Collected Short Stories: Volume IV

by Barry Rachin

  “Can I help you?” Becky smiled stiffly.

  “A dozen hermit cookies.”

  “Sold out an hour ago. Sorry.” A mournful howl erupted from behind the swinging doors followed by a series of muffled sobs. Becky could hear her mother whispering furtively to Curtis Stedman.

  The blonde scrunched up her face, shifting a Vera Bradley handbag to the opposite shoulder. “Forget it.” She hurried out the door.

  Becky waited on a steady flow of customers. One elderly Italian lady, whose breath reeked of garlic, placed an order for a birthday cake. Her mother usually handled special orders, but it was nothing fancy, just a flat cake with white frosting and “Happy Birthday, Angelique!’

  A half hour later, Becky’s mother drifted back to the counter. “The Stedman boy… he’s gone, thank God!”

  “Gone?”

  Mrs. Borelli waved her hand, a peremptory gesture barring any further discussion of Curtis Stedman’s employment status. “Your father is whipping up a tray of cannolis and apricot farfalla. What else we need?”

  “The hermit cookies are gone. So are the Asiago and cinnamon raisin bagels.”

  *****

  The new dishwasher at Nagel’s Bagels lasted not even two week. By Becky’s reckoning, Curtis Stedman flung the crumpled apron on the counter next to the pepperoni spinach pies and was out the door—adios, sayonara, bye-bye, aufwiedersehen, shalom—by one-thirty Saturday afternoon. Stranger still, there had been no indication that anything was wrong. Curtis arrived promptly at the designated time. He washed out the doughy mixing bowls and muffin pans that Becky’s father stacked in a precarious heap on the stainless steel sink. Then he swept the tiled floor, bussed tables and polished all five glass display cases with a bottle of Windex.

  “I need a new clarinet reed,” Curtis said. He had just finished cleaning a refrigerated display full of cheese Danish and apple squares.

  “You play clarinet?”

  “Marching band and high school wind ensemble.” Curtis pushed his gold, wire-framed glasses up on the bridge of his nose.

  “There’s the music store across the street,” Becky offered.

  Curtis peered nearsightedly out the window. Diagonally across Turner Boulevard was a shabby building with a hand-carved sign over the doorway. Music Depot - most of the maroon paint had peeled away and the final letter ’T’ was missing. A young girl carrying a guitar case that was almost as long as she was tall exited the music store into the bright sunlight. “Rico number two.”

  “What's that?”

  “Rico number two. That’s the reed I play.” He picked up the Windex, ran an arc of spray across the glass and began polishing the display. “Maybe I’ll run over on my lunch break.”

  *****

  Becky slipped out the front door and crossed Turner Boulevard. All lights were off in the music store, the front door bolted tight. “Aw, crap!” She hurried back across the street.

  “So why’d he quit?”

  Mrs. Borelli slid a tray of hermit cookies into the oven and closed the lid. “None of your business.” Stocky with a swarthy complexion and auburn hair, Becky’s mother was attractive in a matronly sort of way.

  “I got an idea what happened.”

  “Good!” The woman flung the word in her face like a wet dishrag. “So there’s nothing more to discuss.”

  Becky locked eyes with her mother. A high-pitched tinkling announced someone entering the store. “Go wait on the customer and, while you’re at it, put the ’Help Wanted’ sign back in the window.

  Later that afternoon while she was cleaning up, Becky noticed a well-thumbed paperback on the floor near the rest room. Candide by Voltaire - the pages on the left were printed in French, mirroring the English translation on the facing page.

  In a peculiar sort of way, the debacle was Becky's fault. Not that she meant to intentionally hurt Curtis Stedman – a part-time dishwasher prone to emotional excesses, who read French literature, played clarinet in both the marching band and wind ensemble. Becky was born and grew up on Federal Hill. The place resembled a parallel universe where conventional rules of social etiquette didn’t necessarily apply. One wrong turn could lead you down a loathsome cul-de-sac into a nether world of sordid vice. She knew her way around – not just the physical streets but the gritty, dysfunctional mindset. There were unsavory things you took for granted, shrugged off. That’s just the way it was.

  *****

  “I know Curtis’ mother from Saint Gregory’s parish. His mother sings in the choir.” Later that night, Mrs. Borelli tossed the words out in an offhand manner not bothering to raise her head from her sewing. “The boy is intellectually gifted.”

  “I didn’t know - ”

  “The family doesn’t like to make a big deal about his uniqueness, but it just slipped out when we were commiserating one day after Mass.” Mrs. Borelli, who was letting her husband's pants out, held the waistband at arm's length before resuming her stitching. “According to Mrs. Stedman, there are five levels of gifted intelligence ranging from bright to profoundly gifted. Her son falls in the ‘exceptional’ category.”

  “Exactly how exceptional?”

  “One in every thirty thousand people is exceptional, which places him in the ninety-nine-point-ninth percentile.”

  "What's his specialty?"

  Mrs. Borelli removed her thimble momentarily so she could snip the thread. "History… ancient history predating the Christian era."

  "Okay." Becky felt a slight giddiness welling up in her brain and went upstairs to lie down.

  So the boy sweeping confectioner’s sugar and King Arthur flour from the bakery floor was an underage Einstein! But how could she have thought any different? From the first day he arrived at the bakery, Curtis seemed fogbound, loopy, eccentric, spaced-out - just a tad out to lunch. It took the ‘gifted child’ half an hour to figure out how to manage a mop and pail where he wasn’t sloshing sudsy water haphazardly the length the display room floor. Asynchronicity. That was the loopy, twenty-five cent word Mrs. Stedman used when explaining to Becky’s mother why her teenage son sometimes seemed ham-fisted or dull-witted, undertaking simple chores. Gifted children developed unevenly, their hypersensitive craniums far outstripping everything else in their genetic makeup. But then, it went with the territory—supposedly all these ‘gifted’ types were like that. Becky remembered her physics teacher commenting that Einstein didn’t speak until he was two.

  *****

  Earlier in the week on Tuesday, Becky found Curtis sprawled on the bakery floor. “There’s a wrinkle in my sock,” he groused, waving a sneaker fitfully in the air. The boy ran a probing finger over his instep then slipped the sneaker back on but immediately removed it a second time.

  Becky glanced at his foot. “I don’t see a wrinkle.”

  “Well, I can feel it and the damn thing’s driving me nuts.”

  Becky shrugged and went off to wait on a customer. A half hour later, she spied Curtis near the industrial mixer with the same shoe off and turning the offending sock inside out.

  On another occasion, she found Curtis at the front of the store fidgeting and glancing over his shoulder at the far wall.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “That moronic clock’s ridiculously loud.”

  Becky gawked at the clock, the same one that had hung over the frosted tarallo and coconut macaroons for the past ten years back to when the orthodox Jew, Morris Nagel, still owned the bakery and her father was head baker. In all that time she never found the clock a distraction. Even now, the second hand bumped along inconspicuously accompanied by a whisper-soft ticking. Being in the ninety-nine-point ninth percentile definitely had its drawbacks.

  *******

  “Is Curtis home?” It took Becky twenty minutes to ride her five-speed bike cross town to Providence's, East Side.

  “And you are?” The woman’s voice betrayed a lilting, earthy resonance.”

  “I got a book that belongs to him,” Be
cky side stepped the question.

  When Curtis appeared in the doorway, she said, “Candide… you forgot your book.” He led the way into a claustrophobically tiny back yard with a scraggily peach tree and rock garden. “I know what happened.”

  “Your mother promised not to tell anyone.”

  “Didn’t have to. I went across the street. The Music Depot was closed. They’re normally open until five on a Saturday. I put one and one together and came up with two and a half.”

  Curtis stared Becky full in the face. “You knew what they did over there?” His tone was mildly accusatory.

  “Everybody on Federal Hill knows what they do over at the Music Depot,” Becky replied soberly. “It’s Federal Hill, for Christ sakes!”

  On any given day of the week, a steady stream of youngsters and an occasional diehard grown up could be seen lugging their instruments to lessons. The Music Depot provided rentals – trumpets, saxophones, flutes and even an occasional student model oboe or French horn - sold sheet music and instructional manuals. They carried a decent selection of trumpet mouthpieces from the standard Bach 7C to the extra-wide symphonic models. But the owner didn’t make his living off instrument rentals and half-hour lessons. The store was a front, a betting parlor that catered to a motley crowd of compulsive gamblers—horses, dogs, college and professional football, whatever.

  A loan shark who weighed three hundred pounds, Bernie Antonelli, advanced patrons short-term loans at the perfectly reasonable rate of thirty percent interest. If you missed a payment, interest was compounded along with a late-fee penalty using an accounting method that only Bernie properly understood. It wasn’t usury, per se. Unfortunately, if you missed more than one payment, Bernie would call you up and politely request a meeting at the store so that a arrangement benefiting both parties could be consummated.

  “I was outside admiring this Selmer clarinet in the storefront window.” Curtis fussed with his slender hands as he spoke. “Not some cheap student model but a rosewood beauty with gold-plated keys and custom engraving on the lacquered bell. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I see this muscle-bound goon with biceps out to here, smack some old geezer in the side of the head.” Curtis spoke slowly, measuring each word. "The goon slugged him here,” he pointed to the soft spot just above his right ear, “with a set of brass knuckles. Then, while the guy was writhing on the floor, the sadistic bastard stomped him half to death.”

  “Nasty stuff like that… it doesn't happen that often.”

  “Small consolation,” Curtis replied peevishly.

  The previous year, the owner of the Music Depot spent eight months at a federal prison in Upstate New York. His enforcers were shaking down the venders at the annual Feast of Saint Anthony for two hundred bucks to insure that their grilled sausage and onions stands didn’t end up a pile of splintered toothpicks. Unfortunately, one of the venders who refused to cough up the protection money turned out to be an FBI undercover agent. A month after the Feast of Saint Anthony, a half-dozen cheap hoodlums and tough guy wannabes were indicted and sent off to prison.

  "Come back to work."

  “After making a total ass of myself?”

  “Come back to work,” Becky repeated, grabbing his wrist and squeezing as hard as she could. “I’ll teach you the rope so crap like that doesn’t happen again. Or, if it does, God forbid, you won’t freak out.” Curtis stared at her dumbly, a sad smile creasing his slightly parted lips. Becky Borelli was not to be denied. “I'm not leaving until you return to Nagel’s Bagels.”

  *****

  Becky’s Uncle Harry was a devout Catholic. He attended church every Sunday, observing all holy days of obligation. He even put up five thousand dollars toward the Our Lady of Perpetual Devotion building fund to lay an elaborate mosaic in the church sacristy. A solid brass plaque identifying Uncle Harry as the primary donor would be prominently displayed on the wall once the project was completed.

  But several parishioners approached Father Tomasi complaining about Uncle Harry’s largesse. A harmless, low-level hoodlum, he had been indicted a half dozen times, spending two short stints at minimum security facilities in Connecticut and New Jersey. Nobody knew where he got his merchandise – the designer jeans and handbags, Rolodex watches, jewelry and, on occasion, electronics – that he hawked on the fly out of the rear of his minivan. Uncle Harry wasn’t registered with the Providence Chamber of Commerce or Better Business Bureau.

  Parishioners at Our Lady of Perpetual Devotion objected on moral grounds. No matter how elegant the church mosaic, the money was tainted. Uncle Harry was a conniving hypocrite - a fence who trafficked mostly in stolen jewelry and high-end watches - trying to barter his way into heaven, the five thousand dollars no better than a modern-day papal indulgence.

  In the end, expedient self-interest prevailed. Father Tomasi waved all protests aside, depositing the stack of small denomination bills held together by a rubber band in the church’s bank account. Paolo and Guido Ricci, gifted artisans who emigrated from Naples in the late eighties, were commissioned to design and build the floor. When the project was three-quarters done, Becky visited the church. The intricate mosaic, constructed from imported, glazed tiles, was breathtakingly beautiful. On the wall directly above a granite bowl containing holy water was a garish plaque with Uncle Harry’s name prominently displayed.

  “Lie down with dogs; get up with fleas.” That was the only comment Mrs. Borelli ever made about her dubious brother and the rapturously beautiful mosaic.

  On afternoon a week before New Year’s Becky solicited Curtis' opinion about the controversial mosiac. “The Assyrian King, Assurbanipal,” The boy said in a thin, wispy voice, “had the walls of his palace decorated with magnificent carvings.”

  The strange comment caught Becky off guard. She wasn’t quite sure what it had to do with the ethical dilemma surrounding Uncle Harry. “One scene shows Assurbanipal and his queen enjoying a picnic in their lush palace garden. The mood is relaxed and elegant. Hanging from a tree branch just behind a harp player is the severed head of a defeated king.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  He sipped at the coffee. “Whether it’s ancient Mesopotamian or Federal Hill, nothing ever changes

  *****

  “The Ricci Brothers finished the mosaic.” Becky announced. Three months had passed since Curtis’ mental meltdown and things were progressing smoothly at the bakery. “The church is just around the corner.”

  Becky’s father, who always arrived at work hours before everyone else, had already gone home for the day and her mother was closing up. “The mosaic built with tainted money?” Curtis reached for his jacket. “Yeah, let’s take a look.”

  Becky told her mother she was taking a break and went out into the March sun. A handful of crocuses and daffodils – just the pale green stems not the flowers yet – had poked through the thawed soil in a flower pot next to the bakery. They hurried down Atwels Avenue, past the high-rise housing for the elderly, Caserta’s pizza and the Tuscan Gardens restaurant.

  In late December Bobo Maroni, a low-level enforcer was shot dead, execution style, in broad daylight at the Tuscan Gardens. A brief article appeared on the second page of the Providence Journal. Bobo was eating lunch at the bar - linguini with white clam sauce, a glass of Chianti and a small Greek salad, according to the newspaper. At exactly twelve noon, a middle aged man decked out in a stylish, camel hair coat with a dark fedora pulled down over his eyes, entered. The fellow went directly to the bar and disposed of Bobo with a hollow-point slug from a high-caliber handgun.

  What went unreported in the newspaper was the fact that, at approximately eleven forty-five - fifteen minutes before his demise - patrons sitting at the bar drifted elsewhere. As if on cue, they discretely vacated the premises. That is, everyone except the marked man. Becky learned this curious bit of incidental minutia from Uncle Harry, who dispensed the tidbit glibly with a poker face. Obviously the luckless slob had offended some Feder
al Hill bigwig, stepped over that invisible line. Detectives had to fish Bobo Maroni’s brains along with feta cheese, anchovies and Greek olives from the half-eaten salad.

  *****

  “So how do you like it?” They were standing in the entryway to the church staring at a group of dolphins frolicking in a turquoise, stone ocean. The circular mosaic, done in earth tones and pastel hues, ran twenty feet in diameter and was ringed with decorative brickwork.

  The church, which was empty except for an older woman over by the confessional, doing the Stations of the Cross. The old woman finished the last devotion, dipped her fingers in a basin of holy water and left the building.

  “That particular design… it’s not Roman,” Curtis said.

  “The mosaic?”

  He shook his head. “The dolphin theme predates the Roman Empire. It’s more Minoan.”

  Becky glanced up briefly. Curtis’ face held that same obsessive, pinched look as when he was trying to smooth the imaginary wrinkle from the underside of his athletic sock. “Minoans flourished around fifteen hundred B.C.. They ruled a vast trading empire, stretching from Greece across the Aegean Sea to Ephesus in Asia Minor.” The blond-haired youth tossed these historical facts off as though they were common knowledge. “The Minoan rulers lived in a vast palace at Knossos on the island of Crete, where the walls were covered with colorful frescoes, watercolor paintings done on wet plaster.” He removed his glasses momentarily and massaged the bridge of his nose with the tips of his fingers. “The dolphin mosaic probably came from one of those original frescoes.”

  A priest entered the church, lit several candles near the altar then disappeared out a side door. The air was shot through with acrid, sweet-smelling incense. “You sure are a strange one,” Becky murmured, resting a hand gently on his shoulder. “What else should a teenage girl who works in a bakery on Federal hill know about Minoan culture?”