THE CHANNEL RAT PACK

by Henrick Karoliszyn

The band was already sweating through powder-blue shirts when the magician pulled a pigeon from a Mets cap and let its wings beat through the stale neon air. It wheeled once, twice, then vanished into the ceiling tiles, as if the VFW hall had its own dirty-bird heaven. The magician, who looked like a blotto Jesus, pretended this was part of the act.

“Ten minutes,” said a cheap-suited man standing near a door that opened on a July heat that swam through their armpits. “You’re on after Miller Time.”

Miller Time, the Steve Miller cover band called Space Cowboy, had a singer whose broom mustache could raise cattle despite living in Queens.

Inside, strobe lights combed sequins and corsages. A marching-band-drum wedding cake waited in the corner. The bride cried—she was either happy or drunk. The groom was both. Out beyond the lot, the bay emptied itself, the low-tide odor causing nose hairs to twitch. Planes dragged their bellies over from JFK, a noise that rattled the spine.

“D–d–Danny,” Bobby said, chewing a toothpick until it splintered. “You r–r–ready?”

Danny nodded. He didn’t waste words unless he could hide them inside a song. He slicked his gunmetal hair and straightened his collar. None of them were pretty, but when they sang, rooms forgot pretty and remembered mercy.

Richie, the tallest and narrowest, rolled his shoulders.

“We do Eyes first,” he said.

The cousins, Eddie and Jimmy, stood side by side as if they’d been built that way in a factory. Eddie’s hands sunk in pockets, elbows gnarled into invisible grooves. Jimmy held a lit cigarette, but he forgot to smoke it. They could talk without moving their mouths, like they shared an unseen antenna pulling in the same channel.

“You know him?” Jimmy said.

“Who?”

“That one.”

A man stepped out of a Lincoln with a vinyl roof that looked stripped and pressed back by hand. Gold winked at his throat and wrist.

“It’s Weiss, I think,” Danny said. “Or West.”

“W–w–we still doing it,” Bobby asked. “The song.”

“Always the song,” Richie said.

The Steve Miller boys finished on a long Fly Like an Eagle buzz, cut clean like an electric rope. The MC in the wrong kind of shiny tux called up the Channel Rat Pack like he wasn’t sure he was allowed to say their name. They went shoulder to shoulder through the side door, five wide, a tide pushing into a bottle’s neck.

The hall went quiet the way a bar does after a glass breaks. Bobby’s throat closed, then opened. On the downbeat he lifted his chin and the others slid in: Eddie’s low, Jimmy’s steady third, Danny’s bright wire, Richie’s lead, and Bobby finally threading them altogether.

They sang I Only Have Eyes for You because it made them serious. By the last harmony, the bride wasn’t crying anymore. The groom held her, swaying like the floor might slip underneath them.

The applause came wrong, all big and late as if the room had just remembered how to react. The magician nodded, swayed his hair, then looked back up at the ceiling for his bird. The Steve Miller boys pretended to tune their musical weapons. Weiss—or West, or Westin—had watched with his hand on his chain. When the Channel Rat Pack hit the third verse, he smiled like a man who recognized something he could use.

***

Outside, the man leaned against the Lincoln, keys hanging from one finger. He smelled of Brut and lemon from a Dollar Store bottle.

“You kids want to make a record?” he said.

They laughed at first. It’s how poor boys survive when good things show up in suits: laugh, then say yes soft enough that no one can hold you to it if it goes bad.

“Weist,” he said, like he was introducing himself to someone who knew his work. “Basement off the Bowery. Real board, real mics. You come tonight, we’ll cut a side by morning. I’ll get it graveyard on the spinners shift. You listen after midnight? That’s when the real ones get born.”

“How much?” Richie said.

Weist smiled with half his mouth. “You bring the voice,” he said, nodding at Bobby. “I’ll bring the tape.”

“W–w–what do w–we s–s–sing?” Bobby asked, hating how slow the words came when there wasn’t a melody to carry them.

“What you sing,” Weist said, “is what you’ve got. That doo-wop church stuff. The kind that makes mothers lie about where they were when they heard it.”

He opened the back door. The smell of leather and old cigarettes feathered out. The boys looked at each other.

“Let’s go,” Danny said then clapped his hands as punctuation.

         They didn’t look at Broad Channel behind them, the island of houses on stilts where they lived in bungalows over the marsh.

***

The Bowery studio was a cave with a lamp in the middle. Wires hung from the ceiling like fried roots. The board glowed a soft aurora. The air was someone else’s beer, dust motes floating through beams, and something sweet left from another recording. Weist rolled a stool close and creaked his neck back and forth.

“All right,” he said. “Count yourselves in.”

They counted by looking. The clap was a flat-wood sound. The first take coughed. The second found the rasp in Bobby’s throat. The third caught. On the fourth, Weist tipped his head back and smiled with his eyes closed. By the fifth, they forgot him and the Lincoln; they sang like they were back in the garage on West 9th Road, the bulb humming, marsh grass leaning to listen.

“Again,” Weist said, and the board lights said it with him.

Between takes, the cousins stood still, barge-style, nearly comatose. Bobby chewed his jaw raw. Richie leaned into himself like he’d collapse if he didn’t. Danny drank water that sat wrong in his chest, as if he were filling it with something that refused to hold anything else.

On the seventh, Bobby slid clean through a word that had always snagged him and saw Weist’s hand clench, then ease. The board blinked lucky. On the eighth, the room seemed taller.

“Track,” Weist said. “Come hear.”

They leaned over the colors: flashes of green, yellow, red. The playback murmured at the edges. Bobby’s high stretched like wire between unseen poles. The cousins were dock and tide. Danny was the bridge that held.

“Again,” Weist whispered—not to them, but to the song.

They sang until the air weakened, until Bobby’s body was just a container for sound. Weist stopped the board. “We got it,” he said.

He promised contracts, new jackets, and a photo by the car for promotional purposes. He packed the reel, marked it BC-RP-5, and tucked it under his arm. He handed Bobby a roll of bills to divvy up. There were fewer twenties than his fingers. Nobody counted, still high on adrenaline, despite the exhaustion.

“Tonight you’re artists,” he said. “Tomorrow, you’re businessmen.”

He turned off the lights in sections. The boys stood half in, half out. The board’s glow followed Bobby home, behind his eyelids.

They were quiet in the Lincoln, the kind of quiet that comes after all other options are used up. Weist dropped them where Cross Bay met black water. “Tomorrow, noon,” he said, and drove off.

The island exhaled its low-tide air again. Grassy’s Pub threw jukebox music into what was left of the night, ricocheting through the streets whenever someone came or went.

The garage leaned harder than it had that afternoon. The bulb glowed a bruised yellow.

Bobby turned the roll of money in his palm and looked at it like a novelty.

“Save it for the photo,” Danny said.

They sang once, softly, to see if the room still liked them now that another room had loved them. Planes came low enough to make the rafters shake. Bobby missed a word, found it, missed it again. When they finished, no one said again.

“You think he comes back?” Eddie said.

“Tomorrow,” Richie said.

“Tomorrow,” Jimmy echoed.

Bobby worked at the hill of a word. “W–what if he d–doesn’t?”

Richie looked at him with the softness he saved for no one else. “It’s okay.”

But it wasn’t. The room knew that.

They went to Grassy Point to show their faces and kill off the nerves. The bar smelled like bleach and salt.

“Hey, Rat Pack,” the bartender said. “You get famous on me?”

“Recording an album,” Danny said, splitting the word on his teeth.

“R–r–real board,” Bobby added, proud of saying it whole. “And and and and we’re getting jackets.”

“Bring me back a jacket,” the bartender said. “Something with leather sleeves.”

When they left the bar, they walked to the bridge as the wind crossed both ways. The island puffed out. Bobby looked down at the water.

“Tomorrow,” Richie said. It meant everything that wasn’t.

                                             *

They scattered at two a.m. like a bad hand of cards. The cousins went home to a mother who refused the right questions. Danny walked until the night told him to stop. Richie found a laundromat where a woman kept a chair for men too tired to stand.

Bobby took the long way. The island wasn’t big, but it folded its corners where water lapped against the bulkheads and airport light lifted and set, where you could pretend you were making the road yourself.

The dock boards were slick. He stepped where he always stepped. The bay smelled of wet rope. Planes rolled their white bellies across the darkness.

He thought of the reel in the box, his voice pressed into trenches like a body on a slab, the word again written in air across his chest.

Out past the second piling, the pilings made a mouth. He stopped there. The night pressed. He tried to say it wrong. He tried to make a note—it came out right, lean and spotless. He sang to the water, to see if it could return anything.

Something answered. Not words but a chord scraped with sand, a yes too small to brag about. He leaned toward it and the dock leaned away.

There’s a second when the world forgets it owes you another breath. The water came up and took him. He went under with his eyes open and the song still in his mouth. He didn’t kick, or he kicked wrong. He thought of the buzzing bulb, the Brut and lemon, the strip of blue shirt on the nail. He thought of a row of lights—green, yellow, red—blinking like a secret for the living.

Above him the dock turned sky. The bay rolled him once, like a polite stranger moving him aside.

The note kept going without him.

                                                         *

They didn’t find him. Or they did and hid him somewhere all these years. In some versions he left for L.A., in others he drowned under the bridge, or kept singing in the rafters until the bulb died. In the versions that matter, the song outlives the boy. That’s either mercy or proof that songs are cruel.

                                                         *

Years pass in a paragraph. Tomorrow didn’t come. The Lincoln didn’t. The phone didn’t ring. The money went where money on that island always went: to what hurt and what dulled the hurt. The houses leaned. The city sent men with clipboards who say condemned like amen. Someone finds a cassette that plays once and never again, because tape and tide keep the same god.

At Grassy’s Pub, a photo still hangs: five boys under a naked bulb. Someone’s written in marker EVERY NIGHT, SOMEWHERE. Nobody argues with the image or its message.

Sometimes, when the air tastes like sulfur and mosquitoes make you slap your own ears, you’ll hear four voices. You’ll swear you hear five, but the fifth is the water. The song will end and there’ll be a laugh — the slick kind that belongs to a man you can’t find —and then a single word.

“Again.”

Henrick Karoliszyn is a writer based in New Orleans. His fiction has
been published in the 2025 Hemingway Shorts literary anthology, shortlisted for The Letter Review Prize, named winner of the 2025 Breakwater Review fiction contest, and a finalist for the 2026 Kurt Vonnegut Speculative Fiction Prize. His work has also been featured in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Superlative Literary Journal, Flash Fiction Magazine, Blood+Honey, BULL, The Argyle Literary Magazine, and ExPat Press along with forthcoming editions of Modern Flash Fiction, The Threepenny Review, and FOLIO Literary Journal. He's at work on a short story collection and anovel.