"You tell him what I said about him and my
wife?"
Peter says, "Jimmy, I left you off, I came home
and took a nap. This is when I sleep."
"I called before, the phone was busy."
"That was some guy didn’t have anything to do
with you," he says.
"What guy?"
"Somebody you don’t know."
There is a pause on the line, then, "Don’t
tell him I know what he did, Pally."
Peter sits up in bed and puts his feet on the floor.
"Pally?"
"I wasn’t going to," he says.
Jimmy Measles is quiet.
Peter waits him out, waits
for him half a minute, and then he hears the sound of the atomizer
and the phone goes dead.
* * *
T
wo days later, Jimmy
Measles is sitting in a cab outside Peter’s house. He hasn’t
shaved or slept. His hair is collected in damp, oily clumps, and
pieces of it fall across his forehead.
As Peter comes out, Jimmy opens the door and his
shoes drop one at a time on the street beneath it. Loafers, no socks.
He stands up slowly and turns to the driver, handing him everything
in his pocket.
The driver accepts what Jimmy has given him, sorts
it, turning the bills so they all face the same way, and then offers
some of it back.
"Keep it," Jimmy says.
"I don’t want your fucking driver’s
license," the driver says, but Jimmy doesn’t seem to hear him.
He crosses the street without checking for traffic.
"How long you been waitin’ out here?"
Peter says. "You should of come up."
Jimmy Measles looks up and down the street. "I
got to talk to you," he says.
Peter starts up the street, toward his car. "You
didn’t have to wait outside," he says.
Jimmy takes a cigarette out of his shirt pocket,
lights it, and then lets it hang from the corner of his mouth. They
walk slowly, Peter with his hands in his pockets, Jimmy Measles
falling in next to him.
He feels safer now that he is walking.
"I thought of something, takes care of this
problem I got with Michael," he says, looking at the street.
Peter rubs his eyes.
"The thing is, I got an aunt left me a piece of
property."
Peter stops walking.
"Three acres in the middle of San Jose,
California."
It is quiet a moment. He looks up at Peter. "You
ever been in San Jose?"
"Yeah, and I got to tell you Jimmy, somebody
stole your land. There aren’t three acres of anything there."
"It’s there," he says. "Some kind of
a trust I couldn’t break until I was forty-five years old. I forgot
I had it."
Peter begins to walk again; Jimmy Measles follows
him, squinting through a line of smoke.
"So what do you think?" Jimmy says.
"You mean about the trust from your aunt that
you just remembered?"
They look at each other.
Jimmy says, "Let Michael know for me the money’s
coming for me . . ."
Peter shakes his head. "You’re going to run,
Jimmy," he says, "don’t tell him ahead of time."
"I swear to God . . ."
Peter walks to his car, Jimmy Measles right behind
him. He stops when Peter stops, and waits while Peter finds the key
to the door. Peter gets in the car, and Jimmy leans close to the
window until their faces, separated by glass, are half a foot apart.
Peter rolls down the window.
"You want a ride?"
"Talk to Michael for me, Pally?"
"Get in the fucking car, let me take you home."
Jimmy Measles sits with his head against the cushion
of the seat, the cigarette still hanging from his bottom lip, staring
at the ceiling of the Buick. He is sweating, and he works for his
breath.
"What if it turns out the San Jose thing is
real?" he says. He is still looking at the ceiling, dreaming.
Peter turns north on Broad Street, headed in the
direction of center city.
"I got another one," Jimmy Measles says a
few minutes later.
"What if Michael wasn’t the only one fucking
my wife?" He turns his head without moving it off the cushion
and looks at Peter.
There is a blur in the corner of Peter’s vision,
and then a small, weightless list crosses the front seat of the car
and hits him in the cheek. And then, a long moment later, another
one. It takes Peter two punches to understand what Jimmy Measles is
doing.
Peter pulls the car to the curb and stops. Jimmy
Measles sits studying his right hand. The knuckle is scraped,
probably from the overhead light. His chest rises and falls, fighting
for breath.
The car is quiet.
"You all right now?" Peter says.
Jimmy Measles stares at his fist. Peter runs his
hands over his face and stares at South Broad Street, and before long
he notices the street staring back. Twelve-, thirteen-year-old kids
with hard eyes; everybody’s got a comb in their hair this year.
Jimmy Measles takes another cigarette out of his
pocket, lights it, and tosses the match on the floor.
"What did she tell you'?" Peter says. "She
said I did it, is that what she said?"
"Almost did it."
"How do you almost do somebody?"
He realizes that is a question with too many answers.
He thinks of the girls who had changed their minds at the last
minute, the times he’d changed his mind about at the last minute.
He thinks of the ones who drank too much and got sick, the times the
telephone rang at the wrong time—he would have to be doing someone
three times a day for the rest of his life to catch up with the ones
he almost did.
"You start to and then you don’t," Jimmy
Measles says.
It is quiet again and the kids come by in their new
sneakers and their eyeballs, and Peter sits in his seat wishing she’d
told him something else. Thinking there had to be a different way to
get rid of him.
He starts the car. "You all right now?" he
says.
Jimmy Measles is silent and Peter pulls back onto the
street. They are almost to Catherine and Ninth before he looks at
Jimmy again.
"Listen," he says, "I’ll see what I
can do."
Jimmy Measles gets out of the car as soon as it stops
rolling. The blood from his knuckle blots against the upholstery
behind the door handle. He walks to his front door and opens it
without using a key.
The place looks as black inside as a cave, and Jimmy
walks into it, slow and tired, and disappears.
A moment later the door
swings shut, as if by itself.
* * *
O
ne of the Italians is
lying in the bedroom with broken legs.
Not one of the old men from Constantine’s time, but
a younger man, a lawyer.
He has been there almost two days.
He’d shown up at the house in the afternoon, when
Michael was out, and Leonard and two of his people, who do not know
one Italian from another, took turns breaking his legs in the living
room.
It fed them that he was a lawyer, and not used to
being frightened or hurt.
He is in the bedroom now, waiting. The air
conditioner comes on, shaking the floor, and he screams.
Leonard and his people are on the couch in the living
room, Peter can see them from the kitchen. They look at each
other—how-were-we-supposed-to-know?—waiting for Michael to
forgive them.
"I don’t believe this happened," Michael
says.
He smiles. Peter hasn’t seen him afraid in this way
since they were children.
"How come they send somebody over without
calling first?" he says. "Tell me that."
"What did they want?" Peter says.
Michael looks into the living room. "Who knows?"
he says.
Then he stands up and walks to the refrigerator,
takes out a tray on ice, empties it into the sink, and fills it with
water. He leaves the ice tray on the counter and sits down again at
the table.
"I can’t let the guy out of here," he
says quietly. "I got no choice about that. The way they did him,
he’s crippled. Even if I pay for all the medicine and doctor bills,
it still don’t change what happened. They find out about this,
they’re going to think we’re out of control here."
Peter waits while that settles.
Michael stands up again and walks a few steps toward
the living room, then comes back. It is as if he wants something in
there, but cannot decide to take it.
"What kind of a fucking mothball they got for a
brain, they don’t know the difference between a bunch of old
long-nose guys from Constantine’s time and a guy in a nice suit?"
Michael says. "How do you make a mistake like that?"
The air conditioning goes off; the man in the next
room moans.
"You ought to get him something for that,"
Peter says. "Call a doctor to give him a shot."
Michael is not listening. "Maybe the guy just
disappears," he says.
Peter waits. "You think they don’t know they
sent him?"
"We say he never got here."
Peter gives Michael time to think that through from
the other end, how it would sound if someone told it to him.
The lawyer moans again. "At least turn the
thermostat up," Peter says, "it isn’t rattling the house
every five minutes."
"You want to take a look?" Michael says.
Peter shakes his head.
"I don’t believe this happened," Michael
says again, and it is quiet between them a long time.
"You want to know what I think," Peter says
finally, "you pick up the telephone, call them and tell them
what happened. That three of your people got excited and broke the
guy’s pins when he came to the door."
He looks at Peter, blinks.
"They got stupid Italians too," Peter says.
"They’d see how it happened. And then you tell them, they want
the ones that did it, here they are. Break their legs, set them on
fire, anything they want."
Michael looks into the living room again, considering
it.
"You think so?" he says.
Peter shrugs. "Who knows with these guys?"
he says. He pauses, looking at his cousin. "Now I got something
to ask you," he says.
"What’s that?"
"Let Jimmy Measles slide a little on this
money."
It is quiet again. "You seen him walking around
the street," Michael says, "that means he already got his
slide. Now he’s got to come up with it."
Peter waits.
"He’s into me sixty-five," Michael says.
"That’s one thing when he’s got a club, it’s another thing
he’s a bum. It’s the same thing now as he couldn’t stay off the
tables in Atlantic City, that’s how much I like him walkin’
around owing me money."
"It isn’t his fault, what happened at the
club."
Michael shrugs, his shoulders looking as big as
Leonard’s. "What’s that mean, his fault?" he says.
The air conditioning comes on again, and a long,
hollow wail comes from the next room. Weaker than before.
Peter fixes on his cousin, trying to distance himself
from the sound in the next room, to find a place farther away to
watch the things. Far enough away so that the man in the room becomes
temporary—stalled here a few moments, a passing tremor in the long
settling of this house.
Far enough away so the lawyer’s sounds do not
mingle with his own.
The noise suddenly stops and Michael leans across the
table. He smiles, the way he always does when he’s asking for
something Peter doesn’t want to give up.
"You want to look at him for me, Pally?"
Peter doesn’t move.
"Lookit," he says. "I need another
opinion here .... "
Peter looks across the table. "Give Jimmy some
slack," he says, "I’ll go in and have a look."
Michael stares at him, beginning to get worked up.
Then something changes.
"Fuck it," he
says. "Tell Jimmy to relax."
* * *
F
rom half a block away,
Peter sees the front door is open. It is eleven o’clock in the
morning, the sun is reflecting at him off flattened cans and pieces
of glass in the street, from the windows of the stores and houses,
from everywhere but Jimmy Measles’s open door.
The thought of burglars never enters his mind.
He parks the Buick on the sidewalk, a few feet from
the steps, and sits behind the wheel. He can’t imagine going into
the house and seeing what is there; he can’t imagine not going in.
He opens the car door and steps out.
He doesn’t bother to knock. He steps into the place
and hears a sound upstairs, someone running a shower. He stands
still, listening to the water, making himself stay. He finds a light
switch, but the electricity is off.