“Swing?” Harry said. “Who plays swing?”
“Kids, I’m saying, younger than you. Standards and jump blues, like that Louie Jordan stuff. Very popular with a younger crowd. But it’s strictly for love, that gig. I go home some nights, twenty, thirty bucks.”
“You’re too pro to play for that kind of money. Don’t they know who you are, Pop?”
“You got that right. You know I gigged with Louie, dontcha?”
“Paramount Theatre, 1950.”
“Did I tell you the story?”
“Once or twice,” Harry said.
His father shrugged, disappointed, either because he couldn’t steamroll Harry with the details for the hundredth time, or because his memory was slipping and he honestly didn’t remember having told him.
He poured coffee into a pair of mugs. Then, from a cabinet under the sink, behind the cleanser and the Windex and the laundry soap, he pulled out a bottle of off-brand whiskey with the Irish flag on its label.
“Gotta be five o’clock somewhere in the world, right?” He spilled some booze into his mug, and was about to do the same to Harry’s when Harry stopped him.
On second thought, he said, “I’ll take half a shot, Pop. In a glass, neat.”
His father said, “No water?”
“No water.”
“Because you know what W.C. Fields said about water.”
“Fish fuck in it,” Harry said, but the stale punch line made him wince.
An extra serious voice on the radio made Harry aware it was on, describing a piece of music they were about to hear, and then tiny, muted horns came across, trumpets for sure, and other brass, softly.
“Since when do you like classical, Pop?”
He downed some whiskey-laced coffee. “Since forever. He’s very subtle, Mozart, but he was tearing it up in his own way. Dig the way those strings come in behind the horns. Gradually. You gotta take the time to appreciate him, but it’s worth it.” The old man closed his eyes, his hands around his mug.
Harry drank the whiskey. They weren’t talking about anything, the way they never talked about anything, but this newfound appreciation of Wolfgang Amadeus, which was not bad at all, was making Harry suspicious. His father had never owned a single recording of any kind of classical music, did not attend concerts or operas, and had never said a single word about it before today.
Something was up. But figuring out what it was wasn’t why he was here. Truth was, he didn’t really care. He could’ve gone another year without seeing the old man, no problem. What he wanted was to know how close the law was to him, and he wanted to find out without having to come right out and ask. If they were on his trail, and there was no reason to believe they wouldn’t be by now, with Leo or Aggie or Bryce Peyton giving him up, this’d be one of their first stops.
“How’s Arthur doing?” Harry asked.
“Good,” the old man said. “Arthur’s doing good. You don’t need to worry about Arthur.”
“I’m not worried about him, Pop. I just asked how he was.”
“Well, if you’re so concerned, why don’t you give him a call?”
It seemed like every conversation with the old man ended in some kind of confrontation. Harry wanted to get out of there before that happened. He decided that if the cops had paid a visit, the old man would’ve said something about it by now.
“Anyway, listen,” his father said, “I know this sounds terrible, but I’m gonna have to ask you to leave. Rosa’s due home any second and I don’t want you to get her upset.”
Harry wasn’t sure what the old man had told Rosa about him that would make his presence so upsetting, whoever Rosa was, but she explained a lot of things. The home economics kitchen, the secret bottle of hooch, the bright, summery tablecloth. He felt stupid for not figuring it out sooner.
Harry wanted to use the bathroom before he split, and in order to get there, he had to pass through the back bedroom, the room he’d shared with Ernie growing up. The flowery lingerings of an old-ladyish perfume thickened the air. An oversized bed hogged up most of the space, and the dresser and nightstand were dotted with cheaply framed poses of Rosa’s grandchildren, an infant with a drooly, open-yawped grin, a pair of girls with ribbons in their hair. They could’ve been twins, sporting newly sprouted permanent teeth three gauges too large for their bright, thin faces.
Harry didn’t know what the sleeping arrangements were, but he noticed the old man kept the front bedroom, where he used to sleep with Harry’s mother, intact. He had a portrait gallery of his own, but every single one of the pictures was of him. The old man with Charlie Parker, signed by Bird and wishing him all the best. The old man with Mayor John Lindsey, with Max Gordon at what must’ve been the Vanguard. The old man fronting his Joe Healy Six, eyes squeezed tight in black and white, ripping off a righteous solo.
Solo. That was the old man. Kids or no kids, Mom or no Mom, Rosa or whoever, the old man was a solo act.
It didn’t bother Harry. Why should it bother him? Heading down the stairs and lighting a cigarette Rosa would never get a whiff of, he said out loud, “Who gives a fuck?”, but he did. He did.
You were going to find Jimmy De Steffano in one of three places: pulling a job, on Rikers Island, or swilling two-forone suds in this saloon long overrun by NYU students. If Harry hadn’t been so distracted, he would have made it a point to avoid this route, but as it happened, here he was on the sidewalk with Jimmy, behind door number three.
“Just the man I wanted to see,” De Steffano said. “I heard you were back in town.”
It hadn’t been two days. Harry said, “From who?”
“Bad news travels fast.” De Steffano had reverted to his paroled physique. No jailhouse muscles puffed him up. “C’mon, I’ll buy you a beer.”
“I wouldn’t get arrested in this shit hole. Why do you drink here?”
De Steffano cocked an eyebrow at a mouse-haired chunkette, the ordinary, easily flattered type. The kind they bred in the heartland, who was pudgy and astigmatic and got a genuine thrill out of hanging around a New York hood, smallish even by small-time standards, but a real live criminal all the same.
“We gotta stand here all night?” He was wearing a wife-beater under a leather car coat, rushing the season, catching a chill. “Let’s go inside.”
“I can’t. I got something to do.”
“You’re hurting my feelings. You don’t see me for a year, now you won’t give me the time of day.”
His black hair gleamed in the street light, the back and sides clipped as close as the shadow of goatee that darkened his chin. A crucifix and a crooked horn hung from a chain around his neck. Jimmy D, hitting all the strides.
Harry told him he had to be somewhere, which was about half true, and De Steffano, determined to talk, abandoned the NYU girls for some later hour.
They veered right at the metal cube that marked Astor Place. The skateboard army was out on maneuvers. Peacocking goofy, Easter egg-colored hair, their jeans were so baggy that two of their skinny asses would’ve fit into a single pair. Unlike the concrete jockeys blighting Avenue A, these kids didn’t bum change, and some of them were real athletes, executing swirls and jumps on boards that never left the bottoms of their sneakers.
Three skaters circled a garbage can they had dragged into the street. One made a pass at it, measuring the distance it would take to vault it, swinging wide, powering himself up the block. He idled thirty yards from the target, sucked in one deep breath of concentration. Right leg churning, he started his run, blue-green hair blown back, his billowing sweatshirt flattened against his chest.
De Steffano said, “Ten bucks the kid don’t make it.”
“The kid makes it easy,” Harry said.
“A sawbuck says no.”
“You’re on.”
Harry was afraid his boy had jumped too soon. It looked at first like he’d crash mid-bucket, but as he neared the peak of his arc, he was soaring, arms stretched out for balance, the board at his feet throwing gravity a big fuck you. Landing soft on the asphalt, he had three feet to spare.
“Everybody’s gotta be good at something,” De Steffano said. He forked over the tenner. “What I was doing at his age, I was trying to get laid.”
