Pete Hamill - North River

“I’m a long way from Bleecker Street. It’s safe here or I wouldn’t be talking to you.” A pause. “Besides, I got my own guys.”

“That’s what I need: a crossfire. Jesus Christ, Eddie, the boy is three years old.”

A sigh. “I need to see you, Doc.”

Delaney answered with a heavier sigh, fluttering his lips. “Where are you?”

After he hung up, Delaney stared at the telephone. At the scribbled directions. Then at the safe. The treasure of Eddie Corso was dwindling, eroded by the costs of the steam heat system. The house next winter would be warm. But here came the past.

On Sunday morning, he told Rose that he was taking the boy to Coney Island and would be back in the afternoon.

“Hey, I want to go to Coney Island too,” she said, smiling a wide grin. Her skin was already darker from early summer. And Carlito was browner too.

“We’ll all go together on the Fourth of July,” he said. “Lots of fireworks.”

“That’s a month from now.”

He gambled that she could not change her schedule.

“So come with us,” he said.

She sighed. “Too late. They expect me at St. Brendan’s.”

“Next week,” Delaney said, relieved. “Make sure you get a bathing suit.”

“No! I can’t go around in a bathing suit, and all those young guys watching, all those dirty old guys.”

She laughed harder.

“Okay,” he said, “I’ll go in my long underwear!”

She shoved him hard, the good shoulder. “You do that and I get back on the train.”

Rose dressed and hurried off to perform her corporal works of mercy. Carlito played on his fire engine, shouting, Fire in Coney Isling, fire in Coney Isling. Delaney went into his office. He stared at the telephone, then dialed the number for Frankie Botts.

“Yeah?”

“It’s Dr. Delaney, Mr. Botticelli.”

“Hey, howaya?” he said, the tone friendly.

“I’ve been going over records this morning, and I don’t think I have to see your mother anymore.”

“What?”

“She’s got no pain. She’s walking. All the blisters have healed. She’s got spots on her skin that might take a while to fade. But she’s okay, Frankie.”

Silence. Then: “You sure?”

“I’m sure. She can still use the salve, once a day. But she’s okay. Any problems, call me.”

“Let me ass you somethin’. Can she go to a ballgame?”

“Sure. As long as you’re with her.”

Botts exhaled. “That is great fuckin’ news. Thanks. Thanks for everything.”

“What about our understanding, Frankie?”

“What understanding?”

“I take care of your mother and everything is over down here,” Delaney said. “We don’t have to walk around looking over our shoulders.”

Botts grunted. “I’ll call you back.”

He hung up. Delaney sat there for a while, thinking: You son of a bitch.

They caught the Sea Beach Express at Union Square. The train was packed with men and women and kids, many wearing straw hats, or carrying blankets and lunch baskets, all full of a glad anticipation. He held Carlito’s hand tightly as the laughing crowds parted to allow still more people to board the train. The air was dense. The overhead fans had been shut off long ago, to save money. Many people were sweating heavily. Delaney was sure he could smell tenements.

The train plunged under the river, racing to Brooklyn, racing to the sea. It was as if they all had the same slogan: To hell with the Depression, the sea is free. At the end of the car, the door was open to catch a breeze from the cool tunnel, and four young men started to sing “Toot, Toot, Tootsie.” Almost all the others joined them. When they came to the line If you don’t get a letter, then you’ll know I’m in jail, they were shouting the words. How many of them had been in jail? More than a few. How many had friends in jail, or relatives, or children? Even more. Toot, Toot, Tootsie, don’t cry, Toot, Toot, Tootsie, good-bye…

Then they were up out of tunnels, and the Brooklyn sky was above them, with the Brooklyn light glancing off the unseen harbor, just like in a Vermeer. Nobody got off, and nobody new could get on. The singing continued. “That Old Gang of Mine.” Then “My Buddy.” Carlito was planted strongly on the floor, holding a pole, and his visible world was all elbows and hips and knees, the bottoms of baskets, hands dangling or clenched together, and, when he looked up, all chins and nostrils.

Then there was a brightening and then they started coming into the terminal, and the whole car roared. Last stop. Everybody off. Carlito’s eyes were wide with excitement. The train stopped. The doors opened. And some of the passengers began to run toward the ocean and the sand.

Delaney and Carlito walked more slowly. He looked behind him, but it was impossible to know if they had been followed. Certainly nobody on the Sea Beach Express was wearing a pearl-gray fedora. There was a carousel ahead of them, going around and around, up and down, with slum kids mounted on brightly painted plaster horses while music from Tin Pan Alley or the circus played loudly. The crowds milled and men blinked and mothers called to children, and they all went out to Surf Avenue.

This was his too, and he knew the geography of Coney the way he knew the West Village. He and Carlito stood on the sidewalk, and he pointed out the swirling towers of Luna Park to the left, as if conjured by Scheherazade, and then at Feltman’s across the street. He had brought Molly here once to listen to the Bavarian music in the beer garden, while Grace ran around, a year younger than Carlito, and when he asked Molly what she thought of Coney, she said, I don’t have the skin for this place. On this day, the boy was blinking again, closing his personal shutters as if taking photographs, while the crowds swirled around them. A clock told Delaney he was fifteen minutes early.

He and the boy crossed the street where lines were forming to enter Steeplechase the Funny Place, with its huge grinning face. The boy watched a train inching slowly to the apex of the roller coaster, poising, then dropping while people screamed.

“What is?” the boy said.

“A roller coaster,” Delaney said. “It’s scary.”

“Can we go too?”

“Not today, Carlito. Someday.”

He remembered being here with Grace when she was seven, and how she insisted that he take her on the roller coaster, and how he sat beside her as it climbed, and how terrified she was when it dropped so hard and fast. She screamed and screamed as he held her with his good left hand. Later she continued sobbing and said she never wanted to see Coney Island again, and for three years she didn’t. On this day, as on that day long ago, the vendors were selling hot corn and ice cream and lemon ices and watermelon. Off on the side, a burly man raised a huge hammer and brought it down, and a hard rubber disk rose high on a cable and hit a bell and everybody cheered. Another man was aiming a rifle at a moving tin rabbit, fired, missed, fired again, missed again. In the next booth, a young man wound up like a pitcher and threw a baseball at a target with a hole in the center. The ball bounced away.

“He need a bat, Gran’pa,” the boy said. “And a glove.”

“He sure does.”

It was time to go see Eddie Corso. Delaney took Carlito’s hand and started walking back across Surf Avenue. The boy stopped and looked back at the baseball range.

“I want to see more! I want to f’wow a ball, Gran’pa. Please!”

“We have to meet someone, boy. Come on.”

The boy stood still, refusing to budge. Delaney spoke the boy’s name. The boy did not move. Delaney went over to him and tried to take his hand. The boy half turned and folded his arms across his chest. His lower lip protruded now, his brow furrowed.