The Angel of Montague Street

by Norman Green

  Silvano shrugged. “I didn’t mean to do your pal over there, it was just bad luck. You know I got squeamish since the Army. I don’t like to hurt anybody, not really. But since the guy’s dead, already, what’s one more? I mean, what the fuck? Right?”

  “Little Dom sent me.”

  “Little Dom, that what they’re calling him now? Back in school we used to call him Dumbenick. Carried books home from school every night. What are we gonna do about this, Ivan?”

  “You got the gun.”

  “Yeah, I do. This is embarrassing, though, Ivan. I feel like I been assaulted by Huey, Dewey, and Louie. You the best he’s got?”

  “I might be,” Ivan said softly.

  Silvano shook his head. “All right. Back on your knees. Turn and face the wall again. Up close, Ivan, so you can kiss it. Good. You do me a favor, Ivan. You tell Domenic I’m in town on business. Tell him I’m gonna do what I came here to do, and then I’m gonna go away and leave him alone. Tell him I’m not worth the trouble.”

  “No trouble,” Ivan was saying, but Silvano leaned forward and hammered him in the temple with the butt of the pistol. Ivan’s head bounced off the concrete and he slumped to the floor.

  THE CABDRIVER DIDN’T want to pick her up. “You got to look close,” he said, “don’t let that hair fool you, she be livin’ on the street. You don’t want her.”

  “Be nice,” Silvano told him. “She just saved my ass.”

  “Your life,” the guy said, but he pulled the yellow Checker cab over to the curb.

  She seemed to sense the change in him, he saw her notice the slight tremble in his hands from the ebbing adrenaline, and the way his anger put a twist in his face. She handed him six dirty and wrinkled one-dollar bills. “Change,” she said.

  “I don’t want . . .”

  “Keep it!”

  “All right, all right.” He started to fold the bills, but then he noticed the names written on each one, up over George’s head, Michelle, Tommy, and Heather, and down at one end, “Mommy loves you,” and a few hearts. He wanted to ask her about it, found that he could not. Everybody got their own troubles, he thought. You don’t want mine, I sure as shit don’t want yours. Jesus. He folded the bills up and stuck them in his pocket.

  She sat in the far corner of the backseat and directed the driver down past Black and White and then south where the waterfront curves past Buttermilk Channel, which runs between the land mass and Governors Island just offshore, and into Red Hook, a small neighborhood of high-rise projects and warehouses isolated by the BQE and by the Gowanus Canal, a stinking finger of motionless fluid distantly related to water that pokes two dozen blocks north and east up into the industrial entrails of Brooklyn. Life hangs on grimly, Silvano thought, looking out the window at the people who lived there, it sinks its claws into the most unlikely and inhospitable places, survival is its sole and intractable aim.

  The cab pulled over at the corner of Van Brunt Street and Visitation Place. He looked at the street sign, looked at the grim and graffitied concrete warehouses, looked at the projects a few blocks away that went by the name of the Red Hook Houses. Not an actual fucking house anywhere in sight, he told himself. What kind of visitation could you expect around here? Jesus.

  Silvano handed the cabdriver a twenty. “Don’t go anywhere,” he told the guy. “I’ll give you another one of these to take her back.”

  The driver looked around. “You got ten minutes.”

  Mrs. Clark was looking upward, her mouth agape. “Wow,” she said. “Henry’s gone higher. He’s moved outside.”

  Silvano followed her gaze with his eyes. The brick and concrete building she was looking up at was three stories high, industrial gray with blue from an earlier, more optimistic time showing through in spots. The windows were painted, too, the same gray as the rest of it, and they were covered by wrought-iron gates. There was an improbable metal and glass bubble growing up out of the roof, half dome and half sculpture, architecture in found objects, a crazy, avant-garde, postmodern Noah’s Ark in mixed media, come to rest on a factory roof. Silvano shook his head. Noah on acid. “What is this,” he asked her, “Mickey’s castle? Mad Ludwig’s revenge?”

  She tilted her head down to look at him, her mouth still open. She snapped it shut, shrugged her shoulders. “Henry’s an artist,” she said. “He’s a little bit, what you call, peculiar.”

  “Oh, great,” Silvano said. “You think this guy’s peculiar? That’s a hell of a distinction.”

  “No need to get snippy,” she said. “Truth be told, you’re a little peculiar yourself. I told you, he’s an artist, artists can be funny. Let’s go inside.” She headed for the end of the building and ducked through a hole in the chain-link fence into an empty lot overgrown with sumacs. Silvano followed her, stopped when he heard the low growl.

  She ignored it. “Get over here,” she commanded, and a large, fat, hairy dog the color of dirt came waddling out of the weeds, ducking his head and waving the half tail he had left. “The hell are you doing,” she said to the dog, leaning over to pat his ugly head, “growling at me? You forget me already, you ungrateful mutt?” She reached into one of her pockets, pulled out a few stale french fries. She tossed them to the dog, one at a time. The dog’s jaws made an audible snap as he caught each one. She turned and gave the last couple to Silvano. “Let him take them from your hand,” she said. “Let him smell you.”

  Silvano stepped forward and did as he was told.

  “Don’t you bite him,” she said to the dog. “He’s one of us.” She looked at Silvano and snickered. “You are, you know.”

  “Terrific.”

  Half hidden in the bushes was a metal door. Mrs. Clark jabbed a button set into the concrete wall next to the door, and Silvano could hear a bell ringing somewhere inside the building. Without waiting for an answer, she yanked the door open. “C’mon,” she said, and she stepped into the inky blackness.

  “Henry!”

  A moment later, the lights came on, and Silvano saw that they were in a stairwell. Paint was peeling from the walls in dollar-bill-sized sheets. There was an empty shopping cart in one corner. A door opened up higher. “Hello?”

  “Hi, Henry, it’s me, Blanche.”

  “Blanche?” Henry and Silvano both said it at the same time.

  “LAST YEAR,” Henry told her. “I started building the atrium last year, because the roof was leaking.” He was the red-faced old guy, looked to be maybe seventy-five, had a long white braid hanging down his back. He was the same guy Silvano had seen stealing the radiator out of the abandoned car on the sidewalk outside Black and White the day before.

  Blanche (Silvano couldn’t help thinking of her as Mrs. Clark) looked at him in disbelief. “Since when did you start caring about things like roof leaks?”

  Silvano was sitting on an old sofa. It was in the center of what had once been an open and empty factory floor, but was now a warren of passageways, closets, storage areas filled with Henry’s gleanings, cubicles that served various functions, such as a sitting room, a kitchen, library, as well as work areas and rooms whose purpose Silvano could not quite fathom. “How the hell do you find the bathroom in this place?”

  Henry answered Blanche’s question first.

  “Well, I wouldn’t care if the leak was next to the wall, because nothing serious gets wet,” he said. “But it started leaking right in the middle, right on all my stuff. Right on my living arrangement, so I had to do something about it. When I went up on the roof to look, I found a real mess. It’s a flat roof, wasn’t nothing but layers of tarpaper and asphalt, covered all over with little rocks. When I scraped that away, I found the concrete underneath all rotted. Water must’ve been getting in there for years, freezing and melting, over and over. I cut a big section of it out, I was just gonna cover over the hole, make a wooden deck or something, but what happened was the weather happened to be real nice and the sun was coming in, and it gave me the idea for my solar heating system.”

  S
ilvano looked up into the floorless glass cube over his head.

  From the street it had reminded him of Noah’s Ark, but from underneath it looked like a junkyard in space. Rows of automobile radiators were suspended in the air in front of a wall of glass. They were interconnected with a snarl of rubber tubing that snaked around them all over to a large rectangular rustcolored tank hanging from a pair of chain hoists.

  “Bathroom’s easy to find,” Henry said to Silvano. “Blue arrows painted on the floor. From anywhere in here, find a blue arrow and follow it to the bathroom. Blue is for the bathroom, brown is for the sitting room, green . . . I forget what green is for. But it’s all very logical.”

  “Okay,” Silvano said mildly. Another one, he told himself silently, another crazy person, this one’s like a psychotic beaver, started out building a dam and wound up with his own theme park. Whackoland.

  “What color arrows get me the hell out of here?” Blanche asked. “I’ve gotta get back, somebody’s waiting for me.” She winked at Silvano.

  “What color for exit,” Henry said, scratching his chin. “What color . . . Oh, red. Follow the red arrows. Here, I’ll walk you down. Be right back,” he said to Silvano.

  “Okay,” Silvano said. “Thank you, Blanche.”

  “See ya. Keep the hat.”

  SILVANO WAS STANDING UP, looking at the rows of radiators suspended over his head when Henry came back. Silvano glanced at him.

  Henry laughed. “Don’t matter if it looks crazy,” he said. “Only thing that matters is, does it work.”

  “So? Does it work?”

  “Not yet, I ain’t done with it yet. No reason why it shouldn’t, though. We got the sun shining in on our heat exchanger, there . . .”

  “Heat exchanger?”

  “Well, ain’t that what a radiator is? You got cold water in that tank, see, and you got your tank hanging up higher than the heat exchanger, and cold water feeds down into your heat exchanger, where the sun warms it up.”

  “Okay.”

  “All right, now cold water is heavier than warm, so cold water from the tank displaces the warm, pushes it back up into the tank. You got natural convection to circulate it for you. Then at night, okay, you gotta do two things. You gotta close your blinds right inside the windows, they’re insulated to keep down your losses, okay, and you gotta drop your tank down so it’s lower than your heat exchanger. Then you turn on your ceiling fans, the moving air cools off the water in your heat exchanger, and it drops back down into your tank, and convection works for you again, the other way around.”

  “Sounds like a pain in the ass, you don’t mind my saying. Open this, close that, raise the tank up in the air . . .”

  Henry dismissed those details with a wave of his hand. “Oh,” he said, “in the final version that’ll all be automated. You wouldn’t have to do nothing different than you do now. Set the thermostat and walk away. This’n here’s just a pilot model.”

  “Pilot model.”

  “Yep.”

  “Suppose it works, then what?”

  “Then you file for your patents. You can’t patent water and old radiators, but there’s a few gizmos you gotta have for this to work, water valves and sensors and so on. I patent the gizmos, then I sell the patents.”

  “You’ve done this before?”

  “Of course. I’m an inventor, that’s what I’ve always done.”

  “No kidding. What else have you invented?”

  “Well,” Henry said, “my best one was about twelve years back. It’s a machine that sorts rubbish. What it does, it takes normal household rubbish and pulverizes it, okay, busts it into more or less bite-size pieces, then it feeds the pieces into a stream of air inside a tube. Different materials behave differently when they’re in an air stream, so it’s just a matter of mechanics after that. Paper goes one way, metal another, plastic, wood, and so on. Couldn’t sort everything, only about seventy percent. Cuts way down on what you gotta dump in a landfill, though.”

  “No shit! Did it work?”

  “Of course it worked.” Henry looked insulted. “Sold it to NASA. I don’t know what they’re doing with it. I suppose I don’t care, I got the money. Bought me this building, and I’m still paying the bills with what’s left.”

  “I’ll be damned. So how many patents have you gotten?”

  “Fifty-eight. Made money on about half of them.”

  “You make your living this way?”

  “Mostly. I got back home from the war, I had a hell of a time keeping a job, I had to find something to do. I guess that’s what started it. First World War. The Great War, they called it. The war to end all wars.”

  “How long were you in?”

  Henry looked off into space. “Four years and a bit. I was in the Canadian Army. Four years in the mud.”

  “At least you made it back.”

  “Yeah, I was one of the lucky ones, though there was times when I had my doubts. Time I got back, women had the vote and you couldn’t buy a drink. And I needed one bad. Between the sweats, the shakes, the nightmares, seeing things that weren’t there, I’ll tell you, the last thing I needed was temperance.”

  “How long did it take for them to go away? The sweats and all that.”

  Henry looked at Silvano, squinted at his face. He took his time thinking about the question. “Viet Nam?” he said.

  “Well, yeah.”

  “I probably shouldn’t say anything. All I know is what happened to me. Common mistake, you know, making universal generalizations based on a sample of one.”

  “Oh, come on. Why the hell not? How long did it take for you to get, you know, back to regular again?”

  Henry sighed. “Well, everyone’s different. The first few years were pretty bad.” He peered at Silvano, examining his face. “I’m gonna make some coffee,” he said, turning his back abruptly. “You want?”

  “Yeah, sure.” Silvano followed him down a corridor to the kitchen area. Leave him be, he told himself. He’ll tell you the story when he’s ready. He watched Henry busy himself with water and a stainless coffeemaker. He had the two sections of his coffeemaker put together and he stuck the pot on the stove and lit the gas underneath with a match. “All right,” he said, looking at the pot, not at Silvano. “I’ll tell you a story. I was out on a patrol,” he said, “toward the end of the war. It was summer, everything was wet and moldy. My boots had rotted right off my feet, you know, and you couldn’t get new ones, not for love nor money. My feet weren’t in great shape, either.” He sighed. “Nighttime patrol. Six guys, up out of the trench, out into no man’s land. It was a pointless exercise, but I was beyond asking questions by then. Anyhow, we crawl past a dead fella, he’s still got on his boots, better than mine. German. I’m the last in line, and I stop for his boots, I’m talking to the guy like he can hear me, I’m whispering low, telling him I’m sorry for taking his boots, sorry he’s dead and got no more use for them. I’m talking mostly to keep my mind off the smell. The five guys I’m with, they get a little ways up ahead of me, all of a sudden the mortars start coming in heavy.” He stopped, leaned down and adjusted the flame under his pot. Silvano could hear how the pace of his breathing had picked up as he relived his story.

  “I was startled, you know, and I flopped down quick.” He stopped again, shaking his head. “My left hand went right down into the German’s chest. I laid there right next to him, him dead and me wishing I was, mortars kept it up, crump, crump, crump. They left off, finally, and I got away from there. I went forward, up to where my patrol was, where I should have been. They were all dead, all five of them. I would have been, too.” He looked into the top chamber of his coffeepot, awash now with water and coffee grounds.

  “I went right back past the guy, on the way back. You couldn’t really see his face, it was mostly teeth and skin hanging loose, like on a piece of boiled chicken. Saw the hole in him where my hand went in.” He sighed again, turned off the flame under the pot. “I wondered, you know, if that’s all
the guy was there for, you know, just to hold me up for that few minutes. But that didn’t make any sense to me. Nothing did.”

  “Anyhow. After the war was over, they kept me in another year, almost. I was okay, I thought, until I got home. Then I started seeing that guy’s face. Every night, soon as I went to sleep, I’d hear those mortars going off, and I was right back there, right next to him, my hand in his chest, my face right up next to his, and my nose full of that smell. Jesus. I’d wake up on the floor all covered with sweat, trying to run. Scaring the hell out of my poor wife. For a long time, it got worse instead of better. It changed me, it made me ugly. Made me act mean, drink too much.”

  “Thought you said you couldn’t get a drink.”

  “Not legal. Booze ain’t hard to make, all’s you need is sugar, water, and yeast. Mix ’em together, give her a little time. Then you just boil off your alcohol, put it through a heat exchanger.”

  “Another radiator, huh?”

  “Nah, you can’t use radiators for that, alcohol will leach the lead out of ’em. Plus, you got to be real careful when you’re boiling it off. It’s about like boiling gasoline on your stove. Safer to make applejack, easier, too. Take a jug of cider, let her sit until she turns, right, then just put her in the freezer. Overnight she’ll turn into slush, because what’s water freezes, what’s alcohol don’t. Just pour your slush through a strainer, and there you are. Stuff will give you a hell of a hangover, though.” He separated the two halves of the coffeemaker. “You take something in yours?”

  “Black is good.”

  Henry went looking for cups. “Took a while, but I quit making moonshine, and I made my peace with Klaus.”

  “Klaus?”

  He smiled ruefully. “The German. I don’t know why it was him I got stuck on, there was worse things than that. But one night I gave him a name, gave up trying to forget him. Thanked him for saving my ass, told him I’d remember him as long as I lived, that I’d keep him alive in my mind because he’d kept me alive. I don’t know what his real name was, of course. Don’t know if he had any people, or if they ever found out what happened to him. Don’t know if anyone but me remembers him now at all. After I did that, though, after I talked to him a little bit, you know, the dreams weren’t quite as bad, and the rest of it started to go away. Not all at once, you understand.” He looked at Silvano, as if trying to gauge his strength. “Took about fifteen years,” he said, finally, “after I made my peace, before I really felt right again, before the sweats and all that finally went away, but that’s when it turned around. I can’t tell you how to do that, you have to figure that out yourself. Meantime, try not to do any more damage than you have to.” Henry looked into the depths of his coffee cup. “Blanche tell you what a windy old coot I was?”