Brotherly Love (25 page)

"You know, everywhere I go," Michael says
quietly, "people tell me how funny it is that you was in
Atlantic City when this happened."

Peter turns to look at him.

Michael smiles and holds up his hand. "I ain’t
blaming you," he says. "I know what you was doing there, I
don’t mean that. But still . . . it is funny, ain’t it?"

Peter doesn’t answer. He feels Michael studying
him.

"Jimmy tells me Nick’s kid is something,"
Michael says a few minutes later.

Peter turns and looks at him again. "Jimmy
doesn’t know anything about it," he says.

He had taken Jimmy with him to the gym one afternoon
and he sat in the corner in his yellow bikini underpants and new
tennis shoes, telling stories and smoking cigarettes. Nick thought he
was funny, so Peter brought him back a few times.

"So is the kid good or not?"

"He’s good enough," Peter says.

"Why don’t you talk to him, maybe we get him
out of his old man’s garage."

"There’s nothing wrong with the garage."

"Not for the old man, what else’s he got to
do?"

Peter stares at the backs of his hands. Michael
watches him.

"He’s got a nice life," Peter says.

"He does the same fuckin’ thing every day."

Peter feels himself rising to that, but in the same
moment a spasm. grabs Michael’s leg and he squeezes his face almost
shut, trying to squeeze off the pain, and hisses through his teeth.
Peter waits. Michael’s thick hands encircle half his thigh—as
much of it as he can get his hands around—and then the spasm
passes, and the mood between the cousins has changed.

"It ain’t nothin’ personal about Nick,"
Michael says. "But what is he, fifty-four, fifty-five?"

"He doesn’t sit out on his steps yet nursing
his grudges," Peter says.

That is what the retirement years in the
neighborhoods are about. The loneliest people are the ones whose
enemies have died. They sit in front of their houses in folding
chairs, spring to fall, reframing old arguments, saying it the right
way this time, saying all the things they should have said, with
nobody there to hear them.

Peter knows that Nick is sometimes lonely for
enemies, but it’s only that he misses having someone to fight.
Sparring with Harry or Peter isn’t the same thing. He misses hating
someone for a little while, not knowing how it will come out.

But hate moves further away from Nick DiMaggio all
the time; he understands too much. And what he understands, he
forgives.

"He’s a nice-looking white boy," Michael
says.

Peter nods. Harry could fight main events right now
in Las Vegas or Atlantic City, but it doesn’t matter. He has no use
for those places, or the people in them.

The old man fought up and down the East Coast back in
the fifties and knows where it leads, and his son seems to know it
too.

They are the same person, thirty years apart.

Michael says, "He could make some money now that
ain’t going to be there forever. That’s all I’m sayin’. Maybe
you talk to him, let him know we help him if he wants it."

"They don’t need us to make money," Peter
says.

He is angry now, and his
cousin sees that and smiles.

* * *

S
ometimes Jimmy Measles
wonders out loud why Michael has quit coming to the club. He looks
his place over—the bar, the empty restaurant, Otto, his wife—and
it isn’t enough. "It must be bothering Michael," he says,
"getting used to his leg."

Peter tells him the truth. "It ain’t too bad,
Jimmy."

"Is he pissed at something?"

Peter shakes his head, also the truth. Michael likes
having Jimmy Measles around, but there is something left between
himself and Jimmy’s wife that makes him scared to come in.

Most of the time, Jimmy Measles sits at the bar with
a shot glass and one of the bottles off the top shelf, and looks out
the window onto Catherine Street. Still regretting what happened
there.

Some nights Grace takes a few hundred dollars out of
the cash register, and then is gone for the evening. She likes the
bars on South Street; Jimmy doesn’t seem to care. She kisses him on
the cheek and smiles at Peter on the way out, and the sight of her
from behind, going out the door, stays with him all night.

On one hand he wants to take her away from Jimmy
Measles, on the other hand he doesn’t.

It seems to him that Jimmy Measles causes it.

One night while Jimmy is missing Michael out loud,
Peter turns in his seat, suddenly furious at him for being helpless.

He says, "What are you, a fan club? You want a
fucking autograph or what?"

Then he sees he’s hurt his feelings and wants to
smack him for that too.

He says, "Jimmy, what I’m saying, you got
enough right here to make anybody happy."

But he is talking about
Grace now, and when he thinks of the conversation later, lying in bed
at the house in Cape May, he sees that he doesn’t know anything
about what Jimmy Measles
has at all.

* * *

A
car rolls quietly to the
south curb of Passyunk Avenue, in front of the Rosemont Diner. A man
of Chinese extraction named Robert O’Meara—the police report will
say a.k.a. Bobby the Jap—has just stepped out of the place and is
walking west toward Broad Street, working a toothpick in the gaps
separating his front teeth.

The car moves in front of the man and stops. The back
door opens and the man stoops to see the faces inside. The toothpick
rolls as he smiles. There is a moment then, which no one on the
street can see, when something small changes in his face. A look of
recognition.

The toothpick drops from his lips and Robert O’Meara
gets in. An hour later the car stops again, on an access road near
the airport. The same door opens and a full garbage bag is wedged
out, catching in the opening like something being born, and then,
free of the car, slides into a shallow gulley. Inside the bag, Robert
O’Meara is tied at the wrists and ankles with wire, and shot behind
the ear.

The body is left there, where someone will find it,
as a courtesy.

The door closes and the car leaves.

An airplane passes a
hundred feet overhead, shaking the sky, and the package lies
motionless beneath it in the road.

* * *

T
he news of Robert O’Meara
reaches Michael and Peter in the private office of City Councilman
Benjamin Taylor.

Recent newspaper stories have revealed that nineteen
of the councilman’s relatives—including his ninety-two-year-old
mother—are now on the city payroll, and the councilman, sensing
trouble, has called Michael to see if he can arrange jobs for some of
them with the trade unions instead.

Peter and Michael sit quietly, listening while
Benjamin Taylor lays out the problem. "It would be extremely
helpful," he says, "if these people were viewed as
immediately employable in other avenues of life."

There is new carpet in the office, snow-white and
three inches deep, which comes up around the visitors’ shoes like
something that lives on the floor of the ocean. The city councilman
finishes speaking without mentioning what he might offer in return,
and Michael takes his feet out of his loafers and runs them over the
floor.

"You fuck on carpet like this," he says,
"you don’t walk on it.”

The man behind the desk smiles.

There is a wet bar in the corner, mahogany, and a
long table by the window that appears to have been made from the same
tree; leather chairs a foot or two apart all the way around. The
councilman lives with the fear that someday a constituent will leave
this office with the impression he is not stealing as much as the
mayor.
 
Michael looks up from the
carpet and says, "Please tell me you ain’t asking me to make
your mother a roofer .... "

The call comes in then, over the private line. The
councilman picks it up, flashing cuff links, and says, "Councilman
Taylor speaking .... "

He listens a moment, and then hands the phone to
Michael, who cleans the receiver before he puts it against his ear.
He does business with colored people—more and more, they are part
of the flow of power—but he doesn’t want their germs.

"Yeah," he says.

He listens, not saying a word, and then he hangs up.
He looks at Peter. "Bobby the Jap," he says. "How do
you like that?"

Benjamin Taylor smiles and rests his chin on his
fingers. "Bad news, gentlemen?"

Michael stares at him, perched on his white-tipped
fingers, looking for some sign the spook is playing with him.

Benjamin Taylor lets the smile on his face change, a
natural-looking change, until there is nothing there but sympathy.
Michael stands up, pushing himself away from the desk, and walks out
without another word. Peter stays in the office a moment longer,
getting used to the news, a stillness not unlike falling suddenly in
his chest.

And then he gets up too.

The councilman watches him from behind the desk,
looking uncomfortable. "Tell your brother I am sorry for his
loss," he says.

"Cousin," Peter says. "He’s my
cousin."

Peter walks down four flights of stairs and finds
Michael standing outside the north entrance. The limo is cutting
across the three lanes of stalled traffic that encircle City Hall,
day and night, sparkling in the sunlight. Horns honk, lights change,
nothing moves.

"They picked him up on the street, he gets right
in the car with them," Michael says. "He don’t try to run
or anything."

He shakes his head while Peter pictures Bobby getting
in the car. It seems to Peter that he had been resigned to something
since he started to work for Michael.

"Them people," Michael says, "sometimes
you think they want to die."

The limo pulls in front of a city bus and then climbs
the curb to the sidewalk. It stops with its back end still blocking a
lane of traffic and Monk gets out to open the door.

Michael ducks in and slides across the seat. Peter
crawls in behind him. The door shuts, and Michael’s voice comes to
Peter out of the dark.

"They took him out by the airport and popped
him," he says, "but that’s it. They didn’t do nothing
to him."

Monk gets in behind the wheel. "We going to
Maryland?" he says. There is a Thoroughbred racehorse in
Maryland that Michael is supposed to look at that afternoon. He has
been talking about buying a racehorse all spring.

Peter begins to shake his head no.

"Yeah," Michael says, "Mary1and."

Peter looks across the seat at his cousin, his eyes
adjusting to the dark. Michael shrugs. "I still want my horse,"
he says.

Monk steers the car back into traffic and heads down
Broad Street toward I-95, and then south on I-95 toward the airport.
Peter stares out the window at the high weeds between the refineries
and the runways. Somewhere in the weeds is a dirt road where Bobby
was left in his plastic sack.

"Bobby had kids, right?" Michael says.

Peter nods. "Three of them."

The children lived with his ex-wife in a place called
Davie, Florida. Sometimes Bobby would disappear for two, three weeks
at a time to see them. He never said where he was going or when he
was coming back. Once, when Peter told him he ought to let Michael
know where he was so he wouldn’t get the wrong idea—Michael had
begun to worry that anybody who wasn’t around had gone to work for
the Italians—Bobby said, "Just tell him I’m on a load,
Pally. He ain’t going to understand this anyway, the kid’s are
all girls."

That’s where Peter had been thinking Bobby was the
last few days, with his girls in Davie, Florida.

"His wife, she divorce him or what?"
Michael says.

"Yeah, she left."

"We ought to take care of the kids for him,"
he says after a while. "But nothin’ for her, Pally. Not a
fuckin’ cent."

They cross into Delaware and pass through Wilmington.
Peter notices Michael staring at a stand of trees off the next exit.

“
What I think,"
Michael says quietly, "we got to respond to this a way it ain’t
going to happen again."

* * *

M
ichael stands in front of
the horse for three seconds, his feet spread, his arms folded in
front of his chest. The horse is lying on her back, chewing straw.
"Fuck this horse," he says.

He turns and walks out of the barn back toward the
car.

The man who is showing him the horse hurries to catch
up.

"Mr. Flood?" he says. "You want to
look at her run or something?"

Monk sees Michael coming and opens the back door.

"Te1l your boss, don’t waste my time,"
Michael says.