Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

“There we are, Ira,” Bert said. “It just seemed — still seems, really — we’d have gone bit more directly by way of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, then the Prospect Expressway, then maybe Church Avenue up to your old neighborhood.”

“Really?” Ira said. “Really and truly?”

Bert shrugged. I heard the wide wales of his tan corduroy sportcoat rasp. He wore it with jeans, a canvas off-tan shirt from Peterman, and the navy-blue socks held up by the navy-blue-and-red-striped garters.

Ira said, “I thought maybe seeing the bridge was worth the loss of six or eight seconds.”

“Absolutely,” Bert said. He put his left hand up on the bench seat so that it hung behind Ira. I took it. I leaned forward and put his index finger, very slowly, into my mouth. When I released it and sat back, Ira’s eyes were waiting for mine in his rearview mirror.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi,” each man replied, one with pleasure and one without.

I watched the back of Ira’s head, now that I had seen how familiar his eyes were in their web of lines and folds and the soft flesh in gray-brown crescents beneath that testified to his insomnia. His head had become our pop’s, of course, with the same untamed Howdy-Doody wings of wild fringe a few inches above the pointed ears that hung back around his skull like the folded wings of sleeping bats. His head in silhouette was long and slender, and I thought he’d lost weight because the collar of his shirt seemed not to touch his neck. His hands on the steering wheel were long, like Pop’s. Unlike our father, he murmured to himself as he steered the car: “Uh-huh,” as he turned, “Ah-hm” as he straightened our course again, “Uh-huh” when he checked our location by the street-corners signs. He sang his steering lightly, but with it he confirmed himself to me as a genuine eccentric. I wondered how someone saw me.

I called, “Stop!” We were on Ocean Avenue in middling spring at four o’clock. The air was gathering itself for dusk, perhaps just beginning to take on the weight of reflection of the dirty bricks on the six- and seven-story apartment buildings. Traffic was growing denser with the air that poured invisible yet thick onto Ocean Avenue in a section of Flatbush once called Kensington, the streets of which ran to Midwood, where we’d lived. I’d used to ride my Schwinn on its ticking gears to the gas station to our right.

Ira kept the car in the street, his blinker on, traffic pouring around us. “You don’t want to pull in there,” he said. “They pump the gas and then they keep the car, the schwarzim .”

“African-Americans?” Bert apparently felt required to say. His a , from his days in Syracuse, had the lag you could hear in Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo, Cleveland, even Chicago: a flattened gagging that sounded as if the speaker snarled. Bert Wragg would never snarl. But I wondered if his career could be threatened by the bray of the Great Lakes.

“No, mostly Haitians, as a matter of fact,” Ira said. “And, probably, most of them not citizens. But you can call them African-Americans if you like.”

“I used to put air in my tires,” I said. “And they had a cooler inside where you could get one of those stubby Cokes in the green glass bottle.”

Bert said, “Myrna, those bottles are real antiques.”

“So’s she,” Ira said.

Bert waggled his fingers at me behind Ira’s back. I placed nothing in my mouth.

Two short, slender dark-skinned men stood at the office, where I’d used to pay a dime for my soda.

Bert said, “Their hands are behind their backs.

“They don’t want you to be frightened,” Ira said.

“They’re armed,” Bert said. “Is that correct?”

“Boy, are they armed,” my brother said, in almost a friendly tone.

He pulled out into traffic, and I watched them watch us, alien beings in our time machine. He took a right turn quickly, and then he slowed down because soon — I could feel the car begin to turn, I thought, before Ira murmured at the wheel — we were coming to a left-hand turn, and then the block on which we’d lived. It was as if we had gone across a border, through a checkpoint such as the ones Bert, in his stiff tan correspondent’s trench coat, had passed through, once, bringing home the bad news, for the sake of all Minneapolis — St. Paul, on the killings in Herzegovina. If they gave him the job in New York as backup anchor, and if I left my job and came with him, we would have to build him closets no matter where he lived. His raincoats took up more room than my entire wardrobe.

“No more African-Americans,” I said.

“Whether of African, American, or otherwise descent,” Bert told me.

“Welcome to medieval Poland,” Ira said. “Lubavitchers, all you can eat.” Tall thin boys in black suits walked with heavy fathers in ditto, while behind them on their broad hips came the girls and women. Everyone seemed pale. No one seemed to be away at work. It felt, on our block, as if we had parked in a village square on a market day. We were paid little attention, although two girls in their late teens, wearing cloth coats that seemed to have belonged to large men, stared at Bert and giggled their embarrassment into their hands.

“They live here?” I heard myself say.

“Some of them live in our house here,” Ira said, and I heard the sorrow in him for the passage of time, for the dispossession he had suffered. There was the three-story stucco house, in all its broad shelteredness, a fortress of the rising middle class of 1910 who had built it, and then in the 1950s again, so that our mother had once referred to our block, with an immigrant daughter’s sense of arrival, as The Suburbs. Ocher-colored paint had been replaced with tan, and the dark brown paint of the screened-in porch had been replaced with forest green. A dogwood tree that Pop had planted after a hurricane took down one of the sycamores had in turn been taken down. The other shade tree, across the walk on its little lawn, had been hacked and trimmed, but was surviving. The prickly hawthorn bushes that had lined the walk to our brick stoop were gone. I had hated them, because whenever I played stoop ball by myself on the walk, the ball would go into the bushes and I would have to wait for Ira to show his invulnerability by plunging his hand into the scratchy hedge. Then I would have to wait while he feinted throwing it to me, and then I would have to chase it when he tossed it over my head.

We were parked next to the fire hydrant outside the house we had lived in for eighteen years of my life, and in the car, between us, it was as if someone were showing those sprockety, ratcheting 8mm silent movies that families like ours used for their grappling with time, capturing in overexposed orange the flesh of children who would one day dissolve into the silt and swamp and thinning memory of what had been East Eighteenth Street, and what had been childhood, and what had been Rasbin’s Meat Market on Avenue J, or the fish store with flounder set out on ice, or the elevated tracks of the BMT on Avenue H above the candy store with its wall of ten-cent comic books. Ira, in the front, looked to his right, past Bert, who had turned, politely, to stare at large old houses on little lawns. I, in the back, regarded them both and I studied my house and waited for clues about what I ought to feel. In the leather cockpit of Ira’s car, I felt our mother in her belted orange house dress, our father in his garters and his boxer shorts, our well-furnished childhood rooms, with doors we little people of privilege could shut at will against each other and, crucially, our parents. I did not, however, taste emotions. Perhaps they would come later, I thought, and then I would clutch myself against the ache.