“I had this bad cold,” I told Olsen.
“For six weeks?”
“It was severe.”
Olsen stared at me unblinking like some cobra at a mongoose who’s just told him, “Hey, let’s take a little break for a second, okay?” and then he finally said, “Right” in this quiet, dead tone and then stood up and lurched off down the walkway with a “See you next meeting.” As he loped like some tall, gimpy werewolf in his daytime form, I kept staring at his wide-brimmed Boy Scout hat and imagined the scene at his next “appointment,” where he’d be holding out the Scout hat upside down while collecting protection money from the same Chinese laundry guys we kids used to hassle, only this time with a minor variation inasmuch as when Olsen held up his hand with his fingers and thumb splaying out, now the gesture meant “Pay or Die on Friday.” I often wondered if after they’d paid him he gave them all merit badges in life-saving.
Spreading my arms out on the back of the bench, I looked out across the river, wishing Foley were with me as I thought about a lot of those balmy summer nights when he and I would be glued to one of these benches watching bobby socks and saddle shoes slowly drifting by, or we’d be going through this booklet Get Tough that we’d chipped in to buy and was filled with these highly educational and, to Foley, deeply inspiring photos and sketches of British commandos breaking somebody’s arm or his leg or maybe gouging out his eyes with their thumbs covered over in the same rubber caps that Miss Doyle always used when she’d be slowly turning pages in her ledger. We were acutely security conscious. Though we talked about other stuff too. Sometimes scary kinds of stuff. Like God. Like what if God hadn’t created the worlds and there was absolutely nothing in existence, which discussions were always pretty short, I’ll admit, since almost immediately at this thought our puny minds would short out and sort of gasp and want to throw up amid a shower of crackling electrical sparks like a couple of stymied headhunters happening on the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz. Yet we still smelled the perfume when a really pretty girl walked by.
Pretty girls. There she was again. Right?
Jane Bent.
Head lowered, arms folded across my chest, I pondered the mystery enfolding Jane like an aura with ever-changing colors—on the one hand anxious for Monday to come when I’d be seeing her again and could get to the bottom of some things, and on the other already dreading the approaching end of the weekend and returning to the drabness of school, most especially with winter coming on when in the morning instead of walking five blocks in the freezing rain with cardboard in my shoes to plug the holes, I’d want to fake a bad cold so I could stay snug and warm in my bed while endlessly polishing my vast collection of secret decoder rings and badges and listening to grown-up radio serials like Pretty Kitty Kelly and The Romance of Helen Trent, although never The Romance of Consuelo Chavez, I noticed, or Pretty Sandra Shapiro. Only summer seemed livable to me then, and I even welcomed chubby old Sister Louise’s constant warnings of the dreaded June Regents exams in her husky, sandpaper voice, “In the merry of month of June you’ll be sweating,” a threat she invariably personalized by always turning to glare at Bill Choirelli and adding a heartfelt “You fat tub of guts!”—which today might bring a lawsuit and find Sister Louise in an orange hood and jumpsuit doing the perp walk into some courthouse croaking loudly, “On the merry Day of Judgment all you ACLU scumbags will be sweating!” This followed by Foley, Baloqui and a few other bystanders quietly applauding and murmuring, “Hear, now! Hear! Hear, hear!” Foley idolized Sister Louise. Her position on torture would have never been in doubt.
Now my thoughts swirled back to Jane, this time to the puzzle of her cryptic words: “It’s okay to love me, Joey. But don’t be in love with me.” What on earth could she possibly have meant? As I turned my head to the left and stared down the walkway with an ever-dwindling hope I’d see her walking toward me quickly with that moonrise smile and her arms held out to me, I saw someone quickly duck behind a group of strollers. It was Baloqui. Frimmled, I got up and started walking to the right, but when I turned and looked back I saw him stalking me again and then he jumped behind a tree to the left of the walkway. Grimfaced, I strode over to the tree and stood in front of it, arms akimbo as I growled, “You flaming refugee from a third-rate Toledo sword factory, why are you following me?”
“I’m not following,” I heard Baloqui’s voice answer hollowly.
“You were!” I said firmly.
“I was not. I was walking where you walked. Nothing more.”
“Come on out from behind there!”
“No, they know me here now.”
“You’re standing behind a sapling! I can see you!”
“Touché.”
Baloqui skulked around, looking grave.
“I am always your friend,” he said somberly, “your most loyal, truest friend. But you are right. I lied. I have been following you.”
“Why?”
“I guard.”
I guard?
I’d been getting these déjà vu feelings lately and, looking back, I was having an unusually strong one because of this spook movie called The Uninvited, where Ruth Hussey and Ray Milland smell the scent of mimosa whenever a ghost named Carmel comes around, though in the end the ghost’s good and she explains what she’s been doing all this time, which is just those two words: “I guard.”
But the movie wouldn’t be made for another three years!
That was then. This is now.
But which is which?
“What do you mean, ‘I guard,’” I said, and by now I was actually smelling mimosa as Baloqui said, “I seek to protect you,” and then added his brand-new favorite coda, his increasingly annoying “Nothing more.”
I looked over my shoulder as just for a second a suspicion sliced through my mind like a white-hot Damascus blade through Unguentine that Farragher and Connelly might be lurking in hiding and plotting to toss me into the river. I turned back and Baloqui put his hands on my shoulders, his intense black stare burning into mine as he said to me quietly and with emotion, “It doesn’t matter what our parents might do with one another. No, with us there is a friendship that is strong and can never be broken. And so I guard, my friend Joey. I protect you.”
“Protect me from what?” I blurted, exasperated.
“It’s that girl, Jane Bent,” he said. “Or whoever she really is.”
That did it, that “whoever she really is,” and I drew back and wrenched his hands off my shoulders. “What in freak are you talking about?!” I blustered, and then smoother than Evel Knievel sailing over a canyon on his favorite Harley with a sack full of gifts of appreciation for his longtime friends and contacts in the Las Vegas Hospital Emergency Room, Baloqui launched even higher into Bizarro Land with some lunatic story about Jane being spotted very late the night before standing next to a white limousine with the California license tag STARLET 1 and head-to-head in a “secret-looking, guarded conversation” with the Little Orphan Annie comic strip character and God-figure “Mr. Am!” Baloqui described him to a tee: “Very tall and with a pointy long white beard? Yellow cummerbund, black top hat and jacket? Come on, Joey! No question about it! It was him! And then that other guy, The Asp, he’s in the driver’s seat, okay? So they finish up talking, your girl and Mr. Am, and they get into the limo and drive off and what’s spooky is you can’t hear the sound of the engine. Now I’m not saying it really was them. Understand? I’m not saying it. If it really was them, then no problem: Mr. Am and the Asp, they’re good people. But it actually can’t be them, Joey! They’re friggin’ cartoons! So now what kind of people would pretend to be them? See what I’m saying? What kind of person would do that?”
Baloqui took a step back then, maybe to avoid a potential right cross, although actually I think it was more like in self satisfaction as he folded his arms across his chest and nodded, saying, “Just looking after you, Joey. I don’t know what they’re after, but this girl is in it deep, she’s in deep with bad people, plu
s it looks like they’re rich, so they could finance expensive crazy plots to do you in. Stay away from her, Joey! That’s the only thing I’m saying. Just look out!”
I blinked a few times to clear my head. I’d known Baloqui all the way from first grade and while he had a few crotchets—well, maybe more than a few—it wasn’t until lately that I’d ever had reason to think that his brain waves, shall we say, had been inappropriately altered, and a paranoia dynamite fuse began sizzling and snaking through my mind about the people with the limo being rich, which made me flash on how Jane had whisked that five-dollar bill from her pocket. Who knew how many more might have been there? You know? Then my eyes began to narrow.
“You saw this yourself?”
“Joey, everyone sees things.”
“True. But was it you who in fact saw this?”
“I have eyes.”
“Yes, I know you have eyes. So do I. What I’m asking is are you the eyewitness to this, or is it somebody else with the initials F.A.?”
“And if it’s me you won’t believe it?” he suddenly blurted and—swear before God!—with a tremor in his voice and I could see he was scrunching up his eyes in a ludicrous try at manufacturing tears, or at least some mist, though I admit this pathetic but engaging bit of theater was surely no harder to take than his legendary “Pensive Stork” maneuver, although what followed, which was a choked-up “Okay for you, Joey!” was as close to a crushing final word as the set that I ran with could possibly use. And with this he whipped around, and with his hands in his pockets and his head bent low, he slouched away with this limp he was faking in a pitiful attempt at drawing my sympathy, and in my mind I could see him as Richard III grumbling, “Now is the winter of our discontent made even worse by this heartless prick El Bueno.” I saw him suddenly stop and broadly smile as he seemed to have spotted something on the walkway’s grassy berm. He stooped down to recover a thin piece of wood, but then scowled and, tossing it away, gimped on.
He must have thought it was a “Lucky Stick.”
7
I checked Dick Tracy, wondering how many locks he had picked with that icepick-pointed jaw, and I saw it was time to head home for dinner. Besides that my head hurt. Too much was going on inside of it, too many delirious, mysterious fandangos all bombarding my brain like it was some kind of run-down cargo spaceship being battered by swarms of pissed-off meteors because an article in Science Magazine had referred to them as “space debris.” I took a last wistful look around for Jane and then started to wend my way droopily home, always watchful, of course, as the shadows of autumn gathered deeper, for a sudden Baloqui sneak attack. Though as a matter of fact I was fond of the jerk. Being both Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, plus a touch of Trabb’s Boy in Dickens’s Great Expectations so relentlessly and quirkily deviling Pip, he had what most of us lack, which is vivid life, which I was practically certain beat vivid death, most especially when these scientists were constantly scaring us by insisting “vivid death” was where the universe was headed, though I suppose that when Miss Doyle heard the news, she said, “So?”
I chose an out-of-the-way route home that would take me past the “Supe” in the hope of maybe spotting Arrigo in the lobby and then somehow luring him out into the street, but, as it happened, when I got there he was standing out in front on a cigarette break. When he saw me coming toward him he froze for a second, his eyes wide and staring, then he flicked the cigarette into the street and tore back into the theater. Mr. Heinz was in the lobby at the time. He caught my eye, turned and stared at the auditorium door as it slowly and silently closed behind Arrigo, took another unreadable look at me and then lowered his head and shook it. So okay, so now I knew who was the real “eyewitness.” But what on earth had ever happened to Arrigo? Three years before on Halloween night a whole bunch of us had stopped in at Boshnack’s for a soda. Boshnack’s radio was blasting and he said to us, “Shhhh, boys! Be quiet, now! Quiet! Listen!” Well, turns out it was Orson Welles with his famous phony “Martian Invasion” broadcast on CBS radio which he did so well it sounded like it really was happening and all these building-sized Martian spaceships had landed in New Jersey and were spewing out death rays left and right and all of us were shivering in our skivvies, that is, all except one of us kids who shook his head and dismissively flipped his hand, sneering, “Ah, come on, you guys! It’s total bullshit!”
It was Eddie Arrigo.
Not to dwell on the matter, but in trying to sort out what had changed him, I would keep coming back to this one other time that we’d all come to Boshnack’s on a sweltering summer night with the demon of boredom clawing at its cage within us. Many years later, when I was struggling for a living in Southern California, I lived for a time in a low-rent apartment complex in Studio City called the Valli Sands where there would be late-night Bing Crosby sightings when he would come to visit his future wife, Kathryn Grant, and where the tenant list ranged from Clint Eastwood—then under contract to Universal Pictures for a hundred a week and doing “wild tracks” of Indian war whoops and such for his pay—to me, then a midnight-to-dawn United Airlines reservations agent, and to the guy in the apartment next to mine who sold Bibles door to door and whose daily big meal was a budget-friendly serving of cabbage boiled in vinegar and lots of brown sugar, whereas mine was a dish of Uncle Ben’s rice that I would cook in tomato sauce instead of water and then add sauted onions and a lot of salt and pepper. It was a dish I would serve at the occasional little ’dos to which I would invite a few residents of the complex. Clint and Maggie, his wife, were at the first such gathering, sitting across from me on a tiny sofa, Clint with his hands clasped tightly around his knees and already beginning his A Fistful of Dollars persona of silent and inscrutable staring, although the look was benign and full of both wonder and a touch of bewilderment, perhaps, about what he was doing on the Universal lot following the day that a studio executive pulled up to a Ventura Boulevard gas station where Eastwood was working as an attendant, took one look at him and offered him a studio contract. Clint had never given a thought to a career in movies. I learned this from Maggie. She spoke. Other than that it was a quiet affair.
But the next time, and times after that, were different as uninvited, struggling young actors showed up, including a young Jayne Mansfield, who was bubbly with a sweet-natured confidence in her future, and her husband, Paul, and their six-month-old baby. Of the three only Paul was quiet. He and Eastwood soon found each other and wound up in a staring contest over whose was the deeper silence. In the meantime, and finally getting to the point—because the crowds at these things were now straining my budget, and not wanting to be outdone by the burgeoning attendance at the Brown Sugar Cabbage parties next door—after hours of nightly experimentation, during which I would imagine myself to be Claude Raines in The Invisible Man, dripping chemicals from vial to vial, I found that mixing 7 UP and sauterne wine in a ratio of one-to-two will give you champagne for about four minutes. The inspiration for this great humanitarian discovery was an inevitable progression, I believe, from that previously mentioned fascinating night in July when the slender green bottle of Vanti Papaya that we handed to Arrigo was actually three parts Vanti and one part collective youthful piss.
Arrigo took a sip or two, and then judged it to be “a little bit off,” so he handed it to Boshnack who, after a test sip, shook his head and agreed, “It’s not right.” It was soon after that, is what I’m saying, that Arrigo started making up incredible stories. Connect the dots. I mean, I had to suspect it was the atomically altered Vanti Papaya that had somehow altered Eddie, although old man Boshnack had sipped at it too and the only bizarre effect it seemed to have was that the very next day he cut the price of chocolate Hooten bars from two to one cent and a Hooten with nuts from three to two. A little strange. Maybe Boshnack’s immune system fought the thing off and he only got a touch since the price of egg creams stayed the same. But then who knows? It could even be that Eddie found out what we’d done and was slyly and secretl
y eating his cookies as he showed us that revenge is a dish best served not only cold but maybe endlessly as well.
Right after my encounter with Arrigo at the Supe, I doubled back to Second Avenue and as I passed the Chinese laundry who do I see but “Upright” Olsen in what looked like a pretty heavy argument with one of the laundrymen, probably the owner, and then two others came out from the back and were yammering and mad as hell and right away I saw another of my front-page headlines:
DEAD SCOUTMASTER FISHED FROM RIVER FLATIRON-SHAPED BURN MARKS ON BODY
And below it the subhead:
Scout Hat Filled with Cash Found Floating
Upside Down. Cops: “Suicide Ruled Out”
I hurried on before Olsen could turn and see me and then afterward say the whole thing was all my fault because if I hadn’t missed the last three meetings he wouldn’t have had to transfer his annoyance with me to the Chinks by raising their protection fee from seven to ten percent.
You can prove almost anything you want if you want to.
Pop had cooked Peruvian shish kekab for dinner with a side of corn and boiled potatoes, and as we ate, our little curve-topped Philco radio was booming out the Saturday shows that began at five o’clock with Kay Kyser’s Kollege of Musical Knowledge (“Make way for Her Nibs, Miss Georgia Gibbs!”), and then Bob Hope, Fred Allen and The Hit Parade, which played the top fifteen songs of the week; and, of course, The Lone Ranger, which in every single show had the Masked Man declare to some badass, “You’re not hurt! I only shot the gun out of your hand!” What I achingly longed for was right after that to just once hear a moan and the thud of a body falling to the ground. Pop loved The Lone Ranger, and the Red Skelton Show even more because of Skelton’s running character “The Mean Widdle Kid” who every week made Pop smile and chuckle with delight at his “If I do, I get a whippin’,” and then after a pause for wicked thought, “I dood it!” Pop was so pleased that I could imitate the voice of the kid to a tee and at random times he’d smile and say, “Joey, doing for me now ‘I dood it!’” It tickled him so! And when I’d done it he’d look down and shake his head and start to chuckle just the way he always did at the name “Baby Snooks” or the voice of his favorite newscaster, Gabriel Heatter. Imitating radio voices was the reason I was popular in school, though later on in my high school years when I discovered I could do a really chilling movie werewolf cry, it was a whole other opposite story inasmuch as not anyone, not even Pop, would ever dream of saying, “Joey, doing for me now scary werewolf call,” most especially on a Sunday in Central Park while we’re watching all these honking, ungrateful seals being fed and complaining like they’d just been harpooned when a fish didn’t score a perfect strike into their mouths as if the City could afford to hire Whitlow Wyatt, the Brooklyn Dodgers star pitcher, to come down there every day at two o’clock to throw flounder straight into the mouths of a bunch of glistening, spoiled little shits.