They went to the show downtown and walked around Times Square looking at people, all kinds, and they felt superior and dumb at the same time.
They took the el back home late at night with Juju and Ray sitting next to each other and Nick stretched out on the long wicker seat across the aisle.
'You know, I'm thinking,' Juju said. 'We never should of gone in there. It's not right. Fool around, fool around, fool around. I say all right. But this is not a thing we should of done.'
'You're guilty,' Nick said.
'The man's laid out. Leave him alone. If he was some jerk sat on his ass all his life, be different maybe. This is a working man. The man's laid out.'
Nick assumed the position of a prepared body.
'You're guilty. Go to church and confess. You'll feel better,' he said.
Ray Lofaro had no idea what they were talking about. Juju wouldn't tell him as a matter of principle and Nick wouldn't tell him because he didn't want to be bothered.
The train was a local and took forever.
They rode past the dark tenements of the lower Bronx, past the sleeping thousands in their beds, and Nick got up and tried to rip the wicker apart, first with his hands, which was hard to do, and then by kicking it in and using his hands again to pick apart the weaved strands.
A man at the other end of the car got up and went into the next car and Nick watched him, deciding whether this was an insult or not.
Then he kicked some more, standing back and using the heel edge of his shoe to stave in the back of the seat. He poked with both hands, peeling off strips of wicker in a series of long dry snapping sounds.
His buddies had nothing to say.
He got off one stop before their regular stop and they watched him go out the door. He walked over to the building where she lived. He stood across the street smoking, watching the building. The lamp was lit in the front room but the bed was gone now
He knew that Mr. Bronzini's mother had died recently. His own mother telling him. And over a day or two he began to make the connection that the bed was the old woman's bed, that the apartment was Mr. Bronzini's apartment, that the woman he'd fucked in the apartment was Mr. Bronzini's wife.
He found it didn't matter much. He'd walked past the building a number of times, in daylight, and never saw her. He'd stood on the stoop once or twice, smoking, and she hadn't come out. Lately he'd been standing in the dark and watching the building, after midnight mostly, those sameshit nights, passing the time before he was ready to go to bed.
He was seventeen years and some months. He'd get drafted soon and that was probably not a bad thing to happen. His friend Allie was in uniform now, finished basic, and he was headed to Korea, where he'd fuck the best-looking women, he said, and leave sloppy seconds for Nick and the others.
He stood there smoking. He watched her building and he thought about a thousand things, sane, crazy, dumb, and he thought about the woman.
The empty lot was less than a block from the school entrance, a rambling waste with a higher and lower level, boulders, weeds and ruined walls, signs of old exploded garbage here and there, brown bags tossed from adjacent buildings, and this is where young kids had rock fights and older kids roasted sweet mickeys in the evening chill and where a kid named Skeezer ate a grasshopper live, which was a legend of many a neighborhood, the kid with grasshopper juices running down his chin, but in this case there were reliable older men who'd witnessed, and where other and darker stories were set, a man who slept in a ditch every night and the guys from the other poolroom, Major's, taking a girl into the ruins, late, a summer night, and lining up for sex, and who was the girl, and was she willing, and other stories of the lots.
It was a single expanse of land that was called the lots the way a back alley was called the yards and this is where Matty got his hand busted up in a card game called shots on knucks.
He walked in the apartment and went into his mother's bedroom, where she was doing her beadwork, and he stuck the hand in her face.
'What's this?'
'What does it look like?' he said.
'Blood.'
'Then that's what it is.'
'Then you should go and clean it.'
'Don't you want to know what happened?'
'What happened?'
'Never mind,' he said.
He sat in the living room and examined the marks and scrapes, the mudlet streaks of dried blood. He felt a self-pitying pleasure, doing this, even a fascination, an animal attachment just short of licking, but then his brother walked in the door, earlier than usual, and he tried to conceal the hand.
'What's that?'
'Nothing.'
'Show me, jerk.'
'I just need to clean it.'
'You need to put iodine on that. Let me see.'
'I don't need iodine,' he said with a soft insistence.
He extended the hand and looked away at the same time, sort of tactfully.
'He needs iodine,' Nick said to their mother.
'Is that the 7-Up man?'
'Eye-oh-dine, eye-oh-dine.'
Matty went small in his chair as his brother looked at the hand. Nick's own hands were dirty and bruised and so much bigger, five, six years bigger-a man's hands, almost, blistered on the palms and cut by broken glass.
'How'd it happen?
'Card game in the lots.'
'You go in the lots?'
'Just at the edge.'
'Does she know you go in the lots?'
'I don't go way in.'
'You think it's a good idea, going in there?'
'What do you think?'
'I think go in. But watch yourself. There's kids in there from all over. They don't know you're my brother.'
Nick held his hand and looked at it.
'It doesn't hurt the way it did.'
'You played shots on knucks.'
'That's right.'
'And you ended up holding some cards and the winner whacked you how many times.'
'I had a choice.'
'I remember this choice.'
'Either he gives me nine scraping shots with the edge of the deck or he gives me four scraping shots and then one killer shot with the deck held up and down.'
'Blunt end. Where he hits you square on your knuckles, full force.'
'That's right,' Matty said.
'Let me ask. How could you lose a kid's card game, a brain like you, supposedly, playing with a bunch of little pisspots?'
'They weren't so little,' Matty said.
Nick held his hand. Many times through the years Nick had bopped him on the head, a flick of the middle finger that carried slingshot force. Many times Nick had lifted him off a chair and sat himself down. Nick had held him out the window once for rubbing snot on a door edge. Many times Nick had booted him in the ass for no reason except
