He whistled to himself. The melody cracked on him. Isaac couldn’t blow air. His cheeks contorted and his mouth turned grim. He had the shakes. Something was diving near his groin. His guts twisted in and out. The “Commish” had a corkscrew in his belly. Mother Moses, that worm had been lying in wait. The monster picked its moment to get at Isaac. What did it mean? Was Isaac in some kind of heavy labor? The worm was going to give him twins. A gypsy and a blond Jew. Baby Dermott and baby Coen.
Ooooooo! His knees waltzed out. Isaac had to sit on his bum. Celebrants ran up the stairs to be with Coote McNeill. Cops were arriving a little late. They saluted their Commissioner, paused, and went in. It was funny seeing Isaac with his knees in his face.
Another lad arrived. It was Tiger John, handcuffed to a “screw.” Isaac had bullied the Corrections Department into letting John out of Riker’s for an hour so he could come to the funeral.
“Morning to you, Isaac.”
Isaac’s mouth puffed like a dying fish.
“That man needs a glass of water,” John told the screw.
The screw wasn’t concerned with Isaac. He shook the handcuffs. But John refused to walk. “Isaac, should I get one of the priests for you? They must have a glass of water somewhere in St. Pat’s.”
Isaac pushed on his ribcage like a bellows and brought up bits of air. He belched out a few words to Tiger John. “You can go in, Johnny … I’ll be fine. How are they treating you over there?”
“So-so,” the Tiger said. “I get the Commissioner’s grub. Piss and black pudding … They let me teach the fundamentals of banking to all my little brothers.”
The screw yoked on the handcuffs with one fist, and John had to crawl. Jesus, they were a funny pair, that Corrections officer and the old “Commish,” with their rumps climbing together. Isaac was going to tell the screw to ease up on poor John, but the worm gathered under Isaac’s ribs and uncoiled itself with a squeeze of its tails. Isaac tore his collar away. His windpipe rattled. His fingers turned blue. The little bastard was out to choke Isaac the Brave.
He couldn’t rise up from the stairs. Isaac had to lull that creature to rest. He started to hum.
There was once a Commish
Who lost his mind
On the steps of St. Pat’s.
He’d killed one lad too many.
He went to Ireland
To cure himself
But he couldn’t break that habit
Of getting people killed.
Isaac the Commish
He brings carnage
Wherever he goes.
The worm must have liked the humming it got. It began to let go. The tails disappeared from Isaac’s ribs. He was still too weak to get off his ass. He sat with his ruined collar, while the Fisherman had his Mass.
Two bodies came out of the church. Mangen and his shoofly, Captain Mort.
“Boyos,” Isaac muttered. “Are they finished in there? Why are you hurrying the dead?”
Mangen continued down the stairs.
Isaac held out his hands. “Arrest me, you son of a bitch.”
Mangen stopped and turned to look at Isaac. “Do you have to make a spectacle of yourself outside an Irish church?”
Isaac appealed to Captain Mort. “You’re my witness, Cap. I killed a man.”
The shoofly wouldn’t speak. Mangen crept closer to Isaac. He sat on the steps with him. He was wearing gorgeous red-and-brown socks. He motioned to Schapiro, and the Captain went to the bottom of the stairs.
“Isaac, what sort of killing have you done?”
“Him. The guy in the coffin. I made him drink his yellow water … well, are you going to arrest me or not?”
“Isaac, I’m no magician. I can’t arrest you for a crime that didn’t take place …”
The “Commish” had a violence in the chips of his forehead. “What the hell do you mean?”
“McNeill drowned, may that old man rest in peace … his own boys saw it. He was in the lake, slapping for fish. And he fell. They ran out of the house, but they couldn’t revive him.”
Isaac slid with his bum to a lower step. “Are you happy now? The Tiger’s in jail, McNeill’s dead, and Sammy’s over the hill … you even have me working for you. I sent out two cops to steal Sylvia Berkowitz from my own apartment.”
“The woman’s a little nuts. She can’t make it alone. She has her flair of independence, and then she falls apart.”
“Dennis, if you’re going to play the wise man who brings together husbands and wives, what about old John? Will you furnish a wife for him at Riker’s?”
Mangen stood up. “John doesn’t need a wife.”
The Special Prosecutor abandoned Isaac on the stairs. He jumped across Fifth Avenue with Captain Mort. Isaac wasn’t done. He’d sit until the funeral was over. Then he’d ride down to Headquarters with his honor guard and those captains of his who were in mourning for Coote McNeill.
31
IT was a house of ragamuffins, cell block 5, where inmates wore jogging suits, fedoras, Navy fatigues, cashmere sweaters with holes under the arms, silk scarves with mousy rents in the lining, odd pieces of prison clothes. No two men had trousers that matched. It could have been a training camp for clowns. But the clowns never smiled.
There had been two attempted hangings last month. The block had its own suicide squad, volunteers who would go from cell to cell and reassure brooding inmates. The suicide squad was the only touch of sanity on Riker’s Island. The screws were crazy here. They would rush through block 5 with gas masks and billy clubs and shout “Geronimo.” God forbid if you got in their way. More than one prisoner had been trampled upon and left in a gallery to moan and bleed, until the suicide squad appeared with an improvised medical kit.
When Tiger John Rathgar heard “Geronimo,” he would hide in a corner of his cell and wait for the gas masks to finish prancing through the block. He began to talk like everybody else, Rastafarians, Latinos, blacks from Bushwick Avenue. “Cocksuckers. Motherfucking screws.” But John was the former PC, and that gave him a certain cleverness over the prisoners of his block. He understood the reason for gas masks and billy clubs. The screws would have been eaten alive if they’d come unarmed. They were frightened to death of John’s block. There were cannibals among the population, according to them.
John was shown all the amenities that were proper for a “Commish.” The screws sneered at him, but the Rastis, the Latinos, and the blacks would nod quietly and leave John alone. They wouldn’t break into his cell and harangue him for contributing to their destruction. Only the white prisoners were uncivil to John. These men would stick out their tongues and cry like lunatic apes. “Tiger, Tiger, we’re gonna burn your ass.”
They didn’t lay a finger on the old man. But the threat was always there. John had to chew his carrots in the mess hall with his ass off the edge of the chair and his eyes searching for hostile spoons and forks. You couldn’t tell where an attack would begin. John stayed out of the recreation room. He didn’t have to weave baskets and look at a ping-pong ball. He sat on his bunk most of the time. He pulled a blanket over him so you couldn’t see what he was doing. Then he would take the bankbooks out of his pocket and remove the worn rubber band. John wasn’t greedy. He didn’t hunger for the amount registered in each book. What he liked best was to leaf through the different names. Simon Dedalus. Gabriel Conroy. Leopold Bloom. Gertrude MacDowell. Anna Livia Plurabelle. Nosey Flynn …
A screw was knocking on the bars of John’s cell. The nose valve of his gas mask was open, and he was able to shout at John. “Are you deaf?” John gathered the bankbooks under his knee. Then he came out of the blanket to acknowledge the screw.
“You have a visitor, Mr. John.”
Tiger John shrugged. It was after dark. Riker’s didn’t let visitors in at such an hour.
“Come on, you. Out of that fucking corner.”
John stuffed the bankbooks into his pocket and climbed off his bunk. He followed the screw into the gallery a
nd across block 5. A few of the prisoners winked at him and made friendly grabs at his shirt. “Freedom, man … you blowing out of here.”
John grew into a frenzy. A pulse started to beat in his neck. His mouth was dry. It had to be an important guest. They wouldn’t open Riker’s for an ordinary stooge. The Mayor had come for him. The Man himself. The Honorable Sammy Dunne. Who else? Ah, they’d show these lads what a Mayor could do. Him and Sam, they’d be in the sweatbox at the Dingle before midnight.
He entered the visiting room and found nothing but dumb gray walls. He was put into a grimy cubicle. He stared out at the spook on the other side of the Plexiglas. It was only Isaac the Brave.
John frowned. “Jesus, I was hoping for Mayor Sam.”
“Forget it,” Isaac said. “Sammy couldn’t even show up at St. Pat’s. He’s as much of Mangen’s prisoner as you are … only Sam gets to sleep outside. Do you have a lawyer, John?”
“The best. He screams at me on the telephone twice a day.”
Isaac saw the bulge in Tiger John’s pocket. Bankbooks. They couldn’t have been worth a penny to John. Mangen must have frozen the accounts. He’d use them as evidence at John’s trial, if a trial ever took place. Who could tell what was in the great god Dennis’ mind? He could quash the indictment in another six months and let John slip out of jail with a pack of foolish bankbooks. Hadn’t he shamed the Police? He’d gone into Headquarters and arrested the PC. Mangen forced the Department to clean house. He could advertise this when he ran for Governor next year on the Republican ticket. But Dennis had other means to turn John into a ghost. He could push back the trial and have Tiger John sit like the Count of Monte Cristo, until his sideburns covered his nose and he became the invisible man of Riker’s. Who could say how many poor, shrunken devils schlepped through these galleries at the House of Detention?
“Can I get you anything, John?”
Isaac’s lips seemed to swell through the Plexiglas. “No,” John said. It was a ludicrous sight. Laughable. The old “Commish” and the new with a glass wall between them. “You should have taken better care of me, Isaac. You were my First Dep … now go away. You bring a man bad luck.”
John walked out of the cubicle. The screws would remember that Isaac the Brave had summoned him from block 5, and they’d torment John for it. He wouldn’t be able to flip through his bankbooks in peace.
He heard a strange, soft pluck from the roof over block 5. It couldn’t be anything like a drizzle. The house gang would have gone ape by now, cursing, mopping floors with the blankets they swiped from the cells, measuring the leakage, so they could put garbage cans under the worst holes. White puffs trickled down from the roof. You could catch them with a finger. Mother Mary, it was the first snow of autumn. John touched the white puffs to his face. November snow was a godly snow. The flakes could heal. Simon Dedalus. Leopold Bloom. What more could a man need? John patted the little books in his pocket. Then he winked at the screw behind him and waltzed back into his cell.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1978 by Jerome Charyn
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Secret Isaac Page 22
