Before My Life Began (11 page)

It was still light out when we'd used up all our slugs, so we decided to walk off our eating by heading back along Flatbush Avenue and cutting left at Parkside. It surprised me that Tony could talk so easily about trusting me, about how I was the only guy at school he considered a friend. During recess sometimes he would get one of the Italian girls up against a car fender outside the schoolyard and everybody would yell to come and see, that Tony Cremona had his finger right up somebody's pussy, and we would all come running. It would be true that he was fingering one of the tough Italian girls, but Tony confessed that he only did it because he felt he had to, because it was the kind of thing his brothers bragged about having done when they were his age and that if they didn't hear he was doing it too they would knock him around even more. In the classroom he was quiet in the same way I was, and even though he didn't get the best grades, you could tell from the brightness of his eyes—the way he listened to things—that he was a lot smarter than he let on.

When we got to the corner of Nostrand and Linden—we stopped at his house to pick up my drawing paper—we separated. I told Tony that I'd hide the money and tell my father I found the paper next to a trash can near the art store. Tony said he hoped we could do more things together in the fall when school started. He said we could use the money from the slugs to go downtown to movies at the Paramount or the Fox or the Albee. We could pick up girls together if we wanted and sit in the balcony and neck, or we could go for walks in the park. He figured that if he was with a guy like me he could meet girls with more class. I thanked him again for the paper and for showing me his father's garage.

“Yeah, we're kind of like blood brothers now, I guess, don't you think? I mean, like in the movies when the white guy and the Indian slit their wrists and cross them and mix the blood, except that instead of us cutting our wrists, what's gonna keep our secret bond is that if either of us tells on the other we're gonna
get
our wrists slit, right?”

“I suppose,” I said, and when I did he laughed and pounded me on the back and told me that I was all right in his book, he could tell it from the way I didn't hesitate about going to his house, even though we both knew it might make Abe or my father angry if they found out. “You got real courage, Davey,” he said then. “That's why I'm glad I was smart enough to choose you to be my friend. I mean, we're in the same boat, you and me—except the boats are separate, right?”

“I suppose.”

He took out his roll of dollar bills. “Wow!” he said. “We really did it, you and me, didn't we? We really did it, partner!”

“We really did it.”

“You wanna do it again soon, now that you lost your cherry and we got the jitters out of us? My old man, what he does, see, is he goes into the city and sells bags of the stuff in kangarooland to spics and niggers so they can do what we did, but if he found out I was doing it, he'd cream my ass. You watch your own ass, partner. With Abe and Fasalino and my brothers and all, we gotta make like nothing happened, right? Like we hardly know each other, see—like we maybe just like to play ball together sometimes on account of we go to the same school and we're the two best athletes there.”

I was scared my father would ask me where I'd been and why I was late and how I'd gotten the new drawing paper, but instead he just smiled when I got home and handed me an envelope. Inside were two box-seat tickets to the Dodger-Giant game that night—Abe had left them for us—and I threw my arms around my father's neck and hugged him.

During the game my father bought me everything I wanted—a program and a yearbook and a pennant and hot dogs and a Dodger hat—and when Jackie Robinson doubled in the bottom of the ninth to drive in the winning run, it made the day seem perfect. It was Jackie's rookie year with the Dodgers and he was playing first base and leading the league in stolen bases. On the way home, for the first time I could remember, my father was willing to go over the game with me, inning by inning. He teased me about how articulate I was when I wanted to be and how I'd make a good lawyer someday—a fine public speaker—if that was my choice, and how he would give my mother a full report so that she'd stop calling me her silent one. We held hands too, which we hadn't done for a long time, and I liked the way his skin felt against mine—soft in the middle, but hard and calloused along the edges from all the years of breaking off twine.

We stopped at Carsten's, on Flatbush Avenue, for ice cream sodas, and when he gave me a small speech about democracy and how terrific he thought it was that the Dodgers were the first team in baseball to hire a black man, I almost told him how proud it made me feel too, that Jackie was a Dodger. But I was afraid that if he knew how much I cared about Jackie—how scared I'd been that Jackie might have a hard time under all the pressure and get sent back to the minors—he might use it against me sometime later on, when things weren't going so well for the two of us and my mother was home again.

The air was nice and cool when we left, and we talked all the way to our block about the Dodgers, with me asking him questions about the crazy players he'd seen play for them in the twenties and thirties—Babe Herman and Casey Stengel and Van Lingle Mungo and Dazzy Vance. In front of our building two men stepped out from behind a parked car. One of them was a thin black man wearing sunglasses and a flowered yellow shirt. The other man was fat and wore a dark double-breasted wool suit.

“Mr. Voloshin?” the fat man asked. “Mr. Solomon Voloshin?”

“That's my name.”

“And this is your son David, yes?”

My father didn't answer, and the fat man smiled and reached toward me. I pulled back and stared hard into his face so that I could memorize his features.

“He's a nice-looking boy. Looks a little like his uncle, wouldn't you say? You must care a lot about him, Mr. Voloshin. I got sons too. Three boys. So believe me when I tell you that you yourself don't got a thing to worry about. I ain't here to make no trouble. I'm only here to say that if you get word from your brother-in-law you tell him that maybe he shouldn't come home. That maybe he should consider settling in California.” He laughed. “They got no winters in California, I hear, so it should be much better for his health out there. Okay, Mr. Voloshin? I can count on you to deliver the message?”

“Get out of our way,” my father said. “Get out of our way, do you
hear
me? You just get out of our way.”

The black man stepped forward, but the fat man put a hand on the black man's arm.

“I told you once, Mr. Voloshin. I ain't here to make no trouble. I'm just a messenger making a delivery, yes?” He laughed again. “You make deliveries. I make deliveries. We all make deliveries. So we should understand one another, yes?”

“Come on, Davey,” my father said, and he pulled me with him. I held back a bit, trying to see through the black man's sunglasses.

“You'll deliver my message? You'll tell your brother-in-law that Mr. Fasalino wishes him a long and happy life?”

My father tried to get the key to our building out of his pocket, but his hand was shaking so much he couldn't grab onto it. He jerked his hand away angrily and his key ring and coins spilled out. I got down on my knees and started picking up the change. I looked back at the two men and whispered to my father, asked him if he wanted me to ring Beau Jack's bell. My father's hands were shaking so much now that I knew he wouldn't be able to hold onto anything, so when I found the right key I put it into the lock myself.

My father stepped into the lobby and grabbed me, his nails digging into my muscle, above the elbow. Then, with the door still open, he started screaming with all his might.

“If you goons touch a hair on my boy's head I'll kill you, do you hear? Do you
hear
me? Do you?”

The black man started toward us and I helped my father shove the door closed. The lock clicked. My father kept screaming, his hands in the air, his fists opening and closing the way they did sometimes when he argued with my mother.

“You're scum of the earth, that's what you are! Do you hear me? You ain't nothing but lousy scum of the earth! You ain't nothing but dumb goons. You ain't nothing but scum of the earth! Scum of the earth is what you are!”

The black man's nose was squashed flat against the glass. I heard I doors opening behind us, people shouting at my father.

“
Come on!
” I said.

He stopped screaming. He looked dazed.

“What?”

“Just come on. Don't be a fool, okay? Just come on before they get in after us. All they gotta do is ring and get somebody to buzz the door open.”

“Of course.”

He let me lead him up the stairs. I opened the door, locked it behind us, took my father with me into the kitchen.

“Should I call the police?” I asked.

“Don't do nothing.”

He leaned on the sink with one hand, breathing hard, and I was afraid he was going to faint. His skin was a pale ivory white. He looked as old as some of the men in my grandfather's home.

“I could call Aunt Lillian,” I offered. “She'd know what to do. Abe must have left her instructions.”

He sat and took off his glasses. Without them he looked young and helpless again, the way he did in the wedding picture my mother kept on her vanity table. I brought him a glass of water and he sipped it, bending over, tilting the glass toward his lips. The skin around his eyes was puffy, as if it had absorbed warm water, and the lid on his bad eye hung down almost all the way, the dead eyeball floating toward the outside corner.

I tried to figure out what I would do if he had a heart attack. I imagined lifting him, laying him out gently on the floor, covering him with blankets, telephoning for help. I thought of how I'd felt, lying on the dirt behind the hedges in front of our building, my eyes closed, while my friends talked about my wounds, about field surgery, about plastic land mines. I thought of how wonderful it was when they caressed my forehead with their cool hands and put an imaginary last cigarette in my mouth. I was glad Mr. Fasalino hadn't used Tony's father as his messenger this time.

My father licked his lips and moaned. He held his eyeglasses in his right hand now. I reached across, flattened his palm, took the glasses away from him. I thought of running upstairs to Stevey Komisarik's apartment and getting his father to come and give my father an injection. Stevey's father was a dentist and Stevey had once shown me the black emergency bag in their hall closet. I saw myself telephoning to California. If my mother answered I would ask her to put Abe on so I could tell him and he could break the news to her. I saw myself racing down the staircase, jumping five or six steps at each landing, swinging around the turns, knocking on Beau Jack's door and taking him back upstairs with me. Beau Jack would know what to do. During the first World War he had been stationed in France with an all-Negro unit, digging up American soldiers and burying them again.

“See?” my father said. “Do you see now? Now do you see?”

“Are you all right?”

He pressed against the inside corners of his eyes with thumb and forefinger. He reached across to me with his other hand.

“Give me my glasses.”

He held his glasses up to the light, then stuck the right lens into his mouth, fogged it, wiped it clean with his handkerchief.

“I was scared,” I said.

“Sure you were—bums like that—who knows what they wouldn't do? Even for women and children they got no feelings.”

“I mean I was scared for you when you were shaking so much. When you got all pale.”

“Come,” he said.

I followed him to the living room. He took a bottle of whiskey and a shot glass from the side cabinet of the breakfront. He drank the whiskey in one swallow.

“You want a taste?” he said. “You're okay?”

“I'm okay.”

The telephone rang.

“Don't answer it. It's those bums. But they won't get nowhere with me.”

I tried to smile. “You really screamed at them,” I said.

“I screamed at them.”

“I mean, I never thought you…” I stopped, shrugged. “I don't know.”

He cocked his head to the side and sniffed in.

“You mean you didn't think your old man had it in him to stand up to them, right?”

“I guess. I don't know. You were screaming like a maniac.”

“I wouldn't say I wasn't scared,” he said. “But that don't mean I gotta let bums like that run my life, do you see?” He sat down in his red easy chair, under the window. He stared at me, sucking on the right corner of his lower lip the way he did when he was shooting set shots. His voice was stronger. “So listen. I've been wanting you to know something, okay? That what I used to say about your uncle when he was overseas, I want you to know that I changed my opinion. That first night he got home, didn't I say that the war changed him, that he was different?”

“Yes.”

The telephone rang again and we sat there and waited until, after sixteen rings, it stopped. In my head I made up pictures of Abe dying in front of my building, of him saying to me that it was so crazy, wasn't it, to have lived through the war in Europe in order to die in the streets of Brooklyn.

“If not for your uncle Abe, do you see the kind of trash that would take over the neighborhood? Do you see? People don't want to know how bad it would be if Abe surrendered and let them muscle into his territory. They don't know how good they got it.”

“Does Abe hurt people?”

“What—?”

“At school sometimes I hear stories that he hurts people.”

“Does Abe hurt people.”

My father rubbed his chin, pretending that he was trying to figure out my question.

“All right,” he said. “Listen. I can honestly say to you that to the best of my knowledge Abe himself has never laid a hand on anybody. Not counting Lillian and Sheila, I mean, and what he had to do in the Army.”