Motherless Brooklyn Read Online Free PDF Page B

muse strikes. Or possibly you ought to get out your brushes and canvas. I’ve never been in an oil painting.”
    “Sorry, Frank.” I reached in just as Coney came up behind me and looked inside.
    “Oh, shit,” he said.
    “Help me,” I said to Coney. Together we pulled Minna up from the bottom of the Dumpster. Minna stayed curled around his wounded middle. We drew him over the lip and held him, together, out on the dark empty sidewalk, cradling him absurdly, our knees buckled toward one another’s, our shoulders pitched, like he was a giant baby Jesus in a bloody trench coat and we were each one of the Madonna’s tender arms. Minna groaned and chuckled, eyes squeezed shut, as we moved him to the backseat of the Lincoln. His blood made my fingers tacky on the door handle.
    “Nearest hospital,” I breathed as we got into the front.
    “I don’t know around here,” said Coney, whispering, too.
    “Brooklyn Hospital,” said Minna from the b, surprisingly loud. “Take the BQE, straight up McGuinness. Brooklyn Hospital’s right off DeKalb. You boiled cabbageheads.”
    We held our breath and stared forward until Coney got us going the right way, then I turned and looked in the back. Minna’s eyes were half open and his unshaven chin was wrinkled like he was thinking hard or sulking or trying not to cry. He saw me looking and winked. I barked twice—“yipke, yipke”—and winked back involuntarily.
    “Fuck happened, Frank?” said Coney without taking his eyes off the road. We bumped and rattled over the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway,rottenest surface in the boroughs. Like the G train, the BQE suffered from low self-esteem, never going into citadel Manhattan, never tasting the glory. And it was choked with forty- or fifty-wheel trucks, day and night.
    “I’m dropping my wallet and watch back here,” said Minna, ignoring the question. “And my beeper. Don’t want them stolen at the hospital. Remember they’re back here.”
    “Yeah, but what the fuck happened, Frank?”
    “Leave you my gun but it’s gone,” said Minna. I watched him shuck off the watch, silver smeared with red.
    “They took your gun? Frank, what happened?”
    “Knife,” said Minna. “No biggie.”
    “You’re gonna be all right?” Coney was asking and willing it at once.
    “Oh, yeah. Great.”
    “Sorry, Frank.”
    “Who?” I said. “Who did this?”
    Minna smiled. “You know what I want out of you, Freakshow? Tell me a joke. You got one you been saving, you must.”
    Minna and I had been in a joke-telling contest since I was thirteen years old, primarily because he liked to see me try to get through without ticcing. It was rare that I could.
    “Let me think,” I said.
    “It’ll hurt him if he laughs,” said Coney to me. “Say one he knows already. Or one that ain’t funny.”
    “Since when do I laugh?” said Minna. “Let him tell it. Couldn’t hurt worse than your driving.”
    “Okay,” I said. “Guy walks into a bar.” I was watching blood pool on the backseat, at the same time trying to keep Minna from tracking my eyes.
    “That’s the ticket,” rasped Minna. “Best jokes start the same fucking way, don’t they, Gilbert? The guy, the bar.”
    “I guess,” said Coney.
    “Funny already,” said Minna. “We’re already in the black here.”
    “So guy walks into a bar,” I said again. “With an octopus. Says to the bartender ‘I’ll bet a hundred dollars this octopus can play any instrument in the place.’ ”
    “Guy’s got an octopus. You like that, Gilbert?”
    “Eh.”
    “So the bartender points at the piano in the corner says, ‘Go ahead.’ Guy puts the octopus on the piano stool—
Pianoctamus! Pianoctamum Bailey!
—octopus flips up the lid, plays a few scales, then lays out a little étude on the piano.”
    “Getting fancy,” said Minna. “Showing off a little.”
    I didn’t ask him to specify, since if I had he’d surely have said he meant me and the octopus both, for