Brotherly Love (9 page)

"A guy’s house Constantine knows. What fuckin’
difference does it make whose house?"
 
They
are quiet again and then Peter hears his father on the stairs, and
then the door opens and his father is there in a wash of light.

"I got to go back out a little while," he
says. He leans in the doorway, his feet still in the hall. His face
is troubled, as if something in the room were out of place.

Peter feels himself beginning to cry.

"What’s wrong with you tonight?" his
father says, staying in the doorway.

Peter shakes his head, denying it. "Nothing,"
he says.

"This takes maybe an hour, I’ll pick up a
pizza."

He doesn’t answer.

"You don’t want a pizza?"

"He’s funny today," Peter says, looking
downstairs. He hears himself say the words.

His father peers at him from the door, framed in
light. "Phil’s always funny," he says.

Peter shakes his head. "He’s . . . fucked up."

The first time he has ever said the word in front of
his father. A cloud moves across his father’s face and when it is
gone he suddenly begins to laugh. He laughs in a way Peter has never
heard before; something comes out of him that he didn’t know was
inside.

"Jesus," he says, "that’s too good."

And as Peter looks carefully, he sees his father is
not just laughing, he is smiling at him too. Shining.

"I’ll get us a pizza," he says, and he
closes the door and goes downstairs. Peter stands in the darkness,
listening to his father and his uncle leave the house; he goes to the
window and opens it, and listens to them climb into his uncle’s
car.

The engine starts, the lights go on, and` they are
gone. He lies on his bed with his hands folded behind his neck,
staring at the ceiling and holding on to the sound in the room as his
father laughed. Picturing the shine on his face.

He doesn’t sleep or move, he simply lies on his bed
in the cold room until morning, when his uncle comes back to the
house alone, opening the door with a key, and climbs the stairs to
his room to tell him something bad has happened to his father.

The boy walks straight to the window and jumps.
 

PART TWO

1966

N
icholas DiMaggio is
sitting by the window in Ed’s Diner, making circles on the table
with the bottom of his water glass. He is holding half a dozen
thoughts at once, moving from one to the next, trying at this moment
to imagine how the water gets on the bottom of the glass—not the
word condensation, he knows the word, but how it works. If it is
something you could see with a microscope.

He wishes he had spent more time in school when he
was in school.

He thinks of school.

He looks at the circles and then his hands, grease in
the lines of the joints. He will scrub that out later, before he goes
home. He never goes home to his wife with dirty hands. He thinks of
her sitting straight-backed in a slip in front of her mirror,
studying her face. He holds her shoulders in his hands; he can feel
her pulse.

He closes his hand and opens it, estimating how much
he’s aged by the pain in his knuckles, comparing it to what he
remembers from last winter.

It’s always the winter that brings on pain.

He feels the cold pressing on the window, feels its
breath through the glass, and looking that way, into the street, he
notices it has begun to snow.

He hasn’t seen the sun in a week.

Ed moves behind the counter. There is no one else in
the place, and he is waiting to close. Three-thirty in the afternoon.

"You want more coffee, Nick?"

"No," he says, "the kid should be done
all the work by now."

He pushes himself up out of the booth, watching old
Ed smile, feeling the plastic seats stick to his pants, and puts a
dollar on the table next to his empty cup. It sits off center in the
saucer, a little coffee collected in the low side.

"How’s he doin’, anyway?"

"Real good," Nick says. "I left him
today, he’s got a water pump all over the sidewalk, probably won’t
take me two, three hours to find the pieces, get it back together."

"What is he, twelve?"

Nick stops for a moment to think. "No," he
says, "he’s only nine. You’re making me older than I fucking
am."

"Somebody said he was already pretty good."

Not meaning engines now.

Nick shrugs. "He’s doing all right," he
says. "Come up sometime and see for yourself."

The old man behind the counter looks down the slope
of his apron and grabs his crotch. "I would," he says, "but
you know Annie. I got to beat her off this thing with a spatula."

Nick opens the door, and
feels the wind blowing up from Broad Street. He turns his back into
it and zips his windbreaker. Ed’s face appears at the window,
smiling a few inches away, and then the shade drops.

* * *

H
e sees the white kids
first, two blocks away on the other side of McKean Street, coming
home from public school. The short one’s got a behind like an old
lady’s—the kind that sticks out so far that walking with it is
something you have to think about, like carrying a suitcase—and
he’s smoking a cigarette. The short one, he knows, is Phillip
Flood’s son.

The other one is his nephew. Charley’s boy. They
all live together in the house across the park from Nick’s that
once belonged to Charley. How that happened, he doesn’t want to
know. The little girl got killed, the wife went crazy, Charley
disappeared . . .It seems to Nick that all these things happened a
couple of months after they found the cop next door in the trunk of
his convertible, but time moves for him in a different way than it
used to; the order of things isn’t as clear as it was. He isn’t
sure.

He remembers watching the boys in the park—it seems
to him they were both riding one bicycle—and feeling bad for the
one that belonged to Charley. He never walked over and talked to him,
though, the way he would any other kid. He had a house of his own and
a son of his own, and did not want the entanglements.

These guys, you did not want the connection.

Nick drops his chin until it rests on the jacket,
protecting his face from the cold—everything but the top of his
forehead—and pushes through the wind. How many fighters had broken
their hands on Nick DiMaggio’s forehead? He goes back, remembering
three. He figures that means there were probably a dozen.

It makes him smile, the way his memory blurs. It
seems to him that it started about the same time he was beginning to
see what things were about. But what he remembers and what he
understands are not the same thing, and he knows that, and this part
of his life is as good as the part that came before.

The smile is still in his head when he senses the
movement from the other side of the street.

Four of them come out of the alley half a block away.

Phillip Flood’s son and his nephew are passing the
cigarette back and forth, probably discussing how to get into some
girl’s pants—it terrifies Nick sometimes, thinking he might have
had a daughter——and they don’t see them until it is too late.

Nick comes to the intersection and looks down the
crossing street—Chadwick—to his garage. The door is open, an
eight-year-old Cadillac sits underneath it, half in and half out of
the shop. Harry is on his tiptoes, bent into the engine.

He wanted to put the water pump in by himself—Nick
could see that, so he went to Ed’s for coffee. He wonders if the
kid has even noticed the way it got cold.

Nick stands for a moment at the corner, absorbed in
the ordinary sight of his garage and his son leaning into the open
hood of a car, and then, standing still, he is visited by the feeling
that he is watching the place from his old age, remembering it. He
moves, turning away, frightened, and looks up the street to see what
will happen with the boys.

He wipes cold tears from his eyes and finds a place
against the wall where the wind isn’t as strong.

The short one sees them first. He looks up and seems
to stumble; the cigarette falls off his lip and blows up the sidewalk
to meet them. He turns his head, looking for someplace to run. A
house or a store, a fire station.

The taller one stops too, but he only looks at what
is there in front of him.

The colored boys close the distance. Nick sees the
short one is pretending to have something in his pocket.

Nick crosses his arms and waits. The colored boys
collect in a circle over the white boys; as big as men. They look up
and down the street.

One of them notices him then, half a block away. He
stares at Nick, deciding something, then slowly smiles, as if there
is an understanding between them.

Nick feels himself deciding to walk away. He looks
down Chadwick again, at the open door and the sign over it——NICK’s
AUTO REPAIRS AND GYMNASIUMM—his kid leaning so far into the
Cadillac’s engine that it looks like he is going to fall in.

He decides to walk away, but he doesn’t move. He
was born on the second floor of a house a block and a half from his
shop and the neighborhood is still his, even if he lives two miles
away in a better part of the city. He knows the history of this
street and all the streets around it—he is part of the history—and
he knows the faces, even if he can’t always remember the names.

He remembers the names later, sitting at dinner, or
lying in bed. Nothing is lost, only stored farther back. That is what
lets him smile.

He pushes himself off the wall and moves toward the
boys until he can hear them over the wind.

"Let’s see them pockets."

The white boys go into their pockets and come out
with a dollar or two in change. The colored boy who noticed Nick
before turns and looks at him again, surprised to find him closer.

"You crazy, motherfucker," he says.

Nick doesn’t say a word. Phillip Flood’s kid
notices him then, thinking at first he is help, then deciding he
isn’t. The other one, Charley’s kid, stares at the dark faces in
front of him, holding himself straight. He reminds Nick of Charley,
the way he holds himself. Charley had worked with his hands before he
moved up in the union. He’d spent time on roofs and looked it,
nothing like his brother.

Phillip never was part of it until his brother was
running Local 7.

One of the colored boys takes the money. He studies
it a moment, then says, "Shit," and puts it into his
pocket. "Let’s see them shoes," he says.

Nick folds his arms again and spreads his feet. The
white boys take off their shoes—new, white sneakers—and the
colored boys take them too. Nick feels something stir, but he thinks
of the Cadillacs that come and go in front of the house across the
park, all hours of the night, and stays where he is.

He does not want the connection.

"Let’s see them other pockets," the
colored boy says, and the white boys look at each other and then pull
their coat pockets inside out too. A comb, some matches and
cigarettes, something that looks like a lady’s compact. Nick
squints; and yeah, Charley’s kid has got a lady’s compact. His
hands are pink from the cold, the nails are dirty. The compact is
round and almost the color of his skin.

The colored boy reaches for the compact too, but the
kid pulls it away. The colored boy smiles.

"Let’s see that," he says.

The boy shakes his head no.

"I gone whip your white ass right here," he
says. The kid who looks like Charley doesn’t say a word. His cold
hands roll into fists and he waits.

"You think this old motherfucker gone help you?"
the colored boy says, nodding to Nick. "He ain’t gone do
nothing but get fucked up hisself. He probably like to get his ass
beat, make him feel good."

The boy holding the compact is as grim as this
street. The other one, his cousin, stares at him, waiting for him to
give the colored boys what they want.

And if he does that, Nick will go back to the garage
and look at the water pump. That’s the contract he makes. If
Charley’s kid stands up, it’s another story. Nick won’t leave
him in this alone.

The colored kid stares at the boy with the compact, a
smile breaks his lips.

Nick waits.

He doesn’t want the connection. He doesn’t want
to be a thought in Phillip Flood’s head; it gets turned around.

He sees something change in the white boy’s
posture; he senses this kid who looks like Charley Flood is going to
turn over what is in his hand. Its value has changed.

He is relieved and let down at the same time.

And then, almost in the same moment, the boy
surprises him. He takes a step forward, claiming the empty space
between himself and the colored boys, and throws a soft-looking fist
at one  of their heads. He is off balance and scared, his thumb
is tucked inside his fingers. He hits the colored boy’s mouth as
hard as he can; the colored boy barely moves his head.