A Friend Is a Gift You Give Yourself

by William Boyle

  Wolfstein sees two things simultaneously in the side-view mirror: Richie’s horror at Rena’s treatment of his car and Crea swigging from a bottle of green Listerine and spitting it out his open window.

  “Grandma,” Lucia says, but that seems to be all she can think of.

  “That monster,” Rena says, her voice settling down to a whimper.

  They pass underneath or through something—it’s not quite a tunnel, but it feels like a tunnel, Wolfstein a little loopy, disoriented—and the lights are sooty, a bootsuck gloom ricocheting against the walls. They come out on the bridge in the center-left lane. Orange cones in the road. Lights swishing everywhere from cars. The lights on the bridge, rising in the air. An enormous American flag hanging from the high part at the center of the bridge, moving in the wind like a dress over a sewer grate, making Wolfstein think of Marilyn Monroe. She’s always loved Marilyn. Ate up every book there was to be had. Likes to think of her on a bed wearing nothing, swirled up in white sheets.

  Lights down on the water. Lights of the city behind them. Wolfstein’s planning a move. Make it look like she’s staying to the left, headed on 95 into the deep hustling veins of Jersey and then cutting quickly off the exit for the Palisades, losing Richie and Crea and on the path to Mo. Seems easy enough.

  But it’s not easy, of course. The Impala’s nuzzling them. And the Town Car looms majestically on Richie’s tail, no longer a secret to him.

  Wolfstein moves left, no signal. They’re lined up like a funeral: Eldorado, Impala, Town Car.

  “What are you doing?” Rena asks.

  “Trying to shake them,” Wolfstein says.

  “Like this?”

  Wolfstein looks over her right shoulder, the center lane thick with steady-flowing traffic. She hopes it’s not a tell. She needs to lose both cars. “I’m gonna make a last-second move for the Palisades,” she says.

  “Across three lanes? You’ll get us killed.”

  “I sure hope not.”

  The flag is over them, its wild flapping loud enough to sound like a big engine. The Palisades exit is in sight.

  Lucia and Rena are both looking over their shoulders, trying to figure a way Wolfstein can possibly pull this off. There’s just no let-up in the center lanes. It’s an arcade game. She’ll have to fit between fast-moving cars and hope Richie and Crea are totally boxed out. Wolfstein will be amazed if she can pull it off, but it’s their only hope, as far as she can tell. Getting tracked close onto the Palisades would mean being royally fucked. No shaking them then on that dark two-lane parkway with long stretches between exits—it’ll be easier to be driven off the road, to be shouldered into a rest stop lot or off into the trees.

  She’s thinking about Marilyn again. Seeing her sweetly stretched on the hood of the Eldorado. Now’s the time. Swerve, Wolfstein. Make it count. Get free.

  RICHIE

  Richie’s on the floor, dazed. His hands are painted with blood. Adrienne’s blood. He sees her splayed out across from him. He scrambles to his knees and looks all around. The whole thing with Crea is a blur. He gets a flash of them tangled up, tumbling across the room. He thinks maybe he got the hammer away from Crea. He did. For a minute, at least. Crea pulled a piece from under his jacket. His Sig Sauer P220. Richie swung with the hammer. Missed. Crea fired. Missed. They butted heads like fucking goats or rams or whatever. Crea laughed at him, shook it off.

  Richie tries to shake out of it. Sirens off in the distance. Crea and his hammer are gone now. Richie’s bet is that he’s right outside, somewhere in the shadows, waiting to pounce. He just doesn’t want to be in the house when the cops show. That’s Crea’s way. And who knows where Lucia, Rena, and Luscious Lacey are. Maybe in a neighbor’s house on the horn with a police dispatcher. Or out on Pennyfield trying to wave down a blue-and-white.

  He gets to his feet, goes to the open door, knowing he has to move fast. He looks out at the street. His Eldorado’s gone. Jesus Christ. That means the MAC-10 and the dough and the camera are gone, too.

  But there’s dumb old Enzio on his knees in a cone of light from the overhead streetlamp, reaching around under the Impala, his bandages making him look like some kind of an escaped shock-therapy patient.

  Richie goes back into the house, scans the walls, the refrigerator, looking for a sign, for anything. He’s desperate. They went where? They took his money where? Back to Brooklyn? Rena wouldn’t. Not with Crea in the mix.

  Fucking Crea. Richie wishes now more than ever that Crea had been there at Caccio’s for the massacre.

  Richie kicks past the body of the old wiry bastard who shot Adrienne, noticing a letter on the counter where the guy had been sitting before he crumpled to the floor, bashed to death by Crea. He gets a whiff of vodka from a nearby glass. He paws at the edge of the envelope. Must be something, that’s why it’s sitting out. The envelope has a return address up in Monroe. He takes out the letter and reads it fast. He’s thinking maybe this Mo is Luscious Lacey’s best pal, and they’ll head up to her place to hide out. Only bet, right now. On the floor is the guy’s piece, the one Richie had for a minute before he lost it. He picks it up and checks the chamber. Two bullets. He tucks it in his waistband and feels it against his skin. Not cold or warm. Just there. Foreign.

  Monroe. He’s been there. To the diner once. And for some dealings with a Hasidic Jew in Kiryas Joel regarding a jewel thing back in ’02.

  He puts the letter back in the envelope and stuffs it in his pants pocket. Sirens sound closer but still not too close. He goes over and stands by Adrienne. He leans down on one knee and kisses her, tastes her blood on his lips. He feels her hips, her legs, touches the fragile tips of her long nails. He wishes they were in a bed somewhere. This world. This business. You don’t cry, that he knows. You cry, it’s over.

  He’s seeing Adrienne in high school. The way she crossed her legs. Put on lip gloss. Made jokes that went nowhere. Always wanted him to take her to MSG to watch the Rangers. Girl like her, a hockey fan. His mother liked Adrienne. The true test. Adrienne would help roll the braciole, wear an old apron that belonged to his grandmother. She made good gravy herself. Made her own dough for pizza, too. So pretty, his A. Special thing like that comes along once in a lifetime. No matter what went wrong between them, she was always there to lean on, to come back to.

  He’s got to move. He palms some of Adrienne’s blood from his lips, rises back to a standing position, and walks out of the house.

  Richie closes in on Enzio, his boots thumping the pavement, the neighborhood full of haunted quiet. He drops to his knees and elbows Enzio out of the way. He reaches far under the car, farther than Enzio possibly could, and feels around for the key. He comes out with it and stands back up.

  “You got it! God bless.”

  “Where’s Crea?”

  “Split in his Town Car about five minutes ago. The sirens are getting closer.”

  “I know, I know.”

  Richie opens the driver’s-side door of the Impala and gets in under the wheel.

  “What are you doing?” Enzio asks, putting a hand on the doorframe.

  “I’m going after what’s mine.” Richie jerks the door closed, knocking Enzio off balance, rolling down the window. He starts the car. The engine hums.

  “I didn’t try to rape Rena,” Enzio says. Pause. “Let me come with you.”

  “Why would I let you do that?”

  “Please. Come on. I gotta watch over her.” His hand on the roof of the Impala. Tears in his pissy old eyes. “She’s all I got.”

  “Fine. You know what? Get in. Hurry up. I need a human shield when Crea shows—and he is showing again, I can assure you of that—you’re it, pal.”

  Enzio goes around to the passenger side and gets in the car.

  Richie ratchets them away from the curb. They zoom side streets until they catch the Expressway off Pennyfield, moving away from the sirens.

  “Take it easy,” Enzio says, his head in his hands. “Please.”

  Cop li
ghts whirling in the dark by St. Raymond’s Cemetery. Backup upon backup. Calls coming in. Neighbors a hush until the scene’s clear. Service road beyond the Expressway fence lit red and blue. Richie feels reckless, but he’s driving steady and fast. He’s still tasting Adrienne’s blood on his lips.

  “You said Crea’s coming back?” Enzio asks. “How you know that for sure?”

  “Crea likes games,” Richie says, spitting out the window.

  Richie is visiting Adrienne in his memory. He’s talking to who she was. The kid she was. The woman. He’s kissing her outside of Our Lady of Angels in Bay Ridge. They’re about to go in to watch his pal Bruno Bonnano get hitched to some little bow-legged nurse. He’s watching her read box scores in the Daily News at his kitchen table in her nightie. The way she pushes her hair over her ear. Her good teeth. Always those good teeth. “Take care of your teeth like A does,” Vic used to say. He’s watching her after their first breakup. Tracking her. She’s on Twentieth Avenue, getting an espresso and a little box of rainbow cookies at Licenzo’s. He’s watching through the frosted script on the window. He’s looking over the stacks of Italian bread. He’s thinking she looks like Annabella Sciorra. Jungle Fever. Funny he never thought that before. Now they’ve broken up, he sees it in her eyes. Maybe she’s got her hair different. He’s seeing her on the beach in Coney Island. He’s seeing her in the shower, trimming her bush, getting ready for the beach. He’s seeing her taking the host on her tongue at St. Mary’s. He’s seeing her waiting for what used to be the B train. He’s seeing her all the ways he’s ever seen her. Those first days. Kissing in his car on Shore Road. She’s so goddamn young. Hiding it from Vic. Her hands on him. His hands on her. Memory like a movie.

  One night—this is when she was over in Queens, after the third or fourth time they split—he went to see her after he’d killed Mikey the Goon over at Deno’s Bus Stop. He was shaken up by it. The Goon was only eighteen. But the orders had come down. Vic made him believe he was doing God’s work. But he was still rattled. Kid like that, how could he not be? Sure, the Goon fucked up, Richie knew that better than anybody, but you gotta make a kid learn. What happened that night at Adrienne’s place, he’s seeing it now. Lucia was maybe four, asleep in the other room. Him and Adrienne, they fucked on the floor with that Hitchcock movie The Birds on the TV in the background. All those birds. Wild. He’s seeing it now, her on top of him, wearing a Yankees T-shirt with a ripped collar, the way she’s moving, saying his name, not caring if they wake up little Lu, and then Crea’s hammer is coming right at her, smashing her face like glass.

  Everywhere Richie looks, there’s Crea. Cars next to him are filled with grinning Creas. Creas crawling on overpasses, over fences. Hovering in the back windows of buses and vans and ambulettes.

  Crea saying back there, Richie’s remembering now, that he killed Vic. Richie thinking how fast untruths spread. No one saw Little Sal, not even Rena. It was Crea all along. And it was Richie had to do the hit on Little Sal over it.

  Richie’s keeping his eyes peeled for the Eldorado. Trying to keep focused on that. Afraid that the real Crea will roll up out of nowhere, open fire on him like he did to Ozzie Gigante on the Belt Parkway. Ozzie turned to splatter inside his Escalade, went peeling off into the Fort Hamilton military base fence. One time he and Ozzie had gotten a tour of Monument Park at Yankee Stadium together. Ozzie was tight with Joe Kelly, who had a big in there. It was a good day. Arthur Avenue afterward. Crea clipped him three months later.

  “You know they’re headed this way how?” Enzio asks.

  “I want to talk to you, I’ll let you know,” Richie says.

  Enzio puts his hands up like whoa, whoa.

  In and out of lanes. Needle pushing eighty. Enzio’s clutching his gut, moaning in misery for the stress Richie’s putting on his poor Impala.

  “Your car’s a beaut,” Richie says, shifting gears. “I’m a good driver. I’m the best driver. We find them, you get it back. Just like that.”

  Could be Richie’s wrong, though. That Monroe letter’s pure guesswork. Say they don’t find Rena and Lu. Say it’s not as easy as Monroe. Say they’re headed in any other direction. Luscious Lacey with a million other connections. A hotel upstate. Atlantic City. Vegas. California or Florida or Panda Puss, Tennessee.

  “You don’t find them, what happens to me and my car?” Enzio asks, as if reading his mind. And then, as if on command, Richie spots the Eldorado up ahead. He can tell because it’s his. That shape. How the brake lights hit the road. The tight rectangle of his perfect back window. Sturdy roof. Tires steady and high. It makes him heartsick seeing it. He can’t believe he’s managed to catch up to them so quickly. “It’s there, it’s there,” he says aloud.

  “Where?”

  “There.” Pointing hard over the dash.

  “I don’t see it.”

  “You’re blind then.”

  “What now?”

  “Now I get my car back by any means necessary. You don’t want your Impala fucked up, you better pray my Eldorado goes unharmed.”

  Looked good for a second there. Richie had them in sight, and he honestly thought they’d just pull over and let him have his car and money back.

  But then the jagged pursuit. Lucia yelling at him out the window. Something unlocking in those pretty eyes of hers. The desire for all that dough, probably. She has the same eyes as Adrienne.

  Lucia. He’d slip her twenties all the time when she was a little kid. Fold them into rings and put them on her thumbs the way his uncles used to do for him. She’d blow it all on baseball cards and Swedish Fish and whatever else kids spend money on. Memories of Lucia flooding in: Cookies she liked. Those pistachio-roll ones—what are they called? Lard bread, too. Kid could eat her weight in lard bread. Taking her for pizza at Spumoni Gardens or Lenny’s. “Take me to the circus,” she said to him when she was eight, and what’d he do? Front row at Ringling Brothers. Limo into the city, popcorn, peanuts, cotton candy, the whole nine. They laughed at all the big heaps of elephant shit together, guys scooping it up with shovels. Now look at her. The same age Adrienne was when he first made it with her. All that’s happened, and she’s got dollar signs in her eyes.

  And Crea’s back on his tail, too. Must’ve followed them out of Silver Beach. Probably hiding in the shadows the whole time and staying far enough behind not to be seen. Games. Swishing Listerine, the psycho. Probably not wanting to just blow Richie away. Wouldn’t be enough for Crea. At this point, Richie guesses, what Crea is after is getting him tied up in a warehouse, breaking his legs with the hammer, jolting him with electricity, doing some Lethal Weapon–type torture.

  On the bridge now. In a line. She’s up to something, Luscious Lacey. Crazy that he used to crank it to her. That rack for the ages. She’s gonna, what? Break right for the Palisades, try to shake them? Or maybe she wants him to think that and then she floors it, shoots straight onto 95. You can’t just fool a smart guy like him. And give Crea, the psycho, some credit. They didn’t want to continue this, they shouldn’t have dragged his Eldorado—and, by extension, his score—into it. Take an express bus right on Tremont and go to Penn Station, Grand Central, the Port Authority, whatever the fuck. Now they’re all in line for more trouble, more heartache.

  When the Eldorado makes its abrupt move for the Palisades exit, Richie is boxed in by a van. The driver of the van has a neck like a fat preacher. He’s got a phone book on a chain hanging from his ceiling. He’s motioning wildly with his hands, flipping Richie off, bonking the horn. Richie’s cursing. Crea’s Town Car taps the Impala. Enzio moans, the minor collision sending shivers through him. “No,” he says, restrained. “No, no, no. Richie. Please, no.”

  “Take it easy,” Richie says. “We’re losing them.”

  In the rearview, he sees Crea laughing.

  It happens like one of those little red flip books he had as a kid. Luca Cicotte used to supply the junior high boys with them. You’d thumb through it. Little pencil drawing of a stripper
onstage going down to her G-string and pasties. Last page is her, knees touching, knockers finally fully exposed, smiling wide. Luca had an uncle worked in Times Square kept him in shit like that. Luca was a big hit in the school. Back then, tits weren’t everywhere. The way the car—his fucking car—moves reminds him of that book, the fast action, zippy like he’s seeing it through a whirring fan blade.

  And then the van boxes them in, the fat-necked preacher guy looking right at Richie and howling, spit splattering his window.

  The women are off the exit, spinning into the dark of the Palisades. Richie rides the horn. He knows another way to the Palisades up ahead, but he’s gonna lose ground. Maybe lose them for good if they take one of the first exits. No assurance that they’re actually headed to Monroe. That’s just a gamble, after all.

  Crea’s next to him in the Town Car suddenly, shrugging, holding up the hammer and miming beating his head in.

  “Oh, Jesus fucking Christ,” Enzio says, noticing Crea. “Just let me out and take the car. I’ve thought twice. I got what, a few years left, if I’m lucky? My heart don’t need this. Let me out. I don’t care where.”

  “Pipe down, huh?” Richie says. “I’m thinking here.” He’s trying to see his plan like a map in front of him, what exactly he has to do to get back on track without getting totally lost up Jersey’s godforsaken ass. He’s learned, on several occasions, you get lost up Jersey’s ass, you’re screwed dead to rights. So much signage. So many potential bad turns. So many smokestacks and billboards and barbed-wire fences. And so much land that looks barren, piled with car parts and rubble. You get into that part of Jersey, you’re in a puzzle.

  “What are we gonna do?” Enzio asks.

  “You’re gonna shut up, that’s what,” Richie says.

  What Richie finds himself thinking about just then, his hands clutched tight on the wheel of the Impala, is enemies. Is Lucia his enemy, and is he hers? He doesn’t want it to be like that. He always wanted to be a dad to her. Or at least an uncle. The kind of guy slips her a few bucks and puts a smile on her face. Crea’s his enemy, he knows that with rock-solid certainty. Enemies infect your blood, he knows that, too. The Goon wasn’t an enemy. Sonny Brancaccio, he was. Plenty of enemies, whatever they’re made of. Plenty of almost-enemies.