Reed Coleman - Onion Street

Scott Montgomery

Responding to reports of shots fired, the police discovered the bodies of three men in the basement of a private house in the Manhattan Beach section of Brooklyn. The owner of the residence, Hyman Bergman, was among the deceased. The other men have not yet been identified. Neighbors feared that Bergman’s granddaughter, Susan Kasten, also known to reside at the home, might have been harmed as well. However, she does not seem to have been at home at the time of the incident.

“All three of the deceased appear to have died as a result of gunshot wounds,” said a police spokesman. “We’re working on the theory that it was a botched robbery.”

Neighbors said that Bergman, a concentration camp survivor, kept to himself. “He was a troubled man,” said neighbor Dr. Raoul Mishkin. Bergman is known to have large real estate holdings, and was recently the victim of arson. Last week, one of Bergman’s properties was intentionally burned to the ground. Police refused to speculate whether the two incidents might be connected.

Bobby’s parents visited only once during his stay in Coney Island Hospital, and then it was only to fill out the requisite paperwork. There was no tearful hand-holding or get-better-soon bouquets, nothing that even remotely resembled what had transpired between Mindy and her parents. There was only the superior disdain that Bobby’s parents exuded. I had known these people nearly all my life without really knowing them at all. They were disappointed in Bobby. Believe me, they did nothing to camouflage it. But I had created a fantasy that beneath their icy, Warsaw Pact exteriors, they loved their son beyond description. That they secretly held dear all those bourgeois rituals and milestones — Bobby’s first day of school, losing his first tooth, his high school graduation — that other parents so proudly celebrated. Now I came to see that my stubborn belief was naive and self-serving. The equation was simple: If Bobby’s parents really loved him, mine loved me. It’s not that my folks were stoic and unexpressive. They told me they loved me. It was just that they were such damaged goods, always so hungry for love and approval themselves, that I never trusted theirs for me. I couldn’t speak for Aaron and Miriam.

For the first few days, the hospital was crawling with cops and it was impossible for me to get anywhere near Bobby. I stopped trying. I wasn’t even sure why I wanted to see him other than to tell him to go fuck himself. Below the surface, I think I felt almost as betrayed by him as Susan Kasten had. It was one thing for Detective Casey to have done what he did. It was his job. He believed he was doing right. It was different with Bobby. I still couldn’t get a handle on the angle he’d been playing. Look, I knew Bobby believed the war was wrong and that America was a profoundly inequitable place. On some level he might even have truly believed in revolution, but he wasn’t a bomb thrower. Nor was he Dudley Do-Right. At first I just assumed Casey had coerced Bobby into it, that he had something to hold over Bobby’s head to get him to act as an informant. I don’t know. Maybe he’d caught Bobby moving some real explosives, or transporting a fugitive. Something like that. Something where Bobby had no choice but to cooperate, or go away to prison for twenty years.

“He volunteered,” Casey’d told me the night it all came down.

“Get the fuck outta here!”

I could only imagine my ancestors spinning in their graves at the disrespect I was showing to a cop. Such a display flew in the face of the Diaspora’s mantra: Keep your head down and keep your mouth shut .

Casey laughed at me. “It’s true, Moe, whether you believe it or not. He came to me.”

“How did he find you?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

I wanted to believe the detective was lying to me, but in my gut I knew he wasn’t. That really sent me spinning off my axis. It might have been the Age of Aquarius, but not in my dark corner of the universe. Not only did I feel used and betrayed by Bobby, there was Mindy too. Forget that she was willing to kill Bobby, that she had tried. I could almost understand the rationale behind that. For a few days I pretended that what I couldn’t get over was her willingness to kill innocent people, whether they wore uniforms or not. But that was only part of it. It was more that I felt so completely stupid. It was one thing to be Polonius, to be unaware that you’re the fool. It’s another thing to be the fool and know it. Here were my best friend and a woman I thought I loved, and I didn’t know either of them, not really, not deeply. It made me start to question everything I thought I knew.

I was no longer even feigning interest in school. Oddly, my parents didn’t pester me about it. My parents were uneducated people, not dumb people. And when my dad read those articles in the papers about the failed bomb plot and the murders in Manhattan Beach, he seemed to sense that the missing thread in the fabric of those stories had a connection to his youngest son. Only Aaron bothered asking me about it at all, and when I refused to say anything, he let it go. Aaron never let anything go. Not anything. Not ever. On Saturday morning, when an unexpected visitor showed up at our apartment door, no one needed to guess or speculate in silence any longer.

When my mom came into the room I was still in bed. I was half-watching a rerun of Sky King . People said my mom kind of looked like a cross between the young Joan Crawford and the aging Shelley Winters. Her weight was definitely more on the Shelley Winters side of that equation. But the expression on her face was purely and distinctly her own. It was an odd mix of panic and smug satisfaction, like the look on Chicken Little’s face when the sky actually fell. See, I told ya . It was as if the worst coming to pass was worth it because it confirmed her darkest fears.

“Someone’s at the door for you.”

“Yeah, I heard the bell.”

“He’s a detective.”

That got my attention more than Sky King’s plane Songbird , or his niece Penny. I sat up. “What’s he look like?”

“He’s a big — ”

I didn’t hear what she said after that because I was already out of the bedroom.

Casey stood just inside the door. He curled his lips into a small smile and then quickly undid it.

“Throw on some clothes,” he said. It wasn’t a request.

I opened up my mouth to ask the first of ten questions that came to mind. When I did, he shook his head at me not to bother. I about-faced and headed into the bedroom to change. My mom was still there as if hiding out.

“Ma, get outta here. I gotta get dressed.”

“Why is that cop here? What did you do? Is it Mindy? Was it you who — Oy gevalt! It was you who did this to her. Was she cheating on you? I never liked her, you know. I knew she was no good.”

“Sorry to disappoint you, Ma.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“That the sky’s not falling. C’mon. I gotta get dressed. I have to go.”

• • •

I never experienced the same kind of buzz or rush my friends claimed to feel the few times I smoked pot, but, man, I felt it there in the front seat of Detective Casey’s chestnut Galaxie. Somehow I was a part of something in a way I’d never been before, something bigger than me. It was good to crawl out of the little hole of self-pity and bewilderment I’d dug for myself. It was good to feel important. Maybe this was what Aaron and Bobby felt like. Maybe this was what it was like to have purpose. Fifteen minutes into the trip, Casey still hadn’t explained to me where we were headed or why we were going there. Didn’t matter. He needed me.