5

Pop and I lived in this dingy little third-floor walkup at the corner of 31st Street and Second Avenue across from a raunchy new bar called the Health Club, where after my homework and my favorite radio shows, Captain Midnight and The Shadow, were done, I could tune in some local and terrifically live free entertainment by leaning out the window to watch the nightly bar fights spilling out into the street, almost always involving a couple of old geezers in their thirties or forties—sometimes even lots older—and after they’d bloodied each other as much as their flabby, drunken swings ever could while their girlfriends or wives stood aside and kept moving their lips, saying, “Somebody stop this, would you? Stop them!” in a murmur so low even I couldn’t hear it, and then the combatants would wind up with their arms around each other’s shoulders and go back into the bar to buy each other a drink, the sound of music from a jukebox blasting out into the street as they opened the door, almost always Bing Crosby and “The Rose of Tralee” or “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen,” and if Pop was standing anyplace where he could hear it he’d yell, “Joey, shutting window!” inasmuch as he was tired of the same old songs, but even probably more so, I’d have to suppose, because he’d come here as a child from Peru and had about much interest in “Galway Bay” as in hearing a duet of “I’m an Indian, Too,” by Sitting Bull and Mohandas K. Gandhi. The songs might also have made Pop sad, as they probably made him think of my mom. Her name was Eileen. She was Irish. I’d never seen her. She died giving birth to me. Pop met her at Bingo Night in the basement of St. Rose of Lima Church when both of them lived in the Bronx. Pop had only one photo of her, one of those sepiatoned black-and-white jobs that had been taken of the two of them in Central Park and then slipped into a cardboard frame with SOMEWHERE IN THE U.S.A. at the top. Already blurry from the softness of the focus, the photo had yellowed and was badly faded so I could only make out that she was smiling and slim and had long wavy hair. I could barely even recognize Pop. Whenever I’d ask him to describe my mom he would always start to cry and then he’d go into the bathroom or he’d put on this black leather cap and go out into the street. I’d open a window, then, and watch him. I’d get worried if I saw him slowly walking toward the river.

I also stopped asking about her.

“Why so late, Joey? Almost ten o’clock. You want to eat?”

Wearing a torn old navy blue sweater and with skin that was the color of a waxed pine floor, Pop had sharp, strong features with very high cheekbones and an aquiline nose that knew who it was. You couldn’t tell that he was over six feet tall because pushing those carts for all those years had curved his posture almost into a crouch.

“You looking funny,” Pop told me.

“What do you mean? Funny how?”

“I don’t know,” he said, appraising me. “Different. Come on, now. You hungry? I fix you something good.”

That was Pop. Concern about my care and well-being always coming ahead of any talk about discipline or who struck Juan. I thumped myself down into one of the two folding metal chairs set on opposite sides of this sad-looking, tan colored plastic card table just off the kitchen where we’d eat all our meals and I’d also do homework. Pop had made enough money off his trade to upgrade our pitiful furnishings lately, but after Mom died I guess he mostly lost interest in everything but me. Our apartment had only one bedroom and Pop made me sleep there while he slept on the living room sofa.

“No, I ate, Pop,” I told him.

“Ate what?”

I said, “Spaghetti and pie and ice cream.”

I didn’t think it was such a hot idea to mention the Tokay.

Pop wrinkled his brow.

“Spaghetti, Joey? Where? With the Pagliarello family?”

My first thought was Are you out of your mind?

“No, Pop. A little restaurant on Fourteenth Street.”

“Joey, where you get the money? I don’t give you yet allowance for this week.”

I said, “My friend paid, Pop.”

“What friend?”

“A girl at school.”

Pop came out of his crouch at this, standing straight and tall for a second while his face was a gasp made flesh.

“You let girl pay for your food?”

“And a movie,” I threw in before I knew what I was saying.

That did it, that was all the old man could take, and he launched into a rant about chivalry at first, and then the subject was “manhood what is true and not fakey” and the real and proper order of things and how I’d sinned against the code of some Incas who always made the boys have to wait to have their hearts ripped out until after the girls had gone first. Oh, well, for cripessakes, I knew he didn’t mean what he was yelling, it was really about the worry and the scare that I’d given him by not showing up for dinner, which he couldn’t let on to, of course, this being yet another strict part of the Inca Code. So I bowed my head and took it while pretending to be Galento just waiting for the moment to make his doomed move, which sort of came when I heard a lot of hollering out on the street, and now afraid I was about to miss a beaut of a fight, I kind of snapped and interrupted Pop’s tirade with “Why don’t you take a hike up to Machu Picchu and find yourself an eagle there to tell all your troubles with your Americanized kid!” I jumped up and stomped into the bedroom, making sure to slam the door in the hope of projecting the lying impression that I was the injured party.

A second later I heard a rapping on the bedroom door.

“You sure you no hungry, Joey?”

Once again, that was Pop, that’s how he always reacted, and most times, like the average self-centered teenage jerk, I’d repay him by giving him the “silent treatment.” This night, though, was different.

I didn’t know why.

At least not then.

“Yeah, I’m hungry,” I lied. “What have we got?” And then, wonder of wonders, I said, “Sorry for what I said to you, Pop. I didn’t mean it.”

“I knowing.”

I had a restless night, doubtless due to the disorienting sense of strangeness that followed whenever I did something good, plus for the first time I was feeling kind of guilty, I guess, about getting the bedroom while my poor old Pop who’d been pushing that cart all day had to sleep on the living room sofa. Though at least he’s always ringside, I tried to console myself, for the one-to-two-A.M. fights. I also had the blues because I wouldn’t see Jane again until Monday. I had no idea where she lived. Sometime after midnight I could hear the dim strains of “My Wild Irish Rose” on the Health Club jukebox for three or four seconds as their front door opened, then closed, and I worried even more about Pop; but then the drunken taunts and cursing started up in reassurance that there was regular order in the world and that no planets would come tumbling from the sky that night to strike us, so at last I fell asleep with not a smirk but with the ghost of a smile on my face as the last thought I had was the sudden realization there was someone in this world that I could totally trust: Pop.

The next morning I trudged to my usual Saturday freelance “job” where for three or four hours I’d be standing on the sidewalk in front of the A&P supermarket on Third between 31st and 32nd, asking little old ladies if I could help them carry their groceries home, which would have made me St. Christopher of the Bags, I suppose, except I did it “for a price, Ugardi, for a price,” and meantime hoping that somewhere along the way I might catch a glimpse of Jane, which I didn’t, although I did make forty-seven cents in tips. Pretty good. Afterward, I did what I usually do, which was go to the public library and just to sit there in the dustless quiet where the air had this pleasant, friendly smell of damppaper and warm, dry thoughts and I’d read comic novels by P. G. Wodehouse and anything fantastic and out of this world, which I was getting an inkling was the place to be. But on that day I had this daydream that roaming through the stacks I’d reach up for a book and through the narrow open space where it had been I’d see Jane on the other side, which didn’t happen, I’m more than sorry to tell you, because in fact what I saw was Baloqui.

“What are you doing here?” I hissed in disappointment.

Baloqui hissed back at me hoarsely, “Homework! I’m going to do my composition about Edgar Allan Poe!”

“They stack the books by the last name,” I said, “not the first.”

“Why do you trouble me, El Bueno?”

“Tough.”

A librarian loudly shushed us, so we went outside where we could talk and Baloqui could puff on one of his “loosie” cigarettes you could buy for a penny apiece or, if you were loaded, six for a nickel.

“Have you seen this pretty girl around?” I asked. “Jane Bent. Irish face with lots of freckles. Pigtails. Reddish hair. Eighth grade.”

“Yeah, I might have,” he said as he took a deep drag and looked off in pained thought as if agonizing over whether it was moral to throw his next bullfight in exchange for gang money he could use to send his epileptic brother to the healing waters at Lourdes in France. His lips curled inward in an O, he blew out an almost perfect smoke ring that he kept on staring at with pride as if he’d just built the freaking Eiffel Tower and was about to put the finishing touches on it. “I might have seen her at the movies,” he finally allowed in this cryptic tone of voice.

I said, “You might have?”

He held up a hand. “Hold a second.”

He waited for the smoke ring to dissipate completely, then turned to me with narrowed, searching eyes. “This girl,” he said. “You’re interested in her?”

“Why?”

“Because if it’s the girl I have in mind she’s a psycho.”

“That’s her!” I burst out with elation. “So you know her! Do you know where she lives?”

“No, I don’t and I wouldn’t want to know.”

“What are you talking about, Baloqui?”

“Who can say?”

“Who can say, you dumb spic? Who can say?”

“Alright, alright! I didn’t see it myself. Someone told me.”

“Told you what?”

Here Baloqui launched into a story so spectacularly stupid that at first I was sure he was pulling my leg. An eyewitness, he insisted—his thick, black eyebrows puckering together in keeping with the gravity of his message—had told him that Jane was seen levitating over a crowd at the refreshment counter at our beloved Superior cinema and had words with an usher before settling back down on the ground and running out into the street and out of sight. You could see he’d boned up on Poe because he ended with a spookily delivered “none knows whither.”

I said, “You’re kidding me, right?”

“Swear to God!”

“No, it’s a joke.”

“Well, not a funny one, then, is it?” he said pissily.

I wanted to shove needles into his eyes.

“This so-called eyewitness,” I said. “Who was it?”

“It was Eddie Arrigo.”

“Eddie Arrigo?” I echoed dully.

I couldn’t believe my ears. Arrigo, after being left back three times, had finally gotten into a class graduation photo, all smiley in his blue serge confirmation suit, yet his legend lived on to benumb the normal mind and outshine things like cigarette ash and coal. At dismissal from class each day, when we would march in twos to the corner of Third Avenue, we would pass the all-glass second-floor front of a tarot card reader named Madame Monique, who in actual fact was Arrigo’s mother and had once told Eddie, who then passed it on to us, that the twenty-seventh quatrain of the coded predictions of Nostradamus had been “seriously and widely as hell misconstrued” and that in truth it had to do with an alien “research” spaceship hidden inside the Goodyear blimp, though I suspected her interpretation of the quatrain had been seriously damaged, if not maimed, while in transport, inasmuch as Eddie had also once soberly reported that his mother’s faithful spirit guide, “Irving,” had told her that the Japs would attack Pearl Harbor—“a Hawaiian thing,” as Irving had put it—on March 4, 1941, “April twentieth the latest!” So, okay, Captain Future of Captain Future Comics was always battling against the so-called “Yellow Peril,” which was diplomatic code for Chinks and Japs and maybe even Samoans, for all we knew, but that wasn’t supposed to happen until 1970!

“Eddie Arrigo, Baloqui? Arrigo? What drugs are they insinuating into your sangria?”

Baloqui wouldn’t look me in the eye. Instead, he flicked his cigarette butt into the street, then turned around and strode back into the library, as usual walking tall and with his chin tilted upward as if about to be awarded both ears and the tail while inwardly smoldering and thinking, “To hell with these mocking gringos who wouldn’t know friendship from a used piñata!”

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.