LaPointe leans against the railing of a deserted stoop, holding on tightly as the tingle rises in his chest It is a familiar feeling by now, an oddly pleasant sensation in the middle of his chest and upper arms, as though there were carbonated water in his veins. Sometimes pain follows the tingling. His blood fizzes in his chest; he looks up at the light-smeared sky and breathes slowly, expecting to find a little flash of pain at the end of each breath, and relieved not to.
Little kids a few stoops away are playing rond-rond, and at the end of each minor-key chant they all fall giggling to the sidewalk. The English-speaking kids play the same game with different words—about a ring of roses. All the children of Europe preserve in their atavistic memory the scar of the Black Death. They reel to simulate the dizziness; they make sounds like the symptomatic sneezing; they sing of bouquets of posies to ward off the miasma of the Plague. Then, giggling, they all fall down.
When LaPointe was a kid in Trois Rivières, he used to play in the streets at night, too. In summer, all the grownups would sit out on the stoops because it was stifling indoors. The men wore only undershirts and drank ale from the bottle. And old lady Tarbieau… LaPointe remembers old lady Tarbieau, who lived across the street and who used to tend everybody’s onions. She always pretended to care about people’s problems in order to find out what they were. LaPointe’s mother didn’t like old lady Tarbieau. The only off-color thing he ever heard his mother say was in response to Mme. Tarbieau’s nosiness. One night when all the block was out on the stoops, old lady Tarbieau called across the street, “Mme. LaPointe? Didn’t I see the rent man coming out of your house today? It’s only the middle of the month. I always thought you paid your rent the same way I do.” And LaPointe’s mother answered, “No, Mme. Tarbieau. I don’t pay my rent the same way you do. I pay in money.”
Poor Mme. Tarbieau, already aged when LaPointe was a boy. He hasn’t thought of her for years. He pictures the old busybody in his mind, and realizes that this is probably the first time anybody has remembered her for a quarter of a century. And probably this will be the last time any human memory will hold her. In that case, she is gone… really gone.
The tingle in his arms and chest has passed, so he pushes his fists further into his pockets and walks on toward the liquor store, in and out of the cones of streetlight, where kids dart from stoop to stoop, like starlings on a summer evening.
One summer, the summer after his father left home never to come back, LaPointe discovered that playing with the other kids around the stoops had become dull and pointless. In the long evenings, he used to walk alone on the street, looking up at the moon through newly hung electric wires. The moon would follow him, sliding along over the weaving wires. He would turn quickly and go up the street, and the moon followed. He would stop suddenly, then go again, but the moon was never tricked. Once, when he had been running, then stopping, running and stopping, all the time looking up and getting a little dizzy, he was startled to find himself standing only inches from the Crazy Woman who lived down the block. She grinned, then laughed a wheezing note. She pointed a finger at him and said he was a fou, like her, and they would sizzle in hell side by side.
He ran away. But for the rest of the week he had nightmares. He was terrified at the thought of going crazy. Maybe he was already crazy. How do you know if you’re crazy? If you’re crazy, you’re too crazy to know you’re crazy. What does “crazy” mean? Say the word again and again, and the sense dries out, leaving only a husk of sound. And you hear yourself saying a meaningless noise over and over again.
That was the last summer he played on the streets. The following winter his mother died of influenza. Grandpapa and Grandmama were already dead. He went to St. Joseph’s Home. And from the Home, he went into the police.
LaPointe squeezes his eyes closed and pulls himself out of it. He has found himself daydreaming like this a lot of late, remembering old lost things, unimportant things triggered by some little sound or sight on the Main.
He smiles at himself. Now, that is crazy.
The middle-aged Greek counterman looks up and smiles as LaPointe enters the deserted liquor store. He has been expecting the Lieutenant, and he reaches up for the bottle of red LaPointe always brings along to his twice-weekly games of pinochle.
“Everything going well?” LaPointe asks as he pays for the wine.
The counterman gulps air and growls, “Oh, fine, Lieutenant.” He gulps again. “Theo wrote. Got the letter—” Another gulp. “—this morning.”
“How’s he doing?”
“Fine. He’s up for parole soon.”
It was too bad that LaPointe had to put the son inside for theft so shortly after the father had an operation for throat cancer. But that’s the way it goes; that is his job. “That’s good,” he says. “I’m glad he’s getting parole.”
The counterman nods. For him, as for others in the quarter, LaPointe is the law; the good and the bad of it. He will never forget the evening seven years ago when the Lieutenant walked in to buy his usual Thursday night bottle of wine. A young man with slick hair had been loitering in the store, carefully looking over the labels of exotic aperitifs and liqueurs. LaPointe paid for his wine and, in the same movement of putting his change into his pocket, he drew out his gun.
“Put your hands on top of your head,” LaPointe said quietly to the young man.
The boy’s eyes darted toward the door, but LaPointe shook his head slowly. “Never,” he said.
The young man put his hands on top of his head, and LaPointe snatched him by his collar and bent him over the counter. Two swift movements under the boy’s jacket, and LaPointe came up with a cheap automatic. While they waited for the arrival of a police car, the boy sat on the floor in a corner, cowed and foolish, his hands still on top of his head. Customers came and went. They glanced uneasily toward the boy and LaPointe, and they carefully avoided coming near them, but not one question was asked, not one comment made. They ordered their wine in subdued voices, then they left.
There had been several hold-ups in the neighborhood that winter, and the old man who ran the cleaners down the street had been shot in the stomach.
It never occurred to anyone to wonder how LaPointe knew the boy was pumping up his courage for a hold-up. He was the law on the Main, and he knew everything. Actually, LaPointe had known nothing until the moment he stepped into the shop and passed by the boy. It was the tense nonchalance he instantly recognized. The Indian blood in LaPointe smelled fear.
The Greek counterman is comforted to know that LaPointe is always out there in the street somewhere. And yet… this is the same man who arrested his son Theo for auto theft and sent him to prison for three years. The good of the law, and the bad. But it could have been worse. LaPointe had put in a good word for Theo.
The Lieutenant continues north on the Main, the bottle of wine, twisted up in a brown paper bag, heavy in his overcoat pocket. He passes a closed shop and automatically checks the padlock on the accordion steel grid covering its window. Once a beat cop…
But LaPointe had better get moving along. He doesn’t want to be late for his pinochle game.
2
“…so all the wise men and pilpulniks of Chelm get together to decide which is more important to their village, the sun or the moon. Finally they decide in favor of the moon. And why? Because the moon gives light during the night when, without it, they might fall into ditches and hurt themselves. While the sun, on the other hand, shines only during the day, when already it is light out. So who needs it!” David Mogolevski snorts with laughter at his own story, his thick body quaking, his growling basso filling the cramped little room behind the upholstery shop. His eyes sparkle as he looks from face to face, nodding and saying, “Eh? Eh?” soliciting appreciation.