Pete Hamill - Snow in August

On his way home, Michael surged with the happiness that radiated from the rabbi. For an hour, the rabbi had been so happy, so full of delight, so overcome with the sounds of music and words, that the air of the tiny synagogue rooms seemed to sparkle. It was as if a deaf man had suddenly begun to hear.

That joy filled Michael’s head as he passed the alley beside the Venus and started to turn into Ellison Avenue. Then it vanished. There was a small crowd outside the Star Pool Room. Two police cars and the Plymouth used by the detectives were up on the sidewalk. The front door was open. He could see that the green tops of the pool tables were empty. The Falcons were lined up against the wall with Abbott and Costello facing them. Michael drifted to the edge of the crowd, which was being held back by two uniformed policemen.

“What’s going on?” he asked a man wearing a cap covered with union buttons.

“Da bulls are lockin’ up that Frankie McCarthy,” the man said. Michael trembled.

“What for?”

“Beatin’ up some Hebe, I hear.”

Then everyone backed up a few feet, and the detectives were leading Frankie McCarthy out of the poolroom. Frankie curled his mouth, like a gangster from a movie. His hands were cuffed behind his back and each detective had him by an elbow.

“’Ey, Frankie boy,” someone shouted. “See ya in an hour.”

The crowd laughed and so did the Falcons, who were standing just inside the door of the poolroom. A few of them rested pool cues on their shoulders like baseball bats.

“This is a bum rap,” Frankie McCarthy said, lifting his chin defiantly, like Cagney or Bogart. “They got nothin’ on me.”

Then his eyes picked out Michael on the fringes of the crowd. He said nothing, but his eyes chilled to the color of aluminum.

The detectives broke the look by shoving Frankie into the backseat of the Plymouth. Abbott sat beside him, a dead cigar clamped in his mouth. Costello started the car and drove away. The crowd milled around, talking it over. One of the Falcons closed the poolroom door.

“He’s some piece of work, that Frankie,” said the man with the union buttons.

“Yeah: he’s working overtime at being a bum,” said Charlie Senator, who worked at the Bohack grocery store. He was a quiet, nobody guy who didn’t talk much but was liked by everyone. One reason they liked him was that he had a wooden leg and never complained about it. Michael had heard that his real leg was shot off at Anzio.

“You wouldn’t say that to his face.”

“Probably not,” Senator said. “Guys like that jack you up in the dark. But he’s still a bum.”

“What’d he do was so bad?”

“Plenty,” Senator said, and limped away.

Then Michael saw two of the Falcons looking at him from behind the plate-glass window of the poolroom. He turned and walked quickly home.

Going up the stairs, he realized how dark the halls were, full of shadowy places where Frankie McCarthy could jack him up. Why did Frankie give him that look? Why were the Falcons staring at him from the poolroom? Now Frankie was down at the precinct house and they’d want revenge. He remembered Frankie’s knife. He saw Mister G with his broken head. Somebody must have talked. Michael knew that he had held fast with the police; he hadn’t informed, he hadn’t turned rat. But somebody had. And only he, Sonny, and Jimmy had been in Mister G’s store that day. He felt vaguely sick. He thought he knew his friends. Maybe he didn’t. Maybe Sonny or Jimmy had turned chicken and ratted out Frankie McCarthy. And if one of them did, why wouldn’t the coward shift the blame, tell the Falcons it was Michael? Save his own ass.

But no: it couldn’t be that way. They were his friends. All for one and one for all. They wouldn’t turn informers. They wouldn’t risk the mark of the squealer. The cops must have found another witness. Or maybe Frankie bragged in some bar about beating up Mister G. Or maybe they found his fingerprints on the telephone. It had to be something else. Not an informer. Not someone like Victor McLaglen in the movie about the informer in Ireland. Not a Judas. Maybe.

Still, Michael was afraid. He wished his mother were home, but she had another three hours, at least, to work at the Grandview. He locked the kitchen door behind him. He opened the bathroom door, his heart beating fast, poked his head inside, and was relieved that nobody was there. He tiptoed through the other rooms, turning on lights, holding his breath as he opened closets. Finally he felt safe. He turned on the new Philco, and lit a jet on the gas range to heat the stew his mother had left for him. While Ella Fitzgerald sang on the radio, he opened his schoolbag and laid his books on the kitchen table and gazed dully at his homework assignments. Boring goddamned crap. Why did they waste so much time in English with diagramming sentences? Sure, it came in handy, explaining things to Rabbi Hirsch. But it was so simple. They could get it over with in three days. They didn’t need three weeks of dumb sentences. Why didn’t they read Sherlock Holmes and see how A. Conan Doyle wrote sentences? Or Robert Louis Stevenson? They wrote beautiful sentences. Not this stuff. John threw the ball at Jane. Frank reached for his book. Shit. He thought about reading comics first and then doing the homework, but then he might be too tired and he had to get up at seven and serve the eight o’clock mass, and if he came to class without the homework he—

The fire escape window!

It was never locked. Anyone could get a boost up to the fire escape ladder on the first floor and walk all the way up to the top. Jesus Christ!

He ran to his room. The window was open about half an inch, with a towel jammed in the space to keep out the rain. He removed the towel and pulled down hard to close the window, but he couldn’t get the crude lock to snap shut. He grunted and strained, but the lock was scabby with too many coats of paint. Still, the window was closed. He leaned a book against the window so that if it opened the book would fall and make a noise. Then he stepped back from the light of the street and looked down at Ellison Avenue. He saw nobody from the Falcons. Then the smell of burning stew summoned him back to the kitchen.

The stew was black at the bottom but the rest was all right. He scooped it onto a plate while Stan Lomax came on the radio, with the day’s doings in the world of sports. Jackie Robinson was closer than ever to coming up to the Dodgers. In twelve games against the Dodgers and clubs in Panama he was hitting.519. Amazing. Five-nineteen! Babe Ruth never hit.519. Maybe Ted Williams or Stan Musial could do it, but they hadn’t done it yet. Robinson was still a Montreal Royal, said Stan Lomax, but it seemed sure he wouldn’t be a minor leaguer for very much longer.

Finishing up the stew, wiping his plate with bread, Michael tried to imagine what it must be like to be Robinson. He examined his own skin, spreading it with his hand, then pinching it with thumb and forefinger. It wasn’t really white. Paper was white. His skin was sort of pink. In the summer, it got red and then brown. It had freckles of a darker, reddish color. What must it be like to look at your skin and see that it was black? Or not really black. A kind of dark brown, really. What was it like to wake up every goddamned morning and see that skin and know that some shmuck looked down on you just for that? You hit.519 in spring training and some fat business guy in a suit, Branch Rickey or somebody, some prick who can’t hit.019, will decide if you play or not? How could that be? Michael’s anger rose in him and then faded. If I’m angry, he thought, sitting here, still white or pink, how must Robinson feel?

Then, in his head, he was Robinson, down in Cuba or over in Panama, eating dinner alone in some restaurant, a joint filled with all those girls who dressed like Carmen Miranda, bare bellies and tits bouncing and bananas on their heads. In a fancy place with candles and tablecloths and waiters, like all those movies about flying down to Rio, and here come Dixie Walker and Eddie Stanky. The restaurant is packed. There are three empty seats at my table, Robinson’s table. I wave at them, my teammates, to come over and sit down. But Walker and Stanky won’t sit down. They’d rather starve to death than sit with me. Like Englishmen looking at an Irishman.