"Where’s he assigned to?"
"Frank, did the guy have a family?"
The chief of police walks to his car without
answering the questions, then stops a moment before he gets inside.
"Lieutenant Kopec was an excellent police
officer," he says. "Any further statements will come as the
case develops." And then he turns away from the cameras and
drops into the front seat of the police car and points, with one
finger, toward the other side of the park.
The reporters shout more questions, but the car rolls
out across the grass, leaving tire tracks.
The reporters come back to the convertible, the trunk
is still open. A rope barrier has been set up around it, and
investigators in white coats are going through what is inside.
The reporters look at each other and shake their
heads.
"Frank’s pissed," one of them says.
They remember Peter then, and come back across the
yard, smiling. Peter gets up and goes into his house. In a moment, he
hears them knocking on the door. He sits down on the iloor and turns
on the television set, loud enough so he can’t hear the knocking,
and waits for them to leave.
Bandstand.
* * *
T
he phone rings sometime
after dark.
He picks it up and presses the receiver against his
ear, cold and hard, and listens.
"Who’s this?" It is his uncle, something
in his voice.
"It’s Peter," he says.
"Your father there yet?"
Peter looks across the empty room to the front
window. There are lights outside, a policeman is still guarding
Victor Kopec’s convertible. Victor Kopec himself is gone now, he
watched them lift him out of the trunk.
"No."
"You tell him as soon as he gets in to call me,
all right? . . . You understand me? As soon as he’s in the door."
He hangs up the phone. The television set glows in
the corner, lighting the room, and the light changes with the scenes;
the whole room seems to blink. He thinks of the reporters who would
not go away. He thinks of them talking to each other, laughing on the
other side of the door.
He goes into the kitchen and makes himself a jelly
sandwich. As he eats it, he remembers one of the reporters who stood
in the front yard pointing at the house, arguing with the
photographers.
"Get a picture, get a fuckin’ picture .... "
Time passes. Outside a car engine races and stops,
not his father’s. A door slams. Peter goes to the window and sees
his uncle on the sidewalk. The streetlight throws a shadow across
half his face and makes the pockmarks deeper in the lighted side. He
imagines a pain which could cause such marks.
His uncle knocks as if he were in a hurry to get
inside. Peter opens the door and he steps through it without a word.
He looks around the room—a familiar gesture, but this time he is
not thinking he would like the place for himself.
"He ain’t home?"
He shakes his head.
His uncle closes the door as if it were his own house
and walks inside. "How come you got it so dark?" he says.
He smiles, but something is strained in his voice.
Peter shrugs. "It doesn’t matter to me,"
he says.
His uncle goes to the wall switch and the room is
suddenly filled with light.
"I think you spent too much time alone," he
says. Peter understands that is a joke, he doesn’t know what kind.
He shrugs again and his uncle bends over the
television set, and the sound of voices fills the room. Ralph and
Norton, planning to get rich. He knows the words by heart.
His uncle sits on the davenport and lights a
cigarette. "You got a beer in the icebox?" he says.
Peter nods.
His uncle watches him in a way Peter has seen
before—never when his father is there with them, though. "So?"
he says, "you gonna get me a beer or what?"
He walks into the dark kitchen and opens the
refrigerator door.
In the light he sees the jelly knife lying on the
counter, the open bag of Wonder bread. The bottles of beer are on the
bottom shelf, where the icebox is coldest, and he takes one of them
out. He finds the church key in the drawer next to the icebox,
holding the door open with his knee for light. He takes the bottle
and the church key to his uncle, and then wipes his hand against his
shirt.
His uncle lays the cigarette on the end of the coffee
table, the ash suspended over the edge, and opens the beer. In the
moment just before the glass touches his lips, Peter sees the
trembling in his hand.
"You got something to do?" he says after a
while.
Peter shakes his head. His uncle picks the cigarette
up between his thumb and middle linger, carefully choosing a halfway
spot, as if the ends could hurt him.
The boy sees it again, that his fingers are
trembling. He draws on the cigarette and holds the smoke inside a
long time, and then a trace of it appears under his nose and hangs
there for a moment like fog. He puts the cigarette back on the table
and stands up, taking the beer, and walks to the window to look at
Victor Kopec’s car.
"They said the guy’s head was cut halfways
off," he says. There is a tone of admiration in that, but it
passes even before the words are finished.
Peter thinks of the sounds from the house:
"Fucking God, " the man says. Something
falls and breaks, and then it is quiet. He imagines Victor Kopec’s
head, cut halfway off.
His uncle turns away from the window and lights
another cigarette. "You can’t tell your old man nothing, never
could," he says.
Peter doesn’t answer.
"He’1l stand there, just like you, listening
to somebody as long as they want to talk, and then go do exactly what
he was gonna do anyway. You can’t tell him a thing because he
thinks he already knows everything you know anyway."
He feels his uncle pulling him into his side of an
argument now; he holds himself out. His uncle shakes his head, then
looks again out the window.
"You know what it is?" he says. "He’s
got to be the one that decides. He’s always got to be the one
decides .... "
He pulls at the cigarette and finishes the beer; the
smoke simply disappears inside him. He drops the cigarette into the
mouth of the bottle; Peter hears it hiss as it hits bottom.
"You got another beer?"
He gets him another beer; his uncle lights another
cigarette. Except for the sounds of the television and his uncle
inhaling the cigarette, the room is quiet.
"How old are you, anyway?"
"Eight."
"You supposed to be up . . ." He turns his
wrist and lifts his hand to check the time. "Nine-thirty,"
he says. "You supposed to stay up till nine-thirty?"
Peter shrugs; an ash drops off the cigarette onto his
uncle’s shirt. "You’re lucky," he says. "Your Aunt
Theresa don’t let Michael stay up at all."
Michael is Peter’s cousin. He is a year younger
than Peter, and he climbs out of the window of his room onto the roof
sometimes while the families are visiting and, holding on to the
window frame, pisses onto the sidewalk.
Peter has been farther out on the roof of Michael’s
house; he has walked to the edge and unzipped his pants and then
looked back over his shoulder at his cousin’s face and seen the
excitement inside him.
Michael has tried to get him to jump.
There is a tuning fork going inside his cousin all
the time.
"Right after he done his schoolwork, it’s up
to his room," his uncle says. He looks around the room, reminded
of something. "You got homework?"
Peter doesn’t answer. He does his work at the
school. The nuns go over the same arithmetic every day, the same
reading words, and he does the problems they give him to take home
while they are teaching; sometimes he even knows what they will give
the class to do later. Peter doesn’t memorize things; he sees them,
the way they are put together. A kind of second sight that is so
natural he hardly notices it is there.
No one knows that, it is one of his secrets.
"You got to keep up with your books," his
uncle says, repeating something he has heard; talking now only
because he is uncomfortable with the silence. He looks at the
television set and watches Ed Norton making an onion sandwich. "You
don’t do your books, you end up like that .... "
His uncle finishes the beer and walks upstairs to the
bathroom and urinates without closing the door. The sound stops and
starts; he pisses a little at a time, like he was emptying his
pockets. The toilet flushes and then his uncle is back on the stairs.
"Your father’s got a nice house here," he
says. He stops on the stairs and looks at the ceiling, shakes his
head in an admiring way. "They didn’t built the houses on Two
Street like this—there ain’t no cracks in the walls, right?"
Peter shakes his head.
"Big rooms like this," his uncle says, "a
nice park right across the street . . ." He comes the rest of
the way down the stairs and then stops again, looking outside.
"Your father must sleep like a baby," he
says.
Again he doesn’t answer.
"You like your neighbors?" he says. "I
bet you got neighbors in this place, you want to borrow a cup of
sugar, the lady next door don’t say, ‘Fuck you,’ from behind
the door, am I right?"
He surveys the room, smiling.
"Dentists live in houses like this .... "
Peter stares at him, thinking of Victor Kopec. The
same thought seems to occur to his uncle, but in a different way. "I
wonder if that house is still for sale, now the guy’s dead."
He comes the rest of the way down the stairs and goes
into the kitchen for another beer, and Peter hears his father’s car
in the street.
The car backs into its parking place. The engine
stops, the lights go out. Peter starts for the door, but his uncle
comes back into the room and stops him.
"Hey, where you goin'?"
"It’s him," he says.
"He don’t want you runnin’ around outside
this time of night. He’ll be here in a minute."
Peter stands at the door and waits for the sound of
his father’s shoes on the steps. He wants to tell him something
before he gets inside. He doesn’t know how to say it but he would
step through the door and try—he is not afraid to disobey his
uncle—if his uncle were not there at his side. It is about his
uncle. He is here to hurt him.
The door opens and his father steps inside, and it is
too late.
"Charley," his uncle says, "where you
been?"
His father does not answer him. "You get
something to eat?" he says to Peter.
He nods.
"Go on upstairs," he says, "lemme talk
to your uncle."
He nods again, but he doesn’t move. His father
waits; Peter waits. He waits for him to understand why he isn’t
moving.
"You didn’t hear me, or what?" his father
says.
"He’s just like you," his uncle says, "he
don’t listen."
Peter holds the spot as long as he can and then
starts up the staircase. "Go on," his father says. "And
I don’t want to look up the stairs and see you sittin’ at the
top."
He goes into his room and closes the door. He stands
in the middle of the floor, in the dark, holding himself still and
listening. He hears a prayerlike mumbling at first and then, as he
accustoms himself to the quiet, he begins to hear the words.
"He ain’t that pissed," his uncle says,
"but what he wants, he wants you to sit down with some people,
explain what this Gypsy motherfucker did. That’s all, just explain
to these people, cool them down so this don’t come back and hurt us
.... "
It is quiet a moment.
"It don’t have to be tonight," his father
says.
"There you fuckin’ go. It’s gotta be tonight
because he says it’s tonight."
"Constantine don’t decide everything."
"He ain’t unreasonable about something like
this, your family was involved," his uncle says. "He
respects you for it; that’s what he said, God as my witness, ‘I
respect what the man done.’ But what he wants now, what he’s
sayin’, let’s get together with some people tonight, before the
police do a number on us all, and explain how it happened."
It is quiet a long time downstairs; Peter hears the
television set, Chester whining at Doc.
"It ain’t like he’s askin’ you to
apologize," his uncle says, " just explain where everybody
understands people ain’t started taking people out . . ."
It is quiet again.
"Where is he?" his father says.
"He’s waitin’ for us right now. We go over
somebody’s house and sit down and talk. That’s all."
"Whose house?"