Corky's Brother (27 page)

A minute after I got her to deliver a special delivery to Corky, we heard her yelp for him to stop. Then they were quiet for a while—but until she came running back into the living room, covering her blouse where Corky'd ripped it open, I think we all figured she was making believe again. Corky followed her into the room and while the tears streamed down her face and the girls crowded around her, he sauntered over to them and started ranking Ellen out. She pushed the girls away from her—her blouse was pinned up by then—and screamed at him that she didn't care if his brother did die, he was still an idiot and a punk.

Corky just laughed. “You know what you are?” he said. “You're nothing but a two-bit C.T.—” Then he went up to her and shoved her on the breasts. “And I'll tell you something else, Lana Turner, you ate it up when I soul-kissed you—you're the one who wanted to keep going. You know why I stopped?” He turned to us. “Cause she's the sloppiest kisser I ever met. I've gotten smoother kisses from a wet sponge.” He turned to me. “You wanna bug out with me, Howie? I had enough of this place. Let's get us some real stuff.”

When we got outside, though, he said he wanted to visit Rhoda. “I ought to be with her at a time like this,” he said. “Mel always told me to keep an eye on her, to take care of her—” His voice broke then, and I didn't look at him. Then he started talking about Ellen. “I really showed her, huh? I showed her, didn't I, Howie?” he said, and even after I'd agreed with him, he kept repeating it. “I showed her, didn't I? I really showed her, huh?”

When we got to Rhoda's place on East 21st Street, there was nobody home. “Damn it,” he said. “She must of gone to my folks' place. What'd she wanna do that for?” So we walked back to Corky's house, which was on Martense Street, off Rogers Avenue. I felt funny going in with Corky, but at the door, when I told him I thought I'd better leave him alone, he insisted that I come in with him. Even from outside the door I could hear Corky's mother crying—I'd never heard a woman cry so loud—she just kept wailing and screaming and shouting Mel's name. Corky took a deep breath and opened the door. Inside, it was dark and the apartment smelled as if somebody had been boiling cabbage. Corky's mother was stretched out on the living-room couch with a washcloth over her forehead, and Corky's father was next to her, talking low. Rhoda was sitting in the easy chair, next to the TV, and there were some neighbors walking around the room trying to make themselves helpful.

Corky's mother reached out with her hand. “Is that you, Corky baby?” she said. Corky mumbled something. “Corky, Corky, my love, come to your mother—oh, Corky, why? why—?”

“Easy does it now, Margaret,” Corky's father said.

Corky stood there for a second, at the entrance to the living room, and I stood behind him. The neighbors disappeared into the kitchen, and when Corky's mother started crying again for him to come to her, Corky went to Rhoda instead. He seemed very tall and sure of himself as he strode across the room to her—but the minute Rhoda raised her arms to him and he lifted her from the chair and let her cry on his shoulder, something inside him seemed to break. He didn't cry, at least not that I could tell—and he talked to Rhoda about how he understood how much they'd loved each other—but something seemed to break in his body, to sag, so that even though he was taller than her and she was leaning against him, he still looked like a little boy. He brushed his pompadour out of his eyes a few times, and when Rhoda had finished crying, he straightened himself up a little bit.

“Your brother's dead, Corky—” his father began.

“Godamnit!” Corky said, turning on his father. “You think you're telling me something I don't know?” Then he walked out of the living room, to his own bedroom. He motioned to me. “Come on in here, Howie,” he said.

I went into his room with him and sat down in a chair next to his desk. “Jesus!” he said a few times, and pounded his fist into his palm. Then he paced the room and when he came by me he patted me on the shoulder, as if he were trying to cheer me up, to make me feel good. “You're okay, Howie,” he said. After a while he sat down and took some deep breaths. “Jesus,” he said. “It's hard to believe, you know what I mean?” I said I did, and I meant it. I could still picture Mel—the way he looked in the newspapers, but more the way he looked when I'd seen him play stickball, the way he'd smile when he whipped the bat around. He was a lefty and swung on a line like Ted Williams, with a really graceful swing. Corky started to unwind then, talking about things he and Mel had done together and about how it seemed impossible that they wouldn't do them again, but the fact that Mel was gone just didn't seem real to him. Not until he went to the closet to show me some stuff. He took out picture albums of Mel he'd collected and some baseball caps from teams Mel had been on, an old baseball glove that he'd given to Corky, a pair of spikes. “See these?” he said, showing me the spikes. The black leather was crusted and cracked from dirt and the shoelaces had been broken and retied in five or six places. “They didn't belong to Mel,” he said. “They were mine. Do you understand? Remember last year when we changed the name of our team to The Zodiacs and started getting more games and things? I got these then. Mel bought 'em for me. When he was back from the Dodgers' training camp in Florida just after spring training—before he got sent to Fort Worth—he bought 'em for me and when he gave them to me he said—he said it was about time I stopped using his hand-me-down's, that I was on my own and he—” And then Corky just started blubbering. The tears came rolling down his face. He stood there holding the shoes next to his face, dirty smudge marks running on his cheeks from the tears, asking if I understood. “He said it was about time I stopped using hand-me-down's…do you understand…do you?” When he breathed in, he made deep raspy noises and I wished more than anything in the world I could have done something for him. But there was nothing I could do except listen to him repeat what Mel had said. I don't think I've ever felt as helpless as I did then.

Just as he was beginning to get himself under control, the door opened and his mother came in. Corky's father was with her, holding her steady by the elbow, and I could see the neighbors behind them in the living room, looking in at us.

“I'm feeling better now, Corky,” his mother said. “I didn't like for you to see me the way I was before—”

“That's okay,” Corky said, and he turned his back to her and leaned on the windowsill. He put his spikes on the dresser.

“I heard you from the living room,” she said, and took a few steps toward him. “I know what you must be feeling now—you—you lost your best friend, didn't you?” She had to fight to keep her tears back, I could see. Then she took another step toward Corky and reached out with her hands, to rest them on his shoulders, but the minute her fingertips touched him he whirled on her, screaming like a maniac.
“Leave me alone! Leave me alone
—/” She moved backwards as if somebody had punched her, and Corky's father got to her quickly and held her up. Corky couldn't stop screaming. “Goddamnit, just leave me alone! Leave me alone already!”

“Look at him—” Corky's father said then. Corky's face was beet-red and the bottom of his mouth was spread wide, quivering. “You ain't no good, Corky. I always said it, and I say it again.”

“Stop, Frank—” Corky's mother said. “He's upset. Poor baby.” Then she was crying again, her chest heaving in and out. “He's lost his best friend—he's—”

“This is my room—so get out! Out!” Corky screamed. “Just get out and leave me alone—!”

“Sure,” his father said. “We'll leave you alone—should of done it a few years back, all the good's gonna come of you.” He stopped and hitched up his suspenders. “Maybe I never would of said this, not for what's happened—but you're a bum, Corky. Don't know where it come from. Maybe it's my seed—but you're gonna wind up a bum, living all over the country, never settling down. Maybe it's my fault. Like I say, I don't know—”

“Frank, please, I beg of you, stop—” his mother said. She clung to his arm, but Corky's father wouldn't stop now. I just stood there, wishing I could vanish. Corky's father had always seemed a little strange to me and the other guys—to our parents too—but we knew from Corky that before they'd come to Brooklyn his father had run the family farm in Pennsylvania, and I guess we figured that all farmers dressed and talked the way he did. He was the most tight-mouthed man I ever met. In fact, in all the years Corky and I had been friends—he had come into our class in the second grade—this was the first time I think I'd ever heard his father speak more than one sentence at a time.

“You let me speak my piece, and then I'll be done for good, Margaret,” he said. “At least your brother, God bless his poor soul, at least he had an excuse with that baseball stuff of his—but you ain't even gonna have that—you ain't—”

Corky leapt at his father as if he were going to kill him and then—it happened so fast I didn't even have a chance to move—Mr. Williams had laid him out with one stroke of his hand. I'd never seen anyone react so quickly. One minute Corky's hands were making for his throat, and the next minute Corky's father had whipped his arm across and hit Corky square on the side of the face with the back of his hand and Corky was on the floor, stunned. His mother bent down, but Corky screamed at her to get away. “I'll kill you some day,” he said to his father. “I swear to God I will—”

“I wouldn't doubt it,” his father said.

“Frank, why? Why must you?” his mother was saying. “Why now—?”

“The boy says he wants to be left alone, so we'll leave him—” Corky's father pushed his mother out the door and then turned back. Corky was still on the floor, feeling his jaw as if something were broken in it. “One other thing—all my kin's coming up from Pennsylvania for the funeral and I ask you not to shame your mother or your brother's memory the way I know you'd like to. They'll be here by morning. You get this room cleaned up before that, you hear?”

“Like hell I will,” Corky said as his father left the room. He got up from the floor and rubbed his jaw.

“You okay?” I asked.

“Sure. He caught me off guard, that's all.”

Corky picked up the pair of spikes from his dresser and put them back in the closet with the other stuff from Mel. “If I don't put these away, my old man'II probably throw them out,” he explained to me.

“What about your peep shows?” I asked.

“Yeah,” said Corky. “You wanna give me a hand—I'll stand on the chair and you hand 'em to me—”

“You got any new ones?”

“Nah,” he said. “I'm still working on the Ebbets Field one.” He got down on his hands and knees and pulled a big carton out from under his bed. “I'm gonna attach some flashlight batteries here, and some bulbs—” The short end of the carton, like the ends of all the shoeboxes around Corky's room, had a little square cut out of it which was covered with cellophane, and inside, when Corky let light into the top of the box through special slats, you could see a baseball field laid out, with the stands painted on the sides of the carton. “I used green felt from an old pool table—the guy at Ryan's on Church Avenue saved it for me—” I told Corky how great I thought it looked, and he said it would look better when he got the lights fixed on it. At school Corky was famous for his peep shows. They were always putting them on exhibit, and the teachers would say that if he applied the same imagination and skill to his work as he did to his hobby, he “could be somebody.” What amazed them, I guess, was the same thing that got us all: how a guy as restless and nervous as Corky was most of the time, could have so much patience when it came to making things on such a small scale for the peep shows. The top of his closet was stacked with them, and I helped him put away the ones that were around the room—winter scenes made with cotton, scenes from foreign countries with trees made from twigs, and scenes with animals that Corky had copied from the exhibits at the Museum of Natural History. I looked into each one before I handed it to him, and it seemed to make him feel better to spend some time talking about them.

“Mel really liked 'em,” he said when we were finished. “It was the first thing I ever did, I guess, that he hadn't done—he used to brag to all of his friends about what a great artist I was.” He looked up at me. “Boy,” he said, shaking his head. “How long you think this is gonna go on, me remembering everything Mel ever said or did?” I shrugged and he patted me on the shoulder again. “You don't gotta say anything, Howie. Come on, let's get out of here before I start getting upset again.”

“You ought to get some sleep,” his mother said when Corky announced that we were going for a walk. “You'll need it.”

“I'll be okay,” Corky said.

“Pa's relatives will be here before morning,” she said.

“So?”

“I'm just telling you,” she said. Corky's father didn't add anything, or even look at Corky. He just sat back in his rocking chair as if he were in another world. He looked very old to me.

“You okay?” Corky asked, kneeling next to Rhoda's chair. She nodded and ran her hand over Corky's blond hair. Then he whispered so the others wouldn't hear: “If you need me to stay here, you just say the word, Rhoda—”

“You go with Howie,” she said. “It'll do you good to get some fresh air.” Then she leaned over and kissed him on the cheek softly. Her eyes were bloodshot from crying, I remember, but she looked more beautiful sitting in that dark room with her hair messed than I'd ever seen her. When I tried to imagine what she must have been thinking and feeling, I had to swallow hard to keep the tears back. Still, I knew
I
wanted to say something to her, and I guess I did because in the next instant I was standing next to her chair and she had touched me on the cheek and kissed me too. “Thanks, Howie,” she said. “You keep an eye on Corky now—”