H. Lovecraft - Brooklyn Noir 2

When Frankie came home one evening with cartons of chow mein and sweet-and-sour pork, carried from the restaurant on his Harley, Sylvia wasn’t there. Neither were her clothes and things. Her note said she couldn’t see him for a while, but that she would explain everything in her letter when she had time to write it, and that she still loved him and always would.

For Frankie, losing the woman he loved was no easier at eighteen than it would be for another man losing his wife after decades. He brooded for a night and a day, not leaving the room. The mystery of her departure finally drove him into the street and he phoned her house, but her father said she wasn’t there. Then Frankie had to make a run to Tony Tempesta’s office where Sylvia was the secretary, but she wasn’t on the job either. So then he really got worried and went and rang her father’s doorbell. When no one answered, he went to the back door and jimmied the lock with his Barlow knife and went inside to Sylvia’s bedroom. She was in bed in bandages.

“Jesus! What happened?”

“How’d you get in? You shouldn’t’ve come here. Leave, Frankie, leave.” Sylvia was a little hysterical, which was unlike her.

“I ain’t leaving,” he said, sitting on her bed, touching the gauze on her face and arms. “Does it hurt? How’d you get all that?”

“It doesn’t matter. I’ll heal. Then I’ll do what I have to,” said Sylvia.

“Were you in an accident?” said Frankie, who had the true explanation in his ear, but as always it was something he didn’t want to hear.

“Yeah, an accident,” she said. “And I don’t want you getting in one too. So don’t come around no more. But write me which camp you go to. Maybe I’ll send you cookies, and if it ain’t too far, come and see you.”

“Make a list of anything you need. I’ll come back tomorrow. And bring you roses. Red roses.”

“You’re my honey,” she said.

“You ain’t getting in no more accidents,” he said.

“What’s that mean?” she said, sitting up, extending her arm, and he came back and took her hand again.

He loosened up to put on his wouldn’t-swat-a-fly grin. “You know that angel? She’s been a pain. So I’m leaving her here. And she’ll watch out for you.”

Frankie looked around the room, looked under Sylvia’s bed, but in her closet he thought he saw her. She was a frail and pretty young thing, with bright round eyes of sky, which she dimmed shyly.

“You stay here,” said Frankie. “Don’t leave Sylvia. If you follow me this time I’ll get sore. And besides, you could get hurt out there too.”

Sylvia said, “You have a screw loose, Frankie?”

“It could be.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I made one mistake. Herbie’s name.”

“Is Herbie okay?” he said.

“Yeah. He just shit in his pants.”

“I won’t.”

The next morning Frankie was a hot boiler with a head of steam that had to be let out, so he raced his Harley to the olive oil office, but Bruno wouldn’t be in until two. Tony could feel Frankie’s anger, so slowly Tony prodded him. Then Frankie realized that Tony didn’t know the real reason Sylvia wasn’t on the job, and remembering that Tony would watch out for her, he told him what had happened.

“Beating up Sylvia wasn’t nice,” said Tony. “You go home, kid. I have a talk with Bruno. He belongs to me.”

Frankie was still steaming when he rode off. He tried to cool down by bringing the roses to Sylvia, but when he saw her bandages again his steam rose a few more degrees. Getting back on his bike, he charged around too fast and almost spilled, but he couldn’t decide on a place to go, so he steered back to the olive oil office. He had to give that bully a broken nose.

He had been waiting outside the office for a half hour, straddling his bike, when he saw Bruno walking up the street. Without any planning, Frankie turned on the ignition, gunned it, shifted into first, and, speeding up, shifted into second. With his bike roaring like a cannon going off, he aimed it at Bruno. Bruno didn’t jump out of the way soon enough to avoid the bike entirely. One leg was hit.

Frankie had tried to kill Bruno by running him down, but he had killed himself instead, by missing Bruno and hitting the brick wall beside the plate-glass windows of the office. His neck was broken.

Tony came out. When he saw that Bruno was still alive, he helped him inside and away from the crowd. In the back room where the counterfeit olive oil was mixed, Tony sat Bruno on the work bench and lit a smoke for him. When he returned from the front room with coffee, Bruno sipped it. Then, with a pistol that had a silencer, Tony shot Bruno in the head and put the body in an empty oil drum.

Frankie was laid out at the Califano Funeral Parlor and, in her bandages, Sylvia sat next to his father, Giovanni, for the three days that the body was on view. Gene, Rocco, and Nick were also there every day, in suits and ties, not knowing what to say to anyone. They had known Frankie better than they had the members of their own families. They had loved him as boys do each other, simply and without question, before they must turn to the richer love of a man for a woman, complicated and always questioning.

The last night of their vigil, an hour before the funeral parlor locked its doors for the night, Rocco hid himself in an unused room. Then, Gene at the handlebars of Frankie’s Harley and Nick behind him in a swiped priest’s cassock, they rode across the Brooklyn Bridge. Following the Madison bus on the Skyway, they arrived in Union City and at the Hudson Theater once again. As they had anticipated, the priest’s cassock got Nick in the stage door when he said to the guard, “It’s an errand of mercy.”

Miss Sugar Buns believed that Nick was a priest, and since he was also willing to pay her $50 to perform for a dying man, she said, “Why the hell not?”

She straddled the Harley too, showing her thighs that Nick, behind her, thought were like moonlight in bottles, and with the cassock flaring out behind him like a ghost in the night trying to keep up with them, Nick was holding on around her waist as she held onto Gene in front, who was letting all the untamed juice out of the Harley and speeding in a race of one. Nick was deciding now that he was too old to be an altar boy anymore. He wanted girls, dozens, hundreds of girls.

“This isn’t a hospital,” said Miss Sugar Buns, as Gene knocked three times on the funeral parlor’s back door, and then repeated it.

“You still get fifty bucks,” said Gene.

“What took you guys so long?” said Rocco, letting them in. “I was getting scared in here by myself.”

“God, he’s dead,” she said. “He won’t enjoy it.”

“Give him a chance,” said Gene, doing a practice drum roll, his drums unpacked by Rocco while he was waiting.

“He can’t see so good lying down,” said Rocco. “Let’s get him up.”

“He’s too big,” said Nick, standing at the casket.

“Give me a hand,” said Rocco, at Frankie’s head.

“Where to? His legs’re stiff,” said Nick.

“Let’s stand him some place,” said Rocco, looking around, as he and Nick gripped Frankie at each end.

Miss Sugar Buns said, “First, let’s see the scratch.”

“You ain’t only seeing it,” said Gene, taking out the money, “but you’re getting it. In advance.”

“That’s sweet. I never been paid in advance.” She stashed the bills in her purse.

Frankie was a heavy and stiff lead soldier that Rocco and Nick were standing in the corner now, where they pried open his aggie eyes. To keep Frankie from keeling over, they straddled chairs at each side of him. Then, by candlelight, less noticeable from the street than electric light, and by Gene’s drumbeat, Miss Sugar Buns loosened and discarded, stretching it out, peeling one garment so slowly, bumping and grinding, for the pleasure of the dead Frankie.