Bitter Bronx (22 page)

H
e knew it would happen one day; he couldn't avoid the New York Yankees for the rest of his life. But he didn't have to enter that morgue of the old Yankee Stadium. How many times had he read about the new stadium, a monument to the twenty-first-century Yanks, with enormous murals of A-Rod & Company on the outer wall? And so he didn't protest when the Dogs' own lawyer let him out of his limo at a side gate; he didn't have to march in with the crowd. He was waltzed right through by an attendant, and rode on a tiny elevator that made a wondrous, whistling sound. It was like a fable out of La Fontaine.

He ended up in some damn box that leaned over the field like a crazy cliff. Will had never seen anything like it in all his travels as a barnstormer with the Grasshoppers. Waiters were flocking around a man with a silver ring in one ear. He looked like a Nuyorican nigger. But Will recognized who he was: Roberto Collins, the head dog of the Crotona Dogs. Will had seen his picture in the
Post
.

Roberto Collins had survived a hundred gang wars; he had a deep scar on his left cheek. He couldn't have been much older than thirty. He hadn't started the Dogs, but had risen through the ranks as a street warrior.

“Hey, homey,” he said. “Sit down and enjoy the game.”

Will resisted all the mechanics and rituals of Yankee baseball. He didn't want to watch A-Rod and Jeter, but he did. The field unfolded under him like a glittering green carpet.

“You're my hero,” Roberto Collins said.

“Mr. Collins, I'm a superintendent of an apartment house with a crumbling courtyard. One day a kid will disappear in the rubble.”

“Means nothing. You're a New York Yankee.”

“I played in one game. I struck out twice. I couldn't buy a base hit. I shouldn't have been brought up. It was an accountant's error. They needed a twenty-fifth man while another Yankee was in transit.”

“Ah, but my pappy saw you. A kid from the Bronx. That's what the announcer called you—‘a home-grown product.' Pappy remembered those words.”

But Will remembered nothing quite so grand. He'd been a transient, a single-day wonder.

“How many homeys got to wear that uniform, huh? I grew up under a pile of shit near Crotona Park. I saw those fucking dogs chew up a child. That's how the gang began. We had to retake our territories from a gang of wild dogs. We had fatalities; a couple of us died of blood poisoning. I was a baby at the time. I couldn't do much. But Pappy kept saying over and over, ‘Star-r-r-r-ting in center field, Will Johnson of the Bronx.' That was my mantra.”

“I won't steal for you, Mr. Collins. I won't beat up addicts, no matter what brand name they have on their baggies. And I won't take your money.”

“It's not that simple. But you're right. We are a brand name. And we have to protect that brand. We've built a farmers' market, right on Hoe Avenue. We give stipends to junior high school students. . . . I can't take back that three thousand. It'll look bad. How will I keep the cops under control if I can't control one super in my territories? You can piss the money away. That won't bother me. But you're getting three thousand a month.”

Roberto Collins left after the seventh inning. Will watched Jeter go to his left and make an underhanded lob to first. After that he fled Yankee Stadium. He should have told Laurencia about the bankbook, but he didn't. Stonemasons arrived one afternoon and repaired the crumbling courtyard. These masons also worked at Woodlawn Cemetery. The managing agent for the apartment house was never presented with a bill. Statements arrived every month from West Fork Mutual like clockwork. Will was always three thousand dollars richer than the month before.

He hid the statements and the bankbook. Some boys' club called and asked him to coach a sandlot team in Crotona Park. How could Will refuse a bunch of little homeys? He knew it was the Dogs' own team. But he could heal the wound of that one wounded day at Yankee Stadium by helping these sandlotters hit, field, and run.

Will's picture was in the
Post
. He was called an ex–Yankee slugger. He was asked to speak at local churches and a synagogue in Riverdale. Soon he was listed as one of the borough's “Hundred Top Shakers.” He still hadn't told Laurencia about the bankbook. And then, that fall, after the sandlotters' season, several Homeland Security agents broke into Laurencia's apartment in the middle of the night while Will was sleeping there. These agents didn't say a word to him. They identified themselves, asked to see Laurencia's green card, told her to get dressed, and spirited her away.

Will didn't know what to do. He'd never dealt with immigration lawyers, or lawyers of any kind, except Marcus, the Dogs' own man. He called Marcus at three in the morning and left a barely comprehensible message. Will's phone rang five minutes later. Roberto Collins was on the line.

“I heard all about it, homey. We'll get your missus back.”

L
aurencia was home an hour or two after sunrise. She wouldn't allow Will to take her in his arms.

“Jesus, why didn't you tell me you worked for the Crotona Dogs? I might have been prepared, Will. I might have known what to say.”

“It was a baseball team,” he whispered.

“The Dogs' own team, and you with a bankbook from them that lists me as the beneficiary.”

“I didn't know that,” he said.

“Then what do you know, Will?”

She started to cry. “Couldn't you have seen the nose in front of your face? Are you that much of a child? I'll never become a citizen now.”

She didn't lose her job. The hospital was frightened of a lawsuit. So it kept her on the payroll and relieved her of all responsibilities. Then it offered to buy out her contract. It was some kind of silver parachute. She was branded, a maiden of forty who'd never find another job in hospital administration. Her eyes began to flutter. She cringed whenever Will went near her. She started to cry and never seemed to stop. She accepted that silver parachute.

“I can't stay here, Will. I'm sorry. I still love you, but I can't stay.”

She packed some summer clothes in one tiny suitcase, as if she were leaving for a weekend. She caressed the little scar above his right eye—a baseball wound—and walked out of La Fontaine Avenue. She'd left most of her belongings behind. Will fondled every skirt and blouse and moved them into his own apartment.

Six months passed. He shambled about like some casualty of war. He stopped doing repairs, started mumbling to himself. And then that lawyer man, Marcus of Manhattan, knocked on his door.

“Come with me.”

They rode in the lawyer's limousine, right on Robert Moses' highway, and ended up in Darien, Connecticut.

“Roberto had me find the missus for you. She was working as a housekeeper.”

Will mulled that word in his head. “Housekeeper? That's impossible, man. She has an education. She knows all about fables and talking foxes. She had a staff of twenty under her at St. Barnabas.”

“Super, she swallowed a whole bottle of pills.”

They parked outside a tiny hospital near a bone-dry riverbed. It was the Dogs' own lawyer who got Will inside, who listed him as her next of kin. She had her own room. Will sat near Laurencia, clutched her hand. She'd waken, look at him, close her eyes again.

A car drove him up to Connecticut every other morning. He sat with her into the night, when all visitors had to leave. The freckles seemed to have fled from her face. She smiled at him during his third visit. His shoulders started to shake.

“Stop that, Will,” she said. Those were the first words she had uttered from her bed. “Your shoulders will disappear from all that shivering.”

She giggled like a little girl. But her laughing fit didn't last. And Will was mortified by that absence of freckles.

“I ruined your life. And it's all on account of a bankbook I never asked for and never used.”

“Will, Will,” she said. “You spent too much time with your Grasshoppers—a barnstorming baby. You fathered yourself, Will Johnson. It's a miracle. That's what I first saw in your face when you were lying there at St. Barnabas, the longest man-child in creation. Jesus, your feet were too big for the bed.”

And now both of them laughed. And that very night, after he returned from Connecticut, another limousine appeared on La Fontaine. The window opened with the force of a pile driver. Roberto Collins sat inside.

“Homey, we didn't mean to harm you. We needed a touch of respectability.”

“That's a laugh. I was a Yankee for one lousy afternoon.”

“Don't say that, dog. A Bronx Bomber is a Bomber for life. My pappy loved you until he died.”

“I wish he had never seen me play,” Will said.

The window shut with the very same force. And Roberto Collins rode back into the night. A messenger delivered a packet to Will in the morning. He found a letter inside from the manager at West Fork Mutual. His account at the bank had been opened by mistake. The money wasn't Will's. The account was null and void. And the manager asked Will to tear up the bankbook and every other trace of that “renegade account,” as he called it.

An ambulance arrived that afternoon from Darien. Laurencia climbed out with the help of a cane and rambled across the courtyard on her own. She had to stay with Will. Her own apartment had been rented out months ago.

“Don't get any ideas, Will. It's just for now,” she said, smiling at his enormous form. “After all, you are my next of kin. The hospital got a real kick out of that. That's some lawyer you have, love. You were listed as my half brother.”

He took care of Laurencia, fed her, washed her clothes. And then all manner of strangeness arrived, as if La Fontaine were visiting his own avenue of fables. Laurencia received a registered letter from St. Barnabas, in care of Will. The hospital's director apologized. There had been an error of mistaken identity. And he was abiding by the wishes of Laurencia's attorney—she had no attorney. The hospital had agreed to rehire her. In fact, her employment had never been terminated, he said. The hospital had been “maliciously misinformed.” The bank account in question, of which she was the beneficiary, was the product of someone's willful imagination.

She received another letter in care of Will—from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, reminding Laurencia that her naturalization interview had been scheduled for next month. It was as if that early morning raid by Homeland Security had never happened.

She settled in with Will. He slept in the living room, on a sofa, and tucked her in at night. Her freckles had come back. “Mr. Will Johnson,” she whispered, “are you Sir Fox looking far and wide for some grapes?”

“The grapes are right here,” he whispered right back while she pulled apart the covers and invited him into his own bed. She wasn't shy with him that night. And she brought him to Dominick's the next day, St. Barnabas' own canteen. Will was wearing a Hawaiian shirt. He had the lean look of a barnstormer.

No synagogue or church asked him to speak about his short life as a major leaguer. The glassine bags disappeared from La Fontaine Avenue. The barnstormer was never bothered again.

WHITE TRASH

P
rudence had escaped from the women's farm in Milledgeville and gone on a crimefest. She murdered six men and a woman, robbed nine McDonald's and seven Home Depots in different states. She wore a neckerchief gathered under her eyes and carried a silver Colt that was more like an heirloom than a good, reliable gun. The Colt had exploded in her face during one of the robberies at McDonald's, but she still managed to collect the cash, and her own willfulness wouldn't allow her to get a new gun.

She wasn't willful about one thing: she never used a partner, male or female.

Women were more reliable than men; they wouldn't steal your money and expect you to perform sexual feats with their friends. But women thieves could be just as annoying. She'd had her fill of them at the farm, where they read her diary and borrowed her books. Pru didn't appreciate big fat fingers touching her personal library. Readers were like pilgrims who had to go on their own pilgrimage. Pru was a pilgrim, or at least that's what she imagined. She read from morning to night whenever she wasn't out foraging for hard cash. One of her foster mothers had been a relentless reader, and Prudence had gone right through her shelves, book after book: biographies, Bibles, novels, a book on building terrariums, a history of photography, a history of dance, and
Leonard
Maltin's Movie Guide
, which she liked the best, because she could read the little encapsulated portraits of films without having to bother about the films themselves. But she lost her library when she broke out of jail, and it bothered her to live without books.

The cops had caught on to her tactics, and her picture was nailed to the wall inside post offices, supermarkets, and convenience stores; she might have been trapped in a Home Depot outside Savannah if she hadn't noticed a state trooper fidgeting with his hat while he stared at her face on the wall.