Buffalo Noir Page 10

  But no. Say, if Frankie wanted to go up to Parkside Candy for some fudge. That was a great expedition. You had to take the bus up Hertel, and once you got up near the Parkside you could jump on the metro for a detour to downtown. In this city the metro was only underground sometimes, and sometimes in a cut like a tunnel with no roof. Frankie’s dad said that was Buffalo right there, you think you’re in the sunshine but you’re still in a hole. But Frankie liked it because you could close your eyes and pretend you were riding a real subway, in New York or Chicago or someplace, not Buffalo, not all shabby old low buildings and broken-up roads, where dads had to leave to go West to find a job and they didn’t come back. And the underground part, as long as you were riding down there you could think that when you came up it was going to be new, all honking traffic and skyscrapers and glass.

  Frankie ducked back behind the edge of the window as one of the cops came to look out from the Wisnewski’s. The cop’s face was all serious and Frankie didn’t want the guy to see him spying. The cop turned around again to talk to old lady Wisnewski, who was crying.

  The cool thing about going up to the Parkside, Frankie thought, wasn’t just the detour metro ride. It was still Buffalo when you came back, but inside the candy store, the wood gleamed and the mirrors were polished and it was quiet, like everything was slower. Like it was a different Buffalo. His mom said that was the old Buffalo, from a long time ago when everyone had a lot of money. Frankie asked if his dad had a lot of money then too, but she said it was much longer ago than that. Frankie wasn’t sure what that meant but he loved to go to the Parkside.

  Actually, having Petey along was okay for a while. The first time they went there, the lady gave Frankie extra fudge because she said his little brother was so cute, carrying his teddy bear, holding onto Frankie’s shirt. Frankie started to scowl and say, He’s not my brother, he’s just my stupid cousin, and besides he has snot all over his face, but Eddie was there that time and poked him in the ribs. Frankie got what Eddie meant—Eddie was smart—and stopped himself just in time, and the lady smiled and slipped them the extra couple of pieces. Him and Eddie even gave Petey some, and they told him he really, really had to never tell anyone they came all the way here, because of course it was way past where they were allowed to go without grown-ups.

  That first time worked out fine, so a couple more times Frankie told his mom he was going out to play, his mom told him to take Petey to give Petey’s mom a break, Frankie said, Yeah, yeah, and they hiked it over to the bus stop, Frankie galloping just a little faster than Petey could go and then turning around to yell at the kid to move it.

  The fourth time was the trouble. Petey left the damn teddy bear in the store. What a jerk! They had to go back for it, because Petey wouldn’t stop howling. Everyone on the bus was staring at them. They got home late, but it still would’ve been okay except that little baby Petey started crying when he saw his mommy and told her about almost losing the fucking teddy bear.

  That night Frankie’s mom beat his butt something fierce. He was grounded, and even though she wasn’t home until suppertime she knew if he went out because he had to go over every hour and check in with old lady Wisnewski, who if she wasn’t a witch sure looked like one and she smelled bad. He thought she might be drunk enough that she wouldn’t notice if he checked in or not, but he wasn’t sure so he kept doing it.

  Still, a couple of those one-hour times, Frankie raced to the bus and the metro and took a short ride anyway. He couldn’t go all the way to the Parkside but instead of imagining he was riding under Chicago he pretended he was on a real train, not the metro, on a long trip West to find his dad. Out West they had horses and deserts, and he wasn’t sure but he thought it didn’t snow. That would be as awesome as skyscrapers.

  The only good part was, as long as Frankie was grounded, stupid little Petey was stuck too. His sister and brothers wouldn’t take him with them anyplace, which pissed Frankie off because the brat was much more their job than Frankie’s.

  Eddie said he should just chill and play with his Wii or something until his mom got tired of the whole grounding thing. But Frankie didn’t have a Wii. His mom said they couldn’t afford it, which Frankie didn’t get because it was only a little thing you held in your hand and pointed at the TV, so how much could it cost? But anyway, he didn’t have one, so while he was grounded and thinking about Eddie and the guys running and smashing into each other on the football field without him, it was either watch TV, which was pretty stupid, or make Petey cry, which was fun.

  Frankie ducked back once more as the cop looked out the Wisnewski’s open window again. He was good at ducking back, from all those times old lady Wisnewski came to see what Petey was yowling about before she smacked him. Now she wasn’t smacking anybody, just crying, and she didn’t say anything when the cop seemed to be asking her why the window was open on a cold day like this. She just kept crying and he shook his head. He was one of the cops who’d come before, and he gave his partner that kind of look that said he knew something like this would happen. They always thought they were so smart, cops. Jerk. He didn’t look for a second at the rope that ran between the buildings. Even if he had, he wouldn’t have seen anything on it, but if he was so smart he should have looked, and then he should have said, That’s not a clothesline, who’d hang clothes to dry in a stupid dark air shaft like this?

  When the cops left they took old lady Wisnewski with them, and one of Petey’s brothers who was home. Frankie couldn’t see the door shut but he heard it because the window was open. He realized: now he could go out. What could his mom say? Old lady Wisnewski wasn’t there to check in with. He could even say he’d tried, which was going to be a lie, because he was headed out to the football field right now. Well, almost right now. He checked the kitchen clock. He had plenty of time. First he’d go to the bus and then to the metro and ride a few stops, and then, when he was someplace else, he was going to stuff Petey’s stupid teddy bear in the metro station garbage pail. That’s what Petey had opened the window to try to get, after Frankie had made a noose and hung it from the rope. There it was, dangling, with Frankie putting his hands around his own throat and making a cross-eyed, choking face. Petey had howled and cried, and slammed his fists, and snot ran out of his nose, but Frankie had just laughed and made the choking face again. So Petey opened the window and stood on the sill and reached too far, and then had fallen, which is why the cops came.

  Frankie decided he’d better wait to go out until the ambulance guys and cops down there stopped taking photos and measuring things, and finally covered Petey all up and took him out of the courtyard. He’d seen it on TV, that that’s how it went with bodies. Then he’d go play football, smash and slam and pound with the other guys. But on the way, after he got rid of the stupid bear, he’d go up to the Parkside. He didn’t have much money, but that was okay. The lady there would give him extra fudge for his cute little brother, who couldn’t come with him today.

  Chicken Noodle’s Night Out

  BY JOHN WRAY & BROOKE COSTELLO

  Anchor Bar

  In the faux-Gothic dining hall of my North Buffalo prep school hung a painting of a kid who’d died young. Nobody knew how he’d died, exactly, but his watery eyes and primly parted straw-colored hair didn’t speak too highly for his constitution. I always suspected he’d expired from an acute attack of privilege.

  It was under this painting, at the end of lunch period on the first day of senior year, that Christian “Chicken Noodle” Potelesse told me the story of his own brush with mortality, in the form of two plus-size women, a stretch Buick LeSabre, and a man by the name of Rick James. Noodle had never talked to me before, not even to tell me to get out of his way; but on that morning—the morning after the Incident—he clutched at my sleeve like a Victorian urchin, pale and bruised and diminished, and held me there until he’d told his tale. It was plain to see that he’d gotten his ass kicked, but that wasn’t what gave me the willies: his eyes had a sunken, haunted look
to them, as if the person heretofore known as “Christian Potelesse” were no longer in permanent residence. Here’s the story, as far as I can recollect it.

  Chicken Noodle was sitting in the Anchor Bar, suffering through a date with a girl too smart for him by half, when the door to Main Street blew open and The Man Himself rolled in with his standard entourage: two girls on one arm and his wife on the other. He’d just been released from Folsom Prison (yes, that Folsom Prison), but you wouldn’t have known it from his Panavision grin. When he came through the door everyone in the place stood up and clapped. It made no difference that James and his brand-new wife, Anne Hijazi, had just done two years for kidnapping, rape, and aggravated assault; Buffalo has ever stayed true to its own.

  The girls didn’t seem to mind either, as far as Chicken Noodle could tell. James had composed nearly three hundred songs during his time in jail; maybe he’d promised them a backing track or two. They were heavy and surly in a way that Noodle didn’t mind at all. His own date was an honest-to-goodness college girl from Medaille (he’d shown her his fake ID to prove he was going on twenty-two), but the James girls were about eighteen times more interesting. They looked as though they ate boys like Noodle for breakfast, raw and whole, with a chaser of lightbulbs and gin.

  The house band was smoky and fierce—James came mostly for the music, though Noodle didn’t know that yet—and the girl from Medaille (whose name was allegedly Delia) was clapping along, which was slightly embarrassing. Noodle didn’t mind, though, or at least not too much, because it got the James posse’s attention. He actually thought he saw James wink at him, though he had to admit to me, later, that it seemed unlikely. But that whole night was unlikely. Half an hour later, when Noodle went to the men’s room, The Man Himself followed him in and took a long, hard leak into the next urinal over.

  “Son,” James said comfortably, “I’m going to make you a public service announcement.”

  “Excuse me?” said Noodle.

  “That’s a funky-ass cock you got there. It smells funny.”

  Noodle laughed tightly. Nothing in his life had prepared him for what was now happening.

  “I mean that as a compliment,” James assured him, blowing his nose into a satin handkerchief. “There’s ladies I know—that I know personally—who appreciate a modicum of funk.”

  Before he could think of a reply, Noodle found himself alone again. But he’d barely returned to his seat—he hadn’t even had time to tell Delia the story, not that she’d have believed him—when the first frosted pitcher of Michelob Dry arrived at their table. He knew who’d sent it without bothering to ask. Delia gazed at him with newfound admiration, until she realized that someone else had bought it. Then she got a faraway look in her eye. The next pitcher arrived before the first one was empty.

  Looking back, Noodle could say with reasonable confidence that Delia was the true reason for James’s largesse, but it wouldn’t have mattered to him even if he’d known—and it certainly made no difference at the time. Delia must have sensed something, though, because she got spooked.

  “Why does he keep sending pitchers?” she hissed at one point, when James had only sent two. “Jesus H.” But she got used to the attention pretty quick. She clapped and smiled and waved past Noodle at The Man Himself’s table. James smiled back, every inch the bourgeois cavalier, and tossed his Jheri curls in her direction. The women looked at Delia like she was one eyelash flutter shy of getting beat to shit. Delia actually seemed to like that too.

  At the close of their set, the band—the William McKinleys—announced an after-hours appearance at the Grange Hole, an unlicensed club in a converted grain silo on the south side of town, a few blocks from the husked-out and junk-littered trench that had once been the Erie Canal. Chicken Noodle thought to himself—with a certain amount of relief—that there was no chance whatsoever that he’d be at the Grange Hole that night; but on this point he proved to be mistaken. They’d barely begun their third pitcher when James waved them over to his table. They hesitated a moment—longer than a moment; the better part of a minute, actually—then sheepishly, excitedly obliged.

  “What’s your name called, short greens?” James said to Delia. Noodle felt his skinny, snow-white body flicker and grow transparent.

  “Mary Jane,” Delia answered. Noodle was reasonably sure he’d never heard her call herself this before—he didn’t know, at the time, that she was quoting one of James’s more recent semihits. He began to doubt that she was actually enrolled at any college. She never so much as glanced at him again.

  * * *

  Fifteen minutes later the two of them were shoehorned into the back of a purple stretch LeSabre that felt a lot smaller than it looked from the outside, trying and failing to find something to talk about with Anne Hijazi, spouse and attaché and conscience of their host. The Man Himself was huddled at the front of the limousine’s lounging/staging area with his two unnamed friends—he referred to them, for reasons unclear, as his “insurance policy”—and seemed to have forgotten about Delia and Noodle, at least for the moment. Anne Hijazi was staring at Delia as if she was trying to determine whether her skin would make a better jacket or a coat.

  “I’m gonna be you tonight,” Anne Hijazi whispered to Delia. “And you, Mary Jane—you is gonna be me.”

  It might simply have been the power of suggestion, but Chicken Noodle was struck, in that instant, by how much the two women resembled one another. Anne Hijazi could very well have looked like Delia before the freebase and the cigarette-burn torture and the eighteen months of prison; and Delia stood a very good chance, Noodle thought, of looking like Anne Hijazi in a few hard-lived years—maybe even by the end of that same night. He watched in a kind of idle, shitless stupor as Anne Hijazi and Delia traded jackets, then blouses, then certain other items of feminine apparel of whose purpose he was sadly unaware. According to testimony, a joint was lit and sucked on and passed forward. Noodle was reasonably sure that he saw The Man Himself eat it while it was still burning; his judgment may have been impaired, however, by Anne Hijazi’s teeth, which had fastened themselves onto his left earlobe. I’ll have to remember this, Noodle thought to himself through the coiling, shivering, luminescing fog. Anne Hijazi is the one who bites.

  The scene inside the Grange had a single, vivid analogue in Noodle’s young life. As a twelve-year-old kid he’d traveled to New York City with his mother: they were going to visit his sister at Columbia, a school he never had a prayer of attending himself. His mom was bad at maps, and Noodle was worse, and rather than take the A, C, E, they boarded a 3 train and got out at the 125th Street station. It was ten p.m. on a hot September night and everyone in the city was out on the street. Smoke and music and the smell of frying gristle filled the air. He hadn’t felt threatened walking through Harlem at night with his mother—he’d felt irrelevant, which was exactly how he felt at the Grange. No one could care less that Chicken Noodle was there. He was seventh in line as they entered the club, but he might as well have been seven hundredth. He’d felt transparent before, watching James watching Delia; now he felt completely disembodied.

  At some point, admittedly, he did smoke something that tasted like nothing he’d ever smoked or smelled or heard tell of before. It was less a taste at all, really, than a kind of angry, greasy pressure in his throat. It made his teeth feel soft and slightly furry. He threw up soon after, but enjoyed the experience. Someone took his wallet from his chinos and he didn’t mind at all. Someone pulled off one of his Top-Siders, tried it on, then passed it back to him with a sigh. Someone asked him his opinion of the Bills’ chances that season and he said the Bills could go suck their own dicks. The music dug into him and pinned him to the wall. He was high as hell, yes, but it was the music—Rick freaking James’s music, music that seemed to belong to no one suddenly, to James himself least of all, and therefore, by Noodle’s shattered, suicidal reasoning, could just as well have been his (Noodle’s) own, up for grabs, free for the taking—that sparked and
squirmed in our hero’s modest brainstem and propelled him forward and under and finally up onto the creaking cinder-block-and-loading-pallet stage, behind The Man Himself, beside The Man Himself, then suddenly in the very spot The Man Himself had occupied: the piping, sweat-delineated, somehow blood-smelling locus of light and attention at the stage’s precise geometric center, in the full upward thrust of the black-market kliegs, with the mic that James himself had just a moment before been brandishing and stroking and battering and sucking on like a vibrator or a lollipop or a probation officer’s unlicensed Taser—the music that made it seem like a reasonable idea, after all he’d been through that hour and that night and in the course of his entire bland, tepid, milk-colored existence so far, to tip his head back and begin to sing.

  “She’s a very kinky girl,” sang Chicken Noodle, “the kind you don’t bring home to mother . . .”

  That’s as far, by all reports, as he got.

  Peace Bridge

  BY CONNIE PORTER

  East Side

  When I heard the noise, I reached for the gun. I mean, isn’t that the purpose of having one, having it at hand? You keep it close by, so when you hear that noise in the middle of the night, the bungling burglar, the dog-footed cat thief, you can defend yourself; protect the sanctity of your cave.

  My gun was on my nightstand—in my bedroom. I was across the hall in my office, a tiny bedroom that I hadn’t gotten around to doing anything to since I had moved in a year ago, hunched over my laptop, on my third shot of espresso. The week before I’d had five shots, and I looked into the hallway at one point and swore I saw a circle of bluecaps dropping like it was hot.