Brooklyn Noir Page 10

  “Beth! Brat! Enough! You know the rules about words.”

  “Rules schmules!” I waved away his admonition. Laughter was lots better. “What about this? Maybe the person who wrote … that thing … that Hi … is mad at the drivers.”

  “All of ’em? In every single car?”

  “Well, not mad, exactly, he just thinks they’re, you know, that they’re scummy!”

  “What did you just say?”

  “Scummy!” I hooted. I hollered. I spat a few spit-bubbles out my mouth, not on purpose, but a couple hit him, which was nice. “I can say that! You can’t stop me! I’m Scummy! You’re Scummy! Everybody’s so Scummy, Scummy, Scummy!”

  He tried to paste his I-am-stern-and-strict face onto his face. “Cut out the crap, Beth! What did I just—?” Mid-scold, he gulped, gagged, as he tried to swallow back laughter, quacking glottally at the precise moment he was trying to play the part of an I-know-what’s-best-for-you type Dad—“What did I just tell you?”

  “You told me not to say scummy But you also said crap and before that you said scummy a million-zillion times, so you can’t be mad. Nuh-uh. The rule is phony baloney. Like you.” He gunned the engine again, and we went quiet, listen-ing to the Olds’ hum, meandering on small streets toward wherever he and I were headed, that night, that summer.

  Then, I Eureka!-ed. Out my mouth, before I knew it was coming, I shouted, “But maybe it might be a nice thing! Think about it. Maybe the person who wrote Hi to Scummy isn’t a mean Dummy-fuck-o. Like it’s the opposite. Maybe he and Scummy are bestest best friends, and Scummy doesn’t mind. It’s only a bad name if it hurts Scummy’s feelings, but Scummy likes him, so he likes it, he likes his name, so it’s nice to be Scummy.”

  Dad shook his head hopelessly. “I’ve been around a lot longer than you, kiddo, and I’ve heard all sortsa nicknames, but I never heard anyone call a good buddy Scummy. Nice try. Close, but no cigar.”

  My hands fluttered up dismissively, then flopped in my lap as I kept myself from sighing, “Some people just don’t ever get it.” I twisted, faced him head-on. “Dad, will ya use the noodle God gave you? This guy went to a helluva lotta trouble. He walked on those highways, with the cars and trucks zooming by. Look! There’s no road shoulder. He must of been scared.”

  “You got that right. He was shit-scared.”

  “But we don’t use words like that, do we?” I inquired, all innocent. He reddened. I let him sweat that one out a minute, then continued, “This guy climbed up the walls, and he had to tiptoe around those No Pedestrian Traffic signs just to hang upside down, like bats do, off that overpass. It’s high up there, especially to be upside down, and the bricks are crumbling. That’s scary.”

  “Well taken,” he said. “Go on. Argue your point.” His gaze burned a dimple into the side of my face.

  “I’m tellin’ you. All that tsuris? Why bother with it? To say hi to some scummy stranger-type of person who wasn’t his friend? It doesn’t make sense. Not unless he likes Scummy.”

  He added, in his dropped-register, this-is-cautionary-so-pay-attention tone, “But Beth-Bug, a lotta times people like things that aren’t so good for them. Especially small people like you.”

  “You call me Boll Weevil all the time. A lot of people think boll weevils are icky and gross, and they would say you’re being a big Dummy-fuck-o by calling me by a bug-name, but we know you mean it nice. Same with Scummy. Personally, I think Scummy and his best friend have these private names. Scummy likes being Scummy.”

  Leaning in toward the windshield, my father peered at the sky through the streaky, dirty glass. Refusing to look at me, he smiled. Then he tried to quash the smile by contorting his face, cranking his jaw around to set his lips in their man-who-means-business-no-kidding-for-real arrangement. Then his whole face relaxed, forfeited its struggle against its own mouth, and he smiled like he was the man who’d invented the light bulb. He touched my cheek. “And you, Boll Weevil. In my book, I’d have to say that you are one terrific allrightnik.”

  You

  We stayed stopped at the Stop sign for longer than a Stop sign mandated legally. He was staring ahead of himself, into the middle distance. Then his face changed, dropped, and he stared at his lap. His smile faded, his eyed looked darker and more heavily lidded than they had moments before, and the car’s temperature seemed to fall fifteen degrees. He was thinking, I could tell, and it wasn’t about anything good. “What now?” I asked. “Am I in trouble?”

  After an empty pause, he spoke absently. “Nah. It’s just … I just still think it’s not a very nice thing to call a friend.”

  “Uh-duh-uh,” I muttered. “Guess what? Just because something’s not very nice doesn’t make it wrong.”

  Some thirty years later, I was still alone and without plans to forgive myself for something I’d said in a conversation we’d had when I was six. After work and school, first grade—we both “knocked off,” as he put it, at 3 p.m.—I hung around him in the living room while he read the paper. Then he made dinner, such as it was. That unforgivable evening, he cooked up a vat of “Jewish Spaghetti.” I never knew what inherently Jewish characteristic was discernable in these pale, overcooked noodles—People Like Us called them noodles, not pasta—that he boiled and smeared with a sugary, gummy, aggressively orange sauce—as orange as laboratory signs indicating the presence of radioactive biohazards—spicelessly dotted with sticky, translucent tiles of onion.

  Jewish Spaghetti was disgusting. Jewish Spaghetti was nearly inedible. I loved Jewish Spaghetti. I loved how one small bowl of Jewish Spaghetti became seventeen oil drums of Jewish Spaghetti in my gut. A gift that kept on giving.

  As we chewed and chewed and chewed, I ruminated on my teacher’s introductory lesson—hurled at us first thing that morning, right after she took attendance—about the dizzying, fearsome procedures involved in telling time. The devices: sun dials, hourglasses, wristwatches, atomic clocks, mechanical clocks. The standards: Greenwich mean, Tidal, Atomic, Geologic, Standard, Coordinated universal, Ephemeris. The calendars: solar, lunar, Babylonian, Egyptian, Hebrew, Muslim, Julian, Gregorian, Worldsday, Buddhist, Persian, Coptic, Chinese. The Maya Great Circle.

  Not even to mention the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research headquartered in Tucson, Arizona.

  Topping it horrifically off, the Metric System and New Math were hurtling respectively across the Atlantic and through deep space toward Public School 276. I wasn’t smart or good enough to keep up with it or figure it out. Dad, who was unquestionably not when I got him, couldn’t help me. I could only try to tattoo facts on my memory, to remember without understanding.

  Suspiciously, I asked him, “Are you old?”

  “I’m a little old, but not too old. Like you’re a little young, but not too young.”

  A suction grabbed at whatever lived between my ribs and started draining it out. “If you’re a little old now, then soon you’ll be a lot old. When you’re a lot old, you die, right? Isn’t that what happens?”

  “Yeah, that’s how it goes. I won’t be a lot old too soon. That’s much later. I’m not planning on dying any time soon.” I coughed. With my fork and fingers, I shaped and reshaped orange spaghetti spirals, not piles of the pasta, but plain, wormy lines of it, flat on my plate. Then I worked on spirals within spirals, still two-dimensional. I gulped. I gulped hard.

  “Lookit. C’mon now,” he cooed. From the spirals on my plate, I made and unmade a maze. He slapped his big hands on the table. “Look at me, Beth.” I couldn’t look at him. I concentrated. I complicated my noodle-maze. It looked maze-like. It was crap. Its twirls nauseated me. If I, who’d created this, couldn’t find a way—not one workable entry or exit point—to get myself into and out of the maze, then no one else could lead. Just going in circles and more circles. Round and round forever. Like clock-hands. Like fears. “I said, look at me. Listen good. We got Jewish Spaghetti to eat. Food to mess with. Bridges to climb. We got a lotta living to do before I do something stupid like that.�
� I ditched my fork, busied my orange fingers making braids, then helices.

  “But Daddy, when you die will you be died forever?” Aniline blue. Dyed forever.

  “That’s what dying is, kiddo. But I’m not planning on doing that. Not for many years. Not for the foreseeable future.” Later. A little old. Soon. A little young. A lot old. Too soon. Not too young. Much later. Any time soon. Forever. Many years How many years made many years? And foreseeable future? A foreseeable future wasn’t possible. Unforeseeable was the future’s crux. Unforeseeability made the future the future.

  All this shape-shifting, fake-out doubletalk. Time couldn’t be told. There was no reason even to bother trying to tell time. Time did not listen.

  “Aw, Baby Beth, don’t cry. You’re killing me. Seeing you miserable? That’s what’ll be the death of me.” I wiped my face with the quicker-picker-upper I’d used as a napkin, did the usual little-kid shit, whimpered, sniffled.

  I really didn’t want him ever to die. And I didn’t mean to kill him.

  “Not for nothing, don’t’cha think it’s kind of hard to be so serious and sad when you got stripes of tomato sauce going down your schnozz?” I slid my index finger down my already sizable nose, and it came back greasily orange. Still inconsolable, I reached my index finger across the table, and striped his nose with my sauce. He stuck three of his fingers into my maze and war-painted my cheeks, which my face’s controlled ache told me were dimpin—the gerund form of a verb he invented just for me, its infinitive form, to dimp, referring to the sudden appearances of my dimples while eating or sup-pressing a smile. I poked a finger into my plate, stirred until my finger was slick with sauce, traced creepy-smiley-clown lipstick around his mouth’s perimeter. He stood, opened the fridge, handed me a can of orange soda. “This’ll make you feel better.” I drank some, cheered up a little, then a lot. Then all better.

  I was so saturated with relief and unruly joy that my lips and tongue could almost taste the blood connecting me and my father. I was a balloon-skin about to burst into bits with the force of detonating affection and hope, hope, hope. I barreled toward him, bounded up into his arms, beaming, bobbing my cocksure head, shouting with unadulterated confidence: “You’re right! You’re not going to die any time soon. I just know it!” I spilled out of his arms. I wanted him to see how happy I was, now that I’d figured it out. “Nope!” I jigged a hippy-hoppy succession of leap and skips that he’d called, since I’d been a baby, Beth’s Dance of Sudden Elation. “I was being crazy, all wrong, before. Now for sure I know that you’re going to live at least another two weeks!”

  Guilty as charged.

  The good news, when we buried him, was that for the first time in twenty-four years, as his dead body dropped lower and lower, groundward, down, down, down, he had no fear at all. Burying him was the opposite of going up to work. Supine in his coffin, the cheapest my mother’s boyfriend’s money could buy, he descended, disappearing toward the world’s bottom, groundward, instead of climbing to its top, rising up and above, skyward. Sharper, closer to the surface of feeling even than grief, were the bones of my rib cage, truly a cage now, except the heart it was constructed to incarcerate, mine, had turned to nothing. The cage’s new inmate was Zero, the nothing that most definitely was something, an absence more present than my hands in front of me.

  After the burial I packed my knapsack with my few things and moved into my mother’s house. I wasn’t going anywhere. Even while primed in a permanent state of cat-like readiness, I was solidly placed. I was keeping vigil. I was staying; I was staying vigilant. I assumed the position, like a long-distance runner poised to bolt at the sound of a gunshot that wouldn’t fire a second too soon. Fast and forward. No promises would be made, fulfilled or not, at 617 Flatlands Avenue, where I’d live with the mother who’d let me go. Where I’d live with the simplest fact—no one was ever going to help me ever—and where I’d live with the impenetrable tangle, the un-unravellable knowledge-knot that my mother had never wanted me around, but there I was, living with her as she resigned herself to living with me in a house attached on both sides and jam-packed with no-Dad and no-cry and plastic-covered furniture, exponentially accelerating my development into the little waste of sperm that I was.

  And am.

  PART II

  New School Brooklyn

  CROWN HEIST

  BY ADAM MANSBACH

  Crown Heights

  Tap tap BOOM. Birds ain’t even got their warble on, and my shit’s shaking off the hinges. I didn’t even bother with the peephole. It had to be Abraham Lazarus, the Jewish Rasta, playing that dub bassline on my door.

  BOOM I swung it open and Laz barged in like he was expecting to find the answer to life itself inside. A gust of Egyptian Musk oil and Nature’s Blessing dread-balm hit me two seconds after he flew by: Laz stayed haloed in that shit like it was some kind of armor. He did a U-turn around my couch, ran his palm across his forehead, wiped the sweat onto his jeans, and came back to the hall.

  “I just got fuckin’ robbed, bro.”

  Funny how a dude can cruise the road from neighbor to acquaintance to homeboy without ever coming to a full stop at any of the intersections. Me and Laz, our relationship was like one of those late-night cab rides where the driver hits his rhythm and the green lights stretch forever. He came upstairs and introduced himself the day I moved into his building two years ago: got to know who you live with when you’re moving four, five pounds of Jamaican brown a week. He sized me up, decided I was cool, and told me his door was always open. I didn’t really have too much going on then—just a half-time shit job in an office mailroom and a baby daughter Uptown who I never got to see—so before long I was com-ing by on the regular to smoke. If Laz wasn’t already puffing one of those big-ass Bob Marley cone spliffs when I walked in, my entrance was always reason enough for him to sweep his locks over his shoulder, hunch down over his coffee table, and commence to building one.

  I used to call his crib Little Kingston. All the old dreads from the block would be up in there every afternoon: watching soccer games on cable, chanting down Babylon, talkin’ ’bout how horse fat an’ cow dead, whatever the fuck those bobo yardie motherfuckers do. I never said much to any of them, just passed the dutchie on the left hand side. Jafakin-ass Lazarus got much love from the bredren, but a domestically grown, unaffiliated nigga like me stayed on the outskirts. Whatever. Later for all that I-n-I bullshit anyway.

  I flipped the top lock quick. “What happened?”

  “Motherfucker walked straight into my crib, bro, ski-masked up. Put a fuckin’ Glock 9 to my head while I was lying in bed. Ran me for all my herb.” His hand shook as he lifted a thumb-and-finger pistol to his temple. Fear or rage; I couldn’t tell.

  “How many?” I asked. “Who?” In Laz’s business, you don’t get jacked by strangers. Strictly friends and well-wishers.

  “Just one, and he knew where my shit was.”

  “Even the secret shit?”

  “Not the secret shit. I still got that. But the other ten are gone—I just re-upped yesterday. Son of a bitch filled a trashbag, duct-taped me up, and bounced.”

  “Didn’t do a very good job with the tape, did he?”

  Laz shook his head. “He was too petro. That was the scariest part, T. He was shitting his pants more than I was. And that’s when you get shot: when a cat doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing.”

  “You want a drink?” I didn’t know what else to say.

  “You got a joint?”

  “Yeah. Yeah. Hold on.” I went to the bedroom and grabbed my sack. Laz was sitting on the edge of the couch when I got back, flipping an orange pack of Zig-Zags through his knuckles.

  “This might be kinda beside the point right now,” I said carefully, falling into the chair across from him, “but it’s probably time to dead all that cosmic-karmic open-door no-gun shit, huh?”

  The bottom line was that Lazarus was practically asking to be robbed. He never locked his door, and the only
weapon in his crib was the chef’s knife he used to chop up ganja for his customers. He had some kind of who-Jah-bless-let-no-man-curse theory about the whole thing, like somehow the diffusion of his positive vibrations into the universe would prevent anyone from schiesting him. That and the fact that all the small-timers who copped off him knew that Laz was tight with the old Jamaicans who really ran the neighborhood. Plus, Laz was convinced that he looked crazy ill strutting around his apartment with that big blade gleaming in his hand: a wild-minded, six-two, skin-and-bones whiteboy with a spliff dangling from his mouth and hair ropes trailing down his back. Half Lee “Scratch” Perry, half Frank White.

  It was an equation that left plenty out—the growling stomachs of damn near every young thug in the area, for starters. A year ago, all Laz’s customers were dime-bag-and-bike-peddling yardmen, and everything was peace. Then the hip hop kids found out about him. I told Laz he shouldn’t even fuck with them. I know these niggas like I know myself, I said. They’re outa control. They trying to be who Jay-Z says he is on records, dude. You don’t need that in your life.

  He shrugged me off. They’re babies. I man nah fear no likkle pickney. Any time Laz started speaking yard, I just left his ass alone. But he should have listened. You could practically see these kids narrowing their eyes at my man every time he turned his back. It had gotten to the point where I’d started locking the door myself whenever I came over.

  “It was Jumpshot,” Laz said, as a calligraph of smoke twirled up from the three-paper cone he’d rolled. “It had to be.”

  I leaned forward. “Why Jumpshot?” So-called because he liked to tell folks he was only in the game because genetics had failed to provide him with NBA height. Or WNBA height, for that matter.

  “Two reasons.” Laz offered me the weed. I shook my head. He blew a white pillow at the ceiling. “Three, actually. One, he sells the most. He’s got the most ambition. Two, that shit last month, when he complained and I sonned him.”