Thrill Kids (4 page)

F
LIP HELD HIS JAW
where the old man had hit him. He stood by the kitchen table, shaking, his face colored with rage and shame, his eyes tearful.

“Look at it!” his father commanded in German. “Turn the pages and look!”

“Pa, God, lay off! I don’t want to look.”

“You look! Look and leave the Lord out of it!”

Slowly Hans Heine’s hand touched the paper-covered volume of Night of Horror. He turned a page. There was a picture of a woman with her clothes half ripped off her voluptuous body. Her bare back was striped with bloody whip lashes. She lay on a floor with her arms wrapped around a man’s trousered leg, and he looked down at her, grinning, whip in hand. She was kissing his feet passionately. He was promising, “You’ll get more, baby. I’m going to give it to you until you can’t move!”

“Keep on!” Flip’s father barked angrily. “Turn the page!”

As he did so, Flip looked through eyes that were brimming with tears at illustrations of scantily dressed, sensual women being burned with cigarettes, strangled with wire, kicked down long flights of stairs, tied to wheels, and beaten with wet Turkish towels. His father watched him. He was a large, fat man in his late sixties, with a bald head that was red and shining, round dark eyes that flashed his fury, and a small mouth, which was now tight and tense. When Flip spoke to him, he spoke German. In the Heine household English was seldom used, save when visitors who knew no German were present.

Flip said, “What does this
prove,
Pa — making me do this?”

“It proves you look at this trash. You spend good money to look at this trash! Well, look! Look! Filth!” Again his father struck him across the jaw. “Dirty son! Spend money on filth!”

Flip reeled, regained his stance, and stood crying openly, his shoulders heaving with his sobs. He could hear his mother say, “No, Pete. No. Don’t hit him more. It is enough.” She sat in the parlor beyond the kitchen, in a straight-backed chair, her black shawl wrapped around her even though the night was hot and muggy. She was a little woman, plump and short. Her small face was dominated by bifocals, and her hands were perpetually knitting, in an unceasing, automatic way. The apartment above
Die Lotosblume
had five rooms that followed one after the other, in a straight line. There were no doors to the rooms, only curtains. Flip and his middle brother, Fritz, shared a bedroom next to the one his older brother, Bob, and his wife slept in. Beyond that one was his parents’ bedroom. His sister and her husband lived a block away, on Eighty-seventh Street, and his third brother lived with his wife and kids in the apartment building next door to the restaurant.

“You keep out of this!” Pete Heine warned his wife. “You are too soft on this boy. He is a bad boy!”

Flip blew his nose and rubbed his handkerchief over his wet face.

“Where did you get this?” his father demanded, pointing to the book.

“Some guys,” Flip said. “I don’t know.” “At the store? The store you love so?” “No, pa. No!”

“You go there no more! You stay home. Work more at the place. The devil has your idle hands!”

“I didn’t get it at the store! Blame the store for everything!”

“You get a haircut! You don’t look respectable!” “All the guys — ”

His father struck him a third time. “I say you get a haircut, you get a haircut, Hans!” “Yes, sir.”

Flip’s nose began to bleed. He held his handkerchief to it to catch the blood.

“Blood,” his mother muttered from the other room. “Blood, Pete. Please — no more.” She sat knitting, her hands nervous, her own eyes filling. She said, “Hans, Hans, what can become of you?”

“Now!” his father said. “Go now to the barber!”

“Yes, sir,” Flip said. “I got to stop the bleeding.”

“You go now!”

“I want to wash my face, Pa. Please, I — ”
“Now!”

“Yes,” Flip said, hurrying, holding the handkerchief still to his nose. “Yes.” He went past his mother in the parlor. She reached a hand out and touched his trousers and said his name in a tired, sad way. His father stood, arms akimbo, watching him. Flip opened the apartment door.

“Hans?”

“Pa?”

“When you come back you work tonight! You don’t go anyplace tonight!”

“Pa, I was invited to — ”

“I invite you to work! You come back here and you work in the place!” He slapped the paper-bound book to the floor. “Filth! You dirty son!”

Flip shut the door behind him and started down four flights of rickety wooden stairs. At the landing he reached into his pocket for his comb and ran it through his hair. He stood with his head back, swallowing the blood that came down his throat. When at last he put the handkerchief back in his pocket, he spat on his fingers and touched them to his eyes.

It was still light in the streets and he looked in the window of a florist shop to see the time. Seven. The barbershop was on the corner, and he went on past it.

For a long time Flip walked without knowing where he was going. He had an hour to kill before he would go to Bardo’s, and the only thing he was certain of was that he
would
go there. All week he had thought about it, planned it, even saved out a shirt he wanted to wear. Now he was wearing one with blood on it. He hated his father. Every time he got a chance to climb another rung up the ladder leading out of Yorkville, his father held him back. Their differences always circled around picayune issues that developed with the suddenness of a thunderstorm in August, and lasted far, far longer. It made Flip burn to have the old man raise such a furor over a book like that. Flip had seen plenty worse up at Leemie’s, where he’d got that one; the one he got was
nothing.

When he cut across Ninety-eighth Street going toward Park Avenue, Flip knew he was heading for Leemie’s store. He could get a fresh shirt from Leemie, maybe. Leemie was a creep
one,
but he had a way of getting things. Some of the things he could get were fantastic — all the dirty books and pictures, and bull whips, and things Flip sometimes didn’t even know what a person did with. He pushed a little, too, Flip thought; not just “pot,” but the real stuff. Leemie had his own monkey on his back. Flip smirked when he remembered the way Leemie sang:

“I get my kicks from cocaine. Mere alcohol doesn’t thrill me at all …"

The store was on the bad end of Park Avenue, up in the Hundreds under the New York Central tracks. Flip used to go up to the fruit and vegetable market nearby to buy for the place sometimes, and he got into the habit of stopping off at Leemie’s to listen to records. Leemie sold sheet music and songbooks too, but he never sold very much of anything on display. It was his “front.” Leemie knew all the latest jazz lingo, with some jargon peculiar to dopeys thrown in, and Flip liked to listen to it and memorize it. Even though Leemie was a little squirrily, no one could say he was square.

When Flip got there, the store was empty except for Leemie. It would be hard to guess Leemie’s age. He was probably over thirty-five, but how many years over was not plain. Medium-sized, with a thin, sallow face, horn-rimmed glasses, and a hook nose, Leemie looked good only when he smiled, and then he looked a little silly too, a little “high.”

“How come?” he said to Flip, who never came around in the evening to see Leemie.

“You mean me being here? Or this?” Flip pointed to his shirt.

Leemie shrugged.

“Well,” Flip said, “I’m here to get another shirt, if you got one. My old man decided to play house tonight.”

“Nice,” Leemie said. He tossed a key ring at Flip. “Up one on the left. Two-B. You’ll see the dresser.”

“When’d these come in, Leem?” Flip’s eyes ran along the counter. There was a cigar box filled with knives, all switchblades.

“They were never out.”

“What do you soak?”

“For you? Two and a quarter.” “Can I charge?”

“Somehow that doesn’t move me.”

“Until Monday. I come up on Monday. Pay you then.”

Leemie thought about it.

Flip said, “I’ll bring the shirt back then too, and pick up this rag. I’ll pay you, Leem. I got to get a haircut with what I got on me.”

Leemie said he didn’t mind.

Flip pulled a few of the knives out of the box and looked them over, then tossed them all back but a black one. He pressed a button on the side of the knife and the blade shot out, sharp and gleaming.

“Don’t goof with it,” Leemie told him. “They aren’t in favor with the Fridays.”

“It could kill a person,” Flip said. “Like, lookit how long that blade is. Man!”

“Got some new literature, too. Illustrated from real life.” Leemie laughed. He socked his fist up at his wrist in an obscene gesture. Flip laughed too.

Leemie said, “In this one they’re giving this girl this enema, see, and at the same time — “

Leemie told Flip all about it. When he was finished, neither one could stop laughing for a long time.

“You got time?” Leemie finally asked. “I’ll let you look at some of it.”

Flip looked up at the clock on the wall of the small store. It was twenty minutes to eight. He was going to be late getting to Bardo’s. He still had to get his hair cut. It was going to be bad enough not to show up for work, but to show up later without his hair cut — murder!

“I can’t,” Flip said. “I’ll see them Monday. Where’ll I leave my shirt?”

“Bed. Bring mine back.
And
the money.”

“It’s a swell knife, all right.” Flip had been holding it the whole time, pressing the button and watching the blade spring, pushing it in and pressing the button again. He folded it now and put it into his pocket.

Leemie said, “You didn’t get it from me if you goof.”

“You kidding?” Flip said indignantly. “Think I’m square?”

The shirt Flip found in Leemie’s drawer was like no shirt Flip had ever seen before. It was neat; crazy. It was some kind of shiny material ; not silk, but soft like silk, and bright yellow, sun-colored. It had a wing collar, buttons covered with the same material as the shirt was made of, and five buttons on the sleeves. The best thing about it was the breast pocket. It had a heart on it, a big black one.

Flip studied his reflection in Leemie’s mirror. He knew he looked sharp. He winked at his reflection and as he did so his eye caught one of Leemie’s photographs of naked women. It was a glossy five-by-seven, stuck there in the corner of the glass. Flip went closer and stared at it with a dull, expressionless face. His hand went to his pocket where the knife was, and he drew the knife out fast, the blade bare and pointing. He swung his arm in a half circle until the knife just met the woman in the picture. He waited with it poised there, the tip of it nicking the surface of the photograph. Then he plunged it in. “You move me not at all, baby,” he said, “but I sure kill you!”

T
HE RING
was always kept on the right-hand side of the top drawer of the bureau in his mother’s room. Bardo considered it ironic that such a cheap piece of ten-carat gold should be encased in a fine velvet box. Often, while his mother was sitting at the dressing table putting on the finishing touches of her make-up, Bardo would play with the ring. He could remember very little about the man who had given it to her. Bardo’s father had died when he was not quite three. What he could recall about Thornton Raleigh was mostly inventions of his imagination, inspired by things his mother said about him from time to time. Things like:

“He was brilliant, Bar, but he was a little lost boy. He’d lose a button on his shirt and never notice it….

“Some people can take liquor, others can’t. Thorn couldn’t. It was stronger than he was. It finally killed him …

“Aw, Bar, there was a lot wrong with him, but he was a lovable bum.”

That Saturday evening, before Flip and Manny and Johnny were to arrive, Bardo stood by the bureau where he could see the ring’s case in the open drawer. His mother sat at the dressing table, brushing her hair. Her hair was light brown, feather-cut and softly curled. She had a wide mouth with lips that were soft and curving, and large eyes the same blue as her son’s. They looked as if their owner possessed a delightful secret that could not, unfortunately, be shared with anyone. There was not a single feature of her face that was not exactly right, and combined with her trim, well-molded body, with its slim, long legs and full, ripe breasts, she made a wonderfully impressive appearance. She had married too hastily, too young, and she had never remarried after the sudden death of her husband. She was thirty-five. Men who saw her on the street turned and stared as she passed, and they said to themselves and each other, “There goes a beautiful woman.”

Beauty, in a sense, was her business, and she aptly personified the title of the magazine on which she had worked for thirteen years. She was now an associate editor at
Beautiful Lady.
At work, she wore a hat; usually the kind of hat other women would shy from buying, fearing themselves not quite dramatic enough for it. Her clothes were always in good taste, but they were never ordinary either; never the sort
anyone
would wear. Few would or could.

She was a woman who had worked hard for everything she had, and “everything,” to her mind, was Bar. Immensely proud of him, she was both amused and bemused by him, and at times the only thing she seemed to understand about him was her love for him; yet nothing Bar did or was met with her disapproval. She believed that she would be quick to censure him, and equally quick to forgive him, should the occasion arise, but it never had. Aware that he was certainly different from most boys, she accepted the difference without being able to define it.

“I just can’t see Bardo at a baseball game, yelling his lungs out for his favorite team,” Claude McCoy, her most enduring and persistent suitor, had once remarked.

“He’d think it was vulgar,” she’d agreed, laughing.

She saw nothing remotely offensive in the statement.

Now as she saw Bardo behind her, through her mirror, she smiled. Despite the sophistication he had cultivated in his four years away from her, he still toyed with her jewelry as he had done when he was a little boy; and still he stayed close to her, watching her prepare dinner in the kitchen, following her from room to room.

He had begun calling her by her first name several years ago. He did it in a kidding, affectionate way that she thought of as cute. That, and his habit of referring to himself as “he,” were affectations that diverted and somehow pleased his mother. She was at first surprised and then gratified to realize that Bar was interesting, quite apart from the fact that he was her son. “Bar?”

He put down a box he was holding in his hands, and his eyes met hers in the mirror. “Hmm?”

“What are they like, the boys who are coming over this evening?”

“Oh, Ivy, I don’t know. I guess you might say they’re younger than I am. Not just in years, you understand.” He crossed the bedroom and sat on the edge of her bed, opposite her.

Ivy Raleigh said, “Do you know them well?”

“No, I told you I just met them a week ago. One of them is something of a zoot-suiter. Most amusing.”

“And the others?”

“Typical, I would say. Ingenuous.”

“There. Do you like the way Leo cut my hair this time?”

“Very agreeable, yes.”

“It’s not too short?”

“Perfect!”

“Pearls or rhinestones?” “Let me see…. Pearls.” “I think so, too. Pearls it is!”

He stood and walked over to the window, pushing the draperies aside so he could see down into Fifth Avenue. He looked across at the Park side, where there were benches spaced at intervals in front of the stone wall.

“Peculiar how they loiter,” he said, nodding toward the people who sat idle on those benches. Then he said, “Do you think you’ll ever
marry
Claude, Ivy?”

“Should I? I don’t know. I’m fond of him. I always said I’d wait until you were graduated.”

“He doesn’t like me, does he?”

“Darling, don’t be a silly goose. Of course he does!”

“Not very well, he doesn’t,” Bardo mused, watching one person in particular from the window. It was a man stretched out on one of the benches, apparently asleep. “Only because of you,” he continued.

“That’s not true, Bar.”

Distracted momentarily, Bardo observed, “The police never patrol Fifth. Vagrants just lie around down there.” He was frowning as he stared out.

“What makes you think he doesn’t like you?”

“Intuition.”

“Oh,
darling!”
“He’s jealous.” “Jealous!”

“It’s infinitely feasible. We’re so close.” “Claude isn’t like that.”

Bardo shrugged, still watching the man who slept on the bench. He said, “They’re like cockroaches, these vagrants. In the dark they crawl out of the woodwork. Night comes and there they are. Eyesores!”

“It’s this weather,” Ivy said. “It’s too hot for people who live in dilapidated buildings to stay indoors.” She finished fastening the tiny pearl earrings to her lobes.

“Even in winter they find their way to those benches. And they’re dirty. They’re unbelievably dirty!”

Ivy stood up and turned before the long mirror on the back of the closet door. The deep olive-green dress she wore hugged her body tightly; the front and back of it dipped low to reveal a soft white back and bare chest to the gradual round rising of her bust, where a heart-shaped pearl pin was clipped to a side of the dress. Her hips curved out generously from her slim, pinched waist, and the straps of her open-toed slippers wound around thin ankles.

“You know, you really haven’t any grounds for believing that, Bar, darling,” she said as she looked at herself, turning to see her stocking seams. “I wish you didn’t.”

He whirled around, his eyes suddenly alive with intense concern. “Ivy, good Lord! A bum is a bum in any season, and he’s filthy, and he reeks! I can smell a bum when I see him from the window! Foul-odored and unkempt! Clothes falling off him! What would you have me do? Sympathize with a filthy — “

His mother held her hand up, interrupting him. “No, no, no, no, honey! I don’t mean about vagrants. I mean about
Claude!”

Bardo looked vaguely disappointed.

“Oh,” he said flatly. He walked away from the window. “Are you still on that?” Sinking his hands into the pockets of the gray cord trousers he wore, he regarded his mother. The frown on his face went, and his features softened.

“I just want it clear, honey. Claude
does
like you.”

“All right,” he said. “He does.” He smiled. “Ivy, Bardo Robert Raleigh thinks you look utterly lovely.”

“My darling,” she said. “Thanks.”

“Infinitely stunning.” He stood there while she walked over to him, her hand touching his cheek. “Bar, you’re very sweet,” she said.

“And you’re the only lady B. R. Raleigh knows.”

“Thanks, darling. Hey, say — I’d better get those Cokes on ice. Do you know it’s practically eight? Good heavens, your friends will be here.”

She started from the room as Bardo said, “Not
friends.”

“What, darling?” She was already in the hall outside the bedroom.

“They aren’t friends,” Bardo called after her. “Merely acquaintances.”

Ivy Raleigh went, through the living room into the kitchen. The apartment looked deceptively spacious. Although it actually was a small flat, it was not an inexpensive or even a moderately expensive one. It was more than Ivy could afford, yet like so many things, she miraculously managed to afford it. Claude was right when he said, “You know it’s ridiculous for us to live apart this way, Ivy. You killing yourself on that job to maintain this place, and me with a good-sized house in Clifton that I’m never in. Except of course
this
damnable summer. Why don’t you marry me? Or at least let Bar face the facts of life?”

“Oh, he knows about us, darling,” she’d answered.

“He knows we
go out
together.”

“Do you think that’s all?”

“I’d swear to it.”

“It’s funny. I really don’t know…. But in either case, I dislike indiscretion of
any
kind.”

“Then for Christ’s sake, marry me.”

“You know?” she had answered. “I might.”

Before she had met Claude, three years ago, Ivy had shunned the idea of remarrying. At Thorn’s death she had found a job that paid forty-two dollars a week. She moved back with her parents in Yonkers, taking little Bar with her. Thorn had left her with nothing but debts, and scarcely any good memories. The fact that she had loved him completely every day he was alive, and long after he was dead, did not alter the insurmountable fact of his failure as a husband and a father.

Marriage no longer seemed a profitable goal, and for it she substituted success in a career. But when she found Claude McCoy, she found also that her career was instantly and infinitely less important to her, and that

Claude was incredibly more a man she could love than Thornton Raleigh had ever been. When she became sure of this, Bar was in his junior year at Sandside. Out of fairness to him, she thought, she would wait until after his graduation and until his plans for the fall had solidified before making any decisions about her own future.

It was curious, she realized, as she set the Cokes in the refrigerator and covered the sandwiches she had made for Bar’s friends, that he had mentioned marriage that evening. He had never done it before. Curious, and coincidental, for even that afternoon she had thought of gradually introducing the subject into their conversations this summer. Whatever it had been that had caused him to think of it, she decided, it was fortunate. Typical, too — for they
were
very close, and in the long run her son was not the enigma she sometimes imagined he was. In the long run, he was as transparent as any son is to his mother.

From the bedroom, where he was once more standing at the window, watching the bum on the bench, Bardo heard the doorbell. It was the downstairs bell, and he heard Ivy press the button that unlocked the entrance and call out, “Bar? Better come along. Your friends are here.”

“Directly!” he answered. But he did not hurry.

For a moment he stayed peering down. His eyes were unblinking, their expression bland. Only an almost indiscernible vein pulsing near his neck belied his calm appearance. When he finally did turn away, he stood for another moment unmoving, looking now at the open bureau drawer. Then, going quickly to the bureau, he removed the box in which the ring was enclosed, and put it in the hip pocket of his trousers. Carefully closing the bureau drawer, he walked from the bedroom. There was a new spring to his step.