Chinatown Beat (10 page)

Was it the heroin, or the memory of severing the hand that aroused such ferocious clarity, he wondered, putting out the cigarette. He muted the sound on the television. Leaning back on the bed, his head floated, and one of the blood oaths came back to him. I shall be billed by myriads of swords if I embezzle cash orproperties from my brethren.

He put down the glass jar, glanced at the TV screen, then dipped a bore brush in and out of the heavy metal gun barrel, stroked it. He pulled back the slide and heard it chik-cock in place, then blew at it and released the slide, the crack of metal snapping back the action. When he squeezed the trigger the hammer dropped, chopping down with a hard bock.

And then he closed his eyes and filled his head with visions of diamonds and gold.

Mona wore a short boucle jacket that was blacker than the lace bustier from Victoria's Secret underneath her open silk blouse, a modest black miniskirt, and suede Sesto Meucci pumps with chunky heels.

Johnny held the car door open for her and helped her in, her free hand holding the little flat Armani clutch that contained her makeup and keys. She squeezed his hand, and he closed the door after her.

They headed up the highway toward Yonkers Raceway to meet Uncle Four at the late races, the trotters. It was a half-hour drive up to White Plains, where Uncle Four hosted a delegation of Hip Chings from various cities along the East Coast, who had rented a slew of motel rooms across from the track.

"How are your business plans coming along?" she asked.

Johnny said he was still raising capital but was considering various schemes with some of the other drivers.

"I know people," she said, "who have money to invest." That caught his attention and he watched her in the rearview mirror as she lit up a cigarette. "Maybe you can get a partner, do better for yourself."

He listened.

"You don't want to drive me around forever, do you?" she asked.

She touched the back of his neck and he turned slightly and kissed her fingers, keeping his eyes on the highway. Reaching across to the dash, he turned on the cassette player and they sang Hong Kong love ballads together, like karaoke.

Then the cassette came to a sad song and she asked him to turn it off, casting them into an uneasy silence.

"I have need of a gun," she said suddenly, softly but clearly. "There are men who come around the building. They go through the garbage cans and sometimes chase me for money."

He never flinched. "What kind of gun?" he asked.

"A small gun, something I can carry in my bag."

The face of fat Tony Biondo, the only gzoai to Johnny knew, came into his mind.

"Money's no problem. I need something I can rely on."

Johnny nodded, mo mun tay, no problem.

"A gun with one of those things that keep it quiet." In the rearview, Mona saw his eyes go curious.

"If I need to use it," she added quickly, "the less attention the better."

Their eyes locked a moment.

"Immigration," she said quietly.

Johnny understood, said he'd see what was available, get her a price.

"I knew I could trust you," Mona said with a sad smile.

They arrived atYonkers and she went to Uncle Four's side. Like a pet cat, Johnny thought, a black cat crossing his path. The members of the delegation came out of Boston, Philadelphia, Miami, and Washington, and they all brought whores, or shared whores.

The whores were all colors and tried to pass themselves off as "models" and "escorts."

Johnny left them and went down to the other end of the track. He had two more hours to dust, didn't want to watch Mona, and the wad he'd won at Belmont was scorching his pockets.

He copped a racing form, and looked for more angles to play, to take his mind off of Mona.

Past And Present

The last thing he had heard was the radio.

Then it became the first thing he heard, tinny music chasing him through the night back to Chinatown with Billy's folded cardboard boxes, ready to pack up Pa's stuff.

Jack wolfed down forkfuls of rice and cheng dao from a gravy of ground beef and bits of fried-egg yellow that clung to the side of the splayed takeout container. He scanned Pa's apartment and took inventory more with his heart than with his eyes.

When he was full he went to the black knapsack and took out one of the disposable InstaFlash cameras. He set the black gourdshaped bottle down on Pa's table, thumbed open the cap and poured a big splash into a beer glass and took a swallow. The maotai was 150-proof rice liquor, more fiery than the Johnny Black he was used to, and left a bitter aftertaste following the scorch down his throat. Damn, he cursed on an incendiary breath, screwing his eyes tight. Moving about the dim apartment, he flashed off the thirty-six shots of the throwaway.

He took another swallow so he could begin to forget the way things looked.

Cans and bottles he placed together, along with dried goods and herbal medicines, in a box for the Old Age Center, to go along with the television, the kitchen appliances.

Pa's old clothes lay neatly stacked on his bed, bound for the Salvation Army instead of the Senior Citizens, since none of the old Chinamen would wear the clothes of the deceased.

The furniture, books, and household artifacts would be split between the Women's Shelter, and the Chinatown History Project.

He poured another splash.

In the last box he placed the things he needed to keep: citizenship papers, a bank account held in trust under his name containing five thousand dollars. A steamship ticket forty years old, Ma's passage to America. A copy of his own birth certificate, St. Vincent's Hospital, 1965.

Behind the dusty kwan kung, God of War figurine, with the urn of burnt-out incense, he found two more photographs, so evenly layered with dust that he knew they hadn't been touched in many years. In one he wore a crewcut and a paratrooper's uniform, no smile on his face. The other was a graduation picture taken at the Police Academy, a blue peaked cap over his eyes.

He stared at the photos, and ran his tongue but could not wet the dryness from his lips.

"Chaai lo ah?Now you're a cop? "Pa had said through teeth clenched in derision. "First it was the army, Bong bing, enlisting. You thought they would accept you? Die for a country that hates you?"

Jack had stood silent, had heard the argument before it reached his ears.

"Chinese don't become policemen. They're worse than the crooks. Everyone knows they take money. Nei cheega, you're crazy, you have lost your jook-sing-American born-mind. I didn't raise you to be a kai dai-punk idiot so they could use you against your own people."

He became a cop anyway, a ticket out of Chinatown.

And they did use me against my own people, but only against the bad ones, and I never took any money. Words he'd never found the chance to say to Pa.

Jack dropped the photographs into the box, the rice liquor working heavy on his eyelids. He stacked the boxes in the middle of the room, returned to the gourd bottle.

Cops didn't get paid for the blazing shootouts and deathdefying car chases that were commonplace on TV. By and large, the average cop clocked in his years and put in for a pension, never having fired a round, his service piece never clearing its holster.

Cops were paid to sop up images of body bags and toe tags, to record the horrific ugliness of butchered corpses and grisly executions, to clean up the bloody mess daily, like a sponge, so that the suits and the white collars wouldn't have to sully their psyches, or get their fingernails dirty.

Cops had to look for justice in quiet and painstaking investigations after the fact, and more often than not, they carne up empty.

There was a morgue of unsolved cases larger than the public library.

He did four cop years the hard way, plainclothes duty in the South Bronx, then Harlem, East New York, and Sunset Park, before he returned to the Chinatown stationhouse. Now he wasn't sure Detective One was in his future, and making sergeant even less likely. Plus he'd seen enough dead and brutalized bodies to start wondering if being a cop was the right answer. Maybe there were other possibilities in life, short as it is. Or else, he could hang in there and wind up eating the gun. Did he make a difference?The way things happened in Chinatown, he didn't feel like he did. Always a lot of questions that didn't come up with answers.

The mao-tai flamed down his throat.

There were scattered items on the card table Pa used as a desk. A Hong Kong ashtray. There was a small kwan kung statuette next to a framed, faded color photograph of a threesome: Pa and Ma much younger, and he, Jack the baby, in the middle. They were in a park somewhere, wearing summer clothes.

Grandpa had been a laundryman, but he managed to serve in World War II, and was able to bring his China son, Pa, then eleven, to America through the War Brides Act.

Grandma had chosen to return to China.

The rest was foggy.

Two decades later, Ma would be dead, buried in the village of her sisters, in the south of China, where she'd gone to visit but had contracted cholera and died. Pa had been stunned. He took it as a sign, tried to raise the boy himself.

Jack remembered grammar school. They had Parent-Teacher Days but Pa always worked, never attended. The other kids called Jack gzuoo yee, orphan.

Jack capped the gourd, went over to the bed. Granpa went home to 1 oishan. Pa got the Laundry. Ma died.

And like most of his Chinamen brethren, Pa never believed in life insurance. "Dai ga lai see," he'd say. "Don't ask for bad luck." He'd had no Social Security, no nest egg. Money never figured in the sum of his life.

Yu gor, brother Yu, the laundrymen had called Pa; he had the biggest heart, big with the giving of his all. Until the giving ran out, when it stopped beating one sudden dark morning, and the old sojourner's wandering was abruptly canceled, betrayed by the heart he'd given of so generously. Not to burden his son, he'd left six thousand in cash; a grimy stack of hundred-dollar bills in a safe-deposit box at the Bank of China. It paid for the prearranged funeral expenses, allowed him to depart with face and leave no shame for his son.

For that son, there was a hundred-dollar savings bond, and a note on folded white paper which contained his final message. When Jack had Pa's note translated, it read: I have seen that long shadow behind me, that shadow of our many ancestors. You, my son, are part of that unseen shadow that precedes me, the shadow of my descendants. There is no grandchild, no great-grandchild that I can see. That shadow ends with you. Yet you have the responsibility to make that shadow as long as the one behind me, though I may not live to see it. Remember where you came from. Know who you are. Know where you are going.

This, thoughtJack, from a man who believed only in the struggle of the laundrymen, who fought for his kindred brothers, workingmen all, slaves to the eight-pound steam iron.

The tragedy of the laundrymen, recalled Jack. Could they have known where they were going? Hemmed in by racism? Made unnecessary by the age of machines? He had played his fingers over the crispness of the savings bond, speechless in the silence of the private room in the basement of the bank where he'd opened his father's safety deposit box, the silence of things left unfinished, feelings left unspoken. Now it was too late. The bad feelings between father and son were left unresolved. Pa, dying alone. At the end, had there been forgiveness or recrimination?

Jack would never know, but justwanted to say once what in life he'd been too angry and stubborn to admit. I did love you, Father, after all.

The memories ached inside him, undiminished by alcohol. He checked his watch against the darkness outside Pa's window, and remembered Billy, and the midnight meet at Grandpa's.

The Golden Star Bar and Grill, known locally as Grandpa's, was a wide basement window three steps down from the street with a video game by the front and a pool table in the back. The bar was a long wraparound oval under shadowy blue light, which ran along the perimeter of the ceiling, obscuring a mixed-bag clientele colored more Lower Eastside than Chinatown. A few Chinese. White. Puerto Rican. Black.

Jack set up a nine-ball rack snugly and tossed the wooden triangle under the pool table. It was eleven p.m., Wilson Pickett doing "Midnight Hour" on the jukebox. Jack hit on a beer, then stroked the stick back and out in a fluid, piston motion, until it felt right, then slammed the tip high on the cue ball, blasting it toward the triangle-shaped cluster of nine balls.

The cluster broke with a sharp crack, scattering the balls, the white cue ball following hard through them. Jack studied the layout of balls. Billy had said midnight so there was time to chase a couple of racks around the green-felt table.

He knew he wasn't good enough to run nine balls unless the rack opened up exactly the right way, keeping the shots simple for him. Rarely happened. Divide and conquer, he was thinking, Sun Tsu. Split the rack. Try hard to run four or five balls, then repeat, a second run of four or five.

Nothing had gone down, the colored balls settling across the middle of the table. The one, two, three, he could make those. The four and five split out toward the end pockets, he'd have to work for those. He scraped the blue chalk cube across the tip of his stick and sighted the two, then drew back on the one, watched it drop as the white ball rolled behind the two. Straight shot, side pocket, followed by the three. He hit the beer, chalked again, scanned the place for Billy. Left-side English on the three spun the cue ball off the side rail toward the far end. Four ball, five, at the end of the table. He drew low and hard. The four went down with a plop, the cue ball skidding toward the other end, positioning off to the right. A cut shot, tight and thin.

He missed the five, took a long swallow of beer. Didn't see Billy. He followed through the rest of the rack until the nine ball dropped, and Billy walked into the bar.