Brotherly Love (22 page)

Jimmy Measles stops on the fire escape beneath it and
looks back at the ground. He takes off the new camel hair
double-breasted overcoat his wife bought on Chestnut Street for his
birthday, rolls it carefully around the bottles and tosses it up to
Peter, who is leaning over the side.

Jimmy Measles puts his hands on the bar just over his
head and steps up with one foot.

He puts his foot back on the fire escape. "This
shit’s covered with ice," he says.

To Peter Flood, it sounds as if Jimmy Measles cannot
draw a full breath.

Peter sits on the edge of the roof, holding the coat,
watching. He doesn’t say a word, he only waits. Jimmy Measles does
not belong here.

Jimmy takes an atomizer from his pants pocket, pumps
it into his mouth twice, and climbs the ladder. At the top he stalls,
half on the roof, half off, his feet kicking in the air. Peter puts
his fingers through his belt and lifts him the rest of the way.

It seems to Peter that he is almost weightless; that
he could be hollow.

Jimmy Measles straightens himself and drapes the coat
over his shoulders and walks to the middle of the roof where the
others are settling in. He runs the fingers of his gloves through his
long black hair, pushing it back over his ears. It falls in place
naturally, and holds. Perfect hair.

Using a glove, he dusts a spot near Michael, and then
slaps the glove against his trouser leg before he puts it back on,
cleaning it too. He sits down carefully, careful not to wrinkle his
pants, and begins to open one of the bottles.

Peter notices the shaking in his cheeks and his chin
before the cork pops. He sees it again: Jimmy Measles does not belong
here, he is too weak.

Jimmy hands the bottle to Michael Flood, who tastes
it and hands it back.

Jimmy begins a story.

"I got this stuff from a guy owns a mom-and-pop
on South Street," he says.

The men sit quietly on the roof, waiting. This is
what Jimmy Measles is for, to tell stories.

"This guy’s got a break-in once a month,"
he says. "The way girls get their period, this guy’s got
break-ins. He even gets depressed, that time of the month, knowing
they’re coming. So at night he empties the cash register. He
empties the cigarette machine, takes all the cigarettes home. He
takes the meat out of his refrigerator .... "

It is quiet a moment while Jimmy Measles drinks from
the bottle.

"So what do they do?" he says. "They
take the fuckin’ meat slicer."

Jimmy Measles looks at Michael, who seems to be
waiting for him to finish. It comes to him that Michael doesn’t
appreciate how much a meat slicer weighs.

"Those things must go a couple hundred pounds,"
he says. "It’s like stealing the water heater."

"He ought to get himself a dog," the man
called Monk says.

Jimmy shakes his head. "He had a dog; they stole
it."

He checks Michael again,
to see if he’s smiling.

* * *

T
here is no wind on the
roof.

Michael Flood carefully pulls a thin knife from a
plastic bag in his lap; a drift of white powder lies across the
blade. He leans forward, closing one of his nostrils with his thumb,
and sniffs with the other. His eyes water and he smiles at Jimmy
Measles.

"Tell us that story the lion pissed down your
leg," he says. He takes the champagne from Jimmy Measles and has
a long drink.

Jimmy Measles shakes his head. "That isn’t
about a lion," he says, "it’s about my pants.
Five-hundred-dollar Brooks Brothers suit, one pair of pants, the
second time I wore them. Me and Larry Tock were doing a charity
appearance for the circus—people called us for that shit every week
back then—and so we’re standing around the lion’s cage waiting
for the guy that’s supposed to pay us, and this lion, I swear to
God, it pisses on me through the cage, and the piss eats a hole in my
pants."

Michael Flood smiles as the story comes out; the two
men who work for him look at each other. Peter Flood is thinking of
other things.

In the dark, Jimmy Measles watches Michael to see how
he’s doing. "A five-hundred-dollar suit," he says.

"I heard of elephant manure catching fire,"
says the man called Bobby the Jap. He is the only high school
graduate on the roof. "Spontaneous combustion . . ."

The other man—Monk—doesn’t understand. He pulls
back two inches, as if to get Bobby the Jap in focus.

"Manure," Bobby says. He smiles, showing
gapped, uneven teeth.

"It means shit."

Monk reaches for the open bottle of champagne, tastes
it, makes a face, and then opens his own bottle. Boone’s Farm Apple
Wine.

The men sit in the cold for more than an hour,
drinking Jimmy Measles’s hundred-dollar champagne and Monk’s
two-dollar wine, urinating over the side of the roof, listening to
Jimmy Measles talk.

Michael Flood offers the bag of white powder to
Peter, who shakes his head no, and then to Jimmy Measles. Jimmy
Measles leans forward until his nose almost touches the blade of
Michael’s knife, and then presses one of his nostrils shut and
sniffs.

His speech becomes faster and he laughs at his own
stories. Most of them are about the television program Bandstand, the
times he got beat up after the show, the times he brought girls into
the stage manager’s office.

He thinks of another story but doesn’t tell it.
When he left Michael alone in the stage manager’s office with the
Jewish girl. He remembers the way she could dance. Maureen.

But that isn’t a story to tell, just one to
remember.

He talks about the dances he invented, he and his
partner Suze. Half the teenagers in Philadelphia were copying the
steps they made up before the show.

"You should of seen the letters I got, asking
was I porking her," he says.

A moment later Jimmy Measles’s lungs seize in the
cold air. He reaches into his pants pocket for his atomizer again and
puts it into his mouth, taking deep breaths as he pumps the trigger.

Taking this for an intermission, the man called Monk
gets up and walks heavily to the edge of the roof. He stands still,
his breath fogging the air in front of his mouth, and then the arch
of his piss cuts a line through the light from the streetlamp, and a
moment later the other men hear the sound as it hits the sidewalk.

They drink until there are four empty bottles, wine
and champagne, in a pile on the roof. Michael Flood sniffs again from
the blade of his knife, then holds it for Jimmy Measles.

He doesn’t even offer it to his cousin Peter this
time; Peter’s mind is somewhere else.

"You heard Larry Tock ended up in Texas, right?"
Jimmy Measles says; the drug rolls through him so he thinks that he
does not mind so much being on the roof after all.

Michael and Bobby the Jap look up, waiting, but as
Jimmy starts to lay out the last chapter of Larry Tock’s life, he
senses that they are waiting for something else.

Jimmy Measles stops his story; no one asks him what
happened in Texas. He wishes Michael would offer him something more
off the blade of his knife.

Peter stands up then—the first time—and walks to
the side of the roof which is protected from the street. Jimmy
Measles thinks he has gone there to piss over the side, as the others
have. He catches a glint in Michael’s eye.

Back at the edge, Peter
Flood looks down, pauses a moment, as if he were having trouble
opening his zipper, and then, without saying a word, he jumps off.

* * *

M
ichael Flood walks to the
edge of the roof, smiling, and looks into the canyon beyond his feet.
It is too dark to see bottom.

He knows there is a pile of sand down there as tall
as a car, but it doesn’t seem to him that it is much of a cushion
in cold weather—now that he considers it, about like hitting a car.

He has never jumped himself, although in the
beginning it was his idea.

The others stand up slowly, brushing dirt and grit
off their pants.

In the beginning, the cousins came here alone. Peter
was fifteen, Michael was a year younger. They quit school together,
and Michael’s father, the president by then of the Council of Trade
Unions, had gotten them jobs on the docks.

He could get anyone a job; that was the source of the
power. The politicians came to him, and the Italians—the ones who
owned the streets—left him alone. What they had given away they
could not take back.

With their first paychecks, Peter and Michael Flood
got drunk and came to this roof, and Peter had jumped and busted his
tailbone.

And Michael thought he understood it then, how his
cousin would rather pick up a check for a bad coccyx than unload
pistachio nuts with a line of Arabs watching him from the deck of the
ship.

But Peter Flood never missed a day’s work.
 
It seems to Michael Flood now, staring
into the darkness, that Peter might have kept jumping for the same
reason another man who is given, say, the family trucking company for
his twenty-fifth birthday might keep a Teamsters card in his wallet
the rest of his life.

To prove he is entitled.

Michael Flood turns away and walks back to the fire
escape. The others follow him; Jimmy Measles whispering "Jesus
Christ" as they go.

Peter Flood is already on the sidewalk below the men,
waiting. The stairs shake beneath the men’s feet, but there is no
play in it now. They descend in the same order they climbed—Michael
Flood, Bobby the Jap, Monk and Jimmy Measles.

Michael studies his cousin’s posture, weighing the
unnatural, stiff way he is standing—a little goofy, is his exact
thought. Meaning that he has hurt himself badly. A small, sweet
moment passes through Michael Flood as he recognizes pain. It isn’t
that he dislikes his cousin, only that Peter’s pain makes him
happy.

But that is as much sign as Peter Flood will give,
the way he stands. Michael drops to the sidewalk and shakes his head.

"How the fuck you’re still walking, I don’t
know," he says. Peter Flood gazes at his cousin without seeming
to hear what he’s said. Thinking of other things.

Michael Flood believes that there is something in the
falling that hypnotizes him. That, or the landing makes him hear
music.

He imagines music in his cousin’s ears.

He has never seen Peter land. It is always dark on
that side of the warehouse and the pile of sand is invisible from the
roof, so he disappears before he hits. The sound his body makes as it
hits the sand is heavy and solid, it reminds Michael of the trunk of
his limousine being shut.

Michael would like to see his cousin hit the sand,
the look on his face at the moment it happens. "We got to do
this sometime during the day," he says now.

But he has suggested that before, without results. It
has something to do with the light, he thinks. Peter never feels
crazy during the day, he is strictly a nighttime jumper.

Jimmy Measles is almost at
the bottom of the fire escape now, checking each step for ice,
wheezing, his calfskin gloves sliding down the handrails. Afraid to
let go for even a second.

* * *

P
eter looks past his
cousin and notices the way Jimmy Measles is coming down the steps,
thinking anything higher off the street than a curb he loses his
personality. As soon as he is off the fire escape he relaxes.

"I shit my pants you went off that roof,"
Jimmy says to him.

Peter doesn’t answer. He holds himself still,
trying to recover the other stillness, the thing that was in his
chest as he fell.

But it’s gone.

He hears words being spoken and feels the tightening
in his spine, like ice freezing around tree branches in the winter.
He sees Jimmy Measles’s smiling, worried face in front of him.
Jimmy Measles moves one of his shoes behind the other and dances—one
step and a turn—and stops in front of Michael.

"So, my man," he says, "you want to
habituate Catherine Street or what?"

That is where Jimmy’s club is, at Ninth and
Catherine.

They load into the limo, Michael and Peter and Jimmy
Measles all in back, and head for Ninth and Catherine.

Jimmy Measles opens another bottle of champagne,
Michael sticks his knife into the white powder.

Peter sits straight up, his hands underneath him on
the seat to take the weight off his lower back. The feeling of the
fall is too distant now to remember, and each time the car hits a
pothole, it seems to crack the ice encasing his spine.

He pictures himself in the gym tomorrow, all the
broken ice.

The car stops in front of the club—double-parked—and
Michael gets out without waiting for Monk to open the door. Jimmy
Measles slides across the seat after him, and then looks back in to
see what’s keeping Peter.