The Men in Mercer Street

By nine o’clock on Friday night, Mercer Street was already crowded. Cars were parked along both sides of the road, music came through open apartment windows, and people stood outside the corner store arguing about basketball as if they had money on every play. They probably did. I sat on the hood of Frankie's old Buick with a black notebook balanced on my knee, counting the night's take for the second time. "Three hundred and twelve," I said. Frankie looked over from the driver's seat. "You counted it already." "I know." "Then why are you counting it again?" "Just to be sure." He laughed and leaned back against the door. "You worry too much." I closed the notebook and separated the bills into two piles. Most of the money had come from bets we'd taken that afternoon and evening. Twenty dollars from a mechanic, forty from one of the guys who worked at the grocery store, another fifty from a man who spent too much time at the pool hall and always believed he knew which team was going to win. It wasn't a real business. Not yet, anyway. Frankie and I had started taking bets around the neighborhood about four months earlier. We knew enough people to make it work, and we kept the amounts small enough that nobody paid much attention. We weren't running a bookmaking operation out of an office. We were two nineteen-year-olds with a notebook, a telephone number and more confidence than sense. Still, three hundred dollars felt like a lot of money to me. Frankie looked at the bills in my hand. "So what's your plan?" "For what?" "Your share." "I'll save it." He laughed so hard he nearly dropped his cigarette. "You're serious?" "Yes." "You're nineteen, Nico. You're supposed to spend it." "Spend it on what?" He pointed at himself. "Look at me. I'm dressed like a man who knows how to spend money." I looked at his brown leather jacket, the new shoes he'd bought two weeks earlier and the gold-colored watch he kept checking even though it hadn't worked properly since he bought it. "You look like someone who doesn't have any money left." "That's because I invest." "In what?" "Looking good." I shook my head and put the money back into my jacket. Frankie grinned. He always did that when he knew he'd lost an argument but didn't care. I looked down Mercer Street. I'd grown up on that block, so I knew most of what happened there. I knew which restaurants stayed open late, which apartment buildings had broken elevators, which guys were always looking for a card game and which ones were always looking for trouble. I also knew which places we stayed away from. The Carbone Social Club was one of them. It was halfway down the block in a narrow brick building with dark windows and a small sign above the door. From the outside, it didn't look like much. But everybody on Mercer Street knew who owned it. The Carbones. My father had mentioned them more than once when I was growing up. Never in detail. He didn't have to. "Stay away from those people," he'd told me. I'd listened. At least until now. Frankie noticed me looking at the building. "You ever wonder what's inside?" "No." "You're lying." "I've walked past it my whole life. Of course I know what's inside." "You've never been inside." "Exactly." He smiled. "One day." "Not me." "You say that now." I ignored him and checked the time. It was getting late, and my mother would start wondering where I was. I'd told her I was going to the pool hall after work, which wasn't exactly a lie. We had spent part of the afternoon there. My father owned the barbershop a few doors down from our apartment. I'd grown up sweeping hair off his floor, cleaning mirrors and listening to men complain about everything from their wives to the city government. He worked hard, but there was never much left at the end of the month. I'd spent enough years watching that to know I wanted something different. I just didn't know what that something was yet. Frankie flicked his cigarette into the gutter. "One more." "One more what?" "Bet." "We've got enough." "We've got three hundred dollars." "Exactly." "That's why we should keep going." I looked at him. He shrugged. "What? You scared?" "No. I'm thinking." "That's your problem." Before I could answer, a man walked out of the corner store across the street and handed Frankie an envelope. Frankie opened it, counted the money and looked at me. "Another fifty." I sighed. He smiled. "See?" I took out my notebook. "Who?" "Same guy from yesterday." "Put his name down." Frankie gave me the name, and I wrote it beside the amount. He had bet on a basketball game and wanted to settle before heading home. Nothing about it seemed unusual. That was the problem. We didn't know that the bookmaker we'd been dealing with wasn't working alone. We didn't know the money passing through his hands belonged partly to the Carbones. We thought we'd been taking money from ordinary neighborhood gamblers and collecting our cut. We had no idea that we'd stepped into somebody else's business. By the time we finished, the streets was already calm. Frankie counted the money again while I checked the notebook. "Three hundred and twelve," he said. "Put it away." He handed the bills to me. I slipped them inside my jacket. We climbed into the Caprice, and Frankie started the engine. Definitely it didn’t start at the first go. As we pulled away from the curb, I glanced toward the Social Club. Two men were standing outside. One of them was looking directly at us. I didn't think much of it. Neither did Frankie. We drove around the corner and disappeared into the next street, carrying three hundred and twelve dollars we thought we'd earned. By the following afternoon, we'd learn that two hundred of those dollars belonged to the Carbones. And they wanted it back.