Dancing Aztecs (9 page)

Jerry stood looking over Frank's shoulder as the list grew, trying to figure out which of those people were black and which white. But that was hard to do; blacks have all different kinds of names. Jerry himself knew a black guy out at Kennedy named Murphy.

“Thanks a lot, pal,” Frank said at the finish. “Listen, we'll have to get together soon. Have Margaret give Teresa a call, why don't you? — Okay, fine. — [Laughter] No, you won't, don't worry about it.” And he hung up.

Jerry said, “What won't he? What was that at the finish?”

“He said he hoped he wouldn't read about us in the papers.”

“I'll go along with that,” Jerry said.

Mel said, “Okay, now we have the list, what's next?”

Jerry said, “We split up, that way we can cover four of these people at the same time. Remember, those other guys are after the statue, too.”

Floyd, who almost always hung around with his brother Frank and never did anything on his own, said, “But what if one guy can't do the job? Maybe it's a place where you got to break in or something and it'll take two guys.”

“We'll help each other out,” Jerry told him. “Mel, you explain the situation to Angela; she can stay here, and if one of us has trouble he should call in. Or, as soon as one of us finds it, call in. We keep in touch all the time, and then we can help one another out if it's needed.”

Mel said, “That's nice, Jerry. Like a regular military operation.”

Floyd said, “What do we do? Just everybody grab four names they like?”

“Come on, Floyd,” Jerry said. “Let's be organized. Look at these addresses, they're all over the lot. Here's Jersey, here's Connecticut, they're every goddam place. What we'll do, we'll sort them into groups in the same general area, then we won't have to keep running all over the place. Mel, you got any road maps?”

Mel did, and in ten minutes they'd organized the members of the Open Sports Committee into four groups clustered more or less into four different geographical locations. It was Jerry's idea next to number these groups from one to four, place four numbered pieces of paper in a hat, and then each of them would draw a piece of paper to learn his assignment.

All of which worked fine, up to the point where they couldn't find a hat. Jerry's baseball cap was too small and too shallow for the task, nobody else was wearing a hat at the moment, and though Mel was sure he had a hat somewhere around the house, his extensive search for the damn thing produced only his comment when he'd come back downstairs, “Boy, that bedroom closet's a mess. We oughta straighten that up, Angela.”

“How about a pot?” Angela said. She'd been given a rundown of the scheme, with an introduction to her own role in it—“Taxi dispatcher,” she'd commented—and she was sitting on a spare chair in the dining room, smoking cigarettes and restlessly fidgeting her crossed leg.

There was something deflating about getting your assignments out of a pot—the bottom half of a double boiler, as it turned out—but Jerry decided it was worm sacrificing a little dignity to get this show on the road, so the traditional hat was dispensed with, the four hands reached into the aluminum pot, and then nobody liked what they drew.

“Harlem,” Floyd said, and either through fright or by contrast with his assignment his face had never looked whiter. “I've never been in Harlem in my life!”

“What about me?” his brother Frank demanded. “I get the South Bronx. That's
worse
than Harlem.”

“I can't do it,” Floyd said. “That's all, I just can't do it.”

“You think
you've
got troubles,” Mel said, “look at
my
list. I'm all over the place, I've got Long Island and Connecticut and New Jersey, it'll take me a month.”

Then everybody talked at once, until Jerry shut them all up by banging the pot on the dining room table—“Dents!” yelled Angela, but whether about the pot or the table she didn't say—and when the
bong-bongs
had startled everybody into silence Jerry said, “We worked out those four bunches together. Nobody complained ahead of time, so nobody should complain now.”

“I can't
go
to Harlem,” Floyd explained.

Jerry was unsympathetic. “You want to drop out? If you want, you go home now and you don't get a split, and no questions asked.”

Floyd stood there blinking, stuck between the rock and the hard place, and his older brother Frank clapped him on the back, saying, “You can do it, Floyd. Any good Irishman is worth ten niggers.”

“There's more than ten niggers in Harlem,” Floyd said.

Frank clapped him on the back again, rather forcefully, and told the others, “Don't worry about Floyd. He gets nerved up ahead of time, that's all, but when the ball's in the air he's fine.”

Which ended the fuss. Floyd's display of nerves had embarrassed the others out of their own complaints, and everybody got ready to leave. Mel kissed Angela on the ear—he'd tried for her lips, but she'd turned her head, expelling smoke—and she promised a bit irritably that she'd stay by the phone. Also, yes, she'd call Teresa and Barbara, letting them know Frank and Floyd would not be home for dinner.

Jerry called home and said, “Mom, don't count on me for dinner tonight.”

“We had some excitement,” she said. “Your father was arrested in the park.”

“Arrested! For what?”

“He set fire to his kite,” she said. “But it's all right now, he's home.”

“Good.”

“He bought a BB gun.”

“That's great,” Jerry said.

AFTER WHICH …

Floyd gave Frank the high-sign to stick around, so after Mel and Jerry both drove away the two brothers remained standing together on the sidewalk, where Frank said, “So what is it?”

“We got the short end of the stick, boy,” Floyd told him. “You know that, don't you?”

“They didn't cheat,” Frank said. “I watched them pretty close, believe me.”

“But us micks got it again,” Floyd said. “Every damn time. I'll tell you something, Frank. There's times you can get ahead of a guinea, and there may even be times you can get ahead of a sheeny, but there isn't an Irishman born that can get ahead of guineas and sheenies working together.”

“A million dollars is still a million dollars,” Frank said.

“And the short end of the stick is still the short end of the stick.”

“So what do you want to do? Give it up?”

“We'll work together,” Floyd said. Being a younger brother, and a union member, and part of a construction crew, Floyd had no experience of individual effort and no desire to gain such experience. At thirty-one he was three years younger than his brother and had deferred to Frank all his life. Frank had cushioned the harder knocks of childhood for Floyd, and was still on tap for those occasional problems of adult life that the union couldn't solve. The dependence relationship between the brothers was so long-standing that neither of them was truly aware of it. They were simply brothers, that's all, and as everybody who knew them said, they were “very close.”

But now Frank was showing unusual annoyance, saying, “Work together? How do you suppose we'll do that?”

Floyd said, “Instead of the two of us going our separate ways and getting our throats cut in different alleys, why don't we combine these lists and the both of us go to all eight places.”

“That'll take longer,” Frank objected. “Jerry's whole idea in splitting up was to get it done faster.”

“We won't get it done at all if we're lying in some alley with our throats slit open by some razor.”

Frank hesitated, and Floyd knew his brother would come around. After all, how happy could Frank be at the prospect of entering the South Bronx all alone? Pressing his advantage, Floyd said, “The two of us could be
faster
, Frank. In and out of every address that much quicker than one man working alone, looking over his shoulder all the blessed time.”

Frank continued to hesitate, frowning, thinking it over, but then abruptly he nodded. “You're right,” he said. “All right, we'll do it your way.”

A big smile creased Floyd's face. “Good man,” he said. “I knew I could count on you.”

“There's this couple in Greenwich Village on my list,” Frank said. “We'll do them first. Maybe we won't have to go uptown at all.”

ON THE OTHER HAND …

Jenny Kendall held up the Other Oscar and smiled at it; funny-looking little thing. So like Oscar to think of a memento like this. “Eddie,” she said. “I want to take it along.”

Eddie Ross looked over from the plastic storage box he was packing, and gave Jenny a quizzical grin. “That statue? You want to shlep that all over the country?”

“Yes. It'll be our good rack piece. I'll strap it to the handlebars, like Marlon Brando with that trophy in
The Wild One.”

“Fine with me,” Eddie said. “I tell you what. I'll bring mine, too.”

“You will?”

“Sure. They can stand guard over us while we sleep.”

“Oh, Eddie,” Jenny said, and put the Other Oscar on the bed in order to throw her arms around Eddie's neck and give him a giant squeeze. “That's why I love you!”

It was one of the reasons she loved him. Most of the others she didn't know about. At nineteen, she didn't know yet that minds have underground channels and obscure corners in which much of the main action takes place. It had been terribly difficult to convince her parents that she should be allowed to come away to New York City for her college education, yet it didn't seem to her that there was any connection between that struggle and the boy she'd wound up living with.

Jenny had created a situation in which she could
absolutely not
tell her parents (1) that she was no longer living in the dorm on University Place, (2) that she was sleeping with a boy, (3) that she was going to spend the summer vacation traveling all over the country with that boy on two motorcycles, or (4) that the boy was black. But the fact that her current life was an endless series of secrets kept from her parents had nothing to do with all those quarrels and scenes and struggles during her final year of high school. Not a thing.

As for Eddie, who was also nineteen, it didn't seem to him that he was a complex person, full of ambivalences on the subject of race, nor did it seem to him that Jenny exemplified those ambivalences more than anyone else in his experience. In living with him she denied the racial separation between them, while in hiding him from her parents she emphasized that separation. Eddie was aware of the contradiction, in a vague sort of way, but he knew it didn't mean anything. They were just a couple of kids having a good time, it was as simple as that.

Looking at his watch, Eddie said, “Time we got on the road, girl, if we want to make it to Rhode Island tonight.”

“Okay, lover.” She kissed him once more, on the nose, and then they rolled their sleeping bags, finished their packing, locked up the apartment for the summer, and departed.

AT THE SAME TIME …

On Manhattan's west side, on 43rd Street, the New York Public Library maintains a branch devoted to periodicals, newspapers and magazines. Students and researchers of all kinds cluster there, for it isn't true that no one wants yesterday's papers. Some sit at battered wooden tables, turning the pages of large bound volumes, but most have their heads stuck into the maws of microfilm viewers. With their right hands reaching upward to turn the noisy cranks, they watch the machine's metal floor, on which day after day of the world's history flashes by in a gray blur.

The microfilm viewer cranks are the only noise to be heard in the newspaper library, where the general atmosphere is one of timeless calm. The research being done here is surely very serious, but without urgency, and the researchers have the patience, the quiet self-control, the attention to detail usually associated with people who build ships inside bottles. They turn their viewer cranks, they pause, they make a note in the pad at their right elbow, they crank on; but all at a deliberate and reflective pace. Those reading the huge bound volumes of newspapers never flip a page briskly enough to cause a draft; they turn slowly, the page rippling like a leisurely wave over a flat sandbar.

Amid this self-contained calm, Wally Hintzlebel stood out like a black-sheep uncle at a June wedding. He had learned the use of this research tool in high school, and was currently putting his training to good but frantic use, having come here direct from the Bernsteins' bedroom window. From
The New York Times Index
he had copied down every reference to the Open Sports Committee, extending back over a period of three years, and now he was requesting as much microfilm as the librarians would let him have at one time, and was buzzing it all through the viewer with such speed that the machine was actually rocking on the table. (Several other researchers, with the frowns of elephants disturbed at their feeding, had gathered up their own materials and moved to machines farther away.) From time to time Wally would yank the viewer to a halt, would then jump it forward in tiny hops through some particular Monday or Wednesday, and would abruptly stop, stick his head into the opening of the machine, and hungrily read some four-paragraph story. (“Activist Group Disrupts Trustee Meeting,” for instance.) Occasionally one of these items would produce a name, which he would scribble at once onto the pad at his right elbow. Less often, an address would emerge and be noted. Then, that article sucked of its juices, forward the viewer would leap once more, with the crank going
urk urk urk
.

This, it must be said, was a changed Wally. The thought of the million-dollar statue had galvanized his brain as nothing before in his life. With his mom at home, and other men's wives outside, he'd always thought of himself as content, but the vision of a million dollars in gold—a million dollars in
anything
—had cut through his contentment like a shaft of sunlight through a vampire, leaving a smoking husk in its wake. He wanted that million. Never had he truly wanted anything at all, but he wanted that million. Oh, how he wanted that million.