Blue Eyes

by Jerome Charyn

  “The ball’s flat,” Sylvio griped. “There must be a split somewheres.”

  “Nine serving sixteen,” Schiller said, handing Coen the other “Double Happiness” ball. Odile didn’t need a bearded, slippered gnome to repeat the score. The game was inconsequential. Unable to count on the shark, she interposed herself, kicking off the crepes and stepping out of her skirt. She would make Coen look at her, force him to comment on her nakedness, upset his strokes if she could. Odile wore no underwear on this day, and Schiller, who admired the precise swell of her bosoms in a shirt from Bendel’s, was astonished that her breastline didn’t change without the shirt. A cultured man, a polite man, he was ashamed of the erection in his pocket. This Odile had the firmest chest in the country, Schiller believed. He was too distracted to reckon with the silk in her pubic hair. Coen was busy lobbing the ball. He saw the fallen skirt, but he wouldn’t inhibit the sweep of his bat for Odile. The SROs screamed from Schiller’s gallery. “Sweetheart, do the turkey trot.” They clucked with their tongues, climbing over the gallery wall; they would have gone further, but they realized the cop owned a gun in Schiller’s lap. Odile put her shoes back on, so she could annoy Coen from a higher level.

  The gallery screamed, “Sweetheart, sweetheart.”

  This noise finally caught Sylvio in the head; he’d been brooding over the collapse of his game (the shark still had Coen eighteen to twelve). He turned around, noticed Odile in her shoes. Coen pushed three points past him. Sylvio gripped the Butterfly with his pinkie in the air. No breastline or Venus hair could have disconnected him so. Sylvio wasn’t taking a sexual stance (others had tried to tempt the shark during a game, and failed). It was the porous nature of the light in Schiller’s club that undid Sylvio; the shark suffered a religious manifestation, an epiphany of sorts. Naked in the muggy light, with dark streaks coming down her chest like so many wounds, and her profile punctured by the shadows flying off Coen’s bat, the girl became one of the great martyrs for Sylvio, Santa Odile. His fingers numbed on him, and he lost all the advantages of the penholder grip; he couldn’t scoop up the ball. He might have beaten Coen anyway; even in a crisis, the shark was better than a cop. But Odile had gone for her clothes. Crying, bitter at Sylvio, bitter at Schiller, bitter at Coen, she stuck a leaden arm into the Bendel shirt. She passed the gallery with one buttock showing. Sylvio followed her out, his neck twitching in Coen’s direction. “Cop, I be back. Next month. I shave your ass sitting on a chair. I spot you twenty, man. You play like a cunt.”

  The shark forgot his pouch and his “Double Happiness” balls, and Coen had to fling them at him. He didn’t want the money. “Give it to the welfares, Emmanuel. Let them buy ice cream and cake. They can feast the whole fucking hotel. Everybody eats. But save a few dollars for Arnold.” He had nothing to gloat about; he couldn’t cherish Sylvio’s retreat the way Schiller did. Schiller rattled the money tin.

  “Manfred, that’s another hustler who’ll think twice before annoying us. He won’t dare bring the bat into a public place.”

  Coen had the urge to run after Odile, an urge which he suppressed; she came with the shark, she could go with him. He wondered what deal she’d made with Sylvio: cash or bedwork? The cop was growing jealous. He was fond of her, in spite of her waspishness. She had a stylish walk in her big, gummy shoes. He muttered to himself once Schiller was out of earshot. Odile, you figured wrong. I’m the real hustler, not Sylvio. I was playing money games for Zorro before the kid knew what a paddle was. Manfred Coen of the Loch Sheldrake ping-pong school. I was terrific with sandpaper.

  Odile made the stairs with her cheeks on fire. She wouldn’t look at the shark. Her hems were crooked. She came out of the cellar only partially dressed; she couldn’t get her fingers through the sleeve. Sylvio guided them for her, feeling the luxury of knucklebone.

  “Don’t touch me,” she said. She pressed a hundred dollars in his hand. “You’re paid. Now disappear.”

  Sylvio kept two feet behind Odile, varying his speed according to hers. His pupils had shrunk, and all Odile could see of him were dirty eyewhites. He reminded her of the junkies who punked around in the hallway opposite The Dwarf, their faces a bloodless gray without proper eyeballs; that’s how much he had deteriorated after dueling Coen. “I gave you carfare,” she said. “Now go and scratch.” He dropped behind one more step. She fetched a cab for herself and locked the door on him. Going down Columbus she had a change of heart. She told the cabby to circle around the block; his meter ate thirty cents finding Sylvio. “Get in.”

  He slumped with his knees higher than his head. He didn’t dare touch Odile again. For comfort he rubbed up against the upholstery with the small of his back. Odile hadn’t meant to beleaguer him.

  “My uncle picks the winners. Some shark you are.”

  “Mama, I’m wiped out You know what it is playing a dead man? I counted his blinks. Two blinks in thirty shots. That’s not human. A human man I could squash. Ask around. Ask when the last time was Sylvio Neruda left money under a table.”

  She said, “Shut up,” so he crossed his arms until Christopher Street. She wouldn’t let him off without clutching him. Her tongue licked the flats of his teeth. Even the cabby was suspicious. He wouldn’t believe such kissing could exist in his own cab.

  “I’m sorry,” Odile blew into Sylvio’s ear. He liked the heat of a moving lip. “He’s icy, Coen. Very icy. Some big shit called Isaac trained him to be like that.”

  The shark waddled into the health spa. Sitting with Odile must have activated the crazy bone in his knee. How could you evaluate the kiss of a mama saint? The girl had a bitter tongue, that’s the truth. She took the strength out of his legs, Santa Odile. He wouldn’t accept women backers any more. He reached the ping-pong room huffing, his eyes off the players, thankful for the clean grace of fluorescent light.

  Part 3

  14 Just when Coen was ready to go to Papa, to warn him at least of the tail on Jerónimo, to chide him about the hush money for Sheb, to curse him maybe for monkeying with the finances of his father’s store, Papa came to him. Coen knew the tribe was around his door the moment he spotted an oversize head under his fire escape. It was Jorge eating a Spanish jellyroll. The boy couldn’t decipher street signs but he was the only muscle Papa would ever need. He could poke your eye with a finger, climb on your back and lock your neck in his jaw, grab your testicles, or skewer you with a kitchen knife. Papa wouldn’t have come out of the Bronx for a trifle. So Coen didn’t idle near the door. He sent Papa into the living room, while Jorge remained in the street, remembering faces along the perimeters of his eyes. Jorge was meant to whistle if he saw a cop in plainclothes or a goon belonging to Isaac. He held the jellyroll close to his mouth. His nails were a fine pink from the number of chocolate milks he drank.

  Coen offered Papa peach liqueur or a Bronx snack of cherry soda and pretzel sticks. Papa declined. He had given Coen a perfunctory kiss and went to sit in a corner chair. He was dressed in his store clothes, an old twill jacket with clots of syrup on the sleeves. Papa would sneeze into the shoulder padding from time to time. He hated the North American passion for superhygiene. When he couldn’t leave his counter he pissed in his shoe. He would never bathe his boys more than once a week. He left the bugs to swim in his syrup tanks. No one ever died of a Guzmann “black and white.” He couldn’t swallow the thin homogenized stuff from the Bronx dairies that wouldn’t even leave a proper moustache on your face. Papa drank cream from a can. His eyes were puffy today, and he had to pinch his cheeks to get the twitches out. Coen couldn’t believe that Papa had money or policy slips on his mind.

  “Manfred, I want Jerónimo safe. Go to your Chief—tell him Papa will give up five of his runners and his wire room on Minford Place if he agrees not to touch the boy.”

  “Papa, I already told César. I’m not working for Isaac. I’m playing the glom these days. Papa, ever since Isaac resigned, they’ve been throwing me into all the boroughs except one. They wouldn’t let me ca
tch homicides in the Bronx. Why? Because I might step on Isaac’s toes and prevent him from watching the candy store.”

  “Manfred, he got nothing but bellyaches from me. He had to scrape the floor to collect a penny. Isaac lived on fudge. I spit inside every sundae I made him. I would have brought him up to the farm in a basket and shoveled dirt in his mouth, but this is the United States. You can’t wipe off a big agente like Isaac and expect to stay in business. The cops would mourn for him all over Boston Road.”

  “Papa, why did Jerónimo come back from Mexico? You should have kept him with Mordeckay.”

  “The boy was lonely. He couldn’t adjust to the Mexican traffic lights. A cousin isn’t close enough. How long would he survive without seeing his brother’s face?”

  “If you hadn’t opened your marriage bureau, Isaac might have left you alone.”

  “That’s César’s trade, not mine.”

  “Please. César wouldn’t have moved into Manhattan without the nod from you. And I don’t believe Mordeckay became a rabbi just for César. Papa, you okayed the brides. But Isaac’s going to have, to chew his own warts for a while. They caught the lipstick freak at the Fourth Division, so he can’t lay that trick on Jerónimo.”

  “He’ll find something else. There’s always a loose freak running around.”

  And Papa sat with his thumbs under his chin, an old habit from Peru, when he had to wait for hours at the market of San Jerónimo for a tradesman with pockets fat enough to pick. He had loved Coen the boy, had opened the candy store and the farm to him, had mixed him with his own brood, but he was suspicious of the man. You couldn’t traffic with Isaac for twelve years and go unspoiled. So he trusted Coen only by degrees. Whatever Coen was capable of doing to him and Cósar, he didn’t think the cop would hand Jerónimo over to Isaac.

  “Manfred, I could offer him cash. I could set him up in the south Bronx under a code name. Abraham. It’s stink-proof. No commissioner has a nose that good.”

  “You can’t make Isaac like that. Best thing, Papa, is chain Jerónimo to the candy store, or give him ten blocks on Boston Road for his hikes, with Jorge and Alejandro at the other end of his pants.”

  “Manfred, I’ve dealt with those agentes before. They could kidnap Alejandro. They could give Jorge a permanent headache with their clubs. They could run Jerónimo down with a car. I’m superstitious, Manfred. I don’t want any of my boys to the before me.”

  “Papa, I’m superstitious too. I didn’t know my mother and father would pick the oven when I went into Germany.”

  Papa brought his thumbs out from under his chin and crossed them over his nose.

  “Why did you hound Albert for money? Papa, couldn’t you have waited until I got back?”

  “Manfred, who’s been fucking you in the ear? Did you bribe your uncle with chocolate bars?”

  “No. Isaac told Pimloe, and Pimloe told me. He thought I’d be anxious to spy on César if I knew.”

  “Pricks,” Papa screamed, and he put his thumbs in his pockets. “Hound your father, you say. I kept him alive. He couldn’t have fed a weasel on the eggs he sold. My cousins from Peru had to suck four eggs a day because I wanted to satisfy the Coens. I won’t hedge with you, Manfred. I’m a policy man, not a charity house. Your father, your mother, and your uncle Sheb did small favors for me. I stored some of my account books in their egg boxes. I sent your uncle on errands so he wouldn’t lose his self-respect. I gave them a free bungalow in Loch Sheldrake, but your mother was too refined. She didn’t want your father getting contaminated by me or my boys. She was a cultured woman, that Jessica. I enjoyed having her on the farm. She told your father I flirted with her. Manfred, I swear on Jerónimo’s life, I didn’t do nothing but touch her once on the knee. She should have walked in my orchard with more clothes.”

  “Papa, that still doesn’t explain why they preferred gas?”

  “Manfred, every month your father sold less and less. I could have choked an army with the eggs I took off him. I couldn’t carry him forever.”

  “Then you should have closed him down before I went on maneuvers. How could I clear Albert out of the store from a post in West Germany?”

  “They had it in their heads to die for a long time. Your father had too much gentility. You can’t exist on Boston Road with his diet. The Coens would have been better off if they ate meat instead of grass.”

  “Explain to me, Papa, why Sheb has been collecting premiums from you for so many years?”

  Papa scowled in Coen’s chair. “What premiums?”

  “Two dollars a month from Jerónimo’s hand.”

  “Manfred, don’t stick me too hard. There’s some blood under all my freckles. After he prepared the oven for Albert your uncle was a maniac. Jorge found him on the fire escape laughing and screaming, with piss everywhere. César climbed up and wanted to bring him down. But he would only go with Jerónimo. So the baby went up there and held Shebby’s fingers. That’s how we got him into the candy store. The boys washed the piss off. He slept with Jerónimo, he ate off Jerónimo’s dish. And I gave him an allowance same as the baby. Two dollars a month. We lent him’ Jorge’s coat for the funeral.”

  “Papa, somebody should have thought about inviting me. I had the right to throw a little dirt on my father’s box.”

  “Manfred, César wrote the Army. They didn’t write back.”

  Coen lost his inclination to dig. He couldn’t turn Papa’s head, force him to look at Coen outside Guzmann lines. So he slouched against the wall. Papa got up. Worrying about Jerónimo gave him a squint in his left eye. He had more gray hairs on his neck than Coen could remember. His knuckles were humped from fixing ice cream sodas. He gave Coen a better kiss than before.

  “Manfred, be careful. You shouldn’t touch César’s Chinaman in the face again. He’s been speaking your name.”

  Coen watched the Guzmanns from his windowsill. Papa couldn’t bend like Jorge. He had a stiff-legged walk from standing behind his counter seventeen hours a day. He put his hand in Jorge’s pocket and led them both across the street. His shoulders wouldn’t get warm in Manhattan. Jorge was growling for food. So they had barley soup at the dairy restaurant before César’s man drove them to the candy store. Papa couldn’t fill his stomach without beef or pork. But Jorge seemed fit. He belched through his fist in the steerer’s car. Papa didn’t like to think about the dead. The living gave him plenty to do. But Albert’s wife still had the power to sting him in the ass. Nipples didn’t move him so much. He could have listed on a sheet of policy paper a hundred nipples fancier than Jessica Coen’s. But he couldn’t get underneath her smile. Albert he pitied. Manfred he loved. Jessica could only bother him. She brought pimples on his arms. Instead of salting twenty-dollar bills in the chimneys of his farmhouse, he would watch Jessica from behind a tree, her face stiff in the sun, while his boys clumped around the orchard in country shoes. Nothing could make her put on her halter or hurt the confidence of that thick smile. Did she want all six of the Guzmanns to pay for Albert’s ineptness, his inability to provide?

  Papa had only a narrow fondness for women. He had a habit of changing queridas after their pregnancies were over. They would bear a child for Papa and move to another pueblo. He took pride in the knowledge that every one of his boys had a different mother. He expected simple fecundity from a mujer and would tolerate nothing else. Alejandro’s mother was a beauty with eleven toes. Topal’s was a straightforward market slut. Jorge’s had becoming moles on her ass and could prepare a remarkable fisherman’s soup. He might have put up with her for a while longer if she hadn’t been jealous of his older boys. César’s was a mestizo with slim hips. Jerónimo’s he couldn’t remember. All the mujeres accepted Papa’s crazy calendar. Ever since their time in Portugal, when they had to conduct the Marrano services in a wine cellar under the feet of the civil guard, Guzmanns have celebrated Christmas in July and Pascua (the Marrano Easter) in the fall. The mujeres worshiped Moses, Abraham, John the Baptist, and Joseph of Egypt
. They depreciated the value of the Holy Virgin (no Guzmann would ever pray to a woman), they soaked the Marrano pork in hot oil, they washed the genitals of Papa’s boys. Papa sacked them anyway, one by one. Yet he couldn’t rid himself of that other mujer. He would rinse a glass, scrape off the remains of a banana split, and see a nipple in the sink. He was no better off on the farm. If he sat in his own orchard too long without one of his boys he smelled Jessica near the strawberry patch.

  Jorge fell asleep in the car. Papa’s disposition changed once the steerer took him over the Third Avenue bridge. The water smelled different on the Bronx side. His shoulders baked. He could tickle his brain without terrorizing himself. Papa had learned to play cat’s cradle with other Marrano boys in the flea markets of Peru. No proper limueño could revive a dead piece of string like the Marranos, who had to spend their lives bundling and unbundling their goods. If a boy had no intuition in his fingers and couldn’t feel his way through the constellations of the game, if he knotted his thumbs when he tried to get beyond “the scissors” or “the king,” Papa, who was called Moisés then, would dig around the thumbs and perform surgery on the string. His own boys couldn’t catch on to the game. Jerónimo’s abilities ended after “pinkie square.” César had the fingers but no patience. Jorge, Topal, and Alejandro bungled on the first constellation. They couldn’t even fit the string. The norteamericanos had their own games. None of the farmers at the lake or the merchants of Boston Road could play with him, nobody but Jessica Coen. Who had blessed her fingers? Papa couldn’t vex her with his constellations. She tilted the string with her thumbs turned in, and got out of Papa’s snares. It was curious lovemaking. Four hands in a pie of string. How many times did he graze her bosoms going from “the diamond” to “pinkie square?” And he’d hold her cups for a second while she stood against him taking a constellation off his fingers. She didn’t approve or disapprove of Papa’s caress. He only saw the teeth in her face and her jumbo eyes. She always had the boy with her. Was he concentrating on the hands inside or outside the string? Because Manfred could make “the butterfly” almost as fine as Papa.