Coney (2 page)

“Could you take a look at my bike?”

“Sure kid. My name's Woody.

“Harry.”

The dwarf offered Harry a hand to pull up on. Harry instinctively grabbed it but then began to release, fearing that his full weight would topple the dwarf. Suddenly his fingers were mashed as he was yanked to his feet. His knee throbbed.

Harry calculated Woody's height at about three and a half feet, two feet below him.

“Feel that strength,” the dwarf said, releasing Harry's hand after a farewell knuckle squash.

“Yes,” Harry answered to the wind, not to demean the dwarf by looking down at him.

“Hey, I'm down here,” Woody directed, tugging at the waist of Harry's knickers. “This”—he outlined a short shape with his
hands, much like a man lustfully invoking a woman's figure—“didn't just happen to me. I'm thirty-three years old. I'm used to it. Yeah, I'm used to everything, except bein' patted on the head. I quit bein' one of the moon men at Luna Park because of that. Six-year-old kids pattin' me on the head. Like to take them across my knee and teach 'em some manners.”

The matted, sandy-colored hair, a square patch of tilled earth, invited patting. It seemed unnatural not to. Aba instructed:
Sometimes the natural thing to do is not to do.

Rolling his bike on its unbent wheel, Harry followed the dwarf's swayed back and protruding buttocks. Woody's arms, curved, parenthesizing his body, were the twins of his bowed legs. He listed left and right. Yet, from time to time, Harry skip-jumped to keep up.

They walked on the boardwalk toward the Half-Moon Hotel, whose blue-tinged dome dominated the nonamusement section of Coney; a pasha's palace among bungalows. Looming beyond, the motionless Ferris Wheel anticipated summer lovers kissing while the world turned upside down. Beneath it the Cyclone's sky-riding wooden tracks formed a serpentine road to nowhere. Coney awaited a warm wind to awaken it from its annual Ice Age.

In winter the boardwalk belonged to a tribe of ancient sun worshippers who, steadying their beach chairs against the shuttered concessions, pressed silver sun reflectors under their chins, channeling life into death masks.

Woody turned onto the 28th Street access ramp. The Norton's Point trolley, bound for the Stillwell Avenue subway terminus, clattered into view. Its one passenger sat in the rear of the car. In front, a conductor calibrated the throttle bar. Low-wattage bare bulbs cast a gray mist. A ghost trolley condemned to traverse Coney for eternity traveled endless tracks inside Harry's forehead.

“Hey,” the dwarf called, “we're here.”

A sandwich-board sign to the side of a glass storefront, read:
Woody's Bikes: New, Used, Rental, Repairs. Cash Only
. Inside, the temperature remained below freezing.

“Hey, Soldier!” the dwarf yelled.

A man wearing blue overalls and an unraveling woolen khaki-colored hat emerged from behind a tangle of bikes, each missing a wheel or some other essential part.

“Damn, what is it Woody?” His voice was hoarse and strained as if bruised from fighting its way through his throat.

“Got a job for you.” The dwarf pointed to Harry's bike.

Soldier stroked the handlebars. He smiled at Harry.

“Damn. Poor bike.” He shook his head sadly.

“Wait,” Harry said to Woody, “I never said … well, I really don't have any money.”

The dwarf waved off further protest.

“Take the bike, Soldier. Fix it before anythin' else.”

Harry relinquished his grip. Soldier cradled the bike's middle bar, gently lifted it off the ground and disappeared behind the bike graveyard.

“Don't worry, we can work something out,” the dwarf assured Harry. “Let's talk.”

Woody opened a door cut into the back wall which led into a windowless room containing an unmade, legless double bed, a worn morris chair and a free-standing Atwater-Kent radio. The dwarf sat at the edge of the bed, motioning Harry to the chair.

“So kid, you're scared.”

“Scared?”

“Yeah, about what your old man and old lady is goin' to do to you about the bike. My old man used to beat the shit out of me.”

Harry was not scared. He felt sorry for his father. The bike had been a present for his fifteenth birthday, three months ago. It represented much money to his parents. His mother had opposed the expenditure and boycotted the presentation. She would fill a year with recriminations.

“Yeah,” Harry answered. Agreeing with adults, Harry knew, convinced them that you were smart.

He imagined his father given a choice by the Nazis: spank
your child or die. His father chose death.

“Well, like I said, don't worry. Soldier will fix your bike so Mr. Schwinn himself couldn't tell the difference.”

The dwarf slid forward. His head was between Harry's knees. Harry wanted to cross his legs, but was unsure if he could swing his leg over the dwarf's head. Woody rested a hot hand on his thigh, just as Schnozz, the old barker, had done under the boardwalk. Harry checked that each button of his fly was secure in its hole.

“Got an itch?” the dwarf said. “I got some good stuff for that. I'll get you some later.”

Woody's head swiveled up to engage Harry's eyes.

“Listen. I'll fix your bike, if you do somethin' for me.”

Harry could not extract words from his dry throat. He nodded once to indicate understanding and then shook his head from side to side to decline the offer.

The dwarf imitated his yes-no and laughed.

Now he whispered, lips drawn to the right: “I'm a bookmaker, see, and a little numbers action too. Anyway, what I'm askin' in return for me fixin' your bike is that you ride around pickin' up bettin' slips. No big deal. Most of the cops are paid off by the guy I work for. But just in case, who would suspect a nice kid on a bike?”

“I go to school,” Harry said.

“After school and weekends. And once you work off the bike, I'll start to pay you cash. Ten cents an hour.”

Aba said:
Go wherever there is to go
.

Harry said: “Sure.”

H
ARRY LEFT THE STORE
. T
HE WINTER SUN WAS EDGING INTO THE
Atlantic. He zipped up his brown corduroy jacket to the last notch. Bending his chin to his chest and hunching his shoulders, he lengthened his stride to challenge the immobilizing wind, which retaliated by knifing into his exposed raw knee. The streetlights had not yet come on. Twilight settled on the rows of two-family houses, masking with neat silhouettes the distressed structures.

The few people in the streets walked briskly, purposefully, anticipating, Harry was certain, home and warmth. At his home there would be a note on the kitchen table:
Here's a quarter for supper. Don't eat hot dogs at Nathan's. Go to Kaplan's delicatessen.

He decided to visit his grandparents, who lived in a small bungalow a five-minute walk from his home. He rang the bell. His grandmother leapt on his neck like a football player crunching a clothesline tackle. Her lips wet his cheeks and forehead. She smelled of the carp she ground by hand for the Friday night gefilte fish. The odor's intensity waxed and waned, but never completely deserted her or her house.

“
Kim arrine, Kim arrine
.” Her Yiddish offer of hospitality was delivered in a voice more appropriate for yelling “Fire!”

Bama, as two-year-old Harry had called her (the only name thereafter she would answer to), had arrived in the United States in 1919 and immediately sniffed a mean, godless country: a
medinah
to be ignored. She learned no English, guarding her illiteracy
like a jewel. When Harry had asked her why she did not speak English, she summoned a tone of irrefutable logic:

“For what do I need English? Did they speak English in Warsaw?”

In the house, his grandfather, who insisted on Harry calling him Zadeh so the boy would not forget Yiddish, stood before a mirror adjusting his brown felt hat. When the brim was cocked over his right eye at precisely the correct rakish angle, he turned to Harry and asked:

“How many bowel movements have you had today?”

“Three,” Harry lied, satisfying the minimum, immutable daily number prescribed by Zadeh for guaranteed longevity.

“Good,” Zadeh said. “Do four or five. It's good to have some in the bank.”

Zadeh turned back to the mirror for a last look, then walked to the door saying:

“I will be back in four hours, during which time I will have shown that amateur, Manny Edelberg, how a master plays chess.”

He tapped his hat, confident that when Edleberg, his adversary in weekly chess marathons, beheld its jaunty confidence, he, Zadeh, would have gained a telling psychological advantage.

Bama zipped down Harry's jacket and removed it. Had he been wearing galoshes she would have pushed him into a chair and pulled them free. Bama's role in life was to turn men into invalids. She spotted the tear.

“
Oy
, the hurt of it. What happened?”

“I fell off my bike.”

“A thousand curses on your mother for giving you one,” she said on her way to the bathroom. Returning, brandishing a bottle of iodine, she knelt and removed his shoes, undid his belt and began to unbutton his knickers.

“Wait,” she said, “you catch cold. I'll get you a bathrobe.”

Stinging at the knee, Harry sat wrapped in his grandfather's stained tan wool bathrobe, which smelled of the Prince Albert
tobacco he rolled into Zig-Zag cigarette paper, which when lit, flared, often singeing his nose.

“You do not bleed too much. That is because you are healthy, like I have made you,”

A shiver rode Harry's memory of the one American exception to Bama's Warsaw-enclosed world: the Polar Bear Club, whose members dived into the Atlantic each winter Sunday. In Warsaw, she similarly had defied the Vistula River.

Three-year old Harry, a conscripted cub, had been cradled in her arms and dunked. His body rapidly numbed, but not before he was cut by floating objects which, he realized years later, were chunks of frozen sewage, probably shit.

When he had turned sufficiently blue to ward off diseases for another week, he had been wrapped in a fiercely scratchy wool blanket and force-fed pumpernickel bread smeared with chicken fat. The regimen, she assured, guaranteed him longevity of at least one hundred years. Between them, Bama and Zadeh were raising Methuselah. The immersions ended when he was four and could outrun her.

“Here,” Bama said, handing him a needle and thread, “make it for me.”

Harry threaded the needle while Bama released awed sounds to celebrate Harry's needle-threading ability. He handed her the needle and she began to sew.

“
Nu
, Heshele, you learn good things in school?”

He decided to tease her.

“I learned about America. How good it is to live in such a free country among nice people.”

Her America bristled with enemies: deliverers of catastrophic news like the mailman, who was in the pay of anti-Semites, as were the thieves at the electric and telephone companies. The unsavory band led by a master culprit named Meyer La Guardia.

She waved off education, a new enemy.

“Heshele,” she said, “talk politics.”

She leaned forward in her chair, her yellow-flecked, brown tartar eyes riveted on him as if he were a lone actor caught in a spotlight. He orated:

“Now that the British and French have deserted Czechoslovakia, Hitler will take what he wants. Already, he is doing it with Franco in Spain. The Poles have taken Tetschen from the Czechs. Jewish shops in Germany have been destroyed. The situation is bad. Sweet America is asleep.”

Bama understood none of this except that it was bad for the Jews, as always. It also made little sense to him. Most was verbatim Aba sprinkled with Gabriel Heatter's radio commentary. Harry tried to interest himself in the world and how, according to Aba, a poet who boarded with the Catzkers, it was going to hell, but he couldn't get a handle on it. Too many performers; too many rings. Like Shnozz, the old spieler, dismissed the circus:
Lots of nothing.

Bama inhaled his words through an open mouth, stretching her taut, leathery facial skin. High, thick cheekbones banished all wrinkles to her forehead. Harry thought she resembled the Indian on the buffalo nickel. With her lips parted, she became the “Indian Brave” coin bank sold at the five-and-ten.

“Heshele,” she said, nodding her head in solemn agreement with his discourse, “you are out of the ordinary. And why should it not be? Are you not descendent from the genius of Vilna?”

Praise embarrassed Harry. He could not believe it. In class, he blushed. With Bama, as with his father, praise was automatic, meaningless, except as an expression of love. Harry also had trouble with love. As he hugged Bama before leaving, he hoped she could feel him straining for love.

The temperature had fallen. The few other pedestrians seemed on the verge of sprinting to escape the tormenting air. Harry moved slowly, in no hurry to reach home.

A
N HOUR AFTER
H
ARRY HAD LEFT
W
OODY, A
1939
BLACK
P
ACKARD
(the latest and most expensive model) driven by a chauffeur wearing gray livery pulled away from the Half-Moon Hotel and stopped at the bike store. Woody climbed into the backseat beside Victor Menter, who wore a double-breasted, blue pin-striped suit, white-on-white shirt, gray silk tie seeded with tiny red crowns, black patent leather pumps and gray spats.
A
box-backed camel's hair overcoat lay on his lap. Woody, in sweater, frayed shirt, wrinkled khaki pants, olive-drab army field jacket and black sneakers, secured by dirty white laces, feared that he had missed a command.

“Vic, I'm sorry. Did you say this was a dress-up thing?”