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  And if it was should I be sad or glad?

  We sat on a bench for a while looking out at the river and the twinkling lights of the Brooklyn shore, not talking but refueling our souls while in the distance a tugboat hooted sadly along. Then I heard Jane asking me a question.

  “Joey, do you pray?”

  I turned and tried to read her. Her voice had been earnest and touched with concern, like her jade green stare now meeting mine.

  I said, “What?”

  “Do you pray?”

  “Sure, I pray. I go to Mass every Sunday.”

  “I mean at night. Do you pray every night?”

  I shook my head.

  “You need to do it,” she said. “It builds up graces.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She was looking really serious now.

  “The world’s a battleground, Joey. I mean it. You can’t see it, but we’re really in a scary war with darkness, with these demonic evil shitheads, the ‘Dominions’ and the ‘Powers’ that Saint Paul goes on about, and inasmuch they’ve got most of the high-powered weapons we need to put on armor, which is grace, Joey, the grace of the sacraments; and a way we get to access that grace is by prayer.” Then she added, “For a start.”

  “For a start?”

  “For a start. Didn’t your pop teach you night prayers, Joey?”

  Well, I didn’t know whether I should pull up my socks or sing “Swanee River,” but wisely choosing neither I just gently shook my head. I mean, what could I say? Oh, well, sure: Pop had told me I should try to pray at night. He said that he’d promised my mom he would do that. But teaching me how? I mean, to get in the mood and teach me right Pop would have to be standing in deep meditation on a pointed crag about sixteen thousand feet in the air with the favored family eagles slowly flapping and circling all around him in the mist quietly cawing at him, “Don’t look down!”

  I didn’t say this, of course. What I said was, “Not exactly.”

  “Come on then, kneel down and I’ll show you.”

  My eyes bugged out a little. She was kneeling at the bench, her hands folded prayerfully on the wooden seat. “Come on,” she said. “Do this for me, would you, Joey? It would make me very happy. Joey, please?”

  Well, I did it. I knelt down beside her and with a fervent prayer in mind, alright, which was that none of my classmates would happen by, but as it was Jane taught me a different one: “‘Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. Amen.’ That’s all you need to say,” she told me. And then again that little sneaky caboose, “For now.

  “But do it every night,” she then added. “Every night!”

  “Hey, you sweet-lookin’ honey!”

  Jane and I quickly stood up. It was a group of three guys, most likely eighth-graders from Our Lady of We Don’t Need No Stinking Badges, one big and pretty brawny in a red tank T-shirt with the single word “SO?” on the front in huge letters. “Why don’t you dump your skinny boyfriend,” he went on, “and come along with us guys to a party? What do you say? You want to come? Sure, you do. Come on, I got something nice for you there. Real nice.”

  When I finally had to recognize the probability he was talking to Jane and not someone on the Planet Schwartz, before I could open my mouth to advise him his behavior was “not the way of Zen,” the guy in the tank shirt reached to clutch at Jane’s arm when suddenly, WHAMMO! She’d whipped around sideways and kicked him in the jewels, and with his mouth wide open in shock and awe, not to mention excruciating pain, Mister “I Am Not Zorro After All” slowly crumpled to the ground while the two lesser toughs held back, looking suddenly fearful and confused and not at all like Huntz Hall, a St. Stephen’s grad who played one of the “Dead End Kids” in the movie. Meantime, Jane was now crouched in a fighting position with a tightly clenched fist held out in front of her and another fist coiled at her waist. “Vamanos, hombres!” she warned them. “I have power! I am the power!” Then she took a step forward and instantly the three caballeros turned and ran, heading back uptown, their disgraced fallen leader hobbling gamely as he straggled behind muttering threats of revenge that would have even made the Count of Monte Cristo blench, while now and then he would turn and shake a fist at us, yelling, “You going to see what going to hoppen to you now! You know? You going to see! My God, you going to see!” His Latino Jeremiads continued sporadically until, as he began to recede in the distance, a final valediction so faint that it might have been coming from the edge of the Andromeda galaxy dimly floated down to us from far upriver: “I feel sorry for you guys! You know? I’m feeling sorry so bad I’m going to puke!!”

  The glow of the Tokay had worn off and I wasn’t sure how I should take all of this. First my role as a provider and now this.

  But I was quick to give praise.

  “Holy whack!” I exclaimed. “Jane, where’d you learn judo?”

  “It’s not judo.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “Effective. Listen, Joey, gotta go now. I got lots of stuff to do.”

  “Gee, so early?”

  “Can’t be helped.”

  “Well, okay then,” I said. “I’ll walk you home.”

  She shook her head.

  “No. This is something I need to do alone.”

  “Such as what?”

  “Seven churches,” she said. “Okay? On Holy Thursday you get graces if you visit seven churches.”

  “It isn’t Thursday, though. It’s Friday.”

  She looked up at me with patience in her eyes. And something else. Maybe fondness. Maybe worry. Maybe both.

  Looking aside, Jane folded her arms across her chest while a sigh fluttered down to the tabletop with the weight of a withered leaf.

  “Now it starts,” she murmured.

  She was shaking her head.

  “Whaddya mean?” I said, frowning a little in puzzlement.

  With this she turned back to me, her eyes a little tight as she answered, “You know perfectly well what I mean. Must you always be so quarrelsome, Joey? Do you have to be right every time? Someone tells you it’s daytime, you insist it’s night? Then they point to the sky and say, ‘See, there’s the sun,’ and you give them your biggest killer line, ‘Yes, but! ’”

  “What do you mean?” I said; “It really is Friday!”

  “And you’re stubborn as ever besides. Now, listen, Joey, one more thing. It’s important.”

  “What’s important?”

  “That it’s okay to love me. But don’t be in love with me. Okay? And be good to your father. He loves you so much.” And with that she turned around and started quickly walking south while calling out to me, “Trust, Joey! The magic word is trust!”

  Oh, yeah sure, I was thinking: Trust. I mean, who could you possibly believe about anything? The wiring in my brain was still shooting off sparks from that time near the end of third grade when Baloqui approached me, his eyes wide and his face an off-white, which was the best it could do whenever drained of blood, and grimly whispered in a horrified tone, “Oh, my God, Joey!”

  “What?!”

  “Oh, my God! I just found out what it is you have to do when you get married!”

  “Yeah?”

  “You have to put your weeney inside your wife’s heine!”

  I took a couple of steps backward, half yelling, half gasping at him, “What? Are you out of your mind, Baloqui? Get away from me! No! No, don’t touch me! You disgust me! Where in hell’d you hear a crazy thing like that?”

  “From a guy in fifth grade!”

  I went numb. A fifth-grader! This was authoritative!

  “Then I’m never getting married!” I gritted.

  “Me too!”

  We hugged tightly. I thought I heard a whimper.

  The next month Baloqui’s parents invited me to Thanksgiving dinner, which his family held the day after ours, and all through the meal I’d see Baloqui’s dead stare go from his fathe
r to his mother and then back, and then he’d lower his head and mutely shake it.

  I saw Jane take a right on a path that would lead her to Avenue A and then on to her Holy Thursday churches on a Friday. What a mystery she was: plucky as short, fat Tony Galento getting hammered in the ring by Joe Louis, and jumpy as fleas who’ve just gotten great news; dropping the F-bomb and then teaching me to pray; making sense, then being totally wingy. There was also this aura about her, something spiritual; ethereal, really. And then I remembered some stuff that she’d said to me, things like, “You’re as stubborn as ever.”

  As ever? What did that mean?

  5

  Pop and I lived in this dingy little third-floor walkup at the corner of 31st Street and Second Avenue across from a raunchy new bar called the Health Club, where after my homework and my favorite radio shows, Captain Midnight and The Shadow, were done, I could tune in some local and terrifically live free entertainment by leaning out the window to watch the nightly bar fights spilling out into the street, almost always involving a couple of old geezers in their thirties or forties—sometimes even lots older—and after they’d bloodied each other as much as their flabby, drunken swings ever could while their girlfriends or wives stood aside and kept moving their lips, saying, “Somebody stop this, would you? Stop them!” in a murmur so low even I couldn’t hear it, and then the combatants would wind up with their arms around each other’s shoulders and go back into the bar to buy each other a drink, the sound of music from a jukebox blasting out into the street as they opened the door, almost always Bing Crosby and “The Rose of Tralee” or “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen,” and if Pop was standing anyplace where he could hear it he’d yell, “Joey, shutting window!” inasmuch as he was tired of the same old songs, but even probably more so, I’d have to suppose, because he’d come here as a child from Peru and had about much interest in “Galway Bay” as in hearing a duet of “I’m an Indian, Too,” by Sitting Bull and Mohandas K. Gandhi. The songs might also have made Pop sad, as they probably made him think of my mom. Her name was Eileen. She was Irish. I’d never seen her. She died giving birth to me. Pop met her at Bingo Night in the basement of St. Rose of Lima Church when both of them lived in the Bronx. Pop had only one photo of her, one of those sepiatoned black-and-white jobs that had been taken of the two of them in Central Park and then slipped into a cardboard frame with SOMEWHERE IN THE U.S.A. at the top. Already blurry from the softness of the focus, the photo had yellowed and was badly faded so I could only make out that she was smiling and slim and had long wavy hair. I could barely even recognize Pop. Whenever I’d ask him to describe my mom he would always start to cry and then he’d go into the bathroom or he’d put on this black leather cap and go out into the street. I’d open a window, then, and watch him. I’d get worried if I saw him slowly walking toward the river.

  I also stopped asking about her.

  “Why so late, Joey? Almost ten o’clock. You want to eat?”

  Wearing a torn old navy blue sweater and with skin that was the color of a waxed pine floor, Pop had sharp, strong features with very high cheekbones and an aquiline nose that knew who it was. You couldn’t tell that he was over six feet tall because pushing those carts for all those years had curved his posture almost into a crouch.

  “You looking funny,” Pop told me.

  “What do you mean? Funny how?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, appraising me. “Different. Come on, now. You hungry? I fix you something good.”

  That was Pop. Concern about my care and well-being always coming ahead of any talk about discipline or who struck Juan. I thumped myself down into one of the two folding metal chairs set on opposite sides of this sad-looking, tan colored plastic card table just off the kitchen where we’d eat all our meals and I’d also do homework. Pop had made enough money off his trade to upgrade our pitiful furnishings lately, but after Mom died I guess he mostly lost interest in everything but me. Our apartment had only one bedroom and Pop made me sleep there while he slept on the living room sofa.

  “No, I ate, Pop,” I told him.

  “Ate what?”

  I said, “Spaghetti and pie and ice cream.”

  I didn’t think it was such a hot idea to mention the Tokay.

  Pop wrinkled his brow.

  “Spaghetti, Joey? Where? With the Pagliarello family?”

  My first thought was Are you out of your mind?

  “No, Pop. A little restaurant on Fourteenth Street.”

  “Joey, where you get the money? I don’t give you yet allowance for this week.”

  I said, “My friend paid, Pop.”

  “What friend?”

  “A girl at school.”

  Pop came out of his crouch at this, standing straight and tall for a second while his face was a gasp made flesh.

  “You let girl pay for your food?”

  “And a movie,” I threw in before I knew what I was saying.

  That did it, that was all the old man could take, and he launched into a rant about chivalry at first, and then the subject was “manhood what is true and not fakey” and the real and proper order of things and how I’d sinned against the code of some Incas who always made the boys have to wait to have their hearts ripped out until after the girls had gone first. Oh, well, for cripessakes, I knew he didn’t mean what he was yelling, it was really about the worry and the scare that I’d given him by not showing up for dinner, which he couldn’t let on to, of course, this being yet another strict part of the Inca Code. So I bowed my head and took it while pretending to be Galento just waiting for the moment to make his doomed move, which sort of came when I heard a lot of hollering out on the street, and now afraid I was about to miss a beaut of a fight, I kind of snapped and interrupted Pop’s tirade with “Why don’t you take a hike up to Machu Picchu and find yourself an eagle there to tell all your troubles with your Americanized kid!” I jumped up and stomped into the bedroom, making sure to slam the door in the hope of projecting the lying impression that I was the injured party.

  A second later I heard a rapping on the bedroom door.

  “You sure you no hungry, Joey?”

  Once again, that was Pop, that’s how he always reacted, and most times, like the average self-centered teenage jerk, I’d repay him by giving him the “silent treatment.” This night, though, was different.

  I didn’t know why.

  At least not then.

  “Yeah, I’m hungry,” I lied. “What have we got?” And then, wonder of wonders, I said, “Sorry for what I said to you, Pop. I didn’t mean it.”

  “I knowing.”

  I had a restless night, doubtless due to the disorienting sense of strangeness that followed whenever I did something good, plus for the first time I was feeling kind of guilty, I guess, about getting the bedroom while my poor old Pop who’d been pushing that cart all day had to sleep on the living room sofa. Though at least he’s always ringside, I tried to console myself, for the one-to-two-A.M. fights. I also had the blues because I wouldn’t see Jane again until Monday. I had no idea where she lived. Sometime after midnight I could hear the dim strains of “My Wild Irish Rose” on the Health Club jukebox for three or four seconds as their front door opened, then closed, and I worried even more about Pop; but then the drunken taunts and cursing started up in reassurance that there was regular order in the world and that no planets would come tumbling from the sky that night to strike us, so at last I fell asleep with not a smirk but with the ghost of a smile on my face as the last thought I had was the sudden realization there was someone in this world that I could totally trust: Pop.

  The next morning I trudged to my usual Saturday freelance “job” where for three or four hours I’d be standing on the sidewalk in front of the A&P supermarket on Third between 31st and 32nd, asking little old ladies if I could help them carry their groceries home, which would have made me St. Christopher of the Bags, I suppose, except I did it “for a price, Ugardi, for a price,” and meantime hopin
g that somewhere along the way I might catch a glimpse of Jane, which I didn’t, although I did make forty-seven cents in tips. Pretty good. Afterward, I did what I usually do, which was go to the public library and just to sit there in the dustless quiet where the air had this pleasant, friendly smell of damppaper and warm, dry thoughts and I’d read comic novels by P. G. Wodehouse and anything fantastic and out of this world, which I was getting an inkling was the place to be. But on that day I had this daydream that roaming through the stacks I’d reach up for a book and through the narrow open space where it had been I’d see Jane on the other side, which didn’t happen, I’m more than sorry to tell you, because in fact what I saw was Baloqui.

  “What are you doing here?” I hissed in disappointment.