Motherless Brooklyn Read online

  “Turning!” I shouted. “Get over!” I gripped the door handle as Coney, getting fully into the spirit of things, bent topological probability in moving us across three crowded lanes full of shrieking bald rubber and cringing chrome. Now my tics were quieted—stress was one thing, animal fear another. As when an airplane lands shakily, and all on board concentrate every gram of their will to stabilize the craft, the task of imagining I controlled things I didn’t (in this case wheel, traffic, Coney, gravity, friction, etc.), imagining it with every fiber of my being—that was engagement enough for me at the moment. My Tourette’s was overwhelmed.

  “Thirty-sixth,” said Coney as we rattled down the side street.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “I dunno. Something.”

  “Midtown Tunnel. Queens.”

  There was something comforting about this. The giant and his driver were moving onto our turf, more or less. The boroughs. Not quite Brooklyn, but it would do. We bumped along with the thickening traffic into the two dense lanes of the tunnel, the K-car safe tied up two cars ahead of us, its windows now black and glossy with reflections from the strips of lighting that laced the stained tile artery. I relaxed a bit, quit holding my breath, and squeaked out a teeth-clenched, Joker-grimacing eat me just because I could.

  “Toll,” said Coney.

  “What?”

  “There’s a toll. On the Queens side.”

  I started digging in my pockets. “How much?”

  “Three-fifty, I think.”

  I’d just put it together, miraculously, three bills, a quarter, a dime and three nickels, when the tunnel finished and the two lanes branched out to meet the six or seven toll booths. I balled the fare and held it out to Coney in a fist. “Don’t get stuck behind them,” I said. “Get a fast lane. Cut someone off.”

  “Yeah.” Coney squinted through the windshield, trying to work an angle. As he edged to the right the K-car suddenly cut out of the flow, moving to the far left.

  We both stared for a moment.

  “Whuzzat?” said Coney.

  “E-Z Pass,” I said. “They’ve got an E-Z Pass.”

  The K-car slid into the empty E-Z Pass lane, and right through the booth. Meanwhile Coney had landed us third in line for EXACT CHANGE OR TOKEN.

  “Follow them!” I said.

  “I’m trying,” said Coney, plainly dazed by this turn of events. “Get over to the left!” I said. “Go through!”

  “We don’t got an E-Z Pass.” Coney grinned painfully, displaying his special talent for rapid reversion to a childlike state.

  “I don’t care!”

  “But we—”

  I started to pry at the wheel in Coney’s hands, to try and push us to the left, but it was too late by now. The spot before us opened, and Coney eased the car into place, then rolled down his window. I plopped the fare into his open palm, and he passed it over.

  Pulling out of the tunnel to the right, we were suddenly in Queens, facing a tangle of indifferent streets: Vernon Boulevard, Jackson Avenue, Fifty-second Avenue. Et cetera.

  The K-car was gone.

  “Pull over,” I said.

  Chagrined, Coney parked us on Jackson. It was perfectly dark now, though it was only seven. The lights of the Empire State and the Chrysler loomed across the river. Cars whirred past us out of the tunnel, toward the entrance to the Long Island Expressway, mocking us in their easy purposefulness. With Minna lose were nobodies, nowhere. “Eatmepass!” I said.

  “They could of just been losing us,” said Coney. “I’d say they were, yes.”

  “No, listen,” he said feebly. “Maybe they turned around and went back to Manhattan. Maybe we could catch them—”

  “Shhh.” I listened to the earphones. “If Frank sees we’re off his tail, he might say something.”

  But there was nothing to hear. The sounds of driving. Minna and the giant were sitting in perfect silence. Now I couldn’t believe that the man in the Zendo was the same as the giant—that garrulous, pretentious voice I’d heard couldn’t have shut up this long, it seemed to me. It was surprising enough that Minna wasn’t chattering, making fun of something, pointing out landmarks. Was he scared? Afraid to let on he was miked? Did he think we were still with him? Why did he want us with him anyway?

  I didn’t know anything.

  I made six oinking sounds.

  We sat waiting.

  More.

  “That’s the way of a big Polish lug, I guess,” said Minna. “Always gotta stay within sniffing distance of a pierogi.”

  Then: “Urrhhf.” Like the giant had smashed him in the stomach. “Where’s Polish?” I asked Coney, lifting away one earphone.

  “Wha?”

  “Where around here’s Polish? Eat me pierogi lug!”

  “I dunno. It’s all Polish to me.”

  “Sunnyside? Woodside? Come on, Gilbert. Work with me. He’s somewhere Polish.”

  “Where’d the Pope visit?” mused Coney. It sounded like the start of a joke, but I knew Coney. He couldn’t remember jokes. “That’s Polish, right? What’s it, uh, Greenpoint?”

  “Greenpoint’s Brooklyn, Gilbert,” I said, before thinking. “We’re in Queens.” Then we both turned our heads like cartoon mice spotting a cat. The Pulaski Bridge. We were a few yards from the creek separating Queens and Brooklyn, specifically Greenpoint.

  It was something to do anyway. “Go,” I said.

  “Keep listening,” said Coney. “We can’t just drive around Greenpoint.”

  We soared across the little bridge, into the mouth of Brooklyn.

  “Which way, Lionel?” said Coney, as if he thought Minna were feeding me a constant stream of instructions. I shrugged, palms up toward the roof of the Lincoln. The gesture ticcified instantly, and I repeated ieight=”0emrug, palms flapped open, grimace. Coney ignored me, scanning the streets below for a sign of the K-car, driving as slow as he could down the Brooklyn side of the Pulaski’s slope.

  Then I heard something. Car doors opening, slamming, the scuff of footsteps. Minna and the giant had reached their destination. I froze in mid-tic, concentrating.

  “Harry Brainum Jr.,” said Minna in his mockingest tone. “I guess we’re gonna stop in for a quick installation, huh?”

  Nothing from the giant. More steps.

  Who was Harry Brainum Jr.?

  Meanwhile we came off the lit bridge, where the notion of a borough laid out for us, comprehensive, had been briefly indulgeable. Down instead onto McGuinness Boulevard, where at street level the dark industrial buildings were featureless and discouraging. Brooklyn is one big place, and this wasn’t our end of it.

  “You know—if you can’t beat ’em, Brainum, right?” Minna went on in his needling voice. In the background I heard a car horn—they weren’t indoors yet. Just standing on the street somewhere, tantalizingly close.

  Then I heard a thud, another exhalation. Minna had taken a second blow.

  Then Minna again: “Hey, hey—” Some kind of struggle I couldn’t make out.

  “Fucking—” said Minna, and then I heard him get hit again, lose his wind in a long, mournful sigh.

  The scary thing about the giant was that he didn’t talk, didn’t even breathe heavy enough for me to hear.

  “Harry Brainum Jr.,” I said to Coney. Then, afraid it sounded like a tic to him, I added, “Name mean anything to you, Gilbert?”

  “Sorry?” he said slowly.

  “Harry Brainum Jr.,” I repeated, furious with impatience. There were times when I felt like a bolt of static electricity communing with figures that moved through a sea of molasses.

  “Sure,” he said, jerking his thumb in the direction of his window. “We just passed it.”

  “What? Passed what?”

  “It’s like a tool company or something. Big sign.” My breath caught. Minna was talking to us, guiding us. “Turn around.”

  “What, back to Queens?”

  “No, Brainum, wherever you saw that,” I said, wanting t
o strangle him. Or at least find his fast-forward button and push it. “They’re out of the car. Make a U-turn.”

  “It’s just a block or two.”

  “Well, go, then. Brain me, Junior!”/p>

  Coney made the turn, and right away there it was. HARRY BRAINUM JR. INC. STEEL SHEETS., in giant circus-poster letters on the brick wall of a two-story plant that took up a whole block of McGuinness, just short of the bridge.

  Seeing BRAINUM on the wall set off a whole clown parade of associations. I remembered mishearing Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey Circus as a child. Barnamum Bailey. Like Osmium, Cardamom, Brainium, Barnamum, Where’smymom: the periodic table of elements, the heavy metals. Barnamum Bailey might also be George and Eat Me Bailey’s older brother. Or were they all the same guy? Not now, I begged my Tourette’s self. Think about it later.

  “Drive around the block,” I said to Coney. “He’s here somewhere.”

  “Quit shouting,” he said. “I can hear you.”

  “Shut up so I can hear,” I said.

  “That’s all I said.”

  “What?” I lifted an earphone.

  “That’s all I said. Shut up.”

  “Okay! Shut up! Drive! Eat me!”

  “Fucking freakball.”

  The block behind BRAINUM was dark and seemingly empty. The few parked cars didn’t include the K-car. The windowless brick warehouse was laced with fire escapes, wrought-iron cages that ran the length of the second floor and ended in a crumpled, unsafe-looking ladder. On the side street a smallish, graffitied Dumpster was tucked halfway into the shadow of double doorway. The doors behind were strapped with long exterior hinges, like a meat locker. One lid of the Dumpster was shut, the other open to allow some fluorescent bulbs sticking up. Street rubbish packed around the wheels made me think it hadn’t moved in a while, so I didn’t worry about the doors behind it. The other entrance was a roll-up gate on a truck-size loading dock, right out on the brightly lit boulevard. I figured I would have heard the gate sing if it had been raised.

  The four stacks of the Newtown Creek Sewage Treatment Plant towered at the end of the street, underlit like ancient pylons in a gladiator movie. Fly an inflatable pig over and you’d have the sleeve of Pink Floyd’s Animals album. Beneath its shadow we crept in the Lincoln around all four corners of the block, seeing nothing.

  “Damn it,” I said.

  “You don’t hear him?”

  “Street noise. Hey, hit the horn.”

  “Why?”

  “Do it.”

  I concentrated on the earphones. Coney honked the Lincoln’s horn. Sure enough, it came through.

  “Stop the car.” I was in a panic now. I got out onto the sidewalk, slammed the door. “Circle slow,” I said. “Keep an eye on me.”

  “What’s the deal, Lionel?”

  “He’s here.”

  I paced the sidewalk, trying to feel the pulse of the blackened building, to take the measure of the desolate block. It was a place made out of leftover chunks of disappointment, unemployment and regret. I didn’t want to be here, didn’t want Minna to be here. Coney paced me in the Lincoln, staring dumbly out the driver’s window. I listened to the phones until I heard the approach of my own steps. My own heart beating made a polyrhythm, almost as loud. Then I found it. Minna’s wire had been torn from his shirt and lay tangled in a little heap on the curb of the side street, at the other end of the block from the Dumpster. I picked it up and pushed it into my pants pocket, then ripped the headphones off my neck. Feeling the grimness of the street close around me I began to half-run down the sidewalk toward the Dumpster, though I had to stop once and mimic my own retrieval of the wire: hurriedly kneel at the edge of the sidewalk, grab, stuff, remove phantom headphones, feel a duplicate thrill of panic at the discovery, resume jogging. It was cold now. The wind punched me and my nose oozed in response. I wiped it on my sleeve as I came up to the Dumpster.

  “You jerks,” Minna moaned from inside.

  I touched the rim of the Dumpster and my hand came away wet with blood. I pushed open the second lid, balanced it against the doorway. Minna was curled fetally in the garbage, his arms crossed around his stomach, sleeves covered in red.

  “Jesus, Frank.”

  “Wanna get me out of here?” He coughed, burbled, rolled his eyes at me. “Wanna give me a hand? I mean, no sooner than the muse strikes. Or possibly you ought to get out your brushes and canvas. I’ve never been in an oil painting.”

  “Sorry, Frank.” I reached in just as Coney came up behind me and looked inside.

  “Oh, shit,” he said.

  “Help me,” I said to Coney. Together we pulled Minna up from the bottom of the Dumpster. Minna stayed curled around his wounded middle. We drew him over the lip and held him, together, out on the dark empty sidewalk, cradling him absurdly, our knees buckled toward one another’s, our shoulders pitched, like he was a giant baby Jesus in a bloody trench coat and we were each one of the Madonna’s tender arms. Minna groaned and chuckled, eyes squeezed shut, as we moved him to the backseat of the Lincoln. His blood made my fingers tacky on the door handle.

  “Nearest hospital,” I breathed as we got into the front.

  “I don’t know around here,” said Coney, whispering, too.

  “Brooklyn Hospital,” said Minna from the b, surprisingly loud. “Take the BQE, straight up McGuinness. Brooklyn Hospital’s right off DeKalb. You boiled cabbageheads.”

  We held our breath and stared forward until Coney got us going the right way, then I turned and looked in the back. Minna’s eyes were half open and his unshaven chin was wrinkled like he was thinking hard or sulking or trying not to cry. He saw me looking and winked. I barked twice—“yipke, yipke”—and winked back involuntarily.

  “Fuck happened, Frank?” said Coney without taking his eyes off the road. We bumped and rattled over the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, rottenest surface in the boroughs. Like the G train, the BQE suffered from low self-esteem, never going into citadel Manhattan, never tasting the glory. And it was choked with forty- or fifty-wheel trucks, day and night.

  “I’m dropping my wallet and watch back here,” said Minna, ignoring the question. “And my beeper. Don’t want them stolen at the hospital. Remember they’re back here.”

  “Yeah, but what the fuck happened, Frank?”

  “Leave you my gun but it’s gone,” said Minna. I watched him shuck off the watch, silver smeared with red.

  “They took your gun? Frank, what happened?”

  “Knife,” said Minna. “No biggie.”

  “You’re gonna be all right?” Coney was asking and willing it at once.

  “Oh, yeah. Great.”

  “Sorry, Frank.”

  “Who?” I said. “Who did this?”

  Minna smiled. “You know what I want out of you, Freakshow? Tell me a joke. You got one you been saving, you must.”

  Minna and I had been in a joke-telling contest since I was thirteen years old, primarily because he liked to see me try to get through without ticcing. It was rare that I could.

  “Let me think,” I said.

  “It’ll hurt him if he laughs,” said Coney to me. “Say one he knows already. Or one that ain’t funny.”

  “Since when do I laugh?” said Minna. “Let him tell it. Couldn’t hurt worse than your driving.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Guy walks into a bar.” I was watching blood pool on the backseat, at the same time trying to keep Minna from tracking my eyes.

  “That’s the ticket,” rasped Minna. “Best jokes start the same fucking way, don’t they, Gilbert? The guy, the bar.”

  “I guess,” said Coney.

  “Funny already,” said Minna. “We’re already in the black here.”

  “So guy walks into a bar,” I said again. “With an octopus. Says to the bartender ‘I’ll bet a hundred dollars this octopus can play any instrument in the place.’ ”

  “Guy’s got an octopus. You like that, Gilbert?”

  “Eh.”


  “So the bartender points at the piano in the corner says, ‘Go ahead.’ Guy puts the octopus on the piano stool—Pianoctamus! Pianoctamum Bailey!—octopus flips up the lid, plays a few scales, then lays out a little étude on the piano.”

  “Getting fancy,” said Minna. “Showing off a little.”

  I didn’t ask him to specify, since if I had he’d surely have said he meant me and the octopus both, for the étude.

  “So guys says ‘Pay up,’ bartender says ‘Wait a minute,’ pulls out a guitar. Guy gives the octopus the guitar, octopus tightens up the E-string, closes its eyes, plays a sweet little fandango on the guitar.” Pressure building up, I tagged Coney on the shoulder six times. He ignored me, driving hard, outracing trucks. “Guy says ‘Pay up,’ bartender says ‘Hold on, I think I’ve got something else around here,’ pulls a clarinet out of the back room. Octopus looks the thing over a couple of times, tightens the reed.”

  “He’s milking it,” said Minna, again meaning us both.

  “Well, the octopus isn’t good exactly, but he manages to squeak out a few bars on the clarinet. He isn’t going to win any awards, but he plays the thing. Clarinet Milk! Eat Me! Guy says ‘Pay up,’ the bartender says ‘Just wait one minute,’ goes in the back rummages around finally comes out with a bagpipes. Plops the bagpipes up on the bar. Guy brings the octopus over, plops the octopus up next to the bagpipes. Octapipes!” I paused to measure my wits, not wanting to tic out the punch line. Then I started again, afraid of losing the thread, of losing Minna. His eyes kept closing and opening again and I wanted them open. “Octopus looks the bagpipes over, reaches out lifts one pipe lets it drop. Lifts another lets it drop. Backs up, squints at the bagpipes. Guy gets nervous, comes over to the bar says to the octopus—Accupush! Reactapus!—says to the octopush, fuckit, says gonnafuckit—says ‘What’s the matter? Can’t you play it?’ And the octopus says ‘Play it? If I can figure out how to get its pajamas off, I’m gonna fuck it!’ ”