Goldilocks

by Andrew Coburn

  “It’s all right,” Blue said. “I’ve got your name.”

  Cruickshank said, “I got his number.”

  He slipped away from them, threaded into the crowd between the bright shirts of Hispanic men whose lacquered faces opened into smiles, all of which he ignored. The darkness was falling too fast for his step, and he stumbled against a child wearing a plastic space helmet. The eyes, the button nose, which were all he could make out, reminded him of a boyhood pal, Felix Stanky, with whom he had pitched a neighbor’s dog off a roof. When the cops came, Felix, motherless, took the blame and a social worker assigned him to a home for wayward youth, where, according to rumor, a Franciscan brother buggered him and beat him to death. Henry never doubted the rumor.

  Somebody brushed his arm. It was his bad arm, and he stiffened. In the light emanating from a hot-dog wagon he scowled into the face of a middle-aged man with a patch over one eye, something familiar about him, but then everybody was beginning to look familiar. A woman scooping popcorn into her mouth reminded him of his mother, and the amplified voice of the mayor had a haunting ring, as if he had been hearing it all his life. When he moved into the dark, a smaller voice shot after him.

  “I forgive you.”

  He spun on his heels, suddenly enraged, partly because he did not know where it came from. “Who the fuck are you to forgive me?” he shouted. And then he remembered.

  He groped his way into the bleachers, followed his instincts, and found Emma Goss where he had left her. A floodlight from the top of the bleachers revealed her disappointment when she realized he had brought back no ice cream, nothing on a stick, only his own overly emphatic self. Squeezed in next to her, he pawed through his wallet and tugged out a grimy business card that had gone soft at the edges. He forced it upon her.

  “The guy’s name printed there, you know him?”

  She glanced at the card in the half light. “Pothier,” she said through too much lipstick. “Harold bought the china closet from his father.”

  “He says he forgives me.”

  She returned the card dismissively, with no curiosity.

  Henry said, “I don’t believe him.”

  • • •

  It was an hour of polytechnics, a splendid display in the hot iridescent night, the explosions ear-popping, the air full of flare and smoke. Roman candles shrieked up one after the other in high arching trajectories, streaking, bursting, and blitzing. Streamers festooned the sky and burnt holes in it. Rockets burst into chunks of gold, spirals of silver, gigantic pinwheels of brilliance, so that the earth now seemed heavenly. Henry grabbed Emma’s hand. “This is what war should be like, Mrs. Goss. Not the other stuff.” He jerked his hand away and whistled through two fingers. He relished the noise, the smoldering smells, the blizzard of sparks. When someone set off a cannon cracker under the bleachers, he savored that too, though Emma clutched her heart. When it was over, he shouted for more. Emma gathered herself together and prodded him.

  The crowds herded toward the open gates in a sluggish mood of anticlimax marked by random bursts of disembodied laughter. Henry’s letdown was keen. He felt there should have been more, certainly a brass band, a final salute, the added drama of a volley.

  Here and there he viewed an isolated shape in the crowd and viewed it with challenge.

  “Stay near me,” he said with bravado, as if her safety depended upon him. “You see him, let me know.” She did not know what he was talking about and did not ask. “Pothier,” he informed her theatrically. “He’s wearing a patch.” She glanced at him as if he were crazy. When she stumbled over a discarded soda can, he said, “Don’t worry, I got more strength in one hand than he’s got in his whole body.” He was itching for a confrontation, angry as one seemed less likely with each step closer to the main gate, which was flanked by policemen, but that was where it happened.

  Emma saw them first, five or six of them, recognized one, and said nothing.

  They came out of the crowd without missing a step, Hispanics who had been part of the half-seen audience he had played to earlier and now were performing for him with grins too big for their lacquered faces, with low catcalls in Spanish, with elaborate hand waves. As they swept by, he focused on the wrong one, fingers in splints, and never had a chance. The knife went in and out like lightning. He felt no pain until he tripped over his own feet and knew what they had done. Clutching himself below the heart, he let out a sigh of relief when he saw no blood. Then it came.

  The crowd swerved when he fell; he lay on the grass as if every face in the world were aimed down at him. He looked for Emma, but it was a policeman who crouched over him and asked something he did not hear. “I want my aunt,” he told the officer, who was soon replaced by a leaner figure whose face was black and framed by gold-rimmed glasses. “Am I going to make it?” he asked.

  “There’s always a chance,” Agent Blue murmured.

  “Hold my hand,” he pleaded.

  “Like you held theirs?” Blue asked, and a second later gripped Henry’s hand, the right one, which suddenly had gathered strength, as if Henry were in the process of becoming whole again. “Anything you want to tell me?” Blue asked.

  “Cops killed my mother.”

  “Anything you want to tell me about Mrs. Baker?”

  Henry’s eyes rolled back. “Where’s my aunt?”

  Blue rose and, with a glance at Agent Cruickshank, shook his head.

  Emma Goss, unladylike, hunkered down beside him. It seemed that she was trying to kiss him, especially when his face twitched her way, but it was his ear she sought, not his cheek. “When you get to hell,” she whispered through painted lips, “tell Harold everything.” Then she tugged at his shoes. A policeman stopped her.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  “They’re not his,” she explained.

  The policeman pulled her up, and a woman who smelled of the baby she had been holding kept her on her feet. A siren wailed in the distance as a team of officers held the crowd back at one place and pushed it along at another. In the welter Daisy Shea’s face burned. He shouted, “I know that guy, Edith. I forget his name, but I know him.” Edith was ahead of him, ignoring him. He caught up with her. “Jesus Christ, everybody’s dying but me.”

  “Maybe you’re not,” Edith said. “Did you ever think of that?”

  • • •

  The attendant’s name was Clarence, a fastidious fellow who changed his work whites twice a day and carried a piece of chalk in his pocket for scuff marks on his white shoes. He had the plump clean face of a master baker, with cornflower eyes that might have been colored by crayon. His two dumpling chins added a third when he smiled, revealing little teeth better suited to the head of a baby. He did not look especially strong or agile, but he lifted Ben Baker from the bed with scarcely any effort and deposited him in a comfortable chair at the open French windows. “About time you saw the sunshine,” he mandated, and patted Ben’s head. “I’ve missed my little man.”

  “I missed you too,” Ben said, as if he had not, or not as much.

  “Do you want your slippers or would you rather wiggle your toes?”

  “I want my slippers,” Ben said peevishly, and stretched his pale feet out of his silk pajama trousers. The pajamas were monogrammed, one of several sets Mrs. Mennick had packed for him. Clarence fetched the slippers of soft tan-faced leather and sniffed them.

  “Nice,” he said, and, crouching, counted toes. “Remind me to clip those nails,” he said, and worked Ben’s pliant feet into the slippers. “I knew you’d snap out of it, Mr. Baker. You’re a fighter.”

  Ben agreed. “It’s bred into me. My people helped settle this country.”

  Clarence stayed in his crouch to massage Ben’s ankles. Showing his little teeth, he said, “Your lovely wife phones every day. I talked to her yesterday. I told her you’d be coming out of it. I could tell.”

  Ben said negligently, “She worries about me.”

  “She should worry more about
what she’s paying for you here. I know for a fact they’re soaking her.”

  Ben pulled at the front of his pajama top. “She can afford it. She’s Mafia, you know.”

  “Yes, you told me that the last time. That must be very exciting.”

  Ben gazed out at rolling hills not unlike those viewed from his bedroom windows at home. With cold petulance, he said, “She thinks because she has my name she has my breeding, my bloodline. But she’s just an Italian. I’d never use her toothbrush.”

  Clarence, kneading Ben’s calves under the silk, said, “Would you use mine?”

  Ben said, “I cringe when she sits in my mother’s chair. She thinks she belongs there. My nanny and I know better.”

  “But her money’s nice,” Clarence said. “Yum, yum.”

  “She’s not like us,” Ben replied suavely. “Different smell.”

  “Seems to me something doesn’t smell right here,” Clarence said, wrinkling his pink nose. Then abruptly he slapped Ben on the wrist. “Damn you, Mr. Baker, did you do dirty in your pants?”

  Ben smiled prettily. “Change me,” he said.

  • • •

  The first bullet missed John Rozzi by a foot, the second grazed his shoulder. Instinct, premonition, natural wariness: he had instantly gone on the alert when he stepped out of his room.

  Somebody was waiting to use the toilet. A young guy with his back to him, wearing a girlish kind of jacket with the sleeves hiked to the elbows like a movie star or a sport. When the guy whirled around with a piece in his hand and fired, John was already charging like a bull. He slammed into him full force and knocked him ass over teakettle, took all the wind out of him, stomped his gun hand, and grabbed his throat. He would have strangled him then and there, but other lodgers were popping out of their rooms, people were shouting from other floors. A woman with the back of her dress caught in her underpants ran shrieking from the bathroom. Also, he recognized the sweet Sicilian face.

  He lifted Mario to his feet, shook him, banged his head against the wall, and an inch from his nose said, “You go back. You go back, you tell the fat woman you missed.” With a violent twist, he threw him down the stairs. Then he unloaded the pistol and hurled it after him. “While you’re at it, tell Mrs. Baker too.”

  An hour later, after some deep thought and a double shot of rye whiskey at the Italo-American Social Club, where he and Sal Botello had often played forty-fives, he drove to a pay phone on the highway. He dialed a number from a scrap of paper, and when a voice came on the line he said, “This is John Rozzi.”

  After a slight pause, the voice said, “Yes, John, what can we do for you?”

  John went silent.

  “Do you have something for us, John?”

  “You the white guy or the black guy?”

  “I’m the black guy,” the voice said. “Name’s Blue.”

  “Let me talk to the other guy.”

  “Whatever makes you happy,” Agent Blue said, and a moment later Agent Cruickshank came on the line.

  “What do you want, John?”

  “I want that witness protection program, that’s what I want.”

  • • •

  All of July was hot, no rain except for a few brief thunderstorms, one violent enough to tear off a large limb from the tree next to Emma Goss’s house. The limb landed on the roof but did no damage according to the man who removed it for her. Despite the heat, Emma spent much time in her yard. Every day she watered the lawn, and twice she mowed it, avoiding the milkweed. The monarchs needed it. Once, while she was reading the newspaper in the shade, a monarch gently worked its way over the humid air and lit on her arm, where it stayed until she turned a page.

  Several times, from her side of the shrubbery, Mrs. Whipple tried to get into conversation with Emma, but each time Emma cut her short. Finally Mrs. Whipple beat a path through the boundary bushes and confronted her. “About your poor nephew, Mrs. — ”

  “You know he was not my nephew,” Emma interrupted, superimposing her words on Mrs. Whipple’s. “You know that very well.”

  “I was only being polite, Mrs. Goss. After all, it was not my fiction, was it?”

  Emma heard her words quite clearly but felt her presence only obliquely and was beginning to dismiss it altogether.

  “My husband treated it as a joke,” Mrs. Whipple said, “but I said more power to you. Romance isn’t just for the young. And at any age, I said to him, what’s worse than living alone?”

  “Living a lie,” Emma said coldly, and turned away.

  A little later she sat at the desk in the den with Harold’s gold pen. After some hesitation, she wrote a letter to Mildred Murphy in Florida and told her exactly what she thought of her, but upon reading it over she tore the deckle-edge notepaper into bits. It no longer seemed important.

  Doing housework, she stopped short when she thought she glimpsed Henry in the glare of the china closet and grimaced at her foolishness when closer inspection revealed only the dishes that had been her mother’s. She did her housework in a pair of striped shorts, which she did not yet dare wear outside or in front of the two young men from Sears, Roebuck who maneuvered a new mattress into the house and took away the old. She also stuffed Harold’s clothing into cartons and placed them in the driveway, knowing the rubbish man would sort through them. In one carton were Harold’s Florsheims and loafers and Henry’s ripple-soled construction boots. That evening she took a long bath, went to bed early, and savored the crispness of the fresh sheets and the hardness of the mattress. She had her best sleep in years, not unlike that of a child exhausted by a day of play.

  During the second week of July she made an appointment with the Lawrence Driving School. She had never been behind the wheel of a car in her life, and her first lesson was a disaster, though the instructor assured her that he had seen worse. Her second lesson was no better. Her hands gripping the wheel, her nose dripping sweat, she proclaimed, “I’ll get it if it kills me.”

  The perfect repartee died on the instructor’s lips. Something about the intensity of her determination made him say instead, “I’m sure you will, Mrs. Goss.”

  • • •

  It was the first week of August. Stealthy storm clouds appeared in the midnight sky like sailing ships from another time, bringing hours of howling rain that lasted into the late morning and left the landscape smashed and drowned. Then came sudden sunlight, prismatic puddles, quaking lilac leaves. “Everything’s beautiful,” Daisy Shea said, greeting the world with a smile and failing to notice that someone had stolen the hubcaps from the Cutlass Supreme. Edith pointed it out. “It’s OK,” he said with irrepressible optimism. “I’ll file a claim.”

  “You’ve got a three-hundred-dollar deductible,” she said with a long face. “How much do you think you’re going to get?” She waited poignantly for an answer and then said, “You should’ve sold it like I wanted. The only kind of car you can keep in this neighborhood is a junk.” She viewed him with a critical eye and softened her voice. “You shouldn’t wear short sleeves, Daisy. You haven’t got the arms anymore. And you’re wearing your pants too high. You look like a pear.”

  “But I feel good,” he said. “That’s what’s important. How do you feel, Edith?”

  “Tired. Come on, let’s go.”

  She was late for work. He drove her. Within a few minutes he slid into the clatter of downtown traffic with two fingers on the wheel, which was how he had driven when courting her, impressing her then, annoying her now. When he pulled up at the coffee shop, she took a ten-dollar bill from her bag and gave it to him.

  “Have a good lunch,” she said. “Not here. The food’s poison.”

  He tucked the bill in his breast pocket and thrust his smiling face at her. “Give the old man a smacker,” he said, and puckered his lips. In a hurry, she placed her fingers against her own mouth and then pressed them against his.

  “Don’t spend that money on booze.”

  He drove to Bishop’s, got there before the
full lunch crowd, and was seated at a good table in the middle of the dining room where he could see everybody coming in. Brushing aside the menu, he ordered lamb on a stick. “No fries,” he told the waitress. “And nothing to drink. I’m being a good boy.”

  He knew none of the faces at the surrounding tables, mostly women from downtown offices, but he smiled jauntily whenever he caught an eye. He liked the slipshod way one woman tore her bread and the vigorous way another chewed her food as if life were to be enjoyed to the fullest, no compromises. When the waitress brought his order, the lamb as succulent-looking as anticipated, he prepared to eat in the same zestful fashion, but never took a bite.

  A pain shot through his head, lasting only seconds but so excruciating he felt something had been torn from him. His whole head ballooned, which impaired his hearing. Everyone in the restaurant was carrying on as before, but now without him. It was as though he were watching a mute movie in which all looks, gestures, and movements were sudden and sharp, in many ways sinister, and in all ways exaggerated. Slowly he pushed aside his plate and cradled his head in his arms on the table. The women around him stopped eating and stared. The waitress bent over him. Without raising his head, he whispered, “I’m quite sick.” The next moment he was dead.

  • • •

  A federal grand jury handed down secret indictments against Louise Leone Baker, 5 Baker’s Meadow, Mallard Junction, and Rita Gardella O’Dea, Farrwood Drive, Andover. Both women, along with Mario Paolino of Palermo, Sicily, were arraigned in Boston, where they had been in deep consultation with their lawyers, the indictments not as secret as supposed. Later, outside the courthouse, they faced a welter of reporters and television cameras. Rita’s lawyer told her to say nothing, but she ignored him and positioned herself for the cameras. “They hounded my brother, now they’re hounding me,” she said in a rich voice, and paused dramatically. “I’ll tell you something, ladies and gentlemen, my brother was tough, but I’m tougher.”

  Louise, averting her head, referred all questions to her lawyer. Mario, who pretended he knew no English, posed. Later he asked Rita whether it would be on Italian television. She grabbed his wrist and nearly broke it.