Four
Farrell, Pennsylvania
1948
15
Michael Florek woke up around nine-thirty, looked across the room. The bed where his sister slept remained made up, untouched from the night before. It had been that way for several days. For the past year or so, it had not been unusual for Lola to stay away from home overnight, especially on weekends. Michael’s mother knew what she was up to; so did Michael, and so did plenty of the folks around Farrell and in parts of Sharon. It was no secret to anyone anymore, and in time even the sting of embarrassment began to fade. But if Lola would be away for more than a day or so, she’d always call, leave word with one of the kids. No one had heard from Lola in the last five days.
Mike Florek sat up, stared at the unmade bed. There had been a blue and black afghan blanket on the bed for the past three years, but now the blanket was gone. He used to sleep with Lola in that bed when he was a kid. He would have liked his own, but there were four kids and both his mom and dad back then, two-and-a-half bedrooms for the six of them. At around twelve years of age Mike began to wake up in the middle of the night with a hard-on, pressed as he was against his sister’s back. He knew then that a change in the sleeping arrangements was well overdue. His old man died of a cancer in the chest at around the same time, died young like plenty of the guys who worked at the mill, so the two younger kids moved into his mother’s room and Mike got his own bed. Mike and Lola had shared the same room since.
Mike went out to the living room, saw his mother putting what was left of a chicken into a boiling pot. She could stretch a chicken out all week. The apartment was quiet, what with his kid sister gone for the day, at the high school getting things decorated for the game, and with Louis, his younger brother, into the Army now and gone three months. Lola might have made a little noise if she had been around. That Lola could laugh and she could talk, and she could make a little noise.
“Mornin’, Ma.”
“Michael.” His mother winced, turning up an arthritic elbow as she pushed the chicken down into the pot. Her hair had fallen down in clumps about her plump face.
“I’m just gonna clean up, Ma.”
“You slept plenty late. I’m going to need you to go down to the butcher this morning.”
“I won’t be but a little bit.”
He went into the bathroom, stripped off his pajama top. In the mirror he tried to flex an arm, got barely a ripple. He looked at his bird-cage chest, the scary-sharp blades of his shoulders. Almost six feet, but he barely weighed a hundred and fifty pounds. Twenty years old, and still he hadn’t put on any weight.
Mike washed his face, squeezed some Ipana out onto a brush and cleaned his teeth. He shook some West Point tonic into his palms, rubbed them together, and ran his fingers through his hair. He gave his hair a center part and combed the sides out and back. Then he returned to the bedroom, dressed in trousers and a sweater, and put his mackinaw jacket over that. It was November and already plenty cold.
“I’m leavin’, Ma,” he said as he walked past the kitchen.
“Here.” She crossed the room and pressed a couple of soggy bills into his hand. “Pick up some of that special sausage they got down at the Colonial, okay? We’ll have a good supper tomorrow, for Sunday.”
Florek looked at his mother’s face. The teeth in her mouth were near rotten and so spaced out that her tongue made sloppy sounds against them when she talked. And her eyes, once fierce in their blueness, were faded now and drooped at the corners. He could see that she had been crying, too.
“All right. Ma. I’ll be back in a little while.”
He left the apartment and went down the stairs to the street. They lived above a bakery off Broadway in downtown Farrell, had lived there as long as Florek’s memories stretched back. That part of Farrell, where all the ethnics lived, straddled the line with the downtown section of Sharon. Italians, Poles, Slavs, Germans, Hungarians, Bulgarian-Macedonians, Greeks — if they had an accent, they lived downtown. Some of them had businesses, and most of them worked in the mills. They all had their own associations, as well — the German Club, the Greek Club, like that. The Protestants and the Presbyterians — his father used to call them “the White People,” with that thick Polish way of his — all lived up around Highland Avenue, on the high ground, where those who had money and power always seemed to settle in any town Florek had ever seen. The White People also worked in the mills, but in clerical and management positions. They didn’t smell like Florek’s father used to smell when he came home from his shift. They lived longer lives.
From the street, Florek could see the stacks of Sharon Steel down along the Shenango River, loosing steady blankets of charcoal-gray smoke into the air. At night, the molten sparks from the smokestacks lit up the sky. The mills had killed his father, he was sure of that. But he found a kind of beauty in the fiery orange line stretched out every night across the evening sky.
He walked over to Broadway, passing churches and taverns. Florek had seen a “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” in the funny pages once which said that Farrell had more churches and pool halls, per capita, than any other town in the USA. They might have added basketball hoops to the list; hoops were nailed up on telephone poles all over town. Maybe that’s why Shenango Valley teams were among the very best in the country. Some of the old-timers complained about all the hoops, but Mike Florek wouldn’t have taken down one of them. He liked everything in Farrell just the way it was, the way it had always been. He knew he’d never leave his town.
Florek saw Anthony “Snake” DeLuca walking toward him on Broadway. DeLuca was a senior at Farrell High who ran with a bunch of hep guys. The rumor was that DeLuca and his boys were jazzing some of the student teachers who had come from Westminster College in Wilmington, PA, to instruct at the high school. Florek didn’t doubt it; New Wilmington was a dry town, and DeLuca had probably introduced the girls to Farrell’s bottle clubs. You put a little liquor into a nice Protestant girl and... well, Florek didn’t actually know. He didn’t know much of anything when it came to girls. He had heard, that’s all.
“Hey, Mikey.”
“Hey, Snake, how you doin’?”
“On my way to work.” DeLuca ushered at the Capitol, the town’s A-house. His brother Nunzio worked at the Colonial, which played B-movies and oddball pictures. Florek had seen all the movies by a guy named Preston Sturges at the Colonial. That Sturges character, he shot pictures that really made Florek double over, laugh down deep in his belly.
“Got a matinee today?”
“Sure.” DeLuca smiled. “How’s your sister Lola?”
Florek didn’t like the smile, or the look in Snake’s eyes. He kept his mouth shut about it, though. Snake DeLuca might have been a high school kid, but he had it on Florek by thirty pounds, and the extra weight was strictly muscle. On DeLuca’s weakest day, he could take Florek down.
“I gotta get on.”
“Take it easy, Mikey.”
Florek walked on. He passed a workingman’s hotel that housed single guys and immigrants without families, mill workers all of them. He passed Bessie Barnes’s whorehouse at 518 Broadway, where as a kid he had once stolen a peek at the girls lounging around in silk dresses and feathered, fancy hats. Lola wouldn’t have had anything to do with a setup like that. With Lola it was something else.