“You think I don’t know what you’re gettin’ at?”
“I’m not getting at anything. But
“You’re gonna shut the fuck up.”
“Not likely.”
The old punch drunks who used to hang around my neighborhood gym called it a Western Union. That was when a guy did everything but send you a telegram that he was about to take a shot at your nose.
I just waited for him.
“You’re a fucking asshole,” he told me.
I let him talk and take my measurements. I kept my hands loose at my sides and my feet in a partial stance.
Then I took a piece of a second to think about the delicacy Jimmy Maddox showed digging a utility trench with a two-ton backhoe. It made me rethink my estimate of his speed, and adjust accordingly. In an even tinier fraction of a second his cowboy swing was launched toward my jaw.
I caught his fist like a baseball with my left hand and held it. He froze in surprise, straining against my grip. It was hard to hold him—he was stronger than he looked. I popped him once in the mouth and sat him down on his butt. I squatted down as he dropped, keeping my grip on his right fist and feeling the resistance drain out of his arm.
“I used to be a boxer, son. No more of that stuff, okay?”
He nodded with his free hand over his mouth. He wasn’t ready to say anything, so I did.
“I’m not accusing you of anything. It’s just your personality. So what say we start over. More friendly.”
He nodded and I let go of his right hand. He looked at it like an annoying pet that’d been missing for a few days. Blood ran out of the corner of his mouth and spotted his T-shirt. I handed him the paper towel I’d stuffed in my pocket that morning in a moment of prescience. He held it to his face as we walked over to the Grand Prix. The sun was behind some clouds, and the light was diffuse and less forgiving. The blood on his shirt was bright red. His face was back to pale.
“Do any work around chemical plants, Jimmy?”
He looked at me with a frown.
“There aren’t any chemical plants around here.”
“Up island? New Jersey?”
“Never been there. What difference does it make?”
“No difference.”
He was too jangled to argue anymore. I let him sit in the passenger seat of the Grand Prix with his legs out the door while I leafed through the papers for a clean sheet to write on.
“I think it’s a good idea to do this. There’s no harm in it, unless it bothers you, and that’s your privilege. The court’s already given me what I need to handle things, but she’s your aunt.”
He looked at the letter I’d written out while I was talking.
“Says I want an autopsy.”
“Just sign it, Jimmy. I’ll take care of everything. I’ll let you know when the funeral is.”
His signature was a graceful Palmer-method script. Wrote like he dug holes. Only quieter.
“And if you want, you can say it’s okay for me to act as administrator of her estate.” I handed him another piece of paper. “You don’t have to agree. You can get your own lawyer. I’m just sayin’ I got the time and I’m willing to do it. I just need your address and telephone number. You get whatever she’s got, unless some other family pops out of the blue.”
He read the letter I’d written up. Then shrugged and signed it.
“Money’s okay. I don’t want any of her shit. Too fucking depressing.”
“Except maybe the house. It’s worth a lot of money,” I said.
He snorted into the paper towel.
“She don’t own that house.”
It was my turn to look like a dope.
“She don’t own that house, Einstein,” he said, somewhat buoyed by my confusion. “She just gets to stay there. Till she dies. Now everything gets passed back to some other fucker.”
“What other fucker?”
“She never said much about it. I only know about it ‘cause she didn’t want me gettin’ ideas about her stupid house.”
A black mass of clouds was clumping up over the rangy oak trees. The breeze was working itself into a northwesterly wind. There was something mildly electric about the air—warning of an incoming storm. The concrete guys had stopped working to look up at the sky. Maddox looked wearily over at his unfinished trench.
“Fucking piece of goddam piece of shit weather.”
TWO
THERE WERE THOUSANDS of bars in Greater New York City that looked exactly like this one. It’d been there since before World War II. All the woodwork was simulated mahogany stained a deep, Victorian brown. It ran like wainscoting three-quarters of the way up the wall. Above that the plaster was painted pale green and decorated with framed, faded covers of magazines that had ceased circulation about the time MacArthur returned to the Philippines. The carpet was probably red at some point, but had turned a brown dinge. So had the vinyl stool cushions. Around the bar itself the floorboards had worn down to the grain. The footrail was solid brass, shiny on the top. At the corners of the bar were racks of hard candy and Tums. Bottles lined a back wall that was mostly mirror, decorated with false muntins.
It was a few doors down from the entrance to the stairs that led two flights up to my father’s Bronx
He wasn’t a drinker in the traditional sense. But he preferred sitting in that bar to sitting alone in the apartment. He’d nurse a shot and a beer for hours, alone at a small round table along the wall, discouraging anyone who might want to engage him in conversation. Not that he had to try that hard. Some people have that unapproachable aura about them. Like me. People get close, then veer away, bouncing off the invisible shield.
Thirty years ago I went there to talk to the bartender. I had my gym bag with a change of clothes at my feet. I was also nursing a beer, partly for financial reasons. I was living on a starvation budget, all my money going toward night school. The bartender was about my father’s age. He’d inherited the place from his uncles. The standard bartender look was fat and grizzly gray, but this guy was slender and handsome, with a squared-off jaw and black crew cut. A Navy man, with an anchor on his forearm and a portrait of a destroyer above the cash register. He spoke out of the side of his mouth, and rarely put a T at the start of a word when a D would work better, so you knew he belonged in the Bronx.
I didn’t know how to go about asking him what I wanted to know, so we’d been talking about the Yankees and the economy. He had a nephew my age who was going to Penn State. For some unaccountable reason I told him I was out of school and working as a carpenter. Maybe I thought going to night school at MIT would put him off. I don’t know. I was young.
When the conversation drifted into crime on the streets I had an opening. I looked around, appraisingly.
“This place seems pretty quiet. You must keep it that way, huh?”
“Yeah, I get it done. Don’t like any funny stuff.”
“Wasn’t there something in here, though, a big fight or something? That’s what I heard, is all.”
He was wiping off the bar at the time, which gave him an easy way to move away from me. I sat there with my beer, acting disinterested, until he drifted back into earshot.
“Sorry,” I said. “I’m just being nosy.”
