Coney (11 page)

“Damn, I'd like to see a book like that.”

“I'll lend it to you, Soldier. I know it all by heart anyway.”

“Damn, would ya Harry? I'll give it back, I promise. But you gotta remind me. My memory ain't no good no more.”

Harry suddenly felt as if he were meeting Soldier for the first time. Previously he had been a tool to fix his bike, a head-banging spectacle, another deformed Coney freak. Everyone, it seemed to Harry, played chess using everyone else as designated pieces. The king and queen of England were coming to the U.S. on the
Queen Mary.
Soldier, his proud military uniform become a mourner's sack-cloth, his once eager face rubbed with ash-gray beard stubble, was the undefended, lonely pawn, sacrificed for all the kings and queens of Europe.

A swirling black cloud smothered the sun. The wind asserted primacy as nature's messenger. Harry shivered. He looked at Soldier's knuckles, joined to his by the handlebar. He felt close, empowered to ask a friend's question.

“Is that because of what happened to you in the war?”

Soldier's peach-pit–shaped eyes blinked slowly, trying to focus or perhaps forget.

“Damn, it was that mustard gas. I was always crazy about mustard too, could eat it with a spoon, and the doctors tellin' me that it was burnin' my lungs and givin' me spells. I asked how come I didn't smell it. They told me it didn't smell like mustard. Didn't smell, not at all. But that don't make no difference in the way I feel about mustard. When I go by Nathan's, I like to puke. I can't even try and eat mustard, even though I think I'm still crazy for it.”

“I'm sorry, Soldier.”

“Damn, it's OK, Harry. I'm alive. There's plenty who ain't.”

“Did you kill any Germans?”

“Damn, no, and I'm glad for that. I didn't join up to kill anyone. It was to get the war over. That's what the president and everyone was sayin':
it was up to us Yanks to get the war over
. Damn, killin' was never a part of it.”

“I'd kill Germans.”

“Damn, would ya. I got some German blood in me.”

Harry tightened his grip on the handlebar.

“I'm Jewish,” he said, making amends for not defending his mother in the bike store.

“Damn, that's nice. The army was the first place I met Jew people. A lot different from what I was taught. I was lookin' for their horns. In the hospital there was one just like me with the mustard sickness. Never talked, not one word. Just hummed songs I didn't know. Wonder where he is.”

Soldier stared at the bike quizzically, scratching the back of his neck.

“Damn, how long did Woody say you could keep this one?”

“Woody gave it to me.”

“Damn, gave?”

“Yes, gave!”

“Damn, watch out.”

“I'm not lying!”

Soldier put his hand on top of Harry's.

“Damn, I didn't mean that. Give it back.”

“Never!”

“Damn, Harry, what does he want you to do for it?”

“Nothing.”

“Damn … Please, Harry.”

Soldier shook. Harry, anticipating another coughing spell, took the slips from his pocket.

“Collect these.”

“Damn, don't do it Harry! It ain't the slips. I done that. It's Woody. He wants to mess people up.”

“How do you mean?”

“Damn, Harry, I'm sick. But not as sick as everyone thinks. I hear things because people talk like I ain't there. Woody wants to make everyone like him.”

“Soldier, that's crazy.”

“Damn. No it ain't Harry. He …” Soldier shook his head violently, trying to dislodge the elusive words. “He gets you so you have to live his life. I seen it. I heard him say: “‘Now they're screwed like me.'”

Harry decided not to listen too long to a madman.

“Soldier, I'll think about it … Soldier, would you give Woody the slips for me? It's cold and I'd like to get home.”

“Damn, Harry, sure.”

Standing on the boardwalk, Harry watched Soldier's back grow smaller. Every six steps, he would skip and almost lose his balance.

Some track medal, Harry thought.

H
ARRY PEDALED FRENETICALLY TO ESCAPE THE DAY, SPEED DISTANCING
him from the freaks' bodies, Soldier's tics and the human skeleton's rash and toward a cleansing antidote: Bama's warm, kneading hands and cat-wet kisses. Before he could ring her bell, the door flew open. She pulled him into the house.

“
Oy
, Heshele, precious one, it is the Papa. He is sick. Come see,” she wailed.

Zadeh lay on his back on the bedroom floor, his blood-drained face twisted into a lopsided Halloween terror mask. Spittle dribbled out of the corner of his mouth and fell to his chest like a Lilliputian waterfall.

“Bama, did you call an ambulance!”

“
I
call the police.”

“Did you speak English? Did you tell them your address in English?”

“
I
think yes.
I
am not sure.”

Harry ran to the phone and demanded Coney Island Hospital emergency. The doorbell rang. Bama led two cops into the bedroom. The hospital answered. Harry shouted: “Emergency! Forty-nine Neptune Avenue, ground floor, a man is very sick.”

The receiver was jerked from his hand. One of the cops whispered into it: “This is officer Dunn. It's a stroke. He's alive, just. Bring emergency equipment.”

He laid a fat index finger that smelled of cigars over Harry's lips. Harry nodded.

The other cop was having little luck in moving Bama out of the bedroom. He motioned to Harry for help.

“Now, Ma'am,” he said, “you mustn't touch him. The ambulance is on the way and everything will be all right. This nice boy here—your grandson?—called the hospital. Why don't you go sit with him until the doctors come.”

She widened the spread of her feet. She would not do as he asked. He was the enemy, an anti-Semite. Yet she had called the cops. Harry wondered how that worked in her mind.

“Call the Mama!” she screamed at Harry.

He dialed.

“Hello, Mom?”

“What's wrong?”

“Zadeh,” he said—the name was suddenly silly, not carrying the necessary official gravity—“your father …”

“Yes, yes! What! Arrested again?”

“No, sick. A stroke.”

A short shriek.

“How do you know?”

“There are cops here.”

Bama plunged toward him and grabbed the phone.

“Leah, the Papa, the Papa!”

Bat squeals escaped the receiver.

“Leah, Leah, what will I do? The Papa, the Papa!”

He heard the line go dead and tried to wrest the phone from her, but she would not give it up. A cop tugged at him. “Listen, kid, let her have the phone. It'll keep her out of the room.”

An ambulance siren grew closer and louder, a finger of noise pointed at Jacob Simon Fishman, a stranger become an intimate because he was wrestling with mortality. Men showing white garments under their overcoats wheeled a stretcher into the bedroom. Through the closed door Harry heard loud voices, which he tried to decode to life or death. A cop emerged. He led Harry away from Bama, who still clutched the phone, moaning
the Papa, the Papa
to
a busy signal, and dropped a heavy arm around Harry's shoulders.

“Kid, your grandfather is dead. They did all that they could, but it was a very serious stroke. Look at it this way: even if he had lived, he would have been a vegetable. So maybe he's better off.”

Harry saw Zadeh at his unvarying morning ritual: biting into the raw onion that assured bowel movements and longevity. But it was not the face he had watched licking the stinking juice off his chin. It was the stony, sculpted agony of the bedroom. He tried to blink it away, but he could not. He ran through memories: hand-in-hand walks; being shown off to fellow workers at the leather factory; standing poised at the fishing pier; staring across a chessboard. No use. Zadeh was contorted flesh, bubbles of spittle. Harry sobbed, frightened by his mind's impotence.

The cop drew Harry's face onto his blue-coated chest. Cigar odor clogged his nostrils. Harry gagged. He tried to pull away but the cop increased the pressure, crushing his nose.

“That's it, kid. Get it out here. I know your folks are coming. But till then you've got to take care of your grandmother. Now, stop crying and we'll go and tell her.”

He released his pressure. Harry inhaled deeply.

“You ready?” the cop asked.

Harry nodded. But for what he was ready, he did not know. They were about to tell a woman who could not imagine life without her husband to start imagining it. In India, wives burned themselves with their dead husbands. Maybe they were right. They approached Bama, who squinted at the cop, slowly nodding her head.

“He has died,” she whispered to Harry.

Harry did not answer. Silence sufficed.

The cop began to break the news.

“Ma'am, your husband …”

Bama dropped the phone, doubled her fists, and pounded at the cop's chest. Particles of dust rose between them. Instinctively, the cop reached for his billy club. His hand rested on it as spat Yiddish crackled at him.

“Assassin, maker of pogroms, killer of Jews, Cossack, may your entire family die horribly in a plague!”

The cop nodded his head. He understood her grieving and the spoken memories of her dead husband. He stepped back. Bama's fists continued, chopping air.

The bedroom door opened. Like a figurehead, the other cop led a furled white sail past them. Bama leapt toward it, ripping away the sheet.

“Yakov Shimon, Yakov Shimon,” she wailed, shaking the corpse's shoulders to awaken him.

It was the first time Harry had heard Bama call Zadeh by his given names. She sounded like one of the lost little girls sobbing forlornly into millions of wrong faces on a summer Sunday on the beach.

One cop pulled her off as she cursed his forefathers and their whores. The other grabbed her around the waist. They held her, wriggling and cursing, as the white lump disappeared and the sound of ignition guaranteed its inaccessibility.

One of the cops shouted to Harry:

“Hey kid! Come on. She's your grandmother. Do something! We can't stay here all day.”

Harry offered Bama his hands. She placed her cold palms in his. He led her to a couch. She would not release his hands. They sat like bashful lovers, frozen before petting.

The cops opened the entrance door.

“Sorry, Ma'am,” one said.

“Murderers,” Bama hissed.

Bama lifted Harry's hands and kissed each finger.

“Heshele, the Zadeh loved you.”

“I know, Bama.”

“He was a man who thought big, important things.”

“Yes, Bama.”

She jumped up, ran to Zadeh's desk and snatched his Bible, which was protected by a plastic red-and-white cover more fitting for a barber's manual. She sat next to Harry and opened it to a
page whose margins were completely covered by tiny, thin Hebrew calligraphy. Her tears smudged the blue ink. She lifted her head and hardened her jaw.

“What good is all your scribbling now? Hah! Tell me.” She let the desk know that the challenge was unanswerable.

“Heshele, such a man … such a man who wrote things about God, must clean toilets to bring us to America after.”

After
designated all time following the news in Warsaw of the outbreak of the World War. In Bama's world, life was divided between the
after
or
before
of that event.

In 1913,
Zadeh
had sailed to America alone to earn money quickly in the Golden Land to bring over Bama and their two daughters. His first job had been cleaning toilets on the Third Avenue Elevated Line.

When war broke out in 1914, he had not yet earned the fare. They could not communicate for five years. Esther, their younger daughter, died of influenza. Bama and Harry's mother almost starved to death.

Bama waved a derisive arm at the desk.

“How can you blame him for not being there when we came to Ellis Island? A man with such big thoughts.”

In 1919, he had sent money. From Warsaw, Bama and his mother had traveled to the port of Antwerp, only to discover that they had insufficient funds to cover the passage. In Danzig, it was the same story. Finally in Le Havre, they had found passage on an ancient tanker. After five weeks on an open deck, tossed violently by the winter Atlantic, they had arrived at Ellis Island dehydrated and near delirium.

On that day, Zadeh stood on the dock in Houston, Texas, which, he had been informed—by whom he could not remember, but it was a reliable source—was their port of debarkation.

The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society had rescued Bama and his mother, housing them in a shelter. A week later Zadeh had returned, insisting then and always, that the ship had altered course.

“Heshele, precious one, let us play chess.”

Harry was surprised that Bama knew the game. During his matches with Zadeh, she had not even paused to watch while delivering milk, cookies and tea.

He placed the chessboard between them and set up the pieces. He put a black pawn in one fist and a white one in the other and held them out for her to choose. She looked at the fists and smiled. He set the pawns in place. He had given her the white pieces to play, but she did not begin the game. He turned the board around and made the first move.

She duplicated it. Five more moves were copied. He pushed a piece that blocked duplication. She followed suit anyway, placing two pawns on the same square.

“Bama, you can't …”

“Have you won, Heshele?”

“No.”

He moved. She crowded another square.

“That's it, Bama. I win.”

She spoke to the board:

“That's all I ever wanted him to do! But no. Big man!”