Bitter Bronx (21 page)

“Alicia, can't we structure a deal? One kind word would go a long way.”

“Shut up,” she said. “You're worse than he is. You clean up for the ghoul.”

She drank more and more merlot. I'd swear she was flirting with me under her veil. I offered to drive her back to the Bronx.

“Shut up,” she said. And then Alicia startled me. She reached under the veil with one finger and flicked away a tear.

“I loved to be their lookout. I'd dance in the street, while Uncle Tiny would bust his balls, carrying sinks on his back. And my other
tío
, this old man. I always danced for him, like Salome. I haven't danced ever since. Now I live . . .”

Like a monk in a closet
, I muttered to myself.

She stood up, kissed the old man between the eyes with a kind of surly affection, brushed past me, and ran out of the diner. I wanted to run after her, but her
tío
grabbed me with fists that were steel bands.

“Leave her alone, Ricky. We're reconciled, and you have other fish to fry.”

I couldn't move. I watched her from the window. She flew across the street in one spectacular stride—like a witch or a girl who had rediscovered dancing after a lapse of thirty years. I knew I would never see her again.

MAJOR LEAGUER

W
ill Johnson had been to bat five times in the big leagues. He struck out twice, botched a bunt, popped to left center, and hit into a double play, and he knew he was going back down to the Carolina League. It had something to do with the Yankee roster. There was a player in transit, and another was coming off the disabled list. So for one afternoon in 1975, he was the New York Yankees' twenty-fifth man.

What if he had gone five for five that afternoon? Would the Yankees have put that other player back in transit and kept Will on the roster? Instead, he was returned to Greensboro, where he broke his thumb in the middle of the season. That thumb never healed; it had a permanent hump. He was banished to semipro ball, and ended his career barnstorming with stumblebums. He was finished before his twenty-ninth birthday, a ballplayer with a broken hand. He drifted down to New Orleans, was a chef in Algiers until he smashed a man's collarbone in a bar fight. He ran home to the Bronx, his tail tucked between his legs.

But the Bronx seemed to be in permanent recession. His father had been an unlicensed plumber who lived in a tiny black enclave near Tremont Avenue. Will's whole family was wiped out. His father had a stroke at forty-five. His mother died of sickle-cell anemia. His baby sister bled to death during childbirth. Will's old neighborhood was in ruins. It never recovered from the highway Robert Moses had plowed right through it. Will had met Moses as a little boy. He remembered a very tall man in a hard white hat, standing near a great hole in the ground. Moses had given Will a lollipop, had carried him in his arms.

“Son, what would you like to be when you grow up?”

Will looked into Moses' pale eyes. “A ballplayer,” he said.

It was the last time he ever saw that man in his hard hat. And now Will had to scratch around for a job. A few of the old-timers remembered that he'd been in the big leagues. He was hired as a superintendent in one of the buildings that Moses hadn't managed to destroy. It was on La Fontaine Avenue, in the heart of an old Jewish quarter that had turned Latino while Will was there. Robert Moses' highway was like the avenue's own sore rib. And the heartless din of traffic from that highway had been ringing in Will's ears now for a good quarter of a century.

He was fifty-seven, with cataracts in one eye. The building on La Fontaine had stone lions in the courtyard. It had new radiators and new wiring. A renegade air conditioner couldn't sabotage its circuitry. The building was only two blocks from Quarry Road and St. Barnabas Hospital, and from time to time a nurse or a resident from St. Barnabas would move into Will's building for a while.

He'd lived with one of the nurses, a woman from the West Indies. Her name was Rosette. But she had a husband somewhere, and his brothers came looking for Will. They beat him up with a baseball bat, and he was in a coma for a month.

When he returned to La Fontaine Avenue, Rosette was gone. Will was blind in one eye after the beating. He would coach kids in the neighborhood, teach them how to bat in Tremont Park. But local gangs began to raid the park and rob these kids of their brand-new gloves. And Will wasn't going to fight a whole gang high on coca leaves. He would have landed in the hospital again. So he kept to himself most of the time, drank in his ground-floor apartment, and earned extra money as a freelance plumber along La Fontaine.

And then she moved in. She was some kind of administrator at St. Barnabas, could have been forty years old. She had a lot of freckles. Her name was Laurencia Riley. He'd never heard a name like that. It mystified him. He repaired her toilet, began doing odd jobs for her. Will rewired one of her lamps. He wouldn't take money from her, and he wasn't sure why.

“Are you in the business of charity, Mr. Will Johnson?” she asked, without hiding her brogue. She was from Belfast, had been at a nuns' college but had never taken her vows. She was lucky enough to land a green card. She'd filed her citizenship papers, had been fingerprinted in Foley Square, but hadn't yet been asked for an interview. And she was nervous about it. “Sometimes I feel like an enemy alien.”

After living in the apartment for a month, she dangled a duplicate key in front of Will. “In case you have to operate on my fridge.”

“But I have the key to every apartment,” Will said.

“Then be a good lad, Will Johnson, and take one from my own hand.”

Her signals confused him. Laurencia wasn't like those little mamas who had followed him around while he was barnstorming with the Graystone Grasshoppers. She didn't wear midriffs and stink of perfume. But she began leaving sandwiches for him outside his apartment. And he was growing curious about her. He was a head taller than Laurencia Riley. He stood beside her like a lighthouse, a tower with one good eye.

“Why do you live here, Miss Riley?”

Most of the hospital staff and administrators lived on the far side of Fordham University, with its parks and Tudor-style apartment houses. Every street was patrolled. There were no glassine heroin bags in the gutters, with their ominous stamp of a barking, wild-eyed dog. That was the insignia of the Crotona Dogs, a street gang that had prospered while the Bronx was burning and bands of wild dogs roamed Crotona Park at will. It took years to get rid of the dogs, and meanwhile the gang morphed into the biggest distributor of heroin in the South Bronx.

That didn't seem to bother Laurencia. The no-man's-land south of Quarry Road reminded her of Belfast's bombed-out streets.

“It's where I grew up, Will, Irish fighting Irish, while the British bloodhounds sniffed at the lot of us. No, I'll stay here, thank you. Besides, you happen to live on a very poetic street.”

And she told him about La Fontaine, a writer of fables who lived hundreds of years ago, before there ever was the Bronx and the wild dogs of Crotona Park. La Fontaine's favorite hero was Sir Fox, a local robber baron who preyed upon as many barnyards as he could.

“And what would Sir Fox have made of the South Bronx, Miss Riley?”

“Mr. Johnson,” she said in that brogue of hers, “will you call a girl by her proper name? I'm Laurencia, for Christ's sake, or Ms. Laurencia, depending on your fancy. And Sir Fox would have thrived in this barnyard of ours, even with the Crotona Dogs, who are robbers without his etiquette and without his charm. He would have stopped their pillage, and finally he would have pilfered from them.”

Will had had such poor schooling; he'd run away from home at fifteen to join a gypsy team. And here was an educated woman, a hospital administrator, who could have lived in that golden ghetto on the far side of Fordham, have met a fellow administrator or an MD and married him, yet chose the street of La Fontaine, next to a highway, with its tunnels and dead ends, where heroin addicts sought their ten-dollar bags.

“And there's another reason why I'm here, love. I happen to fancy you.”

Will had never been shy before. But women with freckles and red hair always frightened him. Still, he took Laurencia Riley in his arms, and he didn't have that urge to rip her bones apart while loving her, the way he'd done with ten-dollar whores on the road. She didn't have the curves he admired, but he got to like the curves she did have. And she confessed to him that she hadn't moved here by chance. She'd seen him in the hospital while he lay in a coma.

“I couldn't take my eyes off you, love. There was a beauty in the breaths you took. Jesus, I was ashamed of myself. My own staff saw me blush, and me falling in love with a man in a coma.”

“But that was two years ago.”

“Will Johnson, I had to get me some courage, even if I am a spitfire with red hair. I had to be sure you weren't the Devil, trying to trick an Irish maiden.”

“Well?” Will asked. “Am I the Devil?”

“Indeed. That Devil of my own.”

But she wouldn't live with Will as his “common-law.” They kept their own apartments, yet they found little recreation along the broken spine of Tremont Avenue. There wasn't even a movie house in the neighborhood. And she didn't thrust Will into her life at St. Barnabas. She never ate with him at one of the Italian restaurants on Arthur Avenue—Dominick's had become the hospital's own canteen. There wasn't much to explore in a no-man's-land littered with glassine bags. They discovered a few Creole restaurants near Tremont. And sometimes they'd walk up the hill to the Grand Concourse. But the Crotona Dogs had put their mark on every other wall.

The Dogs had broken up his little baseball clinic, and he couldn't complain to the cops who had deserted the badlands. The foot patrols ended near Quarry Road. Laurencia knew the South Bronx's sinister stats. It was the poorest, most crowded barrio east of the Mississippi. Harlem was a honey pot compared to the South Bronx. Will had to venture into Harlem to buy a box of blueberries.

It felt as if Robert Moses' ghost had come back again and again to haunt the neighborhoods he had ruined. The Crotona Dogs had only crept into Robert Moses' tracks and devoured what was left with their glassine bags. And Will had to play the fool and become the sheriff of his own block. He walked to the very edge of La Fontaine and swept out all the addicts who shivered in the tunnels, squatting in cardboard boxes that had become their cribs.

Laurencia understood the consequences of Will's little act better than he did. She borrowed one of the hospital's cars and they got lost for a week. They drove through Connecticut, stayed at a farm in New Hampshire near a waterfall. The sound of that water revived Will. He didn't want to go back to the Bronx. But she couldn't abandon her duties at St. Barnabas.

There were markings all over the outer wall of his building when he returned—devil dogs stamped above the windows on the ground floor. No other apartment house on La Fontaine had been touched. Laurencia wanted to go to the police.

“Love,” she said, “we're a hospital. We have good relations with the precinct. Detectives are in our corridors all the time.”

“No cops,” he said. “They'll come to the hospital in their polished shoes. But they can't protect us.”

“Then what should we do, Will?”

“Negotiate.”

She loved this madman she was with, and she worried about him. But Will didn't have to wait. The Dogs wouldn't descend upon La Fontaine with their machine pistols and firebombs. The Bronx had stopped burning twenty years ago. A limousine parked in front of the building. A lawyer stepped onto the curb. He had all the sleek lines of Manhattan about him. He knocked on Will's door and introduced himself as the gang's own lawyer. His name was Marcus. He handed Will a bankbook with a pigskin cover.

“We opened it at West Fork Mutual. It used to be affiliated with the Bowery Savings Bank. We thought you'd appreciate the gesture, considering that Joe DiMaggio was once a pitchman for the Bowery. . . . Will, have a look.”

The account was in Will's name. There was one entry inside for three thousand dollars.

“They don't do bankbooks anymore, Will. It's wasteful and old-fashioned. But the manager's a friend of mine, and I told him it was a special case.”

Will's bad eye began to quiver. “Mr. Marcus,” he said, “please stop the fancy footwork. What's this for?”

“Your first payment for policing the 'hood.”

“I don't get it. I kicked some addicts out of a tunnel near the highway.”

“Ah, but they weren't
our
addicts. They were using a rival product. They'd bought on the cheap—from Monster Man. The worst kind of stuff.”

“But that was only an accident,” Will said. “I would have done the same thing if their baggies had come from the Dogs.”

“We're cleaning up the 'hood. You won't find our baggies within a half mile of any public school in the barrio.”

“I still can't accept your three thousand dollars.”

“Ah, then that's a pity,” the lawyer said. He removed a hand cannon from his briefcase. “Don't be alarmed, Will. The gun is for my own protection.”

“Why would I want to harm you?”

“We have three men outside St. Barnabas prepared to torch the place. And unless you get off your sorry black ass and come with me, St. Barnabas will fare no better than a burning barn . . . and you might lose that missus of yours, the Mick with a poetic name.”