by Ed Kurtz
I finished off my beer and thought about going for another, but that last hot gulp at the bottom of the can about turned my stomach. So I sat down instead, right on the floor across the basement from Duong, and thought about all the hell me and Gil had raised when we were kids, when we still had all our hair and we were full of piss and vinegar. Me and Gil, running wild through the girls’ locker rooms, naked as jaybirds. Me and Gil, keying the shit out of Brett Halsey’s brand new Datsun (and then Gil smashing the back window in with a brick). Me and Gil, driving his dad’s panel truck clear down to Memphis to see about a whorehouse he heard about from a friend of a friend, which we never found.
Me and Gil.
I got so lost in the memories of good times a long time past I started to ask him if he remembered the time his brother Izzy got on the roof of the Schwab’s drugstore with Ruthie Stevens and we all chased each other up there to get a look at her tits. I think I started to smile, thinking about it, when Gil turned around and I saw the gun in his hand.
Now I don’t know shit about guns, but this one was silver and heavy-looking and Gil kept moving his fingers around on the grip like he wasn’t used to holding it. I swallowed, loud, and he faced me. Tears were streaming down his face, his eyes blood-red, and if I thought the dregs of that last Schlitz were bad news for my stomach I had another think coming.
“Gil,” I said.
“I ain’t got nothing, Blue,” he said, his voice quiet and choked. “Wanda’s gone, my job’s gone. Next they’ll take my car, and then what? I got to foot it to the unemployment office is what. Blisters all over my feet just to hear they don’t got nothing because I’m fucking unskilled labor.”
“I know, Gil. I know.”
“Forty-two years old and nothing to show for it, buddy. Nothing, nothing, nothing.”
“You got your house,” I tried, half-assed as hell. “Your health. Hey man, you got your health.”
Gil just said, “Shit.” At his feet, Van Duong eyeballed the gun and gritted his teeth. This little old man who ran a pizza joint across town, taped-up and beat-up with a lunatic waving a goddamn pistol around his head. Welcome to the neighborhood, General Duong.
“Maybe you better put that gun away,” I said.
By way of reply, Gil knelt down and put the barrel right up against Duong’s swollen jaw. Duong pinched his whole face into a scrunch and I thought he looked just like a man in the famous photograph with him. It was the expression of a man who knew he was about to die, bracing for it as best he could.
“A man works his whole life, plays by the book mostly, you know. But not the General, here—nah, this cat gets to murder people and make good, Blue. Where’s the justice in that?”
“None, I guess,” I said. “But whoever told you life was fair was lying his ass off to you, buddy.”
“Well maybe I oughta balance the scales a little.”
He dug the barrel in deeper, pressing a dent into Duong’s skin.
“Christ, Gil, what the hell would you do in stir? You plug this guy, you’re going up for life, my man.”
He thumbed the hammer back. I started to sweat. Duong was soaked.
“He’s just a—whaddya call it?—a scapegoat, am I right?” I was bent in a weird position, my hands outstretched. “He didn’t fire you, Gil. He didn’t run off with Wanda. All this old-timer wants to do is sell pizzas and put some bad shit behind him. Ain’t that right, Mr. Duong?”
Duong nodded vigorously, his eyes still closed, his face still pinched up.
“We all got shit we want to shake off, man. I reckon tonight’s gonna be yours.”
“A man can only take so much,” he said, and then someone snorted behind us and Gil spun around and he fired.
*****
Living in the neighborhood all my life I’d heard plenty of guns go off, but never close range and never in an enclosed space like Gil’s basement. It is loud. So loud, in fact, you can’t even prepare for it if you know it’s coming, though of course I didn’t. All it is really is this pop, like a balloon some kid stuck with a pin, but amplified times a thousand. POP! After that, it’s all cordite and a one-note scream in your ears and whoever just got shot bleeding all over the damn place.
In our case, that was Junior Taylor. Somewhere along the line, when I was talking to Gil and trying to get him to put the gun away, Junior woke up from his little nap with the Penthouse Pets and got to his feet. You wake up to a guy with a gun in his hand and it gives you a shock. Junior was shocked. But he didn’t say anything, didn’t make a sound—that was Jackson, who had sleep apnea or something—and if I hadn’t seen it myself, I wouldn’t have believed he went right on sleeping after Gil fired the shot.
The bullet went clean through his shoulder, the lucky bastard. He went down screaming bloody murder, but he was really okay. And Gil finally dropped the damn gun, went hustling over to Junior to see was he all right, all blubbering and telling the guy not to die, like in a movie. Junior cussed a blue streak at Gil, said, “You killed me, you asshole, you murdered me.” All I could think was it should have been Frank; at least he’d been shot before.
*****
While Gil was in the pen—and I had to hand it to my old friend, he took the whole rap for the lot of us—I got a part-time gig driving a taxi for Roy’s Cab. I drove five out of seven nights a week, mostly in and around the neighborhood, mostly drunks needing a ride home from the bars and strip joints to get yelled at by their wives. There was one cat, though, about six months after the fact, who had me run him across town, over I-5 and right up to Grant Plaza. It kind of bugged me out, heading back over there, but I took the fare and dropped the guy at a chiropractor’s office at the far end of the sandstone strip. Good tipper, too.
I left the engine idling for a few minutes after he went inside, trying to figure out whether I was going to get back to the neighborhood or do what I thought needed doing which, in the end, was what I did. I rolled down to the other end of the shopping center and parked right in front of Happy’s Pizza. After a belt of Seagram’s from the glove box for courage, I cut the motor and went in. The little brass bell above the door about gave me a heart attack when I heard it again.
Half-expecting to find Jake behind the register in his sauce-splattered shirt and smashed-flat nose, I was relieved to find a middle-aged woman instead. She wasn’t wearing any kind of uniform, just a cashmere sweater and a string of pearls. She smiled congenially when I came up to the counter, and I sort of half-smiled back. I was nervous as hell.
I said, “Is Mr. Duong around today?”
The woman wrinkled her nose for a second and, unconsciously, I did too. Then her whole face brightened up, and she said, “Oh, Van Duong—took me a minute to realize who you were talking about.”
I’d only ever met one guy called Duong my whole life, but there aren’t a lot of people with names like that in my neighborhood.
“He doesn’t own the place anymore, poor dear,” she said, nodding. “Retired.” She whispered the word the way some people whisper cancer.
“Oh,” I said.
“Some folks seemed to have a problem with him,” she went on, glancing around like she was sharing a state secret. “Something to do with the war, I don’t know. He even got beat up, if you can believe it. The man who did it is in prison now.”
“That’s terrible.”
“It is, it is,” she fretted, nodding even more. I’d seen guys in doorways nodding like that on R Street, but I didn’t guess this nice lady was on junk. “So he sold out, poor Mr. Duong, and my husband and I run Happy’s now.”
“Congratulations.”
The woman made a thin line of her mouth and locked her eyes with mine. Her eyes were crazy blue and a little misty now. She said, “There’s just only so much a man can take, you know.”
I said I knew.
Peek-a-Boo
By John Hodgkins
I knew it was Veronica. The minute I laid eyes on her I knew—although I probably shouldn’t have felt so ce
rtain so quickly. I’d just run six blocks, run for my life, and by the time I ducked into a diner off Avenue C and slipped into the nearest high-backed booth, the blood was humming in my ears and my vision was pulsing with every thump of my heart. Yet despite the fear and fatigue blurring my senses, there was something unmistakable about her, something that made her stand out from her dingy surroundings like a ghostly-white silhouette in a photo negative. Presence, my mother used to call it, back when she still thought of me as her son. That ineffable, indefinable quality that separates them from us.
The years had not been kind to her. I did a quick calculation in my head, and placed her age in the early seventies, but she looked even older than that. Her lemon-yellow waitress uniform only intensified the jaundiced pallor of her skin, and her eyes—once so deep and beguiling—were now dulled by a thin film that seemed to be composed of grease and cigarette smoke and the palpable sadness that often accompanies decades of hard living. Her hands, too, were an old person’s hands: bony and frail, with swollen knuckles that went painfully pale each time she picked up a glass or uneasily hefted a dinner plate.
At first glance, there was nothing special about her: the neighborhood was littered with such hard-edged, broken-down characters trying to make ends meet. But then she’d cock her head at just the right angle, or jut out her full lower lip in concentration, and for a moment—just a passing, fleeting instant—you’d see it; you’d see her. Not as she was now, but the girl she used to be; the soft-featured, platinum-haired incarnation that, for a brief moment in history, held the male populations of the world utterly spellbound.
I wanted to speak to her, but didn’t know what to say. Instead I sat dumbly and watched as she trudged half-confused from booth to booth, scratching orders into her pad with a stubby pencil and delivering dishes to impatient customers, more often than not placing the wrong meals in front of them. They’d scowl and exchange plates, and her boss—a narrow man half-hidden behind the counter—would shake his head as if bemoaning the day he’d ever set eyes on her. She ignored their silent reproofs, or at least pretended to, and focused on keeping her hands from shaking: they seemed possessed of their own uncontrollable energy, constantly idling at a low tremble, and occasionally bursting into a series of jerks and spasms. When one of these spasms hit at a particularly inopportune time, it resulted in two piles of chili mixed with shards of shattered china spreading slowly across the diner’s floor. Her boss expressed his displeasure verbally this time, startling everyone with the volume and savagery of his attack. Defeated, she pulled out her hairclip and slunk into the booth across from mine.
The fluorescent lighting above us shone down like a spotlight, and when she shook her head, in either frustration or release, and a lock of her newly-freed, shoulder-length hair fell across her right eye, it was as if I were a child again.
*****
“Fuck outta here.”
“I’m deadly serious.”
“I’m sayin’—there’s no way.”
The book was laid out on the bar in front of Harold, opened to the dog-eared page featuring the famed publicity shot: Veronica Tate, in all her soft-focused splendor, pursing her mouth seductively and draping her long blonde locks over the frozen grimace of a stuffed panther. As always, her stylists had teased her hair just enough so that a swooping curl obscured most of her right eye.
I poised my finger over the photo, pointing to it but not quite touching it.
“I’m telling you,” I said. “She’s working in this dump in Alphabet City. I saw her with my own two eyes.”
Harold shook his head, and polished off what was left of his gin and tonic.
“Well, you better get those two eyes checked, then. That picture’s gotta be fifty years old.”
“It’s exactly fifty-six years old,” I corrected, “and what the fuck has that got to do with anything? I’m not saying she still looks like this. I’m just saying it’s the same person.”
“I don’t believe this guy,” Harold announced to no one in particular.
By this point, the bar was nearly empty—the Suffolk Street Pub had a tendency to clear out quickly after midnight. The unspoken agreement among patrons was that late night hours were reserved for serious drinkers and for “businessmen,” their business ranging everywhere from small-time dealing and fencing to hustling and bookmaking. Harold had dabbled in all of these trades at one time or another, and had finally settled down—now that he was in his forties—to a nice career supplying local college students with amphetamines. It afforded him a steady income, and more or less allowed him to fly under the radar of local authorities who weren’t too interested in pursuing busts that couldn’t land their names in the newspaper.
Harold pivoted on his stool, as if looking for moral support, but there wasn’t much to be found; a couple of old rummies throwing darts nowhere near a dartboard, a dour middle-aged hooker named Melody who liked to play Johnny Mathis songs on the jukebox (when it was running), and Remo, the heavyset proprietor and sole bartender who sported a bald crown and a cauliflower ear that he claimed he’d received in a prizefight, though none us believed he was ever actually a prizefighter. Harold settled on Remo as his best bet and waved him over.
“Get a load of this,” Harold said, jerking his thumb in my direction as Remo wiped his hands on a dishrag and waddled over. “Sonny boy here thinks he found a long-lost movie star. In Alphabet City, of all places.”
Remo leaned a fleshy, tattooed forearm against the bar.
“What the hell you doing outta the Bowery?” he asked me.
“Good question,” Harold seconded.
“Well, if you must know…I was being chased. By Sly’s boys.”
“Oh Christ!” Harold threw up his hands in frustration, nearly knocking his empty glass over in the process. “Not again. You’re hopeless, kid. You really are. Remo, I ever tell you I used to take bets from Sonny’s old man? This guy, he couldn’t pick a winner in a one-horse race. But what’s worse, this scumbag—sorry Sonny, but he was a scumbag—he’d take the kid here along for the ride. I used to see this little squirt in every seedy OTB and smoky barroom on the East Side, sitting there looking miserable while his pop was more often than not taking a beating out back. And so what does this squirt do when he grows up? Becomes as big a degenerate gambler as his old man.”
“Wait a second, Har—“
He cut me off with a sharp wave.
“Sorry, kid, it’s the truth. I like you, but you’re your father’s son. You got into me back in the day for what, twelve hundred? I even tried to be a good fella and let you work it off selling bennies to the NYU brats…and you swallowed more of them than you sold. And now, to get hooked up with Sly, of all people. How much do you owe him?”
“Four thousand.”
“Sly’s bad news,” Remo intoned somberly, straightening up and easing back down the bar, as if trying to escape some unpleasant mental image.
Harold’s shoulders slumped forward.
“I just don’t get it, kid,” he said more quietly now, a hint of fatigue or perhaps disappointment creeping into his voice. “It’s not like you ain’t smart…”
“Look,” I said, repositioning the well-thumbed book—entitled Silver Screen Sirens—in front of him, and smoothing out Veronica Tate’s picture. “I always appreciate it when you take the time to reminisce about my scumbag father, or point out my many shortcomings, but believe me, I know every one of my flaws better than you ever will. What I came here to talk about was her. The other night, I had maybe the most unbelievable experience of my life. Could we try to concentrate on that for just one second, please?”
Harold sighed, and grudgingly focused his pale watery eyes on the photograph.
“I don’t know,” he mumbled, chewing the inside of his cheek as if mulling over an important question. “It just seems so damned unlikely, is all. I mean, what are the odds against something like this? And anyway, I thought I heard somewhere she died.”
“No, I
went to the library and looked it up. She ‘disappeared from public view’ but there’s no record of her dying. I guess she had some mental troubles, or addiction troubles, or something.”
“Don’t we all,” Harold snorted, more to himself than to me. He pushed the book away and signaled to Remo for a refill. “Okay, for the sake of argument, let’s say you’re right. You’ve stumbled across an over-the-hill starlet working in some shithole diner. Bully for you. So what? How is this going to change your life one iota?”
I watched Remo plunk an ice cube into an empty tumbler, and cover it with two fingers of gin.
“I guess that’s the big question,” I said.
Harold grinned, exposing two silver-capped teeth that glinted in the neon-red light like bloodstained diamonds.
“Kid,” he laughed, “if that’s the big question on your mind right now, then you’re in more trouble than I thought.”
*****
The next evening I went back to the diner. I was supposed to be at work, vacuuming well-appointed offices and emptying wastepaper baskets for a janitorial service, but I figured it might be wise to lay low while Sly was on the lookout for me. When I got there, Veronica was fixed halfway out the door, in the midst of a screaming match with her boss. Between her high-pitched shriek and his steady stream of profanities, it was difficult to figure out the exact point of disagreement between them—something about her last paycheck, and a number of deductions he’d made that she was taking issue with. Eventually she promised him that someday soon he’d be deducting her foot from his ass, and slammed the front door so hard that an adjacent window cracked down the center. She quickly shifted her purse higher onto her shoulder and hustled around the corner.
I followed her onto East 9th, trying to stay close enough so that I wouldn’t lose her, but not so close as to draw attention to myself. She took some twists and turns as we approached Tomkins Square Park, and by the time I hit Avenue A, I thought I’d lost her. The street was almost empty, except for a few passing cars and a group of derelicts congregating in a weed-strewn lot. Taking a chance, I hung a left and started toward 1st Ave. Before I made it three steps, Veronica popped up from behind a cement stairway, her arm extended in front of her. In her fist was a small plastic container topped with a bright orange button. I recognized what it was an instant too late.
