Palisades Park (39 page)

When the last CORE member was arrested, Toni, as usual, was the only one not being lined up at the curb to await the arrival of more police cars to take them to the station.

“Dammit, arrest me too!” Toni snapped at Borrell, but he ignored her.

At the curb, a park guard suddenly approached Jim Peck, his eyes blazing with hatred. “I’d like to kill you!” the guard declared—but he settled for delivering a haymaker to Peck’s jaw. Toni could hear the snap of Jim’s jawbone, and watched in horror as, knocked unconscious, he collapsed in a heap onto the sidewalk. His fellow CORE members rushed to his aid.

Eddie arrived in time to see his daughter, enraged, heading for the guard who’d clocked Peck, now turning away with a bloody-minded smile of satisfaction. Toni took several quick steps, standing toe-to-toe with the guard. He was at least a foot taller than she was, but she had her way of equalizing that. Without a word she jerked up her right knee and buried it in the man’s groin. He howled like a cat being gelded.

Eddie thought,
Oh, Christ!

Toni turned and taunted Borrell: “
Now
will you arrest me?”

Angrily, Borrell came up and grabbed her wrist, intending to slap a handcuff around it. Eddie started forward—

But Jack rocketed past him. “Leave my sister alone!” He propelled himself, clumsily but forcefully, into Borrell, knocking him off balance.

Borrell snapped, “Jesus Christ! No wonder your mother left you two!”

Furious, Jack took a swing at him, but missed. Two patrolmen seized him as well as Toni, slapping them into handcuffs before they could blink.

Borrell barked, “Book both of them for assault and fuck Irving Rosenthal!”

Jack looked at the cops and said with a grin, “Uh-oh. Which one of you has to fuck Irving Rosenthal?”

Toni laughed. The cop holding Jack, not finding it as funny, raised his hand to give Jack a good slap in the head—but the blow was intercepted by Eddie Stopka’s strong right arm.

“There’s been enough violence here today, don’t you think?” he said.

The cop backed off and Toni and Jack were herded, but not violently, into the next squad car that pulled up to the curb.

“Toni, Jack—keep your cool from here on, okay?” Eddie said. “I’ll be at the station to get you out soon as I can.”

In the car Toni turned to Jack and said, “Thanks. For lending a hand.”

“Anytime.” He gave her a lopsided smile. “Who’da thought they’d send mystery men like us to jail?”

Toni smiled as the squad car pulled away from the curb.

Eddie watched it go, then stalked over to Chief Borrell.

“Eddie, I’m sorry,” the chief said, holding his hands palm out, “I didn’t want to arrest them, but they gave me no choice.”

“Funny, the choices you make, Chief.” Eddie looked him straight in the eye. “You sit in Duke’s, rubbing shoulders with Joe Adonis and Willie Moretti, and you don’t arrest
them
. How many households in Cliffside Park have a telephone line put in for use by a bookmaker—fifty bucks a week, found cash—but you never arrest any of them, do you? But Negroes who want only to be treated like any other human being, and the people who take their side? Them you arrest, and worse. You goddamned hypocrite.”

Borrell looked stunned that anyone in “his” town would dare confront him like this. “God damn it, Eddie, I brought you into this park … you’ve got an interest in keeping out the wrong kind of elements, too—”

“You did bring me in. And you treated me fairly and kindly. But as much as I owe you, Frank, I promise—you will not charge my son and daughter with assault or anything else. Because if you do, I will not hesitate one fucking
second
to go the Feds and tell them everything that goes on across the street at Duke’s, and the company you keep in there. You understand?”

“I got nothing to say about who chooses to have lunch in Duke’s! I don’t even know half those guys.”

“Bullshit. I’m not the only one who’s seen you with them, Frank. Anything happens to me or my kids, people will know who’s responsible.”

“Eddie, c’mon, this is ridiculous! Nothing’s happening to anybody.” He forced a laugh, but the color had drained from his face and he started to back off: “Look—that guard who slugged the guy from New York, that was uncalled for, agreed? So was what Toni did to him—but I guess she’s just like her dad, always looking out for somebody else.” He placed a paternal hand on Eddie’s shoulder. “I’ll talk the guard out of pressing charges, and I’ll forget about that swing Jack took at me. All right, Ten Foot?”

“All right,” Eddie said guardedly.

Borrell smiled, a bit sadly. He brushed a piece of lint off Eddie’s shoulder, then fingered the lapel of Eddie’s jacket. “Nice cut. I remember a time when you didn’t have a clean shirt to your name.”

“Yeah,” Eddie said, tone softening. “You took a chance on a pretty raw-looking kid, didn’t you?”

“Ah, you had an honest face. Dopey but honest.” Borrell smiled again. “Guess I’m still taking a chance on you, eh, Eddie?”

*   *   *

Neither Toni nor Jack were charged, which somehow disappointed them; but their shared combat—and Toni’s disaffection from Slim—had healed some old wounds. Together they listened to radio shows for the rest of the day, both so exhausted they went to bed before Jack Benny was over.

The next morning, Toni woke early, refreshed in a way she hadn’t felt in a long while. She wolfed down some milk and cereal, then, on a sudden impulse, slipped on her bathing suit beneath a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, grabbed her bike, and started pedaling toward Henry Hudson Drive.

When she got to Hazard’s Dock she waited, and at precisely nine
A.M.
, Bunty Hill came ambling down the cliff’s side with his walking stick, breaking into a wide smile when he saw her. “Hey, Joe Palooka,” he said, “I hear you broke some goon’s balls. Sorry I missed it.”

“Thanks,” she said proudly. “Mind some company on your swim?”

“Be my guest.”

“I was—thinking of going over to the New York side,” she said casually.

“Yeah?” Bunty seemed pleased. “Looks like a good day for it.”

Toni shucked off her shirt and shorts as Bunty stripped down to his bathing suit, then snapped on his red bathing cap. He walked to the water’s edge, scooped up a handful of water and gargled it, then spit it out and gave her a thumbs-up. Then he walked onto the dock and smiled back at her: “Ready, kiddo?”

“Ready.”

Bunty dove off Hazard’s Dock and into the steel-blue Hudson. Without hesitation, Toni dove in behind him, cleaving the waters with renewed joy and confidence. Above them roared hundreds of automobiles rolling across the span of the George Washington Bridge, but here in the water the only sounds Toni was mindful of were the slap of the salty waves and the excited pulse of her own heart—and the only thing that mattered, in the distance, was that little red lighthouse at Jeffrey’s Hook.

17

St. Petersburg, Florida, 1949

T
ONI GAZED OUT EAGERLY
from her window seat as the Atlantic Coast Line’s
Florida Special
rolled into St. Petersburg, past a colonnade of tall palm trees lined up behind a chalk-white depot building with a red gabled roof. As the brakes screeched and sighed, the train’s vibrations sent a shiver of excitement through her. At the age of eighteen she was away from home, alone, for the first time in her life, arriving in a place as different from what she was used to as—well, as different as she felt in her blue rayon-gabardine suit dress and jacket from the people at the station, all of them dressed in summer whites and short sleeves even though it was well past Labor Day.

Summer apparently never ended here, a point driven home by the bright sunlight and a sticky wave of heat that assaulted her as she got off the train, waiting for her baggage to be unloaded. The air was so humid she found herself sweating like a bricklayer as she picked up her suitcase. She had packed lighter clothes, of course, but had wanted to make a good impression with a more formal outfit. What kind of impression was she going to make now, with her dress shields working overtime?

She enjoyed a brief respite from the heat as she passed through the air-conditioned depot, only to hit another wall of hot, moist air as she exited. She scanned the row of cars parked outside and had little trouble picking out the one belonging to the person she was meeting. Dwarfing all the sedate sedans was a one-and-a-half-ton panel truck hooked up to a twenty-two-foot house trailer. On the side of the truck was a brightly colored illustration of a woman wearing a cape of orange fire, diving from a ninety-foot ladder (it said so right on the side) toward a tank of writhing flame. Alongside this were the words:

ELLA CARVER

Internationally Known

As the Only High Swan Diver in the World

On Fire Into Fire

The Greatest Diving Act

“THE ONE THAT NEVER FAILS THE PUBLIC”

Standing beside the truck was a woman in her late fifties, a square-jawed face framed by a curly wreath of brown hair slowly being silvered by time. She stood about five feet four, maybe a hundred and twenty pounds, and looked just like the photograph Toni had seen in
The Billboard.
Toni approached the woman, said, “Hi, I’m Toni Stopka,” and held out her hand.

Ella Carver’s grip was the firmest Toni had ever felt from a woman; a broad smile softened the square face. “Hello, Toni Stopka, I’m Ella Carver. Welcome to Florida. Hot enough for you?”

“Oh yeah. I feel like an idiot in this suit.”

“Feel free to eighty-six the jacket. We’ve got a little ride ahead of us and there’s no point in being uncomfortable.” She spoke with a faint trace of an accent from her native West Virginia.

“Thanks.” Toni gratefully stripped off her jacket as Ella lifted her suitcase as if it were a paperweight and hoisted it into the truck. “Climb in.”

Toni did just that. Ella slid into the driver’s seat, keyed the ignition, and shifted gear into reverse. Backing up a truck
and
a trailer seemed like a dicey proposition to Toni, but Ella effortlessly angled the whole rig out of the parking space and up Central Avenue, past City Hall, the police station, and the other civic pillars of downtown St. Petersburg.

“Peejay thinks you’re a very bright, talented girl.” Ella rolled down the side window and a warm breeze carried the scent of jasmine into the car. “But he didn’t say why he wasn’t training you himself.”

“Peejay told me, ‘If anybody’s going to teach you to be a world-class lady high diver, it ought to
be
a world-class lady high diver, and Ella’s the best in the world.’”

Ella laughed. “Best ‘lady’ diver—old Peejay sure knows how to parse a phrase. We haggled for years over which one of us could be billed the world’s highest swan diver. He starts from a height of a hundred feet and me from ninety, but I pointed out he rides a bicycle down to fifty feet and only then goes into a swan dive. He was forced to concede the point.”

Toni was only half listening, fascinated by the stands of palm trees adorning almost every street, the quality of the sunlight, the homes and storefronts with facades white as coral. Was this the glorious tropics her father was always raving about?

“So is Peejay right?
Do
you want to be a world-class lady high diver?”

Toni shook off her reverie and said, “I just want to be a high diver, as good as you and Bee Kyle. If that’s world-class, then I guess I want that.”

“Ah, poor Bee,” Ella said sadly. “Last I heard, she and her husband were selling popcorn and souvenirs at a railroad circus in Mississippi.”

“My dad owns a food concession at Palisades Park,” Toni said, a bit defensively.

“No offense meant, honey. At least she’s still in the business. It gets in your blood—been in mine for fifty years, ever since my mama took me to the circus and I saw a woman dive off a high tower. As soon as I saw her flying through the air, I knew that was what I was going to be.”

“That’s how I felt when I saw Bee Kyle and Arthur Holden.”

“You have any prior training, Toni?”

“My friend Bunty coached me in diving at the Y. He had me practicing off their ten-foot springboard: backward and forward somersaults, both piked and tucked, jack-knives, half gainers…”

“You want to learn the high swan dive or come down feet first, like most high divers?”

“If a full gainer was good enough for Bee Kyle, it’s good enough for me.”

“Fine by me,” Ella said. “I can do without the competition.” She laughed warmly and Toni joined in. “All right, you want to apprentice with me, we start right now. I’ve got a short gig at a county fair in Savannah, Georgia, last one for a couple of months. You can help me set up my rigging, check the equipment, fill the tank—the grunt work behind the glamour. We spend days doing grunt work, including driving—all so we can have those three seconds in which we launch ourselves into space and fly.”

She looked at Toni and said with absolute conviction, “But I promise you this—they’re the best damn three seconds you’ll ever have in your life.”

*   *   *

Four months earlier, toward the end of her freshman year at Fairleigh Dickinson College, Toni had worked up her nerve and knocked on the door of her father’s workshop. “Come on in,” he called. Entering, Toni glanced up at the dozens of
tikis—
carved from driftwood, pine, oak, and a special wood he ordered from Hawai
‘
i called
koa—
that crowded the shelving on the walls. They looked down at her with jeweled eyes, bared teeth, shaggy headdresses, and scowling mouths. Her father had assured her there was a purpose to these, but so far he hadn’t shared it and right now she had a purpose of her own.

“Dad? Can I talk to you about something?”

He barely glanced up from the
tiki
he was carving. “Sure, what’s up?”

Toni blurted out, “I’m leaving college after this year.”

That got his attention. His head snapped up. “What? Why?”

“I’ve been trying to tell you all year, this isn’t for me. I’ve just been … going through the motions, to please you. What I
want
is to be a high diver.”