“Excuse me, James Lamar,” I say. “Anybody ever call you Dusty?”
The smile is big as Willie Mays’s glove making the basket catch. “For shure. For shure. And how’d you know dat?”
“Ladies and gentlemen,” I say like Walter Alston calling Clem Labine in from the bullpen, “we got our deus ex machina.”
James Lamar — Dusty! — plunks the tray down and makes a move for the mustard jar.
I’m on my feet, pull out the ole Smith and Wesson for which I plunked down 250 smackeroos for the permit just last year without any thought of ever using it again. “Not so fast, Dusty,” I say. “And if you don’t mind, would you be so kind as to pull the visor of that cap around?”
Sylvia is still not convinced. “What’s that got to do with anything? What is going on here? And that Day Ox you was talking about…”
“Deus ex machina,” I.F. corrects her. “God from the machine. Introduced at the last minute often by a crane in ancient Greek and Roman drama to resolve an insoluble dilemma.”
“On the button,” I say to I.F. “And if you will be so kind as to take a gander at Dusty’s cap, you can appreciate the motive for murder.”
“I don’t see nothing,” Sylvia says, “only a crummy old baseball cap with an SF logo.”
“The logo of the San Francisco, formerly New York, Giants,” says I.F. as the light is beginning to dawn. “We have here a former New York Giants fan who has never forgiven the Dodgers.”
“You got it right, kid,” Dusty snarls. “And I’m up to my keester with all this Dodger talk, all them pictures and not one shot of Master Melvin Ott, King Carl Hubbell, Sal Maglie, the Greatest Willie Mays…”
Before he can run down all the rosters from ’35 through ’57, I throw him the spitter: “And we might add James Lamar ‘Dusty’ Rhodes, who come from nowhere to run off with the 1954 World Series.”
“You better believe it,” Dusty says. “.667, two home runs, seben, I said seben runs batted in and dat was a four-game series. So where is Dusty on dis wall? Do I hear a woid, one stinkin’ woid from any of them wiseguys pitchin’ cards, talkin’ Dodgers, Dodgers, Dodgers. Dem Bums. And youse. Youse got the noive to talk Deus? Deus Latin prayers in this joint?”
Dusty goes quietly after that.
We spring Scoop the next afternoon. Sylvia wants to celebrate with a steak at Gage and Tollner’s. She’s had enough of the deli business — “Bad memories” — and declares this her farewell party.
I.F. invites us to join him for a stroll through the Brooklyn Museum. “I’d like to take a look at Bierstadt’s Storm in the Rockies, Mt. Rosalie. A guy I met on the plane, flying in from L.A. last week, told me he’s a friend of Robert Levinson who was the chairman of the board and could recommend me for a job there. Then we can amble over to the lobby of the former Paramount Theater. It’s the Eugene & Beverly Luntey Commons of the Brooklyn Center, L.I.U. now. We could sit and read poems by Robert Donald Spector and maybe be lucky enough to run into JoAnn Allen or Mike Bush, all stars of their faculty.”
Scoop breaks into a chorus of “Thanks for the Memories” and Sylvia takes his hand like two kids on their way to the boardwalk at Coney Island.
Out of the blue, I.F. says to me, “Harold Patrick Reiser, 1941 through 1948, a Dodgers’ Dodger until he ran into a fence.” Then he gently nudges my holster. “It’s been a pleasure doing business with you, Pistol Pete.”
When all this was Bay Ridge
by Tim McLoughlin
Sunset Park
Standing in church at my father’s funeral, I thought about being arrested on the night of my seventeenth birthday. It had occurred in the trainyard at Avenue X, in Coney Island. Me and Pancho and a kid named Freddie were working a three-car piece, the most ambitious I’d tried to that point, and more time-consuming than was judicious to spend trespassing on city property. Two Transit cops with German shepherds caught us in the middle of the second car. I dropped my aerosol can and took off, and was perhaps two hundred feet along the beginning of the trench that becomes the IRT line to the Bronx, when I saw the hand. It was human, adult, and severed neatly, seemingly surgically, at the wrist. My first thought was that it looked bare without a watch. Then I made a whooping sound, trying to take in air, and turned and ran back toward the cops and their dogs.
At the 60th Precinct, we three were ushered into a small cell. We sat for several hours, then the door opened and I was led out. My father was waiting in the main room, in front of the counter.
The desk sergeant, middle-aged, black, and noticeably bored, looked up briefly. “Him?”
“Him,” my father echoed, sounding defeated.
“Goodnight,” the sergeant said.
My father took my arm and led me out of the precinct. As we cleared the door and stepped into the humid night he turned to me and said, “This was it. Your one free ride. It doesn’t happen again.”
“What did it cost?” I asked. My father had retired from the Police Department years earlier, and I knew this had been expensive.
He shook his head. “This once, that’s all.”
I followed him to his car. “I have two friends in there.”
“Fuck’em. Spics. That’s half your problem.”
“What’s the other half?”
“You have no common sense,” he said, his voice rising in scale as it did in volume. By the time he reached a scream he sounded like a boy going through puberty. “What do you think you’re doing out here? Crawling ’round in the dark with the niggers and the spics. Writing on trains like a hoodlum. Is this all you’ll do?”
“It’s not writing. It’s drawing. Pictures.”
“Same shit, defacing property, behaving like a punk. Where do you suppose it will lead?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it. You had your aimless time, when you got out of the service. You told me so. You bummed around for two years.”
“I always worked.”
“Part-time. Beer money. You were a roofer.”
“Beer money was all I needed.”
“Maybe it’s all I need.”
He shook his head slowly, and squinted, as though peering through the dirty windshield for an answer. “It was different. That was a long time ago. Back when all this was Bay Ridge. You could live like that then.”
When all this was Bay Ridge. He was masterful, my father. He didn’t say when it was white, when it was Irish, even the relatively tame when it was safer. No. When all this was Bay Ridge. As though it were an issue of geography. As though, somehow, the tectonic plate beneath Sunset Park had shifted, moving it physically to some other place.
I told him about seeing the hand.
“Did you tell the officers?”
“No.”
“The people you were with?”
“No.”
“Then don’t worry about it. There’s body parts all over this town. Saw enough in my day to put together a baseball team.” He drove in silence for a few minutes, then nodded his head a couple of times, as though agreeing with a point made by some voice I could not hear. “You’re going to college, you know,” he said.
That was what I remembered at the funeral. Returning from the altar rail after receiving communion, Pancho walked passed me. He’d lost a great deal of weight since I’d last seen him, and I couldn’t tell if he was sick or if it was just the drugs. His black suit hung on him in a way that emphasized his gaunt frame. He winked at me as he came around the casket in front of my pew, and flashed the mischievous smile that — when we were sixteen — got all the girls in his bed and all the guys agreeing to the stupidest and most dangerous tunts.