His face was an hourly reminder of the power of the Falcons. He wondered what Mary Cunningham would think if she could see his face now. After all, his new suit would do nothing for his face. Any more than a new suit could change Jackie Robinson’s face.
And then he thought: My face, or most of it, is now as dark as Robinson’s face. He got up and hauled his cast into the bathroom again and stared at the mirror. They made me into Jackie Robinson, he thought. They did to me what a lot of people want to do to him. They made me into him. Into Jackie Robinson. My blackened face is like Robinson’s. I’m as helpless as he is. He can’t fight back, because he promised Branch Rickey he wouldn’t. Not yet. Not now. He can fight back with his bat, with his glove, with his speed. But not with his fists. Neither can I. Not now. Not yet.
Then, thinking about Robinson, he felt another wave of loneliness and isolation. He wanted to be home. If he was going to be alone, if his friends had truly abandoned him, he wanted to be alone in his own room. Not here in this hospital, with its strange odors of ether and medicine, and stranger faces. Home. Where he would read every book he could get his hands on. Where he’d study harder than he ever had in his life. Yeah. And get the highest grades in the class. Yeah, yeah. The way Robinson fought with his bat and his glove and his speed. Wasn’t a batting average really a kind of grade? You get an answer right in a test, that’s like a hit. You get a lot of answers right, you get a higher grade, a higher average.
He could do that. And keep doing it. Get a high school diploma. Nobody around here ever finishes high school. They go to work in the factory. They shape up on the docks. They become ironworkers or cops or firemen. I’ll get a diploma, Michael thought, then get the hell out of the parish. Go away to the army or the navy or — shit, maybe even college. Why not? The college boys in the movies all looked like shmucks. They wore short-sleeved sweaters with letters on the chest and said things like boola-boola and got drunk at football games. Michael thought: I could do better than those guys. I could get out of here and go to college. Ride the white horse over the factory roof. Live in Manhattan in a penthouse like the guy singing that song. Just picture a penthouse, way up in the sky, with hinges on chimneys, for clouds to go by. Yeah: a house with hinges on chimneys. And I’d go to work in an office where my hands never got dirty and have a closet full of suits and shirts and ties and shoes. More than any gangster, and I wouldn’t have to break the law. Yeah: get out. Go.
Then Sonny and Jimmy would be sorry they walked away from him. He’d be a big shot. In his penthouse. Reading at breakfast about Frankie McCarthy going to the hot seat in Sing Sing. Reading about Tippy Hudnut shot down in a cheap holdup in Coney Island. Reading about Skids and the Russian being sent up for life, and Ferret’s body washing up on the beach with two holes in the head. He’d run into Sonny and Jimmy someday on Park Avenue, as he walked out of his building, a building fifty stories high. There they’d be, throwing garbage cans into a goddamned truck, and they’d say, Jeez, Michael, we’re sorry we were such shmucks back in the parish that time you got beat up, and Michael would raise an eyebrow, like Joseph Cotten did in the movies, and say, Pardon me, but what’s your name?
Yeah.
Maybe he couldn’t shout Shazam and turn into the world’s mightiest mortal. But he could wait in silence, like the Count of Monte Cristo, and build himself up. First, get smart, just like Edmond Dantès did, studying his books in the dungeons of the Chateau d’If. That wasn’t all. He’d lift weights and learn how to box and he’d handle the Falcons himself, one at a time. Maybe not this year. Maybe not next year. He’d hold it all in, for now, the way Jackie Robinson did, and then when he was ready, he would explode. They wouldn’t even remember him anymore, but he would find the guys who had hurt him and he would hurt them back. All by himself. Got shtroft, der mentsh iz zikh noykem. God will punish them, but I’ll have my revenge.
And then get out. Take my mother. Get her a house with her own yard. And steam heat. Far away. Out.
After the sixth day, the nurses gave him crutches and let him walk around the third floor, in a pale green bathrobe. The crutch made it easier to swing the cast behind him. In one room, he saw a man who’d been shot. He saw another man who’d had a heart attack on the F train. In one of the rooms, an ironworker was in a cast from neck to toe after falling off a building, and his friends laughed and whooped and held beer bottles to his lips. They had written their names all over his cast. Michael would look out the window at Ellison Avenue and wish that his friends would come and laugh and whoop. He wished someone would write on his cast. Anyone.
Then, at last, it was time to go home. His mother arrived around nine o’clock with warm clothes and some old trousers with the leg slit so he could push the cast through it. She led him out through the lobby, carrying his newspaper clippings and comic books in a shopping bag, and they took the Ellison Avenue trolley car home. Boarding the trolley, he felt awkward with the crutch, clumsy and defenseless, as he passed it up to his mother and then took her hand to pull himself up two steps. Actions that once were easy were now difficult; he wondered how many times he’d jumped up those stairs without thinking about them for a second. The driver nodded as they boarded, then paused as Michael and Kate moved to the rear and started the trolley after they took seats in the row facing the back door. There were only a few people in the trolley. Michael stared out the window, afraid of seeing Tippy Hudnut and Skids, Ferret or the Russian. He didn’t want to see them, and he didn’t want them to see him. He just wanted to go to his room. And close the door. And get in bed. And read about the Dodgers. His mother glanced at him.
“You’re thinking about these thugs, aren’t you?” she said.
“No. Yeah. Sort of.”
“Don’t.”
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“They’ve been arrested.”
He glanced around, afraid someone might hear them, even in the almost empty car.
“You didn’t give up their names, did you?” he whispered.
“There were plenty of witnesses,” she said. “It was a warm night, people were out. Lots of people—”
“Mom, they’ll come after you. They’ll give you the mark of the squealer. They’ll—”
“Stop it, Michael!”
He felt as if he would fall. He’d made her cross, with his fear and his childishness. But she held his hand as the trolley approached their stop, and he took a deep breath and felt safer. Then she was pulling the cord, and standing, and taking his elbow, helping him to the door. The trolley stopped. The door opened. She went out first and then helped him down the steps. The trolley pulled away, steel wheels squealing on steel tracks, and she gave him the crutches. Then she looked warily around the avenue; so did Michael. There were familiar faces doing the usual things. Teddy polishing apples outside the fruit store. Mrs. Slowacki arranging newspapers on the stand. Peggy McGinty wheeling a baby carriage in a distracted way. But he saw none of the Falcons.