Last Respects (22 page)

Only Rubens could have done them justice. I refer, of course, to Itzick Rubens, the house painter on Avenue C, who used brushes ten inches wide. Or maybe the ministers of Catherine the Great, who were accustomed to partitioning things like Poland. What I am getting at is that until that night on the fire escape, outside the Zabriskie sisters’ bedroom, the naked women of whom I had seen parts had not been small.

What I saw now turned my knees to Jell-O. What it did to my mind I still don’t know. All I remember is a wild sort of churning. As though I were being given the third degree. Questions hurled at me from all directions. Answers flung back at me in the form of flashed snapshots. Like arrows whamming into the huddled nest of covered wagons behind which the ambushed forty-niners were trying to hold off the encircling Indians.

First question. What were three naked women doing in that bedroom? Up like a lantern slide, first fragmentary but graphic reply. Oh, no! Another shot. Oh, yes! Jesus Christ, it’s not possible. Take another look, Benny. I did. Not easy to do because there was a lot of movement, but I managed. Jesus Christ again. That’s what they were doing, all right. But to whom? Keep watching, kid. What was that? A naked man? No, only part of him. What part? Hard to tell. More movement. A face appeared somewhere in the middle of the three Zabriskie sisters. Could it be? Of course it was. But what about the rest of Abe Lebenbaum? I’d never seen my boss except in his blue denim shirt and his sharkskin pants. The rest of Abe now came into view. Incredible. That’s all those pants concealed? Abe, what have you done to yourself? Wait, there were two of them. Two men, I mean. This one seemed to emerge from under the bed. He moved to the closet near the door. When he turned, and I saw what he had in his hand, my mind came clear. The dirty rotten bastard was holding one of the two bottles of Old Southwick I had paid Pauline Zabriskie a quarter to hide for me.

“Put that down!” I screamed.

The scream was inside my head. I couldn’t let those wrestlers know I was there. I also had to stop them from drinking my Old Southwick. How? The scout motto came to my assistance :
Be Prepared!
I was sorry Mr. O’Hare couldn’t see me as I crawled to the wagon and worked the hasp loose. I had removed and placed in the stone cave on the steps down to Old Man Tzoddick’s cellar the Morse signal flags, the iron cooking grill, the two big soup and bean pots, and the troop first-aid kit. I had not bothered with the smaller items.

Now I rummaged around under the bottles of Old Southwick I had picked up thus far. I found the piece of flint. I rummaged faster and came up with the envelope full of charred gauze. The one thing I could not find was the six-inch length of steel file. It must have dropped out while I was emptying the wagon on Old Man Tzoddick’s cellar steps.

“Jesus,” I muttered.

You can’t make fire with flint and charred gauze. You’ve got to have a piece of steel. I took a fast look through the window. Lya was coming into the bedroom carrying glasses. Or maybe she was Pauline? Or Marie? I had never been able to tell them apart on the street, or when they answered the door in their flowered kimonas. How was I going to tell them apart now? I dismissed the question from my mind. Telling the Zabriskie sisters apart was not my problem. My problem was to stop them and Abe Lebenbaum and the other man from drinking the Old Southwick I had promised my mother and Walter Sinclair I would deliver to the Shumansky wedding.

How? Come on, Benny, think. How? The metal slats of the fire escape seemed to say: What about us, you dope? I pulled a wad of charred gauze from the envelope, cupped it in my palm under one of the slats, and hacked at the iron slat with the piece of flint. Sparks flew. Unfortunately, they flew in the wrong direction. I came in closer, shifted the lump of flint to get a vertical stroke, and hacked again. The shower of sparks hit the wad of charred gauze.

I dropped the flint, cupped the gauze in both hands, raised it to my lips, and blew. I did it the way Mr. O’Hare had taught me. As though I were cooling a spoonful of soup. The tiny glow in the middle of the gauze caught and spread. I looked around desperately. I had no paper. Yes, I had. I had the envelope in which the gauze had been packed. With my teeth I tore the envelope sideways and dipped the ragged edge into the glow in the middle of the gauze. It caught. The flame started to creep up. Now I needed something that would really burn. I looked around fast. Like everybody else on East Fourth Street the Zabriskie sisters used their fire escape as an auxiliary refrigerator.

The window sill had strung out on it half a bottle of milk, two paper bags, and four tomatoes. I tore open the paper bags. One contained potatoes. The other was wrapped around a Moxie bottle with a cork in it. I sniffed. It did not contain Moxie now. It smelled like the stuff my mother poured into the empty Heinz pickle jars. It occurred to me that girls who made their livings in bed could not afford to turn their backs, or indeed anything else, on this problem.

I pulled the cork with my teeth, poured some of the benzine on the paper bag, and touched the burning gauze to the paper. The
poof
of flame that went up almost cost me my eyebrows. I took the Moxie bottle in one hand and banged it against the bedroom window. The glass shattered into the room. I shoved the blazing paper bag through the hole. The curtains caught.

“Fire!” I yelled through the hole. “Fire! Fire!”

I was unable to make out exactly what the five people in the bedroom did next. None of it, of course, bore any resemblance to what they had been doing when I caught my first glimpse of them. Now I caught a new glimpse of different parts of the Zabriskie sisters. Or so I thought, anyway. It is possible that what I saw were several parts of only one Zabriskie sister. Anyway, the parts were heaving around like a newsreel shot of lava bubbling away in the crater of a volcano. The same was true of the other man, or, as I had logged him into the date book down in the candy store, Ted Werner. About Abe Lebenbaum all I can honestly report is that I saw his face for a moment. The smoke had started to grow and billow like foaming soapsuds. Then Abe dove headfirst into the suds, moving in the general direction of the door that led to the kitchen. From then on all I remember about the Zabriskie sisters and their two customers was one great big confused screaming contest. I guess it was all that undraped flesh coming into contact with the mushrooming fire. I let them scream. I had work to do.

I started by banging the rest of the window out of the frame with the Moxie bottle. This made it possible for me not only to climb into the bedroom. It also spread the rest of the benzine across the bed in great wide squirting sprays. As a result, what happened to the room was probably not unlike what happened to Chicago when Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicked over the lantern. It was clear that I didn’t have much time.

I went through the window, circled the flaming bed, and reached the closet. On the floor, just inside the door, my foot kicked the bottle of Old Southwick that Lya—Pauline? Marie?—had been about to open when the scout motto came to my rescue. I scooped it up. The burlap wrapper was beginning to smoke but the cork had not been touched. I slapped the smoke out of the burlap by banging the bottle against my khaki breeches, and dove into the closet. My second bottle was exactly where Pauline—Marie? Lya?—had stashed it three days ago. I grabbed it, turned, and tripped. The closet door, swinging shut behind me, had caught my shoulder.

I kicked the door back and caught my foot in one of the pink wrappers the girls wore when they were not working. As I sagged, the wrapper tore with my weight. When I hit the closet wall and pushed myself up straight on my feet, I saw what was behind the wrapper: a shelf with what looked like a dozen bottles of Old Southwick.

They were not wrapped in burlap. They were just standing there, neat and naked. I looked at them, blinked, coughed away some smoke, and tried to think of the appropriate Scout Law. I couldn’t. The men who had decided that a scout was trustworthy, loyal, helpful, and so on, had clearly never contemplated the dilemma of a scout who had to meet his mother at the Lenox Assembly Rooms with a specified number of bottles of Old Southwick and was two bottles short.

I didn’t have time to think it through. I grabbed two of those bottles. I belted my way out of the closet, across the bedroom, through the broken window, and out onto the fire escape. I shoved the four bottles of Old Southwick into the wagon, fastened the hasp, and started down the fire escape, dragging the wagon behind me. I made it to the yard before I heard the fire engines. Hearing them settled one thing. Back out into Avenue D meant back out into the hands of the cops. Not for Benny.

I turned and cut across the yard, through the open back door of the tenement facing Third Street. I scuttled across the ground-floor hall and made it to the sidewalk. I was halfway down Third Street, heading for Lewis, when I was struck by an assessment of my position.

I had caught up on the number of bottles of Old Southwick my mother was expecting. I had done it without using the two ten-spots Mr. Heizerick had given me in the back of the candy store. Nobody except Mr. Heizerick and I knew about those two ten-spots. Mr. Heizerick, feeding nickels into the slot machine in the back of the candy store, was undoubtedly too drunk to remember he had given me the money. Conclusion: I was not only in my mother’s good graces. I was also in possession of twenty bucks that nobody knew anything about.

Next question: Was it necessary for anybody to know about it? The answer was obvious, of course, but as I hustled around the Third Street corner, dragging the wagon into Lewis Street, it seemed only right to subject the question to the rigorous scrutiny of the Scout Law.

A scout is trustworthy? Of course. Loyal? Why not? Helpful? Certainly. Friendly? What else? Courteous? By the time I got to a scout is reverent I had also reached the Fourth Street corner. Dusk was closing in. Moral issues would have to wait. I forgot the two ten-spots in my pocket and dragged the wagon down Fourth Street into the dock area.

As usual, when night was about to come down on East Fourth Street, the dock was deserted. I moved down toward the uptown side. It was lined with barges. They had obviously arrived during the day. All were piled high with coal.

The motorboat was moored to the far side of the middle barge. No lights were showing. I eased the wagon against the edge of the dock and looked around. Nobody was in sight. I leaned down toward the barge.

“Chanah’s boy,” I called softly.

It was the password on which my mother and Walter had agreed.

“Chanah’s boy,” I called again.

The ropes creaked. The capstans groaned quietly. The river slapped against the piles. The beams moved uneasily under my feet. Not much. Maybe not at all. But the illusion of movement was very real. It made the whole night seem very unreal. As though everything I had done from the moment I left home to pick up the hike wagon in the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House was part of a dream. It had been easy enough to believe in the dream while I was racing from the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House to Old Man Tzoddick’s cellar steps, and Rabbi Goldfarb’s
cheder,
and back to our house, and down to Abe Lebenbaum’s candy store, and up to the apartment of the Zabriskie sisters, collecting the bottles of Old Southwick. But now the racing was over. It was quiet on the dock. The dream was finished. I felt awake. Awake and scared.

“Chanah’s boy!”

“Not so loud, kee-yid.”

The tall, thin figure in the black turtleneck sweater came easing gently out of the wheelhouse door on the barge directly below me.

“Sorry,” I said. “I thought nobody was here.”

Walter laughed. This was only the third time I had met him, but I realized at once that what I had remembered most clearly about him was his laugh. This puzzled me. It wasn’t exactly as though this tall young rumrunner had just done something important. All he’d done was laugh. You don’t get to be fourteen without having heard a certain amount of laughter. There was a great deal of laughter on East Fourth Street. I never thought of it until I met Walter Sinclair because until I met Walter, I see now, I’d had the wrong idea about laughter.

All my life laughter was a noise you and other people made to protect yourself. A bastard like Mr. Velvelschmidt showed up with his pig eyes and his receipt book to collect the rent, and you didn’t have it, as my mother often didn’t, so you laughed the bastard off, screaming at his remarks as though he was Ben Turpin, and if you laughed loud enough, he stopped threatening with the lawyer letters and went away, thinking maybe you were not just a stupid deadbeat trying to
goniff
him out of his twenty-three bucks, because a person who laughs at your jokes can’t be all bad, and maybe you were telling the truth about having the rent for him next week.

Walter Sinclair, however, he didn’t laugh that way. He wasn’t baring his teeth like a dog to keep you at bay so you wouldn’t take a bite out of his tail. When Walter Sinclair laughed he made a sound I’d never heard before. Certainly not on East Fourth Street. It made me feel good.

“You’re a smart boy,” Walter said. “If nobody was here, how’d the Old Jeff get herself tied up to this here baby?”

I took a stab at the kind of laughing Walter did. It didn’t come out exactly right. After all, it was my first try. But even so, I could feel the improvement.

“What I meant,” I said, “I meant I’ve got only about ten minutes, and I don’t want to lose any time.”

“You won’t,” he said. “Not while Walter Sinclair is around. You got your bottles?”

“All eight,” I said.

“Good boy,” Walter said. “Now here comes the rest.”

He stepped back into the pilot house, came out with a big burlap-wrapped sack, and handed it up to me. “Too heavy?” he said.

“No,” I said. “I got it.”

“Lay it in nice and easy,” Walter said. “They’re packed good, but it’s five bottles.”

I put the sack into the wagon at the bottom of the box. By the time I came back to the edge of the dock Walter was holding up a second package.

“That’s ten, now,” he said. “Ten, plus the eight you collected, that’s the eighteen bottles your mama said she needs for tonight. I could get hung for these ten. I had to steal them from two deliveries. But I promised your mama I’d get them, didn’t I?”