Lush Life

by Richard Price

  Standing with the rest of the crowd in order not to draw attention to himself, Matty couldn’t take his eyes from Minette and Nina, the girl gamely standing and clapping but without any light in her face.

  Minette was trying like hell, though, clapping as if she were hit with the spirit, but he could tell she wasn’t into it either, was torn between worrying about her kid in here and her husband out there; had already started to make her peace with Ike’s death in order to hold her family together, as banged up and scattered and angry as they might be right now.

  Because that’s what you do, Matty thought, that’s what you’re supposed to do, you take care of them, you lay down your life for them if you have to, not spend every night of your aging gerbil on a training-wheel existence getting wasted and hunting for strange, or waiting on that sea of malice and mayhem out there to set your chest pocket to trembling.

  “See him?” Yolonda lightly punched Matty’s arm. “That kid there?” nodding to an unsmiling and goateed Hispanic teen in baggy jeans and a hoodie, the only one still seated in his row. “Does he look right to you?”

  Matty turned to look, the kid not all that alarming to him but probably worth bracing outside.

  “What’s wrong?” Yolonda said.

  “What do you mean?”

  She put a hand to Matty’s face, her fingertips coming back wet.

  As the band shifted from “St. James Infirmary” to “Midnight in Moscow,” Boulware, dragging three of the eulogizers along with him, trotted up onstage and started to dance, a surprisingly elegant minimalist waggle, a snake-hipped sand shuffle, one hand flat on his belly, the other up and palm out as if testifying. Fraunces Tavern tried to imitate him, but still burning from the disaster with Ike’s sister, her heart wasn’t in it. Nor were Russell and Jeremy, looking confused and sheepish as they edged as close to the wings as possible.

  Calloway Junior produced a second baton from the inside pocket of his tux and presented it to Boulware, who, after co-conducting for a minute, turned to the seats, to the cameras, bawled, “Don’t forget your candles!,” which was the cue for the band to stream back down both sides of the stage and up the aisles to daylight, offering people a way out.

  As soon as they hit the street, Yolonda was on him.

  “Hey, come here for a second?” touching the elbow of the goateed kid’s sweatshirt and casually steering him away from the crowd.

  “What for?” as if he didn’t already know. He had a gold hoop piercing the outside corner of his left eyebrow that made him rear back to keep that eye open equal to the other and gave him a look of chronically pugnacious surprise.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Hector Maldonado. What’s yours.”

  “Detective,” she said. “And the dead guy, how about his name?”

  “Why you asking me?”

  “I’m just asking.”

  “Why you asking,” crossing his arms over his chest.

  Yolonda just waited.

  “I don’t know his got damn name. I’m here doing a homework for media study, and you know why you bracing me.”

  “Yeah? Why am I bracing you?”

  “’Cause you can’t find the dude that did him, and I’m a plátano from the PJs. And comin’ from a Rican like you? Fuck that shit.”

  “You got your homework on you?” Yolonda asked mildly.

  “Got my notes.” Maldonado jerked a fistful of loose-leaf paper out of his front pants pocket and held it up for her to read the halfhearted scrawl.

  DON’T TAKE THE LAW BOARD CALL HOME BELIEVE

  IN ME IKE WORLD WE JUST LIVE IN IT

  “Yeah, Ike . . . see?”

  “What’s your name again?”

  “I said. Hector Maldonado. You should write it down.”

  “You got a mouth on you, you know that?”

  “You got a mouth on you too!”

  “How about I take you in right now, we talk about this in the squad room.”

  “Yeah, you do that! And I’ll go right to them news-truck niggers, tell them why you really come up on me like this. That would make a motherfuck of a media study, huh?”

  “Get out of here.”

  “Hah.” Maldonado loped off in triumph, Yolonda shrugging the whole thing off.

  • • •

  Passing on joining the procession heading to the murder spot six blocks away, Matty lingered on the sidewalk in front of the Langenshield, waiting for Yolonda but fixed on Minette, pacing as she talked to her husband on the cell, one hand clapped over her ear to shut out the din. Nina was at her elbow and took the phone from her mother to talk to Billy too, Matty wondering if he would tell her that he had stayed after all, at least long enough to hear what she had said up there.

  Well, whatever Billy was telling her seemed to be doing the trick, Matty studying Minette studying her daughter as the kid’s features started to soften.

  Yolonda joined the three of them a moment later and looked to Matty, that kid in the hoodie a bust.

  “Oh my God, you were so brave up there,” Yolonda’s voice climbing with tenderness as she enfolded Nina in her arms.

  “Thank you,” the kid hugging herself.

  “Your husband get home?” Yolonda asked Minette.

  “Either there or on his way,” Minette said. “He just wasn’t ready for this.”

  “You going to the thing?” Yolonda tilted her chin towards the tail of the procession.

  “I’ll be there.” Matty looking at her: Don’t break my balls.

  “OK then.”

  All three watched Yolonda walk off, the music growing fainter as the procession, nearly a city block long, hooked a left at the first intersection.

  “So,” Matty said, “you heading home?”

  “In a bit,” Minette said. “Give him some room.”

  “Can I walk around a little?” Nina murmured to her mother.

  Minette reflexively looked to Matty for the answer, Matty shrugging, why not.

  “Don’t go too far, and keep your phone on,” Minette said as if Nina had already pulled something, “and don’t start screening your calls.”

  Out on the street the band, led by Boulware and Cab Calloway, seemed to have lost a lot of its magic, the hundred and fifty or so mourners following them as they played “Old Ship of Zion,” looking a little embarrassed now, a little shanghaied, the afternoon sky too light for their stubby cupped candles.

  Unable to release himself from his outrage at Boulware, Eric paralleled the procession from across the street, riding the herd of crouched cameramen as they shot the show making its way down Suffolk.

  But as the band unexpectedly swung into a wild, swirling klezmer tune, Boulware and the black kid began doing slow, graceful synchronized Tevye whirls as smoothly as if they had rehearsed the moves all last night, and the shooters began to cross over and go into an encircling whir-click tarantella of their own, leaving Eric exposed under the yellow and red metal awning of a bodega.

  After wandering around the neighborhood all morning, Tristan was now squatting on his haunches beneath the side window of a pizzeria down the street from the Langenshield, his notebook propped open on his burning thighs. He thought he’d have laid down a lot more stuff by now, but that cornball marching band hanging out on the steps of that church up the block had been distracting. And when they started to play as they headed inside, turning the building into a boom box, then came back out still playing, there was nothing for him to do but wait until the parade was far enough away that he could hear his own beats again.

  But as soon as he got something going, he became aware of a girl, his age about, standing a few feet away looking into the store window next to the pizzeria. Normally he just looked right through white kids, probably pretty much like they just looked right through him, but this one had her arm all bandaged up; either stitches or a tattoo under the wrapping was his guess.

  Glancing at what he had written, he imagined he was the girl reading it.

  Droppi
n jewels front of fools

  Every word like a school

  standin high,

  do or die,

  you cant never meet my eye,

  cause you know

  that Ill blow

  and your peoples gonna cry.

  When he looked up again, she was gone.

  As the procession continued south by southwest, Yolonda slalomed the line, the sidewalks, looking for a wrong face, but it was hopeless, just too many of the neighborhood lifers drawn to the parade, the cameras, the whole shooting match; hopeless.

  At each intersection, sawhorse barricades steered them from Suffolk to Stanton to Norfolk to Delancey to Eldridge.

  It took about half an hour for everyone to make their way from the Langenshield to 27 Eldridge, where waiting for them in the closed-off block between Delancey and Rivington were a parked sanitation truck, a fire truck, and a life-size straw-stuffed effigy of Ike Marcus lying on a forty-five-degree-angled wooden pallet like a homemade rocket positioned for takeoff. The face was painted papier-mâche.

  The musicians and mourners wended their way past the city rigs, the firemen and garbagemen impassively leaning against the cabs, then began to coil around the effigy until they had created a ring of people six candles deep, the mostly ethnic locals, many with small children straddling their necks, making up an irregular seventh ring, the traffic cops just now starting to catch up once the outer blockades were lifted an even more amorphous eighth.

  And as they all stood there pondering Ike’s likeness, the band continued to mix in klezmer with the jazz and spirituals—“Precious Memories,” then “Kadsheynu,” “Oh Happy Day,” then “Yossel, Yossel”—Boulware and whoever still had it in them singing and dancing, the news shooters getting in between paper Ike and the first ring of his mourners, dropping to the ground like snipers to get up in their faces.

  Backstepping to the sidewalk for some air, Yolonda saw Lugo and Daley both smoking, Daley standing ankle-deep in whatever was left of the shrine.

  “Wild, huh?” Lugo flicked his butt.

  “Oh my God,” Yolonda said, “they’re so creative, these kids, you know?”

  “I couldn’t make a puppet if my life depended on it,” Daley said.

  “So how you guys doing?” Yolonda asked. “You shaking the tree for us?”

  “Which one?” Lugo said. “It’s fucking Sherwood Forest out there.”

  An older Hispanic woman carrying groceries as she tried to muscle her way through the crowd and enter 27 Eldridge gave Yolonda and Quality of Life a withering once-over, muttered, “Now the cops are here,” then slipped into the building.

  Seated with Minette on the front steps of the now deserted Langenshield, Matty went through the motions of rattling off a cursory progress report, omitting, of course, the continuing press gag, the scuttled seventh-day recanvass, and the unreturned phone calls.

  “So are you getting anywhere or not?” she said.

  “Well, there’s still a lot of stuff to be done. On a homicide there’s always a lot of stuff to be done.” Then, sick to death of his own boilerplate mantra, “You know I have to tell you, I was sitting there, you’re very good with them, you know?”

  “With who.”

  “Your family. I was sitting—”

  “You think?”

  With you it would’ve been different, was what he thought.

  “Good with my family.” Minette started tearing up. “Yesterday Billy asked me where Ike was. He couldn’t remember what we did with the body. We. That his mother had him cremated and took the ashes.”

  “That’s . . .” He didn’t know how to finish.

  “Half the time he can’t move a muscle, the other half he’s jumping out of his skin. I went out last night, I come back I can hear the music while I’m still three floors down in the elevator. I walk in, he’s in the living room blasting some old R ’n’ B, covered in sweat, dancing by himself. I’m, ‘Billy, what are you doing?’ He says, ‘I’m watching Ike dance.’ ” Wiping her eyes. “My daughter, did you see her arm?”

  “The sandwich accident.”

  “The sandwich accident,” she muttered, offering no details.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Do you have kids?”

  “Two.” Matty sank. “Boys.”

  “And they’re good?”

  He said, “Yeah,” but Minette read the tell, searched his eyes for what he wasn’t saying.

  Three bosses, a division captain and two inspectors, fresh from monitoring the street procession, passed by, in full dress to show their solidarity with the family and the mourners. But when Matty half saluted in greeting, they responded with dead-eyed stares, as if this whole dog and pony show out here, as far as they were concerned, had been his idea.

  “Is there a problem?” she asked as soon as they passed.

  “Uniforms too tight,” Matty said, and let it go at that.

  The sky above Eldridge Street had morphed from robin’s-egg blue to a huskier late-afternoon shade, and Boulware was still drawing most of the attention; dancing like Zorba, like a dervish, like some purple-robed gospel blaster in a storefront church, and good, Eric had to admit, maybe good enough, but who the hell knew these things.

  And as they had onstage at the Langenshield, some tried to keep up with him but he was untouchable; Eric not even sure the guy was aware that his Song of Myself was being danced on someone’s grave.

  It seemed like the music would go on forever, but with the rush hour coming on fast, one of the ranking cops on the scene worked his way up into the front ring, said something to Cab Calloway, and a moment later Boulware was passed a baton, one end wrapped in flaming batten. And as the band played “Prayer for a Broken World,” he first ceremoniously raised the light to whatever gods were supposed to be peering down, then lit the effigy; Ike instantly roaring up a fierce yellow-blue, as if finally expressing his outrage at what had befallen him, and despite all the calculated showboating of the afternoon, Eric was left openmouthed, a hand on his heart as this man-boy-golem was enveloped in burly rolls of flame that for a long moment seemed to accentuate the human outline before they finally began to destroy it.

  And when the rising waves of heat slowly lifted one stuffed arm in its entirety as if in farewell, Eric found himself paralyzed at the sight of Billy Marcus breaking through from the back of the crowd and running towards his son as if to put out the flames that were killing him, then, like a dog chasing a bumblebee, suddenly reversing himself, nearly knocking over an elderly woman who had just unlocked the front door of her walk-up in order to rush past her into the darkness of the vestibule.

  And through it all the locals continued to quietly watch: from the back of the crowd, from windows, from the top of stoops, most with that shy off-balance smile of bemusement, only one woman standing on her fire escape covering her mouth with both hands, eyes wide as if she had just gotten the news.

  Ike was my brother. I wanted to be him. I still do.

  That’s all she wanted to say. Nina disgusted with herself, cracking up in front of his fruit-loop friends like that, but still, so sorry.

  “Hey, no problem,” Ike had said to her, “we’ll just hook up next week . . .”

  Fighting off the desire to just lie down on the sidewalk and close her eyes, she wandered into She’ll Be Apples, a shop on Ludlow Street so small that there was hardly room in it for the two women working there and herself, the lone customer. Only one pipe-rack stand of clothes for sale, a few hats hanging from pegs high up on the exposed-brick wall, and a scatter of amberish jewelry on a few side tables that to her eyes looked like something she could find in her grandmother’s dresser. She was fascinated by the meagerness of the stock, how someone could just toss a few articles around a room so tiny and call it a store. The women were big too, six-footers speaking to each other with an English accent that wasn’t exactly an English accent. She began to sift through the clothes on the pipe rack, a seemingly random collection of silk-screened wifebeaters
, polyester men’s shirts with dagger collars, hippie peasant blouses, and denim micro-skirts, until she came to an itchy-looking red-brown herringbone riding jacket, nothing interesting about it except that it fit, but when, in the absence of mirrors, she half twisted to check the back, she was startled to see a titanic hole cut out from the nape to the tailbone, and spanning both shoulder blades, a perfect circle of nothing, a whimsy of the designer, but the unexpectedness of it shook Nina to the core, almost scared her, and it became the most excitingly beautiful thing she’d ever seen; making this shop, this street, this neighborhood, the most exotic land; and when one of the six-foot-tall women said, “Oh, darlin’, it’s you,” in her English-not-English accent, Nina started to cry.

  On Eldridge, as the flames finally died out, just a few wisps of straw doing lazy dips and rolls before settling into the street, the Community Affairs officer finally nodded to his uniforms: Herd ’em out.

  But no one seemed willing to leave the scene, the musicians slowly removing their mouthpieces, the mourners hugging and talking, Cab Calloway circulating to hand out his business card.