Rabbi Hirsch nodded, as if finally understanding Michael’s fumbling attempts to explain. He went to the bookcase and lifted the horn again.
“If like Ziggy Elman I can play this shofar,” he said, “I am sitting in the catbird seat.”
Michael smiled.
“You said it.”
18
One Saturday morning a few weeks before Easter, Michael, Sonny, and Jimmy were playing ball against the factory wall on Collins Street. The day was bright but still too cold for a full game of stickball; the other kids remained huddled in their apartments, and there weren’t enough players to choose up sides. But Jimmy had found an old broom in his uncle’s junkpile, and Sonny had saved a spaldeen from the previous summer, and they stripped the straw off the broom and then took turns whacking the ball off the factory wall. Home plate was chalked in front of the wall of O’Malley’s Garage. Each player got ten swings at the ball, then they switched positions. The baseball season wouldn’t begin until April 16. Nobody yet knew whether Jackie Robinson would join the Dodgers. As a Royal, he was now hitting.625 against the big club.
“They gotta bring him up,” Michael said. “How couldn’t they, the way he’s hitting? He goes one-for-three, he’s in a slump.”
“We’ll know real soon,” Sonny said. “Hey, Jimmy, throw me a curveball, you see what I do to it!”
Jimmy kept throwing fastballs to Sonny, who hit every one of them, while Michael moved around as the fielder, retrieving the ball as it bounced off the factory wall. When Sonny finished his ten hits and it was Michael’s turn to bat, he discovered he was hitting the ball harder than he did the previous summer. He knew he was fifteen pounds heavier and two inches taller now, but for some reason he could also see the ball better. He watched the spaldeen leave Sonny’s hand, and it really did get fatter and pinker as it came closer. Every time he swung, he made contact, and the ball rose high against the wall. He was finished quickly: ten pitches, ten hits. As good as Sonny. Then he pitched to Jimmy while Sonny played the field. Jimmy missed four of the ten pitches. And then they switched again. Around noon, a garbage truck wheezed up the street, its gears grinding, and stopped in front of O’Malley’s Garage, blocking home plate. The boys stood around while the sanitation men heaved cans of trash into the truck.
“So what’s the latest up there on Kelly Street?” Sonny said. “You know, the synagogue?”
“I haven’t seen a thing,” Michael said. “I looked and looked,” he lied, “but nothing.”
“So where did the story come from?” Jimmy said.
“Three guys were playing stickball,” Michael said, “and then a sanitation truck got in the way and—”
“Maybe we should go up there some night,” Sonny said in a cold way. “Maybe we can find it.”
“We got more important things to do,” Michael said.
“What’s more important than a fortune of money?”
“The goddamned Falcons, that’s who.”
Sonny gazed around the street. There was no sign of danger on this cold spring day.
“If we had a fortune of money,” Jimmy said, “we could all move to Florida. You could take your mother, Michael, Sonny could take his aunt—”
“Your uncle stays here!” Sonny said.
“You know,” Jimmy said, “if we do go in there some night, the synagogue, we better wait till after Passover. The Jews, during Passover—”
“They kill babies and put the blood in the matzohs?” Michael said sharply.
“Well… yeah.”
Michael thought of Brother Thaddeus and the tunnels in Prague and the Golem and he didn’t want to play ball anymore.
“I gotta go wash the halls,” he said, handing the bat to Sonny, who looked at him in a confused way. Michael drifted away from them toward Ellison Avenue. Thinking: You goddamned idiot, Jimmy. Because of you and your big-mouthed uncle, we have to look over our shoulders when we walk the streets, I’m scared shitless every time I go down the cellar to shovel coal, there’s guys looking at us like they want to cut our goddamned throats, and you believe Jews put blood in the matzohs? Fucking imbecile. I gotta talk straight to them. Gotta. Got to tell them Rabbi Hirsch is a good man. Gotta tell them there’s no treasure. Gotta come clean about what I’m doing there. Gotta gotta. Got to tell Rabbi Hirsch too. Gotta gotta gotta.
He turned into the avenue and then froze. His legs felt heavy, his hands cold. Frankie McCarthy was two blocks away.
Coming in Michael’s direction.
With three other members of the Falcons.
All of them walking with a rolling swagger. Grab-assing. Bumping each other. Smoking cigarettes.
Michael thought: Holy shit.
Frankie McCarthy.
He’s back.
He’s free.
Jesus.
Michael couldn’t cross to his own house without being seen. He flattened himself against the windows of Pete’s Diner, then inched around the corner into Collins Street, trying to look casual. He hoped Frankie and the Falcons were yelling at girls. He hoped they had gone to Unbeatable Joe’s to drink beer. Most of all, he hoped they hadn’t seen him.
The garbage truck was gone. Sonny was batting against Jimmy Kabinsky.
“Hey, let’s go!” Michael shouted. “Frankie McCarthy’s out of jail. He’s coming up Ellison Avenue.”
“Oh, shit,” Sonny said.
He pocketed the ball and held the bat like a club as they trotted together toward MacArthur Avenue, away from Ellison, away from Frankie. Only two blocks away to the right, on the corner of Kelly Street, was the synagogue. We’d be safe there, Michael thought. But how could he bring Jimmy to a place where he believed Jews mixed human blood into the goddamned matzohs? That would be what Rabbi Hirsch called meshugge.
So they ran another long block to the park, leaping onto the slats of the benches, then scaling the stone wall and dropping four feet to the ground. They were all silent, breathing hard as they moved through the debris of the winter: fallen tree limbs, pine cones, beer containers, overturned trash baskets, a lone shoe. They kept moving until they reached a stone transverse bridge, with a few cars moving over it, and found shelter in the darkness under the wide arch. They were now all breathing hard.
“He musta made bail,” Sonny said. “The Falcons musta chipped in to get the two hundred and fifty bucks.”
“You know he’s gonna come after us,” Michael said.
“Probably,” Sonny said. “He’s gotta blame somebody. He’s up on a felony. Maybe worse, if Mister G never comes out of the coma. That could be murder, for chrissakes. And he probably figures we’re the only witnesses, that we could put him in the can for years.” He shivered in the stony darkness. “We tell him about Jimmy’s uncle, he won’t believe us. Nobody’s that fucking stupid.” He glanced at Jimmy, sucked in deep breaths. “But you know, if he gets caught pullin’ any shit while he’s out on bail, they’ll really hang his ass. So you ask me, he won’t do nothin’ direct, know what I mean?”
“In other words,” Jimmy said, “the Falcons could get us, even though Frankie’s not with them in person?”
“Exactly,” Sonny said. “Frankie throws up his fucking hands when the cops come knocking at his door, and says, hey, I was home listening to the fuckin’ radio and I got witnesses to prove it.”
“Meanwhile, we take a good beating,” Jimmy said.
“If we’re lucky,” Sonny said, “it’s only a fucking beating.”
A dozen cars roared across the stone bridge above them and then were gone.
“What the hell are we gonna do, Sonny?” Michael said.