Alternate Side

  Now Nora had to add Ricky to the list of things going awry on the block. The ocher shadows under his brown-black eyes were darker and deeper, and he had the kind of graven marionette lines that many of the women Nora knew had had plumped by a dermatologist. He still said, “Good morning, missus,” whenever he saw her, but he’d lost his light. Usually when she gave him items the twins had outgrown, soccer shirts, picture books, passing them along for Ricky’s own children, he turned them over in his scarred hands and smiled. Now, no. When she told Linda Lessman she had watched him being ticketed, Linda sighed. “Please don’t ask me to fix the tickets,” Linda said.

  “Of course not. But the poor guy. He’ll go out of business if this keeps up.”

  Nora stopped to talk to him while she was walking Homer and he was leaving the Rizzolis’ later that evening. The Rizzoli oven had apparently gone kaput, but Ricky had cleaned out the automatic pilot, and heat had returned to the stove. Homer sniffed Ricky’s pants leg. Nora jerked him back, and Homer turned slowly and looked at her with reproach. The idea that he would ever urinate on a human leg was insulting.

  “No problem, missus,” Ricky said, shifting his tool bag. “He just smells my dog. I got a pit bull mix, her name’s Rosie.”

  “Rosie doesn’t sound like a pit bull name,” Nora said.

  “Nah, she’s real sweet. Pit bulls get a bad rep.”

  “His wife not doing so good,” Charity said later, shaking her head, and when she saw the confusion on Nora’s face, adding, “She got the cancer in the breast. They do—” Here she made a motion that Nora assumed was meant to mimic a scalpel.

  Nora couldn’t help but remember the size of the breasts on the windowsill the day she’d brought the humidifier to the Bronx, or the fit Nita had thrown from her perch above them. It seemed unlikely she’d be a compliant patient.

  “Maybe I can help with a doctor,” Nora said. “I know people on the board of the big cancer hospital.”

  Charity shook her head, then burst out, “Help get people off his back with the parking! Mr. Fisk yelling at him, that stupid man across the street”—even Charity was contemptuous of George—“Mr. Nolan, too. He work so hard for everybody, night, day, weekends. He missed church for Mr. Lessman!”

  There had not been such an outburst from Charity since Rachel had been denied the part of Dorothy in the school production of The Wizard of Oz. “The good witch has a beautiful costume,” Nora had said as her daughter sobbed into her side, and Charity had hollered, “Not the biggest part! Not what was for Judy Gartner when she was in the movie!”

  Not for the first time, Nora wondered what would become of them if Charity were to quit. There were always rumors of poachers, newcomers to the high-rise buildings that had grown up around the block like a forbidding fence, women who trawled the parks and grocery stores for nannies and housekeepers who could be lured away with bigger salaries or lighter duties. Since part of Charity’s routine when she’d first started to work for them was to believe that Oliver and Rachel were the most remarkable children to ever be born in a New York hospital, Nora had been confident for years that she would not leave. When she had first started to think about the twins leaving for college, she had found herself poised on a dark chasm of sadness and uncertainty, because she would miss them so terribly and because she was convinced Charity would quit.

  “No way, Mom,” Oliver said.

  “Homer,” Rachel added. “Charity will stay until Homer dies.”

  “Don’t say that!” yelled Oliver.

  “Then she’ll come work for me,” Rachel continued.

  “Can you afford Charity?” Nora said.

  “No, but you can,” Rachel said with a smirk. “And maybe by that time I can afford her myself. Homer is going to live for a long, long time.”

  “And Charity will stay for us, anyhow,” Oliver added while he was attacking a plate of jerk chicken. One of the reasons Charity loved cooking for the kids was that Oliver consumed vast quantities, often as though he were killing as well as eating his food. He had been a picky eater as a child, confining himself largely to rice, Cheerios, and bananas, and Charity took credit for the change. She insisted that both her sisters, whose names were of course Faith and Hope, said that she was the best cook of the three, which was a way to brag without seeming as though she were the one bragging. Vance apparently agreed. Vance was the only son, the golden child of the family, whose night-school college classes had culminated in a job juggling numbers in some city department. Vance’s opinion on any topic, from Middle East policy to the care of hardwood floors, was invoked by Charity and considered the last, best word on the subject. There seemed to be some concern that Vance had not yet found himself a woman, but there was also agreement that no woman, even the estimable Mavis Robertson, who played the organ at church, was truly worthy of his notice. At church they apparently used Vance’s full name, which was Perseverance, but Charity said he had thought that was too much to use at work.

  “That poor bastard,” Charlie had said after eavesdropping on that conversation.

  “Can you please all back off of Ricky?” Nora said that night to Charlie, at the end of a mostly silent Thai takeout dinner, occasioned, she knew, by what she now thought of as The Bob Harris Situation.

  Charlie picked up his plate. “Do they work for us, these people, or is it the other way around?” he said.

  “These people?”

  “You know what I mean. We’re paying for the spaces in the lot, and Ricky isn’t. If he doesn’t like it, I bet there are lots of other guys in this city who’d like the work. George says there’s a guy who works on Seventy-fourth Street who’s cheaper and better.”

  “Oh, not again. The last cheaper and better was the tree trimmer who butchered all the trees.”

  “You just don’t like George,” Charlie said.

  “I don’t like George. I do like Ricky.”

  “This chicken satay isn’t great,” Charlie said, standing up to get another beer.

  IMPORTANT REMINDER

  Only paid occupants of the lot may have keys to the padlock that holds the chain in place. NO DUPLICATES OF THE KEY SHOULD BE MADE UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. The chain must be in place at all times except when moving a car in or out of the lot.

  George

  There are sounds that a person never forgets. Charlie Nolan said he would always remember the sound of the earth falling onto the lid of his father’s coffin, although Nora had secretly found it a somewhat soothing sound, like very heavy rain on a very solid roof. Ollie could close his eyes and remember the explosive sound of the first home run he’d ever hit, in middle school, at the field at Randall’s Island; Rachel the involuntary squeal that had come from her mouth when she’d opened a nondescript envelope and seen a check for five hundred dollars after she’d won an essay contest her junior year.

  Nora would never forget the high, querulous complaint she’d heard in the delivery room from her children, first Oliver, then Rachel, although Rachel had long ago insisted that Nora admit the two had cried simultaneously, and Nora had complied, and Charlie now even believed this was true because he’d heard it so many times, even though he had been there and knew otherwise.

  Afterward Nora realized that the sound she’d heard that morning in December would fall into the same category for the rest of her life: once heard, it could not be unheard. First there was a percussive noise that she thought was a jackhammer, and then something different, something that sounded like big bags of sand falling from the upper story of a building onto a wet pavement. It wasn’t until she got closer and the screaming started, screaming that went on and on and on, so that, like a child, she wanted to put her palms over her ears, that she realized the last had been the sound of Jack Fisk hitting Ricky in the side of the leg with a golf club.

  “Jesus Christ, Jack,” Charlie yelled as Nora sprinted down the bloc
k toward the lot.

  What exactly happened that day, chapter and verse, depended, of course, on who was telling the story. There were only three people who actually were there: Jack, Ricky, and Charlie. Naturally George told everyone, as he trolled the block all weekend long, that he had been standing right there, had seen it all with his own two eyes. He stuck to that until the police wanted an official statement and then it turned out he’d actually been taking the rescue pugs to the groomers to have their nails trimmed.

  “Oh my God, oh my God, Charlie, do something,” Nora yelled as she neared the entrance to the parking lot.

  She had just finished doing her long run, her Saturday-morning-through-Central-Park-buy-an-everything-bagel-on-the-way-back run. Just under seven miles, just under ninety minutes. Nora liked that feeling about halfway through, when a trickle of sweat ran between her shoulder blades beneath her insulated shirt, at the same point when she had lost all feeling in her nose because it was thoroughly frozen. Then the shivers, coming out of the bagel shop, and the slow lope home. On a shorter run she had time to obsess, about what the twins would do after graduation, about whether they would move away or move back in, about whether Jenny had not called because she was irritated at Nora or away somewhere for work—it was always the latter—about where she and Charlie should go on vacation and whether she wanted to go on vacation with Charlie at all.

  But for some reason the longer route eliminated obsession and pared her brain down to purely the motor part of the cortex. Sometimes she would get home and realize she could not remember a single part of the run, that she was like a self-driving car, following a prescribed route with no one behind the wheel. She had been in that sort of fugue state when the screaming started.

  By the time she got to her husband, Ricky was lying next to his van, the leg of his khaki-green pants pitch-black with blood, the knee at a peculiar angle that made Nora afraid she was going to be sick when she looked, then looked away. His screams had turned ragged and breathless, his face a terrible putty color. The golf club was on the ground next to him. Nora knelt. She wanted to put a hand on Ricky’s foot but she was afraid anything she did would make him jerk away and hurt himself still more, if that was even possible.

  “I hear a siren,” Charlie said.

  “Did you call 911?” Nora said, looking over her shoulder. She saw Jack Fisk bent over the curb with his back to her, his hands on his knees. “Jack, did you call 911?”

  Charlie shook his head.

  “What did you do?” Nora screamed at Jack. “Are you insane? What did you do?” From behind Jack she saw Linda Lessman running out her front door and into the street, stopping at the curb opposite and looking up at the end of the block. Nora heard that terrible sound again in her head, the heavy thing hitting the softer thing, hard, and she turned back toward Ricky, who was sobbing, tears making tracks down either side of his face. “They’re coming,” she said. “They’re coming.” The sirens were louder.

  “He gonna lose that leg,” yelled one of the men looking down from an open window of the SRO. “It’s all messed up, man. He gonna lose that leg, for sure.”

  “Get up, Bun,” Charlie said, his voice shaking. He bent down to pull her to her feet and she saw the cherry lights strobing behind her from two patrol cars. Suddenly there were men in uniforms all around them. Nora stepped back next to Jack, who was arguing with two of the cops. “Calm down, sir,” one of them said.

  “Him!” yelled the man from the SRO, and when Nora looked up at the window she saw that at least five of the residents were standing, staring down. “Police! He’s the one who hit him. He hit him real hard.”

  “Give me a minute to get you a goddamn business card,” Jack was yelling at the cops. Charlie put a hand on Jack’s upper arm, talking first to him and then to the two police officers standing in front of them, their eyes narrowed. Linda and Nora had stepped back and were standing shoulder to shoulder, as though they were holding each other up. “Jesus Mary and Joseph,” Linda said, craning her neck to look toward Ricky. “Should I go get Sherry? Where is she? She should be here.”

  Between the wintry air and all of them breathing hard, even the cops, the area around them was as foggy white as the train station in an old movie. An ambulance pulled up and two EMTs ran to Ricky. The one man at the window of the SRO kept repeating, “He hit him! He hit him hard! Officer! Officer! It was assault with a deadly weapon.”

  “Shut up, you moron,” Jack shouted back. “It was a goddamn golf club!” The two cops, nearly as young as Nora’s own children, tried to speak, and one laid a hand on Jack’s arm. Jack wheeled, looked as though he was going to hit the young cop. Another police car came down the block fast.

  “They letting him go,” the SRO guy yelled, leaning out so the others at their windows could hear him. “They letting him go because that guy that got hit, ’cause he’s black, and the other guy, he’s white. And rich.”

  “He’s not black,” one yelled back. “He’s Puerto Rican.”

  “You don’t know he’s Puerto Rican. Why, ’cause he’s brown? He could be a light black, like Lena Horne or what’s-his-name, the ballplayer.”

  “He speaks Spanish, dude,” said the other man, leaning so far out his window to eyeball the other, one floor up and two windows across, that Nora thought he might fall out.

  “That don’t make him Puerto Rican, man. He could be from Mexico, or maybe Panama, one of those other places.”

  “Officer!” yelled a third man. “Officer!”

  “What?” the younger cop yelled back.

  “I was at Attica in seventy-one.”

  “Ah, Jesus, Benny, not the Attica thing again,” one of the other SRO guys said.

  “Don’t put your goddamn hands on me,” Jack suddenly yelled, and the next thing Nora knew, he was up against the patrol car, face against the window, the officers holding him flat and snapping on handcuffs. Linda grabbed Nora’s hand and whispered, “I’m going to get Sherry. Don’t leave. Don’t let Charlie get in the middle of this. Don’t let him say anything to the police.”

  “They taking him now,” said the SRO guy, talking to the others. “White or no white, they taking him. He messed with the po-po.”

  “He’ll get off, man, you know he will. These people, man, they pay the cops off, they get lawyers, they get out. The workingman, now, he goes to Rikers.”

  “I was at Attica in seventy-one.”

  “Shut up, Benny. You’re too young for Attica. You’re just a nut bar.”

  It was amazing how quickly it was all over. The ambulance backed down the street fast, an EMT visible through the lit window bending over a gurney, and the police cars followed, two with the backseat empty and one with Jack bent over in the back. Nora could tell he was yelling even though she couldn’t hear him. The cords on his neck looked like trusses holding his head up. Linda ran back toward Nora. “There’s no one answering the door at their house.”

  “I’ve got to go inside and sit down,” Nora said. “You didn’t see his leg. I feel nauseous.”

  “Did you see what happened?” Linda said. Nora shook her head. Charlie nodded. “I’ll make some calls and then come over to your house,” Linda said. Nora looked down at her left hand. She was still holding the bagel, wrapped in white paper, but she had crushed it flat and her hand was slick with melted butter.

  Charlie’s was the first version of the story Nora heard afterward, and then Jack’s via Sherry, who had been away at a professional conference and had to get on a train in Boston fast. Both of them went like this:

  Jack was scheduled to meet a client at his weekend house in Bedford. The client was important. Jack was running late. Ricky’s van was parked in the entrance to the lot in its usual place, the one Ricky insisted put it far enough to one side so that anyone could get past it, the back half of the van just inside the lot line, the front half jutting onto the sidewalk
.

  Jack had tried to ease past. The top of his side-view mirror became entangled with the bottom of the one on Ricky’s van at a moment when Jack was looking at his other side-view mirror and stepping on the gas.

  (Nora could see it, could hear it, that horrible sharp sound of the mirror being torn off, the horrible sharp sound Jack would make deep in his corded throat as it happened.)

  Jack kept going until his car was in the street, both his side-view mirror and the one on Ricky’s van hanging from a tangle of colored wires. In a rage, he leapt out and opened the trunk of his car, where he kept his golf clubs, and took out his three iron. Apparently everyone agreed it was a three iron.

  “I tried to grab his arm,” Charlie said, which Nora knew was a foolhardy act when Jack Fisk was in a rage.

  “Charlie’s just lucky Jack didn’t brain him,” Sherry said afterward.

  What had sounded to Nora like a jackhammer was the sound of Jack hitting the side of the panel van with his three iron. Charlie said that was when the men from the SRO came to their windows and started yelling. Between that and the sound of the golf club hitting the van, Charlie insisted that no one heard Ricky yelling, “Stop! Mr. Fisk, stop, please!” until Ricky was right behind him and had jumped at Jack to try to grab his arm. By then the side of the panel van, once convex, was concave.

  Who knew what the truth was? Jack said Ricky ran right in front of him, that he hit him by accident when he meant only to hit the side of the van. Ricky told the police Jack wouldn’t stop hitting him, which sounded not like an accident but like assault, which was what the cops charged Jack with when they took him downtown.

  “Remember that time Jack told Ollie to be cooperative and polite if he was ever picked up by the cops?” Charlie said. “He should have followed his own advice.”