by Mark Slouka
Farber was still staring at Karen. “Keep ’em,” he said to Ray.
I could see Karen’s face tighten. “I don’t see what—”
“I’m going to have to ask you to keep your mouth shut.”
“We have a right to know what we’re—”
“Shut your mouth.”
“You got no reason to talk to her that way,” I said.
Farber turned around, slowly. “I remember you,” he said.
“I remember you, too,” I said.
I could feel the crazy shaking starting in my stomach.
He smiled. “Oh, you’re gonna remember me all right.”
“Look, he’s my friend,” Karen said. “I’m just—”
“Friend?” He let it hang in the air—a taunt, a leer.
I stepped in front of Ray.
“Everything alright here, Vince?” It was Falvo.
Farber didn’t turn around. “Ed.”
“Anything I can do—help subdue the natives?”
“I’m just—”
“I’m joking, Vince.”
“Nothin’ O’Hara’s office can’t straighten out.”
Falvo wasn’t moving. He nodded toward me. “Well, this one’s one of mine.”
“Then you know he’s got a mouth on him.”
“Actually, I’m surprised to hear it.” He turned to Ray, whistled. “Another altercation?”
“So what?” Ray said.
“You see what I’m dealin’ with here?” Farber said.
“Why don’t you tell me what happened here, Vince?”
Karen and I started to say something but he held up his finger.
Farber told him.
“That’s unacceptable,” Falvo said.
“Yes it is.”
“Unacceptable.”
“Glad you agree,” Farber said.
“I’m telling you, it’s this climate of permissiveness, Vince. No standards, no discipline … If this was the army we’d be talking rank insubordination.”
Farber glanced over quickly.
“And you have to deal with this in class, too?”
“I wouldn’t put up with it.”
“Well, I’m sorry you had to put up with it this time.”
“Not as sorry—”
“Especially considering they’re my kids.”
Farber looked confused. “What—all three of ’em?
“Been working with him on the side.” He looked at Ray. “How long have I been working with you?”
“I don’t—”
“All right, Vince—I’ll take care of this.”
“Thanks—I’ve got it.”
“I know you do. But it’s my watch. I was supposed to have an assessment in on this one a week ago.”
“Well—”
“The three of you—let’s go.” He took me and Ray by the elbows, started walking us away. “I don’t need this coming back to bite me, Vince, know what I mean?”
WE’D BARELY TURNED THE CORNER when he stopped. He seemed tired. “Don’t you people have somewhere to go?” he said.
“What’re you going to say?” I said.
“I’m sure I’ll think of something.” He looked at Ray. “You’ve been to the nurse with that?”
“You want to see my note?”
Falvo looked at him for a while. “You OK?”
Ray nodded.
“Come here—let me see.”
I was surprised when Ray went over to him. Falvo took his chin in his hand, turned his head to the side, touched around the outside of the bandage. “This hurt?” He felt around the closed eye socket, gently. “How about that?”
“I’m fine—really,” Ray said.
“Sure?”
“I know what I’m doin’.”
“OK,” Falvo said, and walked away.
“WHAT’S GOING ON?” he said to me that morning after class. “Close the door, have a seat.”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“With your friend—what’s going on?”
“You mean—”
“The bruises, the eye, the lip—these fights I keep hearing about, the whole thing. No bullshit.”
“He gets into fights,” I said. “He’s got a temper.”
“He’s got a temper.”
“Yeah.”
Somebody knocked on the door.
“I’m busy,” Falvo called. “What about home—how’re things at home?”
For a second I thought he was talking about me.
“I don’t …?”
“At home, with his dad. How’re things with his dad?”
“Listen, he’s my best friend—he gets into fights, that’s all. And he knows these clubs—where you can make some money.”
“You mean like boxing? You know this?”
Somebody knocked on the door again.
“He fights middleweight,” I said. “Really, it’s not like that.”
“Alright,” Falvo said. “Come back at four.”
“Don’t we have practice?”
“It can wait.”
I DIDN’T SAY ANYTHING to Karen or Frank. We ate our lunch like we always did when it wasn’t raining—convicts in the exercise yard, huddled out of the wind. Pushing the season. Ray was lying down in the nurse’s office, Karen said—his side was hurting pretty bad. He’d said he didn’t mind missing lunch anyway since he couldn’t really eat or talk. The nurse wanted him to get an X-ray.
“What for?” I said.
She shook her head.
“Why would he need an X-ray?” Frank said.
It was only then we noticed her eyes.
“Hey. Hey—c’mon,” Frank said, putting his arm around her shoulders. “He’ll be fine. Really.”
“Tell me,” she said.
“Tell you what?” I said.
“It’s OK,” Frank said.
“Tell me what’s going on.”
“I swear to God, there’s nothing to tell. Look, he doesn’t talk about it because he knows you wouldn’t like it. He goes to this club. In Danbury.”
“Where in Danbury?”
“What?”
“Where in Danbury?”
“How do I know where? In Danbury. Look, it’s not like I’m sittin’ there holdin’ his spit bucket or whatever. He’s been doin’ it a while, I don’t know, a year, maybe more.”
She was just looking at me, her mouth pressed together.
“Karen, I swear—”
“I thought we were friends,” she said.
“I am, we are—I swear …”
She wiped her cheek with the base of her thumb. “Never mind,” she said. “Forget it.”
I FOUND FALVO writing on the chalkboard, talking over his shoulder to one of the black kids who was sitting at a desk in the front row. “Read it out loud,” he said.
“Again?” the kid asked.
“You want me to come back?” I said.
“Again. Come in,” he said, waving me in.
It was the kid from the gym. I hadn’t recognized him without all the sweatshirts.
He read the sentence—something about Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle—and Falvo wrote it on the board, little bits of chalk dribbling down like rain on a window. “OK—subject, object, verb,” he said, the chalk knocking against the board. “Better. Now do the rest of them the same way for tomorrow.”
The kid closed his notebook.
“You two know each other?”
“S’up?” I said.
The kid nodded.
“I’ve been trying to get Mr. Jones here to consider joining the track team,” Falvo said.
“Great idea,” I said.
The kid started gathering his stuff.
“The bus isn’t leaving for another fifteen minutes,” Falvo said. He turned to me. “Larry and I have had a very interesting conversation about your friend.”
“Is that right?” I said.
“Go ahead. Tell him what you told me.”
“Ain’t nothi
n’ to tell.” He had a slow, drawn-out way of talking, like he was bored, that got on my nerves.
“Go ahead,” Falvo said. “Off the record—for the next ten minutes, you’re not in school.”
“Tell me what?” I said.
The kid shrugged.
“Tell me what?”
“Friend a yours ain’t no boxer,” he said.
“What’re you talkin’ about?” I said.
“I’m telling you. All street. Way he uses his feet, that slidin’ thing he does—he just makin’ it up.
“I don’t—”
“Larry’s Golden Gloves,” Falvo said.
“So what?”
“Try to listen to what he’s saying.”
“I ain’t sayin’ he can’t fight,” the kid said.
“So what are you sayin’?”
“Look at where he holds his hands, man. Look at his knuckles—you think he got those wearin’ gloves? An’ all that shit all up around his neck?”
“I don’t know what’re you tryin’ to say. So he fights on the street, so what? Everybody knows that.”
He was sprawled back in his chair, looking at me. I wanted to hit him. “Lemme ask you somethin’, smart man. How many times you seen him fight?”
“Hundred twenty-three.”
“All that time, anybody touch him?”
I didn’t say anything.
“Yeah, now you listenin’.”
“Listenin’ to what? I don’t—”
“Listen to what he’s saying, Jon.”
“Listen, man, he ain’t my brother, I don’t care who’s takin’ him down. All I’m sayin’ is he ain’t gettin’ that shit in the ring or the street.” He leaned forward, said it slow like it might sink in better that way: “Muthafucka beatin’ on that boy knows what he doin’,—an’ all this other shit here, he just doin’ that to cover his Eye-talian ass up.”
IT’S NOT LIKE I didn’t do anything. I did. I talked to him—or tried. More than once.
There was nothing. His old man? Ray laughed. His old man was his old man—probably a good bet he wasn’t going to find the cure for cancer. Every now and then he’d tie one on, get a little crazy—what else was new? It was like that thing about the leopard—asshole wasn’t gonna change his spots.
For two days after he came in to school that morning he mostly slept. On the third I walked over to his house. It was one of those yellow, quiet fall days that feels like a memory of something else. I found him raking leaves in the front yard. Wilma was sleeping in the sun, fat as a tick.
I asked about his dad.
He was OK, he said. The two of them pretty much had it worked out where they stayed out of each other’s way. Especially now.
I gathered an armful of leaves in a loose hug and walked to the chicken-wire cage standing in the shade and threw them in the fire.
“Why’s that?” I said.
“Pissed about the X-ray, I guess.”
“You got the X-ray?”
“Sure.”
“When?”
He stopped raking, looked at me. “I don’t know—couple days ago. Why?”
“No reason—just Karen said your side hurt, that’s all.”
He handed over the rake, picked up a pile. “Yeah, you know. But hey, check it out,” he said, turning his face left and right like a man in a shaving commercial—“lookin’ better, right?”
“Fuckin’ Joe Namath.”
“See? All good.”
I took off my jacket, threw it on the fence. There was no wind. The smoke rose straight up, thinning out.
“God, I love that smell,” he said, dumping a bunch of leaves in the cage.
I TRIED AGAIN. It was always the same. He told me everything—about the Mexican guy, something Calderon, who put him down, about how he’d realized he was in trouble but figured he could snake his way out of it, about the look on his dad’s face when he came home. Lucky for him the old man had his own shit to deal with—a week before he’d broken two fingers busting up a fight, had to wipe his ass left-handed.
“Your old man had to bust up a fight?”
“Regular family of brawlers, what can I tell ya? Not what you’d call your upstanding citizens.”
We were sitting on the steps of the porch in the weak sun. Ray was picking shit out of the treads of his boot with a twig. Somewhere up the street somebody choked off a lawn mower—the last mow of the season. The bugs had died with the frost.
He pulled his boot closer. “I hate these squares,” he said, flicking a spot of shit into the bushes.
“You were lucky,” I said.
“Yeah, that’s me—Mr. Lucky.” Anyway, he was done with it, he said—he’d promised. He was studying for his license—the car was almost ready. Karen was giving him driving lessons.
I watched him push a small wall of shit down a groove like a twisting road. “Smells like shit,” he said.
“No way.”
“Yeah, some things you just can’t explain.”
The lawn mower coughed once, twice, then caught and rose.
“Keep thinking it’s gonna get hot again,” I said.
“Kiss it goodbye.”
He banged his boot against the side of the steps, snapped off the end of the twig against the floorboard and went back to work. “Time to start thinkin’ cold, your feet frozen, dick like an olive—”
“Not my dick.”
“Olive pit.”
He banged the boot. “There. Think I got it.”
“So he’s back on full-time?”
“Who?”
“Your old man.”
“Guess so.”
“So that’s good, right?”
“I don’t know. Probably not gonna be takin’ me out to the ballgame as much, no more father and son talks—”
“—camping trips—”
“—playin’ chess, hangin’ out together … gonna be a bitch.”
THE BURNING SMELL of the leaves, that cool dirt smell before you threw them in—sometimes it was like you could smell the sun. It smelled like stone, or wind.
I can see us there, Ray still moving a little slow—raking, piling, burning. I can see Wilma sleeping on the walk, the shadow of the porch cutting her across the shoulder—already pregnant, though we didn’t know it then.
When you’re used to something, it’s hard to see it another way.
I could have asked him straight out. I didn’t. I didn’t want to embarrass him, I think.
I DIDN’T GO over to Ray’s house much on the weekends, so it’s a coincidence I was even there. I’d stopped coming by since we’d looked through his dad’s stuff from the war. The few times I ran into Mr. Cappicciano now he’d act hurt that I didn’t come around anymore. I’d been busy, I’d say—between school, track. He’d kid around with me, ask me about my parents, about school, what kind of car we were driving now. “Nice of you to grace us with your presence,” he’d say, winking, then turn back to the TV.
I’d come by that day because I thought we could go to Bob’s, or maybe grab a game of pool now that Ray had fixed things up at O’Reilly’s. A windy day, small white clouds chasing themselves across the sky, leaves half-gone. I was restless—I’d been writing a paper on the First Amendment, figured I pretty much had it. So I grabbed my jacket and walked over.
They were already there—the cruiser parked by the curb as usual. I jumped up on the porch. “Better things to do,” I heard one of the regulars say.
I’d knocked on the door before I realized it wasn’t them.
They were standing in the living room, Mr. Cappicciano in a sleeveless t-shirt and pajama pants leaning against the case with the beer steins. I’d never seen these cops before. There were two, an older one with eyes like a cat’s just before it goes to sleep or nails you, and a younger guy who looked like he’d had rocks for breakfast, with quick rabbity muscles in his cheeks. It wasn’t a social call: they had their whole thing on—uniforms, sticks, guns, the whole bit.
�
��So who’s this?” said the older one, turning to me.
“Friend a’ Ray’s,” Mr. Cappicciano said. He had his arms folded across his chest, the apple with the knife wrapped across the muscle like a flag in the wind.
“What’s your name, son?”
I told him.
“You a friend of his son’s?”
“Just said that,” Mr. Cappicciano said.
The cop looked at him.
I nodded.
He turned to Mr. Cappicciano. “Sir, could you ask your son to come down here, please?”
“What for?”
“We’d like to talk to him.”
“What’s he done?”
“Don’t know he’s done anything yet.”
“Why do you want to talk to him, then?”
The cop smiled to himself.
“Ray? Come down here,” Mr. Cappicciano yelled.
Ray paused when he saw the cops, then came down the rest of the way. He still looked pretty bad.
“Your name Ray Cappicciano?” the cop asked.
“That’s right.”
“Ray, I’m Officer Mayo, how you doin’?”
“I’m fine.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah.”
“You don’t look so fine.”
Ray shrugged.
“Where’d you get that is what we’re askin’,” the younger cop said.
“Some guys from Carmel,” Ray said. “I don’t know their names.” He didn’t look at me.
“Some guys from Carmel,” the older cop said.
“Yeah.”
“And you don’t know their names.”
“That’s right.”
“You do that a lot, am I right?”
Ray shrugged.
“You get along with your dad, here?”
“Sure, you know.”
“I don’t know.”
“Sure.”
The cop turned to me. “Your friend get along with his dad, would you say?”
“Sure,” I said.
The cop looked at them for a while. “Alright,” he said.
“Can I go?” Ray said.
“Yeah. You—stick around,” he said to me. “Hey,” he said when Ray was halfway up the stairs, “I hear about any more fights we’re gonna have to talk again, you understand what I’m sayin’?”
