Amy had said he’d used those same words to Ginette. I hadn’t entirely believed her, it seemed so gross, but now I knew she’d told me the truth. He must like the sound of those words, I thought. Words, not deeds. That filled me with sudden blazing courage I didn’t know I had.
With the edge of my hand I knocked the barrel of the gun aside. Carter’s eyes widened. Voice a little shaky, I said, “You have no right to use that word.”
“What word?”
“Jewboy.”
“Hey, you’re not a Jew? You’re not a boy? Put them together, adds up to Jewboy, right?”
“And I don’t live in the city anymore.”
“Listen, you dumb kid —”
I said, “Get out of my life, asshole.” I jumped out of the truck and slammed the door as hard as I could. He yelled at me but I didn’t listen. I wasn’t even scared. Even though I’d called him an asshole I knew he wasn’t going to shoot me in the back on Newtown Lane.
I got on my bike and pedaled down the Montauk Highway. The air was cold on my forehead, and as I reached home the rain began to fall.
I told Inez that I didn’t feel well, that I’d probably eaten something bad in town, and that I didn’t want a birthday dinner and certainly not a cake. And I didn’t want to celebrate. When my mom came home at six o’clock I said the same thing.
“But, darling, what’s wrong?”
“Can I tell you another time, Mom?”
She softened. “Of course, Billy. I have a present for you.”
“Can you give it to me tomorrow, Mom?”
She left my room, shutting the door quietly. I laid down on the bed and buried my head in the pillow. My body shook and I cried hard silent tears.
Carter Bedford had insulted and humiliated me. I wanted to kill him.
When I admitted that to Ginger Casey eight months later, she sighed, and she bit her lower lip with big white teeth. She asked me if I’d ever admitted it to anyone else. I said I hadn’t. That was good, she said. “Don’t.”
“But what if the judge asks me?”
“Hey, I’ve already forgotten you said it. Maybe between now and the time the judge asks you, if he ever does, you’ll forget, too. You’ll certainly forget that you and I ever had this conversation.”
Chapter 16
I plunged my Swiss army knife deep into his belly, and then I twisted it up toward his heart. The blood flowed in a crimson river down his shirt front. Gasping, he sank to the floor.
“I thought you were a wimp. I didn’t think you’d do it —”
“Well, now you know. You went too far, you bastard.”
Too messy. I tried it with the Airweight, gripping it with two hands the way the good shooters did. Snap – got him right between the eyes. A bright red flower bloomed in his forehead. He died with those milky eyes wide open and staring at me.
I ran him over with a car, too. Squashed him cartoon flat.
All that happened before I went to sleep on Friday night and again the first thing on Saturday morning when I woke up. He had taken advantage of me because I was a kid. He could do it. He had the power.
Amy and I hadn’t had any chance to make plans for the weekend. I didn’t know if Carter would be around that weekend or not. If I called A-1 Self-Storage, Carter or Ginette would pick up.
That was a terrible weekend. I played hearts and Star Wars on my GameBoy, I worked out a few more elaborate ways to kill Carter — staked him out in the Mojave Desert near a hill of killer ants; put him on a rack that I built myself, and tore him in half, slowly — and on Sunday morning my dad said to me and Simon, “Hey, guys, want to go over to Shelter Island, have lunch, maybe shoot some pool? Men only. Birthday celebration for the younger fruit of my loins. Quality time.”
“Okay,” Simon said, “but no cell phone, Dad.”
My dad seemed to talk on his cell for half of his life. And he had call-waiting, so that he would switch back and forth between conversations, keeping people on hold. I promised myself I’d never do that to anybody.
He smiled. “I’m expecting one important phone call.”
“Sure,” Simon said, “but you’ll have to answer the unimportant ones, too, right?”
“All right, Simon, I’ll call that important client right now.”
The call took twenty minutes, and then my dad said he had to return two calls that came in during the first one. By then Simon and I had made our own lunch in the kitchen.
My dad came in. “What about Shelter Island?”
“Dad,” I said, “we don’t really like to shoot pool anymore. That was fun when we were little kids.”
“Let’s throw a ball around on the lawn.”
For about half an hour we threw a football back and forth on the front lawn. My dad may have daydreamed for a minute or two that he was quarterback for the New York Giants, but we spoiled his dream: I kept dropping the passes, and Simon could never take a handoff properly. Finally the cell phone rang — it had been laying on the grass by the front steps — and after my dad answered he put his hand over the mouthpiece and said to us, “This one’s really important. I’ve got to take it. How about some Scrabble this evening?”
Monday morning I hurried off to school early, my bike wobbling against the wind. Collar up, I waited for Amy on the steps in front of the middle school. She edged past me and ran up the steps. Then when lunchtime came, she ran into the girls’ bathroom. At the three o’clock bell I blocked her way. “Want to go for a walk?”
“I have to go home and mind Jimmy.”
“Are you mad at me?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.” And she brushed past me.
That night I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling, feeling miserable.
Every day after that, one way or another, she backed off. She’d given me that beautiful birthday present of her drawings, but now she didn’t even want to talk to me. Had Carter told her I was out to do bad things to her?
I didn’t know. I didn’t understand.
On Wednesday, at lunchtime in the school cafeteria, I said, “Amy, what’s wrong? Please tell me.”
“Leave me alone.”
That evening I found Inez in her living room, watching the news in Spanish on the Connecticut channel. Inez had her own apartment which she had furnished over the years with china ornaments, chintz-covered armchairs with little white doilies, and a pendulum clock that represented a beehive in bronze. The only modern things were her cordless and her Sony Trinitron television. She smoked small Dutch cigars that she lit with kitchen matches.
“Am I bothering you, Inez?”
“Never, cariño. Qué pasa?“
She’d met Amy. I told her some things about Carter and Ginette, and I cleaned up the story of what had happened out at A-1 Self-Storage on the weekend. I didn’t mention the gun, for fear that Inez would have had a heart attack.
“And now she won’t speak to me.”
“This girl, she is twelve?”
“Twelve and a half.”
Inez puffed at her cigar. “Could be she got her period for the first time. You know what I mean?”
“You think it’s that?”
“Makes some women crazy. You say she is only six months older than you, but girls grow up faster. They have moods. They want things to happen. And then, the next minute, they don’t want those things to happen. Makes them nervous. They don’t like to be pushed.”
“I don’t push her, Inez.”
“You understand what I mean about moods, and wanting, and not wanting?”
I thought she meant sex, which is a subject I didn’t know a lot about. You couldn’t learn about it by reading about it, the way you could learn astrophysics. So I said, “I think so.”
“Give her time, cariño. You understand? Step back. If she likes you, she’ll come to you.”
“You think so?”
Inez shrugged. “Who knows?”
“Thanks, Inez.”
She gave me a hug. She always smelled of
old tobacco and stale dentures but no one ever commented on it.
On Monday my dad called me from his office. He said, “Max Russo took me to lunch today at the Four Seasons. Cost him a bundle. He wants you and the monkey to do a new commercial that will air during the Super Bowl. He says—I’m not a hundred per cent sure what he meant—’In this one we want Billy to speak to the animal, then translate monkey talk.’ Billy will know what I mean.”
“Good idea,” I said.
“Max offered two hundred twenty five thousand dollars — there’s a premium for Super Bowl commercials.”
“Not bad.”
“You don’t sound enthusiastic. You want to think about it?”
“Could I?”
My dad stalled the ad agency, and the truth is that I forgot about it. The money didn’t mean anything to me, not then. There was nothing I wanted to buy, and I wasn’t focused on the future except to get old enough and strong enough to climb rocks, and maybe to kill Carter Bedford with my bare hands. For that I didn’t need money. I needed time to move at a faster pace.
Max Russo took the delay the wrong way. My dad found out later that the ad agency got in touch with zoos all over the country, searching for another Pygmy Green Rhesus who liked hard candy. The best they could find was a fourteen-year-old in Dallas who had a pet spider monkey that had once tried to take M & Ms out of the kid’s mouth, but afterwards the kid needed stitches. They were considering doing the commercial with computer graphics, but Harris Garth of the parent company vetoed it. “Get that same kid with the funny hair,” he ordered. “He makes people laugh.”
Max called my dad at his office.
“Look, Jack, enough’s enough. We’ll make a flat offer of three hundred fifty thousand, but no residuals. Saves bookkeeping. And we need to shoot it this week, so your boy will have to incommode himself and take another day off from school. You think you’ll let him do that for a lousy three hundred and fifty grand?”
“I’ll ask him.”
I said, “Sure, why not? Sounds good.” I guess I was just in a better mood that day or else I needed something to do.
Iphigenia and I took their company limo into the city and shot the second commercial. I had to join the Screen Actors’ Guild and pay a membership fee of eighteen hundred dollars. Uncle Bernie got a check for $87,050, which was 25% of the net. He said, “Billy, you’ve made my day. No, the truth is, you’ve made my life. If it wasn’t for you, I’d probably be bagging groceries. I’ve rented a loft building on the Lower East Side. I’m going to give a Super Bowl party and you’re the guest of honor. I’ll send a car out for you. A painter friend of mine works at Tel Aviv Limo. I know you dig that rock star treatment.”
“I prefer the train,” I said. “If I read in the limo I get carsick.”
That weekend I knocked on the door of my mom’s office in the pool cabana. She had just finished her forty minutes of yoga. She looked up from her computer and gave me an ear-to-ear smile. Microsoft and Dell, her favorites, were going through the roof.
“Mom, I’m doing pretty well with the money I’ve invested. I’ve been reading Barrons and your other magazines. Could I have part of what I make from the Super Bowl commercial to put in my funds at Modern Age?”
She loved it. “Absolutely, Billy. How much do you want? Is ten percent okay?”
“Is that negotiable?”
When she finished laughing, I said, “I want twenty-five per cent.”
She and my dad talked it over and agreed to it. In those times you could throw a dart at the lists of stocks and mutual funds, and whatever it hit, you made money.
The investing kept me busy, and it helped take my mind off Amy, and I stopped making a fuss about going to Aspen for Christmas. I said, “Mom, I’ll come for the whole twelve days, if you still want me to.”
She hugged me and said, “That’s the Billy I know and love.”
Uncle Bernie flew out to Aspen with his new girlfriend, the one who’d written the check to me. When Ginger Casey, five foot nine and bundled in a huge shearling coat, walked in on his arm, the living room suddenly filled with a spicy tropical smell, and Simon jabbed me in the rib with an elbow. Ginger wore a lot of Indian bracelets that jangled, and she was the most knockout lady I’d ever seen outside of the movies. She was originally from Nashville and she still had a Tennessee accent. She looked me in the eye and shook my hand with the kind of grip you’d expect from a man.
“I’ve heard a lot about you two guys,” she said. “I’m looking forward to getting to know y’all.”
Later, in our room, Simon said, “Boy, I’d like to get to know her all.”
“Chill out, dork.”
My dad came back from skiing and was introduced to Ginger. He said, “You’re tall, Ginger.” She said, “You’re short, Jack.” There was a breath of silence — then she cackled a throaty laugh, and I knew they’d be friends.
That evening he twisted the corkscrew into a 1990 French burgundy. “It should have been decanted and allowed to breathe, but even so, this is a classic vintage.” This was for the benefit of Ginger Casey. He went through the rigmarole of sniffing the cork and rolling a smidgin around in the bottom of his glass and swishing it through his teeth before he sipped it. My mom deliberately looked the other way or I know she would have cackled like a hen.
At dinner Ginger told us how she’d met Uncle Bernie in Florence three years ago, when her parents took her to Italy as a law school graduation present. Outside the Uffizi Gallery Uncle Bernie chatted up the family and convinced them to use his services as a guide to the best trattorias.
“He and I bopped around Umbria for a week on his motorbike,” Ginger said. “Thought I might be an old married lady before I’d see him again. Then I hear, ‘Hey, dude, here’s Bernardo, back in the Evil Empire.’” She shrugged her big shoulders. “And here we are.”
“Tell us about your career,” my dad said, like she’d asked him for a job.
“I went to Cornell Law,” Ginger said. “Passed the bar and I was offered a job with”— and she named one of those big city law firms where it feels like you could swap the names with any other law firm and it would still come out the same. “I handled mortgage foreclosures and wills, and after a year I looked in my bathroom mirror and I said, ‘Ms. Casey, this is taking you where you swore you’d never go.’ So I hunted up this super-bright black guy I used to know up in Ithaca. He was starting up an office on Delancey Street with two local hippie types. Now it’s Caruso, Cohen, Jones, and Casey. I do a lot of tenant v. landlord stuff. And juvies, and drug cases. I have seventeen-year-old clients try and teach me to cook crack in a microwave.”
Soon she and my dad were off and running, talking about “bleed ‘em and plead ‘em” lawyers, big-buck corporate law (“There’s no magic to it,” he said, “it’s just hondling.”), and the claw marks that Ginger had seen carved into the walls of cells at Rikers Island.
The best part of the holiday for me was the climbing wall at the community center three blocks from this humongous house we’d rented on Smuggler Street. Otherwise, I got enough of the extended family to last a while. Uncle Eli watched all the bowl games, shouting instructions to both coaches. Aunt Harriet claimed that someone opened her bedroom door twice at 3 A.M. and threw wet dishrags in her face. Grandma Braverman grumbled: “If I’d known that dwarf ape with all her germs would be here, I’d have stayed home.” My cousin Deborah, doing her master’s at Syracuse in Late Twentieth Century Suburban Issues, could barely speak grammatical English. Deborah’s twin, David, had moved to Santa Fe and was studying Ayurveda. He said, “Uncle Jack, you’re the pitta type — a natural leader, totally stressed out, and you can’t eat oranges or onions.” Uncle Bernie was hairy and heavy, highly sexed, therefore the kapha type: no dairy, and only white meat of turkey. Those who disregarded this dietary advice would get cancer or suffer a stroke.
One evening, in their bedroom at the head of the stairs, I heard my dad say, “He hasn’t mentioned her one single ti
me.”
My mom said, “I think he’s over it.”
I stood silently in the dark on the staircase, hoping it wouldn’t creak.
“A classic case of puppy love,” my dad said. “The garbage man’s daughter. Who would have believed it of Billy, who’s such a snob?”
“Shhh.”
It hurt, because I wasn’t over it, and it wasn’t puppy love, it was friendship. I missed her. And I wasn’t a snob — at least I didn’t think so, or didn’t know it until then. As for calling Amy “the garbage man’s daughter,” that made me see my parents in a new way.
On New Year’s morning, a gray day with snow predicted, my mom left for Washington D.C., and soon afterwards my dad, Simon, Ginger, and I took off to ski Aspen Highlands. “It won’t be crowded today,” my dad said. “I’ll teach you guys to use your poles properly.”
We did a few runs on the easier slopes, and then, near the top of the mountain, he took out his cell to switch it off for the downhill run — but it beeped before he had a chance. In his warm voice he said, “Hello?” I gazed out at the White Mountain National Forest and plotted climbing routes.
“Hold on, Amy. He’s right here.”
I was so surprised that I lost my balance and almost tipped over. I stabbed my poles into the snow so that I could hold the cell phone with a mitten and press it to my ear.
“Amy! How’d you get this number?”
Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 04 - BOY ON TRIAL - A Legal Thriller Page 12
