New York City Noir Page 8

  Jesus, did he have a brogue? He certainly had picked up that lilt to his voice that my father’s generation possessed. That half-accent that the children of immigrants acquire in a ghetto. I had to get out of there. A few more minutes and I feared I’d start sounding like one of these tura-lura-lura motherfuckers myself.

  I stood, probably too quickly, and took hold of the bar to steady myself. “What about the picture, Frank?”

  He handed it to me. “Martin is right,” he said slowly, “let it lie. Why do you care who she was?”

  “Who she was? I asked who she is Is she dead, Frank? Is that what Marty meant by letting the dead rest?”

  “Martin … Marty meant …”

  “I’m right here, Francis,” Marty said, “and I can speak for myself.” He turned to me. “Francis has overindulged in a few jars,” he said. “He’ll nap in the back booth for a while and be right as rain for the ride home.”

  “Is that the way it happened, Frank? Exactly that way?”

  Frank was smiling at his drink, looking dreamily at his better world. “Who owns memory?” he said.

  “Goodnight, Daniel,” Marty said. “It was good of you to stop in.”

  I didn’t respond, just turned and slowly walked out. One or two guys gestured at me as I left, the rest seemed not to notice or care.

  * * *

  I removed the picture from my pocket again when I was outside, an action that had taken on a ritualistic feel, like making the sign of the cross. I did not look at it this time, but began tearing it in strips, lengthwise. Then I walked, and bent down at street corners, depositing each strip in a separate sewer along Fourth Avenue.

  He’d told me that he’d broken his arm in a car accident, pursuing two black kids who had robbed a jewelry store.

  As I released the strips of paper through the sewer gratings, I thought of the hand in the subway tunnel, and my father’s assertion that there were many body parts undoubtedly littering the less frequently traveled parts of the city. Arms, legs, heads, torsos; and perhaps all these bits of photo would find their way into disembodied hands. A dozen or more hands, each gripping a strip of photograph down in the wet slime under the street. Regaining a history, a past, that they lost when they were dismembered, making a connection that I never would.

  PRACTICING

  BY ELLEN MILLER

  Canarsie

  When my father started to bench-press me, I figured he meant business. For real. Finally.

  By the time he started bench-pressing me, I’d already wisely given up hope that he’d ever make good on his promise. But the bench-pressing seemed an encouraging sign, enough of a reason to believe my father, so I suspended my doubt.

  I didn’t simply hope. I believed

  He’d been promising for two years—twenty-five percent of the time I’d spent being alive, being his daughter. Being alive and being his daughter were the same single thing. The only thing and everything. All I wanted from the world.

  The first time was supposed to be my sixth birthday present. I bugged him. I nagged him, like a wife. I irritated myself when my talking-out-loud voice would whine—like a child, which I insisted I wasn’t—But you promised, even though my thinking-inside-myself voice had long ago admitted defeat, told me the truth, convincingly and correctly maintaining, Nothing doing. Pretend he never said a word. Forget it. Then, out of the blue, he’d say, “Later, I promise,” and he’d give me a wink. Dad was the only man I’d ever meet who didn’t, upon winking, instantly become a calamitous schmuck. “We have plenty of time.”

  The promise itself was a present, a gift he offered not only to me, but also to time, to the future, stored in a box filled with mystery, tension, delay, buildup, all to be revealed later. If his promise had been packaged and wrapped, the gift-card’s envelope, taped seamlessly to the top, would have read, Do Not Open Me Until … but the calligraphy would have stopped short of naming the holiday. He kept me guessing and waiting, waiting, but since I couldn’t tell time, I couldn’t know for how long. Exactly what, at eight years old, did later mean? His words, spoken to the future, “We’ll go later, next month,” didn’t sound a helluva lot different from, “We’ll go later, in fifteen years.” One month. Fifteen years What was later? When did later bleed into too late? How much time was plenty of time? What sensations could be expected when plenty of time elapsed and disappeared? When did too late become never? Time, always warped and subjective, was especially so when I hadn’t been around long enough to develop and practice the rote, unoriginal, possibility-canceling, chance-choking, constricting—that is, adult—habits of experiencing time, living in time, doing time, apprehending in a felt way, without having to concentrate so hard my eye sockets pounded, how long fragments of time were supposed to last until they stopped being fragmentary and became durable, lasting. How long? Long enough. To last. Until. Lasting.

  Instead of bringing me up, the day I turned six he brought home a squat glow-in-the-dark clock. An alarm clock. I couldn’t read it; I couldn’t set it. I’d look at its various meaningless appendages—arms, hands, digits—then quickly turn from the pale, sickish, muffled green glow. When I couldn’t sleep, the tick contributed its two cents to my considerable, familiar insomnia and anxiety.

  Soon I appreciated the stunning appropriateness of the erm alarm clock

  Perhaps he intended to teach me early on—to route my thoughts along an acceptable, suitable course immediately, starting my expectations off right at age six—that clocks were meant to be punched.

  His promise, so handsomely packaged in that gift-box, contained nothing, so I’d done good to halt hope in its tracks. To stop hoping for Dad to make good on his word, or for much of anything else, seemed a wise idea, a useful policy to adopt more generally, to apply more globally, as an apotropaic A prophylactic against disappointment. Disappointment was dangerous.

  But he started again just before I turned eight. “We’ll have so much fun. Just you wait.” Repetition, and the slippage of much too much time—even I knew by then how long too long, how much was much too much—between the initial promise and its most recent nonfulfillment, emptied the promise-box of all the substance it probably had never had, so I gave him a piece of my mind. “You’re full of bull. You’re just all phony baloney.”

  “I’m what?” Mock horror. Mock indignation. Mock mockery.

  “I said, Dad, that you are all yak and no shack.” I didn’t know what I meant, but I liked how tough it sounded.

  “The things that come out of your mouth.” He snorted. “Where do you get them?” In mock fury, he commanded, “Get your tush over here. Right now, you little … you little … you little you.”

  He shook his head gravely, freighting the final pronoun, you with extra volume and vocal emphasis, so that the you by whom he meant me almost sounded like it referred to something special. Like some languages had one you for politely addressing outside-people and another you for informally addressing inside-people; other languages had one you for speaking to superiors and another you for speaking to subordinates; English—rather, my Dad’s peculiar delivery of English—conferred upon me a separate, specific second-person pronoun. It sounded and was spelled the same as other you’s, but Dad’s you as in, “you little … you,” referred just to My very own second-person pronoun! Now that was one tremendous gift if there ever was one.

  But even having my very own personal pronoun was risky, because it’s pretty tough to keep stopped-hope stopped up when you are getting all youed up, when someone you really like keeps promising you scary, fun, exciting stuff—and even tougher for the of that moment to remain securely devoid of hope, to make smart, self-denying decisions with Dad youing me—the long ooo of it broad and extended, like a hand.

  “Now,” he announced, rubbing his hands together—like a man who’s busted his ass all week, eaten crow at a job he hates, but it’s Friday, and his dinner at Abbracciamento on the Pier, a thick steak pizzaiolo, fatty, bloody meat sizzling, cheese bubbling, is being se
rved by a hot-to-trot miniskirt, he’s salivating, thinking, this is gonna be yummy—“we start practicing.” Before I noticed his swift crouch and downward reach, he’d grabbed my ankles and flipped me, along with the rest of the visible world, upside down. Queasy with suddenness, I tried focusing hard, to keep everything from whirling too wildly, on the paint-splatters everywhere covering his stumble-proof, good-luck work boots. Together, we slid to the floor. I righted myself to sitting too fast; my subadequately upholstered tush—a bony butt without cushioning ocks—banged to the linoleum. “We gotta be prepared,” he declared. “I’m gonna need some big muscles if we’re gonna do this.”

  I was a weedy child at sixty pounds. My father was a bridgeman. A workingman. To work, in the true, original sense, meant to move heavy objects, to transfer energy from one system to another, causing an object, against its own resistance and stationary inertia, to move. Work called for muscle, math, multiplication. Work was the product of the force used to move something stubbornly heavy and the distance the object had successfully moved in the direction of that force. Dad had been working for a long time.

  His biceps were strip steaks, marbled not with fat, but lined with web-works of veins materializing from under his skin. “Put them back! Put them back inside!” I’d cry, when I was little—which, by the time I turned eight, I adamantly decreed I wasn’t, not anymore—while futilely pushing and pressing individual bulging veins back underneath his skin to keep him intact, to return his veins to their proper place inside, where all matters blood-related belonged. And Dad’s thighs and calves were sometimes hard to look at without contemplating mint jelly.

  The man had muscle. Nonetheless, he was determined to bench-press me, sans bench, every night. For strength. For practice. A delaying tactic, I understood later, but then, like a fool, I’d already reversed my own prior, better judgment. Stupidly, I again hoped, and I believed that his teasing promise had finally and for real tipped away from the tease toward its promise: the bridge—although I would have gone with him anywhere. I would have had to have gone with him anywhere. Lucky, lucky me: As it happened, I’d been hungering to go up on a bridge with him for years, but if he’d have wanted to go somewhere else, or if he’d have wanted to do something else, there wouldn’t have been much else for me, other than to go, and to do.

  After dinner we’d meet in the living room for practicing. He’d go horizontal on the floor, stretching his arms to their widest span. Like a career waiter, deftly steadying a sterling tray, piled nearly to toppling with fragile tableware, he’d broaden and flatten his right hand’s fingers, balancing me delicately, without a flinch, at the bony hollows of my throat and chest. I’d soften my scrawny structure, make myself pliant. When he’d stabilized my torso, he’d wrap his flung left palm around my ankles for lift-off. Muscles and veins popping out all over him, our bodies perpendicular, his arms pumped my body—first up and aloft, far from his, then down, low and close—up and down, up and down until I was flying and falling, flying and falling, breathless, giddy, shrieking, stoned with giggles. He grunted with pretend exertion, like it was so laborious. When he decided we were finished—always, always, he made this determination unilaterally, so I could never anticipate when the end was approaching and temper my wishes accordingly—he lowered me, I rolled off him, and he moaned, exhaling gigantically, like he was so winded.

  Bedtime followed. He’d toss me like a gunny sack over one shoulder and carry me firefighter-style to the living room couch, which was my bed, right there in the room where we practiced. Not far to get to my bed. No transitional cooling-off time. After the wild velocity and proximity of practicing, the end’s abruptness, the severance accompanying his “Goodnight, you”—separations always hitting the one who stays behind harder than they hit the one who goes on ahead—I’d marinate in a living room redolent with breath, heat, his man-smell, my flannelly kid-having-fun smell, while he went away to his own bedroom. I’d have trouble falling asleep in that still-buzzing living room. Overstimulated, alone, all jagged up, for hours I’d twist myself into pretzels of indecision.

  Should I or shouldn’t I? I shouldn’t. I shouldn’t. I knew that I shouldn’t.

  Much later on, comfortable without the burden and benefit of empirical evidence to negate or support my hypothesis, I’d maintain that sexual acts per se were meager foreplay for the truer pleasure, the deeper intimacy, of shared sleep. Whoever has access to a helpless, sleeping body owns it, controls it, can do anything to it, so it was natural that I’d only ever slept with Dad. Sleeping with him was bad. I knew that. I also knew that bad things weren’t necessarily wrong things, but interrupting his sleep was criminal; if we’d had religion, it would have been sinful. Hours before completely confessing to my sorry self that I’d already decided to go ahead and do it, I’d cringe with the afterward-shame, the dirty regret that should have sunk in later—or the next morning, his eyes still bloodshot, his features absent of all signs of being rested—and which should have deterred me. I hated myself for interfering with his sleep, even more so for loving to do it. For exploiting the wakeful one’s God-like power of ultimate say-so over a defenseless body. He worked very hard at a dangerous job to keep me housed, schooled, fed, clothed. He needed rest. Badly. Too often, always knowing better, I couldn’t defeat the urge to do wrong, especially once the light appeared, and I’d re-remember that not having closed my eyes during the night would neither retard nor prevent the arrival of the too-bright morning, of another next day with unbounded possibilities to be survived or not.

  The dark was a mild worry. What kept me awake and afraid was me. Something about me. I scared myself. Lots. Grow up. My thinking-inside-myself voice told me off. Stop being a baby. I’d abandon the couch, slip into his grown-man’s bed, straddling his chest, gently, gently alighting my fingers along his lash-lines. Softly, softly, and firmly, too, I’d press his lids up and open, until I saw his red-webbed eyes’ whites, and I asked, I begged, “Dad? Are you in there?”

  “Of course, Bee,” he’d mumble sleepily. As if the answer was a certainty beyond all doubt, that his still being in there, inside himself, whole within his own intact body, as planned, as promised, would always be the case.

  NEW YORK CRIMINAL LAW STATUTES: PENAL LAW, PART 3.

  Title O. Offenses against Marriage, the Family, and the Welfare of Children and Incompetents.

  Article 260. Offenses Relating to Children, Disabled Persons, and Vulnerable Elderly Persons.

  § 260.10. Endangering the welfare of a child

  A person is guilty of endangering the welfare of a child when:

  1. He knowingly acts in a manner likely to be injurious to the physical, mental or moral welfare of a child less than seventeen years old or directs or authorizes such child to engage in an occupation involving a substantial risk of danger to his life; or

  2. Being a parent, guardian or other person legally charged with the care or custody of a child less than eighteen years old, he fails or refuses to exercise reasonable diligence in the control of such child to prevent him from becoming an “abused child,” a “neglected child,” a “juvenile delin-quent,” or a “person in need of supervision,” as those terms are defined in articles ten, three and seven of the family court act.

  Endangering the welfare of a child is a class A misdemeanor

  If caught, that’s a year or less in jail. No one with even half a brain in his head gets caught.

  Canarsie Pier’s stink of briny rot rendered plausible what otherwise seemed unlikely: that Canarsie had once been a sleepy fishing village. Ninety years before Dad and I stood at our jump-off point for more sophisticated practicing—“a whole new level,” he’d said—most of the neighborhood’s few thousand residents, mainly Italian immigrants, made their living fishing, crabbing, clamming, or oystering Jamaica Bay’s rich waters and beds. By the 1920s pollution and the Great Depression had destroyed Canarsie’s shell-fishing industry. Shellfish, aquatic homebodies, were loath to travel far from home, and they gene
rally remained inside the calcareous houses they built for themselves. Food was delivered to their bodies by built-in siphons that drew water into their shells for filter-feeding: first capturing food, then spitting out water. I’d guiltily consider the attachment of shellfish to their houses whenever Dad and I collected shells at Brighton Beach: Every shell in our dry, deadly hands was once someone else’s house! How selfish to bring back to our home, for frivolous ornamentation, the self-made homes of other beings who’d have preferred to stay put, soft bodies encased under solid cover, however temporary and illusory the protection might be.

  If sedentary living made clams and other shellfish susceptible to accumulations of high concentrations of human-made poisons—bacterial coliforms from sewage, polychlorinated biphenyls from industry—the Bay’s fish traveled for food, in mobile homes of skin and scale, to mixed and open Atlantic waters, so fish weren’t as vulnerable to dire accumulations of pollutants. In warm weather, crag-faced, gravel-voiced old-timers would cast long for eel and fluke or snag butterfish or samplings of Jamaica Bay’s increasing population of Canarsie White Fish—floating used condoms—right off the Pier’s decaying edges. Word on the Pier, from above, state and federal environmental officials, and from below, locals, people like us, was: “You can fish, but you can’t clam.”

  Canarsie Beach Park was part of Gateway National Recreation Area—not a National Park, as if a park was too much to wish for; we needed to maintain realistically low greenery expectations—but a Recreation Area Still, the place was Federal enough to have behatted, uniformed rangers. And rules. The Department of Health had officially and consistently declared Jamaica Bay unswimmable for fifty years: No primary-contact recreation—activities in which bodies made direct contact with raw water, especially total bodily submersion—allowed. Secondary contact recreation, like fishing or boating, where skin contact with water was minimal and ingestion improbable, was permitted. Clamming, I guessed, was ultra-forbidden because it required getting the whole body into the water to dig.