Positively from deep in the memory bank:
Put your feet on the sand, look to Europe where you stand
see it inside
Make the smooth edge stone, take the ocean for your own
the stars are witness
The west’s beton and steel cannot help you when you feel
the earth is moving
Drink your tears for body salt, find a place along the fault,
hide forever.
For centuries governments have sought to protect their secrets. The Romans recorded strategic information on wax tablets as well as the more expensive papyrus, the ancient equivalent of the super-computer. Tony Rhodes, an agent in place, uses a cookie jar to conceal his codebook and operational notes. Tony is hiding on Guernsey in the British Channel Islands the target of an FBI probe as well as a terrorist group. Forced out of his lair he heads for a local barbershop whose owner has an affection for knick knacks.
Excerpt:
That was the image he fought to capture and keep, his secret love, his Achilles heel. God he loved Trish enough to cut her loose while she was young.
Trish lived in Del Mar, California, married to a successful movie producer named Roland Cutler. The desire to kill Cutler flared from time to time—this morning was such an occasion. Tony put it down to nerves. The movie industry fascinated Tony because of all the ways money could move, across borders, into shake and bake corporations that dissolved after the film’s completion.
Tony dressed before attending to the chores his three-room suite demanded. He made the bed arranging the quilt into a tri-fold on the edge of the bed. Langley approved of a well-made bed with nurse’s corners and a hint of stretch to the material. The young guys coming over from the Army Special Forces all made their beds that way.
When the cell phone rang Tony hesitated before answering. “Zero three nine,” he said.
“Sorry to bother you,” a man said. “I must have misdialed.”
“Is it about my ad in the paper?” Tony asked.
“The Ariel Square Four? What sort of shape is it in?”
“Clean. Rebuilt.”
“That’s too much bike for me,” the man said. “I’ll call back Sunday if I change my mind.”
“All right,” Tony said, his excitement mounting.
“Saddlebags?”
“It’s all original.”
“That’s the Mark II model, the four piper?”
“Yeah, it’s a ’55.”
“Such a classic. I doubt it will last until Sunday.”
Tony rang off slipping the phone into his jacket pocket. He didn’t need a codebook to understand that his counterpart in MI5 had just delivered a warning. He glanced around the bedroom before deciding to head for town as usual.
His landlady, Mrs. Duscherre, had taken to puttering in the garden beneath his window, a garden of leggy rose bushes and shade plants in the sun. She clucked and wheezed, pruning the already pruned, waving to Tony whenever he appeared n the porch, as though waving goodbye.
“Good morning Mr. Tidyman,” she said in a singsong voice that grated on his nerves.
“Yes,” he said standing on her porch. “Thank you.”
His response, always the same, never failed to produce a frown. Tony had interviewed a cartel leader in Panama a few years earlier and every time Tony said “good morning,” the man always said, “thank you.” This went on for two weeks before Tony asked the drug lord why he kept thanking him when he greeted him. “I thank you for not killing me this morning, Colonel.”
Tony loved being called Colonel.
When he thanked his landlady Tony was being sincere. The reference was lost on Mrs. Duscherre who seemed to have beat the rush into middle age somewhere in her twenties.
He doffed his hat and she watched him go.
Mrs. Duscherre had been reluctant to rent the suite to him. Every thirty days he enjoyed raucous sex with an English woman, a woman with airs and a disdainful manner. Nothing in the lease forbade sex although it was understood to be in poor taste. He waved at her from the pavement like a man off to war instead of breakfast.
Tony paid the rent that morning, spooning out the dough, his scarred fingers playing with the bank notes while she pretended not to look. Her kitchen captured the odors of week old bacon and burnt toast. Tony always wore his duty free slug of Beau Rivage Cologne when he paid the rent because a man who smells like an Ottoman prince is a man to be feared.
She’d noticed the strangers in the saloon car the previous week. They had parked on her road directly in front of Mrs. Hare’s even though the Hares no longer rented rooms. She had the impression that the men were watching her house, a feeling of intrusion she disliked intensely. When she telephoned the police, they’d sent a car around for a look but the strangers had left.
Mr. Tidyman paid promptly, a boon in the off-season, but spring brought the promise of English tourists, perhaps a sturdy German family going everywhere on foot.
Yes, she thought, by May she would nudge Mr. Tidyman out the door.
Once out of sight Tony picked up his pace. Tony had a calendar on his refrigerator. Beneath a stunning photo of the cliffs on Sark read the legend “Paradise is the Channel Islands.” He’d written “blood diamonds” in the box marked “things to do.” If Special Branch kicked his door in while he was in town, he estimated they would devote a month to puzzling over the handwritten note.
He had today, possibly tomorrow, to make arrangements, alert his network, destroy evidence, plant false leads, preserve his best identity, grab some lunch and get a haircut from the fat guy on the esplanade. Halfway to the Promenade Tony reversed direction retracing his steps toward the rooming house.
Mrs. Duscherre was in the front garden when Tony returned. The house had been Gestapo Headquarters during the German occupation and he wondered if his landlady’s forebears had been around back then.
“A bit on the warm side,” she said before firing up a duty free Silk Cut. “Odd weather.”
“Warm weather in March. Go figure.”
Tony entered the kitchen relieved to be alone. He grabbed several items from the silverware drawer, stuffed his pockets and left. He locked the door and went down the stairs.
Mrs. Duscherre was confused by his comings and goings, the look on her face one of pasty authority. Tony doffed his hat and she looked away. Once on the sidewalk he walked briskly under the shade of the chestnut trees and Dutch Elms toward St. Peter Port’s esplanade.
A Jaguar Vanden Plas glided past him near the small roundabout above the harbor. The tinted windows and low profile made it hard to discern how many occupants were in the car but his instincts said three. Three men, two in front, one in back. Wide boys from what little he’d seen, men designed for action.
He ducked into the street of shops near the Town Church. Tony strolled the narrow lane before stopping abruptly to admire a floral display. He sauntered across the crowded street toward a pub with tables scattered on the sidewalk. Lunch was winding down, one of the waiters smoked a cigarette, contemplating the tourists as they passed.
He followed the signs for Hauteville House where Victor Hugo had lived in exile for fourteen years. Tony doubled back, walking at a fast pace, eyes peeled for the Jaguar.
In a shop called Cornet Tony purchased a ceramic cookie car. The saleslady assured him he would be very pleased with the purchase. The jar depicted a mouse in farmer’s overalls wearing a yellow scarf. With a removable head the cookie jar had a capacity of some two quarts, she said, plenty of room for goodies.
“You must have grandchildren,” she said.
“Sweet tooth.”
After the grandchildren crack Tony allowed her to wrap his treasure in the previous day’s edition of the Financial Times. He forked over five pounds, dumped the change into his pocket and left the shop. The fat man’s barbershop was two minutes away, but Tony devoted fifteen minutes to evasion tactics, varying speed and direction every ninety seconds, backtracking past the Cornet clutching his mouse.
The cobble stone street was the width of a large alley. He entered the pub, ordering an ale and a plowman’s lunch. The landlord wiped the table down with a cloth before trundling off to fill the order. Tony took his package into the Gents and locked the door behind him.
After unwrapping the cookie jar, Tony lifted the mouse head free and glanced inside. He removed a bag of diamonds from his jacket pocket and dropped the bag into the cookie jar. Next he deposited a forged Canadian passport in the name of Henri Dumond of Trois Riviere, Quebec. Henri was okay for third world borders, but wouldn’t pass muster in Europe.
Someone rapped on the door. “Out in a sec,” Tony called. Footfalls sounded from the hall.
Tony removed his tweed jacket and rolled up his sleeves. He unfastened a bracelet on his left wrist, gold encrusted with sapphires before taking off a Rolex Oyster Perpetual. He strapped on a Casio watch with a plastic band, slipped the Rolex and the bracelet into the cookie jar. He paused for a moment. He really liked the Rolex—a gift from a deposed African dictator. Tony removed a second Rolex from his right wrist, a lady’s Oyster Perpetual.
The knock on the door was more insistent.
“Yeah, just a sec.”
Tony hesitated before dropping the Frozen Rope codebook into the cookie jar. On page forty-one of the book the names were written in plain text. He jotted the date on the upper right margin, closed the book, and placed it inside the ceramic mouse. Tony replaced the head, put on his jacket, rewrapped the cookie jar and left the bathroom.
A pleasant looking woman ushered her son forward. “All right, Jeremy, best hurry.”
Tony ate his lunch, drinking the ale, his eyes on the pub’s front door. He wondered if Sammy Moyer had gotten the message that Brazzaville was too hot in June. Tony wanted Sammy to run, but he hadn’t gotten the confirmation telex at the Bank of Lyon.
Sammy had provided a list of names, broken loose from network intercepts, vetted by no one other than Sammy. The list was the sort of raw intelligence that analysts would study for weeks, but the information frightened Tony and his immediate visceral response was belief. Some fool in Hollywood had written a screenplay based on real events, Tony’s personal history developed for the silver screen.
Another fool had green lighted the project and hired Tony’s daughter to star. Only a handful of people knew of his brief marriage three decades earlier, let alone that the union had produced a child. In his line of work secrecy was vital and he’d taken steps to protect their identities. Now her name was on a list of potential targets, and he was fucked if he knew how that might have come to pass.
Tony paid his bill, picked his up his cookie jar and headed for the door
<p> You know its late in the business cycle when ravenous investors scoop up Initial Public Offerings having plans involving Wi or Fi or Spectrum Breadth or social networking. Even worse are the gatekeeper floats a variation on monkey in the middle wherein two tall people toss a ball over a short person’s head. Gatekeepers don’t produce anything, and that’s okay. They enhance, they tweak, they refine and serve the midstream, that gaping hole between producers and end users. Natural gas can’t heat your apartment without a midstream pipeline.
<p> If you’re a writer, you’re a producer. You’re a wildcat well in Irian Jaya. A volcano has swallowed your neighbor and triple canopy jungle shrouds your hideaway: life is good. Insects hum. You get the idea of sending a message to the outside world. But who are you going to contact? It’s like uh oh we ate the missionary, please send another. We’ll behave.
<p> Literary agents! As boiling lava fills Main Street you happened to grab a copy of Writers Digest from somebody’s cold dead fingers and scan the ads. Writers wanted. Your first thought may be wanted for what? The post office has photographs of writers who are wanted, but is this a good thing? At this point you have to resist the temptation to flee upriver: you gotta put some product in the pipeline.
<p> Year One: the letter you wrote to the agent may have gotten lost. It may have been stolen, shredded, lost at sea, vaporized, vulcanized, ionized, briefly pitied by a third party, misdirected, or subjected to extremes of heat and cold.
<p> Years Two and Three: Well, your letter may not have captured their imagination. Anyway you have more product. A wellhead fire kills your cousin. You write another letter.
<p> Year Nine: Phrases like “sorry, not for me,” now infest your vocabulary. If you don’t want a banana, just say so. You check the ads in Writers Digest: “Writers wanted!” Who are these people? What is the source of this insatiable want?
<p> Panic in the Year Zero: alligators eat people wearing pith helmets! This is the last straw. Those weren’t missionaries, they were literary agents and those are your gators. You better hope no one finds out about that. Wait a week, write another letter. Feed your pets.
<p> Time for a long overdue chat with Detective Mickey Reidel the protagonist of FLAMINGO DAWN. Mickey moved from a supporting role in THE WORKING DEAD to the lead in FLAMINGO DAWN. In a surprise move Mickey has chosen to ignore his author and put up a MySpace Profile.
<p> Mickey you’re forty one years old. Aren’t you afraid that MySpace reaches the wrong demographic?
Yeah, I’m scared shitless about that. Keeps me awake at night. Oh, wait a minute, according to my profile I never sleep.
<p> Tell us something shameful about yourself. People love that.
I shot Mother Theresa. I’d like to say I didn’t mean it or that I was drunk at the time, but I did mean it although it’s kind of funny if you think about it. I shot a poster of Mother Theresa that I put up on my bedroom door.
<p> You live in Kew Gardens, Queens and love garage sales.
Yeah, I live in a big house my parents bought way back when. My sister and I inherited the house. She and her husband lived with me for a while before they moved out to Rockaway. Some guys I know are gonna remodel my kitchen. And, yeah, I go to garage sales. One time I went to a garage sale on York Avenue and bought a famous painting for seventy five cents.
<p> Did you acquire the Mother Theresa poster at a garage sale?
No, it came from a Catholic church over toward Maspeth. They had a whole bunch of them.
<p> You list your hobbies as guns and Tylenol.
That’s a joke, I was kidding. I like to cook, paint, I collect Irish lace.
<p> How did feel about being the lead in FLAMINGO DAWN?
Well, shit, it was about time. Armand DiPino was the lead in what, three books? Sure he’s younger and better looking but let’s face it when those literary agents read my shit…you know what I’m saying.
<p> So you resent DiPino?
Hell no. I’m saying he had three cracks at this thing and now I get one. I mean we had a famous literary agent on the line and he blew it, man, he whiffed. Life’s tough, you know? I’m a lot more mainstream; I own a house, I got a boss truck, a detached garage, a cool girlfriend, a nine year old daughter. DiPino lives in the West Village. He does his laundry in a basement.
<p> What sets you apart from other fictional detectives?
My problem is I’m always getting tangled up with ordinary people who’ve broken the law. I’m a sucker which is why I maintain my distance. My house is neat and orderly. I don’t drink a lot and I don’t like to socialize too much. ADAs and whatnot think I’m a wiseguy and I’m always pissing important people off, but I don’t do that for sport. If I can keep someone decent out of the system I do it. Hey, my house is paid for.
<p> Thanks Mickey.
Oh, wait, there’s been a rewrite: I don’t have a cool girlfriend anymore. I need some control over here, you know?
<p> David Isaak of Tomorrowville fame is conducting a survey on his blog about how novelists write their books. Some are planners, some are freewheelers while some freewheel before backing up from the edge of the precipice.
<p> David invited me to join the discussion by posting my process here on this very blog. His email arrived just as I was typing “the end” on a manuscript in one of those bizarre we are the world coincidence moments so frowned upon at famous writers school. I should add that the novel just completed has reached this stage before and will reach this stage again in a few weeks after I “step away” from the project which means going into the kitchen and eating olives directly from the jar. I use a spoon because olive jars have narrow mouths like rattlesnakes or claims adjustors and very few famous writers that I’ve ever heard of contend they cannot work because their hand is trapped inside a jar of olives. That’s more of a movie star thing, and God knows, we’re not movie stars. So, I use a spoon.
<p> Essay wise we’re also battling the headwinds of the inescapable fact that while I have completed manuscripts none of them have been turned into books but rather returned to me, the creator of these manuscripts, with varying levels of thrust so that it may be said my process is limited to those preliminary rounds you used to see at Madison Square Garden where guys would go three rounds in a veil of cigar smoke thick enough to endanger great swathes of otherwise innocent citizens leaping from chairs crying “kill the bum!” If only novel writing, or manuscript writing, handed down from generations of monks in their cells, delivered that sort of audience participation or at least a solitary business mogul with hair a Florida orange might claim as its own, then you’d have a process on your hands.
<p> To summarize: it seems to me that Nolan Ryan used to soak his fingers in pickle brine to avoid blisters on his fingers and he could throw a baseball one hundred miles per hour past a man with a bat in his hand and a prayer on his lips. From now on I won’t use a spoon, I’ll take my chances with the rattlesnake and just reach for it.
I know that book length fiction behaves badly at times, punishing the author with subversive side trips, falling plot points, strange interludes of cross-genre heaving, the sinking feeling that Miss Snark is looking over your shoulder consulting the crapometer. Action verbs, gerunds, entire passages from Kaavya Viswanathan, Bibilcal references, and global warming riddle the page while you wonder if your career as a hod carrier will ever blossom the way Chairman Mao envisioned?
I cry uncle: much-loved manuscript FLAMINGO DAWN is home from the wars. Only two years old, it has encountered schoolyard bullies, lost of few pints of blood, dislocated a few bones. So, it is now in Bay Three where a crack team of mechanics tore it apart and I have their estimate. Major rewrite. The little fellow needs new structure.
Step one: Weeping. I’ve hired a team of professional mourners. They shriek as I dissect the manuscript. Unlike dead frogs this experiment yields no tactile results, no cries from the faint of heart. Structure? I’ll give you structure…okay all the scenes from the protagonists point of view? Line up. This is gym class for the soul.
Pink Floyds cautionary words certainly apply to writers. Not only to crime fiction writers, but literary, romance, speculative, genre benders, graphic novelists and poets. In ONE GOOD TURN Kate Atkinson arms her villain with a baseball bat. When I read the passage I was thinking two things: Why does a Scottish guy have a baseball bat handy? Does he choke up or swing away? Another character counter-attacks with a briefcase: I’m hoping it wasn’t one of those soft leather things, but a rugged briefcase that has flown United many times and fears nothing.
Death by Steinway: Here’s a scene that illustrates the problem: “She was trapped, the Cuisinart defense a failure. Megan grabbed the Steinway Baby Grand. Lifting it high overhead, she rushed Herbert whose suit of armor was a liability now. He staggered toward the balcony with sweeping views of New Jersey. Herbert spotted the thirty caliber machine gun mounted near the ficus tree…if only he wasn’t wearing armor.”
Forensic analysis: Megan’s former job as a piano mover came in handy. Herbert had gone to a jousting tournament before his cell phone rang. A platoon of Marines had encamped on the balcony, but forgot their machine gun before they rapelled down the building. A Steinway Baby Grand developes a ballistic signature unlike those of other pianos. This is our murder weapon people.
Once more into the book, dear friends: Black Forest is an unregistered nano novel whose progress can only be tracked by your reporter. I picked up the gauntlet of the nanowritmo in the hopes of pushing the manuscript. Now it’s pushing back. 20,000 words complete with 6 days left. 30,000 words short of the goal. Looks like Butler University is a basketball superpower, I don’t know who J-Fed is, it didn’t rain yesterday, and Google vaulted over 500 dollars per share. I have more excuses somewhere, a long list, a short list, a revised short list and a Final Four. 30,000 words in 6 days? We’ve seen that movie.
I’m happy with the progress. The other day I was working on the book finishing the last of the opening scenes and I began to doubt that the structure I’d planned was going to work, that Part One, the bridge to Part Two wouldn’t stretch across the tme line divide. I ignored the voice in my head and kept going only to realize that the first half of the novel dovetails into the second, eight years later, without jarring the story. This method of writing is called wandering through the desert until the oasis is found. My nano goal wasn’t so much to write a novel, but to write enough story to see if a novel might be in there somewhere.
Do my opening 130 pages need rewriting and editing? Sure. But not yet. I want to push it to the end and see where it goes. The ending I envision will probably morph into something unexpected. Meanwhile nano is a motivator to forge ahead.
The Black Forest is a crime novel set in New York City in 1964. A teenager, Brenda Antonucci, witnesses the murder of her father outside a Hells Kitchen restaurant. Brenda is assaulted before being spirited out of the city to her parents suburban home. She remembers little of what happened, to the relief of the mob and the police.
Dylan Farrell is the first officer on the scene. He ignores his partner’s advice to call first before responding. He discovers Brenda in the back room of Musto’s a mob joint on Ninth Avenue. Detectives from the Special Investigations Unit are shaking the place down. They don’t want an active investigation. Dylan is expected to play ball to protect his fellow officers.
Dylan’s been down this road before. In 1956 his tank unit took part in Operation Reforger, an exercise designed to block Soviet troops entering West Germany through the Fulda Gap. In a tiny village in the Black Forest his tank kills a German girl on a bicycle. The accident goes unreported and the tank crew conspire to keep the secret.
Section One of the book is called “The Grasseaters.” This is a phrase from the Knapp Commission investigation into police corruption based in part from testimony from Frank Serpico. Grasseaters and Meateaters described two kinds of corruption from the casual to the methodical. Dylan Farrell is an ordinary guy who has to make a terrible choice: send his friends to prison or go along and become a grasseater.
Here’s the opening.
It was hot the night Brenda Antonucci was attacked, hot the way Hell’s Kitchen could be hot, buildings dripping with dark moisture, residents impatient and restless. Brenda had gone to Musto’s on Ninth Avenue, a ristorante with a limited clientele, a limited menu, and a room in the back for cards.
August of 1964 marked the tenth year of the war for control of the Westside book. Brenda heard her father mention the book many times, when he was on the telephone, his back to the kitchen table. She wrote a poem about the book in fourth grade, a poem her father had slapped her for, the nuns had slapped her for. Her mother had dragged Brenda through a novena about the poem, coughing through prayers, rosaries, gin, and cigarettes.
After that they didn’t talk about daddy’s book.
Her mother died in the spring of ’64, a week before Brenda graduated from Tenth grade. Brenda’s Sweet Sixteen party was canceled and the house swelled with relatives, friends, men with open collar shirts who told Brenda what a fucking shame it was about her mom. Vivien was a happy girl, a party girl, not a ball breaker like some. “She didn’t break balls,” her father moaned in eulogy. “Not my Viv.”
Big Dan Antonucci broke a lot of things on his way up the ladder in the Profaci family. It was his cursed luck to throw in with Joey Gallo, Crazy Joe and his brothers, Larry and Albert. After Vivian’s funeral some Gambino men came around for a meeting of the minds, to ask Big Dan if he renounced his allegiance to Joey. They sat in the back yard where the inflatable pool sagged in a turquoise mound. The men sat on lawn chairs borrowed from Brenda’s grandmother who lived in the old neighborhood where lawn chairs served a limited purpose.
Brenda gave them iced tea. Big Dan hung his head, rubbed his large hands together, allowing his iced tea to melt on the plastic table with the sunflower design. His glass sweated, Big Dan sweated, the Gambino guys fanned themselves with magazines.
They offered condolences. What a pisser, huh? She was too young, thirty-five years old, too young to go like that. A total pisser.
Viv looked good at the service, someone said. The sun beat down as they talked about traffic on the Southern State. Brenda listened while her older brother, Little Danny, sulked. He’d smashed her Ricky Nelson 45, the one with Waitin’ in School on the B side. Danny broke a bowling trophy by throwing it against the wall. Doctor Campo had given them a few sleeping pills, just in case. Brenda had taken a few but nothing had happened. She tried Scotch and threw up. Real grief seemed to elude her. Mrs. Donatelli had shrieked when Vivian’s casket was lowered. Brenda felt astonishment at the outburst; Mrs. Donatelli and her mother had never been close, although they were prominent in the Holy Names Society at the diocesan church.
Brenda’s focus turned to her father. Big Dan displaced all others in her small universe; his sorrow was that of a wounded animal, powerful, misdirected, confused, self-absorbed. Her father head locked the parish priest, demanding a full accounting from God for Vivian’s abrupt departure. Dan wept over his wedding album, shredding photographs until Brenda tugged the scrapbook from his scarred hands. Between outbursts Dan spoke about business. Brenda fed him veal shank while Dan railed about this guy or that guy, he named names, even joked about going on television with Estes Kefauver.
She prayed her father would settle down. He was the breadwinner. Brenda did the Stations of the Cross, offering her body to Holy Office, commending her spirit in contemplation of sin. Big Dan made indiscreet remarks on the telephone. Brenda cringed when she heard him say how fed up he was. Dan spoke to bosses and under bosses in a vigorous new way, offering candid opinions about their leadership abilities, their generosity, their testicles.
Dan said he was allowed a three day mourning period. He didn’t go to work. Brenda worried about the west side book. What was happening to it? She knew the book required Dan’s constant attention, otherwise rats and chiselers would take the food from their mouths, the clothes from their backs. Her mother had understood the nature of Dan’s dedication, his attention to detail. Vivien had spoken to other women in hushed tones about the press of affairs, fucking cops, fucking deadbeats.
Brenda had the wild fear the men visiting from the city might do something to her father. Her father wasn’t making eye contact, speaking to them with his eyes turned downward.
One of the men became agitated. “Come on, no more bullshit, Dan. This thing is out of control.”
Brenda waited around in the kitchen in her one-piece bathing suit, a pink suit her mother had bought her for her fifteenth birthday, because a bikini was out of the question.
“You want to be a slut?” he mother asked.
Brenda cracked the ice cube trays, emptied them, then refilled them with water. Four grown men might need a lot of ice. Yes, she wanted to be a slut if that meant being a grown woman with the ability to choose her own clothing, her own friends, her own life. She’d almost said that to her mother that day in A&S with the snotty sales girl watching; yes, I want to be a slut.
Good thing she hadn’t. She be doing stations of the cross for the rest of her life, pondering Jesus’ sacrifice when all she wanted was a sexy bathing suit or at least some breasts. She was flat as a pancake where her mother had been well endowed, full figured, a regular Rosalyn Russell according to what she’d overheard.
“Bring us some wine,” Big Dan bellowed.
She hurried outside with the bottles. The Gambino men didn’t smile at her this time. They didn’t make jokes or ask how she was doing.
“Leave it,” her father snapped. “Bring some glasses.”
Big Dan had been quiet after the guests left, quiet in a way Brenda decided constituted fear. Her anxiety grew when her father began to pace in the family room. He snatched the car keys from the hook above the telephone, started to say something to her, juggling the keys in his left hand, his expression pained. “I’m going in to the city,” he said.
“Is everything all right?” Brenda asked.
“Sure. I won’t be back till late. Here’s a couple of bucks for you and your brother.”
He handed her a twenty.
“I don’t need this much,” she said.
Her father shrugged, kissing her forehead. “Keep an eye on Danny. If anything comes up, leave a message at Musto’s. You got the number?”
Brenda nodded. Standing close to him, she caught the tang of sweat under his shirt as he hugged her, the rough stubble of his beard, tobacco and wine on his breath. “If Bobby Forks calls…ah, forget it.”
She watched him drive away. They’d lived on Long Island three years now. Brenda could not get used to it; there were no sidewalks, only driveways and lawns, trees and cars. She’d grown up in Bay Ridge, far from the Manhattan, but Brooklyn had its own rhythm, and smells. Brooklyn had sidewalks, stoops, street corners, bakeries and Laundromats on the bigger streets. People gathered at these places, they talked, they knew one another.
Brenda didn’t see Danny until he was behind her. He snatched the twenty of her hand, pushing her onto the sofa with a harsh laugh. “You’re too stupid to take up space,” he said.
“That’s dad’s money,” she said.
“You don’t get it, do you? He ain’t coming back. Twenty bucks? Since when does he hand out that kind of money?”
“Since mom died.”
Danny looked stricken. “What? There’s more?”
He searched the house, smashing the cookie jar he’d made in the fifth grade, turning their mother’s dresser inside out, throwing her clothes and underwear all over the bedroom. Tears ran down his cheeks as he screamed and threatened her, but Brenda had hidden the money well, Her father had given Brenda four hundred dollars to buy groceries; she knew why Danny wanted the money. She was not going to let him take their food money to buy a gun.
He smacked her a few times before rushing out of the house, slamming the door behind him. Brenda waited for twenty minutes in case he came back. Then she peeled out of her bathing suit, took a shower in her mother’s bathroom, and got dressed. She called for a station taxi and when it arrived, Brenda went over to Massapequa Park to wait for a train.
Wellington Leg: As the towne slowly merges with the Sea of Japan it is time to take stock of Week One in the parallel universe Nano event undertaken by your reporter at the beginning of November. I didn’t register for Nano, preferring a kinder gentler approach. Here’s what has happened so far.
Black Forest has grown by 11,000 words. Some of those words have gathered together in complete sentences while others have set their own course and speed for Parts Unknown. Still others want to go to Maui. I’ve borrowed the earl’s Writer’s Blocke Insurance Policy and read the fine print: “The wordes must cohere together in some recognizable way.” Now they tell me.
I can no longer spell. But the novel has an opening now, ninety pages of front story. That’s good. It no longer reads like a narrative outline and that’s good too. As to setting, 1964 was an interesting year, still the Fifties in many ways, but the Beatles landed and the Rolling Stones played the New York Academy of Music on 14th Street. The New York World’s Fair opened in April a month after Kitty Genovese was murdered, a killing that rattled the Big Apple like no other.
The Mets left the Polo Grounds ( Coogan’s Bluff) for Shea Stadium. Marvelous Marv Thornberry covered first base and Al Downing went 6-19 and pitched well. Idlewild became JFK. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution set the stage for massive involvement in Vietnam, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 forbade discrimination based on race, gender, creed, color or national origin. The fuse was lit. The final year of the Pax Americana was anything but tranquil. RFK went after the Mob and Malcolm X made his speech The Black Revolution.
Louie Louie was on the charts. Scholars still parse the lyrics searching for hidden meaning.