The Exceptions

by David Cristofano

  “Dude!” he yelled.

  I got in his face and whispered, “I promise I will try not to kill you. Try not to kill you.”

  “What’s your problem, man?”

  I tightened the ball of material, shoved it up under his chin. The idiots stood back a little, rocked in circular patterns like Weebles. “Where were you heading? Where were you going with that open fly, stud?”

  Willie considered my question, moved his scrunched-up chin and lips without a word, hesitant to form a true answer. We stared into each other’s eyes and I could not find a shred of humanity in the void of his expression. The frigging malocchio! Ultimately, the answer drifted from his lips, an answer of full disclosure but laced with not a hint of confession.

  “Bitch was mine.”

  And so it went.

  I pressed my forearm against his neck and punched his gut with my left hand. As Willie bent over breathless, I yanked back the hood of his sweat jacket, revealing a long ponytail that I wound around my fist, used it to twist his entire body around, then smashed his head against the wall over and over and over until a pasty bloodstain stuck to the painted cinder blocks.

  I could hear the engine of Melody’s little Civic race as she overaccelerated, the screech of her car as she took the corner near our stairwell at an unsafe speed, the tires making a noise that might have been their attempt at asking for mercy. I glanced out the square window again just as Melody’s car drifted from my view, descending the garage, heading directly for the safe streets of Lexington.

  I turned to the idiots, Willie’s ponytail still in my fist, his head hanging from my hand like a briefcase, his body writhing in my grip as though I were holding a cat by its tail. “What do you say, guys—three-on-one?” One of them stood dumbfounded, the other hopped from foot to foot like he needed to take a leak. “Your fearless leader needs your help.”

  Willie tried to grab my leg, lame swipes through the open air like a drunk trying to grip a lamppost for support, kept mumbling something that sounded like double cheeseburger.

  The idiot who couldn’t stop moving said, “C’mon, Willie, fight back!”

  I laughed so hard my left knee buckled a little, could barely keep from bending over in hysteria. I tightened Willie’s ponytail in my hand and twisted his bloodied, cross-eyed face to mine. “What do you say, Willie, want to go another round?” Then I slammed his head into the glass wall overlooking the streets of the city from three floors high. “C’mon, Willie, fight!” I said. Slam again. “You can do it, Willie!” Slam. “Go, Willie, go!” Slam. Slam. Slam.

  I released him and his body fell limp and crooked to the cement floor; the only thing missing was a chalk outline.

  I stared at the idiots for a few seconds before saying, “So, what did we learn today?”

  All I can say is this: dust cloud.

  And as Willie’s troops abandoned him on the battlefield, I yelled, “Hey, take your trash with you!” I grabbed Willie by his jacket and jeans and tossed his body down the half flight of steps toward the second floor. I considered leaving him with a souvenir, but really didn’t care enough about him to make the point.

  I could hear the two of them running and tumbling down the steps, then the crash of the door at the bottom of the stairwell. I looked out the window and watched them fly out to the street, scatter in different directions like a pair of roaches.

  I opened the door to the garage and gently pulled it closed behind me, no loud bang this time. I casually headed toward my car like I was nothing more than a visitor to the city’s center, could still smell the rubber from Melody’s frenzied departure, eyed the fresh tire marks she left on the cement, walked them like a tightrope.

  By the time I reached the Mustang, pain arrived in all the places that would later require some form of attention, the worst of the bunch a near ripped-off fingernail from the middle finger of my right hand, no doubt still twisted in the fibers of Willie’s jacket, along with some of my blood and all of my DNA. I had long since become immune to worrying about the outcome of these violent outbursts, for the Bovaros only acted out on the bottom-dwellers, the drug addicts and criminals—certainly Willie fit the bill; he’d never surrender any truths about that day, especially his attempted rape. Throughout my childhood I had watched guys stumble to their feet, beaten and bruised, only to resist assistance from police, oppressed by some parole violation or outstanding warrant. Willie was going nowhere. Not that day, not ever.

  I cascaded down the ramps of the parking garage and drove out to Broadway, headed directly for Melody’s apartment. I pulled into the lot for her building and spotted her Civic parked on the edge. I crept up alongside it and turned my engine off, rolled down my windows. I could hear the engine of her car still ticking as it cooled.

  The only thing I could be sure of was that she made it home. I had no assurance that she made it home safe. I watched the door of her building, then her car, then the door again. I reclined my seat a little, lit a cigarette, and took a drag that lasted five seconds, closed my eyes and held the smoke in my lungs even longer, felt the rush of the nicotine as the warmth drifted from my chest out to my limbs and my head, into my blood. I blew the smoke out my window and waited.

  And waited.

  I left three times that evening—once to get a bag of burgers from McDonald’s and twice to use the restroom—and each time I returned I parked in a more secluded location, always staying within a clear view of her car and the front door of her apartment, utilizing my recently learned method of triangulation.

  I’d venture a guess that during the period of time I surveilled the scene from that distant corner of the parking lot, every single resident of her apartment building came and went—everyone but Melody. I was determined to stay until I saw her again, until she came out from her shelter, until I could be sure she was even marginally okay, that whatever fear or trauma caused by Willie and his cafoni had disintegrated or passed. I rolled back my moonroof and a gust of crisp Kentucky air swirled around the interior, a mixture of cut grass and smoldering Kingston charcoal. I stared up at the heavens, dotted with a number of stars never seen in a New York sky. As the clock ticked forward and fewer and fewer people came and went from her building, I waited.

  And waited.

  The morning came through my windows damp and loud; nests of birds in the branches of the white oaks overhead shrieked with chicks begging for food, a thin layer of dew covered everything: my dash, my windows, the knob of my stick. I flipped my wrist over and glanced at my watch: 7:23. Once I’d finished wiping my eyes, I surveyed the lot and all the cars remained, including Melody’s, which had not budged since she returned from Lexington, the front wheels still turned outward and away from the curb as though she had pulled into the spot with great haste.

  As noon approached, the air dried and the sun shone through a cloudless sky. That type of easy summer day comes only a few times a year, the kind that instills a certain guilt if you don’t find a way to enjoy it, yet there was no sign that Melody might surface, that she might enter the world again in her little sundress, show the only way more beauty could be added to such a perfect day. I hoped for that. But by the time 12:30 arrived, only four cars remained across the entire parking lot; one was Melody’s, one was mine, and the other two were unlikely to move: a relic of a pickup that had special license plates designating it as a farm truck, and a banged-up minivan with a flat rear tire.

  Almost everyone had returned home by seven that night. The sun had faded away slowly, as did the residents of Melody’s apartment building.

  I’d spent the day making myself sick on fast food, nicotine, and caffeine, getting cramped and sore in the cab of my Mustang. Unshowered and unshaven for a few days, I was having a hard time being near myself. I’d begun longing for my humble apartment, where I could sprawl across the width of my king-size bed, take a shower so hot it would sting my skin, whip up a plate of peppers and eggs before I launched into my day. Though despite the discomforts of this journey,
the aching in my trapezoids from lifting Willie off the ground, the scab around the torn nail of my middle finger that looked to be heading for an infection, the constant return to public restrooms that caused glances of increasing concern to be cast my way, I had no choice but to wait for Melody to surface, to know she was somehow surviving.

  That night turned cold, draped itself over me like a wet washcloth on the head of a fevered child. The fluctuation in temperatures drove me crazy, had me balancing the windows and the heat and the air-conditioning throughout my residency in the car. You might think the boredom, though, was what really did me in. I diluted it with the likes of regional newspapers and magazines acquired as an excuse to use the restrooms of local convenience stores, with half of the library of music CDs in my glove compartment, with no less than six baseball games delivered via AM radio, with slowly eaten meals and lengthy prayers. The dullness and tedium did exist, overruled by the anxiety of what was happening behind the door of Melody’s apartment. Boredom performs terrible acts upon the imagination: It expands the realm of possibility to its furthest limits, the best- and worst-case scenarios. And I ran through them all with Melody, from casual disinterest about what had happened in Lexington to a resulting case of severe depression to a downright panic toward any future interaction with humanity. I imagined too many times her hiding under the covers, blinds drawn, shaking.

  I could never be sure until I saw her.

  If I’d brought trouble to Lexington two days earlier, by Monday morning I officially looked like trouble. I’d been living out of my car for just over forty-eight hours, and in that parking lot for thirty-six of it. My bathroom existed at an Exxon, my comb was my right hand, my toothbrush my finger. A five o’clock shadow was well on its way to becoming a beard, and my stomach, when not hurting, was audible.

  The sun crested at five-thirty that morning and I crept out of my car to stretch and move my body in the motions of my childhood: the swing of a bat, the shot of a basketball, the sweep of a hockey stick. Once I’d finished my limbering, I slipped back in my car to procure more coffee, doughnuts, cigarettes, and a local newspaper, returned and parked a distance from Melody’s Civic just as the apartment dwellers with work schedules started to materialize and face the day.

  One resident, an attractive woman I would have pegged in her late fifties, came out in a short business dress, wearing makeup and heels that suggested she resented the unstoppable progression of her age—though what stuck with me was that I’d seen her twice already prior to that morning, that I’d been in residency at this apartment building for so long that I was beginning to assemble an accurate catalog of its inhabitants.

  In the gap between the emergence of the workers and retirees, I flipped through the Lexington Herald-Leader, central Kentucky’s local news source. I turned to the crime section, surprised at the level of wrongdoing that occurs in Lexington; Willie and his buddies would eventually find a place they could call home. In the prior twenty-four hours, there’d been two murders in Bourbon County, two arsons in the city of Lexington that suggested they were serial acts, and in Whitley County over fifty guns were stolen from an evidence room at the courthouse. The Bovaro crew had, as an organization, a presence in many cities across the United States, though nothing in Kentucky as far as I knew. I made a mental note to suggest it to my father; we’d fit in better than I might have guessed. The remainder of the crime appeared petty; where I grew up much of it would not be worth investigating, never mind mentioning. I read each and every crime report, and as my eyes zigzagged from article to article, there was one story missing.

  Willie’s.

  I’m certain that whoever found him in that stairwell called the police, and he was quickly transported to a nearby hospital, where the nurses pulled back his hood and removed his jacket to reveal bruises and dried blood that suggested a drug deal gone bad.

  DOCTOR: “Can you tell me what happened?”

  WILLIE: “I fell.”

  With that, their collective interest in his story would dissipate, they would clean him up, mend the cuts and emerging bruises, send him off with a prescription for a drug that would turn into a profitable venture and allow him to return to his drug of choice.

  And when the police officer started his way to ask a few questions, Willie would slip out of the room, out to the street, and back to his crappy life.

  The Lexington Herald-Leader got it right: This story was not newsworthy.

  As I closed the paper to refold it and open a new section, Melody appeared in the doorway of her building. I quickly unfolded it again, used it as my cloaking device, only my eyes and forehead exposed to the scene. At the sight of her, my heart pounded not faster but harder. I could feel my pulse in my stomach and throat, tried to swallow it back down more than once, the increase in the depth of my breathing causing the paper to undulate before me. The powerful onset of emotion pushed out the sense of reason I’d seemed to have built up over the prior two days.

  She walked to her car at a healthy pace, a purse over one shoulder and a large leather bag over the other, slowing only when the leather bag would slip off and she’d have to pause to hoist it back up. She wore slacks of a forgettable color and a white tank top with a light blue sweater covering all but the straps of her top, and each time the leather bag dropped, it would tug both the sweater and the straps down to expose her bare shoulder. I memorized her rhythm of reassembling: the strap, the sweater, the bag. If you put Willie or Mullet in a lineup, I’d be hard pressed to pick them out, but if you asked me to recreate her motions from that morning, I’d do so with near-perfect accuracy. As I watched her pace, her movements, I remained baffled. The way she looked—recovered—was the one look I was not expecting. In fact, I’d convinced myself she wouldn’t surface at all. Her back-to-my-regular-schedule demeanor suggested she’d been through related disappointments before and become desensitized to them, though her eyes had a redness that implied tears had been wiped away not much earlier, and the bags beneath them suggested lousy sleep.

  She balanced her purse and bag, reached in the pocket of her slacks, and pulled out her keys. Her headlights flickered, then she walked around to the back door on the driver’s side and put both items in the backseat. As the back door closed, she paused at the window. At first I thought she was staring at something in her car, until she brushed her cheek lightly and I realized she was looking at her reflection in the glass.

  I viewed her from my car, my head turned oddly, newspaper drifting lower and lower as I became absorbed. Melody stood up straight and did something that, in a most unexpected way, modified my personality. As she looked at her reflection, even though her hair was very short, she tucked her hair behind her ears. Her movement was slow and gentle, an act performed with the tips of the middle fingers of both hands, the motions occurring simultaneously, and from my distance it looked as though she were trying to trace the delicate shape of her ears. I immediately replayed it in my head two or three times. I wanted to watch her do it again, live. How odd it is the way a man’s mind is randomly shaped toward preference; it’s impossible to predict the triggers. My brother Jimmy, for example, would never admit it but he’s a people-watcher with a real preference for young women. His obsession manifests itself in the movement of a girl’s legs as she crosses them, in the sound as the skin of one leg rubs against the other, and the slower and more seductively it occurs, the more likely he will turn to me and say, “Man, I love it when a woman does that.” But his statement is hardly true; he really means that some woman he knew at some time in his life did that thing, it flipped some irreversible switch in his head, and he spent the rest of his days trying to find another woman who could replicate the motion that left this permanent predilection in his mind and desire in his heart. Every guy has them buried somewhere, things that had little business entering the realm of sensuality—the crossing of your legs, the chewing on the end of a pen while you think, the way your hand rushes to your chest with a hearty laugh, how you close you
r eyes when you whisper in a friend’s ear, the motions that compose the act of putting your hair in a ponytail or the way your hair gently falls to your face when you pull the band back out—somewhere a man is mad for it. As for me, for many years to follow, when I would see a girl tuck her hair behind her ears in nothing more than a vaguely similar manner, that delicate trace of the ears, I would think, She’s really cute, and never understand exactly why.

  The paper had dropped all the way to my lap.

  Melody started her car and after a few seconds she pulled out of her space, made her way down the gravel road. Her car became enveloped in a white burst of limestone dust, the loud crunching as she drove over the rocks overpowering the birds and distant machinery, and as the powdery air disappeared, so had Melody.

  I turned the ignition of the Mustang; that was as far as I got.

  For all the hours I had spent idle in the parking lot outside Melody’s apartment building, you’d think I would’ve found any excuse to move on, but I remained in that spot for too long, paper dropped in my lap, newsprint-stained fingers on the steering wheel at ten and two, head-cocked and blurry-eyed and openmouthed like a catatonic fool.

  I had some sense that I should follow her, but common sense trumped it, helped me to realize that there was little point in further visiting and staking out various parking lots of rural Kentucky. The only windows of her existence that I could see through, the insignificant glimpses of her life between starting points and destinations, offered nothing but a rising tide of questions that always remained unanswered, with the ultimate question, the point of it all, never being heard: Is she okay?

  Yet I could not surrender the obsession. I would never be at peace until I knew.