Buried on Avenue B (25 page)

 

CHAPTER 65

MANNY'S FIX-IT IS
in a First Street basement that smells hospitably of leather, stain, and heated glue. When O'Hara steps through the door, the stooped repairman is conferring with a would-be It Girl in culottes and heels, and if he notices the arrival of a homicide detective, he keeps it to himself. He focuses instead on the vintage bag the girl has dropped onto his counter, and shakes his head in dismay at the many areas in need of repair. Now that he's playing himself, instead of a doddering old codger, Manny seems a decade younger.

Having assessed the damage inside and out, Manny looks up apprehensively and breaks the bad news. “One hundred and twenty-five dollars.”

“Manny, that's more than I paid for it.”

“I would hope so.” With a look of resignation, he reaches for the bag again, and O'Hara notices the black-and-white pin:
OBAMA. CHANGE WE CAN BELIEVE IN.
Apparently, he is now up-to-date on presidential politics.

While Manny reappraises, O'Hara takes in the cluttered space. Completed repairs are stuffed between shelves. Repairs-in-progress crowd his workbench, along with umbrella ribs, trunk locks, and other replacement parts. In the back corner is an old barber's chair, and above it a hand-drawn sign advertises haircuts for $14, hot shaves for $7. Between Manny and his customer is a display case featuring items for sale—vintage jewelry, flatware, several watches, and a couple cameras, including a Polaroid Swinger. They could be flea-market finds, but more likely they're the purloined harvest of junkie thieves like the real Gus in ICU.

O'Hara leans toward the photographs on the side wall. In one, Manny stands beside Paulette, his too-young, too-pretty girlfriend. In another, his arm is draped around a slight young man O'Hara recognizes as Popsicle. Side by side, their resemblance is striking.

“It's a big job,” Manny tells the girl. “The whole back has to be cut out . . . a new lining sewn in . . . the lock replaced. . . .”

“Can't you just patch the back and fix the lock?”

“I could try.”

“Manny. You're such a doll!” Before she leaves, O'Hara has to watch her dip across the counter and kiss him on the cheek.

“HI, MANNY.”

“Hi, Darlene.”

“That picture on the wall, that your grandson?”

“Yeah.”

“That's interesting, because not long ago I saw a fortune-teller named Miss Marla. Perhaps you know her. I've been seeing a lot of fortune-tellers lately. She mentioned an old Gypsy who sought reparations for the murder of his grandson. According to Miss Marla, a
kris
was convened, but in the end they told the old man to take a hike.”

“Darlene, you believe what you hear from fortune-tellers, I got a good deal for you on a bridge that connects Manhattan to Brooklyn.”

“Manny, you already sold me that fucking bridge three times over, and a river full of bullshit to go under it. I were you, I wouldn't push my luck.”

“How can I help you, Darlene?”

“Let's start in Florida, the old man's condo, right after Fudgesicle and your grandson go in posing as employees of the Sarasota Water Authority.”

“Sounds like you already got it figured out.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“According to my grandson, it was the usual drill. They tell the old man they're checking for contamination and have him bang on his water heater. Two minutes later the guy comes back into the bedroom, banging whatever it is they gave him on the barrel of a rifle.”

O'Hara had grown attached to her version, the one in which Bunny brings back the spoon so he can shove it up Fudgesicle's ass, but this makes more sense. By knocking the spoon on the gun, Bunny could make it sound like he was still hitting the water heater and take them by surprise.

“Then what?”

“The old man points the gun at Fudgesicle, tells him to get on his knees, or he's going to kill him. I wish he had. Instead, Fudgesicle bends down and grabs the boy.”

“What do you mean?”

“Fudgesicle picks up the boy.”

“To run?”

“The kid doesn't need help to run. Limp or not, he can run faster than Fudgesicle. Even I can.”

“What are you saying?”

“He picks up the kid to hold him up in front of him—as a shield . . . so the old guy won't shoot.”

O'Hara had played out the scene a hundred different ways, but not like this. She feels like she's been kicked in the stomach.

“Holding the boy, Fudgesicle rushes past the old man toward the door. He hits the gun, the gun goes off.”

“I don't understand,” says O'Hara, although it's more anger than an inability to comprehend. “What made Fudgesicle think he could treat the boy like that?”

“I can't answer that one, Darlene. Maybe he'd say 'cause he was the one who adopted him, or maybe because the boy wasn't a real Gypsy. But he treated my grandson no different or worse, so who cares what that piece of shit thought?”

“How do you know about all this?”

“My grandson called me right before he took the boy to the ER. He thought it might get him killed. I guess he was right, because I never heard from him again.”

O'Hara leans against the counter. The smells that were pleasing when she walked in have turned noxious.

“If the boy was a
gadje
, why'd he rate a Gypsy funeral?”

“He was born
gadje
, raised Gypsy. His mother was Christina, the woman from the garden. That day you came with your book, I thought you'd see it. She has the same face. When she was fifteen, she got pregnant. The only one who noticed was the Big Roma who lived on her block. She arranged the whole thing. She had the girl tell her father she was sleeping over at a friend's house, delivered the baby that night, and sold him to Fudgesicle and his wife, a Gypsy named Gabriella. ”

“I ran into that bitch in Florida,” mutters O'Hara, more to herself than Manny. She winces at the memory of Herc's stepsister, staring at the TV.

“At the
kris
,” says Manny, “the old lady came up with the idea of burying the boy in the garden. As if having him back near his real mother made everything right again. She didn't care about my grandson, just her own bad
kasa
. So she had Fudgesicle get his body from wherever he'd dumped it and move him to the garden.”

“And who the hell are Pizza and Crisco?”

“His Gypsy grandmothers. Pizza is Fudgesicle's mother. Crisco is the mother of Gabriella. At one point they were partners, but they had a falling out and have hated each other ever since.”

“Why didn't you go straight to the cops?”

“I didn't want to be expelled. Demand a
kris
, you have to abide. Something called
marime
. You wouldn't understand.”

The basement air is suffocating. O'Hara does one last scan of the premises and lands on the sign above the barber's chair:
HAIRCUTS $14, SHAVES $7
. She remembers the straight razor across the drain, the wet carpet just outside the door, and the damp corner of the
DO NOT DISTURB
sign. “Manny, when was the last time you gave someone a shave?”

“Been a while. Kids all growing beards like the sixties all over.”

“You didn't, by any chance, give one the other night to a shit bag at the St. Marks Hotel?”

“I don't think so. But you know how it is, Darlene. My age, you forget half the things you do soon as you do them.”

 

CHAPTER 66

BE CAREFUL WHAT
you wish for, O'Hara's mother likes to say. You might get it. For the next couple weeks, the weight of her long-sought answers feels like a backpack full of stones, and she's almost nostalgic for the ignorance with which she arrived that morning at Manny's Fix-It.

The onset of fall always knocks O'Hara off balance—something about the crisp air and the school-bell chill—but this year the malaise seems deeper. She knows K is right. It's time for a change. Long past it. She should call her old boyfriend Leibowitz and ask for another chance, or at least have him give her the name of a good Jewish shrink. But of course, she does neither. Instead, she calls in sick, takes a subway downtown, and wanders the East Village.

It's mid-October, midweek, midafternoon. Few people are out, and those who are seem underemployed and at loose ends, marooned by the day. At the bodega on Sixth and B, O'Hara buys a coffee and carries it across the street to the garden, where the entrance, with its garland of tiny stamped-out hands, is locked. O'Hara sips her coffee and peers through the bars at the overgrown quarter acre. That the Big Roma made Fudgesicle rebury the boy in here almost makes sense. Having brought the kid into the world and brokered his adoption, it was on her to send him out of it, and if possible, square things with the boy's mother.

This afternoon the garden feels as slack as the streets, adrift on the same autumnal lull. From the entrance, O'Hara has a good view of Christina Malmströmer's garden. Even dormant, its tidiness stands out. While other plots have been abandoned in haste, Christina's has been thoughtfully shut down for the season and a layer of loam spread over it to rejuvenate the soil. As Christina told O'Hara, she's the one in the family who is good at growing things.

O'Hara was so much luckier. Eight months into her pregnancy, she was in such denial about her predicament that she almost forgot about it. Had the bulge been detected by a sharp-eyed baby broker instead of the school nurse, and had that person promised to make it all go away without anyone being the wiser, she couldn't have resisted the offer any more than Christina had. And after Christina saw how the old man treated her sister for infractions that were so minor by comparison, she would have feared the worst. Then again, old man Malmströmer didn't get off any easier, spending his nights making furniture while his flesh and blood hopped around the neighborhood on a broken leg.

O'Hara tosses her cup into the trash and pushes from the gates. She walks past Malmströmer's basement workshop and a fortune-teller's window and keeps going, all the way to Lafayette. At St. Mark's, she dodges the skaters around the Cube and enters the subway at Broadway and Eighth. As she waits on a bench, whose inhospitable angles have been designed to deter the homeless, a schizophrenic at the end of the platform goes off in a sputtering rage. Each eruption lasts about twenty seconds, subsides, and builds again, and O'Hara sits through a dozen before the R arrives.

Four stops later, O'Hara gets out at Times Square. Unlike the Village, it's streaming with New Yorkers and visitors. The locals ply familiar routes in silence. The tourists move in thrilled packs, chirping in their native tongues. O'Hara is swept along in the flow, barely participating in her own locomotion, until she starts up the stairs and sees five feet in front of her the back of a tall red-haired man carrying a guitar case and a tiny amp and realizes it's Axl.

The stairs lead to a mezzanine, with a walk-in newsstand to the left. In the sprawling subterranean archipelago, it occupies its own level, floating above the Queens-bound tracks from which they just ascended and below the pedestrian thoroughfares that lead to the shuttle, the 1, 2, and 3, and the A, C, and E. Just short of a railing overlooking the tracks, Axl puts down his guitar and amp, and O'Hara ducks behind a column.

When she looks back, Axl is crouched on one knee. He plugs in his old Fender, fiddles with some knobs, and casually strums a few chords as if alone in his room, picking out a melody. From the track below come the hiss of brakes and the recorded female voice: “This is a Queens-bound R train. The next stop will be . . . Forty-Ninth Street.”

As passengers sweep by, O'Hara makes out the start of Aerosmith's “Walk This Way,” and despite her precarious state, the riff lightens her heart, just as it would if she stumbled across it on a radio dial or it dropped on a jukebox. It has the same effect on three young skateboarders. When Axl reaches the chorus, using a wah-wah pedal to simulate Steven Tyler's wail, one puts his hands on his hips and performs a cocksure urban strut. In the midst of the second verse, another train pulls in. Rather than compete with the clamor, Axl stops playing and talks to the skaters, cultivating his little audience, keeping it intact. When enough quiet returns, Stevie Wonder's “Living for the City” snags a couple more travelers. So does Joan Jett's “I Love Rock 'n' Roll.”

O'Hara is mortified to see her one and only son busking in the MTA, not even in a good spot. At the same time, she is in awe of the stones required to take out a guitar and play in front of the passing crowd. She couldn't do it in a million years, not with a gun pointed at her head, but Axl can. He's good at it and likes what he's doing, and people can tell. It puts them at ease and inclines them to linger, and after every song newcomers outnumber deserters. In fact, the spot he's chosen isn't half bad. With the airiness of the space and the tiles on the walls, put on during the eighties, when the city was awash in cash, the acoustics are excellent. And of course she approves his choice of covers. Maybe this is not such a bad development, she tells herself. Maybe this can all work out.

“There's something I should tell you,” says Axl when the subways cooperate. “If anyone out there is tempted to steal my tips, you should know that my mom is with NYPD. In fact, she's a homicide detective. No shit. Not too many females in homicide. When she had me, she was young and crazy. She still is, but that's another story. When I was colicky, or refused to fall asleep, she sometimes put this on the stereo. Whenever I hear it, I think of her.”

The song builds slowly and takes a minute or two to morph into ZZ Top
.
As a fresh surge of travelers scale the stairs, Axl sings.

Hot, blue and righteous

an angel called me aside

Hot, blue and righteous

said, “stick by me and I'll be your guide tonight.”

O'Hara's love for her son buckles her knees, and she grabs the column for support. By the time she collects herself enough to peer out, Axl has unplugged and packed up, and is descending the stairs. O'Hara is proud of her son and scared to death for him, and as she watches his shaggy head disappear from view, she knows that her worst fears and fondest hopes have both come true.