The Angel of Montague Street

by Norman Green

  The guy got to an intersection where the sign said DON’T WALK, and he didn’t, he stopped and waited there like a schmuck even though there were no cars coming, people streaming past him, looking at him like he was an idiot. Another strange bird, Silvano thought, sign says wait, so he waits. It’s a good thing the guy’s not in a hurry, though, because he could lose me, easy.

  Atlantic Avenue rises slowly uphill as you move away from the water, crests four blocks later, then slides gently back down again, flattens when you pass Brooklyn Correctional. Silvano had missed running, wondered why he hadn’t kept it up. There had been a time when he would have laughed at a run like this one, but he wasn’t laughing now. His lungs were burning after the first three or four minutes, protesting the abuse, the cigarettes, the last few years of relative inactivity. God, he thought, I really have to get back into serious shape. Really. The guy stopped for two more signs telling him not to walk, and Silvano silently thanked the man’s obedient nature each time. The guy began to gain on him, though, at about the one-mile mark, up past the old Ex-Lax factory, no wonder the place was painted shit brown, and he turned right at Flatbush Avenue. Damn, Silvano thought, I’m gonna die of a heart attack. He slowed to a walk, sweating, shaking his head in disgust. I’ll just walk up to Flatbush, he told himself, before I turn around.

  He didn’t make it that far. Before he got there, the guy came back around the corner, pedaling back the way he came. Silvano, shaking his head, spat nicotine slime into the gutter. After the guy passed him, going back, he kicked himself back into motion.

  BACK AT HIS SPOT in the stairwell of the parking garage, he wiped his face with his shirt. It’s a terrible thing, he thought, when you used to be a racehorse, discovering you can’t make it to the end of your driveway and back without stopping to suck wind. He sat there watching for the remainder of the afternoon. Shortly after three the construction workers packed up and went home, and soon after that, armored trucks and vans began returning to the lot. By five-thirty it seemed they were all back, and the drivers began leaving through the gate and going home. The last three to leave were Sean, the bike rider, and another person who came out of the office after them, he couldn’t tell from the distance, but from the way the person walked, he got the impression it was a woman. He headed back down the stairwell.

  He got to the sidewalk in time to see Sean’s Cadillac come out through the gate, followed by a crapped-out old Ford Maverick with Joseph O’Brian behind the wheel. Last through was the woman, and she closed and locked the gate before crossing the street and heading up the hill. Silvano loitered in front of the hospital, watching, and a tall, dark-haired man crossed the street a half a block up, fell into step behind her. Silvano followed them on his side of the street, not quite sure why he was doing it, happy that neither of them was riding a bike. He was berating himself for slapping around the dude in the stairwell, there had been no need for that. He could have used another stairwell to get to a higher floor and then crossed over, he could have avoided the guy altogether, but it was the same old thing, the same compulsion it seemed he’d had from the beginning of time. If there was conflict, if there was confrontation, he was like a moth to a flame, he could circle around for a while but sooner or later he’d wind up with his ass in the fire. He knew all the excuses by heart. It was his old man’s fault, it was Brooklyn, it was the Army, it was the boxing ring, it was all those years he’d spent fighting Noonie’s battles, keeping the neighborhood bullies off his brother’s back. He’d used all of those justifications and more, and they were all bullshit. It was him, it was something that boiled up inside him, some eternally pissed off and insatiable gargoyle, and he hated it. “What I want to do, I don’t do,” who was it who had said that? St. Paul? “And what I don’t want to do, I do.” Well, sure. But it wasn’t who he wanted to be.

  The woman from Black and White went down a set of white stairs that went underneath a storefront bakery that made Middle Eastern pastries. Silvano stopped and leaned on a parking meter, watching. The place in the basement was a Lebanese bakery that specialized in tiny three-corner spinach pies and ground lamb pies. He had noticed it on his way down the hill, paused to catalog the ethereal smell of what they were baking. The guy who’d been following paused at the entrance, looked around, then he went in behind her. Go on, Silvano told himself, go on and look. Besides, they might have something good in there for dinner.

  IF NOT FOR THAT SMELL, he couldn’t imagine anyone bothering with the place, the entrance looked too much like a set of cellar stairs leading down into some dark and mousy cavity where the baker upstairs would store his raw materials. There was a small sign, white like the stairs, black letters in English and Arabic, proclaiming the name and hours of the establishment.

  It was a short room. Silvano, the woman behind the counter, the old baker, and the girl from Black and White, was she a girl? It was difficult to tell her age. But all of them could stand upright. The man who had followed her had to duck his head, and he did, instinctively, as if he had knocked it before on one of the thick wooden beams holding up the floor above. Nearly everything in the room was painted white, the rock foundation walls, columns, wooden ceiling, brick floor. The tall man was having an animated conversation with the girl in a language that Silvano did not quite recognize. Not Arabic, he thought, and not Greek either, although she could have passed as a member of either ethnic group. The woman behind the counter watched impassively.

  More than twenty, he thought, less than, say, thirty, an inch taller than him, she had a thoroughbred’s build, with black shoulder-length hair, fierce black eyes in a hawk’s face, and she was staring at the man who had followed her with a fine mixture of disdain and disapproval. The guy continued to talk at her earnestly, hands held out, palms upward in supplication. She cut him off, her voice dismissive, and she turned to the counter.

  “Can I help you?” It was the woman behind the counter.

  The man turned to the counter. “Excuse me,” he said, “just one minute.” The girl from Black and White sighed in exasperation and looked up at the ceiling. The man continued on in that strange language, his voice getting louder and more insistent. The old baker stopped what he was doing and turned to watch, his expression unreadable. Not Slavic, either, Silvano thought, her features were too fine. He would have guessed Arabic, maybe it was some dialect he hadn’t heard, but he wasn’t sure. She was something, though, standing there going toe to toe with the guy towering over her.

  She said nothing this time, just waved the guy off like someone shooing away a fly.

  The woman behind the counter was running out of patience. “Hey,” she said. “Buy something or go away. You want police to come?”

  The man turned in her direction again, his face a mixture of anger and anguish. He held his hand out, his meaty forearm blocking the counter. “Excuse me,” he said to the woman, “please, just one more minute.”

  The girl got up in his face then, her own face a mask of patrician contempt. They both began talking at once, shouting and not listening. The baker hefted his shovel speculatively, and he eyed Silvano with one eyebrow raised. The message was clear: If you make me do it, I will. I may be old but I’ll give him what I’ve got.

  “Oh, fuck me,” Silvano said. God, he thought, you got some sense of timing. “Hey,” he yelled, louder than the two of them. “Hey, asshole.” I was being good, God, he said silently, I already said I was sorry about the guy in the stairwell, I just came in here to get something to eat. This has to be your doing.

  The man took a half step in Silvano’s direction, his face twisted in an angry scowl. “This is not your business,” the guy said, raising a clenched fist. “This is—”

  Silvano cut him off. “Lady already told you to get lost. Twice, I figure. Why don’t you just walk?”

  The man turned completely away from her and suddenly all of his anger and frustration were focused in Silvano’s direction. He faced Silvano and reached around to a back pocket.

&nbs
p; Silvano’s voice was flat and calm. “If you take that out, I’m gonna have to cut you with it. That’s the rule.” The other guy stood still, breathing noisily through hairy nostrils. “You understand me? Leave it where it is, you can walk up those steps and go home. Take it out, you leave on a gurney. You understand me?”

  “Who the hell are you?” He was sneering, but he did it without moving anything but his face. “You big scary guy, huh, you think you’re superman? Where’s your cape, big man, you don’t look so tough to me.”

  Silvano shrugged. “You can’t win.” He had given the speech many times, in barrooms, in dark alleys, and it was one of the rare truths that he would give up without hesitation. “I’ve got fourteen amateur fights and eleven years in the Army. I don’t wanna go to jail, and you don’t wanna go to the hospital, so do us both a favor.” He stepped around to the side, giving the man a clear path to the stairs. “Walk away. Be smart. Go home.”

  The guy stood there, deciding, and after a minute he began to relax. He exhaled and carefully moved his hand around to the front. He looked back at her, but she said nothing, she turned her back, so he looked at Silvano one more time before he turned and went out.

  She was rigid with anger, shaking just slightly. He stood watching her until she turned to look at him. “Friend of yours?” he said, with a slight smile.

  She pursed her lips, shook her head in mock disgust, but then she smiled in spite of herself, and for that one split second she was beautiful, radiant, angelic in black hair and tan skin, and she had him. “No,” she said, “you were right. He’s an asshole.”

  He held out his hand. “Silvano,” he said.

  Her smile was gone, she regarded his hand, then shook it. He waited.

  “Elia,” she said, giving in. “Elia Taskent.”

  “Hello, Elia. You think he’ll come back?”

  She cocked her head, watching him. “I can take care of myself.”

  “I never doubted it for a minute. But could I walk you home? Just so I don’t stay up all night worrying.”

  She looked at him, evaluating, then she smiled again, just a twitch of her mouth. “All right,” she said. “Just let me buy my dinner first.”

  “I’M SORRY,” SHE SAID, when they got back out onto the sidewalk. “What did you say your name was?”

  “Silvano. What kind of a name is Elia Taskent?” They walked down Atlantic, right where he’d chased the guy on the bicycle just hours before.

  “Turkish. Tell me about yourself, Silvano. What do you do?”

  “I work with some carpenters at Black and White, all the way down the end of Atlantic.”

  “That’s where I work! How come I haven’t seen you there?”

  “I just started. Was that guy an ex-boyfriend?”

  She gave him a withering look. “Give me credit for better taste than that. I would never date a guy with that much hair in his nose. His parents were friends with mine, years ago. Some kind of distant relation. He’s an old-fashioned Turk, thinks it’s scandalous for a woman to be out on her own. He thinks I need some man to give me permission to walk down a sidewalk by myself.”

  “He offering his services?”

  “No,” she said. “He’s a typical male. He doesn’t have any solutions, only problems. Did you really have fourteen amateur fights and so many years in the Army?”

  A lot of people, in his experience, did not care for ex-soldiers. Normally, he wouldn’t have told her, he would have kept it to himself, but she’d heard him in the bakery, and she remembered. He prepared himself for the brushoff. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m afraid I did.”

  She looked at him. “So you got out of the Army and came to New York City.”

  “Well, not exactly.” Her eyes narrowed, and she waited for an explanation. “Actually, I got out a few years back. I, ah, kept working for the government for a while, out on the West Coast.”

  “Oh. And then you quit and came to New York City.”

  “Ah, well, sort of.”

  She shot him a look. “Complicated history.”

  “Yeah. I went to Japan for a while. I came East from there.”

  She stopped on the corner of Smith Street. “We turn here. Why Japan?”

  “Well,” he said. Ah, Jesus, what a long story, he thought. Why don’t I just make up something simpler? Maybe she’s different from all these American women, he thought, maybe she’s got enough primitive tribal blood in her to understand, maybe she doesn’t automatically assume every ex-soldier is a bloodthirsty murdering savage. He found to his surprise that he wanted to tell her the truth, or some part of it. “You ever know anybody who spent a long time in prison?”

  She stood still, regarding him. “Yes,” she said, finally. “Why do you ask?”

  “Other institutions can be similar,” he said. “You learn a particular set of rules, in some situations. Certain things you have to know, and do, to survive. Certain, I don’t know, modes of behavior. From the outside, they are not . . .” He searched for the right word. “Comprehensible. You have to have been there, to really understand.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “When you get out . . .” He inhaled, blew it out, started over.

  “It’s not so easy to keep straight, which is the real world, there or here. And those rules that you lived by for that period of time, the things you believed and what you did, they may have kept you alive, okay, but once you’re out, they don’t work any more, they’re unacceptable. You . . . I. I was unacceptable. Even to myself. So I had to find a way to change back, and no one tells you how to do that.”

  “That why you went to Japan?”

  “More or less. I had this friend in Nam, guy named Ramirez. I always thought he was smarter than me, quicker, mentally. Guy always seemed to know what he wanted, you know what I mean? Anyway, he gave me a call, sent me a picture of himself, he was at this Zendo in Japan, yellow robe, shaved head, and the whole bit. I couldn’t believe it. So I went to see him. They wouldn’t let me in, but I hung around, like, for a while. They had a guy there fixing the roof, and I sort of helped him out a little bit. So they let me stay.” He walked silently for a few steps, remembering. “So they wake you up with a bell at like four-thirty in the morning, by five you’re sitting on this cushion, okay, you fidget or make noise, this guy comes up behind you, he’s got a stick, about the size of a Little League bat, only squared off instead of round. They call it a kaisaku. He bows to you, you bow to him, he whacks you with the stick.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope.”

  “You get whacked with the stick?”

  “Many times. They hit you right here, both sides.” He squeezed the big muscle on the top of his shoulder. “I didn’t mind it, you wanna know the truth, my back would be screaming after about twenty minutes, getting whacked makes the pain go away for a while. So anyhow, they had chants, too, you start out chanting soft, ‘nah, moo, bo, sah,’ like that, everybody together, and you get louder and louder, whole room full of bald-headed assholes yelling at the top of their lungs. ‘Nah, moo, bo, sah!’”

  She was laughing. “What’s that mean?”

  “Beats the shit outa me. Thousand years ago, whatever it was, Zen first came to Japan, Chinese monks were teaching it, Japanese had a hard time with the language, they had a particular way they mispronounced the words, they’re still doing it. It’s traditional, you know, ‘we don’t know why we do this, but it’s the right way, so this is how you should do it.’ See, I got fooled by the name. Zen. Sounds so cool, don’t you think? Doesn’t it? Doesn’t it sound cool?”

  She had a wry smile on her face. “I suppose.”

  “Once I thought about it, though, it didn’t seem that much different from any other religion. I mean, guy comes along a couple thousand years ago, right, in most cases the guy has a relatively simple rap, ‘Hey, why don’t we try this another way.’ Right? Maybe I’m oversimplifying. Oh, jeez, you’re not religious, I’m not insulting you, am I?”

&n
bsp; She grinned, shook her head.

  “Oh, good. But anyway, the guy dies, right, now the priests are in charge, and priests are really just lawyers, okay, and pretty soon all you got left are legalities. The original point of the exercise is lost.”

  “This is my street,” she said. “So what happened?”

  “I changed the words of the chant.”

  “To what?”

  “Moo goo gai pan.”

  “Oh no,” she said. “You didn’t.”

  “I figured, what the hell’s the difference. Turned out, I was the only guy thought it was funny.”

  “We’re here,” she said.

  “What? Oh, this is your building.” It was five stories high, wide enough for two apartments, side by side plus the stairway, dirty gray brick, trash cans overflowing, ancient windows with the frames painted black, rickety iron fire escape clinging to the front of the place, made you wonder if you’d rather burn to death or be crushed when the thing fell off the building with you on it.

  She stopped in front of the steps that went up to the entry. “All right, Silvano,” she said, “thank you for the escort. Tell me how much of that story was bullshit.”

  He sighed. “Just the ending.”

  “Moo goo gai pan?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I thought so. Tell me the truth. What really happened?”

  “The truth is ugly.”

  “I can handle ugly.”

  “Okay.” He looked down at the ground. She was up on the second step now, looking down, but he didn’t look up at her. “My buddy Ramirez,” he said, “my best friend Enrique, he hung himself in the Zendo. Left a note behind, said he couldn’t live with it anymore.”

  She came back down the two steps and stood up close to him, stared at his face. “I’m sorry to hear that. How about you? Can you live with it?”

  He looked at her, looked into that face, soft and yet hard. “I’m working on it.”

  “Good,” she said, and she poked him firmly in the chest with her forefinger. “Don’t bullshit me, Silvano. I don’t like it.”