Little Brothers Read online

  “Just happened to come this way tonight. Some day I’m going to get me a job that ain’t pushing stiffs around at four in the morning.” That was Ric’s one big joke, and he said it loud enough for the girl to hear. He loaded sides of beef on butcher’s row, West Fourteenth Street. “I work in a cow morgue.”

  “Very funny,” the waitress said.

  “I never seen that coat before, Angie.” Ric leaned back to take a better look.

  “It’s mohair,” Angie said. He did not know what it was.

  “I was wanting to see you tonight,” Ric said, “but I didn’t want to get in the way of you know what. I wanted to tell you about me and Pa.”

  Angie didn’t want ever to hear about Ric and his father again. His father was a kind of cripple. He didn’t go on crutches, but he couldn’t work and he fought all the time with Ric, and Ric took it out on Angie.

  “I almost killed him tonight. He’s in the Bellevue Hospital.”

  Angie didn’t say anything. He wasn’t even sure he believed it.

  But the waitress said, “No kidding?”

  “No kidding, baby. So how about the java?”

  “Okay, Angie?”

  He was surprised she’d asked him. “I guess so.”

  Ric said: “You two pals or something? Introduce me, Angie.”

  Angie could think of only one name, Alice. “Alice, this is Ric Bonelli.”

  Alice gave him the briefest of nods. She turned the burner on under the coffee maker. “What happened to your father?”

  “He hates my guts, but he lives off me just the same. I got a brother a lawyer and a sister married practically to a bank. I got to go to bed early you know to get some sleep and right in the middle of the night he wakes me up to go out and get him a bottle of wine. I said I wasn’t going, and he was griping about being cooped up, and the first thing I knew he’s broke a window and he’s shouting about being free, America the land of the free, stuff like that. Which I don’t take making fun of, as you know, Angie. So I got kind of rough with him. Then old lady Niccoli next door starts pounding on the wall. By then I was getting crazy mad and I knowed I had to get out of there or smash him or something. I was going to go to your place, Angie. Then I remembered. I just went out and walked and …”

  “In your nightclothes?” Alice interrupted.

  “I’d fell asleep with my clothes on,” Ric said. “Anyway, I got him his stinking wine and went back, and what do you think he did? He started in on me all over again.”

  Angie had never seen Ric quite this way before although he had heard variations of the story, the fights, the wine; even Mrs. Niccoli ran through Ric’s life story like a witch, sticking her nose in all the time.

  “Slow down,” Alice said. “If I’m going to make you coffee I want to hear what happened.”

  “I got him the wrong kind of wine or something. I was trying to calm him down so I poured some in a glass for myself. He’s always wanting me to take a drink with him. ‘Okay, Pa,’ I says to him, ‘give a toast.’” Ric wiped his nose on the sleeve of the sweater.

  “So what did you toast to?” Alice asked.

  “Life. You don’t drink a toast to death.”

  “I myself drink to people,” Alice said and dumped a spoonful of instant coffee into a mug. “Angie?”

  “No thanks.”

  “I know. You’d have to pee. Go on, Mr. Bonelli.”

  “How come you call me that?”

  “It’s your name, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, yeah, only I don’t think of it as me. I think of my old man. What if he dies, Angie?”

  “Wasn’t it an accident, whatever happened?”

  “In here it was no accident.” Ric thumped on his chest.

  Alice poured the water and shoved the steaming mug across the counter. “What did you do, hit him over the head with the bottle?”

  “That’s very funny, lady, because it’s exactly what I did. I got even madder, see, when the old dame next door kept pounding on the wall. So I went out in the hall. I was going to let her have it. I mean who the hell is she? She lives alone and tries to live our lives for us, see. She’d have me in a penitentiary if she could. She wrote Fuck in the hall once and blamed it onto me. I know. She left off the ‘k’ like in Ric the way I spell it. Where was I?”

  “Getting fucked by the old lady,” Alice said, without cracking a smile.

  Angie flinched in spite of himself. He’d heard it often enough, but it didn’t sound right coming from any woman.

  “You got some sense of humor,” Ric said. “The old man was trying to hold me back …”

  “Drink your coffee,” the waitress said. “It ain’t such a great story. It happens all the time in the Bronx.”

  “Boy, you’re some wisecracker, aren’t you?” Ric said. He pulled at Angie’s arm. Angie had to turn his way even though Ric’s sweater stank and he was trying not to smell it. “When I swung at him, you know that railing running along the stairs? He crashed through it all the way down the stairs on his head. Niccoli started to scream. She woke up the whole fucking building, and I was still trying to get the old man to come to when the cops broke in.”

  “Why didn’t they arrest you?” Alice asked.

  Ric looked at her as though she was completely stupid. “He ain’t dead yet.” He took one sip of the coffee and set the mug down, spilling it. He pushed it away. “This stuff is poison. Come on, Angie. I’ll buy you a decent cup somewheres.”

  “I can’t, Ric …” He looked at the waitress who looked like she was going to throw the coffee in Ric’s face. “I promised to take Alice home after she closed up.”

  She threw the coffee into the sink, wiped out the mug with a paper napkin, and put it back on the shelf.

  Angie remembered then that she mentioned the Bronx.

  Ric said, “No you don’t. No chick’s going to come between one Little Brother and another.”

  Alice said, “Fat Boy, there ain’t a chick alive who’d want to come between you and anything. Now, vacate or I’m going to take a fork to you and let some of the grease out—a guy who’d hit his own father.”

  “Say Fat Boy to me again, baby, and I’ll take this place apart for you.”

  “Fat Boy.”

  Ric mumbled about it being enough to wreck one place in a night and slid off the stool carefully—like he had a sore behind. He pulled his sweater down and then again wiped his nose on his sleeve. “I’m getting a cold or something.”

  Alice went to the door pulling the cord to one fluorescent light after the other.

  Angie tried to get past Ric but the fat one caught him and put an arm across his shoulders so that they walked in the blue gloom together. “What if he dies, Angie?”

  Angie did not believe it. At least he did not believe it happened the way Ric had told it. He had heard things too much like it before and he figured Ric was exaggerating again. He would not be surprised, having watched the way Ric got down from the stool, if it had been Ric himself who got bounced down the stairs.

  “What if?” Ric repeated.

  “What if what?”

  “All right. What if the Jew dies?”

  Angie bolted away from him and outside. The Jew wasn’t going to die, not because of Angie, but Ric had given him the shivers all the same.

  Alice was waiting, the key in the lock. “Come on, Fat Boy. Time to go night-night.” Angie wished she’d stop riding him.

  Ric lumbered through the doorway. “Some Brother you are,” he said to Angie, and to the girl: “Thanks for the hospitality.”

  “Keep the change.” She never let up.

  Angie watched him go. He looked fatter than ever where his sweater bunched around his middle. He had his hands almost in his pockets, but they didn’t fit all the way.

  “The big slob,” the girl said.

  Angie said, “Thanks for standing up for me. I mean when I said about taking you home.”

  “Don’t you want to?”

  “I’ve never been
in the Bronx.”

  “I don’t live in the Bronx anymore. Come on.” She hooked her arm in his. “I’ll sew those cuffs up for you and iron them, and maybe tomorrow you’ll change your mind and take me to Palisades Park. You really aren’t going to California now, are you? The truth.”

  “I might.”

  “Do you actually have a plane ticket?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  They walked in silence, crossing Houston Street with the traffic light. He didn’t ask where she lived, he only tried to keep his step in time with hers. He was a little taller than her when you allowed for the way her hair was puffed up. It was the color of a half-ripe orange under the street lights. Every now and then she gave his arm a little squeeze. He responded by tightening his muscle.

  “What made you say my name was Alice?”

  “I don’t know. Alice’s Restaurant, I guess.”

  She squeezed his arm again. “I don’t think I’d mind being an Alice. We’ll look it up when we get home.”

  3

  SHE LIVED ON SULLIVAN Street in a basement apartment with bars on the small high windows and curtains of red, white, and blue polka dots. As soon as she yanked the curtains closed, she kicked off her shoes and started to take off her uniform. One look at Angie and she laughed, grabbed a garment from the beaverboard closet that separated the living room from the kitchen, and went into the bathroom in back. She called out to him to make himself at home.

  Angie looked down at the shoes. They were swollen out of shape, like his mother’s shoes, and he decided that Alice or whatever her name was must be a lot older than he had thought. One of the closet doors hung open the way she had left it. Angie picked up the shoes and took them to the closet where several other pairs in the same condition huddled on the floor. There was also a heap of soiled underwear, and, to Angie’s shock, a man’s suit. He took the shoes back and left them where he had found them.

  He sat down on the daybed which rolled an inch or two from the wall. Then he got up and removed his coat. He folded it and left it on the bed and tried the chair underneath the lamp. A portable television set stared blankly at him, but he didn’t think it would be polite to turn it on. There were books in the stand alongside the table. A dictionary and paperbacks with spooky titles and pictures of women lost in the woods. He had a feeling there wasn’t an Italian name in any one of the books and began to search.

  “Don’t ask me how, but I just knew you were a bookworm,” the girl said. She hung her uniform in the closet and closed the door. “Look up Alice in the back of the dictionary. I’ll get us some wine. Do you like wine?”

  “Sure.”

  In the dictionary he came first to the names of men. He knew what Angelo meant only too well. His second name was Carlo, Charles. It meant manly, strong.

  Alice …

  She came from the kitchen with a bottle and two glasses. She smelled of perfume. “So?”

  “It means truth.”

  “Well now, isn’t that interesting?”

  “What?”

  “That you should think I’m an Alice.”

  It wasn’t that way at all, but he did not say so.

  She put the glasses on the table and filled them with the dark wine. “Skoal,” she said, taking one glass and clicking it against the other.

  “Ciao,” Angie said, and taking up the glass he sipped the wine. It was a surprise, sweeter than honey. “It’s sweet.”

  “That’s why I like it. It’s kind of friendly when you get home at night. How old are you, Angie, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  “Nineteen.” He wanted to say twenty-one but didn’t have the nerve. “And you?”

  She settled herself in the chair on the other side of the book stand, and tucked her feet under her. “It all depends,” she said with a sigh. The robe came open when she leaned back and stretched. One of the big breasts came out. She covered it.

  Angie shelved the dictionary, looking carefully to put it in the right place. He got a straight chair from across the room and straddled it, facing her, his arms on the chair back. “What’s your real name?”

  “Don’t you like Alice?”

  “Sure, but.”

  “Actually, I change it all the time,” she said. “I don’t think a person should keep anything they get tired of. And I don’t think a person ought to do anything they don’t want to. I’m a very independent person.”

  “Do you like working in a restaurant?”

  “Sure I do. Except for my feet hurting sometimes. I get to meet all kinds of people.”

  “Men,” Angie said.

  “What’s wrong with men? I don’t like girls.”

  “I mean a certain kind of men.” He was thinking of the truck driver sticking his tongue in his cheek to Angie.

  “I like all kinds—except that Ric character. What makes you so scared of him?”

  “I don’t know.” He couldn’t explain what he felt about Ric, the inside fear: it wasn’t so much of being hurt physically. It was something else, too. He stared at the wine where he had set it down on the table. “When we were little kids he used to get me down on the ground and he wouldn’t let me up till I said I was his friend.”

  “Angie …” She waited for him to look at her. “Truth: you stole the coat, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think the person you stole it from will go to the police?”

  “Maybe … I guess so.” It seemed to have happened a long time before.

  “Come on, tell Aunt Alice the whole story.”

  His eyes snapped and she laughed. She poured the wine he hadn’t drunk into her glass. “I’m only teasing. You’re so serious for an Italian.”

  “How did you know I was Italian?”

  “I don’t mind. I told you, I like all kinds of people unless they’re mean. Was the fat boy with you when you stole the coat?”

  “No. I got a place I go up on a roof and in the building across the street there’s a girl …” He stopped. It was too hard to tell. “Let’s forget about it, huh?”

  “There’s no harm in looking,” Alice said, far ahead of him. “If people leave their blinds up they got to expect it. It’s a compliment in a way …”

  So he managed to tell her what had happened from when the girl came to the window and pulled the shade down only” to have it spring up to the top.

  Alice thought about it and drank her wine. She licked in the purple traces around her mouth. “You’d been watching her before, right?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “And him?”

  “I never saw him before.”

  “So,” she said. “Los Angeles. He’s probably got a wife and kids at home.”

  “No!” It came out like a cry.

  “Oh, boy,” Alice said, “I sure get ’em with the hang-ups.”

  “To hell with you,” Angie said, getting up. He pulled the chair from between his legs and set it down with a clatter. “No woman says that about a Sicilian.”

  “Mafia,” she said, mocking him.

  Angie charged across the room and grabbed up the coat. For a plumpish girl, Alice was very quick. She came up behind him, slipped her arms under his and around his middle. She locked him against her. He could feel the softness of her up and down him, the way her thighs fit under his buttocks, her belly in the small of his back, her breasts at his shoulderblades.

  “Don’t be mad at me, Angie,” she said, and nipped his ear with her teeth. “I was only teasing. Would I’ve asked you to come home with me if I didn’t like you?” She wriggled her fingers through to where she could play with his nipples. Angie dropped the coat and grabbed her hands.

  Alice laughed. “You do like me, don’t you?”

  “Sure.”

  “Don’t you want to—you know?”

  He said the word to himself. Aloud he murmured, “Sure.”

  She turned him around to her, letting the robe fall open and held him against her naked body. Angie tasted the wine in her kiss, str
onger than from the glass. She walked him slowly backwards until he collided with the daybed. He went down on his back, his legs sprawled and Alice on top of him, a delicious weight after the first stab of pain. She raised herself on knees and elbows and pushed the breasts up toward his face. He put his hand to one and the nipple hardened.

  “Go on,” she said. “That’s what it’s for.”

  He looked into her face; the wide eyes narrowed to shimmering slits, the sweat glistened on her upper lip. It was too much, a dream, and he thought of his mother and the fear of waking up to her accusation. Everything in him went limp. He turned his head aside. “I got to get up,” he said.

  He was ashamed to watch her move away, pulling the robe tight around her. The smell of her stayed with him, the wine, the perfume and the sweat, and he could hear her suck in her breath between her teeth.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. He swung his feet to the floor, and sitting, he put his face in his hands. He did not want to cry. Of all the things he didn’t want to do at that moment, crying was foremost. From between his fingers he watched her pick up the sports jacket from the floor and hang it over a chair back. Don’t let me cry, he prayed, then to himself he said, You goddamned wop, don’t cry.

  After a moment he heard voices. Alice had turned on the television. She wheeled it around and sat down beside him on the couch. She pulled one of his hands away from his face and held it in hers. “It’s all right, baby,” she said.

  Baby.

  “It’s a good movie anyway,” she said. “I’ve seen it a lot. The Asphalt Jungle.”

  Gradually, Angie became involved in the picture.

  “I used to look like her,” Alice said of the blond actress who didn’t seem very bright to Angie.

  “Who’s she?”

  “Marilyn Monroe.”

  “Is that Marilyn Monroe?”

  “Yeah, that’s her.”

  “You do look like her,” Angie said, and squeezed her hand. There was not a strong resemblance.

  After a while Alice put her arm around him and pulled his head down on her shoulder. He stayed that way even though it gave him a crick in the neck. His mind wandered from the picture to what had happened to him. It wasn’t that he hadn’t wanted to. He wondered if he should try to explain that to her. He wondered about the man’s suit in the closet. Then he got caught up in the picture again. The burglars were moving into the jewelry shop. Doc ripped the sheet off a display case. Angie shivered. Alice gave his hair a tug. The shadows, the lookout, the footsteps, Doc lighting up a cigar—the sound of the electric drill as Louis revved the motor and put the drill to the safe lock. When the drill snapped, Alice laughed aloud.