“No. You wouldn’t. But a lot of people would.”
Mary slid the Mayor out from in front of the refrigerator with one foot, put the leftovers inside, closed the door, and slid him back to his spot, smack in everybody’s way. It was a wonder that no one ever stepped on him, but nobody did, and he wouldn’t budge on his own. He liked the ride.
“Would it be,” Mary suggested casually, “that you’d like to come along?”
“Uh-uh.”
“Another time, then.” She surveyed the kitchen. Spic and span until the onslaught of night snacking. Claire was over at the sideboard, reaching for the tallest shelf with ease. Claire had the legs in the family. She reminded Mary of her own mother, Jenny Rose. The longest legs and most heathen ideas in all of Skibbereen. If Mary didn’t know better, she’d think Claire was Jenny Rose born twice. Sometimes, when Claire looked at her … ah, silly notions only got you round the bend and back to where you started. You lived and died and if you’d done it well you would get your reward. There was no telling what the Holy Ghost was up to.
“Ma?” Claire steadied the plate she almost dropped, “How do you think something like that can happen? A murder like that?”
Mary closed her eyes and turned her head. Claire had always been the clumsy one. She couldn’t bear to watch her with the good china.
“I mean from the murderer’s side. How can someone live with such guilt?”
Guilt? Interested now, in spite of herself, Mary sat at the white pine table. “If indeed the murderer knows guilt,” she said.
“You mean a schizophrenic?”
“Ah, these labels psychiatrists put on things! Evil was around a long time before they thought up words like that. Words that allow murderers to sit around in hospital gardens and take the sun just as nice as you please. And then back out on the street to kill again.” She straightened her shoulders. “Especially in this city.”
“Yeah, but there must be more to it than that, than simple good and evil.”
“What’s simple? We all are secrets from ourselves.”
Claire sat down, too. She loved it when her mother got like this, all deep and confidential. Irish.
“We trudge along, not being especially good, hoping, anyway, for miracles. Don’t we? And then there are those who, having given up, have given in, regardless of … because of the blind and total lure of evil.”
“Yeah, but how does it start, the madness? When? Is it learned or inherent?”
“Or,” Mary’s face lit up, “is it a living force predestined and allowed to exist by some great power, planted into innocence haphazardly?”
“A plan that has no plan?”
Mary leaned across the table. “Just lessons to be learned,” she whispered. “Battles to be won.”
Claire lit a cigarette. Her mother would be annoyed to know that the gurus preached the same philosophy, almost word for word.
“Oh, give me one,” Mary snapped.
Surprised, Claire gave her hers and lit another.
“Just don’t tell your father.”
The Mayor hopped up and howled. “Oh, drat,” Mary put the cigarette out quickly and waved the air. “That’s Mrs. Dixon. Let her in and I’ll get ready.”
Claire opened the door and in came Mrs. Dixon, short and plump and her hair rinsed blue.
“Now look at this!” she gushed. “The prodigal daughter returned and not a tat the worse for wear! Just as pretty as ever!”
Claire smiled. Mrs. Dixon was so nice that she made you feel not nice. “Mom’ll be right down, Mrs. Dixon. Just went to change her blouse.”
“Let me look at you. My, my!” Mrs. Dixon pulled her apart by the wrists. “You look like a teenager. Those lashes! And your brother’s eyes!” Her own kindly, reminiscent gray orbs twinkled.
Claire’s mouth went dry. She willed her mother to hurry. “Why don’t you sit down, Mrs. Dixon, Mom will be—”
“I always wondered about you, Claire … if you were ever coming home. Your mother missed you so. And your dad—”
Mary arrived then, still buttoning up. Claire fled.
“Hello, Mrs. Dixon. Are we late?”
“Plenty of time, plenty of time.”
“Oh, you’ve brought your umbrella! Did they say it would finally rain?”
“It’s for the webs, dear. Fending off the spider webs.”
Michaelaen looked out the upstairs window. He watched Grandma go. Now she was gone. Immediately, he snuck down the hallway and down the back stairs. He made himself into a tight little fellow and scooted out the doggy door. Nobody saw him. He rushed. He crossed Eighty-fifth and went straight up the block till he came to the tree. He sat down on a root two feet high. This tree was three, maybe four hundred years old. Even Grandpa said so. Michaelaen pulled one sturdy leg over and straddled the root. It was warm as himself. He dug swiftly with the shoe horn he’d brought and in a minute he had a pretty good hole. Michaelaen went into his pocket and pulled out the pictures he’d hidden there. Brian. Miguel. And a couple of the other big boys. They were a little sticky from his pocket. He folded them over and put them in the hole, then covered it up good. Just in the nick of time, too, because here came stupid Charlotte, who lived across the street. Probably on her way to the carousel, by herself. Thought she was big. Phhh. It wouldn’t be too good if she saw him, so he’d better go home. She was one little freshie of a tattletale.
Johnny Benedetto lived in a three-over-three house, right on the southeast rim of Aqueduct Racetrack. The sweet smell of horse and manure and hay filled his kitchen all the time. In the summer it was worse. Johnny stood in the dark at the window, drinking Diet Coke, groggily watching through the Venetian blind at the horse they’d put up in the temporary big top, a golden horse whose head was more often out than in. The horse reminded Johnny of himself. She was a real rubberneck—couldn’t stay indoors without watching the street.
There were plenty of housewives on Johnny’s block who’d demonstrated and fought not to have the stables extended so close to their backyards, but that was just how Johnny’d got the house, cheap, from a family whose asthmatic daughter couldn’t stand it. They’d moved out to Valley Stream and Johnny had lucked out. Nobody liked the smell, but what were you gonna do? There was a feeling Johnny got from looking out and seeing that horse there with her head sticking out. He couldn’t understand why his neighbors didn’t feel it, too. Fury. Black Beauty. Flicker. No, there was something all right about having a frigging horse out your window.
Johnny left his Coke can on the back stairs in a pagoda of other Coke cans and locked the back door. The track was all lit up, the fourth race already underway, and the mosquitos were biting. He was very much alive and that little Hispanic boy was dead. Real dead.
“Who do you like in the ninth?” Johnny greeted the horse while he lugged out the garbage. He opened the garage and hopped into the car. The front seat was littered with old papers, outstanding bills, styrofoam cups and one change of a wrinkly wardrobe which sat there like a frazzled passenger. This was Johnny’s office. The engine underneath the hood looked like a gleaming space center and fingerprints on the door were removed fastidiously almost before they got there, but the inside of the car? He wouldn’t know what you were talking about. Johnny turned the key in the ignition, set the air conditioner on full speed, and snapped on the overhead light. He searched the front and back seats thoroughly and eventually came up with the address he needed. When you had nothing to go on, you went with any stupid lead before you wrote it off. The worst feeling was having nothing to do. If you thought about things too much you’d go nuts. And you usually did.
His honor, digesting, watched staunch vegetarian Claire transport shiny bologna on Wonder bread out to the porch. The crickets were singing. Claire balanced a tall glass of milk with her sandwich and a pickle rolled dangerously round the plate as she maneuvered the door with an elbow. One frozen Milky Way protruded from each under arm.
“What?” she looked at him. “You, with yo
ur Kosher chicken appetite. You’ve got nothing to say.”
The cat can well look at the queen, thought the Mayor, miffed.
Claire climbed up into the hammock with her goods. The wobbly table was already prepared with an ashtray, a candle, and five Kodak boxes of unopened slides. These were the last days of McLeod Gange and the first color shots from her third day in Queens. Maybe one of them would be brilliant. One would be sufficient. Claire lit the candle to hold each slide in front of. This was not the way it was done, but she had sold her projector and carousel to Sami Ja back in McLeod Gange, the Tibetan village where she’d lived above the Tea Shop of the Tibetan Moon. She was used to doing it this way, now. And Sami Ja was back in the Himalayas making a living showing slides of naked Bagwanis from Poona to the wide-eyed Tibetans. His shows were a raving success. Even the sweet, aproned ladies came. The sight of those earnest, pink-faced yuppies on the road to redemption via nudity delighted them. They laughed and laughed.
Sami Ja was a Tibetan teenager who’d latched on to Claire like a suckling wolf when he’d heard where she came from. “New York?” he’d cried, ecstatic. “Want some hash?” Claire could still see him with his scant Fu Manchu and a lavender jacket that read CBS Sports, front and back. He would pay her to marry him, he’d told her on the day she’d arrived in the village, filthy dirty from the coal truck. “No? And what about a letter to sponsor? Oh, no? Well then, how would she feel about a good down sleeping bag? Brand new! Mountain climber died first day out. Good zipper!”
Claire had bought the sleeping bag. All alone, late at night when the tea shop was closed and the mice scurried joyfully over the icy rafters, she was happy to have her good zipper. Claire would miss Sami Ja. “Another day,” he’d flick his prayer beads over easy, “another dollah.” He would be all right, back there, taking bets from the trekkers, selling forbidden tours of the Dalai Lama’s palace, playing poker with the disenchanted. One day he, too, would know these highlights of American culture that he could now only hear of and dream about: Haagen Daaz. “Dynasty.” That polyester mecca of bliss: Atlantic City. Someday it would all be his.
Claire held the first slide of him up to the light.
There he was, on tiptoes, squinting at the camera from the waterfall. He was thinking maybe this photograph would be seen by some big-shot producer. Claire sighed, remembering the cool, enduring waterfall.
A car came down the block and its headlights lit up the spider web along the rail, turning it silver and exposing wriggling victims caught and now doomed. Claire groaned and looked the other way. It wasn’t the spider that troubled her. Spiders were good luck. This one scrambled over to his favorite, strategic thread and waited for wind and traffic to send him his well-earned dinner. What troubled Claire were those he wouldn’t eat. Grudgingly, she’d have to get up and untangle the ones she felt especially sorry for. She couldn’t help it. She suspected she was only prolonging their inevitable karmic rebirths to a higher form of life, but it was a tricky problem. After all, destiny had placed her in this spot, too, complete with her sucker’s instinct to save the stupid things. The spider would only catch more, so what good would it do? And what was good, anyway? What you meant well very often turned out to be a muddle. Like the time in McLeod Gange when she’d run around trying to get some help for the dying cat. Claire had barely known the cat, but Hula, the proprietress of the tea shop, had pulled the mangy thing off the street for her and her aversion to mice and so she’d felt bound to the thing.
She’d cleaned it up and fed it for a week, but the sickly thing would not get well. It lay at the top of the stairs and wouldn’t move, wouldn’t eat. It just stank. And Claire had picked it up and run around trying to get help for it. Everyone had laughed. Nobody cared about a damn cat. She’d carried the stinking animal into the traffic of Himalayan hubbub and she was going to find him a vet. Of course there was no vet, not even in the Hindu village down below, so she carried it to the healing lama. When she’d finally made it to the lama’s cabin he wasn’t there, he was up in the mountain searching for herbs to roll into pills. The narrow-eyed assistant, thinking himself helpful, had brought out a club, and he was baffled when Claire, in tears, had jogged away down the path with the now-moaning cat. In a panic, Claire had realized that she had to get the poor thing home to the Tea Shop of the Tibetan Moon. Along the way, in the middle of the village, with the prayer wheel going round and round and a session of young monks playing potsy in the road, the cat had thrown back its orange head, stretched its arms and legs in rigid agony, and died.
When things were set to die, Claire knew, one might well provide them with peaceful surroundings in which to do it and not go carting them about like a lunatic, as though it would do any good. She bit into her bologna sandwich. The bread was so fresh that it stuck to the roof of her mouth like a host at communion. And you couldn’t beat sharp mustard. You really couldn’t. Murmuring confusion seeped from the separate television camps the family was divided into around the house. She had the feeling, almost hope and almost fear, that nothing would ever happen again. The milk was ice cold and she drank it greedily. A burst of laughter from inside lit up her face and she smiled with them at some new antic of Michaelaen’s. Or someone’s. It didn’t matter. She was with them, apart but close.
The car that had just passed turned around, hesitated, then stopped right in front of the house. Some sporty little car. A light went on in Iris von Lillienfeld’s back porch and the Mayor crossed over the street. A big man climbed out of the car, studied something in his hand and proceeded up the front walk. Claire leaned forward. It was that—that drug dealer from this afternoon! A thrill of something went right through her.
“This 113-04?” He shielded his eyes from the lantern, then saw her shocked face. Jesus! It was that very same cuckoo from the pizza place!
“You’ve got a lot of nerve,” she reprimanded him, her tone dating back to a decade of tight-assed, condescending grammar school nuns.
“Look, lady. Before you get all bent out of shape, I didn’t come here to see you!”
Claire dropped the whole box of slides. Lady? How old did he think she was? Had he followed her home?
“Does a Mr. Stanley Breslinsky live here?” he continued, politely bending down to help her pick up the cascade of slides.
“No!” she snatched one right out of his hand. He had wrists thick with enemy black hairs. “You’ve put your fingerprints all over the slide.” She pulled her hair out of her eyes. “Yes, he does live here,” she said, annoyed, in fact, that he hadn’t followed her home.
Married, concluded Johnny, hating her.
“Dad!” called Claire. Now he hated her more.
No one came and the two of them glared at each other. “Dad!” she called again, louder, refusing to get up and give those scornful eyes a good shot at her short shorts.
Stan looked through the front screen. “Oh,” he said, peering out at Johnny. “I didn’t hear the dog.”
“He took off,” Claire complained. “This man would like to speak with you.”
This man, Johnny mimicked her inside his head. Like, “this creep.” “Detective Benedetto,” he said. “I’m with the 102nd. You stopped off there this morning?”
“Yes?” Stan looked around guiltily, then remembered Mary was off to church.
“I wonder if I could have a word with you?”
“Sure!” Stan opened the door and ushered Johnny in. What a hulk of a guy! He slapped him on the back and directed him into his “study,” a room dedicated to one cannon after the next. Wherever you looked there were cannons, homemade crossbows, hunks of wood in various stages of finish. Johnny gave a low whistle. “You make this stuff?” he eyed Stan, impressed.
“What? This?” Stan waved aside the room as though he’d never seen it. “Just a hobby. Old man like me. Got to have something to do now, don’t I?”
Johnny picked up a rosewood and brass miniature of exquisite proportion.
“This is beautiful.”
/>
“That’s the Gustavus Adolphus,” Stan glowed. “Swedish.” If Michael had lived … Stan started to think, till he caught himself.
“God. I’ve never seen work like this. Look at the wheels!”
“You have a good eye. Most people don’t notice detail like that. The wheels happen to have been the most difficult of all. I had to study to be a wheelwright in order to make them. Lots of time, they took, lots of time. We fired one last weekend. That’s why there’s still a little powder burn near the wick.”
“You’re kidding! You mean these things really work?”
“Indeed they do. The cannonballs are in the limber, there.”
Johnny flipped open the miniature lock and opened it. It eased open like a well-oiled treasure box. Not only were there twenty little cannonballs lined up neatly on a polished shelf, but a proper bucket, a mallet, and a pickax as well, all gleaming in rosewood and brass. A delicate white cord with gold-nuggeted ends was waxed, braided, and coiled.
“But you’re an armorer!” Johnny exploded.
Stan was wiping his hands on an old piece of shammy. He looked up through his bushy eyebrows and studied Johnny. “Not many people know what a small-arms expert is, either.”
Fascinated, Johnny turned the smooth wheel of the Rodman. “Yeah, well, there aren’t too many of them around. I got to know one of them in Nam. He was a genius with explosives.”
“Really? That’s what I did in World War II. Demolition. We blew up the swastika of Nürnberg.” He grinned. “Among other things.”
Stan and Johnny gazed at each other with final approval. The record came to an end and Stan hurried over to flip it. “Ah, Puccini,” he sighed.
“Sir?”
“Puccini.”
“Sounds good,” Johnny scratched his forehead, embarrassed.
“So,” Stan sank into his chair, “down to tacks.”
Johnny reminded him of the conflicting numbers he’d reported.
“Oh, yes. You see, my daughter saw this car, and—”
Johnny looked up at Carmela pirouetting into the room. She was wearing a tuxedo and stiletto heels. Her mouth was an indignant fuschia.
Park Lane South, Queens Page 5
