Coney (34 page)

“Maybe if you hit someone, you would stop this foolishness.”

“Velia, don't you see how shaken I am?”

“Yes, yes. So terrible. One moment of an uncontrollable car. My whole life is an uncontrollable car.”

“Velia, this is not human. What is becoming of us?”

She flared her nostrils.

“Not becoming. We have become.”

“What?”

“Little people. Tiny people, who are stepped on as a matter of habit. Sentenced to a life of misery.”

“Why do you exaggerate? We have to eat. We have a fine son. We have each—”

“Other,” she cut him off. “What does that mean? I'm sure I don't know.”

“It means love.”

“Love! Then love is a slum. Love is more than two hours a day on a stinking, crowded subway. Love is to try and blind myself to tomorrow, to the rest of my life.”

“Don't you feel my love for you? Heshele's?”

“You sound like one of your miserable
romanen.
I'll tell you
what love is. The love of a king who would give up his throne for me. That is the kind of love due me.”

He swallowed hard. During the past five months he had increasingly feared for her mental state. She always had courted fantasy, but ever since her transfer out of Barbetta's office—the affair with Barbetta had obviously soured—the border between dreams and reality had been crumbling.

She boasted of many identities even to people who knew her background. People who had known her parents! She had been born in St. Petersburg to the Romanovs, into the Prague branch of the Hapsburgs, in Warsaw to the Chopins, Each lineage spawned its own story, but with common threads: heiress to glory and splendor; adulation of her beauty which led to many brokenhearted suicides; then a cruel twist of fate (usually a peasant uprising) that forced her to run for her life and be thrown up on the shores of poverty and vulgarity in Coney Island.

Catzker could not imagine that she expected to be believed. Eventually he came to a more frightening conclusion: at any given time she believed the persona presented.

She was a fanatic moviegoer and excellent mimic. Even alone with him, she began to present a parade of royalty: Marlene Dietrich as
The Scarlet Empress
, Norma Shearer as
Marie Antoinette
, Claudette Colbert as
Cleopatra
, Greta Garbo as
Queen Christina.

Three weeks ago, he had come home to find her blind drunk, admiring herself in a mirror. Although it was a mild summer night, she wore her Winter Palace costume: a black seal coat and matching fur hat. Tips of blond hair peeked out from beneath the hat, forming a semihalo on her forehead.

“Hello your majesty,” she had said, rotating her head to show him her profile, which many had told her was indistinguishable from that of Renée Falconetti in
The Passion of Joan of Arc.

He had said nothing.

“Why so quiet, little tsar?” she said, removing her hat and shaking her hair like a wet dog. “Let us have some of that, how you
say, champagne, with the tiny bubbles in it.”

He recognized Garbo in
Ninotchka.
Velia also claimed the Romanov crown jewels.

She dropped her coat at her feet, like a stripper beginning her act, revealing a contour-hugging black ankle-length dress. A string of white pearls encircled her breasts like a geographic marker. She gyrated toward him. Jean Harlow.

She had stopped just short of him, squinting, puzzling his identity, then twisted her face in haughty disgust.

“You are not my tsar. You are a peasant. I will have you shot,” she had slurred, before passing out at his feet.

Catzker reached across the bed to take her hand. She pulled it away.

“Velia, it is good to dream, but …”

She cut him off.

“Sure, I talk nonsense. I'm just a stupid woman. You and your genius cronies, you know everything.
We must do this … and we must do that
. Everything but we must work, make money and live like human beings.”

“Velia, you are in one of your moods. It will pass.”

Nausea rose from her stomach and stank in her mouth.

“Not just a mood. Permanent. You want to know what will become of us? Soon there will be no more
us
. There will be you, who will remain as you are for the rest of your life. And there will be me, finally me, the me that was meant to be. Someone will save me.”

“Velia, don't talk like a crazy woman.”

“And why shouldn't I talk like a crazy woman? Would a sane woman live like this! When I ran from you thirteen years ago, I was sane. No, still crazy because I took him”—she pointed to Harry's room—“with me. What has happened during those years? Exactly nothing. We walk arm in arm. People say:
What a beautiful couple
. Beyond that there is nothing. The beautiful couple disgusts each other. At least one half does. I should have left the two of you to stink up rooms with your feet together.”

He sighed.

“Velia, we must get away. Refresh ourselves.”

“Sure.
We must
again. We have enough money to ride the subway. It doesn't go to Tahiti.”

“Listen, in Pennsylvania is a Baron de Hirsch farm, where boys are trained to become farmers in Palestine. The paper wants me to write an article on it. The three of us could go. It would cost nothing. We could spend a weekend walking in the country, refreshing ourselves, getting back to what we were. Heshele said he would like to try farming.”

“Another wonderful idea: Jewish farmers to plow up a Jewish homeland. This is what Baron de Hirsch wastes his money on? The only thing Jews can grow are beards. Do you want to make that”—again she pointed toward Harry's room—“a Jewish farmer? Why not a blind aviator?”

“I just thought some good country air …”

The nausea overtook her. She ran to the bathroom and threw up. He followed her, asking if she were ill. The idiot, she thought. I have no privacy even in sickness. Perhaps he would like to watch me shit.

“Get out of here,” she screamed. “Become a farmer!”

T
HAT AFTERNOON,
M
ENTER AND
W
OODY WERE PLAYING
RUMMY YUMMY
,
the card game Menter had invented especially for the two of them. The cards lay on the back of a nude whore from Rosie's, crouched on her hands and knees between them. Her mouth was buried in Menter's crotch. Woody held her thighs and pumped lightly inside her.

Menter took a card from the top of the deck, set it among the seven cards fanned out in his hand and discarded one, face up. He cautioned the dwarf:

“You're rockin' the boat, Woody, gettin' too excited. Maybe we ought to switch.”

Woody stopped moving and shut his eyes.

“Never fails. All
I
gotta do is think of Fifi nude and
I
calm down.”

“Let's switch anyway,” Menter said. “I'd like some target practice.”

He tapped the woman.

“Gert, about-face!”

The whore, a woman of forty with stretch marks of motherhood on her flat stomach, rotated slowly so as not to upset the cards. She butted Woody's hard penis upward and, on its descent, caught it in her mouth like a dog trained to flip a bone resting on its snout.

“Bravo, Gert!” Menter shouted.

Encircling his penis in a loose fist, he moved his chair left and right, as if it were the hinged air gun of an arcade target game.

“Gotta watch the aim. Don't want the wrong hole—or maybe
I
do.”

He rolled himself forward slowly.

“Perfect bull's-eye. Give the man a Kewpie doll.”

Woody drew a card and discarded. The familiar pain of a stymied orgasm knotted his stomach. However, he was not allowed to come before Menter.

Woody was sure that Menter faked a screaming climax because he had no feeling down there. But if Menter saw him reaching the edge of orgasm before the howl, he would crash the whore to the floor, and order her back to Rosie's, leaving him with aching balls,

The phone rang.

“Get it Woody,” Menter said.

The dwarf took tiny steps so as not to agitate his pain.

“Hello … Vic, it's a guy named Frank Bruno.”

“Now, Gert,” Menter said, “just stay like that. Maybe put a few fingers up and rub a little to stay warm. That's a good girl.”

He took the phone from Woody, who began to walk toward Gert.

“Stop right there. Gert don't like it without me. Ain't that right, Gert?”

The whore lifted her chin and nodded.

“Hello Frank,” Menter said.

Menter closed his eyes and listened, interjecting only a few yeses or grunts, while his finger traced the holes in the speaker like a man reading Braille. Woody tiptoed back to Gert. He pumped furiously.

“Bingo!” Menter shouted, throwing his arms over his head and clasping his palms together like a victorious prize fighter. He looked at Woody and shook his head:

“Scram, Gert!”

Woody clutched her buttocks. The whore jumped to her feet. The cards floated down. One fell on Woody's penis and stuck. She grabbed her clothes and dressed while stumbling toward the door. Menter owned Rosie's. He punished with a weighted cane and lighted cigarettes.

Woody helped Menter dress. He felt as though he had been
kneed in the testicles. He walked toward the bathroom.

“Gonna play five against one,” Menter said. “Kid stuff. But, what the hell, on a day like this, go ahead. But don't take all day.”

“You dwarfs are plenty horny.” Menter said, as Woody walked back into the living room. “I guess it's because your bodies are too small to hold it in. Normal people like me, we've got staying power. That's what it takes to be a man.”

Woody nodded. Menter reminded him of Molly,
the singin' whore
, who always put on a show for her customers by screaming that no one did it to her that good before and she loved it so much that if it wasn't for Rosie she wouldn't take any money. If you shoved a cannon up Molly, she wouldn't feel it. He had caught Menter staring jealousy at his ample cock.

Menter lit a cigarette, giving Woody his Roosevelt profile.

“You know why FDR's a great man?”

“'Cause he's president.”

Menter slapped his forehead.

“No. But he got to be president because he knows how to get the most out of everything he does.”

“Oh.”

“And now it's my turn.”

Is he going to tell me that he's going to be president, Woody thought? Sure he'll be president, right after he gets a hard on.

“To do what?” Woody said.

“To mix business with pleasure.”

Menter wheeled himself around the room, shouting: “Oh, boy, oh, boy!” He stopped at the telephone, lifted the receiver and said:

“Right in there. A gift from heaven. Thank you, Frankie.”

Woody wished Menter would get over whatever it was that was making him crazy. Jerking off had only increased his need for the real thing. He needed a woman. He needed Rosie's.

“Woody,” Menter said, “I'm goin' to make a lot of dough from this fire. That was always true. But now I also get to rid the world of disgusting freaks and a kike.”

“What? I don't understand.”

“The fire-setters. The freaks, Soldier, that kike writer. They all die. My friend Adolf would be proud of me.”

Menter took a long drag on his cigarette and, without inhaling, let the smoke escape his mouth. A translucent cloud covered his face, then curled its way through his hair. The top of his head seemed to be smoldering.

He's crazy, Woody thought. I'm tied to a crazy man. So what's new? Crazy men always called the tune, especially for dwarfs. What was sane? His dumb brother in Hollywood making that all-midget Western
, The Terror of Tiny Town
?

“How you gonna kill all those people?”

“I ain't gonna kill 'em. They're gonna' kill themselves.”

“Huh?”

“Oh, yeah. We're goin' to make them a suicide cocktail: kerosene, gasoline, naphtha, acetone, and shake well.
In the hands of an experienced torch
, Frankie told me,
it's surefire
.” He laughed at his cleverness. “A good torch knows the mixture gives off vapors that explode like a bomb. So he soaks a long rope or leaves a paper trail that slowly crawls to the doused spots. And when it goes boom he's walkin' the street. But amateurs, they just sprinkle it around and then throw a match, thinking they got time to get out before everything goes up. They think that because
you, Woody
, tell 'em that's the way it is. But the real way it is”—he clapped his hands together loudly—“is when it goes boom, they go boom and the world is rid of a shitload of freaks and worse.”

He means it, Woody thought. He wants to kill six, seven people just like that. I got no feelin' for nobody, but I ain't no murderer.

Menter raised his left palm in front of his face and spat on it.

“I'm readin' my fortune,” he said. “It says there are happy days in store for me. But one thing is wrong: there's a gutless dwarf who could fuck me up because he's scared shitless.”

He spit again.

“My fortune says to get rid of him. To put him in the ground and it will be smooth sailing. Whaddya think about my fortune, Woody?”

Maybe I could skip town, Woody thought. Sure, I'm tough to find. Blend in with everybody. Christ, if I could only get to Rosie's and clear my head.

“It must be some other dwarf your fortune is talkin' about. This one is with you one hundred percent.”

“That's good, Woody. Make sure you don't go talkin' to that other dwarf. He's bad news.”

“Sure.”

“Now, here's what you do. You buy as many one-gallon gas containers as we need. Bring 'em here. Frankie will fill 'em just right. Then you get the word out that the fire setters should come to your bike shop to pick them up. We already told 'em to just sprinkle it all around and throw a match. You tell 'em that we got the best stuff. That it'll take five minutes before the fire really gets going, because that's how the stuff in the containers is mixed. They got plenty of time to get out before it starts. Got it?”