Blood of My Brother (6 page)

“The school said you were missing,” his mother said.

“I spoke to your friend’s father,” said A.J. “We were just about to go looking for you.”

On the table in front of Jay was a dish of
spaghettini marinara,
a favorite of his, with several chunks of his father’s
bread on a plate next to it. He was hungry, but he hadn’t touched it. His parents were making him too nervous.

“What else did you see?” his father asked.

“I saw the guy on the roof.”

“The guy with the rifle?”

“Yes.”

“You saw him shooting?”

“Yes.”

“Did you see Phil get shot?”

“Yes.”

“Son of a bitch,” said A.J., softly. Jay watched his father’s eyes go flat, look inward, if that was the right way to describe it. Sadness, Jay thought. Every day for as long as Jay could remember, Phil Franco had stopped by the bakery to buy bread to bring home to his family. Jay had listened in occasionally as Phil and A.J. had spoken about grown-up things. They were friends, he thought now. My father had a friend-—and lost him. These thoughts were like small claps of thunder in his brain, marking something he would think about later, lying in bed.

“We’ll go to the funeral,” A.J. said.

“Me?” said Jay.

“Yes. When people die, they’re laid out in a funeral home—it’s called a wake—then they’re buried in a cemetery. You saw Phil die, you should see him buried.”

Silence.

Jay turned his attention to his mother, who had said little since placing Jay’s food on the table. She was looking around the small kitchen. Jay followed her gaze as it swept in a few seconds over the things that he had seen her wipe and scrub and clean every day of his life: the gas stove, the new refrigerator, the worn linoleum floor, the chipped enamel sink. He paused with her to look through the window above
the sink at the television antennas on the rooftop of the three-story tenement behind theirs, the hot summer breeze rustling her gauzy yellow curtains.

Carmela taught something called
Greek mythology
at the local junior high school, two blocks away. Occasionally Jay had watched with pride as one of her students, passing her on the street out front, would say, “Hello, Mrs. Cassio,” or “Good morning, Mrs. Cassio.” Until tonight he had thought that her air of calm authority was a permanent part of her, like her beautiful brown eyes or her wedding ring. Tonight he could see she was afraid—of the city going up in smoke, yes, of course, but of something else, too, something worse; something he would only much later identify as the prospect of poverty and loss of hope.

“I think that’s a good idea,” she said to Jay, finally, her face recomposed, reassuring him with her eyes, “You can meet Phil’s wife, and tell her how brave he was.”

Jay looked at his mom and nodded, trying to understand this thing called a
wake
, where a dead person was
laid out
, and where he was supposed to say something to Phil Franco’s wife, whom he’d never met. He couldn’t imagine any of this, but he trusted his mother implicitly and was not afraid. Years later he would come across the concept of grief counseling and recall that, in two or three sentences, his parents had given him all he would need to deal with the strange mix of exhilaration and anxiety that had been pressing on his heart since witnessing the cold-blooded killing of the cop Phil Franco.

“Your friend’s father says you went to the church to pray,” said A.J., who had called Dan’s dad as soon as Jay walked in the door.

Jay stared at the Formica tabletop, suddenly fascinated by its squiggly yellow and blue lines.

“Look at me, Jay,” A.J. said, and Jay, knowing he had no choice, did. He saw not anger on his father’s face, however, but fatigue and relief, and perhaps the beginning of a smile.

“Is that right?” A.J. said.

“Why not?” said Carmela, coming swiftly to Jay’s rescue. “Anybody would want to pray at such a time.”

Jay knew what lying was, and that it was supposed to be a sin, but it was by his suggestion that they conspire to lie together—a compact that by its nature excluded the rest of the world—that Dan had offered himself as a friend. What was the committing of a
sin
against an abstract and lifeless
God
compared to the betrayal of a flesh and blood friend? Nothing. And so Jay held his father’s gaze, prepared to lie, exhilarated at the thought of having a friend and a life separate from his parents.

“Don’t answer,” said A.J., giving way to a full-blown smile. “Nothing could be more absurd. But somebody had balls to think it up.”

At seven o’clock, after drinking a cup of hot milk laced with a teaspoon of whiskey, a guaranteed restlessness remedy usually reserved for Christmas Eve, Jay was in bed. Carmela sat next to him for a minute or two until he pretended to be asleep. After she left, he lay there and listened as she and A.J. sat in the living room of their tiny apartment watching the looting and burning of their city on television, occasionally murmuring something to each other he could not hear.

He fell asleep thinking of friends lost, Phil Franco, and found, Dan Del Colliano, his exhilaration finally giving way to his exhaustion.

A.J. and Carmela Cassio were stunned by what they saw on their television that night, especially the images of rifles sticking out of windows at the Columbus Homes and the sacking and torching of Big Red’s on nearby Mount Prospect Avenue, the last supermarket in the Ward. During a commercial break, A.J. called the two young men who helped him make the bread every night at the bakery and told them not to come to work that night, and possibly for another day or two. An unbroken string of nights, going back to 1903, in which bread had been made at Cassio’s, had come to an end.

If you had an aerial view of the city that night, as New Jersey’s governor Richard Hughes did for example, from a helicopter, you would have seen buildings and cars burning; people smashing windows and looting stores and dancing around bonfires in the streets; the streaking overhead lights of police cruisers and ambulances; and the smoke from tear gas as the police tried to flush snipers from buildings in neighborhoods thick also with hatred and tension and fear. You would have seen all this, and more, but you would not have seen A.J. Cassio sit up abruptly in his bed at two thirty, his usual rising time, and begin to fumble for his slippers, nor his wife rise also, to gently place her hands on his shoulders and say softly, “Jay, you forgot, you’re not making bread tonight,” nor A.J. grunting and shaking his head as Carmela slipped off her nightgown and encircled her husband’s body with her arms, pressing her breasts against his back while caressing his chest and stomach and loins and, pulling him down beside her, murmuring, “hold me Jay, hold me, sweet-heart . . .”

Jay gave the eulogy at Danny’s funeral mass, held at St. Lucy’s, still standing amidst the rubble of the old neighborhood, including the rubble that filled the empty lots where the Columbus Homes—demolished in 1994 by the same federal government that built them—had once stood. He kept it simple, speaking of Danny’s love for his mom and his two sons, his loyalty to his friends, his contagious smile. Kay Del Colliano, dressed in black, sitting in the front pew next to the casket, an arm around each of Danny’s boys, had had a hard life, and now had lost her only son. At the wake she had told Jay that she was afraid that Dan’s ex-wife—class conscious and ashamed of her Italian roots—would not let the boys see much of her now that Dan was gone.

“Your son—and your father,” Jay said, looking at Kay and the boys, “lived every second of his life to its absolute fullest. I never saw him back down from a fight. I never saw him do anything halfway. If he was afraid of anything, I never knew about it. I often wondered where his energy, his happy spirit, came from, especially in a world where many see only sadness and misery. I now realize that Dan was a gift—from God, from the universe—to all of us who knew and loved him. But great gifts are not meant to last forever. We were
lucky to have him as long as we did, and we will need each other now more than ever before. Danny will speak to me always. I know that I will see him again one day, recognize him instantly, and smile . . .”

Jay was no stranger to sudden death or change. His parents had been killed on their way to his law school graduation in San Francisco in 1987. The universe had stopped that day for Jay, and never really started moving again. Numb, he married his girlfriend at the time, whom he did not love and barely knew. Unhappy, childless, they were divorced a year later. Jay moved into an apartment in Montclair, but spent most of his time at work, finding refuge in an ethic of sacrifice that almost, but never quite, defeated the demons of heartache and loneliness that haunted him.

Quietly, without ever speaking of it, Danny fought these demons with him. He knew, somehow, that pain cannot be conquered, only endured, but he also knew his friend, knew how harmful Jay’s natural tendency to isolate himself and brood could be in the wake of such a loss. And so, knowing that he was the only person capable of it, he forced diversions down Jay’s throat, dragging him to golf in Florida, to fish in the Sea of Cortez, to gamble in Las Vegas. One night in New York with Danny, Jay met an adventuresome, sexy redhead who he dated for a year, a year in which his heart returned more or less to normal. By living, we outwit death, but who would help Jay outwit it now that Danny was gone?

Jay did not ride in the funeral cortege after Danny’s mass. Frank Dunn asked to be taken on a quick tour of the neighborhood before heading to the cemetery, and Jay grimly complied. Dunn stared silently as Jay pointed out the tenement on Seventh Avenue that had housed the family bakery and three generations of Cassios, now a boarded-up shell; and the duplex on Garside Street where Jay and Danny lived
side by side, with their families, for eighteen happy months from 1970 to 1971.

They headed out of the city toward Bloomfield, where Danny would be buried in Glendale Cemetery, next to his father. On the visor of Jay’s car was a postcard he had received from Danny the day after he learned of his murder. “Finally made it to Jupiter before I died,” it read. “Not at all like the other planets. Miss Kelly says hello . . . Dan.” Jay had brought it with him to the church, thinking he might use it in his eulogy. In the end he decided not to. These were Dan’s last words to him, which he would keep to himself.

“That was a nice thing you said about needing each other more now,” said Dunn.

“Thanks.”

“I don’t think it will work, though. The ex-wife’s a bitch.”

“I know.”

“Do me a favor,” Dunn said.

“What?”

“Have a drink with me after the funeral. I believe I’ll need one.”

Jay got a new bike for Christmas, 1972, a shiny red and white beauty that stood in the basement of the Cassios’ new apartment through a stormy winter and a cold, rainy spring. In late May the weather broke and, after school one day, he decided to take it to Branch Brook Park, whose endless, winding cinder paths had been calling his name for four long months. The day was warm and beautiful, and the park was only three blocks away. His father was asleep, and could not be woken to ask permission, and his mother was far away “at work.”

He rode like the wind for a half hour before he was hailed down by two teenaged black boys who he thought wanted to talk. Before he could come to a full stop one of them punched him squarely in the mouth, knocking him to the ground. Instead of trying to get to his feet, he rolled over and spread himself over his bike, which had toppled over next to him, one hand in a death grip on the handlebars, the other enmeshed in the spokes of the rear wheel. The two boys pounded him with their fists and feet for a minute or two, but he clung all the tighter, hoping they’d go away or that someone would come to his rescue. Then he felt a sharp pain down his right upper arm. Without thinking, he grabbed his
bicep and soon his hand was full of blood. At the same time the boys flung him to the side of the path and were gone, with the bike, which he never saw again.

The next day Kay Del Colliano, who lived four blocks away, came over to commiserate with Carmela, bringing Danny, who laughed when he saw Jay’s swollen lip and missing tooth.

“How many were there?” Dan asked. They were sitting on the porch of the Cassios’ sagging duplex apartment on Garside Street, eating ice cream, one of the few things Jay would be able to eat for the next week or so.

“Two.”

“How old?”

“I don’t know. One was big.”

“Did you hit back?”

“Yes,” Jay answered, lying.

“That was dumb,” said Danny. “It was two against one. You should have just covered up, or run, and let them take your bike. It’s only a bike.”

A faint smile—his first in twenty-four hours—crossed Jay’s face as he looked at his friend. Danny was smiling, too, the wicked smile that by now Jay had seen many times, but could never quite get used to.