Half the Blood of Brooklyn

He’s a talker.

– Pisses me off is that it’s Friday night. Supposed to be safe night. Why it’s the only night we do the act.

He picks at the dry blood crusted around his right ear.

– Don’t suppose you know if eardrums grow back?

I ignore him. Trying to think. Trying to figure how far I can take this. The cost of returning without Lydia.

He points at my own mutilated right ear.

– Just askin’ cuz it looks like you have some recent experience with this kind of thing.

Trying to figure if I can just dump him and Vendetta and haul ass back to Manhattan and tell Terry I did everything I could, but Lydia is gone.

– ’Course, yours look to be more of the external variety.

He snaps his fingers next to his bad ear.

– Damn. Fucker’s dead as dead. Pisser. Years of mutilatin’ myself, never did a stitch of permanent damage. Mind you, there was a period of trial and error where it was more from luck than anything else that I didn’t ever bite off nothing that couldn’t grow back.

I think about the solid Lydia once did for me. How I never paid it off. How it was too fucking big to be paid off in one installment. Till now.

Vendetta looks at him from her spot on the floor between our seats.

– Don’t forget the toe.

He holds up his hands.

– Well sure, the toe. Just the pinkie toe, mind. But that was pure experimentation. Tell you, got no regrets about that toe. I hadn’t tested it out first, I might have bit off a finger or something like that. As it is, I’ve sliced and diced and gnawed my flesh just about every which way you can and kept myself in one piece all the while. Traveled my act far and wide. ’Course that was when this was an open city. That’s when the borough of Brooklyn on Long Island was a free place, where a man could go where he pleased and do as he pleased.

He waves his arms at the avenues reeling past us as we roll down Stillwell.

– Toured from Greenpoint to Brighton to Cobble Hill to Canarsie to Bay Ridge. Wintering in Coney, of course. No turf in Brooklyn then. That’s a Manhattan thing. Here, you just pay a mind to where you are, be respectful to whoever the big dog happens to be on the block. Nothing formal. Just a matter of using your head and slipping a dollar or a pint in the right hand. I’m out Red Hook, pitching my tent, taking a bum or two off the streets, I know I gotta throw something to the Docks.

He looks my way.

– Least that’s how it was. Till the Docks up and went to Manhattan and ain’t come back not a one.

I drive, half listening with my half ear, thinking, figuring, looking for an angle that will send me home before I do something stupid. Stupider than usual.

He talks.

– Not that I give a damn. Bastards always had their fingers in one too many pies far as I’m concerned. And they got damn grabby with the ladies when they came around to see the show. A little touching ya got to expect, but Docks boys tended to ride their flippers a bit high up the thigh for my liking.

Vendetta folds her arms on the dash and rests her chin on them.

– Docks stink. All of them. Of tar. Think because a girl’s in show business she’s naturally a whore. Had to take the burlesque out of the act when we went out there. Would have raped me and Harm to death they’d seen that.

She puts her forehead down.

Stretch touches the back of her head.

– We’ll get her back, darlin’.

Her voice is muted by her arms.

– What they gonna do with her?

Stretch clacks his teeth.

– Gonna do nothin’ to her. Lay a hand on her, gonna find it’s a stump when I come through their turf.

I touch the smoke tucked behind my whole ear. My last smoke.

He shifts his ass and adjusts the pieces of 2?4 he dug out of the back of the van and put on the seat to use as a booster.

– Turf. They started that shit out here. First thing was, they sealed themselves up. Few years back, five or six, you wanted to get from Sheepshead Bay to Sunset Park, suddenly you had to circle through Dyker Heights. Then they started pushing out, clearing blocks for just themselves. Not a matter of talkin’ to the right fella to pass, just no damn passage at all. Try to go straight across Bensonhurst like you used to, a freakin’ boat comes cruising up and a bunch of guys with beards and fedoras come piling out, beat the crap out of you, toss you outside their turf. If you’re lucky. You’re not lucky, you never see the outside of Gravesend again.

I’ve got my fingers on that smoke, I start to tug it from behind my ear, stop, look at him.

– A boat?

He spreads his arms.

– Car. Bigass Caddies and Lincolns an’ suchlike. You know, Jew Canoes.

I put the cigarette in my mouth and put it to work and I get a little less stupid, for the moment.

They don’t go out on Friday nights. Chaim. Shiva. Trying to save the bodies of their friends from the fire. The lingo they were talking.

– Jesus, they’re Jews.

He scratches his chest.

– Well, that’s one way of putting it.

– Thing I can’t figure out, how a man comes all the way out here and doesn’t bring an extra pack of smokes.

– I was planning on going straight back over the bridge.

– Sure you don’t have a spare hiding somewhere?

– I had a spare it’d be sticking out of my face right now.

Vendetta points out the windshield.

– There. There.

We come forward from the back of the van, me crawling, Stretch walking.

I try to see something, but we’re on the far side of McDonald Avenue with all of Friends Field between us and Washington Cemetery.

– What?

She jabs her finger at the playground on the edge of the Field.

– In there. Someone was walking around in there.

– What about in the cemetery?

She points again.

– No, just there in the park. I can’t see shit in the cemetery.

I edge back and sit on the floor.

– This is bullshit.

Stretch comes back.

– Tellin’ you, they got to bury their dead within twenty-four hours. It’s like a rule they have.

Vendetta turns.

– Like not working on the Sabbath.

He kicks one of the pieces of wood littering the van.

– That was pure bullshit that was. Ain’t no confusion about that. Everyone knows they don’t do nothin’ from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. Don’t work, don’t drive, don’t answer the phone, don’t turn on a fuckin’ light. Only way anyone gets around anymore in Brooklyn is Friday night. Only time safe to go out and do some foraging. We couldn’t do the act at all anymore they didn’t lie low Friday night.

I pick up one of the wood scraps and pop my switchblade and start whittling.

– Based on the way they fucked your shit up, I’d say that rule’s become pretty fucking optional.