The junk business boomed while I was still a kid civilian. Sammy's mother saved old newspapers and donated aluminum pots and pans, my father sold them. There was a good living in waste, as the old man found out, and a few small fortunes for the dealers in scrap metal. We went racing for buildings slated for demolition. We followed fire engines. The big Coney Island fires were always a gold mine, for us a copper mine and lead mine, because of the pipes we salvaged. When Luna Park burned down soon after the war we had a bonanza of junk. They paid us to take it away and they paid us again when we sold it to scrap dealers. Everything hot was packed in asbestos and we took the asbestos and baled that too. We were pretty well off after that one and the old man had the ten thousand to lend me to buy the lumberyard, at stiff interest too, because he was always like that, and because he didn't like the idea. He didn't want me to leave the junk business and he didn't want us to move almost three hours away. Old schoolhouses and hospitals were especially good. We bought a second truck and hired neighborhood strongmen who could lift and who could scare other junkmen away. We even hired one big shvartza, a strong, quiet black man named Sonny who walked in one day and asked for work. We tore through plaster walls and asbestos insulation with metal claws and hammers to get at the copper and lead pipes with our baling hooks, crowbars, and hacksaws. My pop fired Smokey Rubin.
I passed on the word. News came back from Smokey that he would be out looking for me and that he'd better not find me. At night after that I went to Happy's Luncheonette on Mermaid Avenue and sat down to wait for him. Sammy and Winkler looked weak when they came in and saw me. I thought they would faint.
"What are you doing here?" Winkler said. "Get out, get out."
"Don't you know Smokey is out hunting for you?" said Sammy. "He's got a few of his pals."
"I'm making it easier for him to find me. I'll buy you some sodas and sandwiches if you want to wait here. Or you can sit where you want."
"At least go get your brothers if you want to act crazy," said Sammy. "Should I run to your house?"
"Have a malted instead."
We did not wait long. Smokey spotted me as soon as he wdked in-I sat facing the door-and came right up to the booth, backed up by a guy named Red Benny and a weird one known as Willie the Geep.
"I've been looking for you. I've got things to say."
"I'm listening." Our eyes were locked on each other's. "I came to hear them."
"Then come on outside. I want to talk to you alone."
I mulled that one over. They were thirty or over, and we were seventeen and a half. Smokey had been in the ring. He'd been to prison and was cut up badly at least once in a knife fight.
"Okay, Smokey, if that's what you want," I decided. "But have your boys there sit down awhile if you want to talk to me alone outside, and if that's what you want to do."
"You've been saying bad things about me, right? Don't bullshit. Your father too."
"What bad things?"
"That you fired me and I've been stealing. Your father didn't fire me. Let's get that thing straight. I quit. I wouldn't work for any of you anymore."
"Smokey"-I felt that nerve on the side of my cheek and neck start to tick-"the old man wants me to be sure to tell you chat if you ever set foot in the shop again he'll break your back."
That made Smokey pause. He knew the old man. If the old man said it, Smokey knew that he meant it. My father was a short man with the biggest, thickest shoulders I ever saw and small blue eyes in a face that reminded people of a torpedo or artillery shell. With his freckles and hard lines and liver spots, he looked like an iron ingot, an anvil five and a half feet tall. He'd been a blacksmith. All of us have large heads with big square jaws. We look like Polacks and know we're Yids. In Poland with one blow of his fist to the forehead he'd killed a Cossack who'd raised his voice to my mother, and in Hamburg he came close to doing that again with some kind of immigration warden who'd made that same mistake of being rude to my mother but backed away in time. In my family no one ever got away free with insulting any of us, except, I guess, for Sammy Singer with me and my wife with the big tits.
"How's your dad, Marvin?" Red Benny said to Winkler, while everyone in Happy's Luncheonette watched, and after that Smokey had another reason to be careful.
Winkler drummed the fingers of one hand on the table and kept quiet.
His father was a bookmaker and made more than just about anyone else in the neighborhood. They even had a piano in the house for a while. Red Benny was a runner, a collector, a loan shark, a debtor, and a burglar. One summer he and a gang cleaned out every room in a resort hotel except the one rented by Winkler's folks, making the people upstate start to wonder what Winkler's pop did for a living to let just him be spared.
By then Smokey was already slowing down a little. "You and your father-you're telling people I stole a building from you, right? I didn't steal that house. I found the janitor and made the deal for it all by myself."
"You found it while you were working for us," I told him. "You can work for us or you can go in business for yourself. You can't do both the same hour."
"Now the dealers won't buy anything from me. Your father won't let them."
"They can do what they want. But if they buy from you, they can't buy from him. That's all he said."
"I don't like that. I want to talk to him. I want to talk to him now. I want to straighten him out too."
"Smokey," I said, speaking slowly and feeling suddenly very, very sure of myself, "you ever raise a voice on even one word to my father, and I'll see that you die. You lift a finger to me, and he'll see that you die."
He seemed impressed with that.
"Okay," he gave in, with his face falling. "I'll go back to work for him. But you tell him I'll want sixty a week from now on."
"You don't understand. He might not take you back for even fifty. I'll have to try to talk to him for you."
"And he can have the house I found if he gives me five hundred."
"He might give you the usual two."
"When can I start?"
"Give me tomorrow to try to bring him around." Actually, it did take some talking to remind the old man that Smokey worked hard and that he and our black guy were pretty good together at chasing other junkmen off.
"Loan me fifty now, Louie, will you?" Smokey begged as a favor. "There's some good smoking stuff from Harlem outside that I want to invest in."
"I can only lend you twenty." I could have given him more. "That's funny," I said when they'd gone out the door. I was flexing my fingers. "Something's wrong with my hand. When I gave him that twenty I could hardly bend it."
"You were holding the sugar bowl," Winkler said. His teeth were shivering.
"What sugar bowl?"
"Didn't you know?" Sammy snapped at me almost angrily. "You were gripping that sugar bowl like you were going to kill him with it. I thought you would squeeze it to pieces."
I leaned back with a laugh and ordered some pie and ice cream for the three of us. No, I hadn't known I was gripping that cylindrical thick sugar shaker while we were talking. My head was cool and collected while I looked him straight in the eye, and my arm was ready for action without my even knowing it. Sammy let out some air and turned white as he lifted his hand from his lap and put back down the table knife he had been holding.