“You’d be surprised how much prejudice there is in this city,” Naomi said.
“You Jewish?” Colley asked.
“How’d you guess? With a name like Bernstein, what’d you think I was?”
“I thought you were maybe an Arab.”
“You mean this?” she said, indicating the robe. “My aunt sent it to me from Israel.”
“It looks like what the Arabs wear.”
“There are very close cultural ties between Jews and Arabs, believe it or not.”
“I believe it.”
“You want a drink, yes or no?” Benny said.
“You talking to me?” Colley said.
“No, I’m talking to the wall.”
“I’ll have another gin and tonic,” Naomi said.
“How about you, Colley?”
“No, nothing,” Colley said.
“That’s a nice sweater,” Naomi said. “Very chic, those holes in the elbow. You’re a very snappy dresser, Colley.”
“Lay off,” he said.
“Then don’t give me any crap about what I’m wearing, okay?” she said.
“Hey, watch your mouth,” Benny warned. “Maybe you didn’t understand this is a friend of mine.”
“I thought I was a friend of yours, too,” Naomi said.
“Not like Colley. You got that?”
She glared at him sullenly.
“You got that?” Benny said again.
“I got it,” she said.
“Then here’s your drink,” he said, and put the gin and tonic down in front of her.
“Thanks,” she said.
“Take it in the bedroom,” Benny said. “I want to talk to Colley.”
She looked at him.
“Do what I tell you,” Benny said.
“I think I’ll go home instead,” she said.
“You go down the street this time of night, you’ll get raped,” Benny said. “You want some boogie to jump out a doorway and rape you? Get in the bedroom there. You trying to embarrass me in front of my friend?”
“No, but...”
“Then get in there,” Benny said. “And take off that thing your aunt sent you. You look like a goddamn Arab, Colley’s right.”
The girl hesitated.
“Go on,” Benny said.
Her lip was trembling.
“Go on.”
She sighed heavily, and then left the room. Colley could hear her sandals slapping on the floor as she walked through the apartment. He heard a door open and then close.
“What’s the matter?” Benny said immediately.
“There’s cops in front of my mother’s building, some nigger stabbed a guy in the pizzeria. I don’t want to go up there just yet.”
“What else, Colley?”
Colley hesitated.
“Come on, this is me,” Benny said impatiently.
“I shot a man,” he said. “Benny, I killed a cop.”
Benny nodded.
“It was on television,” Colley said.
Benny nodded again. “I seen it. A liquor store?”
“Yeah.”
“I seen it,” Benny said again. “That was you, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“They looking for you yet?”
“I don’t think so. I think it’s too soon.”
“Who saw you? Did anybody see you?”
“The guy behind the counter.”
Benny nodded. “Maybe he won’t finger you. Sometimes they’re scared. Especially a cop dead, you know?”
“That’s what I figure.”
“He might think you’ll come back for him he opens his mouth.”
“That’s just what I figure.”
“You want to stay here tonight?”
“I don’t know what I want to do,” Colley said. “I think I’ll go over my mother’s. Once the cops leave, I think I’ll go over there. They can’t be too much longer, huh? It’s only some nigger stabbed a guy.”
“They’ll just throw him in the car, is all,” Benny said, and shrugged. “Look, you can stay here if you want. Don’t let her bother you,” he said, and gestured with his head toward the rear of the apartment. “She’s mad at herself cause I got her shooting dope. I picked her up in Poe Park, this was last Friday night, she’s coming on like a big hippie, you know, smoking pot like it’s going out of style. I get her down here, I tell her listen, baby, you want something’ll really blow the top of your skull, try some of this. She says what’s that? I tell her it’s scag. She says what’s scag? And then she tips it’s dope, it’s heroin. No, thank you, she says. Thanks a lot, but no, thanks. That was last Friday. Sunday, she shot up for the first time. I got home from church, I went to eleven o’clock mass, you know me, Colley, I like to sleep late...”
“Yeah,” Colley said.
“I got back to the house, it must’ve been a little after twelve, she asked me was there any pot left? I tell her we’re all out of pot, why don’t she try some of the real stuff? She shrugs and says why not? She’s been shooting a nickel bag a day ever since. She’s half hooked already. Few more days, I’ll have her on the street peddling her ass. How you like that?” he said, and laughed.
Colley laughed too.
“Listen, you sure you don’t want to spend the night?” Benny said.
“No, I got to get going,” Colley said, and stood up.
“Paisan,” Benny said, and beamed like a pope again, his arms wide, his head tilted, his palms open in benediction.
The police cars were gone.
Colley went up the street and looked in the pizzeria, see if there were any guys there he knew. There was only a black guy sitting in one of the booths near the juke box, girl with him had an Afro looked like the bride of Frankenstein in blackface. Colley’d seen that picture on television, couldn’t tell whether it was supposed to be a put-on or not. He guessed not. He guessed it was just such an old movie that it seemed funny, even when it was supposed to be scary. He nodded to the bartender, and the bartender nodded back, but Colley figured the guy didn’t know him from a hole in the wall. He went outside into the hot August night again. Two black girls were standing in the doorway to his mother’s building.
“Well, well,” one of them said.
The other one pursed her lips and made a kissing sound.
Colley went right by them. Hookers in his mother’s building, great. His brother Al kept saying it would be traumatic to move their mother out of the building. His brother Al was thirty-five years old. He was a Buick dealer in Larchmont; Albert L. Donato, it said on his brother’s showroom window. The L stood for Lawrence, but Al never told anybody what his middle name was. Lawrence sounded faggoty to Al. Al had gone to college for two years, planning to become an accountant; he’d changed his mind when the opportunity to buy into the Buick dealership came along. An uncle in New Jersey had put up the money for the dealership. Uncle Nunzio. Dear old Uncle Nunzio. When Colley got busted the first time — this was when they had the club, and he shot Macho Albareda in the throat — Uncle Nunzio wouldn’t go the bail for him. Set Al up in an automobile agency at the age of twenty-one but wouldn’t go the five-hundred bail for his other nephew. Nice man, Uncle Nunzio. They finally had to ask Al for it, which Colley’s mother hadn’t wanted to do, which was why they’d gone to Uncle Nunzio in the first place. Al was always using words like “traumatic” or “personality disorder” or “acting-out neurotic.” He especially used “personality disorder” when he was talking to Colley man-to-man.
“Nick,” he would say — he was the only person on earth who called him Nick — “I want to talk serious to you. I understand, Nick, from what Mama tells me, that you didn’t learn too much while you were in jail.”
“I learned a lot while I was in jail, Al.”