Motherless Brooklyn

By implication we orphans were idiots of connectivity, overly impressed by any trace of the familial in the world. We should doubt ourselves any time we imagined a network in operation. We should leave that stuff to Minna. Just as he knew the identity of our parents but would never reveal it to us, only Fran Minna was authorized to speculate on the secret systems that ran Court Street or the world. If we dared chime in, we’d surely only discovered more wheels within wheels. Business as usual. The regular fucking world-get used to it.

One day in April, five months after that Christmas meal, Minna drove up with all his windows thoroughly smashed, the van transformed into a blinding crystalline sculpture, a mirrorball on wheels, reflecting the sun. It was plainly the work of a man with a hammer or crowbar and no fear of interruption. Minna appeared not to have noticed; he ferried us out to a job without mentioning it. On our way back to the Home, as we rumbled over the cobblestones of Hoyt Street, Tony nodded at the windshield, which sagged in its frame like a beaded curtain, and said, “So what happened?”

“What happened to what?” It was a Minna game, forcing us to be literal when we’d been trained by him to talk in glances, in three-corner shots.

“Somebody fucked up your van.”

Minna shrugged, excessively casual. “I parked it on that block of Pacific Street.”

We didn’t know what he was talking about.

“These guys around that block had this thing about how I was uglifying the neighborhood.” A few weeks after Gilbert’s paint job the van had been covered again with graffiti, vast filled-in outlines of incoherent ballooning font and an overlay of stringy tags. Something made Minna’s van a born target, the flat battered sides like a windowless subway car, a homely public surface crying for spray paint where both private cars and bigger, glossier commercial trucks were inviolate. “They told me not to park it around there anymore. Then after I did it a couple of times more, they told me a different way.”

Minna lifted both hands from the wheel to gesture his indifference. We weren’t totally convinced.

“Someone’s sending a message,” said Tony.

“What’s that?” said Minna.

“I just said it’s a message,” said Tony. I knew he wanted to ask about Matricardi and Rockaforte. Were they involved? Couldn’t they protect Minna from having his windows smashed? We all wanted to ask about them and never would, unless Tony did it first.

“Yeah, but what are you trying to say?” said Minna.

“Fuckitmessage,” I suggested impulsively.

“You know what I mean,” said Tony defiantly, ignoring me.

“Yeah, maybe,” said Minna. “But put it in your own words.” I could feel his anger unfolding, smooth as a fresh deck of cards.

“Tellmetofuckitall!” I was like a toddler devising a tantrum to keep his parents from fighting.

But Minna wasnȉt distractable. “Quiet, Freakshow,” he said, never taking his eyes from Tony. “Tell me what you said,” he told Tony again.

“Nothing,” said Tony. “Damn.” He was backpedaling.

Minna pulled the van to the curb at a fire hydrant on the corner of Bergen and Hoyt. Outside, a couple of black men sat on a stoop, drinking from a bag. They squinted at us.

“Tell me what you said,” Minna insisted.

He and Tony stared at one another, and the rest of us melted back. I swallowed away a few variations.

“Just, you know, somebody’s sending you a message.” Tony smirked.

This clearly infuriated Minna. He and Tony suddenly spoke a private language in which message signified heavily. “You think you know a thing,” he said.

“All I’m saying is I can see what they did to your truck, Frank.” Tony scuffed his feet in the layer of tiny cubes of safety glass that had peeled away from the limp window and lay scattered on the floor of the van.

“That’s not all you said, Dickweed.”

That was the first I heard Minna use the term that would become lodged thereafter in my uppermost tic-echelon: dickweed. I didn’t know whether he borrowed the nickname or invented it himself on the spot.

What it meant to me I still can’t say. Perhaps it was inscribed in my vocabulary, though, by the trauma of that day: Our little organization was losing its innocence, although I couldn’t have explained how or why.

“I can’t help what I see,” said Tony. “Somebody put a hit on your windows.”

“Think you’re a regular little wiseguy, don’t you?”

Tony stared at him.

“You want to be Scarface?”

Tony didn’t give his answer, but we knew what it was. Scarface had opened a month before, and Al Pacino was ascendant, a personal colossus astride Tony’s world, blocking out the sky.

“See, the thing about Scarface,” said Minna, “is before he got to be Scarface he was Scabface. Nobody ever considers that. You have to want to be Scabface first.”

For a second I thought Minna was going to hit Tony, damage his face to make the point. Tony seemed to be waiting for it too. Then Minna’s fury leaked away.