Brooklyn Noir 2: The Classics (21 page)

Some 79th Street kids, when they tried to hit a homer, or get an A, but failed, next time didn’t even try, and thereby avoided the failure too. Others, such as Rocco, who was flattened to the canvas a few times, always got up to win the fight. And Gene wouldn’t quit either. So when he heard on the radio that the 69th Regiment of the New York State Guard was asking for volunteers, he went to their armory.

The sergeant, a grocer in daytime, was forming his new company. Most of his soldiers so far were older guys like himself who wouldn’t be drafted because they had kids, flatfeet, a punctured eardrum, or a weak heart. Still, they would do their bit in the Guard, which didn’t give physicals, and would protect the home shores in case the enemy got some crazy idea it could invade. So when Gene Dragoni showed up, the grocer-sergeant had high hopes that some young blood would be coming in too.

“You’re seventeen?”

“Yeah.”

“Why’re you joining?”

“To get training. For when I get drafted.”

“You ever shoot a gun?”

“No. But I ain’t afraid to.”

“You sick or anything?”

“I’m an ox,” said Gene, who was more like a bantam.

“Let’s go meet the colonel.”

The chicken colonel wasn’t saying much. Through his thick glasses, he looked at the paper on which Gene had written his name, address, and religion, not required to give references this time. The colonel glanced up a few times and then went back to reading the paper. Gene thought that if the colonel didn’t hurry up he would piss in his pants, partly because he was nervous. He thought the colonel knew he was too young, but was taking him anyway.

Finally, the colonel stood up and shook hands, and Gene thought it was a puny shake. “Welcome to the Guard, Private Dragoni,” said the colonel.

With the signed requisition in his hand, Private Dragoni was sent to the quartermaster. That sergeant worked during the day in Macy’s men’s wear stockroom. The quartermaster asked Gene his sizes and loaded up his duffel bag with two sets of olive-drab fatigues for training, a khaki uniform for summer parades, and dress olive woolens for winter parades, and Gene stored his clothes in Rocco’s garage.

He went to three meetings in fatigues, and marched around the armory, which was as big as St. Finbar’s if all the pews were taken out. The recruits were instructed on how to strip down a rifle, clean it, oil it, and reassemble all the parts. Not only did they learn to do it, but they had to do it very fast. Gene was getting fed up with doing it over and over, and with marching back and forth.

Then the regiment was going upstate for the weekend. They would fire weapons. That ignited Gene’s interest again. He convinced his father that he was going to pick vegetables for the war effort, as he had done once before as a class project one weekend.

The M-1 was almost as tall as he was when he brought it down from carrying it on his shoulder. He got into the standing shooting position as ordered, as the other recruits did too, hoisting the butt end against his shoulder, sighting down the barrel, getting ready to fire.

“It has a kick,” said the sergeant. “You have to lean into it. Cup it inside your shoulder.”

“Like this?” said Gene, who didn’t have much weight to put behind the butt.

“And spread your feet, to keep your balance when it comes back on you.”

“I can do it.”

“You men, you each got a clip. When you hear the whistle, fire at will from the standing position. When you hear it again, you stop. Even if you ain’t fired all your rounds. Ready. Aim. Fire.”

The sergeant blew the brass whistle hanging from his neck. The live men shot at the cardboard men against the hill. The hill sponged up the bullets that went through the targets or missed them. Gene drove the bolt forward, and then, as he had learned, squeezed the trigger gently. The rifle fired with a small explosion, but it recoiled violently, knocking him on his ass, and the weapon was almost out of his hands. Taking his stance again, he pushed on the bolt to load the chamber, but forgot to squeeze. The pulled trigger exploded the round and the rifle shot back, again knocking him down.

“It takes getting used to,” said the sergeant.

“My arm hurts too,” said Gene.

“Your size, you should have a carbine. But only a noncom gets it. If you made corporal you’d have it. And it ain’t so heavy.”

“I don’t think I can shoot in the prone position now. I hurt.”

“Get down there, Private Dragoni.”

“I don’t think I can run anymore, sarge.”

“Get the lead out of your ass, private.”

By the time the weekend was over, Gene had had enough of being a soldier. But he had been sworn in, as in the regular Army, and he had been at the lecture that warned against going AWOL, which could land a guy in the stockade the same as a GI in the South Pacific leaving to screw a native girl. The sergeant had put it that way to give them a piece of candy on the side. The guys puffed their chests to show they were loyal GIs who wouldn’t run out on the sergeant. They also wanted to show they were the kind of guys that, if they had a legitimate pass signed by the CO, would go out to the grass huts and knock off a piece of native tail.

At church on Sunday, Gene asked God to get him out of the Guard. He was too young. He was too small. He was too bored. When he grew up in a few years, he would be happy to be drafted at eighteen. Then he would serve his country as other guys on the street were already doing. It was his duty too. He had no doubt of that, but in the meantime, if God could arrange a miracle and get him honorably discharged, he would say a novena to St. Anthony and wouldn’t ever go to another burlesque show.

With all the suffering in the world, God didn’t have time to get back to Gene, who was more impatient after another Guard meeting. He was lectured on how to clean his brass buttons and his brass belt buckle, polish his boots, and arrange his underwear and personal items in his footlocker. He thought he was too quickminded to worry about such crap. He wanted to do something daring and brave, but knew now that he had to wait.

When Frankie was grinding up 79th on his Harley one evening, Gene flagged him down, but Frankie was going too fast as usual and couldn’t stop, so he made a U-turn up ahead, and even though 79th was one-way, rode his motorcycle back the wrong way to talk to Gene.

“You’re oldest,” said Gene, “so I have to ask for some advice. I wouldn’t trust asking guys my own age. They can be dumb. And I can’t ask my father, since he thinks I’m smart.”

“Shoot,” said Frankie.

Gene winced, but it meant he should get on with it, so he did. “I joined up, but I hate it. I got to get out.”

Frankie turned his bike the legal way and got off and took off his black leather jacket that was warm in the cold wind generated by his speeding. But the jacket was too warm now that they were going to talk on New Utrecht’s steps across the way. Gene told him his story from the beginning, and a few times Frankie laughed, especially since he was the opposite of Gene and wanted to stay out of the service. For a while Frankie was stumped about how he could help, but then his own birthday coming up gave him an idea.

The night of the next meeting, they packed all Gene’s Guard clothes from Rocco’s garage and strapped the duffel bag on Frankie’s Harley. Gene straddled the duffel bag and held on and they rode to the armory. An hour early, Gene shouldered his stuff and they went in. Ten minutes later the colonel came in, and Gene saluted and asked for permission to speak to the commanding officer.

“At ease,” said the colonel. “Say your piece.”

“I hate to admit this, sir.”

“Yes?”

“I lied when I joined up, sir.”

“So?”

“So I’m too young, sir.”

“You took the oath, didn’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then you’re in the Guard, private.”

“But I can’t be in, sir.”

“Why not?”

“I haven’t grown up yet, sir.”

“You’re the right age. I don’t think you lied. You’re dismissed now,” said the colonel. He picked up a piece of paper and began reading through his heavy glasses. Then he looked up and Gene was still there. “I said you’re dismissed, soldier.”

Now Frankie stepped up and sat on the corner of the officer’s desk. He snapped another piece of paper in the colonel’s face. “What I have here,
sir,”
said Frankie, “is my friend’s birth certificate.”

“So what?” said the colonel.

“So look at it,” said Frankie.

“I don’t know who the hell you are, but get off my desk and out of this government building or you’ll be thrown out.”

“This is your last chance,” said Frankie.

So then the colonel grabbed the certificate, glanced at it, and said, “It’s a forgery.”

“We’ll go to the
New York Times.
Show them Gene’s birth certificate. And say you, Colonel Whitcomb, are holding him in the Guard against his wishes.”

The colonel took the birth certificate again and studied it for such a long time that Gene was sure he would piss in his pants now.

“I have no use for crybabies in my command,” said the colonel, finally. “We’ll send you your goddamned discharge. And don’t ever come back here again.”

After Frankie slept with Sylvia that Saturday night, he called her every night of the next week. Two of those nights she said for him to come over when it was dark. He should walk, since his Harley made a racket and people watched where it went. If the porch light was off, it meant a neighbor had dropped by and he should come back in twenty, thirty minutes.

In the subsequent weeks and months they ate, talked, played games and cards together, and they went to movies, restaurants, a picnic on Long Island, with Sylvia driving her old Studebaker, and across the George Washington Bridge to Palisades Amusement Park in New Jersey, and they rode the 69th Street Ferry from Brooklyn to Staten Island. If her parents weren’t going out of town, they made love in their rented room in Borough Park, and Frankie learned that Sylvia wasn’t a moll even though her other boyfriend was a gangster. She was just a little too hungry for excitement and a little too sad over the war from which her fellow Jews were running for their lives. Otherwise, she was a little tough, medium sweet, and very smart, and he loved her a little more now that he knew her human weaknesses.

For her part, Sylvia learned that Frankie kept his word, that if he said he would arrive at six he did, if he said he would bring wine he did, and that he hadn’t told his friends he was sleeping with her. They grew used to each other, and loved each other, and were careful that Bruno didn’t find out. Since Bruno was married and, according to him, had a Sicilian wife who would roast his nuts in olive oil, he wasn’t around much, and Sylvia, using her clever mind, cut back even on the few demands he did make. She slept with him twice in June (including Frankie’s graduation night) and twice in July and twice again in August, and by then Bruno was making her sick.

The only thing that Bruno was doing differently was making the most of the few times they had together. But Sylvia was feeling more and more like the whore who screws for money but doesn’t get paid. If she was paid by Bruno, perhaps she could go on with it, especially if she bought gold jewelry with the money. But Bruno didn’t even bring her flowers, which Frankie did, from his father’s garden, once a fragrant bunch of lilies of the valley, and another time zinnias with the colors of crayons.

“I’ll tell him something,” she said.

“It’s better I talk to him man-to-man.”

“Don’t be dumb, Frankie. He carries a gun. He’ll blow your brains out.”

“Better me than you,” he said, and the voice in his ear said indeed it would be him and not her.

“That’s very brave,” she said.

“He doesn’t scare me.”

“I know that.”

“So I’ll go have it out with him.”

“You won’t. That’s an order.”

“I don’t take orders.”

“You will from me.”

“Sylvia, I can’t let you risk your pretty neck.”

“Kiss my toes.”

“Jesus.”

“Kiss them. You said you would if I asked. So do it.”

“What’s that going to prove?”

“That you love me enough to do what I say. I’m waiting.”

Frankie got down on his knees and kissed her red painted toenails. Her toes didn’t smell sour as his could, but of perfume, which seemed to be hidden everywhere on her body.

“I could almost make love to your toes,” he said, getting up and rewarded with a deep kiss.

“The bum’s a bully,” she said. “So we have to play him careful. So neither of us gets hurt.”

“Tell him it’s over.”

“He won’t accept that. He’d keep after me, thinking he said something wrong, or did something. He’d apologize. Slobber over me. Hoping everything would be hunky-dory.”

“Write a letter. Say you’re pregnant. Going to Puerto Rico for an abortion. You don’t want to get knocked up again.”

“Are you kidding? With
him
Sicilian? You think he’d let me get an abortion of his kid? He’d pass out cigars. My God, I’d never get rid of the bum.”

“So then what?” said Frankie.

“I could always shoot him. With his own gun. In the motel. He always signs in as Jones.” She seemed very serious, looking Frankie in the eyes.