Bronx Noir

I shuffled out of the aisle, and slowly went up to take communion, along with the redeemed brethren beside me. It meant nothing to me, I convinced myself, this ritual, but still my heart began to thump with the inchoate tremor of the damned. I did not believe in this tasteless wafer, but I feared somehow the wrath. I had always believed I’d be found out further, even after being discovered back then, limp and bloody, curled fetal in the chancel where I’d collapsed after the beating, after hiding, hoping to remain hidden. Then, it was fear of my punishment. Now, it was dread of another crime. Now. But then. Not back then. Not when I had not killed my brother. It hadn’t been me. Despite what my mother believed. Now, I wanted to see the sanctuary door again. To remind myself of where I’d been, or broken in. I thought it looked the same, but couldn’t be sure. Even the church changes—witness the newfangled grasping. I took the host in my hands, muttered my false thanks, and gave a little glance to the right of the altar. Later.

I shuffled back in holy ignominy to my pew, and leaned forward against the row before me, aping prayer, as we all do no matter what we think we believe. I prayed to Our Lady of Providence. I prayed to the sad spirit of my brother, wherever he ended up. Wherever my mother’s useless prayers might have positioned him in the afterlife.

The priest sat after the communion rite, to read announcements and utter remembrances. “Let us pray for those who are isolated in institutions, prisons, nursing homes, hungering for the warmth of home.” How many of this sparse little congregation knew prisons? How many of them knew what the warmth of home was, or did they just pretend to carry with them a phony memory of affection to get themselves through their leaden days? I had cut off my family. I had turned back all letters. I knew they would be filled with the screeches of my mother’s despair, my sister’s keening anger. I kept aside only that one of Bella’s, thicker than most, the guard signaling it contained cash for when I got out. But I could barely read even that except to take her offering and deny her the satisfaction of forcing me to hear of her generosity and deluded, misguided, untoward hope. Her stultifying superiority in matters moral.

“Let us pray for Father Tran, who is visiting family in Vietnam,” the priest said. “For Father Guzman, in Argentina, working with the missions there. And Father Terranova, in Costa Rica this July.” No one was at home. These roaming Augustinian mendicants spent their summers proselytizing among the heathens of the world. And tonight—I looked over the pastoral staff list on the bulletin—only white-haired Father Farrell would likely be on hand. “Let us go in peace. The mass is ended,” he told us. I waited as the church emptied, to walk about. But a clutch of Latinas were nattering on with the reverend Farrell there by the altar rail, his own trio of “excellent women,” Excellents III, perhaps. I left, after having walked once more toward the apse, to glimpse the chancel door.

Before heading to what my ma considered home, I decided to stop at Patsy’s again. Temptation, no. Just, I don’t know—people, places, things, all of which I’d been warned against. As if it mattered, when there were fewer people I knew. The places I’d remembered were few too, and the thing I wanted, well, it was the only reason to be here. But it wouldn’t be at Patsy’s. Where I shouldn’t be either. I was supposedly clean. At least I was no longer using, had broken that habit fairly early on, managed to get through the years unimpeded, but for one lapse. I could handle the bar now, I thought. Just not yet my mother.

It was just after 1, and the westerly sun had begun to shaft along the bar just as it had back in the day, turning the sudsy beer golden, the shots of rye amber, swathing the nursing codger briefly in light before a sepulchral pallor reclaimed him. Danny—God, it was he, still here, lanky as a Joad—leaned against the till, a towel draped over his shoulder, his attention taken upward by a blaring documentary. A standard-issue sot leaned over the bar, his elbow nestling his grizzly chin, his face turned downward but biased in the direction of the television. In a booth among those that lined the back a couple cooed inebriated nothings at each other; on their table were a tallneck Miller and a highball, half finished, plus a few empties. The lovebirds’ heads turned briefly toward the door as I came in, and Danny glanced my way, but only to sigh slightly. This was his afternoon quiet, so to speak, and a trio of tipplers was enough for him. Reluctantly, he turned away from the television.

“Can I get ya something?”

He didn’t recognize me, haloed as I was by the sun.

“Coffee.”