A Master Plan for Rescue (26 page)

The next day,
I found Albie in the sunless alley, surrounded by a half dozen sixth-grade boys who were watching him smoke as if he was a vaudeville act. I said I had something to tell him, and he dismissed the boys, saying that we had private business. They filed out, trailed by Elliott Marshman, who dragged the thick soles of his orthopedic shoes in case Albie decided to call him back.

As I explained the plan—the submarine, the refugees, Coney Island—the lit end of Albie’s Lucky Strike bounced in the dim light like a winter firefly. I gave him only the parts of Jakob’s story he needed to know, and told him nothing about the wheeze I’d heard behind the roof door. Albie’s father—the convert—had insisted he learn Yiddish as well as Hebrew. We made plans to start collecting poor box coats later that afternoon.

I was halfway home when I heard the wheeze again.

Or thought I heard it. For the first time since my eyes had gone bad, I couldn’t be certain of something I was hearing. It was possible it had been the bus wheezing up Broadway, or heat escaping through the subway grates, or a hundred other things. Since that afternoon on Jakob’s roof, I’d been listening for the wheeze, and I’d started to hear it everywhere.

I reeled around. But there was no one there.

At least, no one I recognized, no one close to me. Because there was never no one on a New York City street in the middle of the day. And with my eyes, twenty people I might have recognized could have been standing just beyond my three-foot zone, and I wouldn’t have known it.

A master plan for rescue dreamed up by a boy
, I thought.
Who had believed that was a good idea? A man who had tried to make a pigeon fly across the ocean to deliver a message to a dead girl?

A chill wind blew up the street, turning me cold. Cold as those refugees would be if their submarine was sunk by a battleship, if their inflatable boats were capsized by a coast guard cutter. If somebody with a wheeze had them sent back to Germany.

I felt the weight of those twenty-three lives settle on me. Lives that were depending on my plan. A plan that, perhaps, I’d dreamed up for my own reasons.

I took off, ran all the way back to Dyckman Street, and down into the basement of our building.

I tore through the shelves where everybody stored the things they couldn’t fit inside their apartments—glass ornaments and camping equipment and clothes that were wrong for the season we were in—until I found the shoebox my father had labeled
Tax Receipts
. There was so much duct tape wound around the top, I had to get a screwdriver from Mr. Puccini’s toolbox to cut through it.

After I did, after I’d taken off the top, I was looking down at my father’s gun.

He’d shown it to me more than a year ago. We’d been to see a Charlie Chan movie at the Alpine Theater—
Murder Over New York
—and on the way out, I’d asked him if he still had his gun from when he’d worked as bodyguard to the Duke’s illegal alcohol. I remember asking him if he’d ever shot anybody.

“I shot over a couple of people’s heads a few times,” he’d told me. “That was about the extent of it.”

I took my father’s gun out of the shoebox.

There were five bullets rolling around in the bottom of the box, and I loaded them into the gun. My father had taught me how the afternoon we’d gone to see
Murder Over New York
. I can’t say why. Maybe he thought it was a skill I could use.

I raised my arm and aimed the gun at the coal-burning furnace in the corner—the furnace that was breathing fire like a mechanical dragon, making a wheezing sound like a person with asthma. For a small gun, it felt heavy. No, not heavy, substantial. The feeling traveled up my wrist and into my body.

I made a firing noise with my mouth. Then I lowered my arm and dropped my father’s gun into my jacket pocket. My pockets were stretched out from me forgetting my gloves and the gun fit inside perfectly.

Looking back, I don’t believe I had any intention of firing the gun at anything more animate than that furnace. It is only that the reality of what Jakob and I were attempting had finally become clear to me, as if it had come and stood in my three-foot zone. And the weight of my father’s gun in my pocket made me feel safe.

I went upstairs to our apartment then and got Albie’s flying cap—the cap I’d forgotten to bring back to him today. I folded it in half and tucked it into the shoebox labeled
Tax Receipts
. Then I wound several layers of Mr. Puccini’s duct tape around the top of the box and put it back on the shelf.

I believed Albie had loaned the cap to me for luck, and now I wanted it someplace where nothing could get at it. If he asked me about it, I would make some excuse, tell him I forgot it.

I didn’t plan to remember it until those inflatable boats landed at Coney Island.

•   •   •

When I met Albie
on Vermilyea Street, I was pulling my old Radio Flyer wagon. I’d fitted the wooden slats into the sides, and then taped a sign to them that said
ALUMINUM FOR NATIONAL DEFENSE
. I’d also thrown in a couple of my mother’s old pots.

Albie asked why the sign and the pots, and I told him part of the plan was making sure nobody knew we were collecting poor box coats.

“Nobody like who?”

“Just nobody,” I said.

We were tossed out of the first church we went into—St. Jude’s—by a fat priest, after Albie strolled past the bowl of Holy Water as if it were a drinking fountain.

“Don’t you know how to make the sign of the cross?” I asked him.

“Why would I?”

“Wasn’t your father Catholic at one time?”

“Not since before I was born.”

The two of us stood in the wind on the corner of Nagle Avenue, while I made Albie practice the sign of the cross until he could perform it as haphazardly as anyone who’d been born to the faith. Then we headed over to Holy Trinity. As we were entering, Albie turned his face up to the weak November sun and asked me if he looked too Jewish to pull this off.

I recalled what Jakob had told me about the Wandering Jew exhibit, the hooked noses and thick lips made out of rubber. To me, Albie only looked like himself—a smallish boy with pale skin and violet half-moons beneath his eyes.

“You look fine,” I told him.

We started out by asking for the coats. Hiding our own jackets in the bushes, claiming to be coatless. We told the priests we had a sister at home who also needed a coat. They told us to have our sister come in and ask for herself.

After that first day, we realized it would take too long to collect twenty-three coats by asking. That’s when we began stealing them. We’d wait in the back until the priest disappeared into a confessional, then slip up the aisle to the poor box and rummage through it, tossing the stained shirts and moth-holed sweaters—all the clothes that smelled like other people’s closets—onto the floor, until we’d found every coat that was our size or smaller.

Sometimes whoever was confessing only had a few sins, and the priest came out before we were finished. Then we grabbed whatever coats we’d found and ran, the echoey sound of our footsteps bouncing around the church, disturbing the old ladies on the kneelers, their rosaries dangling from their fingers.

Because of my eyesight, because nothing was truly clear unless it was three feet away from me, I was always running into the unknown. This made everything feel hazardous. Still, I liked these flights from the dim churches into the clear November light, my arms full of coats, a cassocked priest nipping at my heels. I liked the companionable sound of Albie’s shoes keeping time with mine, the reassuring weight of my father’s gun in my pocket tugging on my shoulder.

At some point, we remembered we’d have to take the twenty-three refugees on the subway, so we also began stealing nickels out of the wooden offering boxes from the side altars. The boxes where people paid for the candles set before the statues of saints—Joseph, Mary, Francis of Assisi. When Albie asked me if we were allowed to help ourselves to the money from these boxes, I told him they were only another kind of poor box.

•   •   •

When we pulled
the Radio Flyer up to Good Shepherd, I sent Albie in alone. I couldn’t bring myself to step inside that ocean-y blue light, couldn’t make myself walk into the church I’d run out of only a few months before.

I waited outside with the wagon, praying Father Barry would not sense me there, the way he sensed any minor transgression—chewing gum, daydreaming—during a Catechism lesson. Albie was back out in less than a minute, his gloveless hands empty.

“That priest didn’t take his eyes off me for a second. It was like he knew what I was doing there. Like he could tell I wasn’t Catholic.”

“Not much happens in Good Shepherd Father Barry doesn’t know about.” I picked up the handle of the Radio Flyer.

Albie stepped in front of the wagon.

“There were coats in that poor box.”

“Forget them.”

I wheeled the Radio Flyer around him.

“We only need to distract that priest.”

“Let’s go to Blessed Sacrament.”

I began walking up Isham Street.

“You could go in and confess.”

I shook my head and kept walking, but I didn’t feel him following me. I turned around. Albie was standing on the sidewalk, half-turned toward Good Shepherd.

“What are you going to do?”

“The bowl of Holy Water in there? It’s very unstable.”

“Don’t,” I told him.

“It wouldn’t take much to knock it over.”

I pictured my mother walking into Good Shepherd for five o’clock Mass—less than an hour from now—and seeing that bowl of Holy Water smashed into a hundred pieces on the tiled floor. Imagined what terrible sign she’d take it for.

I turned the wagon around.

“All right,” I said. “But be quick about it. Because I’m going to make this short.”

The inside of Good Shepherd smelled the same as Father Barry’s suit the day they’d waked my father with an empty coffin, the same as my mother’s clothes smelled every day now. Like Mass incense. Like candy you believe will taste better than it does.

I dipped my fingers in the Holy Water and moved them to my forehead, heart, shoulders in the sign of the cross. Then I put them in my pocket and pressed them against the barrel of my father’s gun to keep them from recalling the rough feel of my mother’s mouth
.

Father Barry was standing in front of the confessional booths, as if he knew I’d be coming. He said my name, and then he clapped his hands one time, like that was all the applause I deserved.

I pointed to the confessional, and Father Barry nodded. He spun and went through the door, the hem of his cassock swirling around his ankles.

It was stuffy inside the confessional, the atmosphere full of other people’s sins. Father Barry’s hair shone white through the holes of the mesh screen that divided his side of the booth from mine.

I confessed to lying to my mother, and to not having attended P.S. 52 for forty-six consecutive days. Then I sat on the wooden bench and waited for Father Barry to ask me if I was sorry and tell me how many Hail Marys it would take for my sins to be absolved.

“And why did you not attend school for forty-six days?” Father Barry asked me.

His voice floated through the holes in the screen, clear and distinct. It was the voice he used when he wanted to accuse us of something—not contributing enough to the building fund, or eating meat on Friday. In his tone, which filled the stuffy atmosphere of the confessional, thickening the air, making it difficult to breathe, I heard that my mother had told him everything. Everything I had told her about my father not being dead, everything she hadn’t believed.

I gripped the edge of the wooden bench, my arms twitching with fury. First, my mother had given Father Barry all of my father’s clothes, let him send them to darkest Africa, then she had poured the story of what had really happened in the 42nd Street subway station into his hairy ears.

“I asked you a question,” Father Barry said. “Why you did not attend school for forty-six days?”

“I was looking for Nazis,” I told him.

“I should counsel you that lying to a priest is as great a sin as lying to God.”

“I am not lying.”

“And why were you looking for Nazis?”

“Because we’re at war with them.”

I heard rustling from Father Barry’s side of the confessional. “And that is the only reason?”

I was gripping the bench so tightly my arms were shaking.

“Or perhaps the reason has something to do with your father?”

All the holes in the mesh screen turned flesh-colored as Father Barry brought his face closer.

“You know that your father is dead, don’t you, Jack?”

There was a smooth layer of solicitousness floating in Father Barry’s undertone like oil, but beneath that hummed the pure pleasure the priest would take in telling my mother that he had been the one to make me see reason.

Alone in my side of the confessional, I shook my head.

“Say it, Jack. Say it instead of a Hail Mary.”

Though I tried to stop them, Father Barry’s words wormed their way inside my head. That thing he wanted me to say. That lie. It pounded and echoed, making pictures. The way the radio made pictures. Clear and perfect. My father arcing off the subway platform, over and over again. Each time Father Barry’s words echoed—
You know your father is dead—
a new picture appeared on top of the old one. My father falling. And then falling again. And again.

It didn’t seem my head could hold all these pictures. I was sure that any minute, the bones of my skull would blow apart.

“Say . . . I know my father is dead,” Father Barry repeated

My hands—out of my control now—flew to the mesh screen. The screen filled with the flesh color of Father Barry’s face. I slammed my fists against the flesh-colored holes, over and over, until the screen began to give, and then cut into my knuckles—a thin, sharp, satisfying pain. I only stopped when the light changed on the other side of the confessional, when it was clear that Father Barry had opened the door and fled.