by John Searles
Ping.
Knock.
Ping.
A long, steady breath of steam sprayed into the room and kept coming. The piece of shit wasn’t broken after all—someone must have turned it off. Why hadn’t my mother tried giving it a good, hard twist like I just did? It didn’t make any sense. But with only twenty-six minutes to get to the station, I had no time to play detective.
I left the soon-to-be toasty apartment and hiked it downstairs to my bike. The chilly morning air smelled like a tire fire. Even though it had warmed up a bit, my body shivered—probably remembering what I had been through six short hours ago. Pedaling like crazy, I retraced part of my route from last night. Past Cumby’s. Past the motel. This time no Leila. No Roget. No Edie.
I made it to the bus station with five minutes to spare, dumped my bike behind a fence, and bought myself a ticket. It was my first time ever taking off to such a faraway place, and my stomach felt cramped and twisted when I thought about the crowded city streets of New York. A million faces as strange and scary as those newspaper stories.
NIXON ORDERS 90-DAY PRICE FREEZE TO CURB
DOMESTIC INFLATION
BENGAL REBUILDS AFTER CYCLONE
POLICE STILL SEARCHING FOR SUSPECT ACCUSED
OF SLAYING TWO BOSTON WOMEN
I repeated the plan in my head to calm myself: find Uncle Donald’s apartment, explain the whole dirty deal, get the money, and head back home. With every passing minute my scheme sounded more far-fetched. But what choice did I have? The thought of going back to Edie’s made my hands shake and my breathing speed up. I was afraid that if I walked through her door, if I caught sight of her face, if I heard the sound of her raspy voice, then the dark tangle of feelings inside me would well up and overtake me. I was afraid I might hit her like my father did and that maybe I wouldn’t be able to stop there. I thought of the knife plunged into Sharon Tate’s pregnant stomach, and this is what came into my mind: If a person could get that swept up in their anger and commit such an unthinkable evil, then maybe I could, too, simply because I’m human. The thought came and went in a flash, leaving me feeling sick. I looked around the station, as if to make sure that no one had heard what I was thinking.
At two minutes to eight I spotted a walking skeleton of a man across the parking lot. He boarded one of the buses and drove it around to my gate. “All aboard,” he said when he swung open the door.
I climbed the rubbery black steps, and he ripped my ticket in half.
“Looks like it’s just the two of us until Hartford. Why don’t you sit up here with me?” he said when I took my seat three-quarters of the way back.
I could have told him to bug off, but I decided just to go with it. I dragged my duffel bag to the first seat and sat right in front of a sign that read PLEASE DO NOT TALK TO THE DRIVER WHILE THE BUS IS IN MOTION. Obviously my gummy-mouthed chauffeur didn’t give a dirty nipple about that rule.
We were about to shove off when someone outside screamed, “Wait! Hold the bus!”
The driver slammed on the brakes and opened the door. I looked up to see that skinny girl from the police auction and last night at Cumby’s. Again. This time she was carrying a sign that said EQUAL PAY FOR EQUAL WORK. She was dressed in a St. Bartholomew outfit—plaid skirt, dark sweater, and tights—which explained why I never saw her in my school. Leon always said that Bartholomew girls were starved for action, so he hit on them every chance he got. I didn’t think he’d go for this one, though. Not that she wasn’t pretty, because she was. Sort of. But her signs were a bit much.
“Thank you for stopping,” she said to the driver, breathless. “You saved me from Saturday services.”
The old guy must have thought she was a bit weird, too, because he didn’t invite her to join our party. She moseyed on down the aisle to the very back of the bus, clumsily balancing her sign, a duffel bag, and a giant black guitar case in her arms. No kids today. When she passed me, she smiled. This time I looked away, because I had too much to think about and didn’t want her chatting me up as well. When we started moving again, I turned to look out the window but couldn’t help stretching my neck a bit to see what she was up to.
“Damn it!” she said to herself as she stood by the bus bathroom emptying her duffel bag. “I forgot my boots.”
With that she took a bunch of clothes and went into the bathroom and shut the door.
“So,” the driver said after a long, long silence in which he steered the rickety bus out of Holedo and down the highway, “what’s your name?”
I had been staring out the window, thinking of my father out there, somewhere on a similar highway. A series of solid yellow lines connecting us in a complicated route. A stretched umbilical cord from my seat in this bus to him. “Leon,” I said, wanting just for this ride to be someone else.
“I’m Claude. What’re you going to do in the city, Leon?” Claude spoke in a too-loud, over-the-shoulder voice that he must have cultivated through years of trapping passengers in this seat as he drove with their lives in his withered, hairy-knuckled hands. The high volume probably did the trick when the bus was jam-packed. But at that moment, in the empty belly of the beast, Claude’s voice sounded louder than necessary. Adult to child.
I glanced behind me to make sure the picket girl was still in her dressing room. She was. “I’m going to meet a girl who wants me to lick her crotch clean,” I said, giving him my best Leon. Served the guy right for not leaving me alone. After all, I had a mess of shit to sort out. Talking to him was a waste of time.
“Well, there’s nothing like some good pussy,” Claude shouted back.
Obviously my Leon tactic didn’t give him the leave-me-the-fuck-alone shock I had expected. We switched lanes, and a tractor-trailer passed. I thought of my father again. Driving. All those connections between us. I didn’t know why I was thinking about him, almost missing him right now. Maybe because we had both been burned so badly by Edie. And even though we’d never swap war stories, it might feel good to have him around as a silent partner in all this.
“Listen,” I said, wishing I had ignored Claude’s invitation to sit up front in the first place, “I need to take a snooze. So if you don’t mind, I’m going to close my eyes.”
“Sure thing,” he said. “May as well rest up. The city’s a tough place for a young fella like you.”
“I can handle it,” I said.
“I hope so,” he shouted back. “All those muggers, beggars, murderers.”
A flapping feeling swept through me. In my stomach I imagined an invisible embryo somersaulting and leaving me unsettled, the way Edie always described. But I wasn’t going to let this no-brain bus driver get to me. “I said I can handle it,” I told him.
“Good thing,” he said, taking his eyes off the road and looking at me in his big mother of a mirror longer than I liked. His eyes were set deep in his face, with barely any lashes. His cheeks were jowly. “Police are always finding young kids like you dead in some fleabag Harlem motel room.”
“I’m just going to visit my uncle,” I said, wanting to shut him up once and for all.
“What about the girl?”
“Girl?” I asked, then remembered. “Oh, I’m going to visit my uncle after I lick her crotch.”
“Right,” he said.
The picket girl emerged from her dressing room wearing flared denim jeans bleached blue and white like the sky and a long-sleeved tight black shirt with buttons down the front. No more schoolgirl.
I closed my eyes to put an end to all the distractions. In the darkness behind my lids I saw a blizzard of Edie images: Edie writing the Dominick-I-need-to-see-you note last fall when her face was black-and-blue. Edie tilting her head and lacing her fingers between mine as we lay in her bed. Edie tucking her stray hair behind her ear and leaning forward to kiss me. Edie walking into her bedroom and finding me gone last night.
As much as I hated to admit it, and as pissed off as I felt, I was going to miss my nights with her. Over and over
I wished there were some sort of explanation. Maybe I had heard her wrong, I tried to tell myself. After all, she hadn’t said my name. For all I knew, she could have been talking about the paperboy. But I knew what she had done. What I didn’t get was how she could go through with it. How could Edie have faked all those nights at her house? Laughing with me? Holding my hand? Kissing me? It was a lot of effort just to get her claws on some cash. And there had to be an easier way to get back at my father.
To stop myself from thinking about Edie, I tried to conjure up everything I knew about my Uncle Donald. A few hours earlier, when I sneaked into my mother’s room to grab the bus fare, I dug up Uncle Donald’s number and gave him a wake-up call. When he answered—his fat-man’s voice, crackly with sleep—I hung up. Just a test to make sure he wasn’t off globe-trotting to get funding for one of his engineering projects. I wanted to be sure he would be present for my visit, since it wasn’t the type of thing I could blurt out over the phone. After all, since he traveled so often, and since my mother usually went to visit him instead of the other way around, I had only met my uncle a handful of times. From what I knew, he seemed like a cool enough guy—big and burly, always cracking some over-my-head joke and making himself laugh. I used to ask my mother why he didn’t invent something useful, like a remote control that would start her car in the morning so it would be warm when we got in, or a radio battery that didn’t die after a couple of days. But my mother said his inventions were not that gimmicky. He focused more on doodads for disease-research laboratories, more interested in curing cancer than warming my ass. And for that he made a bundle.
As far as I knew—which was not much—Uncle Donald didn’t have a girlfriend. Probably because his Santa Claus belly and gray beard weren’t exactly the type of thing chicks got hot for. Besides, between traveling and raising Truman, how could he have time for a love life?
Truman.
The thought that I was actually going to meet my half brother face-to-face after all this time was too much to think about. I could have let my mind hunker down on a million different questions: What if he wanted to come back to Holedo with me? What if he was retarded or crippled and that’s why my mother didn’t like to talk about him? Instead of sailing off into one of those scenarios, I told myself not to focus on it too much in order to avoid jinxing anything.
I peeled my banana and practiced my conversation with Donald in my head. I decided I would tell him exactly what had happened.
Direct. Honest for a change.
In Hartford a gaggle of giggling girls boarded, all of them dressed in University of Connecticut sweatshirts. Ponytails. Twisted braids. Fruity perfume. Mint gum. Without any coaxing from Claude, they bunched up front and whipped up a conversation with him in no time. He played Mr. Innocent pretty damn well, too. All flattery and laughter. Little did they know one of the last things he had said before they boarded was “Nothing like some good pussy.”
I kept waiting for him to warn them about dead people in motel rooms, but he never said a word on the subject. They were traveling in a pack. I guess he thought I needed to be warned.
“Cool!” one of the girls said to Claude, and the whole crew shrieked with laughter.
I had missed the punch line but was really sick of their flirt-with-the-bus-driver routine anyway. Out my window the miles of forest gave way to clusters of neighborhoods. An aboveground pool left uncovered in somebody’s backyard. A lawn with patches of frozen mud and snow. As the scenery flashed by, I made promises to myself. The first had to do with my mother. Before I went into the bath last night, the final thing she had said to me was “Dominick, I’m just so tired. Things have got to get easier for me.” I didn’t have an answer for her then, but when I got home tonight, I was going to make sure she got the rest she needed. I had been a bigger prick than my father, and I was going to make it up to her. First with the money. Then by being the kind of son she wanted. Like one of those changed people in a fairy tale.
Poof.
Clean bedroom.
Grade-A student.
No girlfriends over the age of seventeen.
That would be me.
The second promise I made was about Edie. I vowed to myself that I would get even with her, squared away. Somewhere, somehow, she was going to pay. I didn’t have a specific plan, but I knew one would come to me.
By the time the bus pulled into Port Authority, I had pretty much stitched up my entire life, complete with Edie begging my forgiveness, a tropical vacation with my mother, every last penny paid back to Donald from a part-time job, and even a girlfriend my own age. In my head it was perfect.
Now I just had to make it come true.
Claude slapped me five, and I hopped off the bus behind the girls, trying to look like I knew how to get where I was headed. The truth was, I didn’t have a fucking clue. On the way here, the bus had driven through a stretch of burned-out brick buildings and sidewalks crowded with scowling faces. We almost sideswiped two taxis, and the bus stalled at an intersection, instigating a honking chorus from the parade of cars behind us. The whole experience left me feeling more than unstrung about my New York adventure.
Thank God for the I-for-Information sign at the top of an escalator. I waited in a line that looked more like one at a soup kitchen than a bus station, folding and refolding Uncle Donald’s address in my hands. Around me the dirty station was a hive of activity. People darted past one another, racing out to the street or down to the buses. Whenever I breathed in, I got a good whiff of a pissy, ammonia smell, so I tried to hold out for as long as possible before taking in more air.
In. Out. In. Out. I felt like a woman in labor.
“What’s the best way to get to Ninety-seven Bleecker Street?” I asked the lipsticked black woman on the other side of the glass when it was my turn. She hooked me up with two sets of directions. One for the subway and one for the bus. But when she saw the lost look on my face, she told me my best bet was to take a cab.
I made my way out of the station into the silvery winter daylight. The air felt cold and windy, but nothing compared to the arctic freeze I had survived last night. I had seen enough New York movies that making my way along the sidewalk felt pretty much like I had imagined. Gritty. Massive. Holedo times a thousand. It reminded me of a carnival ride or a movie that ran endlessly. All anyone had to do was take a breath and jump on in, which is exactly what I did.
A pink neon sign flashed WET! HOT! NASTY! Another buzzed LIVE GIRLS! If I were here for any other reason, I might have walked by those buildings, maybe tried to sneak inside even though I was underage. But I had to keep my mind on my mission.
The money.
My brother.
A taxi zoomed down the street. I waved my hand in the air, but the driver whizzed on by. Another taxi was right behind. Again I waved, and again the driver blew past me. I stood on the street a moment, wondering what the hell I was doing wrong. Looking lost was a direct invite for a wacko to brush up against me. “Plan A: You give me a quarter,” he said. His breath pure decay. “Plan B: You give me fifty cents.”
I clutched my duffel bag against my chest like I was protecting something precious in there. A baby. A bundle of money. In my head I heard Claude’s warning: muggers, beggars, murderers. . . kids like you dead in some fleabag Harlem motel room. I made my way down the sidewalk away from the creep. And when a cab wheeled down the block, I waved both my arms in the air like someone drowning, calling for help.
“They’re full!” another man who looked enough like Claude to be his brother shouted from a slumped position on the sidewalk. “Look for one with the roof light on.”
I couldn’t even hail a cab without a how-to lesson from a bum. I thought about thanking him but heard Claude’s warning again, so I scoped out an available taxi and threw my hand in the air. When the driver actually stopped, I leaped inside and told him to take me to 97 Bleecker Street, Apartment 3B.
“Should I drop you in the living room or the kitchen?” he asked.
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I knew he was making a joke, but I didn’t get it. I was too busy rationing breaths again, since the cab smelled worse than the bus station. In. Hold. Out. Hold. Repeat. “Huh?” I managed on an exhale.
“I don’t need the apartment,” he said in a tongue-clucking accent. “Just the building number or the cross street.”
Taxi lesson number two. “Oh,” I said, cranking the window open to make breathing a bit easier, only to find exhaust blowing back at me. “Sorry.”
As we drove downtown, the tall steel buildings and straight-arrow streets slowly vanished. Before I knew it, we were bumping along a crooked road lined with trees and brick houses only five or six stories tall. It was a part of the city I had never seen in movies, like something straight out of a storybook, one of Edie’s fairy tales.
The driver stopped in front of 97. I gave him five bucks and hopped out. My uncle’s building was a wide, brick-faced job with only six floors and dead ivy vines stretching across its face. I couldn’t bring myself to buzz right away, so I stood there a moment looking up and down the block. Not far down the street a playground was deserted, probably too cold out for little kids. One of the swings—left twisted and tangled into a noose by some long-gone brat—moved back and forth in the wind. A man with a braid walked the perimeter of the park, a bouncy white poodle on his leash. I watched his ropy knot of hair drum against his back as he moved. I watched his dog press its gummy nose to the ground.
