Bridge of Sighs (40 page)

But Gabriel Mock was having none of this. “Jerry K. lives down to Atlanta. Moved there last year.”

Uncle Dec had either forgotten this or never known it. “Really? He did?” It was disappointing and mildly embarrassing to have invented such a fine lie under duress, only to have it exploded so effortlessly by a tiny drunk Negro. He’d been confident of his ability to convince Gabriel that Johnny Kozlowski was his brother Jerry, since the two men did look a lot alike, but not if the latter now resided in Georgia.

Apparently Gabriel didn’t hold this attempt to confuse him against my uncle. “What kind of place we livin’ in, where a Negro boy, all by himself, gets beat half to death and nobody does nothin’?”

“People are no good,” my uncle conceded. “They
enjoy
shit like this.”

Gabriel shook his head in wonder. “Enjoy seeing a Negro boy beat into a coma for goin’ to a movie?”

My uncle nodded agreeably. “And in about five minutes, when the cops come and shoot you, those people in there will enjoy that, too.”

“Let ’em come. I’ll cut their gizzard out.”

Then he showed him the knife he was planning to use, and Uncle Dec pretended he’d never seen a switchblade before. When Gabriel pressed the button and the blade flew open, locking into place, he said, “Hey, do that again.”

Gabriel, proud of the knife, obliged, folding the blade back into the handle expertly, after which my uncle took it from him. “Give that back here,” Gabriel said, astonished that a man who’d just admitted people were no good would do him like this.

“I tell you what,” Uncle Dec said. “Let me hold on to it for a while. You can have it back in the morning.”

Gabriel blinked at him. “How my gonna cut his gizzard out with my knife in your damn pocket?”

Two police cars pulled up at the curb just then, disgorging angry cops, and a moment later they had the little black man facedown on the concrete, his hands pinned behind him. “Careful,” one of the cops said, “he’s got a knife.”

“No, he doesn’t,” Uncle Dec told them.

But the cops had been warned about the knife and couldn’t be dissuaded. They pulled his pants down around his ankles so they could inventory the contents of his pockets, and Gabriel was not, according to my uncle, wearing underwear. By then Murdick’s patrons had begun spilling out onto the sidewalk. “I thought them people were all supposed to have big dicks,” one man said when Gabriel was pulled to his feet before the assembled crowd. One of his front teeth had been knocked out in the struggle, and blood dripped down his chin, onto his shirt.

Uncle Dec suggested that the speaker drop his own pants for the sake of comparison, but the man demurred. The only person still inside Murdick’s was Johnny Kozlowski, who took the opportunity to make himself a free gin and tonic, after which he sat back down on his barstool until last call, growing more and more convinced that the world was rank with injustice.

T
HAT
S
UNDAY AFTERNOON
I rode my bike out to Whitcombe Park, hoping Gabriel might be there, but of course he wasn’t. I knew he’d been arrested but thought he might be out of jail by then. I knew the small outbuilding where he kept the thick black lacquer and found the section where he’d left off, and I set to work painting, first one side and then the other, imagining Gabriel’s surprise when he returned. If he thought about it, he’d figure out who’d been helping and be grateful.

But by midweek he still hadn’t returned, and on Friday when I arrived home with black paint on my clothes, my mother asked what I’d been up to. Normally, I went straight to Ikey’s after school, but this week I’d barely put in an appearance. When I told her I’d been painting Gabriel Mock’s fence while he was in jail, she sighed and said she wished I’d said something sooner. Gabriel had been let go from his job on Monday, so it wasn’t even his fence anymore. When I asked why, she said, “Because black men don’t threaten white men with knives.”

“But Uncle Dec had it,” I protested. “When they searched him—”

“People saw it, Lou. He’d threatened a white man.”

“But that’s not fair,” I said, feeling young and helpless and stupid.

“Of course it isn’t,” my mother said. “Do you think it’s fair that man should spend his whole life painting and repainting a fence that belonged to a white man who owned slaves? Do you think it’s fair that if we hired Mr. Mock to work at Ikey’s people would stop coming to the store?”

The way she said this made it clear that she and my father had already had a conversation about this, one I had no difficulty reconstructing. She would feel more deeply than he about the injustice done to Gabriel and his son, and she’d want to help if she could. But she was also what she liked to call a realist, and she, not my father, would’ve calculated the cost of offering a job at Ikey’s to a Negro. To some of our neighbors, it wouldn’t matter. Others would claim it didn’t, but then would quietly take their business to Tommy Flynn or drive to the A&P when they ran out of milk or bread. Despite our renovation, my mother knew Ikey’s was still a marginal business, and she understood just how little it would take to tip us out of slender profitability and into red ink. A tiny black man could maybe do it.

Naturally, my father would disagree with her reasoning on both counts. In the face of her fury, he’d admit that Three and Gabriel had been victims of injustice, but for him it didn’t necessarily follow that it was our particular responsibility to find a remedy, however partial. People like us were responsible for our own families, not other people’s. Sure, the Negro kids had every right to go to the theater on Saturday afternoons, to sit wherever they wanted, next to whomever they wanted. But his more deeply held conviction was that people should get along and not start trouble that could easily be avoided. That had been the heart of what he’d wanted me to understand so long ago when he’d taken me on that milk-truck tour of the Borough. Yes, I had every
right
to be there. This was America, and I was an American. To him, though, it wasn’t a question of rights or privileges. It was just better all around for a person to know where he belonged. He wanted me to understand that the East End was a good place and ours a good family. Sure, you had a right to want something different, or something you believed to be better, but that right shouldn’t spoil what you already were lucky enough to have. He wouldn’t dispute Gabriel Mock the Third’s right to want what he wanted, but the desire itself would mystify him. What about all those cute little Negro girls? he’d ask my mother. What’s wrong with them? What would possess the boy to
want
so foolishly? What good did it do you to want what was bad for you?

But he’d also doubt my mother’s pessimistic view of our neighbors. “They ain’t gonna care,” I could hear him say, shrugging his big shoulders in incomprehension. When he was a younger man, before he’d been given his Borough route, he’d delivered milk on the Hill, and while he didn’t have his brother’s ease with the Negroes who lived there, he knew and liked many of them. Some still spoke to my father when they met on Division Street, and I couldn’t see where his conversations with these men were all that different from those he had with white men he met at the diner or the barbershop. A Negro man, asked how he was doing, might mention he’d won a daily double last week or quit playing a number he’d been betting for the last two years only to have it hit yesterday, and my father would commiserate and say he should’ve stuck with it one more day or ask the man what he did with his winnings, to which he’d reply,
I spent it, whatchu think?
I’d noticed my father didn’t shake hands with these men the way he did at the diner or the barbershop, but this reserve seemed to me as much theirs as his. He believed in polite behavior, and so did they. If people would just treat each other decent, he was fond of saying, there wouldn’t be near as much trouble in the world.

“You ain’t gotta
love
each other,” he’d say.

“Really, Lou?” my mother would interrupt. “Didn’t Jesus say that’s exactly what we’re supposed to do?”

“Just act polite,” he’d go on, talking to me now, not her. “It don’t cost nothin’ to be nice to people.”

He believed that people were basically good, and to prove his point he’d name half a dozen or so, some from the neighborhood—old Mr. Gunther, say, who was so sick with cancer but never complained—and others who were famous, like Mickey Mantle or John Wayne. Which always caused my mother to rub her temples and wonder out loud why she even tried.

T
HE QUESTION
of whether or not to hire Gabriel Mock turned out to be moot, because after his arraignment on a charge of criminal threatening, he packed a small bag and called Hudson Cab, whose driver, Buddy Nurt, after determining that Gabriel had the fare, drove him to the train station in Fulton, which left me even more friendless than ever. I saw Karen Cirillo from time to time at school or the Saturday matinee, but she almost never acknowledged me. Sometimes I’d think she was going to, only to have her play that trick with her eyes and make me disappear. Once we found ourselves pressed together on the stairs of the YMCA, waiting for the gym doors to open, and I tried to strike up a conversation by asking how things were over at Berman Court, reminding her that I’d once lived in the very apartment she now occupied with her mother and, I presumed, Buddy, but all she did was regard me strangely and say, “You’re
weird,
Lou. You know that?” Only after offering this personal observation did it occur to her to ask if I had any money. She and her girlfriends weren’t sure they had enough to get into the dance. I did but claimed I didn’t, feeling something shift inside me with that lie. I was glad not to have given her money—besides, she and her friends did discover the means to get in—but I felt dispirited, too. My weakness, my inability to deny Karen what she wanted, I knew, was my only connection to her, and strength, if that’s what my lie represented, pretty much removed any hope of reestablishing our old Ikey’s intimacy. She was, as she’d always been, Jerzy Quinn’s girl.

During this same period, the second half of eighth grade, Jerzy himself became even more of a phantom, disappearing from view for weeks at a time. It wasn’t unusual for him to be absent from school, of course. He often skipped or left by the gym door after attendance was taken in homeroom, behavior that sometimes, perversely, resulted in suspension. But he was also less visible around town. He still commanded his army of pale wraiths, but they often congregated outside the pool hall or along the banks of the Cayoga without him. He’d been only tangentially involved in what happened to Three Mock, who remained comatose for weeks after his beating, but he’d taken some of the blame for it, perhaps because he was the one the cops had found kneeling beside him there in the parking lot. Even at the time I found it ironic that he should emerge victorious from the whipping he’d taken at the hands of Bobby Marconi, only to be undone in the end by a skinny Negro who’d never thrown a punch. Overnight, it seemed, everyone understood that Jerzy and his gang were a junior high phenomenon that could not survive the transfer to high school, where thick-necked football players ruled.

Not long after the fight, the Kozlowski family did move to the East End, just as Perry predicted. For some reason I’d concluded that as a natural consequence of those events they wouldn’t be permitted to cross Division Street, but one Monday morning Perry showed up in school wearing a plaid short-sleeved shirt. His new uniform drew immediate derision from a boy in Jerzy’s gang, but Perry grabbed him by the throat, lifted him off his feet and offered to put him in the hospital bed next to Three Mock, and when the boy said he’d just been kidding, Perry let him go. For days after this incident we expected to hear that Perry’s former friends had caught him alone somewhere and showed him who was boss, but it never happened, further evidence that Jerzy’s reign of terror was coming to an end. No sooner did we imagine it
could
end than it did. Thinking back on it, we seemed to recall almost weekly beatings and humiliations, but how many had there actually been? When we tallied them now, the number wasn’t large. And how many gang members were there? Too many to count, it had seemed a month earlier, until we counted them, and again the number wasn’t so large. It had been well known that all the West End boys who had sworn allegiance to Jerzy carried knives, but had we ever seen one?

Then, in late May, with summer vacation just a few weeks away, a rumor that explained Jerzy’s mysterious absences began to circulate. He was sick. He needed to have an operation. When he showed up on the last day of school, he looked so thin and weak that we knew it had to be true, which aroused a new fear. It had never occurred to any of us East Enders that illness would have the temerity to attack Jerzy Quinn or, if it dared, it would make headway.

Without school to foment rumors, and with high school and its new terrors to consider, Jerzy disappeared from our collective consciousness that summer. I know he hadn’t crossed my mind in a month when, in late July, Perry Kozlowski stopped in at Ikey’s for a soda. “You heard about Jerzy, right?” he said. And when I confessed I hadn’t, he shrugged. “The doctors cut his left nut off. I guess he’s not so tough anymore.”

I
NSTALLING MY UNCLE
as the butcher of choice for Borough housewives did draw shoppers from beyond our East End neighborhood, but it had some unintended consequences as well. With a larger store and longer hours, we found ourselves stretched thin. My father didn’t like to leave Ikey’s when there was work to do, but there always was, and he couldn’t be there every minute, not seven days a week. He opened the store in the morning and closed up at night, but my mother insisted he get out for a while in the middle of the day. Sometimes he’d just go across the street and make himself a sandwich and read the paper on the front porch. Or he’d head down to the Cayoga Diner or the Thomaston Grill for a hamburger or a chili dog, over conversation with men who’d been laid off. The tannery was down to one shift now, but so far it hadn’t closed its doors completely.