Fresh Kills (15 page)

When I saw him, wearing black jeans and a green T-shirt, completely involved in a complicated method of licking the ice cream cone, oblivious to anything else, I felt really pissed off – mostly because I'd been so scared.

“Hey, Artie.”

“What the hell happened to you?”

He looked at me worriedly. “I'm fine. Don't be mad. Please. Here, you can have the rest.” He held out the cone. “Come on, Artie. Take a bite. It's really good.”

“No thanks.” I got out my keys, went through the door, Billy following me, picked up mail from my box and then got into the elevator and went upstairs.

“Artie?”

By the time we were in my loft, I had cooled off.

“Try it,” he said, holding out the ice cream again like an offering.

I ate some ice cream.

“Good, right?”

“Yeah.”

“How good?”

“It's pretty good.”

“You have a green mustache.”

I wiped my mouth.

“You're OK?” Billy asked.

“You asked me not to go out without telling you, so could you do me a favor in future and tell me where you're going and when?”

“I promise. But you could always just call me.”

“What on?”

“I have a phone. I'll give you the number,” Billy said. “I thought I gave you the number.

“They let you have a phone in Florida?'

“What is this, a police interrogation?” he said, but he laughed nervously. “Come on, Artie. It's funny.”

“Yeah yeah.”

“When I was coming up here, they let me have a phone so they could find me,” said Billy. “I mean so they could keep in touch. Come on, please, please don't be mad. Artie? I'll make you lunch. Hey, I'll share a cigarette with you. You want to watch a game?”

“Maybe.”

“Artie?”

“What?”

“It makes me scared when you get nervous about me. I mean, there was the garbage at my house and stuff, is everything OK? Is someone going to hurt me?”

“No,” I said. “No one's going to hurt you. How about we watch the game?”

“You'll watch with me?”

“Sure.”

He turned on the TV, then threw himself on my couch, and continued eating his way through the ice cream and the sugar cone and I thought to myself: get over it. I pushed Billy's feet to one side of the couch and sat down. The phone rang.

“You found him?” It was Tolya.

“Yeah.”

“So if he wants to go out for ice cream you let him go,” Tolya said. “You can't stand guard over him his whole life, Artemy, are you listening to me? I know about this stuff. I have two girls. I spent my life watching over them, then I had to let go. It was you who told me I had to let go of Valentina. You have to do that. I met Billy. You told me he's fine, then he's fine.”

“You liked him?”

“Yes. Also, Luda is in love with him. He's very nice with this little girl, very sweet. This makes my Valentina happy. Also, I'm calling so you'll come tonight to Luda's birthday party.”

“Sure,” I said. “Where?”

“I buy entire toy store for one night for little Luda,” said Tolya. “Is called slumber party.”

“What time?”

“Six, seven. Billy of course comes also. Party for kids, OK, then we go to East Hampton, for vacation. Come with us. Big house I rent for summer, ocean in front, pool, tennis court, butterfly trees. You ever see butterfly trees?”

“I think Billy's probably too old for a girls' party at a toy store.”

“So next week, I rent Madison Square so he can play basketball, for now he comes to Luda's party. I see them together, Artyom, they are like brother and sister, both children with sad times.”

For once, though I'd pretty much stopped paying attention, Tolya's crazy English got to me.

“Speak to me in English. Or Russian. But for chrissake cut the crap,” I said. “Do me a favor. My head hurts.”

“So take an aspirin,” Tolya said. “See you later.”

“Yeah, I'll think about it.”

“You took care of something on Staten Island? Something that upset you?” said Tolya. “You reported in to Sonny Lippert like a good boy?” There was no love lost between Tolya and Sonny Lippert.

“I called Sonny. I did what I had to. I saw the woman on Staten Island whose name, you'll love this, is Gorbachev. Fucking Russians.”

“Like us?” He grinned. “Oh, I forgot, you're an American. God bless America,” Tolya said and started to sing, then switched to the “Internationale”. He had a terrific voice and though I wouldn't have admitted it to anyone on earth, it made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

“Is there anything on Staten Island except garbage?” Tolya asked.

“Fucking beats me.”

Later on, a smear of green ice cream still on his mouth, and stretched out on the couch in my loft, Billy watched the opening of the Yankees game, sipped at a can of Coke and looked about as content as a kid could look.

I went into my bedroom to change my clothes and put on the radio. Along with the weather and stock market report, there was news about some homeless guy attacked over on Mott Street. It only caught my attention because Mott was a few blocks from me.

In Chinatown, the streets were always jammed. People bought bok choy and lychees and haggled over fake Vuitton bags and Prada wallets. Among the crowd and the hagglers, it
was easy to miss a homeless guy lying on the sidewalk, no one noticed he was bleeding. Mostly people picked their way around the homeless, now there were so many of them on the streets again. Eventually, a cop noticed the guy.

I listened to the rest of the news, went to the closet where I still kept a few things, found some clean chinos and a new black polo shirt I'd picked up on sale, and put them on.

While I was changing, I noticed that an old denim jacket of mine had slipped off the hanger onto the floor. I hadn't worn that crummy jacket in years. I hung it back up.

“Hey.” Billy smiled up from the couch.

It was the same seductive smile my father had always used when he wanted something, wanted me to work harder in school, wanted my mother not to worry if he took me away fishing for a weekend; probably it was the same smile he used as a KGB guy on those occasions when smiling got results. I knew I had it, too, and I didn't like it about myself much; not so much the smile, but the ability to make people talk. It seemed like a kind of con, ingratiating, disingenuous, cunning.

But my father was dead and my mother could no longer speak. She had talked plenty when we were still in the USSR. She got in trouble for telling the truth about the system, and my father lost his job because of her being a noisy Jew. But now in the nursing home in Haifa, she was so deep in the fog of Alzheimer's that no one could reach her at all. I had gone over to see her after I got married. Maxine wanted to come but I could see how nervous she got every time there was a report of a suicide bombing on TV. I went by myself.

In a chair by a window, my mother sat. I leaned down close to her to show her my wedding pictures.

Ma?

There was no response. All that was there was the form of a woman who resembled my mother sitting in a low armchair by
a window. Now, I sat on the edge of the couch and ruffled Billy's hair.

“Wow.” Billy was watching clips from an old Yankees-Red Sox game. “That pitch was like so insanely crazy.”

“You can't say that about the Sox. They're the enemy. Didn't I teach you anything?”

“Why?”

“History,” I said.

“That's not fair,” he said with a kid's sense of the rightness of things. “They did it good, isn't it fair to say it was good?”

“You want to be a real New Yorker, you have to harbor a grudge against the Red Sox,” I said. “That's how it is.”

He looked confused.

“I was joking,” I said. “Sort of.”

“They teach us not to get mad,” said Billy earnestly. “They teach us to be rational. I like it, being rational. I do. One of my therapists told me, you feel upset or something, talk to yourself. It's like intelligent people can make themselves better.”

“How many therapists do you have?”

“Never mind, Artie. Just come and watch the game. It's just starting.”

“Who's playing today?”

“Yanks and Orioles,” he said.

“I'm sorry about the fishing, but we'll go tomorrow for sure.”

“How was Staten Island?”

“Weird.”

“Could we fish there?” Excited, Billly bent one arm, miming the way he held his fishing pole.

“Sure.”

“If you have a case to work on there I could help you.”

“You want me to be straight with you?”

Billy nodded.

“I can't ever take you along on cases.”

“I see.”

“I'm sorry.”

“If you have to go back to Staten Island, I could always like wait in the car,” Billy said. “I can go with you and wait or you could leave me at some diner or something. Then we'd go fishing. Can I use your computer? I want to look up places to fish there just in case you have to go again. Artie?”

“Go use the computer if you want.”'

He scrambled up to a sitting position, crossed his legs, leaned forward, excited.

“I have a better idea,” said Billy. “I just had a wild idea, like could we maybe catch the last few innings of the game? We could get the subway. What do you think? Remember how you took me after 9/11 to the stadium and got me the Yanks jacket, and everyone was singing?”

“You remember?”

“Course I remember,” Billy said. “I remember everything we ever did together because they were the best times in my whole entire life.”

“I promised Tolya Sverdloff we'd go to a birthday party later for Luda, the Russian kid. We could probably go to the game and get something to eat after and still make the party.”

“Please,” Billy said. “Please please please please.”

“OK, OK.”

“You know, I was thinking they should keep Luda in America.”

“Why's that?”

“'Cause she's so full of rage,” he said. “Maybe over here in America someone can help her.”

“I don't understand exactly.”

“I mean, those little kids like Luda who are orphans in Russia, they live a horrible life, they're orphans, no one gives
a shit or anything, and there's terrorists everywhere,” said Billy. “Luda told me people take children hostage and kill them. Everything they see is bad and I bet those kids are getting ready for some kind of revenge the rest of their lives.”

“When did you get so smart?” I said.

“Yeah, you think?” Billy was beaming. “Do you ever feel like. . . never mind.”

“What?”

“Do you ever feel I'm your own kid?”

“Sure I do. Let's get ready or we'll miss the game.”

“Honest?'

“Yeah, you know that.”

I went to the kitchen where I kept spare keys in a jar. I gave them to Billy.

“This way you don't have to hang around downstairs waiting for me again. Just in case.”

“Thanks,” Billy said, beaming. “For like trusting me,” he added, putting the keys in his pocket. “I'm glad we're here. I don't mind one bit that Maxine didn't want me at your other apartment. I like this better.”

The loft was a mess. Scaffolding was up near one of the big industrial windows. The walls needed painting. I had moved most of my things and some of my furniture to our apartment, Maxine's and mine, and the loft looked bare. My plan had been to renovate, first for Maxine and the girls and me. When I realized she was too happy in the apartment near the river ever to leave, I figured I could rent out the loft and make some dough. I told myself I planned to rent it out.

On his way to the bedroom, Billy turned and said, “This is your real place, isn't it?”

He knew me. The way some kids do, Billy instinctively got how I felt. For now, I didn't want to think about Maxine coming home and me taking Billy back to his parents who
wouldn't know what the hell to do with him. I didn't want him going back to Florida. I resisted thinking about any of it. Something would work out.

I switched off the TV. I went to my bedroom to get some money from a stash I kept in the closet. From the doorway, I saw Billy. His back was to me. He was standing in front of my open closet, looking at himself in the mirror that hung on the door. I could see him reflected in it. He was wearing my old jacket, the one that had fallen off the hanger.

The homeless guy who got beat up on the sidewalk in Chinatown died that afternoon while we were at the Stadium cheering for the Yankees who wiped out the Orioles 12–3.

We ate hot dogs heaped with sauerkraut, drenched in mustard and ketchup and Billy put mayo on his, too, until we felt like bursting. Then we had Cracker Jacks. We joined in all the yelling and cheering with the family next to us. There were five kids, four of them girls, decked to the nines in Yankees gear. One of them was around Billy's age and I noticed they spent a lot of time laughing together.

The sky was murky, but no one cared so long as it didn't pour, and everyone was lit up because the Yanks were finally doing something right, so we yelled some more and clapped until we were hoarse and our hands hurt.

“Artie, look at the woman selling cotton candy, she has like a Louis Vuitton do-rag on her head, that is so New York.” He nudged me. “God, I'm happy to be home.”

“I see Florida didn't exactly crush your New York attitude.”

“If you had a mom with an entire closet of Louis Vuitton everything, including a dog carrier when we don't have a dog, you'd spot all of it. I could be a designer birdwatcher, like one of those people who hang around the park with little books looking for different species. Weird, right? I can do Vuitton,
Armani, Chanel. My mom so like talks about it all the time. God, look, did you see Derek catch that?” He stood up in his seat.