‘You crazy bastard.’

  ‘You kids don’t know what papers are,’ Teddy said. ‘In the old country to go to the next town we needed papers. Ain’t that right, Pasquale?’

  Patsy was nibbling at a handful of rughetta leaves. He nodded.

  Wiggy said, ‘Didn’t they make the Jews carry papers?’

  ‘Where. Italy?’ Lee asked.

  ‘Naw, dummy. The Germans,’ Reb said. ‘They made the Jews wear these big yellow letters saying kike or something like it.’

  ‘Didn’t they have numbers tattooed on their arms?’ Dom said.

  ‘Wait and see,’ Reb said. ‘We’ll all be tattooed with numbers. The draft card’s the start of it.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘Sure. First they say keep it on you. Next thing they write it on you. That’s why I tore mine up.’

  ‘Be-eautiful,’ Dom said. ‘But this country’s at war.’

  ‘War your ass. We never declared war,’ Teo said.

  ‘They call it a police action,’ Vinnie said.

  ‘But our guys are getting creamed over there,’ Chub said. ‘What is it then if it ain’t war? Tiddleywinks?’ He was squeezing his fingers into one of the compartments of his wallet.

  ‘It’s all politics, asshole. That’s all it is,’ Lee said. ‘And you can be sure somebody’s making his profit on it,’ Teddy said, looking again for Patsy’s nod. It came.

  ‘I knew I still had it here,’ Chub said. ‘My draft card.’ He began reading. ‘Any person who alters, forges, or in any manner. No, here it is. The law requires you to have this certificate in your personal possession at all times. Gee. Just what Reb was saying.’

  But Reb was up, his wristwatch was out of his pocket, and he dangled it by its leather strap for everyone to see. He was saved from further discussion on the war. The circle broke up.

  ‘That bill, Sal. You really worried about it?’

  ‘You’re the one that brought me to meet the old guy and fixed me up for credit. I hate doing anything to make you look bad, Reb.’

  ‘Shit, old man Logan likes me. You want me to go down there with you after work? Charge some more stuff?’

  ‘Oh, sure.’

  ‘What’s wrong, Sal. You short of cash or something?’

  ‘I’ll say. Hey, don’t you mention this to the guys now but last night she tells me she’s pregnant.’

  ‘Again?’

  ‘Fifth time in six and a half years.’

  ‘Couldn’t you get her fixed up? After this one I mean.’

  ‘Christ, Rebbie. With her that ain’t easy. I’ll tell you about it another time.’

  ‘Well, listen. You want some kind of advance on next week’s pay? Or say fifteen bucks on loan from me?’

  ‘Make it the fifteen. Personal.’

  ‘I’ll write you out a check this afternoon.’

  ‘Jeezus, thanks.’

  ‘Forget it. No, do me one favor. Come down with us tonight. There won’t be any broads. Nothing for Mary to worry about there. We just play cards and there’s plenty to eat and drink.’

  ‘I don’t know. Let me think it over.’

  ‘Won’t cost you nothing.’

  ‘It’s like Dom and Chub were saying. I’d have to ask her first.’

  ‘Ask her then.’ Reb stood against the trunk of one of the ash trees, pissing. ‘I’ll be by to pick you up around six.’

  ‘Hey, Reb, not there,’ Vinnie pleaded. ‘You’ll stink the place up.’

  Turning, a big grin on his face, Reb directed his stream onto a slip of hemlock that sprouted beside a mound of Patsy’s bricks.

  3

  Soderini’s pale green Chevrolet rolled to a stop under the line of ash trees, gave a final roar, and pitched forward dead in a cloud of blue exhaust. When he entered the house, he found Patsy and his son Lee on their knees laying brick in the living room fireplace. The crew of carpenters was tapping away on the roof, felting and shingling it.

  ‘Esiste Dio, Libero?’ Soderini shouted.

  Lee looked up and laughed. As long as he could remember Reb’s father had greeted him that same way. Never hello but always ‘Does God exist?’ And when they were kids there had been a nickel for the right answer. ‘Naw,’ Lee said.

  ‘Atta boy,’ Emilio said. Patsy said, ‘Wey, Emilio.’

  ‘How you going, Patsy?’ Soderini said.

  Patsy said nothing but thrust his jaw at the work.

  Soderini gave the fireplace a dutiful glance, took a folded newspaper out of his jacket pocket, and touched it with a finger. ‘Have you seen this?’

  It was L’Adunata, their anarchist fortnightly from New York.

  Patsy’s trowel went down into the mortar tray as if spearing a fish. He stood, hitched his pants, and studied the lines under Soderini’s finger.

  ‘And you know what Proudhon said? Dio e l’Umanità sono due nemici irreconciliabili.’ Soderini bent over Lee, who was still on his knees. ‘You know what that means, Libero?’

  ‘No,’ Lee said.

  ‘God and Humanity. Two enemies. Irreconcilable.’

  Lee gave an uncertain nod and quickly scraped up a trowelful of mortar. In the upper level of the house, half hidden behind a forest of studding, Teo paced the bedrooms. Vinnie shuttled in with a pail of mortar.

  ‘What the hell are him and Patsy talking about today?’ he said.

  ‘Don’t you understand Italian?’ Lee said. ‘Not that fancy stuff you guys talk.’

  ‘You Abruzzesi. They’re discussing religion.’ Vinnie listened. ‘You mean against religion. Christ, it was the same thing when he was here Monday.’

  ‘No it wasn’t. Monday it was politics.’

  ‘Be-eautiful,’ Dom said. ‘Religion. Politics. When them guys get together it ends up the same thing.’ He stood there, sent down from the roof to reinforce. ‘And you know something else?’ he added. ‘They always act like they never seen each other for three months.’

  ‘Dio rappresenta l’idea antinaturale della immutabilità,’ Soderini read from the newspaper.

  ‘See, Emilio, that’s the same as what I say,’ Patsy said. ‘The idea of God is against Nature. In Nature everything changes. Not him. Not God. He’s never changing.’

  ‘If I was a writer,’ Soderini said. ‘If I was young.’

  ‘What the hell’s he talking about now?’ Dom said.

  Soderini shook a finger up over his shoulder. ‘Atheism,’ he bellowed.

  ‘Atheism,’ Lee said.

  ‘Oh, be-eautiful,’ Dom said, wearing his big sheepish grin. ‘With all you frigging atheists around I don’t stand a chance of getting into heaven. None at all.’

  Soderini began his tour of the
house, moving silently from room to room in his shined shoes and green Stetson worn without a dent in the crown, squatting and peering and squinting, sighting along the walls first with one eye then with the other. ‘Ateo, over here.’ Emilio stared at the outside walls where two windows came together with only the corner post separating them. ‘Reinforce.’

  ‘But the inspector already.’

  ‘Reinforce.’

  ‘Come look, Pa. He stamped the permit.’

  ‘Course he stamps it. But his stamp isn’t our stamp.’

  ‘I’ll take care of it.’

  ‘Now. Right now. And the same goes for over there.’ Soderini wagged an arm at a point beyond the studs of three or four partitions and sent Teo’s eyes and Dom’s to another bedroom where windows crowded the corner.

  ‘All right, all right,’ Teo said. ‘But what the hell did we give Bowles the box of cigars for? That’s five bucks.’

  ‘He’s hungry, that’s why,’ Soderini replied. ‘So we feed him. And just the same we reinforce.’ The old man’s voice was without a trace of hardness. A power saw screeched under Teo’s hand.

  Dom nailed pieces of two by four to the doubtful corners. When he finished Teo led him into the second bedroom. Again the saw wailed and screeched. Teo looked around. His father was gone and his brother was there.

  ‘Where’d he go?’ Teo said.

  ‘He’ll be back. He’s up on the roof,’ Reb said.

  ‘The roof. What’s he doing up there?’

  ‘I sent him.’

  ‘What the hell for?’

  ‘For a look around.’

  ‘Christ,’ Teo said. ‘I thought we made him retire so he could stay off places like that.’

  Through the opening in the living room wall where a picture window would go, the brothers saw the polished shoes descending a ladder. Soderini’s feet came together on each rung the way a child’s do coming down stairs. Reb smiled, not at that but at a memory of Emilio’s stubbornness two years before when they first suggested he think about retirement. Pay me without working? That’s charity. Eat without working? That’s capitalist. It took a summer but in the end their pleading won. Soderini stood planted by the stairwell looking the lefthand wall up and down. ‘Ateo, over here.’ The old man’s eyes were lifted while a finger pointed at the spot by his side where he wanted his son to stand. ‘All those pieces up there. Looks like it was done with the hatchet.’

  ‘It’s good enough, Pa,’ Teo said. ‘It’s strong and the lathing and two coats of plaster will cover it up. No one at all will know. No one.’

  ‘Except me.’ Soderini gave his chest a couple of audible taps. ‘And down there you didn’t reinforce. There, there. That needs a column.’

  Dom did a fidgety dance at Reb’s elbow.

  ‘I asked Bowles about that, Pa,’ Teo said. ‘You know, he’s not just an inspector. He’s an engineer too.’

  For Reb that did it, that word. He told Dom to get hopping and bring one of the extra columns in from the garage, and stepping forward, his hammer raised, Reb began ripping into the mass of odd two by fours. Smash, smash, smash. Only when he stopped to catch his breath did he notice that Teo was nowhere around. Splinters of wood and twisted nails strewed the floor and stairs. Reb fished into his overalls for his watch. It read four thirty.

  Soderini had been standing behind him, quiet, his face at peace, watching his son work.

  ‘Ribelle,’ he said. ‘There’s something I want to talk to you a little later at home.’

  4

  ‘You left your dirty work clothes in the middle of the bathroom floor.’

  ‘I was just going back to pick them up,’ Reb said. He was hastily tucking in his shirttails when his mother came into his room.

  Reb was the youngest of her three children, the only one of them still with her, and at one and the same time Angelina was amused and exasperated by him. ‘And another thing. After you take a shower I want you to get in the habit of wiping the glass around the tub.’

  ‘Wiping the glass. What for?’

  ‘The water leaves white spots if you don’t.’

  ‘But the thing ain’t worth having if you have to wipe it every time,’ Reb said.

  ‘I don’t care. I want to keep it looking nice and new. When you finish drying yourself pass the towel over the glass. How long does that take?’

  ‘Okay, Ma, okay.’ He spent half his time trying to outfox and outmaneuver her and the other half shamelessly getting around her. It was a science.

  He knew just what word would disarm her, what tone would melt her. For her part the moment she detected what he was up to she laughed and let him win. The moment he won he relented and conceded something to her. It was like a crucial contest played out in fun.

  Last year they had remodeled the kitchen, this year the bathroom. The bathroom was Angelina’s pride. She had chosen the color of the fixtures and tiles herself. Sunny yellow. The new tub was enclosed with sliding glass panels. Reb knew she brought people upstairs to show the room off.

  Angelina hovered over a table, examining the stack of shirts he had brought home that afternoon from a Chinese laundry. ‘Haven’t I told you over and over I don’t want you throwing money away sending your shirts out? I want to do them for you.’

  ‘But I got so many, Ma. And the laundry does them cheap.’ He spoke to her over his shoulder, inspecting his closet and wondering what clothes to pack.

  ‘Look at this. When I iron a collar is this the way it comes out? Only a few years ago you were wild if I didn’t do your shirts just so. You used to be so particular.’

  ‘I just don’t want you killing yourself washing and ironing all them shirts any more, that’s all.’ The old closet was tall and narrow and so tightly hung with clothes that he seldom bothered to wear anything it held. Instead he had begun building himself a new closet with shelves and sliding doors along one whole wall. The drawers of two small bureaus were stuffed with shirts and sweaters. He had a cache of at least two dozen dress shirts, almost half French cuffed, most in mint condition, all of them inaccessible. The bulging closet held eight or nine suits but over and over he wore only the same couple of handy ones that hung on a hook behind his door and some six or so shirts that went in a shuttle to the Chinese laundry.

  ‘What will people think of your mother if you wear a shirt like this?’

  ‘Which is it, Ma? You worried I’m wasting money or you worried what people are going to say about you?’

  She laughed. ‘Got a clean handkerchief?’

  ‘Yeah. But do me a favor and get my razor and toothbrush for me, will you?’

  She took away his wet towel. He chose a necktie and moved to the window where he nervously eyed the driveway. No sign of his father yet. His sister Livvy’s two kids were at the far end of the yard playing under the pear trees. Behind the garage the old bathtub with its claw feet lay on its side.

  In the last couple of years change had come over the whole neighborhood. Gone were the sprawling stacks and piles of useless or unused bits of material: sand and brick and stone, rusting machinery, rusted iron pipes, broken cement blocks, bleached planks, rotting cords of firewood. Gone even were the clumps of chokecherry under which this treasure had once been stored. Gone was the big shed out behind the garage where Soderini had kept staging timber and sawhorses. One by one the bevy of chicken sheds, pens, and rabbit hutches had disappeared. As had the occasional neighborhood goat and the pigs. Trucks were fewer too, vegetable gardens smaller, and what remained of them was no longer fenced with iron bedsteads and wire and scraps of wood. No one grew grapes or made wine anymore. Money and order had come, the place had risen into respectability, and now there were tidy lawns and flowerbeds. The clawfooted tub stood in decay, chipped, stained, oozing rust, a relic, a memento. Already at twentytwo for Reb a world was dead. Angelina returned with the toilet articles. Reb went to her, the tie draped around his neck, and gave her his back. She fit the necktie under his collar and patted the collar down smooth.r />
  ‘I hope you’re still going down the beach,’ she said. ‘I picked a lot of tomatoes for you.’ He thanked her. ‘I put the bag in your car. They’re all washed.’ He knotted his tie before the mirror and gave his hair a few quick licks with a comb, then was on his knees looking under the bed. ‘You seen my suitcase anywhere?’

  ‘You never let me touch anything in here.’ Her eyes went around the room. The new closet was framed but still unpaneled. One door was partly hung, the other waited against a wall. The few finished shelves were piled with socks and underwear. Tools, sawdust, plywood scraps, unopened boxes of vinyl tile lay everywhere. She sighed.

  ‘Oh, Ma, don’t start that again now. I know it’s a pigsty but soon as I get the chance I’ll finish it.’ He sprang up, brightening. Maybe she had been nagging his father to get after him about the room and that’s what Emilio wanted to speak to him about. But what did Kropotkin and the encyclopedia have to do with his bedroom? The gloom fell again.

  ‘How many times I’ve heard that story. Just get it done, will you? Your father had a look around the other day and he agrees with me. You don’t let me do anything in here but make the bed and I’m so ashamed when people come.’

  ‘People? What do you mean people? Why do you have to bring people in my room?’ But he saw her unhappiness and changed his tone. ‘Hey, if you want to worry worry about what I’m going to carry my clothes in. How about going down in the kitchen and finding me a nice big shopping bag, okay?’

  He laid various clothes out on the bed, wondering who he could have lent his suitcase to. To rush or not to rush, that was the question. Should he bolt before his father got home or make only moderate haste and attempt a less deliberate getaway? He decided it would be fair simply to leave when he was ready if by then Soderini had not returned. Foraying into the old closet he found himself rushing to locate the suit coat that matched the trousers he was wearing. He heard Angelina come up the stairs.

  Asking what else he wanted from the garden she nudged him aside and began refolding and packing his clothes.

  ‘That’s okay, Ma. Just the tomatoes.’

  ‘We’re having beans with prosciutto tonight.’