Crazy (4 page)

But he really had me going. Big.

I went back into the library, grabbed
Portrait of Jennie
off the shelves and took a seat at a reading table as far from Baloqui as I could, though he was still sitting facing me, slouched down low in his seat and with his black eyes shooting death rays at me from an inch above the top of the book he was holding propped open on the desk in front of him. I tried not to notice.
Good luck!
Every time I looked up from my book Baloqui’s baleful stare would be on me like some vengeful Latino Banquo’s ghost until I finally decided,
Screw you and your Thanksgiving turkey stuffed with fried green bananas and rice and beans!
I got up and slunk out into the street with glare wounds all over my face.

For a while I just paced back and forth out in front. I hadn’t seen Baloqui in a sulk like this since I asked him for the answer to a puzzle that I’d read in the
Book of Knowledge
. “A brick weighs six pounds and half its own weight,” I quoted, “and so what is the weight of the brick?” “That’s a puzzle?” He’d scowled. “What does it weigh? It weighs nine pounds.” “No, twelve,” I told him, which might have been fine, but then I had to add, “I got it right away.” Well, we argued, and his bushy black eyebrows knitted together and at one point I thought he was going to deck me as his face was turning blue and he was shouting, “That’s
ridiculous!
Your stupid book
lies!
” and then for days he would pretend not to see me or hear me until finally I retracted and said the
Book of Knowledge
answer had turned out to be a typo. I am not a hard man. So now I did a little thinking and decided that before messing up my friendship with the jerk, I should go to the Superior and fact-check Arrigo’s story, which I did. I paid my nickel admission, walked into the lobby and found out from an usher that the theater manager, the guy I wanted to talk to, wouldn’t be in until three, so while I waited with a nickel bag of popcorn in my lap I was able to watch a whole bunch of neat-o cartoons, and then a couple of cowboy chapters, one a Tom Mix and the other Buck Jones, in which hundreds of bullets were fired except no one ever seemed to get hit unless he was standing near Gabby Hayes, which of course made me wonder if Hayes was Italian and possibly related to the Pagliarellos. The first feature, in the meantime, was
The Great Dictator
, a Charlie Chaplin movie that had the packed crowd of us grammar school aesthetes constantly erupting in guffaws that were almost as loud as when someone in a movie went blind or was decapitated or had acid thrown in his face. Halfway through the Hitler-Mussolini barbershop scene, I checked the time on the Dick Tracy watch that I got for my birthday from Pop years before, and seeing it was ten minutes after three I got up and went out into the lobby, where I finally met up with the Superior’s manager, a tall, stocky guy named Mr. Heinz. He was old, maybe twenty, twenty-one, and chewing gum with his mouth a little open and his hands on his hips as he stood staring down at me with this spazzed-out look in his eyes like he wasn’t quite sure that he wanted to be conscious.

“So what’s up, kid? You lookin’ for a job? I’m real busy.”

Right away I understood that I was going to have to grovel, but having so recently seen Gunga Din telling Victor Mc Laglen, “Din only poor beasty, Sahib” in a moment of breathtaking cinematic cringing destined never to be equaled, or even approached, until the sun grew cold and, long before that, the last executive at any TV or cable station running ads about erectile dysfunction and the state of one’s colon at the family dinner hour, had been shot, disemboweled and given no rites, I knew exactly how to do it to perfection, which I’m sure Sister Joseph would have told me was just more evidence that “there
are
no coincidences with the Holy Ghost.” And so after an “I know this sounds nutsy” preamble, along with a rich and heavy dose of “sirs,” I repeated what Baloqui had said about Jane while at the same time telling Heinz that she was my sister who’d “been missing for days” and that any little clue “could be helpful to the police.”

“The police? I haven’t heard of any police coming by.”

“Levitation’s not a crime,” I said.

“Probably not.”

“But did it actually happen? Did you see it yourself, sir?”

He said, “No, kid. I didn’t. And except for one person seems like no one that I talked to about it did either. She was back of this crowd at the candy counter. But one of the ushers sure saw it.”

“He
did?
”

“So he says. He said he yelled at her to stop but she gave him ‘the arm’ and some guff about a bell.” Heinz shrugged. “I dunno.”

I pointed to an usher coming out of the theater.

“Is that him?”

“No, that’s Louis. The guy you want to talk to is Eddie.”

“Eddie who?”

“Eddie Arrigo. He comes in at six o’clock. You want to wait?”

“Oh, I’d like to, Mr. Heinz, sir. I’d like to. But I’ve got an appointment with this grouchy detective who’s in charge of the search for my sister. When I’m late he gets mad and makes threats.”

“He shouldn’t do that.”

“No.”

I left and could hardly stand to wait until Monday when I could get the straight skinny from Jane herself, though I was scared she might think me half a jerk for even bothering to check out Arrigo’s story, although, speaking of which, it might be time to put my cards on the table and confess that I was always into “out of this world” kinds of stuff and maybe more than a little too willing to believe, which of course will make a lot more sense to you after you consider that for maybe four months of second grade I believed that Doc Savage was an actual person, although, unlike Arrigo, and not wanting to be piling on or anything like that, I never claimed to be related to Doc Savage “by marriage.” So okay, that’s neither here nor wherever you want to put it, my only point being that when it came to reports of such things as levitation, my famed cynical smirk was nothing more than a cover as I tended toward
wanting
weird things to be true. As it happened my mask of superior snide was ripped off by Tommy Foley on one of those days where, always just before Christmas and Easter, my whole class would get marched into church two by two to sit in pews and wait in dread for our turn for confession because we never knew who’d wind up being our confessor, the wildly popular ninety-two-year-old Father Causey who had so heard it all and so endlessly often that if you told him that you’d murdered someone, he’d keep his head down and sigh, then say, “How many times?” and for your penance tell you, “Think about saying a Hail Mary,” whereas the other priest was the previously mentioned Father Huerta, and we all would sweat bullets that he’d be our confessor after Paulie Farragher told us how when he’d confessed to him that in the past four months he’d had impure thoughts about girls “for sure once, maybe twice,” Huerta growled, “Is that all you ever think about?” and gave him three decades of the rosary for a penance, which made me think Huerta was probably lucky to be in a state of grace and that the penitent’s box was so small as I had this sudden vision of Farragher swinging his arms around in his patented windmill defense and maybe breaking Huerta’s nose while he was giving absolution. So okay, it’s now a Friday just before Easter when Foley, who is sitting beside me in a pew, leans over and whispers in my ear that he’s heard from a source he refused to identify that if you stare at the back of someone’s head pretty soon they’ll feel the vibes and turn around to see who’s watching them, and he asks me now to help him try it out, to which, of course, I immediately agreed. I mean, it was Foley who’d reported to me accurately that if two or more people keep staring at somebody’s shoes, like on a bus or the subway, at first they turn their glances here and there, trying hard to look oblivious and cool like Noël Coward on opening night in London with the V-2 rockets whistling close overhead and then exploding and shaking the theater, when in fact they’re really feeling like the lead in some weirdo play by Franz Kafka until finally they break and look down at their shoes to find out what could possibly be wrong with them. I admit that we almost got beaten to a pulp one time on the bus to the Central Park Zoo. We had to pick on some guy wearing jackboots? Never mind. Oh, well, sure, this is Gotham City but not everyone gets rescued by Batman, maybe only Father Causey and only if Batman is Catholic and thinks Causey and Huerta are the only two priests in the city. So anyway, I teamed up with Foley that Friday in church and we both aimed our laser-beam stares at the back of Winifred Brady’s head when out of the corner of my eye I detected a strangeness, a long thin shadow that was swinging back and forth on the door to the tabernacle on the altar, and with my eyes opened wide in some excited, dumb schoolboy surmise, I poked Foley with an elbow and pointed at the shadow as I hissed at him in wonder, “Hey, Foley! Look at
that!
” An altar boy, Foley followed my point, and then he turned to look back at me with this oddly appraising and possibly borderline infuriating stare as he explained to me that while I had my head down fervidly praying that I’d get Causey, another priest had come out on the altar and had opened—and then a few seconds later closed—the tabernacle door and left the key in the lock so that the “occult” phenomenon I thought I was seeing was the shadow of the lazily swinging chain to which the key to the tabernacle door was attached.

“You thought that was something supernatural, El Bueno?”

It wasn’t what he said, but that smile of bemused superiority that did it as I wanted to punch Foley in the mouth right then and there, but I was afraid I’d get Huerta for confession and he’d ask me if all I ever thought about was punching people. In the meantime, this “El Bueno and the Mys terious Swinging Shadow” episode turned out to be a blight on my reputation. Foley spread the word that not only did I break under water torture in the East 23rd Street public pool that past summer, but I would believe almost anything and had an incredulity threshold about thirty levels higher than Pope Leo III’s when he met with Attila the Hun in the middle of a river and Attila explained to him his concept of “eminent domain.” And then I made things worse, I guess, when egged on by envy of Timmy Lyons, who had held us all spellbound as he breathlessly told us that he’d had a dream of Christ in which the Lord had walked up to him and said, “Be a priest!” and then further, “When I woke up, I vomited,” Lyons offered as vivid and multicolored proof that the dream was not a dream but a “visitation.” My competitive nature aroused, I responded on the very next day with a made-up dream in which Christ not only said to me, “Joey, be a priest!” but as he said it he “put his hand on my shoulder and
squeezed
.” I won the battle but lost the war, inasmuch as whereas Lyons was held in awe, who got the bad press for telling stories? Me. So I did a big turnaround. I couldn’t take the giggling and the sly little smiles and began a campaign to become known as “El Bueno, the Ravager of Bullshit,” which by now in seventh grade I had finally achieved. It made me sad.

Right after my discussion with Mr. Heinz of Plato’s
Phaedra
and its possible echoes in the Catholic existentialism of Gabriel Marcel, I wandered down to the East River walkway and sat on a bench just like any other kid who’s been cow-kicked by a monkey for the very first time, only maybe just a little on the downcast side and hoping hard that maybe Jane would walk by. Instead, who comes along and plops his lank down beside me with a long-toothed, jagged grin and rigged out in full Boy Scout uniform with merit badges splashed all over this sash that he wore but the leader of my Scout Troop, “Upright” Olsen, which is what we all called him on account of him being so tall and with this honest open face and him always quoting stuff from the Boy Scout Oath about having to be “upright” and “morally strong,” although anyone could see, just the same way I was looking at them now, these tiny numbers you could write on rice on both his thumbnails and all of his fingernails, which was how illegal “numbers takers” recorded their customers’ bets so that if challenged by a cop they could quickly erase them with saliva and a handkerchief, the only difference between Olsen and any other numbers taker being Olsen seemed to favor forest green ink.

“Hey, how’re they hangin’, El Bueno?” he said with this twisted smile and pin-lights for eyes like Tommy Udo in
Kiss of Death
when he cackles, “I hate squealers’ mothers,” having just pushed an old woman in a wheelchair down a long flight of stairs to her death.

“What’s up?” he went on. “You just takin’ the air?”

“Pretty much, Mr. Olsen.”

“Me too.”

Which was a joke, as I knew he was probably on his way to some more of his numbers clientele, including maybe a stop to collect protection money from some poor old immigrant shopkeeper he’d previously bamboozled into thinking that he was in the Mafia.

“Didn’t see you at the last three meetings. Sick or what?”

I didn’t tell him the real reason. Every troop in the city took a nickel in dues but Olsen had upped it to a dime. Pop had already been stuck with the cost of my spiffy Scout uniform that he bought from this ultraexpensive Boy Scout Trading Post on Park Avenue and 32nd where there was always a security guard and with the clerks and the customers tiptoeing around on this thick plush carpeting and talking in barely a notch above a whisper so at first you thought you must have blacked out and somehow wound up in a wing of the Museum of Natural History where in these lit-up thick cases made of glass instead of caveman tools there’d be these hatchets and compasses and knives with the Boy Scout logo on them. I’d sometimes go in there and moose around with my nasally whistling, avid, warm breath condensing on the tops of the glass display cases as I ogled stuff I knew I couldn’t ever buy. I did notice that neckerchiefs were very expensive.

“I had this bad cold,” I told Olsen.

“For six weeks?”

“It was severe.”

Olsen stared at me unblinking like some cobra at a mongoose who’s just told him, “Hey, let’s take a little break for a second, okay?” and then he finally said, “Right” in this quiet, dead tone and then stood up and lurched off down the walkway with a “See you next meeting.” As he loped like some tall, gimpy werewolf in his daytime form, I kept staring at his wide-brimmed Boy Scout hat and imagined the scene at his next “appointment,” where he’d be holding out the Scout hat upside down while collecting protection money from the same Chinese laundry guys we kids used to hassle, only this time with a minor variation inasmuch as when Olsen held up his hand with his fingers and thumb splaying out, now the gesture meant “Pay or Die on Friday.” I often wondered if after they’d paid him he gave them all merit badges in life-saving.

Spreading my arms out on the back of the bench, I looked out across the river, wishing Foley were with me as I thought about a lot of those balmy summer nights when he and I would be glued to one of these benches watching bobby socks and saddle shoes slowly drifting by, or we’d be going through this booklet
Get Tough
that we’d chipped in to buy and was filled with these highly educational and, to Foley, deeply inspiring photos and sketches of British commandos breaking somebody’s arm or his leg or maybe gouging out his eyes with their thumbs covered over in the same rubber caps that Miss Doyle always used when she’d be slowly turning pages in her ledger. We were acutely security conscious. Though we talked about other stuff too. Sometimes scary kinds of stuff. Like God. Like what if God hadn’t created the worlds and there was absolutely nothing in existence, which discussions were always pretty short, I’ll admit, since almost immediately at this thought our puny minds would short out and sort of gasp and want to throw up amid a shower of crackling electrical sparks like a couple of stymied headhunters happening on the Tin Man in
The Wizard of Oz.
Yet we still smelled the perfume when a really pretty girl walked by.

Pretty girls. There she was again. Right?

Jane Bent.

Head lowered, arms folded across my chest, I pondered the mystery enfolding Jane like an aura with ever-changing colors—on the one hand anxious for Monday to come when I’d be seeing her again and could get to the bottom of some things, and on the other already dreading the approaching end of the weekend and returning to the drabness of school, most especially with winter coming on when in the morning instead of walking five blocks in the freezing rain with cardboard in my shoes to plug the holes, I’d want to fake a bad cold so I could stay snug and warm in my bed while endlessly polishing my vast collection of secret decoder rings and badges and listening to grown-up radio serials like
Pretty Kitty Kelly
and
The Romance of Helen Trent
, although never
The Romance of Consuelo Chavez
, I noticed, or
Pretty Sandra Shapiro.
Only summer seemed livable to me then, and I even welcomed chubby old Sister Louise’s constant warnings of the dreaded June Regents exams in her husky, sandpaper voice, “In the merry of month of June you’ll be sweating,” a threat she invariably personalized by always turning to glare at Bill Choirelli and adding a heartfelt “You fat tub of guts!”—which today might bring a lawsuit and find Sister Louise in an orange hood and jumpsuit doing the perp walk into some courthouse croaking loudly, “On the merry Day of Judgment all you ACLU scumbags will be sweating!” This followed by Foley, Baloqui and a few other bystanders quietly applauding and murmuring, “Hear, now! Hear! Hear, hear!” Foley idolized Sister Louise. Her position on torture would have never been in doubt.

Now my thoughts swirled back to Jane, this time to the puzzle of her cryptic words:
“It’s okay to love me, Joey. But don’t be
in
love with me.”
What on earth could she possibly have meant? As I turned my head to the left and stared down the walkway with an ever-dwindling hope I’d see her walking toward me quickly with that moonrise smile and her arms held out to me, I saw someone quickly duck behind a group of strollers. It was Baloqui. Frimmled, I got up and started walking to the right, but when I turned and looked back I saw him stalking me again and then he jumped behind a tree to the left of the walkway. Grimfaced, I strode over to the tree and stood in front of it, arms akimbo as I growled, “You flaming refugee from a third-rate Toledo sword factory, why are you following me?”

“I’m not following,” I heard Baloqui’s voice answer hollowly.

“You were!” I said firmly.

“I was not. I was walking where you walked. Nothing more.”

“Come on out from behind there!”

“No, they know me here now.”

“You’re standing behind a sapling! I can see you!”

“Touché.”

Baloqui skulked around, looking grave.

“I am always your friend,” he said somberly, “your most loyal, truest friend. But you are right. I lied. I have been following you.”

“Why?”

“I guard.”

I guard?

I’d been getting these déjà vu feelings lately and, looking back, I was having an unusually strong one because of this spook movie called
The Uninvited
, where Ruth Hussey and Ray Milland smell the scent of mimosa whenever a ghost named Carmel comes around, though in the end the ghost’s good and she explains what she’s been doing all this time, which is just those two words: “I guard.”

But the movie wouldn’t be made for another three years!

That was then. This is now.

But which is which?

“What do you mean, ‘I guard,’” I said, and by now I was actually smelling mimosa as Baloqui said, “I seek to protect you,” and then added his brand-new favorite coda, his increasingly annoying “Nothing more.”

I looked over my shoulder as just for a second a suspicion sliced through my mind like a white-hot Damascus blade through Unguentine that Farragher and Connelly might be lurking in hiding and plotting to toss me into the river. I turned back and Baloqui put his hands on my shoulders, his intense black stare burning into mine as he said to me quietly and with emotion, “It doesn’t matter what our parents might do with one another. No, with us there is a friendship that is strong and can never be broken. And so I guard, my friend Joey. I protect you.”

“Protect me from
what?
” I blurted, exasperated.

“It’s that girl, Jane Bent,” he said. “Or whoever she
really
is.”

That did it, that “whoever she
really
is,” and I drew back and wrenched his hands off my shoulders. “What in freak are you talking about?!” I blustered, and then smoother than Evel Knievel sailing over a canyon on his favorite Harley with a sack full of gifts of appreciation for his longtime friends and contacts in the Las Vegas Hospital Emergency Room, Baloqui launched even higher into Bizarro Land with some lunatic story about Jane being spotted very late the night before standing next to a white limousine with the California license tag
STARLET 1
and head-to-head in a “secret-looking, guarded conversation” with the
Little Orphan Annie
comic strip character and God-figure “Mr. Am!” Baloqui described him to a
tee
: “Very tall and with a pointy long white beard? Yellow cummerbund, black top hat and jacket? Come on, Joey! No question about it! It was him! And then that other guy, The Asp, he’s in the driver’s seat, okay? So they finish up talking, your girl and Mr. Am, and they get into the limo and drive off and what’s spooky is you can’t hear the sound of the engine. Now I’m not saying it really was them. Understand? I’m not saying it. If it really was them, then no problem: Mr. Am and the Asp, they’re good people. But it actually
can’t
be them, Joey! They’re friggin’
cartoons!
So now what kind of people would
pretend
to be them? See what I’m saying? What kind of person would
do
that?”

Baloqui took a step back then, maybe to avoid a potential right cross, although actually I think it was more like in self satisfaction as he folded his arms across his chest and nodded, saying, “Just looking after you, Joey. I don’t know what they’re after, but this girl is in it deep, she’s in deep with bad people, plus it looks like they’re rich, so they could finance expensive crazy plots to do you in. Stay away from her, Joey! That’s the only thing I’m saying. Just look out!”

I blinked a few times to clear my head. I’d known Baloqui all the way from first grade and while he had a few crotchets—well, maybe more than a few—it wasn’t until lately that I’d ever had reason to think that his brain waves, shall we say, had been inappropriately altered, and a paranoia dynamite fuse began sizzling and snaking through my mind about the people with the limo being rich, which made me flash on how Jane had whisked that five-dollar bill from her pocket. Who knew how many more might have been there? You know? Then my eyes began to narrow.

“You saw this yourself?”

“Joey, everyone sees things.”

“True. But was it
you
who in fact saw
this?
”

“I have eyes.”

“Yes, I
know
you have eyes. So do
I
. What I’m asking is are you the eyewitness to this, or is it somebody else with the initials F.A.?”

“And if it’s me you won’t believe it?” he suddenly blurted and—swear before God!—with a tremor in his voice and I could see he was scrunching up his eyes in a ludicrous try at manufacturing tears, or at least some mist, though I admit this pathetic but engaging bit of theater was surely no harder to take than his legendary “Pensive Stork” maneuver, although what followed, which was a choked-up “Okay for you, Joey!” was as close to a crushing final word as the set that I ran with could possibly use. And with this he whipped around, and with his hands in his pockets and his head bent low, he slouched away with this limp he was faking in a pitiful attempt at drawing my sympathy, and in my mind I could see him as Richard III grumbling, “Now is the winter of our discontent made even worse by this heartless prick El Bueno.” I saw him suddenly stop and broadly smile as he seemed to have spotted something on the walkway’s grassy berm. He stooped down to recover a thin piece of wood, but then scowled and, tossing it away, gimped on.

He must have thought it was a “Lucky Stick.”