Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
They dared one another to kiss her.
Scar-face! Burn-a-by!
If no adults were around their play became rougher. Their faces became flushed,
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their eyes shone with a greedy hunger. That afternoon Juliet had not been able to elude them and they’d forced her into an alley just off Baltic Street, hardly two blocks from her home. The Mayweather boy tugged at Juliet’s hair, the Herron boy tugged at the collar of her new sweater. If she’d been hearing music in her head, imagining her own voice lifted in song, it was a crude awakening now, these grinning boys surrounding her. Why couldn’t she scream, why did her throat shut up in panic? She was desperate to escape but could only push and shove and weakly slap at their busy hands. When she tried to run they blocked her, encircling. Loudly laughing and jeering, egging one another on.
Jully-ett! Jully-ett! Burn-a-by! Who bit your face?
Juliet’s sweater was ripped, her school books knocked to the ground and kicked about. The attack by these boys was more protracted than it had ever been before, Juliet was beginning to panic. She knew what boys can do to girls: if the girls are alone, and helpless. She had no clear knowledge yet she knew.
Yet she was trying not to cry. Never give your enemies the satisfaction, Ariah warned. Never show them tears.
“Hey. Little shits!”
There came into the alley, on the run, fists swinging, Bud Stonecrop the cop’s son, bearing down on the boys like a pit bull. He moved swiftly and without warning. He seized Clyde Mayweather’s head in one big hand, as you’d grab a basketball, and slammed it against Ron Herron’s head. He struck the D’Amato kid with his fist, breaking and bloodying his nose. He kneed the Sheehan kid in his puny groin, followed this with a kick to his belly. The boys stumbled back, astonished by the attack, and by the ferocity of the attack. Those who could run, ran scattered and bawling. Stonecrop outweighed the biggest of the ninth grade boys by more than thirty pounds. He stood panting and wordless above Juliet who crouched, still shielding her head against her assailants. Her sweater, a pink embroidered cardigan she’d bought with baby-sitting earnings, was torn at the neck, and buttons were gone. Stonecrop mumbled what sounded like,
“Shit-faced fuckers. Should of killed ’em.” He stooped to retrieve one of Juliet’s buttons on the ground. And another. These were pink mother-of-pearl buttons, tiny in the palm of Stonecrop’s massive 434 W
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hand. Seeing that Juliet was trying awkwardly to hold her ripped sweater together, Stonecrop swiftly removed his T-shirt, and handed it to her grunting what sounded like, “Here.”
Juliet took the shirt from the shaved-headed boy and numbly pulled it over her head. A gray cotton T-shirt, not clean, damp beneath the arms, voluminous on Juliet as a tent. The right sleeve hung over her shoulder at half-mast. Embarrassed, Juliet murmured,
“Thanks.” The shaved-headed boy was a little older than Royall, no more than eighteen, but with the thick muscled torso of an adult man. Juliet had a fleeting impression (she was looking away, not at him) that he was covered in a bear-like pelt. His shirt, on her, smelled of briny sweat and fried onions. Juliet would wear it home and enter the house at 1703 Baltic undetected by her usually vigilant mother (Ariah was at the rear, with a piano student) and later that evening she would launder it tenderly by hand and hang it to dry in her room and next day return it in a plain paper bag addressed BUD STONE-CROP and placed on the front porch railing of the ramshackle house at 522 Garrison Street.
There would be no further close contact between the shaved-headed boy and Juliet Burnaby, no words exchanged, for more than four years.
10
S t o n e c ro p ! In the Baltic Street neighborhood of Niagara Falls, New York in the late 1960’s he’d begun to acquire a reputation while still in junior high. He was
Stonecrop the cop’s son
. Sometimes, to those who knew his family, and his father the NFPD sergeant, he was
Bud, Jr.
But you never called Stonecrop by that name. You never called Stonecrop by any name. You avoided Stonecrop, even looking at him.
You didn’t want Stonecrop to look at you, to register you in what would appear to be his dim-flickering yet vigilant consciousness, as you would not want a predator of any species, a shark for instance, to register your existence. In childhood, that early instinct to survive by becoming invisible.
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By the age of twelve Stonecrop had grown to a height of nearly six feet and a weight of one hundred eighty pounds and he would continue growing through adolescence. Even among the big-boned Stonecrops he was distinctive. He had the build of an upright, en-gorged blood sausage about to burst its casing, and his face was of that hue, hot and hard. His natural smile was a grimace. His head suggested the density and durability of a concrete block. His hair, stone-colored, was brutally shaved at the back and sides of his head (by a barber who happened to be an uncle) and was short-cut at the crown, harshly stubbled as a winter cornfield. His eyes were small, steely and alert and antic as pinballs. His discolored teeth were spade-shaped and his nose had been flattened at birth, and could not be broken or made to bleed by any blow. It was said of Stonecrop that already in elementary school he’d begun to sprout ominously thick, wiry hairs on his stocky body. His cock grew weekly. In the boys’
locker room it was observed to be always semi-erect; the other boys soon learned to avoid looking at him with the instinctive terror of an individual armed with a three-inch penknife confronted by an adversary with a machete. Yet, in the presence of girls, Stonecrop was withdrawn, aloof or indifferent. Girls said of him he made them
shiver
.
Stonecrop was the youngest son of NFPD sergeant Bud Stonecrop, a locally known, controversial police officer who’d retired young. The Stonecrops were a large Niagara Falls clan, married into the Mayweathers and the O’Ryans, but alliances between families, especially boy cousins, were inconstant. The Stonecrops of Garrison Street were not invariably on good terms with the Stonecrops of Fifty-third Street or their Mayweather neighbors. Bud, Jr. was a reliable friend only when he wished to be; but he could always be counted upon to be a reliable, treacherous enemy. While in school he ran with a select gang of boys of his approximate size, background, and temperament, but more often Stonecrop was alone, a brooding boy. He cut classes frequently but never received any grade lower than C−.
No teacher would have wished to flunk him, and “teach” him another year. Yet he was often earnest, even somber in his classrooms. He scowled at textbooks as if they were printed in a foreign language in 436 W
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which he could pick out familiar words now and then. He quit school abruptly after his sixteenth birthday, in his junior year, but before quitting he’d insisted upon being allowed to take a much-derided girl’s course known as “home economics”; in this course, to the surprise and delight of his girl classmates and their teacher, Stonecrop excelled as a cook.
A cook! But no one laughed.
It was said that Stonecrop’s windpipe had been injured in a street fight and that was why he spoke in mumbles and grunts; in fact, Stonecrop had a deep, hoarse voice but a tendency to stammer, out of shyness. It was Bud, Sr., his father, who’d been severely injured in the throat, as well as elsewhere on his body: the sergeant had been am-bushed in Mario’s parking lot, beaten nearly to death with tire irons by assailants described as “coke-crazed Negroes” with a vendetta against him. (This was the official police report. At the first precinct, where he’d been assigned for most of his career, and among Stonecrop’s relatives, other facts were known about the beating and his subsequent physical and mental condition.) He’d been retired from the NFPD with honors and a full disability pension at the age of forty-two.
It was expected that Bud, Jr. would go into police work, like his father. There were police officers, parole officers, prison guards among the relatives. But from the age of eleven Stonecrop had been drawn to his uncle Duke’s Bar & Grill on Fourth Street; after quitting school he began working there full-time. Duke’s Bar & Grill was near the first precinct and the City-County Building and had long been a popular hangout for NFPD officers and staff and for burnt-out veterans from the district attorney’s office. Always there was a shifting contingent of women at Duke’s, many of them lonely divorcées. Already by early evening the atmosphere in both the bar and the adjoining restaurant was boisterous, smoky and convivial. Jukeboxes in both favored elemental rock music of the 1950’s and country-and-western, turned up high. The TV above the bar was always on, broadcasting sports events, though no one could hear it. In the kitchen of the restaurant, Stonecrop and co-workers listened to deafening 1970’s rock music on a portable radio. The older kitchen workers appeared
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to be fond of Stonecrop, the owner’s nephew; he was willing to do what they called shitwork, scraping plates, hauling out garbage, scouring away grease and washing dishes. To reward him, the cook sometimes let him prepare meals, under his supervision.
Of course no one in the Stonecrop family approved of Bud, Jr. as a kitchen worker. Was this a joke? A kid that size, and not dumb?
(Anyway, not so dumb. He was at least as bright as his old man who’d graduated from Police Academy and made quite a lucrative career as a cop “with connections.”) There was continual pressure on Stonecrop to get a “real” job, a “serious” job, a job “fitting for a man.” Through relatives he began working with Parks & Recreation but nearly ampu-tated his right foot working with a chainsaw. For a hellish winter season he was a rescue worker for Niagara County, going out with snow removal trucks on ten-hour emergency missions. One of his better-paying jobs was at a local quarry but he’d hated such zombie work and wound up drinking with older guys though he was under age at the time, returning home drunk, or not returning home. By the age of seventeen Stonecrop had grown to six feet two, two hundred twenty pounds, and so there was talk among the relatives of training him as a boxer. Stonecrop’s semi-invalided father Bud, Sr. began to fantasize Bud, Jr. as the next heavyweight champion of the world, returning the crown to the Caucasian race where it belonged. (There had been no American white champion since Rocky Marciano who’d retired undefeated in 1956.) But Stonecrop was a reluctant boxer. He was a street fighter by instinct, with a tendency to throw powerful round-house rights from the shoulder, and so he had no patience, let alone skill, for more devious strategies of jabbing, slipping punches, moving adroitly on his feet. Stonecrop could intimidate an opponent with his size only if his opponent was not his size, or larger. At the gym on Front Street, training half-heartedly for his first Golden Gloves tour-nament (which would be held in Buffalo), Stonecrop became sulky, sullen. His small antic eyes became bloodshot, his lips swollen and cracked. He had difficulty breathing through his nose, which was all cartilage, now flatter than ever; after a few rounds, he panted like an ox. His eighty-year-old trainer admonished him as you’d admonish a young ox: “Boxing isn’t about getting hit, kid. It’s about hitting the 438 W
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other guy. See?” Stonecrop lacked the language to protest. Flat-footed and mute he stood in the ring allowing blows to rain upon his unprotected head, face, torso. His big white body, covered in the damp pelt, exuded an air of stoic, wounded dignity, brooding upon its curious fate.
I don’t want to hit some guy. I want to feed him.
In his first Golden Gloves bout, at the Buffalo Armory, Stonecrop went down in fifty seconds of the first round, felled by a sixteen-year-old black heavyweight, and was counted out by the appalled referee.
In this way, Stonecrop was allowed to quit the gym forever and to return to Duke’s Bar & Grill, working longer hours. (Still, his uncle paid him hardly more than the minimal wage.) Stonecrop’s father, sinking by degrees into more serious illness, often semi-paralyzed, would not forgive him, and never asked after Stonecrop’s work at the restaurant. When the cook quit, Stonecrop stepped in. He learned to execute orders swiftly and with increasing confidence. Though within a few months he became restless with the grill menu, preparing fatty hamburgers and cheeseburgers, pork sausage, fried eggs, bacon, buns, and toast, frying everything in shimmering grease. As a boy of ten he’d begun preparing meals at home in the absence of his mother and he had his own ideas about food, in defiance of his Uncle Duke. Lost in scowling concentration in grease-splattered apron and cook’s hat, slope-shouldered, head bowed over the chopping block, Stonecrop ventured to insert chopped Bermuda onions, green peppers and chili peppers into ground beef; he experimented with novel ways of preparing even Canadian bacon, Birds Eye frozen fish, chicken wings and chicken-in-the-basket, french fries. Stonecrop annoyed his uncle by using new types of pickles, potato chips, cole slaw. He developed his own spicy version of Campbell’s tomato soup, a staple of the restaurant’s menu, laced with spices and chunks of fresh tomato. He developed his own Italian dishes, primarily spaghetti and meatballs.
His corned-beef hash and special chili began to find customers. In time, Stonecrop would develop an interest in “greens” other than ice-berg lettuce, and in fresh vegetables instead of canned or frozen. Perversely, he came to prefer chunk cheddar cheese to sliced process American cheese for burgers, which narrowed Duke’s margin of profit. He had his own ideas about rib steaks, “chicken-fried” steaks,
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London broil and pork chops. Pork and beans, breaded halibut and cod cakes, even mashed potatoes. When customers began to remark upon, or to complain of, the new, exotic taste of Stonecrop’s burgers, his Uncle Duke lit into him in fury. “You little cocksucker, what’s this? What kind of shit is this?” The older man, shorter than Stonecrop by inches and slighter by perhaps thirty pounds, stabbed open a hamburger to reveal incriminating chips of onion, pepper, chili pepper in the meat. He took a bite, chewed suspiciously and took another bite, shook ketchup onto what remained of the meat and tasted it again. He conceded, “Well. It ain’t bad. It’s different, a little like dago food. But this goes on the menu as a special—Bud’s Burger. And next time you experiment in my kitchen, kid, tell me beforehand, or I’ll break your ass.” Red-faced, sullen, Stonecrop wiped his sweaty face on his apron and mouthed
Screw you
, so that the kitchen laughed loudly.