Joey-O
a novel in progress by Earl Coleman

Chapter 1

“Ostowitz.”

Hesh gulped. Here came the question. No matter what it was, he knew the answer. If only he could say out loud. Always was the way of it, his tongue against his teeth. Thinking, thinking, never this is this and that is that, speak up for himself, what it was he knew. His head was going, not his tongue. Even when it was only Joey he was fighting with, always on the tip the answer, but under the gun, like now, forget it, his head a factory of static, station never coming in, not centered on the dial numbers, somewhere in between. If he could only say: just hold it for a shake until I get my tongue in gear. Wait! “Yes, Mr. Grundel?”

“What’s needed here, Ostowitz?” Grundel pointed to the mock-up of the engine on the ancient desk.

And suddenly it came to him as it did so often, this gift he had, substantial as a kugel like his mother made, as unexpected as a package from his papa, saw him last when he was six. He’d memorized it from the book! “What’s missing is a thermostat by-pass hose. You install it with two Number Six screw hose clamps. Look first for internal corrosion. Find it. Clean it. Job is right.” He knew it. He always knew he knew it. Looked triumphantly across at Joe who turned away.

Joe had seen the teacher turn toward Hesh. Fuck him.

“That’s good, Ostowitz. Which one are you? You’re Joey, aren’t you? You look so different but I never name you right.”

“No. That’s Joe, the other side.” He pointed across the shop to where his tall, lean twin was dwarfed by two black giants flanking him like ebony bookends, standing, lounging against the body of an Impala. “I’m Herschel. Heshy.”

“ I like it that you pay attention, Heshy. You study the manuals. I like that. When you get out of here you’re gonna make a life.” He turned toward Joe. “How ‘bout you, Joey? You ready for the world out there? What kind of time you guys still looking at?”

“Short time.” The way to talk, to hold himself he knew. Hard-on solid. Like all there. Nobody tried it on with them, not big or black or Spics or nobody. Don’t fuck with Joey O. They knew it, even screws. Fuckin’ A he was gonna make a life.

When Binky made it up for visitor’s day he made him swear first off his T-bird was OK, without a scratch, the gas still in it, sitting there till he got sprung. Hot to get behind that wheel again but kept his cool. A model prisoner. Binky said last time he had a couple of new angles in the garment trade.

Didn’t matter that he came from Clinton Street, just turned twenty-one, in the slammer on a B and E. Grundel showed respect. Joe liked the feel of that. Not who he was right now but who he’d be. Respect. Joe the Man. Control. The thought came quick of Tess, eight months ago tonight, the night before the burglary, set to get his rocks off, teasing her to show who had control. It came when he said come. He bobbed his head at Grundel, signing off.

*

Lena’s rheumatic fingers struggled with her purse catch, then clawed to fish out food stamps with the nails she still had left. She offered the stamps to the checkout girl with a look part challenging, part poor mouth, hefted her brown paper bags from the counter and shambled out, heading toward Clinton Street.

She paid scant attention to the hectic commerce on the Spring sidewalks, schwarzes selling records, purses, jewelry, books set up on stands, the world loosening its corsets just to make a lousy buck. She huffed with effort as she moved her heavy body on arthritic legs. Rushing trucks zoomed by her, past the drunken fire hydrants, barbed wire lots, busted windows. Pleasure cars jounced into potholes, radios full blast, “Do You Love Me?” “Up On the Roof.” Her head was stuffed with worries over Hesh and Yussel, worries that she nagged at, as you would a sore. They made her blind and deaf to everything.

A shondeh to be locked up in that place. What were they -- hardened criminals, her sons? The judges had to take revenge? Sympathy for a mother they had none? Her boys who didn’t have two pennies they could rub against each other. So they’d made a mistake. No one made mistakes?

She couldn’t deny it. They were twins but she worried about Heshy more. Yussel she could never get control of, hung out with lowlives. Heshy, under Yussel’s influence, got into trouble. She shifted her bulky packages uncomfortably and finally set them down on the gritty sidewalk to catch her breath.

At last she reached Clinton Street, her house still two blocks down, the street itself a solid mass of tenements. It had always been a slum, from the moment they had slapped it up for working poor in 1900. Even so, at one time it had also been a neighborhood. Today, in 1963, there were jangling noises everywhere, so many different languages, ear-splitting music, now a soldier on her street, wearing a green beret. How could that be? Where were they fighting, where? They’d ship them off to war, her sons? How would they build a life up for themselves, the world so hard? What did she want -- too much? A couple grandkids, both her boys with steady jobs at least, who knows, a little store.

A difference in the girls they picked. Heshy’s Edie, such a girl, working from the moment she left school. Tessie was a tramp, another of the bummikehs that Yussel found. Joe, he called himself now. Joe! A shondeh.

As she approached her stoop her heart gave a knock as always coming up to Yussel’s Thunderbird, red with bucket seats, polished bright you could go blind. “Fast cars and girls” it seemed to shriek at her. Like new it shone while up and down the block the others looked like dreck. Eight months. The car still there, like he’d be back this afternoon.

Her eyes rose to the formidable stairs up which she had to schlep her bundles, then higher, where the gasping windows breathed in deep the April day as if trying to suck air into the rat trap rooms.

She’d cook some liver now and make it into sandwiches for them, the chicken fat already rendered. A little salt. A piece of pickle on the side. What could they get up there? Pfeh! On Sunday she’d be going up to bring them what to eat.

*

Herschel was pissed cause Gresham, the screw, held up the tile wall with his back, staring straight at them with his mackerel eye. Jeez he had a right to fucking privacy. He took his mother’s hand anyway, gentled it the way you’d work the dial on a safe. Rheumatism bad, her fingers were all cockeye, looked like plugs of wire rolled in electrical tape. “Mama, mama,” he worried over the fingers of her left hand, enclosing them in his.

“My Heshy.” She put a thick right hand on his arm. “They treat you OK? Yussel too?”

“Sure ma, sure. I tell them you come after them they treat us bad. Shape up right away.” He wrapped his muscled left arm about her broad fleshy back, protecting her the way he used to on the bus to hump-back grandma’s, Joe always watching cars go by the window side. “You OK? Edie calls you, like she said? Joe’s Binky and the guys look in, make sure?”

“What’s Joe? By Yussel is no good? Ashamed? So what’s he got to be ashamed? His name? But thank you. Edie calls me. Tell me Heshy, where my Yussel finds such friends? They look like gangsters in the movies, what. Twice a day show up and look. Even here you’re busy worrying am I OK. I know, my Heshy. Shmul, your papa, ran away from his responsibilities but left me two strong boys to watch, take care of me.”

He hated it she talked about his papa. The image of that face was lost except his eyes. Hot. Hot eyes. They looked like they could burn a hole in you. They wanted something bad. He wanted too. “Hey -- I only got one mama, right?” Looked into her puffy face, her eyes like drops of Number One oil, glinting from the fluorescents overhead. Her forehead sweating, always sweating, brown hair falling down. Bad for her, the fat. He couldn’t tell her that. “How’s your rheumatism, ma?”

She offered her misshapen hand to him, the knotted fingers twisted up. “Not good. A hand? Call this a hand? What else is new? Not one thing it’s another.”

What could he do for her? His toughened muscles were ready to leave his body, leave this work farm, this rat’s hole and go forth; learn how to make it with the doors to everything slammed shut. “Anything you need, you tell. You know what I’m sayin’ ma? Anything. Yussel and me we got connections, ma. You know?” Well Joe had the connections but he had Joe. Until the stupid heist went bad.

She shifted heavily. Her body sagged, an over-crammed and swollen laundry bag. “What do I need, my Heshy? To eat? Crumbs I have. My welfare check comes regular, you gotta watch the mailbox they don’t steal. What else? Shmatehs I don’t need, I got. My boys I got. How long they gonna send you home?”

“Just two months, ma. Behave ourselves. Two months. Before you look around. We gonna make it, ma, Yussel and me. You hear me, ma? We’re gonna make it. Watch us go.”

“Of course I hear. A mother’s heart. I read you like a book. You got ambition, want to do. To make a dollar. My dream for you -- a candy store on Coney Island Avenue corner Church. A gold mine you could have, my boys.”

“I don’t like a candy store too good.” It was a candy store that they’d been busted for. Bad rep, bad judge. The time a piece of cake but still. Who knew a cop would happen to drive by and see Yussel’s flashlight, shouldn’t have been up so high.

*

“Yussel.”

Joe kept his eyes on the page and answered low. “How many times, you fuck? The name is Joe.”

What was Joe mad at, what? Like mad enough to punch him out. The plan he’d laid out over lunch? Hesh stopped himself before he said too much. “What you doin’ Joey, what?” Who did he think he was? Good looking, that was all of it. What did he have so special he should be stuck up?

“Reading.”

Hesh stood over him, a solid hundred sixty-five, Joey stretched out on the lower. “I can see you’re readin’, wise-ass. What you readin’, Joey?”

“The Fantastic Four.”

He leaned down and plucked the magazine from Joey’s hands and held it in his fingers like a bug. “You study up for Electrical Systems, McNally, this afternoon?”

Joey, leaner, two inches taller, down-lines at the corners of his fighter’s mouth, looked up at his brother coolly, expressionless. “Who are you, Hesh, you snatch my book away? A screw, my father, what?” He should have been more careful with the flash. It always pissed him off when he fucked up. Especially when there was someone there to see. Yeah, you could make believe it never happened. But. Now Heshy thought that he could think things for himself. Fat chance. You get control you got to keep it tight. Otherwise, who knows?

“Never mind your papa. In my mind he’s dead. One of us has got to think. Like I said, when we get outta here, no way that we can make it knockin’ over candy stores.”

“What kind of bullshit, Hesh? I’m the one that doesn’t think? And you’re a genius, what? Who got this cell for us, they never give to brothers, never. Who did the thinking part for you and mapped out every plan we ever had?”

“Good ones too. Hah, Joey? Just like the last?”

“Hey -- it was a sure thing Hesh. Bad luck. We must have picked it up somewhere.”

“Bad luck? You turned the beam on, wise-ass! You and your plans. We do it this way, Hesh. Well Joey, we ain’t done too good your way. Let’s try it my way once.”

“Your way? How we gonna make it your way Hesh? What kind of way is that, the way you said at lunch? We study automotive? Lay under cars, grease falling in our eyes? Eat shit? Call that a plan?” There had to be a way to take back the control.

Hesh thought how he could answer Joe. He couldn’t say it, get the knots out. He’d warned him watch the flash, Joey cocksure always. Cocksure didn’t always work! So maybe slow was better which Joe couldn’t see. But close, he wanted close. They used to be till they got busted. Whose fault was that? It wasn’t his! Now all he got was back talk. Worse. Like Joey had a beef with him. “What is it? You don’t like the plan I said at mess? I always listen up to yours. You got one better, hot shot? I don’t care how mad you get, don’t look to me for no more jobs. I’m going straight. You got some big-time plan, except to rip off more deliveries, you, Binky and the gang? You ever listen when I speak? What’s wrong with it, my plan? We’re gonna own it, Joey. Get it? Us, together, dig? We’re gonna own a thing. Some thing that’s ours. That’s my plan. Yours got us in the can. What’s bad you get a little grease? You study up. I’m gonna do my push-ups now.”

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