Mick (11 page)

Toy laughed at that, leaned his head back against the wall, making his hat go even further down over his face. I looked at him, looked for him to be nervous. But he wouldn’t show it. I turned back to Sully, who would.

“Toy?” Sully asked cautiously. “Not for nothin’, you understand, but what if... say you knew something like that was gonna happen, like this afternoon?”

“
This
afternoon?” I cut in.

“Like, just suppose. What do you suppose you might do, if you knew?”

Toy chewed on the cigar, rolling it around in his mouth a bit. “I guess I’d just do what I’m doing right now.” He shrugged.

I couldn’t be that casual. “So, Sul, what are you gonna do?” I asked, kind of asking myself by asking him.

Sully tilted his head sideways, looked off into space, like he hadn’t thought about it before. Then he returned with his answer, turning back to me and shrugging, with a simpleton smile. “Well, I’m
here
, ain’t I? That’s doing something, I think.”

Toy reached over and smacked Sully lightly on the side of the head, laughing again. He was right. For Sully—not the moxiest ol’ boy around—staying to hang with Toy under the circumstances was something. Which seemed to leave only me with a crisis of nerve.

“Maybe we should do something else for a change, y’know, not just hang out here on the same old sidewalk, in plain view, where everybody knows we’re here. ...How ’bout a movie? Or bowling, maybe.”

“Take off if you want to, Mick,” Toy said. “I understand. It won’t bother me.”

This was a problem for me. Toy just would not give it up, and now I was coming up even bigger chicken than Sully. Which was
big
chicken. “God, will you stop being so cool and collected all the time, Toy? I hate that. Doesn’t this stuff have any effect on you at all? Don’t you feel anything—”

“Got a quarter?” Toy cut in.

“Huh?”

“For a phone call. I have no change.”

“Goddamn it, Toy,” I said, hopping to my feet, waving my arms in front of him.

He got up, stood toe to toe with me. Calmly but firmly he said, “I won’t discuss animals. I don’t care what they do. I won’t waste not one of my days thinking about them. I won’t.” He extended his palm for the coin.

“I got it,” Sully said, flipping the money up to Toy, who walked the few paces to the pay phone on the wall by the store entrance.

“He’s a friggin’ cuke, ain’t he,” Sully asked as we both watched Toy.

“
He
is? Since when have you been such a cool cucumber, being so stand-up after Augie warned you?”

“Ya,” Sully said, nodding in amazement as if we were talking about some third party who was not himself, “where did that shit come from? Must be Toy. Something contagious about him.”

Toy was waving me over to the phone. I went, as did Sully, who was not invited but never needed to be.

“It’s for you,” Toy said, jamming the receiver into my hand. “Evelyn.”

I froze, with the phone a foot away from my ear. Suddenly I was thirsty, as if an entire cylinder of Morton’s salt had been poured down my gullet. I was vaguely aware of Sully’s low laughter about a thousand miles behind me, and I heard myself making a scratchy throat-clearing sound.

“Get
on
with it,” Toy said, reaching out and bending my arm for me to bring the phone to my ear.

“Hello?” I said, though it was still ringing.

“Hola,”
the voice came on. My throat closed even tighter when I realized it was Evelyn’s brother, Ruben.

“Ah, can I speak to Evelyn?”

This was followed by a long silence.

“Who is this?” he finally said suspiciously.

I knew answering that question wouldn’t help. So I didn’t. “Could I please—”

Click.

I asked Toy for the number and Sully for the coin, and called right back before losing my newfound nerve.

“Buenos días,”
he said brightly, picking up on the first ring.

“Hello, I’d like to speak to—”

Click.

Sully and Toy were all subdued smiles when I slammed the receiver down.

“Shut up,” I said.

“I think maybe I can make you a little headway here,” said Toy. He took up the phone.

“Hola,”
he said after a short wait.
“¿Es posible hablar a Evelyn, por favor? Sí. No, no se. ¿Mick? Hmmm, no, Mick no está conmigo. ¿Ella es allí? Maravilloso.”

I looked at Sully. Sully looked at me.

“Gracias,”
Toy said, then turned to me. “You’re on.”

I took the phone again, fuzzy again. I was thinking as much about Toy now as I was about Evelyn. Spanish? Why didn’t I know that? Had I said anything ignorant that might have offended him, back before I knew? Sully, Toy’s good buddy just minutes before, was standing three feet away from him now, looking most confused. Evelyn took her sweet time coming to the phone. I thought I heard something.

“Olé,”
I said, but she wasn’t there yet.

“The word is
hola
,” Toy said, disgusted. “Don’t even try. I think English is enough of a chore for you.”

“Yes?” Her soft but very serious voice came over the line.

“Ya, hello, Evelyn. Hi.”

“Who is this, please?” she said, a lot more suspiciously than she needed to. I was slipping away already, I could feel it.

“How ’bout could we talk first, and
then
I could tell you who I am?”

“If you don’t tell me who you are right now, I’m hanging up.”

“It’s Mick.”

Click.

“Well, you got a couple of sentences deeper than I thought you’d get,” Toy said. “It’s a promising start.”

“And finish,” I said. “It’s unbelievable, how much I’m hated by that girl. I can actually
feel
it, the hate, when I’m near her. It’s not a good feeling, Toy.”

“You’re doing fine,” Toy said, sticking a cigar in my direction. “She just doesn’t know you yet. She will like what’s inside, when she sees it. Trust me.”

I took the cigar, pointed it back at him like a teacher’s pointer. “You know her. I mean,
really
know her, don’t you?”

He lit up his cigar with a sly grin, gripping it in his teeth. “I know lots of things,” he said.

Toy offered a cigar to Sully, who had been staring dumbly at him since the phone thing. He didn’t take it. “You speak Spanish,” Sully said flatly.

“I speak Spanish,” Toy repeated, same tone.

“How come you never spoke it around us before?”

“¿Porqué no hablas Español alrededor de mí?”

“What does it matter, Sul? This is Toy, for chrissake. What are you thinking?”

“I don’t know, Mick. Toy, I don’t know what I’m thinkin’. But I’m thinkin’
something.
I mean, a guy just wants to know these things about another guy, that’s all. I don’t know. A guy shouldn’t hide stuff, that’s all. Y’know, for trust, he shouldn’t.”

“I don’t hide,”
Toy said, mean enough to scare me.

“I don’t agree,”
Sully answered, not nearly as tough, but pretty aggressive for Sully.

We all stood looking each other over for a minute. It was weird, like we were meeting for the first time all over again. It started out as another Toy-Sully thing, but I was doing it too. It was uncomfortable.

“I’m gonna go,” Sully said. “I’ll catch you all.”

We didn’t say anything to him, not even good-bye, because nothing would have been quite right then. It was good for him to go, and it was good for us to move on to something else.

“You think you have the guts to see this thing through?” Toy asked, trying to sound light.

“Which thing?”

“Miss Evelyn?”

I got the butterflies again. I nodded.

“Let’s go pay her a visit.”

“At her
house
?” I said.’ “No, Toy, I know you know her and you know everything about everything and all, but, no, I can’t go
there.
”

“Why not?”

“Why not? ’Cause I got a problem, is why not. A reputation, a stigma, a bullseye on my ass, is why not. And if I do make it through the neighborhood all the way to Evelyn’s house, she’ll shoot me herself right there on her doorstep.”

Toy laughed at me and started pulling me along by the arm. “
I
can take you there,” he said. “You’ll be fine. What the lady needs from you is sincerity, she likes sincerity. You go there, show her the effort, she’ll see you’re sincere. The door will open. Trust me.”

I badly wanted that door to open. And I did trust Toy. Even if he did hide things.

T
HE DUMB MONKEY, I
waddled along behind Toy as he led me just like that to the place I so wanted to go. He walked the way he always walked, medium slow, side-to-side rock, but looking straight on, with purpose. I followed roughly in his steps, but looking everywhere else. My nerves were acting up again. It was a case of wanting to
be
at Evelyn’s house without having to
get
there.

Old men sat on stools outside the six-table restaurant, the
Boca Loca
. The overwhelming smell of garlic and cinnamon rolling out the open door somehow came together and made sense, made me hungry, made me calmer. We passed Soraya’s Children’s Boutique with silly-looking tiny versions of adult clothes on scary gnomish mannequins in the front window and nobody inside. We passed the bowling alley that sounded like thunder with the twenty-candlepin lanes and
Los Violines
nightclub—“Open All Day”—right next door, playing salsa out of a gigantic jukebox and advertising
THE AMAZING RUBEN BLADES AND SON DEL SOLAR
, on a life-sized concert poster. Under the poster was tacked a hand-lettered sign, “He ain’t gonna be here, but we like him anyway.”

When we hit Pablo’s Complex of Beauty, it was time to turn off Centre Street onto South. Evelyn’s street. On one corner three men were taking parts off a new white five-liter Mustang and transferring them to an old, red one. On the other corner was a phone company van.

I had never been down South Street. I didn’t even
know
anyone who had walked down South Street. And I guess South Street sort of saw me the same way. I got some
looks
. I recognized guys from school, walking past, sitting on cars or on steps. People who just didn’t bother with me at school, but now, here, shot me the intense, no-fooling look. Most just nodded, or grunted, respectful-like, at Toy as he cleared me a path.

“Almost to the promised land,” Toy said over his shoulder. “Place with the pink door there, with the Mary-on-the-half-shell in the yard.”

We were almost there, approaching the statues—Mary standing in an upturned bathtub, draped in flowers and surrounded by pink flamingos standing on one leg. There were a lot of other Mary statues around, but this was the slickest. It made me smile, which helped the raging butterflies that were overtaking me. Suddenly, something else overtook me, from the street side.

The phone truck that had been parked at the end of the street two blocks back was here now. And not parked, but moving beside us. Creeping. At exactly our pace. I stopped, peered right into it.

“Shiiit!” I yelled. “Toy, we gotta run.” I pulled his sleeve, but he yanked it out of my hand.

“What for? I ain’t running nowhere.” He puffed up a bit, made two fists and looked in all directions.

Doors popped open all over the van. The front passenger side, sliding side door, back doors. Out came Augie, Danny, one fat Cormac—the other stayed at the wheel—and a more-than-typically demented-looking Baba.

“All right, cut the shit now,” I said, holding up my hands and walking toward them. “Where’s my brother?” What did I think, that I could
fix
everything? By
talking
? To
Terry
? There was no Terry anyway. He would be home, at the Bloody, pulling the strings and obeying his restraining order.

They didn’t even acknowledge me. Augie in the lead, pulled a cop nightstick from behind his back, dipped a shoulder into me and bounced me aside. Then Baba came along, his eyes red-rimmed tiny black dots. He wore something on his fist, like a dog chain with the links welded together to fit perfectly, rigidly across the knuckles. “Come on, Baba,” I pleaded, trying to tap into something that wasn’t there.

He walked right over me. Literally, like in war clips on the news when the tanks roll right over the tiny people. So wired he showed no comprehension of who I was or that I was rolling under his feet. So died a lifetime friendship.

I looked up to see Augie walk to Toy—who of course had not taken a single backward step—and raise the nightstick. Before Augie even had the thing over his head, Toy shot him a rocket right hand, out of nowhere, no windup, no crouch, no leverage, that picked up boosters out of the air and
dropped
Augie like a sack of soup bones to the sidewalk. The nightstick clacked across the cement. Toy stood. His feet never even shifted. I got back to my feet, but stood there like a spectator.

“Too long, too long,” Cormac called, sticking his head out the van window. “Gotta go.” No one was particularly concerned with Augie holding his face and rolling on the sidewalk.

Baba stepped up to Toy, raised his chain-encrusted fist, turning it around and back again, admiring it.

Finally, Toy took a step back. He reached around behind him, down into his pants.

Shik.
The blade, six inches, was out and up, between them. Baba moved on him anyway.

“Take off, Toy,” I said. He stood there.

“Let’s
go
!” Cormac yelled, putting the van in gear.

Then there was a click. The tiny noise that shot through everything else. We all looked to see Danny with the gun pointed Toy’s way. His hand was shaking, and I would have bet anything he couldn’t do it. But there it was.

“Go,” I yelled at Toy. “They ain’t gonna bother me.
Go
!”

Toy hesitated, then ran, his boots clicking loudly down the street. I thought Danny was going to faint, he looked so drained and relieved as he let the gun swing down at his side. He helped Augie to his feet and they all started piling into the van. “We ain’t lettin’ him get away,” Augie muttered.

“Let him go,” Cormac the driver said. “We made him shit his pants, that’s what’s important.” Like the rest of them, Cormac was not as hot about the operation as Augie was. Like
most
of the rest of them, anyway.