It had occurred to Carney a few weeks ago that Robert might need a summer job. A couple of hours a week, some local errands, fetching sandwiches, and organizing the files in the basement. He’s looking for work next summer, or after school, the boy can say he has some retail experience under his belt. That’s how it started, seeing his nephew without Aunt Millie around and not on a birthday. Discoveries, like the high-pitched laugh the boy let out when one of Larry’s jokes vibrated on his frequency. Who knows? Maybe he’d start calling him Uncle Ray, instead of Ray.
No go, so far.
They separated at the subway exit. Robert walked up Lexington, turned, and raised the shopping bag in thanks. Carney gave him a thumbs-up. He called the store and told Rusty to lock up tonight. Plenty of time to check out the new furniture place on 135th to see what they had going on before he met Pepper.
An M100 bus rumbled east down 125th. The Anchor Bank advertisement on the side of the bus featured the Statue of Liberty, and the crosstown movement made her appear to run down the street, as if after a junkie who’d snatched her purse. The old broad was faster than she looked.
CELEBRATING 200 YEARS OF FREEDOM!
FROM YOUR BANK FOR THE NEXT 200
ANCHOR BANK OF NEW YORK
The city had escaped bankruptcy and sure ruin, Carney thought, but they didn’t trust it, so they celebrated the old good news instead. Like by proxy. A bit overboard for his tastes. When the ad manager from the Amsterdam News had dropped by the furniture store to help with the July buy, he laid out his array of bicentennial images: Lady Liberty in various postures, the Betsy Ross flag with its thirteen stars, fireworks over the Capitol, fireworks over the NYC skyline. Riffs on Washington crossing the Delaware and signing the Declaration. Now they followed Carney everywhere. Whether hawking galoshes or retirement funds or dog shampoo, the same rah-rah images rushed to serve. On billboards all over town, Lady Liberty held a mustard-splattered Nathan’s hot dog instead of her ledger, and Crazy Eddie’s arranged the Founding Fathers around a document legislating “Insane Savings!”
There was the case of The Spirit of ’76, the painting of the two drummers—one too young to enlist, the other too old—and the fife player leading the rebel soldiers across the battlefield. Carney had thought that the man was playing a flute, until John corrected him: “I learned about it in history class.”
Classic painting, snapshot of the country’s birth, etc. That spring Carney had encountered no fewer than three variations: One with the fife player sucking on a Dr Pepper; another where Loews movie theaters replaced the drums with big buckets of popcorn and had the drummers scooping deep; and one in which the three musicians marched down the middle of modern Fifth Avenue, oblivious to traffic, as part of the City of New York’s “Look Both Ways” pedestrian safety campaign.
The whole thing was a big marketing push. Every other day there was a newspaper column huffing about “the American Experiment.” As if the experiment hadn’t finished and we didn’t know the results. What are you, Carney, some kind of Communist? He had a few days to come up with something for the News. Free drink coasters for customers who can recite the Declaration of Independence while standing on one foot with their eyes closed.
200 YEARS BUT IT FEELS LIKE MORE—ASK THE INDIANS
THIS JULY 4TH, SALUTE TRUTH, JUSTICE & 3-POSITION ADJUSTABLE RECLINERS
AT CARNEY’S FURNITURE
Wait—“Truth, Justice, and the American Way” was the tagline of the Superman radio show, not some U.S. history thing. Mighty Whitey to the rescue. How about:
200 YEARS OF GETTING AWAY WITH IT
He liked the last one, and soon adopted it as a refrain.
* * *
***
They talked fires.
“Your old man worked for a finisher named Wilbur Martin,” Pepper said. A finisher put a building out of its misery, he said. The owner’s at the end of his rope—taxes up to here, junkies taking over—so he sells the building to the finisher, who strips out the wiring, the plumbing, anything worth a buck, and then torches the joint for the jacked-up insurance policy. “You see Wilbur walking down the hallway, sizing the place up, you best be looking for another place to hang your hat. Big Mike put ’em to the torch when it was time to cash in.”
“You smelled it on him.” Big Mike had made grim jokes about splitting “like a roadrunner” once he lit the match—no timers, no alarm clocks for him. Carney had known that arson-for-hire was one of his father’s sidelines but had never pictured how it went down. The people in the apartments next door, the sleeping children, the bedridden old man unable to rise from his bed. He was angry for a moment that Pepper had confirmed the truth he had avoided.
They were in Donegal’s, curtain of twilight coming down and Broadway deciding who it was going to be tonight. Pepper and Carney sat at the bar, with a sparse carryover crowd from happy hour behind them. As in the Dumas Club, the decor had not changed much in the last fifteen years. Busted neon stayed busted, wobbly tables got wobblier. The Dumas men continued to prosper; achievements here were measured differently, like the death of the only other person who knows what you did that night, or your kid doesn’t hang up when you call after all these years.
The bar was sleepy. In the old days the TV thundered when Lucha Libre was on, to the patrons’ rabid endorsement. This evening’s wrestling was a new program, featuring a league Carney had never heard of. Sound off, the matches a pantomime. Donegal’s population had dwindled. Fewer boasts about jobs gone right and commiserations about jobs gone wrong. They were dying off, the old crooks and hustlers and flimflam artists, or upstate after an ill-advised scheme to cover medical bills or six months’ back rent or new teeth. There had to be another version of Donegal’s five blocks over or five blocks down that served half-bubbly drafts to a younger generation of thieves and hoods.
Their regular bartender, Buford, only worked Mondays and Tuesdays now, leaving anyone who used the bar for messages to the inconstant attentions of Toomey. Toomey’s father was Italian, and he drew his Sicilian heritage into service as an excuse when called for fucking up everybody’s messages. “I got my mind on other things, you know?” Meaning, ladies. Meaning, it’s 1976, why don’t you get an actual fucking answering machine, you cheap bastard?
On the TV, the wrestlers had migrated outside the ring to duel with folding chairs. “I haven’t seen Mr. Fuji in a while,” Toomey said.
“He still wrestles,” Pepper said.
Pepper looked good. He was on his feet again, after having thrown his back out “carrying an unconscious body.” If it had been anyone else, Carney would have asked for an elaboration, but he knew one was not forthcoming, plus it sounded like business as usual to be honest. The old crook was bedridden for six weeks. Carney had John run up chicken and puzzle magazines, missions from which his son returned bewildered. Uncle Pepper was a professor of esoteric disciplines.
Now he was back. If anything, Pepper seemed more formidable after his recovery. Always a deliberate creature, he moved and talked half a beat slower now, and it made him more dangerous, like a lion appreciating a pack of gazelles at a watering hole, mulling over the menu. All the time in the world.