Brooklyn Noir Read online

  “Today’s your day,” I said, palming the clutch of keys off to him. “You get to do the whole thing.” He unlocked and opened the Buick’s trunk, pried off the cooler’s squeaky Styrofoam lid, retrieved a Rheingold, took a long pull. He offered me a sip.

  “Just don’t tell.” Immediately following the initial sip, my arms and legs felt heavy and achy, but they ached good. Another sip, and they ached real good. Another, and I became unsteady. I grabbed Danny’s arm so I wouldn’t skin my knees stumbling to the gravel.

  I’d never seen so hairy an arm on someone so young. Up close. With my free hand, I touched the hair on the arm I held hostage, mussing the hair against the whorls of its natural growth configuration, then smoothing it back, as I’d done at home with the wall-to-wall shag. Back and forth, up and down his arm. I was simultaneously lost in and intensely concentrated on the beat, the rhythm of cyclically creating swirling arm-hair chaos and then returning it to tidy normalcy He didn’t stop me. His breath was raggedy. I continued stroking, ruining a pattern, restoring a pattern.

  Distantly, Chicky hollered, “I said one beer, not the whole six-pack.” Danny neither responded nor registered hearing his father. Now he had gooseflesh, his soft, young, black arm-hairs standing straight up, a phenomenon I’d later learn was scientifically called piloerection. Chicky shouted, “You writin’ a book or somethin’?” Danny, who got to see his arms and their hair every day, was as transfixed as I was. His breathing steadied, slowed, deepened. Nearly but not quite rupturing my reverie, from afar Chicky yelled, angrily, “Danny? You deaf or just not listening to me today? If I have to come over there …” Wordlessly, Danny stared at my hand gliding along his arm’s shaft. Touching his arm-hair, and the arm-skin underneath, was awfully pleasant and vaguely disturbing, a brand new, unnamable inner commotion that started to spook me. I didn’t want to stop petting him, but I thought I should mention what I’d half-heard. “You’re dad’s mad. You’re in trouble.” Danny didn’t hear me. Chicky bellowed, “Hey, Lefty. People’s gonna think your girl’s the type who hangs around parking lots. See what’s doing over there, will ya?”

  My father approached us, boots grinding gravel. Once the beer can came within his eyeshot, his face became a blade of disapproval, features finely sharpened and narrowed. And it cut. I’d done bad. I scrambled for a strategy to fix it.

  Perhaps for the first and only blessed time, being a child spared me something. Still young enough to play innocuous tickle-wrestle games, without pulling my hand from Danny’s arm, I wiggled my fingers, ten desperate, panicked worms, deep into Danny’s belly, like I was tickling him, “Cootchie-cootchie-cooo.” Quick-footed, quick-witted Danny followed my lead, doubling over and laughing maniacally, then cootchie-cootchie-cooo-ing my armpits. I shrieked, too, with crazy-person laughter. Although Dad seemed relieved that all Danny was doing was tickling me—the man had no idea that I was doing all the doing, or thought as much—I knew right then that it was officially and indelibly safe to say that I really had a problem, that I was disgusting, that there was poison in my putrefied blood, that I’d been born bad.

  A bad seed. A bad egg. Three hundred million bad seeds in a grand hurry toward a head-on collision with one bigger bad egg. The blood-script of a messy but astonishingly idiot-proof recipe for bringing into being a being born bad An accident—a statistically improbable accident—waiting to happen. That would be me.

  For decades I’d awaken with a start, sweatily, those two words in my mind, on my tongue. Born bad

  When Dad first warned me that taking kids up on bridges was against the law, he’d explained, in his serious-man voice, “Here’s the tricky thing, Beetle. The laws weren’t made for People Like Us. Mostly, People Like Us have to obey the law, but we don’t have to respect it. And we sure as hell don’t have to like it. Ain’t one law says you have to respect the law.” I was proud. We were tough. We meant business. Me and my bad Dad. A tough team. Once pledged to the team, there’s no getting off. Ever.

  Even after death, there’s no quitting the team. Danny loyally stuck by the Testaverde team, as the team did by him, long beyond his death—his premature payment of the ultimate union dues—two years after his transcendent ladder-climb. Violating child labor laws, and working illegally, without papers, Danny had quit high school to work iron. The walking bosses had looked the other way at his age, because Danny was a crackerjack cabler, skilled beyond his years, until the day he’d slipped and fallen off a too-slippery beam.

  The men, as Dad recounted the story, struggled to catch him, nearly falling off themselves, but they only managed to grab hold of his shirt. His Alexander’s-boys’-department polyester shirt. In a wakeful nightmare, a day-mare, the men watched impotently as Danny plummeted, and his shirt flew off, and his naked back looked so startlingly white against the black water. Water as hard as concrete, water harder than steel, water that murdered bodies falling from such heights by breaking them into many pieces, even if the lungs managed miraculously to carry on functioning during the descent.

  No one could bear to look at Chicky.

  Finally, the men watched as, from deep within him, Danny’s intestines sprung pyrotechnically out of his insides and into the open air, unfurling like some kid’s birthday-party streamers, launching skyward, as if powered by a spring-loaded catapult. The remnants of his body sunk heavily into the water, piece by broken piece. His guts were the last part of him anyone saw. His guts—up, up, up—as they soared.

  All the men removed their hard hats, tacitly arriving at a collective mandate that the workday was over—and not just for Danny. Most of them immediately headed down off the bridge, but some were immobilized, stunned still, including several who required hours of humiliating, never-to-be-mentioned-again coaching and hand-holding from other men. Three guys were physically incapable—it wasn’t emotional or anything, they swore, but sheerly, physiologically impossible—to unbolt their locked-shut eyes. The three had to be embraced and carried down the whole way.

  Criminals. All of us.

  “If we’re gonna climb a bridge together, I have to teach you the right way to fall off. Into water. When you know how to fall right, we can go up and know what to do if God forbid something goes wrong. But remember: None of these things are allowed. There’s rules against it, so you can’t tell anyone what we’re doing. Afterwards, you can’t tell anyone what we did.”

  “If it’s not allowed on Canarsie Pier, let’s skip it. It’s rinky-dink anyway. We could jump off a real bridge in Jamaica.”

  He grinned amusedly. “You think it’s legal across the county line? In Queens County, but not Kings County?”

  I stood awhile, crossed and uncrossed my legs, which locked at my stiffened, knobby knees. I lost my balance a little during one crossover, caught myself, and swallowed hard. I hadn’t meant Queens. I’d meant the island. From the commercials. Ocean waves. Palm trees. Sunsets. And that music. I folded my arms across my chest. “I meant the beach.”

  “Forget Bergen Beach. We’re good enough right here. Anyway, how’s stepping from flat sand into the ocean like jumping off a bridge? ’Slike taking a walk, not a fall.” I hadn’t thought through the spatial aspects that far—although secretly, anticipating our trip to the bay in for-real Jamaica, I’d packed my knapsack with my bathing suit and two towels and placed toothpaste, toothbrushes, shampoo, suntan oil, soap, and snacks in my Fonzie lunchbox. Peering down into this Jamaica’s bay, I saw that these logistics weren’t analogous to a work situation either. Canarsie Pier’s setup didn’t provide the slightest simulation of the long-distance free-fall from those heights to those depths, and that was what I’d wanted him to show me. The distance between Canarsie Pier’s cement banks and Jamaica Bay’s foul water was a matter of sad little inches—nothing compared to the vast expanses of absolute nothing between a bridge’s tensile steel and the suck of rushing, fluctuating open water. My stomach sat low, depressed with the first signs of starting-to-be-sad stomach syndrome.

  “First of
f, when you’re falling more than twenty feet, you don’t know diddley-squat about what’s floating around you. You could hit Jimmy Hoffa for all you know. You don’t know how deep the water’s gonna be. Make like you’re blind. A leap of faith.”

  I got quiet. I got cold, even though the night was hot, and when I shivered, poking through my Danskin, my nipples mortified me. He wore only pale, unpatterned blue boxers. No shirt. No one was around, so it was okay, he said. He figured cops wouldn’t hassle us at 1 a.m., so we went then, in the small hours. It was to be our secret.

  The distinction between secrecy and privacy. A tough one.

  The sky was yellowish and bearing down, pressing the low roofs of the attached houses with green awnings beyond Seaview Avenue, closing in on the Pier’s hot concrete. He asked, all sympathetic and paternal, “Getting cold feet?”

  “What are you? High as a kite on drugs?” The question had been popping out of Canarsie’s parental mouths.

  “Then pay attention. I’ll explain it as many times as you need, but I’ll only demonstrate once.”

  “Why?”

  His features clustered to a pinch of nose and lips—a disgusted look, I thought, standing with my squinched-raisin nipples and ignorance. “I’m not allowed to jump in even once. I can’t go twice. They’d cart me to jail if they knew you were doing it, too.” I was dry ice, frozen and burnt. “Learning how to fall is the most important thing you’ll ever learn, and they won’t teach you that in school. The trick is to do exactly what doesn’t come naturally. When you’re falling, you won’t be able to see or even think, but if somehow you can, try to fall wherever the water’s deepest.”

  “But then I’ll drown.”

  “Drowning’s always a risk, but that’s a swimming problem, not a falling problem. And if drowning is your main concern, you lucked out big time, because you can only drown if there’s a miracle and you survive the fall and the hit. The deepest water is furthest from shoreline. Assume the water isn’t deep enough to stop you bashing yourself against the shore bottom. Hit bottom with your head, you break your skull. Hit bottom with your legs, they snap like Pick-Up Sticks. Go for the deepest part. Stay away from all objects, especially anything that supports the bridge.”

  “Then there’s nothing to hold onto. To help me. Float.”

  “This is true. Nothing to help you out, but also nothing to smash yourself into. All kinds of garbage collects near bridge supports. Sure, a little raft would be nice to find, but you’re more liable to find something a lot bigger and a lot harder than you are. Then you’ll pay.” He turned around, looked behind himself. “Checking for John Law. Coast’s clear. Okay now. Jump feet first. Stay straight. If you aren’t perfectly straight, you’ll break your back when you hit.” I was trembling, and not because of the extreme temperatures my skin had touched. He said, “I thought you wanted this. What’s with the Gloomy Gus punim?”

  “I’m just listening.”

  “Totally vertical. Feet first. Squeeze your feet together tight. And your butt cheeks.”

  “Butt cheeks?”

  “If you don’t squeeze your cheeks, water’s gonna rush in. Screw up your insides. Internal damage and such like.”

  “Rush in where?” What fun, to watch a big strong man squirm. I knew where he was talking about, that it embarrassed him to talk about it. I knew that things could go inside that place just as things could come out of that place. “Rush in where?”

  “Into your insides. Your tummy. And you’ll get one helluva stomachache. Always make sure to cover your privacy real tight.” Outside his boxers, he cupped his hands around his parts, like I was some guy at a row of urinals.

  “Why? Why should I? Why should I cover my privacy?”

  “You just have to.” I wanted to watch him wriggle out of this one. I remembered how one winter, when we’d gone to see the human polar bears go swimming at Brighton Beach, I’d asked him why men had nipples. He’d blushed and changed the subject to his favorite: ironwork. And a few years earlier, I’d asked him where babies came from. Flustered, pink-faced, without a trace of levity or irony, he said, in a voice possessed of an untainted, artless sincerity never heard out of grown-ups’ mouths, “Ummmmm, you should ask your mother.” My question was sufficiently stress-provoking to make him forget that I didn’t have much of a mother to ask, and that if I did ask the mother I came from, he and I wouldn’t have been having this conversation. This situation.

  “Just do what I tell you and remember to protect your privacy.”

  The thick yellow sky pushed down on my skull and brain. “First you said I couldn’t think or see straight. Then you said to remember to cover my privacy. How’m I gonna remember if I can’t think?”

  “Trust me.” To trust someone who kept checking behind his back did not come easy.

  “Explain why you did that.” I pointed, accusing his shorts of something. The idea of his parts poked out; the idea of his sheltering hands obscured the idea of the bulge. “Izzat fair? You said you’d explain it however many times, then you don’t explain it, not even a tiny bit?” He looked around frantically. “Dad, we’re alone, but it doesn’t matter anyway, ’cause everything’s all wrong.”

  “Wrong? What’s wrong? I’m steering you wrong?”

  My talking-out-loud voice said, “No,” but my thinking-inside-myself voice bawled, You already did. This was supposed to be something else. You’re pulling a change-up on me and you don’t even say you’re sorry. I started crying, then I stopped myself.

  “I know it’s scary, Butterfly,” he cooed, all kissy-face-buddy-buddy. “I’ll demonstrate. Better to learn by example.” He plopped onto the concrete and lay flat, flat everywhere except for the forcefully un-flat, trace afterimage of the ghost in his shorts. “Another thing to know. Remember how we make snow-angels?”

  “That’s winter. In the snow. It’s summer now. Everything’s different.”

  “Pretend with me. As practice.” He spread his arms and legs apart, wide. His pectorals and deltoids emerged, tauten-ing, hardening, and his boxers gapped, puffed, and puckered in places I thought would’ve worried him if he hadn’t been busy trying to get in good with me—after he’d rooked me, no less. His arms and legs described arcs on the concrete. “While you’re falling, making snow-angels in the air generates resistance and slows down your plunge.” He flapped his limbs like a dying bug, too stunned to flip from his back onto twitchy, kicky legs.

  I was done. No more pretending. No more practicing. I wasn’t lying down on hot concrete, no way no how, to make fake snow-angels in the summer. I was done bench-pressing, too, because falling lessons, and all the practicing building up to it, had always held zero promise. For me. I said, “This is C-R-A-P crappola.”

  “I don’t like that word.”

  “Well, tough titties. I don’t like this. I don’t even think I like you. I’m going home.” As if it would work this time, I said it again—I’m going home—as if I had any say at all in the matter. He appeared embarrassingly eager to scuttle like a caught cockroach off the Pier, but if he hadn’t been ready to leave, if he’d wanted something else, somewhere else, or something more, I would’ve been stuck. I had no keys. I wondered whether it was accurate to call it our house if only one of us had keys.

  Chicky Testaverde came by a couple of times that summer to have grief-drinks with Dad after he’d already been at the bar, talking ironwork, having several after-work drinks with the guys. He never confessed to suffering days so stricken it took five after-work drinks to calm his once-nervy nerves. He never confessed to icing over with bone-seizing fear while on bridges now, unable to move in any direction, sometimes hugging a girder or a beam, eyes crushed closed for five minutes. But he spoke like a man indicting himself for murder, which implicated us as coconspirators, when he wept, “I shoulda known to keep my kid off the bridge.”

  Later during the summer of the Pier business, the three of us—Dad, awkwardness, and I—got in the car, tooled around, listened to AM radio and t
he wind roaring through the open windows. The drives were probably his uncomplicated method of getting through the hours. His directions and destinations were always questionable and unquestioned. One night he’d gotten lost, maybe missed an exit if he’d had one in mind, near the Belt Parkway’s labyrinthine, accident-prone Ocean Parkway intersection, a snaky Mobius-mess of ramps, exits, merges, under- and overpasses. Traffic was slow.

  He drove the Olds below an overpass on whose brick someone had spray-painted in darkest black, Hi Scummy.

  We noticed it, read it, and looked at each other. Hi Scummy jetted us into laughter so belly-felt it was unbearable, like being too-tickled. Our hysterics were a relief, too, the discharging of something that needed letting out. Laughter was going to kill us, because Dad was losing control of the wheel, swerving like an alkie. He pulled off at the nearest exit and parked. We genuinely could not stop laughing. We were having An Episode. I was scared I might wet my pants, but I also didn’t care if I did.

  When he could talk again, Dad asked, “You think the guy who wrote Hi Scummy was pissed off at somebody who drives under that overpass-thing every day? To make sure the other guy really gets the message?”

  “How would Scummy know the guy’s handwriting? And would Scummy know to look up there for a message?”

  “Hmm. Smart one. Good point. Also, how would Scummy know that he was the exact Scummy that the Hi was meant for? ’Cause for sure there’s more than one person who takes this route and fits that description.” He paused, changed tone, adding a grim voice to his voice. “That’s if we used words like that, Beth. And we don’t. Those words aren’t allowed, so we don’t use them.”

  “Oh,” I said, earnestly. “What about words like Dummy-fuck-o?”