On Bear Mountain Read online

  She saw the look on my face and held out an arm. “Baby,” she rebuked in a weak, tender voice, “come on here and keep me warm. I’m just fine.”

  “Pancakes, Mama,” I repeated firmly.

  “No. Com’ere, baby.”

  I gave in to emotion and curled up beside her, under the covers. I massaged her enormous stomach over her nightgown. She hummed in appreciation, then fell into a light sleep, frowning. I put my hand on her chest and counted her heartbeats. She felt so frail, compared to me. When the sun was high in the windows, I dozed off.

  Her jerking movement woke me. The sunlight was still cascading into the room; not much time had passed. But now she was wide awake and sweating, her eyes half-shut. I bounded out of bed and watched her grip the covers. “Mama? Mama?” I said loudly. “I’m calling the doctor.”

  “No!” Slowly, she relaxed. Her eyes went to me. She managed to smile. “I’m just fine. I’ll tell you what you do. You go call Miz Maple. Her number’s in the phone book. I’m gonna have her come over and set with me.”

  Roberta Maple was a stout older woman who had helped deliver me when I was born. Daddy hadn’t mentioned anything about calling Mrs. Maple. “I . . . I better call Daddy,” I insisted. “Daddy told me to.”

  “But I’m not sick. Wouldn’t I tell you if I was?”

  “Mama — ”

  “Shoo. Call Miz Maple.”

  “I thought she only came around when people had babies. Are you — ” I halted, afraid. “Are you?”

  “I’m not having no baby, today, honey,” she said quickly, smiling too brightly at me. “Our baby’s not supposed to come ’til after Christmas. Now go call Miz Maple. I just need some company.”

  Caught in a dilemma of conflicting information, I went downstairs, climbed onto the footstool that helped me reach the wall phone, and called Roberta Maple. She said she’d come right over. I took down the note about Daddy’s work number, and studied it as if secret advice might reveal itself to me.

  I put the note in my overalls’ pocket and went back upstairs to watch Mama until Mrs. Maple came. That was the worst decision I made, that day.

  • • •

  Horror stiffened my bones. Mrs. Maple and Sue Tee had banished me to the kitchen for the past three hours, and I’d strained my ears listening. I heard Mama cry out. I leaped on the stool and grabbed the phone, fumbled for the note in my pocket, and called the number. When a man answered I yelled, “Tell Tom Powell to come home quick!” and then I slammed the phone down. I pulled the Tiberville phone directory from a shelf. My hands were shaking so badly I could hardly plant a finger on the listing for the doctor.

  Mama’s god could be pissed off at me for the rest of my life, I didn’t care. I was dialing when Sue Tee Harper intercepted me and wrestled the receiver out of my hand. Mrs. Maple’s assistant was wiry, bucktoothed, and dressed in a floppy brown pantsuit. She had the hardened eyes of a poor mountain woman who had no illusions about life’s realities. “Girl!”

  “I’m calling the doctor!”

  “Callin’ the doctor?” She mimicked me in a high-pitched drawl. “Lord Jesus, girl, your folks ain’t got no money for a doctor!”

  “He’ll come anyway!”

  “You do what you wuz told. You leave that phone alone. God’s takin’ care of your mama. You go sit out on the porch and pray.”

  “My daddy’s gone to make some money. I AM CALLING THE DOCTOR.”

  “He ain’t makin’ enough to pay for no doctor.” She pointed in the general direction of the pasture. “He spent his doctor money on that bear contraption out yonder. If you want to squeal, you squeal at it, you hear? Your mama cain’t afford no doctor and she sure wishes she had one now. But she knows your daddy put all his doctor money on that evil idol.”

  I stumbled backward, gaping at her. What to believe? Ponderous footsteps hurried down the stairs. Mrs. Maple waddled into the kitchen, carrying something wrapped in a bloody sheet. “Get her out of here,” she said to Sue Tee.

  Sue Tee grabbed me by one arm, but I wrapped a hand around a thick iron towel bar bolted to the wall beside the sink counter. Fred Washington’s ancestors had forged that towel bar, and like them it was strong, black, and built to stay. “Girl! Damn you, girl!” Sue Tee yelled, pulling as I held on. I stared at the little bundle that didn’t move, the bundle that Mrs. Maple placed on the kitchen table. “Get her outta here, I said! I have to get back upstairs!”

  Sue Tee grunted, jerked, and I fell to the floor. As I scrambled to my feet, she shoved me outside, tossed me my cloth coat, then locked the door. Sue Tee ran to the table and pulled back a bit of the sheet. Through the wavy door panes I glimpsed a tiny, still face. When she covered that face with the sheet again I was stunned, then filled with rage. What was she doing! Mama’s baby would smother like that!

  Picking up a piece of firewood from the long stack against the porch wall, I smashed a pane of door glass. Sue Tee swung around and threw up her hands as I reached inside and unlocked the latch. “Out! Out!” she yelled as I darted back inside. “What kind of thinkin’ do you do, girl?” I dodged her and she grabbed me by the coat collar. I swung the piece of kindling still in my hand, and hit her in the chin. She yelped, whirled me around, and pointed furiously at the bundle. “You want to get in the middle of this? All right! Your little brother’s dead. That’s his body right there! Now, will you listen to me and take yourself outside?”

  I froze. The stick of kindling fell from my hand. I couldn’t register everything at once; my mind refused to hear what she’d said. “Sue Tee!” Mrs. Maple yelled from upstairs. “I need you!”

  “I’ll be right back, and you better be gone,” Sue Tee said, then ran out of the room. I forced one foot in front of the other, gaining momentum as I neared the table. I shot out a hand and pulled on the sheet. It fell aside. And there he was, my baby brother, bluish-pink, his eyes shut, his tiny face as still as a sleeping kitten’s. I didn’t see a dead baby. I saw my brother. My brother. Not dead. Not this one. He was full-sized. I wouldn’t let this baby be born dead.

  I gathered him and the sheet in my arms, and ran outside. When young chicks were smothered in the masses as the Tiber delivery people unloaded new flocks into the chicken houses, Daddy would gather as many of the limp bodies as he could, and I would help. We’d rush them to the livestock trough and dunk them in the water. Sometimes the cool shock revived them, sometimes it didn’t. But we tried.

  That’s where I headed with the baby. He was limp, he felt hopeless, but I ran as fast as I could. I knelt down and shoved him, sheet and all, between the strands of barbed-wire fence that fronted the trough, and I sank him in the icy water for a second, then lifted him out, and dunked him again.

  There was no response. I unwound the sheet and submerged him, naked, one time. I couldn’t bear to do that again, it looked so hard and cruel on his tiny, wrinkled body, and he was still as limp as a bean-bag doll.

  What to do, what to do? I clutched him to my chest, opened my coat and tucked him inside, then stumbled across the yard. Courage was giving way to fear and misery; I was suddenly blinded by tears. I hit something hard with one foot and tripped, sprawling on my side. I had run into the Iron Bear’s concrete pad, and now, looking up and gasping for air, I saw the Bear looming over me. I lay beneath its jutting head, gazing up at the mesh of pieces and parts shielding me from a cold gray sky.

  “It’s all because of you!” I shouted. “You got the doctor money!” Under my coat, pressed tightly against the bib of my overalls and the sweaty flannel of my shirt, something moved. I sat up, shaking, and opened one side of my coat. My brother curled one miniature hand against my shirt, opened his mouth, and began to mewl. I stared up at the Bear. Had it heard me and felt guilty?

  I was afraid to move, afraid I’d hurt the baby, stop him from living, now that he was. I huddled there with my coat drawn closely around him, staring at the house, my mind a blank wall waiting for someone to please, please come and tell me that Mama was all
right, too. The Bear had saved the baby. The Bear would save her. Nothing else would make sense.

  Soon Daddy raced up the driveway, left the truck’s door standing open, and ran into the house. I tried to get up and follow him, but my knees shook too badly. I sat back down on the Bear’s concrete base, and waited. The baby continued to make soft sounds and began to wiggle.

  Daddy finally came out of the house, saw me, and half-ran, half-stumbled toward me. The look on his face made me hunch over in pain. When he reached me I began to cry; I opened my coat so he could see the baby. “He’s not dead, Daddy. Isn’t Mama okay, too? I tried to call the doctor.” Daddy sank down beside us and wrapped one arm around me. He slid his shaking hand inside my coat and curved it behind the baby’s head. “One miracle is all we could hope for,” he whispered, then his voice broke and he cried, too, holding me against his chest, his other hand still cupping my brother.

  I was stunned. He didn’t have to tell me that Mama was dead. I could feel the emptiness under my skin, between my veins, around my heart. There was no money for a doctor because Daddy had been foolish, and Mama’s idea of god had killed her, and he and the Iron Bear had let god do it. Dry-eyed and in shock, I looked back up at the sculpture. It hadn’t saved my brother. It had killed my mother.

  CHAPTER 5

  Quentin sat on the brick stoop of the apartment building in the growing autumn darkness, trying to study under the light of a streetlamp. He took a cigarette from his jacket then put it back. Mrs. Silberstein and the neighborhood’s other old ladies would report him to his mother if they caught him smoking. They never seemed to notice the drug dealers and panhandlers who occupied every corner, but they’d notice Quentin Riconni puffing a filter tip. They still took care of their own.

  Staying out of trouble, even small trouble, had become his mantra. He was one year away from graduating, and the teachers at St. Vincent’s said he had a shot at any scholarship he wanted. He pictured himself at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. MIT. As far as he was concerned, it was the best engineering school in the country.

  He slapped a calculus text on his knees and opened it. Lost in concentration, at first he didn’t hear the firm tap of Carla Esposito’s wedged high heels on the sidewalk. “Oh, Quent, shit. Not again,” she called softly. He looked up, startled.

  The shoes made her almost as tall as he. Her black hair overflowed from a Farrah Fawcett mane of teased layers. She wore denim bellbottoms and a bright pink blouse beneath a long leather jacket. There was no bra under that blouse. Her eyes were rimmed with thick black mascara, her lips bright pink, like her nails. At fifteen she was going on thirty. If Alfonse had caught her looking like that, he’d have put her in a convent school.

  She sat down on the step beside Quentin’s legs and sighed deeply, thrusting her substantial breasts against his thigh. He and she had recently taken each other’s virginity with speedy, awkward intimacy under a tree in a nearby park. Since then, they’d improved their skills at every opportunity. “Electricity turned off again, huh?” Her voice was gentle.

  After a grim moment spent staring at his book, he closed it hard. “Yeah.”

  “I thought the bills were under control.”

  “Ma’s been sending more money to the old man than I realized. She was hiding it from me. He’s shipping his work to galleries out of state. Not that he sells much. Hell, he barely covers the cost of shipping. Then he had to replace his welder, and some other equipment. That’s why she’s sending him extra money. I shoulda known something was up when she took a second job. She’s working two nights a week at a bookstore.”

  “You could come over to my place. Pop’s working late.”

  “Thanks for the invite, but I’m not in the mood.”

  “That could change.” She slid a hand between his legs and groped until he caught her hand in warning. Yet Quentin studied her with pure greed. Feisty, loyal, and ambitious, Carla always wanted to make him happy, whether it was good for him, or not.

  She grinned wider. “Gotcha. Wow.” Her grin faded when he shook his head. “Come over where there’s lights, please, please, please, or I could come up to your place before your ma gets home. Let’s play doctor in the dark.”

  “That’s how everybody else around here ends up with babies they don’t want.”

  “Not me.” She patted a pocket of her bellbottoms. “I stole condoms from Tivolii’s. That old Russian turned her back and I swiped ’em from behind the counter.”

  “Some detective’s daughter.”

  “I’m not getting pregnant. We’re getting out of this place. We’ll live on the other side of the bridge — we’ll live all the way over at Central Park — in a penthouse. With a chauffeur!” She preened. “Do I look like I belong in Brooklyn?” She had won a dozen community beauty pageants, and had even modeled dresses for a department store catalog. Carla pulled on his thigh, sliding her fingers higher. “Don’t worry about the electric bill. It doesn’t matter. Come on. I can cheer you up. I don’t like it when you’re like this.”

  “I want to bash my head against a wall. I want to explode.”

  “It’s only lights!”

  “I hate having the goddamned electricity turned off. I hate the way Mother hangs her head when she reads the bills. I hate when she won’t look the grocer in the eye because he won’t charge any more on her account. My old man promises her every year’ll be better. He got a big gallery in SoHo to show some of his pieces last month. People laughed at them. There’s always a few people who rave about his stuff and buy something, but never enough. He’s ahead of his time, they tell him. Who knows? Who cares? He didn’t sleep for a week. I want things put right, you understand? I’ll never make promises I can’t keep. I take care of my responsibilities.” He was almost yelling, now, and gripped Carla by the shoulders. “I’m a man, a man, and I’ve got duties. I can’t do anything about the electricity, but I’m not a bum!”

  She slammed a fist into his arm. “You know I love you! I want to help!”

  “And I’ve told you a dozen times I don’t want you to love me and I don’t want your help. Capice?”

  “You got another girl! That’s why you talk this way! I’ll fuckin’ kill her when I find out who she is!”

  He scrubbed a hand over his face and sighed. “There’s no other girl. I just don’t want anybody to love me. Anybody. Any girl. Not you or anybody else.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t need love. What good is it?”

  “I’m gonna marry you someday!”

  “You want to get married? Find a husband. Not me. Never. I don’t believe in marriage.”

  “You’re a liar!”

  “You think whatever makes you happy. But enough about it. Enough.” He straightened ominously, warning that one more word would send him to his feet and walking away. They had had this argument before. She never believed him, and he never gave in.

  Carla popped to her feet, her face livid and her hands clenched. “Fuck you. Fuck you. I know what this is about. You think you’re gonna go away to some big college next year and never come back here, and I’m just some Brooklyn wop cop’s daughter you’re gonna forget all about. You don’t know everything, Quentin Riconni. You don’t know nothing. You don’t even know where your ma really works at night!”

  He got to his feet, instantly on alert. “What are you talking about?”

  Her face paled. Her eyes filled with tears, and her anger faded. “Shit,” she said under her breath. She hadn’t meant to say anything.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Quentin, I . . . damn. Damn.” Carla’s shoulders slumped. “Pop found out, ’cause detectives always hear stuff about those operations. He tried to talk her out of it, but she made him promise not to tell. She says it’s just for a little while.”

  “What?”

  Carla’s mouth trembled with remorse. “She’s doing office work for Frank Siccone’s.”

  The loan shark. Siccone was scum under a rock.
He sent guys out to break knees and fingers. He was a merciless piece of shit.

  Quentin quickly walked Carla back to her brownstone and kissed her in the darkness beside the steps. “I’ve got things to do,” he told her, and left her standing there, crying.

  He watched the stars for comfort as he strode down dark city streets no one should be walking alone. This part of Brooklyn was squeezed under strips of sky, the smell of diesel oil and subways and spilled garbage scenting the night. The streetlights beamed like yellow eyes. He hunched his shoulders menacingly under his coat and shoved his hands deeper in his jean pockets, clamping one fist around a small automatic pistol, the other around a switchblade.

  A man appeared from the shadows of an alley. “Hey, what you doing, what you got for a friend?” the man asked in a slurred voice. He reached loosely for Quentin’s arm.

  Instantly Quentin pulled the knife, flicked it open, and thrust it up, stopping the slender point just below the man’s breastbone. “I’ll cut your heart out,” he warned softly.

  “Hey, hey now.” The stranger backed into the alley, hands up, then turned and staggered away.

  Quentin put the knife away and continued walking fast, his knees weak. A sleek, jacked-up black Camaro pulled up at the corner. Quentin strode to the door and got in. Johnny Martin, swarthy and thick chested, with shaggy black hair, sneered at him. “You still got the balls to do it?”

  “Hell, yes.” Quentin’s chest felt like a balloon filled with water. He spread his hands on the knees of his jeans, letting his palms dry. Johnny drove him to the Heights, and they quickly perused the expensive cars parked along a street lined with nice old homes. “Go,” Johnny ordered. “Get that one.”

  Quentin leaped out and ran to a small, dark Mercedes. With a flick of the tool in his hand he was inside the elegant sedan, and with another twist, its engine roared to life. He drove blindly back to his own familiar haunts, with Johnny following, and pulled the car into the sunken driveway of Goots’s chop shop.