Snow in August

4

That afternoon in the howling white world, while his mother worked her shift as a nurse’s aide at Wesleyan Hospital, Michael Devlin was alone in the living room of the flat, lying on the linoleum floor beside the kerosene heater. A pillow was folded under his head. His stack of Captain Marvels was beside him. After mass and the promised bacon and eggs and his mother’s departure, he had searched for the issue that told the story of Billy Batson’s first encounter with Shazam. Or rather, he’d found the retelling of the story, because he didn’t own the precious first issue of Whiz Comics, the one published long ago, near the beginning of the war. In the retelling, for a special issue of Captain Marvel’s own book, the man in the black suit was there with his hat pulled down to mask his face. But except for the black clothes, he didn’t resemble the rabbi from Kelly Street, and neither did the wizard Shazam. The wizard was much older, with a white beard instead of a dark one, dressed in a long, flowing robe. The rabbi was younger, heavier, and with his blue eyes and horn-rimmed glasses looked more like a schoolteacher from the Wild West than an Egyptian wizard. Somebody who could have taught Abraham Lincoln.

After a while, Michael put aside the Captain Marvels and started reading a comic book named Crime Does Not Pay, all about the terrible killer Alvin Karpis and his bloody career and bloodier end. This comic made Michael feel very different from the way he felt reading Captain Marvel. Captain Marvel was about magic words and mad scientists and tigers that talked, about bullets that bounced off chests and a hero with a gold-trimmed cape who could fly through the air. But the crime comic was full of real gangsters in real cities. No capes. No magic words. Just robbing and shooting and dying. Bullets didn’t bounce off chests, they went through them; and nobody went flying through the air, high above the skyscrapers. The crime comics were about men who were once good kids in places like Brooklyn and came to bad ends. Like the men from Murder Incorporated, Lepke something and Gurrah. Pretty Boy Floyd. Dillinger. They died in ambushes. They died outside movie houses. They even died in the snow, like Tommy Devlin died in Belgium, but without being heroes. They didn’t ever die for their country. They died for money. Or women.

Partway through the story of Alvin Karpis, Michael realized that the wind had stopped. He listened hard, fearing some trick from the storm, and then heard shovels scraping against sidewalks and knew that it was over. He wanted to tell his mother the news, but she was working at the hospital. So he dressed, and grabbed his dry gloves, and dashed down the stairs to find his friends.

Sonny Montemarano was already there, testing the snow with big mittened hands. His dark face was shiny, his eyes bright.

“You ever seen anything like this?” he said.

“Never,” Michael said. “They got icicles up at the armory that look like rocket ships.”

“We couldn’t get out my door,” Sonny said. “It’s frozen shut. We hadda jump out the fucking window.”

“This morning, the wind threw me across the street,” Michael said. “Like I was a goddamned feather.”

“I never seen anything like it. What a fucking storm.”

Sonny always said fuck. Michael loved hearing Sonny talk, but he still had trouble using the forbidden word, afraid it would become such a habit that he would say it in front of his mother. He used goddamned. None of them said the worst word of all: motherfucker. Sonny had tried it one time last summer, but Unbeatable Joe, who ran the saloon on the corner, heard him, grabbed him by the shirt collar, and said, “Don’t ever use that fucking word, you hear me? Only niggers use that fucking word.”

Then Jimmy Kabinsky arrived, with a big wool hat pulled down to his brow. He was a DP, a displaced person, and a figure of much amazement in Sacred Heart School because he’d learned English in three months. Nobody was more amazed than Sonny Montemarano; his grandmother had come from Sicily forty-one years ago and still didn’t speak much more than Sonny, come uppan eat or Sonny, you shut up.

“They got snow like this in Poland?” Sonny asked.

“They got snow in Poland goes up three flights,” Jimmy said. They started walking together toward Collins Street.

“You’re shittin’ me,” Sonny Montemarano said. “Three flights? You’d have nothing but dead Polacks, you had that much fucking snow.”

“I swear,” Jimmy Kabinsky said. “My uncle told me.”

“Oh,” Sonny said, rolling his eyes at Michael behind Jimmy’s back. “Your uncle. That makes sense.”

Jimmy’s uncle was a junkman. He made a living picking up old newspapers, broken bicycle wheels, ruined radios, then piling them into a pushcart and taking them off to some warehouse on the waterfront. During the last year of the war, the kids rode him without mercy. For one thing, his arms were very long, his shoulders sloped, and his body was always pitched forward at an angle, even when the pushcart wasn’t dragging him down the hills of the parish. For another, he had no wife and no kids and never went to the bars with the other men. Finally, he was very ugly, or so everyone agreed: his eyes were buried under a clifflike brow, his wide, potatolike nose was always flared in anger, his ears were like a pair of ashtrays, and his teeth were yellow. The kids all called him Frankenstein, except when Jimmy was around. When Jimmy came to live with him, because DPs all needed sponsors, he became Uncle Frankenstein. The kids didn’t rag him when Jimmy was around, out of respect for Jimmy, whose parents died in the war.

“How high you think the snow is in Ebbets Field?” Jimmy said.

“Upper deck,” Sonny said, winking at Michael. “My grandmother heard it on the radio.”

“Upper deck?” Jimmy said. “Come on, that’s like, what, six flights?”

“Deeper than fucking Poland!” Sonny said, shoving Jimmy into a pile of snow. “And they got the wind out there, blowin’ to left field. Swear to Christ.”

Soon they were romping in the snow, falling facedown into its whiteness, hurling snowballs at each other and at strangers. Kids emerged from the tenements with sleds, heading for Prospect Park. A trolley car slowly pushed its way along Ellison Avenue. A few cars arrived from nowhere, their tires encased in chains. Then Unbeatable Joe, thick and burly with a fur hat and a heavy army coat, came to look at his saloon, gazing at the sign that was smashed on the sidewalk. He shook his head and kicked the sign. Then he unlocked the door and went inside. He was back in a minute, holding two shovels. He shouted across the street.

“Hey, do you worthless, lazy bums wanna make some money?”

They took turns, two of them shoveling while the other warmed his hands. Michael shoveled around the fallen sign, which was two feet high, three feet wide, about a foot deep. The neon lettering was smashed, the tin sides bent, the steel cables torn; that was some goddamned wind. Then he started cutting a path for pedestrians, pushing loose snow out toward where the gutter was. That was the easy part. But there was a layer of hard-packed icy snow beneath the fine snow that had fallen near the end of the storm. The packed snow wouldn’t move.

“Lemme try,” Sonny said. He took the shovel from Michael, forced the blade under the packed snow, put a boot on the top of the blade, and shoved hard. The snow peeled back. “Ya see? Ya gotta get under it.”

“I’ll finish it, Sonny,” Michael said.

“No, no, I enjoy this.” He laughed. “Help Jimmy.”

When the job was done, Unbeatable Joe came out again.

“You bums oughtta sign up with Sanitation right now,” he said. He took a dollar from his pocket and handed it to Sonny. “Go get laid.”

He turned and kicked the sign one more time.

They went past Slowacki’s candy store, which was too crowded, and walked another block to Mister G’s. In this smaller, darker candy store, Sonny bought a Clark bar, Jimmy chose a bag of peanuts, and Michael picked a box of Good and Plenty. Behind the counter, Mister G was reading the New York Post. He was an old man, short and dumpy, with very little hair and sad eyes behind rimless glasses. He was an oddity along Ellison Avenue; it was said, for example, that he was a Giants fan and that his kids had gone off to college. That was strange; Michael had never known anyone but Dodger fans and nobody at all who had gone to college. It was also strange that Mister G read the Post in a neighborhood where men swore by the Journal-American. And that he lived with his wife in a tiny apartment at the back of the store. It was said of her that she “went to business,” which meant she had a job in an office and rose early and went to the subway in a suit or a dress. It also meant that they could afford a regular apartment but were too cheap to move from the back rooms of the candy store.

Mister G said nothing as he rang up the sale on a heavy gilded cash register on a shelf behind the counter. He gave Sonny change from the dollar while flipping a page of the newspaper in a distracted way. Mister G’s silence was not odd, for there was no need for chat. Kids were in and out of the store all day, buying penny candies from the boxes on the counter, or nickel candies from the three-tiered rack. And the store was not only for kids. Grown-ups used the pay phone in the back. Or bought newspapers. And in neat boxes on the right of the counter, Mister G had built displays of cigarettes and ten-cent cigars.

“Man, I hope it snows s’more tonight,” Sonny said. “I hope it snows for a month. We’d be rich.”

He was dividing the change when Frankie McCarthy walked in.

Sonny shoved the change in his pocket and started examining the comics on the standing rack against the wall. The Spirit. Batman. Jungle Comics. Michael was suddenly nervous. Frankie McCarthy was one of the older guys, at least seventeen, and the leader of the gang called the Falcons. He scared Michael. He had dark red hair, wet now from the snow, freckles, slushy blue eyes with very small pupils. He kept his lips pulled tight over his mouth to hide a broken front tooth. The summer before, Michael saw him punch out a drunken man on the sidewalk in front of Unbeatable Joe’s, battering him until the man’s face was a smear of blood. The scene was terrible, but Frankie McCarthy seemed to enjoy it. So did his boys on the Falcons. They all cheered as Frankie walked away from the fallen older man like he was Joe Louis. And he enjoyed it. That’s what scared Michael.

“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.