Everyday People

by Stewart O'Nan

  And if they didn’t find it?

  He didn’t know. He was tired. He couldn’t think when he needed to eat.

  Renée was waiting for him, thanking the policeman over and over. She took Tony in her arms, then examined the cut, fingering the butterflies until he winced.

  “Not so bad,” she said, but he could tell she was saying it for him. The apartment smelled of sautéed garlic. She’d made a Bolognese especially for him and tried to be quiet while they ate. He could see it was hard for her.

  “I’m okay,” he said.

  “Did he hit you?”

  “No.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “He jumped in the truck and drove away, that was it. I saw him maybe three seconds.”

  “And nobody knows him?”

  “That’s what they say.”

  “How long have you been doing business, and this is how they repay you?”

  He thought of trying to explain the way of neighborhoods to her, but she knew. She would say East Liberty was different, and then they’d get into an argument he did not want to have tonight.

  “My friend Vanessa took care of me. Everyone was very nice.”

  “But they won’t say who it was.”

  He shrugged. “Some punk, probably not from around there.”

  “I’m sure,” she said, and got up to clear their plates. He thanked her for supper and she said he was welcome.

  “Don’t kid yourself,” she said. “They take care of their own.”

  “Like us.”

  “Don’t go making excuses on their account. They stole your truck.”

  “One person stole my truck.”

  “The rest of them are protecting him—it’s the same thing.”

  She left him there while she fixed dessert, lemon sherbet with biscotti, his favorite.

  “At least you’re all right,” she said.

  She didn’t have to say it could have been worse, that it could have been the police who called her. The cut stung, and for the first time he understood that her worry wasn’t imaginary. The truck really was gone.

  He went to bed at the regular time, Renée looking in on him, asking one final time if he was all right. In the yellow light from the hall, she looked for a minute like Rita, those big eyes, that nub of a chin, and he thought of her St. Christopher swinging from the mirror, the Little Horse somewhere out there in the dark instead of their locked garage.

  “I’m okay,” he said, and waved her away, like she was being too much of a mother. The hall light went off.

  He’d bought the truck used in the mid-sixties from his cousin Nunzio, who’d painted it red, white and blue and swapped the doors for the gates. Even then it was an antique, a refugee—like him—from the thirties. The dashboard was varnished cherry, the headlights mounted like eyes on the fenders. The first thing he did was rechrome the grille and the bumpers and all the freezer latches so they shone on bright days. In the morning he’d go out in the driveway with his creams and soft cloths and rub it lovingly—like a horse, Rita said, like a pet. The Little Horse, Renée christened it. He’d repainted it three times since then, and lately he’d had problems finding leaded gas, but the engine was still strong, the frame straight and unrusted. Whenever Renée talked about him quitting, he just shrugged it off. “When the Horse goes, I go,” he’d say, not really meaning it. Now he wondered if it was a prediction. His mother claimed their branch of the family had The Sight.

  The police would find it, Renée said so herself.

  He thought of the boy and what he would do with the truck. Nothing. Brag to his friends. He couldn’t sell it.

  The pointlessness of it hurt him. It would have been easier to understand if the boy had robbed him, torn his change apron from him, the pockets bulging with silver, or if he’d pushed him to the ground, shouting something, jabbing his finger at him like a knife. Yet even as he pictured it differently, the same facts came back to him, erasing all possibilities. The truck pulled away, swerved to miss the parked car, and he dove so it didn’t hit him. He had not fought, had not been beaten. He had lost his truck, and in his mind there was no doubt that it was his fault.

  Maybe Renée had The Sight, because the next morning after she left for work the police called and said they’d found it, not far from where it had been taken. It was in the impound yard in Brushton, they’d had to tow it over there. “There’s been some damage,” the man said.

  “A lot?” Tony asked.

  “You’re insured?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you should have no problem.”

  “Can I come down and take a look at it?”

  “It’s not a safe neighborhood,” the man warned him. “It might be better if you let your garage take care of it.”

  “I know the area,” Tony said.

  Reluctantly, the man gave him the address. “We can have one of our people accompany you.”

  “That’s all right,” Tony said. He thanked him and hung up and went to the desk in the front hall to look for his policy.

  He called Renée and told her he was going over to see it.

  “Do you want me to come with you?” she asked.

  He said no, mostly to protect her. As a girl, she’d loved the truck like the pony she dreamed of. Weekends, she helped him, ringing the bells from the passenger seat, making change. Every year until she was in middle school, she’d bring him in to talk to her class. It wasn’t until she was in college that she started asking things like “Doesn’t it get boring? Don’t you ever want to do something more, something different?”

  “No,” he’d say, knowing exactly what she meant—that she was ashamed of him for not being rich and important like her friends’ fathers. She still loved him, that didn’t change, but he could feel her disappointment, and for a while it had become his own. His cousin Nunzio was his wholesaler; Tony drove a delivery truck for him in the winter. He could easily get a position with him, sit at a desk all day in a shirt and tie down in the Strip, buying and selling truckloads of nuts and jelly beans on the phone. It was not what he wanted, but without Rita around to help him make decisions it seemed almost reasonable, and he would have asked except that fall Nunzio had just divorced his wife—Rita’s cousin Terry—and it would not have been proper to do any new business with him. After college, the subject never came up. Renée was in New York, using her degree, trying to be a dancer. He sent her a check every month, and once in a while she mailed him clippings from shows he’d never heard of, her name highlighted far down at the bottom. Then the clippings stopped and she moved to San Francisco. Then one day she was waiting in the vestibule for him, her bags at her feet, a complicated knee brace on one leg like a football player. “I’m back,” she said. A week later she got a job at the Oakland Howard Johnson’s, in reservations. That was almost ten years ago. He didn’t have to ask her if her job was boring, if she didn’t ever want to do something more. Maybe now she understood, he thought, but they no longer talked about it. They got up, they went to work, they came home.

  All this flew through his head as he gathered his policy and his keys and his jacket. It was raining out, gray. The cut stung. If the truck wasn’t bad, maybe they could have it ready for tomorrow. Or would it be like her knee, ruined, never the same again?

  He took the good car, the Lincoln. The Big Baby, Renée called it, because he hardly drove it. It was plush, quiet inside, only the wipers shuttling back and forth. He didn’t know the street the yard was on, but he had an idea, he had a map.

  The neighborhood was no worse than East Liberty, he thought, though the road the map finally put him on was. The row houses on one side stood abandoned, their doors and windows holes, tar-paper fake brick falling off in squares. On the other side, there were bars on the doors and windows, an old three-toned Toyota with fancy chrome wheels the only sign of life. The houses gave way to an abandoned plant of some kind, the parking lot weedy, then an auto-body shop with a high fence topped with razor wire, and then
, at the dead end, the impound yard with its fence sandbagged around the bottom so no one could dig under it. There was a concrete-block garage surrounded by cars and auto parts. A sign on the locked gate said to honk for service. He looked in the rearview mirror before he did.

  He was about to honk again when a black man in a zipped-up jumpsuit came out of the garage and waved without actually looking at him. He was short and squat and it took him a while to cross the yard, wiping his hands with a rag, stepping around puddles. His glasses were large and made him look owlish, wide-eyed. He unlocked the gate with a key chained to his waist, then slid it aside so Tony could drive through. He locked the gate behind him, wary, eyeing the street as if preparing for an attack.

  Tony got out of the car. The man just stared, waited for him to say something, blinking.

  “My truck’s here somewhere. An ice-cream truck?”

  The man laughed—just a snort, like he’d said something ridiculous. “You’re the guy, huh? They said you’d be coming down.” He waved for him to follow and stuck the rag in his back pocket.

  They walked around the rear of the garage, past a doorless Cadillac full of batteries, a rack of hoods stacked like books, a doghouse with a rusted chain. The puddles were rainbowed with oil.

  As they cleared the corner, the man stopped and pointed. “That the one?”

  Tony came abreast of him and saw the truck—his truck, he thought, yes, because it took him a minute to recognize it. The headlights, the entire front fenders were completely missing, just the tires and red wheels sticking out. They’d spraypainted the hood and the sides: SRT in red fluorescent, over and over. He walked toward it, stunned, oblivious of the puddles, his hands out in front of him as if trying to heal it from a distance.

  The grille was gone, and the doors made to look like gates. He opened the hood and saw they’d taken the plugs, the distributor—everything but the battery itself, still tied down, the screws stripped silver. The seats were slashed, the stuffing wet, and they’d gone to the trouble to smash the gauges, every last one, the cherry dash splintered and gouged around them. He looked up to the rearview mirror but it was gone.

  “Bastards,” he said.

  The man nodded, goggle-eyed. “They did a job on her.”

  The freezer was littered with broken glass, a few malt liquor bottles. They’d tried to set a fire. All of his boxes were gone. SRT, it said across the Fudgesicle decals.

  “Left the wheels,” the man noted. “You’re lucky it’s so old. None of this stuff fits anything.”

  Tony didn’t ask him about the keys, figuring he’d laugh at him again. He’d brought an extra set, and started to climb up on the wet seat; the man stopped him and pulled out his rag and brushed away the blue cubes of glass.

  “Thank you,” Tony said, and the man nodded.

  He turned the key but nothing happened, not even the starter kicking in. He didn’t expect anything. He sat there feeling the wet seat beneath him, wondering how much it would cost to fix everything. He’d have it done at Sal’s, right there in Bloomfield. Nunzio would loan him the money.

  At his age, it didn’t make sense. Absently, he tried the toggles for the lights, the hazards and turn signals, none of them working until he switched on the bells and the music came chiming out of the speakers hidden in the canopy. The man bopped his head to the tune and smirked, as if it figured, the one thing.

  Tony shut it off and climbed down. “You have a phone I can use?”

  “Inside,” the man said, and led him past the Caddy again.

  “Fucking niggers,” Sal said over the phone.

  Tony glanced at the man at the other desk as if he could hear. “How long you think it’ll take?”

  “Depends on parts, you know with that thing. Could be months.”

  Spring, Tony thought. It wasn’t that far off. “Okay,” he said. “If you could send someone over.”

  Leaving, he thanked the man again and shook his hand. The man unlocked the gate, let him back the Baby out, then rolled it closed again. Driving away, Tony wished he’d gotten his name.

  At home, he called the police about the St. Christopher and the rearview mirror. He wanted to know where they’d found the truck. Maybe they were around there somewhere.

  “I don’t think you want to go there alone, Mr. Giuliano,” a different policeman said.

  “I know the neighborhood, Officer.”

  “That may be so, but—”

  “It’s not a bad neighborhood.”

  “I’m just suggesting it might be better if we send someone with you.”

  They made him wait half an hour, and then the man they sent couldn’t find the street. He couldn’t find it because it no longer existed. It was behind the Nabisco factory, back by the railroad tracks, cut off from its other half by the new busway, a wasteland. The officer walked him into a vacant lot crowded with naked weed trees and speckled with trash—pink egg cartons, rusty tar buckets, the white chunks of a Styrofoam cooler, the ribs and skin of an umbrella. Plastic bags flew from a fence edging the busway. The officer motioned toward the corner where a set of bedsprings leaned on a tipped-over stove, and they made their way for it, tiptoeing around bald tires and swaths of sodden carpet.

  “Right around here,” the officer said, and scanned the ground.

  There was too much junk to see anything. Doughnut boxes, the head of a broken broom, puffy triangles of diapers, desk drawers, bike tires, a crooked barbecue cart. He saw one of his boxes among the flood of junk—the anonymous brown cardboard soft and dark now, CHERRY stenciled on the side.

  They searched for twenty minutes in the rain but found nothing else.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” the officer said, and Tony said it was all right. On the way home, they talked about the truck. The officer seemed genuinely sympathetic. He said the graffiti meant Spofford Rolling Treys, a local street gang.

  So they had known all along, he thought. They knew who it was and they’d said nothing, watched him get knocked down, his truck taken away.

  When he got home he called Sal to see if he’d done an estimate yet.

  “What, are you kiddin’ me? I got no idea what these parts are gonna cost, how’m I supposed to do an estimate?”

  “Good,” Tony said. “Don’t do anything. I don’t want it fixed.”

  “So what do you want me to do?”

  “You can have it.”

  “Tony, no disrespect, but I can’t use it.”

  “Sal, listen. What do you usually do with something like this?”

  They went back and forth on who would pay to have it taken away. Finally Sal said he wouldn’t charge him for the towing, seeing he was a good customer.

  While he was on the phone, Tony had been pacing. Now when he got off, he had to sit down. That was it, he thought. He’d retire, spend his mornings at the St. Clair, read the paper over a cup of coffee, play the numbers every day like those old bums, smoking their stogies by the bowling alley. Outside, the rain came down, beading the telephone wires. The apartment was dark, and he imagined this was what the rest of his life would be like—Renée coming home tired from work and having to cook him dinner. All because of the boy.

  How many times did he have to replay it in his mind? The truck dipped, and he still didn’t suspect anything. Then the exhaust hot on his shin, his surprise that the tire was moving—the emergency brake, he’d thought, the children, one of them could be crushed—and he turned and ran. The memory had become a dream, the one scene repeated in the slow motion of a nightmare. He would run and run yet never reach the door, he’d only see the boy, his long fingers on the wheel, the Seahawk’s fierce beak, and then he was falling, waking up.

  He was thinking of Miami, of himself in a bathrobe on the beach, when the phone rang. It was the police. They’d picked up a suspect, if he could come down and identify him.

  “Of course,” Tony said, like he’d thought hard about it.

  He tried not to drive too fast, and then it took him forever to fi
nd a parking spot outside the precinct house. The sergeant at the desk pointed him through the doors with his pen, and there was the officer who’d helped him look for Rita’s St. Christopher. He had a clipboard and talked while they walked down the hall.

  “We got an anonymous call that this juvenile might be involved,” he said, and Tony thought it had to be his Vanessa. She’d saved him twice now, he’d tell Renée.

  The officer led him into a dark room with a single window, a heavy green shade pulled down in front of it. “We need to know if this is him, so you need to be positive. If it’s not him, you need to tell us that.”

  He pulled the shade up, and there in the window sat the boy in jeans and a Steeler jacket, the same kind. Where did he get all these jackets from? He was in a hallway by a candy machine, watching people walk past, and Tony thought he didn’t look anything like the men in the pictures. There were no plans in his face, just a scowl, half pouting, like a child. When the hall was empty, his face changed, and he looked around, worried, and stubbed his nose with the heel of his hand, sniffed in with his shoulders as if he had a cold. Tony thought of his frozen Milk Duds, his hand out for the change.

  “Is that the one?” the officer asked.

  “What’s going to happen to him?”

  “So that is him.”

  “Yes.”

  “Seeing as he’s a juvenile, he’ll probably be sent to a juvenile detention center, depending on his record.”

  “Not jail.”

  “Not the jail we think of as jail.”

  “I don’t want him to go to jail.”