Bloodbrothers

by Richard Price

  "Did she dig it?" Butler was spread-legged in his chair, eyes going in different directions.

  "She came!"

  "She came?" Butler slid off his chair and fell on the floor.

  "An' in the mornin' I wake up and she made me breakfast in bed. Like a sultan, Butler, orange juice, toast, a mushroom omelet, hot coffee."

  "Mushroom omelet!" Butler groaned, covering his face with his hands.

  A girl came in, long black hair, dangling earrings, lean face, make-up. Butler scrambled up from the floor. "Yes."

  "Two pairs, thirty-four, honeytone."

  "Thirty-four, honeytone." Butler gawked at her. He turned to Stony, "Thirty-four honeytone!" He turned to the shelves. "Thirty-four honeytone!" Stony saw Butler had a hard-on a mile long. He pulled out a box, flipped it open on the counter, extracted two pairs, draped one across the inside of his forearm, caressed the material while staring at the girl. "This is honeytone."

  "Yeah, I know." She looked at him suspiciously, opened her pocketbook and fished around for money.

  "Anything else? Pantyhose? Bras? Panties?" he asked hopefully.

  "No."

  Butler handed her the package. She put a dollar-eight on the counter. Butler took her hand and placed it over the money. "On the house, dear." He looked like he was in pain. Stony held a hand over his eyebrows as if shielding his eyes from the sun. He tried not to crack up. She slid the money off the counter back into her pocketbook. "Thanks." She stared at him queerly.

  "Come back soon." Butler waved at her retreating back, then squeezed Stony's knees. "Honeytone!" He got down on his knees. "I found my calling." He collapsed on his back.

  Butler's Uncle Frank came into the store, a short bald guy with gray sideburns, gold-rimmed aviator glasses, a silky brown body shirt over a pot belly, gold and brown hound's-tooth double-knit slacks. He was startled to see Stony behind the counter. "Where's Bobby?"

  "He's on the floor."

  Butler got up, dusted off his pants.

  "What the hell you doin' on the floor?"

  "I lost a contact."

  Frank leaned over the counter, looked down. "I thought maybe there'd be somebody down there with you."

  Butler smirked at Stony. "Wise guy here."

  Frank grinned, revealing perfectly even gleaming white false teeth. He grabbed Butler around the neck and pinched his cheek while grinning at Stony. "I love this fuckin' kid, he'd like to bang everything that walks inta this place, wants to get some nice granma in trouble." Butler's face turned red. He rolled his eyes and stuck his tongue out in mock strangulation.

  "Least I don't go after the delivery men." Butler straightened his collar, the red draining from his face.

  "I'll fuck you under the table any day a the week." Frank laughed.

  "You believe this old cocker?" Butler said to Stony.

  Frank faked a punch. Butler ducked. "Bobby, I'm goin' home." He came behind the counter, flipped open a long rectangular covering over the keys on the cash register where the total receipts were registered. "Eighty-one fifty?" he squawked. "Whatta you doin' in here?"

  Butler shrugged. "It's a slow day, Frank."

  "Yesterday you had over two hundred!"

  "So that was yesterday! You wamme to pull 'em in off the streets?"

  Frank glared at his nephew, faked another punch. "I'll kill 'em someday. I'll kill 'em." He walked out from behind the counter. "I'll see you tomorrow, lock up nice." He left the store.

  "Lock up nice, what the fuck does that mean?" Butler laughed to Stony. "He's on his way out, Stones, he doesn't have that many good years left. About two weeks I'd say offhand."

  "I dig him." Stony chuckled.

  "Yeah, he's O.K." Butler tilted his head back and massaged his throat with his fingertips. "So anyways, Annette's the one now, hey?"

  Stony shrugged. "She ain't gonna be my main squeeze, if that's what you mean."

  "Where's Cheri in your head?"

  "Cheri who?"

  "Three-Finger Annette," Butler announced, "da woman dat makes you fo'git da other woman."

  "Hey, Butler." Stony winced. "Don't call her Three-Finger no more, O.K.?"

  ***

  At the age of ten, Annette Palladino had developed full woman's breasts that, coupled with the fact that she started smoking cigarettes at eleven, sealed her fate at Saint Anne's School for Girls as a hoowah in the eyes of students and nuns alike. Other girls smoked too, but they didn't have tits as big as Annette's. When she lost two fingers to a paper-sorting machine on a class trip to a newspaper plant, the sisters smugly attributed it to God's evening the score. Also at eleven, the powers that be advertised Annette's calling by putting scarlet letters all over her face, in the form of severe acne. She had no friends among her classmates—the contempt was mutual. She ran with an older crowd, girls among whom she didn't stick out, so to speak. The only problem was that her body was about five years ahead of her mind and the track she ran on was a little too fast for a twelve-year-old. At fifteen she got knocked up by a twenty-year-old ex-con smack freak who told her she couldn't get pregnant if they did it standing up. Her mother sent her to a Catholic retreat for wayward girls to have the baby. It was a boy. She couldn't see it, name it or touch it. He was given away immediately to a couple in Florida with six kids. Their identities and address were verboten information. She returned home and stayed in her curtain-drawn room for eight months, eating canned ravioli, watching TV and lying in bed. When she finally emerged, she had gained sixty pounds—her complexion had gone from ruddy to death white and she had developed severe astigmatism. She hitched to Haight and Ash-bury streets, was informed she missed the party by about five years, got locked up on vagrancy and conspiracy to commit prostitution charges and celebrated her sweet sixteen in a detaining cell in a women's prison in Oakland. The court released her on the stipulation that she be sent home to her father in the Bronx. Her father shipped her off to a convent in the Hudson Valley to become a nun. She ran away from the convent after three days, fell in love with a bartender in Rhinebeck, New York, and lived with him in a farmhouse for a year. During that year, her skin cleared up, she lost seventy pounds, went back to school, got a high school diploma, discovered she had a mind and worked part-time with kids in a day-care center. But a year away from the city was about all she could take, so at seventeen she split from her boyfriend and returned to the Bronx, supporting herself by cocktail waitressing and every so often turning a few tricks. Even though she was the same age as Stony and his friends, she felt miles and years ahead of them and naturally gravitated to the bar owners, bartenders and older bouncers in the clubs where everybody hung out. She developed a crush on Stony because he reminded her of a younger version of Fred, her ex-boyfriend bartender, in Rhinebeck. The only problem was that Stony and his crowd related to her in a way reminiscent of the eleven-year-olds at Saint Anne's.

  Stony was a little different. When none of his friends were around he smiled at her in a particular way, something in his expression conveying to her that he knew there was something else out there beyond his teen-age friends and chump-change family. And that, whatever it was, he wanted some. She knew that when he was back with his pals, he got into the "ol' Three-Finger Annette" number, but that didn't really bother her. Small thrills for small minds. She had watched him and his cocktease girlfriend who looked like that big-titted blonde in "All in the Family." She had her number from the git-go. The Jewish princess with the Crown Jewels between her legs. One of the true hookers of the world. When the grapevine had it that they split up, she waited two weeks until she figured Stony was climbing the walls with horniness, then called him up. He was over to her crib in ten minutes flat. Just to blow him out of his socks she gave him the Royal Harem treatment that night. She knew, by the expression of his face after twenty minutes in bed, that Cheri was nothing but a childhood memory. Annette had a nice time racking with him that night. He was a little too fast and sloppy and he had to learn a little about lying back, relaxing and apprec
iating things done to him instead of running through all the male performance numbers, but basically he had it in him to develop into a class A fuck.

  As nice as the sex was, what really stuck in her head was the conversation. After fucking, they sat up in bed all night talking. She felt on her guard, so she didn't tell him anything of the scenes she had been into since ten, but he poured his heart out. He talked about his family, his brother, his uncle, the doctor that got him the gig in the hospital, what it felt like working with kids, how his own brother reminded him of the black kids he cared for every day, the new thoughts and connections he was making in his head about kids and parents. All these new ideas of his were things she could have told him when she was twelve. As she listened, she had the feeling he was telling her all this to get a specific reaction from her. He wanted to hear something. Finally, she said that he might as well slash his wrists if he quit the hospital and worked with his father and uncle. He was crazy even to consider becoming an electrician, and that the further he removed himself from that family the more of a human being he would become. That if he went into construction and became a full-blooded De Coco, whatever heart and feeling he had would shrivel up inside him faster than a hard-on in a room full of nuns. Stony freaked out and started running around the apartment, shouting at her that she was a dumb cunt and didn't know shit from Shinola about anything and basically saying that she just didn't understand. Annette just shrugged and felt O.K., I'm wrong, no sweat. But later that night, when she sat up because Stony was tossing and turning, moaning in his sleep, she knew she had hit it dead on the nose.

  15

  STONY HELD COURT in the day room facing a semicircle of six wheelchairs. Besides Derek and Tyrone his fan club had expanded in the course of the day to a red-headed nine-year-old anemic named Felix; a horribly scarred ten-year-old, Freddy, who had fallen on a third rail while hitching a ride on the back of a subway and had been in Cresthaven for a year undergoing skin grafts; a long-haired, thin, eight-year-old girl, Esperanza, who had an undiagnosed blood disease; and an eleven-year-old girl named April, who had a wired jaw.

  "Anyway, folks, this next story is true. It's about something that happened right outside this hospital."

  "Man, you lyin' awready." Derek laughed.

  "Hey look, I'm an Indian, you forget?" Stony leaned forward in his folding chair. "Indians don't lie."

  "You really an Indian?" Felix asked.

  "Ask Derek and Tyrone. My grandfather's name was Cochise. You ever hear of him?"

  Six negatives. "Well, how 'bout my father, Creamchise?"

  Freddy laughed, the others still indicated no. Stony winked at Freddy.

  "Well, see, my tribe, the De Cocos, useta live on a reservation hundreds a years ago right outside on Fordham Road, which was pretty good because we could get out of our tepees in the mornin' an' go shoppin' in Alexander's, right?"

  Finally everybody laughed, except April, who couldn't move her jaw.

  "Well, actually, there was nothin' to Fordham Road in those days, just a couple of hamburger places, a beauty parlor and the Loew's Paradise. Matter of fact, Fordham Road used to be such a drag that the Indians called it Boredom Road. There was really nothin' there but Indians, millions a Indians an' they were all De Cocos, just one big fat tribe."

  "Was there buffaloes?" Esperanza giggled, covering her mouth after the question.

  "Buffaloes! Man, there was buffaloes, antelopes, lions, elephants, turkeys, there's still a lotta them, there was tigers, gorillas. Hey, look, down by this water hole there was so many different animals, that they just threw a fence up and called it the Bronx Zoo."

  April smirked as best she could. Stony gave her Groucho eyes, tapping an imaginary cigar.

  "Was there snakes?" Tyrone asked with a look of disgust on his face.

  "No, no snakes."

  "Good!"

  "The snakes in the zoo came up on the subway from Manhattan." Freddy flinched. Stony cursed himself.

  "Anyway, gettin' back to my story, hundreds a years ago Fordham Road was nothin' but Indians. An' these were tough Indians, man, they were so tough they useta eat steak with a spoon."

  "I hate steak," said Tyrone.

  "Shut up, stupid!" Derek sneered.

  "The De Cocos had a ritual you had to go through to be a full-blooded Indian. See, when you got old enough they gave you a test to see how tough you were. There useta be this big cave right outside this hospital. This was way before Cresthaven was built, and what they would do was they would line up all the young men and blindfold 'em, give 'em an ax each, an' one by one they would take them way, way back into the cave, where there was spiders an' bats"—Stony curled his face in disgust—"but no snakes. Now this cat was blindfolded, remember? And they would leave him there, just one scared, blindfolded young brave, and the test was he had to get out of the cave without takin' off the blindfold an' the way he had to do that was by takin' the ax and tappin' the walls like this." Stony rapped his knuckles slowly and at paced intervals, like heartbeats, on the seat of his chair. "Y'see? An' as he moved along the cave an' got closer to the opening, the sound of the tapping would get lighter because the walls would be gettin' hollower, you got that? An' in this way, he would find the opening where all the braves would be waitin' for him. When all the braves passed this test, they would have this big party to welcome them into manhood."

  "Would they do war dances?"

  "War dances! This was a party, man! They would throw on some heavy jams, some Curtis, some James Brown, Tower of Power, you name it! These cats would put 'Soul Train' right outta business. They had this dynamite dance called the Funky Buffalo, lemme see if I remember it." Stony got up, thinking fast. "Now gimme a sec, it's an old ancestral dance. I gotta remember how to do it." Stony finally decided to get down on all fours, made grunting noises and kicked his legs back while moving in a circle.

  "Tha's weak!"

  "I woun't dance wit' choo, man!"

  All the kids laughed, slapping their knees and imitating Stony's buffalo grunts.

  Stony got up, his face flushed, laughing along with them. "Well, y'see they had to dance like that, you know, on all fours, 'cause the women in the tribe were only nine inches tall, man, an' if you do one a these numbers"—Stony did a high-stepping rain dance—"you dance like that, you likely to wipe out the whole ladies' club if you ain't careful. But I'm gettin' away from the story here. One day for the initiation they send this young brave way back in the cave, and they're all on the outside waitin' an' they hear"—Stony tapped on the chair seat—"from inside 'cause he's tappin' the ax, right? Then all of a sudden they hear this 'rrrrrr.' " Stony made a rumbling noise in the back of his throat. "An' all of a sudden everything went Boom! It was a cave-in! Rocks started flyin', the earth shook, clouds a dust came bloomin' outta the cave, oh, it was terrible!" Stony held his head.

  "What happened to the Indian?"

  Stony started tapping on the seat. "Well, they heard him tappin' inside, so they tried to dig him out soon as the earth settled, an' the rocks stopped flyin' an' the dust cleared. But the cave was blocked to the sky with gigantic boulders and they couldn't get in more than two inches an' they tried, boy, they tried, they pulled, an' yanked and tugged, but they couldn't move one boulder. I mean they tried for hours while they could still hear that tappin' and all the women were weepin' an' wailin' and the men were gruntin' an sweatin' but nothin' from nothin man."

  Stony kept tapping as he told the story. "There wasn't one Indian who wasn't knocked out to the bone. They just couldn't go on anymore. Even the women and children were exhausted. Then all of a sudden the tapping stopped."

  Stony stopped tapping the chair.

  "He was dead?" In a whisper.

  "Instead of havin' a celebration they wound up havin' a funeral." Stony sadly shook his head. "They never tried another cave initiation again. They just put flowers in fronna the blocked cave for the dead young brave's spirit and called it a day. That woulda been that, except that the next
year on the first anniversary of the cave-in, in the middle of the night"—Stony started tapping his chair and said in a hoarse whisper—"the tapping started again!"

  Derek looked worried, everybody was frowning. "An' every year after that, on the same midnight that tapping was heard, and all the De Cocos shook in fear and prayed to their gods and made sacrifices; they sacrificed crops, they sacrificed white birds, they sacrificed lambs. One year they even sacrificed a great buffalo whose burned bones spelled 'murder,' but the tapping wouldn't stop and slowly, year by year, the De Cocos started leaving, wandering all over the world until there was nobody left to hear that midnight concert but the wind." Stony continued to tap, the sound filling the room. "Then, many years later, white men came to build a town and they saw that cave, and it was in the way, so they blew it up with dynamite and started building houses and banks and train stations and a big town was in full swing, but every year on this one particular midnight they heard strange tappings from the spot where the old cave useta be—it echoed through the town like the ticking of a giant clock and nobody knew what it was or where it was coming from. This old, crazy lady said she saw a blindfolded Indian wandering the dark streets one night with an ax in his hand, but when she went to touch him to take off the blindfold, he vanished right in front of her face. Nobody would believe her because she was out of her tree, but she knew she really saw him and every year when that tapping sound was heard she would go out into the street, see him stumbling around and she would try to help him, but he always vanished before she touched him. Then one year on that special midnight, she heard the tapping, got dressed and went out looking for him. Before she could find him, two robbers tried to hold her up. When she wouldn't give them her money, they stabbed her. When the mornin' came, they found the old lady dead in the street, clutchin' an old piece of cloth, what looked like it coulda been used as a blindfold. And about a hundred yards up the road they found two more bodies—the robbers." Stony started tapping again. "Their heads was split open with an ax."