Brotherly Love (29 page)

Peter holds on. "Well, he knows," he says.
"He knows what he gave you, he knows what you owe—and you
understand those are two different things, right?—and suddenly he
doesn’t treat you so well. Suddenly you’re somebody runs errands,
somebody he tells you where to be.

"And you do that shit, after all the guy lent
you money, but all the errands in the world don’t take cent one off
what you owe him. Running you around’s what he does, remind you
that the debt’s still there."

He lets go of Jimmy Measles, sorry for squeezing his
arm.

"Michael doesn’t like anybody that owes him
anything," he says. "He’s been like that since he was in
diapers."

The word diapers comes out accidentally, and hangs in
the air a moment, growing like some balloon stuck on a helium nozzle.
Jimmy Measles doesn’t seem to notice.

The smile again.

"All I’m saying, don’t get into him too
deep, Jimmy. You get in, be able to get out."

Peter walks out of the club an hour later, thinking
of diapers and his cousin. He does not see the two old Italians
sitting in a cloud of cigarette smoke in their Ford until he is close
enough, if it were not for the closed window, to touch them.

The one in the passenger seat watches him as he walks
past.

Peter passes the car, looking up the street; he feels
a cushion under his shoes, as if he were walking on a mattress. He
knows if he hears the car door open, he is ruined here on the
sidewalk, but there is no sound.

He puts himself in the old Italian’s place.

He is thinking nothing
good comes this easy.

* * *

I
n the morning, Peter
finds Jimmy Measles alone in the far corner of the club next to a
mound of wet, black carpet. The ceiling and roof are gone in this
part of the building, there is nothing overhead but clouds.

Jimmy has found a chair that has inexplicably
survived the fire untouched—the rest are in black piles all over
the club, indistinguishable now from tables and pieces of the walls
and ceiling and floor.

Peter smells the gasoline and imagines the path of
the fire. It seems to have begun in the basement, gone up the
staircase to the kitchen, then into the dining room and bar, looking
for a way out, and then finally followed the kitchen flue to the
roof.

Jimmy Measles is sitting in his slippers and robe,
wheezing with every breath, smoking a cigarette, a quart bottle of
peppermint schnapps between his legs. Fire inspectors—most of them
wearing masks against the smell—are picking through the place.
Outside, a small crowd is pressing into the restraining ropes the
fire department has strung across the front of the building. There
isn’t much to see, and the crowd is smaller now than it was earlier
in the morning; the firemen have told the television reporters there
are no bodies.

Which is not completely true.

The dogs are rolled inside two towels at the foot of
Jimmy Measles’s chair, one of them pressed against his slipper.
Jimmy’s eyes are bloodshot and watery.

"They should of let the dogs out," he says.

"Maybe they wouldn’t leave." Peter trying
to find something to save.

Jimmy Measles drinks from the bottle of schnapps then
leans forward and puts his hand across one of the blankets. "Why
would they burn up a couple little dogs?"

"If you want, I could take care of them now,"
Peter says. "You could go talk things over with Grace."

Jimmy Measles takes the atomizer out of his robe
pocket, moves the cigarette away from his lips long enough to use it.
"She’s asleep," he says. "Her mother called a
doctor, in two minutes he was over to the house and gave her
something that was in the Valium family."

Peter surveys the room, broken glass everywhere, the
smell of burned dogs and burned wood and gasoline. Something
sweet—Southern Comfort.

Looking to the front, he can see the fumes in the
light from the street. It seems to him that Jimmy Measles cared about
the dogs in a different way than he cared about the rest of the
place. The dogs were just dogs, they weren’t part of the show.

A policeman comes in, a saggy-faced man in a coat and
loafers, stepping over what was left of the front door. He hesitates
a moment, taking the room in, then makes his way to the back. "Mr.
Katz?" he says.

Jimmy Measles looks up, does not answer. "Mr.
Katz," the policeman says, "I wonder if you mind I ask you
a couple questions. "

Jimmy looks at himself and then at the ceiling. There
is a chandelier up there, hanging from its cords. He smiles in a
familiar way that isn’t a smile. The cop stays where he is, waiting
until Jimmy is ready.

"What I wanted to ask you," he says, "do
you know a reason somebody’d want to fuck with you like this?"

Jimmy looks into the barrel of the bottle. The cop
squats until he is sitting on his heels, putting himself in front of
Jimmy’s face. "What I mean is, could you have a problem with
the neighbors, or maybe you threw somebody out of here, they left mad
and come back?"

Jimmy bends into his lap and breathes from his
atomizer. He shakes his head.

"Were you experiencing business problems of
another kind?"

"Wait a minute," Peter says, and the cop
looks up at him, waiting. Peter speaks to Jimmy. "The next thing
he’s going to ask, are you insured."

The policeman comes up off his haunches slowly, as if
it hurts him to stand up. "I don’t remember asking you
nothing," he says.

"He’s lost his place," Peter says. "He
can’t tell you a thing sitting here in his slippers that he can’t
tell you the same thing later, when he’s had a chance to calm
down."

The policeman has another look at the room. "You
insured, Mr. Katz‘?" he says.

Jimmy doesn’t answer.

"I don’t mean to put myself in your business,"
Peter says to the policeman, "but he’s upset. He lost his
place and he lost his dogs . . ."

The policeman considers Jimmy a different way. "Is
that right, Mr. Katz?" he says. "You lost your dogs?"

The policeman notices the towels rolled up at Jimmy
Measles’s feet. "You know, there’s some people, Mr. Katz,
would burn up their own dogs."

Jimmy Measles gets out of the chair and heads for the
front door. He takes the bottle; he leaves the two rolled packages
there on the floor. At the doorway between the bar and the restaurant
he stops, dropping the cigarette on the floor and then carefully
grinding it out with his slipper. Then he goes outside.

The cop kicks at a piece of the ceiling, and
underneath is one of the small glass bowls Jimmy put on the tables.
The carnation inside it still looks as if it just came out of the
florist’s.

"Those dogs were really his pets?" the
policeman says to Peter.

"Yeah," Peter
says, "those were his pets."

* * *

T
he next time Peter sees
him, Jimmy Measles is standing on  the corner of Ninth and
Catherine in his underpants, soaking wet, swinging at a parking meter
with a softball bat. It is five-thirty in the afternoon, and his wife
is watching from the living room window.

What looks like half of South Philadelphia is in the
street with him, rooting him on.

As Peter comes through the crowd, Jimmy stops banging
the meter long enough to pick up his atomizer, which he has placed on
his front steps next to a fresh bottle of schnapps, and holds it in
his mouth while he pumps the trigger.

It reminds Peter somehow of the old Phillies, back
before the players used golf gloves, when they’d step out of the
batter’s box for a handful of dirt.

"Blood for blood," Jimmy Measles says to
the crowd, and moves back to the meter. "There’s going to be
Guinea blood on the streets."

The next swing he takes misses the parking meter—more
memories of the old Phillies—and he splays across the sidewalk. He
lies still, gathering his resources, and then, using the bat to lift
himself off the sidewalk, he gets back to his feet.

He sees Peter then. "Hey, Pally. Tell Michael
for me that we got something to do."

An announcement.

He tries another swing, but he is exhausted and the
bat hits the pole and falls out of his hands.

Peter says, "Jimmy, where’s your pants?"

"Blood for blood," he says. "We’re
gonna wash the streets with Guinea blood."

Peter picks up the bat, hands it to Jimmy Measles,
and steers him inside. Jimmy Measles steps in the glass from the
parking meter and limps to the step. He sits down, drinks from the
bottle of schnapps, and then touches his foot, which is bleeding. He
inspects the blood on the finger, and then holds it over his head for
everyone to see. "Blood for blood," he says, and the crowd
cheers.

Peter tries the door but she has it locked. In a
moment he hears her working the chain on the other side.

Jimmy Measles walks into his living room to polite
applause, trailing the bat, dirt and little rocks falling off his
back, and sits heavily in a black leather chair. Peter looks at his
wife.

"Guinea blood," he says again.

Peter sits down himself. "Jimmy, you don’t
mind, that’s the Italian Market outside."

"Blood for blood,"
he says, and then he smiles his worst smile and closes his eyes.

* * *

S
he asks him to help her
get Jimmy upstairs. "He’ll wake up if there isn’t a
television on," she says, "and he’s going to want his
pills."

Peter looks at Jimmy Measles, who is spreading out
over the couch like a stain, and considers carrying him upstairs.

"Pi1ls on a load like this?"

"He’ll be awake in half an hour," she
says. "The only thing that gets him back to sleep is his pills."

"Jimmy isn’t that strong," he says, "to
be taking pills and drinking the same time. He’s better off awake."

"He isn’t better off awake today," she
says. She stares at her husband, lying on the couch. "He was
over there," she says.

He looks at her, not understanding.

"When it happened."

It takes him a moment.

"He thought he heard the dogs," she says.

Peter pulls him by the wrists up off the couch. His
skin lets go of the leather an inch at a time, it reminds him of
peeling a Band Aid. He puts his head underneath Jimmy’s arm and
moves him across his shoulder, balancing the load, and then stands
up. Jimmy Measles smells like the fire. His skin is hot in back,
where it was pressed into the couch, and cold and damp against
Peter’s cheek.

Peter carries him up the stairs, feeling an
unfamiliar panic—something about the weight of the cold skin
pressing into his face.

She walks ahead of him and opens the bedroom door.
All the furniture upstairs is white. He takes Jimmy Measles to the
bed and bends until the weight rolls off him. He covers him with a
sheet, and he kicks it off.

Jimmy settles into his pillow and then slowly curls
away from the light, his hands buried between his legs. His wife
pulls the blinds and the room is dark. Peter has a sudden, transitory
thought that he and Grace have finished a bedtime story and the baby
has fallen asleep. She is careful closing the door, not to make any
noise.

"Can you stay a little while?" she says
downstairs.

He is halfway to the front door, she is in the
kitchen.

"These guys don’t want him," he says,
thinking she is afraid, "and if they did, they wouldn’t come
into his house." He sits down on the couch, brushing some of the
dirt onto the floor.

She comes out of the kitchen with two drinks. He
notices the ring Jimmy Measles gave her. There must have been a
scramble in the diamond mine the day they found the stone.

She sits so close to him that he can feel the heat
off her arms. Her hair is black, and she has pulled it away from her
face. He looks at his watch.

"Just a few minutes," she says, "to
make sure Jimmy doesn’t get up and go back outside with the bat."

They are on the couch twenty minutes when the noises
start upstairs. There is a bump and another bump, and then a bump
that shakes the ceiling. Jimmy begins to yell.

Peter sets his drink on
the floor and slowly stands up.

* * *

J
immy Measles is standing
on the edge of the bed when Peter opens the door. He holds out the
flat of his hand to warn him not to come any closer, as if it were a
suicide.

Peter says, "Jimmy, I refuse to talk you down
off a bed."

He dives from the bed to the floor then—dives
without arc, the way timid children dive into swimming pools, leaning
forward and down to meet the water—and lands on his stomach. The
clock falls off the night table. He lies still a minute, as if trying
to remember where he is.