Free Manhattan 62 by Reggie Nadelson

still night, no air, hard to breathe, Italian families out on the stoop, men in undershirts, women gossiping, swollen feet in backless bedroom slippers.
    Outside my building, Tommy is hanging around with some boys who look like creeps from some gang. I tell him it’s late, time to go to bed, but he ignores me. Upstairs, I get a pair of ice-cold beers, drag my mattress out onto my fire escape, and settle down. These days, I’m not sleeping. The heat. The case. At least out here, there’s a breath to catch.
    What time is it? 11:30. As hot as midday. Left Minetta around 9.30, Max still at the window. Left Nancy around 11. I can’t get the sight of them, Max, Nancy, out of my head; it eats away at me like a worm in my gut.

CHAPTER FOUR
    October 17, ’62
    A LL DAY W EDNESDAY, COLD seeping under my apartment windows, the murder on the pier too fresh in my head, me hallucinating, feverish, my hands stinking of the dead body, I stayed in bed, trying to sweat it out. When the phone rang, I struggled to get to the kitchen to answer it. I was too slow. Whoever it was had hung up.
    In spite of myself, I was hoping it was Nancy. Burning up I lay on my bed, thinking about her.
    I wanted Nancy in spite of her and Max being an item almost since they met at Minetta. Me, being a sap, it had taken me a while to figure it out. She was like white phosphorus.
    My uncle Jack got hit by the fall-out from a phosphorus bomb in the war. He recovered but his right eye was always screwed up, and it was on his mind a lot, the way those bombs would explode, set things alight, could be used for bombers to find their way. When fragments of white phosphorus hit your skin, they stuck to the flesh, you couldn’t get it off, and it burned you bad.
    It was like that with Nancy. Whatever it was, it stuck to me. It burned me, I couldn’t get it off. She took no notice. Carelessly, she strutted her stuff. Sometimes she let me sleep with her. Sometimes not. She laughed and charmed and sulked, and she got what she wanted. She had the looks and the sex, and I couldn’t resist no matter how many times I tried. I knew she was bad for me. I knew she would never love me, or want me the way I wanted her, and it was killing me.
    I watched the ceiling of my apartment and listened to the radiator clank, steam hissing. I had to get up. I had to get onto the case, the dead man on Pier 46. I knew it wasn’t the Mafia. I felt panicky because I couldn’t stand up. My legs were like Jello.
    Next door, somebody was typing. Upstairs, somebody was playing opera music. Lot of Italians still around the area, even a few artists who couldn’t afford better.
    My own pop had said I was going straight to hell for living in Greenwich Village alongside faggots and Commies. But God knows, it was better than the dark, pious, myopic place I came from. I was born on the West side, midtown, what they call Hell’s Kitchen. My parents lived in that suffocating apartment where you could smell the cabbage from downstairs, and hear the neighbors yelling, and the sound of my mother saying her beads.
    The family, the church, it was all they cared about, maybe baseball for the men, at least until the Giants left town. The women hung up pictures of the President next to the Sacred Heart stuff, and they talked about JFK like he was some kind of saint. Otherwise, they had no vision of life.
    My old man hated the Russkis almost as much as he hated the English, and that’s saying something. Joe McCarthy was a saint in my house, not to mention J. Edgar Hoover.
    â€œYou got to hand it to them, the Russians, they put a man in space, first,” I said once because I was obsessed with space, and also to aggravate my pop. He wanted to slug me; I could see it on his thin mean face that was worn down from anger.
    But by then I was bigger than him and a cop, and he couldn’t do anything about it, or the way I dressed.
    â€œWhat’s with them shoes, Pat?