Staten Island Noir Read online

  Angela, I said, this is really stupid. What's going on? What do you want? For Chrissakes, I'm marrying your brother in six weeks. Take this shit off me!

  She looked at her watch—I mean, my watch that seemed now to be hers.

  We've got a lot of time, she said to Joey. Buddy doesn't get home for hours.

  There she was right. Buddy had two jobs, one at a restaurant and the other at a mob-owned nightclub somewhere in the 70s in Manhattan where the boss had signed a half-dead Judy Garland while she was nodding off on pills. I was supposed to meet him when he got off at four a.m., which was hours and hours away.

  Can I put down this goddamn gun, Angela? Joey said. And can we get moving? Would you quit yapping?

  Okay, okay. I thought you were ready. You mixed the cement, no?

  It's not just the cement. I gotta move the rocks. They gotta fit. I want it to look nice.

  I could feel the blood in the back of my throat; she must have broken my nose, the crazy bitch. I imagined the mouse starting under my eye.

  You know we're in Great Kills, she said to me. Great Kills, get it? You're gonna be great killed. Angela thought this was hilarious.

  I wasn't feeling so cocky right about then, I have to admit. I thought I was better than Angela. I mean, comparing us was like apples and pears, but if you want to know the truth, while I appreciated her finer qualities, ultimately I did feel she was a creature below.

  Angela, talk to me. Let's figure this thing out, I said.

  It's easy, she said. You're a smart girl; you figure it out. But let me give you a hint. Buddy's got everything here. We take care of each other. We're family. What's he need you for? What's he got to go to Manhattan for? You wanna take the kids away from me? I love those kids . . . they call me Mama. They hug me so tight sometimes I can't breathe.

  We can work something out, I told her. Maybe Buddy and I could live here. Maybe find a house nearby . . .

  Buddy had hinted at this very plan and I had kiboshed it unequivocally. I'd lived in Rome and Paris and Bombay. I was going to live in Staten Island next to his sister?

  Buddy told me he asked and you said no.

  I didn't. I never said no.

  Buddy's a liar?

  No, he just doesn't listen. You know, Angela, how he doesn't listen. It could be great, all of us together.

  She looked at me. I sensed that Joey was feeling bad for me. His hand wasn't shaking so much anymore. I willed him to put down the gun but he didn't. He just wasn't gripping it so tight that his hand shook.

  Angela smiled. She was a beautiful girl. Black hair, skin like pearls dipped in milk. The first time I met her, she had on a one-shoulder dress and I swear I wanted to put my tongue against her skin and lick, it was that luscious.

  I fell for that once, Angela said, with that other rat bastard. We were like sisters. Then look what I had to do. She took everything anyway, but at least we got the kids. Joey and I took care of her, didn't we, Joey? But just my luck, we get rid of one son of a bitch and Buddy finds another. He's a real pain in my ass sometimes, my brother.

  Angela, be honest, Buddy's only here with you because—

  Because what?

  She didn't look so beautiful right now. I shut my mouth. Because he had nowhere else to go, I wanted to say.

  Buddy's mother always said she was sorry she gave up the tenement apartment on Spring Street. She didn't call it a tenement, though. She called it her "nice apartment." From Buddy I knew it was three rooms in the back, facing the alley, tub in the kitchen, and everyone waiting in the hallway when one of them took a bath on Saturdays. Tenements weren't Buddy's style and neither was Florence Street, from what I could see. There were more trees on Spring Street.

  Joey had been "fixing up" the house on Florence Street ever since he'd gotten out. Joey was handy, he had what they called "hands of gold," which he seemed to use for ripping things out and never putting them back, the bathroom on the second floor, for instance. We're getting a new bathroom, Angela had told me, but they'd been using the one in the basement for three years while Joey moved on to other projects, such as busting up the stairs so everyone had to walk up a wooden ramp like the cart horses in the stable on Thompson Street.

  And then there was Joey's wall. The first time Buddy took me to Florence Street, Joey was in the front yard mixing cement. There were piles of boulders, different sizes, and Joey was using them to build a wall. The kids were carrying over the smaller ones and Joey was fitting them on top of one another and side by side and cementing them in place. The wall belonged on an English country estate. The wall belonged on meadows and hills and dales. The wall was beautiful and ridiculous. The house was small and ugly and sat on a small and ugly lot, and then all around it, not more than ten feet out, was this magnificent stone wall that each time I visited got higher and higher, until it was starting to look like a rampart. Buddy laughed about it. He called it Joey's therapy. But I have to be honest, it gave me the creeps.

  I'm tired of talking, Angela said to me. Get out of the car.

  No, no, Leave her in the car until I'm ready, Joey said.

  We can't leave her in the car. We'll put her in the basement while you set things up.

  The basement? Did you ever carry dead weight up stairs? Joey said. I'm no Hercules and for sure, she ain't no lightweight.

  I let the insult pass. I'm always surprised when people say mean things about me. As I said, I was always thinking people liked me when they really didn't give a shit. But all that aside, what the hell were they talking about?

  I pulled at my wrists, but when I did, the rope tightened around my neck. I was afraid I would pee myself. I thought I'd bring up using the bathroom but I wanted to wait for the right time. Maybe I could get away then, make a noise, maybe I had a chance. The kids would hear, the old lady, deaf as she was, the dog, the neighbors not twenty feet away, someone.

  Angela smiled. She can walk, she said. She can walk up the basement stairs. It'll be dark.

  You're kidding me, Joey said.

  I always believed in you, Joey. Even with that crazy wall. I always believed in you. That's why I stuck, through thick and thin.

  I have to go to the bathroom, I said.

  You wanna take her? Joey said.

  Let her piss herself, Angela told him. She looked me straight in the face. Whatta we care?

  Can you guess the rest? Joey put the gun to my temple. Angela duct-taped my mouth. She checked the rope around my wrist and my neck. She pulled me out of the car and down the basement steps. Joey wanted to put out a mat so I could lie down. Angela said no. I'd piss on it, remember I had asked to go to the bathroom? And then she'd have to throw it out and Clorox the place. She'll be lying down forever, Angela said. Just like the other one.

  In the end, they put some blankets on the floor and pushed me down. I could smell dog on the wool but I was glad just to lie there and close my eyes. I heard them leave. I watched the light go away as the sun went down. I heard the scrape of the trowel. I heard one of Buddy's kids call out to Joey, asking him why he was working on the wall, it was nighttime. I think I slept. And then they were pulling me up. Angela and Joey. And walking me up the stairs.

  There was no moon. I wondered what Buddy would think—if he would think that, like his first wife, I had just up and disappeared. Gotten cold feet? Left him at the altar? And the kids . . . would they feel abandoned again? Miss me? I noticed when I got close to the wall how wide it was, wide enough to lie down on. The wall was different heights in different parts. I wondered how high it would go in the end. I realized I would never know.

  Angela took my arm and walked me to a place where the wall was low, maybe four feet, and she made me lie down. I felt the stones that jutted through the layer of cement hard against my back, my shoulders, my head, and then she picked up a boulder, so big that it blocked my vision. It would have blocked out the moon if there had been one in the sky, and she brought it down with all her strength.

  * * *

&nb
sp; Buddy came home early the next morning. When he woke up, he took his coffee into the yard where Joey was working on the wall. The kids were rolling stones. They were still in their pajamas.

  It's really coming along, Buddy said. This wall is going to be here after we're all dead, Joey. It's like the goddamn Colosseum.

  The phone rang and someone inside picked it up. Is that for me? Buddy shouted.

  You expecting a call? Joey said.

  I thought it might be Ruby. She never showed up last night.

  She ever done that before?

  No, Buddy said. Never.

  WHEN THEY ARE DONE WITH US

  BY PATRICIA SMITH

  Port Richmond

  Maury's eyes were crazy wide, staring right into the camera, just like they were on yesterday's show and the show before that. His hand rested on the shoulder of some blubbering white girl, Keisha or Kiara something, her hair all hard-curled and greased up into those stiff-sprayed rings, smeared black circling her eyes, greening gold Nefertitis swinging from her ears, more faux preciousness twinkling from her left nostril. Seems like K or K's baby daddy could be any one of the fidgeting young black men and—surprise!—she kinda didn't know which one.

  The contestants were all sloe-eyed, corkscrew braids, double negative, mad for no reason except that they had been identified on national television as fools who didn't give a damn where their dicks went. It was time, once again, for the paternity test and Maury's dramatic slicing open of that manila envelope. For some reason, the prospect of finally knowing whose seed had taken hold reduced Kiara or Keisha to unbridled bawling and a snorting of snot.

  Jo had the show on more for background than anything, but she stopped for a closer look at the little nasty who'd opened her legs and been done in. It amazed her how anybody, let alone a white girl, could look at any one of those sadsacks and feel bad enough about herself to fuck him. "I ain't never been, or ain't never gonna be, that damned horny," she said out loud, just as Tyrell, sloe-eyed and corkscrewed, was revealed to be the father of the squirming little bastard in question.

  "I'm gon' take care of my 'sponsibility," he monotoned, a semi-earnest declaration which was greeted by wild hooting and hand-clapping from Maury's drama-drunk studio audience. Even after receiving the sudden blessing of papahood, Tyrell avoided looking at or touching the mother of his child. Kiara or Keisha stood, shivering in a whorish skirt and halter top, in dire need of at least an orchestrated hug. She continued to keen.

  I cannot watch this shit, Jo thought, just after thinking, Where did she find an actual halter top in 2010? Although she made a move to punch the television off, she didn't do it. Instead she lowered the volume so the string of skewed urban vignettes could still distract her from what she really needed to be doing. Maybe the next segment would feature some tooth-challenged redneck hurling a chair across the stage upon discovering, after a week or so of sweaty carnal acrobatics, that the he he thought was a she was really a he fervently embracing his she-ness.

  Jo revisited her mental to-do. Last night's crusted dishes, still "soaking." A mountain of undies and towels, waiting to be lugged to the Bright Star laundromat, where the guy who guarded the dollar changers—to make damned sure that no "nonlaunderers" used them—never missed an opportunity to converse with her tits. Oh, and she'd skipped breakfast again. After her last tangle with an oil-slick omelet at The New Dinette, a succession of Dunkin's dry toasted things, and her own ambitious attempts to get healthy and choke down oatmeal, the idea of a morning meal had lost its appeal. By three p.m. she'd be trolling Port Richmond Avenue, inhaling a loaded slice or two at Denino's or resigning herself to The New's lunch menu and one of their huge, dizzying burgers.

  There wasn't much in the fridge—various leftover pastas curling in Tupperware and cold cuts she could practically hear expiring. Ravenous, she spotted the pack of Luckies on the edge of the dinette table, and her whole mouth tingled with crave. Although the pack was half-empty, she didn't remember buying it. Just one, she thought. Just one, and maybe a little drinkie to follow. Instead she closed her eyes and took a deep breath, shutting it out, and did what Katie had told her to do. She said the word "poem" out loud.

  That's it, she thought, scrambling for her wire-bound notebook and new pen. I'm going to write me a poem. From the flickering Panasonic, Maury asked, When did you first suspect that Aurelio was sleeping with your mother?

  Poetry was Jo's new medicine. During her last trip to the university hospital's emergency room, her vague complaint that she had been "sleeping too long and smoking too much and maybe drinking a little harder and my kid is driving me crazy" earned her a useless nicotine patch and the advice of Katie McMahon, a perky community counselor, who suggested she put little bits of her life into lines. Rhyme or not, no matter. About anything she wanted it to be about. "If you call it a poem, then it is," Katie had said.

  Surprisingly, the little scrawlings helped. She'd written more than a few choice lines about Al, the ex-cop who showed up with his monthly hard-on to pound her into the mattress with something he called love. She wasted whole pages on Charlie, who'd inhabited her womb for nine months, and now had no patience for her "stupid fuckin' rules." He dropped by occasionally to pilfer weed money from her wallet, gobble the contents of the refrigerator, or sleep off an encounter with too many shots of Jäger. On good days—or when she needed to remember that there had actually been good days—she wrote all pretty about a moment when she was full of light, strolling over the Bayonne Bridge like she was walking on water. From up there the island magically shed its dingy and became more than gossip, stench, and regret. The key to happiness on Staten Island, she decided, was to get as close as you could to the sky and make the assholes as small as possible.

  Flipping to a fresh page in the notebook, she clicked the top of her pen and licked the point the way she'd seen real writers do before they—

  A key rattled in the lock and the front door was flung open with such force that it banged into the wall, knocking more mint-green chips from the plaster. Jo felt her heart go large and stone.

  "Hey, what the hell is up, Jo?"

  He refused to call her Mom. Or Mother. Sixteen years old, six-feet-two inches of swaggering explosive. Her son.

  "It's hot as shit out there. What's in this place to eat?"

  "I think there's some ham in the—"

  "The same ham as last time? That shit's old. Ain't nuthin' cooked in this bitch?"

  Jo steeled herself. "Charlie, I told you not to come in here—"

  "Cursing? Hungry? And you gon' do what?"

  Jo knew the answer. Nothing. She had never not been terrified of her son. Charlie had ripped her open at birth, glared at her as he bit her breast to demand milk, pinched and pummeled his kindergarten classmates, set fire to wastebaskets in school restrooms, been suspended from sixth grade for showing up plastered on a vile mix of Kool-Aid and vodka, and greeted all attempts to control and educate with a raised middle finger. He strutted and primped in Day-Glo Jordans, a too-big Yankees cap twisted sideways on his head, pants two-sizes-too-wrong pulled down so far the waistband backed his ass. He adopted the lyric swagger of black boys, taking on their nuance and rhythms while hissing about "niggers" in the circle of his crew. While Jo watched in horror, Charlie grew as wide and high as a wall. He arced over her when she dared make mama noises, and huffed in her face with dead breath, which stank of cheap tobacco.

  His eyes looked like someone had died behind them.

  She wasn't sure what he did during the day. It wasn't school. She'd gotten letters and phone calls from Port Richmond High attesting to his continued absence. "He's a dropout," she finally blurted to one well-meaning guidance counselor, before hanging up the phone.

  There were even rumors that Charlie had managed to father a child. Sometimes, when she closed her eyes, Jo could see him snarling, fully erect, a gum-cracking girl laid wide and waiting. His lovemaking would be thrust and spit. When she thought of a child built of Charlie and air
, a thick shudder ripped through her.

  "Did you hear me? Food! I'm fuckin' hungry! I swear, Jo, don't make me have to—"

  She sprang from her chair and bolted for the kitchen with no idea what she would do once she got there.

  He'd only hit her once.

  One clouded August night, a week after Charlie turned sixteen, Jo saw him on the street just after finishing her part-time job at Bloomy Rose, a florist in Midland Beach. She'd worked late that night, helping with a huge order for the funeral of a local politician. As she wound her way toward her bus stop, a fierce rain needled her cheeks. Assuming the rain had driven everyone inside, she was surprised to see a dark human huddle on Father Capodanno Boulevard just before Midland Avenue, and even more surprised to see her son at its edges.

  But there he was, hanging on yet another corner with Bennie Mahoney, a no-gooder from New Dorp, and two other boys she didn't know. Their backs were hunched against the downpour, and she saw the orange flare of cigarettes. She wanted and didn't want to know what they were up to.

  The sign on the nearest building on Midland read Q.S.I.N.Y., and she could hear the guttural thump of dance music from inside. The letters made no sense to her until she realized where she'd seen them before. The island's first openly gay club had launched on the Fourth of July weekend to much fanfare and trepidation. Staten Island wasn't known for its tolerance, and there were worries that the patrons of the club would become targets for ham-handed haters.

  The letters stood for Queer Staten Island New York.

  Jo felt an ominous drop in her belly.

  Charlie's views on all things gay were well known and frequently bellowed. While Jo admitted a cringe when she thought about man-on-man, and a starkly uncomfortable curiosity when she considered girl-on-girl, Charlie's florid vocabulary was peppered with references to "fuckin' fags," "cocklickers," and "turd burglars." Jo remembered a bespectacled whisperer from their block who had packed up and hightailed it off the island with his family after being on the receiving end of a vicious beatdown. He never identified his attackers, but Jo remembered how he would practically shrivel when he passed Charlie on the street.