Onion Street

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  “Sharp kid, very sharp. So, when is Murray gonna see you? We can have a little nosh. Have a drink maybe.”

  “Soon, Murray. I’ll call. Thanks for the help.”

  “Anytime, partner.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  What’s funny about Brooklyn is that it’s not its own place. Brooklyn is actually the westernmost tip of Long Island. Us Brooklynites don’t like acknowledging that fact, and it’s easy for us to pretend because we’ve got Queens as a buffer between us and the Nassau County line. Over the county line, Long Island stretches eastward beyond Nassau to the wild netherworld of Suffolk County. Coney Island isn’t an island, but a peninsula. Just don’t try and sell that notion to a Brooklyn native. If the world’s shape doesn’t suit us, we’ll reshape it as we see fit. Yet in spite of our willful ignorance of geography, there’s not another collection of people anywhere on earth who see the world or their place in it with a more honest eye. Good liars have to know the deeper truth of things. If nothing else, Brooklyn teaches you that, how to see those deeper truths.

  I hated Long Island, not because Brooklyn was part of it, not for any good reason, really. I always saw it as a kind of suburban East Berlin, a place where parents coerced their kids to go live in the lap of torturous luxury. You will never again be allowed to wear hand-me-down clothing. You must never play sports on concrete and must suffer with pristine grass fields. You must sleep in your own bedroom. You will never be allowed to share a bathroom again. When you graduate from high school, you will be forced to accept a new automobile. And worst of all, you will be exiled to an actual university. I suppose if I gave it any serious thought, my hate for the Island had more to do with jealousy than anything else. Don’t get me wrong: I love Brooklyn, and I wouldn’t trade my childhood for anything. But by the time I hit Brooklyn College, the blinders had come off. Even as a kid I knew my dad was never going to make it big. He wasn’t ever going to come home from work one day and say, “C’mon, everyone, we’re moving. I just bought a house in Glen Cove.” We were doomed to rent, doomed never to have anything to call our own. We were never going to have a little plaque outside our door that read THE PRAGERS. Dad was never going to magically make our lives a little bit easier. No one would.

  I took a little ride to Oceanside. It was on the south shore of Long Island, a couple of miles east of JFK airport, across the county line. The town wasn’t exactly bustling, but it was loud. Located directly under the glide path for a runway at Kennedy, Oceanside was almost as noisy as Coney Island on a spring Sunday. The difference being that graceful, soaring jets are more majestic than bone-rattling, earthbound subway trains. It wasn’t all that fancy a place, either. Many of the houses I saw were smaller than those in Midwood, Mill Basin, Dyker Heights, or Manhattan Beach. For the most part, the homes were modest, well-kept affairs with tidy front lawns and small backyards. Unlike in the city, though, these houses here weren’t squeezed in and shoehorned together. People could breathe a little in a place like Oceanside.

  Wallace Casey’s house was very much in keeping with the other houses I’d seen in Oceanside. His street was a street of such houses. There was nothing showy or chesty about it. Nothing about it cried out for attention. Nothing about it made you want to turn away. I don’t know much about architecture, so I can’t tell you in what style the house was built. It had red painted clapboards with white trim and black asphalt roofing shingles. The aluminum storm door had some scroll work on it with a fancified letter C in a circle at the center. C for Casey, was my guess. The flashiest things about the place were the white-painted flower boxes that accented the street-facing windows. There was a small gravel driveway and an attached one-car garage. There was no car in the driveway. That didn’t mean no one was home. In fact, someone was home. As I watched the house, wondering what to do, I saw the shadowy figure of a woman twice pass by the front window.

  I didn’t have much of a plan. I just sort of hoped Wallace Casey wouldn’t be home. After nearly getting run over and run off the road, after getting smacked in the ribs, getting tied up, and nearly getting kidnapped, I wasn’t in the mood for a confrontation. Sure, I’d been tough enough to break a guy’s nose with a single blow, but that was more a matter of surprise and survival: his surprise, my survival. But those clowns with their stupid masks were strictly amateur hour. If Casey was the menacing bastard I thought he was, I didn’t like my chances against him. And even if I was wrong about him and he was a flower child at heart, he was a man who had a fondness for sawed-off shotguns. Either way, I would definitely be the underdog.

  When I looked over into the back seat and saw a writing pad from Aaron’s company, I got an idea, an idea I hoped wouldn’t get me in any more trouble or put me in any more danger than I was already in. I grabbed the pad, found a pencil in the glove box, and hopped out of the car. I crossed to the Casey house side of the street and approached it as if I had just come from their neighbor’s house. I rang the doorbell and waited.

  “Who is it?” a woman asked, pulling the door back slightly, as far as the door chain would allow. This may have been the suburbs, but many, if not most, of the people who lived here came from the city. Old habits and caution die hard. “Can I help you?”

  “Hi, I’m Joseph Jones from the Students for a Fair Draft. We’re an organization that — ”

  She stopped me. “You mean the draft like for Vietnam?”

  “Exactly. I’m in your town today to collect signatures for — ”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “We’re for the war.”

  It didn’t escape my notice that she said we, and not I. “That’s fine. Although I am against the war myself, our organization is neither pro nor con. What we are about is making sure that the draft is fair and that everyone has an equal chance of getting drafted. We don’t want the kids of rich and powerful people to be able to dodge the draft while poor kids go off to get killed far away from home.” I was encouraged. These were the first sentences she’d let me finish. “I was wondering if I could ask you to sign our petition, which we will present to Congress — ”

  She stopped me again. “I’m sorry. I don’t think my husband would like me doing that. He’s a policeman and — ”

  It was my turn to stop her. “Your husband’s a cop?”

  “So what if he is?” She got understandably defensive.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Don’t get me wrong. It’s just that I think a cop, a guy who puts on a uniform and risks his life every day, would really be for our cause.”

  “Maybe, but I’m sorry. If you want, you can come back in a few minutes and talk to him. He’ll be home soon.” She closed the door.

  I stood there for a few long seconds, stunned, unmoving, completely confused. Then, like a zombie, I crossed the street and got back into the car. If there hadn’t been a very real possibility that Casey would be rolling down the block at any second, I might have sat there for hours going over in my head the implications of what his wife had just told me. Instead I twisted the ignition key, put the car in gear, and drove. A few car lengths away from the corner, I caught sight of Wallace Casey’s chestnut Ford Galaxie in my rearview mirror. The nagging question repeated itself: What was a cop doing mixed up with the likes of Bobby Friedman? More importantly, why was Bobby Friedman mixed up with a cop? It wasn’t so much the questions that bothered me. It was that I couldn’t think of many good answers. No, I couldn’t think of any.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  I had a sick, uneasy feeling in my gut during the entire ride over from Oceanside. It wasn’t that I was scared. I was scared. Given my recent history, it made perfect sense to be scared. But it wasn’t fear that was making me queasy. My unease was about something more insidious. It was as if I’d been walking around the last week or so with glasses with the wrong prescription and somebody had switched them back when I wasn’t looking. Suddenly, all the stuff that had appeared to be so out of focus was now clearer, if not quite crystal clear. I could see a way to connect
some of the puzzle pieces that had seemed so utterly random and disconnected: Mindy’s warning to stay away from Bobby, the attempt to run Bobby down, Bobby showing up at the apartments above the fix-it shop, the cop on the Belt Parkway letting Bobby go. Even so, many of the events of the last several days still didn’t make much sense. There were plenty of puzzle pieces that continued to feel as if they were from a completely different puzzle.

  At least I knew the cop was at home. As things were, walking into a neighborhood dive as an outsider was going to be uncomfortable enough. I never would have risked a visit if there was a chance Wallace Casey would be around. And when I stepped into the Onion Street Pub, I realized the only truly unusual thing about the joint was its name. If not for the few horse-racing-related props — an obvious concession to Aqueduct Racetrack’s proximity — the place might have been any bar on any street in any neighborhood in any borough in New York City. There were a few framed black-and-white photos of jockeys on horses in the winner’s circle at the nearby track, blankets of flowers tossed over the horses’ shoulders. Did the horses ever give a rat’s ass about the garlands and the glory? I doubted it. There was a saddle hung on the wall. A whip and riding boots too. There was a dusty, faded display of a jockey’s silks, goggles, and helmet, but the place didn’t smell like a barn. There was no stink of wet hay or horse shit. There were flies, though. I never understood how in February in New York, every other fly in the city has moved on to that great moldering garbage heap in the sky, yet you walk into any dive bar and voila, flies.

  Although only two of the three patrons at the bar had lit cigarettes dangling from their slack lips, there was a mighty cloud of smoke hanging in the air like a drawn gauze curtain. Maybe the flies had taken up the habit too. Why not? If the February chill couldn’t kill them, smoking wouldn’t. The two guys at the bar — one about my dad’s age, the other looking old enough to be my grandfather’s father — peered up from their copies of the Daily Racing Form just long enough to take another drag on their smokes. Their gray stubbled faces, already sour with lifetimes of defeat, barely registered my presence. The woman at the bar, her blonde updo unmoving as she turned her head, gave me a long, hungry look worthy of Cassius. Apparently, I was her type. I think maybe anybody with male plumbing might have been her type. Almost anybody. Not the two losers at the bar, certainly.

  The bartender was a different matter altogether. He’d put his eyes on me the second I opened the door and hadn’t taken them off me yet. He was an ex-Marine type, the kind with a hard blue stare, gray brush cut, and tattooed biceps. He had some mileage on him, most of it the ugly kind. Too young for WWII and too old for Nam, Korea was probably his war. He looked like he was still fighting it.

  I sat down next to Blondie and her updo. She was about thirty going on forty, and had a once-pretty face that had seen way too many last calls for alcohol. Not only did she have trouble pushing away from the bar, she also seemed to have the same issue with the dinner table. She had a good thirty pounds on me. Well, maybe not so good. She smiled at me and I smiled back.

  “Buy me a drink?” Blondie asked with a bit of desperation behind the come-on.

  I looked at her glass. “Sure. What’s that, Scotch?”

  “It is, on the rocks.”

  I got the barman’s attention, pointed at Blondie’s glass and said, “One more of these and a Rheingold for me.” I threw a five-dollar bill on the bar.

  The barman looked about as pleased as a fifteen-year-old kid late to his own circumcision. Maybe Blondie was his girl, but I didn’t think so. He just didn’t like strangers in his place. It upset the balance of the universe, the natural order of things. I decided to prove him right.

  “You got a jukebox in this establishment?”

  “Yeah, but you won’t like it,” he said, slamming our drinks on the bar.

  “Why’s that?”

  “No crappy psychedelic hippie shit on it. None of that Motown nigger shit, neither.”

  I ignored him. Guys like him, they lived to get you going. They were so miserable and rotten inside, they needed to spew their bile on the rest of the world. I wasn’t in the mood, not yet, anyway.

  Blondie took a swig of her Scotch, looped her arm in mine, and said, “C’mon, lover, I’ll show you the way.” She took her drink with her. Apparently the trip to the juke was going to be thirsty work.

  My tour guide smelled of too much Scotch and too much perfume — the cheap, cloying kind, like motel soap or lavender and lilac-laced potpourri. I wasn’t sure which was supposed to overwhelm the other. Didn’t matter, really; neither did the trick. The jukebox was at the back of the bar by the bathrooms and next to the cigarette machine. The bartender might’ve been an asshole, but he was an accurate one. There wasn’t a song on the box written by Lennon and McCartney or Jagger and Richards or Smokey Robinson. The Four Seasons was about as radical as the juke got. Mostly there was a lot of Sinatra and Tony Bennett. I was surprised to see some Nat King Cole and Johnny Mathis. I guess only blacks who sang for Motown counted as niggers in the barman’s philosophy. When I noticed there wasn’t any Neil Diamond or Simon and Garfunkel on the juke, I couldn’t help but wonder where Jews fit into his racial cosmology. Well, there were two Sammy Davis Jr. tunes. That was a victory of sorts, but it didn’t make me want to raise my fist in defiance and scream, “Power to the people.”

  I handed Blondie some dimes and told her to play away. She loved it, and knew exactly what tunes she wanted to play and what numbers to press. Sinatra started singing about a summer wind, pretty loudly too.

  Blondie spun me around. “C’mon, lover, let’s dance.”

  So we danced, Blondie pressing herself tightly against me. Surprisingly, her touch didn’t seem very sexual. It was almost as if she was just happy for the closeness of another human being. That made it more comfortable for me, made it easier for me to return the embrace. Still, her hair kind of got in the way of full enjoyment. When she rested her head on my shoulder, the scratchy, stiff updo brushed against the skin of my cheek. While it didn’t draw blood, it came pretty close. Her hair was so saturated with hairspray that I would have been afraid to light a match within five feet of her. When Sinatra was done, so were we. I bowed to her and she blushed. When we returned to our seats, I decided it was time to see what I could learn from Blondie.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Angie.”

  “Pleasure to meet you, Angie. I’m Moe.”

  “Back at you.”

  We shook hands.

  “So, Angie, I’m curious.” When I said that, she sidled up closer to me. “How did this place get a name like Onion Street?”

  She laughed and shook her head at the same time. “People are always asking that who drop in here.”

  “And … ?”

  She stopped shaking her head, but kept a smile. “The rule is if you don’t know, no one who does is supposed to say.”

  “The rule? I’ve never liked rules much. You don’t look like a woman who’s much for the rules yourself.”

  “My, aren’t you a clever one? Nice try, but this is my local and you know how it is.”

  “I suppose.”

  I raised my beer to her. We polished off what remained of our drinks. I pointed to the bartender that we needed another round. Angie seemed quite pleased by this. I could tell, because her left hand was now halfway up my right thigh. The barman put the drinks up, and I fed him another five. He didn’t like me any more than the last time I ordered a drink. If possible, I think he liked me less. Funny how that worked. I was drinking, but he was the one getting nastier. Angie and I clinked glass to bottle, and sipped. I never figured out where I developed a liking for beer. Aaron says it was at his bar mitzvah when our Uncle Lenny gave me a whole bottle to drink. He told me it was grownup soda. What the hell did I know? I drank it. I think Aaron is still mad at me because I fell asleep during the reception.

  “Okay, Angie, so you won’t tell me how this joint got its name. How
about who owns it?”

  She tilted the top of her piled-up hair at the bartender who was at the opposite end of the bar attending to the older loser. “George owns the place.”

  “He always so friendly, or am I just catching him on a good day?”

  “Clever and funny. I might just have to take you home.”

  When I didn’t jump at that line, she said, “He isn’t really so bad. He’s an ex-cop. They kicked his ass off the force. He don’t like talking about it, so don’t go there with him.”

  “Don’t worry about that, Angie. I don’t think I wanna go anywhere with George.”

  “How about with me?” she wanted to know, sucking down her drink for a little shot of courage.

  I was hoping it wouldn’t come to this, but I guess I knew it would. “Sorry, Angie. I got a serious girlfriend, and she’s in the hospital right now.”

  “Oh, that’s terrible.”

  I wasn’t exactly sure what Angie thought was terrible, that I wouldn’t sleep with her or that Mindy was in the hospital. She’d been nice so far, so I gave her the benefit of the doubt. “Thank you. She’s recovering, but slowly. That’s kind of why I’m here.”

  “How’s that?” Even in those two little syllables, there was increased tension. She waved to George for another drink. He poured it for her and looked at me.

  “No more for me, thanks.” I took out my last five and told him to keep the change. Didn’t seem to improve his opinion of me.

  When he left, I took out a picture of Bobby Friedman that I’d thought to bring with me. The photo was a year or two old, and I’d had to cut myself out of it. If Angie looked closely enough, she’d see that the disembodied arm slung across Bobby’s shoulders was mine. I didn’t think she was in the necessary state of sobriety to notice my arm.

  I pointed at Bobby’s face. “See this guy? The cops think he beat up my girl. Have you ever seen him in here?” So I lied to her, what else could I do? I couldn’t tell her who Bobby really was.