Blood Makes Noise Read Online Free

cranky infrastructure.
    And Michael was alone.
    The sides of the CGT were bluish now, the light from street lamps retreating in tiny halos. He walked back down the alley to his car, paused to put the key in the door, and smelled it again for the first time.
    Wafting up the alley on gusts of memory: slaughterhouse blood atop dead canals. The warm stench of half-sunk fishing boats. The rot of night-old tango sweat. It was a smell of childhood, of La Boca, which for Michael were one and the same.
    He hadn’t realized how close he was to the old neighborhood, just a few blocks south and a million miles away, with its crumbling piers and crazy immigrant homes. La Boca. The dockworkers would be up now, setting off for work, swinging lunch bags thick with
fugazza
. The children would wake soon. Hammering feet on slick cobblestones, school-bound voices catcalling in an Italian-accented Spanish that was true of all Spanish here but no more so than in La Boca.
    After four years back in Buenos Aires, he had yet to visit the old docks. It seemed another world now, too far away to touch, close enough to burn if you stared too long. His innocence lay there. So did his mother and sister. He thought of them, let the dull spasm reach stiffly over years…
    …Then started his car and drove away.

2.
    A first memory:
    His mother, young, raven hair brushing his cheek as she kneels beside him, smelling of spoiled milk. Something weak and small twitches in her arms and he’s only two but he knows it’s trouble. “Michael,” she says to him in Italian, “this is your sister.”
    His father, an old man even then, towering sinew with a shock of arrogant white hair. He picks Michael up roughly, bellows at him in Ukrainian: “Not king of the hill anymore, eh?”
    They lived in Chicago. West Taylor. His father had played clarinet with the Kiev symphony, had survived the Reds in ’18 but not his brother’s reputation in the White Army. The Cheka sniffed his house, sniffed his friends, sniffed his back as he picked through a pile of frozen, massacred corpses on Christmas morning for the body of his brother. The symphony was disbanded the next day on Stalin’s orders, and on New Year’s afternoon Nikolai Suslov read the writing in the snow and walked out of Russia.
    Through Poland, where he slept in church doorways with his clarinet. Into Germany, where he hunted rabbits in the Black Forest to stay alive. Across northern Italy, where he stole grapes in the shadow of the monastery at Monteriggioni and was discovered by the vintner’s daughter, Constantina D’Oro, a moody, restless woman, who brought him pecorino and Sienese prosciutto. He was thin, broke, and had only his clarinet. She was bored, sharp, and had only her swollen, veiled chest. She was eighteen. He was fifty-seven.
    They came to America, to Chicago, where he looked for an orchestra, then a band, and ended up with one-nighters in gangster speakeasies. He grew frustrated. She grew pregnant: first with Michael, then Maria.
    Not long after, Michael’s parents gave up on the Depression, on America, and emigrated to Buenos Aires, where Constantina had relatives.
    “Love her, Michael. Love your little sister…”
    Michael and Maria grew and came to understand, then love, their La Boca neighborhood. He palled with the other immigrant kids, and they ran in gangs through the narrow rainbow streets; drew chalk dragons on apartment walls painted red, yellow, and green; sailed waste-wood battleships in the putrid canal; pestered dockworkers, who’d make them sing sweetly before surrendering candies from Bolivia or Scotland. And always there was Maria, following, just wanting to be near him.
    “Watch out for your sister, Michael.”
    His father now, and Michael vowed he would. Though she was weaker and sickly, Michael allowed her to tag along and bloodied the nose of any of the gang who complained. And Maria steeled herself, built forts with them, slayed demons, helped spook the ice