Blood Makes Noise Read Online Free Page A

man’s old cart mare with Chilean firecrackers, only occasionally lying down to gulp, to search for her breath and medicine. Never telling their mother, always climbing to her feet and running with Michael home when she called for supper.
    There would be evenings she caught up to Michael and he’d be standing on the sidewalk, looking up at the riotous hulk of their apartment building—purple corrugated walls, green shutters, orange cupolas trimmed with blue-and-red doors. The lights would be coming up in each window, and with them the tumbling smells of
bifes
, pasta, and burbling tomato that mingled with canal garbage into something unreally sweet that shot to the back of their mouths. Struggling through it all, as the sky fell andthe gas street lamps ticked and fussed, would be the thin, drifting sound of their father’s clarinet, and for a moment Michael knew his universe worked. As the certainty swept out from his heart, he turned to Maria and she was looking at the same building, feeling the same confidence, and he put his arm around her and promised his sister he would always look after her.
    Inside, supper was hot and clanging. His father would uncork the Chianti, bought cheap off the docks, and alternate with straight shots of Finnish vodka as his family waited nervously to see which side of the mountain the sled of his emotions would tip to. Sometimes it would be the gentle slope of his better nature, and with a stamp of his boot and an open gesture with bony fingers, he would tell stories of his days in Kiev, of the orchestra and legions of doe-eyed Ukrainian flowers that had wept for his attention. Sometimes he would skip a part on purpose, and his children would catch him and demand the full version, for they’d heard these stories a thousand times and loved them for the certainty of their cadence.
    But sometimes the sled would tumble the other way, his father’s face darkening with frustration. He had twice the work here in the music halls of Avenida Corrientes than in Chicago—at half the pay. His nights were busy but the days were spent watching the Suslovs sink further and further into Constantina’s relatives’ debt. He hated the half-breed orchestras here and their bombastic, mercurial conductors. As his rants broadened and soured, he would sweep his eyes over each of them, looking for a blink, a rise that would stoke a flash of temper. Sometimes it was Michael; a wrong look, a half sentence, and his father would be on him, boxing his ears till the tears stung and his head rang.
    More often it was his mother, unable to contain another slur against her family, who would take the bait, their voices leapfrogging over each other, and Michael and Maria would dive for cover, knowing one would eventually brush its mate and releasea furious, scrapping brawl. In the face of Constantina’s flailing rage, Nikolai’s temper would collapse into belly laughter as she’d struggle and shriek and finally collapse into tears. There’d be kisses, and a pause, and the scoot of a chair as he’d carry her to the bedroom. Foreplay in Michael’s home usually involved broken furniture.
    And once a broken body.
    Up past the docks. To the tanneries, where the canal fermented with cattle guts and bone. Where they were never allowed and where they stood now—his gang, and he and little Maria—on a rise over the tannery’s waste pipe, shouting over the roar of chemical entrails blasting—too heavy, too slow—in their tumble to the canal. There, even though it was forbidden, to see an older girl living in one of the tar paper shacks clinging to the rear of the tannery—a girl who, for a fistful of dock candy, would lift her dress and let them touch her thing.
    A boy’s moment, and Maria can’t come. She’s to wait by the belching pipe. Because she’s a girl and most of all because she’s his sister. So he lines up with the others, passes down his toll of Belgian taffy, reaches, and feels something to his