Brotherly Love (16 page)

Nick stands up and walks to the cash register.
Phyllis takes his money, makes the change.

"Give me a coffee and one of them donuts,"
he says.

She puts a jelly donut and the coffee in the same bag
and he carries it back to the garage. The Plymouth is sitting where
he left it. He looks at the engine, remembering where he was, and
then heads upstairs. The old man likes sweets, maybe the donut will
cheer him up.

He isn’t there.

His bags are pushed into a corner near the mats and
covered with a blanket. He has more things now than when he came;
Nick isn’t sure what kind of things they are. He keeps them
covered. Nick looks at the blanket, estimating the number of bags
underneath. Four.

He walks to the window near the old man’s things
and sets the paper bag on the chair where he will see it. The coffee
will stay warm an hour and the donut is good for a week. The old man
still eats from garbage cans, he doesn’t mind stale donuts.

Thinking of that, Nick passes the trash can on the
way back to the stairs. He stops and lifts the top and looks inside,
wondering what it would be like. Adhesive tape, a Vaseline jar, old
newspapers, dust. Before the old man came, the same stuff would have
been all over the floor.

He sees the letter right away, torn in half and then
in quarters.

The envelope is on the other side of the can, intact.
It would be an easy thing to put the pieces of the letter together,
and Nick stares at them, wondering what sort of life they might say
this Urban Matthews had.

What he gave up for paper bags and a borrowed corner
of a gym. Who he gave up. But it’s the old man’s business.

Nick puts the lid back on
the can and walks downstairs to finish the Plymouth.

* * *

N
ick is sitting in the
window late in the afternoon, watching the street for Urban, when the
black car stops in front of the gym and begins to unload. First two
men in windbreakers who check the street, then Phillip Flood, then
the boys.

The men in the windbreakers stay on the street and
Phillip Flood and the boys come up.

"Nicky," Phillip says, "I come over to
ask you a favor." Nick doesn’t answer. Phillip draws him back
to the windows, where he can watch the street as they talk.

"I don’t know what you heard about me and
Constantine," he says, "but the man was like my own
family."

Nick looks at him, surprised. The Lincoln is still
sitting in the middle of the narrow street, white smoke coming out of
the tailpipe almost the way water pours out of a faucet. The men in
the windbreakers have gotten back inside.

"We had our disagreements, but I give you my
word . . ."

Nick looks at him, thinking, So this is who got
Constantine? A Mick?

He remembers the way his hand felt patting his pocket
after he’d put the hundred-dollar bill there.

"Like my own family," he says, moving to
put his face in Nick’s line of sight.

Phillip Flood shakes his head. "On account of
the way this happened, I think there could be some misunderstandings,
you understand what I mean?"

"Misunderstandings," Nick says.

"And I just want to ask you, you know, to let
the boys come up here like before. That’s all. And I might have
somebody to come up here with them, to keep an eye out that none of
this shit spills over onto you."

His hand moves to the side of Nick’s cheek. He pats
him there, and then on the back of the neck.

"I got people tellin’ me to hide until
everything calms down," he says. He pauses a moment, as if to
think it over, then shakes his head. "That just makes it look
worst, right?"

Nick doesn’t answer. The hand moves off the back of
his neck.

"I don’t want nobody in here carrying,"
Nick says, looking at the car outside.

Phillip Flood smiles. "No problem, Nick. They’ll
stay downstairs, you won’t even know they’re around."

Nick nods.

"Is that all right, they stay down there on the
street?"

He shrugs. "It ain’t my street."

Phillip turns back into the room and watches an
old-time trainer working a young colored fighter in the ring, moving
his padded catching gloves to call for hooks or jabs. The force of
the punches throws the trainer’s ancient arms backward, and finally
knocks the glove off his left hand.

The fighter waits while he bends slowly to retrieve
it, and then fits it back over his hand. A respectful kid, Nick
thinks, he won’t say anything to hurt his feelings. For the same
reason, he doesn’t take anything off his punches when he starts in
again.

"How are they doin’, anyway?" Phillip
Flood says, meaning the boys. "They learning to fight?"

"They’re doing all right," Nick says. He
can’t remember the last time Phillip’s kid even got out of his
street clothes.

It is quiet a moment while Phillip watches the
trainer and the colored kid in the gym. When he turns back, something
has changed.

"Tell me something, Nick," he says. "If
they’re doing all right, how come Peter comes home busted up all
the time and Michael don’t ever get a fucking mark on him?"

Nick takes his time answering. "Everybody’s
got their own speed," he says finally.

Phillip Flood nods. "Maybe I’ll come by some
time and watch them mix it up."

Nick shrugs.

"You don’t mind I come by and watch," he
says, watching Nick, as if he’s trapped him. The kid in the ring
knocks the glove off the old trainer’s hand again.

Nick shrugs. "Nobody has to fight up here,"
he says, "that ain’t the idea. If they feel like it, then they
can fight. You feel like it, you can watch."

"They feel like it," Phillip Flood says,
and then pats him again on the cheek. "Kids are always fightin’,
right?" He smiles and then starts to leave, the moist feel of
his hand is still on Nick’s cheek.

Nick stops him, grabbing his elbow. Phillip Flood
looks at the hand; everything in the gym seems to stop. Out of the
corner of his eye, Nick sees his son, standing in his socks on the
scale, his face perfectly still, watching.

"I don’t want nobody up here with guns,"
he says.

Phillip Flood nods. "Yeah, you already said
that," he says.

Nick lets go of him and turns back to the window in
time to see the old man crossing slowly in front of the black
Cadillac, looking inside. He stops for a moment, as if the car has no
business there, and then the driver’s side door opens and one of
the men in the windbreakers steps out, his head tilted at an angle
just behind his left shoulder, and watches him until he moves to the
other sidewalk.

The man in the windbreaker gets back inside the car;
Nick sees him laughing at something the other man says.

The old man and Phillip Flood pass each other on the
stairs, and by the time the old man clears the stairwell, the gym is
itself again, full of movement and noise. All of it somehow
connected, like an engine.

Harry is tying his shoes, the ancient trainer in the
ring shuffles to his right, holding the catching gloves for the
lighter to hit. A cop does sit-ups on a board propped against the
edge of the ring, a huge white kid who has been training here the
last week begins hitting one of the heavy bags.

The place has no memory, and that’s the way it is
supposed to be too.

Over on the bench, Charley’s kid—what’s his
name, Peter?—is taking off his street clothes to work out. He hangs
his shirt and pants carefully from the nails overhead, and puts his
socks in his shoes and slides them underneath. He bends over to pull
on his sweat socks, still as narrow as a bird across the chest, but
he is growing into his body. He is going to be strong—Nick already
feels it when they’re in the ring—but he’s got no talent for
this, no instincts. Everything he knows, he’s learned.

Not that there weren’t fighters who went somewhere
without talent, but that kind, there wasn’t usually much else they
could do. And the payments went up all the time. Even after they
quit. Something in that thought—the payments—calls up the uneasy
feeling Nick gets once in a while watching Harry in the ring, that
this could lead someplace it isn’t supposed to.

But it’s not the same situation. Harry’s
protected. And he has talent; he has Nick.

But Charley’s kid—something occurs to Nick that’s
been in the back of his mind almost since the first day Phillip Flood
brought him up here.

He thinks maybe Charley’s
kid likes to get hit.

* * *

P
eter and Michael sit in
the back seat of a car. The two men who picked them up at the gym are
inside the gas station while the attendant cleans the windows. He
takes a long time, making sure the dirt is out of the corners.

"Jimmy Measles told me he’d get us blown,"
Michael says.

Peter feels a chill run six ways at once through his
body. He thinks of the woman who stepped into the back seat of his
uncle’s car that night; he has thought of her every day and night
since it happened. Repeated the words she said to him, remembering
the sound.

"Blown?" he says.

Michael shrugs and looks out the window. "Anytime
we want.

He’ll take us to
Bandstand
and get us blown."

"We can’t get into Bandstand. We can’t
dance."

"He can get us in. He’s on the committee."

"How come he can get blown at
Bandstand
,
he’s hanging around in front of Nick’s all week dancing with a
light pole?"

Michael stares at the men inside, smoking cigarettes,
and when he answers his breath fogs the window. "He’s scared
they’re going to kick his ass."

"Who?"

"Kids at Bandstand, I don’t know. They said
they were going to kick his ass, so we go along to protect him and he
gets us blown."

"We’re supposed to protect Jimmy Measles? You
seen those guys on television? They’re seventeen years old."

Michael looks at his cousin and smiles. "All we
got to do is show up with him."

Peter sits quietly in the back seat of the car,
waiting for the men who work for his uncle to come out of the filling
station, imagining blow jobs from the girls he has seen on
television.

"Nobody’s going to
fuck with us," his cousin says.

* * *

T
he same two men always
pick Peter and Michael up at school and take them to the gym. Ever
since Constantine was hit. They wait outside and then drive them
home. In between, they leave for half an hour and visit the Rosemont
Diner on Passyunk for coffee and Danish.

They aren’t supposed to leave, but then they aren’t
supposed to eat in the car either, and they do that all the time.
They are big men with thick necks, and Peter doesn’t think they are
afraid of his uncle, even though they pretend to be.

They leave for the Rosemont at the same time every
afternoon. They order the same Danish, sit in the same table by the
window, and are back in thirty minutes.

Michael has followed them, and knows these things
down to the number of sugars they put in their coffee.

Eight.

* * *

O
n the afternoon Jimmy
Measles is going to get them blown, l Peter waits by the stairs, his
gym bag at his feet, while Michael   watches the street
from the corner of the window.

"You ain’t going to train today?" Nick
says.

Peter shakes his head. He says, "We got
someplace we got to go."

Nick nods, looking at him, then at his cousin. "You
waiting for your uncle?" he says.

Peter looks into his face and says, "No."
He doesn’t lie to Nick.

"You going to do something stupid?" he
says.

Peter thinks it over; he doesn’t know. It feels
stupid, but it’s something you do a lot when you get older. At
least he thinks it is. "Naw, we’re just going somewhere."

Nick smiles at him as if he knows where they are
going, and a moment later Michael leaves the window and hurries
toward the stairs.

"Let’s go," he says.

Michael notices Nick watching them, and he smiles.
"We got to go back to school," he says.

Nick nods.

And then Michael is headed down the stairs and Peter
is starting down after him. Nick is still at the top, looking at him
in a peculiar way.

"It isn’t too stupid, Nick," Peter says.

Nick nods. "Something a little stupid, that’s
good for you once in a while."

Jimmy Measles is waiting on the sidewalk downstairs.
He is wearing new pants and a green jacket and he practices dance
steps as they walk to Broad Street to catch the C bus. The toe of one
of his black loafers touches the cement behind the heel of the other,
his elbows come tight against his sides, and then he spins
effortlessly, never losing a step, his eyes closing as he goes
around.