A Friend Is a Gift You Give Yourself

by William Boyle

“We’re gonna carry her upstairs to the bedroom,” Wolfstein says.

  “And then what?” Lucia asks.

  “I don’t know and then what. Can you carry your end?”

  “I think so.”

  They pick up Grandma Rena and head for the staircase. Lucia’s struck by how feather-light her grandmother is.

  Crea doesn’t pay them any mind. He’s focused on Richie, ready to slam him in the jaw with the hammer.

  Richie growls and lunges past Crea, going for Bobby’s gun on the counter.

  Crea takes a gusty swing and whiffs, knocking over Wolfstein’s weird lamp and smashing one of her pictures on the wall, opening up a hole in the sheetrock. The hammer gets stuck, and Crea struggles to yank it out.

  Richie’s got Bobby’s gun.

  Bobby’s mumbling, his head down. “Just shoot me,” he says to Richie. “You’ve got the piece now. Just end it for me.”

  Crea clobbers Bobby in the back with the hammer. Bobby yelps like a dog slammed up against the grille of a fast-moving truck.

  Richie, all nerves now, drops the gun.

  Crea thwacks Bobby again. This time for the hell of it. Bobby’s noises go feral, a deranged man giving birth to a new kind of pain, his body twisting.

  Wolfstein is leading the way upstairs, Rena’s limp body clunking against the steps, Lucia trying to keep her raised up and steady. “Jesus Christ,” Wolfstein says. “You okay, kid?”

  Lucia gulps and nods. She should feel shattered by the violence, by the noises. She should feel afraid. It’s one thing that Adrienne’s gone. Another thing that Crea’s coming upstairs for them as soon as he’s done with Richie. But she doesn’t feel any of that. Maybe she is a psycho. Psychos must feel at home and alive in moments like this. She wonders—if she makes it out of this—if she’ll be fucked up for life. Probably she’s already been fucked up for life anyway, with her bloodline.

  Rena’s eyes open as they move down the hallway, Lucia finally letting her feet fall to the carpet. Her skin is green, and she’s biting down on her breath hard like she’s holding in puke. Lucia wonders what she’s seeing and what she’s thinking. Like, is she staring at the smudgy ceiling, feeling maybe it was all just some horrible dream?

  “Rena, sweetie, how you doing?” Wolfstein whispers.

  “I don’t know,” Rena says.

  More crashing sounds from downstairs. They get in the bedroom, propping Rena on the bed. Wolfstein locks the door behind them.

  “What are we gonna do?” Lucia asks.

  “Is this all real?” Rena says.

  “Sorry to say it is,” Wolfstein says, trying to push her dresser in front of the door. “Help with this, kid, huh?”

  Lucia goes over and helps. The dresser totally blocks the door.

  “All that crazy fuck’s got is a hammer,” Wolfstein says. “We shelter in place, maybe we get out of this. The cops show, we’re in the clear. Anyway, maybe he’s finished when he gets done with the boyfriend.”

  “I think we should run,” Lucia says. “Look”—taking the key from her pocket—“I got Richie’s key. We can take his car. You want to deal with cops?”

  “I avoid them when I can,” Wolfstein says. “Rena?”

  “Vic always told me, you got an option to keep the police out of it, you take it,” Rena says. Stern. Focused suddenly. Less green.

  “Both of you, I’m looking at you with serious eyes now. That’s your mother down there,” Wolfstein says, pointing to Lucia, “and your daughter,” tilting her finger at Rena. “Honor-wise, I don’t want you to have any regrets. We leave her behind, we leave her behind.”

  “She’s dead,” Lucia says.

  “Rena?” Wolfstein says.

  Rena nods. “What that bastard Crea did to my daughter, I want blood for that. And Vic. He said he killed Vic, didn’t he? Jesus. We get out of here, it gives me time to process it all. Make a plan.”

  “Fine,” Wolfstein says. “I don’t give a shit about the house. That bastard smashed the only picture that was extra special to me. But I’ve gotta retrieve my dough, and we’ve gotta go to my pal Mo’s straight from here and warn her about possible fallout. This is her joint. I’m sure the cops will be up in Monroe looking for her by tomorrow morning. Could be a good place to hide out and collect ourselves for the night, anyhow.”

  “Okay,” Rena says.

  “What money?” Lucia asks.

  Wolfstein stands on the bed next to Rena and yanks the half-tightened screws from the vent cover in the center of the wall. She pulls out a square-shaped black bag and throws it on the bed. “This dough. My nest egg.”

  “How we gonna get out of the house?” Rena says.

  “Out the window,” Wolfstein says, getting down and dropping to her knees. Talking Lucia through it now: “I lived in a house in L.A. once that had a real bad fire. Since then, the joint I’m in doesn’t have a proper fire escape, I carry around this ladder.” She reaches under the bed and pulls out a compact ladder. “I attach it to the window, it drops down about fourteen feet.” She stands and then goes over to the window, pushing up the screen. She latches the top part onto the sill and deploys the ladder. “It holds a thousand pounds. We go down in quick succession and make a break for Richie’s car. Sound good?”

  “I’ll drive,” Lucia says.

  “I’ll drive,” Wolfstein says. “You two gotta be shaken up bad. And we get pulled over, we don’t need a fifteen-year-old behind the wheel. Kid, you go first.”

  Wolfstein throws the bag out the window. It lands with a thud in the yard. Lucia turns her Yankees cap backward on her head and spiders down the ladder fast. She thinks about her suitcase, left behind on the living room floor, and realizes how little she cares about its contents. There are other Best Buys. Plenty more CDs to steal. She hates the clothes she has. Her toothbrush is so old. She wants an electric one. Only thing she really cares about losing is the tubed-up Jeter poster she managed to fit in there and those sorta-precious Yankees ticket stubs.

  Rena’s next. She’s slow on the ladder. Unsure. She slips on one rung and almost flops down. Wolfstein is fast behind her, though she complains about a pain in her leg.

  Soon they’re all standing in the yard. Wolfstein’s holding her bag of money like a football, shaking out her right leg. They look around. Across the street, The Guy Who Couldn’t Pick Up His Key—Enzio is his name, Lucia remembers—is on his knees at the side of the beautiful old car Rena stole, searching underneath it for something, his reach limited. He seems nerved up. He’s oofing and aahing, his old-man sounds echoing through the neighborhood. The hood of the car is glinting under the overhead streetlamp.

  “Shit, the other one’s still here,” Wolfstein says. She nudges Rena. “Tell me this dummy dropped his key again.”

  “Looks like it,” Rena says.

  As they pass the car, Enzio draws back and looks up at them in horror. “My key,” he says, mostly focusing on Lucia. “I dropped it, and it went under the car. Help me get it, please. I don’t want to get killed.”

  Lucia ignores him. So does Rena. Wolfstein laughs a little.

  “Please help me,” he says. When he realizes no help is coming, he’s back on his knees and elbows, reaching around under the car, groaning.

  Lucia rushes to open the driver’s-side door of Richie’s car. She gets in, scooching over to the middle of the big front seat. Bench seat, it’s called. She likes these old cars, how you can sit three people in the front. The kind of car where no one wears seat belts, either. She leans over and unlocks the passenger side. Rena climbs in and puts her left arm around her. Wolfstein gets under the wheel and throws her bag in the back. Lucia passes her the key, and she starts the car, a sweet rumble.

  Lucia looks over in the direction of Wolfstein’s house. Both Wolfstein and Rena seem to be stubbornly keeping their gazes away from it. Another car is parked out front. It’s black and long, almost like a hearse, with tinted windows. A Mets flag hangs from the antenna. Probably Hammer Dude’s car. Beyon
d that, the front door of the house is open. Richie and Hammer Dude are wrestling in the living room, right in front of Wolfstein’s recliner. The hammer’s gone. She doesn’t see the gun. The men roll out of the threshold, and then they’re gone from her line of vision.

  She can’t see her mother’s body, but she knows it’s there. Richie said she was dead, but Lucia wonders if she really is and, if she is, what that means, exactly. Is she seeing anything? Feeling anything? Lucia doesn’t believe in God, so she guesses she doesn’t believe in an afterlife, but she hopes that Adrienne and Papa Vic get to at least smoke a cigarette together or something. She doesn’t even know if Papa Vic smoked, and her mom smoked only rarely, but that’s something she’d want: one last smoke before it all went dark forever.

  She makes a quick scan of the rest of the block now, expecting to see some curious neighbors outside, anxious about what’s going on at Wolfstein’s, but there’s nobody yet. Maybe someone’s peeping from behind a curtain. That’s the way city people are. When the cops show, they’ll gather like gossips out in the street, but when danger’s still present, they’re nowhere to be found.

  Wolfstein pulls a quick three-point turn and then drives away up the block, lights still off. Lucia looks back and sees the old man shaking his fist at them.

  Wolfstein negotiates the car through Silver Beach with its limited-access roads and then makes a left onto Pennyfield Avenue, hopping onto the Throgs Neck Expressway from there. Wolfstein flips on the lights. No one says anything. Rena looks as if she’s totally passed through terror into anger. It’s hot in the car. The windows are down. Lucia’s ears are filled with the buzz of other cars whipping by. She doesn’t know for sure where they’re going—she’s never really been beyond the edges of the city except for a couple of trips to Jersey, knows only these five boroughs—but she’s glad not to be headed wherever with Richie and her mom. Or her former mom, whatever. Wolfstein said Monroe, and Lucia’s pretty sure that’s north, that soon they’ll be out of the city, that probably there’s no going back.

  Lucia breaks the silence. “You were in porno movies?” she says to Wolfstein.

  Wolfstein, hands loose on the wheel, says, “We’ve gotta get some cigarettes.”

  WOLFSTEIN

  Of all the things she had to leave behind at the Silver Beach house, Wolfstein’s only really bummed about the Stevie Nicks picture. That whackjob mobster with the hammer had to go and smash the hell out of it. Otherwise, she would’ve made an effort to grab it. Like Mo had said in her letter, that was the night of their lives, one to remember forever.

  Now her eyes are steady on the road. Rena’s in shock. Lucia’s clammed up. They’re in the middle lane on the Cross Bronx Expressway. She hasn’t driven in a while, since Florida, maybe, but it’s old hat. From here, they’ll cross the George Washington Bridge and get on the Palisades. Without traffic and without any other hitches, it shouldn’t take them but an hour to get to Mo’s.

  Wolfstein’s admiring the Eldorado. Adrienne’s boyfriend—or whatever he was, probably dead meat now—has kept it pretty immaculate. She could run her finger along the dash, she bets, and she wouldn’t swipe up any dust. She knows cars. Admires them. Especially from the seventies and eighties. She got fascinated with them back in Los Angeles. Hard not to. You look around, there are all these beautiful cars eating up the landscape. Convertibles. Sleek machines. Big boats with chrome bumpers you could see the history of the world in. She liked nothing more than driving around L.A. and taking in the cars. She owned a couple of good ones when she was there, a Challenger and a Thunderbird, both sold when she hit the skids. Mo had a Trans Am once. The big shots in the industry she knew, they had ridiculous cars: Lamborghinis, DeLoreans. She still, most of all, appreciated a nice Caddy like this. The way you could throw your arm across the back of the bench seat and just cruise. Cars now, they’re made like shit. Plastic. Toys. Built for safety, her ass. You drive around in a little Civic and a truck hits you, you get crunched up like an accordion. This Eldorado, it could take a licking. A tank, that’s what it is.

  She should be thinking more about Adrienne and Bobby and the whole nightmare scene back at the house, but she’s not. Her hands are clattery on the wheel. She’s got nervous energy. Her bones feel like hot glass. She’s licking the back of her teeth.

  Instead, her mind wanders to a call she got on her radio show this one summer night about a year into her run. It was particularly hot in the studio that night, the AC busted and a box fan humming in her face, and she was particularly breathy. The driver was a trucker who called himself Dr. Twatwaffle. The name got her giggly. He was flirty in mostly inoffensive ways. A lot of the callers, they were truckers and they weren’t very nice or sweet, and they stayed on the line only long enough to shoot a load. But Dr. Twatwaffle, despite his alias, was sincere. And what he said to her, after complimenting her voice and her movies, was the truth. He either let it slip or he was just comfortable enough to reveal something about himself. He said, “I’m so scared. Since my divorce, I don’t know what to do.” Her response, one of the smartest things she’s ever said in her estimation, was: “Just say fuck it, sweetie. Keep pushing forward.”

  And that’s what she’s trying to do now, she guesses. It’s always been her nature.

  In the rearview, she sees a car zooming up on their tail. Hard at first to make out in the cluttering grind of the Cross Bronx, cars ripping by on both sides with precise madness, but then it’s easy to tell that it’s the Impala that Rena showed up in. It stands out, the road lights reflected in its hood. Richie’s behind the wheel now. She can see that as they get closer, nearly kissing bumpers. She can’t figure how they could’ve caught up so fast. She should’ve been going faster, getting out of the city at ninety, smoke spinning up from the wheels.

  “Shit,” she says to Rena and Lucia, or maybe just to the night, “they’re behind us.”

  Rena, shaken from her stillness, turns and looks out the back window. “Richie made it out? And Enzio’s with him?”

  Lucia turns now, too, fully on her knees, chin pressed against the back of the seat. “Where’s Hammer Dude?”

  “Maybe Richie killed him,” Rena says.

  “I doubt it.”

  Wolfstein speeds up, swerving into the next lane.

  “Are we in a chase?” Lucia asks.

  “I guess,” Wolfstein says.

  “Richie wants the car and the money.”

  “My money?”

  “The money he stole. It’s in the trunk. Didn’t you hear him say that? Plus, he really, really loves this car.”

  The traffic is getting thicker. Wolfstein is switching lanes at a rapid clip. Richie’s staying with her, elbowing the horn, motioning for them to get off at an exit. Rena rolls up her window. He gets next to them on the right, his window down, and screams, “That’s my fucking car!” Enzio’s slouched in the passenger seat, shell-shocked by the way Richie’s jolting the Impala around, his cheeks ruddy, his mouth drooping open.

  Richie gets so close to them, Wolfstein pulls the wheel left to keep from getting sideswiped.

  “Open the window!” Richie calls out.

  Lucia leans across Rena and cranks down the window. “Fuck you, Richie! Your money’s my money now!” she says. Determination in her voice. A hard edge.

  Richie scrunches up his face, confused, maybe a little wrecked by hearing that from Lucia. His face saying, You were like a daughter to me.

  It occurs to Wolfstein they’re not even going that fast anymore. Down to forty-five, but it feels much faster with the boxed-in tension of the Cross Bronx. All the other cars. The walls and overpasses. She’s trying to get the needle over fifty, but the lanes are swelling and slowing up, and there’s just no way to shake the Impala.

  Richie’s back behind them. Wolfstein makes another quick lane switch, and then he’s a full lane over, two car lengths removed. Some breathing room.

  “How we gonna lose them?” Rena asks.

  “We’re not,” Wolf
stein says. “Not until we get across the bridge at least.”

  Richie’s riding the horn now.

  Closer to the bridge, Wolfstein slips the car into a gap ahead of a big wobbly van with graffiti-covered windows and no hubcaps. The van blocks out Richie totally.

  “It’s like I picked up that ashtray,” Rena says, “and then the world fell apart. I didn’t do that, my daughter would be alive.”

  “Hey now,” Wolfstein says. “Don’t you think like that. Don’t you talk like that. Does no good.”

  “I’m keeping Richie’s money,” Lucia says. That hard-edged voice again. “He got my mother killed. I deserve that money.”

  “Okay, kid,” Wolfstein says. “You and Grandma Rena’ll figure it out when we get to Mo’s. Let’s just get there in one piece, huh?”

  “I don’t pick up that ashtray, nothing goes wrong.” Rena’s stuck in that line of thinking. “Richie and Adrienne are riding off into the sunset.”

  “Probably doesn’t happen like that.”

  Lucia: “And what about me? I wasn’t going anywhere with them.”

  The Impala cuts out from behind the van and comes up on their left again, Richie hitting the horn in short spastic burps.

  Lucia reaches across Wolfstein and flips Richie off.

  “You’re a goddamn firecracker, kid,” Wolfstein says.

  Rena’s muttering under her breath.

  Wolfstein catches a quick glimpse in the rearview mirror of another familiar car behind the Impala, the one that had been parked outside her joint when they took off, a black Lincoln Town Car, probably a ’95 or ’96, Mets flag looped on the antenna. It’s bathed in bright highway light. Richie doesn’t see it, she can tell that much. “Shit,” she says.

  “What?” Rena says.

  “The other guy.”

  Rena twists her body around. “Crea? Where?”

  “The car behind the Impala.”

  Rena, at the top of her lungs, starts howling. “You fucking monster!” she says, as if Crea can hear her across lanes and through the heavy hum of traffic. She’s crying. “My baby girl, what you did to her! Vic!” She pounds her hands against the roof of the Eldorado, tinny thwacks echoing through the car.