Queens Noir (8 page)

"Maureen's a doctor, after all. You'll get to play with your
grandkids. All the time!"

"Oh, they'd sure love the free baby-sitting . . ." Rose is telling
her new Chinese friend, Li. "But at fourteen and ten? Those
kids think I'm boring and smell weird. And I am. And I do!
I'm no dummy!"

This strikes Rose as so hysterically funny that soon she's
collapsed in a stained dining room chair, cradling her arthritic
elbow. Harboring an illegal alien is one of her first ever crimes
(give or take a little parking on her late husband Vincent's
handicapped permit). She feels Sambuca giddy, puffy with
pride. If Vin, may he rest in peace, could see Li lying here in his favorite shirt-the ivory one with black piping and breast
pocket snaps-he'd surely be impressed. Donning their cowboy best, Vin and his buddies from the social club used to
spend each Sunday morning riding around Belle Harbor on
their mopeds. "The Good Guys" they called themselves, and
went looking for good deeds to do. But Vin had never risen to
this Robin Hood level: A good deed and a crime too!

"It was mostly his excuse to get out of church," Rose adds
and crosses herself; a reflex.

"Yesu Jidu!" Li suddenly claps from his spot beneath the dining room table, an awkward choice of seating conversation-wise
but okay; maybe it's cultural.

"Yesu Jidu? . . . Parla Inglese?" Maybe he's dreaming with
his eyes open. So weak and emaciated, it's like taking care
of a child again. Like Vin in the end. But this fellow can't be
much older than thirty. A large bruised head on a skeletal
frame and wet-looking hair even now that it's dried. In one
hand he clutches a Ziploc bag containing a small roll of bills
and a phone number written on a scrap of newsprint. With
the other, he points a shaky finger at the iron crucifix from
Calabria hung over Rose's marble sideboard.

"Yesu Jldu," he repeats. "Mel"

At last, Rose gets it. "You're Jesus Christ! Well, no wonder
we're hitting it off!"

And not an hour ago, he was on his knees, in his undies,
puking up the Atlantic Ocean all over her shower house.

For some reason, this cracks her up all over again.

When the helicopters whirred her awake, the phone was ringing too. Rose fumbled for her bifocals. Three a.m.

"Are all the doors locked?" Paulie panted. "Turn on the
TV! There's a boatload of illegal chinks out-!"

"Who taught you to talk like that?"

"I'm comin' over."

"Who said?"

"Don't you get it? They're washin' up by-what?"

"What?"

"I heard something."

"Helicopters?"

"Oh, Christ, Ma! Get up! Turn on the TV!"

It was easier to just push aside the window curtain. Yes,
the giant metal insects were out there hovering. But that was
not so unusual here on the shore where they're often called
in for drownings, drug traffickers, and big-wig airport transport. And what with that 120,000-pound dead whale that just
washed up in Arverne Friday, the sky had been pocked with
press copters all week. But this new swarm buzzed the other
end of the beach, up near Riis Park, and seemed to be composed of police and Coast Guard choppers.

"Get Dad's gun; I'll feel better."

"Paulie ..."

"Get it, Ma, or they'll be stormin' our fuckin' house."

"Who taught you that language?" Our house.

"If you don't get it, I'm comin'."

So what choice did Rose have but to slowly unload herself from the bed? She'd never get back to sleep now anyhow.
Instead of a robe, she preferred one of Paul's old red surf-shop
sweatshirts. Instead of slippers, flip-flops. Better to accommodate a hammer toe or two.

The gun, still loaded and ready to guard Vincent's Bootery
on 116th Street was hidden, appropriately, in one of Vin's old
cowboy boots. It was painful, physically and every which way,
for Rose to crouch in the closet and extract it. Yet she lingered, running her hand along the familiar broken-in black leather and fancy white boot stitching, letting herself miss the
husband she mostly despised. The revolver sagged heavily in
her big front sweatshirt pocket but the feeling was not altogether unpleasant, a little like a baby there. Vincent's Bootery
was now a cell phone store.

The backdoor sticks. To open it, you have to lean with your
whole weight, wham, shoulder-first. Each time Rose does this,
she imagines falling onto the brick patio where she'll lay in
crumpled agony until 8:30 a.m. when, obligated, Paulie comes
to check she's not drinking, and forevermore forces her to
wear that medical leash with the button to press in case of
emergencies.

"I know you would have come and rescued me," Rose
says, as she shuffles toward Li with a breakfast tray. "If I were
out there wailing in pain, I know you would."

Li just bows (or has a cramp). He reaches clumsily for the
tray and a bowl skids off, smashing. Together, the two wrestle
the food down to the scratched-up dining room tile. Can he
hear all her joints popping? she wonders. His smooth black
eyes both avoid and study her as if she's a phantom or royalty,
the Queen of Queens maybe.

"The Queen of Queens and Yesu Jidu will commence to
dine. Choice of Fiberall, orange juice, Sambuca."

It's a far swim from the meals she used to make, for her
daddy, then her husband, then her son, for the endless stream
of relatives from Italy and Bensonhurst, for Good Guys and
Bad Guys, their loud wives, sandy children, pets! On a Sunday
like this, she'd be expected to serve the antipasti and the pasta,
two meats, a vegetable side, dessert, espresso, and mints. She
prayed for a daughter to help her. When that didn't work,
she prayed for an air conditioner. Finally, "I just prayed they'd leave me the fuck alone, excuse my Italian. And here I am.
Until Paulie gets his way. Or the whale saves me."

"A bacterial time bomb," the papers are calling the washed-up
finback. If the city doesn't get rid of her before the next high
tide, she could infect the whole waterfront. Rockaway's summer of '93 would be an environmental disaster, a PR nightmare! A blessing for Rose. No one will bother coming near
her house if the beach is closed. Rose will live happily ever
after for one more summer. Rose and Li-

Sadly, no one's ever seen a Chinese person in Rockaway
besides the delivery boy for Wok and Roll. People would definitely notice. Li's dark hair and busy eyebrows are actually a
lot like young Vin's were, but there are those nearly lidless
eyes to give Li away, high cheekbones, a nose like some kind
of exotic sliced mushroom. He sniffs with what might be disgust at the box of Fiberall cereal.

"If Paulie hadn't had my gas turned off, I'd make you
my famous cutlets and escarole," Rose apologizes. "Or some
soup-I know your people like soup. The nerve of that kid
after forty-five years of scarfing my rigatoni. On a Sunday like
this, I'd serve an antipasti and a pasta, two meats-

Eyes closed, Li begins quickly eating the cereal, with his
hands, from the box, no milk. He's got a way of chewing with
his whole head that Rose has never seen before. And Rose has
seen a whole lot of people eating.

"I'd go easy on that Fiberall," she warns.

He streaked across her lawn just as she made it out the backdoor, without falling. There goes the neighbor's huge black
lab, Blacky, off its leash again, she'd assumed. And though
she'd noticed his bark sounded odd, like a croup, she was too
distracted, thinking how the wretch had gone to pee in his favorite spot against her shower house. No point reasoning
with the owners, people so deeply unoriginal that they'd name
a black dog Blacky. Didn't they also want her property? Eager to
buy and tear down the place Paulie was born in to build something they called a solarium. Owning things others covet might
make some feel powerful, but it just filled Rose with fear.

In the distance, Ambrose lighthouse pulsed on, off, on, but
its usual soothing rhythm was jangled by searchlights roaming
the dark, chaotic waves. She could hear sirens. Screams? The
helicopter din made it hard to make out. Then that lumpy
policeman appeared, bouncing around the side of the house.

"What!" Rose snapped, clutching her sweatshirt closed.
She'd been hassled by the law once before, after starting a fire
on the beach. Had she really fallen, this officer would have
been the one to find her. Quite by accident, while coveting
the ivy climbing up her facade, the decorative inlaid tile, flowering shrubbery, large picture windows, his flashlight would
have suddenly illuminated what was left of her, Rose Camille
Maria Impoliteri. A shriveled, bloodied human carcass. An
ugly, used-up thing requiring removal. A nuisance.

"We were ringin' but you were out here, I guess," the policeman said, and only then remembered to flash a badge.
"O'Donnell."

Behind him, a second, trimmer uniform materialized. This
one trailing a nightstick along the beach wall and whacking
now and then at Rose's ornamental grasses. He looked so
much like an old classmate of Paulie's. Kevin? Kieran? But
then they all did. Those fair-haired Rockaway lifeguards and
rangers, cops, firefighters, Coast Guard; they could all pass
for larger versions of the St. Francis High School bullies who
tagged her son "Guido" and "Greaseball Wop," "Guinnie Rat"
and "Zipperhead."

"Stop!" her frail voice failed to yell. "Why's he doin'
that?"

"Just checkin' around." O'Donnell smiled, still bouncing,
in place now. "You see anything unusual?

"Yeah. Over there, your partner beatin' on my plants."

"Any Chinese, I mean. Boat ran aground on a sandbar off a
Breezy," he explained. "The Golden Venture. Full of Chinese illegals. They're drownin' and runnin' so we're s'posed to check
around." With a couple more bounces for punctuation.

"I know about that," Rose said. "You need to use the men's
room?"

A genuine offer but O'Donnell ignored it. "Anyone else
wit ya here? Husband? Kids? Some kinda companion?"

Rose snapped. "What makes ya think that? I can take care
a myself! I am-"

Which is when Blacky started up barking again, barking
from inside the house next door, the same old bark she was
used to. So Blacky wasn't actually out there, Rose got around
to understanding. So it hadn't even been a dog that ran past
her just-

"Wait," she called uselessly. By the time her mind had gotten here, the two officers had set off to search the garage.
"Wait. You can't do that."

Her elbow throbbed and flamed from opening the door,
but still she followed.

"You can't do that! Wait!" Kicking off her flip-flops to try
and move faster. "No, I think you're not allowed to do that.
Without a warrant." Was this true? She hadn't the faintest
idea. All she knew for sure was, "This is my house!"

The backdoor sticks, the tile is scratched; the basement floods
every time someone cries, Vin used to joke. But according to the brokers who periodically call, the brick rectangle is now
worth two million easy. Ten thousand was what Rose's daddy
paid for it brand new, back in the '40s.

"Germans came ashore then, did you know that? German
spies in Rockaway!"

Now total strangers regularly stroll up and make offers on
the house over the beach wall.

"But I'm gonna fool them all, Li," Rose all of a sudden
decides. "I'm gonna leave the place to you."

The Good Guys didn't help anyone that much. Other
than a lady who let them load up her car with groceries in the
Waldbaum's parking lot, the Good Guys never really helped
anyone at all. Vin said they tried but no one was interested.
Even the lady with the groceries, Vin said, probably she just
felt sorry for them. So the Good Guys took to drinking instead. Then they'd drag race their mopeds up and down Beach
Channel Drive. Vin would stagger into Sunday dinner to alternately love up and criticize Rose. My favorite flower. You call
this turd a meatball? My soft, fragrant Rose. Lazy bitch can't go to
Bensonhurst for some decent bread!

"It was that and more, and I took it until the day he says,
Rose, he says, dome a favor. Don't serve this grease when my cousins come from Calabria. In front of our Jewish friends, he says
this in front of the Friedmans. He calls my sauce grease."

Li can't possibly understand the story, yet he tilts his head
at its tone of hurt and even stops eating while she speaks. If
Paulie and his atheist wife ever showed her half the deference,
she might have invited them to live here already. If.

"That night, I burned the table leaves," Rose continues.
"This table here. I dragged those two heavy planks one by one
across the floor-see here these long scratches?-that's from
draggin' them, and mind you, by myself, since Paulie's too busy upstairs with Vin watchin' detectives chase each other or professional wrestlin' ... But I know you would have helped me,
Li." At that, he tries to give Rose the wad of bills from his
Ziploc bag and she pretends not to notice.

Once she finally got to the garage, all the chairs and cushions
she'd paid the grandkids to stack at the end of the summer
had been tossed across the dirty floor, and still the officers
were going at it, knocking over beach umbrellas, tossing paint
cans. What would they do if they actually found a person?
Her father had come over just like this, on a boat from Sicily. And Vin had arrived in an Armani suit on a plane. But
the ways they'd been harassed would be nothing compared to
what they'd do to a poor Asian soul stuffed on a freighter, for
months it had to be, now half-drowned and frozen from kicking for his life in the frosty June chop. Just thinking about it
made her sure she heard the croup again, that someone was
there.

"Someone's here," Kevin or Kieran said, but he meant
Rose. "Hey. Hi. Ma'am. Ya really shouldn't be out."

"At my age?"

"At this hour. With that cough." One of his green eyes
was lazy, drifting. Rose thought to cough again to cover for
the stranger. She wondered if the wok she'd long ago ruined
had wound up here in the garage. She'd cleaned it wrong and
it had rusted or