Buddy Boys by Mike McAlary Read Free Book Online

neighborhood corner.
    â€œI’ll wear a pink coat,” Betsy said. “You wear a white carnation, so I’ll be able to recognize you.”
    Henry hung up the phone and went upstairs to find Kathy Costello sitting on the couch. Mildred Winter and Kathy’s mother were sipping tea in the kitchen.
    â€œLet me see that ring I gave you,” Henry said nonchalantly.
    Kathy pulled the ring from her finger and handed it to him. He closed one hand on the ring, grabbed his coat with the other, and headed for the front door.
    â€œI don’t want to get married,” Henry was heard to say.
    Henry returned home two days later. Kathy Costello and her mother were long gone, having returned to their side of the mountain.
    Henry and Betsy spent their evening in her Corvair station wagon parked on a road alongside the village garbage dump. After three years, there was a lot to talk about. They laughed long into the evening, agreeing that Betsy had phoned Henry at precisely the right moment in his life.
    The couple talked about buying land together and one day possibly even opening a joint checking account at the Dime Savings Bank. Finally, Henry held up the ring and said, “I got this.”
    Earlier in the year Henry had taken the first job of his adult life, joining the Valley Stream Sanitation Department as the tail man on a garbage truck. He got the job through a hunting buddy named Jimmy Leavy who wound up working on the same truck. By coincidence, they had been assigned a route that included both their homes. Henry was thoroughly unprepared for the physical strain of lifting twenty-five hundred garbage cans into the back of a truck. An hour into the job it seemed to him that a lot of people were throwing away cement with their trash. And at 10 A.M . when the truck stopped in front of his home, he tore off his uniform and ran into the house.
    â€œI quit!” he yelled.
    Winter refused to come out of the house until Jimmy promised to let him ride in the truck while he finished off the rest of the route. It took a week before Henry was able to work an entire shift without threatening to quit. By that time he and Jimmy were moonlighting as junk dealers. Sifting through their neighbors’ garbage for something they called “mongo,” the garbage collectors came up with copper, other metals, and wood, which they later sold. Eventually, they graduated to a route in an even nicer neighborhood, finding toasters, stereos, and an occasional working television set in the morning trash.
    Although they had their problems, Henry and Betsy continued to date over the next four years. Henry worked on the garbage truck but he really wanted to be a New York City cop. And on an August night in 1973, his brother-in-law, Dennis Caufield, a city cop working with an undercover anticrime detail in Brooklyn’s 75th Precinct, invited Henry to join him on a midnight tour.
    Henry drove into the city and met Caufield on a corner, sitting in a yellow cab with his partner.
    â€œWhat’s this?” Henry asked.
    â€œOur cover,” Caufield explained.
    As he accompanied the cops on their tour of a bleak neighborhood named East New York, he gazed at rows of gutted tenements and tilting brick buildings. He saw wooden planks nailed over windows and sheets of steel bolted over apartment house entrances. Henry watched intently when a group of blacks scattered from a Pennsylvania Avenue storefront as the Checker cab—with three white men inside—drove past.
    â€œThey seem to recognize you guys,” Henry noted.
    â€œCockroaches,” Caufield replied.
    â€œSkells,” the partner added, using the catchall nickname used by cops when referring to ghetto pimps, prostitutes, drug dealers, robbers, muggers, junkies, and other lowlifes. Henry remembered thinking, “Why would anyone from the suburbs want to come and work in a ghetto?”
    By the middle of the midnight tour, as the undercover cops raced