Education of Patrick Silver

by Jerome Charyn

Zorro stationed him a block from the Manhattan View Rest Home, where Manfred’s uncle lived. Then he disappeared, flicking his tail behind the humped backs of cars parked along Riverside Drive. The giant grew restless waiting for Jerónimo. Images of boys with wounds in their necks entered his skull. The baby had hoodwinked Patrick with those afternoon naps in the old shul. Jerónimo sneaked out of the cellar while Patrick yawned over bottles of ale. With his guardian tucked away at the Kings, Jerónimo could prowl. Patrick rubbed his fists. Mercy, the Guzmanns had used him to shadow the baby’s tracks. All the lucre he’d gotten from them, money that kept a shul alive, was smeared with children’s guts.

  His eyes stayed open. Patrick had sworn himself to Papa Guzmann. He wouldn’t betray the clan. He was a lively look-out, standing in his socks; the edges of his shirt twitched in the hot breeze coming off the park. The giant was turning to lead. He didn’t want to flag Jerónimo.

  How many hours passed? Five? Two? One? It might have snowed in August. Patrick wouldn’t move. His white hair had begun to crispen. The rest of him was gray. A stooped boy turned the corner, onto Riverside Drive. His hair was Patrick’s color: white with a shiver of blue. He hugged the walls of apartment buildings, which burnt to a furious orange in the evening sky. The boy galloped through this orange haze. Nothing could interfere with the stab of his knees.

  Patrick called to Jerónimo. His forehead thumped with grim reminders of the baby’s art: crayons, lips, raw handles, and eyes. God help us all, he couldn’t condemn the baby. An Irishman had enough flint in him to set a planet on fire, but he couldn’t squeeze affection out of his heart. He put away the monster stories. He was Jerónimo’s keeper again. He would steer him off the roofs, hide his crayons and his piece of metal. “Jerónimo.”

  The baby looked up from the orange bricks. His mouth wriggled open. The skin tightened around his eyes. His stoop deepened. He crept backwards, rocking on his heels, then plunged into Riverside Drive.

  “Jerónimo, don’t run away from me.”

  The baby dashed into the gutters. He never got across the street. A car stopped for him. It was Zorro’s dusty cab. Patrick could see the Fox through a wormy window. He heard the squeak of a door. The baby’s legs were in the air. His belly slid along the cushions; most of him was inside the car.

  The giant could have recaptured Jerónimo. He only had to borrow the powers of Cruathair O’Carevaun, hold on to Zorro’s bumpers, and hurl the cab into Riverside park. Patrick watched the Fox drive off with Jerónimo. “Brother to brother,” he said. “God bless.”

  He went up to Broadway. He could still have his dog’s beer in an Irish bar. He was the savior of Marilyn the Wild. The Shillelagh Society could announce his many sins: Patrick Silver, the Guzmann slave who lost his gun and fell in love with a Jane Street tart. No matter. He could walk into the Claremorris with his holster sitting like a lame prick on his thigh. None of his old brothers would ever throw him out.

  13.

  THE Fox hugged Jerónimo during the ride. It was a greedy embrace. He wanted to feel the knit of his brother’s bones, the earmuffs in his pocket, the mothballs every Guzmann crinkled into the cuffs of his shirts (these mothballs could fight the devil’s stinky perfume). Zorro wasn’t afraid of losing him. Jerónimo wouldn’t jump out of the car. The baby looked into Zorro’s eyes. He didn’t whimper. He didn’t flail with his arms. He sat cuddled in Zorro’s chest.

  The Fox was talking to himself. His eyes were black. He cursed Isaac and Isaac’s control over the streets of Manhattan and the Bronx. He knew his father’s plans. Moses was leaving America. Zorro could have dodged Isaac’s blond angels for the rest of his life, sleeping in telephone booths, eating falafel sandwiches in doorways, pissing into a bottle, waxing his jaws a different color every day of the week, but he couldn’t desert his family. Zorro was an American baby. He could thrive in Peru, Mexico, or Isaac’s Manhattan. He’d pick your pockets, sell you a girl, take your nickels for a lottery that didn’t exist. The Fox enjoyed his nakedness. He could cover himself with wax, mud, newspapers, green stamps. But his father had gathered heavy plumage in the Bronx. And Isaac had plucked him dry. Lost without his farm and his candy store, Moses was sick of the New World.

  Zorro could taste his brother’s heartbeat. It was strong as Papa’s Boston Road curry, spiced with powders that arrived from Uruguay. That was the aroma of the crypto-Jews, hot and sour, the crazy Marranos whose dread and love had the same powerful smell. The Fox’s shirt was wet. Was Jerónimo teething against Zorro’s stomach? The baby peeked out at the fire escapes on Ninth Avenue. He brooded over ideograms in the windows of fish and poultry stores, smiling when he recognized the snout of a swordfish, chicken feathers, the webbed feet of a duck.

  Zorro’s taxi probed the truckers’ slips behind the markets of Gansevoort Street. The chauffeur, Miguel, was a native of Boston Road. Zorro hired him because the limousine companies of Manhattan were filled with Isaac’s spies. Miguel drove for landlords, pimps, and petty thieves like Zorro and Papa Guzmann. He was paid to keep his eyes on the road. A chauffeur who got curious about his job might return to the Bronx without any ears. But this skinny borough confused Miguel. He couldn’t understand how West Fourth Street could bend far enough to collide with West Thirteenth. Zorro knocked on the glass. Miguel drove into the yard of an old warehouse on Washington Street. He saw a man in the yard: Moses Guzmann.

  Miguel tried not to stare. The Guzmanns were touchy people. If your nose wasn’t pointed at the ground, Papa thought you were giving him the evil eye. But they had no more instructions for him. The Fox and the baby got out of the car. Miguel hunched into the steering wheel to narrow his line of sight and avoid the Guzmanns’ terrible eyebrows, necks, and chins.

  Papa wore his cooking smock from the Kings of Munster. He’d escaped from the bar between casseroles and trudged around the corner to Washington Street. Customers would be calling for his squid in half an hour. Papa had little time. He’d left Jorge with Topal and Alejandro. If Isaac’s blue-eyed gorillas raided the bar again, Moses would have three missing boys. He manufactured his own weather under the smock. His ribs were cold. He had trembles in his back when he touched the baby.

  Zorro whispered in Papa’s ear. “We can hide him on the boat.”

  “Never,” Papa said.

  “I could go away with him. To Florida. We could live with the cubanos.”

  “Half the cubanos work for the FBI. They’d sit him in Isaac’s lap in two weeks.”

  “Then let me strangle Isaac, Papa, and we’ll have a little rest.”

  “Another Isaac would come.”

  Papa watched his youngest boy go slack in the shoulders. The Fox’s cheeks were pale under the yellow wax. But his jaws remained grim. Papa had no grand ideas about his family. Four of his boys were idiotas. He’d slept with syphilitic women in the marketplaces of Peru, fornicated like a mongrel dog. None of his wives had a tooth in her head. Zorro was an accident, the only Guzmann whose brains weren’t soft. Papa thanked the Lord Adonai every hour of his life for giving him a child who didn’t have to count with his thumbs. At an early age Zorro solved the intricate geography of Papa’s candy store, and became the Fox of Boston Road. He extended Papa’s empire into Manhattan with his natural guile. But he didn’t forget his brothers. He adored Topal, Alejandro, Jorge, and Jerónimo, and he looked after them. He showed the boys how to zip their flies. He made an abacus of their fingers, getting them to add and subtract with a furious concentration. He would stall traffic on Boston Road to herd his brothers across the street. Breathing saffron in an Irish bar had clogged Papa’s vents: couldn’t Moses understand how maddening it was for Zorro to give up one of his brothers? His instinct was to clutch Jerónimo and shit on the world, hold out against Isaac and his Manhattan army.

  “César, don’t be an ignorant. He won’t last a day in the Tombs. The convicts are more vicious than the police. You know the names they’ll call him. Rooster. Queen Jerónimo. I don’t want their ugly hands on his th
roat.”

  Papa removed a brick from his cooking shirt; it was the only weapon he’d carried out of the Bronx. He had himself to blame. He’d seen the mud on Jerónimo’s boots. Did it rain in Papa’s candy store? The baby fell asleep with wet hair. Papa closed his eyes to the fact that Jerónimo loved to prowl. The baby crawled out the little back window while his brothers were snoring and Papa was fixing ice-cream sodas or deciphering the hieroglyphics of his numbers bank.

  Papa’s fingers clawed into the brick. He wouldn’t let Isaac shove Jerónimo into the Tombs. The baby would never see a jury. The prisioneros at the detention house had their own punishment for molesters and murderers of children. They would choke him to death for playing with the testicles of young boys.

  Jerónimo didn’t scowl at the brick. He turned his face to Papa. He rubbed Zorro’s shoulder with his Guzmann neck. He was thinking of all his brothers. The baby didn’t have the word goodbye in his vocabulary. His nostrils sniffed for air. His tongue lay curled on his lip.

  The chauffeur, Miguel, prayed to Santa Maria for the courage to hold his chest on the steering wheel and blind himself to the Guzmanns. Miguel was weak. His head peeled over the bottom of the window in time to watch Papa’s brick. He would swear on el día de los Inocentes that Papa skulled Jerónimo with a kiss. Either Miguel was crazy, or Papa’s elbow didn’t move more than an inch. Moses touched Jerónimo between the eyes. The baby crashed into Zorro’s arms with a puckered forehead. Miguel slid down into his seat. He would have stayed there for a month unless the Guzmanns commanded him to rise. The door opened. Miguel heard the scuffle of several bodies. Señora, they had turned his taxi into a hearse!

  Someone tapped him on the ear. Miguel wouldn’t forget a signal from the Fox. He drove out of the yard. There were two Guzmanns in his minor. Zorro and the dead baby. Papa wasn’t in the car. Jerónimo’s brains were mostly blue. He had a swollen head. He sat in Zorro’s shoulder, like a live boy. Miguel screamed under his tongue. He was afraid to utter a sound. The Guzmanns could murder you before you had the opportunity to blink.

  “Miguel,” Zorro said. He wasn’t unkind to his chauffeur. He didn’t growl. His voice was gentle and low. “Take us uptown.”

  The chauffeur felt a pinch in his spine. Was the Fox going to caress a dead baby from Fourteenth Street into the Bronx? Miguel was aware that the Guzmanns could provoke a miracle. Any Marrano could make himself into a male witch. Would the Fox breathe into Jerónimo’s nose and set the baby to yawn and smile before they got across the Harlem? Would they hold conversations in Miguel’s back seat? He squinted into the minor for obvious signs. He waited for the swelling to go down. If the Fox caressed the baby long enough, the pinkness would return. Jerónimo wouldn’t be stuck with blue brains. The Fox was beginning to murmur. Were these the incantations of a Marrano witch, or love songs to a brother? Miguel didn’t care. He wanted a resurrection in his car. Who would believe him when he told his compadres that he’d watched a middle-aged boy die and get reborn in under half an hour.

  Papa had to cook, or the bar would have grown suspicious. Was there a rat among the Irishmen? Papa couldn’t be sure. The brick was under his shirt, hidden from Sammy’s customers. The gallants at the Kings of Munster couldn’t have noticed Papa’s distress. He shredded chunks of abalone with perfect control. His other boys were sleeping in the sanctuary. They would moo for Jerónimo after their heads came off the pillows. What excuse could Papa make? Jorge would bawl with a finger in his eye. Topal and Alejandro would hug behind Silver’s holy closet. The bar wouldn’t understand their wails.

  Moses was sick of breathing Dublin ale. He meant to pack after he prepared his last bowl of squid. The Guzmanns were going to Europe. Now that Spain had a king, young Juan Carlos, the Marranos could return to their original home. Moses would keep out of Madrid. The madrileños were a light skinned race. Papa would try the north. He would settle in Bardjaluna, a city the Arabs helped build. He would live in the old Chinese district, near the oily port, in virtual retirement. He would set up a stall of birdcages on the Ramblas and pick the pockets of Swedish and German tourists. He would take his boys to see Charlie Chaplin films. Zorro wouldn’t be content. He would go above the Ramblas, into the boulevards, and drink coffee with pretty girls. He would wear soft scarves and shun Papa’s birds. But he wouldn’t neglect Jorge and the other two. The Fox adored his brothers.

  Silver came into the bar. He looked forlorn. He wouldn’t chat with Sammy’s customers. He had Guinness in a corner, without a taste of Papa’s squid. The giant didn’t bother peeking for Jerónimo. He was the only Irishman at the Kings of Munster who understood where the baby was.

  The giant wasn’t Papa’s chattel any more. But he couldn’t get free of the Guzmanns. He was tied to that miserable family. He realized the choices Papa had. Once the baby was arrested, even the Marrano saints couldn’t have kept him alive. Papa had to hide him, or put him to sleep.

  Moses and the Irish were watching one another. They could grieve without opening their mouths. They didn’t embrace. Nothing passed between them except the sad energy in the coloring of their eyes. Patrick sucked on a bottle without leaving his corner. Papa attended to the squid.

  Part Four

  14.

  EACH Thursday morning in September a blue limousine would park outside the John Jay College of Criminal Justice to deliver Father Isaac. The Chief had to make his eleven o’clock class. He was lecturing on the sociology of crime. His students were a privileged lot. Patrolmen, firemen, and sanitation boys, they had never sat in a class with the First Deputy Police Commissioner of New York. They were crazy for Isaac. He would talk to them about Aeschylus, with a gun sticking out of his pants. They would go dizzy from his insights, his remembrance of poets, hangmen, crooks, politicians, and carnival freaks.

  The First Dep had one liability: his automatic pager would force him in and out of class. The bleeps coming from the region of his tie could curl the ears off any student. Patrolmen and firemen wagged their heads until Isaac turned off his gadget and got to the telephone in the hall.

  On this Thursday morning Isaac was morose. Headquarters switched him to a gravedigger’s shack in Bronxville, New York. He grumbled to Herbert Pimloe, who picked up the phone. “I’m lecturing, Herbert. What’s so important?”

  “We found the baby,” Pimloe said.

  Isaac felt a crack in his mouth. “Where, Herbert?”

  “In the Guzmann yard. Isaac, you were right. The fucks buried him in the family plot. I swear to God. It took an hour to dig him up. Isaac, you couldn’t believe the bones in that yard. Papa must be an orderly guy. He sank all his enemies in the same place. You remember that creepy runner of his, little Isidoro? I think he’s down there, sleeping with Jerónimo. We sent for the morgue wagon. Isaac, should we wait for you?”

  “No,” Isaac said, his mind drifting to the vultures at the morgue who would hover over Jerónimo, pathologists from Bellevue with their dissecting kits, tubes, laboratory handguns, airtight jars for liver and kidney samples.

  “Herbert, call Bellevue. Tell them to cancel the truck.”

  Pimloe stood in the gravedigger’s shack with the phone stuck in his cheek, waiting for the First Dep to clarify himself. Father Isaac didn’t mutter a word. “Why should I stop the truck?” Pimloe finally said.

  “Because we’re leaving the baby in the ground.”

  The Chief was deranged. The PC would come down on them all if he discovered that Jerónimo hadn’t been exhumed. Pimloe had to supervise a team of gravediggers to get at Jerónimo. They’d been pushing bones around since a quarter to seven.

  “Isaac, the baby has a dent in his skull. That’s Guzmann work, if you ask me. What about Isidoro? Isaac, look how many corpses we could pin on the tribe. The Fox can’t squeeze out of this.”

  “Herbert, button up the mess you made and go home to your wife.”

  Father Isaac returned to his section of firemen and cops. There was a wormy boy in his head. He didn’t feel l
ike jabbering about Aeschylus, blood, and crime. His pager began to scream again. Isaac dismissed the class.

  He didn’t have to argue with Herbert Pimloe. Headquarters switched him to another location. He had his old chauffeur on the wire, Sergeant Brodsky, calling from a West Street diner. Brodsky was jubilant. “Isaac, the Guzmanns belong to us. They’re booked on a Spanish freighter. Barcelona’s the last stop. Isaac, imagine. They used your name. They registered as the four Sidels. What fucking nerve they have. They’re on board this minute. They carried Jorge in a mattress. Isaac, I didn’t see Jerónimo.”

  “Jerónimo’s on top of the Bronx,” Isaac said.

  Brodsky scratched his nose. “What d’you mean?”

  “The baby isn’t going to Barcelona.”

  “Isaac, have a heart. Is the moron with you, or Pimloe? You want me to raid the boat? We got sledgehammers. I could chop that pier to shit and pull Zorro off his Spanish freighter.”

  “Brodsky, the Guzmanns can do whatever they please. Zorro doesn’t exist for us. Let Papa have his ocean voyage. The Atlantic will be good for Jorge’s legs.”

  “God, Isaac, can’t I collar one of them? Just one? Alejandro, or Topal. I don’t care.”

  “Brodsky, goodbye.”

  Isaac got to Horatio Street in his blue limousine. He dismissed his driver with a polite nod and entered the Kings of Munster. Irishmen fled from the bar. The lone dog in the place, an ancient terrier who loved to lick empty Guinness bottles, scampered under a table. Sammy wouldn’t say hello. Isaac ground his teeth and walked into the sanctuary. Patrick had his minyan. He didn’t need Father Isaac. He was standing with Rabbi Hughie and the elders of the shul, and three bearded gentlemen in soft white prayer shawls. “Cover your head,” Patrick growled. “You’re in a holy room.”

  Isaac put a handkerchief over his ears.