City of Margins

by William Boyle

  But then Nina circles back around. “Phil’s number,” she says after another prolonged exhale. “I’ve got it right here on the fridge. I don’t remember anything anymore. Not even my son’s number. You got a pen?”

  He looks around. He doesn’t have a pen. He puts down the phone and rushes over to the bar and asks Gibson the bartender if he can borrow one. Gibson tosses him a cheap promo pen that reads DR. DICK VOLLUCCI, CHIROPRACTOR. Nick snatches up a cocktail napkin and heads back to the phone booth and tells Nina he’s ready. She gives him the number. He writes it down, runs it by her to make sure it’s correct, and thanks her. She groans and tells him to say hi to Ava and ask her to stop by for coffee one day.

  He hangs up the receiver and then picks it up again, pushes in another quarter, and dials Phil’s number. He looks over at Antonina, bent over the machine, still playing that same quarter. A pinball wiz. As the phone rings, he readies a short speech.

  But there’s no answer.

  He lets the phone ring twelve times before giving up because twelve’s a number he likes. He’s superstitious about it.

  He goes over to Antonina, tucking Phil’s number away in his pocket, and leans on the machine next to her.

  “How’d it go?” she asks.

  “Looks promising,” Nick says. “I got his number from his mother. She’s excited for me to talk to Phil. I couldn’t get through to Phil yet, though. I’ll try him back later.”

  “You’re such a fucking loser,” Antonina says, finishing her game by letting the plunger snap back and then returning to the table to drink her beer.

  “Hey, that’s not nice.” Nick bristles at being called that. Whatever else Antonina is, and he can think of a few things she might be, she is clearly not a loser. She’s like one of the girls he sees with boys across the street from Our Lady of the Narrows after three, running, kissing, swatting away hands. She’s serious. Cool. That hair. Those overalls and boots. She’s probably already, at seventeen, slept with twice as many people as he has in his life. She’s probably done hard drugs. She probably tastes like sucking a mint in a downpour. He goes back to the table and sits across from her. “You don’t even know me. How can you say that?”

  “I don’t need to know you.”

  “Are you drunk? Maybe I shouldn’t have bought you that shot.”

  “Get me another one, and I’ll tell you everything I can think of.” Antonina practically shotguns the rest of her second beer. “Another beer, too.”

  “Yeah?” Nick scurries to the bar and buys two more shots and another beer. He’s still got half of his first beer left.

  He sets the shots on the table, and Antonina picks the first one up and pounds it, slamming the glass back down. He’s about to go for the other shot, but she gets to that one first, too. She washes it down with some beer.

  “Okay,” she says. “Now I’m feeling loose.”

  “About Donnie and Big Time Tommy?”

  “Are you trying to fuck me, Teacher Man?” Antonina says, looking and sounding pretty drunk. “Don’t you have a girlfriend?”

  Nick’s thinking about his job and his reputation suddenly. He imagines Sonny Divino coming through the door with his own bat, finding out that Nick’s getting his seventeen-year-old daughter loaded early as hell on a summer day. “I’m not. I didn’t try anything.”

  Antonina stares over at the pinball machine. She’s quiet for a few moments. “You can kiss me.”

  “What are you talking about?” Nick says.

  “That’s what you want. So, kiss me.” She turns to him. Her mouth is a bright oval.

  “Antonina.” He scooches his chair closer. The truth is he would like nothing more than to kiss her. He’s thinking, seriously, Seventeen’s plenty old, right? He’s thinking, It’s just a kiss. He’s not thinking how she might just be fucking with him. Girls at this age, they’re mercurial. One minute, it’s You’re trying to fuck me, loser. The next, it’s Kiss me. That doesn’t change really. He leans in slowly. His breath smells bad. He can taste it. He bets she puts something on her lips that tastes sweet. He bets his whole mouth will soon taste like raspberry or vanilla. When his face is only inches from hers, he closes his eyes.

  Antonina pulls away, laughs at him, swats at his chest. “See what a pathetic fuck you are?”

  Nick’s face goes hot. He feels stupid and irrelevant the way only a high school girl can make you feel. He remembers the feeling well from his high school days. Helen Passantino from Fontbonne. She made him crazy and then tore him apart. He’s dumb, falling for Antonina’s little act.

  He doesn’t say anything at first. And then, after thinking about it, he says, “Just tell me about that night in the schoolyard or Donnie working for Big Time Tommy. Anything. Please.”

  She stands up and flips Nick off. “Thanks for the drinks, asshole,” she says. “Good luck with your movie.” Then she walks out of Spanky’s, and there’s nothing he can do to stop her.

  DONNIE PARASCANDOLO

  They keep pieces in the trunk of Sottile’s car for just such occasions, squirreled away under a pile of rags and rope. Sottile’s car is an ’88 Cadillac Brougham, parked at a hydrant in front of Flash Auto. People know not to mess with it. They use Sottile’s car more often than not these days because Donnie’s lost his cop privileges. And Pags, well, his ’82 Chrysler Imperial broke down last year and he’s too lazy to have it fixed.

  They get in the car, Donnie riding shotgun, Pags in the back.

  “What do you think?” Pags says to Donnie.

  “This Duke’s what, in his sixties?” Donnie says. “How much trouble could he be?”

  “I knew a guy, sixty-seven, his name was Johnny Christmas Lights,” Sottile says. “He got that name because he was the master of doing his house up for Christmas. Dyker Heights, you know? Those big displays. Johnny owned a pork store in Long Island City. He was fit. Did martial arts, I don’t know the kind exactly. Aikido or whatever. These two mooks tried to rob him when he was closing one day. Sawed-off shotguns, ski masks, the works. What’s Johnny Christmas Lights do?”

  “What?” Pags says.

  Sottile demonstrates while driving. “Front-of-the-head strike to one, bam. Chest thrust to the other, bang. These little shits are on the floor, writhing around, can’t breathe. Johnny Christmas Lights grabs the shotguns, sweeps these guys out the door like sawdust. Sixty-seven he was at that point in time.”

  “Fuck are you saying?” Donnie asks.

  “I’m saying, don’t underestimate this Duke. I don’t want to get clipped by some loose-cannon golden-ager because I took him for granted.”

  Donnie shakes his head. “There’s no such person as Johnny Christmas Lights,” he says.

  “You don’t believe me he’s real?” Sottile asks. “He’s dead now, but he was one hundred percent a real guy. Ask around.”

  They drive over to where Duke lives on West Ninth Street between Highlawn and Avenue S, parking at another hydrant. Duke’s house has weather-beaten blue siding, flaky shingles on the roof, sagging blue gutters, a front porch with rotting beams, and a fenced-in yard scattered with plastic shopping bags. Donnie takes it in. The plastic bags look like they’re growing there, white stringy weeds among the dust and dirt.

  They go to the trunk, pop it, and get the pieces, Donnie and Pags looking around before tucking them into their waistbands, Sottile dropping his to the blacktop before recovering it by awkwardly stooping with a groan.

  “Let’s fucking do this,” Sottile says, and then he erupts into a coughing fit.

  “You gonna have a heart attack on the way in?” Donnie says.

  “I’m good,” Sottile says.

  They walk in the front gate, trying to be as quiet as possible, Donnie leading the way. His hand is at his side, ready to draw. They climb five steps to the porch, and Donnie scopes out the windows. Blinds drawn, no obvious action inside that he can tell.

  Pags instinctively thumbs the bell.

  “Fuck you doing?” Donnie says.<
br />
  “Ringing the bell,” Pags says. “We gonna just stand here like a bunch of citrulli?”

  From inside, a woman calls out: “Who is it?”

  “Census Bureau!” Pags says, with joy in his voice.

  Donnie shakes his head. “Who’s gonna open the door for that?” he says in a whisper.

  There are two doors. A screen door—the screen battered around the edges, several holes covered with clear tape—and the inside door, made of heavy wood, a curtained window in the center of it. Donnie reaches out and tries the screen door, but it’s locked.

  An old woman peeks out from behind the curtain. Donnie can’t make out much about her yet, but she’s got a grizzled face and a shock of white hair screwed on her head. She gives them the once-over. He wonders if she saw him reach out and try the handle on the screen door.

  “Census Bureau, huh?” the woman says.

  “You Miss O’Malley?” Donnie asks.

  “I’m a person living in this house, and you’re ringing my goddamn bell.”

  “We’d like to have a word with you and your brother.”

  “That so?”

  Donnie’s hand goes to his waistband. He’s secure knowing the piece is there. With Big Time Tommy’s warning, he’s not sure what to expect. A bullet could come whizzing through the glass any second and catch him in the throat. He moves off to the side a little, figures he’ll let Pags or Sottile take the hit if that’s the way it goes down.

  But the heavy wooden door is flung open from the inside, and the woman is standing there behind the screen. She’s in a rainbow muumuu and fuzzy slippers. Her skin is tough. She has a pack of cigarettes tucked in the sleeve of the muumuu. She’s smiling a wild smile. “Come on in,” she sings. “The water’s nice. The sharks don’t bite.”

  Donnie’s spooked by her singing. The words sound like a theme song for a TV show he’s never seen, but he’s pretty sure she’s just making them up.

  She unlocks the screen door and continues her song: “Come on in. Take a seat. We’ve got apples. We’ve got meat.”

  “What the fuck?” Pags says.

  Donnie grabs the handle and opens the screen door slowly.

  They follow her inside, down a cluttered hallway, into an even more cluttered and somehow lopsided kitchen. The linoleum on the floor is red, cracked in places, edged with tumbleweeds of dust. The table is covered in folded-open napkins, used in place, it seems, of a proper tablecloth. A cuckoo clock hangs from a peg on the wall; it’s not wound up, a spring having erupted from the bottom, dangling there. The ceiling is corkboard. The windows over the sink are closed. There isn’t an AC in sight. It’s hot in the little kitchen.

  “Have a seat,” the woman says. “I’m Vera, by the by. Lived in this dump my whole goddamn life.”

  Donnie, Pags, and Sottile sit on wobbly wooden chairs around the table.

  “Where’s your brother?” Donnie asks. “Duke’s his name, right?”

  She points to the back of the house. “He’s in the shitter. Usually takes about an hour in there. I says to him, I says, ‘Don’t your legs fall asleep, okay?’ He just shrugs. A man will sit on a can until he’s blue in the face, that’s the only thing I’ve learned in this stupid life. You want some Entenmann’s?”

  “We’re good,” Donnie says.

  She trudges over to the refrigerator, opens the door, and narrates what she sees: “Duck sauce, old yogurt, month-old cold cuts, canned carrots, an Egg McMuffin. Shit. I don’t even have the crumb cake I offered. Duke must’ve eaten it. That’s why he’s in there, shitting up a storm. He’s got an uneasy tum-tum.”

  “Can you go get your brother?” Pags asks.

  “I’m not getting within ten feet of that bathroom door,” Vera says.

  “We’ve got some business with him.”

  “Census Bureau, you said.”

  “Sure. Right. Counting heads.”

  A voice comes booming from the back of the house: “Who the hell you talking to out there?”

  Vera yells back: “Census Bureau!”

  “Census Bureau, my balls!” A toilet is flushed, and a door whines open loudly. Heavy footsteps follow.

  Donnie looks at Pags and Sottile, letting them know they should be ready for anything.

  Duke comes through a dark doorway at the back of the kitchen. He’s squat and heavy. A brutal stink coasts on the air behind him. He’s wearing clothes like he’s in a Western. Ten-gallon hat. Shitkicker boots with spurs. A shirt with snap buttons. Jeans and a shiny belt buckle with his name embossed on it. Gunbelt around his hips, an antique-looking six-shooter strapped in a holster there, bullets tucked in little loops on the side of the belt. He’s even got that John Wayne strut. But when he talks, it’s the thick, ugly voice of the neighborhood.

  “Fuck you little snatches want?” he says.

  “Holy shit, a real Brooklyn cowboy,” Pags says.

  “You’re with Ficalora, and you got the balls to come in my house?” He turns to his sister. “Vera, you’ve gotta use your bean. These shitbirds ain’t Census Bureau. They’re Ficalora’s goons.”

  Vera shrugs apologetically. “It’s all the same to me.”

  “You owe, you owe,” Donnie says to Duke. “You work for Mr. Natale, right? You know how it goes.”

  “I say who I owe,” Duke says.

  “Let’s talk reasonable, okay? Al più potente ceda il più prudente. You know what that means? ‘Better bow than break.’ Just give us the ten large, and we’ll be on our way.”

  Duke’s hand hovers over his piece. “Get out of my house, you fucking guinea.”

  Donnie leaps up and pushes back from the table. In an instant, he’s jumping at Duke, toppling him to the ground, knocking off his stupid-ass hat. He takes out his own piece and clocks Duke in the side of the head with the grip. Duke is flat on his back, a pained look on his face. He’s not even trying for his piece. He’s an old man who’s playing dress-up, that’s it. Donnie can’t believe Big Time Tommy took the threat seriously. Vlad must have a real streak of limp-wrist in him too, like Sottile.

  “Where’d you find this fucking getup?” Donnie says. “Some mail-order catalog?”

  Duke, stunned, doesn’t respond.

  “That’s where he got it all, yep,” Vera says. She’s standing away from the action.

  “You go around disrespecting Big Time Tommy Ficalora?” Donnie says to Duke. “Where you get the balls for that? You’re gonna pay up or I’m gonna drop you off in Brownsville dressed like this. You’ll fucking wish I shot you. Where’s the dough?”

  Duke groans.

  Donnie hits him again with the grip of the gun. A cut opens over the old cowboy’s bushy right eyebrow. “Where’s the dough?” Donnie asks again, his voice restrained.

  “It’s under the sink,” Vera says. “Don’t hurt him anymore.”

  Donnie leans over and strips Duke’s gun from the holster on his belt. It looks like the kind of dipshit piece that would’ve probably exploded in his hand. He tosses it to Pags and then scrambles over to the sink, flinging open the cabinet beneath the dirty chrome basin. Two boxes of Depends are stuffed under there among bottles of dish soap and rusty pipes and blooming bunches of plastic Pathmark bags.

  “In the boxes,” Vera says.

  “You shouldn’t have let them in,” Duke says to his sister. “I told you not to answer the door. I told you let me answer the door.”

  “Sometimes I get sick of not answering the door,” Vera says.

  Donnie pulls the diaper boxes out from under the sink and opens the flaps. There’s more than ten large in there. A lot more.

  MIKEY BALDINI

  They’re splayed out naked on the brown-and-gold rug on Donna’s living room floor, Donna curled against him, listening to a record by someone named Garland Jeffreys who Mikey’s never heard of. The record is called Ghost Writer. Donna says it’s one of her favorites. The song that’s playing now is “New York Skyline.”

  “You like it?” Donna asks.

/>   “It’s really good,” Mikey says.

  Donna sings along with it under her breath for a moment, something like, “Hindsight, foresight, sometimes we’ve got no love at all. New love, true love, sometimes we’ve got no love at all.” It fits the moment, and that’s why she’s singing it. She’s got a nice voice, he can tell, even though her singing is only a whisper. The song sounds like feelings he’s had that he can’t name, just riding the subway or walking around the city. He likes when songs hit him that way.

  He sure wasn’t expecting this to happen with Donna, for it to go this far this fast. Maybe that jacket of his old man’s is a good luck charm.

  When Donna had first taken off her clothes, she kept talking about how she was ashamed of her old body, how it had been a long time since anyone else had seen her naked, and how it felt wrong. He said she looked beautiful, which is sometimes a thing you just say to a girl, but he meant it. Her body has a wisdom to it. He’s never seen anything else of the sort. He thinks of the word natural, like her body’s been through the things it’s been through, giving birth and grieving for Gabe especially, and that’s the purpose of a body, after all. To live. To wear down from living. If anyone should be ashamed, he’d told her, it should be him, with his nothing body, his hairy shoulders and back. She’d laughed and touched the swirls of dark hair on his shoulders. Her discomfort faded quickly.

  He’s also realizing that his body has never had that sense of purpose, that he’d been trying to give it purpose when he had his chin tattooed and those gauges put in his ears. Never, that is, until now. Until his body was with her body.

  It was, Mikey’s thinking, the best it’s ever been. New in some unexpected way. While they were sitting up against the couch, Donna on top of him, one of her hands on his shoulder and the other on the arm of the couch, he’d seen something in her face he’d never seen before. Her eyes closed, biting her lower lip, the expression of pleasure was absolutely and totally real. That look was the kind of thing that could make you love someone forever, and it had set his mind wandering. There could be more of this, a life with Donna and her records. He feels like he’s known her for a long time already.