Dancing Aztecs Read online

  The truth was, it was his no-good brother-in-law Deke Finburdy that Wylie really wanted to punch. A stumblebum and a ne’er-do-well, Deke had married Wylie’s wife’s sister on purpose. Just to get on the gravy train, that’s all, live on Wylie Cheshire like some kind of flea. No wonder Wylie hit that punching bag too hard, with Deke around.

  Now, Wylie sat drinking beer and glowering while Deke occupied himself admiring once again all Wylie’s mementoes, the framed photographs and awards, the trophy case full of prizes, the signed footballs. It was all there, Wylie’s four years of varsity ball down at Orambling College, his three years with the New York Giants, his six years with the Kansas City Chiefs, his two years in the Canadian Football League, and his triumphant last three years with the Cincinnati Bengals. Defensive guard all the way, one of the biggest, meanest, roughest, smartest, and all-around best linemen in pro ball.

  And here were the mementoes to prove it, everything from the football he’d carried for his only touchdown (wrenching it out of Sonny Jurgensen’s hands and lumbering eleven yards to the end zone with it) to the photograph of his round black unsmiling face next to the round white smiling face of Howard Cosell, the time Wylie had been guest announcer on Monday Night Football, four years ago, just after he’d made public his retirement.

  Wylie had started brooding over the possibility that he might shoot himself a little darts—the bull’s-eye did look something like Deke’s nose—when one of the kids came down and said, “Daddy?”

  Wylie gave the kid one eye. “What you doin outa bed?”

  “There’s a white man creepin around the house, lookin’ in the windows.”

  Wylie gave the kid both eyes. “A white man?”

  “Lookin’ in the windows,” the kid said.

  Wylie had lived in this mostly white neighborhood for seven years without any trouble—face it, Wylie Cheshire never had any trouble anywhere—but since his retirement from pro ball he’d devoted himself to any number of black causes (a man has to do something with himself, not just lay around the house all day), and the stories he’d heard from his less muscular brothers had made him just itch to get his hands on one of them bigots. Was this to be his chance? “Which side the house?” he asked the kid.

  “Back by the bedrooms.”

  A peeping torn, instead of a bigot? That would be disappointing, but on the other hand any action was better than just sitting here, watching Deke paw the mementoes, so Wylie got to his feet and said, “Deke. Comere.”

  Deke, an eager and obedient mutt, trotted over and said, “Yeah, Wylie?’

  “Kid here says we got a peepin’ torn outside.”

  “Yeah?”

  “What we gone do,” Wylie said, “is flank him. We treat him like an end-around, and we make him turn and run up the middle. You got that?”

  “Sure, Wylie,” Deke said. He was willing, but that was about the best you could say for him.

  “Okay,” Wylie said. “You go out the front door and around the left side of the house. That side.” He pointed, with one of those big hands. “Got it?”

  “Sure, Wylie.”

  “And I’ll go out the back door and come around the other way. Let’s go.”

  The kid said, “Kin I come along? Kin I? Kin I?”

  “You go with Deke,” Wylie told him.

  “Gee, thanks!”

  So upstairs they went, and off their separate ways. Wylie went out the back door without letting the screen slam, went on the balls of his feet across the patio, skipped over Georgia’s rose bed, and went softly to the corner of the house, where he peeked around and in the light-spill from various windows beheld the white man jumping up and down, trying to look in the bathroom window, which was higher than the others.

  So, just a peeping torn, after all. Then, as Wylie continued to watch, Deke and the kid came around the front corner of the house and trotted in the direction of the white man, who saw them, spun around twice, and ran directly toward Wylie. Though he didn’t know it yet.

  Wylie clued him in. As the white man neared the corner, Wylie jumped out, in defensive guard stance, feet planted wide, elbows up high and to the sides, forearms ready to smash, shoulders hunched forward and head hunched down. And stood there.

  The white man came to a screeching halt. He threw one panic-stricken stare over his shoulder at Deke and the kid, and then tried to run around Wylie to the left. Wylie moved just enough, gave him a forearm tap, and the white man tried to run around him to the right So Wylie moved to his right and gave out with another forearm tap.

  This wasn’t a white man who gave up easy. This time he feinted to the left and tried the right again, and got Wylie’s forehead bonking off his nose. He gave a little nasal cry at that, fell back a step, and then devoted himself full-time to feinting; left, right, left, right, never quite going anywhere. While Deke and the kid stood some distance behind him, watching the fun.

  Finally, Wylie decided they’d played enough. Straightening out of the lineman stance, lowering his arms to his sides, he said, “Boy, if Alex Karras couldn’t get through me, what chance you think you got?”

  A slow learner, this white man. One last feint to the left, and he tried to go to the right again. So Wylie stuck out his arm and clotheslined him, and the white man went wham on his back on the lawn, and lay there for a while trying to breathe.

  Deke and the kid came up then, and the kid stared fascinated into the white man’s reddening face. “What is he, Daddy? Is he Ku Klux Klan?”

  “We’ll ask him,” Wylie said. “Soon’s he catches his breath.”

  Deke was frowning down at the white man, and now he said, “By golly, I do believe that’s the fella sold Willy the Willys,” referring to his brother Willy, who was an even bigger good-for-nothing than Deke himself. Looking across the body at Wylie, Deke said, “You remember, Wylie. I went with Willy when he bought that car, that red Willys that never did run worth a damn, and a couple months after he bought it some fellas come around from the finance company and broke both his arms.”

  “Cause he didn’t make his payments,” Wylie said, remembering the incident well. His part in it had been to refuse to loan Deke’s brother any money.

  “He give ’em a whole washing machine,” Deke said. “Anyway,” he said, looking down at the white man, whose face by now was very red, “I’m pretty sure that’s the fella sold him the car.”

  Wylie looked down at the red white man. “That right, fella?”

  The man on the ground shook his head violently back and forth, while at the same time gargling. Apparently he was having trouble starting up his breathing machinery again. As a humanitarian gesture, Wylie tromped on his stomach a bit, to help him get started, and then the fella began to gasp and breathe and pant and flop around and generally behave like a landed trout. Wylie waited until that phase had ended, and the fellow’s complexion had come pretty much down near white again, and then he reached down, grabbed a lot of shirtfront, and stood the white man on his feet. Still holding the bunched shirt, Wylie said, “You a car salesman, fella?”

  “NO!”

  Deke was squinting almost in the fellow’s face. “I’m sure it is,” he said.

  Wylie said, “You come around here to sell me a car?”

  “I—I—I—”

  Wylie shook him a little, to get him unstuck. “You what, fella?”

  “I—I—I—heard the house was for sale!”

  “You did, huh? Where’d you hear that?”

  “At the gas station! Over by the Southern State!”

  Wylie shook him again, out of irritation. “That’s the dumbest lie I heard,” he said, “since I stopped talkin’ to owners.”

  Deke said, “Wylie, lemme call Willy, he can come right out and look for himself. He’ll know if this is the fella.”

  “Good idea,” Wylie said. “Come on, car salesman, let’s go inside.”

  “I have to leave now!”

  Wylie released the shirt-front and closed his hand around the fe
llow’s upper arm. “Let me help you change your mind,” he said.

  SEQUENTIALLY …

  Angela and her sister Teresa were partners now, and Teresa was dummy when the phone rang. She went off to answer it, returning a minute later to say, “It’s Mel.”

  Angela was trying to make a particularly tricky no-trump bid, and barely looked up. “Again?”

  “He sounds weird.”

  “What’s he want this time?”

  “I think you better talk to him, Angela. I’ll play the hand.”

  Angela tried a finesse from dummy in diamonds, but Barbara was too stupid to be finessed. Down came her ace. “Shit,” Angela said, got to her feet, and handed the cards to Teresa. “Sorry, partner, we’re down one.”

  “We’ll do what we can,” Teresa said.

  Angela went into the living room and spoke into the phone. “Now what?”

  “What took you so long?” The shrill rapid whisper was only barely recognizable as Mel’s voice.

  Angela was in no mood for a lot of crap. “What’s the matter, Mel?”

  “I’m captured!”

  “Where? Back in Haddam’s Ear?”

  “On Long Island. Some huge black football player’s got me!”

  “Mel, I don’t know what to do with you tonight.”

  “Send the guys out to Wylie Cheshire’s house, 58 Ridge Road, Deer Park! Hurry!”

  “There’s no guys here. You’re the only one ever calls.”

  “Listen, Angela, this is a phone in the bathroom! They won’t let me stay in here much longer! They’re waiting for a guy I sold a car to, years ago! Once he gets here and identifies me, I don’t know WHAT they’ll do!”

  “I’ll come out myself,” Angela decided. Anything was better than more of that bridge game. “Give me the address again.”

  “These are big mean guys, honey!”

  “I’m a big mean girl. What’s the address?”

  “Wylie Cheshire, 58 Ridge Road, Deer Park!”

  “Be right there,” Angela said.

  BEFORE LONG …

  Greater New York is in some ways like a house. Manhattan is the living room, with the TV and the stereo and the good furniture, where guests are entertained. Brooklyn and Queens are the bedrooms where the family sleeps, and the Bronx is the attic, full of inflammable crap that nobody has any use for. Staten Island is the backyard, and Long Island is the detached garage, so filled up with paint cans, workbenches, and a motorboat that yon can’t get the car in it any more. Hudson County over in New Jersey is the basement, with the furnace and the freezer and the stacks of old newspapers, and the Jersey swamps are the toilet. Westchester is the den, with paneling and a fake kerosene lamp, and Connecticut is the guest room, with starched curtains and landscape prints. The kitchen is way up in Albany, which means the food is always cold by the time it gets to the table, and the formal dining room was torn down by William Zeckendorf and friends back in the early fifties.

  Jerry Manelli had spent most of his life in just one corner of this house, and he was only now beginning to realize it. The last twenty-four hours had been frustrating, but they’d also been interesting, catching his attention as nothing had done for years. While he’d been moving in the small circle of the family and Inter-Air Forwarding and a succession of Myrnas, the world all around him had been full of strange neighborhoods and even stranger citizens, and if they weren’t people you’d want to be around every day of your life, so what? They were new experiences, and it had been a long while since Jerry had had any new experiences.

  The problem was Inter-Air Forwarding. The damn thing was too successful. It had started out to be a hustle, and bit by bit it had turned into a job. A job. He could get arrested for it, but that didn’t make it anything different; it was still a job.

  Thirty years from now he could steal himself a gold watch, and retire with the old man, looking for hobbies.

  It had been the faggots’ incomprehensible living room that had set him off, for some damn reason, that and the comedy scene they’d played out, each of them believing the other one had brought Jerry home. That would make a good story, except the living room put a twist on it that confused things. And you had to see them in that living room to get the point. Jerry could maybe tell the story to the other guys so they’d laugh, but they wouldn’t actually get it, because they wouldn’t understand about the living room. Not even Mel, who was the family intellectual. (Jews couldn’t help themselves that way. Your Jew was the only kind of guy that could be an egghead—read books, listen to classical music on the car radio—and still be an all right guy.)

  But other things had added to Jerry’s present weird mood, his new view of himself as someone who’d suddenly found he was in a six-foot-deep rut when all along he’d thought of himself as sailing. There was Harlem, and the drunken black man. There was the stoned naked man in the closet; in some sort of oddball way, he’d been fun to talk to.

  But the capper was the missing wife, Bobbi Harwood. What an exit! Throw all his shit out the window, pack your bags, and gone. Gone where? Into the billion comers and crevices of New York City, out into a world of such endless possibility that the mind couldn’t even grasp it. It seemed to Jerry that Bobbi Harwood must also have found herself in that six-foot-deep rut, and she’d done the only sensible thing there was to do: leap! Get out of that rut, and go someplace else.

  But where? Thinking about Bobbi Harwood, trying to figure out where and how to find her, had made Jerry more and more aware of just how easy he was to find.

  How can you tell the Tuesdays from the Thursdays? You can’t.

  Thinking things over, Jerry drove down from Harlem almost all the way to the Midtown Tunnel before he stopped at a phone booth to call the Bernstein house. But then it wasn’t his sister Angela who answered but his brother-in-law Frank’s sister-in-law Barbara, who said, “Nobody’s here but me.”

  “Where’s Angela?”

  “Mel called and said he was in some kind of trouble somewhere, so Angela and Teresa and Kathleen went out to rescue him.”

  “Angela and Teresa and Kathleen? Where’s the guys?”

  “Frank just called about ten minutes ago. He sounded really upset about something, and he said he was on the way back, and he asked me if anybody else had found the right statue, and when I told him no he used curse words.”

  “What about Floyd?”

  “He’s coming with Frank.”

  “Well, I’m on my way back, too,” Jerry told her. “I got three of my four statues, but none of them were any good. I’ll have to look for the fourth one tomorrow.”

  “Will you want a cup of coffee?”

  “I’ll want a beer,” Jerry said. “Lots of beer.”

  “That’s funny,” Barbara said. “Frank said the exact same thing.”

  LATER …

  Angela Bernstein, Teresa McCann, and Kathleen Podenski got out of the station wagon in front of Wylie Cheshire’s house, where Mel was being imprisoned. Angela said, “You two go in there and distract them.”

  The two women looked blank. Kathleen said, “Distract them?”

  “Tell them you’re Avon Ladies.”

  “We don’t have any display things.”

  “Tell them you’re Avon Lady Avon Ladies, you’re here recruiting new Avon Ladies.”

  Both women look doubtful. Teresa said, “I’m not sure I—”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Angela said, “use your imagination! Start a Tupperware party, be Welcome Wagon girls, be their local Muscular Dystrophy volunteer, be taking up collections for PONY. Do something!”

  “Well, all right,” Teresa said, but she still looked doubtful. So did Kathleen, but at any rate both women finally started up the neat slate walk through the clipped green lawn toward the brick ranch-style house where Mel was a prisoner.

  And Angela went around to the side of the house. This was an expensive Long Island neighborhood, with large house lots, so the nearest neighbors were far away beyond privacy screens o
f shrubbery. Angela, waiting till Teresa and Kathleen had done their Avon Lady ding-dong at the front door, began to move down the side of the house, looking in windows. In the living room, greeting Teresa and Kathleen, were two black couples; the women were young and personable, one of the men was kind of lanky and loose-jointed, and the other man was a monster. “Good Lord,” Angela murmured, “I wouldn’t want to go to bed with that” And she moved along.

  In one bedroom were any number of black children asleep in bunk beds. In another were two black girls asleep in matching youth beds; lace frills skirted everything in the room, including the wastepaper basket.

  Finally the rear of the house. The back door was unlocked and inside was an extremely neat kitchen. The lady of this house ran a very tight ship, from the look of things.

  But where was Mel? Cautiously Angela crossed the kitchen and moved through an empty dining room. Ahead she could hear the murmur of conversation; Teresa’s voice, Kathleen’s voice, other voices. Angela couldn’t make out exactly what was being said, but the tone seemed generally calm and civilized, so she remained unworried.

  But where in hell was Mel? Not in the master bedroom, and not in the excessively masculine little den, and that was it for the house, except for the basement, so back to the kitchen Angela went, and down the stairs to a family room so cluttered with sports equipment and trophies it looked like Abercrombie & Fitch’s window after a bombing.

  Mel was in the utility room with the furnace and water heater and washing machine and drier, and he looked just as white as they did. “You made it!” he said, in a shrill whisper, and tried to clutch Angela to him.

  “Later,” Angela said, disengaging herself. “Come on, let’s get out of here before something goes wrong upstairs.”

  Upstairs, things weren’t precisely going wrong, but they were going just a bit agley. Teresa and Kathleen had entered the house without discussing what exact cover story they would use, and so Teresa had gotten herself rather thoroughly entwined in a presentation of herself as a spokesperson for the League of Women Voters before she realized that Kathleen appeared to be collecting for cystic fibrosis. The glaze slowly spreading over the eyes of Wylie Cheshire, Georgia Cheshire, Deke Finburdy, and Faith Finburdy was not diminished when both women simultaneously switched horses in midstream. Were these women asking them to vote for cystic fibrosis?