‘I was watching this on CNN an hour ago,’ says Slattery. ‘They said old elephants lose their minds sometimes, just snap. Watch this.’
Black quills appear on the elephant’s weathered hide and Jakob listens to the reporter describing the tranquilizer darts, six in all, each loaded with enough sedative to knock out any reasonable elephant. The beast shudders for a moment, shaking its massive head, the great ears flopping back and forth. Then it turns in its tracks and charges toward the sidewalk. The crowd gathered there disperses in all directions, like billiard balls after a good break. The elephant lowers its head and smashes through the glass storefront of what appears to be an electronics shop.
‘Goddamn,’ says Slattery, rocking back and forth on the sofa. ‘Look at that mother go!’
The soldiers begin firing their rifles – loud, echoing retorts – and the video image shakes before being replaced on screen by a Thai military spokesman standing behind a lectern, explaining the day’s events.
‘They killed it?’ asks Jakob.
‘Oh, yes,’ says Slattery, ‘they did indeed. Poor fuck went for a walk in the wrong part of town.’
Jakob wonders what caused the animal to snap: old age, faulty synapses in the brain, the long-resisted urge to take an afternoon stroll down the avenue? He tugs the bill of his Yankees cap lower on his forehead.
‘What time is Monty coming over?’
‘He’s not. He’s eating with his dad. We’re going to meet him later on.’
How can Monty eat? Jakob wonders. How can he swallow his food?
The television screen goes black for a moment between commercials, and Jakob sees his face reflected in the glass. ‘Do you think I look like a ferret?’
‘A ferret?’ Slattery laughs. ‘That’s good, I hadn’t thought of that before.’
‘So do I?’
‘One of the kids in your class told you that?’
Jakob frowns. ‘Nobody told me. I was just wondering.’
‘Somebody must have said something. You wouldn’t just think, all of a sudden, Hey, I look like a ferret. You’ve been looking at your face for twenty-six years.’
‘Actually,’ says Jakob, ‘let’s drop it.’
‘I don’t even know what a ferret looks like. But yeah, you might resemble one.’
‘Fine, thanks. You’re a wonderful human being.’
Slattery pats Jakob on the head. ‘And you’re not bad for a ferret. I’m going to take a crap and then we can go eat.’ He lifts himself from the sofa with a groan. He squats low to the ground for a moment and then straightens up, left knee creaking loudly. ‘Christ,’ he says, limping to the bathroom.
Jakob sits alone with the television, staring sullenly at the square-jawed anchorman, angry without knowing the exact cause of his anger. Sometimes he is fairly sure that he doesn’t like Slattery, that he never liked him, even if Slattery is his best friend. Jakob remembers the first day of ninth grade, walking through the school gates, uneager to spend another year with the tanned boys who milled in the courtyard wearing loosely knotted ties and boat shoes. When he met Frank and Monty he thrilled at their Brooklyn accents, their carefully combed hair the opposite of traditional prep school dishevelment. Both of them had been in scores of fistfights, which mesmerized Jakob, who had been in exactly zero. But they were out of their element here, nervous around the diffident poise of the oldtimers, intimidated by the casual displays of wealth. They immediately fastened upon Jakob as a sympathetic figure who knew his way around. During the convocation that opened the school year, Monty nudged Jakob with his elbow and motioned to an older boy sitting several pews in front of them. ‘That’s a Ralph Lauren jacket the guy’s wearing. Thing costs four hundred bucks.’ Jakob was delighted by the immediate intimacy, by the presumption that they came from similar backgrounds and that both of them would be shocked by a high school junior wearing a four-hundred-dollar jacket. Three months went by before Jakob had his two new friends over to his apartment. He feared they would lump him with the rest of the soft aristocrats in their grade. But by the time Monty and Frank showed up at the Elinsky household, they had already been to parties at triplexes on Fifth Avenue, townhouses on Park, a spectacular beach cottage in the Hamptons – and Jakob’s place, though perfectly nice, was far from intimidating.
The other old-timers in the class at first affected disdain for the newcomers, the ‘F.A.s,’ students receiving Financial Assistance, two Irish, two Puerto Rican, and four black, shipped in from Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. Lords of the Outer Boroughs was the initial review, a moniker that Monty seized for his own and ran through his hip-hop spell checker; the Outta Buro Lordz soon became the most admired clique in the school. Jakob reveled in his status as an honorary member, if always conscious that he lived, after all, on Central Park West, that his father was a tax attorney, that his knowledge of the outer boroughs consisted of Yankee Stadium to the north and Kennedy, LaGuardia, and his cousins in Forest Hills to the east.
Now it is Slattery and his associates who dine at expensive restaurants, while Jakob grades grammar quizzes in his eleven-foot-square apartment, boiling water for another meal of spaghetti and tomato paste. Jakob generally enjoys playing this game, the How Pathetic Is Your Life? game, but not now, not tonight, not when his friend is headed for federal prison in the morning.
Slattery finally emerges from the bathroom, drying his hands on a towel. ‘You ready? I’m starving.’
Jakob turns off the television with the remote control and stands. ‘What’s he going to do with Doyle?’
‘Huh?’
‘Where’s Doyle going to end up?’
‘Oh. I don’t know.’ Slattery throws the towel onto the coffee table, opens a closet, and pulls a black cashmere overcoat off a wooden hanger. ‘With Nat?’
Jakob shakes his head. ‘I doubt it.’
‘With his dad? I really don’t know. You like this coat? A friend of mine brought it back from London.’
‘Frank,’ says Jakob, picking at his fingernails, ‘are you ready for this?’
‘Ready for what?’
‘For tonight?’
‘I got to tell you,’ says Slattery, buttoning the coat, ‘it was such a crazy day at work, I haven’t even thought about it much.’
‘You haven’t?’ asks Jakob, startled. ‘He’s your best friend.’
‘You don’t have to explain it to me, I understand that. What do you want me to do? We’re going out with him, we’ll have a few drinks, what am I going to do? Come on, let’s move. Tie your shoes.’
Jakob gets down on one knee and begins lacing his rubber-soled hiking boots. ‘I’m nervous about seeing him. I really am; I’m scared. It’s like visiting a friend who’s in the hospital with cancer. What do you say? He’s going to be living in a cell for seven years. What do you say to him?’
Slattery shrugs. ‘You know what? I don’t think you say anything. I think we go out with him tonight, and we try to have a good time, and if he wants to talk about it, we talk about it. He’s going to hell for seven years – what am I going to do, wish him luck? We get him drunk and try to give him one more good night.’
Jakob ties a double knot and stands. ‘You make it sound like you’ve done this before.’
‘I have. My cousin got sent up for three years. Ready?’ Slattery opens the front door and waits for Jakob, one hand on the light switch.
‘He did? You never told me that. What for?’
‘He’s a fucking thief, that’s what for.’
The biggest scandal in Jakob’s family was a bulimic cousin. He wonders what other secrets Slattery has been keeping. ‘So he got through it okay? In prison and all?’
‘No. Not even close to okay. Come on, come on, let’s go.’
‘Wait a second,’ says Jakob, patting his hip pockets. ‘Where’s my wallet?’
‘Oh, Jesus.’
‘I had it when I came in here. I know I had it.’
‘It’s sitting on the sofa, schmuck.’
Jakob retrieves the wallet and pockets it. ‘It’s weird, though, I think, just knowing Monty, I think he’ll be okay.’ He sees the expression on Slattery’s face and continues, hurriedly, ‘No, no, I’m not saying it will be easy. If it was me, I’d never make it a day, I know that. But it’s Monty. He’s tough. He’s always been tough.’
‘No, he hasn’t,’ says Slattery, flicking off the lights, ‘and he won’t be okay. I don’t know what you’re thinking, Jake. There’s not going to be a happy ending.’
Jakob exits the apartment and waits while Slattery locks the door. ‘I’m not saying happy. I’m just saying—;’
‘You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. Tough? How do you know from tough? What do you think, because he wins a couple fights at Campbell-Sawyer, that means he’s a tough guy in Otisville? You don’t understand the trouble he’s in. You don’t get it. Monty’s got three choices, and none of them are good.’ They walk down the blue-carpeted hallway, Slattery twirling his key chain.
‘Three choices,’ says Jakob, impatient. Slattery always talks to him as if he were a dense child, not quick enough to understand the world’s complexities.
‘Okay. One, he can run. Get on a bus going to wherever and just hope they never catch up with him. That’s number one.’
‘He won’t do that. His dad’s bar—;’
‘I’m not saying what he will do. I’m saying what his choices are. Number two—;’ Slattery makes a gun with his thumb and index finger and points it at his temple.
Jakob’s eyes go wide. ‘Kill himself? Not a chance. So what’s the third option?’
‘The third option?’ Slattery thinks for a moment. ‘Oh, the third option is he goes to prison.’
Jakob nods. ‘That’s what’s going to happen. He’ll go, and he’ll make it through.’
‘Okay. Maybe. But no matter what, it’s bye-bye Monty.’
‘What does that mean?’
Slattery raises his thumb. ‘If he runs, he’s gone. You’ll never see him again.’ He raises his index finger, the top joint crooked from wrestling days. ‘If he pulls the trigger, he’s gone. They’ll keep the casket closed.’ He raises his middle finger. ‘If they lock him away, he’s gone. You’ll never see him again.’
‘I’ll see him again,’ says Jakob. ‘I’ll see him when he gets out.’
The elevator doors open and Slattery steps inside. ‘I wouldn’t bet on it. You think you’re still going to be friends? You think you’ll kick back with a couple beers and reminisce? Forget it, Jake. It’s over after tonight. You getting in?’
Seven
‘What’s good here?’ asks Monty, reading the menu from a blackboard on the wall.
‘The veal,’ says his father. ‘The veal’s good. That’s what I usually get.’
‘Okay.’ Monty leans back in his chair and surveys the restaurant: a low-ceilinged relic just north of Houston Street, one of the last of the old-school Italians, where they still serve spaghetti and meatballs, eggplant parmesan, chicken cacciatore.
‘Taking off Thursday night,’ says Monty. ‘That’s big of you. Who’s minding the place?’
‘Kennelly’s taking care of it.’
‘Kennelly? He’s going to drink all your rum. You trust Kennelly?’
‘It’s only a couple hours. You said you were meeting your friends, so I figured ten o’clock—;’
‘That’s fine,’ says Monty. He plays with the label on their bottle of red wine. The waitress, an old woman with a face like a crumpled paper bag, takes their order. She wears a platinum-blond wig and false eyelashes; she beams when she hears Monty’s selection.
‘Good pick,’ she says, her front teeth red with lipstick. ‘Veal’s the best thing here.’ She shuffles away and Monty thinks, She’ll be dead before I get back here.
‘So I talked to Sal—;’
‘Ah, come on, Dad.’
‘See if he can help with anything.’
‘Dad, come on, what are you thinking? Sal? The guy’s been out of the picture for twenty years.’
‘He might know some people in there.’
‘The guy’s about a hundred years old. He sits around playing gin rummy all day. What’s Sal going to do for me?’
‘He still knows people. He could put in—;’
‘Dad, would you please? I’ll be all right. Just, please, don’t get involved in this. Okay?’
‘You’re still going to be a young man when you get out. I know,’ says Mr Brogan, raising his hands, for Monty is shaking his head. ‘I know you don’t think so. But listen to me. You keep your head down in there. Don’t start any trouble—;’
‘Enough.’ Monty stares at the backs of his hands. He wills them to quit trembling, but they won’t.
When the waitress brings out their food, Mr Brogan diligently cuts the spinach leaves on his plate into smaller and smaller squares. He had wanted desperately to give his son something, to encourage him in some way, but now, watching the boy try to eat, he knows it is useless. How do you say, It’s only seven years? Mr Brogan’s father was a barman; Mr Brogan grew up in bars and worked in them his whole life, sometimes rough places where a wrong word could lead to a beating or worse. But he understands that nothing in his experience can come close to what waits for Monty, that Monty is traveling to a foreign land Mr Brogan knows only from rumor.
Mr Brogan’s bar is his bond to the court, his guarantee that Monty will not run away. Since June, Monty has been free because of the bar: free before trial, during trial, after conviction, after sentencing. Mr Brogan has owned the bar for thirty years, but sometimes he wishes Monty would run. Let them have the place; let them try to make money off it. Caught between Bensonhurst and Bay Ridge, he owns a neighborhood bar without a neighborhood. Most of his patrons work at the hospital down the block or in the stores on 86th Street; they stop off for a drink before driving home. They are loyal, his customers, they like him and confide in him, but they do not have much money to spend.
‘This should never have happened,’ says Mr Brogan, staring at his glass of soda water.
‘All right, let’s not start now. It’s a little late in the game.’
‘I know,’ says Mr Brogan. ‘I know it, and I’m sorry, Monty. I should never have let you get involved.’
Monty raps the tabletop with his knuckles. ‘Hey. Let it go. You had nothing to do with it, okay? Don’t start with this now.’
‘I just wish we could have talked about it. You could have made so much money in a real business; you didn’t need that . . . You should never have gotten involved with that.’
But money was never the sole draw for Monty. He hadn’t grown up poor and he wasn’t greedy; he liked fast cars and Italian shoes but he didn’t need them, didn’t hunger for them. It was more about sway. Sway helps make your money and money helps make your sway, but sway is not money. Sway is walking into a clothes shop and knowing you can buy anything on the shelves, true, but sway is also the clerk opening the shop after hours so you can walk through the aisles alone with your girlfriend; sway is the clerk unlocking the back room to show you the latest deliveries, still sheathed in plastic bags; sway is the clerk standing silent in the corner while you browse, and the clerk won’t complain if you paw the merchandise and kiss your girl for an hour because he knows about you and the trouble’s not worth it. Sway is making a phone call in the morning and having courtside seats at Madison Square Garden that night. Sway is entering a nightclub through the staff entrance so you can skip the metal detector. Sway is locking eyes with an undercover cop on the subway; you know what he is and he knows what you are, and you wink at him because he drives a battered Buick and you drive a Corvette, and he cannot touch you.
The Corvette is gone now. The government took title after Monty’s indictment. He wonders where it is – parked in some smirking suburbanite’s driveway or else still waiting in a federal lot for auction day. Monty does not love cars the way some men do, but he was proud of his vehicle, proud of its low-slung black body,
the roar of its engine, the way he could make it bolt through the gaps in midtown traffic. On lucky days he’d find a string of green lights and cruise home in style.
In thirteen hours, home becomes the Otisville Federal Correctional Institution; a Catskill Eagle bus will take him there. They will give him the proper documents to sign, they will strip-search him, and they will fingerprint him – again.
Monty doesn’t mention Otisville or the Corvette or the principle of sway to his father. Instead, he says, ‘I didn’t hear you complaining when you were borrowing money. Not a word back then.’
‘No. You’re right. That was a mistake.’
Mr Brogan remembers when Monty was an infant, red-skinned and kicking. The boy would squeeze his eyes shut and pound on the blue blanket he lay on, wailing weakly – short, stuttered cries – in the months before his lungs were strong enough for true volume. His mother would pick him up from the crib, one hand supporting his head; she would walk with him and sing to him. She could never hold a tune but Monty did not seem to mind; he watched her obsessively, his green eyes locked on her green eyes. Or she would read to him from a picture book while his fuzzed head rested on her breast. She would read to him and he would listen quietly, long before he knew what the words meant: Goodnight stars, goodnight air, goodnight noises everywhere. And Mr Brogan would stand in doorways, always a little apart. Not jealous exactly, but maybe a little jealous, always conscious that this was an alliance to which he could only be witness.
There was something fierce about the boy’s love for his mother and her love for him. They were a beautiful pair. Later, when they marched down the street together, his handclutching hers, people turned to watch them, smiling. What a darling boy. She had insisted on naming her son after Montgomery Clift, her favorite actor, and she got her wish over her husband’s objections. Back then Mr Brogan felt uneasy about the name; he thought it was bad luck to name their only child after a fallen movie star. But Montgomery it was, and Mr Brogan was glad to see that the boy looked like his mother: the same rich black hair; the same small, even teeth; the same straight nose; the same eyes, so green as to be unsettling. He was a beautiful boy and he grew into a beautiful man, and Mr Brogan was always proud to have such a handsome son. Now, though, he wishes Monty were a little less handsome.