The Book of Stone. Jonathan Papernick
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was his father. Stone had rarely seen him smile, and when he did there was a deep cruelty behind his calculating eyes as if he were taking pleasure in someone else’s misfortune. And then, deeper into the album, something changed in his father: he’d grown into the six-foot-three clean-headed giant that he was, a full six inches taller than Stone had ever grown. What a drastic change he had undergone, from an ordinary midcentury American boy into something almost mythic. He no longer resembled his son in the least—he looked like a different man.
In another album Stone found pictures of himself as a child, at birthday parties, Passover seders, Thanksgiving dinners—all the usual events at which a camera ordinarily appeared to document the moment for posterity. There was nothing unusual about these pictures—he might have been any one of ten million American boys the same age—except nearly every photograph had been defaced. Where Stone’s mother would have been, smiling as he opened his fifth birthday present or crying on his first day of school, there was nothing but a scratched-out spot as if somebody had taken a razor to the glossy sheen and rubbed it down to the raw photographic paper. Again and again his mother had been eliminated from each photograph, scratched out or excised with a pair of scissors, eliminated and thrown down Orwell’s memory hole.
Stone had little sympathy for his mother, who had disappeared without a word when he was twelve years old. But he had hoped he would see in these photographs a family as yet unbroken, happy, ignorant of the future that lay ahead. He wrapped himself in the robe and took a deep draft of the fabric, but instead of his father’s scent all he smelled now was the stink of his own marijuana.
A wrinkled manila envelope slipped out of the back of the album, scattering old scallop-edged black-and-white photos about the floor.
“Papa Julius,” Stone said, snatching up a photo. The Judge had never referred to him by name, but Stone’s mother had insisted her son call him Papa as a sign of respect—an early suggestion of the rift yet to come. The name had felt right on the tip of Stone’s young tongue despite the fact that he had not met the man and was forbidden to speak his name aloud when his father was near.
He was surprised the Judge had kept pictures of Julius; he had not seen him, as far as Stone knew, since he had moved uptown to Columbia over forty years earlier. But there was Stone’s grandfather, faded against the yellowing photographic paper, smiling, his foot on the running board of a black Oldsmobile. Another shot: under the sign for Ratner’s Deli, the Williamsburg Bridge in the background, Julius laughing as he pulled a hat off Meyer Lansky’s half-turned head.
“Meyer fucking Lansky!” Stone said, laughing. “Holy shit!” This was history, he thought, with a flash of pride. He had met his grandfather only once, just before he died, and had been trained by the Judge to act as if he had never existed. But if his grandfather had never existed, it would mean his father had never existed, which in turn would mean that he himself could never have come into being. But Stone was here, and he belonged to them; he’d inherited their genes, shared the same strands of DNA, climbed a similar whirling double helix like a magic ladder to his past and future at the same time.
There were dozens of photos of Julius Stone from his days with Murder Incorporated. Stone studied the photos. His grandfather did not look like a killer. He had intense eyes, sure, but there was a playful glimmer in them, as if he were about to tell a joke. He might have been a vaudeville comedian or a magician with those mischievous eyes. Stone was amazed how similar in build he was to his grandfather, the wild-haired killer, one hundred and twenty pounds of dynamite set with a short fuse.
Stone had to pee and stumbled his way to the bathroom. He caught a glimpse of his face in the mirror as he passed. His image swam in and out of focus as he looked into his own eyes, bloodshot and coated in a sickly film, and saw no sparkle, just pools of sorrow.
A strange thought occurred to Stone as he slipped out of his father’s robe. He looked so much smaller now, pale and gaunt, his body like a plucked bird, like some depilated mammal waiting to be snatched in predatory jaws. But he knew he was not helpless; he stood on the shoulders of two powerful men whom one crossed at one’s own peril. His fingers were slim and tapered—musician’s fingers. He had let his father down giving up on piano as a boy even though he had shown some brilliant sparks of talent. His father had wanted him to be the next Vladimir Horowitz or Arthur Rubinstein, but he had no interest in playing just to please his father, so he quit and never played again. Now, he formed the delicate fingers of his right hand into the shape of a pistol and pointed them at his own image in the mirror. “Reach for the sky, or I’ll fill you full of lead.” Stone laughed for the first time in months, shouting, “Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.”
“What the fuck is going on back there?”
Pinky must have returned home while Stone was emptying the boxes. He fell silent, neither shamed nor embarrassed, just irritated he had been interrupted.
Pinky was at the bathroom door, smelling of cheap cologne, his gelled hair brushed forward on his head to form a severe widow’s peak. “I’m telling you, it’s not good for you to be alone right now. I’m buying you a drink.”
“I’m not thirsty,” Stone said.
“My house, my rules. You’re going to drink with me.”
IT WAS A cool September evening, with a soft breeze off the river. Stone’s high was fading fast, his misery rolling back in like a black tide. Somehow he knew leaving the apartment, leaving the books and photographs behind, would lead to his premature destruction. He would be run down by an errant driver, shot by a stickup man, mugged by a neighborhood kid for the lint in his pockets. Nothing good could come of this. They walked in silence past the tangle of graffiti tags on the wall of Pinky’s apartment building. Pinky’s shadow bounced jauntily ahead of Stone’s, his head blackening the paint-scrawled words YOU LIFE IS NOT SO GREAT. Three young black men hung out in front of the Tip-Top Deli and Grocery, crowding the pay phone, waiting for it to ring. They passed a vacant lot and then a small storefront Brotherhood Ministries church where one of the Reverend Randall Roebling Nation’s preachers shouted from a basement pulpit, “Jesus gonna bring ya on home . . .”
Stone could still hear the parishioners clapping their hands and stamping their feet when he and Pinky reached the overpass of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway two blocks away. A livery cab drove past honking its horn, a Puerto Rican flag waving from its antenna.
The whole world was full of static, chaos, random vibrations of noise filling the air to the point of rupturing the invisible seams of the universe. “I need to go home,” Stone said, feeling dizzy. “Before something happens.”
“Nothing is going to happen,” Pinky said. “It’s the weed got you paranoid. Nothing a couple drinks can’t fix.”
“No, listen,” Stone said, “I need to go home. Now.”
Pinky grabbed him roughly by the shoulders and said, “You don’t have a home without me. Remember? A couple drinks, that’s all.”
Under the damp belly of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway they walked with the flow of traffic along the length of a rusted chain-link fence. They turned left at Washington and stepped out from underneath the BQE onto a one-way street that dead-ended a few hundred feet away at the Navy Yard, sleepless Manhattan lit up beyond. This tiny stretch of urban decay looked like the last battlefield of the Industrial Revolution. Forklifts were parked in a crazy array on the sidewalks, some with their silver prongs still raised. Twisted metal lay hunched in piles against the old graffiti-covered warehouses. An oil drum burned on the corner. Despite the late hour, an ice cream truck played a mournful children’s song somewhere in the distance.
For some reason, some presentiment itching at the back of his skull, Stone turned toward the overpass, where he saw, through the glow of the oil drum fire, three figures moving out from under the shadow of the expressway, dressed in black, their hats propped on their heads like smokestacks. He heard garbled mutters of Yiddish. Jesus Christ, he thought, remembering the man who had torn his suit at his father’s funeral. He couldn’t get away from them. Walking through the blighted streets of Pinky’s neighborhood, it was easy to think this was another planet, of graffiti, dice games, institutionalized poverty,