Long Island Noir

by Kaylie Jones

  “Yeah, they’re scary,” Danny reflected. “When Jay Knight had a congressional town hall meeting there, he got booed off the stage. There were all these people screaming at him, Keep the government out of our Medicare! And others chanting, No amnesty! Build the fence! The cops had to escort him to his car.”

  “Yes, but why two names?” Lisa asked.

  Jason Googled Montanelli. “He’s got a teenage son, Michael,” he explained. “Goes to Sachem East High.”

  “Fourteen is a white-supremacist code,” said Danny. “It stands for the fourteen words, one of their slogans.”

  “A lot of them use it in their online handles,” Jason added. “That and 88.”

  “Fourteen could be his age when he started posting,” injected Lisa. “Or the year.”

  “There hasn’t been a lot of organized white-supremacist activity on Long Island,” mused Danny, “but they’ve been trying to make inroads into the anti-immigrant movement. That stuff really doesn’t play very well here. People moved out of the city to get away from the blacks and the Puerto Ricans, but they’ll insist they’re not prejudiced. They want to keep their towns white, but they’ll say it’s about schools and crime. They lower their voices when they talk about race.”

  “Yeah, but the kid could be a wannabe,” Jason put in. “You know teenage boys, they always want to be the most bad-ass. The closest they’ve ever been to South Central is watching the Lakers on TV, but put on a red bandanna and presto change-o, they’re a Blood, you know what I’m saying? And if you read what WhiteMale14 is posting, it sounds like he’s bragging about it.”

  Lisa had the last word. “That makes sense, but it’s all speculation. We’re not cable TV. It still doesn’t give us anything we can use. Let’s get back to work. Production’s tomorrow night.”

  St. Matthew’s Church in Central Islip, a few miles away, was abuzz with grief and outrage. People from middle Suffolk’s Latino communities agglomerated, commiserating and pondering what to do. In the basement, nine people met around a long fold-up table, draining a metal urn of coffee. There was no formal leader, but they deferred to Nydia Perez and the priest, Father Miguel Martin Reyes.

  Father Reyes had just celebrated his sixty-first birthday. He’d been at St. Matthew’s since 1990. A year in El Salvador had marinated him in liberation theology. These children, these thin, young boys in cheap sandals kicking a ragged soccer ball in the dirt street between their houses of cinder blocks and cane stalks, these children and toddlers skittering about like a litter of kittens, they are the future of our world. And without justice, what will happen to their lives? What will happen to their souls? Their parents slaving away, their teenage brothers and sisters succumbing to the temptations of drugs and gangs, trading the flower of their youth for a few gaudy trinkets and a poisonous solidarity.

  The hierarchy hadn’t liked him preaching those lines in Brooklyn and the South Bronx. The last straw was when he’d led a sit-in protesting the closing of a firehouse in Bushwick, the city neighborhood scorched almost to the ground by looters in the ’77 blackout and by landlord-hired arsonists in the decade surrounding it. They’d bounced him out to a suburban parish where he occasionally heard dark mutterings. We moved out of the city to get away from THEM. Now they give us one as a priest?

  Demography played a trick on them. The parish now gave more Masses in Spanish than in English.

  Still, the gringos here had tested his faith. Ignorance you could cure, but theirs was different. It was a willful, belligerent ignorance that insisted it was right and didn’t want to know anything else. You couldn’t tell them nothing.

  He remembered the young woman teacher who, almost in tears, spoke about the parents at her school telling her, “Why does my son have to learn Spanish? This is America, we speak English!”

  You needed to have faith. Without faith there was no hope. Without hope you were in the abyss, like the glue-sniffing kids in San Salvador, the boys in Brooklyn, barely teenagers, who if you asked where they were going to be in ten years, they’d tell you “dead” or “in jail.” If they were optimistic, you’d get some variant on “big-time drug dealer.”

  Bolivar and Susana, Jefferson’s older brother and sister, arrived at the ICU around noon after taking a red-eye from Guayaquil. His pulse was strong but jittery, the oxygen mix okay yet his breathing irregular, the EEG slowly fading to a flat green line. He was brain-dead. Father Reyes gave him Last Rites.

  At 4:07 p.m. on Tuesday, Jefferson Tomás Nuñez Yagual left this world for whatever lies beyond it, paz en el cielo or eternal nothingness.

  The funeral was at 9:30 Wednesday morning in Central Islip. Danny headed west on 347 and then south on Nicolls Road toward the LIE, steering with his left hand, his right alternating between delivering bites of buttered bagel and sips of deli coffee. The Expressway jammed up just after he got on. Stop-and-go, inching forward, then jumping up a few yards when the car in front moved. Shit, I’m gonna be late. No time to find a good position, unobtrusive but close to the action.

  Traffic opened up just before Exit 60, then slowed again when he passed the ramp. The car barely moved when he stepped on the gas. White smoke spewed from the engine. He pulled over. It smelled like burnt rubber. He opened the hood. The radiator was jetting out smoke and steam. There was a big crack in the top.

  He called Lisa. “Don’t worry about it,” she told him. “Deal with the car and come back to the office. I’ll reimburse you.” He called a tow truck and took a cab from the garage.

  Top-of-the-hour news bleeps teletyped out of the radio.

  Five Farmingville youths have been arrested in connection with the fatal beating of a South American immigrant in Lake Ronkonkoma last weekend. Suffolk County police said they made the arrests after one of the suspects posted pictures of the assault on Facebook. The victim, twenty-four-year-old Jefferson Nuñez, died yesterday afternoon.

  Danny desperately checked his phone for messages. It was hopeless to try to get online in the cab. His phone beeped with a text from Jason. Michael M. 1 of 5 charged. Other names TK.

  The story’s blowing up and I’m out of the action. He furiously recalculated. It’s a backstory/reaction piece now. The dailies and TV will be all over the arrests, we’ve gotta go for depth, and I have twelve hours to do it. I should’ve been at the funeral.

  He got another message a couple of blocks from the office. Jason had grabbed some screenshots off Facebook. The photos were dim and impossibly blurry, but the comments were readable. Another spic smackdown! M&M do it again! Mark, u should of kicked that hard when we played Newfield :)

  They really were that fuckin’ stupid, he mused. Or narcissistic.

  In Lisa’s office was an executive-looking woman he couldn’t recognize, but she seemed familiar. Like bad news. And Lisa looked like she’d just run over a cat and was trying to figure out how to tell its owner. Oh yeah, she’s from Human Resources at VNT Media, the parent company, the one you’d see once or twice a year at staff meetings where she explained our benefits or how they were being “adjusted.” The knowledge hit him before its full import could flower.

  “We’re sorry, this has nothing to do with the quality of your work, but your position is being eliminated.”

  Father Reyes delivered the funeral oration.

  “His name was Jefferson. His family, thousands of miles away in a different land, gave him the name of an American hero. They named their youngest son after the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence. The man who wrote that all men are created equal. And we believe that Jefferson Nuñez was brutally beaten, cruelly murdered, by a gang of young men—still boys, really—who thought that he was not American enough to have the right to life.

  “He was one of the legions of immigrants who have come here, seeking a better life for themselves and their families. Who fled the green fields of Ireland when a deadly plague turned the potatoes black. Who fled the grinding poverty in the mountains of Sicily and the marshlands of Poland so their children
would not be trapped in the same fate.

  “Who taught his killers to hate people like him—and us? Was it the descendants of those who came before?

  “Dios conoce el camino de los justos. God knows the way of the just. Let us make that road, and let His love and wisdom guide us as we build it.”

  BLOD DRIVE

  BY KENNETH WISHNIA

  Port Jefferson Station

  The envelope was addressed to Mr. James F. Keenan III, a name he never used.

  Jimmy tore the envelope open the minute it arrived, barely flinching as the chaotic results of his frenzy sent a wayward piece of glue-stiffened flap slicing into his little finger.

  His meaty hands had no trouble grappling with an I-beam swinging on a cable ten stories up, but now they tingled as if they belonged to someone else as he unfolded the letter, leaving a thin smear of blood on the plain white paper.

  His long-overdue severance pay.

  He stared at the numbers on the check and recoiled as if he’d been whacked in the head with a cue ball.

  Something was wrong. Dead wrong. There were only three numerals, and two of them were zeros that meant less than nothing. There was an awful lot of emptiness on the page, where there definitely should have been something. Something more.

  “Seven dollars?” His temples pulsed, and the room flattened out behind the sheet of onionskin bearing the name Brady Construction, the walls and furniture turning paper thin. “Seven fucking dollars?”

  He’d been waiting all week for this lifeline, or at least for a sign that he had a chance of being pulled from the rising tide of debt before his strength failed and he went down the drain completely.

  The envelope fell to the floor.

  Even the white noise of daytime TV couldn’t drown out the giant sucking sound in his ears.

  You work for a company twelve years …

  Time enough for the navy-blue anchor on his wrist to go fuzzy around the edges and fade to match the dull grayish blue of dead people in movies.

  His muscles were still hard, and he could hump a ton of rebar up a ladder as fast as any kid half his age. But the company could get away with paying the kid a whole lot less.

  He crumpled the check and threw it at the TV screen. It fell three feet short of the target.

  “Honey, what’s wrong?” Rusti called from the kitchen, her voice cutting through the whirlwind like a chain-smoking Siren of the seas.

  He saw himself in the supermarket aisles, the prices jumping out at him: $4.99 for a gallon of milk. $3.99 for a halfgallon of juice. $12.99 for a twelve-pack of Bud Lite. Thirty to forty bucks a week for pads and lotions and all the other female stuff. Even hunting for the three-for-a-dollar bargains on canned peas and carrots, the total quickly shot past $100 to $150, then easily cleared the bar at more than $175 for a week’s worth of groceries and other needs. And how the heck were they supposed to get through five months of winter with the price of heating oil rising faster than a Wall Street guy can drop a thousand bucks on drinks at a high-class titty bar?

  “I’m going out,” he said, pulling his faded denim jacket off the hook. “You need anything?”

  “Sure. Coffee, sugar, paper towels—”

  “Better make a list.” He really didn’t want to carry all that crap around, but he’d already offered.

  “You need a list to remember three things?”

  “All right, never mind.” He yanked the door open while stuffing his arms into the sleeves.

  “I’ll write it down for you.”

  “I said never mind.” He pushed the screen door so hard it bounced back and nearly smacked him in the face. “Damn it!” He kicked the bottom panel, leaving a dent in the aluminum, and marched out. But the door swung back like it always did and the latch-hook caught the sleeve of his jacket and tore it.

  “F-aargh!”

  He had to let fly at something, so he punched the wall and his fist went right through the sheetrock, which swallowed his arm up to the elbow.

  “Jesus …” He pulled his arm out, astonished by the size of the hole he’d left, and brushed the white dust off his sleeve. The last time he’d lashed out like this, in the brick house on Ocean Avenue, he just hurt his hand on the old-school plaster and lath. But these cheap tract houses were made of toothpicks and cardboard.

  And now he needed to go to the hardware store to buy a sheet of wallboard, a roll of paper tape, and some spackle.

  A swirl of pale green caught his eye. Rusti was on her knees in front of the TV in her faded bathrobe, flattening out the check on the coffee table, a cigarette dangling from her fingers. Her stringy red hair hung loose, covering her eyes, but the smoke curling upward darkened the freckles on her chest, and all he wanted to do right then was find a dark hole he could crawl into and hide out for a while.

  He scrambled out the door, but not fast enough. He still heard her sigh, heard the disappointment in her voice when she called after him: “You can forget about the sugar, okay? We can do without.”

  The new Spanish supermarket had just opened up on the other side of Route 112, so at least they’d save some money on gas, instead of having to drive to the Pathmark on Nesconset Highway. But he wasn’t ready to face the narrow aisles just yet, or contend with whiny toddlers spilling out of shopping carts, so he kept walking north past the strip mall and the funeral home.

  Traffic was heavy on 112, as always, and he had to deal with the crush of cars, battered pickups, and SUVs idling at the light, leaning on their horns and spewing carbon monoxide into the air.

  The 104 Bar was closed, and foreclosure signs were sprouting like jagged milestones around the bare trees along the road. And the Claddagh Inn, in a fruitless effort to bring a few tourists up the hill from the port, had switched over to live music, which should have meant Clancy Brothers look-alikes in thick wool sweaters playing Fuck-Them-English-Bastards reels and jigs, but usually meant way-too-loud tribute bands playing lame-ass covers of Van Halen and Led Zeppelin hits from another era.

  He desperately needed to walk off the frustration, but the sidewalks were cracked in so many places he had to watch his step, so he couldn’t find a rhythm that would allow him to burn off some of his blinding rage. The wind whipped at the power lines, and dead leaves swirled around his feet. He passed Dano’s Auto Clinic, his eye lingering on the poster-sized graduation photo of Dano Jr. in the window, a seventeen-year-old kid who was shot dead in a booze-and-testosterone-fueled confrontation on a black guy’s lawn.

  As if there weren’t enough problems in the world.

  He crossed the LIRR tracks and felt like he was crossing the border into enemy territory, into alien turf.

  Except for the Army-Navy store, which had owned a piece of Main Street for decades, half the storefronts were empty, and the rest had been taken over by bodegas and phone-card stores catering to the latest wave of suckers who actually thought they had a shot at the American Dream. Even the pool hall announced itself in bilingual red-and-yellow neon, and salsa blared from every other doorway.

  “Should have brought my passport with me,” he grumbled, as three dark-skinned guys hanging in front of the Spanish deli narrowed their eyes at him.

  He started down the hill past the biker bar with the misspelled sign, Harley’s and Honey’s (didn’t anyone know where to put apostrophes these days?). There was already a row of gleaming Harleys lined up along the curb outside the bar, and God help you if you rode anything less than a Harley. How could these geezers afford them, anyway? And doesn’t it matter that Harley-Davidson just royally screwed its workers?

  He glared at the aging bikers, almost daring them to start something. But they picked up on the intensity of his anger, and refused to meet his gaze.

  Harley-Davidson, he thought. Proudly made in the U.S.A. Except that the bubble had burst and his brother steelworkers in Milwaukee had just caved, approving a seven-year wage freeze and a two-tiered pay scale that screwed the new hires and paid the temp workers even less, even when demand f
or the cycles went up, which sure wasn’t how they taught the laws of supply and demand at the local community college.

  He paused at the corner when the lights changed. On a clear day you could see all the way to Connecticut from where he stood. But the power plant’s red-and-white-striped smokestacks were belching twin plumes of thick gray smoke that blended seamlessly with the clouds and obscured the horizon like a moldy blanket.

  A flier for the annual Dickens Festival was flapping in the breeze, half-glued to the lamppost across the street. Every year, on a Saturday in mid-December, the well-to-do Port Jeff villagers dressed up in Victorian costumes and strolled around the center of town reenacting their favorite bits from A Christmas Carol. Maybe they should have gone with A Tale of Two Cities instead, since they elected to split the town in half to keep their tax revenues from going up the hill to the bums in Port Jeff Station and to keep the riffraff out of their school district.

  Port Jefferson Village was once a sleepy town with little more than a post office, a diner, and a used bookstore where you could get fifty-cent paperbacks (and macramé supplies, back in the day). Then somebody got the bright idea of building a couple of fishermen-themed restaurants, including one in the shape of a ship’s hull, and things started to take off.

  And now the windows were going dark up on the hill.

  Jimmy let the dead weight of his mood pull him further down the hill. But even with a black hole where his heart should have been, he managed to formulate a plan of sorts to head to the docks and watch the waves come in and maybe let the cold November wind chase the dark clouds from his thoughts.

  There were fewer foreclosure signs on this side of the tracks, and the houses got bigger and nicer and further back from the street. Suddenly a Spanish chick with dynamite tits and a clipboard in the crook of her arm stepped in front of him.