Pete Hamill: Snow in August

“Whatta you got in your pocket, kid?” he said to Sonny.

“Nothin’, Frankie.”

“You’re lyin’ to me, kid,” he said, turning to Michael. “He’s lyin’, ain’t he? I seen yiz shovel the sidewalk in front of Joe’s. I seen Joe put somethin’ in this guinea’s hand.” He smiled in a chilly way. “And it set me thinkin’.”

Michael turned away from the slush-eyed gaze. Mister G looked up from his newspaper, peering over his glasses.

“What I’m thinkin’,” Frankie McCarthy said, “is this. I’m thinkin’ you should buy me a soda, kid. And a pack of Luckies too. I’m thinkin’ you’re a nice, generous kid and would be only too happy to do this for a neighborhood guy just come outta the snow.”

Mister G cleared his throat.

“Hey, leave the kid alone,” he said in a reasonable voice.

“What?” Frankie McCarthy said. “Wha’d you say?”

“I said leave the kid alone,” Mister G said, annoyed now. “Kid broke his ass shovelin’ snow, let him keep his money.”

“This is none of your fuckin’ business, pal.”

“It’s my candy store,” Mister G said. “I don’t like extortion going on in my store.”

“You Jew prick,” Frankie McCarthy said, ignoring Sonny and moving to the counter. “How’d you like me to turn this place into a fuckin’ parkin’ lot?”

Michael moved away, toward the rear of the store, his back to the pay phone. Something bad is about to happen, he thought. I wish I could stop it. I wish I was bigger and stronger. I wish I could step over and grab Frankie McCarthy by the neck and throw him into the goddamned snow. I wish.

Jimmy Kabinsky was near the door now, and Sonny gestured with his head for Michael to follow them out into the snow. Michael started to ease behind Frankie McCarthy.

“Stay right there, kid,” he said to Michael, his nostrils flaring. “I wanna show you how to deal with a Jew prick like this.”

Mister G slammed the counter. “Don’t you dare call me a Jew prick, you… you Irish son of a bitch!”

Frankie McCarthy exploded. With one hand he swept the tiered rack of candies off the glass-topped counter. Pivoting, he used the other hand to sweep the cigar boxes onto the floor. Then he stomped on the cigars, his lips curling, the broken tooth showing. He turned and jerked the comic rack off the wall, littering the floor with Blue Bolt and Sheena and Captain Marvel . He kicked at the comic books, driving them into the air. Michael tried to say a word, but it would not come.

Then Frankie saw Mister G lifting a telephone and he leaped for him, grabbed the phone, and smashed the top of the counter, splintering the glass. He wasn’t finished. He turned and hammered Mister G with the phone. The eyeglasses dangled from one ear. Blood spurted from the old man’s nose, and he held his face in pain, hunching before the next blow. Sonny and Jimmy opened the door and rushed out. The door slammed behind them. Michael didn’t move.

“That’s how you deal with a Jew prick like this,” Frankie McCarthy said, smiling through tight lips.

Then his eyes widened again in a kind of frenzy, and in the tight space behind the counter, he kicked and stomped at the fallen man, who made small whimpering sounds of futile protest while Frankie screamed: “You cocksucker, you Jew cocksucker! You motherfucker!” Then Frankie jerked the ornate cash register from its shelf, grunted as he raised it over his head, and hurled it down on Mister G. The cash drawer sprang open with a jangled sound and change rolled on the wooden floor.

In a calm way, Frankie picked up some bills and change and then turned to Michael.

“You didn’t see a fuckin’ thing, did you, kid?”

Michael said nothing.

“ Did you?”

Michael shook his head no. Then Frankie McCarthy smiled and reached over for a pack of Lucky Strikes. He hefted them and went to the door.

“All I wanted from this Jew prick was some cigarettes, for chrissakes.”

He went out, leaving the door open to the cold air. For a long, heart-thumping moment, Michael did not move. He wanted Sonny and Jimmy to return, to help him decide what to do. They didn’t come back. Slowly, Michael walked around the counter and saw that Mister G was weeping, his face to the wall, wet blood on his hands. The cash register lay on its side on the floor beside the scattered pages of the New York Post . Mister G’s eyes were shut. The boy touched his elbow.

“Mister G, I’m sorry,” he said. “Can I help you? Maybe—”

Mister G moaned, but did not speak. Michael backed away. Then he took the rabbi’s nickel from his pocket, went to the pay phone, and dialed the operator for an ambulance.

That evening, as his mother ladled tomato sauce over two bowls of spaghetti, Michael Devlin tried to explain what had happened in Mister G’s candy store. The words spilled out of him. He described what was said, leaving out the curse words, and the way Sonny and Jimmy ran outside, and how Frankie McCarthy wrecked the store and tried to destroy Mister G. She smiled thinly when he told her about calling for an ambulance, but the smile faded when he told her how he ran out of the store, panicky, afraid the police would think he had something to do with hurting Mister G. Jimmy and Sonny had vanished, he said, but Michael stood in the doorway of 378 Ellison Avenue and saw the ambulance coming slowly through the boulders of frozen snow, followed by the first of three police cars. All of them parked far from the doorway of Mister G’s candy store because of the huge piles of snow. Men came out of Casement’s Bar to watch, and Michael joined them. They smoked and talked about the way this kind of crap was ruining the parish, and Michael felt safe in their company. The men wouldn’t let Frankie McCarthy harm him.

Then he saw Mister G’s wife coming along the snow-packed sidewalks from Garibaldi Street, a small, thick woman in overcoat and boots, with a large bag of groceries in her hands; saw her pause a block away, as she squinted at the ambulance; saw her suddenly hurrying, slipping and jerking on the packed snow. And then, as Mister G was carried out on a stretcher, the attendants straining and heaving to lift him over the snowbanks, Michael could hear her scream and saw her run, and the grocery bag fell from her hands and broke open and cans of Campbell’s soup and a box of Wheaties and two rolls of toilet paper spilled across the snow.

He told his mother all of that, and she pressed his shoulders to her warm body, then took a small glass from a shelf and poured herself some of the sweet wine she liked, a dark purple wine called Mogen David.

“Holy God,” she said. “That poor woman. That poor man.”

Michael did not tell her about his own confusion.

On the street and in the schoolyard, he’d heard all the stories about Jews being greedy and sneaky Christ-killers. But when this man, this Jew, poor Mister G, had been beaten so savagely, Michael had felt no elation. If Jews were bad, then Frankie McCarthy should be a hero. But in that candy store, it was Mister G who had spoken up to defend Sonny. And in return Frankie had been as scary and vicious as any gangster, while Sonny ran away. Michael struggled with that confusion. He also couldn’t express his own fear, the shameful cowardice that had stopped him from trying to help the old man. He could not get around one awful fact: while Frankie McCarthy was battering Mister G, Michael said and did nothing. Sonny ran; he thought, but I froze. And when it was over, and Mister G lay bleeding, and Frankie had told me to forget what I’d seen, I just nodded my head.

“He’s a bad fella, that McCarthy,” Michael’s mother said. “He comes from bad people and he’ll end up in the gutter.”