Forsaking All Others

by Jimmy Breslin

  “I want everything pretty.”

  Oscar held up the pearl beads.

  “Oh, I want them,” Melody said.

  “What will you do to get this?”

  “Don’t worry,” Melody said. Her hand went to his fly. When she felt the metal barrel of the pistol she looked up. “I do not make love to that.” Oscar took the .45 Colt Commander out of his belt and put it on the floor and sighed as Melody went down on him.

  Afterward, Oscar draped the pearl necklace around her neck and the two went up on the roof to drink wine and watch the traffic on the street. Oscar had his left arm about Melody’s waist. The .45 Colt Commander was back in his belt. He had taken it from under the pillow of a man sleeping as Ralphie burgled a Queens house. He took a large swallow of the wine, leaned unsteadily against Melody and looked down. A black Plymouth Fury pulled up to Ana’s Bar. A black detective got out of the passenger’s side and walked into the bar. The driver, white, got out, then reached in for something, then stepped out and walked around the front of the car.

  “Look at this guy,” Oscar said.

  “Who?” Melody said.

  “This guy.” Oscar put down the bottle of wine, went into his belt for the Colt Commander and then aimed it at the white detective’s head. The detective was a step away from the doorway of the bar when Oscar Ocascio fired the .45 Colt Commander. Melody now was running across the roof to jump the divider to the next building and Oscar stuffed the gun into his belt, grabbed the wine, and ran unsteadily after her.

  Across the street, Myles and Hansen were crouched inside the bar, guns drawn, peering through the saloon window, which had a large bullet hole in it.

  “You set us up!” Myles said.

  “I did not,” Luisa Maria screamed. “I did not even know you were coming.”

  “Just call 911 and say ‘1013,’ that police officers are being shot at and give the address,” Hansen said.

  Late that afternoon, nine detectives, wearing bullet-proof vests and carrying shotguns, crashed into Ana’s Bar, where two delivery boys drank beer and Luisa Maria listened to the juke box. Lieutenant Robert Martin stepped behind the bar and began smashing bottles with his shotgun barrel. Two other detectives drove shotgun butts into the juke box.

  “You know I had nothing to do with it,” Luisa Maria said. She pointed to Myles. “You tell them.”

  “No. You tell Teenager that when we see him we’re going to get him,” Myles said.

  After they left, the door in the back of the bar opened and Albertito, who had been upstairs with the drugs, looked out.

  “Somebody shot at them this morning and they’re mad,” Luisa Maria said.

  “We didn’t shoot at them,” Albertito said. “Why should they be mad at us?”

  “The shot misses them anyway,” Luisa Maria said.

  The shotgun barrels moved like iron locusts through Teenager’s territory. First to the Aguaserra, where the glass counters splintered and greasy pigs’ ears rolled to the floor. Then to the La Barca, where bottles smashed loudly. Then across the street to the Casa, where Ada, the barmaid, ran into the kitchen as the detectives wrecked the place. There were six people in the Casa, sitting at tables, and they remained there as the detectives swung the guns at anything glass.

  Myles stepped into the Casa’s kitchen and brought the shotgun barrel down on a stack of plates. He wheeled around and saw Ada cowering against a counter. Alongside her was a pestle and mortar that was decorated as if it were an expensive beer mug.

  “What’s that for?” Myles said.

  “For the garlic bread,” Ada said.

  “Where’s the garlic?” Myles said.

  Ada pushed two cloves that were on the counter behind her. Myles put the garlic into the mortar and carried it outside. He rested the shotgun against the bar and took out his .38. He looked at the sullen faces at the tables.

  “Watch this,” he said.

  He held up a clove of garlic and then began to rub it inside the mortar. He emptied the bullets from the gun cylinder onto the bar and then dropped them one by one into the mortar. He took the pestle and ran it around the inside of the mortar. The bullets clinked on the sides as he stirred them. He spilled the bullets out of the mortar and with deliberate motions inserted them back into the cylinder. He shoved the gun into the holster on his hip.

  “Tell him that I will shoot him with one of these bullets. That’s what I think of him. I’ll shoot him with garlic bullets.”

  Satisfied with himself, Myles followed the others out of the bar. That was a good thing, he told himself, thought it up just while I was standing there. The Guineas are supposed to shoot garlic bullets when they’re mad. Or at least Myles thought he had heard that someplace.

  He had not noticed the sudden fear that came over a couple of the faces when he dropped the bullets in with the garlic. Later, when Teenager was told of what had happened, he sneered until the garlic bullets were mentioned. Then he left immediately for Mama’s house.

  “If he shoots me with a garlic bullet, the soul dies too,” Teenager said.

  Mama nodded.

  “I must get protection from the saint,” Teenager said.

  “The saint doesn’t talk to me today yet,” Mama said.

  “Then I must kill this cop or he will kill my soul,” Teenager said.

  Mama shook her head. “The one cop is like the teeth in a shell. There are many, many cops. One does not matter. If you kill him, you will make a hero of him. If the cop you kill wanted to put garlic bullets into you, then all the other cops will come to avenge him. They will shoot many garlic bullets into you.”

  “What should I do?” Teenager said.

  Mama showed him the button from Myles’ jacket, which sat on a black cloth with a yellow sulphur powder spread over the button and cloth. A small reptile’s tongue was alongside the button.

  “Soon I will take this and bury it in the cemetery and the cop will die,” Mama said.

  “What do I do until he dies?” Teenager said.

  “You must go away.”

  “This I cannot do.”

  “You should go away until this is in the ground and the cop dies,” Mama said again.

  Teenager left her, went out the cellar door of the building and drove to his own apartment. “Get these kids out of the way,” he told his wife. He went into the bedroom and called Benny in Puerto Rico.

  “I am dying here,” Benny said.

  “I was thinking that I should come down,” Teenager said.

  “You will die here,” Benny said. “For me they have a warrant. I have to die here. You, they have nothing to arrest you for. Why should you come here?”

  “I don’t know. I’m thinking.”

  “Why don’t you ask the lawyer what you should do?” Benny said.

  “Fuck the lawyer. He will tell me I am in such trouble I must pay him thousands,” Teenager said.

  “Then ask Maximo. Maybe he could tell you,” Benny said.

  “I think I will do that,” Teenager said. He hung up and wondered where Maximo was. With all these police around, he couldn’t go directly to Maximo’s house. He would send somebody.

  25

  AT TWELVE-THIRTY, WHEN NICKI was sitting at the desk and thinking about going out for her usual lunch of coffee and cigarettes, the phone rang.

  “Nicki?”

  “Who else?”

  “I want to meet you. Early. Very early.”

  “All right, I guess,” she said.

  “You guess? What’s the matter?”

  “I’m just thinking of how I have to push my way onto the subway again.”

  “We won’t have to. I want to meet you by your office right after work. I have to be someplace at nine-thirty.”

  “Some more freaking politics?”

  “No. I just have one thing I have to see in Times Square. At nine-thirty. Then I’ll get you to the bus terminal.”

  “This doesn’t sound like much of a night to me.”

  “It
’s the best I can offer. Unless after, you wan—”

  “—I can’t tonight. I’ll just get the bus home.”

  “So I’ll meet you at five,” Maximo said.

  “Fine.”

  Stepping from the elevator after work, she picked his beard out of the crowd and walked to him boldly, almost not caring if anybody she worked with happened to notice them together. She took him by the hand and led him down to the bank, which was at the far end of the lobby and which remained open until six o’clock each night. They walked casually, she leading him by the hand, as if dragging a wagon, and he laughing and asking where she was taking him, and they were walking with their bodies apart, arms extended, walking jauntily, sportily, and yet the mere holding of hands sent a tremor through her that almost had the strength of sex.

  Oh, what’s to do with you? she said to herself.

  Inside the bank, she released his hand and went to a line with her check and bankbook. She did not want him to stand with her, for now she was dealing with another universe and would be unable to do it if her insides stirred with his touch. There was no deposit slip to be made out, of course, for that had been done in the morning, the moment her check was placed on her desk. The weekly salary check amounted to three hundred and thirty-nine dollars and sixty-seven cents, of which she was depositing two hundred and fifty. On a week such as this, when she intended to buy nothing for herself, she needed only carfare and coffee and cigarette money.

  While waiting on line, she glanced back at Maximo. She sighed.

  Two nights before, the moment she heard her husband’s voice, she took a deep breath. It was Monday, a night he was not due to call—his regular time was each Thursday at eight o’clock—and immediately she felt this heavy robe fall over her, a robe of beautiful, costly material, but so thick and heavy that she could walk only as far as the door before the material became so heavy to carry that her legs could go no more.

  “I saw the board today,” her husband had said.

  “Today? It wasn’t supposed to be for a month?”

  “Don’t ask me how it happened, Nicki. The lieutenant just came and said, ‘Come on, they’re here today and let’s get you over with.’ ”

  “What did they say?”

  “You know them, they don’t say nothing. But the lieutenant come up to me later and said he thought it was all right. He said they’re going to give me a date.”

  “Ronnie!”

  “Isn’t that something?”

  “When?”

  “Well, if it goes the way he says it’s going, these joints are so filled with the other kind that they don’t like to keep whites around. All kinds of trouble starts on account of us being under the same roof with this other element. So he says that if things stay the way they are, I’ll get a date in February.”

  “Ronnie!”

  “I know. I can’t believe it, either.”

  “What am I supposed to do?” she said.

  “Just get ready.”

  “Ronnie, could we do one thing?”

  “Anything.”

  “The minute you get it all official and we know the date, then could we forget about the next time in the trailer?”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “No. I want to drive myself crazy. I want to make such a buildup for you coming home that I’ll explode.”

  “Honey, whatever you say.”

  “Let’s just wait and drive each other crazy.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  “When are you going to know official?”

  “What could it take? Two days, three days. But the lieutenant knows what he’s talking about. He says he thinks they’ll give me a release date for February sometime.”

  When she had hung up, her mother, sitting at the kitchen table, grunted. “You know what you should do?”

  “What, Ma?”

  “Get those towels of yours, wherever you put them and wherever you use them, and burn them up in a fire. While you’re at it, burn up whoever the son of a bitch is right with the towels. Get rid of everything you’ve been doing all at once. Get it out of your mind. You got your husband coming home and you got a whole life to get back to now.”

  Now, standing at the teller’s window, she inspected the book when it was handed back to her. The balance was thirteen thousand, six hundred and ten dollars. To her, the progress of her life was marked by the numbers on the pages: I lived and was able to save this much money, she told herself proudly. For an instant, she regarded the numbers as the cables on a bridge that would take her to her own life. When you have money, she told herself, you can choose any night and hide yourself in it and walk across the bridge to anywhere forever. Iowa, she thought. Nobody ever would think of looking for you if you simply picked up and went to Iowa. You could live and die in Iowa and nobody would even know who to notify when they found the body. She saw herself walking on a farm, walking on her toes so as not to disturb the dirt, going down an aisle between furrows of high corn that ran for so far into the distance that if you tried to look for the end of the lane you became disoriented. Pale green leaves tightly bound around the corn and only these blades of green, flopping out from somewhere at the base of the corn, able to touch her. She saw herself taking a step and on both sides of her the long green leaves reaching out to touch her sides and arms. For each time in her life that something had reached out, a hand, a look that demanded compliance, a custom that caused her to concede and remain inside the circle in which she had been born and raised and taught that she never would be able to leave, she could in Iowa walk past a thousand corn stalks, feeling the long green leaves brushing off her arms as she moved as she pleased.

  However, now, standing beside the teller’s window, the numbers in the bankbook suddenly represented something more realistic: figures to impress a parole officer—a record of money honestly earned over a long period—and also numbers to offer a husband as proof of virtue and loyalty during all the desolate months of his absence. Numbers that signaled that this great beautiful housecoat was about to fall upon her and prevent her from walking about life every bit as much as would a pair of broken legs.

  The manner in which the teller had placed the change inside the bankbook irritated Nicki. There was only eighty-four dollars, but the teller had the tens mixed up, a couple of wrong sides facing up, and even if it were only two dollars, Nicki wanted her money always to be as neat as she kept her bedspread.

  She straightened the money, put the bankbook into her bag and walked up to Maximo and took his hand. Happily, she walked with him on the crowded sidewalks to a restaurant on East 58th Street where a woman in a white smock sat in the window and made pasta. Nicki immediately withdrew; what are we going to do, walk into a place where somebody will run to the phone and get us killed? Then through the windows she could see that among those at the bar were at least several blacks. This eased her fear; there could be no one in this place who would know her or her family.

  The bar was crowded and she opened her coat and leaned on a ledge against the wall as Maximo, in a black coat with toggle buttons, picked his way through shoulders and brought her back a Scotch and water. In his other hand he held a screwdriver, which to her was a ridiculous drink because she knew the bartender put only a hint of liquor in such a drink.

  She took some of the Scotch, then stared at the glass. When, she thought, do I talk to him? Here in this crowd? What if he became mad. No, this is no way to get anything done. I’m melting in my coat in this place. She thought about taking off the coat, but then, as she watched the blacks moving to and from the bar, brushing against the chests of white women, she decided to keep it on, no matter how uncomfortable.

  “How’s the job?” she heard Maximo ask.

  “It’s fine.” He never had asked her about the job before this.

  “Where do you think you’re headed for?” he asked.

  “With the job?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t know. I’ll keep the job until it’s
time to stay home and have a baby.” She poked a finger into his chest. “And don’t you misunderstand what I’m saying. I said ‘have a baby’ and that means a real baby. I take no chances on kinky hair.”

  “Who says I want to have a child who looks like Lucky Luciano?” Maximo said.

  “Then both of us have nothing to be afraid about,” she said.

  “Is that your ambition, just to go home and have children someday?”

  “I think I’ve done pretty well to get as far as I have at work,” she said.

  “I’m not saying that. I’m wondering how much farther you can go.”

  “Banks like men,” she said.

  “They seem to like you so far.”

  “Anything above my job is a man with college,” Nicki said. “I’m a woman with high school.”

  “Then go to college.”

  “And do what for a living, steal cars?”

  “No, you keep working. Go to school at night. Probably you won’t have to go all the way through. The minute they hear at the bank that you’re in college, they’ll look at you differently. And I’ll be around to help you.”

  At 7:15, they left the bar and walked up to a theater on 59th Street that was showing a three-hour movie about beleaguered gays in France. Nicki waved a hand. “I can’t sit through that,” she said, “I thought we had to go to the West Side for something.”

  “Not until 10,” he said.

  “Where on the West Side?”

  “Broadway and 43rd.”

  “What’s so important there?”

  “I have to be there for five minutes, but I have to be there.”

  “If it’s so important,” she said.

  “It is.”

  “Then we’ll go,” she said.

  They walked over to Broadway and went past car showrooms and faded Chinese restaurants, and the sidewalks soon were filled with freaks hanging out under marquees advertising sex shows and on the crossstreets the traffic was solid with theater people, thin wrists sticking out of fur coats, chatting in limousines taking them to plays. Now there were several large movie houses, but nothing appealed to Maximo, and Nicki liked only Rocky, which she already had seen twice. At 42nd Street, the Amsterdam was showing an old James Bond doubleheader, which Maximo thought was perfect for wasting an hour or so.