Queens Noir (15 page)

I looked over at Sherry, leaning against a ball return to
tie her apron. She had her eyes on them, on all of us. She
couldn't hear, but it was like she did.

"Mark my words," Diane said. "Blood will tell."

That whole summer, I'd lie in bed at night waiting for my mother to come home from her shift waiting tables at the tavern. I'd lie in bed and think about Eddie and Carol. It was like
how I used to think about Alice Crimmins, the Kew Gardens
lady who killed her kids so she could be with her boyfriend.
I couldn't get her face from the newspaper out of my head.
Two, three times a night, I'd run around testing all the window latches, the window gates.

Now, though, it was all about Eddie and Carol. I'd stay under my sheets-cool from sitting in the refrigerator for hours
while I watched television and ate Chef Boyardee-and think
about how they looked, all flushed and pulsing, how you could
feel it coming off them. You could feel it burning in them. It
made my throat go dry. It made something ripple in me, like
the time I rode the rollercoaster at Fairyland and thought I
just might die.

Then I'd start thinking of Sherry standing behind that
counter all day. When she'd first started she cracked gum and
looked bored, went in the bathroom twice a day to wash hot
dog sweat off her hands and spit out her gum in the sink.

But lately she didn't look bored. And nights, she'd get into
my head. Standing there like that, her head dropping, eyes lowered, watching. I wondered when she was going to make her
move. Was she waiting to see it for herself? Hadn't she figured
out yet when and where it was happening, right behind the wall
of pin trestles that she-we all-stared at every day all day?

Each day it seemed closer and closer. Each day you could
feel it in the place, even as the clean and fresh-faced Forest Hills kids pounded their bright white tennis shoes down
the alleys; even as the shiny-haired teenagers hunched over
the pinball machines, shoving their hips, twisting their bodies, like they wanted to squirm out of their skin; even as the
customers at the bar, steeled behind smoked glass by lane 30, cocooned from the pitch of the squealing kids and mooning
double dates, cool in their adult hideaway of tonic and beer,
crushed ice and lemon rinds and low jazz and soft-toned waitresses with long, snapping sheets of hair and warm smiles, and
a bartender who understood them and would know just what
to do to make them happy ... even with all that going on at
the Lanes, it was going to happen.

"I don't like the way they talk about her," Diane was whispering to my mother, leaning over my mother's counter, tangerine nails tapping anxiously. "Sherry and Myrna and Myrna's
friends from the Tuesday league."

"Talk's just talk," my mother answered, loosening her apron.

"Listen," Diane said, leaning closer. Looking over at me,
trying to get me not to listen. "Listen, she deserves something.
Carol does." Her voice even lower, husky and suddenly soft.
"Her mom's at Creedmore. She's been there awhile. Took a hot
iron to Carol when she was a kid. She was sound asleep when it
happened. Still a scar the shape of a shield on her stomach."

Diane was looking at my mother, looking at her like she was
asking her something. Asking her to understand something.

My mother nodded, eyes flickering as the fluorescent light
made a pop. "You got a customer, Diane," she said, pointing
toward the bar.

I was thinking they might stop. Might take a few days off, let
things cool off. But they didn't. They only changed it up a little. From what I could tell, Carol came in the back way for her
shift and met Eddie first. Met him back there before anyone
even saw her. But they didn't stop. And one day Eddie came
out with a streak of Carol's lilac lipstick on his bleach-white
collar, just like in a story in a women's magazine.

I watched him walk across the place, lane by lane, with
the stain on him. I glanced over at Sherry, who was leaning
against the pinball machine and watching him. I thought:
This is it. She's too far to see it, I thought to myself. But if he
moves closer. If she moves closer.

Yet neither of them did.

When I saw him later, the lipstick was gone, collar slightly
damp. I pictured him in the men's room scrubbing it off, scrubbing her off. Looking in the mirror and thinking about what
he'd done and what he couldn't help but keep doing.

The kids from Forest Hills High School were all over the place
that afternoon, all in their summer clothes, girls with tan legs
and boys freshly showered and gleaming. The rain had sent
them, some straight from lounge chairs at the club, others
from lifeguarding or the tennis courts. I always noticed the
fuzzy edges of my summer Keds around them. I always wondered how the girls got their hair so shiny, their clothes so
crisp, their eyes so bright.

I had a feeling it was going to happen that day. I couldn't
say why. Before Sherry even got there. But when she did, I
knew for sure.

She looked like she'd been running a fever. There was this
gritty film all over her skin and red blotches at her temples.
Her uniform was unwashed from the day before, a ring of
grease circling her belly.

She was late and I'd just left my post, just left the two of
them. They never took their clothes off, ever, but sometimes he'd
lift her skirt so high I could see flashes of her skin. I was searching
for the scar, but I never saw it.

Her fingers pinched around his neck, the rushed pitch to her
voice ... it felt different this time. It felt like something was turning. Maybe it was something in the way his hands moved, more quiet,
more careful. Maybe something in her that made her move looser,
almost still.

I got it then. And I knew for sure when I saw them break apart
and each look the other way. She dropped her skirt down with a
snap of one wrist. He was already walking away.

I flicked off the last piece of the strawberried scar on my knee.
The skin underneath was still tender, puckered.

And now there was Sherry. I was coming from the back
and she was right in front of me, talking at me, her voice funny,
toneless.

"I saw you sitting over there yesterday. By the machine
room.

"No one's at concessions," I said, wondering where my
mother had gone.

"It was the same time. I saw you come out from there at
the same time yesterday."

"I guess," I said.

It was ten minutes later, no more, when we all heard the shouting. Jimmy, Myrna, Eddie, two guys putting on their bowling
shoes-we all followed the sounds to the ladies' room.

Carol was hunched over, hair hanging in long panels in
front of her. She seemed surprised, her mouth a small "o." It
looked like Sherry'd just punched her in the stomach.

But then I saw it in her hand. The blade was short and
Sherry held it so close to her, elbows at her waist. The blade
was short enough that it couldn't have gone deep.

Jimmy backhanded Sherry. She cracked her head on the
stall door and slid slowly to the floor, one hand reaching out
for Jimmy's shirt.

The knife fell and I saw it was one of those plastic-handled ones they used to open the hot dog packages at concessions.

Eddie pushed past Jimmy and knelt down beside Sherry.
She had a surprised look on her face. He was whispering to
her, "Sherry, Sherry ..."

Carol was watching Eddie. Then she looked down at her
stomach and a tiny blotch of red against the banner-blue.

"That ain't nothing," Myrna said, birthmark twitching.
"That ain't nothing at all."

Myrna taped up Carol with the first-aid kit. Then Jimmy
took all three of them to his office. I walked over to concessions, but no one was there.

That was when Diane came running in, shouting for
someone to call an ambulance.

"We don't need no ambulance," Myrna said. "I hurt myself worse getting out of bed."

But Diane was already on the phone at the shoe rental
desk.

We all ran down the long hallway and up the stairs to
the boulevard. Someone must have already called because the
ambulance was there.

At first, it was like my mother had just lain down on the
street. But the way her neck was turned looked funny. Like
her head had been put on wrong.

Diane grabbed me from behind and pulled me back.

That was when I saw a middle-aged man in a gray suit sitting on the curb, his face in his hands. His car door was open
like he'd stumbled out to the sidewalk. He was crying loudly,
his whole body shaking. I'd never heard a man cry like that.

Diane was telling everyone who would listen, "She said
she saw him. She said she saw Fred Upton pass by on the 4:08
yesterday. But he'd never take a bus, would he? That's what
she said. So she wanted to watch for it at the same time today. See if it was him. You know how she always thought she was
seeing him somewhere. No one must've hit the bell because
the bus didn't stop. And she just ran out onto the street after
it. That car didn't have time to stop."

She looked over at the man, who started sobbing even
louder.

"Hit her like a paper doll," Diane continued. "Nothing but
a paper doll going up in the wind and then coming down."

Later, I would figure it out. My mother, nights spent looking out
diner windows, uniform steeped in smoke, thinking of the stretch of
her thirty years filled with glazy-eyed men stumbling into her lifeall with the promise of four decades of union wages like her old
man, repairing refrigerators, freezers in private homes, restaurants,
country clubs, office buildings for her whole life never stopping
for more than one Rheingold at the corner bar before coming home
for pot roast at the table with the kids.

Those men came but never for long, or they came and then
turned, during the first or second night in her bed, into something
else altogether, something that needed her, sure, but also needed
the countergirl at Peter Pan bakery, or four nights a week betting
horses at the parking garage on Austin Street, or a night watching
the fights at Sunnyside Garden even when it was her birthday, and,
yeah, maybe he needed the roundcard girl he met there too.

There was a dream of something and maybe it wasn't even a guy
like her old man or the one in the Arrow Shirt ad or the doctor she
met at the diner, the one with the big apartment in the new high-rises,
the view from the bedroom so great that she'd have to see it to believe
it, he'd said. Maybe it wasn't a man dream at all. But it was something. It was something and it was there and then it was gone.

It wasn't the boys from Carrickmacross
Or the boys from Ballybay
But the dealin' men from Crossmaglen
Put whiskey in me tae

y father announced this from a comfortable armchair by a window. Clad in good pajamas, he had
"showered, shat, and shaved," as he put it himself.
In fact, this had been engineered and executed by an obese
but energetic Polish lady of some thirty-eight years who was
now about to leave after the graveyard shift. An old phonograph exuded Johnny Mathis or Andy Williams, I don't know
which. Or care. Schmaltzy music kept my dad quiet. It was
almost as important as the nurses.

The Pole bustled back into the room, sweating already,
and hung about with bags and baskets.

"A proper scavenger," said Dad.

"You can talk," the Pole shot back.

"Live where you'd die. Build a nest in your ear." He eyed
me crossly. We exchanged stares.

"I weel not take much more of thees," said the Pole. "He's
gotta be put in a home. Those opiates are bedd for his hedd.
Hallucinations again last night, squirrels climbing the bedroom vall and someone up a ladder-"

"She's cleaning the house out little by little," said my dad,
"hence the multifarious bags."

"-not to mention the insults and the smell of his excreta,"
she went on.

I stood up, hoping she'd get the hint. I had no desire to
discuss Dad's excreta-or anyone else's-with a sweaty and
exhausted Pole.

"Get someone to relieve me a few nights," she ordered,
heading for the door. "I gotta lotta werk on."

She was mixed up in illegal sweatshops, and perhaps even
illegal aliens. A true wart on the heel of humanity, she even
had her own off-off-illegal sweatshop, in which the most desperate of Eastern Europeans put together for her benefit little
trinkets and zippered bags made from the offcuts of the real
thing.

"When you kill a pig, nothing goes to loss but the squeal,"
Dad pronounced as she flounced out the door.

We were alone. My son Sean hadn't come home last night,
an increasingly frequent occurrence. The big house was silent
but for the ticking of old clocks, Dad's only hobby and luxury.
Every room had several of them. "Are them things gonna be
bongin' all night?" my wife had said the first night we slept
there after the honeymoon.