Pete Hamill - Snow in August

“Yeah. On my leg. I couldn’t see what it was — a bat or a club or what.”

“They’ll not hit another boy around here,” she said. “I promise you that.”

Her face was a grid of lines, with her green eyes burning. She went away to fetch the doctor, and he came back with her, his face shiny and smiling. There wasn’t a hair on his head. Unlike Brother Thaddeus, he had a mustache, eyebrows, and eyelashes.

“Well,” he said, “you’ve got two badly bruised ribs, young man, a fractured bone in your lower leg, the tibia we call it, along with multiple contusions and a few loose teeth.” He smiled in an insincere way. “Otherwise, you’re fit as a fiddle.”

Michael tried to laugh but his ribs hurt too much. He wondered if Pete Reiser hurt this much. Or Mister G. Kate told him to lie still. When the doctor left, Michael reached for his mother’s hand.

“What about my friends?” he said. “What happened to Sonny and Jimmy?”

“Nothing,” she said, a hair of bitterness in her voice. “Nothing that I know of.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure,” she said. “Why? Was something supposed to happen to Sonny and Jimmy?”

“The Falcons, they told me they were gonna get them, sort of,” he said. His voice sounded disappointed. He didn’t mean to sound that way. “They must think the three of us squealed on Frankie McCarthy.”

“If anything had happened to them,” she said, “I’d have heard about it.”

“We didn’t tell the cops anything, Mom,” he whispered. “We’re not informers.”

She squeezed his hand in a comforting way and glanced at the cast on his leg.

“But Jimmy’s uncle, he’s so dumb, it could be he said something to the cops, and maybe—” His head hurt, trying to figure things out. “They might have taken something he said and added it to something else and, oh, who knows, Mom? But I didn’t rat. I swear… I didn’t. I didn’t squeal.”

There was a long silence, and Michael could feel confusion coming off his mother like a mist.

“Sonny and Jimmy — when I was, you know, out —did they come to see me here?”

“I don’t know, Michael,” she said gently, responding to the sound of abandonment in his voice. “They weren’t letting visitors in to see you, because it was… well, a police matter, I guess. Of course, I know everybody here, from working here, so I had no trouble. And I am your mother. And Father Heaney came by.…” She turned away, gazing at the bars of the venetian blinds and the street beyond. “I’ll let Sonny and Jimmy know you’re okay.”

“And what about Rabbi Hirsch?”

“I haven’t seen him,” she said.

“If they let a priest in, they should let him in.”

“Who knows, Michael? I’ll try to find out. You’d better rest.”

Exhaustion moved through him like a tide. He tried to resist it, tried to force his eyes to remain open. His mother’s hand felt warm. The tide took him.

With his lower right leg encased in a heavy plaster cast, Michael remained in Brooklyn Wesleyan Hospital for nine empty days. He did have some visitors. Father Heaney stopped by to tell him not to worry about his final exams; he’d be allowed to take them when he was feeling better, even if the school year was over. On another morning, he woke up to see Abbott and Costello staring down at him. The detectives wanted names. Michael said he didn’t know any names.

“Come on, kid, don’t bullshit us,” Costello said. “Everybody knows the names of these bums.”

“Get their names from everybody then,” Michael said.

“You just don’t want to be helped, do you?” Abbott said.

“It’s too late now,” Michael said.

They sighed and left. Michael wondered why he didn’t just give them the names. Tippy Hudnut and Skids, Ferret and the Russian. Just those names. Street names. Let the cops figure out their real names and where they lived. But he couldn’t do it. Even though they had hurt him, hurt him real bad, he couldn’t be a rat. He knew if he turned rat he’d be sorry for the rest of his life. He’d be walking down a street somewhere and remember the time he ratted to the cops and he’d be through for the day. He’d be in the army, where nobody knew him, and someone would want to know about his life and he’d have to keep this one thing secret. Or he’d take the cop’s test and be assigned to some precinct and then run into Abbott and Costello and they’d remember that he was a rat and tell all the other goddamned cops and they’d freeze him out, because everyone knew that cops despised informers as much as the criminals did. No. If he ratted, he’d be as bad as them. Then they’d really win. Then they’d really ruin him. They’d make him as dirty as they were.

Every morning the bald doctor arrived at Michael’s bedside, carrying a clipboard, flanked by an intern and a nurse. His favorite word was fine . Michael was fine. His progress was fine. He was healing up just fine. Then, feeling fine about himself, he moved to the next patient.

Every afternoon, before going to work, Kate Devlin came to visit, bringing him ice cream and newspapers and once, the latest Captain Marvel . The comic book now seemed childish to him. He had learned that there were truly bad people in the world, and when they went after you, you really hurt. He told her he didn’t want any more Captain Marvels . He was more interested in the newspaper stories about Jackie Robinson. And the condition of Pete Reiser. The great center fielder was conscious again, promising to be back playing soon, and the sportswriters were demanding that Branch Rickey come up with some money to pad the concrete walls of Ebbets Field. They called him El Cheapo and said that half the ballplayers didn’t have enough money to take the subway to the ballpark. But Rickey had brought up Jackie Robinson when all the other owners wanted white players only, and Robinson always called him Mr. Rickey, so how bad could the old man be? Each day, Michael read every word of the sports pages and tore out the stories about Robinson. When his mother arrived the following morning, he’d give them to her to take home.

“You’ll have a scrapbook on this fellow thicker than the blue books,” she said.

“Someday he’ll be in the blue books, Mom,” he said. “This is history.”

But when she was gone, and the doctor and the nurses moved to other rooms, he was left to think. And he began to feel alone in the world. There was no sign of Rabbi Hirsch. Not even a note. Worse, neither Sonny Montemarano nor Jimmy Kabinsky had come to see him. His best friends. One for all and all for one. He didn’t expect the other kids from school to visit him. But he knew that if either Sonny or Jimmy had been hurt, he’d have visited them . He wished that they had telephones at home so he could call them from the booth down the hall near the nurses’ station. But nobody he knew had a telephone, least of all Jimmy and Sonny. They would have to come to the hospital to see him. Obviously, they’d found better things to do. In the first few days, he tried to make excuses for them. Maybe they’d decided to study for the final exams that Michael had missed. Maybe they’d found jobs after school. Maybe Sonny’s mother was sick or Jimmy’s uncle. And yeah: maybe the Falcons had warned them to stay away from the hospital.

But maybe it was something else. Lying in the dark at night, he wondered if they thought he had squealed. Not about the beating but about Frankie McCarthy. They could have heard this on the street. Maybe Frankie had spread rumors that the DA was using Michael as a witness. Maybe the cops had spread the word that they had gotten Michael to talk, in order to scare Frankie. Why not? They all lie. Cops lied and judges lied and politicians lied. Everybody knew that.