Bloodbrothers (2 page)

She exhaled heavily through her nostrils, glowered at him and shook her fist in front of his nose. The fight was over.

***

"Where the hell are you taking us?" Marie asked as Tommy turned the car onto the George Washington Bridge.

"Keep your draws on." Tommy smiled. Albert sat in back chewing on his fingernails and staring at some sailboats. Stony was playing basketball in his head, doing weaving, whirling lay-ups in slow motion against a whole team of six-foot-ten spades. Then he started running numbers in his head. Cheri. Under their new agreement they were both free to play. Last week after graduation the Mount rented out Club D'Artagnan for a shit-face and Cheri started coming on to Mott the Bear. Stony went berserk and Butler had to shove him into the john to stop a fight. If she wanted to play, she didn't have to be insulting about it. Mott the Bear, Christ. Tommy. His old man was starting to break his chops about the union. His only alternative was college. Stony wasn't in love with the idea of more school, and more school wasn't in love with the idea of Stony. The only place he could get into his counselor had to find with a magnifying glass. Purdy Free Normal, Purdy, Louisiana. Hot damn. He didn't have anything against construction work. It was healthy, good bread, but... but... but. Marie. His old lady was coming down hard on Albert these days. That scared him. The kid had a constitution like a dandelion. If he wasn't careful he'd get loved to death.

A few miles into New Jersey Tommy swung the car into a cemetery driveway and drove up the narrow, steep lane for a quarter of a mile until he came to crosshatched blocks of graves. He stopped the car and took a scrap of paper out of his jacket.

Marie turned white. Afternoon sun glinted off the cellophane strips keeping the lacquered black curls in place by her ears.

"Tommy..." She pressed her fingers to her lips. Her eyes were wide. "This ain't funny."

Stony sat up and stared in puzzlement at the endless tombstones. Tommy read directions from the paper and continued driving, making sharp rights and lefts for a mile more through the heart and into the outer regions of the cemetery that were more sparsely populated. He drove with his head out the window reading names on headstones.

Marie lit another cigarette. Her hands were shaking so bad she had to use the car lighter instead of a match.

"Lucca!" Tommy shouted, and slammed on the brakes. "Everybody out!" He jumped out of the car, studied the paper again and walked to a grassy headstoneless twenty-by-twenty plot slightly uphill from a headstone marked Lucca. Tommy turned around and waved impatiently for his family to join him.

"What the hell is goin' on, Tommy?" Marie fumbled in her purse for a yellow pill. "Shit," she winced. She couldn't take pills without water.

"This is weird." Stony gawked. "Whatta we doin' here?"

"Well how d'ya like it?" Tommy beamed.

"What?"

Tommy extended his arms over the patch of grassy earth. "That's ours."

"What're you talkin' about?" Marie frowned.

"I bought it through the union. It's a benefit. I figure we gonna all die some day, right? So we need a place. You know, so we can stay together. The union got this burial committee. Frankie Jacobs is on the board so I ast him to get me a good deal."

Nobody said anything. Albert looked worried. Tommy walked onto the center of the plot and stared at the ground around him. "I figure I'll be here. Marie, you'll be next to me. Then Stony right under me and Albert next to him under you, over there."

"I wanna be next to Stony," said Albert.

Tommy lay down on the ground, put his hands behind his head and crossed his legs. "Not bad," he laughed. Marie ran back to the car. Albert walked over to his father and lay down next to him. He crossed his legs and put his hands behind his head like Tommy.

***

Going home everybody was silent. Tommy was angry that nobody was crazy about his present. Stony thought about Mott the Bear. Albert wondered if dead people had to eat.

"Tommy?" Marie looked at him.

"Yeah?" he sulked.

"Long as we're here, could we see Mama?" Marie's voice was thin and sad, cutting off any wisecrack Tommy wanted to make.

"O.K.," he said, after he'd driven half a mile. He turned off the highway at Paterson and drove through a residential area until he hit the entrance of Saint Ambrose Cemetery.

"Stop a minute." Marie got out of the car, walked into the monument and flower shop and came out with a small cross of lilacs and tiger lilies. Tommy drove into the cemetery past clusters of gravestones that jutted out of the earth like rotten teeth.

"I'm gonna stay in the car," Tommy mumbled. Marie didn't answer but got out and walked to her mother's grave. She was weaving slightly like a stunned cow. Tommy watched her for a while, then turned around to his sons. "Go with your mother." He nodded in her direction. Albert was sleeping with his head on Stony's lap. Stony pretended to be asleep. Tommy sighed and lit a cigarette.

Marie walked to the gray headstone and carefully placed the floral cross on the earth at the base. Her head was spinning as it did every time she came here. She knew her mother was watching her in heaven. She touched the carved lamb on the top of the stone and read the epitaph for the millionth time in the last six months:

Farewell my husband and daughter dear.
I am not dead but sleeping here.
As I am now you soon shall be.
Prepare for death, and follow me.

Marie sank to her knees in the soft earth—grass staining her hot pink slacks. Her face contorted into a trembling pout. She raised her fingers to her lips as if in prayer. "Oh, Mama." She closed her eyes.

Fifty yards down the path Tommy De Coco sat restlessly, wishing his wife would hurry the fuck up.

***

Sunday afternoon sunlight splashed the walls and furniture as Chubby De Coco lay on his back like a beached whale in his blue-striped boxer shorts on the sheetless king-size bed. He was wearing enormous headphones, listening to the best of Henry Mancini. His eyes were closed and he was smiling. A frosty mug of beer sat on the night table within easy reach. Phyllis was at her mother's and would be gone until dinner. He was happy.

He took off the headphones after a while and pivoting himself on his ass swung his legs over the side of the bed. He reached for the mug, finished the beer, yawned and made his way to the bathroom. The bagginess of the boxer shorts made his legs look even thinner than they really were but the elastic waistband was taut.

He stood over the toilet and pissed, holding his dick with both hands. He hated the way Phyllis decorated the john with gold Florentine wallpaper, gold ceiling paper, a gold furry toilet cover, a fake brown wood sink, a shower curtain with brown, gold and crystal beads like a Chink whorehouse. The whole house looked like a whorehouse as far as he was concerned. Like his brother, Tommy, they lived in Co-op City so he only paid $200 rent including utilities for a four-and-a-half-room apartment with air conditioning in every room. He figured for that price he could afford to let Phyllis splurge on furniture and wallpaper and crap. He himself could give a shit what the place looked like as long as he had that air conditioning but she liked what Marie called "Jewish Renaissance." She couldn't buy goddamn lamps—she had to have chandeliers. Jungle-thick rugs all over the house so you couldn't touch anything without getting twenty-five volts up your ass. Plus you had to take your goddamn shoes off like you were entering a Dutch church. And the stuff
he
liked, like the purple velour couch and the red leather Barcalounger, she had wrapped in what looked like big Glad Bags—giant plastic slipcovers—so that he couldn't even relax and watch TV in the living room without leaving half the skin on his back stuck to the plastic every time he wanted to get up to make a sandwich or go to the bathroom. He was surprised she didn't put a slipcover over the color TV.

Chubby wandered into the kitchen for some eats. He peered into the refrigerator, took out a bowl of tuna salad, two Schaefers and a hard-boiled egg. He hummed the theme from "Peter Gunn" that was on the Henry Mancini album. That was the other thing he liked in the apartment besides the air conditioning. That stereo with the headphones he got himself. He could spend all day with those headphones on listening to Tony Bennett and Frank Sinatra. He was fixing himself a tuna sandwich and wondering what the hell ever happened to Perry Como when the phone rang.

"Yo."

"Chub."

"Tommy, how you doin'?"

"Chub, lissen. I met this chick." Tommy was whispering. "Chubby, I'm tellin' you, she got a tongue like a anteater."

Chubby snickered, scratched his belly.

"I thought I was gonna die, Chubby. I hadda
beg
her to stop."

Chubby lit a cigarette. It looked as thin as a kitchen match between his stubby fingers.

"I swear to Christ, baby."

"She a blonde or a brunette?" Smoke slipped and curled over the tip of his slightly protruding tongue.

"Neither, orange."

"Orange! Jesus Christ. Cuffs and collars?"

"Cuffs and collars."

"Tommy, I gotta meet this bitch. You know that, don'cha?"

"How 'bout tonight? I tol' her all about you. She's gonna be waitin' at Banion's."

"Oh my heart." Chubby closed his eyes and let his tongue hang out.

"I tol' her what a steed you was." Tommy laughed.

"Oh shit." Chubby turned pale. "Tommy, I can't do it tonight."

"Whatta you talkin'?"

"I tol' Phyll I'd take her to a movie."

"Bullshit! Take her tomorrow."

"C'mon, Tommy, I promised."

"You pussy."

"Hey, Tommy, c'mon now. It ain't right."

"What time's the movie?"

"Eight-thirty."

"So, come after."

"What am I supposed to say to her?"

"You know you sound like a fuckin' teen-ager, Chubby. I tell everybody what a goddamn stallion my brother is and set 'im up with a million-dollar mouth an' a pair a jugs what belongs in the Museum a Modern Art an' he can't even get away from his wife."

"Hey." Chubby grinned. "You really tell everybody what a stallion I am?" He ran a thumb around the elastic of his boxer shorts.

"Chubby, you know what they call you down at Banion's now?"

"What?"

"The Prick."

"Tommy, pick me up at the gas station." Tommy neighed like a horse. Chubby was about to hang up. "Hey, Tommy! Tommy, what's her name?"

"Sylvia."

***

"Lissen, I tol' Tommy I'd meet him for a drink in a half-hour," Chubby said to his wife as they came out of the movie theater.

She shrugged. "So go."

"You not mad?"

She shrugged. She looked tired, with deep eye sockets and a bony face. There were always deep swaths under her eyes. She looked dehydrated.

"You sure you ain't mad?"

She shrugged again.

" 'Cause if you want I won't go." She didn't answer.

"O.K. I'm goin' now." Chubby took a few steps. "You sure? You don't wamme to watch Johnny arson with you?"

***

Banion's was a bar up in Yonkers where Tommy and Chubby liked to hang out. It was long and dark with yellow lights and wood paneling. Banion was the bartender as well as the owner. He was paralyzed from the waist down and worked in a motorized wheelchair. Behind the bar was a three-foot-high platform with a ramp at the end so Banion could be eye level with all his customers. He knew the De Coco brothers from the time he was a construction electrician with them and they were all working on Freedomland back in 1957. In 1960, a steel beam fell across his back when he was working on the Albert Einstein Medical Center. Disability paid for the bar.

***

Tommy let Chubby off in the parking lot and sat in the car for a half-hour smoking cigarettes.

"Then I had this dream..." Sylvia delicately scratched her nose with a long red pinkynail. "I had this dream where this man comes to my door and gives me two jugs of wine..."

In the almost brown, subdued light of the bar Chubby looked interested. He looked sincere.

"...and I went to this old Jewish lady in my building, and you know, I told her the dream because she knows about things like that and the old lady asks me if I got children and I said yeah I got two boys in Vietnam and then she said the man in the dream was God and the two jugs of wine were my boys and God was giving them back to me safe and sound from Vietnam."

Chubby smiled, motioned for another seventy-seven for the lady, rested his hand on hers and looked into her eyes. She squeezed his hand. He was in.

"An' your boys are awright, right?"

Sylvia started weeping into a pastel Kleenex. "Larry died three days later."

"Aw shit! Hey that's terrible!" Looking at the bar mirror he saw Tommy finally walk in. Chubby caressed her veiny fingers and cursed himself silently. "The
other
one's O.K. though, right?"

She blew her nose and sneered. "He comes back and in two weeks he marries a Puerto Rican."

"Aw Jesus!" Chubby said with real feeling.

"She'll break his heart. They don't know from faithfulness, those animals. All they know is this." She shot her middle finger through a ring of her thumb and forefinger moving it back and forth rapidly.

Tommy sat at the far end of the bar. His eyes met Chubby's in the mirror. They both stifled laughs.

"He'll come crawling back to me"—her face turned ugly—"but I won't be there."

Chubby took in her jugs again. Nice big hangers. Come in Rangoon. She was about fifty he figured. Frosted orange hair. Wrinkle cream. He wanted to change the subject.

"So now you live alone, hah?" He extended a lighter under her unlit cigarette, caught Tommy's eye again and smiled.

"Just me and Shaintze."

"Ha?"

"Shaintze my Siamese."

"Oh, haha."

"Do you like cats?"

"Oh yeah, haha, I love 'em to death."

"Nat loved cats too."

"Your husband?"

"He died two years ago. He died of cancer," she said, raising her chin and tapping her throat. "Right here."