Intruder

by Peter Blauner

  A curdling rage turns inward and a burning compressed gas forces its way up through Philip’s stomach into his chest. It’s not indigestion from the heavy lunch uptown. It’s sickness. Sickness of the soul. Sickness of life. He sees himself on an opera stage, a tragic figure in whiteface, being dragged down to the bowels of hell by faceless demons. He’s always secretly thought of himself as too large a presence for the mundane world he moved around in—the tar roofs, the long drives on the Long Island Expressway, the humiliating dinners with Uncle Carmine on Todt Hill—but even that world is about to end. A black despair begins to poison his very being.

  No. He won’t allow it. He won’t allow things to be done to him again. He looks at the wall over his lawyer’s head. Law degrees, courtroom sketches, and just over to the left, a group of citations from the USMC. United States Marine Corps. All this time, he’d been thinking his lawyer was just some drunken hack. But there they are: the Purple Heart and the oak-leaf cluster, the Bronze Star. Symbols of courage and valor. The values men lived and died for.

  Nothing in life is achieved without risk, Philip reminds himself. He’s done courageous things before to get out of trouble. Now he looks inside himself, trying to find that nerve again.

  “What if those witnesses didn’t testify?” he asks. “What if Schiff decided he wasn’t going to cooperate? Think we’d stand a chance?”

  “I don’t see how that’s in Schiff’s interest. Then he’d still be the one on the spot.”

  “Well, he might change his mind.” Philip turns up his palms. “People are funny that way.”

  83

  AT three-thirty that afternoon, Philip Cardi shows up at the Schiffs’ house in his red Dodge van. He parks on the south side of West Seventy-sixth Street and gets out carrying a blue toolbox. It’s a bitterly cold afternoon three days before New Year’s. The air hurts. Philip goes up the steps to the town house and tries the key that Jake gave him on the front gate. But the locks have been changed. He curses and looks up at the pink-and-gray smoke sky.

  A garbage truck rumbles by and a blonde woman in thigh-high suede boots teeters past walking a dachshund. Philip opens his toolbox and takes out a small pick set in a black vinyl case. He unzips it and finds the right file for a Medeco lock. While he’s inserting it, one of the neighbors, an old man with an egg-shaped head and thick glasses, comes out to watch him. Though it’s the middle of the afternoon, the man wears a flannel bathrobe.

  “How’s it going?” Philip says.

  “I wasn’t sure who you were at first.” The old man points to the window he was watching from. “But I think I’ve seen you before.”

  “Yeah, I was doing some work on their chimney.” Philip smiles. “You’re right to be careful, though. There’s a bad element in this neighborhood.”

  The old man goes back in his house just as Philip breaks the lock.

  Jake, Dana, and Alex come home at quarter to five with the groceries.

  “Now the thing I want to do first is attack the living room,” says Dana, hanging up her shearling coat and reaching for the light switch. “We’ve been letting this house go all to hell because we thought we had this trial coming up. But we don’t have that excuse anymore.”

  She flips on the light. Philip Cardi is sitting on the new George Smith couch with a copy of Atlantic Monthly on his lap and his feet up on the glass coffee table.

  “Let’s take a ride,” he says.

  Twenty minutes later, Jake is behind the wheel of Philip’s Dodge van, driving the four of them across the Brooklyn Bridge.

  A portion of his mind is still refusing to accept the reality of what’s happened. Their lives are supposed to be going back to normal. They should be turning around and heading home. They’ve got no business riding in vans with men holding .357 Magnums. They’re supposed to be having dinner at Café fucking Luxembourg tomorrow night.

  Philip hums “The 59th Street Bridge Song.” “Do, do, do, do, feelin’ groovy...”

  Jake glances off to the right, looking for the Statue of Liberty around the bend in the frozen river. Brooklyn approaches. The giant cargo loaders towering like dinosaurs over the piers. The Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Watchtower building. The old disused warehouses so ugly they’re beautiful. A fading dusk light touches all of them, infusing this part of the city with a kind of bittersweet glory.

  Jake tells himself he won’t let this life slip away so easily. He’s worked too hard, looked forward to too much.

  A silver Integra starts to pass him on the left and he turns the wheel just slightly toward it. Maybe an accident is the way to get out of this.

  “Counselor, look at me,” Philip says from the backseat.

  “What?”

  Jake’s eyes move up to the rearview mirror. He sees Philip grab Alex by the hair and jam a gun into his right ear.

  “If you do that again,” Philip says calmly. “Everybody in this car dies.”

  Jake straightens the wheel and listens to the hum of treads under the van. All of a sudden, he understands how John G. lost his mind.

  By nightfall, they’ve reached Bensonhurst. Thirty years melt away before Jake’s eyes. There are the same low-slung pale brick houses, the little bakery shops and espresso cafés, the social clubs on Eighteenth Avenue with the plaster saints in the windows and armadillo-skinned guys in dark clothes pacing around outside. It’s still like a little Italian village, except with satellite dishes now, and he remembers how frightened and lonely he was growing up a skinny Jewish boy in nearby Gravesend. How bigger kids in gangs would rough him up after grade school and steal his baseball cards. How his father would beat him and embarrass him in neighborhood joints like Randazzo’s. He’d sworn he’d never come back unless he really had to.

  But as he glances out the driver’s side window and sees two big-waisted guys in short thin jackets hauling a massive refrigerator off the back of a truck, he’s reminded that there’s something else about this place: its toughness, its harsh vitality, its sheer in-your-faceness. This is part of the real New York. The men and women who live here aren’t a bunch of wan aerobicized Manhat-tanites, but people ripe and sweaty from the life struggle. Not just the Italians, but the new immigrants too: the Chinese, the Koreans, and the Russians. The streets here are bordered by real blood and muscle. And in some way, he knows growing up around this neighborhood made him strong enough to leave it.

  “All right, pull up in front of the surgical supply store,” says Philip. “But don’t park near the hydrant. The last thing I need is a fucking ticket.”

  Jake stops the van in front of the store on Sixty-fourth Street. The prosthetic arms and legs in the window are arranged exactly the way he remembers them from the mid-sixties. All of a sudden, he feels like a small boy trembling before his father’s rage again, trying to work up the nerve to protect his mother.

  Philip pushes Alex out first and presses the gun into the empty-eyed Grateful Dead skull on the back of the boy’s T-shirt. Then Jake helps Dana step down to the curb. He’s never thought of her as particularly stylish or clothes conscious, but she looks completely out of place here with her beige ribbed Bloomingdale’s sweater and her understated makeup. Welcome to Brooklyn.

  The blood has drained from her face, but the corners of her eyes have turned deep red. The last time he saw her look like that was when Alex fell into an encephalitic coma for two days all those years ago. He remembers how he prayed and promised God he’d be a good man if he made his son well again. He wonders if he’s being punished for not keeping up his end of the bargain.

  A hard winter wind strafes his face and the sky offers no stars. Act, he tells himself. Don’t do nothing. A man cannot go too far to protect his own family.

  Philip leads them into the building through a glass door and an older woman wearing a blue cloth coat, a thick mask of salmon-colored makeup, and a brilliant corona of dyed black hair nods as she lets them in through the second door in the foyer.

  “How you doing, Mrs. Tonetti?” Philip say
s, pushing the rest of them past her.

  From upstairs, Louis Prima’s voice floats down like a memory of another time.

  Philip shoves Alex up to the second-floor landing and stands there waiting for Jake and Dana to catch up with them.

  “I just wanna remind you,” he says in a low voice. “If either of you try to run, I will shoot your son. If you try to grab my weapon, I’ll kill all three of you.” He looks over at Jake. “We understand each other?”

  “Yeah.”

  There are two green-painted doors on the landing. Behind one of them is silence. Behind the other is the sound of an old movie on television. Jake hears pounding in his ears and realizes it’s his heart beating the way it did that night he went up the stairs to face his father with the broken Piel’s bottle.

  “You don’t love me,” an actress is saying. “You don’t even know what love is.”

  Philip opens the door on the right, revealing a small overfurnished living room with cream-colored walls and a wine red carpet. There’s the same kind of smoked mirror above the couch that Jake’s father once punched in the old apartment. An old woman in a black dress sits in a wheelchair right next to the four-foot-wide Sony color TV.

  She turns and says something angry to Philip in Italian.

  He ignores her and roughly pushes Alex and Dana into the room.

  “Hey, watch it.” Jake tries to step between them.

  Philip shrugs and slams him over the head with the gun butt.

  Jake falls to the carpet and blood clouds his vision. When he tries to stand, he finds he can’t. There’s terrible pressure on the right side of his head as if part of his skull’s been crushed in.

  The old woman in the wheelchair begins to shriek. Jake lifts his head to look at her and Philip kicks him in the face with a work boot. Blood and mucus explode on the laces and Jake begins to throw up.

  “Let me let you in on a little secret, Jake.” Philip looks down at him. “Gravesend ain’t Bensonhurst. We used to kick the shit out of you faggots from Avenue X all the time.”

  The woman in the wheelchair begins to wave her meaty white arms and squawk like a great angry bird.

  “All right, Ma, don’t worry, all right?!” Philip shouts back at her. “Just go in the back bedroom and watch your program. I’ll clean it up.”

  Jake senses Dana kneeling beside him, stroking the back of his neck.

  “Get over on that fucking couch and shut up,” says Philip, pointing the gun at her.

  The old woman wheels herself out of the room. Dana goes over and sits on a blue-and-yellow striped couch next to Alex. Her mascara is starting to run. The Grateful Dead logo drips down the front of his T-shirt. Philip grabs Jake by the scruff of the neck and hauls him to his feet.

  “What are you, a tough guy?” he says. “You think you’re tough?”

  He knees Jake in the nuts and carbonates his scrotum. “There, that’s tough.”

  Jake’s eyes water and bile rises in his throat again. He turns to his wife and child on the sofa. They look pallid and shaken, like a pair of passengers on a plummeting airplane. Dana rocks back and forth, her arms wrapped tightly around herself. Alex bangs his knees together.

  “All right,” says Philip. “Everybody into the bathroom. The party’s over.”

  He sticks the gun into Jake’s left ear and makes the three of them march out of the living room and down a short hallway.

  The bathroom is completely pink. Pink tiled walls, a pink linoleum floor, even pink toilet paper and pink soap. Jake sees an enema bag with a long white hose sitting on the back of the toilet and a quiver goes through his stomach.

  “You and you.” Philip turns to Dana and Alex. “Go stand in the bathtub.”

  They look at each other and then at Jake, as if expecting him to somehow explain what’s going on.

  “Just do it!” Philip shouts. He takes the gun out of Jake’s ear and points it at them.

  Dana and Alex step carefully into the tub, ducking their heads to avoid knocking down the spring-loaded curtain rod.

  Philip turns and locks the bathroom door. In a terrible moment of clarity, Jake understands what’s about to happen.

  “Don’t do this, Philip. It’s a mistake.”

  “Shut the fuck up, Counselor. You’re not talking to some spic car thief about a plea bargain. I only got one way out of this and you know what it is.”

  There’s whiskey on his breath, but he isn’t just drunk, Jake realizes. Philip’s thought about this. He intends to kill all of them and wash the blood out in the tub. Then maybe he’ll take the remains and burn them in a Dumpster under the Manhattan Bridge. No bodies, no witnesses, no mess. All it takes is a stone cold heart.

  “All right, get down on your knees in front of that toilet,” Philip says, jamming the gun into the back of Jake’s neck. “You’re gonna show your family how to die like a man.”

  Jake starts going to his knees slowly with the right side of his head still throbbing. For the last half hour, he’s been waiting for some brilliant strategy to occur to him. But since veering into the Integra on the bridge, he hasn’t had a hint of inspiration.

  “What do you need, an invitation to kneel?” Philip pushes the back of Jake’s head.

  Jake starts to shove him back, but then Philip kicks him in the back of the head, causing him to bang his nose on the porcelain rim.

  “You fuckin’ educated people can’t do anything right, can you?” he says, putting the gun to Jake’s head again. “You need somebody to do all your dirty work, don’t you. You can’t even fight your own wars or fix your own house. It’s a wonder you can piss standing up without any help. Am I right?”

  He glances back at Alex shivering next to his mother in the bathtub. “What do you think of that, junior, huh?”

  Alex says nothing.

  “You wanna come over here and suck my prick? Maybe I’d let your old man live a little while longer.”

  Alex mumbles something indecipherable.

  “Fuckin’ kids are useless,” Philip sighs. “Don’t you teach this one any respect?”

  Tears sting Jake’s eyes as he kneels before the toilet with the barrel of the gun burrowing into the base of his skull. He no longer feels confident that he will be alive in thirty seconds.

  “Think of something pleasant,” says Philip.

  A Kotex commercial plays on the TV down the hall. Jake turns to look at Dana and Alex. It’s too soon to die. He wants to see Alex grow up and decide his father’s not such an idiot. He wants to grow old with Dana and enjoy afternoon movies and sunsets. He wants to tell both of them that he’s sorry, that he loves them, that he didn’t mean for their lives to end in the same kind of cramped airless apartment he tried so hard to escape.

  From the corner of his eye, he sees Alex reach up with both hands for the shower curtain rod.

  At first the image makes no sense; Alex doesn’t do things like this. He’s been shielded from violence all his life. His parents have always told him to run away from trouble on the street, to avoid eye contact with strangers. But here he is, almost in slow motion, pulling the rod down from its place between the two walls.

  Philip starts to turn with the gun in his hand.

  Alex swings the rod, arms fully extended the way Jake taught him to swing a baseball bat.

  Philip turns the rest of the way and faces him with the gun barrel raised.

  There’s a collision of steel and cartilage.

  Alex has smashed the middle of Philip’s face with the stainless-steel rod. Blood sprays in an arc to the left and Philip turns to follow it, hands up to his broken nose. The gun flies the other way and lands on the linoleum floor.

  Everything stops for a second.

  It’s as if the room has tilted and all the contents have shifted. None of them have adjusted to their new place yet.

  But then Philip screams out and tries to reach for his gun. Jake dives on him and pins him against the bathroom wall. He punches Philip twice in the mouth and draws
blood. Then he head-butts him. But Philip is still struggling hard. He pulls Jake’s hair with his left hand while his right hand fumbles around for the gun.

  Alex comes over to help. He grabs Philip by the throat. Then Dana grabs the gun off the floor and holds it on Philip, trying to keep him at bay.

  But the sight of her with his gun is too much for Philip. With Jake and Alex holding on to him, he manages to stand and knock the .357 out of her hand. Then he punches her in the windpipe.

  She reels away, gagging.

  Hatred seizes Jake’s heart. He tackles Philip and forces his head down into the toilet. Alex stands back for a moment, aghast at what his father’s doing. But then he sees Jake needs help. He moves behind Philip, grabs him by the ankles, and tries tipping him face-first into the toilet bowl like a wheelbarrow.

  Philip’s right hand scurries around the floor, like a spastic spider, still trying to find the lost gun.

  Outside, Philip’s mother is ramming the bathroom door with her wheelchair and screaming again in Italian.

  Philip’s hand finds the gun. His index finger starts to curl around the trigger and his palm closes on the handle.

  Jake gives a small terrified yell. If Philip gets control of the weapon, he will surely kill them on the spot. But then Dana comes over. His gentle loving wife. Who’s cared for people all her life. She leans down and bites into Philip’s wrist with all her might. He yowls into the bubbling bloody water and his fingers splay out. The gun hits the linoleum.

  Philip’s arms bulge, and veins and arteries boil out from his neck. His entire body jerks violently. The closeness to death has tripled his strength. Jake isn’t sure how much longer they can hold him down.

  Philip’s mother is pounding the door with her fists and screaming out her son’s name, like she knows she’s about to lose him.

  Her face contorted in fury, Dana stops biting Philip’s wrist and comes around behind him to dig her nails into the back of his neck. Alex drives his elbow into Philip’s spine. Jake holds the bucking head under the water. Die, fucker, die. It takes all three of them just to hold their own against Philip’s wild thrashing. All this time, Jake’s thought it’s been his job alone to protect the family. Gradually Philip’s shoulders start to sag. His neck muscles relax. Bit by bit the struggle is subsiding and strength is beginning to ebb away.