V. (19 page)

"Sleep in the daytime," Geronimo said, "ho-ho. You crazy, man. We are going out after some cono."

Fina came in all warm and sleepy-eyed; heard they were holding a party, wanted to tag along. She worked 8 to 4:30 as a secretary but she had sick leave coming. Angel got all embarrassed. This sort of put his sister in the class of cono. Geronimo suggested calling up Dolores and Pilar, two girls they knew. Girls are different from cono. Angel brightened.

The six of them started at an after-hours club up near 125th Street, drinking Gallo wine with ice in it. A small group, vibes and rhythm, played listlessly in one corner. These musicians had been to high school with Angel, Fina and Geronimo. During the breaks they came over and sat at the table. They were drunk and threw pieces of ice at each other. Everybody talked in Spanish and Profane responded in what Italo-American he'd heard around the house as a kid. There was about 10 per cent communication but nobody cared: Profane was only guest of honor.

Soon Fina's eyes changed from sleepy to shiny from wine, and she talked less and spent more of her time smiling at Profane. This made him uncomfortable. It turned out Delgado the vibes player was going to be married the next day and having second thoughts. A violent and pointless argument developed about marriage, pro and con. While everybody else was screaming, Fina leaned toward Profane till their foreheads touched and whispered, "Benito," her breath light and acid with wine.

"Josephine," he nodded, pleasant. He was getting a headache. She continued to lean against his head until the next set when Geronimo grabbed her and they went off to dance. Dolores, fat and amiable, asked Profane to dance. "Non posso ballare," he said. "No puedo bailar," she corrected him and yanked him to his feet. The world became filled with the sounds of inanimate calluses slapping inanimate goatskin, felt hitting metal, sticks knocking together. Of course, he couldn't dance. His shoes kept getting in the way. Dolores, halfway across the room, didn't notice. Commotion broke out at the door and half a dozen teenagers wearing Playboy jackets invaded. The music bonged and clattered on. Profane kicked off his shoes - old black loafers of Geronimo's - and concentrated on dancing in his socks. After awhile Dolores was there again and five seconds later a spike heel came down square in the middle of his foot. He was too tired to yell. He limped off to a table in the corner, crawled under it and went to sleep. The next thing he knew there was sunlight in his eyes. They were carrying him down Amsterdam Avenue like pallbearers, all chanting, "Mierda. Mierda. Mierda . . ."

He lost count of all the bars they visited. He became drunk. His worst memory was of being alone with Fina somewhere in a telephone booth. They were discussing love. He couldn't remember what he'd said. The only other thing he remembered between then and the time he woke up - in Union Square at sundown, blindfolded by a raging hangover and covered by a comforter of chilly pigeons who looked like vultures - was same sort of unpleasantness with the police after Angel and Geronimo had tried to smuggle parts of a toilet under their coats out of the men's room in a bar on Second Avenue.

In the next few days Profane came to tally his time in reverse or schlemihl's light: time on the job as escape, time exposed to any possibility of getting involved with Fina as assbreaking, wageless labor.

What had he said in that phone booth? The question met him at the end of every shift, day, night or swing, like an evil fog that hovered over whatever manhole he happened to climb out of. Nearly that whole day of slewfooting drunk under February's sun was a blank. He was not about to ask Fina what had happened. There grew a mutual embarrassment between them, as if they'd been to bed after all.

"Benito," she said one night, "how come we never talk."

"Wha," said Profane, who was watching a Randolph Scott movie on television. "Wha. I talk to you."

"Sure. Nice dress. How about more coffee. I got me another cocodrilo today. You know what I mean."

He knew what she meant. Now here was Randolph Scott: cool, imperturbable, keeping his trap shut and only talking when he had to - and then saying the right things and not running off haphazard and inefficient at the mouth - and here on the other side of the phosphor screen was Profane, who knew that one wrong word would put him closer than he cared to be to street level, and whose vocabulary it seemed was made up of nothing but wrong words.

"Why don't we go to a movie or something," she said.

"This here," he answered, "is a good movie. Randolph Scott is this U.S. marshal and that sheriff, there he goes now, is getting paid off by the gang and all he does all day long is play fan-tan with a widow who lives up the hill."

She withdrew after a while, sad and pouting.

Why? Why did she have to behave like he was a human being. Why couldn't he be just an object of mercy. What did Fina have to go pushing it for? What did she want - which was a stupid question. She was a restless girl, this Josephine: warm and viscous-moving, ready to come in a flying machine or anyplace else.

But curious, he decided to ask Angel.

"How do I know," Angel said. "It's her business. She don't like anybody in the office. They are all maricon, she says. Except for Mr. Winsome the boss, but he's married so he's out."

"What does she want to be," Profane said, "a career girl? What does your mother think?"

"My mother thinks everybody should get married: me, Fina, Geronimo. She'll be after your ass soon. Fina doesn't want anybody. You, Geronimo, the Playboys. She doesn't want. Nobody knows what she wants."

"Playboys," Profane said. "Wha."

It came out then that Fina was spiritual leader or Den Mother of this youth gang. She had learned in school about a saint, called Joan of Arc, who went around doing the same thing for armies who were more or less chicken and no good in a rumble. The Playboys, Angel felt, were pretty much the same way.

Profane knew better than to ask whether she was giving them sexual comfort too. He didn't have to ask. He knew this was another work of mercy. The mother to the troops bit, he guessed - not knowing anything about women - was a harmless way to be what maybe every girl wants to be, a camp follower. With the advantage that here she was not a follower but a leader. How many in the Playboys? Nobody knew, Angel said. Maybe hundreds. They all were crazy for Fina, in a spiritual way. In return she had to put out nothing but charity and comfort, which she was only too glad to do, punchy with grace already.

The Playboys were a strangely exhausted group. Mercenaries, many of them lived in Fina's neighborhood; but unlike other gangs they had no turf of their own. They were spread out all over the city; having no common geographical or cultural ground, they put their arsenal and streetfighting prowess at the disposal of any interested party who might be considering a rumble. The Youth Board had never taken a count on them: they were everywhere, but as Angel had mentioned, chicken. The main advantage in having them on your side was psychological. They cultivated a carefully sinister image: coal-black velvet jackets with the clan name discreetly lettered small and bloody on the back; faces pale and soulless as the other side of the night (and you felt that was where they lived: for they would appear suddenly across the street from you and keep pace for a while, and then vanish again as if back behind some invisible curtain); all of them affecting prowling walks, hungry eyes, feral mouths.

Profane didn't meet them in any social way until the Feast of San' Ercole dei Rinoceronti, which comes on the Ides of March, and is celebrated downtown in the neighborhood called Little Italy. High over all Mulberry Street that night soared arches of light bulbs, arranged in receding sets of whorls, each spanning the street, shining clear to the horizon because the air was so windless. Under the lights were jury-rigged stalls for penny-toss, bingo, pick up the plastic duck and win a prize. Every few steps were stands for zeppole, beer, sausage-pepper sandwiches. Behind it all was music from two bandstands, one at the downtown end of the street and one halfway along. Popular songs, operas. Not too loud in the cold night: as if confined only to the area below the lights. Chinese and Italian residents sat out on the stoops as if it were summer, watching the crowds, the lights, the smoke from the zeppole stands which rose lazy and unturbulent up toward the lights but disappeared before it reached them.

Profane, Angel and Geronimo were out prowling for cono. It was Thursday night, tomorrow - according to the nimble calculations of Geronimo they were working not for Zeitsuss but for the U. S. Government, since Friday is one-fifth of the week and the government takes one-fifth of your check for withholding tax. The beauty of Geronimo's scheme was that it didn't have to be Friday but could be any day - or days - in the week depressing enough to make you feel it would be a breach of loyalty if the time were dedicated to good old Zeitsuss. Profane had got into this way of thinking, and along with parties in the daytime and a rotating shift system devised by Bung the foreman whereby you didn't know till the day before which hours you would be working the next, it put him on a weird calendar which was not ruled off into neat squares at all but more into a mosaic of tilted street-surfaces that changed position according to sunlight, streetlight, moonlight, nightlight . . .

He wasn't comfortable in this street. The people mobbing the pavement between the stalls seemed no more logical than the objects in his dream. "They don't have faces," he said to Angel.

"A lot of nice asses, though," Angel said.

"Look, look," said Geronimo. Three jailbait, all lipstick and shiny-machined breast- and buttock-surfaces, stood in front of the wheel of Fortune, twitching and hollow-eyed.

"Benito, you speak guinea. Go tell them how about a little."

Behind them the band was playing Madame Butterfly. Non-professional, non-rehearsed.

"It isn't like it was a foreign country," Profane said.

"Geronimo is a tourist," Angel said. "He wants to go down to San Juan and live in the Caribe Hilton and ride around the city looking at puertorriquenos."

They'd been moseying slow, casing the jailbait at the wheel. Profane's foot came down on an empty beer can. He started to roll. Angel and Geronimo, flanking him, caught him by the arms about halfway down. The girls had turned around and were giggling, the eyes mirthless, ringed in shadow.

Angel waved. "He goes weak in the knees," Geronimo purred, "when he sees beautiful girls."

The giggling got louder. Someplace else the American ensign and the geisha would be singing in Italian to the music behind them; and how was that for a tourist's confusion of tongues? The girls moved away and the three fell into step beside them. They bought beer and took over an unoccupied stoop.

"Benny here talks guinea," said Angel. "Say something in guinea, hey."

"Sfacim," Profane said. The girls got all shocked.

"Your friend is a nasty mouth," one of them said.

"I don't want to sit with any nasty mouth," said the girl sitting next to Profane. She got up, flipped her butt and moved down into the street, where she stood hipshot and stared at Profane out of her dark eyeholes.

"That's his name," Geronimo said, "is all. And I am Peter O'Leary and this here is Chain Ferguson." Peter O'Leary being an old school chum who was now at a seminary upstate studying to be a priest. He'd been so clean-living in high school that Geronimo and his friends always used him for an alias whenever there might be any trouble. God knew how many had been deflowered, hustled off of for beer or slugged in his name. Chain Ferguson was the hero of a western they'd been watching on the Mendoza TV the night before.

"Benny Sfacim is really your name?" said the one in the street.

"Sfacimento." In Italian it meant destruction or decay. "You didn't let me finish."

"That's all right then," she said. "That isn't bad at all." Bet your shiny, twitching ass, he thought, all unhappy. The other could knock her up higher than those arches of light. She couldn't be more than fourteen but she knew already that men are drifters. Good for her. Bedmates and all the sfacim they have yet to get rid of drift on, and if some stays with her and swells into a little drifter who'll go someday too, why she wouldn't like that too much, he reckoned. He wasn't angry with her. He looked that thought at her, but who knew what went on in those eyes? They seemed to absorb all the light in the street: from flames beneath sausage grills, from the bridges of light bulbs, windows of neighborhood apartments, glowing ends of De Nobili cigars, flashing gold and silver of instruments on the bandstand, even light from the eyes of what innocent there were among the tourists:

The eyes of a New York woman [he started to sing]

Are the twilit side of the moon,

Nobody knows what goes on back there

Where it's always late afternoon.

Under the lights of Broadway,

Far from the lights of home,

With a smile as sweet as a candy cane

And a heart all plated with chrome.

Do they ever see the wandering bums

And the boys with no place to go,

And the drifter who cried for an ugly girl

That he left in Buffalo?

Dead as the leaves in Union Square,

Dead as the graveyard sea,

The eyes of a New York woman

Are never going to cry for me.

Are never going to cry for me.

The girl on the sidewalk twitched. "It doesn't have any beat." It was a song of the Great Depression. They were singing it in 1932, the year Profane was born. He didn't know where he'd heard it. If it had a beat it was the beat of beans thumping into an old bucket someplace down in Jersey. Some WPA pick against the pavement, some bum-laden freight car on a downgrade hitting the gaps between the rails every 39 feet. She'd have been born in 1942. Wars don't have my beat. They're all noise.

Zeppole man across the street began to sing. Angel and Geronimo started to sing. The band across the street acquired an Italian tenor from the neighborhood: