Brotherly Love - Pete Dexter

by Pete Dexter

  But he has suggested that before, without results. It has something to do with the light, he thinks. Peter never feels crazy during the day, he is strictly a nighttime jumper.

  Jimmy Measles is almost at the bottom of the fire escape now, checking each step for ice, wheezing, his calfskin gloves sliding down the handrails. Afraid to let go for even a second.

  * * *

  Peter looks past his cousin and notices the way Jimmy Measles is coming down the steps, thinking anything higher off the street than a curb he loses his personality. As soon as he is off the fire escape he relaxes.

  "I shit my pants you went off that roof," Jimmy says to him.

  Peter doesn’t answer. He holds himself still, trying to recover the other stillness, the thing that was in his chest as he fell.

  But it’s gone.

  He hears words being spoken and feels the tightening in his spine, like ice freezing around tree branches in the winter. He sees Jimmy Measles’s smiling, worried face in front of him. Jimmy Measles moves one of his shoes behind the other and dances—one step and a turn—and stops in front of Michael.

  "So, my man," he says, "you want to habituate Catherine Street or what?"

  That is where Jimmy’s club is, at Ninth and Catherine.

  They load into the limo, Michael and Peter and Jimmy Measles all in back, and head for Ninth and Catherine.

  Jimmy Measles opens another bottle of champagne, Michael sticks his knife into the white powder.

  Peter sits straight up, his hands underneath him on the seat to take the weight off his lower back. The feeling of the fall is too distant now to remember, and each time the car hits a pothole, it seems to crack the ice encasing his spine.

  He pictures himself in the gym tomorrow, all the broken ice.

  The car stops in front of the club—double-parked—and Michael gets out without waiting for Monk to open the door. Jimmy Measles slides across the seat after him, and then looks back in to see what’s keeping Peter.

  "In a minute," he says. "I’ll be there in a minute."

  Michael and the two men who work for him are already headed inside, knowing that Peter likes a little time alone after he jumps.

  * * *

  Peter goes with Michael to Jimmy Measles’s club four or five times a week. He and Michael, and usually Bobby the Jap and Monk to watch the door.

  Jimmy Measles buys everything; he will not accept Michael’s money. Jimmy likes the customers to see him sitting at a table with Michael, making him laugh.

  Peter is there with them, of course, but he doesn’t laugh; he doesn’t see the point. And he has noticed that Jimmy Measles’s wife doesn’t see the point either.

  She sits apart from Jimmy and his friends, under the stained-glass window which divides the bar from the restaurant, drinking margaritas. The diamond on her finger catches the light from across the room. Her name is Grace.

  Grace does not come to the bar to please her husband, but, as these things go, it pleases him that she is here. It makes him happy that Michael notices her and then looks at him, admiring what he has.

  Peter watches Jimmy showing off his wife and his friends. Showing off his wife to his friends.

  He aches sometimes, at the size of Jimmy Measles’s misunderstanding.

  * * *

  The place itself is newly remodeled. New furniture, new floors, new lights. A pink neon sculpture in the window that bears a resemblance to Jimmy Measles’s face.

  He keeps a fresh carnation floating in a bowl of water on every table in the restaurant. He has hired a $1,200-a-week European chef named Otto and now has a menu no one in South Philly can read.

  The European chef has cut the food end of the business in half, and where the restaurant once broke even, serving eggs and hamburgers and chicken, it is now losing twenty-five hundred a month, and the missing customers account for perhaps another two thousand a month of the bar end of the business too.

  And while that has been going on, the bartenders have discovered what Jimmy is paying Otto, and are stealing more than they are entitled to stealing like they worked for the city.

  Jimmy Measles does not understand it at all. He watches his business stall in the water and begin to sink, but he holds on to his chef. Slow nights, he brings him out of the kitchen into the bar and introduces him around to prove he can’t speak English.

  And Grace sits in her seat under the stained window, sipping her margaritas, leaving lip prints on the glasses.

  She knows he is in trouble, but it seems to her that he has always been in trouble, one kind or another. In some ways she is attracted to that, or perhaps it is the way he accepts it.

  Jimmy never worries out loud. He isn’t a complainer—not a word, even about his asthma.

  But the problems have a circular feel now, as if she and Jimmy have been through them all before.

  It has been too long since he surprised her.

  * * *

  Jimmy Measles’s wife studies the men sitting with her husband at the table, and finds herself drawn to Michael. He is not the best-looking—but Jimmy has enough good looks to last her forever—and it is not because he is the boss. She doesn’t care about that, either.

  He has no conscience. She sees that and wants it.

  She gets up and approaches the table, carrying her drink. Jimmy reaches for her without stopping his story, his hand sliding around her waist and then resting on the rise of her bottom.

  Peter stands up, offering her his chair. An act of will—straightening his back.

  He walks carefully to the bar, protecting his back, wondering if he could take her away from Jimmy. He is not happy to be thinking that, but it comes up when he is around her. It is something she puts in the air.

  He understands that Jimmy Measles has a way with women, that he is handsome and knows how to touch them.

  He understands certain women naturally love bartenders—before Jimmy hired Otto and remodeled, he worked his own bar six, sometimes seven nights a week, and made a living—and that certain women naturally love men who remind them of their fathers, or love men who are funny, or who buy them stuffed animals.

  He knows the reasons don’t make any sense.

  But this time some law of natural selection has been broken

  and she doesn’t try to hide it.

  She sits in the chair she took when Peter stood up, laughing at one of Jimmy’s stories from the Bandstand days, but she isn’t paying attention to the story.

  Her lingers touch Jimmy’s knuckles, and then she glances across the table at Michael, and something touches there too. She smiles at her husband’s story, but she isn’t anybody to care about other peoples’ stories, or stories about other people.

  And she isn’t anybody to love bartenders.

  * * *

  Peter and Michael are sitting in the car while Bobby the Jap, gun in hand, checks the doors to the house. It is early in the morning, coming in from a night at Jimmy’s.

  Peter has boxed that afternoon and is sore and tired, and after Michael is inside, he will go back to his apartment and lie in the tub.

  Michael closes his eyes and drops his head into the seat cushion behind him. "Somethin’ like that," he says, "she falls off the toilet into her own vomit, she’s still too good for Jimmy Measles. Am I right or not?"

  His eyes open and his head turns in such a way that the streetlight catches his forehead and throws a shadow across half his face, and in that moment Peter can see that he has decided to fuck her.

  Peter doesn’t answer. He thinks of the way she lifts a margarita to her mouth using both hands, as if it were something she wanted to smell.

  "You think it’s possible?" Michael says.

  Peter shrugs.

  It is quiet a moment, then Bobby pushes through some shrubs at the edge of the driveway, coming around from the back.

  "What I think," Michael says, "you get with somethin’ like that once in a while, you wouldn’t have to jump off no roof to fuck up your back."


  He leans closer to his cousin, nodding the way he has always nodded when he asks Peter for something he does not want to give up. Intruding into every corner.

  "What do you think?" he says "It ain’t like Jimmy’s somebody we know .... "

  * * *

  In the end, without saying a word, Peter agrees to Michael’s fucking Jimmy Measles’s wife. More precisely, he begins to take Jimmy with him to the fights every Wednesday night at the Blue Horizon while Michael stays at the club with Grace.

  Which is the same thing. Peter does not lie to himself about that.

  Jimmy is always anxious to go—too anxious to go—but the Blue Horizon is hot and close, and full of black people and smoke, and in that combination Jimmy Measles sweats and worries, and cannot seem to catch his breath.

  Week after week, Peter finds himself preoccupied with Jimmy’s breathing, and distracted from the lights.

  Why do I care if he can breathe? he thinks.

  But he knows. Jimmy Measles has attached himself to Peter—when they are drinking he sometimes shows him pictures of his dogs—and in that attachment is a contract, and obligations that Peter is just beginning to glimpse.

  Sometimes, he thinks, it’s like having a dog of his own.

  * * *

  Reluctantly, Peter quits the Blue Horizon and takes Jimmy Measles to the lights in Atlantic City instead. It ruins the atmosphere for Peter, but improves Jimmy’s breathing.

  And feeling more comfortable, Jimmy settles into a ringside table and begins, with his first drink, to negotiate a blow job. Some nights, he asks half a dozen times before he finds a prostitute who will go upstairs with him and take his money.

  To Jimmy, everybody in Atlantic City looks like a hooker. Jimmy’s interest in the fights themselves never grows beyond the violence of the knockdowns, but he likes being with Peter and he likes Atlantic City, and if the idea ever tugs at him, what his wife and Michael are doing back in town, it never shows.

  It tugs at Peter Flood, though.

  In its way, what Michael said is true: Jimmy Measles isn’t anybody they know. But Michael meant only that Jimmy was a Jew. Peter takes him out of town and gets him drunk, spends so much time with him now it’s like a bad job, and all through the night, everything Jimmy does or says is to cover up something else.

  And Peter allows that and encourages it.

  It’s what makes it possible to take him out of town while Michael is with his wife.

  He doesn’t know Jimmy Measles, and he holds the door against the day that is no longer true.

  * * *

  Two months pass and Michael and Jimmy’s wife become habitual, more than once a week now.

  Peter leaves his cousin at the club with her, Monk and Bobby sitting in the bar, and takes Jimmy Measles to Atlantic City every time one of the casinos offers a card. He believes he has seen every four-round fighter on the East Coast.

  And she takes Michael across the street.

  Monk and Bobby move their drinks to a table near the window to watch the house. At closing time, they get a sandwich and wait in the limo.

  In the morning, Peter comes out of his apartment, showered and clean, climbs into the waiting limo and smells Jimmy’s wife all over Michael, and cheese steaks and onions all over the car. And suddenly confronted with what he has done, Peter sometimes tries to talk Michael into quitting Jimmy’s wife, saying that keeping regular hours with her is a careless way to do business.

  And even if careless business isn’t his concern—what he is thinking about is the way it feels when Jimmy Measles gets drunk and shows him the pictures of his dogs or calls him his pal—the warning is real.

  The Italians remain split into factions, the old and the new. The old men are faithful to the old rules; they worked for Constantine and, twenty years after his death, still powerless, they claim the unions as their own, the way they were before Constantine was killed.

  They want nothing to do with drugs or Atlantic City or any of the businesses held by the men who took their place. The men who took their place, who own the streets, smile at the old Italians now, and overlook it when one of them drinks too much and shoots a roofer or an electrician.

  They are sympathetic in a wary way, knowing the old men are not harmless.

  The men who own the streets do not smile at the Irish, though. The bargain that was struck with Phillip Flood has lasted so long that all the men who made it are dead, and the jobs are the real source of power in the city—the men who own the streets see that now—and eventually they will try to take them back.

  And Peter reminds Michael, this morning in the limo, that it is careless to take the Italians for granted.

  Michael leans across the seat, smiling at him, and pats him on the knee. He says, "They’re dyin’ of old age, Pally."

  Peter looks out the window. To his knowledge, Jimmy Measles’s wife is the only woman his cousin ever liked better the second time. She is the only one he doesn’t talk about, sitting in a booth afterwards at the Melrose Diner, discussing if she liked to swallow it or not.

  She is different, but Michael never says anything about what she does, or has him doing.

  The closest he ever comes is once at the racetrack, holding eight hundred dollars’ worth of winning tickets in his hand while the tote board flashes the word inquiry in front of his horse’s number, he turns to Peter and says, "You ever wondered while you was fucking somebody if there was hidden cameras in the room?"

  * * *

  A week later—also at the track—Michael asks Peter if he thinks he could keep Jimmy Measles in Atlantic City all night.

  Peter covers his eyes.

  "You got a headache, Pally?"

  "Yeah I got a headache and it’s got a name."

  "He ain’t so bad," Michael says.

  "After he gets his blow job," Peter says, "there ain’t anything left he likes but to drink champagne. He doesn’t play craps, he doesn’t want to go to the shows; he wants champagne.

  "And with Jimmy and champagne, there’s always a point waiting for you where he’s gonna do something—paint a happy face on his dick and show it to the keno girl or throw glasses into the fireplace, even if there isn’t a fireplace. The only thing distracts him is if somebody remembers him from Bandstand."

  Michael says, "He ain’t so bad."

  Peter cannot think of an argument for that and takes Jimmy to Atlantic City for the night. And then another night, and another.

  They go to the fights, they buy champagne. Then Jimmy gets blown, and then Peter spends the last four hours before daylight trying to keep him happy, and at the same time trying to keep the moment when he brings out his penis and his felt-tip a little ways in the future.

  * * *

  And that is where Peter is on the morning the old men in the raincoats catch Michael crossing the street in front of Jimmy Measles’s house, heading toward the limo. Peter is in Atlantic City, Monk and Bobby the Jap are asleep in the front seat, Grace is still in the door, watching Michael leave.

  The men in the raincoats have shotguns and go for his legs first, intending to finish him after he is on the ground. Michael sees them too late, one on the sidewalk, one in the street. He takes the pistol out of his coat pocket, beginning to run, and shoots four times, blowing out the front window of a poultry store kitty-corner in the Italian Market.

  He is hit himself as he hears the pieces of glass drop onto the sidewalk.

  A moment later Bobby the Jap comes out of the limo screaming—a shoeless Kamikaze—and the old men in the raincoats are so unnerved at the sight of this foreigner that even though Michael is on the ground, crawling toward the car, dragging one of his legs, they don’t stay to finish it.

  And three hours later when Peter turns his Buick onto Catherine Street, he sees the television cameras and knows what has happened.

  * * *

  Michael is out of surgery at Thomas Jefferson Hospital by the time Peter arrives, and by then the only interest he has left in Jimmy Mea
sles’s wife is avoiding her.

  Peter never sees him again with any woman he doesn’t pay.

  When things go wrong, Michael always goes back to what worked for him before.

  * * *

  The man on the television set keeps saying Michael has "reputed ties to organized crime."

  He takes off his glasses and looks directly into the camera and reports that the shooting resulted from a power struggle between Michael and reputed mob boss Salvadore Bono for control of the union pension funds. He puts his glasses back on and begins a recitation of the long history of labor and organized crime in the city while the camera plays over Ninth Street and the broken window, settling finally on a few drops of blood beneath the window.

  Chicken blood.

  "Police were unable to question the president of the Council of Trade Unions," the man on television says, "who is now in guarded condition following surgery on his hip. No suspects have been arrested."

  The television sits on top of Jimmy Measles’s cooler. Jimmy sits beneath it at the bar on a stool next to Peter’s, looking sore-eyed and grim, drinking champagne through clenched teeth. He hardly looks at the customers as they come and go, he kisses nobody’s cheeks, pats no fannies. He leans close to Peter to speak, his lips pulled back from his even, white teeth, which are still locked.

  "I take this personally," he says, "people shooting my friends outside my club."

  Peter doesn’t say a word. There is no one in the bar except Jimmy Measles himself who does not know what Michael was doing in front of the place at six in the morning.

  "Flood’s father, Phillip," the man on television says, "was assassinated in 1974 as he stood on the porch of his home in South Philadelphia .... "

  Peter waits, but the usual details of his uncle’s death—which always seem to follow the mention of his name on television or in the papers—are missing tonight. He feels Jimmy Measles looking at him, and turns in that direction, thinking he has finally begun to wonder what Michael was doing in front of his place.