“So, what's the punch line?” Teo asks.
“You're asking me?” Zip says. “It's
your
pigeon.”
“No, not one of mine.”
“Yeah, but you brought it in here.”
“But the joke is your idea.”
“Jesus, we got no punch line,” Zip says. “You know what that means?”
“What?”
“We'll never get out of the joke.”
Â
Whitey calls.
Joe, lying on the bare mattress, naked but for mismatched
socks, doesn't answer. He knows it's Whitey on the phone. Joe can almost smell his cigar.
What day is it? Must be Thursday, because yesterday was Wednesday, a day's reprieve Johnny Sovereign never knew he had. Joe can have the conversation with Whitey without bothering to lift the receiver.
âJoe, what the fuck's going on with you?
âHey, Whitey, you ball-buster,
vaffancul
!
Are these ball-busting calls some kind of psychological warfare? Maybe Whitey knows about Gloria Candido, and the whole thing with Johnny Sovereign is a setup. Maybe it's Whitey arranging for these women to distract Joe from doing his job, giving Whitey an excuse other than being a fucking
cornuto
to have Joe clipped. Could Whitey be that smart, that devious? Maybe Whitey has tipped off Sovereign to watch his back around Joe and Sovereign is waiting for Joe to make his move. Or maybe the women are good luck, guardian angels protecting him from some scheme of Whitey's.
Joe quietly lifts the receiver from the cradle. He listens for Whitey to begin blaring,
Yo
,
Joe
,
whatthefuck?
but whoever is on the line is listening, too. Joe can hear the pursy breathing. It could be Whitey's cigar-sucking, emphysemic huff. Joe slides the stiletto from his right sock, holds it to the mouthpiece, thumbs off the safety, touches the trigger button, and the blade hisses open:
Ssswap!
Then he gently sets down the receiver.
Joe dresses quickly. The shirt he's been wearing since Tuesday reeks, so he switches to the white shirt Marisol left behind even though it smells of perfume. She's left a trail of rusty footprints down the hall from the kitchen as if she stepped on broken glass, and Joe splashes them with Rémy and mops them with the dirty shirt he won't be wearing, then kills the bottle, washing down a
mix of painkillers. There's a soft wheeze from his closet, as if an accordion is shuddering in its sleep. When he dials Johnny Sovereign's number, Vi answers on the third ring.
“Johnny home?”
“He'll be back around six or so,” Vi says. “Can I take a message?”
“So where is he?”
“Can I take your number and have him call you back?”
“Do you even know?”
“Know what?” Vi asks. “Who's calling?”
“An acquaintance.”
“You called yesterday and the day before.”
Joe hangs up.
The Bluebird is doing fifty down the cracked alleys, and when a bag lady steps from between two garbage cans, she has to drop her bag to get out of the way. Joe rolls over her shopping bag, bulging from a day's foraging, and in the rearview mirror sees her throwing hex signs in his wake. He pulls up behind Sovereign's, and there's that smell of trash, oil, and pigeons, compounded by a summer breeze. Joe can sense someone eyeing him from inside the empty garage, and he eases his right hand into the pocket of his sport coat and flicks the safety off the .22, uncomfortably aware of how useless the small-caliber pistol is at anything but point-blank range. A gray cat emerges from Sovereign's garage, carrying in its mouth a pigeon still waving a wing. The cat looks furtively at Joe, then slinks into the morning glories, and from the spot where the cat disappeared, Grace steps out. Morning glories are clipped to her tangled black curls. She's wearing a morning-glory-vine necklace, vine bracelets, and what looks like a bedraggled bridesmaid's gown, if bridesmaids wore black. Her bare feet are bloody, probably from walking on glass. “Long time, no see, Joey,” she says. “I been with the Carmelites.”
Joe recalls Sal asking if he was going to her closed-casket wake. “You had a thing with her, didn't you?” Sal had asked.
“No way!” Joe told him. “A little kissyface after a party once. I don't know why she made up all those stories.”
“That whole Fandetti family is bonkers,” Sal said.
Nelo, her father, a Sicilian from Taylor Street, operates an escort service, massage parlors, and a strip bar on South Wabash, but he brought his four daughters up in convent school. The official story was that Grace wasted away with leukemia, but rumor had it that it was a botched abortion. Now, Joe realizes old man Fandetti is even crazier than he thought, faking his daughter's death in order to avoid the humiliation of an illegitimate pregnancy. No surprise she's a nutcase. He wonders if they collected insurance on her while they were at it.
“If you stick your finger inside, you can feel the electric,” Grace says and demonstrates by poking her finger into a flower. “That hum isn't bees. Electric's what gives them their blue. You should feel it. Come here and put your finger in.”
“Where's your shoes, Grace?”
“Under the bed, so they think I'm still there.”
“Still where? What are you doing here?”
“Come here, Joey, and put your finger in. You'll feel what the bee's born for. They're so drunk on flower juice!” She walks to the car and leans in through the window on the passenger side, and the straps of her black gown slip off her shoulders, and from its décolletage breasts dangle fuller than he remembers from that one night after a birthday party at Fabio's when he danced with her and they sneaked out to the parking lot and necked in his car. She'd looked pretty that night, made up like a doll, pearls in her hair, and wearing a silky dress with spaghetti straps. That was what she called them when he slipped them down and kissed her breasts. She wanted to go further, pleaded with him to take her
virginity, but he didn't have a rubber and it wasn't worth messing with her connected old man.
“Know what was on the radio?”
“When?” Joe asks. He's aware that he's staring, but apparently still stoned on that hash oil, he can't take his eyes off her breasts. His reactions feel sluggish; he has to will them. He realizes he's been in a fog ⦠he's not sure how long, but it's getting worse.
She opens the door and sinks into the leather seat and humming tunelessly flicks on the car radio. “I Only Have Eyes for You” is playing. “Our song, Joey!”
“Grace, we don't have a song.”
“The night we became lovers.”
“Why'd you tell people that?”
“You got me in trouble, Joey, and in the Carmelites I had to confess it to the bishop. We weren't supposed to talk, but he made me show and tell.”
Joe flicks off the radio. It's like turning on the afternoon: birdsong, pigeons cooing, flies buzzing trash, the bass of bees from a thousand blue gramophones.
“All the sisters were jealous. They called me Walkie-Talkie behind my back. They thought I didn't understand the sacredness of silence, but that's not true. They think silence is golden, but real silence is terrifying. We're not made for it. I could tell you things, Joey, but they're secrets.”
“Like what, Grace? Things somebody told you not to tell me?”
“Things God whispers to me. Joey, you smell like a girl.”
“I think you can't tell 'cause you don't know. Tell me one secret God said just so I see if either of you knows anything.”
“I know words to an accordion. If you turn on your radio you'll hear stars singing the song of a thousand crackles. I know about you and girls. I know what's in your gym bag.”
“Yeah, what?”
“They're your way of being totally alone.”
“What's in the gym bag, Grace?”
“I know you can't stop staring at my tits. I don't mind, you can see. Oh, God! Windshields glorify the sun! Feel.”
“Not here, Grace.”
“Okay, at your place.”
“That's not a good idea,” Joe says, but he can't stay here with her either, so he eases the car into gear and drives slowly up the alley. The top of her dress is down, and against his better judgmentâalmost against his willâhe turns onto Twenty-fifth, crosses Rockwell, the boundary between two-flats and truck docks. He drives carefully, his eyes on a street potholed by semis, but aware of her beside him with her dirty feet bloody and her bare breasts in plain view. Rockwell is empty, not unusual for this time of day. They're approaching a railroad viaduct that floods during rainstorms. A block beyond the viaduct is Western Avenue, a busy street that in grade school he learned is the longest street in the world, just like the Amazon is the longest river, so they called it Amazon Avenue. Western won't be deserted, and across Western is the little Franciscan church of St. Michael's and the old Italian parish where he lives.
“I'm a Sister of Silence, so you need to be nice to me like I always was to you.”
“I've always been nice to you, too, Grace.”
“I could have had men hurt you, Joey, but I didn't.”
They're halfway through the streaky tunnel of the railroad viaduct and he hits the brakes and juts his arm out to brace her from smacking the windshield. “I don't like when people threaten me, Grace. It really makes me crazy.”
“Let's go to your place, Joey. Please drive. I hate when the trains go over. All those tons of steel on top of you, and the echoes don't stop in your head even after the train is gone.”
“There's no train.”
“It's coming. I can feel it in my heart. My heart is crying.” She squeezes a nipple and catches a milky tear on a fingertip and offers it to him, reaching up to brush it across his lips, but Joe turns his face away. When he does, she slaps him. He catches her arm before she can slap him again, and under the viaduct, minus the glare of sun in his eyes, he sees her morning-glory-vine bracelets are scars welted across her wrists. Whistle wailing, a freight hurtles over, vibrating the car. He releases her arm, and she clamps her hands over her ears. Her bare feet stamp a tantrum of bloody imprints on the floor mat.
“Get out!” Joe yells over the concussions of boxcars, and he reaches across her body to open the door. She looks at him in amazement, then mournfully steps out into the gutter, her breasts still exposed. Without looking back, he guns into the daylight on the other side, catches the green going yellow on Western, veers into traffic, rattles across the bridge wheeled by pigeons that spans the Sanitary Canal. He isn't going back to his place, he's not heading to pick up his laundry, and until he finishes this job he's not going to Fabio's or any of the hangouts where he might run into Whitey. It's Thursday, and Joe's been seeing Gloria Candido on the sly on Thursdays, when Julio goes to his grandmother's after school, but Joe isn't going to Gloria's either. He's in the flow of Amazon Avenue, popping painkillers, Grace's handprint still hot on his face. He heads south to see what's at the end of the longest street in the world. The radio is off as if he's broken contact, and he'd drive all night if not for hallucinations of headlights coming head-on. Finally he has to pull over and close his eyes. When he wakes, not sure he was ever really asleep, he's parked on a shoulder separated from a field by rusty barbed wire netted in spider silk suspending pink droplets of sun. The blank highway is webbed like that as far as he can see. He thinks, I could just keep going, and at the next gas station, on an impulse, Joe decides he will keep going if she doesn't answer the
phone. But then he doesn't have enough change to make the call. “Make it collect, for Vi Sovereign,” he tells the operator.
“Who should I say is calling?” the operator asks.
“Tell her a friend who's been calling, she'll know.” And when the operator does, Vi accepts the call. “Where you calling from?” Vi asks. “I hear cars.”
“A phone booth off Western Avenue. Johnny home?”
“You're calling early,” she says. “He'll be home around noon or so for lunch.”
“You don't know where he is or what he's doing? I can hear it in your voice. Did he even come home last night?”
“What do you keep calling for? If you're trying to tell me something about Johnny, just say it. You somebody's husband? What's your name?”
“Maybe we'll meet sometime. I'd pay you back for the phone call, but then you'd know it was me.”
“I'll recognize your voice.”
“Better you don't,” Joe says, and hangs up.
Before noon, he pulls up behind Johnny Sovereign's. From the longest street in the world, he's back to idling in a blocklength alley, and yet it's oddly peaceful there, private, a place that's come to feel familiar, and he's so tired and wired at the same time that he'd be content just to drowse awhile with the sun soothing his eyelids. He lights a smoke, chucks the crushed, empty pack out the window, checks the empty alley in the rearview mirror, and notices the handprint still visible on his face. He catches his own eyes glancing uncomfortably back, embarrassed by the intimacy of the moment, as if neither he nor his reflection wants anything to do with each other. He puts on a pair of sunglasses he keeps in the visor, and when he looks up through their green lenses, a tanned blonde with slender legs, in a halter top and short turquoise shorts, stands beside the morning glories. She's wearing sunglasses, too.