Karla stared at her brother in mild surprise. “I didn’t know you cared?”
“It’s no skin off my ass if they slaughter two or twenty million.
“Still,” Karla said, “it’s a nice looking shed.”
When she was gone, Mickey pushed all the furniture against the opposite wall and finished the bedroom. He swept the scraps into a trash bag, washed the floor with a pair of torn boxer shorts, and put the tools away. In the kitchen he dialed a faded number taped to the wall above the telephone.
“Pick up or delivery?” the voice on the other end of the line said.
“Pickup,” Mickey said. “Number two special.”
“One Mexican pizza with hot chili peppers, hamburger, refried beans, diced tomatoes, cheese -”
“Ten minutes,” Mickey interrupted, “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
After supper, Mickey set the bedroom back in order. He showered and changed into a pair of light-colored Docker slacks and a pea green sports shirt with a crest on the pocket, a present from Karla on his 43rd birthday. He had never worn the shirt before.
In the bedroom, he lit a cone of sandalwood incense and watched as a wispy plume of chalky smoke curled toward the ceiling. On the bedroom dresser, he laid out a fistful of diazepam tablets with the distinctive V-shaped design. White, yellow, blue. Placing a blue, 10 mg pill under his tongue, he brushed the remaining pills back into the drawer and flicked the stereo on to 89.7 fm, WGBH. In a mournful legato, Sarah Vaughn was crooning Misty, bending and reharmonizing the tones in ways that only she could comprehend. Sucking in his gut, he stood in front of the full-length closet mirror.
Twenty years. Though the war ended two decades earlier, Mickey was trying to reach even further back, to retrieve some memory of how things felt before the mortars and madness. By the second chorus, the tranquilizer kicked in. The music, sweetly-scented sandalwood, and plum-colored wallpaper all conspired to lull him back through a narrow slip of a time while outside the sheeting rain continued with the same unbroken intensity.
Look at me.
I’m as helpless
as a kitten up a tree…
Psycho. The Bates Motel. In 1960, Mickey and a fellow sixth grader snuck into the Brandenburg Cinema to watch Janet Leigh strip down to her ivory slip. During the shower scene, Mickey dropped his head between his knees and simply waited out the ensuing horror. He visited the movie for Ms Leigh’s milky thighs and a hint of cleavage, not the slash and gore.
On my own,
would I wander
through this wonderland alone ...
Rubic’s cubes, dashikis, spam and eggs, Daisy, pump-action bb rifles, Jade East cologne for men. Shoes with stiffened tongues in lieu of laces - tongues which slid back and forth on wire rails. After only a year or two, the style fell out of vogue. Maypo cereal. Brylcream (just a little dab’ll do ya). Bell bottom dungarees. Muumuus and tie-dyed shirts. Crook, rum-soaked cigars. Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis and James Brown and Bill Haley and the Comets (or was that earlier?).
Church. An altar boy through junior high, Mickey carried the cross; he held the heavy book as the priest read the convocational prayers, even rang the silver bell during Mass.
never knowing my right hand
from my left,
my hat from my glove,
I get misty or too much in love.
When the song ended, Mickey went into the bathroom and filled the sink with hot water. He washed and lathered his face. Twice. With an abandoned, old-fashioned double-edged razor that predated his nostalgia, he shaved his beard.
On Saturday they worked into the early afternoon covering the roof and stapling a protective layer of tarpaper over the bare plywood. Mickey slit open a bundle of gray shingles. Trimming the bottom flaps off several sheets with a utility knife, he nailed the first shingles to the lip of the overhang. Then he showed Rasmei how to alternate rows so the slits formed a broken line leading to the peak. “I’ll snap chalk lines on the tar paper so you can see what you’re doing.”
“You don’t trust me?”
“You’re fine; it’s the shitty shingles I don’t trust.” He climbed the ladder and threw a 40-pound bag on the pitched surface. Five hours later Rasmei ran a cap across the peak and the shed was finished.
“At Sherwin Williams next to the YMCA, get the top grade, opaque stain,” Mickey said. “Any color that matches the house. Two gallons. Tell them I sent you and they’ll charge it to my account and give you the contractor’s discount.” He blew his nose on a handkerchief that had seen better days. “Now tell my why your father never smiles.”
Rasmei scowled and folded her hands in her lap. “On April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge invaded Phom Penh and drove the entire population into the countryside. We took only what we could carry, some gold and jewelry. In a village 25 miles north near Prek Po my mother died of dysentery. Father, a school teacher, was forced into slave labor, harvesting rice seven days a week. We had very little food and people were disappearing, being relocated, every so many months.
“During the monsoon season, the earth became soaked and began spitting up the bodies of the murdered - political prisoners, school teachers, businessmen, woman and children. It was as though, denied a proper Buddhist burial, their immortal souls were swimming through the muck to reunite with loved ones. Of course, we, the living, knew better. Cambodia was one, huge concentration camp, the killing fields everywhere.”
“Old news.” Mickey said gruffly. “Tell me something I don’t already know.”
“A year passed. So many men had died, there were two, perhaps three, women for every man. One day a neery, a female soldier, came to my father and said, ‘You shall be my husband.’ My father was horrified. The neery was filthy. She could neither read nor write. An AK-47 slung over her shoulder, she smelled like a dung heap. But as a Khmer Rouge fighter, she could choose anyone for a spouse. To deny her meant almost certain death.”
“An unimaginable nightmare. After losing all our worldly possessions and watching my mother waste away, my father was now being forced to marry his tormentor! An unwashed, jungle-bred neery… my future stepmother.
“A month past and a group wedding was arranged. Fifty couples - some willing, others less than enthused about their prospective mates. The day following his second marriage, my father feasted on a bowl of rice gruel spiced with python meat before going back into the paddies.”
“No rest for the downtrodden.”
“A month after they were married, the war in the East heated up and my father’s new bride was sent to do battle with the Viet Cong. We never saw or heard from her again. When the Vietnamese liberated our village, we fled to safety in Thailand and then to America.”
“And the neery?” Mickey asked
Rasmei shook her head. “Dead or hiding in the jungle with the remnant of Pol Pot’s army.”
“Who was the woman sitting next to your father in the car the other day?”
“My mother’s sister. Her husband died during the reign of terror. She fled the country with us after the war; my father thought it only fitting that, to honor the dead, they spend the rest of their mortal lives together.”
“Your father’s a bigamist.”
“Polygamy, she bristled, “was an accepted practice among the rich and upper classes in Cambodia for many centuries. And, anyway, I doubt the neery - even if she were still alive - would contest my father’s third marriage.”
“Which explains why he never smiles.”
Rasmei shook her head gently up and down. “If you’d been through such an experience, would you?”
They were sitting on the peak of the newly finished roof looking out over a half acre of wild flowers and straw-colored grass. Previously a cow pasture, the land lay fallow for several years, the only regular tenant a fat ground hog which emerged at dusk to feed. As the sun slouched toward the horizon, they could feel the heat streaming off the fresh shingles.
A coffee can half filled with stubby roofing nails lay on the roof between them. Rasmei emptied the nails into the pouch on her cloth apron - the same one Mearadey had abandoned - and tossed the can to the ground. “My father bought a new washing machine,” Rasmei said. “A Whirlpool. Dual speed, eight cycles. It even has a hand washable setting for silk and delicate fabrics.”
“Obviously, you studied the owner’s manual.”
“My stepmother doesn’t read English, and Mearadey is too scatterbrained to be trusted with laundry. She mixes whites with darker clothes that aren’t color-safe.”
“There must be a reason you’re telling me this,” he said.
“Near our prison village was a small river. My mother washed clothes, beating them on a flat stone.” The muscles around her mouth twitched sharply but her voice remained even. “It’s the last memory I have of her before she died.” Rasmei sighed and didn’t speak again for several minutes. “Take me out somewhere.”
Mickey’s eyes narrowed. “On a date?”
“Ashamed to be seen with an oriental?”
“I don’t go anywhere. I’ve no social life.”
“Saturday afternoon you go off.”
Mickey laughed, making a derisive snuffling sound that hardly reached to his lips. “I bike two miles down the road to Brandenburg Center. At the Bagels and Cream Delicatessen, I order the luncheon special and a medium coffee. Then I sit in the park and contemplate my navel.” He didn’t bother to tell her about the Maui-wowi.
“It was just a thought,” she said with a tart brevity that brought closure to the issue.
Fifty feet away in the field, there was a disturbance. Near a white dogwood tree, the high grass was thrashing fitfully in the opposite direction to a stiff breeze. A clump of blue columbine shuddered and suddenly dropped from sight like a plastic bobber dragged under by a large fish. Mickey put his hand over hers and squeezed the palm. “If you’re up for it, how about gourmet coffee and an assortment of New York style bagels?” he said just as the ground hog waddled into view from behind a thorny tangle of purple-throated jimsonweed and loganberries.
Nagel's Bagels
Lugging a tray of gourmet cheese Danish from the bakery proper out to the selling floor, Becky Borelli eased back through the swinging door, gestured to her mother and muttered, “The new kid’s gone totally mental.”
In the far corner of Nagel's Bakery Fifteen year-old Curtis Stedman was slouched over a table sobbing mawkishly. His slender body flopped about like a marionette where some practical jokester was jerking the strings causing the limbs to lurch about spastically in an utterly grotesque parody of genuine despair. Just two weeks earlier, the blond haired boy had been hired to work Saturdays plus two afternoons a week.
Mrs. Borelli approached and asked Curtis what was wrong, but the lanky, fair-skinned boy only wailed all the louder, his bony elbows flailing about aimlessly. A metallic blue Camaro eased into a parking space in front of the store, and a platinum blonde, her hair done up in a tight bun with an ebony comb, eased out of the driver’s seat. “Marone!” Mrs. Borelli grabbed Curtis under the armpit, wrestling him to his feet, and navigated the distraught youth to rear of the bakery.
“Can I help you?” Becky smiled stiffly.
“A dozen hermit cookies.”
“Sold out an hour ago. Sorry.” A mournful howl erupted from behind the swinging doors followed by a series of muffled sobs. Becky could hear her mother whispering furtively to Curtis Stedman.
The blonde scrunched up her face, shifting a Vera Bradley handbag to the opposite shoulder. “Forget it.” She hurried out the door.
Becky waited on a steady flow of customers. One elderly Italian lady, whose breath reeked of garlic, placed an order for a birthday cake. Her mother usually handled special orders, but it was nothing fancy, just a flat cake with white frosting and “Happy Birthday, Angelique!’
A half hour later, Becky’s mother drifted back to the counter. “The Stedman boy… he’s gone, thank God!”
“Gone?”
Mrs. Borelli waved her hand, a peremptory gesture barring any further discussion of Curtis Stedman’s employment status. “Your father is whipping up a tray of cannolis and apricot farfalla. What else we need?”
“The hermit cookies are gone. So are the Asiago and cinnamon raisin bagels.”
*****
The new dishwasher at Nagel’s Bagels lasted not even two week. By Becky’s reckoning, Curtis Stedman flung the crumpled apron on the counter next to the pepperoni spinach pies and was out the door—adios, sayonara, bye-bye, aufwiedersehen, shalom—by one-thirty Saturday afternoon. Stranger still, there had been no indication that anything was wrong. Curtis arrived promptly at the designated time. He washed out the doughy mixing bowls and muffin pans that Becky’s father stacked in a precarious heap on the stainless steel sink. Then he swept the tiled floor, bussed tables and polished all five glass display cases with a bottle of Windex.
“I need a new clarinet reed,” Curtis said. He had just finished cleaning a refrigerated display full of cheese Danish and apple squares.
“You play clarinet?”
“Marching band and high school wind ensemble.” Curtis pushed his gold, wire-framed glasses up on the bridge of his nose.
“There’s the music store across the street,” Becky offered.
Curtis peered nearsightedly out the window. Diagonally across Turner Boulevard was a shabby building with a hand-carved sign over the doorway. Music Depot - most of the maroon paint had peeled away and the final letter ’T’ was missing. A young girl carrying a guitar case that was almost as long as she was tall exited the music store into the bright sunlight. “Rico number two.”
“What's that?”
“Rico number two. That’s the reed I play.” He picked up the Windex, ran an arc of spray across the glass and began polishing the display. “Maybe I’ll run over on my lunch break.”
*****
Becky slipped out the front door and crossed Turner Boulevard. All lights were off in the music store, the front door bolted tight. “Aw, crap!” She hurried back across the street.
“So why’d he quit?”
Mrs. Borelli slid a tray of hermit cookies into the oven and closed the lid. “None of your business.” Stocky with a swarthy complexion and auburn hair, Becky’s mother was attractive in a matronly sort of way.
“I got an idea what happened.”
“Good!” The woman flung the word in her face like a wet dishrag. “So there’s nothing more to discuss.”
Becky locked eyes with her mother. A high-pitched tinkling announced someone entering the store. “Go wait on the customer and, while you’re at it, put the ’Help Wanted’ sign back in the window.
Later that afternoon while she was cleaning up, Becky noticed a well-thumbed paperback on the floor near the rest room. Candide by Voltaire - the pages on the left were printed in French, mirroring the English translation on the facing page.
In a peculiar sort of way, the debacle was Becky's fault. Not that she meant to intentionally hurt Curtis Stedman – a part-time dishwasher prone to emotional excesses, who read French literature, played clarinet in both the marching band and wind ensemble. Becky was born and grew up on Federal Hill. The place resembled a parallel universe where conventional rules of social etiquette didn’t necessarily apply. One wrong turn could lead you down a loathsome cul-de-sac into a nether world of sordid vice. She knew her way around – not just the physical streets but the gritty, dysfunctional mindset. There were unsavory things you took for granted, shrugged off. That’s just the way it was.
*****
“I know Curtis’ mother from Saint Gregory’s parish. His mother sings in the choir.” Later that night, Mrs. Borelli tossed the words out in an offhand manner not bothering to raise her head from her sewing. “The boy is intellectually gifted.”
“I didn’t know - ”
“The family doesn’t like to make a big deal about his uniqueness, but it just slipped out when we were commiserating one day after Mass.” Mrs. Borelli, who was letting her husband's pants out, held the waistband at arm's length before resuming her stitching. “According to Mrs. Stedman, there are five levels of gifted intelligence ranging from bright to profoundly gifted. Her son falls in the ‘exceptional’ category.”
“Exactly how exceptional?”
“One in every thirty thousand people is exceptional, which places him in the ninety-nine-point-ninth percentile.”
"What's his specialty?"
Mrs. Borelli removed her thimble momentarily so she could snip the thread. "History… ancient history predating the Christian era."
"Okay." Becky felt a slight giddiness welling up in her brain and went upstairs to lie down.
So the boy sweeping confectioner’s sugar and King Arthur flour from the bakery floor was an underage Einstein! But how could she have thought any different? From the first day he arrived at the bakery, Curtis seemed fogbound, loopy, eccentric, spaced-out - just a tad out to lunch. It took the ‘gifted child’ half an hour to figure out how to manage a mop and pail where he wasn’t sloshing sudsy water haphazardly the length the display room floor. Asynchronicity. That was the loopy, twenty-five cent word Mrs. Stedman used when explaining to Becky’s mother why her teenage son sometimes seemed ham-fisted or dull-witted, undertaking simple chores. Gifted children developed unevenly, their hypersensitive craniums far outstripping everything else in their genetic makeup. But then, it went with the territory—supposedly all these ‘gifted’ types were like that. Becky remembered her physics teacher commenting that Einstein didn’t speak until he was two.
*****
Earlier in the week on Tuesday, Becky found Curtis sprawled on the bakery floor. “There’s a wrinkle in my sock,” he groused, waving a sneaker fitfully in the air. The boy ran a probing finger over his instep then slipped the sneaker back on but immediately removed it a second time.
Becky glanced at his foot. “I don’t see a wrinkle.”
“Well, I can feel it and the damn thing’s driving me nuts.”
Becky shrugged and went off to wait on a customer. A half hour later, she spied Curtis near the industrial mixer with the same shoe off and turning the offending sock inside out.
On another occasion, she found Curtis at the front of the store fidgeting and glancing over his shoulder at the far wall.
“What’s wrong?”
“That moronic clock’s ridiculously loud.”
Becky gawked at the clock, the same one that had hung over the frosted tarallo and coconut macaroons for the past ten years back to when the orthodox Jew, Morris Nagel, still owned the bakery and her father was head baker. In all that time she never found the clock a distraction. Even now, the second hand bumped along inconspicuously accompanied by a whisper-soft ticking. Being in the ninety-nine-point ninth percentile definitely had its drawbacks.
*******
“Is Curtis home?” It took Becky twenty minutes to ride her five-speed bike cross town to Providence's, East Side.
“And you are?” The woman’s voice betrayed a lilting, earthy resonance.”
“I got a book that belongs to him,” Becky side stepped the question.
When Curtis appeared in the doorway, she said, “Candide… you forgot your book.” He led the way into a claustrophobically tiny back yard with a scraggily peach tree and rock garden. “I know what happened.”
“Your mother promised not to tell anyone.”
“Didn’t have to. I went across the street. The Music Depot was closed. They’re normally open until five on a Saturday. I put one and one together and came up with two and a half.”
Curtis stared Becky full in the face. “You knew what they did over there?” His tone was mildly accusatory.
“Everybody on Federal Hill knows what they do over at the Music Depot,” Becky replied soberly. “It’s Federal Hill, for Christ sakes!”
On any given day of the week, a steady stream of youngsters and an occasional diehard grown up could be seen lugging their instruments to lessons. The Music Depot provided rentals – trumpets, saxophones, flutes and even an occasional student model oboe or French horn - sold sheet music and instructional manuals. They carried a decent selection of trumpet mouthpieces from the standard Bach 7C to the extra-wide symphonic models. But the owner didn’t make his living off instrument rentals and half-hour lessons. The store was a front, a betting parlor that catered to a motley crowd of compulsive gamblers—horses, dogs, college and professional football, whatever.
A loan shark who weighed three hundred pounds, Bernie Antonelli, advanced patrons short-term loans at the perfectly reasonable rate of thirty percent interest. If you missed a payment, interest was compounded along with a late-fee penalty using an accounting method that only Bernie properly understood. It wasn’t usury, per se. Unfortunately, if you missed more than one payment, Bernie would call you up and politely request a meeting at the store so that a arrangement benefiting both parties could be consummated.
“I was outside admiring this Selmer clarinet in the storefront window.” Curtis fussed with his slender hands as he spoke. “Not some cheap student model but a rosewood beauty with gold-plated keys and custom engraving on the lacquered bell. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I see this muscle-bound goon with biceps out to here, smack some old geezer in the side of the head.” Curtis spoke slowly, measuring each word. "The goon slugged him here,” he pointed to the soft spot just above his right ear, “with a set of brass knuckles. Then, while the guy was writhing on the floor, the sadistic bastard stomped him half to death.”
“Nasty stuff like that… it doesn't happen that often.”
“Small consolation,” Curtis replied peevishly.
The previous year, the owner of the Music Depot spent eight months at a federal prison in Upstate New York. His enforcers were shaking down the venders at the annual Feast of Saint Anthony for two hundred bucks to insure that their grilled sausage and onions stands didn’t end up a pile of splintered toothpicks. Unfortunately, one of the venders who refused to cough up the protection money turned out to be an FBI undercover agent. A month after the Feast of Saint Anthony, a half-dozen cheap hoodlums and tough guy wannabes were indicted and sent off to prison.
"Come back to work."
“After making a total ass of myself?”
“Come back to work,” Becky repeated, grabbing his wrist and squeezing as hard as she could. “I’ll teach you the rope so crap like that doesn’t happen again. Or, if it does, God forbid, you won’t freak out.” Curtis stared at her dumbly, a sad smile creasing his slightly parted lips. Becky Borelli was not to be denied. “I'm not leaving until you return to Nagel’s Bagels.”
*****
Becky’s Uncle Harry was a devout Catholic. He attended church every Sunday, observing all holy days of obligation. He even put up five thousand dollars toward the Our Lady of Perpetual Devotion building fund to lay an elaborate mosaic in the church sacristy. A solid brass plaque identifying Uncle Harry as the primary donor would be prominently displayed on the wall once the project was completed.
But several parishioners approached Father Tomasi complaining about Uncle Harry’s largesse. A harmless, low-level hoodlum, he had been indicted a half dozen times, spending two short stints at minimum security facilities in Connecticut and New Jersey. Nobody knew where he got his merchandise – the designer jeans and handbags, Rolodex watches, jewelry and, on occasion, electronics – that he hawked on the fly out of the rear of his minivan. Uncle Harry wasn’t registered with the Providence Chamber of Commerce or Better Business Bureau.
Parishioners at Our Lady of Perpetual Devotion objected on moral grounds. No matter how elegant the church mosaic, the money was tainted. Uncle Harry was a conniving hypocrite - a fence who trafficked mostly in stolen jewelry and high-end watches - trying to barter his way into heaven, the five thousand dollars no better than a modern-day papal indulgence.
In the end, expedient self-interest prevailed. Father Tomasi waved all protests aside, depositing the stack of small denomination bills held together by a rubber band in the church’s bank account. Paolo and Guido Ricci, gifted artisans who emigrated from Naples in the late eighties, were commissioned to design and build the floor. When the project was three-quarters done, Becky visited the church. The intricate mosaic, constructed from impo