Island of Divine Music (18 page)

May was half Asian and half French, and he wasn’t even sure how you spelled her name, but it was pronounced Gway May, and she was about thirty-five and had three kids. He met her at the pharmacy where she sold mostly penicillin to GIs with the clap, and they started sleeping together soon after, and he started proposing marriage days after that. Almond eyes and freckles, auburn hair, and a nose somewhere between the steeples along the Loire and the round huts along the Mekong, and all they could do was make love and hazard words for the things around them in French and English and Vietnamese. He would spend six months out in hell and then a month in her fishy apartment among the kids and the grouchy grandmother, naming things as if they were newly formed on the earth, and clinging as if their bodies might fly away in the night. From what he gathered she’d overdosed on barbiturates and rum about three days before his return from a tour. Always sad, the toothless grandmother told him, Gway May always sad.

Heroin had seemed the only honest thing since. How could he explain? There was no logic about it. Heroin made him aware of
something which had to do with
being,
which had something to do with May still
being.
Whenever Paulie tried to put it into words people shook their heads or, if they were stoned, nodded stupidly without understanding, and he knew he sounded just as stupid talking about it. Methadone made him feel permanently stupid and spaced out and kind of mellow, and it kept him from shooting up because the government knew and he knew that if he shot enough smack to get off now he’d kill himself. Methadone kept him out of the junk market, and only combined with a couple of joints and a quart of pale ale did it come close to good.

Once a day Paulie stood in line for a cup of orange juice with his narcotic in it. They always gave him a donut and coffee, too. Once a month he stood in line for money from the government which required some blood work and proof of his daily orange juice, as well as a pep talk about how a slowly decreasing dosage would make him clean and ready for work. He always tried to picture himself working, maybe selling tickets at a porno theater, something that took no brains or physical stamina. Paulie had been a talented athlete in high school, but now it took a singular effort to walk to the county office, especially after a couple of joints or a quart of Rainier. He had to climb two hills to get there, and sometimes on the way back he’d buy lunch at this noodle house in Chinatown and stretch out with a quart afterward in that Chinese park where the old men played mah-jongg and the pigeons landed on his paper bag or his foot, and he’d get the best sleep of the month, even if a couple of pigeons pecked and shat on him, right there in the park.

He was thinking about the girl behind the counter, the way her kneecaps looked so flat and small when she knelt to get something, when he fell asleep in the park in Chinatown. In the dream she reached across the counter to touch his cheek, and soon they were kissing. Full of curried noodle soup and beer and Uncle Sam’s controlled opiate, Paulie drifted under this girl’s dress until a soft hiccupping came to his ear. Somebody was right next to him, practically on top of him. It took Paulie a while to acknowledge this because part of his mind felt too good to let go of the dream while another part was accustomed to the vigilance of war. A face was hiccupping an inch from Paulie’s ear, and a hand was in Paulie’s front pocket, pressed right against his penis. Moving, in fact. Paulie cleared his throat, and the hand stopped moving.

Paulster, you let me explain ’fore you kill me?
Hiccup.

It was Roger the Lodger, that weird little speed freak who panhandled and stole and begged for a place to crash free in every room in the hotel, including Paulie’s. Paulie was so body-heavy tired he couldn’t move. Get your hand off my dick, Roger, he managed to say.

It’s stuck, man.

Stuck?

Promise you won’t kill me.

Promise. Stuck?

I thought your thing was the bankroll.

What?

I thought your thing was money, you understand what I’m sayin’? Then you roll on your belly and I got stuck.

Roger was a small, wild-haired, white gnome of indeterminate
age who sometimes sounded like a streetwise black kid from Hunter’s Point and other times sounded like Grandpappy Amos from
The Real McCoys.
I’m sorry, Paulster, I didn’t plan to rob you, I come to warn you, man. He hiccupped again. Roll over, man, these Chinamen lookin’ at us like we really strange.

We are really strange, Paulie said. His body was so tired he didn’t know if he was able to roll over yet. His legs felt like wooden posts attached to a concrete torso, at the nexus of which throbbed one piece of flesh with Roger’s hand under it. His beard was damp from his own drool. Were you jacking me off, Lodger?

Oh, man.
Hiccup.
I kind of, I don’t know. Thinkin’ if I help you make it to the mountaintop, then when you step over into the promised land there be enough room to get my hand out, you understand?
Hiccup.
Not my preference for the entire situation, but I was tryin’ to make the best of a bad deal. Hey, I’m still stuck, you got to move.

Paulie managed to turn his pelvis enough to free Roger’s hand. What’s this bullshit about warning me?

There’s some mafia out to get you, and I swear to God, on my mother’s Bible, man, that is the God’s fucking truth.

You didn’t come to rob me because it’s the day I get a check from Uncle?

You think I pay attention on your schedule with Uncle Sam? Roger shook his little hand like a rag at the end of his arm and massaged his elbow with the other. I come to warn you, man, I reckon because I care for you. Then when I find you I thought maybe to seize an opportunity, you understand what I’m sayin’, maybe a dollar
or two, but you gonna thank me you didn’t walk in on those bad motherfuckers. You owe them some money or something?

Paulie thought about this as he watched Roger pace back and forth and shake his sore hand like a flag of surrender in front of the dignified older men who sat holding tile dominoes at the little tables. Did he still owe money to that guy, Lenny, who’d sold him a few lids of dope last winter? Lenny had a scar like a shiny eraser mark across his nose and cheek where some goons had poured acid as a kind of late-payment fee. Had Lenny fingered him for some reason?

I was you, Roger said, still massaging his arm, I’d keep clear that hotel. Hey, Paulster, could you loan me a couple of bucks? Where you keep it, in your boots?

T
he third time that day the Cadillac parked in front of the hotel the Lodger saw them and nearly peed his pants running up the stairs to warn Paulie. He found him in bed with Janey. It was late afternoon, and the fog had come and gone, letting jagged lines of light fall across the empty bottles and roach-filled ashtrays from a broken Venetian blind. Roger stared at the obese woman’s exposed breast, which was larger than his head and had a stripe of light crossing its nipple, and decided to touch it by way of shaking her awake. Janey sighed. Roger hesitated. Maybe those old Cosa Nostras are looking for somebody else, he thought as he squeezed Janey like a rugby ball, but she smacked his hand and started cussing. Paulie snorted, lifted his head, and slept on, and Roger gasped about the mafia
while Janey cussed him. Rapid footfalls, jingling pocket change, and a few whistled notes of Barbra Streisand echoed from the stairway. A strange harmony, two men whistling contrapuntally in the sonorous stairwell:
People, people who need people, are the luckiest people in the world.
Both Janey and Roger fled, the obese woman wriggling into her kimono as she made her way down the hall, but Paulie merely lifted his head again and fell back into a stupor until his uncles dragged him out of bed.

T
he brothers ate breakfast with their little brother and discussed the business and how Paulie was doing under Walker’s supervision. Joe and Paulie hadn’t spoken much since the dishonorable discharge, and although Joe had made several efforts, including a couple of lunches with his son during the work week, he couldn’t connect with the boy’s negativity, he said. He and Sinclair both seemed like the most negative people at their youthful age that Joe could imagine, always angry and sloppy and shaggy, never making eye contact, smelling of smoke and sweat and sour beer. Lu said Paulie was making progress, putting on some muscle again, and for that Joe was grateful.

Paulie discovered another honest thing that week of cold turkey, besides his own poor hygiene and withdrawal symptoms, and it was Johnny Sinclair’s anger, his pure hatred of white people. He didn’t know about all that Black Muslim, Black Power revolution crap and the other political things the guy said, but the hatred was something Paulie could recognize. They were shoveling gravel onto
a conveyor belt in a concrete hole somewhere south of hell or Fruit-vale while the old guy, Walker, threw load after load into the hopper with a tractor of some kind. It was maybe 95 in the shade. Paulie’s strength was slowly coming back to his arms after a blur of days of staggering and vomiting and collapsing with brooms and shovels in his hands and getting picked up and handed a canteen by his uncles. He and Sinclair would move their bodies vigorously for a little while, especially the first few days when Lu and Ciso were there, as if the kid were competing with him, then drop back and have a beer in some half-hidden spot. They never spoke about it, except to compare brands and prices, and the old guy didn’t say anything because he kept a flask of brandy on him all day and worked in stony silence between sips, sometimes finishing two fifths by the end of the day. Paulie was outconsumed by the kid, but he added a couple of joints into the mix, which Sinclair only accepted a few puffs from after the fifth day. The methadone addiction ran its course.

In the mornings Sinclair and Paulie hefted the beer-filled cooler into the back of the pickup, where Paulie would ride with his head leaning against the lid to keep it from blowing off even as the morning joint started raising the lid of his skull. He knew that Sinclair couldn’t abide sitting in the cab next to a white guy like himself, and their tacit agreement to ride in separate quarters made Paulie smile for some reason. Even when the young man got hot and started talking like he might need to kick Paulie’s white ass or line up all the white people in the Bay Area and shoot them if he didn’t move out of the way or something, it made him grin. Go ahead, Paulie said finally, kick my ass, Panther Man.

You think I won’t? Sinclair asked him. He was drunk, swaying with his chest puffed out.

Right. I think you won’t.

You think I’m scared of your old Vietnam baby-killer bullshit?

I think we’re both fucked up and in our own movies, Paulie said. This was an idea he frequently called to mind about people’s behavior, overheard at some bar in the city. And your movie is this thing about being a black revolutionary, and my movie . . . Paulie stopped talking and stared at his beer can. His movie had to do with being the only man who could rescue this beautiful woman with three little kids in a dirty apartment in Saigon. His movie was about healing her sadness, taking her distant gaze and the mystery of her other worlds, that blend of French confection and Asian serenity, that attraction he’d always had for older women who knew more life than he, and letting her beauty and the tenderness of her loving heal his horror-filled mind. Bringing her home to the States, to a safe and quiet house in the country, to a life in which they would learn new languages to speak and he could be her protector and lover. He guessed that was his movie, but he didn’t explain it to Sinclair.

The beer can flew out of his hand, smacked into a pile of lumber by Sinclair’s hard hat. The boy’s hands were raised in fists. Paulie dipped into the martial-arts stance he’d learned in basic. You shouldn’t fly off the handle like that, he said.

Fuck your white devil baby-killer ass, Sinclair said. He moved his feet quickly, aping Muhammad Ali, but he stumbled on a chunk of Sheetrock and fell. Jimmy Walker rushed over and helped the
boy up, then slapped him, hard, in the face. For a few seconds the normally stoical older man yelled in his nephew’s face while Paulie stood in his karate stance, watching. The boy had tears in his eyes when he resumed work.

T
he anniversary of Min’s death found Lu moping and drinking Scotch and getting sick and breaking his bedroom wall with a fist and patching it up with Spackle and walking most of one night and sleeping most of the next day. He stopped by his eighty-six-year-old mother’s place, and the frail old woman told him to stop his moping. Enough of the sad-sack look, Rosari said. No more crying in your beer.

When he got back to his routine he learned that Ciso had bought a boat from Olivera, a boxy-looking red thing with an outboard motor and a shark decal on the hull. Tipped into the grass like some prehistoric herbivore, it reclined on a trailer out in Ciso’s yard next to the bathtub virgin with the Christmas lights.

The three Verbicaro brothers played nine holes before work that morning. Lu smacked two terrific tee shots but skunked all the greens. This left him with a pain in his stomach. Joe hit straight and beautifully throughout, and Ciso was out in the rough as often as the fairway, but he sank one chip shot which ricocheted off a tree and landed in the cup.

Upon their arrival at work Lu noticed Olivera’s door hanging slightly ajar and the glowing tip of a cigar showing in the shadows within. Olivera waved them over. His hanky was on his neck, mopping
the sweat. In the dark warehouse Lu could see dozens of steel barrels. Is this it? Lu whispered. Is this our stuff?

No, no, no, this is some other shit. We need to move this pronto, the little guy said. Think you could get the team together? Strictly on the QT?

At day’s end Walker’s speech was slurred, his movements slow and deliberate. He was hosing cement dust off his truck when the Cadillac pulled up. Paulie watched as the older man leaned up to the passenger door to listen to Uncle Lu. He caught his uncle’s eye and came up to get a hug through the window. You boys listen to Mr. Walker here, Lu said. He’s got a deal for you.