Brotherly Love (24 page)

Michael says, "He ain’t so bad."

Peter cannot think of an argument for that and takes
Jimmy to Atlantic City for the night. And then another night, and
another.

They go to the fights,
they buy champagne. Then Jimmy gets blown, and then Peter spends the
last four hours before daylight trying to keep him happy, and at the
same time trying to keep the moment when he brings out his penis and
his felt-tip a little ways in the future.

* * *

A
nd that is where Peter is
on the morning the old men in the raincoats catch Michael crossing
the street in front of Jimmy Measles’s house, heading toward the
limo. Peter is in Atlantic City, Monk and Bobby the Jap are asleep in
the front seat, Grace is still in the door, watching Michael leave.

The men in the raincoats have shotguns and go for his
legs first, intending to finish him after he is on the ground.
Michael sees them too late, one on the sidewalk, one in the street.
He takes the pistol out of his coat pocket, beginning to run, and
shoots four times, blowing out the front window of a poultry store
kitty-corner in the Italian Market.

He is hit himself as he hears the pieces of glass
drop onto the sidewalk.

A moment later Bobby the Jap comes out of the limo
screaming—a shoeless Kamikaze—and the old men in the raincoats
are so unnerved at the sight of this foreigner that even though
Michael is on the ground, crawling toward the car, dragging one of
his legs, they don’t stay to finish it.

And three hours later when
Peter turns his Buick onto Catherine Street, he sees the television
cameras and knows what has happened.

* * *

M
ichael is out of surgery
at Thomas Jefferson Hospital by the time Peter arrives, and by then
the only interest he has left in Jimmy Measles’s wife is avoiding
her.

Peter never sees him again with any woman he doesn’t
pay.

When things go wrong,
Michael always goes back to what worked for him before.

* * *

T
he man on the television
set keeps saying Michael has "reputed ties to organized crime."

He takes off his glasses and looks directly into the
camera and reports that the shooting resulted from a power struggle
between Michael and reputed mob boss Salvadore Bono for control of
the union pension funds. He puts his glasses back on and begins a
recitation of the long history of labor and organized crime in the
city while the camera plays over Ninth Street and the broken window,
settling finally on a few drops of blood beneath the window.

Chicken blood.

"Police were unable to question the president of
the Council of Trade Unions," the man on television says, "who
is now in guarded condition following surgery on his hip. No suspects
have been arrested."

The television sits on top of Jimmy Measles’s
cooler. Jimmy sits beneath it at the bar on a stool next to Peter’s,
looking sore-eyed and grim, drinking champagne through clenched
teeth. He hardly looks at the customers as they come and go, he
kisses nobody’s cheeks, pats no fannies. He leans close to Peter to
speak, his lips pulled back from his even, white teeth, which are
still locked.

"I take this personally," he says, "people
shooting my friends outside my club."

Peter doesn’t say a word. There is no one in the
bar except Jimmy Measles himself who does not know what Michael was
doing in front of the place at six in the morning.

"Flood’s father, Phillip," the man on
television says, "was assassinated in 1974 as he stood on the
porch of his home in South Philadelphia .... "

Peter waits, but the usual details of his uncle’s
death—which always seem to follow the mention of his name on
television or in the papers—are missing tonight. He feels Jimmy
Measles looking at him, and turns in that direction, thinking he has
finally begun to wonder what Michael was doing in front of his place.

But there is nothing like that in Jimmy’s
expression. "His hip, that’s it?" he says.

Peter shakes his head. "What the doctor said, a
piece of buckshot stayed, more or less—I can’t remember the
word—it homogenized the head of his dick."

Jimmy Measles takes this
news as if the wound were his own.

* * *

W
hen Peter arrives at the
hospital the next morning, Michael is connected to half a dozen
tubes. A machine is squeezing his legs every ten seconds to prevent
blood clots, and even with a fresh shot of morphine rolling through
him, he is talking between breaths and sweating.

"If I could, Pally," he says, "I’d
just shoot the fuckin’ thing off. This minute."

He isn’t sure if his cousin is saying that because
his penis hurts or because it gets him in trouble, but he doesn’t
ask which way he intends it to be taken. Lying on your back in the
hospital, you don’t want somebody asking you to explain what you
mean, especially about wanting to shoot part of yourself off.

Peter pats his cousin’s shoulder and thinks of the
effort it takes to be clear. He studies the length of Michael’s
legs under the sheet.

"So what did the doctors say this morning?"
he says.

Michael shakes his head.
"You won’t fucking believe it," he says.

* * *

T
he buckshot has torn away
most of the hip socket and taken the head of the femur with it.

Two doctors come in the door while Peter is still in
the room. They report that they are in agreement that Michael needs a
new hip. Michael listens to them and then turns his head. He does not
care for the idea of manufactured parts, even though the doctors have
brought the artificial joint along to show him how it works.

The thing comes in two pieces. There is a plastic
socket that screws into the joint and a piece of chrome a foot long
that fits into the bone.

Michael studies the two parts and then hands them
back to the surgeon. He closes his eyes and drops his head onto the
pillow.

"It was up to me," he says again, "I’d
just shoot the fuckin’ thing off."

The doctor holding the parts smiles in a comfortable
way, feeling good about being a surgeon and about not being Michael
Flood. He says, "You already tried that, Mr. Flood."

Michael opens his eyes and stares at the doctor. It
seems to Peter that for half a minute there is no sound anywhere in
the hospital, that even paralyzed people are afraid to move.

And then Jimmy Measles comes through the door,
carrying pasta from his restaurant that is some shade of green that
shows even through the Styrofoam container, and the moment passes.

Everyone in the room is
relieved to see Jimmy Measles.

* * *

T
en days later, they give
Michael the new hip. The operation takes all day—the doctor with
the sense of humor explains to Peter afterward that it is easier when
the surgeon removes the femur and socket himself than when the
patient does it for him.

They keep Michael in the hospital five weeks, and for
five weeks Jimmy Measles sends over lunch and dinner every day, and
visits in the afternoon, which is when Peter visits too.

Just once he brings Grace.

The moment Michael sees her he begins checking his
sheets, making sure he is covered. She walks past Peter to the
window; her eyes never glance at the bed.

Jimmy doesn’t notice. He checks Michael’s toes,
has him move his feet, and when he is satisfied he doesn’t have a
blood clot, he begins a story about his second wife, Rhonda, the one
from Vermillion, South Dakota, who tried to have him committed.

Grace is in a chair near the window, all to herself.

"So I been married to Rhonda two weeks,"
Jimmy says, "and I stay out a few nights to celebrate, end up
early one morning in the lobby of the bank at Chestnut and Broad,
waving their fire hose around, you know, like it’s my dick, and
when I wake up again I’m in a hospital for observation, the
doctor’s outside talking to my wife and she’s sayin’ she wants
me committed. Married two weeks, and she wants me locked up, and I
hadn’t even been home yet. I guess that’s the way they treat
people in South Dakota .... "

Michael isn’t listening. He is preoccupied; he
looks everywhere in the room but at Grace.

Jimmy gives up the story and checks the bottles
overhead that feed the tubes, making sure the doses haven’t
changed. It seems to Peter that he knows as much about the operation
now as the doctors, nearly as much as the nurses.

"They said your white count’s all right?"
he says.

Michael doesn’t seem to hear him.

"Leg cramps? You got a good pulse in your feet?"

Michael shakes his head and looks at Peter. "It
was up to me . . ." he says, and those are the last words out of
him until Jimmy Measles takes his wife and leaves.

When she is gone Michael sits up, trailing tubes, and
eases his leg off the side of the bed. He reaches for his walker.

"Where you going?" Peter says.

"This place is gettin’ on my nerves," he
says, but something catches him then and freezes him to that spot,
and that moment, until Peter can get him back onto the bed.

The next day they take the
drainage tubes out of Michael’s leg. Peter watches that, and does
not return to the hospital afterwards. He has Bobby the Jap and Monk
take turns at the door and calls once a day, usually in the afternoon
from the gym, to see if there is anything Michael wants him to do.

* * *

A
week after the doctors
pull the drainage tubes out of Michael’s leg, two detectives walk
into the gym to talk to Peter. They do not introduce themselves, they
just begin to talk. "We been thinking," one of them says,
"how funny it is that you was in Atlantic City the night Michael
gets shot."

Nick hears that and turns his back on the cops and
moves to the other side of the room. The detectives smile at each
other, young cops in plain clothes.

Peter is half undressed, standing in his underwear.
He looks at them a moment, then pulls his pants back on and walks
down the stairway without a word. The two cops look at each other,
confused, and then follow him down.

The first one outside is grabbed by the shirt and
thrown into the garage door. The door shakes at the impact. Nick
sticks his head out of the window, then goes back inside.

Peter turns to the other cop, furious, putting his
finger in the middle of his chest. "I don’t have any trouble,
you want to ask me the question," he says, sounding calmer than
he is, "but not here. This isn’t my place."

The detectives look at each other, not knowing what
to do.

"Hey, Peter," one of them says, "lookit,
we’re just doing our job .... "

"This isn’t the
place," he says. "You don’t come here anymore. This
p1ace’s got no connection to Michael."

* * *

T
here is a call one night
from the Italians, the ones who own the streets.

The man says, "I understand you’ve got medical
problems in the family, you might be thinking of takin’ over the
business."

He doesn’t answer.

"You need some business advice," the man
says, "you know where we are. Maybe something can be worked
out."

The man hangs up.

* * *

P
eter goes to the gym, he
reads the papers, once in a while he drives to the little house his
mother left him in Cape May and gets a night’s sleep.

It is the only place he can sleep through till
morning.

Other nights, he stops at Jimmy Measles’s club.
Grace is still at her table, as if nothing has changed. He wonders
how the shooting looked to her, the shotguns and the glass and
Michael lying in the street.

He saw that she didn’t like Michael much, even when
she was running him across the street two, sometimes three nights a
week.

She’d used him up early.

* * *

B
eing shot changes
Michael. He hardens and narrows; he gains weight, he stays out of
Jimmy Measles’s club. He has no patience for business.

He sees the change himself
and knows that something has been taken away from him, and sometimes,
he finds himself staring at his cousin, wanting to take something
away from him too.

* * *

T
hey are sitting in the
living room together early in the afternoon, Michael’s leg elevated
by a footstool, his crutches lying across the floor.

Peter is looking out the window to the park,
thinking, for no particular reason, of the children who found little
pieces of his uncle in the trees over there, and sold them, encased
in plastic bubbles they stole from the ring machines at the grocery
store, for ten dollars each during the Mummers’ Parade.