Freddie didn’t care about Linus’s proclivities. Linus knew he didn’t swing that way and never tried anything. “Far as I remember,” Freddie said. He shrugged. “We were loaded most of the time.”
The Madison Avenue apartment was small and quiet without Linus. No one to shove the trash into the hallway chute, to laugh at his jokes when he made fun of white people on TV. Hanging with Linus reminded Freddie of the old days, when it was him and Carney running wild. Aunt Nancy had passed, Uncle Mike was who knows where, his own mother doing a double at the hospital, Pedro in Florida: That left the two boys and whole days to cram full of feverish schemes. Then Big Mike came back and took Carney home and it was over.
Before long Freddie was staring at Linus’s living-room rug and tracing his missteps, recent and not so recent. The fucked-up haze of lost seasons. Those stretches of pleasurable but aimless loafing, running numbers for murderers, his brief but momentous incarceration. The Theresa job and the guns and hard men it brought into his life. The black water of his thoughts flooded the submarine compartment, he scrambled to the hatch and sealed it off…but then his toes went cold again and he looked down…
Freddie sighed and shuffled for two weeks and then accepted Linus’s abduction as a sign from Jesus or God or the Big Whatever that he should make a change. He decided to clean up. He got his own place in Hell’s Kitchen on Forty-Eighth Street, two floors above a chop suey joint. Linus had his sanatoriums; Freddie’s version of mandatory shit-getting-together was enduring a series of square jobs. Like a chump. Or a monk performing grunt work to prove something to the empty sky. Stocking shelves in a Gristedes over on Lexington, operating the register at Black Ace Records on Sullivan, selling sneakers at a sports outlet on Fulton Street in fucking Brooklyn. Of the three, Black Ace was better for meeting girls.
“I was pulling a Ray-Ray,” Freddie told his cousin. “Keeping my head down, keeping it boring.” Like when Carney was in college studying and Freddie couldn’t get him out of his apartment. “I got so jealous when you told me you wouldn’t be coming out,” Freddie said. “I was all by myself. And when you were done and graduated, you had something.” What did Freddie have to show for all those nights?
He hit the books. Not schoolbooks but dime novels: Strange Sisters, Violent Saturday, Her Name—Jezebel. Stories where no one was saved, not the guilty （killers and crooks） and not the innocent （orphans scooped up at bus stations, librarians inducted into worlds of vice）。 Each time he thought things would work out for them. They never did and he forgot that lesson each time he closed the covers. So optimistic as he plucked the next one from the spinning wire racks. The novels passed the time, as did the pawnshop TV and the occasional girl in a rumpled skirt. His type? Barely beating back the darkness.
During his occasional visits, Aunt Millie complimented him on his healthy glow. “You have a girlfriend keeping you happy?” Freddie dropped in on Carney and his brood, keeping his clean living a secret as he had his crooked living. He liked it when May and John called him Uncle Freddie, like they knew his secret identity.
“I’d ask what you were up to,” Carney said, “and you’d go, ‘Doing my own thing.’ Why didn’t you say?”
“I was doing my own thing,” Freddie said. “That’s why they call it that.”
The mission: reemerge when he had his shit together. Freddie imagined a loud gong would tell him when it was time, reverberating, shaking pigeons loose. Spook half the west side of Manhattan. He took up a pipe and on warm nights perched on the fire escape overlooking Forty-Eighth, puffing, the iron scaffold a periscope that allowed a view of the sleepy-churning Hudson while the saxophone of Ornette Coleman barked and bleated on the hi-fi, wringing the city’s death rattle from its harrowed throat. In his own period of isolation, his cousin had cultivated ambitions—starting a business, settling down with a nice lady. Now that Freddie stopped and thought about it, he was at a loss: All he knew was that he didn’t want to be who he had been. Climb over the windowsill, flip the record, return to the periscope. Scan the horizon.
It all ended when he ran into Linus outside Cafe Wha? and like that they signed up for another tour and the ship sank into the black water and it was as if the world had never known them.
After a month he was back on Linus’s couch. By now Linus was on the needle, using every day. Freddie had a snort now and again, but he’d seen too many people gobbled up to indulge without fear. One time—they were heading uptown on the subway at two a.m.—Freddie shared stories about Miami Joe and the good times on their circuits of Harlem hotspots. He didn’t mention the heist, or Arthur’s murder, or Miami Joe’s not-quite Viking funeral in Mount Morris Park, but he did say that Florida sounded like a righteous sort of place, the way the mobster had described it. “You’ve never been?” Linus asked.