Shades of Pink

by 33 authors

  Power tried to pull back, but I was too scared to move, even to let go.

  Juice stood over us a moment, not speaking. Then he drew his cut-down pistol and pumped metal through hand and dick together.

  Power slumped against the bricks. I knelt in his blood, staring up the barrel of Juice’s pistol. A huge drumbeat pounded through me, but no pain. No pain yet.

  “Listen up, Monk. Loyalty for the living is like piety for the dead. When the egg hits the sidewalk, it’s all you got to save you. You ready to test your piety, or you wanna try loyalty?”

  I couldn’t speak.

  Power bled to death before Juice was done with me.

  I lay in a liver-smelling pool of thickening blood, and waited to die too. It would be after midnight by now. My ma and my little brothers would be coming home from the fireworks show. Maybe Juice would see they didn’t go hungry. Maybe tomorrow would be the day Red Gomez would bring in his new dawn, so that the profits of the factories would go to feed the widow and the orphan.

  Maybe the moon really was made of cheese, and my brothers could draw it out of the sky.

  Pink Gomez came out of the night, draped my good arm over his shoulder, and half-carried me home with him. His poppa, a veteran of clubbings by coppers and strikebusters alike, wrapped my hand.

  But as the days passed, I took fever. The wound festered. Any movement brought blinding pain.

  The day Pink went to wash my hand and found my fingers turning black, he wept like some little girl. At least he cut the waterworks and wiped the snot off his face before he walked me to the hospital.

  I woke up smelling bleach and vomit, with a white curtain around my bed and a bandaged stump below my elbow. I tried to make a fist with the hand that wasn’t there.

  Bone splinters speared into tender, swollen flesh. I howled.

  Laughter came through the curtain. Men I didn’t know told me to shut up, to be a man. I huddled behind my bleached curtain, chewing my bleach-tasting blanket, waiting for the pain to fade.

  About when I could breathe right, the curtain opened.

  A starched white nurse glared at me. “I don’t care how much ruckus you cause out on the street, you filthy little paddy, but you will not continue to disrupt my floor. Do you understand?”

  I stared at her, not sure whether to say yes, s’ster or yes’m. She didn’t look like a nun, not with her skirts stopping halfway down her shins, but she was a nurse, wasn’t she?

  After a moment, she turned like a soldier, and marched off.

  Without her blocking the view, I saw a hospital ward. An old guy in the next bed stared open-mouthed at the ceiling, not moving. Maybe not breathing. Two other guys in pajamas played cards on the far bed. They ignored me. Someone out of sight coughed in a sickening, bubbly way.

  After a minute, a cigar-chewing doctor stopped in the doorway next to the card players. He talked at me from there, without coming in. Like I stunk or something. Like ugly was catching. He said I was lucky to be alive. Said I might have ghost pain in the hand. If so, wasn’t nothing could be done. I’d have to take it like a man. Then he left.

  One of the card players looked at me. “So, you got woo-oo-oo, ghost pain?”

  The other player laughed.

  My clothes were folded in a basket under my bed. I dressed slowly, fumbling one-handed. I had to get out of here before the bean-counters came in, got to asking my name and how I planned to pay my bill. Hospitals don’t come cheap. Juice had special interest rates for doctor-loans, but they didn’t come down to charity.

  Nobody looked up as I walked out. Nobody said squat. I was as invisible as I might be in my own neighborhood.

  The next day I took my cap in my awkward left hand and dragged myself to Juice’s office. Times were hard. Big men with two good hands stood on line for thin soup or a thinner chance at a paying job. Veterans of the Great War huddled on the sidewalk, panhandling for dimes. Who but Juice would hire an ugly little gimp?

  At first, he only let me sweep and clean ashtrays. Paid me a nickel a day—not enough to cover bus fare, and he knew it—or three bucks a week, as the mood took him.

  I had to teach my little brothers to pick pockets, how to plant a quarter and harvest a wallet from some greedy mark bent on snatching the silver. For a few months they brought in enough bacon to feed us all. But both pushed their luck and ended up in reform school.

  Ma accused me of getting them pinched. Every evening, she glared into the bowl of hot water we pretended was soup, while I tried to guess whether she was in the swearing mood or the come-at-me-with-knives mood.

  I spent a lot of those nights in the bicycle locker downstairs.

  I learned to wrap the stump of my right arm tight, like it was a baby to swaddle, learned not to bump it against anything, and learned not to reach for anything with the missing hand. When I forgot, gut-twisting pain ambushed me.

  I also took my youngest brother’s abandoned copybook and tried to learn to write southpaw. Just learning to hold the pen and fill it with ink took a long time. Trying to write without tearing the paper or plopping spots of ink on it was maddening. I’d made my own code, working for Juice. Every stray mark, crooked letter, or ink smear meant something. Now I filled pages with broken jitterbug lines, smears, and blots that soaked through the page. Precision was a ghost, gone with the fingers of my good right hand.

  One Sunday I took a nicked bottle of Juice’s gin to Pink’s apartment, looking for sympathy and a game of chess. I found Red Gomez at his table, writing more speeches. With, I realized, his left hand.

  While Pink set up the gameboard, I stood by his poppa, watching in wretched envy as he drew graceful flourishes and exclamations, full of fire and wonder, and never a smear or spatter.

  Please, sir—I caught the words unsaid. “Please, Comrade, would you show me how to do that?”

  He blinked up at me, like a man awakened by a spotlight, and scratched under his Lenin mustache. Then he nodded. “Of course, Comrade. Every son of the revolution should be able to read and write. How else may he resist the tyranny—”

  “I can read!” I cut in before his train of oratory hit full steam. “I just can’t write with the wrong hand.”

  He nodded again. “Come, then. Let me teach you.”

  And he did. I couldn’t make exactly the marks I had made so easily before, but I learned to coax the steel nib gently over the paper and pull fine threads of ink in the direction I wanted.

  I practiced for some months, with no reward except praises from Pink and his poppa, before Juice suddenly decided his new reever was milking him and handed the books back to me. I showed him exactly how the books had been snaked, and counted up how much had been taken. Juice stomped the reever until I wasn’t sure he’d live, and of course Juice made me watch.

  Sick as it made me, I held my peace. This meant I was his cully again. I could support my ma without watering the soup, and I could also tuck back a bit while looking for someplace better to live. Or maybe just not so bad.

  When Red got caught trespassing and went back to Sing Sing, I figured Pink would take his bed, so I bid for the sofa where Pink had slept all his life. Pink hesitated, said I’d hate it and any rent for that thing would be cheating a friend. Any patch of floor would be less lumpy and no harder. I told him the floor by his couch would be heaven enough to pay rent on, and sure he needed it. I just wanted some roof over me that didn’t also shelter either Juice or my ma.

  He looked at me sadly and shook his head. But the next day, he gave me a key.

  I bought a thrift store sofa to replace the one he had, and moved in. Slept better than I could ever remember. But then Pink’s girl moved in with us, and I discovered that hell was listening to them go at it on the other side of the pasteboard wall. I dreamed too much, listening to it. Dreamed of Pink’s hard little brown hands all over me, his knotted-leather muscles moving against my skin, his foreigner’s whisper warming my ear. I’d wake up sweaty and sticky and exhausted, but not early enough
to skip the line of men at the shower down the hall.

  Then Pink’s boss heard him talking to other workers about the coming Red Dawn, when workers would own the factories and share out the profits fairly, without managers and robber barons to leech off them. Pink had never been big, but unlike me he had learned to run. That day, he was smart enough to leg it while the manager was still gathering sluggers for the stomping party.

  When he came home and woke up his girl, telling her he was no longer trapped in the factory, that he could now spend his full time working for the party like his poppa, she called him a miserable Bolshevik. Come dawn, she left.

  As it turned out, the party had no spare funds to support a soft-voiced little spick who didn’t have his father’s knack for lighting fires inside people. Pink grummed around, circling want ads and trying to darn the frayed cuffs of his good coat. It wasn’t the worn coat that marked him. It was his name, his face. No boss would hire a strike organizer’s son, a man who might spread communist dreams through a factory floor like a bad case of scabies.

  And he was painfully lonely. He hadn’t seemed happy with the girl, not really, but now his misery took the taste out of anything I brought home. Even corned beef sandwiches from McKenna’s, where the boyo at the counter sliced the bread thin for me so I could taste the meat. Our sandwiches sat half-eaten, while Pink and I both thinned down looking at them. If some bim would make Pink smile, I thought, I wouldn’t begrudge the sleep lost while listening to them go at it.

  I told myself—told him—it wouldn’t last. Girls in plenty made eyes at a guy as pretty as him, a guy who smelled as good as he did. A guy who opened doors, carried packages, touched his cap to say hello. Who didn’t spend half his pay on booze. They eyed him even when he had a girl on his arm. A guy like Pink doesn’t stay lonesome long.

  But instead the night came when he pushed away his sandwich, grabbed me by the stump, and led me to the big bed. We did things that would have got more than my hand shot off, if Juice had seen us.

  Morning after morning, I’d wake up to study his curly black hair and his statue-perfect profile, and wonder how an ugly mook like me could ever be so lucky. Those black-coffee eyes—when they fixed on me, the defeated job-hunter’s look fell off him like a wet overcoat, and I felt like a man.

  All winter, and all through the summer that followed, I was Monk only twelve hours a day. Then I’d come home to Pink, and be Mook for the twelve that counted.

  When Pink’s poppa came home and threw us both out, bellowing that Pink had betrayed the proletariat, whatever that meant, we found a new apartment. Our place, together. But we didn’t have rent control to hold down expenses any more, and the room cost four times what the old place had. So Pink went to Juice for work.

  Juice put him in the warehouse, and from then I lived in terror.

  They say any job beats no job, but these wasn’t the best days to work for Juice Conlan. He wasn’t so young any more. Couldn’t handle the booze or the hop like he used to. Didn’t handle the bims so well either. The sidewalk rent dropped off. He’d beat a girl so bad she couldn’t work for two weeks, figuring the other girls would be scared enough to cover the shortfall.

  Doesn’t always work that way. And sometimes the bim or her friends would get ideas about revenge. The revenge might be small potatoes. But it might be trouble. Especially if one of them connected Pink with his poppa, who was again in the newspapers for preaching against liquor, prostitution, and men who lived like leeches and tapeworms off the weaknesses of the poor—men like Juice Conlan.

  Meanwhile, Juice was getting leaned on by his own bosses. Faces at the top changed, and every new man wanted to squeeze out a bigger dib. When the changes abruptly stopped, the new boss was a Limey who smelled of Old Bay Rum. He wanted us to drop by every Thursday right after lunch to hand over cabbage and explain why there wasn’t more of it. I carried the book and receipts that said what Juice wanted said, and when he got tangled up in words I untangled him with numbers.

  I didn’t like having to speak up; there was this quiet man who paced the Limey’s plush office, and I felt him watching me. People who watch make me itch.

  On the Wednesday after Columbus Day, I stayed home as usual to adjust all three sets of the books. Juice knew about two, and I’d told him that some receipts and records for the second set didn’t need to see the office, lest one of his sluggers get ambitious. He believed me. I guess he knew I had too good a memory to get ambitious on my own. I still never left the third set of books unguarded at home, though. Not when the train station had lockers with better locks than anything I might own.

  Juice would have cut a hole in my belly and let the sluggers take turns at me, had he known what records I was keeping. But I was a bookkeeper, not some sorcerer who could simply remember every detail of what the other books twisted, much less what the other books left out.

  While thinking of the shipment of China silk Juice had “found” at the dock, I grabbed the key from the hook and stepped out the door. A cold breeze caught the back of my neck. Holding my collar tight against it, I turned to lock the door. A shock of pain shot up my right hand and arm.

  The key fell.

  When I could see through the sparks, the key gleamed dully on the unswept hallway floor. I looked inside, at the hook I’d taken it from. Not bent; the key couldn’t fall on its own. I had taken that key from that hook with my missing right hand.

  And I was breathing like I’d run up all five flights of stairs.

  I looked left and right, but nobody else stood in the hallway. Cooking and schoolwork and quarreling was going on behind every closed door, but I alone had the hall.

  I closed my eyes, squatted, and felt on the gritty floor with my shattered fingers. To keep from jarring those ghostly splinters of bone, I moved as delicately as a man lifting the ash of a burned photograph. The key, the key. There. Cold and hard and polished slick. A pick perfected for one single lock.

  I looked up at the knob, and the key hole under it.

  Carefully, I picked up the key. It was heavier than gold. I slid it gently into the keyhole, feeling brass nudge brass inside the lock, moving too slowly to jar another shriek of pain from my hand.

  The key turned. The tumblers fell apart in the right pattern. The lock opened.

  I slid the key out of the lock and dropped it into my pocket. Then, to see what happened, I put my ghost fingers on the tarnished face of the lock and pictured the tumblers falling together. They clicked, and locked.

  “Open.” My fingers remembered the old prod and pull.

  The lock opened.

  I still had the touch.

  I stood there, wondering how—wondering why. Trying to find a word other than miracle. A flower bud of joy tried to open in my chest, but I was afraid to let it.

  From the north, the Angelus tolled, stopping traffic in the street below the window. Five o’clock. I was due at the office in twenty-five minutes, to show Juice the week’s numbers and find out what he wanted the Limey to know.

  I guarded my hand on the subway, like always. The conductor nodded when he saw me. He had three missing fingers that still burned with the carbolic acid a nurse had poured over them forty years ago. He said he hadn’t been to a hospital since.

  I didn’t plan any return visits either.

  Juice’s office door was locked. Bits of peeled paint and dust littered the floor under the knob, like the door had been slammed hard.

  Pacing the hall, up and back, I saw every door was shut tight, like it was Sunday or something. Like the coppers might come by at any moment to collect an open door tax. Like trouble had already come by, and was expected to make a return trip.

  I went downstairs and gave the banker’s girl a nickel to telephone Juice at home. No dice. I went back to stare at the office door. And realized I had all three sets of books with me. I hadn’t stopped at the train station.

  I needed to get them in hidden, under my coat if nothing else.

  The scarred pl
ate under the knob felt rough, but the tumblers inside were smooth enough. “Open.”

  It opened.

  Juice’s desk lay upside-down amid what looked like the afternoon mail. New holes had been shot in the plaster wall.

  No blood. A robbery would mean blood. So what had made Juice lose his temper this time?

  Half under a newspaper, I found the first photograph: Juice’s moll out on the boardwalk, snuggling up to a guy who didn’t have Juice’s bull shoulders. Under the corner of the desk I found the second: a girl feeding a spoonful of ice cream to a curly-haired guy who looked a lot like Pink. Mouth was wrong, and Pink didn’t have a hat like that, but ... Juice would look at this picture and swear it was Pink Gomez.

  The main warehouse was two blocks east. I ran, clutching the books to my chest. They were all I had to bargain with, all Juice needed my good will for. My hat fell somewhere, and I kept running. Pinpricks of sleet stung my face.

  My wind gave out in the second block, where windows were boarded and jobless men leaned against walls and light posts, measuring me as threat or target. I wasn’t much of either, though, especially half-trotting and trying to catch my breath.

  The warehouse door was four steps down from the sidewalk, and I knew another flight ran down from the door.

  The door was locked.

  I put my sweating cheek against the cold steel. “Open!”

  This end of the warehouse was dark, as was the far end by the freight elevator. Lights blazed in the center. I took a second to map out a track among the crates, and plunged wheezing down the dark inner stairs.

  The books dragged at my arm. I should have left them behind. No, I still needed them to bargain with, to show Juice that I—that my work—was worth something. Was worth taking a closer look at those pictures.

  A scream rang off the ceiling. That loud a noise should knock dust off the light fixtures and the I-beams overhead. I bit my lip. Nothing I said from a distance would be heard.

  Trying not to wheeze too loudly, I stumbled toward the light.