Brain Guy: A gang killer meets his match in a TNT blonde (13 page)

The sun advanced upon him like a glaring face when he opened the street door. He blinked on Leroy Street isolated in the Sunday vacuum, detached from purpose and work. The warehouse and printery were deserted by men. No raw truckers shouted. No vans trundled upon the side-walk.

An El was speeding north on Greenwich, the windows rattling, the fleeing roofs of the cars traveling under a huge and measured blue vault. The faces peered down at him, the eyes of strangers uninterested in the train’s destination, Burnside Avenue. That was in the Bronx. With Bill’s money he was going to have a good time. The best time would be traveling to the Bronx. He laughed at ten bucks being made so unnecessary for a good time. He crossed under the El, the light zigzagging through the ties, walking through a constant eternal series of light-shafts, all slanting and full of sun motes. His life was a deep and foul rooting in narrow places. He hurried past the trucking offices ready to resume their traffic with a hundred cities, come Monday. He was wasting his life. What could he do? Maybe Bill’d get him another job. Or a job like Bill’s. To drink, live danger, to know lots of hot tough women; hell, that was life anyway. The grind at Metz’s was an insult to any guy with spunk. He pushed his legs out vigorously, leaving Greenwich, striding into the sun again, westward to Washington Street and the smell of the harbor.

Many buildings had been razed here by the landlords and mortgage companies. Washington Street was an area devastated by war, a battlefield, the few remaining buildings presenting cracked windows, disused. Business had collapsed, lost foothold and position. Eastward the massed city behind Hudson Street spread to the East River, South to the Battery, north to Times Square. He was happier near the river. The wind unconfined, lurching into the lots, picking up the tag ends of paper. Families were strolling. The street had the aspect of a park lane. The city had retreated. And he wished Cathy were with him.

He had intended going down to the river, beyond West Street, the railroad terminals and steamer berths, until coming to the last land he might sit on the dock, staring at the greasy heavy water, foul and green. Here a man could look the river in its face, the red tugs, the anchored leviathans, at New Jersey’s opposite shore, the roadway out of New York, the start into the plains and mountains of America. Not today, he thought, recalling lonely Sundays when he had sat with the waters. He’d go to Burnside Avenue. Uptown with Cathy. He was cheered at his own daring like one embarking on journeys. Devil take Bill and blue Monday. He liked Cathy. She liked him. What more could a fellow want? He day-dreamed, his eyes slitted against the sun like half-closed shutters, thinking rosily of uptown and gleaming cities. Hell, he’d forgotten to take the poor mutt out for an airing.

H
E LEFT
the dog with the Gebhardts, the kids mobbing it enthusiastically, baby Carl murmuring bawa bawa, holding out his hand as if towards a jewel of price. “Have a good time,” cried Pop and Mom.

The two of them hurried down the corridor. She was ahead of him, the nape of her neck fluffy with tiny blond hairs. The flight of stairs, each step edged with a shining strip of metal, seemed to push him at her. In this gloomy transit between home and street he grabbed her from the rear, kissing her protesting face. She blushed down to her throat, ashamed and surprised. He thought of all her pale body, crimsoning, her breasts and thighs and toes, until she was rose-beautiful all over. He let loose and they were walking to the door as if nothing much had happened.

“You shouldn’t,” she said.

“I like you. You didn’t say anything when I kissed you in the movies.”

“This is too near.” Her eyes were so miserable he imagined the ghostly fathers of St. Veronica, the Gebhardt home, the doctrine of sin and a thousand other religious inhibitions.

He flung the door open on sunlight and fresh air and had his answer, breathing deeply. “You’re bugs. Don’t you like me?”

“I like you.”

“What you mean then? Shouldn’t I kiss you if I like you? Your family kisses you.”

She giggled. “You’re a faker.”

“Liking’s liking. If I like somebody, I kiss them. You ought to be glad I like you.” She blushed as they went down the stoop. She didn’t know what to say, feeling his lips on her cheeks, thinking of her parents. She’d never been kissed before, even if he wouldn’t believe it. She liked kissing, flushing redder. She was in the second year at high school. When she was a kid she’d cried and prayed many nasty things away. At public school she had heard all the bad words many times, seen them scrawled in chalk on the yard walls or whispered in the classrooms by young sports. You couldn’t shut your ears, although she brought her legs together, shuddering. Then, walking home from school at three o’clock, the boys used to rush past her and the other girls, whipping out hands against their black-stockinged legs, sometimes jumping full on them like men leaping from horseback, pressing their hard nasty bodies against the girls. Then, lots of her friends petted. She’d even seen a boy lying on a girl behind the stairs, both of them sort of undressed and naked somehow. There were many nasty things. Going to high school, men’d wink and young fellows’d make cracks. High was wonderful. There were no boys, only girls, no one to get fresh except strangers on the street, and the loafers on the corner.

But all she said from this lifetime’s experience with males was that he shouldn’t do it, he should behave.

What dumb ideas she had! Back home, he told her, all the girls knew what kissing’s for. But then, she was a Catholic. His eyes were wicked, as if he had hit the reason. “But lots of girls I used to know were Catholic and they knew their onions.” His voice was the metallic worldly one of nineteen, wise about women because he’s had a maid on her back on a summer night. Hell, what didn’t he know about women? Cathy walked dumbly by his side, her head lowered as if he were one of those almost forgotten public-school kids whispering in her ear when teacher wasn’t looking, whispering a brutal ravishment. She’d been raped that way so many times she was wiser than he. She knew more about men than he, the taker of a few cheap bats, knew of women.

“Plenty girls’d like to know me, smiling at me in the El, and in the store, too.” It was a pain for him, a man, to be treated in that kiddish way. But her downcast head with the calm curve of forehead balancing against the straight fine nose and rougeless lips, the line of neck swelling out into her budding breasts, her virginal beauty, created the first agony in his heart. He was nineteen. His heart pounded, his eyes were almost veiled with tears of joy, tears for his own youth and her youth, and the wonder of their springtime on this blowing cold day. He forgot the wisecracks, jerking the words out. “I love you, Cathy. Honest I do. When I said I like you, gee, I meant I love you.” Hell, he wasn’t a man any more, the tough wisecracking fellow the clerks down at Metz’s called Der Starker, who could lift tubs of butter like nothing. He was just a kid speaking for the blood humming in him, speaking for the life, the youth, the male fertility in him.

They walked silently up to Hudson Street, the poor-folk shops were closed, the delicatessens, the butchers’, the corner chain stores with their gilt signs. In front of a coffee-pot four or five boys were stamping their feet, smoking. They spotted the dame and the boy-friend. The dame was oke, not classy dressed, but oke, a good build, none of your chickenbones. The boy-friend was a hefty kid, nice-looking. “I knew that dame in school,” one of them said. “Boy, was she the iceberg! N’now she’s flopped. They all flop.” He laughed like a philosophic rake.

“Where we going?” said Cathy. “To the fish teayter or the Museum?”

“No fish teayter for us. We’re stepping up to the Bronx. You on?”

“Sure I am.”

“Thatta girl.”

“The Bronx’s all Jewish and Irish,” she said. “It’s Abie’s Irish Rose.” They laughed.

“I’ve never been there.” He grinned at Cathy glancing at herself in the mirror of a chewing-gum machine on the El platform. “Jesus, you can beat any ten girls blushing. You want to grow up.” But he felt swell for him to be the reason.

“Don’t kid me. You like me the way I am.”

Hell, you couldn’t guess what a woman’d say next. The train crashed in. The steel wheels stopped rolling. They sat down in one of the double side-seats, putting their feet on the seat in front. It was riding in a private compartment. The conductor made a face. “He’s a donkey. Cmon, lemme hold your hand. Carl holds your hand and you say nothing.”

She laughed. “That donkey’s watching us.”

“I can lick any mick alive.”

They sat close together, Cathy next the window. The El started up the tracks, slicing the district like a knife through butter. On either side, tenements lined the tracks. They went calling on many homes. A longshoreman was smoking a corncob in one window. A gray fat woman was leaning out of a top story, watching the train with the implacable curiosity of a small-towner. A kid gripped her doll as if the El were the bogy man. They stared into the privacy of lives, seen and forgotten. A young woman arguing with an unknown. People eating. But mostly the windows were curtained, and they seemed to be sneaking by at night.

Joe squeezed her palm. Holding hands was nothing. Not after you kissed a girl. Holding hands had been some stuff walking down the Museum aisles. Now it was nothing. He’d kissed her. His breath came hard, thinking about it. He wanted to take her in his arms and hug her to death, kissing her pale face all over. His eyes were far away on the sun-gilded tracks flashing by. Tall semaphores with red and green flags rocked by them. The El stopped; the conductor bawled: “Fiftieth Street. Nex’ storp, Fifty-ninth….” People slid in and out. A young man took the double seat across the aisle, riding backward so he could sneak a look at Cathy. He was a sensitive fellow who always picked his seat within sight of a pretty woman so he could while away the gripe of the long ride. He lived in the Bronx and wondered whether Joe and Cathy would get off in the Eighties. They looked like Irish-German-American somebodies living on Amsterdam Avenue. He glared sadly but with resolution at Cathy’s slim legs and flushed bright face. She liked her fellow. Hell, he thought.

Joe sobered up with the audience. His heart pumped like a son-of-a-gun but he was getting used to his excitement. His shoulder touched Cathy’s. She was leaning her elbow on the sill. His shoulder was so wide his body didn’t touch her anywhere else. He put his arm about her, yanking her towards him, his teeth wanting to rattle when he felt her hip and side press into his own. That’d give the nosey guy something to think about. Did he like Cathy, not even knowing it until today? “I love you.”

“You’re kidding,” she said.

“I’m not.”

“You are.” Her yellow fringe of hair was smooth beneath her blue hat. He hadn’t known he loved her until he kissed her in the hallway. What a sap he was! He’d been making blunder after blunder about love for weeks. What a sap! Every time the El ground steel against steel, or jerked ahead after stopping, she let her body’s soft natural impact caress his own. It was the first time she let her body do what it wanted. Up to this Sunday she’d flexed herself so that she wouldn’t bump him when the train started. They sat close, happy, united, gazing foggily out of the window at the press of grim hard poor lives through which the El was roaring like an artery. Now they were climbing higher above the street, peering into the fifth-floor windows, reading the stone lettered inscriptions carved near the roofs. The Shenandoah. The Glenby. 1895. 1904. They were riding through the long-ago when these houses had been stylish. On the right the roofs flashed their tar coverings. Beyond the chimneys were the trees of Central Park. Eastwards the tenements and boardinghouses were gradually giving way to the canopies on Central Park West. Much to the young man’s surprise they didn’t get off. At 110th Street, the tracks shot round in grand curves, the El ready to fly off in space. Walled behind the heights of 110th Street, the Park was left behind.

“Morningside Park,” said Cathy. “We had a picnic there once.”

St. John the Divine. Tall arches, brave spires, and steel scaffolding. The central green coppery dome was a beauty.

“Down there,” said Cathy, “are the Negroes.”

The conductor growled: “Hunerd’n Sixteenth.” New York shoved its black faces against the windows. It was as if he were on a river liner penetrating a jungle full of savages. Big blacks. Coffee arms like hams. Rows of kid heads. Browns and yellow-browns. With here and there an Irishwoman’s head where the white race was continuing triumphant. Joe wanted to know why the whites didn’t move out. Cathy said the rents were cheap. Now and then, in a Congo tenement, a mulatto with a thin white-featured face hurt him somehow. So white and yet a Negro.

The young man concentrated on Cathy. He made the trip every day. Negroes were nothing new. A pretty dame was something else. Joe gripped her hand; greater than all the novelties of the far-away, he sat holding love in his hand, the five fingers of Cathy, a Woolworth ring on the finger next to the pinky. She said she was glad he and Bill hadn’t gone out today. She was glad to be with him. Bill was always busy, wasn’t he? Sure he was. Bill was a high-power business man with cockeyed hours. Bill was smart. She glanced at him, baffled by his tone.

“Have your parents ever discussed Bill?” He smiled. “Not that I’d blame them. He’s skating on thin ice. When we were kids Bill could do anything on ice.” Ten bucks of Bill’s smart money was in his pocket. He was sore. “We’re taking a taxi back.”

She was stupefied at his princeliness. He mustn’t. A cab from the Bronx’d cost three dollars almost.

He told her to mind her own business. He had plenty of money. Bill made a lot as a bookkeeper. He wouldn’t waste his dough but Bill’s dough was different. Anyway, he was the boss. He looked like Bill with his eyes sharp and commanding, his chin thrust out. A slow creeping languor weakened her bones. She was soft as jelly. Three dollars, my! The young man was disgusted. That couple, hell. They looked engaged, having fun together. Damn. These poor Irish-German-Americans had fun when they were young. No waiting for them. They lived. The young man was a German. He attended New York University Heights Branch. The girls he knew couldn’t be got, coached by their old ladies to lie low until they got a wedding ring. The young man hated to fork over two bucks when he got hot. It wasn’t decent, romantic, or profitable. It made him taste rubber. He didn’t like it. Damn those poor people who were regular pagans. He had eighty-two cents in his pocket. Damn the poor. A cab wouldn’t be bad. In a cab he could make love. It’d be worth Bill’s dough. He worked ten to twelve hours for two bucks. Bill’s dough was easy, a different kind of dough. He’d like to make it himself. Gee, what a city New York was! You needed dough in a city like New York.