13

The next day I had my hands around Paulie Farragher’s throat and was squeezing so hard that his face had turned blue, but not blue enough yet to satisfy me. I’d surprised him alone in the office of Joseph Andrews Mortuary, which was right across the street from the St. Stephen’s church rear entrance on 33rd and where he worked a few hours a week and therefore wouldn’t be wearing that moth-eaten oversized coat so he couldn’t do his his weirdo “Dutch Defense.”

“You miserable potato-eating cretin!” I snarled.

I like to think of it as praying with my heart.

We’d gone swimming at the 23rd Street pool—me, Jimmy Connelly, Farragher and Tommy Foley. Ignoring the warning voices in my head that were saying, “Go not to the pool today, Joey,” I went anyway, meeting up with the others at the pool and thinking maybe my hyperalertness against the chance they might again seek to “safety test” the operational limits of my lungs would serve to keep my thoughts away from Jane and the question of my sanity for a while. I stayed clear of the diving pool so nothing happened. It was on the way home that “The Great and Enduring Farragheronian Evil” occurred when the other guys decided on taking a trolley home, they being exhausted, I suppose, from the intense concentration required while targeting me with thought rays intended to lure me to the diving pool and ultimate immersion in the wetness of things, as I’d caught them all staring at me once so intensely that their eyes were almost popping out of their heads while they seemed to be arguing over something, Foley in particular heatedly insisting, “No, it’s got to be the back of his head, the back!” Anyway, I didn’t have the nickel fare and…Okay, okay, I had it but I didn’t want to spend it, so I hitched on the back of the trolley but then had to let go when Farragher decided, it being a nice day, to walk to the trolley’s open back window and shoot a glob of spittle straight into my eye, thus preparing me for future studies of the character Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello and the mystery of utterly unmotivated evil—though for maybe half a second before placing my hands around his throat, I did, in all fairness, weigh and find incredibly wanting his vociferous claim that he’d been aiming at a wasp on my forehead that was crawling toward my eye. I couldn’t decide which was worse: his stupid lie, or his wounded whimper that “No good deed ever goes unpunished,” a lament not entirely unexpected from the future Cardinal Hayes High School valedictorian who thought the names of the Three Musketeers were Orthos, Bathos and Aramis.

Leave off with that smiling. He had to be destroyed.

I’d marched steadily up Third Avenue with blood in my eyes, plus some phlegm, until I got to the mortuary, where I cupped my hands to my eyes and then pressed them against the darkly tinted glass façade and saw only Joe Andrews, the owner and chief mortician, sitting at his desk against a wall. No Farragher. His father was the superintendent of the building and they lived in the basement apartment, but I knew these were Farragher’s working hours. As I began to look away from Andrews, I saw him start kneading and clasping and unclasping his hands, which was what Farragher once told me he always did when surreptitiously breaking wind, meantime coughing or loudly clearing his throat to cover up any sound from his deadly malefactions whenever a client was sitting in the office, or against the possibility that someone might enter the room so quietly he might be unaware of their presence. I shifted my glance to a door that led to the place where morticians do their thing with the deceased and I wondered whether Andrews coughed and fiddled with his hands while he was farting in the presence of the dead. I suppose we’ll never know. Meantime, Andrews got up from his chair and headed for the door to the street, so I pretended to be reading his “Coming Attractions” sign in the window while he exited the mortuary and walked across the street to a tiny soda, cigarettes and candy store, perhaps to check on the progress of the Milky Way bar that he’d placed atop the block of ice in the soft drinks bin, so I jumped on my chance like a panther and entered the mortuary, where I found and tackled Farragher as he was exiting a viewing room, and after having fun strangling him for a while I had my fist upraised and ready to pound him into jelly, when all of a sudden I just froze with my fist in midair, thinking:

Wait a minute! What would Kurt Vonnegut do?

I’m not sure that’s why I stopped but I did. I mean, I didn’t look down and say, “I love and forgive you, brother Farragher and pray you will amend your evil ways very soon,” or any other lunatic stuff like that inasmuch as I still was steamed as hell. I just got up and started walking out of the place and when I’d reached the front office and opened the door to the street, I bumped into Andrews, who was coming back in. “Is there anything I can do for you?” he asked me and I vehemently blurted, “Jesus, no!” I walked around for a while, still wondering why I’d pulled my punch, and not getting too much of an answer. I just felt it was wrong, that’s all. It was wrong and it made me feel crummy.

I wandered down to the East River walkway. With the weather so nice and this being a Saturday, I couldn’t find an unoccupied bench, so I sat on a grassy patch for a while looking out across the river at Brooklyn and thinking of that movie that Jane and I had to suffer through just so we could get to Gunga Din, this leading me, of course, to more thoughts about the mystery of Jane. And the mystery of me. I was seeing and hearing things. Right?

Who was that person in the mirror?

Once again, I went to bed that night feeling oddly good; in fact, extremely oddly good. At peace, you might say. I slept well. I did get up one time to tiptoe into the living room and slide down a window to shut out the sounds of a Health Bar fight, as they were so loud they might awaken Pop. I turned and glanced fondly at him on the sofa. He was good and he slept well every night. Then I thought of something else: when I grew up I wanted to be like Pop. I went back into the bedroom and climbed into bed, and just before falling asleep I could swear I heard someone whispering, “Nice.”