Snow in August

25

His mother’s voice was soothing and whispery but her eyes were wide and anxious, and then she went away. A bald man with thick eyeglasses peered at him and used his smooth fingers to pull back one of his eyelids. Behind the bald man there were horizontal bars of light and dark. They went away too. Father Heaney’s face peered at him and his lips moved but no words came out and then he went away. A tube of cold glass was slipped under his tongue and then grew warm and then slid out. Every time he tried to move, he hurt. He felt warm and wet and realized he had pissed in the bed and was embarrassed. His mouth tasted like nickels. There was something attached to his arm, and when he was alone and stared at the bars of light and darkness and then closed his eyes he saw purple lines and pink bars. Sounds came from a long way off. Wheels squeaking. Dishes clattering. A blurred loudspeaker voice. He heard rosary beads clicking smoothly against each other. He smelled something soapy. He was tossed, pierced, penetrated, moved, washed, handled.

He lost two days.

And then woke to his mother’s face again, her eyes wide in relief, her cool hand touching his cheek. He said, Hello, Mom, and she exhaled and said, Thank God.

His tongue felt furry, and she held a glass to his lips while he sipped the cool water. The taste of nickels remained. After a while, her eyes narrowed, and her face was full of wrath, and she said, Who did this to you, son?

He tried to tell her. He described the Falcons. He tried to make them clear without naming them. He did not say the names of Tippy Hudnut and Skids, Ferret and the Russian. He wanted to tell what he could tell, without violating the codes. The Irish codes. The codes of the parish. Even though they had done this to him. Tippy Hudnut and Skids, Ferret and the Russian. Even though they had beaten and broken his body. Even though they had put him in this room.

But then he remembered the humiliating smell of his own shit, and he could not hold back. This wasn’t the police. This wasn’t the district attorney. This was his mother, right here in a third floor room at Brooklyn Wesley an Hospital. He told her the names, as precise as a batting order: Tippy Hudnut and Skids, Ferret and the Russian. He didn’t know their full names. He knew what they were called on Ellison Avenue. He told her how. Ferret and Skids held his arms while Tippy and the Russian took turns hitting him. He told her about the smell of beer. He told her what they’d said about delivering a message from Frankie McCarthy. He did not mention the shit.

“Did they use a club on you?”

“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.