Эд Макбейн - Last Summer

“Her grandfather was Chinese,” Sandy said.

My grandfather was a Spaniard, Aníbal said proudly, who owned seventy acres of land and a farm in the Meseta , as well as a town house in Salamanca, a very wealthy man. He had gone to Puerto Rico to visit his brother in April of 1936, only to receive word from home some three months later that the country was fast approaching civil war, and he had best hurry home to protect his interests. Aníbal seemed somewhat vague as to whether or not his grandfather had hurried home (he was, in fact, rather vague about everything along about then), but in any event it seemed the land was seized by the government, along with the town house (which sounded very fishy to me; I didn’t think Franco had behaved that way), and grandfather had emigrated to Puerto Rico with his family, a broken man who was now poor but still honest. (It occurred to me, while Aníbal was telling his story, that I had never met a poor person who did not claim his ancestors had been wealthy and powerful.) Old grandfather apparently did not fare too well in Puerto Rico, and died still poor but honest (not to mention proud) in the shack on the edge of the sea, his legacy to his only son, Luis, who was Aníbal’s father. So now, here in this wonderful land of opportunity, Aníbal was ready to restore honor and wealth to the family name by becoming an accountant and eventually buying his own home in, as he put it, “a nice residential section of the Bronx.”

“That’s very nice up there in the Bronx,” Sandy said.

“Almost like country,” David said, and winked at me.

“ Sí, sí , I know,” Aníbal said.

We had begun eating by then, and some of the alcohol effect was beginning to wear off, but he was still slurring his words, and swaying gently in his seat, and smiling beatifically at Rhoda, who was furious at us for what we’d done, and even more furious at Aníbal for having allowed it to happen. When Aníbal ordered a brandy after the meal (Sandra, you will join me now? he asked, and Sandy shook her head demurely and answered, Oh, thank you, Annabelle, I don’t think so) Rhoda became nearly apoplectic. Aníbal finally staggered out into the street with us at about a quarter past ten, having paid the lion’s share of the check, which was only fair since he’d drunk so much.

The town was its usual Saturday-night self, riotously asleep even here in the business district. We crossed the street to avail ourselves of the big weekend entertainment — Woolworth’s lighted window — and then headed down for the bay front and the parking lot where Aníbal had left his car. The lampposts threw spaced circles of light into the blackness. Aníbal reeled along beside us, throwing his arms wide and bursting into song whenever he stepped into one of the circles, like a performer in successive spotlights. We were perhaps three or four-blocks from the parking lot — were, in fact, crossing the street to get on the same side as the lot — when we saw them.

I’m not sure they would have recognized us if our reaction hadn’t been so immediate and so obvious. But the three of us froze at once, stopping stock-still in the middle of the street as Rhoda and Aníbal moved forward to the sidewalk and then turned to see what was delaying us. The three boys were dressed just as they’d been dressed on the night of The Big Rape Scene, almost as though having once been typecast they refused to accept any other roles, levis, tee shirts, wide belts, loafers. They swaggered up the sidewalk, pushing each other and laughing, and then saw us, stopping the moment we did, freezing in an attitude of uncertainty. Then one of them let out a yell that chilled me to the marrow, “It’s Long Legs!” he shouted, his voice rising, the simple exclamation loaded with something more than merely joy of recognition, shrill with discovery, thoroughly malevolent in its promise of revenge for the merry chase we’d led them and the razzing we’d administered from the deck of the ferry.

I was terrified this time.

This time the danger was unmistakable, there was no wondering about illusion this time, there was only panic being pounded into the heart like a splintery wooden stake. What happened next happened in split-second sequence, and yet it all seemed to overlap, the only concession reality made to distortion. I grabbed Sandy’s hand and started to run, and then I head David’s voice shouting, “Run!” and then I remembered Rhoda, and dropped Sandy’s hand, and whirled, and stopped, and Sandy shouted, “Come on , for Christ’s sake!” and I ran to the curb as the three boys raced down the sidewalk, and saw the angry face of one of them, and seized Rhoda’s hand, and heard David yell “Let’s get out of here!” and Rhoda said “What?” and idiotically I thought of the three astronauts who had been trapped inside the Apollo rocket when the flash fire erupted, and the way one of them in his last few seconds alive had shrieked in what the Times described as a shrill voice, “Get us out of here!” I caught another fast glimpse of the boy’s face as he approached, and then saw that Aníbal had his mouth open, and I lunged forward and pulled Rhoda off the sidewalk, and heard Sandy shout, “Stop them, Anna-belle! They’re after Rhoda!”

Aníbal reacted at once. He planted his feet wide, clenched his fists and calmly and deliberately and drunkenly waited for the rush of the first boy, who was almost upon him now. This was something he understood, Sandy had chosen precisely the words to hurl at him, “They’re after Rhoda!” This was pride and this was honor and this was manhood, and this was only the code that had contributed to the flow of mucho sangre along 111th Street and environs, “They’re after our girl, they’re after our turf, they’re after our balls, get them, get them, get them!” I suddenly wondered if he’d told us even one tenth of the truth about his life in Spanish Harlem, and as we ran across the street again, I turned for a last look at Aníbal Gomez. Hunched forward in the light of the lamppost, wearing his neat brown suit, swaying somewhat with the liquor that still fumed inside him, he stood with his slender accountant’s hands clenched, and bravely prepared to defend the honor of the wrong girl the computer had provided.

“God damn you, come on! ” Sandy shouted, and the hero Aníbal Gomez burned himself in my mind in brown silhouette, and I thought again of the heroes in the space capsule and the way they had been reduced to merely terrified human beings at the end, and wondered if Aníbal Gomez would also scream to the unseen power that was NASA Control or whoever when three townie hoods tried to stomp out his brains — but it was Rhoda who screamed instead and tried to go back to him.

I grabbed her hand, I swung her around, I pulled her up the street. She was still screaming. Sandy ran over to where we were struggling. Behind us, I could hear grunting sounds, the muffled thud of fists, gentle mayhem, while here apart from the danger Rhoda screamed to the night and Sandy approached with terror-filled blue eyes, blond hair streaming from beneath the red wig, and quickly brought her hand to Rhoda’s mouth to smother the cries. I grabbed Rhoda’s arms and held them pinned to her sides while she squirmed and struggled to get loose, trying to calm her, knowing her screams would do no good, we did not want police on the scene, we did not want to have to explain fuzz to our parents. She was wearing lipstick Sandy had expertly helped her to apply, her mouth was slippery, she twisted her head sharply to the left leaving a wide blood-red smear on the right side of her face, escaping Sandy’s hand and screaming again, screaming hysterically while behind us the grunting went on, the pulpy sound of fists, the soft noise of people sweating hard to kill each other. “Hold her!” Sandy shouted, grasping for her mouth again — and Rhoda bit her.