Blue Eyes (22 page)

“Papa, why did Jerónimo come back from Mexico? You should have kept him with Mordeckay.”

“The boy was lonely. He couldn't adjust to the Mexican traffic lights. A cousin isn't close enough. How long would he survive without seeing his brother's face?”

“If you hadn't opened your marriage bureau, Isaac might have left you alone.”

“That's César's trade, not mine.”

“Please. César wouldn't have moved into Manhattan without the nod from you. And I don't believe Mordeckay became a rabbi just for César. Papa, you okayed the brides. But Isaac's going to have, to chew his own warts for a while. They caught the lipstick freak at the Fourth Division, so he can't lay that trick on Jerónimo.”

“He'll find something else. There's always a loose freak running around.”

And Papa sat with his thumbs under his chin, an old habit from Peru, when he had to wait for hours at the market of San Jerónimo for a tradesman with pockets fat enough to pick. He had loved Coen the boy, had opened the candy store and the farm to him, had mixed him with his own brood, but he was suspicious of the man. You couldn't traffic with Isaac for twelve years and go unspoiled. So he trusted Coen only by degrees. Whatever Coen was capable of doing to him and Cósar, he didn't think the cop would hand Jerónimo over to Isaac.

“Manfred, I could offer him cash. I could set him up in the south Bronx under a code name. Abraham. It's stink-proof. No commissioner has a nose that good.”

“You can't make Isaac like that. Best thing, Papa, is chain Jerónimo to the candy store, or give him ten blocks on Boston Road for his hikes, with Jorge and Alejandro at the other end of his pants.”

“Manfred, I've dealt with those
agentes
before. They could kidnap Alejandro. They could give Jorge a permanent headache with their clubs. They could run Jerónimo down with a car. I'm superstitious, Manfred. I don't want any of my boys to the before me.”

“Papa, I'm superstitious too. I didn't know my mother and father would pick the oven when I went into Germany.”

Papa brought his thumbs out from under his chin and crossed them over his nose.

“Why did you hound Albert for money? Papa, couldn't you have waited until I got back?”

“Manfred, who's been fucking you in the ear? Did you bribe your uncle with chocolate bars?”

“No. Isaac told Pimloe, and Pimloe told me. He thought I'd be anxious to spy on César if I knew.”

“Pricks,” Papa screamed, and he put his thumbs in his pockets. “Hound your father, you say. I kept him alive. He couldn't have fed a weasel on the eggs he sold. My cousins from Peru had to suck four eggs a day because I wanted to satisfy the Coens. I won't hedge with you, Manfred. I'm a policy man, not a charity house. Your father, your mother, and your uncle Sheb did small favors for me. I stored some of my account books in their egg boxes. I sent your uncle on errands so he wouldn't lose his self-respect. I gave them a free bungalow in Loch Sheldrake, but your mother was too refined. She didn't want your father getting contaminated by me or my boys. She was a cultured woman, that Jessica. I enjoyed having her on the farm. She told your father I flirted with her. Manfred, I swear on Jerónimo's life, I didn't do nothing but touch her once on the knee. She should have walked in my orchard with more clothes.”

“Papa, that still doesn't explain why they preferred gas?”

“Manfred, every month your father sold less and less. I could have choked an army with the eggs I took off him. I couldn't carry him forever.”

“Then you should have closed him down before I went on maneuvers. How could I clear Albert out of the store from a post in West Germany?”

“They had it in their heads to die for a long time. Your father had too much gentility. You can't exist on Boston Road with his diet. The Coens would have been better off if they ate meat instead of grass.”

“Explain to me, Papa, why Sheb has been collecting premiums from you for so many years?”

Papa scowled in Coen's chair. “What premiums?”

“Two dollars a month from Jerónimo's hand.”

“Manfred, don't stick me too hard. There's some blood under all my freckles. After he prepared the oven for Albert your uncle was a maniac. Jorge found him on the fire escape laughing and screaming, with piss everywhere. César climbed up and wanted to bring him down. But he would only go with Jerónimo. So the baby went up there and held Shebby's fingers. That's how we got him into the candy store. The boys washed the piss off. He slept with Jerónimo, he ate off Jerónimo's dish. And I gave him an allowance same as the baby. Two dollars a month. We lent him' Jorge's coat for the funeral.”

“Papa, somebody should have thought about inviting me. I had the right to throw a little dirt on my father's box.”

“Manfred, César wrote the Army. They didn't write back.”

Coen lost his inclination to dig. He couldn't turn Papa's head, force him to look at Coen outside Guzmann lines. So he slouched against the wall. Papa got up. Worrying about Jerónimo gave him a squint in his left eye. He had more gray hairs on his neck than Coen could remember. His knuckles were humped from fixing ice cream sodas. He gave Coen a better kiss than before.

“Manfred, be careful. You shouldn't touch César's Chinaman in the face again. He's been speaking your name.”

Coen watched the Guzmanns from his windowsill. Papa couldn't bend like Jorge. He had a stiff-legged walk from standing behind his counter seventeen hours a day. He put his hand in Jorge's pocket and led them both across the street. His shoulders wouldn't get warm in Manhattan. Jorge was growling for food. So they had barley soup at the dairy restaurant before César's man drove them to the candy store. Papa couldn't fill his stomach without beef or pork. But Jorge seemed fit. He belched through his fist in the steerer's car. Papa didn't like to think about the dead. The living gave him plenty to do. But Albert's wife still had the power to sting him in the ass. Nipples didn't move him so much. He could have listed on a sheet of policy paper a hundred nipples fancier than Jessica Coen's. But he couldn't get underneath her smile. Albert he pitied. Manfred he loved. Jessica could only bother him. She brought pimples on his arms. Instead of salting twenty-dollar bills in the chimneys of his farmhouse, he would watch Jessica from behind a tree, her face stiff in the sun, while his boys clumped around the orchard in country shoes. Nothing could make her put on her halter or hurt the confidence of that thick smile. Did she want all six of the Guzmanns to pay for Albert's ineptness, his inability to provide?

Papa had only a narrow fondness for women. He had a habit of changing
queridas
after their pregnancies were over. They would bear a child for Papa and move to another pueblo. He took pride in the knowledge that every one of his boys had a different mother. He expected simple fecundity from a
mujer
and would tolerate nothing else. Alejandro's mother was a beauty with eleven toes. Topal's was a straightforward market slut. Jorge's had becoming moles on her ass and could prepare a remarkable fisherman's soup. He might have put up with her for a while longer if she hadn't been jealous of his older boys. César's was a mestizo with slim hips. Jerónimo's he couldn't remember. All the
mujeres
accepted Papa's crazy calendar. Ever since their time in Portugal, when they had to conduct the Marrano services in a wine cellar under the feet of the civil guard, Guzmanns have celebrated Christmas in July and Pascua (the Marrano Easter) in the fall. The
mujeres
worshiped Moses, Abraham, John the Baptist, and Joseph of Egypt. They depreciated the value of the Holy Virgin (no Guzmann would ever pray to a woman), they soaked the Marrano pork in hot oil, they washed the genitals of Papa's boys. Papa sacked them anyway, one by one. Yet he couldn't rid himself of that other
mujer.
He would rinse a glass, scrape off the remains of a banana split, and see a nipple in the sink. He was no better off on the farm. If he sat in his own orchard too long without one of his boys he smelled Jessica near the strawberry patch.

Jorge fell asleep in the car. Papa's disposition changed once the steerer took him over the Third Avenue bridge. The water smelled different on the Bronx side. His shoulders baked. He could tickle his brain without terrorizing himself. Papa had learned to play cat's cradle with other Marrano boys in the flea markets of Peru. No proper
limueño
could revive a dead piece of string like the Marranos, who had to spend their lives bundling and unbundling their goods. If a boy had no intuition in his fingers and couldn't feel his way through the constellations of the game, if he knotted his thumbs when he tried to get beyond “the scissors” or “the king,” Papa, who was called Moisés then, would dig around the thumbs and perform surgery on the string. His own boys couldn't catch on to the game. Jerónimo's abilities ended after “pinkie square.” César had the fingers but no patience. Jorge, Topal, and Alejandro bungled on the first constellation. They couldn't even fit the string. The
norteamericanos
had their own games. None of the farmers at the lake or the merchants of Boston Road could play with him, nobody but Jessica Coen. Who had blessed her fingers? Papa couldn't vex her with his constellations. She tilted the string with her thumbs turned in, and got out of Papa's snares. It was curious lovemaking. Four hands in a pie of string. How many times did he graze her bosoms going from “the diamond” to “pinkie square?” And he'd hold her cups for a second while she stood against him taking a constellation off his fingers. She didn't approve or disapprove of Papa's caress. He only saw the teeth in her face and her jumbo eyes. She always had the boy with her. Was he concentrating on the hands inside or outside the string? Because Manfred could make “the butterfly” almost as fine as Papa.

His boys had an uncommon knack. Jorge snapped awake a block from the candy store. Papa's stools were filled. The girls were waiting for their ice cream. The hard smudges under their eyes, all their piggy looks, told him he'd better not dally with the steerer. So he sent the car back to the dairy restaurant with one slap of the fender. And he had the girls in their plates, breathing hot fudge, before Jorge could count the quarters in his pockets.

“Isaac, Isaac the Prick”

DeFalco, Rosenheim, and Brown, snugged up in fiberglass vests, were berating Coen's old Chief; they couldn't understand why their own squad commander had surrendered them over to Isaac. Brown and Rosenheim carried riot guns from the borough office. The pump gun that DeFalco was cradling belonged to Coen. DeFalco had snapped open the door to Coen's locker with a common pair of pliers, but he wouldn't take Coen's shopping bag along.

“Why doesn't Isaac get the rat squad to chauffeur him around?” DeFalco snarled; none of them was anxious to ride shotgun for the First Dep.

“Maybe he knows what shitty work they do, all them blue-eyed gloms,” Brown said. “He wants a decent team.”

“Bullshit,” Rosenheim said. He had more cunning than the other two. “It must be a cover. Isaac can't be seen with First Deputy boys.”

They saluted their dispatcher with shotguns and trundled down the stairs; outside their own offices they walked with a pronounced slump. Their backs curved more on the ground floor, inside the territories of the uniformed police; they were contemptuous of all the hicks in blue bags. Brown stopped at the switchboard to bother the
portorriqueña
Isabel; she had been subtle with him this past week, refusing to crouch in the lockerroom, near his fly.

“Isobel, we're going to blow on Shotgun Coen. He's sleeping with César Guzmann—you know, the nigger Jew, and if we catch them together, it'll be their last embrace in a while.”

Isobel wouldn't play. She was worried about Coen; and she couldn't satisfy Brown with the
israelita
in her head.

“O boy,” Brown mumbled, rolling his eyes in memory of Isobel's knobs and the warm spit between her teeth. He would have crashed into the desk if Rosenheim hadn't steered his elbow another way. The three bulls pushed through the door.

“Where's Arnold?” DeFalco laughed, looking at an empty stoop. “Where's the little rat?”

“Fucking ungrateful crip,” Brown said. “Didn't we throw him a dime for every coffee he brought up? I'd like to piss on his gimpy toe.”

“It's true,” Rosenheim complained to himself. “I had softer bowel movements with Spanish around.”

DeFalco was snarling again. “Blame Isaac. The Chief owns the Puerto Ricans. Didn't he recruit Arnold for Coen? How many spies do you think Isaac used to run? Maybe a hundred, I swear.”

“Bullshit,” Rosenheim said. “The man's lucky if he had ten guys working for him, all rejects.”

They noticed Isaac sitting in their Ford.

DeFalco hefted the stock of Coen's pump gun; he could sense the imperfections in the wood. “The prick's waiting.”

“Let him starve,” DeFalco said. Close to the car his snarl disappeared The bulls shook politeness into their fiberglass vests. They ate their own teeth wearing rubber smiles. They prayed Isaac would adopt them; no detective was feared like one of Isaac's angels.

They piled into the front seat, Isaac squinting at them from the rear. None of them volunteered to sit with the Chief. But Rosenheim and DeFalco moved to the back when they saw Isaac step out of the car. They were afraid to risk Isaac's displeasure. Hunching under the range of the mirrors, DeFalco slapped Rosenheim's hand. They smiled; Brown had Isaac to himself. They hoped he enjoyed the glom. Brown felt prickles on his neck. He couldn't drive without orders.

“Where we going, Isaac?”

“Touch the handbrake,” Isaac said. “You're burning rubber.” Then he relented a bit “Bummy's. We're going to Bummy's.”