Lush Life (44 page)

"You going to the thing?" Yolonda tilted her chin towards the tail of the procession.

"I'll be there." Matty looking at her: Don't break my balls.

"OK then."

All three watched Yolonda walk off, the music growing fainter as the procession, nearly a city block long, hooked a left at the first intersection.

"So," Matty said, "you heading home?"

"In a bit," Minette said. "Give him some room."

"Can I walk around a little?" Nina murmured to her mother.

Minette reflexively looked to Matty for the answer, Matty shrugging, why not.

"Don't go too far, and keep your phone on," Minette said as if Nina had already pulled something, "and don't start screening your calls."

Out on the street the band, led by Boulware and Cab Calloway, seemed to have lost a lot of its magic, the hundred and fifty or so mourners following them as they played "Old Ship of Zion," looking a little embarrassed now, a little shanghaied, the afternoon sky too light for their stubby cupped candles.

Unable to release himself from his outrage at Boulware, Eric paralleled the procession from across the street, riding the herd of crouched cameramen as they shot the show making its way down Suffolk.

But as the band unexpectedly swung into a wild, swirling klezmer tune, Boulware and the black kid began doing slow, graceful synchronized Tevye whirls as smoothly as if they had rehearsed the moves all last night, and the shooters began to cross over and go into an encircling whir-click tarantella of their own, leaving Eric exposed under the yellow and red metal awning of a bodega.

After wandering around the neighborhood all morning, Tristan was now squatting on his haunches beneath the side window of a pizzeria down the street from the Langenshield, his notebook propped open on his burning thighs. He thought he'd have laid down a lot more stuff by now, but that cornball marching band hanging out on the steps of that church up the block had been distracting. And when they started to play as they headed inside, turning the building into a boom box, then came back out still playing, there was nothing for him to do but wait until the parade was far enough away that he could hear his own beats again.

But as soon as he got something going, he became aware of a girl, his age about, standing a few feet away looking into the store window next to the pizzeria. Normally he just looked right through white kids, probably pretty much like they just looked right through him, but this one had her arm all bandaged up; either stitches or a tattoo under the wrapping was his guess.

Glancing at what he had written, he imagined he was the girl reading it.

Droppin jewels front of fools Every word like a school standin high, do or die, you cant never meet my eyey cause you know that III blow and your peoples gonna cry.

When he looked up again, she was gone.

As the procession continued south by southwest, Yolonda slalomed the line, the sidewalks, looking for a wrong face, but it was hopeless, just too many of the neighborhood lifers drawn to the parade, the cameras, the whole shooting match; hopeless.

At each intersection, sawhorse barricades steered them from Suffolk to Stanton to Norfolk to Delancey to Eldridge.

It took about half an hour for everyone to make their way from the Langenshield to 27 Eldridge, where waiting for them in the closed-off block between Delancey and Rivington were a parked sanitation truck, a fire truck, and a life-size straw-stuffed effigy of Ike Marcus lying on a forty-five-degree-angled wooden pallet like a homemade rocket positioned for takeoff. The face was painted papier-mache.

The musicians and mourners wended their way past the city rigs, the firemen and garbagemen impassively leaning against the cabs, then began to coil around the effigy until they had created a ring of people six candles deep, the mostly ethnic locals, many with small children straddling their necks, making up an irregular seventh ring, the traffic cops just now starting to catch up once the outer blockades were lifted an even more amorphous eighth.

And as they all stood there pondering Ikes likeness, the band continued to mix in klezmer with the jazz and spirituals-"Precious Memories," then "Kadsheynu," "Oh Happy Day," then 'Yossel, Yossel"-Boulware and whoever still had it in them singing and dancing, the news shooters getting in between paper Ike and the first ring of his mourners, dropping to the ground like snipers to get up in their faces.

Backstepping to the sidewalk for some air, Yolonda saw Lugo and Daley both smoking, Daley standing ankle-deep in whatever was left of the shrine.

"Wild, huh?" Lugo flicked his butt.

"Oh my God," Yolonda said, "they're so creative, these kids, you know?"

"I couldn't make a puppet if my life depended on it," Daley said.

"So how you guys doing?" Yolonda asked. "You shaking the tree for us?"

"Which one? Lugo said. "It's fucking Sherwood Forest out there."

An older Hispanic woman carrying groceries as she tried to muscle her way through the crowd and enter 27 Eldridge gave Yolonda and Quality of Life a withering once-over, muttered, "Noiv the cops are here," then slipped into the building.

Seated with Minette on the front steps of the now deserted Langenshield, Matty went through the motions of rattling off a cursory progress report, omitting, of course, the continuing press gag, the scuttled seventh-day recanvass, and the unreturned phone calls.

"So are you getting anywhere or not?" she said.

"Well, there's still a lot of stuff to be done. On a homicide there's always a lot of stuff to be done." Then, sick to death of his own boilerplate mantra, "You know I have to tell you, I was sitting there, you're very good with them, you know?"

"With who."

"Your family. I was sitting-"

"You think?"

With you it would've been different, was what he thought.

"Good with my family." Minette started tearing up. "Yesterday Billy asked me where Ike was. He couldn't remember what we did with the body. We. That his mother had him cremated and took the ashes."

"That's . . ." He didn't know how to finish.

"Half the time he can't move a muscle, the other half he's jumping out of his skin. I went out last night, I come back I can hear the music while I'm still three floors down in the elevator. I walk in, he's in the living room blasting some old R 'n' B, covered in sweat, dancing by himself. I'm, 'Billy, what are you doing?' He says, Tm watching Ike dance.'" Wiping her eyes. "My daughter, did you see her arm?"

"The sandwich accident."

"The sandwich accident," she muttered, offering no details.

I'm sorry.

"Do you have kids?"

"Two." Matty sank. "Boys."

"And they're good?"

He said, "Yeah," but Minette read the tell, searched his eyes for what he wasn't saying.

Three bosses, a division captain and two inspectors, fresh from monitoring the street procession, passed by, in full dress to show their solidarity with the family and the mourners. But when Matty half saluted in greeting, they responded with dead-eyed stares, as if this whole dog and pony show out here, as far as they were concerned, had been his idea.

"Is there a problem?" she asked as soon as they passed.

"Uniforms too tight," Matty said, and let it go at that.

The sky above Eldridge Street had morphed from robin's-egg blue to a huskier late-afternoon shade, and Boulware was still drawing most of the attention; dancing like Zorba, like a dervish, like some purple
-
robed gospel blaster in a storefront church, and good, Eric had to admit, maybe good enough, but who the hell knew these things.

And as they had onstage at the Langenshield, some tried to keep up with him but he was untouchable; Eric not even sure the guy was aware that his Song of Myself was being danced on someone's grave.

It seemed like the music would go on forever, but with the rush hour coming on fast, one of the ranking cops on the scene worked his way up into the front ring, said something to Cab Calloway, and a moment later Boulware was passed a baton, one end wrapped in flaming batten. And as the band played "Prayer for a Broken World," he first ceremoniously raised the light to whatever gods were supposed to be peering down, then lit the effigy; Ike instantly roaring up a fierce yellow-blue, as if finally expressing his outrage at what had befallen him, and despite all the calculated showboating of the afternoon, Eric was left openmouthed, a hand on his heart as this man-boy-golem was enveloped in burly rolls of flame that for a long moment seemed to accentuate the human outline before they finally began to destroy it.

And when the rising waves of heat slowly lifted one stuffed arm in its entirety as if in farewell, Eric found himself paralyzed at the sight of Billy Marcus breaking through from the back of the crowd and running towards his son as if to put out the flames that were killing him, then, like a dog chasing a bumblebee, suddenly reversing himself, nearly knocking over an elderly woman who had just unlocked the front door of her walk-up in order to rush past her into the darkness of the vestibule.

And through it all the locals continued to quietly watch: from the back of the crowd, from windows, from the top of stoops, most with that shy off-balance smile of bemusement, only one woman standing on her fire escape covering her mouth with both hands, eyes wide as if she had just gotten the news.

Ike was my brother. I wanted to be him. I still do.

That's all she wanted to say. Nina disgusted with herself, cracking up in front of his fruit-loop friends like that, but still, so sorry.

"Hey, no problem," Ike had said to her, "we'll just hook up next week . . ."

Fighting off the desire to just lie down on the sidewalk and close her eyes, she wandered into She'll Be Apples, a shop on Ludlow Street so small that there was hardly room in it for the two women working there and herself, the lone customer. Only one pipe-rack stand of clothes for sale, a few hats hanging from pegs high up on the exposed -
brick wall, and a scatter of amberish jewelry on a few side tables that to her eyes looked like something she could find in her grandmothers dresser. She was fascinated by the meagerness of the stock, how someone could just toss a few articles around a room so tiny and call it a store. The women were big too, six-footers speaking to each other with an English accent that wasn't exactly an English accent. She began to sift through the clothes on the pipe rack, a seemingly random collection of silk-screened wifebeaters, polyester mens shirts with dagger collars, hippie peasant blouses, and denim micro-skirts, until she came to an itchy-looking red-brown herringbone riding jacket, nothing interesting about it except that it fit, but when, in the absence of mirrors, she half twisted to check the back, she was startled to see a titanic hole cut out from the nape to the tailbone, and spanning both shoulder blades, a perfect circle of nothing, a whimsy of the designer, but the unexpectedness of it shook Nina to the core, almost scared her, and it became the most excitingly beautiful thing she'd ever seen; making this shop, this street, this neighborhood, the most exotic land; and when one of the six-foot-tall women said, "Oh, darlin', it's you," in her English-not-English accent, Nina started to cry.

On Eldridge, as the flames finally died out, just a few wisps of straw doing lazy dips and rolls before settling into the street, the Community Affairs officer finally nodded to his uniforms: Herd 'em out.

But no one seemed willing to leave the scene, the musicians slowly removing their mouthpieces, the mourners hugging and talking, Cab Calloway circulating to hand out his business card.

The firemen started to move into position, sauntering over to the smoldering pyre.

"Folks." The Community Affairs officer dipping into clusters of people now, gently touching shoulders here and there, as if to tell the guests that dinner was being served..

And as the crowd continued to linger, to ignore the cops, the firemen, to ignore the city itself hammering its horns on the choked side streets, the Community Affairs officer resorted to a PA speaker: "People, all due respect. It s time to take this somewheres else."

The firemen allowed some water to pulse through their hose, splash noisily at their feet.

Slipping their work gloves on, the garbagemen began lurching upright from the side of the truck.

But still, hardly anyone left.

As the last of the cameras were being stowed back into the satellite trucks and as the water pressure in the firehouse increased, Boulware, a little wild-eyed now, began to corner his friends and make hasty plans to reconvene at a bar, then announced it out loud, "Going to Cry!" and Eric, watching it all from a stoop, at last felt something akin to compassion for the guy. Over the next few months it would probably be easier for him to get laid around here, he'd take a few more drinks on the house, maybe land a new not-very-good agent, but nothing of consequence would really change and he would spend year after year chasing that flaming straw as it took off into the blue with all his big plans. Basically what Boulware could look forward to, Eric knew, was a long -
term bout of depression and a steadily mounting sense of loss, not for his dead friend here but for this afternoon, the last best day of his life.