Bronx Noir

He knew that when he died he would meet an army of demons who would make him pay for his sins. He was not afraid, but still he was not ready.

He rode his bicycle back to his apartment, went upstairs, and stood in the hallway outside his door for ten minutes, listening, waiting. When he finally went in everything was as he had left it. He took only the suitcase, and when he got back downstairs his bicycle was gone and so he walked with the suitcase to the whore’s apartment. He called from the pay phone and she buzzed him in. When he got upstairs he gave her three hundred dollars and she closed the door behind him.

In the morning he washed himself, wet his hair and combed it back, used her razor to shave his face. He left her naked and curled and sleeping, felt bad for her though he could not say why. He left her an extra hundred dollars, then went to the diner by the college next to the subway station and drank tea and waited.

He still had the professor’s brochures in his pocket, along with a map that he had torn from the whore’s telephone book. Around noon he walked onto campus, past the security booth and parking gate, through the roaming clusters of students. He headed into the building, up the stairs, knocked on the professor’s door.

The professor answered and said, “Hello.” An awkward smile. “I didn’t order.”

“I know.” His suitcase in one hand, brochures in the other, he said, “I had some questions about these classes. Could I ask you?”

The professor paused, looked at his watch. “Sure. I have a few minutes. Come in.”

The professor was bigger than he had thought. His pants fit him so loosely he needed to pull the belt in as tight as he could. The shoes were at least a size too big, as were his shirt and undershirt. The blazer was big enough to cover him so he did not look saggy and suspicious. All over he could smell the professor’s cologne, but there was nothing he could do about that right now.

He had left the empty suitcase in the office, had moved the money into the professor’s book bag and another bag he had found in his desk drawer. Close to the train station he found a barbershop where he pointed at a picture on the wall and the barber cut his hair down close, then closer, so when he was finished he looked like a teenager again. Inside the station he looked around and did not know where he would go. He looked at the professor’s watch on his wrist, then walked through the massive corridors of the station. With the professor’s glasses he saw things with a new clarity. He got his shoes shined, then stopped at a rack with postcards of New York’s wondrous sites: the big famous buildings, the pretty parks and rich museums, the baseball stadium with the crossed N and Y emblazoned in white over the field. He took a card out of the rack and gave the man at the counter a dollar.

A young Chinese couple helped him figure out the schedule. He paid for his ticket in cash, pulled the bills from the professor’s wallet. He would hold onto the IDs just in case he needed them, until he felt it was safe to be no one again.

On the train he kept both bags at his feet. There were mostly old white people around him, some in suits, some dressed for a day of leisure. No one looked at him or bothered him. The train car was air-conditioned and very cold. The conductor checked his ticket and nodded and then the train was rolling. He pulled the postcard from his blazer pocket and stared at the green field, trying to imagine the next mirage of his life, until they were out of the tunnel and barreling beyond the city.

HEY, GIRLIE

BY JOANNE DOBSON

Sedgwick Avenue

Hey, girlie,” the voice rasped down at me from the fourth-floor window. “I want you should get me a coconut cake over by Phillips the baker. Make sure it got a nice red cherry in the middle. And don’t smoosh it on the way home like you do the bread.”

A coconut cake? Holy crap—Mrs. Blaustein must be in the money. It was usually a nineteen-cent loaf of Wonder Bread with her. The quarter’d come spinning down from the fourth floor, and I’d catch it in my skirt before it hit the sidewalk. Magic: money out of thin air. All I’d have to do was run the bread from the grocer at the corner of Kingsbridge up to 4-C, two blocks round trip and four flights of stairs. I got a nickel, but she always wanted the penny back.

Everyone knew Mrs. Blaustein took care of a crazy lady who never came out of the apartment. Katy-Ann Cooper said she was a maniac killer, the crazy lady, and that’s why she wouldn’t show her face. But my mother said Katy- Ann was full of shit—excuse her Irish—Miss Cohen was just a poor unfortunate who had gotten in the way of history. My mother said things like that. She liked to read, and not just the racing forms like my father, but books from Kingsbridge library. Me too. The day I bought the coconut cake I’d just come back from the library with a stack of books up to my chin, and I knew I’d finish them all by Sunday night. I flopped right down on the green couch and started The Yearling, but my mother said, “Go out and play, for Christ’s sake—it’s such a nice day. You can read anytime.”

So, I was the only one of us kids who ever saw the crazy lady. It happened this way. Mrs. Blaustein made a toss over the window guard, and I made my usual brilliant catch. This time it was a dollar bill wrapped tight around a half-dollar and held together with a big fat paperclip. I bought the best cake at the baker. It cost the whole dollar-fifty. Lemon-filled. Spinkled all over with fluffy coconut. A perfect red circle of a cherry. I carried it careful in its white cardboard box like it was the coronation crown jewels, down Kingsbridge, past the Veteran’s Hospital, round the corner onto Sedgwick, my braids for once hanging nice and straight over my shoulders like the good Lord intended instead of slapping my face like when I run with the bread.

I was younger then. Ten. I thought I was tough, but I didn’t know nothing. Anything. That was two years ago, there was a new queen in England, Maxie Isaacs next door died of polio, and Mr. and Mrs. Rosenberg went to the electric chair. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, that is. Not the Rosenbergs from 5-F. My mother said the judge should burn in hell for that verdict. My father said, “Now, Tessie…”

We didn’t go to church anymore, not since Father O’Mally said little Maxie Isaacs was a baby Christ-killer and that he would burn in hell instead of going to heaven like a good little Catholic child. We’re big on hell in my neighborhood. So I went to P.S. 86 instead of Our Lady of Angels, and I didn’t have to wear a uniform, and Mrs. Marrs didn’t yank my braids when she caught me hiding a book on my lap during Math.

I walked that coconut cake into the courtyard, past the stoop, up the three steps. The lobby smelled like apple kugel, the second-floor landing like Mrs. Costigan’s cats, the third like sauerkraut with weird Jewish stuff in it, caraway seed, maybe. A radio was playing piano music, but suddenly it stopped with a crash that almost made me drop the cake, then started again from the beginning. Not the radio, then. A real piano. I had just rounded the fourth-floor stairs when Mr. Schmidt came out of 4-C, Mrs. Blaustein’s apartment, with his big toolbox. “Vot you