Fresh Kills

by Bill Loehfelm

  I walked around the front of the car, climbed into the driver’s seat, and started the engine. I turned to the others in the back.

  Jimmy poked Rose in the shoulder. “Are we there yet?” he asked, several times. “She’s on my side,” he whined. “Tell her to stay on her side.”

  Rose whacked him playfully in the temple. “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “Let’s put our backs to this place for a while,” I said.

  I WATCHED HER CAREFULLY, BUT Molly didn’t seem the least bit nervous as I parked the car in the pay lot beneath the ferry terminal. We made our way up the dingy concrete stairs to the terminal, where the scent of the ocean disappeared beneath the mingled odors of fresh urine and stale wine.

  “You always take me to the nicest places,” Molly said as we crossed the landing and turned up the last set of stairs, a single lightbulb flickering over our heads.

  Finally, we emerged into the pale fluorescent glow of the train depot. Warm orange light pouring from their open doors, half a dozen of the silver trains sat idle on the tracks. They looked like a kid’s play set, fresh out of the box. The electricity waiting to power them crackled in the air, tingling in my nose.

  “Up here,” I said, leading our entourage away from the trains up the wide ramp to the ferry terminal. Single file, we passed through the turnstiles.

  The vast, high-ceilinged room was quiet, dimmed sunlight tumbling in through the dirty skylights. The coffee stands and fast food joints ringing the room did no business. Cashiers leaned on their elbows, flipping through newspapers or just staring off into space. A few tourists crowded together at the pea-green double doors that led to the next boat, clutching shopping bags and purses to their chests, nervously glancing over their shoulders into the yards of empty space behind them. A Port Authority cop shook the shoulder of a homeless man passed out on a bench.

  We crossed the room, our dress shoes clicking on the marble floor. The big digital clock above the double doors read “Next Boat: 03 minutes.” The five of us lingered in a patch of sunlight, well away from the tourists. Molly and I held hands. Snatches of conversations in French and Spanish drifted back to us.

  “You want a coffee or something?” Jimmy asked me. “A beer?”

  “I’m good,” I said. “But we’ve got time if you need something.”

  “Anyone?” Jimmy asked.

  Everyone declined. Jimmy stayed put, rocking on his heels with his hands in his pockets.

  The big clock hit zero and the doors rumbled open. We let the tourists get a head start, took our time moving down the hall, emerged into the sea air, and boarded the squat orange boat.

  The other passengers had disappeared inside, heading up the stairs to the second deck. We stayed on the back deck, leaning on the railing. Seagulls perched on the pilings all around us, watching the proceedings, beady eyes glittering in their tilted heads. The whole boat shook as the engines rumbled to life beneath us, churning the brown water to froth, kicking trash to the surface then swallowing it again. The deafening groan of the horn sounded, chasing the gulls airborne. The smokestack at the center of the boat coughed up a cloud of smoke, and we heaved forward. The pilings shrieked and rocked as the ferry muscled them aside and headed for open water.

  Jimmy shouted something at Julia, but she just raised her hands and shook her head, unable to hear him. Molly put her arm around my waist, leaning into me so I could hear her over the engines. “Let’s go upstairs,” she said. “It’s too loud back here.”

  “You’re sure?” I asked. She nodded and walked away from me.

  I smacked Jimmy on the shoulder and pointed toward the doorway. He passed the message to Julia and took Rose by the hand. We followed Molly, who was already waiting for us at the top of the stairs.

  Her shoulders set straight, her chin tilted up, Molly led us the length of the boat. Pigeons and sparrows scattered out of her way, puffing their feathers as they cooed and chirped their complaints at the rest of us. An abandoned Daily News blew in pieces over the tops of the benches, its pages caught in the wind off the sea. Molly turned out the door onto the observation deck. I held up my hand and we all stopped just inside the door.

  “Give her just a minute,” I said.

  Through the windows, I watched Molly part the tourists and walk to the front of the deck. She made the sign of the cross and bowed her head, gripping the metal railing. The wind tossed her hair wildly around her. It pressed her black dress tight against her body. As the boat plowed its way toward Manhattan, I watched the empty space where the Towers once stood open up over her trembling shoulders. She raised her head and stared straight into it. The tourists around her, oblivious, posed for photos as we passed the Statue of Liberty.

  My throat tightened and my heart ached for her. Jimmy stood with his head bowed, his hands folded above his belt buckle. Rose had her arms around him, her forehead pressed into his shoulder. Julia wiped away one tear with her thumb then gave up and let them fall. She looked away from me, clutching her arms tight against her chest. There was no one to tell me what to do. I had no advice, no smart-ass remarks, no vitriolic speeches to offer in dismissal or as distraction. Nor did I feel the need.

  Even in our most self-indulgently tragic teenage daydreams, we’d never imagined standing in such an ordinary place and staring into one of the great tragedies, the great crimes, in our country’s history. A crime that stole the blood of one of our own. Of all the things we talked of doing together, grieving for and with each other never made the list.

  Standing together on that boat, we were someplace far beyond anywhere we’d ever conceived of being while running the streets of Staten Island years ago. We were too young and bored then, kicking around dreams of the future like soda cans in the schoolyard, tilting them into the shine of the streetlights and tossing them aside like the caps off our beer bottles. Why pay attention? Tomorrow, there would always be more. Things never changed on Staten Island.

  Our mothers always made our lunches, always bought our clothes at the Mall, always got home from work before we got home from school. The trains took our fathers to the ferry in the morning. The ferry brought them to the City, where every day they took their places in the sky, somewhere high up in those impossibly tall buildings, nested and safe like birds. The trains and the boats, like our mothers and fathers, would never stop working. The sky would never fall.

  Our fathers, our families, the ones we loved, would never change, never betray us, never not come home. They would never die. Until they did. Until one day you woke up and your life was different forever, whether you were eight or thirty-one, whether you wanted it that way or not. And there was nothing left to do but take your place in the bucket line alongside the other survivors, helping to bear the loss and clean up the mess, the future suddenly a diamond clutched so hard in your fist its sharp corners drew blood.

  I fought back the urge to run to Molly, to turn her away from the emptiness and cover her eyes with my hands, to promise her it wasn’t really there. But I knew it wouldn’t do any good. There wasn’t any escaping her loss any more than there was escaping mine. She didn’t look interested in running, anyway. She stood straight and tall against that expanse of blue sky, like she was trying to fill it on her own, a tower unto herself. A fragile, defiant skyline of one. It was too much for anyone to do alone. Without a word, I took my place beside her, making us two against the yawning, open sky.

  The boat closed in on Manhattan and the looming skyscrapers surrounding the docks seemed to bow forward over our heads. The boat’s engines dropped a gear. As the wind eased, all around us seagulls drifted down out of the sky like a fleet of crooked-winged escorts, rising and falling on the drafts. Molly’s hair came to rest against her shoulder blades. She leaned into me for balance as the boat bumped along the pilings and settled into the dock.

  “I wish I knew what to do for you,” I said.

  “You’re doing it already,” she said, stretching her arm across my shoulders. “You’re
here, warm and alive, with me. That’s enough.”

  WE LET EVERYONE ELSE disembark then headed down the curving ramp to the street. Jimmy bought us hot pretzels from a curbside vendor and we wandered back toward the water, over to Battery Park, breaking our pretzels into steaming pieces and eating as we walked, licking mustard from our fingertips. Julia ate the entire thing and a piece of mine. We found a couple of empty benches and sat gazing across the gray water at Staten Island. I handed out cigarettes to Molly and Jimmy.

  “I hear they’ve started laying the foundation for the Freedom Tower,” Jimmy said.

  “It’s about time,” Rose said.

  “Are the families still fighting over the memorial?” Julia asked, looking at Molly. “I heard people are suing to reopen the search for remains at Fresh Kills.”

  Molly stretched her legs in front of her and leaned over them, running her hands over her knees. “I assume so,” she said. “I haven’t paid much attention to everyone’s big plans. I’m sure people will be suing each other over that memorial fifty years after it’s finished.

  “My folks and I, we’re not involved in any of that. We found what we could of Eddie. We said our good-byes. It needs to be finished for us.”

  “I hope that damn tower at least goes up in our lifetime,” Jimmy said. “I want to see it, a great big middle finger from New York to those savages across the ocean.”

  I rubbed my hand over Molly’s back. “It’ll get done. It won’t go the way anyone has planned. There’ll be delays and mistakes, but it’ll happen. These things take time. They’re complicated.”

  Molly smiled up at me. “You’re exactly right.”

  “Well then, that’s settled. Good work, everyone,” Jimmy said. “I have renewed hope for the future.” He rubbed his hand over his belly. “But as for the present, those pretzels only got my stomach rumbling. Let’s catch a cab to Little Italy and eat ourselves stupid. My treat.”

  Jimmy didn’t wait for an answer, striding off into the park. The rest of us, one by one, turned our backs to Staten Island and followed him toward the vast canyons of the City.

  NOT LONG AFTER SUNDOWN, back at my apartment, jackets and ties abandoned to the back of the couch, Jimmy and I watched the Mets run up an early lead on the Houston Astros. A win lifted them into first place. Jimmy and I both knew it, but neither of us mentioned it. Both of us understood that if we did say anything out loud, a jinx powerful enough to undo all the Mets’ hard work would stream straight from my apartment to Houston and infect the team. It was the girls who made all the noise.

  At their request, we’d stopped at a liquor store on the way home. Molly, Rose, and Julia, shoeless and giggling, flitted about in the kitchen, arguing and experimenting their way to what I knew would be a supremely awful round of martinis. They’d tried to enlist my help, but I refused. I made drinks for a living, I told them. It was hardly what I wanted to do with my last night off before a long weekend of returning favors and covering shifts. I was more than willing to drink bad martinis, I told them, if it meant I could stay rooted to the sofa and watch the game. What I didn’t tell them was how good their laughter sounded floating out of my kitchen, and that the longer they played, the longer I could enjoy the sounds of it.

  During a commercial, Jimmy asked when Julia was headed back to Boston.

  “She’s going back tomorrow, on the train,” I said. “I’m taking her to Penn Station in the morning. She doesn’t have to be back in class till Monday so I asked her to stay for a while, here at the apartment, but she wants that couple of days to settle back in.”

  “Makes sense,” Jimmy said. “I bet both of you feel like you’ve lived a lifetime in the past few days.”

  “For sure.”

  “When will you guys see each other again?” Jimmy asked.

  “Soon. She’s coming back in two weeks. We’ll spend the weekend trying to get things going with clearing out and selling the house.”

  “Sounds grim,” Jimmy said. “You’ll need to relax. Call us up. We’ll take you out to dinner.” He bumped me with his shoulder. “Bring Molly. Think she’ll be available?”

  “Oh,” I said, smiling, “I get the feeling she will be.”

  “So she’s really getting rid of David?” Jimmy asked.

  “She is indeed. She figures he’ll be relieved more than anything else. They’ve been just going through the motions for a long time. They’ve been on life support too long. It’s past time to pull the plug.”

  “Strange choice of metaphors,” Jimmy said.

  Somebody knocked hard on my door.

  “Pizza’s here,” Molly yelled from the kitchen.

  “Heard that,” I said, standing. Jimmy dug for his wallet. “I got this,” I said.

  To my surprise, it was Waters at the door, and he wasn’t holding a pizza.

  “Howya doin’, Junior?” he said. “Nice work at the funeral today.”

  “Afternoon, Sheriff. Thanks for coming.”

  “No problem.”

  I realized he was still standing in the hallway. “Come in. We’re just relaxing a little, waiting on a couple pizzas.” I stepped aside and let him in.

  The kitchen had gone quiet. The three girls stood motionless in the doorway, Julia with a dish towel wrapped around her hand. Jimmy stood and walked over to Waters.

  “Jimmy McGrath,” he said, extending his hand. “I’m an old friend of the family.”

  “Detective Nat Waters,” the detective said, shaking hands. “Me, too.”

  “You know my sister, Julia,” I said. “That’s Jimmy’s girlfriend, Rose, and my friend Molly.”

  Waters nodded. He still hadn’t come far enough inside the apartment for me to close the door. “Detective Purvis sends his regrets,” he said. “He had every intention of coming to the funeral. It was me that advised against it.”

  “Tell the detective we appreciate the kind thoughts,” I said.

  “Do,” Julia said.

  “I will,” said Waters.

  “I’m guessing that’s not what you came to tell us,” I said.

  “Well, that’s true. If I could talk to you and Julia alone for a minute. I have some news.”

  “Come in and sit down,” I said, settling my hand on his shoulder. I guided him into the room and closed the door. “We have martinis, I think.”

  “No martinis for me,” Waters said. “All due respect, this is really a family-only conversation we need to have.”

  “You caught someone,” Julia said.

  “We know who did it,” Waters said. He was sweating, fidgety. He pulled out a handkerchief and dabbed at his forehead. In fact, he looked slightly sick. Not at all like a sheriff who’d got his man. It made me nervous. I wished for a moment that I’d been alone in the apartment when he arrived. But it wouldn’t have changed the facts.

  “There’s nothing you can’t tell us in front of our friends,” I said.

  I looked at Julia. She nodded, stepping away from Molly and Rose and into the living room. “We’re gonna tell them exactly what you tell us,” she said, “as soon as you leave, anyway.”

  Waters shook his head. “Have it your way.”

  “Out with it,” Julia said. “Please.”

  “It was a mistake,” Waters said. “It was a bad hit.” He stopped.

  My jaw dropped. I heard Julia gasp. “Whadda you mean a mistake?” I asked.

  Waters squirmed. “Turns out I wasn’t wrong about the gambling, but it wasn’t your father that was supposed to be shot.” He walked into the middle of the room, looking at his hands as if he were still putting the pieces together. “Apparently there’s a less than upright South Shore bookie that looks a lot like your father and frequents the same deli.” He looked around the room at all of us. “I don’t know what to tell you. It was an accident.”