Underworld (99 page)

JuJu didn't want to follow him in but he had to. Once Nick went in, JuJu had to go in too.

He'd wanted to see a person dead and Nick was going to show him. They stood in the anteroom of the funeral home near Third Avenue, where twenty or thirty men were smoking and talking.

“Maybe this is not a good idea,” JuJu said.

“Just be sure you don't laugh.”

“What am I gonna laugh?”

“Show some respect,” Nick said. “We want them to think we're family.”

Nick shoved him and they went into the viewing room. Women sat in folding chairs saying their beads and there were sofas against the walls, younger women looking strange in black, sealed away from knowing, with several small girls placed among them, grave and pale.

They went up to the casket and looked in. It was an old man with nostrils gaped wide and the hands of a carpenter or mason, copper fingers rough and notched.

“Here's your body. Soak it up.”

They knelt at the casket.

“He doesn't look that bad,” JuJu said.

“I think they plucked his eyebrows.”

“I thought it would be different,” JuJu said.

“Different how?”

“I don't know. White,” JuJu said. “The whole face chalk white.”

“They put makeup and grooming.”

“White and stiff, I thought.”

“He's not stiff, this man?”

“He could almost be asleep. If he slept in a suit.”

“So you're disappointed then.”

“I'm a little, yeah, disappointed.”

“Why don't you say it louder,” Nick said, “so they can drag us out to the street and beat us to death.”

“This was a bad idea of yours.”

“We're supposed to have an envelope,” Nick said.

“This was a bad idea. What kind of envelope?”

“If we're family,” Nick said. “A mass card or money.”

“I thought an envelope is when you get married. Not when you die.”

“An envelope is when you do anything. They're always doing envelopes.”

“This was a bad idea. I'm ready to leave.”

“Too soon. Say a prayer. Show them you're praying. Show them respect,” Nick said. “Women in black dresses. We don't show respect, they tear us apart.”

In a corner of the poolroom a guy named Stevie hawked up a wad of pearly phlegm, called an oyster, and spat it down the neck of his Coke bottle.

JuJu said, “I ask you for a slug of soda, you do this?”

“Hey. I didn't say no.”

“But you do this? You spit in it?”

“You asked for a slug. I'm saying. Take two slugs.”

Stevie cleared another oyster out of his throat and spat it into the bottle and handed the bottle to JuJu.

“But you do this? You hack up this big thing, which you think nobody in his right mind's gonna drink from a bottle that has this big thing floating in there.”

“You want a slug. Hey. Take a slug. Take whatever.”

“So you're giving me your whole soda, you're saying. Take whatever. If I'm crazy enough to drink it.”

“What's mines is yours,” Stevie said.

JuJu smiled falsely, a look with a mocking quality. Then he drank the whole thing down in one long slug. He followed with a small gassy belch and tossed the bottle back to Stevie.

Nick watched in admiration.

Later that night he took Mike the Dog out for a walk. He walked along the hospital wall and then went east through the empty streets. He stood across the street from the building where the woman lived. There was a bed in the front room, stripped of sheets, an empty bed cranked up, easy enough to see just to the right of the stoop, the curtains half drawn, a lamp lit nearby, and he stood there a while smoking.

When he got back with the dog, two men were coming down the poolroom steps. He thought he recognized one of them from the poker game and they came down the steps in a kind of rumble, making the dog back off.

Mike was alone, at the counter, doing his tally.

“Where'd you take him, to the men's room at Grand Central?”

Nick wagged a thumb at the men who'd just left.

“I know those guys?”

“I don't know. You know those guys?”

“Serious business, right?”

“I might as well tell you,” Mike said. “You'll hear about it anyway.”

“What?”

“You remember the guy who sat by the door when we ran the games?”

“Sure. Walls.”

“Walls was not here the night of the holdup.”

“I thought that was interesting.”

“A number of people did. And a number of people who were here that night thought that one of the three holdup men.”

“Wait. They wore masks, right?”

“Could have been Walls. Mask or no mask. And of course Walls has not been seen since. So you can imagine the interest being shown in his whereabouts. Not to mention two of the players are very close,” Mike said, “to the organization.”

“The organization. And now?”

“Walls has been seen.”

“Walls has been seen. They found him.”

“And he's shit out of luck. In a Puerto Rican grocery about a mile from here.”

“What's he doing in a Puerto Rican grocery?”

“Buying a green banana. Hey. How the hell do I know?”

Nick laughed. The news excited him. He found it satisfying even though he liked Walls, he admired Walls, based on the few words they'd exchanged that one time. They'd found him and killed him. He told himself to remember to get a paper first thing in the morning. It was bound to be in the papers, this kind of thing.

“He took your money too,” Nick said. “Not just the cash on the table.”

Mike stood on a chair to turn off the TV, which was running without the sound.

“I'm not looking to celebrate,” he said. “This is a thing it brings the wrong kind of attention. I have the precinct I have to keep greased so they don't close me down. The robbery was bad enough. This thing brings homicide detectives and reporters coming around.”

“How'd they do it?”

“How'd they do it. They shot him. Bang bang.”

“I know. But how? How many guys? What kind of weapons?”

Photograph of blood-streaked body with towel covering head for decency sake.

“They shoot anyone else? They get away in one car, two cars?”

“I don't know. I didn't ask.”

“He was armed, this Walls, when they shot him?”

“I don't know,” Mike said.

“They shot him in the head or what?”

“Nicky. I say all right. Go home and get some sleep.”

They went to the show downtown and walked around Times Square looking at people, all kinds, and they felt superior and dumb at the same time.

They took the el back home late at night with JuJu and Ray sitting next to each other and Nick stretched out on the long wicker seat across the aisle.

“You know, I'm thinking,” JuJu said. “We never should of gone in there. It's not right. Fool around, fool around, fool around. I say all right. But this is not a thing we should of done.”

“You're guilty,” Nick said.

“The man's laid out. Leave him alone. If he was some jerk sat on his ass all his life, be different maybe. This is a working man. The man's laid out.”

Nick assumed the position of a prepared body.

“You're guilty. Go to church and confess. You'll feel better,” he said.

Ray Lofaro had no idea what they were talking about. JuJu wouldn't tell him as a matter of principle and Nick wouldn't tell him because he didn't want to be bothered.

The train was a local and took forever.

They rode past the dark tenements of the lower Bronx, past the sleeping thousands in their beds, and Nick got up and tried to rip the wicker apart, first with his hands, which was hard to do, and then by kicking it in and using his hands again to pick apart the weaved strands.

A man at the other end of the car got up and went into the next car and Nick watched him, deciding whether this was an insult or not.

Then he kicked some more, standing back and using the heel edge of his shoe to stave in the back of the seat. He poked with both hands, peeling off strips of wicker in a series of long dry snapping sounds.

His buddies had nothing to say.

He got off one stop before their regular stop and they watched him go out the door. He walked over to the building where she lived. He stood across the street smoking, watching the building. The lamp was lit in the front room but the bed was gone now.

He knew that Mr. Bronzini's mother had died recently. His own mother telling him. And over a day or two he began to make the connection that the bed was the old woman's bed, that the apartment was Mr. Bronzini's apartment, that the woman he'd fucked in the apartment was Mr. Bronzini's wife.

He found it didn't matter much. He'd walked past the building a number of times, in daylight, and never saw her. He'd stood on the stoop once or twice, smoking, and she hadn't come out. Lately he'd been standing in the dark and watching the building, after midnight mostly, those sameshit nights, passing the time before he was ready to go to bed.

He was seventeen years and some months. He'd get drafted soon and that was probably not a bad thing to happen. His friend Allie was in uniform now, finished basic, and he was headed to Korea, where he'd fuck the best-looking women, he said, and leave sloppy seconds for Nick and the others.

He stood there smoking. He watched her building and he thought about a thousand things, sane, crazy, dumb, and he thought about the woman.

The empty lot was less than a block from the school entrance, a rambling waste with a higher and lower level, boulders, weeds and ruined walls, signs of old exploded garbage here and there, brown bags tossed from adjacent buildings, and this is where young kids had rock fights and older kids roasted sweet mickeys in the evening chill and where a kid named Skeezer ate a grasshopper live, which was a legend of many a neighborhood, the kid with grasshopper juices running down his chin, but in this case there were reliable older men who'd witnessed, and where other and darker stories were set, a man who slept in a ditch every night and the guys from the other poolroom, Major's, taking a girl into the ruins, late, a summer night, and lining up for sex, and who was the girl, and was she willing, and other stories of the lots.

It was a single expanse of land that was called the lots the way a back alley was called the yards and this is where Matty got his hand busted up in a card game called shots on knucks.

He walked in the apartment and went into his mother's bedroom, where she was doing her beadwork, and he stuck the hand in her face.

“What's this?”

“What does it look like?” he said.

“Blood.”

“Then that's what it is.”

“Then you should go and clean it.”

“Don't you want to know what happened?”

“What happened?”

“Never mind,” he said.

He sat in the living room and examined the marks and scrapes, the mudlet streaks of dried blood. He felt a self-pitying pleasure, doing this, even a fascination, an animal attachment just short of licking, but then his brother walked in the door, earlier than usual, and he tried to conceal the hand.

“What's that?”

“Nothing.”

“Show me, jerk.”

“I just need to clean it.”

“You need to put iodine on that. Let me see.”

“I don't need iodine,” he said with a soft insistence.

He extended the hand and looked away at the same time, sort of tactfully.

“He needs iodine,” Nick said to their mother.

“Is that the 7-Up man?”

“Eye-oh-dine, eye-oh-dine.”

Matty went small in his chair as his brother looked at the hand. Nick's own hands were dirty and bruised and so much bigger, five, six years bigger—a man's hands, almost, blistered on the palms and cut by broken glass.

“How'd it happen? You punched a little girl in the mouth?”

“Card game in the lots.”

“You go in the lots?”

“Just at the edge.”

“Does she know you go in the lots?”

“I don't go way in.”

“You think it's a good idea, going in there?”

“What do you think?”

“I think go in. But watch yourself. There's kids in there from all over. They don't know you're my brother.”

Nick held his hand and looked at it.

“It doesn't hurt the way it did.”

“You played shots on knucks.”

“That's right.”

“And you ended up holding some cards and the winner whacked you how many times.”

“I had a choice.”

“I remember this choice.”

“Either he gives me nine scraping shots with the edge of the deck or he gives me four scraping shots and then one killer shot with the deck held up and down.”

“Blunt end. Where he hits you square on your knuckles, full force.”

“That's right,” Matty said.

“Let me ask. How could you lose a kid's card game, a brain like you, supposedly, playing with a bunch of little pisspots?”

“They weren't so little,” Matty said.

Nick held his hand. Many times through the years Nick had bopped him on the head, a flick of the middle finger that carried slingshot force. Many times Nick had lifted him off a chair and sat himself down. Nick had held him out the window once for rubbing snot on a door edge. Many times Nick had booted him in the ass for no reason except he was passing through a room that had Matty in it.

“I think we're talking about iodine here.”

“I don't need iodine,” he whispered.

He looked at his hand in Nick's. His brother had an odor of work and heat and sharp salami, the spicy bright salami he ate on the job.

Their mother came in and looked at the hand.

She said, “Mercurochrome.”