Corky's Brother

by Jay Neugeboren

  Josh continued stalking.

  “Man, he looks like the old Brown Bomber now, don’t he?”

  “Don’t look like no Brown Bomber to me.”

  “Five bucks says he mops the floor with your boy.”

  “Make it ten.”

  “You’re on, man.”

  Emmett smiled now, despite the pain that seemed to be somewhere in his back, pulling down and ripping, but he smiled because he felt the worst was over. He wouldn’t be stupid enough to get that close again. Because Josh might be fast with that knife, but he’d be slow otherwise, like all niggers, slow at everything except running. Them nigger boys could run. That was one thing. Like when they used to hell up down in Louisville when he was a kid and get one of them alone and paint on him in white: Keep this nigger running. Keep this nigger running.

  Emmett lunged forward, but Josh parried with his forearm and they backed away from each other. Good, Emmett thought. I’ll set him up. He lunged again, and again Josh parried with a sweep of his arm, cutting Emmett’s sleeve with the knife. Emmett backed away and then came forward a third time and lunged. Josh went to parry, but before he could, Emmett had ducked his head and his hand wasn’t there when Josh’s arm went flailing out to meet it. Instead, Emmett’s fake had worked and he had ducked his head and had come plowing into Josh’s midsection, the glass edges aimed for Josh’s groin. In missing Emmett, though, Josh stumbled and avoided the brunt of Emmett’s charge, so that the broken bottle ripped into his thigh and with his left hand Josh clubbed the top of Emmett’s head as he went by. Emmett fell to the floor.

  The broken bottle slid across the floor and shattered. Josh moved in for the kill now, hulking above Emmett.

  “Lift his liver, man,” someone shouted to Josh.

  “I got another ten on Josh if anyone’ll see me.”

  “Who’s got a knife?” Jim Bryant asked. He turned toward two Negroes. “One of you got a knife or a razor?”

  “You talkin’ to us, Jim?”

  “Keep it fair. Throw Em a knife.”

  The boys looked at each other, then one of them shrugged, reached into his pocket, and flipped a knife into the open circle. Josh kicked it at Emmett, who picked it up and rose to one knee. Josh moved forward slowly, wary now. Emmett watched him, seeing two Joshes as his head refused to clear. He flicked the knife open and waited. The two black faces merged into one and then separated, then merged again. There was a dull ache at the back of his head and his legs felt cold and damp. Above him he saw the black figure coming and he began to lift up from his knee but then everything went blank and the only thing he remembered was being thrown back down and then the sound of something dull, like punching against a sponge, and a warm, liquid feeling all over him, a quiet, almost peaceful feeling, doubled up, his knees trying to reach his chest, his arms rigid, straining.

  Josh saw his chance and was on Emmett before he could rise, knocking away the knife and crashing his body against him, driving the knife up to its hilt into the flesh of Emmett Rumple. Satisfaction came with the plunge and he licked his lips and there was no world for him in that instant but only a pale white face before him, under him, and the knife red, withdrawn from the soft bodyflesh, and now a speck of blood on that white face and now another and the eyes that had hated him all these years started to close. Then he hesitated. The factory was still: a hush, funeral quiet in which the workers paid their respects to the act they were waiting for him to conclude.

  The silence startled him; he wouldn’t be satisfied! It seemed impossible. It hardly seemed fair. The thought terrified him and his body hurried to carry out the execution; but in the backlash his mind had already reverted, and he was utterly disappointed, petulant, child-like—and he knew it was all over for him. The knife hung in the air, and seeing it there, seeing the doubt on his face, Jim Bryant took advantage and rushed into the circle, knocking him away. Nobody said anything, or even began to collect on the bets. They just stood there, staring, quiet.

  The Zodiacs

  WHEN I WAS in the seventh grade at P.S. 92 in Brooklyn, Louie Hirshfield was the only one of my friends who wasn’t a good ballplayer. Which is putting it mildly. Louie was probably the worst athlete in the history of our school. He was also the smartest kid in our class and you’d think this combination would have made him the most unpopular guy there, but it didn’t. He wasn’t especially well liked, but nobody resented him. Maybe it was because he let you copy from his homework—or maybe it was just because he didn’t put on any airs about being smart. In fact, Louie didn’t put on airs about anything. He was one of the quietest kids I’d ever met.

  The only time I ever saw him excited—outside of what happened with him and our baseball team—was when our fathers would take the two of us to baseball games at Ebbets Field. Louie lived one floor under me, in my apartment building on Lenox Road, and we’d grown up together, so I knew lots about Louie that nobody at school knew. He was an interesting guy, with lots of hobbies—tropical fish, rocks, stamps, Chinese puzzles, magic tricks, autographs.

  That was the one thing the guys did know about. I don’t know how many days he’d waited outside Ebbets Field to get them—all I know is he had the best collection of baseball players’ signatures of any guy in school. Lots of them were addressed personally, too—like “To Louie, with best wishes from Jackie Robinson.” What amazed me most about Louie, though, was that he could figure out a player’s batting average in his head. If a guy got a hit his first time up in a game, Louie would say, “That raises his average to .326”—or whatever it was—and sure enough, the next time the guy came up, when the announcer would give the average, Louie would be right.

  Louie had no illusions about his athletic ability—he was never one of those guys who hangs around when you’re choosing up sides for a punchball or stickball game so that you have to pick him. Whenever he did play—like in gym class at school—he did what you told him and tried to stay out of the way. That was why I was so surprised when he came up to my house one night after supper and asked if he could be on our baseball team.

  “Gee, Louie,” I said, “we got more than nine guys already—anyway, we’re not even an official team or anything. We’ll be lucky if we get to play more than five or six games all year.”

  “I don’t really want to play,” Louie said. “I—I just want to be on your team.”

  “Well, I suppose you can come to practices and games,” I said. “But I can’t promise you’ll ever get in a game.”

  “Honest, Howie—I know all the guys on your team are better than me. I wasn’t even thinking of playing.—What I’d like to do is be your general manager.” His eyes lit up when he said that. I looked at him, puzzled.

  “Look,” he said. “What do you think makes the Dodgers draw almost as many fans as the Yankees? What was it that made people stick with the Dodgers when they were hardly in the league?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “They were just Dodger fans, I guess.”

  “Sure—that’s it. Don’t you see? Being a Dodger fan means something because being a Dodger means something colorful to the fans. And you know why? Because the Dodgers have what my dad calls ‘a good press’—they know how to get headlines in the papers whether they’re winning or losing.”

  I nodded. “But what’s that got to do with us?”

  “What’s your team like now? I’ll tell you. It’s the same as ten thousand other teams of guys our age all over Brooklyn. Nobody cares if you win or lose—except maybe you guys. If I’m general manager, Howie, I’ll promise you this—your team will be noticed. Guys won’t say, ‘We got a game with Howie’s team.’ They won’t come to the Parade Grounds to see all the older guys play. They’ll come to see The Zodiacs!”

  “The who—?”

  Louie stopped for a second and I realized that I’d never heard him speak so fast before. “That’s—that’s the first thing you have to do, it seems to me.” He spoke more hesitantly now, the way he usually did, not looking right at you.
“You have to have a name that’s different.”

  “What’s wrong with calling ourselves the Sharks?”

  “Nothing’s wrong with it—but don’t you see, nothing’s right with it, either. I’ll bet there’s a hundred teams in Brooklyn alone called the Sharks. Sharks, Tigers, Lions, Phantoms—every team has a name like that. But calling ourselves—I mean, your team—The Zodiacs, will make them different—”

  “Sure—but giving us a crazy name isn’t going to win us any games.”

  “Right. What will win you games? I’ll tell you. A good pitcher. I’ve been going down to the Parade Grounds to watch games, making a study of the teams there, and I’ve found that pitching is about ninety percent of winning. Especially at our age, when we’re not fully built up yet. Did you know, for example, that on high school teams pitchers average about eleven strike-outs a game? It’s like with baseball teams in spring training—the pitchers are way ahead of the hitters, because the hitters’ reflexes aren’t developed yet.”

  “Izzie’s a pretty good pitcher,” I said. Izzie was my best friend, and the pitcher for our team.

  “Sure, but let’s face it, he’s not a real top-drawer pitcher. He’s just not big enough to be. He’s got good control, I’ll admit that—but his fast ball is almost a change-up. If you let me be general manager, Howie, I’ll get the best pitcher in our school to play for us.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “George Santini.”

  I gulped. “Him?”

  “That’s right.”

  George Santini was a year ahead of us at P.S. 92 and he was always getting in trouble with the teachers and the cops. He was about six feet tall, had black greasy hair which was long and cut square in back, and the biggest pair of shoulders I’d ever seen on a guy. He was also the best athlete in our school. The coaches and teachers were always talking to him about going straight and being a star in high school and college, but George never seemed to care much. He was the leader of this gang, which, as far as everybody in our section of Brooklyn was concerned, was the most dangerous gang the world had ever known.

  What made George’s reputation even worse was his older brother, Vinnie. Vinnie was about nineteen years old and he’d already spent two years in jail. He was a skinny guy—not at all like George—and the word on him was that he was really chicken. To listen to George, though, you would have thought that Vinnie was the toughest guy ever to hit Brooklyn. Whenever he wanted an audience, George would sit down on the steps of the school—on Rogers Avenue—and start telling tales of all the jobs he and Vinnie had pulled off. Sometimes, if we’d bother him enough, he’d tell us about the gang wars he had fought in with Vinnie—in Prospect Park, in Red Hook, in Bay Ridge. If he was sure no teachers or cops were around he’d show us his zip gun, the gun that Johnny Angelo—one of George’s lackeys—claimed George had once used to kill a guy with.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “If my mother ever caught me hanging around with him, I’d really get it—and, anyway, how would you get him to play for us?”

  Louie smiled. “You leave that to me.”

  A few days later I got all the guys together at my house and I let Louie speak to them. He told them what he’d told me about how he would make our team special, maybe famous—and he also told them that George Santini had agreed to pitch for us. A few of the guys reacted the way I did to this news—they were scared. But when Louie insisted he’d be able to handle George, Izzie and I backed him up.

  “I say it’s worth a try,” Izzie said. “Even though I’m pitcher and he’ll take my place. I’ll bet we could beat lots of high school teams with him pitching for us.”

  “Sure,” I said. “You ever see the way he can blaze a ball in?”

  A few more guys followed our lead, and after a while we all agreed that we’d probably be invincible with George Santini pitching for us.

  “One thing, though,” asked Kenny Murphy, our second baseman. “How’d you get him to play for us?”

  “Simple,” said Louie. “I offered him the one thing he couldn’t refuse—fame. I told him I’d get his name in the newspapers. It’s not hard. All you have to do is telephone in the box score to the Brooklyn Eagle and they’ll print it. My father knows a guy who works there.”

  For the next few weeks Louie was the busiest guy in the world—calling up guys at other schools, arranging games, getting permits from the Park Department, coming to our practices…When he started giving us suggestions on things, nobody objected either. He may have been a lousy ballplayer, but he knew more about the game than any of us. Izzie and I gave up playing basketball in the schoolyard afternoons and weekends and spent all our time practicing with The Zodiacs.

  Our first game was scheduled for a Saturday morning the second week in April. Louie had gotten us a permit to use one of the diamonds at the Parade Grounds, next to Prospect Park, from nine to twelve in the morning, and we were supposed to play a team of eighth-graders from P.S. 246. I was at the field with Izzie by 8:30, but the other team didn’t get there until after nine. We ran through infield practice and then let them have the field for a while. Kenny Murphy’s father, who’d played for the Bushwicks when they were a semi-pro team, had agreed to umpire the game. By a quarter to ten neither Louie nor George had shown up and the other team was hollering that we were afraid to play them.

  Since George had never come to any practices, some of us were a little worried, but at about five to ten he showed up. He was wearing a baseball hat like the rest of us, with a Z sewn on the front, and he looked a little embarrassed. He was smoking and he didn’t say much to anybody. He just asked who the catcher was and started warming up. He wore a T-shirt, with the sleeves cut off. Looking at him, you would have thought he was too muscle-bound to be a pitcher, but when he reared back and kicked his left foot high in the air, then whipped his arm around, he was as smooth as Warren Spahn, only righty, with the natural straight overhand motion that every coach spends his nights dreaming about. Stan Reiss, our catcher, had to put an extra sponge in his mitt, but he was so proud, catching George with all the guys looking at the two of them, that I think he would have let the ball burn a hole in his hand before he would have given up his position.

  “C’mon,” George said after a dozen or so warm-ups. “Let’s get the game going.”

  “We were waiting for Louie,” I said. “He should be here any minute.”

  “Okay,” George said. “But he better hurry. I got better things to do than spend all day strikin’ out a bunch of fags.”

  He said the last thing loudly, for the benefit of the other team. Then he turned and spit in their direction, daring one of them to contradict him. No one did.

  A minute later I saw Louie. He was getting out of his mother’s car, on Caton Avenue, and he was carrying this tremendous thing. From my position at shortstop I couldn’t make it out, but as he came nearer, running awkwardly and holding it in front of him like a package of groceries, I realized what it was: his old victrola.

  “Hey, George!” Louie called. “You ready to break Feller’s strike-out record?”

  George laughed. “Anytime they get in the batter’s box—”

  “Wait a second,” Louie said. He put the victrola down next to the backstop. He started fiddling with it, cranking it up the way you had to to get it to work, and then he started playing a record. At first it wasn’t cranked up enough and you couldn’t tell what kind of music it was. But then Louie cranked some more—and I whipped off my hat and stood at attention as the strains of “The Star-Spangled Banner” came blasting across the infield. I looked at George and he was smiling as broadly as he could, holding his cap across his heart, standing rigid, at attention. The team from P.S. 246 must have been as shocked as we were, but by the time the music got to “and the rockets’ red glare” both teams were standing at attention, saluting, listening, while Louie kept cranking away so that the music wouldn’t slow down. People sitting on benches, guys playing on other diamonds, men and women walking along C
aton Avenue, a few park cops—they all stopped and started drifting toward our diamond. When the record was over, Louie—in the loudest voice I’d ever heard—shouted “Play ball!” and we started the game. We must have had a crowd of over fifty people watching us play our first game, and I told myself that if George had been pitching for a Major League team that day he would have pitched at least a shut-out.

  He struck out all but two of their men—one guy hit a grounder to me at shortstop, and another fouled out to Corky Williams at first base. He also hit four home runs. I got a double and two singles, I remember. We won, 19-0, and the next day, as Louie’d promised, our box score was in the Brooklyn Eagle.

  Louie got us six more games during the next two weeks, and we won all of them. George gave up a total of seven hits in the six games, and he was a pretty happy guy during that time. He had clippings of the box scores of all the games in his wallet, the way we all did. Clippings of the box scores—and then, the first week in May, the best clipping of all: an item in Jimmy O’Brien’s column in the Brooklyn Eagle about our team, mentioning George, and Louie’s victrola. I think I carried that clipping around with me until my third year in high school.

  After that we began getting even more attention and teams from all over Brooklyn were challenging us to games. We played as many of them as we could—and George kept shutting out every team we played.

  In the meantime Louie devised another plan. He called a meeting of the team the second week in May to discuss it. He told us that a team with our ability and prestige had to live up to its name. We said we were—we were winning games, weren’t we?

  “Sure,” Louie said. “But what do you look like out on the field? People are starting to come in pretty large numbers to see us play—they hear about us, we got a reputation—and then when they see us, we look like a bunch of pick-ups.” He lowered his voice and went on. “What we have to do,” he said, “is develop some class. And I’ve got the plan worked out. It’s not new, I’ll admit—lots of the high school guys use it. I say we run a raffle and use the money to buy ourselves jackets and uniforms.”