Blue Eyes (26 page)

The cashier said, “I'm sorry. He isn't at his table, Mr. Shine. What should I do?”

César muttered whoreboy, whoreboy, until his steerer came on the line.

“Zorro, I was in the men's. I can have the car. But where's the rush? You know how many eyes this Isaac has? He carries binoculars in both tits.”

“Boris, you told me a room with a first-class view. You forgot to mention that it's choked with kitchen pipes. Get the bus.”

César rode to Jane Street. He was wearing a winter coat in May, with the collar up around his ears, and a seaman's cap pulled against his eyebrows. Odile recognized him under all the baggage. She couldn't tell whether Zorro had come to kill her or maim her limbs because of her alignment with Vander, but she had to let him in. Her belly tightened as he passed her in the hallway. Her heart thumped into her ribs. Would he undress her before he snapped her neck? Would he have her perform disgusting tricks? She saw his pallor when the hat and coat came off. He collapsed into a soft chair. Odile felt a mild rage against César; he wasn't going to make any overtures at all.

“Zorro, would you like a snack?”

“None of your sandwiches,” he said. “Save them for the Johns. Who are the green candles for?”

“They're for Coen.”

“I should have figured you'd be mourning Isaac's boy.”

César wouldn't stroke her with pieties. Twenty years apart had deadened him to Coen. He had his brothers and his whores and one Chinese pistol. César reformed the taxi bandit, deflected his violent streak by giving him a string of whores to supervise, and took him into the Bronx for Marrano wine; he couldn't distrust a man who loved pork. César regretted losing Chino (he should have realized the Chinaman would kiss himself into the ground chasing Coen), and he worried about Jerónimo's new hideaway (with Isaac sitting on Manhattan, César had to cancel his trips to the baby), but he had no trouble sleeping in Odile's chair. César snored like his brothers, and slept with a hand on his balls. Getting nothing from Zorro, Odile wanted to run to The Dwarf, dance with whoever was on call, feel a hipbone in her groin, but she didn't dare leave the room. César had strict habits. He would send his brothers to smash up The Dwarf if there was no Odette when he woke. So she had to be content eating wax off the bottom of a green candle and watching Zorro blow air.

Papa was preparing to shut the candy store. He never fixed sodas beyond the second week of May. Alejandro would remain in the Bronx. He would move into a bowling alley for the summer months and preside over Papa's accounts from there. If Papa's better customers preferred to do business with the nigger banks while Papa was out of town, it didn't matter too much. Papa would get them back in the fall. He wasn't going to sacrifice Loch Sheldrake for a pile of ten-dollar bets. He had his orchard to think about, his garden, the strawberry and blackberry seasons, and the safety of his boys. Jerónimo couldn't get run over in an orchard, and Jorge could survive without being plagued by street signs and traffic lamps. Papa burned candles for the Chinaman and Coen on the shelf above his malted machines. He prayed to Moses with a dishrag on his skull, spit three times according to Marrano law, so Coen and the Chinaman might be able to rest in purgatory. Still he had only a passing confidence in the efficiency of his prayers. He didn't believe one solitary man could heal the miseries of the dead. Papa was no moneygrub. He could have hired professional mourners to trick the three judges of purgatory (Solomon, Samuel, and Saint Jerome), with powerful cries from the lungs. These mourners had sensible rates. They could tear through walls with a cry for anyone who could meet their price. But to Papa cries weren't enough. The dead needed whole families to intercede for them, brothers, sisters, fathers, nephews, mothers, sons, to wear dishrags and shawls, to offer pennies to the Christian saints, to appease Moses with a candle, to recite Hebrew prayers transcribed into sixteenth-century Portuguese; Coen and the Chinaman were familyless men without the Marrano knack to survive. Papa discarded any notions of immortality for himself. He had lived like a dog, biting the noses of his enemies, smelling human shit on two continents, sleeping in a crouch to safeguard his vulnerable parts, and he expected to drop like a dog, with blood in his rectum, and somebody's teeth in his neck. But Papa didn't intend to the from an overdose of Isaac, or offer his sons to the First Deputy's shotgun brigade. He believed Isaac was more than a simple son-of-a-bitch. What cop would want to erase six Guzmanns, almost an entire species of men? Isaac had to be one of those destructive angels sent by the Lord Adonai to torment pigeaters, the Marranos who had slipped between Christians and Jews for so many years they could no longer exist without Moses
and
Jesus (or John the Baptist) in their beds, and had defied the laws of Adonai with their foreskins and their rosaries. Unable to snatch a Guzmann, Isaac settled for a blond Jew and a creole with Chinese ancestors.

So Papa wailed. The dishrag surrounded his ears. He screamed for the Chinaman in English and fine Portuguese, but he screamed louder for Coen. Papa had fattened himself in North America after sitting on his rump in Peru. He owned earth, a farm with Guzmann berries, and fixtures in the Bronx. And in Papa's head all four Coens, father, mother, lunatic brother, and son, came with the fixtures and the berries. The Coens were Papa's North America. Papa didn't have to scan outside Boston Road; he could measure his strides against the cracks in Albert's eggs. When he wound the Marrano phylactery—tiny leather box containing Spanish, Dutch, and Portuguese words from the books of Moses—through the opening in his sleeve, he prayed first for the health of his boys, then for the maintenance of the Coens. He couldn't discount Jessica, who gnawed at his guts with her independent smiles, who must have understood Papa's game; Papa needed a stumbler like Albert to add some bulk to his own success. But it wasn't plain exploitation. Papa loved the Coens. He might have been disgusted by their vegetable meals, but he admired Albert's gentleness, he pitied Sheb for his swollen brains, he was attracted to Manfred's blond demeanor (the Guzmanns were a hairy black), and he was bothered by Jessica, terrified of the scorn she could produce with a smile, and adoring the ambiguity in her face. So he wailed. Not because he had turned three Coens toward their graves and left the fourth to rot in a home with a river view, by compromising Albert and romancing Jessica with a piece of string, by keeping them prisoners in an egg store with his small loans, by letting Manfred stumble into a war zone meant for Isaac and the Guzmanns, and fanning Sheb's isolation with dollar bills. Papa had wiggled too hard staying alive to be deformed by a sentiment so unprofitable as grief. But he was bound to the Coens, in the Bronx, Manhattan, or purgatory, and his wails only reminded him that he could never get clean of them.

The steerer was holding Jerónimo until the strawberry season when he would drive the baby to Loch Sheldrake together with Papa, Jorge, and Topal. There were too many sharks on Boston Road (police cars under Isaac's control) to satisfy Papa. So Boris Telfin sat with the baby in a rented room on Ninetieth Street with a steampipe that would knock through July, and made no more than one or two trips per day to his window seat at the dairy restaurant. He suffered from the loss of spinach pancakes and bean pie. And he was frightened of César. With his crazy Guzmann head Zorro could intuit if Jerónimo had an insufficient supply of chocolate or a grease spot in his hair. Boris groomed the baby, evening his sideburns with a pair of scissors, and cursing Zorro while he shampooed Jerónimo's scalp.

The baby demanded more. He ripped through the steerer's pockets in search of Brazil nuts and black halvah. Boris had to endure fingers in his pants. And if he didn't acquiesce to the baby's walks, he would have gone to the dairy restaurant with long scratches on his face. “Jerónimo, look before you cross. This is Isaac's village. If they kidnap you, I won't need burial insurance. Your father and your brother will treat me to a stone.” He dressed the baby in slipovers, peacoat, and earmuffs. “Better warm than cold. The weather can change. And the dicks won't expect you in such a bundle.” Boris felt for his wallet and patted nothing but cloth; the baby had already picked his side pocket. Just like monkeys, Boris concluded. A family of thieves. But the baby hadn't stolen money from him before. “Two dollars? Jerónimo, why two dollars?” Boris didn't quarrel with the steal. The Guzmanns were paying him a hundred a week for the baby's room and board, and he could deduct two dollars from his profits without getting hurt. “Jerónimo, the key's under the garbage pail in the hall. It fits the top lock. Not the bottom. Turn it with both hands. You'll lose your grip otherwise.”

The baby left first. He picked his way through bundles of newspapers on the stairs, testing for solid ground with one shoe, keeping the other shoe flat. The janitor misinterpreted the off rhythms of Jerónimo's moves, thinking a harebrained cripple lived on the second floor. Jerónimo rejected the musty odors of the janitor's hall for the more natural stinks outside. His skin pinkened in the street. He had a dark blush around the eyes, the color spreading into a definite blotch behind the ears. Half a block from the steerer's place his knees began to pump higher than his belt. His earmuffs climbed with every step. The citizens of Ninetieth Street weren't accustomed to such stupendous walking. The baby could avoid tricycles and wagonettes without shifting a heel. His head maintained a regular line. Roughened alley cats, some with scars in their whiskers, dropped chicken wings and ran from the baby's staggered sounds. He was over Broadway and on the stoops of Manhattan Rest in under three minutes. The nurses made allowances for him. They knew he was the gray-haired boy who visited Sheb Coen. Jerónimo laid the two sticky dollars and a clutch of toilet paper in the elbow of Shebby's pajamas. They kissed in front of neighbors (men and women from a lower floor), the blotch disappearing from Jerónimo's neck. The neighbors didn't take Shebby to task for kissing in a public dorm. None of them was fooled by the bushy gray hair, or Jerónimo's chubbiness in the peacoat. He had all the marks of a Guzmann; tight cheeks, knobs in the forehead, deep sockets for the eyes, lips that curved into a fork under the jaw. Shebby's neighbors wanted to undress the boy. They pulled at his sleeves, tried to get under the muffs. Shebby howled in his bed. “You bitches, let go. That's all-weather clothes he's wearing. I'll mangle you, you play with his ears. Jerónimo, he's like a sister to me, better than any nephew or brother boy. Brings me dollars and no unkind news.”

Sheb had to throw bookends and medicine bottles before his neighbors would desist. Jerónimo remained with one earmuff over his mouth, and his sleeves puffing like elephant trunks near the floor. Sheb fixed the baby, bundling him with clawed hands. The neighbors scattered elsewhere, and now Sheb had his own dorm mates to reckon with. “Bitches, make room for the boy.”

Without prologues or explanations Sheb and the baby locked wrists and began to weep; these loud sniffles alarmed the dorm mates, Morris, Sam, and Irwin, because they couldn't locate any genuine cause for such spontaneous commotion, and they had no chance to realize that Sheb and the baby were given to long cries, that they had behaved like this in the egg store, under fire escapes, and on the farm. They were crying for their sustained infanthood, for the white patches that had sprouted on Jeronimo's scalp early in life, for the little indignities that had swelled their knuckles and shortened their necks in the Bronx, for their inadequacies in matters concerning the making of money, for their dependence on brothers, fathers, and a sister-in-law, for their heavy drugged sleep in which they dreamed of winter storms, sewer floods, collapsing fire escapes, burning roofs, Bronx volcanoes, for the fright they carried with them during the hours they were awake. Sheb broke the wristlock and wiped the baby's eyes with a pajama cuff. Morris winked to Irwin, Irwin winked to Sam. “Kookoo.” The baby prolonged his goodbyes, exploring under Shebby's sleeve with half a knuckle. Sheb understood the implications of the gesture; the baby wouldn't be back until the fall. “Jerónimo, watch out for dead branches. Don't come home with a splinter in your ass.” They kissed for the last time, Sam sticking out his lip and becoming Jerónimo for the benefit of Irwin and Morris. “Put your face where it belongs,” Sheb told Sam after he sent the baby off. He gave the dollars to Morris (the toilet paper he kept). “Find your teeth and go to the corner. Get us a mixed assortment. Some apricots, some pears, some prunes.”

“And dates,” Irwin said.

“And dates,” Sheb confirmed. “The man can't shit without his dates.”

Jerónimo whisked through the nurses' station. The old men standing in the hall with their robes on caught the bobbing earmuffs and a navy blue cape. They wondered what mischief a walking blue coat could bring. The baby saw Isaac and his chauffeur at the bottom of the stairs. Brodsky was grinning and dangling his handcuffs at Jerónimo. Isaac was carrying a fat cardboard box.

“We got him,” Brodsky squealed, his lungs thick with anticipation. “Chief, should I go for his arms or his legs?”

Brodsky blocked the stairwell, and the baby would have had to climb over the chauffeur's head or run up to the roof. He crouched on a middle step. Isaac made Brodsky lower the handcuffs.

“Jerónimo, come down.”

Brodsky whispered to the Chief. “Isaac, don't be strange. Put a bracelet on his leg and he'll lead you to Zorro. I've dealt with dummies before. I know their shtick.”

“Brodsky, get out of his way.”

The chauffeur humped himself into a corner, regret ballooning out on his face. Brodsky had taken up Isaac's cause with so much vehemence, he couldn't let a Guzmann go free and not damage some of his own tightened parts. He developed a cough on the stairwell. Isaac wouldn't console him. The baby edged down a shoulder at a time and slipped between Isaac and his man without rubbing either of them (a remarkable feat considering the narrowness of the stairs and the chauffeur's hefty proportions). Isaac had to shout fast or lose him completely.