DANCE PARTNER

by Dan DeNoon

It wasn’t much of an assignment, but I was glad to get it even though it had already been a long day. The editorial assistant’s job — my job — was to come in early to help proof the first issues of the Paterson Courier-News hot off the press and to stay late to take the story our aging statehouse reporter would call in from a bar in Newark. In between I typed boilerplate copy and obits. And hung out with the beat reporters, copy editors, and pressmen who were teaching me the real trade.

Now, at least, I’d get out of the newsroom for something other than a thirty-minute lunch.

It started when Rasheed, one of the beat reporters, got a tip from the coroner about a shooting. He’d made a quick call to the cops and drafted a down-and-dirty story. Tentative slug: HONOR STUDENT, 16, LATEST VICTIM IN GANG WAR. Slotted for maybe five inches on page B-3 — if someone could wheedle a photo of the kid from the grieving parents. Shootings being more or less a daily event in Paterson, Rasheed was banging out a story that warranted more than a blurb: a battle between two townships over finding a new landfill site.

At least that’s what the city editor told me as he loomed over me, a tall middle-aged man whose severe attitude and assurance of his own worldliness fostered the impression that he was hundreds of years older than he was. He ran a hand through his thinning blond hair and tossed a handwritten address on top of the stack of press releases from which I was churning out business briefs.

“One month on the job – ‘bout time to get your feet wet,” he growled. “Get me some goddamn art for Rasheed’s shooting story or we’ll have a five-inch hole to fill. And confirm that honor-student crap. It’s just about dinner time, should be a good time to catch the family at home.”

I’d hoped that if my first real assignment out on the street had to be dreadful, it would be something I could handle — car-crash carnage, yeah, I could do that. Confronting an angry politician accused of corruption might be a little intimidating, but also kind of fun. But using some bullshit excuse to ask favors of a mom or dad who’d just lost a kid: It’s a crappy part of the job. Reporters only talk about it to each other, if they talk about it at all. The Taylor-ham-egg-on-a-hard-roll I’d gobbled as a late lunch shifted in my stomach.

Not that I was going to complain. At 31, I was pretty old to be an editorial assistant. After a decade waiting tables and never finishing the novel I’d barely begun, I finally got a job in which I could call myself a writer. The excitement of being in an actual newsroom almost made up for the incredibly low pay — I’d made more in a day tending bar in Atlanta than I made here in a week. But it was my last chance to make it as a professional writer, and I’d be damned if one of these days I didn’t get a news beat of my own.

I walked past the AP fax slowly grinding out photos of Reagan and Gorbachev to the other side of the newsroom, where Rasheed was two-finger typing at his word processor. A thin wisp of smoke rose from the half-smoked cigarette in an ashtray precariously balanced on the stack of newspapers beside him. “Hey, Rasheed, what are the parents like?”

Rasheed didn’t look up. The fluorescent overhead lights glinted in the sharp-handled pick stuck just so in his medium Afro. “Fuck if I know, never spoke with them. Got a call from a source at the morgue, called the cops, and asked a few questions. No witnesses, no murder weapon, no suspects, no obvious motive, no real story. The cops had zero arrest records on the kid, which makes him an honor student in my book. Italian and Hispanic gangs over in that ‘hood always having turf wars. Drive-by shooter probably mistook the kid for someone else, or maybe just didn’t care. Or maybe the kid was buying dope on the wrong corner.”

“Any arrests coming?”

Rasheed looked up in mock disbelief. “Yeah. Sure. Think maybe they’ll call in the state police and dust for fingerprints? Maybe dredge the river for the gun? Brother, the cops downtown do not give a rat’s ass. Only reason to run the story is the kid’s clean record.”

He resumed pecking at his keyboard, and I went back across the room to consult the street index on the big city map taped to one wall. I’d lived in Jersey for only a few months, and didn’t yet know Paterson’s layout. I’d followed Ellen up here when she got her residency at the East Orange VA thinking there’d be lots of writing jobs in the Northeast – what a joke. Just more places here to get rejected. Hell, just finding a place to stay meant sleeping in our old Buick until we finally cajoled a Belleville couple into letting us pay a small fortune to use their basement apartment. What the hell. Ellen was at the VA all the time and I was happy to stay late at the newsroom, learning everything I could and hoping for a break.

Fortunately, the old town was laid out mostly in a grid; it wasn’t hard to chart a course. I felt a stab of pride as I draped the cord of my recently issued press credentials around my neck, threw on the heavy gray wool overcoat Ellen had bought me at a secondhand shop on Canal Street, and went out to the twilit parking lot. Clouds hid the sky; a gust of wind blew needles of light rain into my face, cold but refreshing. I got into my Buick, wiped my glasses dry with a handkerchief, pumped the gas pedal, and turned the key in the ignition. When the engine rumbled to life I fingered my press badge and grinned.

New Jersey in general, Paterson in particular, felt alien and wonderful. Every creaky brick building, every old guy having a shot-and-beer on the way home from work looked like a story I could write. I burned to discover them. But today I had a single mission. Get the – at a red light I looked at the address again – Mancini family to cough up a picture. A “cut,” I reminded myself, in the new lingo I was learning. It was getting pretty dark by the time I found the right street. No traffic here so I slowed down to take it in. The corner store was Giulia’s Groceria. Handwritten cardboard signs in the window advertised cuts of meat I didn’t recognize. Cater-corner to it was a bar with no visible name except for the neon green Genesee Beer sign in the window. I parked along the curb. The address I’d been given was just two blocks but the walk seemed longer.

It was a duplex townhouse that had seen better days. Even though it was a cold November day I could smell the stale coffee grounds and rotting orange rinds scattered around two straggly rose vines out front. Cheap ceramic chatchkas faded on the windowsill. A few cement steps in need of new paint led up to two doors side by side; neither had a name. I rang the bell on the first door, heard nothing, and knocked in what I hoped was a friendly shave-and-a-haircut staccato. The door I hadn’t knocked on opened; a sleepy-eyed unshaven man in a sleeveless ribbed tee shirt held it half open.

“Mr. Mancini?”

The man pointed with his stubbly chin to the other door as he shoved his shut. I started to knock on it, but then heard someone slowly shuffling inside. I felt my pulse in my ears. The door opened to the length of the chain guard; a rheumy eye peered out at me from under white hair.

“Mrs. Mancini?”

“Go away.” She began to close the door.

I shoved my press ID into the crack, wondering if it would be sheared in half and realizing too late I’d lose two fingertips if it were. “It’s about your son? Roberto? I’m from the Courier-News?”

There was a long pause. I removed my fingers from the door jamb.

“Is not my son. Wasn’t.” The voice was tired but the door didn’t shut all the way.  “We been already this morning to the morgue. What else you want?”

I took a deep breath and let a little of the Southern accent I’d been trying to lose seep back into my voice. We Southerners wield manners the way Yankees wield rudeness. “Ma’am, y’see we just want to tell his story. So sorry to trouble you but might his parents be here?”

The door closed, and the chain squeaked out of its groove. “Come.”

The old woman who opened the door was wearing a neat print apron over a worn dress. Beyond her, a small dining area opened to a kitchen where an elderly man with white whiskers slumped in a wheelchair. Something simmered on the stove, its meaty aroma the wisp of a forgotten memory.

“Bobby, he was my grandson,” she said. “My boy, he got sent up to Rahway. The mother?” Her shrug was the weariest I’d ever seen. “Who knows?”

I searched for words. “Oh. I see.” My throat was dry. “Mrs. Mancini? Ma’am? I’m so sorry for …”

“Sit.” The woman gestured to a small table with three neat place settings.

I took off my coat and sat. The chair was hard and straight-backed. “The police told us it was a drug deal. Was …”

“No!” Mrs. Mancini produced a wooden spoon from her apron and held it in front of my face. “Bobby good boy. Not like his father.”

She turned abruptly and went to the kitchen. I tried out a smile on the old man in the wheelchair. He returned a terse grin but didn’t move. The woman returned with the pot from the stove and a half bottle of cheap Chianti in a straw basket. She spooned something onto the plate in front of me and pushed it toward me. “Eat,” she commanded. She sat across from me and poured each of us a small glass of wine.

I cut into a piece of soft meat. Tripe. I forced myself to take a bite. Spicy. Chewy. I swallowed with difficulty, washed it down with a sip of the vinegary wine.

While I manfully chewed another bite, the woman spoke softly. “Bobby Senior got sent to Rahway. Mother ran off. Been with us since he was fourteen.” She took a tiny sip of wine.

“I hear he was an honor student,” I said, hoping Rasheed’s exaggeration was at least partly true.

Mrs. Mancini snorted. “Not easy. Two jobs. Stocked groceries at the store, took the bus to Passaic to bus tables at Sonia’s. But yes, smart boy, he did good.” She glanced at the man in the wheelchair. He stopped grinning. “My husband, he don’t get out no more. I clean for Father Ryan.”

My eyes wandered over to a credenza with a single picture frame. A medium-height teen in a tight-fitting blue tux holding hands with a Hispanic girl in a frilly, floor-length dress. Prom picture maybe?

The woman stiffened when she saw my eyes widen. I lowered my voice to the most sympathetic tone I could muster. “Ma’am, folks should know what he was like. Hard worker. Not like those gang kids. But at the paper, we …” pushing the lie deep into my gut, making myself believe it “… Ma’am, we can’t run the story without a cut — I mean a picture — to show folks he was a good kid. A picture like that one.”

“You see a camera around here?” Mrs. Mancini said, rising from her chair. “We don’t got no more pictures.”

I swallowed hard. Jesus. This must be how the snake in Eden felt. “We’ll take good care of it,” I said, knowing full well how the art boys cropped photos.

 “You come to my home. You eat my food. Now you want my picture.”

She went to the credenza and clasped the picture to her chest with both hands, holding her dead grandson for the last time, the Pieta in real life, not Michelangelo’s marble but a wooden piece I’d seen at the Met: Mary’s face wrenched in utter grief, her son’s tortured body shrunken in her lap.

I began to stand, but sat back down and took another bite of tripe, trying to focus on the rich sauce rather than the slimy meat. It was clear that I was going to have to rely on her ingrained hospitality rather than her generosity. I chewed thoughtfully and swallowed, looking as grateful as I could manage.

“That’s a great picture,” I said. “Who’s the young lady?”

She relaxed slightly and looked into the picture. “Puerto Rican girl. Bobby is …. Bobby was crazy about her. Rented that suit, paid for the picture, out of his own money. Just to be her dance partner at that birthday thing, the one with the fancy name.

“Quinceañera.” The old man’s voice was soft but clear. He’d turned his chair to face us. “He was her escort, I forget what they call it. Puerto Rican girl. Her brothers, she said they didn’t like him being Italian but she didn’t care. Told the cops when they came by with the news. Didn’t listen to me. Maybe you tell them, eh?”

It took me a minute to find my voice. I was still surprised Mr. Mancini was conscious, let alone able to talk. “Of course,” I lied, remembering what Rasheed had told me. “They’ll be glad to have a lead. I’m sure they’ll want to get to the bottom of this, this investigation.”

Mr. Mancini snorted and glared at me, his faded blue eyes now wide open and bloodshot. How had I not noticed that he’d been weeping?

Nobody said anything for what seemed an eternity. My neck felt sweaty.

“Give him,” he said even more softly.

I stood. Mrs. Mancini extended the picture toward me. I took it, heavy as a lead coffin.

“Now you go," she said. Wet lines streaked her cheeks. Her hands fell limply to her sides before she raised one toward the door. “Go!”

Mr. Mancini slumped back in his wheelchair.

There was probably something I should have said but it escaped me. Without letting go of the picture I picked up my coat. I gave the old man a weak smile that he did not return and left.

On the walk back to the car I found myself remembering the time Ellen and I were on a beach in Mexico. We’d watched a gigantic black frigate bird gliding on wind currents until it saw a pelican below it dive to catch a fish. The frigate bird shot downward at the pelican and struck at it with beak and claw until the squawking victim gave up the fish.

“The bird book has a term for that,” Ellen told me. “The magnificent frigate bird is a kleptoparasite.”

I carefully put the picture on the car seat and pulled on my overcoat. When I got back to the newsroom the city editor was still there. Feeling a strange mixture of pride and disgust, I showed him the picture. He looked me in the eye.

“Welcome to the club,” he said.

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