Before My Life Began (17 page)

I told him that I was reading in one of Beau Jack's magazines that hunting was actually good for certain animals like deer and foxes and bears and wolves—that by killing members of the species who weren't quick enough or healthy enough or smart enough to get away, the hunters made the entire species stronger. I asked him if he felt that way about his own men. Would his organization be stronger now that the weaker men were gone?

“Something like that,” he said.

We were across the street from the art store, near the firehouse and the post office. I wanted him to talk to me. I knew what to say.

“What was your mother like?”

He stumbled, but caught himself quickly, brushing my arm with his hand, for balance.

“What—?”

“Nothing,” I said. I'd saved the question for a long time.

“I heard you.”

“What was your mother like, is all I asked. My mother says sometimes that you used to worship her for all she did raising you, but that when you got older, if the two of you were in a room together there were always sparks. Until she died, I mean.” I shrugged. “I don't understand.”

“Neither do I,” Abe said, and he almost smiled. “Listen. I thought about it a lot when I was overseas, when the war was over and I was waiting to be shipped back home. They didn't kill only the weakest, Davey. They killed all they could find—the strongest, the smartest, the bravest. The weakest got away sometimes because they were weak, or because they were cowards, or because they were rich.”

He shook his head sideways, talked more, and I realized how much I liked listening to him, how much I loved simply walking close to him so that I could feel the heat coming off his body. He asked me if I knew about the ovens and the gas chambers, and I said that everybody did. I'd seen a newsreel with my father, of American and British soldiers wearing gas masks while they loaded bodies onto trucks. Most of the bodies were covered with lye, decomposing. I saw bulldozers pushing mountains of Jews. I saw pictures of empty barracks and hills made of eyeglasses and false teeth and hair and crutches and children's shoes.

We were almost to the corner of Flatbush and Church avenues. Abe seemed more relaxed. Bundles of newspapers came flying toward us from a passing truck. The deaf newsdealers signaled to one another with their stubby fingers.

“You think I'm a brave man, don't you?”

“Yes.”

“I'm not a coward. That's true.” He nodded. “If I really had guts, though, do you know where I'd be now?”

“In California?”

“In Palestine. That's where I'd be if I had the guts. Like Mickey Marcus. I'd be fighting the Arabs and the British, so that Jews could be free, so we could have a place of our own—a home, Davey, a real
home!
—so nobody would ever again try what Hitler tried. Can you understand that?”

“Not really,” I said. “I didn't know you cared so much that we were Jewish. I didn't think you were religious.”

He sighed and looked around, as if suddenly aware that we were outside in the street, walking.

“Forget it. Just forget the whole thing, okay?”

He put his arm around my shoulder and told me that he wasn't religious and that he never saw the camps, but that he did see some of the people from the camps afterwards, when they were in hospitals. He said it made him wonder how and why it was that some people survived—why some were chosen to live and others to die. It made him ask himself lots of questions. The will to survive, he decided, wasn't everything. The sources of survival weren't only in us, in individuals. He said he would tell me a quick story, the kind he and his Army buddies heard again and again. A woman he was friends with told him that when the Nazis took her two sons away she begged for their lives, and when the boys were on the truck and she was running after it, an officer stopped the truck and brought her two boys to the tailgate and lifted them up by their necks, one to either side, like chickens, and said to the woman that he would show her he was human. She could choose one. I asked which one she chose, and Abe grabbed my arm angrily, accused me of not having listened to him, and walked off.

“I'm sorry,” I called, and I ran after him.

“Don't you understand
anything
I was saying to you? Don't you even listen to me?”

“I always listen to you,” I said.

Abe blinked. “Sure you do. Let's go, okay? We're late.” He took my hand and we walked in front of a mounted policeman who was coming in our direction. Abe didn't seem to notice him. I watched the policeman's gun and holster bob up and down on the side of the saddle. The policeman waved at my uncle in a friendly way. “Sometimes I forget that you're still a kid, that you're only a boy.”

“Me too,” I said.

He smiled now, in the way I loved. I had said the right thing. He warned me not to dwell too much on the story he had just told me. Evil, he stated, was not personal. What was it then? We were on Flatbush Avenue. He led me into the Bickford's building, up three flights of stairs to his offices. We fooled ourselves in very sentimental ways, he said, whenever we decided to personalize evil. There were evil people in the world, it was true, just as there were good and brave people. But when I'd heard enough stories, he added, I would come to see that the mother's choice had been one of the easy choices. A choice that made little difference. Like the choices Abe himself had made. His hand on the doorknob, he turned and looked at me again. His eyes were brown holes. They looked exactly like his father's eyes.

I heard voices coming from the other side of the door.

“Come,” he said.

He closed the door to the back room, a room I'd never been in. At the far end Avie Gornik sat on a wooden chair by himself, bent over, head in his hands. He looked up at me, groaned. The room was large and bare, about fifteen by twenty feet, but with no phones, no rugs, no windows, nothing on the walls. There was a long metal table in the center, like the kind doctors gave examinations on. Four of Abe's men were there: Little Benny, Turkish Sammy, Louie Newman, Big Jap Willer.

Little Benny put his hand on my uncle's arm, whispered.

“There are no secrets while my nephew is here,” Abe said, pulling away. “He'll always know anything I know.”

“Sure, Abe. Whatever you say. Only I just wanted you to know that everything's set, the way you ordered it.”

I didn't trust any of the men who worked for my uncle. They talked and walked as if they were actors trying to get parts in movies, as if they were imitating the guys who played henchmen for George Raft or Edward G. Robinson. I'd heard them talk about movies sometimes,
The Blue Dahlia
or
Double Indemnity
or
Key Largo
or
The Big Sleep
, and it always seemed strange to me that they talked about the movies as if the actors' lives on the screen were more real than their own.

Louie Newman said something to Abe about Spanish Louie, but Abe didn't react. Louie was a fat man, about my father's height, shaped like an eggplant—like the Penguin in
Batman
comics. We'd make fun of him behind his back for the way he walked around our neighborhood, waddling from side to side, carrying a little black doctor's satchel in which, according to Tony, he kept the usual: a rope, a knife, a gun, an ice pick, and false identity papers. The store owners were afraid of him and gave him whatever he wanted.

Big Jap Willer smiled at me, but I didn't smile back. He had a jaundiced complexion, greasy flat black hair, slanty eyes. During the day, whenever he saw me with my friends he'd make me tell them that he was a Jew, not a Jap—that there were lots of Jews from Russia who looked like him. Sometimes he'd show up at our house with a package of steaks or lamb chops wrapped in butcher paper, and if my father was gone he'd hang around talking to my mother and telling dirty jokes. Afterwards my mother would say that the easiest thing to do with Big Jap was to humor him because he sometimes became mean toward women who didn't laugh when he expected them to.

“Everything's been taken care of,” Benny said. “All we been waiting for is you and the kid here.”

Gornik moaned. Turkish Sammy went to the door. Benny went around telling everybody that Turkish Sammy had served time in jail because, when he worked in a traveling circus, he broke a man's back with his bare hands by holding the man across the small of his own back and stretching him until the man's spine cracked.

“Avie.”

When Abe said his name, Avie looked up at once.

“Please, Abe,” Avie said. “For old time's sake, huh? Don't do it. What for? We been through a lot together.”

“We want to help you,” Abe said. His voice was smooth and silky. It soothed me the way petting Kate soothed me. “I warned you years ago, Avie. You've been doing things that can get us all into the kinds of trouble we don't need.”

“Jesus, Abe,” Avie said, reaching towards Abe. The thumb and index finger of his right hand were stained yellow from nicotine, the way my father's were. “Have a heart, huh? I never hurt none of them. I didn't know—”

“You know my nephew.”

“Sure. He's a good kid. He's a good little ball player. All the other kids look up to him. Davey Voloshin.”

“Now listen carefully,” Abe said to me. “We had a meeting here before—a kind of trial—and we found out that Avie's been acting in a way that can bring harm to everyone. He put his small needs above the good of the organization, you see. Mr. Fasalino never wants to speak to Avie again. So that we have to clean up our own house. Do you understand?”

“No.”

Benny reached under his jacket, to hitch up his pants. I saw the leather harness, the black butt of his .38.

“You want me to draw him a picture?” Benny asked, and he laughed.

“Nah,” Big Jap said. “You don't gotta draw pictures for this kid. You ever seen the pictures he can draw? Even when he was a little pisher he used to draw these terrific war pictures. His mother always showed me.”

“Sometimes we have to perform acts that may seem cruel, Davey, but I hope you'll come to see that they're not. It's why I brought you here.” He got into a deep-knee bend position so that his eyes were level with mine, and he spoke to me as if we were alone, as if we were the last two people left on earth. “All right. This is what I was thinking before, the conclusion I came to: that I'm your uncle and that there is no way, from now on, that you are ever going to be free of that fact. It's nobody's fault, but it's so. Do you see? Therefore, we have to give up false hope and begin thinking of the future and of the life you're actually going to have. We have to begin to show you things, the way they are, do you understand?”

“No.”

“Because he don't want to,” Benny said.

“Sure,” Louie said. “I mean, it won't be too long now and maybe he'll be working for his uncle and we'll have to take orders from him, right?”

“You might even have to take Abe's place someday,” Benny said, and then as if he'd said the wrong thing, he added: “If he's gotta be gone to Havana or Vegas or somewhere to look after other things. I mean, a guy with your uncle's brain ain't gonna rot the rest of his lifetime in Flat-bush, is he?”

I turned to Abe and tried to ask him with my eyes if what they were saying was true. He showed nothing.

“All right, Benny.”

Benny talked to me about the things Avie did, taking boys into alleys and cellars, and even into his own apartment when his mother was asleep. Benny laughed. He said Avie was what they called a switch-hitter, that he did things with women too. But he had gone over the borderline this time, had fallen for some dumb young guinea, had let himself be set up, had given away information about trucks. At their meeting they had decided that Avie's fate would rest in my hands.

“Yeah,” Louie said, laughing. “I mean that's fair, right, since Avie had the kid's future in his hands, you know what I mean?”

“Jesus, Abe,” Avie began. “Don't put the kid on the spot like this. I give you my word, I'll do
anything
. I mean, didn't I take a chance, setting up the council with you and Fasalino, after what happened? Didn't we get ours back? Didn't I show you something?”

Avie sounded like my father when my father was in the middle of begging my mother to forgive him.

“Please, kid. Give me a break, huh? Don't you know what they're gonna do to me? Don't you got any idea?”

I said nothing. Had men really been killed, I wondered, because of a few trucks full of cigarettes and slot machines and juke boxes? I wanted to be able to ask Abe questions, but I was embarrassed in front of his men, and I was afraid he wouldn't answer me truthfully or fully, that he would just say what he'd said before: that it wasn't the money or the territory that made men act the way they did. It wasn't power either, but the
idea
of power—of controlling others, of never having enough—and that I wouldn't understand that idea until I was older, had lived more. Benny kept on talking, telling me to tell them exactly what Avie had done to me that night in the cellar. I told them. I felt as if I were in a trance. I left nothing out. Avie whimpered, protested that I was only repeating words that Benny had put into my mouth.

“Nobody puts words into my mouth,” I said. “I'm telling the truth, the way it really happened.”

“Anything else?” Abe asked.

“He said he did the same thing to you when you were a boy.”

Benny whipped his pistol from his holster and went for Avie, but Abe stopped him. Avie covered his face with his hands.

“Oh Jesus, Abe,” Avie said. “Jesus H. Christ. Oh Jesus…”

“I figured out that he was only trying to scare me. I figured he was telling me that so that I would never tell you.”

“Sure,” Benny said. “The kid's got a real brain, just like you, Abe, see? He got ice water in his veins, too.”