The Little Brothers Read online

  The cat jumped up on the counter, giving the old man a start. Grossman folded his arms and looked at it. Angie wanted it to run; he could hear the abuse in the old man’s voice while the cat, poor cat, was hoping for the purrs of love. Angie bit his lip and closed his eyes. It did no good. In his mind’s eye he saw first the stroke and then the clout for which the cat never seemed to be prepared. He heard its yowl and felt its pain and surprise and rage and helplessness. He knew the feelings in his bones.

  When Angie opened his eyes, the old man was staring back at him. He came from behind the counter, climbed up among the religious articles, and kicked those in his way from beneath his feet. Angie was fascinated, held rooted as by a mesmerist, for Grossman himself never took his eyes from the place in the window where Angie’s face showed through. The nearer he came, the more terrible his eyes seemed to the boy, bits of color in them like fire in coals. Angie felt the curse turned back on him. He put up his arm and blocked out the eyes. Only then was he able to break away and run. He ran all the way to his hideout. It was not until he had pulled the ladder up behind him and closed the trap door that he felt safe from an unnamable evil. He knew that no matter what happened to him with the Little Brothers, he would never go near Mr. Grossman’s again. Even Ric could not make him do that. He took the knife from his belt and buried it, sheath and all, in the sand bucket he had stolen from the floor below. At the time he took the bucket, he had thought of using it in an emergency as a cat uses sand. Was Mr. Grossman himself on drugs? That possibility soothed him. It was a kind of explanation.

  He went to the parapet and looked at the windows across the way. He promised himself that he would go home soon; he would wait a little while and see if the girl’s lights came on … Mr. Rotelli would be waiting with Angie’s mother, and if there was an argument, he would take Angie’s side, which Angie hated. He looked at the street below. In the longest time only one car passed, and four men, one of them staggering from one side of the walk to the other, then back, as though he was aboard ship on a stormy sea. If the girl came now with someone chasing her … How often he had imagined himself leaping down fire escape to fire escape to save her. He had never seen an Italian as blond as she was; his mother said there were blue-eyed Italians, mostly from Firenze. He wished his family had come from there instead of Sicily.

  Sicilian bitch. He thought of the night he heard his father call his mother that. Then he’d gone roaring out of the house, slamming one door after another like a string of firecrackers. Angie, in bed, had stopped his ears, trying not to hear his mother’s wails. He had not yet fallen asleep when she came into his room hours later, but he pretended that he was. He moved away from her touch as though in his sleep. But she had knelt by the bed and stroked him, taking down the sheet. That was in August, too. And to this August, three years later, he could feel her warm wet lips on his behind. In the morning when she’d found his bed was wet, she had beaten him with the yardstick. Sicilian bitch.

  The light flashed on in the girl’s apartment. She opened the window wide and pulled the shade three-quarters down. It wouldn’t go any further, Angie knew, and this time as soon as she turned her back it flew up again, all the way to the top. She couldn’t reach it. A man came up behind her and drew it down as far as it would go. A minute later he put a chair with its back to the window, and hung his coat over it, leaving but two tiny squares of light on either side.

  The lump in Angie’s throat was hard to swallow. It did not help to ask himself what he expected—that she was some kind of Immaculata? Who was? And who was Angelo Palermo to her? What hurt the most, he persuaded himself, was being shut out that way: it was like a door in the face. He eased himself out of grief by guessing at who the tall man might be. A movie star? He seemed older. She would have to be with an older man, not some kid who had played an extra. A writer maybe. Or a choreographer. It was a word Angie loved. He sometimes dreamed that he was a dancer. Alone, he danced at home, moving the furniture out of the way. So he made up in his mind a picture of the man and the girl whose name he did not know: they came up to the roof overhead from her apartment to look at the stars or the New York skyline, and then they discovered the dancing boy. Angie took off his dark tee shirt and, naked to the waist, began to dance. He leaped and twisted and made shapes with his arms, wings of his hands, arrows of his feet. What I need, he thought and laughed aloud at his own wit, is a fiddler on the roof.

  The light went out in her apartment and the coat still hung on the back of the chair. The music inside Angie stopped. After a while he put on his shirt and wished he had a sweater also. The sea-scented dampness seeped into him, and the longing. He watched the lights of a plane and thought of his father in California, his mother, and the wedding ring she couldn’t get off her finger though in bursts of anger she pulled at it until her finger was raw. He thought of the diamond ring Mr. Rotelli wore and his polished fingernails. He thought of Mr. Grossman going up to his apartment on the second floor, and how the cat darted past him on the stairs. Sometimes the old man would sit down on the stoop and take off his shoes and the cat would go round them, bobbing its head to and from them as much as to say how they stank. Angie thought of his father again and the laced shoes that supported his ankles. His mother worked at the bakery ovens now where he had worked before he went away. When she got up at a quarter to five, she would know that Angie had not come home. He ought to go home, but he didn’t want to. He tried to fall asleep in his tent, but he couldn’t. Just as he was dozing off, he woke up in a turmoil of fears. Which made him angry. Why should he be afraid of his mother, for example? Or of Mr. Grossman, for that matter? He got up and went to the building’s edge again. The coat was still blocking the window; they’d have her fan alongside the bed. Now he knew what pain was, a new kind of pain that almost felt good because it made him want to fight. The man was probably a lot stronger than Fat Ric, of whom he was afraid, and yet Angie knew he could fight the man till death.

  He began to study the fire escape where all the plants were and how steps went up from it with two graceful rails wheeling onto the roof.

  2

  THE VESTIBULE DOOR TO her building stood open. The apartment doors would be locked and double bolted. Angie glided noiselessly up one flight of stairs, then another. Here the fire steps to the roof were on springs. They hugged the ceiling. Angie leaped and brought them down with a shower of dirt and rust. He went up, lithe as a cat and shouldered open the roof door. He stepped out into the open.

  He had never felt so keyed up at the prospect of mischief which could get him into serious trouble. He truly did not care. It was almost as though he wanted that to happen. He went over the edge of the roof and down the iron steps backwards. He looked down only once, to make sure where the flower pots were. He kept thinking of himself as a cat, a soft-footed, sure-footed cat. He squatted outside the window, listening. The only sound from within was the whirr of the fan. His nerves tingled at the thought of a sudden explosion in there, the man leaping up, the girl screaming. But the only other sounds were far away, the rumble of Con Ed, the wet, hissing sound of tires on the Bowery, the squeal and groan of subway cars climbing out of the ground onto the Williamsburg Bridge. He put his hand to the coat: it was as soft as belly fur. Slowly, slowly, he drew it from the chairback into his arms. He felt a wallet in the inside pocket, took it out and left it on the chair, a chivalrous act that satisfied him even more with himself. No one awoke. The whole city might well have been asleep. With the collar of the jacket between his teeth, he climbed back up, and once on the roof, put the jacket on. It was soft, warm, expensive, and except for the sleeves which were too long, it fit him well. He had missed an envelope in the pocket from which he had taken the wallet. Which was all right. A letter would tell him to whom and where if he someday wanted to make restitution. There was a small flat key in the change pocket which he resolved not to think about.

  He dropped from the roof to the floor below and left the attic door open. They could use some ai
r in that hall. He went down the stairs with dancer’s feet, but the minute he reached the street he was a kid scared of the dark again, and even more scared of its patches of light and the shadows within them. Heaps of rubbish looked like crouched bodies. A man at the wheel of a parked car was asleep or stoned or stone dead. He could not go home with the coat, and suddenly he was afraid to return with it to his hideout. He wanted people, lots of people and lights everywhere. He kept to the middle of the street and half-walked, half-ran to Houston Street.

  There the street lights hung in neon spans and cars passed regularly in both directions. Bowery bums sprawled in doorways of old clothes shops and hardware stores, drunken men who stank of their own juices, but harmless, not like junkies. Across the street was dangerous, the beat of the blacks and Puerto Ricans, and the iron-faced motorcycle crowd. It was no-man’s-land to the Little Brothers. Angie clung to his own side. He wanted to get to the West Village, and the closer he came to it, the safer he felt. He wanted to see himself wearing the coat. The glimpses he caught in store windows tantalized him. Near Lafayette Street, he passed a restaurant where the whole counter wall was a mirror. Angie went back. Two men sat on stools near the back and a waitress was pouring coffee for them. He turned under the cuffs of the jacket and made sure he had his wallet in his hip pocket. He went in and sat near the door.

  He ordered coffee, hardly taking his eyes from himself in the mirror. The coat was a pearly gray and over his dark blue tee shirt, it looked perfect on him. His chin was darker than the rest of his face: some day he was going to have a beard as heavy as his father’s. His black hair was long, but not in the hippy way. He looked moody, like a musician or an artist, especially when he scowled and stared into his own wide dark eyes. He looked older than sixteen. The waitress said “Thank you, sir” for the quarter tip he gave her. He sipped the coffee black although he wanted sugar and cream in it. He was afraid the cuff would come out if he stretched his hand for the bowl and pitcher.

  He grew bold with the bitter heat in his stomach and took the envelope from the inside pocket. It wasn’t a letter: it was an American Airlines folder with a plane ticket inside for a return flight to Los Angeles; he was a minute or two figuring that out. The passenger’s name was Phillips. Angie thought at once of his father. What would he say if his youngest son showed up …?

  The waitress pushed a damp cloth between his cup and the sugar bowl. “Going somewhere?”

  He looked up at her. She was a plump girl with big breasts and tired eyes that made her look older than she probably was. Her hair was a shade of red he’d never seen before. “Los Angeles,” he said in his deepest voice, and thought that maybe it might be so.

  She jerked her head toward the men down the counter. “They’re going to Cincinnati tonight.”

  Angie glanced at them. They wore field jackets. “Truck drivers?”

  “Long distance movers. That’s why this dump stays open at night. We’re between the bridge and the tunnel.”

  Angie couldn’t think of anything to say. He kept trying to look up at her face, but her breasts were eye level to him. Finally he looked at his nose in the coffee mug.

  “Know where I’m going tomorrow?” she said without enthusiasm. “Palisades Amusement Park.”

  “That’s nice,” Angie said. He had never been there. He put the mug down carefully in the circle it had already made on the counter.

  “What’s so nice? I got to pay my own way.”

  “You wouldn’t if I was taking you,” Angie said. He wanted to say something nice to her. He could see the dark nipples through the uniform.

  “So ask me my objections?”

  He made himself look up. She darted the tip of her tongue out at him. She wasn’t pretty, but she wasn’t ugly either. Little lights had come into her eyes.

  Angie pulled a sad face and put the envelope back in his pocket where he patted it. “I wish I could,” he mumbled. One cuff was coming out of its fold. He put his hands beneath the counter and tried with his fingernails to make a crease that would hold.

  She shrugged as much as to say she hadn’t expected it to turn out any better. “Do you live in California?”

  “Not yet,” he said, afraid to lie about a place he knew nothing about.

  “I didn’t think so. Not enough sunshine vitamin C.” She reached for the coffee maker and refilled his cup.

  “I’m going to work in a movie. My father’s out there. He sent for me.”

  “Is he a big shot or something?”

  Angie said, “I guess so.”

  “What’s your name in case you turn out to be a real Dustin Hoffman.”

  Angie grinned. “He’s my favorite actor too.”

  “You know what?” she said, cocking her head to one side. “You got a nicer smile than him. I mean it.”

  Angie thought of the nine dollars minus forty cents in his pocket. “If I was to get delayed, I mean—you know—I’d take you to Coney Island tomorrow.”

  “I’d rather go to Palisades. It’s a nicer class of people.”

  “I like the ocean,” Angie said. He knew the price of a subway token. Two bus fares were something else.

  “It’s got a swimming pool with real waves,” she said.

  “I couldn’t go anyway,” Angie said. “I got this reservation.”

  “Then what did you ask me for?”

  “Wishing,” he said.

  “Wishin’, pishin’,” she said, and almost broke the coffee jug when she slammed it back on the burner.

  One of the truckers signaled for his check. There was a lot of laughing as she toted up the figures. Angie studied himself in the mirror. It stood to reason that he looked older or she wouldn’t have made insinuations. When the men walked out one of them winked at Angie and stuck his tongue in his cheek. Angie was pretty sure what it meant.

  The girl rang up the money in a noisy cash register. “I’m going to close up now,” she said.

  “Okay.”

  “You don’t have to go till I’m ready.” He could not quite see what she was doing at the register, but when she turned away from it she left the drawer open. It looked empty. Wherever the money was, nobody was going to break into an open cash register. She took the dishes out of the washer and stacked them on the backboard, glancing now and then at Angie in the mirror.

  The clock on the back wall showed twenty past three. A night could be a very long time. He could still make it home and into bed and even asleep before his mother got up for work. If he could sleep, which he doubted.

  “Why don’t you talk to me, big shot? What kind of a movie are you going to be in?”

  “I’m not.”

  “That’s what I figured. You worked as an extra today on Grand Street, right?”

  He nodded.

  “I had a flock of them in here tonight when they quit work at eleven.” She brought the coffee maker. “I’m only going to throw it out.” She was about to pour some in Angie’s mug.

  “No, thanks. It makes me …”

  “Be my guest.” She made an open-handed gesture toward the washroom door.

  “Maybe I better,” Angie said. He stood up and tried to walk at his best height. He would look funny from behind, the expensive sports jacket over jeans and sneakers. Everything was so quiet. In the washroom he tried not to make any noise urinating. The water flushed like a busted hydrant. He looked at himself in the tarnished mirror: all eyes and no jaw. He threw his head up, his shoulders back.

  When he went out Fat Ric was sitting at the counter.

  Ric had on his old black sweater and the way he was hunched up, he looked swollen inside it. Even his eyes were puffy. Something had happened to him in the week since Angie had seen him. Angie didn’t care about that. He wasn’t even curious. But he did care about how easy it had been for Ric to find him and start messing in his life again as soon as “the ordeal” was finished.

  Ric didn’t bat an eye as Angie approached. Angie thought of trying to march past him and right out t
he door, but he could feel Ric’s eyes marking his every step.

  “Congratulations,” Ric said when Angie got close to him. It sounded sarcastic.

  “Huh?”

  “Didn’t you know? The Jew just choked to death on a matzo ball.” Ric’s shoulders shook at his own joke. The sound wasn’t funny and his face hardly showed the laugh at all.

  Angie felt a little sick.

  “What about a Jew?” the waitress said, an edge to her voice. She was watching them both in the mirror, her lipstick poised in her hand.

  “Nothing personal,” Ric said. “Come on, baby, a cup of coffee. Instant’s okay. I want to tell Angie something.”

  “Too bad, but you got the wrong shop.” She proceeded with the lipstick, but her eyes met Angie’s in the mirror. There was something protective in them: he caught it. God knows what she had caught from his.

  “Sit down,” Ric said to Angie. He kicked his foot out at the stool next to his. Angie climbed up on it. He kept holding the cuffs in place, his hands in his lap. Ric did not seem to notice.

  “I got a feeling it’s going to work for you, Angie.”

  Angie knew what he meant, but he said, “What?”

  “Are you kidding, Little Brother?”

  “I don’t know,” Angie said, meaning he did not know whether the Killing Eye would work on Grossman or not. He had the feeling Ric knew what had happened at the window. “How come you’re …” He couldn’t even finish what he started to say.