Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail! (17 page)

Taken totally off-guard and by surprise, Boxer did something incredibly stupid: He lunged for Eric and took the gun from him, checking to see if the damn thing was loaded. It was. “Where the hell did you get a gun!”

“On Fort Street.”

Of course he did, Boxer thought. Illegal any-and-everything could be had on Fort Street. He examined the gun, the serial number filed off. He wiped the weapon and the shells, reloaded it. “You're lucky you didn't kill yourself. You know nothing about guns, Eric.”

“I'm already dead, Charlie. The only thing left alive inside of me is the desire to make her pay for betraying us. Give me the gun. I'll kill her, then I'll call the cops and surrender. No trial, just like before, and back to jail and the life I've come to know.” He raised his fist in the Black Power salute. “All power to the people!”

Boxer took his arm, pointed him at a chair and told him to sit down. He did. “I want you to listen to me, Eric. Please. Will you do that?” Eric looked at him and nodded. “I'm going to hide in the bathroom behind the door, which will be open so that I can hear everything. You'll talk to Tamara … Sandra … just like you'd planned, ask her whatever you want to ask her. If she admits to killing William and J.T., I'll arrest her on the spot. All right, Eric?”

“I'd like some more chicken, Charlie, if I may.”

“That's fine, Eric,” Boxer said, thinking it would look more natural if he were sitting at the table eating when Tamara arrived, and he fixed him a plate and watched him eat as if he had not just eaten enough food for three people half an hour ago, wondering what he'd do with this man after Tamara, for he clearly could not and should not be left to his own devices. He didn't stop eating when the knock sounded at the door and Boxer, heading for the bathroom, he had to motion to Eric to open the door.

Boxer heard the door open. He was glad he couldn't see Tamara. Feeling her presence was sufficient; it was even stronger now than when she was a young woman. And her tone of voice was just as disdainful.

“Well. Eric. Sorry I can't say it's good to see you. What do you want?”

“You know what I want, Tamara, otherwise you wouldn't have come.” Boxer heard Eric resume his place at the table, heard the plastic fork clicking against the plastic plate.

“I'm not going to stand here in this shit hole watching you eat rubber chicken.”

“Then tell me what I want to know and leave,” Eric said, and Boxer tensed at the tone of voice he'd used. He was provoking her. “Did you kill William and J.T. or did the pigs?”

“Which would you prefer?”

“I think it was you. I think J.T. finally convinced William that you were the Uncle Tom in the woodpile, to use J.T.'s expression. I think William had started to suspect you. I know he was getting ready to cut you loose … “

“You don't know anything!”

“Yes, I do. I heard William and J.T. talking that night. You'd gone to bed, didn't want to be bothered with us. They were talking about you … “

“You could hear through walls, Eric?”

“They were outside smoking. You wouldn't let them smoke in the house. They didn't trust you … oh, I should've guessed! A pistol in your pocket! You gonna shoot me now? Who're you gonna plant the gun on this time?”

“I'll find somebody” she snapped.

“How about on me, Tamara?” Boxer emerged from the bathroom holding Eric's .38 on her and he was glad he was because the look on her face was murderous. “Put the gun down,” he said.

She stared at him then laughed. “Well if it isn't little Charlie Gordon all grown up.”

“Put the gun down, Tamara.”

“Or what?”

He pulled back the hammer and she flinched. He watched her eyes. They flashed. William had been right about that: Her eyes really did do that. And she really was a gorgeous woman. Still. Her expertly styled hair was cut short and dyed some kind of bronze that perfectly complemented her bronze skin. She seemed not to have gained very much weight in forty years, and she was stylishly if not quite expensively dressed, the charcoal gray suit and white blouse with pearls at the neck visible under the boxy black coat with the deep pockets spoke: Solidly, comfortably middle class. She looked like a university professor. She probably was a mother, perhaps a grandmother now. He wouldn't have recognized her if he'd passed her on the street—and he doubted that he ever would have, not in his line of work. Too, he'd steered clear of the University.

Eric read his thoughts. “You married, Tam? Or should I call you Sandy? Bet you married a white dude and live in The Heights, far, far away from Coontown.”

She whirled away from Boxer and aimed at Eric. Boxer raised the pillow from the nearby bed in his left hand, jamming the .38's muzzle into it and fired rapidly three times. Tamara/Sandra dropped to the floor like all the bones in her body had melted. Eric looked down at her and sagged in his chair as if something had happened to the bones in his body, too.

“That's what she gets for killing them,” Eric said.

Boxer wasn't so sure. “Eric, get all your stuff and get out of here. Come on! Do it!”

“And go where, Charlie? I was going to live here for a while.”

He thought for a moment. “Walk over to the bus station and take a taxi to the Black Jack diner on Central Avenue.” He fished some bills out of his pocket and gave them to Eric. “The taxi driver will know where it is. I'll meet you there as soon as I can.”

Eric packed his belongings. It took about half a minute. He looked longingly at the left over chicken. “This Black Jack diner. Is the food good?”

“Some of the best,” Boxer assured him

“Can I eat, Charlie?”

“As much as you want, Eric.”

He looked at Boxer without crazy eyes. “The Army. Vietnam. Why, Charlie?”

“I'd been expelled from school. What else was there?”

The weary revolutionary walked out of the door, shoulders hunched up around his ears. Then he stopped, straightened up and lifted his right hand in a fist. “All power to the people.”

“Right on,” Boxer replied softly and closed the door. He had a big mess to clean up in a very short time. Everything he'd brought into the room, including the chicken bones and empty cartons, he stuffed into the intact pillow case. He got a towel from the bathroom and wiped every surface in the room, everything that he or Eric could have touched. He wiped the .38 again and dropped it beside the late Tamara Knowles, AKA Dr. Sandra Gullatti. She still held the weapon she'd brought with her and Boxer expected that it, like the one she planted on Eric all those years ago, had crimes on it. This time, though, it would point back at her. He looked for a purse, realized that she hadn't brought one with her, and knew then that she'd killed J.T. and William. Because she'd come here to kill Eric.

He grabbed the stuffed pillow case, turned off the lights, and gave one last check of the room. The television was on. He hadn't noticed before. The sound was muted and the picture was as grubby as the room. He looked for a remote. There wasn't one so he used his elbow to shut it off. “The revolution will not be televised,” he said, and left the room.

Kenneth Wishnia

Hitler celebrated his forty-seventh birthday the other day with a triumphal procession through the streets of Berlin, and he couldn't wait to unwrap his shiny new presents, mainly field-ready motorized units and heavy artillery. Then in an elaborate state ceremony, Air Force Minister Goering anointed him with the imperial title of
Oberste Kriegsherr.
The starstruck reporter for the
New York Times
couldn't understand why the Führer would accept the title of Supreme Warlord, given his repeated claims that he is thoroughly devoted to working for peace, but none of us had any trouble figuring it out.

“You believe that
mishegas?
Adolph frigging Hitler claims he's a peace-loving Socialist, and they just repeat it without question when anyone who's read a newspaper in the last three years can see that he wants to be the next Kaiser,” says Benny, the rising steam forming a gauzy veil around his words.

“Oyb nisht erger,”
I say, smoothing out a cluster of pleats in a blue chiffon dress. If not worse.

We have plenty of so-called Socialists right here in New York who support Wall Street's own brand of imperialism, including the head of our union, but there's no point in mentioning that—it would just set Benny off on another one of his rants, and what good would that do? Even with the shop windows open, it's already hot enough by the pressers' stations to curl the wallpaper.

The business agent came by a couple of hours ago, fussing over the new styles and feeling each piece of material with his grubby fingers, before settling on a lousy $2.75 per piece for a brand new tropic print silk evening dress with a double cut-out strap back that's going to retail for $19.95 at Simon's on Fifth Avenue. I figure that after the cutter, the operator, and the finisher are done with it, my share works out to about forty-five cents, which means it will take a couple of hours of heavy-duty steam pressing to pay for just one of my son Aaron's weekly violin lessons. And our second child is due in about four weeks.

A pair of thick rubber hoses dangle from the overhead rod like a couple of sweaty jitterbuggers shimmying down to supply the irons with steam. The 150-gallon boiler is swaddled with thick layers of insulation, but it still radiates enough heat to make a plain cotton undershirt feel like you're wearing a penitent's hair shirt, and I have to work right next to it grinding out piece after piece because that's how we get paid. None of us are paid by the week, except for the almighty cutters, so Benny stands across from me as we drag the big, heavy irons across the delicate chiffons, crepes, and organdies, smoothing out the wrinkles and getting the dresses ready for shipping.

Summer's almost here and the fabric is getting lighter and harder to work with. Slim waists are in this season, with big poofy shoulders and sleeves echoing the leg-o'mutton styles of the Gilded Age. I think of my own dear wife, who may not be as sleek as this year's models, but unlike them, she's built to last. And I ask Benny how many more dresses he thinks we have to press before we can retire or drop dead from heat exhaustion, whichever comes first.

Abe Weinstein looks up from the buttons he's sewing onto a white silk dress with big black polka dots and a
very
thin waist. “Just hang on another dozen years or so, Reb Mordkhe,” he says over the clamor of the Singer machines.

Abe is the only one in the shop who uses my full name, Mordecai. Everyone else calls me Morty. Morty Levy.

“For it is written that the Levites shall retire at age fifty.”

“Where is it written?” says Morris Gutbeder, glancing up from his machine. “I didn't see it in the Morning
Freiheit.”

“Maybe it was in the
Forverts,”
says Benny, but Gutbeder doesn't take the bait.

Abe lets the thread go slack. “The Midrash says that when the Israelites were wandering in the wilderness of Sinai, only the tribe of Levi did not debase themselves by worshiping the Golden Calf.”

“No wonder they all became Communists,” Benny says, winking at me.

Abe was a respected scholar back in the old country. A real
talmed-khokhem.
He's got a full beard and everything that goes with it. Now he's a finisher, trimming cuffs and seams and doing a little needlework as needed, and occasionally sharing traditional wisdom amid the industrial activity like a character from a Sholem Aleichem tale who's fallen into our world and can't find his way back to the
shtetl.
Especially with that beard. I've been shaving since I was sixteen.

“Enough of your fairy tales,” says Gutbeder. “Where's Linkel?”

“He'll be here,” says Grossman, without missing a stitch.

Gutbeder is a big bear of a man and a war vet who looks as out of place handling silk and lace as a Cossack horseman taking the Seventh Avenue Local.

His pal Ruben Grossman served in the Soviet Navy during the Revolution. He was a Russian Jew, I was Polish Jew, and our respective leaders tried to convince us that we two Jews should be shooting at each other. Good thing we saw it differently.

Benny gives the tropic print dress another blast of steam and a once-over as I pick up the pleated chiffon dress and carry it over to the rack that's headed for Oppenheim Collins on West Thirty-Fourth Street. Any excuse to stretch my legs, which always get stiff when I have to stand for a few hours, especially my left knee, a legacy from the war. Not the Great War. I was too young for that. The war Poland declared on Russia in 1919. A little advice to all would-be conquerors: It is
never
a good idea to invade Russia. You will get your
tukheses
handed to you.

Gutbeder and Grossman keep checking the clock like nervous fathers killing time outside the delivery room. But the piece work continues.

I take my time hanging the dress, which gives me a moment to look out the grimy window that some joker propped open with a baseball bat and check out the traffic on Broadway, eight floors below. The same happy bustle as always. No continuous stream of red pouring spontaneously into the streets and threatening to overrun the banks, as some of my
khaveyrim
have predicted every year since Moses led the Israelites out of slavery.

I return to the pressers' station just as Moishe Kaufman bellies up in a sweat-stained undershirt with an oily black cigar clamped between his teeth and shoves the bottom half of a navy blue two-piece in front of me.

“Gotta do the sheams on thish one,” he says around the cigar.

This is the part of the job I hate. Now I have to turn the skirt inside out and flatten all the seams so he can keep working on it. All that stitched linen has to have a crisp, clean look when it's done, but the time-consuming task of underpressing just adds to my workload without increasing my piece count. And in this style, the finished piece retails for the bargain price of $6.95 at Saks, so you can imagine what my share of it will be.