Queens Noir Excerpt
The following is editor Robert Knightly's contribution to Queens Noir.
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First Calvary
BY ROBERT KNIGHTLY
Blissville
The little girl is playing there by herself. She's off in a corner of the yard by the alleyway where the girls come out of the Good Shepherd School at 3 o'clock when the bell rings and walk through to the street. But it's already late, getting dark, time for all little kids to be home with their mothers. Nobody can see her there in the alley, he knows, because he's been watching her awhile from behind the iron picket fence. She doesn't see him, nobody sees him. For about the hundredth time, she takes her baby out of the carriage, fixes its clothes, talks to it, and puts it down again. He's on the move now, out from behind the fence, walking quick on stubby legs down the alley. She can't see him coming, she's got her head in the carriage again.
"Be good now, baby," he hears her say just as he reaches her and she straightens up and sees him. "Oh!" she says.
He pushes her hard and she flops down like a doll on her behind. He's down the alley, out the gate, onto Greenpoint Avenue almost before she starts bawlin'.
He crosses the avenue, pushing the carriage in front of him fast as he can along the high stone wall between himself and the dead people buried in First Calvary. He dares not look left for fear of the Stone Saints high up on their pedestals standing watch over the graves. Even though he knows they can't see him because their backs are turned to the street. He knows why this is so because his Nan has told him. Saints give fuck-all for the likes of the shanty Irish, Nan says. As he rolls across Bradley Avenue, he sneaks a look at the front door of the Cork Lounge, where Nan takes him and the dog on Saturday afternoons, after the stores for a growler of Shaeffer "to go."
The carriage is big as him but he can push it all right. He hurtles past the people sitting on the front stoops of the houses, there like always, the mothers hanging out the windows in their parlors, resting big folded arms on windowsills all up and down the block, watching. He knows this, so he keeps his head down behind the carriage, pushing it up the block fast as he can, up and on his toes, leaning into it like the football team he's seen practicing in the vacant lots off Review Avenue alongside the Newtown Creek.
Still, he feels the eyes on him, watching. He trips! Hits the pavement on hands and knees. The carriage rolls forward by itself, already two squares of sidewalk ahead, but he's up! After it! Tears stinging his eyes, he grabs the handlebars, just missing the cars parked at the curb. He rights his ship and sails on up the sidewalk. His hands are dirty, right knee scraped where his overalls ripped. They'll ask about that, he knows. He'll say: I fell, it don't hurt. At the corner, he wheels around onto Starr Avenue.
For the only time he can ever remember, there's nobody on his stoop. Home free! He backs up the stoop, dragging the carriage by its handlebars up the four stone steps and into the vestibule of his tenement, then down the long, carpeted hallway to the door to the basement stairway, and parks it there in the dark. No one can see him reach in and take the doll in its frilly dress into his arms.
"Be good now, baby," he cautions, then lays it back down in the carriage, covering it, head and all, with the pink blanket so no one can see.
He climbs the four flights of stairs, holding tight to the wooden banister worn smooth by generations of hands, all the way to the top where he lives with Nan and Aunt May. Nan's his grandmother and Aunt May's mother and his father's mother. He knows this because they told him, and his home will always be with them as long as he's a good boy, and his mother drinks and his father's a whoremaster. He does not remember his mother because she dropped him off when he was eight months and didn't come back. Nan keeps house and Aunt May goes to work at the phone company. And Aunt May is the boss of all of them, Nan says when Aunt May can't hear her. There's an old dog named Dinah lives with them, it's Aunt May's dog, it won't let him walk it. He reaches up for the doorknob and goes inside.
"Young man!" Aunt May calls from the parlor. He goes in to her. She's in her housecoat, sitting in the arthritis chair by the window. Nan calls it that because Aunt May has that, and sits in it all the time. Nan's not there, she went to the store. He sees the open window and pillow on the sill, the sheer curtain wafting in and out on the summer breeze, before dropping his eyes to the little fox terrier sitting alongside the chair, studying him, alert as if also waiting for him to account.
"I found it," he says, staring at the dog who stares back, weighing his words with beady, angry eyes. Then, curling its upper lip to show fangs, growls from deep down in its little chest.
"Where did you find it?" Aunt May snaps.
"In the schoolyard."
"Liar!"
"She gave it to me."
Aunt May makes him push it all the way back. As he runs the gauntlet, he again keeps his head down, eyes to the pavement. The little girl is still there, bawlin', with her mother and a bunch of little girls. The other little girls are bawlin' too; he has no idea why. When the little girl sees him, she stops, runs to the carriage, snatches up her doll and hugs it. But when Aunt May holds him by the scruff of the neck in front of the little girl and tells her to give him a good slap right across his face, she starts bawlin' again. Staked out by bloodthirsty hostiles, his face burns under their piteous stares. In sight of the Stone Saints across the street giving him the ass, he prays with all his might that all the windows in all the houses on every block be nailed shut.
End of Excerpt
More about Queens Noir
The Queens Noir e-book (eisbn 9781617750595) is available from Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, the iTunes store, Kobo, the Sony eReader store, Google Play, and from the websites of participating independent bookstores. The print edition ($15.95, ISBN-13:9781933354408) is availabe on our website and in online and brick & mortar bookstores everywhere.
On the heels of Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the Bronx, the borough of Queens enters the chambers of noir.
Featuring brand-new stories by: Denis Hamill, Maggie Estep, Megan Abbott, Robert Knightly, Liz Martinez, Jill Eisenstadt, Mary Byrne, Tori Carrington, Shailly P. Agnihotri, k.j.a. Wishnia, Victoria Eng, Alan Gordon, Beverly Farley, Joe Guglielmelli, and Glenville Lovell.
Queens used to be dismissed as the "Bedroom of Manhattan"— daily disgorging its sons and daughters by elevated rail and the Queensboro Bridge to their jobs in "New York" (as Manhattan was known to us in the outer boroughs). In 2007, Queens is the Borough of Immigrants— 2.2 million residents, forty-eight percent of whom are foreign-born, the vast majority of them Asian. In fifty-plus distinct neighborhoods, speaking 140 different languages, reside: Chinese, Koreans, Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Guyanese, Jamaicans, Haitians, Trinidadians, Colombians, Ecuadorians, Dominicans, Mexicans, Filipinos, not to mention Greeks.
Queens County is the largest borough, accommodating two beaches, two airports, Aqueduct Racetrack, three elevated train structures, and Shea Stadium. Queens Noir has set twenty original crime stories in the neighborhoods and at the "Big A," Shea Stadium, JFK Airport, Rockaway Beach, and aboard the elevated Flushing 7 subway line.
Robert Knightly relocated from Manhattan to Jackson Heights, Queens in 1994 (marriage and a bigger apartment). He spent his first forty-four years in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, just a hop, skip, and a jump over the Pulaski Bridge spanning Newtown Creek between Greenpoint and Long Island City, Queens. He works as a criminal trial lawyer for the Legal Aid Society in the Queens Criminal Court in Kew Gardens. Once upon a time, he was a New York City policeman, but that was in big, bad Brooklyn.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
PART I: QUEENS ON THE FLY: BY SEA, HORSE, TRAIN, PLANE, AND SILVER SCREEN
"Alice Fantastic" MAGGIE ESTEP (Aqueduct Racetrack)
"Under the Throgs Neck Bridge" DENIS HAMILL (Bayside)
"Golden Venture" JILL EISENSTADT (The Rockaways)
"Buckner's Error" JOSEPH GUGLIELMELLI (Shea Stadium)
"Baggage Claim" PATRICIA KING (JFK Airport)
"Arrivederci, Aldo" KIM SKYES (Long Island City)
PART II: OLD QUEENS
"Hollywood Lanes" MEGAN ABBOT (Forest Hills)
"Only the Strong Survive" MARY BYRNE (Astoria)
"First Calvary" ROBERT KNIGHTLEY (Blissville)
"Bottom of the Sixth" ALAN GORDON (Rego Park)
"The Flower of Flushing" VICTORIA ENG (Flushing)
"Crazy Jill Saves the Slinky" STEPHEN SOLOMITA (College Point)
"Last Stop, Ditmars" TORI CARRINGTON (Ditmars)
PART III: FOREIGN SHORES
"Avoid Agony" SHAILLY AGNIHOTRI (Jackson Heights)
"Viernes Loco" K.J.A. WISHNIA (Corona)
"Out of Body" GLENVILLE LOVELL (South Jamaica)
"Lights Out for Frankie" LIZ MARTINEZ (Woodside)
"Jihad Sucks; or, The Conversion of the Jews" JILLIAN ABBOTT (Richmond Hill)
"The Investigation" BELINDA FARLEY (Jamaica)