Snow in August (5 page)

Then Michael knelt on the altar, and Father Heaney placed a host on his tongue too. Michael squinted but didn’t shut his eyes.
He saw that the priest’s thick fingers were yellow from cigarettes. And he remembered the rabbi’s dirty fingernails. And thought:
Maybe the pipes in the synagogue have frozen and burst, like the drains at the armory, and there isn’t any water. Maybe he’s
not permitted to wash his hands. Like he wasn’t permitted to turn on the lights. But helping the man had to be what the catechism
listed as a corporal work of mercy, right? Even if he was a rabbi. A Jew. That still must count. You were supposed to help
the needy. The poor. The sick. The man looked poor, didn’t he? And he needed someone to turn on the lights. For some mysterious
reason.
Is not permitted
…. The mystery of the brief moment in the synagogue grew larger as Michael swallowed his own softened host. The rabbi wasn’t
Svengali. He wasn’t Fagin. But he was strange and mysterious, like someone from a book, a bearded guardian of secrets. And
Michael thought: I want to find out those secrets.

Finally the mass ended. Father Heaney muttered
Ite, missa est
, and Michael answered
Deo gratias
, and the priest strode off the altar, with Michael behind him. In the sacristy, with its marble counter and ceramic sink,
Father Heaney began removing his garments: the chasuble and stole, the maniple and cincture, the amice and alb. Under all
of these, the priest was wearing a tan turtleneck sweater and black trousers. His black shoes were stained from dried rock
salt. He sighed, took a pack
of Camels from his trouser pocket, and struck a wooden match on the sole of his shoe to light up. He inhaled deeply. The smell
of the cigarette filled the air.

“Thanks, young man,” he said, his eyes moving under the hooded lids. “And, hey: How in the hell did you make it here this
morning anyway?”

“I walked, Father.”

The priest inhaled deeply, then made a perfect O with the exhaled smoke.

“You walked, huh? How many blocks?”

“Eight.”

“No wonder you were late,” he said, his black eyebrows rising. “Well, you can offer it up to the souls in Purgatory.”

“I did, Father. During the prayers.”

“I hope you included me,” the priest said, without smiling. And then grabbed his army overcoat and walked out to cross the
snow-packed yard to the rectory.

Michael’s duties were not finished. This was the last mass of the day, and so he went back to the altar to extinguish the
two candles with a long-handled device the altar boys had named the “holy snuffer.” The old women were gone. They seemed to
have ascended into the darkness like the waxy smoke from the candles after he capped them with the brass bell at the end of
the snuffer. For a moment, staring into the darkness, he imagined the rafters full of smoky old women with hair sprouting
from their chins. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Whispering in Italian and Polish and Latin about dead husbands and dead children.
Like angels grown old but not allowed to die. He could smell them: the odor of candles.

Quickly, Michael came down off the altar, genuflected, and returned to the empty sacristy. He pulled the surplice over his
head, hung the cassock in the closet, and changed into his
street clothes. Before leaving, he flipped the switches of the altar lights, peering out to be sure he had turned them all
off. Then, from the dark upper reaches of the church, he could hear the moaning of the wind. And through the wind, a voice.

Please
, it said.

Please to help
.

T
hat afternoon in the howling white world, while his mother worked her shift as a nurse’s aide at Wesleyan Hospital, Michael
Devlin was alone in the living room of the flat, lying on the linoleum floor beside the kerosene heater. A pillow was folded
under his head. His stack of
Captain Marvels
was beside him. After mass and the promised bacon and eggs and his mother’s departure, he had searched for the issue that
told the story of Billy Batson’s first encounter with Shazam. Or rather, he’d found the retelling of the story, because he
didn’t own the precious first issue of
Whiz Comics
, the one published long ago, near the beginning of the war. In the retelling, for a special issue of Captain Marvel’s own
book, the man in the black suit was there with his hat pulled down to mask his face. But except for the black clothes, he
didn’t resemble the rabbi from Kelly Street, and neither did the wizard Shazam. The wizard was much older, with a white beard
instead of a dark one, dressed in a long, flowing robe. The rabbi was younger,
heavier, and with his blue eyes and horn-rimmed glasses looked more like a schoolteacher from the Wild West than an Egyptian
wizard. Somebody who could have taught Abraham Lincoln.

After a while, Michael put aside the
Captain Marvels
and started reading a comic book named
Crime Does Not Pay
, all about the terrible killer Alvin Karpis and his bloody career and bloodier end. This comic made Michael feel very different
from the way he felt reading
Captain Marvel. Captain Marvel
was about magic words and mad scientists and tigers that talked, about bullets that bounced off chests and a hero with a
gold-trimmed cape who could fly through the air. But the crime comic was full of real gangsters in real cities. No capes.
No magic words. Just robbing and shooting and dying. Bullets didn’t bounce off chests, they went through them; and nobody
went flying through the air, high above the skyscrapers. The crime comics were about men who were once good kids in places
like Brooklyn and came to bad ends. Like the men from Murder Incorporated, Lepke something and Gurrah. Pretty Boy Floyd. Dillinger.
They died in ambushes. They died outside movie houses. They even died in the snow, like Tommy Devlin died in Belgium, but
without being heroes. They didn’t ever die for their country. They died for money. Or women.

Partway through the story of Alvin Karpis, Michael realized that the wind had stopped. He listened hard, fearing some trick
from the storm, and then heard shovels scraping against sidewalks and knew that it was over. He wanted to tell his mother
the news, but she was working at the hospital. So he dressed, and grabbed his dry gloves, and dashed down the stairs to find
his friends.

Sonny Montemarano was already there, testing the snow
with big mittened hands. His dark face was shiny, his eyes bright.

“You ever seen anything like this?” he said.

“Never,” Michael said. “They got icicles up at the armory that look like rocket ships.”

“We couldn’t get out my door,” Sonny said. “It’s frozen shut. We hadda jump out the fucking window.”

“This morning, the wind threw me across the street,” Michael said. “Like I was a goddamned feather.”

“I never seen anything like it. What a fucking storm.”

Sonny always said
fuck
. Michael loved hearing Sonny talk, but he still had trouble using the forbidden word, afraid it would become such a habit
that he would say it in front of his mother. He used
goddamned
. None of them said the worst word of all:
motherfucker
. Sonny had tried it one time last summer, but Unbeatable Joe, who ran the saloon on the corner, heard him, grabbed him by
the shirt collar, and said, “Don’t ever use that fucking word, you hear me? Only
niggers
use that fucking word.”

Then Jimmy Kabinsky arrived, with a big wool hat pulled down to his brow. He was a DP, a displaced person, and a figure of
much amazement in Sacred Heart School because he’d learned English in three months. Nobody was more amazed than Sonny Montemarano;
his grandmother had come from Sicily forty-one years ago and still didn’t speak much more than
Sonny, come uppan eat
or
Sonny, you shut up
.

“They got snow like this in Poland?” Sonny asked.

“They got snow in Poland goes up three flights,” Jimmy said. They started walking together toward Collins Street.

“You’re shittin’ me,” Sonny Montemarano said. “Three flights? You’d have nothing but dead Polacks, you had that much fucking
snow.”

“I swear,” Jimmy Kabinsky said. “My uncle told me.”

“Oh,” Sonny said, rolling his eyes at Michael behind Jimmy’s back. “Your
uncle
. That makes sense.”

Jimmy’s uncle was a junkman. He made a living picking up old newspapers, broken bicycle wheels, ruined radios, then piling
them into a pushcart and taking them off to some warehouse on the waterfront. During the last year of the war, the kids rode
him without mercy. For one thing, his arms were very long, his shoulders sloped, and his body was always pitched forward at
an angle, even when the pushcart wasn’t dragging him down the hills of the parish. For another, he had no wife and no kids
and never went to the bars with the other men. Finally, he was very ugly, or so everyone agreed: his eyes were buried under
a clifflike brow, his wide, potatolike nose was always flared in anger, his ears were like a pair of ashtrays, and his teeth
were yellow. The kids all called him Frankenstein, except when Jimmy was around. When Jimmy came to live with him, because
DPs all needed sponsors, he became Uncle Frankenstein. The kids didn’t rag him when Jimmy was around, out of respect for Jimmy,
whose parents died in the war.

“How high you think the snow is in Ebbets Field?” Jimmy said.

“Upper deck,” Sonny said, winking at Michael. “My grandmother heard it on the radio.”

“Upper
deck
?” Jimmy said. “Come on, that’s like, what, six flights?”

“Deeper than fucking Poland!” Sonny said, shoving Jimmy into a pile of snow. “And they got the wind out there, blowin’ to
left field. Swear to Christ.”

Soon they were romping in the snow, falling facedown into its whiteness, hurling snowballs at each other and at strangers.
Kids emerged from the tenements with sleds, heading for Prospect Park. A trolley car slowly pushed its way along Ellison Avenue.
A few cars arrived from nowhere, their tires encased in chains. Then Unbeatable Joe, thick and burly with a fur hat and a
heavy army coat, came to look at his saloon, gazing at the sign that was smashed on the sidewalk. He shook his head and kicked
the sign. Then he unlocked the door and went inside. He was back in a minute, holding two shovels. He shouted across the street.

“Hey, do you worthless, lazy bums wanna make some money?”

They took turns, two of them shoveling while the other warmed his hands. Michael shoveled around the fallen sign, which was
two feet high, three feet wide, about a foot deep. The neon lettering was smashed, the tin sides bent, the steel cables torn;
that was some goddamned wind. Then he started cutting a path for pedestrians, pushing loose snow out toward where the gutter
was. That was the easy part. But there was a layer of hard-packed icy snow beneath the fine snow that had fallen near the
end of the storm. The packed snow wouldn’t move.

“Lemme try,” Sonny said. He took the shovel from Michael, forced the blade under the packed snow, put a boot on the top of
the blade, and shoved hard. The snow peeled back. “Ya see? Ya gotta get
under
it.”

“I’ll finish it, Sonny,” Michael said.

“No, no, I enjoy this.” He laughed. “Help Jimmy.”

When the job was done, Unbeatable Joe came out again.

“You bums oughtta sign up with Sanitation right now,” he said. He took a dollar from his pocket and handed it to Sonny. “Go
get laid.”

He turned and kicked the sign one more time.

They went past Slowacki’s candy store, which was too crowded, and walked another block to Mister G’s. In this smaller, darker
candy store, Sonny bought a Clark bar, Jimmy chose a bag of peanuts, and Michael picked a box of Good and Plenty. Behind the
counter, Mister G was reading the
New York Post
. He was an old man, short and dumpy, with very little hair and sad eyes behind rimless glasses. He was an oddity along Ellison
Avenue; it was said, for example, that he was a Giants fan and that his kids had gone off to college. That was strange; Michael
had never known anyone but Dodger fans and nobody at all who had gone to college. It was also strange that Mister G read the
Post
in a neighborhood where men swore by the
Journal-American
. And that he lived with his wife in a tiny apartment at the back of the store. It was said of her that she “went to business,”
which meant she had a job in an office and rose early and went to the subway in a suit or a dress. It also meant that they
could afford a regular apartment but were too cheap to move from the back rooms of the candy store.

Mister G said nothing as he rang up the sale on a heavy gilded cash register on a shelf behind the counter. He gave Sonny
change from the dollar while flipping a page of the newspaper in a distracted way. Mister G’s silence was not odd, for there
was no need for chat. Kids were in and out of the store all day, buying penny candies from the boxes on the counter, or nickel
candies from the three-tiered rack. And the store was not only for kids. Grown-ups used the pay phone in the back. Or bought
newspapers. And in neat boxes on the right of the counter, Mister G had built displays of cigarettes and ten-cent cigars.

“Man, I hope it snows s’more tonight,” Sonny said. “I hope it snows for a
month
. We’d be rich.”

He was dividing the change when Frankie McCarthy walked in.

Sonny shoved the change in his pocket and started examining the comics on the standing rack against the wall.
The Spirit. Batman. Jungle Comics
. Michael was suddenly nervous. Frankie McCarthy was one of the older guys, at least seventeen, and the leader of the gang
called the Falcons. He scared Michael. He had dark red hair, wet now from the snow, freckles, slushy blue eyes with very small
pupils. He kept his lips pulled tight over his mouth to hide a broken front tooth. The summer before, Michael saw him punch
out a drunken man on the sidewalk in front of Unbeatable Joe’s, battering him until the man’s face was a smear of blood. The
scene was terrible, but Frankie McCarthy seemed to enjoy it. So did his boys on the Falcons. They all cheered as Frankie walked
away from the fallen older man like he was Joe Louis. And he
enjoyed
it. That’s what scared Michael.