Ratner's Star (21 page)

“I want to see how smart you really are. Let's say I give you a job. You work for me thirty days. Running numbers, makes no difference, doing anything, I don't care. Now you can get paid two ways. Listen to this, because it's up to you which way. I give you ten thousand dollars right up front and you do thirty days' work. Or, listen to this, I give you a penny the first day, two cents the second day, four cents the third day and I keep doubling it for thirty days. You start with one measly cent. You work thirty days right through, Sadays and Sundies. I double each day. Or you get ten thousand big ones, straight up and down, I peel them right off, cash on the barrelhead. So which way is it? I want to see how smart everybody says you really are.”

“Penny first day and keep doubling.”

“Why is that, jerko?”

“I end up with lots more.”

“I'm ready to peel off ten thousand chibonies and you stand there and look me in the face and tell me this penny-ante deal is a better envelope. Tell this girl to stop squinting, hey. This girl gets on my nerves, this girl.”

“I end up with five million three hundred and sixty-eight thousand seven hundred and nine dollars and twelve cents. Penny the first day and keep doubling for thirty days.”

“This girl squints one more time, I'll kick your ass.”

“Why my ass? Kick hers. Or maybe you're afraid she'll kick back.”

“That I'd like to see.”

“Natasha, kick.”

“I'm waiting and hoping,” Aniello said.

“She won't kick today. But that doesn't mean you're safe forever. Let's see you come back tomorrow. Bring your friends. She'll kick every ass that gets in her way. That's the way she is. Some days she really feels like kicking ass.”

On Mr. Morphy's first day as special tutor he asked the small boy
to add all the numbers from one to twenty-four. Billy knew there was a key. The number one went with twenty-four, two with twenty-three, three with twenty-two and so on, each pair totaling twenty-five. The key was twenty-five, which was simply to be multiplied by the number of pairs, obviously twelve. It was like climbing a ladder. You went up to twelve and then from thirteen down the other side to twenty-four (a ladder, he'd one day reflect, or a stellated twilligon) and it was easy to see that every corresponding set of numerals added up to twenty-five. The number twenty-five also possessed a certain immovability, refusing to disappear or even change places when raised to the second, third, fourth or higher powers. While the resonant number twelve matched one-to-one the letters in his fictional name, the scrawl on his birth certificate (William Denis Terwilliger Jr.) represented a unit length that totaled a satisfying twenty-five.

Babe began to spend more time at the window, sipping Champale and looking across the street at the playground four stories down. The reason was Raymond (Nose Cone) Odle. Raymond was seven feet, two inches tall but his finesse on the basketball court contradicted this fact. Although Babe wasn't a basketball fan he couldn't help being impressed by Raymond Odle, a senior at DeWitt Clinton High whose moves were already legendary among the syndics of the tristate basketball underground, heralding the age of the little big man. When people witnessed his implausible wrist-dribble or his zero-gravity double-pump fadeaway jumper off a pick at the high post (a shot that often concluded with the metal-gripping drollery of backspin and dead-rimming), they knew they weren't seeing just another demonstration of giantism engaged in a parody of faunlike grace. Raymond was truly fluent and his moves were essentially those of a guard or small forward. His touch was light and deft, his movement toward the basket an uninterrupted medley of hip-swerves and epigrammatic deceptions. When he came off the boards with a rebound he seemed to drop more slowly than the other players, able to pause up there, a final ripple of his body, easily shaking people off in the course of his serene descent. The name
NOSE CONE
began to appear in headlines on the sports pages. Also spray-painted on the walls of buildings. Raymond's largesse as an athlete, his
fullness of style, was most evident in the free and easy atmosphere of the playground games. Babe watched from the window. People stood outside the fence, nodding. In the playground the little kids chanted: “No'Co, No'Co, No'Co.”

Billy was just starting at Bronx Science when Raymond Odle was a senior at Clinton and they rode the same bus. One day he found himself sitting next to the seven-foot-two-inch athlete. The length of Raymond's fingers almost made Billy faint. Dusty brown bones. Leathery sticks. So ancient and breakable. How could fingers that long and fierce seem delicate as well, seem
readable
, ten numbered documents made from the stems of aquatic sedges. He was sure one blow from Raymond's thumb would be enough to disfigure him for life. Yet he felt secure next to the long man, figuring no marauding gang was likely to attempt a raid on any bus that contained Raymond (Nose Cone) Odle. So whenever possible he shared a seat with the basketball player, squeezing nervously past Raymond, who got on a stop earlier and liked to sit in the aisle seat and stretch his legs. There was a lot of conversation on the bus, most of it from Raymond's schoolmates, directed Raymond's way, particularly before an important game.

“Lose their shoes, No'Co.”

“No'Co, shoot the eyes, little-big.”

“Throw the rock, No'Co.”

“Put some hurt on their heads, No'Co pivotman.”

Billy sat in the window seat, huddled in his mighty parka, a book or two opened in his lap. There was an intricate knowingness to the voices, the ever tensile quality of street experience, something old and secret, possibly dangerous to hear. He liked the fact that Raymond never replied to comments made by the other boys. Raymond was above it all. Raymond had the moves.

“Bring us a move, No'Co.”

If in the right frame of mind, on the right day, he would oblige by doing a silent little sit-down version of one of his moves on the court. He did this by bouncing in his seat and simultaneously tapping out an abbreviated foot-routine without bothering to uncross his legs. He wrung out every such move in deadpan fashion while his schoolmates
went wild, pounding the sides of the bus and uttering near sobs of joy. In all the months they shared the same seat Billy heard Raymond speak but one sentence and it was directed at him, Billy, in evident wonder at the disparity between his age and the involved titles of the mathematical texts he carried and gingerly read, sometimes two at a time.

“What I got sitting downside me here is getting to be nothing but two eyes and a head.”

Babe made crazy faces to entertain the kids, among them Ralphie Buber, who was twice Billy's size but appeared to be sharing his brain, as Faye put it, with a silent partner. It wasn't unusual to see him coming along the street carrying a live crab taken from one of the fish markets on Arthur Avenue. He would hold the crab in his right hand and improvise a prehensile claw with the left. Then he would stand on a corner and leap out at passing cars, left hand and live crab extended, making as he leapt a strangulated glottal sound that may have been intended to represent what crabs say when trying to scare automobiles.

“Movies are the dreams I never had,” Faye said. “They say everybody but everybody dreams. It's just a question of remembering is how they usually put it. I'd like to believe that, mommy, but it's no go. In my case it's not a question of remembering. It's a case in my case of sorry lady no dreams for sale. Movies take place in the dark. That's their magic for me. I saw them all, every one of them I could get to go see. At the Fairmont, the Deluxe, the RKO Fordham, the Paradise, the Valentine, the Ascot, the Fox. I went everywhere and saw every picture, the greats and the stiffs, great and stiff alike. What's great is that they were all great, even the stiffs. Because they took place in the dark. Because everybody wore costumes. Because it was like something you were remembering instead of seeing for the first time. We talked back to movies then. You could do that then. If somebody in the picture said something stupid, you said something back. If you wanted action, you told them to stop kissing behind the ear and get to the swordplay. The ushers went up and down the aisles with their flashlights, trying to shush people up and telling people to get their feet off the seats. Boys tried to pick up girls. People squeezed in and out of the aisles through the whole movie, going to the bathroom, going for candy and soda, going to the lobby to just hang around. Meanwhile the balcony is a
total zoo with smooching, arguments, heavy necking, candy wrappers flying around, feet up on the seats, talking back to the picture. Now if I want to go to a movie I have to go downtown. Around here they're either shut down, or supermarkets, or high crime areas with chandeliers. So it's TV for me. No great loss as long as they keep showing the classics. The movie industry perished in about the nineteen forties anyway. Artistically it just dropped dead. Maybe the war killed it. But they were great all the same, pictures then; I vouch for every one of them, swordplay or no swordplay. I was a little girl. Then I was a grown woman. It all happened in the movies.”

There was a shooting on the second floor late one night. Babe went down to watch the police outline the body's position in chalk. People stood in the doorways clutching their own arms. Little kids slid out from the massed adults and played in the halls, running up and down the stairs in their underwear. A transistor radio played Latin soul. Babe was the last person to leave the scene, having observed the details with the same degree of attention he lavished on construction sites and people changing flat tires.

“Who was it?” Faye said.

“Alphonso Rackley.”

“Do I know him?”

“Fishnet shirt.”

“Wears a T-shirt underneath?”

“Him.”

“Do they know who did it?” she said.

“There was talk his brother-in-law. I overheard a remark or two being passed. Common Saturday night occurrence.”

“Overheard who—cops?”

“Ballistics team.”

“Then what happened?”

“They marked the body,” he said. “It was spread up and down four or five steps, so it took them a while to mark it.”

“Then what?”

“Put him in a body bag and carried him down. Three patrolmen. Two front, one rear.”

“Do they have the brother-in-law in custody?” she said.

“He fled the scene.”

“What about the blood?” she said. “Do I have to walk through a pool of blood on my way downstairs tomorrow?”

“The super cleaned it.”

“It must have left a gorgeous stain. I never talked to this Alphonso person in my life. Now I'll be avoiding his personal bloodstain for the next ten years.”

“D.O.A.,” he said. “That's the way they'll log it in their log books when they get him to the morgue.”

“Dead upon arrival.”

“I talked to a detective on the scene. He asked me any family. I said the only family's the guy that shot him. I told him I knew the deceased. I told him we talked in the hall once or twice. The deceased carried a small lead pipe in his back pocket everywhere he went. So with me and my poolstick, it gave us something to talk about whenever we saw each other in the hall. He was quiet and soft-spoken. Never had much to say. Everybody liked Alphonso. I told him that. I told him I couldn't think of any reason why anyone would want to do a thing like this to a person like the deceased.”

Raymond Odle's grades were not good. Naturally this fact alone wouldn't have prevented most colleges from recruiting him. There was a worse problem. He had accepted a sum of money (four figures, it was said) in return for lending his name (or nickname) to a recently incorporated ice cream franchise operation that had outlets in all five boroughs. Double Dribble Nose Cones. It was Babe's opinion that the young man's amateur status should not be shattered by one minor mistake. Strict legality prevailed, however, mainly because the case received a great deal of attention at the height of a public outcry against pampered athletes and questionable recruiting practices. In the end the only school that would accept Raymond was an unaccredited junior college that specialized in maritime studies. The school was located on an old supply ship permanently at anchor near the Shackleton Ice Shelf. The basketball team played only four or five games a year. A pickup team of scientists from a research station near the Ross Ice Shelf flew in every six months, weather permitting, and the forty members
of a New Zealand basketball club, the Christchurch New Celtics, took a chartered flight down to Antarctica whenever they found themselves with surplus funds. So Raymond Odle's moves on the court, those effortless serifs of his, were destined to be witnessed only by novices, fellow students and a few bearded meteorologists.

The playground games continued for a while. But Babe noticed that the players now wore combat boots. The games grew edgy. Glass from broken wine bottles littered the asphalt court. No one seemed to care about the score. The players wore combat boots and gave each other immoderate chops to the neck in lieu of strategic fouls. He stood by the window, the poolstick at arm's length, and on the lumbering blue bus his small son remembered the strange dangerous language spoken to the giant at his side by boys of an ageless race.

Hoy Hing Toy was waiting for him when he came sneaking out of the gym to avoid addressing the members of Desilu Espy's discussion group. They went to a remote sector well below ground level. Beyond the experimental accelerator they descended a flight of metal stairs and entered a ramp at the top corner of a spacious chamber. A gigantic balloon filled much of this space. Hoy led the way to a small glassed-in office set away from the ramp and located about fifteen stories above the floor of the chamber. Radio maps and pulse charts were scattered over the desk top. Billy looked down on the silver balloon.