Brotherly Love (15 page)

Peter waits while that settles.

"Look, these guys are tired," the Italian
says. "With Constantine gone, all they want now is nobody does
them too. Let ’em alone, maybe throw them a bone once in a while,
everybody gets along. There ain’t no reason to go hurting a bunch
of old men .... "

"Shit," his cousin breathes, "we got
Constantine." Peter puts his hand over his cousin’s mouth. He
listens to the men downstairs talk, convincing his uncle that the old
Italians are harmless now.

"Things are going to
be different," his cousin says. Peter looks at him again, and
his cousin whispers, "We can do anything we want."

* * *

N
ick hears of
Constantine’s death at seven in the morning at Ed’s Diner. The
place is full of smoke and all the booths are taken. Ed comes out of
the kitchen wearing a clean apron and spots him sitting at the far
end of the counter.

Nick has wrapped his hands around a hot cup of
coffee, trying to get them warm. Ed moves past Phyllis, his morning
waitress, who is bent over behind the counter looking for something
in her purse. He lifts his stomach with his hands to squeeze past her
bottom, and then gives her a pat on the fanny on the way past.

"Ed, I’m warning you," she says. She
comes up red-faced, her lips fastened around an unlit cigarette. She
leans into one of the gas stoves to light it, then picks up an order
of eggs and scrapple, trying to remember whose it is.

"You got scrapple and eggs, Nick?" she
says.

"Nick don’t eat breakfast," Ed says, "you
know that."

She sets the food down farther up the counter and Ed
stands in front of Nick and wipes his hands on the apron.

"How ’bout Constantine," he says quietly.

Nick looks up. Ed checks both directions, as if he
were afraid of being overheard.

"They got him over on Twelfth Street last night,
parked right in front of his house."

"Who?" Nick says.

Ed shrugs. "The Young Turks, I guess. The old
guys been holding off the young guys a long time now."

Nick doesn’t know any of the Young Turks.

Ed says, "One behind the ear and then one in the
eye."

"He was alone?"

"The bodyguard’s got a concussion on his head,
says they must of knocked him out first." He shakes his head and
the men are both quiet.

"You wonder where does a guy like that—the
bodyguard I mean—where does he think he’s going to hide?" Ed
says.

Nick takes a drink of his coffee.

"They must of put him in a corner," Ed
says, meaning the bodyguard. "Somebody puts you in a corner, you
can’t tell what you’re going to do."

Nick thinks about that, about worrying over what you
should have done. Who you should have done. He thinks that people in
Constantine’s business must worry all the time. "What a way to
live," he says.

Ed looks around his diner. "Myself, I’d rather
just work for a living, drive home in an Oldsmobile."

Nick nods and sips at his coffee. Phyllis squeezes
behind Ed, carrying two plates to the booths. "You don’t mind
moving your ass, Ed," she says, "there’s people come in
here to eat." He smiles at Nick and backs into her a little,
moving his behind against her stomach.

"Ed, I’m warning you," she says. "I’m
going to put these fucking eggs down your pants."

Ed turns to look at the
plates, considering it. "What are they," he says, "over
easy?"

* * *

N
ick goes back to the
shop, carrying a cup of coffee in a paper bag. An old Ford Fairlane
500 is sitting in the garage, its hood open, the engine cold and
black. Nick opens the bag and puts the coffee on the fender and then
hangs a light from the hood release and turns it on.

The car is as old as Harry. The engine is caked in
grease a quarter-inch thick, stone cold, and he reaches in and chips
at the battery cables where they connect to the posts, trying to
knock off enough of the yellowed crust of iron oxide so he can fit a
wrench there and loosen the cables.

The man who owns this car lives in a row house with
his wife and her mother three blocks from the garage, and has never
changed the oil. He doesn’t believe in changing oil, he believes in
adding one quart when the engine gets two quarts low. He says
changing the oil is like having relatives move in; he says it upsets
his engine.

Nick clears away enough of the iron oxide to get his
wrench around the nut and then presses until feels it give. He pulls
the wrench toward him until it hits the engine block, then regrips
the nut, and pulls it back again. When it is loose enough, he reaches
in with his hand and twists the cable off. Then he begins on the
other post.

He hears water running upstairs, the old man in the
shower. Nick tries to remember how long he has been up there; he
thinks it is probably a month.

Nick isn’t sure if he wants him to leave or not.
He’s clean at least. He keeps himself clean. And if he’s
upstairs, Nick doesn’t have to worry about what happened to him
after he left. Sometimes now in the morning he will come down into
the shop and sit in a corner and watch Nick work. He’ll bring tools
when Nick needs them and then put them back; sometimes he sweeps.

Most afternoons now, when the gym begins to fill up,
he leaves. He doesn’t like kids, or coloreds. The kids tease him,
pretending to steal the bag he keeps his things in, saying
"Pop-pop-pop"  while he moves around the room
sweeping.

The old man will push the broom at their feet or make
a spitting noise that is not quite "Pop"—a noise that
Nick now understands is as close as he can come to "Fuck"—and
then, unless Nick makes them leave him alone, the old man’s face
will turn murderous and dark, and he will pick up his things and
disappear. He has his own key now; Nick doesn’t know when he comes
back.

The kids are always after him. Nick doesn’t know
how to tell them to leave him alone without hurting his feelings. He
knows he wouldn’t want to be protected himself.

He twists the other cable off, and then lifts the
battery out of the car and sets it on the sidewalk just outside the
open door. The owner of the Ford will want to see it. He’s known
Nick thirty years, but still he’ll want proof he isn’t trying to
rob him.

He stands up slowly and sees the mail lady walking up
the sidewalk. He waits for her there, on the sidewalk, noticing the
way the strap holding the mailbag presses into her narrow shoulder.
She’s got bad skin and two kids and her husband’s in the
Detention Center on a burglary. Nick knows the house where she lives,
but he can’t remember her name.

"Nicky, how you doin’?" she says. Her
face is covered with powder to hide the rough spots, and she’s
turned her eyelids blue.  Her perfume mixes with the smell of
gasoline, and she has a ring on every finger of her right hand.

Earrings as long as her ears themselves. Anything to
keep you from looking at her complexion.

"You’re going to break your shoulders,"
he says, looking at the bag. It’s stuffed and spilling out the top.

"What’s breakin’ is my balls," she
says, and grabs herself there quickly. Her pants are tight across her
stomach, and the material bunches together in the place she touched.
It seems to him that she gets her good disposition from that place,
he couldn’t say why. Other women, he knows, don’t like her.

He smiles while she looks into her bag, and then she
hands him half a pound of mail from people he doesn’t know. He goes
through it quickly, noticing a letter for the old man.

Nick looks at the small, careful writing on the
envelope.

"Urban Matthews."

The old man is the only person named Urban Nick ever
heard of. It’s his second letter.

He got the first one couple of weeks ago—a check
from the government—and now a letter from Des Moines, Iowa. He
wonders if they have Catholic schools in Des Moines. It looks like
the handwriting of somebody who went to Catholic school.

"That’s it," she says, and she reaches
out suddenly and squeezes Nick’s hand.

He watches her walk up the
street—her pants are tight across the back too—and remembers a
morning when she stopped something she was saying about her husband’s
lawyer to lick her thumb and wipe at a grease stain at the corner of
his mouth.

* * *

H
e climbs the stairs with
the letter and finds the old man sitting naked, except for his socks
and shoes, on the edge of a chair near the mats. He is bent at the
waist, his fingers pushed all the way to the knuckles into a hole in
one of the mats, retrieving something he has hidden.

The old man starts when he sees him, and drops the
mat. Nick looks around the room, thinking there is probably money
hidden a hundred places up here.

"You got a letter from Iowa," he says.

The old man accepts the letter without moving off the
chair. A scar runs the length of his stomach, dividing it. The skin
billows up on each side, hiding the scar itself, all of it but the
deep red stitch marks at the ends.

The old man bends again and picks up a towel off the
floor and his face is florid when he comes back up. He covers his lap
with the towel and looks up at Nick, waiting for him to leave.

Nick looks other places in the room, not to intrude.
He blows into his hands and nods toward the window. "Cold
today," he says.

The old man waits.

Nick heads toward the staircase. As he starts down,
the old man is studying the envelope, as if he were trying to decide
how to open it. The towel falls off his lap again; he doesn’t seem
to notice.

Nick returns to the Ford.

He sets the new battery on the tray in the corner of
the engine compartment, and then reconnects the cables. Leaving the
hood open, he gets into the front seat and turns the key. The engine
cranks and then starts; the garage fills with black smoke.

He parks the Ford on the sidewalk and then backs a
Plymouth into the spot where the Ford had been and begins a ring job.
He works quickly, to keep himself warm. He thinks of pulling the
Plymouth all the way into the garage and shutting the door, but the
feel of the place changes when it’s sealed off; it’s like a hotel
room.

Still, he’d like to shut the door. He would if
Harry were here to keep him company. He thinks about his son as he
takes the cylinder head off, exposing the pistons—the earnest
expression that comes over his face when he looks into an engine. He
remembers the same look on the kid’s face when he was sitting in a
high chair, figuring out a banana.

He is reminded suddenly of Charley’s son, who is
always serious, and can’t be talked out of it, the way Harry can. A
kid who understands too much, who isn’t really a kid at all, not a
whole one.

He’s got a foot in the world.

Nick knows because he was
that kind of kid himself.

* * *

S
ometime before lunch, he
realizes that he hasn’t heard anything move upstairs. Even when the
old man doesn’t come down in the morning, he hears him moving.

He straightens out of the engine and holds still,
listening.

Not a sound.

* * *

N
ick eats soup for lunch.
The diner is full now, everyone talking about Constantine. He listens
to two men at the counter. "It was drugs. Constantine wouldn’t
let no drugs on the street, and it was too much money in it. If it
wasn’t for that, he’s still alive."

"How old was he?" the other one says.

"I don’t know, seventy-eight, seventy-nine,
but he was all there, you know? He knew what he was about."

"Anybody seventy-nine years old ain’t all
there. You get that old, you start thinking your own dick’s funny."

Nick sits with his face a few inches over the soup
bowl, not wanting to be included. He thinks of his own father, who
died at seventy-six.

"Phyllis thinks my dick’s funny already,"
the first man says.

She hears that as she walks past, carrying dirty
dishes. "I think it’s a riot," she says and disappears
into the kitchen.

"I ain’t kidding," the other one says.
"My wife’s father, he started laughing at his dick. He’d
take it out at dinner and laugh."

"For what?"

"I don’t know for what. Like it was a big
joke."

Nick blows across his spoon and leans into the steam
rising off the bowl. The metal burns his lips and his eyes water. The
conversation stops and starts.

"Constantine wasn’t laughing at his dick. He
knew what he was about."

It is quiet a moment, and then Phyllis comes through
the swinging doors, carrying hamburgers.

"You don’t believe me," the same man
says, "you see what happens now. You want to see some crazy
shit, you watch what happens now the young guys take over."