Motherless Brooklyn (13 page)

“It’s not that I only like women with large breasts,” he told me once, years later, long after he’d traded the Court Street girls for his strange, chilly marriage. We were walking down Atlantic Avenue together, I think, and a woman passing had caused his head to turn. I’d jerked my head too, of course, my actions as exaggerated and secondhand as a marionette’s. “That’s a very common misunderstanding,” he said, as if he were an idol and I his public, a mass audience devoted to puzzling him out. “Thing is, for me a woman has to have a certain amount of
muffling
, you know what I mean? Something between you, in the way of insulation. Otherwise, you’re right up against her naked soul.”

Wheels within wheels
was another of Minna’s phrases, used exclusively to sneer at our notions of coincidence or conspiracy. If we Boys ever dabbled in astonishment at, say, his running into three girls he knew from high school in a row on Court Street, two of whom he’d dated behind each other’s backs, he’d bug his eyes and intone,
wheels within wheels
. No Met had ever pitched a no-hitter, but Tom Seaver and Nolan Ryan both pitched them after being traded away
—wheels within wheels
. The barber, the cheese man, and the bookie were all named Carmine—oh yeah,
wheels within wheels
, big time. You’re onto something there, Sherlock.

By implication we orphans were idiots of connectivity, overly impressed by any trace of the familial in the world. We should doubt ourselves any time we imagined a network in operation. We should leave that stuff to Minna. Just as he knew the identity of our parents but would never reveal it to us, only Fran Minna was authorized to speculate on the secret systems that ran Court Street or the world. If we dared chime in, we’d surely only discovered more
wheels within wheels
. Business as usual. The regular fucking world—get used to it.

One day in April, five months after that Christmas meal, Minna drove up with all his windows thoroughly smashed, the van transformed into a blinding crystalline sculpture, a mirrorball on wheels, reflecting the sun. It was plainly the work of a man with a hammer or crowbar and no fear of interruption. Minna appeared not to have noticed; he ferried us out to a job without mentioning it. On our way back to the Home, as we rumbled over the cobblestones of Hoyt Street, Tony nodded at the windshield, which sagged in its frame like a beaded curtain, and said, “So what happened?”

“What happened to what?” It was a Minna game, forcing us to be literal when we’d been trained by him to talk in glances, in three-corner shots.

“Somebody fucked up your van.”

Minna shrugged, excessively casual. “I parked it on that block of Pacific Street.”

We didn’t know what he was talking about.

“These guys around that block had this thing about how I was uglifying the neighborhood.” A few weeks after Gilbert’s paint job the van had been covered again with graffiti, vast filled-in outlines of incoherent ballooning font and an overlay of stringy tags. Something made Minna’s van a born target, the flat battered sides like a windowless subway car, a homely public surface crying for spray paint where both private cars and bigger, glossier commercial trucks were inviolate. “They told me not to park it around there anymore. Then after I did it a couple of times more, they told me a different way.”

Minna lifted both hands from the wheel to gesture his indifference. We weren’t totally convinced.

“Someone’s sending a message,” said Tony.

“What’s that?” said Minna.

“I just said it’s a message,” said Tony. I knew he wanted to ask about Matricardi and Rockaforte. Were they involved? Couldn’t they protect Minna from having his windows smashed? We all wanted to ask about them and never would, unless Tony did it first.

“Yeah, but what are you trying to say?” said Minna.

“Fuckitmessage,”
I suggested impulsively.

“You know what I mean,” said Tony defiantly, ignoring me.

“Yeah, maybe,” said Minna. “But put it in your own words.” I could feel his anger unfolding, smooth as a fresh deck of cards.

“Tellmetofuckitall!”
I was like a toddler devising a tantrum to keep his parents from fighting.

But Minna wasnȉt distractable. “Quiet, Freakshow,” he said, never taking his eyes from Tony. “Tell me what you said,” he told Tony again.

“Nothing,” said Tony. “Damn.” He was backpedaling.

Minna pulled the van to the curb at a fire hydrant on the corner of
Bergen and Hoyt. Outside, a couple of black men sat on a stoop, drinking from a bag. They squinted at us.

“Tell me what you said,” Minna insisted.

He and Tony stared at one another, and the rest of us melted back. I swallowed away a few variations.

“Just, you know, somebody’s sending you a message.” Tony smirked.

This clearly infuriated Minna. He and Tony suddenly spoke a private language in which
message
signified heavily. “You think you know a thing,” he said.

“All I’m saying is I can see what they did to your truck, Frank.” Tony scuffed his feet in the layer of tiny cubes of safety glass that had peeled away from the limp window and lay scattered on the floor of the van.

“That’s not all you said, Dickweed.”

That was the first I heard Minna use the term that would become lodged thereafter in my uppermost tic-echelon:
dickweed
. I didn’t know whether he borrowed the nickname or invented it himself on the spot.

What it meant to me I still can’t say. Perhaps it was inscribed in my vocabulary, though, by the trauma of that day: Our little organization was losing its innocence, although I couldn’t have explained how or why.

“I can’t help what I see,” said Tony. “Somebody put a hit on your windows.”

“Think you’re a regular little wiseguy, don’t you?”

Tony stared at him.

“You want to be Scarface?”

Tony didn’t give his answer, but we knew what it was.
Scarface
had opened a month before, and Al Pacino was ascendant, a personal colossus astride Tony’s world, blocking out the sky.

“See, the thing about Scarface,” said Minna, “is before he got to be
Scarface he was
Scabface
. Nobody ever considers that. You have to want to be Scabface first.”

For a second I thought Minna was going to hit Tony, damage his face to make the point. Tony seemed to be waiting for it too. Then Minna’s fury leaked away.

“Out,” he said. He waved his hand, a Caesar gesturing to the heavens through the dented roof of his refitted postal van.

“What?” said Tony. “Right here?”

“Out,” he said again, equably. “Walk home, you muffin asses.” We sat gaping, though his meaning was clear enough. We weren’t more than five or six blocks from the Home anyway. But we hadn’t been paid, hadn’t gone for beers or slices or a bag of hot, clingy zeppole. I could taste the disappointment—the flavor of powdered sugar’s absence. Tony slid open the door, dislodging more glass, and we obediently filed out of the van and onto the sidewalk, into the day’s glare, the suddenly formless afternoon.

Minna drove off, leaving us there to bob together awkwardly before the drinkers on the stoop. They shook their heads at us, stupid-looking white boys a block from the projects. But we were in no danger there, nor were we dangerous ourselves. There was something so primally humiliating in our ejection that Hoyt Street itself seemed to ridicule us, humble row of brownstones, sleeping bodega. We were inexcusable to ourselves. Others clotted street corners, not us, not anymore. We rode with Minna. The effect was deliberate: Minna knew the value of the gift he’d withdrawn.

“Muffin ass,”
I said forcefully, measuring the shape of the words in my mouth, auditioning them for tic-richness. Then I sneezed, induced by the sunlight.

Gilbert and Danny looked at me with disgust, Tony with something worse.

“Shut up,” he said. There was cold fury in his teeth-clenched smile.

“Tellmetodoit, muffinass,” I croaked.

“Be quiet now,” warned Tony. He plucked a piece of wood from the gutter and took a step toward me.

Gilbert and Danny drifted away from us warily. I would have followed them, but Tony had me cornered against a parked car. The men on the stoop stretched back on their elbows, slurped their malt liquor thoughtfully.

“Dickweed,”
I said. I tried to mask it in another sneeze, which made something in my neck pop. I twitched and spoke again.
“Dickyweed! Dicketywood!”
I was trapped in a loop of self, one already too familiar, that of refining a verbal tic to free myself from its grip (not yet knowing how tenacious would be the grip of those particular syllables). Certainly I didn’t mean to be replying to Tony. Yet
dickweed
was the name Minna had called him, and I was throwing it in his face.

Tony held the stick he’d found, a discarded scrap of lath with clumps of plaster stuck to it. I stared, anticipating my own pain as I’d anticipated Tony’s, at Minna’s hand, a minute before. Instead Tony moved close, stick at his side, and grabbed my collar.

“Open your mouth again,” he said.

“Restrictaweed, detectorwood, vindictaphone,” said I, prisoner of my syndrome. I grabbed Tony back, my hands exploring his collar, fingers running inside it like an anxious, fumbling lover.

Gilbert and Danny had started up Hoyt Street, in the direction of the Home. “C’mon, Tony,” said Gilbert, tilting his head. Tony ignored them. He scraped his stick in the gutter, and came up with a smear of dog shit, mustard-yellow and pungent.

“Open,” he said.

Now Gilbert and Danny were just slinking away, heads bowed. The street was brightly, absurdly empty. Nobody but the black men on the stoop, impassive witnesses. I jerked my head as Tony jabbed with his stick—tic as evasive maneuver—and he only managed to paint my cheek. I could smell it, though, powdered sugar’s opposite made tangible, married to my face.

“Stickmebailey!”
I shouted. Falling back against the car behind me, I
turned my head again, and again, twitching away, enshrining the moment in ticceography. The stain followed me, adamant, on fire. Or maybe it was my cheek that was on fire.

Our witnesses crinkled their paper bag, offered ruminative sighs.

Tony dropped his stick and turned from me. He’d disgusted himself, couldn’t meet my eye. About to speak, he thought better of it, instead jogged to catch Gilbert and Danny as they shrugged away up Hoyt Street, leaving the scene.

We didn’t see Minna again until five weeks later, Sunday morning at the Home’s yard, late May. He had his brother Gerard with him; it was the second time we’d ever laid eyes on him.

None of us had seen Frank in the intervening weeks, though I know that the others, like myself, had each wandered down Court Street, nosed at a few of his usual haunts, the barbershop, the beverage outlet, the arcade. He wasn’t in them. It meant nothing, it meant everything. He might never reappear, but if he turned up and didn’t speak of it we wouldn’t think twice.
We
didn’t speak of it to one another, but a pensiveness hung over us, tinged with orphan’s melancholy, our resignation to permanent injury. A part of each of us still stood astonished on the corner of Hoyt and Bergen, where we’d been ejected from Minna’s van, where we’d fallen when our inadequate wings melted in the sun.