The Sacrificial Circumcision of the Bronx (22 page)

At that moment he was startled by a distant voice yelling down to him.
“Help me, Uli!”
It sounded like his sister, Karen.

Peering up the narrow chute, he wasn’t able to discern anything through the curling flames. “How’d you get up there?” he called to the voice.

“Help me! I’m stuck!”
Uli heard, and he knew he had to get up there as quickly as possible.

37

“T
he circumcision”—as his neighbor Robert had called it—was a longitudinal line, a no-man’s-land running several blocks wide across the middle of the Bronx. This barren stretch of the borough held the artifacts of a once thriving community. Everyone in East Tremont waited anxiously to see what kind of apocalypse would devastate the southern end of their beloved neighborhood. Weeks and months passed—nothing.

Living right on the boundary, Paul and Lucretia would hear windows being broken at night. People, probably kids, were rooting through the empty houses like vengeful ghosts. Months passed without so much as a single building being demolished. When the remaining members of ETNA who hadn’t been evicted sent a letter to Robert Moses’s office asking if the abandoned area could be either guarded or fenced off, they were duly ignored.

One morning in 1956, without any warning, a massive wrecking ball started slamming into the sides of one of the apartment buildings down the block. Soon a small cloud of dust covered the area. A gang of workmen besieged the place with all the annoyance of an occupying force. Jackhammers pounded constantly. For the next six months or so, the sound of demolition and the smell of brick and concrete dust filled the air. The work began at 8 a.m. sharp and sometimes continued until 7 at night. Squads of dumptrucks and bulldozers carted off the piles of stones and rubbish. With them came the battalion of surly workmen holding red flags at major intersections. It was as if a wall had partitioned the neighborhood in two. They would block the pedestrian and vehicular traffic, sometimes for hours, not allowing people to cross different sections of the sprawling construction site.

Paul and others felt a strange relief as the last homes were leveled and the rubble was trucked away. But then the dynamiting began. It turned out that the expressway was to be sunken into the earth and the bedrock had to be made consistent. For the remainder of the year, the area residents would hear periodic booms followed a few seconds later by a trembling of the earth. The mini-quakes took their toll on building foundations, resulting in an appearance of fine cracks along everyone’s walls and ceilings. Gradually those cracks grew bigger.

It was in this period that Paul and his wife first heard the little coughs coming from Bea’s room upstairs. When Lucretia dashed in that first time, she found the child struggling to breathe. Lucretia and others in the area began sealing their windows and ventilation ducts at night, but a fresh skin of dust was always there at the end of every day.

After thirty years, even Abe Hoff moved, leaving the Moses family as the only people still living on their side of the block. One by one, many of the little stores along East Tremont Avenue—the social hub of the neighborhood—started going out of business.

Uli climbed back down out of the rectangular hole and headed into the Mkultra where he collected six metal wastepaper baskets. He stomped them flat, then molded them around his limbs, back, and head. He gathered as many bottles of water as he could find and shoved them up into the rectangular hole with the six crushed metal baskets. After carefully angling himself back up through the tight space, he tied the metal into a tight bundle and tethered it and the bottles to his belt loops.

It was a monstrous climb. Uli heaved himself roughly a foot at a time, resting every couple of hours. At one point, secured by ropes hooked to the metal track, he stopped altogether to take a long nap. When he awoke, he called out for Karen but got not reply.

Uli knew after some unmeasured length of time that he was getting close to the top because he began to feel the heat from the strange flames above him. In one small nook near the top of the shaft, he noticed a blackened indentation like a relief sculpted into the concrete wall. His stomach churned and bile rose to his throat. The crisp contours of a face above the jaw were all that was left of what Uli presumed to be the poor scorpion kid. In the bottom of his pocket, Uli found the two mercury dimes he had snatched awhile ago from a desk drawer. He placed them in the tiny sockets where the eyes had once been—the only honor he could pay to the deformed youth.

After another half hour of climbing toward the ceiling of flames, one mystery was solved. A large pipe carrying propane, methane, or some other flammable gas that ran above this entire chamber—buried roughly ten feet below the desert floor—had exploded. Beyond the raging torch rising from the broken pipe, Uli could make out a sliver of blue sky—freedom.

It was a sunny day on the planet earth. Uli wondered how the kid could have ruptured the thick pipe, but it only took a moment to realize that this wasn’t what had happened. There must have been a gas leak. The candle affixed to the top of the kid’s helmet must have touched off a dense cloud of gas, bursting an opening through the tons of sand sealing the top of the deep elevator shaft.

38

C
rime rates in East Tremont exploded. People who used to leave their doors open suddenly found themselves getting burglarized. Those who would spend their summer nights sleeping out front on their porches to catch the cool air were awakened by muggers. Morrisania, near where Leon lived, went from being a modestly safe area to altogether treacherous. Though Leon was a hulking brute, his tiny mother seemed to be a lightning rod for criminals. Usually they just grabbed her purse and ran. She only kept a few bucks on her anyway. One afternoon, though, she had just withdrawn a hundred dollars from the bank and was walking along the street with her purse pressed to her chest. When some teenage punk tried to grab it, she held on with both hands. It became apparent that she wasn’t letting go, so the mugger started slugging her. She finally released the purse when she fell, but the furious juvenile continued beating and kicking her. She made it to the hospital, but died two days later from internal hemorrhaging. For Leon—as Paul soon saw—his mother had been his primary companion.

Nice houses once worth a pretty penny were soon sitting empty in a buyer’s market. Apartments that had attracted lines of potential tenants sat unoccupied as landlords lowered rents even further. Where Crotona Park had once been the southern border of a good neighborhood, the dividing line moved all the way up to East Tremont Avenue.

Paul felt there was a small dose of hysteria around the issue, but nonetheless took the precaution of installing stronger locks on their doors. Sure, the area had taken a hit and people had left in a panic, but he believed things were slowly stabilizing. A few of the old timers, still committed to their faith that the neighborhood would be okay, were holding the line, believing that this acute depression would eventually reverse. It was just a matter of time. A silver lining to all this was that as a wave of new immigrants moved into the communities, older neighbors who had once shunned the Moses family were now warming back up to them. People were again saying hi.

Over the dinner table that Easter, Paul pointed out how, despite everything, they were really quite lucky. They had barely escaped losing their home, but after eight years of teaching Paul was now earning a good wage at a job he enjoyed. Lucretia, too, was getting more bookkeeping work than she could handle. Financially, things were actually going quite well. As soon as summer vacation began when Bea finished kindergarten, Paul decided they had to get out of the city before things got too hot and wild. Locking up the house, he drove Lucretia and Bea up to the Adirondacks for the month of July. He had just taken out hefty theft and fire insurance policies. Glimpsing the place through his rearview mirror, he half hoped it would be burnt down when they returned.

That time in the country was just what the doctor ordered. Every moment was either relaxing or romantic. In early August Lucretia announced that she had failed the rabbit test again—she was pregnant. Their second child would be born in April.

Exhausted and covered in sweat, Uli prepared for his final surge by pouring the last remaining bottle of water over his burning scalp. Moving slowly upward, he was able to pull himself onto a narrow ledge that seemed to mark the top of the sealed elevator shaft. The heat was becoming too intense to proceed.

Uli rested for several minutes, then strapped the heatretardant body armor fashioned from the trash cans over his clothes. The massive blue flame was blasting away just ten feet above him. He had to somehow get around it to reach the earth’s surface. He removed the flattened can from his head and used it to stab into the compressed dirt, sending cascades of sand down the narrow shaft. As he progressed, he could feel his hair burning on his head. Taking occasional breaks to cover his scalp, he pressed on, shoveling a thick current of sand down past him for the next twenty minutes or so. Soon he had created a narrow upward rut along the side of the blasting spout of blue flame.

Retreating back down the shaft to where the heat abated, he rubbed his fingers over the blisters along his head, neck, and arms and caught his breath. Using the last vestiges of his strength, he scampered like a sand crab up the narrow trench he had just created along the side of the giant fiery crater. Scooping the relatively cool sand around him for relief, his hand suddenly broke through into open space. He frantically hauled himself up and collapsed onto the desert floor. Drenched in sweat, too tired and singed to even remove the body armor, he simply lay there panting under the burning sun. Smoke rose from his burnt clothes. After a few minutes, he pulled the hot metal plates off his chest and arms and passed out.

39

I
n late January, a week of unseasonably warm weather started melting the frozen crusts of snow. When Paul’s teaching semester began, there was a sense of hope. Lu-cretia was in her seventh month of pregnancy and she somehow knew this one was going to be a boy. Though she didn’t say anything, she wanted to name him Paul Junior.

Then one day in early February, Mr. Rafael, the new Negro head of the science department, popped his head into Paul’s third-period classroom just as the kids were beginning a quiz. “Paul,” he said, “I’ll cover for you.”

“Why? What’s going on?” he asked, stepping out into the hallway.

“It’s your wife, Mr. Moses,” a middle-aged police officer spoke up behind Rafael. “She’s passed away.”

“What?” Paul asked, bewildered.

“We’re not sure what happened,” a second, younger cop said. “Someone found her on the ice, her skull was fractured.”

“Lucretia’s …?” He couldn’t even envision it. It was absolutely inconceivable. “Where is she? Where’s Lucretia?”

“Come on,” the first cop said, leading him outside. “We’ll take you there.”

“One of the neighbors found her on the sidewalk in front of your house. She must’ve been lying out there awhile. He called an ambulance,” the younger of the two cops explained over the siren as they sped to the hospital. “Someone else said they saw some hooligan running away, but she still had her purse on her … Or else maybe she just slipped on the ice.”

Paul wasn’t listening anymore. Once they arrived at Cabrini Hospital, a nervous young doctor said that they would need about thirty more minutes before their examination of the body was complete.

“What the hell happened?”

“We’re not sure yet, but it looks like a subdural hema-toma, a head injury due to her fall on the ice.”

“Did she … just slip or was she … attacked?” Paul could barely speak.

“We’re trying to ascertain that right now,” the doctor replied. “If she was hit we might find other marks or bruises, but she might’ve just fainted, which isn’t uncommon for a pregnant woman.”

“How about the baby?”

“I’m sorry, the fetus died with her.”

Paul leaned against the clean white wall and slid to the floor. Over the course of the afternoon, Lori and several other neighbors came to visit him in the hospital, but Paul just stared off in shock.

“I’ll get Bea from school,” Lori offered. “She can stay with Bill and me until you’re ready.”

Consciousness is as tangible as any matter. It, too, must obey the laws of physics. With the velocity of decades behind it,
Paul reasoned,
a life can’t just come to an abrupt halt in space or time. Even if the body machine fails, the psychic energy of Lucretia’s being, the components and particles of her consciousness, have to be propelled somewhere.

Soon a detective approached him.

“Where is she? Where is she?” he called out.

A sympathetic desk nurse got on the phone and rang the pathologist in the basement who said the exam was over and the grieving husband could come down and see his wife’s body. The nurse directed Paul to the basement and he was brought into a viewing room. Lucretia was wheeled out on a gurney and he was left alone with her. Only her face was visible. A sheet covered her nude, pregnant trunk. A black and red bruise the size of a walnut pushed out from the front of her skull. It seemed so unfair that this small broken part could end the rest of her. Paul pulled up a hard wooden chair and stretched forward, laying his head and arms over the top of her cold chest. The pathologist returned to the room ten minutes later to find Paul half-sitting, half-laying next to his wife.

“I’m so sorry for your loss,” he said gently, “but I’m going off duty now.”

“When can I see her again?”

“We’ll surrender the body to whatever funeral home you want us to,” the doctor explained. Paul nodded. He couldn’t breathe. The pathologist asked Paul something … He couldn’t really … He shook his head no … The man led him … to the elevators … upstairs, instead of leaving … he stayed in the hospital waiting room … one floor above the morgue … near … his wife’s body … for as long as he could … passing out in the chairs … then waking up … staying until … the next … day … Time kept pushing forward.