Snow in August

6

In the morning, after mass, Sonny and Jimmy rang the bell and Michael bounded downstairs to meet them. Sonny embraced him in the hallway.

“We didn’t leave you flat, Michael,” Sonny said. “That fuck Frankie McCarthy was all over the place with his boys, the fuckin’ Falcons, so we had to hide out.”

“We stayed up the house,” Jimmy said. “Listenin’ to the radio.”

“That’s what I figured,” Michael said, wanting anxiously to believe that he had not been abandoned in Mister G’s store. He didn’t tell them how he’d felt, and didn’t mention to them that he had called the ambulance. That was yesterday; today was today. They started to walk toward the park. The air felt cold and clean. Michael thought that the snowbanks were like mountain ridges now, and they began to name the tall piles on the corners, shoved into peaks by the city snowplows. Mount Collins. Mount MacArthur.

“Fuckin’ mountains will last ’til summer,” Sonny said. They laughed, and watched smaller kids burrowing like miners into the sides of the snow hills. It was hard for Michael to imagine these streets sticky with summer.

They walked into the park, following the kids lugging sleds and others draped with ice skates. At a food stand beside the zoo, Sonny bought a hot chocolate and shared it with Jimmy and Michael. The only animals in sight were the polar bears, and Michael thought they looked happier than he’d ever seen them.

“How do you figure Mister G is feelin’?” Sonny said at last.

“How could he feel?” Michael asked. “Frankie hit him with the goddamned cash register.”

Sonny shook his head and looked off at the snowy forest beyond the zoo. “I know how I feel,” he said. “I feel fuckin’ awful. The guy was stickin’ up f’ me remember?”

Michael remembered.

“It’s over,” he said.

“Like hell it is,” Sonny said.

For the next two days, Mister G’s candy store remained closed. At all hours, Michael and his friends saw detectives moving around the snow-packed streets of the parish in an unmarked police car. These were the cops they called Abbott and Costello, because one was tall and thin and the other short and fat, like the movie comedians. They were not comedians. Most of the kids had heard what they did to bad guys in the third-floor squad room at the precinct house on McGuire Avenue and didn’t want such things to happen to them.

Around noon on the second day, Abbott and Costello stopped in front of Unbeatable Joe’s and went in together and drank beer at the bar for a while and then left. Costello did the driving. Then they pulled up in front of the Star Pool Room, across the street from the Venus, and hurried in. They came out talking to each other, shaking their heads. Costello waddled into the Venus, while Abbott waited outside in the snow, his right hand inside his gray overcoat. Michael saw him spit into a snowbank. Then Costello came out of the Venus and they got in the car and drove away.

“They’re lookin’ for Frankie,” said Sonny. “For beating the shit outta Mister G.”

The boys were standing in the doorway of the variety store next to Slowacki’s candy store, stamping their feet to keep warm.

“I saw them go up his house too,” Jimmy said.

“I hope they get him,” Michael said. “I hope they put him in the goddamned can.”

“What?” Sonny said. “You hope they get him?”

“What he did to Mister G was rotten,” Michael said. “He’s the prick. He’s a coward, Sonny, a goddamned jerkoff, beating up an old man like that. Besides, he was defending you.”

Sonny paused. “Yeah,” he said, “but you better not say nothing. You don’t want to end up with the mark of the squealer.”

“What’s that?” Jimmy asked. Little puffs of steam issued from their mouths when they talked.

“They take a knife and they dig in the point here,” Sonny said, twisting his forefinger into his cheek at the hinge of his jaw. “They make a hole, see? And then”—he pulled the finger down his cheek to the corner of his mouth—“then they cut it all the way down to your mouth. So everybody knows you got a big mouth. They know that for the rest of your fucking life.”

“Jesus,” Jimmy said.

Michael shuddered.

“It’s real bad,” Sonny said. “Very bad. The mark of the squealer.”

“Still…,” Michael said.

“The bulls come askin’ you questions, Michael, you didn’t see nothing,” Sonny said. “That’s it. For you. For all three of us.”

Michael remembered what Frankie McCarthy had said as he was leaving with his pack of Lucky Strikes. You didn’t see nothing. One of the rules.

“Okay,” Michael said. “But what happens to Frankie?”

“Nothing, probably.”

“That’s not right, Sonny.”

“No, but that’s the way it is.”

“You mean, he can just do that and not get punished? He beat the crap out of an old man. He could’ve beat the crap out of us. So who punishes him?”

“I don’t know. God, maybe.”

Jimmy Kabinsky smiled. “My uncle said Mister G got what he deserved.”

“What do you mean?” Michael asked.

“He’s a Hebe,” Jimmy said. “My uncle says back in the Old Country they would have killed him.”

“For what?” Sonny said. “Resisting assault?”

“No, just, you know, in general.”

“Your uncle is a goddamned jerk,” Michael said.

“What do you mean, a jerk? He’s—”

“Hey, come on, knock it off,” Sonny said. “What do we gotta have an argument over Jews for? Jesus Christ.”

“My uncle says the Jews killed Jesus and they gotta pay.”

“Jesus was killed, what? Five thousand fuckin’ years ago?” Sonny said. “I guarantee you Mister G wasn’t there that day.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Not buts, Jimmy. Look, I don’t like Jews any more than the next guy. But it don’t make no fuckin’ sense to beat the shit out of Mister G because of something he had nothing to do with.”

“Right,” Michael said. “It wasn’t about Jesus. It was about us.”

“Well…”

“Come on,” Sonny said, “let’s go shovelin’.”

They wandered along the snowy ridges and icy hills of Ellison Avenue, repeating jokes they’d heard at school before the Christmas break, discussing the possibility that if it snowed at least one more time they’d never go back to school, arguing about who invented the telephone and wishing they had one, and stopping in shops, where they offered to shovel snow. The shopkeepers had their own shovels, and some of them had kids who were doing the work. But they earned sixty cents anyway and then went to Slowacki’s and sat at the counter and ordered three hot chocolates.

“You know, I gotta confess something,” Michael said.

“You beat up Mister G,” Sonny said laughing.

“No,” Michael said. “Something else.”

He told them about his visit to the synagogue on Kelly Street and how the rabbi appeared in the blizzard and called him over and asked him to turn on the lights. He couldn’t exactly describe the sound of the man’s voice, or admit to his fear when he stepped into the vestibule. But he did say that he thought the rabbi was a pretty good person.

“That’s it, that’s why you got so pissed off before,” Jimmy said. “You’re in with them.”

“All I did was turn on the goddamned lights,” Michael said, sipping the thick, sweet cocoa. Mrs. Slowacki was busy with other customers; with Mister G’s closed, she was busier than ever, selling candy to kids and cigarettes to men.

“That’s how they get you,” Jimmy said.

“What, to trick me and drop me through a trapdoor? Jimmy, here I am, alive.”

“How do you know he didn’t hypnotize you?”

Then Sonny put up his hands, palms out.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” he said, halting the argument. “This could be good.”

Michael turned to him.

“What do you mean?”

“The treasure.”

“What treasure?”

“Don’t tell me you never heard of the treasure, Michael. Everybody knows about it.”

“I never heard of no treasure,” Jimmy said.

Sonny lowered his voice and leaned close to Michael and Jimmy. “All the Jews, they give money and jewels and rubies and gold and shit like that to the rabbis. But these rabbis, they don’t put it in banks. They bury it. They hide it. They keep it there, so if one morning they gotta run, they pack it all in a bag and get the fuck out of there.”

Michael thought about the rabbi’s frayed coat, his dirty hands, the peeling paint in the vestibule.

“They always talk about the treasure up the synagogue on Kelly Street,” Sonny went on. “My uncles, my aunt Stephanie, they all heard about it. It’s hidden up there. Jewels, diamonds, gold, everything. A long time ago, before the war, my cousin Lefty even busted in there one night with some friends, trying to find it. But the rabbis got it hid pretty good.”

He paused, his eyes excited, gazing around to be certain that nobody in the candy store could hear him.

“So?” Michael said.

“So Michael, you got your foot in the door now. Go all the way in. Find the fucking treasure.”

Michael’s heart tripped.

“You mean, so we could rob it?” he whispered.

Sonny turned his head to the side, his eyes drifting toward the rack of comic books and pulp magazines.

“Nah. Not rob it. Take it back is what I’m thinking. It’s all money they got from rents and charging too much in stores and shit like that.”

“Come on, Sonny,” Michael said. “That’s just stealing.”

“So what if it is? Wouldn’t you like to get a house for your mother? Out in Flatbush or someplace? You know, with a yard and a tree and a garage with a car in it? You wouldn’t like to say to her, Ma, no more working at the fucking hospital, I made a score?”

“She’d laugh at me. Or she’d call the goddamned cops.”

“That’s bullshit and you know it, Michael,” Sonny said. “Money is money. You make up a good lie and she’d take it. Nobody calls the cops on their own kid.”

“You don’t want your share,” Jimmy Kabinsky said, “you give it to me. My uncle wouldn’t call the cops.”

“I saw the rabbi,” Michael said. “He’s poor. His clothes are raggedy. The tops of his shoes look like burnt goddamned bacon. He has a treasure in there, why doesn’t he buy a coat?”

“Maybe he don’t even know the treasure is there,” Sonny said. “He’s new, right? You never seen him before, right? Maybe the last guy died and never told this guy about the treasure.”

“And maybe there’s no treasure.”

“So find out.”

Costello, the fat cop, came in, wheezing as he stood before Mrs. Slowacki and ordered a pack of Pall Malls. The boys stopped talking. The detective gave them a look and walked outside, peeling the cellophane off the cigarette pack. Abbott was sitting in the police car, which was raised on one side on a hummock of frozen snow. He nodded when the fat cop slipped in behind the wheel.

“That tub of shit,” Sonny said.

“Big tough guy,” Jimmy said.

“So what about it, Michael?” Sonny said.

“I just don’t believe the story,” Michael said, wishing he’d never told them about his visit to the synagogue.

“You believe in Captain Marvel and you don’t believe this?” Sonny said.

“Who says I believe in Captain Marvel?”

“You told me last year maybe it could be true.”

“That was last year.”

“So this year, go up the fucking synagogue and see what you can find out.”

Michael finished his cocoa.

“Let me think about it,” he said.