Life and Death of a Tough Guy (12 page)

“Look how big and white the moon is! It looks different!” she exclaimed one night, and although he answered, “What’s so different about it? It’s the same old moon,” he knew that it was different because he was with her.

“When I graduate from high school next year,” she confided to him on another night as they sat in an ice cream parlor, “I’ll get a job. I can type and take shorthand.” He had glanced at her, a straw between her pink soft lips, thinking: what a dumbbell! She was full to the ears with all the junk they taught in the schools. Work hard and you’ll get ahead, save your pennies and some day you’ll be somebody. Joey Kasow knew better: the world was for sale, with cops and feds and even judges on the bargain counter.

Walking her home, he wondered where she kept her eyes. For sitting in front of the tenements with their husbands sat all the penny-savers. He remembered his mother sitting on her soapbox in the hot summer nights and how she’d carried it upstairs when it was time to go to sleep. Her special little extra-special soapbox. Oh, the dumb penny-savers.

At the corner of Twenty-Third and Eighth, he always let her go on home by herself. That was the way she wanted it. These God damn jewgirls, he’d think as if he were a bona fide Irishman himself. And dream of the night when there’d be no going home for her, when he’d be kissing her silly.

“Do you ever write to your family?” she asked him the next time they met. Always she was asking him about his God damn family. So when he lay abed in his room thinking of Sadie, sometimes he’d think of them. Her face — that Irishlooking face of hers that could look Jewish when her eyes had a sad look in them — would flip their faces into his memory: a family of faces like the related faces of cards with Sadie Madofsky the red queen of all Jewish hearts.

Did his dumb family still live on Thirty-Seventh? Was his brother Danny and sister Sarah going to school like Sadie Madofsky? The Jews loved school all right. The Jews acted like school was another kind of Holy Moses synagogue. And here he was all fouled up with a God damn jewgirl schoolgirl. “You ought to write to your family,” she had scolded him gently when he’d said he wasn’t much for writing letters. And on the bus — they were always on that God damn Fifth Avenue bus — he’d laughed and said, “I’ll write you a letter.”

“We live on the same block, Joey.”

“I’ll write you anyway. I’ll write love and kisses, how about it?”

One of these days, he promised himself, she wouldn’t pester him about his damn family. One of these days he’d have her in a bed and she’d forget about his family and her family, about her old man the Jew tailor and her dead mother and all the rest of that God damn family stuff.

Slowly, patiently, as warm May changed into hot June, his hands like the spreading green leaves in the city parks moved like shadows on her body. Retreating at her protests, moving again, touching again, always touching.

They walked along quiet Seventh Avenue, the lofts of the furriers dead in the night, the skins of mink and silver fox locked in safes, and only the unseen nightwatchmen pounding their beats inside the dark-glassed walls. “I never thought I’d be out with a girl who didn’t pet — ”

“Joey, don’t start in again — ”

“Don’t you believe in no fun? Know what? I’m goin’ call you Sweetie from now on because I love you.” It was too dark to be sure but he knew she was blushing. He slipped his arm around her waist and laughed at her half-hearted protest: “Who’ll see us? Anyway I’ll marry you one of these days, Sweetie!” laughing at his joke and waiting for her to speak, but she was silent. Only their heels sounding on the pavement, only a bum shuffled north to Times Square. It gleamed ahead of them, a lovers’ square, a lovers’ rainbow of colored lights in the pulsing and fleshly darkness.

• • •

Through the windows of the kitchen behind her father’s store, Sadie Madofsky watched the summer singing in the backyard. The windows were protected with iron bars against sneak thieves, the backyard fenced in on three sides, the row of sheds like a fourth fence. Scattered blades of grass had sprouted between the cracks of the slate slabs — and the summer sang.

She would glance up from her book or the dishes she was washing and gaze out at the faded fences painted bright with mid-morning, the washlines waving many-colored flags, the blue sky deeper than any sea. And invisible, yet real as youth, sweet as first love, the summer sang like a little golden bird.

But when she turned her head away from the windows, she felt the silent rebuke of this kitchen where she kept house for her father and brother, and studied every night during the school year. The black castiron stove that wouldn’t be used again until another winter, stared at her like a hard-working housewife; the linoleum on the floor gleamed with cleanliness; the round kitchen table with its wooden lion paws spoke of the plain bread and meat of life, while the blue-covered couch against the wall opposite the sink where her father slept at night, his Jewish newspaper perhaps on the blue-covered pillow, reminded her of the father presence.

Goodness, narrow and strict as that kitchen, moved in a straight line to the two tiny bedrooms of her brother and herself, and then down a long dark corridor to the curtain that divided the flat from the store. There, up front, in the light of the street, her father worked, bending over his steam iron or seated at his sewing machine. Her heart ached thinking of her father. At night when she was in bed she would pray silently for forgiveness: Oh God, I’m being bad, please keep me good. Please God.

But when she looked through the barred kitchen windows, the kitchen was gone, her father and brother were gone, and even the all-seeing eye of God was blinded by the golden singing in the backyard.

Had Joey tried to put his hand on her breasts as they rode on the bus through the June nights? Tried to squeeze her knees as they sat in the movies dark? Had he only two nights ago, while walking home, pulled her into a darkened doorway, hugging and kissing and pressing himself so close and tight she had felt the night changing into day, with all the people in the world watching?

Out there in the backyard the summer was singing.

Was she lying to her father? So many lies…. “Papa,” she had said last Christmas, “I want to see my friend Judy Feiner once in a while, I’ll be back early….”

Singing, singing.

Nights, she dreamed. Of running in dark woods, of drowning, of bleeding. Of a jack-in-the-box like one she had owned years ago, but when she pressed the lever, the dream jack jumped up huge and frightening with a red face and a red fool’s cap. The spiderwebs of her nightmares clung to her during the day. She had conceived the notion that her dead mother knew about Joey. And often she would go into her bedroom to the large framed photograph of her mother which hung above a little bamboo table. “Mama,” she would whisper and gaze at the face in the photograph, a solemn face despite the forced smile hastily assumed at the photographer’s command. “Mama,” the girl would whisper her lips barely moving. “I don’t want to be bad, but Joey loves me and I love Joey, Mama….”

The solemn face was pretty, dimpled in one cheek, the eyes large and bright and that little watch-the-birdy smile on its lips. It didn’t look like a dead face, and yet her mother had died in two weeks during the wartime influenza epidemic and her father and her brother and she had gone to the funeral with little camphor bags tied around their necks. “Mama,” her lips would shape the word: the holy word of childhood, the magic word against all dangers. “Mama….”

While out in the backyard the summer sang.

• • •

On the night of Sarge Killigan’s party to celebrate the speakeasy the Spotter had put Sarge in charge of, Bughead Moore decided that a certain jewboy needed a good lesson. “Sarge was gonna ask you, Bug,” Cockeye Smith’d whispered in the Bug’s ear, “but the jewboy let out a stink. Said if you’d be there he wouldn’t, so Sarge, he give in.” Still, if the Bug hadn’t gotten plastered on the night of the celebration party, maybe he would’ve let things ride.

He sat with his girl Agnes in Dinty’s speak on Forty-Third Street, his elbows on the whiskey-splashed table, his pink face in his hands, chewing on his wrongs. The cigarette smoke hung in clouds about him, the booze poured in rivers, and the Bug explored the winding whiskey trails known only to heavy drinkers in the land of Might-Have-Been. If that jewboy’d only stayed a hobo. If the Spotter’d only seen through the jewboy’s tricks. If only Joey’d got himself croaked or broke a leg. If, if….

“Needs a good lesson,” the Bug mumbled, hitting the table with the flat of his meaty hand. “Sarge, he usta be my buddy. Alla them usta be my buddy.”

The girl tried to calm him. She was a full-bodied long-legged brunette who had been passed from one beer runner to another like an umbrella — a bootlegger’s girl, living with the Bug now these five, six months. “We could go home,” she tried to tempt him, smiling.

“Naah!”

“Let’s go home,” she said anxiously.

“Sarge, he usta be my buddy. Some buddy, the louse! ‘Hey, jewboy,’ ” the Bug improvised, his voice rising. “ ‘Should I ast my ole buddy Bughead?’ ‘Naah!’ the jewboy says.”

“This Cockeye, I wouldn’t believe a word he says — ”

“Who believes that rat? But did Sarge ast me or didn’t he ast me?”

“Let’s go home, big boy.”

“Whose side you on?” the Bug shouted. The girl felt chilled although nobody at the nearby tables seemed to hear the barrelchested Bug with his voice like a megaphone. At Dinty’s somebody or other was always yelling anyway, with no listeners anywhere. At Dinty’s they fixed drinks strong enough to plug up the ears of a blind man. Dinty invented them all by himself. There was the Snorter which was mostly gin; the Three Cheers which was supposed to be real rye from Canada and maybe had an eyedropper of Canadian to every pint; the Volstead, named after the man who as Dinty explained, “Without him where’d we all be?” and which was something between a Manhattan and a can of Sterno.

“Jinxed from the minnit he showed his mug,” the Bug was mumbling again. “Gives me a box-a candy. For your mother — ”

“A box of candy?”

Old grievances and new grievances, they came alive in the Bug’s liquor glass. “I’m gonna crash that party an’ break that jewboy in half!” the Bug shouted and then laughed with pleasure, imagining himself giving the boot to Joey Kasow.

The girl stared into his happy eyes. Her head twisted as if looking for help. At the tables, downtown was rubbing elbows with uptown, mobsters and their girls near businessmen and their girls; a plainclothes dick on the Spotter’s payroll was exchanging a friendly word with the great Dinty himself, the inventor of drinks, who sometimes used to wish he could invent himself a scheme to get out of buying the Spotter’s booze. Between the tables, waiters in short black coats hustled through smoke thick enough to stuff a pillow with. There was no help out there and the girl knew it. But knocking around on bootleg row hadn’t gotten her used to hearing a man talking about killing another man.

When they cabbed over to the Hotel Drexler — Cockeye hadn’t left out a single detail about the Killigan celebration party — Bughead was no longer laughing or even talkative. He had crawled into the little black box of hate he carried in his heart.

The hotel was in a sidestreet in the Eighties near the Museum of Natural History, new when the museum had been new, in a day when the skirts of the women had swished the sidewalks. The elevator was an old-fashioned one with metal basketweave sides, the corridor up on Killigan’s floor smelled musty, but when the door of Killigan’s room opened to the Bug’s knock — “Honey don’t start anything!” Agnes had begged him again as his fist crashed on the wood — they walked straight into what could have been a honky-tonk. The phonograph was playing
Smiles
, three or four couples foxtrotting, while over at the little bar set up on the table, the Spotter’s whiskey and gin were being drunk by the Spotter’s boys and their girl friends.

“The Bug hisself!” Sarge Killigan welcomed the bruiser like a long-lost brother. The Bug elbowed him aside, plunging through the dancers toward the face that had haunted him at Dinty’s.

Agnes cried out, “Honey, don’t start anything!” and all the dancers stopped dancing, the girls like stupid dolls in their short sleeveless dresses and flesh-colored stockings rolled below their knees, the men staring for a stunned second before they rushed between the Bug and Joey. “Take it easy!” three or four voices banged. “Take it easy!”

Sarge Killigan, Mike, Lefty and Georgie had the Bug surrounded, but no one put a hand on Joey.

Joey looked at the Bug wrestling the peacemakers and he felt himself tightening, every nerve, every muscle, even his eyes in their sockets, so that staring at his enemy, the lines of sight between them seemed to become fixed in space, holding him and the Bug in a furious kind of balance that would only change when a gun was pulled. But he didn’t have his gun on him — wasn’t he following the Spotter’s advice to cache it unless he was on a job? A thousand to one the Bug did. There was gun pointing out of the Bug’s eyes. Gun pointing out of the Bug’s cursing mouth:

“Lemme at that jewboy!”

How many times’d he heard that word of hate? This night? Other nights?

“A celebration party!” Sarge Killigan was shouting indignantly, his arms wrapped about the Bug. “You start anything, you get your head broke!”

“Take it easy, Bug!” his assistants shouted, their hands on the cursing Bug, too. Like a drunk about to get the heave-ho, the Bug struggled a little before giving in. “Okay,” he said.

Joey said to the Bug. “Don’t spoil the party. Let’s bury the axe, Bug.” For a second they confronted each other, the Bug in the grip of a dozen hands, Joey standing free, a living monument that could have been called The Good Sport and the Bad Sport.

Everywhere, voices were urging the Bug. “This is a party!”

“Kiss and make up, you guys!”

The Bug scowled, “Okay, okay.” A girl in a green dress began to titter.

The Bug said. “Okay, take your dirty hands offa me — ”

“Foist, I want your gun,” Sarge Killigan said. “Nobody’s carryin’ guns at my party. Hold onto him, youse guys!” They pinned the Bug’s arms. Sarge unbuttoned the Bug’s jacket and pulled the Bug’s gun out of its holster. The Bug’s girl Agnes whispered a prayer of gratitude. Somebody put a record on the victrola and the music, happy and idiotic, reminded them all they should be dancing. As the Bug, followed by Agnes, beelined it for the bar, a blonde in a black knee-length dress danced towards Joey, humming to the sax. She pushed her round black-silked belly and black-silked breasts against him and they danced out onto the middle of the room.