“Maybe he didn’t like her.”
“Just go talk to the woman is all I ask.”
“Who did you say she was?”
“Jesus, man, I told you, some kind of relative of Rhonda’s who Rhonda feels like she never did anything for and now she’s alone, and no one understands what the hell she’s saying. She said, OK, maybe I know someone.” Sonny ate some more of his steak. “This is good.”
“Who said?”
“Rhonda.”
“How did the woman know you could get someone?”
“Rhonda’s always talking about me, man, you know that.” Sonny grinned faintly, a lugubrious, defensive, diffident grin I had never seen before and I realized he really loved Rhonda.
“The woman knew about me?”
“How the hell should I know? Yes. Probably. Not by name maybe. What difference does it make? Maybe Rhonda brags about you, too,” he said. “No kidding. She’s your number one fan. I mean, just give it a couple hours, right?”
“No.”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m off this week and I’m busy.”
“With the boy? You want to talk about that?”
I didn’t want to talk about Billy. I kept my mouth shut. Sonny waited.
“Yeah, OK,” I said finally. “I’ll go.”
“Tomorrow would be good,” said Sonny.
“No. When I can.”
“I’m not asking you to change your life, man. I’m just asking you to take a run over to Staten Island.”
“I said I’d go. For Rhonda, I’ll do it. I’ll take a run out there,” I said to shut him up. “I’ll go talk to the woman once, if you want, when I get some time, OK? I’ll do that if you want me to. What’s her name?”
From his jacket pocket, Lippert took a piece of paper with a name and address.
“Here’s the deal over there on Staten island,” Sonny said. “You ever been over there? People in Staten Island are strange, like they barely live in New York, man. I mean there’s boroughs and boroughs, you know? I get Brooklyn, the Bronx, even fucking Queens. But Staten Island, I mean it’s like some parallel universe, like you’re already in New Jersey.”
“How come you know so much about it?”
“I taught a course at the college out there once, a million years ago, I got a part-time job, I was shacked up with some girl. It was wild. Borough president, name of Albert Manascalo,” he said, beginning to sink into his past. “Al to his friends. He had so much power he could make a Jew an honorary Italian if he wanted. The place was full of rage and religion, man, you hear me? Redemption if you got lucky. Dark stuff. You ever really get into Dostoevsky? It’s like all there.”
“Staten Island is like Dostoevsky?” I said. “You’re losing me.”
“Pretty much, man. Her name, the lady you got to go see, get this, man, is Gorbachev.”
“You’re fucking with me.”
“Yeah, like Gorby. No relation. Or maybe there is, maybe there’s a branch of them over on Staten Island. First name Vera.”
“I’ll take a piece of steak,” I said.
6
Little kids rode skateboards in the dark up and down the Brooklyn streets, weaving in and out, like bumper cars in an amusement park. Streetlights picked them up as they darted out from behind buildings, swerved onto the sidewalk, smashed into the street, chasing cars, daring cars, hanging on to a rear bumper for a ride, before they swooped away into dark shadows behind buildings.
I was on my way across Brooklyn after seeing Sonny and I’d probably had more to drink than I should have, and I was driving too fast when the kids got in my way. This part of Brooklyn a few miles from the ocean was low-lying, ram-shackle and poor. Immigrants – Pakistanis, some Chinese, some Jews – shared the space uneasily with local gangs.
On one street out front of a bodega, I saw two boys, huge kids, who resembled grown men, with cans of beer in their hands. Younger boys begged beers from them and swaggered into the stores with false IDs, trying to buy smokes. No one asked a lot of questions around here.
“Fucking watch it,” yelled a white boy, maybe sixteen and mean-looking – who appeared in front of me out of nowhere on his skateboard and forced me to slam on my brakes.
The kid danced his skateboard into the middle of the road, rocked on it, danced it up close to my car, reached his hand out and touched the hood of my car, grinning, laughing, taunting me. He had his baseball cap on backwards, pants hanging low on his hips. He was playing to me. In my headlights I could see his face. I felt like ramming the creep. Instead I leaned out of the window and told him to fuck off, but he made a face, gave me the finger and started whistling. A couple of his pals, waiting on the curb, jumped their boards into the street. White boys, maybe Hispanic. I leaned on my horn.
I kept honking. Flashed my brights. In the hard white flashing light, the boys looked like clowns, and one of them wasn’t any older than Billy. Then, without warning, all three swerved up to the car window, laughing.
I leaned on the horn some more. Told them to fuck off. Warned them. Rolled up the window, stepped on the gas, forced the boys back. I was pissed off and a little scared and I didn’t really care – just for a second – if I hit them. In the rear-view mirror, I saw two of them follow me to the corner, where I turned fast, doing sixty, maybe more.
The side street was almost empty. In the mirror, I saw the maroon car coming up behind me. I was sweating now, and feeling crazy, wondering if the guys on skateboards had forced me into this one-way street on purpose, if it was all a set-up, if the kids were connected with the maroon car somehow. I didn’t believe it. It didn’t mean anything, never did, not most of the time.
I drove past some Hasidic men in eighteenth-century outfits who were discussing God or the price of diamonds. Kept going towards the ocean, to the beach, past broken streets that were empty, the car still on my tail. I cut across a gas station that was shut. I could see patches of rust on it and bumper stickers. The driver looked fat, with a big head.
Then I lost him. Like that. It made it worse, him appearing, then just disappearing. It was as if he wanted me unnerved, off balance, more than he wanted to close in. I was probably drunker than I knew. The guy in the car made me feel hunted. I thought I saw him again in the rear-view, and wondered if I was hallucinating, or just scared.
I cut over to Manhattan Beach and the Farone house as fast as I could without crashing into anything.
No one was on the steeet except for a teenage girl on a bike. I recognized her as the chubby kid who had been running earlier at Coney Island where the plane crashed. I parked and got out of my car near the Farones’. For a few seconds I stood on the street, listening for other cars, but all I heard was the whispery sound of the ocean on a calm night.
The door was unlocked. No lights in the house, just the door left open. I knew I should never have left Billy alone.
“Billy?”
Except for a light coming from the second floor, the house was dark. I heard a very faint noise. I couldn’t track it. I kept my hand on my gun. Where was he?
“Billy?”
I felt like a dope, my voice bouncing off the walls. Pushing through the dread that I felt thickening around me, I went upstairs to the landing outside Billy’s room. I pushed the door cautiously. The smell of turpentine hit me.
There was no one inside. On the walls, paint samples – pink, orange, rose – were streaked in horizontal lines. A drop cloth, stiff with paint, lay on the floor. Rolls of wallpaper were stacked in a corner near a ladder that lay on its side. A rough work table made of a couple of boards held a radio, a couple of paint cans, a box from Dunkin’ Donuts, and paint brushes stuck in a glass Mason jar half full of dirty water. Three blue and white cardboard coffee cups were on the table too, one of them half full; in it floated a cigarette butt.
Billy’s things were gone. His bed, books, desk, clothes, posters, computer, all gone. The room where he’d lived since he was a little boy had vanished. Even the shel
ves were gone. It was as if he’d been cancelled out.
Standing in the room, the conditioning off, it was hot. A single yellow light was on out back and from the window, though it was dark now, I could just see the patio, the blue pool, the striped loungers, the white orchids that were ghostly at night. A bug zapper was on in the yard. The sprinkler sprayed water in irregular patterns across the grass.
The noise like a mouse was coming from the garage underneath Billy’s room. It got louder, moving, into the kitchen, up the stairs, then muffled by the carpet. An animal, I thought. A dog. The Farones didn’t have a dog. I waited.
“You saw?” Billy was standing in the doorway of his empty room, his face somber. It was Billy who had come softly up the stairs. He was barefoot.
I wanted to put my arms around him, but I wasn’t sure how he’d take it so I just said, “Are you OK?”
“I’m OK.”
“What about the fish?”
“I can’t find them, not the fish or the tank. I just hope they’re not dead,” he said, voice wavering at first like a little boy, then growing steady. “Look, I have to figure my dad took them to the restaurant so they could be fed. He would do that kind of thing. He probably has them on some pasta Alfredo or something.”
“It must have been lousy, finding your room like this,” I said.
“I’m OK,” Billy said. “Honest.”
“The front door was open.”
“I left it like that for you. I didn’t go out. I promised you I wouldn’t. I went into the yard was all, and the garage. They put my stuff there.”
“I didn’t see any lights.”
“I just put a little one on in the garage.”
Billy set off back down the stairs and I followed him to the kitchen and through a side door into the garage. Genia’s green Range Rover was in its usual spot, so was a long table with power tools she had bought for Johnny that he never used. His silver Porsche, which had cost him a bundle and which he could barely get into now he was so fat, wasn’t there. I figured maybe he’d left it at the restaurant. Stacked against the wall were blue plastic storage crates and next to them Billy’s fishing gear, his bike and his computer.
On one of the crates was a stack of school books. With a Russian’s snobbish love for anything intellectual, Genia made Johnny buy fancy editions of Russian novels, Tolstoy, Pushkin, Dostoevsky, in expensive leather bindings with gilt writing, but she kept them behind glass in her living room. Did Genia buy them from Dubi Petrovsky? Was that how Dubi knew Billy was coming home?
Genia was scared of Billy being at home. Redecorating his room was a way of making him disappear. I was furious with her. I had left a message in London to tell her I’d picked Billy up in Florida; she didn’t return it. I thought about calling again, but what would I say? That she was a lousy mother?
“Artie?” Billy was holding up a dark blue hoodie he’d taken from one of the crates. “My stuff doesn’t fit me. You think that’s why they put it here? You think that? I went into my room and there wasn’t anything at all, Artie, they took away my stuff, and put it in these boxes.” He put the hoodie down and picked up a pair of jeans and looked at them. “Do you think they planned on giving my stuff away, Artie?” He sounded a hell of a lot calmer than I would have been. “You think they figured I wasn’t coming back? You think they didn’t want me to come back?”
“Maybe they just thought you outgrew a lot of your clothes.” I said. “You brought some things back up from Florida, right?”
“Sure, yeah, I left my bag over at your place, remember? I guess I was thinking I’d like to have my old clothes. You think it’s like a metaphor or something? Old things not fitting? I’d like that.”
I pulled the lid off of one of the blue boxes. Inside were more books. Billy inspected the titles. It gave me the creeps, him standing there with his childhood packed into plastic boxes in his parents’ garage.
“Maybe your mom was planning on redoing your room.”
“The wallpaper has ladies on it from olden times and gold borders and there’s pink paint. You think that’s for me? It’s better if we tell the truth, at least to each other,” said Billy. “I’m OK with what my mom did, honest, I really am.” Pulling a thick white sweater from one of the open boxes, Billy put it on. His arms stuck out six inches from the cuffs and he started laughing, and then I laughed.
“How about we go shopping tomorrow for some new stuff?”
“Sure,” Billy said. “We could give my stuff to some poor kids, right? My grandma, Big Tina, always gave shit to the church, you know. I could drop it off with her.” He looked at me. “Except she’s too weird. They’re all weird on the Farone side except my grandpa and no one gives him a break except me. It’s just old clothes. I really don’t care. I’m with you, I’m good, I really am.” He put up his hand to give me a high five, then grinned at the corniness of doing it.
“Let’s get a soda or something,” I said, and my voice bounced off the cinderblock walls of the garage and sounded faraway and thin.
*
In the kitchen, I turned on a light. Billy got some Frescas from the fridge.
Scrubbed down clean as a hospital ward, the kitchen was all fancy Italian glass cabinets and granite counters. The fridge motor turned over.
I took a long swallow of the Fresca and said, “I’m sorry I took so long earlier.”
“Where were you?”
“Something to do with work,” I said. I’d been with Sonny Lippert two hours if you counted going and coming.
“I got used to it, being by myself, when I was a kid,” Billy said thoughtfully, as if he’d thought about the business of being alone a lot. “Down there, in Florida, it’s like there’re almost too many people. You have to share a room. You have to eat with everyone. You never have any time. There’s usually some shrink hanging around and stuff. It’s great to have some time alone now, I mean sit around and read or just chill.”
“Is it hard?” I sat down at the counter, and Billy climbed up on a stool opposite me.
“It’s OK. It’s boring sometimes,” he said, pushing his hair off his forehead. “There’re a couple of really good teachers. I mean most of the kids are like practically illiterate, you know? They made me a tutor in English. I get to tutor younger kids. I like that. They’re so like weirdly grateful just to have someone not treat them like idiots.”
“That’s good.”
“Artie?”
“What’s that, sweetheart?”
He rolled his eyes.
“What?”
“You can’t call me sweetheart,” Billy said. “It’s way too weird. I’m fourteen.”
“I could call you buddy. Or pal.”
“I don’t think so!”
“Why not?”
“On you that’s even more weird, I mean you’re not the type.”
“What type is that?”
“Bubba-type guy.”
“Got it.”
“I have something I probably need to tell you,” said Billy, pushing his hair away nervously, looking a little shifty now.
“What’s that?”
“It’s pretty awful.” He drank his soda and rolled the can between his hands.
“Come on.”
“OK. It’s like I smoke. I’m trying to quit, but once in a while, I can’t help it and I don’t think I can make it through two weeks without one. Also, I don’t want to lie to you. I really don’t. Are you mad at me?”
“What about in Florida?”
“We sneak them. They know. They figure we’re all so screwed up, not to mention that there are kids there who did a lot of drugs on the outside, a cigarette isn’t the worst thing.” Billy dug a pack out of his pocket.
“I should give you the lecture, right?” I said. “It is a lousy thing. It really does suck. You end up with some crap disease and wheezing and coughing. You smoke, then you die.”
“You quit?” Billy said.
“I’m trying.”
“Can I
have just one?”
“You don’t need to ask me.”
“Let’s go outside so I don’t stink up Mom’s house,” said Billy. “She doesn’t like that. Even she goes outside when she smokes.”
“I know.”
“You do?”
“Yeah,” I said and we went outside together.
On the patio by the pool in the half dark, the only light coming from the kitchen, Billy lit up. He didn’t smoke like a kid play-acting. He smoked like an adult with a habit.
I was dying to join him but I thought I should try to be some kind of role model.
“Let’s go home. My place,” I said. “Tomorrow we’ll go fishing, and maybe buy you some cool new stuff.”
“Am I making you nuts, smoking?” Billy said. “I’m so happy you quit. I want you to be around forever. I’m really going to try.” He crushed the cigarette in an ashtray on one of the glass tables.
From inside the house, the phone rang.
“I’ll get it,” I said.
Through the kitchen window, I saw Billy carefully pull off his clothes. From behind he looked like a man. He jumped in the pool. Water splashed over the edge. From the street came the sound of a garbage truck, grinding trash in its maw.
Holding the receiver, in the second before I heard the voice on the phone, I knew something was wrong. Maybe it was only afterwards that I knew. When I replayed the incident, me picking up the phone, Billy jumping in the pool, the crude voice on the phone, felt like I knew all along.
“Get him out of here,” the voice said.
“Who the hell is this?”
“We don’t want that kid in Brooklyn, you got that?”
“Who the fuck is this?”
“What’s the difference? I know exactly who the fuck you are. You’re that Russki cop, right, who’s related to Johnny Farone’s wife? So you listen, you take him back or we’ll do it for you. You understand? He did plenty of bad shit already and he ain’t going do to nothing again like that, so I want him out, you get him the fuck out of here.”
Fresh Kills Page 5
