Still, and though Pop would never agree, Bobby would have probably run Battle Brothers into the ground. I can say this because he was always too generous, and would have undoubtedly bid too low for jobs and been a soft touch with the crews and not cut enough corners when he could with the customers or the vendors and who/whatever else there was holding down our margins. I'm no natural business whiz and the worries never once kept me up at night but Battle Brothers was the whole of Pop's life and in the sum of it pretty much mine. I think my career-long effectiveness came from the fact that I could funnel all of my frustrations and exasperations and notions of self-misprision into just the right kind of fierce mercenary pressure, which I could reserve until called for and then unvalve on some poor sucker caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Christ I could holler. Mostly, though, I was just in a pissy mood. Some of the guys, I know, would kid around and refer to me as Jerry Not So Merry or Jerry Sour Berry (their other, non-public names for me I'm sure much more rank and vile). At the annual landscapers' association banquet (last year emceed by the dashing Jack Battle at the Brookville Country Club), I never particularly associated too well, always choosing to sit with the newer contractors on the periphery and pretend I didn't know anybody. The Pavones and Richters and Keenan and Ianuzzis would hold their royal blowhards court and roast each other and get fresh with the hired girls and undoubtedly scuff up the putting green with their drunken fisticuffs, these overtanned, blunt-fingered guys upon whom I would wish a horrid pox or blood plague but who in fact weren't unlike us Battles at all.
Bobby was the one who would have fit right in; he was ever willing to tolerate those he considered to be any kind of comrade in arms, and not at all for business reasons. I don't know where he got this need to be part of the crowd, part of the gang, as neither Pop nor I is so constituted, but then again he was universally adored, and after we had his memorial service there came together what amounted to a big block party for him in our old neighborhood, which wasn't thrown by us, as Ma for once in her life didn't much feel like putting out a spread for company and went right up to her bedroom to change into her nightgown and take a few pills for sleep. Pop trudged clown into our finished basement and clicked on the talk radio extra loud, and though I don't like to think about it probably just played with his 1/175-scale USS Arizona, which took him at least three years to make, painting included. Daisy refused to come, as she despised funerals and cemeteries and was back in Long Island with the kids, and so I moped around the kitchen for a bit until I heard music coming from the street.
When I went out there I was amazed to see how large and festive the gathering was — it was more a celebration than a wake, some kind of commencement, like a demigod had been approved to ascend Mt. Olympus. Everybody was hauling out their extra card tables and chairs and setting out the Pyrex casseroles of baked ziti and lasagna and sausages and stuffed clams and bean salad that was probably just their family dinners. They had a keg of beer for the men and jugs of blush wine for the ladies, and the kids were playing Red Rover and Kick the Can at the end of our coned-off street, and even a couple of cops had stopped by for a cold one. Basically it was like one of those Saturday night city street fairs except there weren't any flashing string lights or cotton candy machines or necking couples, though I do remember seeing a kid puking on the Rados-cias' garage door, probably having filched too much leftover Lambrusco.
Everybody was hugging me and friendly in a way I had never known them to be friendly, which, if I have to be honest, was clearly not so much about condolence or sympathy but rather whatever they might have sensed of Bobby as residually expressed in me (he had those sparkly eyes, too, and the same wavy dark hair). But none of it was unpleasant or even sad, and I can tell you that I felt more comfortable and at ease that evening on 149th Street than in all the years growing up there as a not unhappy youth, because when you're among others and don't have to be exactly in your own skin it can be the strangest blessing, not to mention the added effect of feeling an afterglow as warm-hued as Bobby Battle's. (Perhaps this explains my love of travel, because when you're walking along some quay or pi-azza or allee there's an openness and possibility and that certain intimacy with strangers which is near impossible on an American street or food court, the scale still hunched and human.) Guys were toasting me and making sentimental speeches about Bobby's honey singing voice and stunning bat speed, and the ladies were the ones who seemed to be putting on a serious buzz, as I'd be passed from one to another in a rope line of tangos, and then later that evening when almost everybody had folded up camp and gone inside for the night, a woman named Patricia Murphy came up to me and told me she had gone out with Bobby for a little while during middle school and asked if I would walk her to her car.
I actually remembered her, or thought I did, as she was one of those fourteen-year-old girls who are physically developed beyond anybody's capacity to handle too well (much less craven adolescents). She had a grown woman's hips and thighs and she had a bigger, fuller chest than any senior girl in the high school.
She was certainly okay-looking but it probably wouldn't have mattered if she looked like Ernest Borgnine she was so built, and like too many girls in her position she probably ended up giving away a bit too much for popularity's or some other sake to those very boys in the school keen on taking as much as they could.
Bobby wasn't one of those, certainly, and I remember they were in a school production together, something called A Med-ley of Shakespeare, featuring bits from three or four of his plays, and maybe their romance lasted a couple weeks at most afterward, I'm sure ending with the requisite study hall dramatics and tears. That night after the funeral Patricia was in a funny kind of mood, which is odd for me to say given that I didn't know her at all. She was sort of laughing to herself and gently poking at my ribs and arms like my sexy cousin Wendy Battaglia used to do at those big Sunday family dinners that nobody ever throws anymore, and when we got to her car, which was parked right in front of our house, she announced she was too drunk to drive and could we maybe sit inside for a little while? I figured that made good sense and by that point I was feeling pretty valorous with all the back slaps and glad hands accrued to me during the evening. I figured my folks would be sound asleep, which they were, as I could hear Ma's high snoring titters, wee-ha, wee-ha.
So I went into the kitchen and put on a pot of coffee for her, but when I turned Patricia Murphy was right there, practically pressing up against me, her chest maybe not any bigger or fuller ten years later but still plenty magnanimous, with a kind of space-age uprightness and pomp that makes you think this is why you live in this confused post-Newtonian world. She asked if I could show her Bobby's room. I didn't think anything of her request, really, or her proximity, and we went up the tight stairs to the second door on the left with the old Polo Grounds poster tacked on it.
Bobby Battle's bedroom, pre-fungus, was as advertised, the picture of American Golden Boy-hood, festooned with pennants and posters of starlets and books on log cabin construction and model rocketry. I thought she'd maybe poke her head in the closet or sit on the bed or try his still supple third baseinan's glove on for size, but she stood apart from me at an awkward distance and then said in a coquettish thespian whisper, "You are merry, my lord." I replied, confused, "Who me?" and before I knew it she fell upon me, down to her knees, swiftly unlatching my belt. And as she took me barely chubby in her dryish small mouth I finally for once that evening thought of my brother, lost somewhere back in Vietnam, his soul wandering the death fields, who would go on forever and ever, like any true titan, through all of our flawed enactments, whether he would wish to or not. And that's when I first really felt what must have been a pang of brotherly lacking, which for me wasn't so much an emptiness as this mysterious prosthetic groan, from down deep. And I was thinking of Daisy, too, of course, and how I'd ever begin to explain myself if she found out, and was just in fact planning a delicate extrication when Pop walked in and caught me and Patricia Murphy, duly arrayed. He could have been angry, certainly, or at least repelled, but he simply looked at her, and then at me, and said like it was quarter to four in the afternoon on a job already running a day behind, "Let's pick it up here, Jerome."