Buffalo Noir Page 14

Mr. Lacey said, with his air of completing an algebra problem on the blackboard, in a tone of absolute finality, Yes. And we’ll never speak of it again after tonight. In fact, of any of this—making an airy magician’s gesture that encompassed not just the Bison Diner but the city of Buffalo, the very night—ever again.

  And so it was, we never did speak of it again—our adventure that night following Valentine’s Day 1959—ever again.

  Next Monday at school, and all the days and months to come, Mr. Lacey and I maintained our secret. My heart burned with a knowledge I could not speak! But I was quieter, less nervous in class than I’d ever been; as if, overnight, I’d matured by years. Mr. Lacey behaved exactly, I think, as he’d always behaved toward me: no one could ever have guessed, in any wild flight of imagination, the bond between us. My grades hovered below 100 percent, for Mr. Lacey was surely one to wish to retain the power of giving tests no student could complete to perfection. With a wink he said, Humility goeth in place of a fall, Erin. And in September when I returned for eleventh grade, Julius Lacey, who might have been expected to teach solid geometry to my class, was gone: returned to graduate school, we were told. Vanished forever from our lives.

  All this was far in the future! That night, I could not have foreseen any of it. Nor how, over thirty years later, on the eve of Valentine’s Day, I would remove from its hiding place at the bottom of a bureau drawer a bloodstained man’s handkerchief initialed JNL, fine white cotton yellowed with time, and smooth its wrinkles with the edge of my hand, and lift it to my face like Veronica her veil.

  * * *

  By the time Mr. Lacey and I left the Bison Diner, the light there had become blinding and the jukebox music almost deafening. My head would echo for days, Lonely? lonely? lonely? Mr. Lacey drove us hurriedly south on Huron Street, passing close beneath factory smokestacks rimmed at their tops with bluish-orange flame, spewing clouds of gray smoke that, upon impact with the freezing wind off Lake Erie, coalesced into fine gritty particles and fell back to earth like hail. These particles drummed on the roof, windshield, and hood of the Volkswagen, bouncing and ricocheting off, denting the metal. God damn, Mr. Lacey swore softly, will You never cease!

  Abruptly then we were home. At my aunt’s shabby woodframe bungalow at 3998 Huron Street, Buffalo, New York, that might have been anyone of dozens, hundreds, even thousands of similar woodframe one-and-a-half-story bungalows in working-class neighborhoods of the city. The moon had vanished as if it had never been and the sky was depthless as a black paper cutout, but a streetlamp illuminated the mouth of the snowed-in alley and the great snowdrift in the shape of a right-angled triangle lifting to the roof below my window. What did I promise, Erin?—no one knows you were ever gone. Mr. Lacey’s words seemed to reverberate in my head without his speaking aloud.

  With relief I saw that the downstairs windows of the house were all darkened, but there was a faint flickering light up in my room—the candle still burning, after all these hours. Gripping my hand tightly, Mr. Lacey led me up the snowdrift as up a treacherous stairway, fitting his boots to the footprints he’d originally made, and I followed suit, desperate not to slip and fall. Safe at home, safe at home! Mr. Lacey’s words sounded close in my ears, unless it was, Safe alone, safe alone! I heard. Oh! the window was frozen shut again! so the two of us tugged, tugged, tugged, Mr. Lacey with good-humored patience, until finally ice shattered and the window lurched up to a height of perhaps twelve inches. I’d begun to cry, a sorry spectacle, and my eyelashes had frozen within seconds in the bitter cold so Mr. Lacey laughed kissing my left eye, and then my right eye, and the lashes were thawed, and I heard, Goodbye, Erin! as I climbed back through the window.

  The Odd

  BY ED PARK

  Central Business District

  “Welcome back to the Strange,” the boy says. “It’s a full house here at the Bizarre.”

  His mother laughs. It’s a little warmer now, and quiet.

  “You do it,” the boy says.

  “The Weird is packed to the rafters and the fans are going wild.”

  “Why are they going wild?” he asks. “Tell me again.”

  He has made the request six times tonight, voice full of love and wonder, and it will be the sixth time she complies. There is no other story to tell. The story is why they’re here. They need to sleep. But first she must enter words into the silence, because the silence is too great.

  “Close your eyes,” she says, “and I’ll tell you what I remember.”

  “They’re already closed.”

  “Good.”

  She has to pick her words carefully, at least to begin with. Otherwise the kid will have a fit.

  “At center ice, wearing number 11, is Gilbert Perreault from Victoriaville, Quebec. Acquired the first year the Sabres were in business.”

  “On left wing.”

  “On left wing is Rick Martin, and on right wing is René Robert.”

  “Both acquired the second year.”

  “Correct.”

  “Together known as?”

  “Together known as,” she says, and then the two of them together: “The French Connection.”

  She does it a little differently this time, with a French accent: Ze Fransh Connectione.

  The boy laughs. “And who are the Sabres playing tonight?”

  “Tonight they are playing the Philadelphia Flyers in the third game of the 1975 Stanley Cup finals.”

  “Almost twenty-five years ago,” he says.

  “Almost twenty-five years ago.”

  “The only time the Sabres have been this close to the cup,” he says. Everything he says is so serious it cracks her up. Usually she tries to hold it in but tonight they need to laugh.

  “Yes.”

  “We won’t even get into the ‘no goal’ business.”

  “We’re steering clear.”

  “The fucking Dallas Stars.”

  She can’t help it: she laughs. He has his father’s mouth.

  “Dallas isn’t even a hockey town,” he continues. “It’s never snowed there. Not in a million years.”

  “Philly gets snow,” she says.

  “Have you ever been there?”

  “Just once, when I was a girl. I saw the Liberty Bell.”

  “Can I see it someday?”

  “Yes, honey.” She squeezes his hand. “Of course you can.”

  He squeezes back and takes his hand away. “Back to the game.”

  “Back to the game. The Sabres are in the finals. They trounced the Black Hawks and defeated the Canadiens and here they are.”

  “The Chicago Black Hawks in the quarterfinals and the Montreal Canadiens in the semis.”

  “Yes.”

  “Say it right.” He is, she thinks, a bit Strange. Sometimes he’s even Bizarre. But then so is everyone. Peculiar. Unusual. Out of the Ordinary. Her thing is that she always liked the dare part of truth or dare. She would pick it every time.

  “The Black Hawks in the quarterfinals and the Canadiens in the semis,” she says. “They’re two games into the finals against the Philadelphia Flyers.”

  “Good. Is this the first home game?”

  “This is the first home game in the series for the Sabres. They are down two games in the series.”

  “The crowd is roaring at the Totally Weird.”

  “Yes, the crowd is roaring. Perreault is at center, wearing number 11. Rick Martin at left wing, number 7. Rene Robert is number 14.”

  “Spell René.”

  “R-E-N-É.”

  “There was a girl named Renee in my class.”

  “Different spelling. For a girl, there’s one extra e.” He brought her up earlier in the day, when she was telling the story. She can’t quite picture the girl.

  “Spell his last name.”

  “R-O-B-E-R-T.”

  “How come you say it row-bear?”

  “That’s how a French person would say it.”

  “They are all from Canada and they all speak Fren
ch. Their English isn’t very good.”

  “Well, they could speak English, but they definitely had thick French accents.”

  “And so they were called the French Connection.”

  “Yes.”

  “What were they connecting?”

  She breathes for a while. She has a cigarette but she’s good about not smoking in front of the kid. She wonders how long that policy will hold.

  “Think of them passing the puck,” she says at last. “The puck is like a line that connects one stick to the other. On and on down the ice, passing, passing.”

  “Then shooting.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Right into the goal.”

  “Bingo.”

  “In front of a capacity crowd at the Strange, the Bizarre, the Totally Weird.”

  “Yes, baby.” She clutches his hand.

  “Don’t call me baby. I’m not a baby.”

  “I can’t help it. You’re still my baby.”

  He lets it slide. He holds her hand tighter.

  “There was a movie called The French Connection that came out around the same time. I never saw it.”

  “Can we rent it someday?”

  “Someday. It’s not really for kids.” It must be milder than the video games he’s been glued to since age four.

  “What’s it about?”

  “I don’t know that I’ve ever seen it. There are policemen and bad guys.”

  “Robbers?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Murderers?”

  “They probably kill some people. I’m not sure. Does it take place in France? Maybe. There’s a famous actor named Gene Hackman who’s in it.”

  “Is he dead?”

  “No. I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  Somewhere a drop of water lands in bigger water.

  “Are we going to die?”

  “We’re not going to die.” She kisses his head. “We’re not.”

  “Tell me about the fog.”

  “Okay. On the night of the game, it’s very warm in Buffalo, and the rink doesn’t have air-conditioning.”

  He hoots like that’s the most absurd thing imaginable. “No air-conditioning!”

  As if on cue, a ghostly wind rolls over them. She can hear its progress beyond, rattling equipment, making a loose panel creak.

  “Well, it’s May, and May usually isn’t so hot in Buffalo. It’s a strange night. Even before the puck drops, a layer of fog covers the ice. And as the game goes on, the fog thickens until the players have trouble seeing. I remember there were workers who had to skate between periods with giant sheets and banners to try to clear the fog. But it just seemed to get harder and harder to see.”

  “You were in the crowd that night. That night at the Curious.”

  “I was in the crowd that night,” she says. “In the Curious.”

  “The Bizarre. The Unusual.”

  “Yes. The Totally Weird. With your grandfather and your great-uncle and my cousins.”

  “How old were you?”

  He knows the answer. “I turned seven that night.”

  “It was your birthday!”

  “It was. Still is. May 20.”

  “May 20. One week after mine.” He loves that they are both the same zodiac sign, Taurus. “But how did you get tickets?”

  Again, he knows the answer. This part she has to get right. The silence swells until she thinks she’s hearing things again. A trickle of water, a pipe crashing through plaster. “These were the hottest tickets in town, as you can imagine,” she says, then waits because she knows he will repeat.

  “The hottest tickets in town,” he says.

  “The night before the game, my cousin Jenny was listening to the radio, and they were giving away tickets to the fifty-fifth caller.”

  “Why fifty-fifth?”

  “The station was WGR 550, and everyone called it GR 55. Jenny was supposed to be concentrating on her homework but she had the radio on, softly.”

  This is the boy’s favorite part. “Then what happens?”

  “In those days, kids didn’t have their own phones. There were no cell phones at all. Most houses had only one or two phones, one in the kitchen, maybe another one upstairs. When she heard that the station was giving away tickets, she had to figure out how to get to the phone in her parents’ bedroom. They were downstairs, so she thought the coast was clear. She made it into the bedroom and picked up the receiver.”

  “Then what happens?”

  She thinks about her cell phone, traces its outline in her handbag. How long ago did it die? Did her text even go through? She has lost all sense of time. Maybe morning is on the way. The edges of the room seem to be paler. It might be her eyes seeing what isn’t there, the way her ears hear things that aren’t there.

  “Jenny dialed one number, two numbers, three numbers,” she continues, back on script. “Then she heard someone coming upstairs. It was her dad! He was calling her name.”

  “What did she do? Mom, what did she do?”

  “Jenny dialed the last four numbers and held her breath. The bedroom was totally dark. Through the crack of the door she could see her father’s shadow pass as he went to look in her room.”

  “He was saying, Jenny, Jenny, how’s the homework coming along?”

  “Right. He was pretty strict about schoolwork. He wanted her to do well in school and learn a lot.”

  “School is important?”

  She chokes up. Her boy has had some trouble this year. He might have to repeat the grade. “It’s important, but a lot of things are important.”

  “Then what happens?”

  “Jenny dials the last three numbers.” It occurs to her to add a detail absent from the previous tellings. “All the houses back then had what they called a rotary phone. The phones didn’t have push-buttons back then. Think of a circle, a plastic circle, with holes as big as your fingertip all along the edge. You pick the number you want, pull it as far down as it can go, and then let it zip back into position. Then you do the next number.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  She explains some more, traces a big circle and smaller circles on the back of his hand. But it’s impossible to show how rotary phones work, here in the dark. As futile as describing how dinosaurs moved or how the pyramids were built, or the way your eyeballs flip an image upside down to your brain.

  She senses his confusion. The confusion that gets him mad. This has been a problem lately at school. At home. Everywhere. He’s been hitting other kids. He’s been hitting her.

  She thinks of something. “Guess what? I’ve been telling the story wrong.”

  “You have?”

  “I always think of the game being foggy from the very start. But it wasn’t. It didn’t get foggy until the bat.”

  “Tell about the bat.”

  He loves the bat. “When I think of it now, the place is like a haunted house. It’s the first home game for the Sabres. We’re the host. And even before the game begins, people start seeing something flapping, falling. At first it looks like a piece of trash, some pages from a magazine. But then it never hits the ground. It keeps going up and zooming down and going up again.”

  “A bat. A bat in the Weird. A bat in the Eccentric.”

  “That’s right. A bat in the Peculiar.” A bat in the Batshit, she nearly says.

  “What happened with Lorentz?”

  “Play gets underway. You can’t imagine the noise. People are shouting the whole time. Jim Lorentz sees the bat and lifts his stick and hits it.”

  “And it’s dead.”

  “It’s dead.”

  “What number was he?”

  “Lorentz? I can’t remember. I just remember Gil Perreault and Rick Martin and René Robert, 7, 11, 14.”

  “Then what happens?”

  “They get the bat off the ice. And then the fog starts. That’s the part I messed up. There was no fog till the bat.”

  “Till the bat was killed.”

&nb
sp; “Yes,” she says. “Till the bat was killed.”

  A noise high above. Faint, but they both hear it. He moves closer to her. They heard voices before, two or ten hours ago, or they both imagined it at the same time—men moving through the building. They should have called out, then. Before the boy dropped the flashlight and it rolled between two old vending machines, impossible to move. Before her cell phone died. Before a weak panel gave way and dumped them, gently, to this dark room where they wait for the morning.

  The noise came again, still soft but closer. “Was that a bat?”

  “No, honey.”

  “Bats, bats, bats,” he cries. “There are bats in the Odd!”

  His voice echoes in the bowels of the huge wreck they’re in, abandoned for a decade and marked off with tape. Tape in tatters, tape you could slip under with a kid for a quick look. Quick tour, show him your roots. She always liked a dare. A fence with a hole, she’d go through, didn’t matter what was on the other side. They were just passing through town and here was this monument, unprotected. A firsthand history lesson for the boy who has some behavior issues, who is Peculiar, Unusual, occasionally a bit Bizarre. Show him the shell of Memorial Auditorium, what everyone used to call the Aud.

  Good Neighbors

  BY GARY EARL ROSS

  Allentown

  By the time the Washingtons moved into the house two doors away late last summer, Loukas and Athena Demopoulos had lived next to Helen Schildkraut for nearly five years. Nestled in the heart of Allentown—a neighborhood known for its Victorian-style homes and antique shops—theirs was a short street with modest older houses, narrow driveways that led to peeling garages, and countless trees—elm, oak, maple. The trees formed a lush green canopy in summer and left everyone’s lawn awash in brown, gold, and red leaves in the fall. In fact, it was autumn leaves that alerted Lou to the competition.

  Lou and Athena had moved into the smaller clapboard house years after their three sons left their sprawling North Buffalo home—the first for college, the second for the army, and the third for the state penitentiary. They had sold their thriving Greek restaurant for a sum that would support a modest lifestyle. Still too young to collect Social Security, they retired to Allentown instead of Florida because Athena insisted on remaining a bus ride away from Niko, her favorite, until he completed his sentence or made parole. A short, bony woman with busy fingers, arched eyebrows, and perpetually pursed lips, she wore dark clothing, even in summer. Her favorite pastime was straightening out her two ungrateful daughters-in-law, who kept her other sons chained to faraway Dallas, Texas, and Fort Benning, Georgia, but she looked forward to growing tomatoes and squash in their postage stamp of a backyard. Lou looked forward to wandering through nearby antique stores and criticizing the lamb souvlaki and spanakopita at the Towne Restaurant. That he would even set foot in the Towne—for many years a rival of Demeter’s, his place on Hertel—was to Lou an act of great generosity, an acknowledgment that the competition was finally over. Besides, the new owners had made such a mess of Demeter’s that it hurt to go back, and the Towne was walking distance from his new home, its corner location close to several antique shops on Allen and Elmwood.