notice the kid already. Even when Eddy is pissed, he can’t manage to make those dark, drooping bags of his look anything but sad.
I nudge him.
“That the kid?”
The kid makes eye contact with me. I hope he doesn’t give it up. I hope I don’t give it up. He smirks at me, teasing-a demon with the face of a cherub.
“Yeah. Hey, kid.”
“Hey.”
“What you got for me?” asks Eddy. The kid holds out a tan Ferragamo wallet. Eddy takes it, and opens it up.
Edward Schalaci.
“Mr. Edward Schalaci,” says Eddy. For a moment, I think he’s talking to me. “Would you look at that,” he says, “guy’s name is Eddie, like me. One-hundred fifty Columbia Heights. Yeah. Would you look at that, Brooklyn Heights, that’s real money. Guy’s probably married. Wife’s got no clue. Right? Let’s get a move.”
As Eddy starts to walk down to the subway, the kid turns and smirks at me. Kid’s got a crazy sense of his own power. He’s an orphan from Poughkeepsie who came to The City to live off wealthy pedophiles. Got thrown out of a few downtown lofts and been selling his ass ever since. There’s something supernatural about the way he seems to get younger every time I see him, as though he started at sixteen and now looks fourteen. Pretty soon he’ll be reduced to shaking down sickos from a stroller.
The thought makes me queasy. My wife is ready, I mean
We have done this a couple of times: we go into the bathroom and pretend to be from the Youth Squad, I take The Kid outside while Eddy talks the guy into giving him money, to avoid being arrested. Eddy has been making money like that all over the west side of Lower Manhattan for years. His biggest moneymaker is this kid.
Eddy hooked up with The Kid on one of his fugazi raids, took him under his wing and taught him how to hustle, taught him how to get paid without giving it up. The Kid still did his own thing, and this wallet represented the coup de grace of their partnership. It meant that The Kid had consummated a transaction and then ripped the john off, ’cuz there are just no good deals left in The City.
When I see the wallet I think of this and only this. I try to joke in my head, but I cannot smile. I see the kid reduced to a baby and wrapped in my wife’s tan arms: a bundle of joy, shock, and heartbreak. Is there a parent alive or dead who hasn’t been heartbroken?
The wallet now is the source of the evil, clear evidence that Eddy knows exactly what this kid is doing and is an accessory. Eddy takes this confession in his hand like a ticket at a deli. I cannot decide if Eddy is magnificently in tune to his hustle or just facile as cardboard.
We join the heavy flow of traffic, heading toward the inevitable. There is no point in talking business in front of these strangers, so the three of us keep quiet. Eddy gives me commiserating glances as we squeeze on the crowded train, reminding me of Pop again. Old and red faced, Pop would raise his eyebrow and shrug like that with me, often reduced to the basics of interaction, like we spoke different languages.
The crowd thins before we leave Manhattan. We get off at the Clark Street station, stepping into the open Brooklyn air beneath the old sign for Hotel St. George. Nothing tastes different about the air, but I’m aware of it. I’m breaking an old promise I made my father by coming here. I didn’t want to see him in Brooklyn, with his Benson- hurst lowlifes and me trying to be a cop. I wonder what borders of mine my wife’s unborn bundle will cross. The Kid looks around, stark baby-blue eyes restless and pissed.
“Who’s this guy, anyway?” he asks, gesturing to me.
“That’s Ron.”
“Hi,” I say.
“
“As far as you’re concerned,” says Eddy, “yeah, he’s a fuckin’ detective.” Eddy clears his throat with a thick, nasty hack. Then, as if his throbbing throat reminds him, he lights a cigarette.
“You want one?” he asks me, already putting his pack of Marlboro menthols away. It is a running joke between us. I don’t smoke. He offers anyway, hoping someone will join him in being self-destructive.
“Yeah,” I say.
“You serious?”
“Yeah. Calm my nerves a bit. I got to act like you anyway, right?”
Smiling, his old movie star dimple like a crater in his cheek, Eddy takes his pack back out, and looks inside. He shakes it. Then reaches in, and gives me one, a bit bent. Then he throws out the pack, and motions toward me with his lighter.
“Wait,” I say. “Your lucky?”
When he opens a new pack, Eddy always flips the first cigarette upside down, and saves it for last, his “lucky.”
“It’s no problem,” says Eddy. “It’s lucky. So maybe you won’t get addicted.”
He lights it. The minty smoke burns down my throat, and bites my lungs. I cough.
“Damn,” I say. “What you smoke these for? Things have teeth.”
The smoke clears way for more to come. The feeling is old and familiar. Pop smoked cigars, so I smoked cigarettes.
“You got a preference?”
“Used to smoke regular cigarettes,” I say. “Parliaments.”
“Heh. Pansy ass.”
We keep walking, following The Kid’s little sinister swagger.
“When you were a cop, you ever want to be a detective?” he asks me.
“Sure,” I say, thinking. “But I most likely woulda gone upstate, you know? Been a trooper. Easy work, man. Good money.”
“Heh. No angle in a fugazi state trooper, though, I’ll tell you that. Looks like you got to settle for a detective.”
“A detective’s good,” I say. “Just never thought I’d score good on the test.”
“You scored fine on my test, heh.”
I repeat this to myself: I am a laid-off cop. I still have my shield. That is why Eddy wants to work with me. He needs identification. I am bitter about being laid-off. I repeat this to myself.
We reach Pineapple Street. The neighborhood is a residential haven, with grand old architecture in muted red and earth tones. No home is higher than four stories on the tree-lined blocks, with ceremonial staircases, ornate banisters, and columned entrances. The doors and windows are huge, dark chandeliers dangling within, and brick fills in the rest of the expanding block.
“Let’s go check out the promenade,” suggests Eddy.
The Kid rolls his eyes. I agree, I want to get this over with, but Eddy is already on his way. Over his shoulder, I see Manhattan. From a distance, the towering shapes and rectangles look like an immaculate geometric drawing, a conception impossible to build. Then the murky gray water comes into view, the moat separating the boroughs from The City, as it’s simply referred to by those who don’t call it home.
The water reminds me of Pier 4 Bush, the day my father took me to learn his routine. Looking out at the mercury water and stacks of identically shaped, multicolored crates, Pop introduced me to what seemed like half the ILA Union. Augie, the plan clerk who told what crates wouldn’t be missed; Patty, the dock boss who told the checkers where to carry them; Eddie, the checker who took the crates off to a truck; and Ernie, the rounds man who was on the job twenty-three years without making one arrest. Then Pop and Ernie collected on some gambling debts. Nobody got violent around me, least of all Pop, whose hands had already begun to shake and couldn’t intimidate a child-he approached the dockworkers, as they would say, with two feet in one shoe. That day he told me I had a choice about whether I wanted to follow in his footsteps. As far as he was concerned, I chose wrong.
Now look at me. He’d be real proud.
The Kid leans over the banister, dangling a ball of spit at his lips and letting it fall below. I want to discipline him, smack him around. Not that my father ever laid a hand on me, though I know he wanted to. Couldn’t ever bring
