In the rising summer heat, he wondered how his life would have been if it hadn’t snowed so hard that day in December and he hadn’t gone shoveling and if Unbeatable Joe hadn’t paid them a dollar. He wondered how it would have been if they had gone to Slowacki’s candy store that day instead of to Mister G’s. Or if they had started an hour earlier or an hour later. They never would have been in Mister G’s when Frankie McCarthy walked in and Mister G wouldn’t have stuck up for Sonny, and Michael wouldn’t have seen all the violence that came after that. Sonny and Jimmy wouldn’t have run out. The cops would never have come to ask him questions. Nobody would have thought he was a rat. It would have been a different summer. Mister G would still be selling newspapers, cigarettes, and candy. Michael wouldn’t have a broken leg. He’d still have his friends, and he’d be playing ball across the endless afternoons or traveling with them to the beaches of Coney Island. Ten minutes on a snowy winter afternoon had changed his life. It was so goddamned unfair.
Then one night, he was walking home from the Grandview with his mother, discussing a movie called Boomerang. A vagrant had been accused of murdering a priest in some town in Connecticut. The cops thought the vagrant was guilty and the newspapers wanted to put him in the electric chair. But a lawyer played by Dana Andrews proved that the man was innocent. What was different was that Dana Andrews didn’t find out who really killed the priest. He’d never before seen that kind of ending in a movie.
“Life is like that sometimes,” Kate Devlin said. “You think you know, and you really don’t.”
“But this is a true story.”
“That’s what they say. It’s still a movie, son.”
Then they turned into Ellison Avenue to walk the final three blocks home. And Michael stopped moving, tightly gripping the handles of the crutches. Walking straight at them were five of the Falcons, including Tippy Hudnut, Skids, and the Russian. They were talking loudly, shouting at two girls on the far side of the avenue.
“Come on,” Kate Devlin said, placing a hand in the small of Michael’s back. She knew they could not turn and run. Not with Michael on crutches. So she walked straight at them. Defiantly. And then the Falcons saw them. Tippy, thin and long-haired, with tattooed arms, smiled and widened his arms in a gesture commanding the others to wait. They spread themselves across the sidewalk. Kate moved to the space between Tippy and the bulkier, blond-haired one they called the Russian.
Tippy stepped to the side, blocking her way.
“Well, looka who’s here,” Tippy said. Michael could smell the beer on his breath.
“Excuse me,” Kate said.
“Nah, I ain’t gonna excuse you, lady.”
She glanced around, but the street was empty now. She stepped to her right, and Tippy moved again.
“The fuckin’ troublemakers,” the Russian said, his yellow teeth showing as he grinned.
“I want no trouble with you, young man,” Kate said.
“She don’t want no trouble,” the Russian said, and the others laughed.
“But you’ll have plenty of trouble,” Kate said, “if you don’t let us go home.”
“Oh, wow: a threat,” Tippy said. The word sounded to Michael like tret. Tippy’s eyes were glittery, his nostrils flaring. “Are you scared, fellas?”
“Oh, yeah, I’m scared,” said Skids, who was the shortest, with thick muscles bulging from his T-shirt and black eyebrows that met above his nose. “I think I’m gonna shit my pants.”
“A broad and a gimp,” Tippy said. “Very, very scary.”
“The broad ain’t bad-looking but,” said the Russian.
“Great tits,” said Skids.
Kate slapped him. And then Skids grabbed her blouse and tore it down. She started to cover herself and then Michael piled in, swinging his crutch, saying, You bastards, you bastards, you fucking bastards. Skids shoved Kate backward and then jerked one of Michael’s crutches from his hands and swung it, hitting him in the back of the neck, and then the other crutch was gone, and he was toppled over on his side and one of the Falcons kicked him. Shouting, Stool pigeon, rat-fuckin’ stool pigeon… He saw his crutches placed across the curb and the Russian stomping them into pieces. He started to get up and saw Tippy shoving his hand under his mother’s skirt, while Skids held her from behind, squeezing her breasts. She was screaming now: You pigs, you dirty pigs, you cowardly pigs.
And then a window rolled up from one of the apartments, and another, and voices were shouting, Hey, you bums, stop that you bums, and then one of the Falcons said, Awright, let’s get da fuck outta here. And they were gone.
Michael pulled himself up by holding a lamppost. His neck ached. His side was burning. He turned to his mother. Her face was a ghastly mask of anger and humiliation. She pulled her blouse together with one hand and hugged Michael with the other.
“Hey, lady, you all right?” someone shouted from the upstairs apartments.
“We’ve got to go,” Kate whispered to her son. “We’ve got to get away from here. We’ve got to leave.”
31
She didn’t speak again that night, nor did she speak in the morning. He asked her a few questions: Did she feel all right? Did she want to see a doctor? She shook her head yes, then no. At breakfast, Michael made the tea. Then he went downstairs to Teddy’s grocery store, swinging with one hand on the wall and one on the banister, and bought her some pound cake. Her favorite. She poked at it with a fork. He told her he was going to the cellar to look at the hot-water furnace. But he took a stickball bat from the back of the hall, to use as a cane, and kept going out the front door, heading for Kelly Street.
The parish was just waking up. There were shreds of morning fog. He took the long way along MacArthur Avenue, slowed by the cane, driven by the need to summon Rabbi Hirsch, to have him talk to his mother. Father Heaney was gone. He didn’t want neighbors to know what had happened because his mother might be ashamed. He couldn’t call the cops. He needed Rabbi Hirsch. His soft voice. His humor. His wisdom. Finally, he turned into Kelly Street.
And stopped in front of the door as if he had been smacked.
Someone had carved a swastika into the wood. The gouged edges were rough, as if they’d used a can opener. He banged on the door, called Rabbi Hirsch’s name, used the bat to bang harder.
And then he saw him.
Lying in the gutter between two parked cars. Like that poor wino who died during the blizzard. Up at the end of the street, across from the armory, the corner where nobody lived.
“Rabbi Hirsch!” Michael hobbled quickly to his side.
But the rabbi could say nothing. His face was crusted with drying blood. There was a gash over his right eye. His jaw hung slack and loose. His lower teeth had been snapped off at the gums. There was a huge swelling on the left side of his head, and blood seeped from his left ear, puddling on the asphalt.
Michael raised his bat and began screaming at the sky.
Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.
Then the world was red as rage, and he smashed with the bat at the trunk of one car and the windows of the other, he swung at the air, he struck at the ground, he cursed and bared his teeth, and hammered again at the cars, while Rabbi Hirsch lay there, and people were shouting from windows, away down the block, and he wailed again at the sky, wolf howl, banshee wail.
Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.
The ambulance came and a police car and a crowd of kids and women and the owners of the two ruined cars. An orderly said, He’s alive. But as they lifted Rabbi Hirsch on a stretcher into the ambulance, Michael heard one cop asking him whether he’d done this to the rabbi, and someone was shouting, Lookit my cah! Who the fuck’s gonna pay for my cah? And the other cop was saying, Your insurance company pays, pal, and the man said, I don’t got any fuckin’ insurance! And then Mr. Gallagher was there, on his way to work, and he said to the cop, This kid couldn’t do this, this kid was with us when we cleaned off the last swastikas, this is a good kid, and look, he’s got a cast on his leg, for Christ’s sake, and there’s no blood on the goddamned bat.