The 25th Hour (8 page)

‘You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. Tough? How do you know from tough? What do you think, because he wins a couple fights at Campbell-Sawyer, that means he’s a tough guy in Otisville? You don’t understand the trouble he’s in. You don’t get it. Monty’s got three choices, and none of them are good.’ They walk down the blue-carpeted hallway, Slattery twirling his key chain.

‘Three choices,’ says Jakob, impatient. Slattery always talks to him as if he were a dense child, not quick enough to understand the world’s complexities.

‘Okay. One, he can run. Get on a bus going to wherever and just hope they never catch up with him. That’s number one.’

‘He won’t do that. His dad’s bar—;’

‘I’m not saying what he
will
do. I’m saying what his choices are. Number two—;’ Slattery makes a gun with his thumb and index finger and points it at his temple.

Jakob’s eyes go wide. ‘Kill himself? Not a chance. So what’s the third option?’

‘The third option?’ Slattery thinks for a moment. ‘Oh, the third option is he goes to prison.’

Jakob nods. ‘That’s what’s going to happen. He’ll go, and he’ll make it through.’

‘Okay. Maybe. But no matter what, it’s bye-bye Monty.’

‘What does that mean?’

Slattery raises his thumb. ‘If he runs, he’s gone. You’ll never see him again.’ He raises his index finger, the top joint crooked from wrestling days. ‘If he pulls the trigger, he’s gone. They’ll keep the casket closed.’ He raises his middle finger. ‘If they lock him away, he’s gone. You’ll never see him again.’

‘I’ll see him again,’ says Jakob. ‘I’ll see him when he gets out.’

The elevator doors open and Slattery steps inside. ‘I wouldn’t bet on it. You think you’re still going to be friends? You think you’ll kick back with a couple beers and reminisce? Forget it, Jake. It’s over after tonight. You getting in?’

Seven

‘What’s good here?’ asks Monty, reading the menu from a blackboard on the wall.

‘The veal,’ says his father. ‘The veal’s good. That’s what I usually get.’

‘Okay.’ Monty leans back in his chair and surveys the restaurant: a low-ceilinged relic just north of Houston Street, one of the last of the old-school Italians, where they still serve spaghetti and meatballs, eggplant parmesan, chicken cacciatore.

‘Taking off Thursday night,’ says Monty. ‘That’s big of you. Who’s minding the place?’

‘Kennelly’s taking care of it.’

‘Kennelly? He’s going to drink all your rum. You trust Kennelly?’

‘It’s only a couple hours. You said you were meeting your friends, so I figured ten o’clock—;’

‘That’s fine,’ says Monty. He plays with the label on their bottle of red wine. The waitress, an old woman with a face like a crumpled paper bag, takes their order. She wears a platinum-blond wig and false eyelashes; she beams when she hears Monty’s selection.

‘Good pick,’ she says, her front teeth red with lipstick. ‘Veal’s the best thing here.’ She shuffles away and Monty thinks,
She’ll be dead before I get back here
.

‘So I talked to Sal—;’

‘Ah, come on, Dad.’

‘See if he can help with anything.’

‘Dad, come on, what are you thinking? Sal? The guy’s been out of the picture for twenty years.’

‘He might know some people in there.’

‘The guy’s about a hundred years old. He sits around playing gin rummy all day. What’s Sal going to do for me?’

‘He still knows people. He could put in—;’

‘Dad, would you please? I’ll be all right. Just, please, don’t get involved in this. Okay?’

‘You’re still going to be a young man when you get out. I know,’ says Mr Brogan, raising his hands, for Monty is shaking his head. ‘I know you don’t think so. But listen to me. You keep your head down in there. Don’t start any trouble—;’

‘Enough.’ Monty stares at the backs of his hands. He wills them to quit trembling, but they won’t.

When the waitress brings out their food, Mr Brogan diligently cuts the spinach leaves on his plate into smaller and smaller squares. He had wanted desperately to give his son something, to encourage him in some way, but now, watching the boy try to eat, he knows it is useless. How do you say,
It’s only seven years
? Mr Brogan’s father was a barman; Mr Brogan grew up in bars and worked in them his whole life, sometimes rough places where a wrong word could lead to a beating or worse. But he understands that nothing in his experience can come close to what waits for Monty, that Monty is traveling to a foreign land Mr Brogan knows only from rumor.

Mr Brogan’s bar is his bond to the court, his guarantee that Monty will not run away. Since June, Monty has been free because of the bar: free before trial, during trial, after conviction, after sentencing. Mr Brogan has owned the bar for thirty years, but sometimes he wishes Monty would run. Let them have the place; let them try to make money off it. Caught between Bensonhurst and Bay Ridge, he owns a neighborhood bar without a neighborhood. Most of his patrons work at the hospital down the block or in the stores on 86th Street; they stop off for a drink before driving home. They are loyal, his customers, they like him and confide in him, but they do not have much money to spend.

‘This should never have happened,’ says Mr Brogan, staring at his glass of soda water.

‘All right, let’s not start now. It’s a little late in the game.’

‘I know,’ says Mr Brogan. ‘I know it, and I’m sorry, Monty. I should never have let you get involved.’

Monty raps the tabletop with his knuckles. ‘Hey. Let it go. You had nothing to do with it, okay? Don’t start with this now.’

‘I just wish we could have talked about it. You could have made so much money in a
real
business; you didn’t need that . . . You should never have gotten involved with that.’

But money was never the sole draw for Monty. He hadn’t grown up poor and he wasn’t greedy; he liked fast cars and Italian shoes but he didn’t need them, didn’t hunger for them. It was more about sway. Sway helps make your money and money helps make your sway, but sway is not money. Sway is walking into a clothes shop and knowing you can buy anything on the shelves, true, but sway is also the clerk opening the shop after hours so you can walk through the aisles alone with your girlfriend; sway is the clerk unlocking the back room to show you the latest deliveries, still sheathed in plastic bags; sway is the clerk standing silent in the corner while you browse, and the clerk won’t complain if you paw the merchandise and kiss your girl for an hour because he knows about you and the trouble’s not worth it. Sway is making a phone call in the morning and having courtside seats at Madison Square Garden that night. Sway is entering a nightclub through the staff entrance so you can skip the metal detector. Sway is locking eyes with an undercover cop on the subway; you know what he is and he knows what you are, and you wink at him because he drives a battered Buick and you drive a Corvette, and he cannot touch you.

The Corvette is gone now. The government took title after Monty’s indictment. He wonders where it is – parked in some smirking suburbanite’s driveway or else still waiting in a federal lot for auction day. Monty does not love cars the way some men do, but he was proud of his vehicle, proud of its low-slung black body, the roar of its engine, the way he could make it bolt through the gaps in midtown traffic. On lucky days he’d find a string of green lights and cruise home in style.

In thirteen hours, home becomes the Otisville Federal Correctional Institution; a Catskill Eagle bus will take him there. They will give him the proper documents to sign, they will strip-search him, and they will fingerprint him – again.

Monty doesn’t mention Otisville or the Corvette or the principle of sway to his father. Instead, he says, ‘I didn’t hear you complaining when you were borrowing money. Not a word back then.’

‘No. You’re right. That was a mistake.’

Mr Brogan remembers when Monty was an infant, red-skinned and kicking. The boy would squeeze his eyes shut and pound on the blue blanket he lay on, wailing weakly – short, stuttered cries – in the months before his lungs were strong enough for true volume. His mother would pick him up from the crib, one hand supporting his head; she would walk with him and sing to him. She could never hold a tune but Monty did not seem to mind; he watched her obsessively, his green eyes locked on her green eyes. Or she would read to him from a picture book while his fuzzed head rested on her breast. She would read to him and he would listen quietly, long before he knew what the words meant:
Goodnight stars, goodnight air, goodnight noises everywhere
. And Mr Brogan would stand in doorways, always a little apart. Not jealous exactly, but maybe a little jealous, always conscious that this was an alliance to which he could only be witness.

There was something fierce about the boy’s love for his mother and her love for him. They were a beautiful pair. Later, when they marched down the street together, his handclutching hers, people turned to watch them, smiling.
What a darling boy
. She had insisted on naming her son after Montgomery Clift, her favorite actor, and she got her wish over her husband’s objections. Back then Mr Brogan felt uneasy about the name; he thought it was bad luck to name their only child after a fallen movie star. But Montgomery it was, and Mr Brogan was glad to see that the boy looked like his mother: the same rich black hair; the same small, even teeth; the same straight nose; the same eyes, so green as to be unsettling. He was a beautiful boy and he grew into a beautiful man, and Mr Brogan was always proud to have such a handsome son. Now, though, he wishes Monty were a little less handsome.

‘I’ve got to get going, Dad. I’m meeting the boys in a few minutes.’ The veal chop sits half eaten on Monty’s plate.

‘I’ll be there tomorrow,’ says Mr Brogan. He removes his wallet from the inside pocket of his jacket.

‘Tomorrow? What for? I get on a bus and I’m gone.’

‘Forget the bus. I’ll drive you. It’ll take half as long.’

Monty frowns, wiping his mouth with his napkin and backing his chair away from the table. ‘No, thanks, Dad. I’d rather say goodbye here.’

Mr Brogan pulls a small photograph from his wallet and hands it to his son. ‘Take this. They’ll let you keep it.’

Monty holds the picture carefully in his fingers. The three of them, the whole family, stand before a lavishly decorated tree. On the back, written in pencil: Christmas
Eve
, 1976. Monty at six, wearing yellow Mighty Mouse pajamas, holding his mother’s hand and staring at the floor. Mr Brogan remembers how they had pleaded with the boy to smile, had joked and coaxed and threatened, all to no avail.

Mr Brogan tells the story and Monty nods, though he doesn’t remember any of it. But it hurts him to see how lovely she was, how young. Because he cannot remember her that way; he cannot remember her beautiful, only wasted and crooked on the hospital bed.

Mr Brogan clears his throat. ‘She—;’

‘Don’t, Dad,’ says Monty, still looking at her face. ‘Not now.’

Monty carefully inserts the photograph in his own wallet, lays down money for the check, stands, kisses his father on the forehead, and walks out of the restaurant. Mr Brogan closes his eyes and listens to his own breathing. He has one wife and she’s buried in Woodlawn; he has one son and he’s headed for Otisville.

Eight

A faceless man knocks on the door in Naturelle’s dream, but the sound is all wrong, the knocks too high-pitched, and she realizes in the seconds before waking that what she hears are Doyle’s claws clattering on the hardwood floor. A rough tongue begins licking her face and she opens her eyes.

‘Hey. Hey.’

Doyle’s front paws are planted firmly on the mattress, brown eyes unblinking in his blunted face.

‘Come on, Doyle, get down. Down. Down, Doyle, get down.’

He licks her face again and she tries to shove him away, but Doyle thinks she is playing and bows his head to lick her wrist. Naturelle sits up and checks the digital clock on the nightstand: 9:23. For a second she believes that morning has come, that Montgomery is gone, that she has missed everything. But outside the city is dark, as dark as the city can get. The night is waiting. And what bothers her most is the feeling that slid through her when she thought it was morning – not panic or disappointment or sadness, but relief.

Doyle barks sharply and Naturelle stares at him guiltily, as if the dog has been reading her thoughts. ‘What?’ she asks him. But he just watches her, wagging the stump of his tail.

‘Now?’ She rises from the bed and walks to the window, looks out at the fat flakes of snow dropping slowly to the street. Several inches already blanket the parked cars. ‘It’s snowing,’ she tells the dog. ‘I don’t know, Doyle. It’s really coming down.’

Doyle barks again, now standing by the closet, and Naturelle raises her hands in surrender. ‘All right, all right.’ She bends down to touch her toes and then opens the closet door and begins rummaging for her running clothes. When she steps into her tights, Doyle sprints into the living room; Naturelle hears his claws skidding on the floor, his excited breathing, his muscular little body banging into furniture.

Ten minutes later they are jogging counterclockwise around the Central Park reservoir. The snow is falling thickly; the track is only visible for ten yards in either direction. Beyond the chain-link fence to her left is nothing but white, same for the woods to the right, a fringe of bushes and trees hedging the unknown. Naturelle wears a hooded jacket and heavy mittens. She has released Doyle’s leash and the dog runs free, now twenty feet ahead, sniffing at a clump of frozen shit, now thirty feet back, chasing a terrified squirrel through the underbrush. Naturelle knows that Montgomery would be furious if he saw his dog unleashed. ‘Give the city an excuse and they’ll fry a pit bull in butter,’ he likes to say, but it’s too exhausting running
and
controlling the dog. Doyle is too strong for his own good.

She has asked Montgomery a dozen times what he plans to do with the dog, and she has never got a straight answer. Where will Doyle go? After February, which Monty already paid for, Naturelle will have to move out of their apartment, back to the Bronx with her mother for a while, until she can find a job and get a place of her own. And Mrs Rosario would never allow Doyle – or anything else that belonged to Montgomery Brogan – into her home. Doyle and Mrs Rosario met one time and hated each other: the dog, ears flattened against his skull, had snarled at her on first smell; the woman, scowling, had said, ‘Looks like he been chewed on by rats.’ And Montgomery, to make everything worse, had pointed at Mrs Rosario’s dyed hair and said, ‘It’s probably the hair. He hates anything that shade of red.’