Pete Hamill - Snow in August

The maybes warred in his head. And there was one other. Maybe they’d heard that Michael had shit in his pants. That would have meant that he was scared, that he had no heart, that he couldn’t take a beating like a man. No matter what they knew about him, he could be just another momma’s boy. Maybe that’s what they thought. The worst maybe of them all.

He wished he could talk about these things with Rabbi Hirsch. The rabbi would come up with a Yiddish proverb that would make him feel better. He would ask Michael for the name of a good boy who could serve as the Shabbos goy, filling in until Michael came back. Like Carl Furillo was filling in for Pete Reiser. And because Michael didn’t want to send Sonny or Jimmy into the synagogue, he would tell Rabbi Hirsch to ask Father Heaney. And Father Heaney was the kind of guy who’d go down and turn on the lights himself. Then Rabbi Hirsch would change the subject to Jackie Robinson and talk about the latest game and try out some new words he had learned from Red Barber. And maybe he would sing “Zip-a-Dee-Do-Dah” or “Don’t Fence Me In” and make Michael laugh. Or he would talk about how punishment was the job of God. Even if Rabbi Hirsch was angry with God. Even if he didn’t, maybe, believe in His goodness anymore, after everything that had happened in Europe.

But there was no Rabbi Hirsch coming down the corridors of Brooklyn Wesleyan. It was as if he had never existed.

And Michael felt more alone than he’d ever felt in his life.

On the fourth day, the nurses allowed him to go on his own to the bathroom in the corner of the room. This was an enormous relief; Michael hated the cold steel bedpans of the first days and thought he saw the nurses smirking at him, as if they knew what had happened on the evening of the beating. Now he was free to swing off the bed and hobble to the bathroom without a nurse’s help. The cast felt as if it weighed a hundred pounds. But there was something worse. When he looked in the mirror for the first time, he saw a stranger. The stranger’s face was lumpy and swollen. The skin on the right side of the stranger’s face was the color of an eggplant. He touched the mirror and then his face, and knew that he was the stranger.

Later, dozing in his bed, he remembered the evening of his beating and the four Falcons stinking of beer, and he wanted to hurt them back. He wanted to cause them pain. To turn their faces purple. To break their fucking legs. Pricks. Momsers . And then he sobbed, because he could do nothing; even if he caught them one at a time, he could not hurt them. If his father were alive, he could hurt them, really badly, so they’d never hurt anyone again. But Michael was too young and too small. He could hit a spaldeen harder now, but he could not beat up men. And they were men. They were as big as soldiers. As big as the detectives. He could hurt them with a bat. Maybe. But if they took the bat off him, it would be worse than the first time. And a gun… the police would know, his mother would be shamed, and where would he get a gun anyway? He tried to imagine himself with a gun in his hand, making them beg. But he could not imagine himself firing the gun, shooting holes in their heads and their hearts.

His face was an hourly reminder of the power of the Falcons. He wondered what Mary Cunningham would think if she could see his face now. After all, his new suit would do nothing for his face. Any more than a new suit could change Jackie Robinson’s face.

And then he thought: My face, or most of it, is now as dark as Robinson’s face. He got up and hauled his cast into the bathroom again and stared at the mirror. They made me into Jackie Robinson, he thought. They did to me what a lot of people want to do to him . They made me into him. Into Jackie Robinson. My blackened face is like Robinson’s. I’m as helpless as he is. He can’t fight back, because he promised Branch Rickey he wouldn’t. Not yet. Not now. He can fight back with his bat, with his glove, with his speed. But not with his fists. Neither can I. Not now. Not yet.

Then, thinking about Robinson, he felt another wave of loneliness and isolation. He wanted to be home. If he was going to be alone, if his friends had truly abandoned him, he wanted to be alone in his own room. Not here in this hospital, with its strange odors of ether and medicine, and stranger faces. Home. Where he would read every book he could get his hands on. Where he’d study harder than he ever had in his life. Yeah. And get the highest grades in the class. Yeah, yeah. The way Robinson fought with his bat and his glove and his speed. Wasn’t a batting average really a kind of grade? You get an answer right in a test, that’s like a hit. You get a lot of answers right, you get a higher grade, a higher average.

He could do that. And keep doing it. Get a high school diploma. Nobody around here ever finishes high school. They go to work in the factory. They shape up on the docks. They become ironworkers or cops or firemen. I’ll get a diploma, Michael thought, then get the hell out of the parish. Go away to the army or the navy or — shit, maybe even college. Why not? The college boys in the movies all looked like shmucks. They wore short-sleeved sweaters with letters on the chest and said things like boola-boola and got drunk at football games. Michael thought: I could do better than those guys. I could get out of here and go to college. Ride the white horse over the factory roof. Live in Manhattan in a penthouse like the guy singing that song. Just picture a penthouse, way up in the sky, with hinges on chimneys, for clouds to go by . Yeah: a house with hinges on chimneys. And I’d go to work in an office where my hands never got dirty and have a closet full of suits and shirts and ties and shoes. More than any gangster, and I wouldn’t have to break the law. Yeah: get out. Go.

Then Sonny and Jimmy would be sorry they walked away from him. He’d be a big shot. In his penthouse. Reading at breakfast about Frankie McCarthy going to the hot seat in Sing Sing. Reading about Tippy Hudnut shot down in a cheap holdup in Coney Island. Reading about Skids and the Russian being sent up for life, and Ferret’s body washing up on the beach with two holes in the head. He’d run into Sonny and Jimmy someday on Park Avenue, as he walked out of his building, a building fifty stories high. There they’d be, throwing garbage cans into a goddamned truck, and they’d say, Jeez, Michael, we’re sorry we were such shmucks back in the parish that time you got beat up, and Michael would raise an eyebrow, like Joseph Cotten did in the movies, and say, Pardon me, but what’s your name?

Yeah.

Maybe he couldn’t shout Shazam and turn into the world’s mightiest mortal. But he could wait in silence, like the Count of Monte Cristo, and build himself up. First, get smart, just like Edmond Dantès did, studying his books in the dungeons of the Chateau d’If. That wasn’t all. He’d lift weights and learn how to box and he’d handle the Falcons himself, one at a time. Maybe not this year. Maybe not next year. He’d hold it all in, for now, the way Jackie Robinson did, and then when he was ready, he would explode. They wouldn’t even remember him anymore, but he would find the guys who had hurt him and he would hurt them back. All by himself. Got shtroft, der mentsh iz zikh noykem . God will punish them, but I’ll have my revenge.

And then get out. Take my mother. Get her a house with her own yard. And steam heat. Far away. Out.

After the sixth day, the nurses gave him crutches and let him walk around the third floor, in a pale green bathrobe. The crutch made it easier to swing the cast behind him. In one room, he saw a man who’d been shot. He saw another man who’d had a heart attack on the F train. In one of the rooms, an ironworker was in a cast from neck to toe after falling off a building, and his friends laughed and whooped and held beer bottles to his lips. They had written their names all over his cast. Michael would look out the window at Ellison Avenue and wish that his friends would come and laugh and whoop. He wished someone would write on his cast. Anyone.