by Peter Gadol
Carlo’s first thought was they wanted him to call for help. He rolled down his window as one man approached, and as soon as he had the window part-way down, the man reached in the car and twice depressed the power lock. Before Carlo could react, the second man had opened up the passenger-side and slid in next to Carlo. This second man was pointing a gun at him.
“What do you want,” Carlo asked, “what do you want—do you want the car?”
The man with the gun didn’t respond.
“Take it,” Carlo said and lifted his hands off the steering wheel, and he would have gotten out of the car and bolted if the first man were not standing next to the driver’s-side door and preventing egress.
“What do you want—do you want money?”
The man pressed the gun against the side of Carlo’s ribs, which hurt, and still the man didn’t speak, which only confused Carlo.
“What, my wallet?”
Which was what Carlo reached for—he kept it in his front pocket—but as he did this, his foot began to slip off the brake and he slammed his foot hard against the pedal, which made the man with the gun in the passenger seat jerk forward, his free fist hitting the glove compartment.
“Don’t fuck with me,” the man said and jabbed Carlo in the ribs. “And don’t look at me,” he said. “Don’t look at me.”
But Carlo already had looked at the man, already noted the way his chin drooped left to right, the way his moustache was similarly angled. Already Carlo had taken a good long look: blue eyes, black hair, young, possibly high school-aged, a constellation of moles by his left ear. Carlo turned instead toward the other man still standing on the street, which was when he noticed that while the man wasn’t holding a gun, he had formed a pretend one with his thumb and first two fingers. Bang, bang.
“Put the car in park,” the man with the real gun said, and Carlo obeyed.
“Get out,” the man with the gun said and shoved Carlo toward the door, again with the gun pressed at, into his ribs, but the second man standing next to Carlo’s door still made that impossible—
“Get the fuck out of the fucking car,” the man with the gun yelled, and so Carlo opened his door, which irritated the second man, although he moved aside and grabbed Carlo’s shirt collar when Carlo did climb out of his car. Also the second man clutched Carlo’s right wrist and pulled it behind Carlo’s back, angling it up, painfully so.
The man with the gun slid into the driver’s seat and tossed his weapon to the man now twisting Carlo’s arm, who guided Carlo swiftly in front of the headlights and back toward the freeway underpass. No one drove by on Fletcher, no one on Riverside, although cars could be heard thrumming across the freeway overhead, useless. They stood in a damp dark space, which was when the second man pushed Carlo against the wall.
He said, “Don’t look. Don’t you look.”
Again too late because Carlo and the man restraining him had made what could only be described as extensive eye contact. He could describe both perpetrators, similar in height, weight, youth, eye color, haircut—although the one with the gun now had a smoother shave and no mustache.
“Did he look?” the man back in the car shouted.
“He fucking looked,” the second man shouted back, and he tugged Carlo’s wrist up against his back, which sent a charge down through his elbow and up his shoulder.
Other men got out of the ambush car, its flashers still pulsing, two more men, one from the driver’s side, heavy, gesticulating at the guy behind the wheel in Carlo’s car, and the man from the passenger side, now strutting over to the underpass. There were many men against him and the only way not to look at them would have been for Carlo to close his eyes, but he didn’t want to close his eyes and not know what was happening.
“You shouldn’t have looked,” the second man said, and he pressed the gun against the base of Carlo’s skull. “You fucked up big time, looking.”
If Carlo closed his eyes, he thought, it would represent some kind of capitulation, inaugurating the worst scenario. He didn’t move. His forehead was pressed against the concrete wall. He ached everywhere.
The man who had walked over from the ambush car was saying something like, “Let’s go,” or “Let him go,” or “Go at him,” or “Let me go at him.”
Carlo couldn’t hear well because his head was buzzing, and didn’t dare turn to look now, nor did he close his eyes, and he wanted to throw up. All the rich food. Everything was catching up with him and he became pretty sure he was either going to vomit or defecate.
“He fucking looked,” the man holding the gun said to the man from the ambush car.
“Fuck the fuck, and let’s go,” the man from the other car said.
Carlo was thinking Robbie would never understand what happened tonight, and Carlo never wanted him to know. All that mattered in the world was being held in bed at night—everything else was inconsequential. He wanted to close his eyes. Acid ran through his esophagus into his stomach and his thighs were weak, his knees, calves, and ankles weak, giving in, and he wanted to throw up or shit.
The man holding Carlo was possibly going to break his arm, and also he was lifting his right knee up into Carlo’s buttocks.
Behind them, there was shouting. Behind them: “Let’s go.”
And Carlo let his eyes close. His forehead and cheek were scraped up from being pressed against the concrete. His arm was numb.
“Oh man,” the guy holding him shouted. “Oh man,” he shouted again and released Carlo’s arm and stepped back. “Oh man.”
Something had to give.
“He fucking shitted,” the man who had the gun said.
“Let’s go,” the other man shouted.
“Oh man. That’s disgusting.”
Indeed, Carlo was thinking, disgusting it was. Warm, wrong, infantile, weak.
“Fuck,” the man who had the gun shouted. “He almost shitted on me.”
“Let’s go.”
Carlo didn’t turn to look, but he heard the men running back to the cars. He heard car doors slamming and engines revving. And he did finally turn when the man with the gun and the other man both jumped in the ambush car and the ambush car, the long black sedan, its flashers still on, lurched forward and tore off right onto Riverside, zigzagging as it picked up speed. Then the man who was in Carlo’s car followed them. He shifted the car in gear and he must have hit the gas hard, but the road was slick with drizzle, and as he tried to take Carlo’s car around the corner, he drove directly, definitively into a telephone pole, smashing the right side of the car, the hood folding back like an accordion, small bits of glass flying everywhere.
From where he was standing beneath the underpass, Carlo didn’t have a good view, but he could see the airbag deflating, a flower in time-lapse decline. There was some smoke in the air.
The ambush car skidded in reverse. Then there were three men on the street, opening Carlo’s car on the left, pulling the man out from behind the wheel like the car might explode—Carlo was waiting for an explosion. The man looked injured the way he held his shoulder and limped over to the ambush car, dragging a foot, and then all the men were in the car and they zoomed off again, doors shutting while the car was in motion.
Carlo doubled over and wanted to throw up, but now nothing came. He waited a moment. No one drove by. He wasn’t sure he wanted anyone to drive by because he was wet, he was fetid. He hobbled over to the wreck. No way could he drive the car. The right side looked like it had been welded to the telephone pole. It was wrecked.
His cell phone was in the car, its red light blinking. The message was from Robbie, feeling worse, running a fever. Could Carlo pick up some ginger ale on his way home?
The police came. They called a tow truck. They began to take Carlo’s statement, enough information to post an all-pointsbulletin. Every time a cop took a step toward Carlo, Carlo took a step back. He was mortified. They wanted to take him back to the station. He said he didn’t want to stink up their car, how could he ride with
them? They said don’t worry about it, it wouldn’t be the first time, they had some plastic. Carlo wanted to change his clothes. They said they’d give him something to slip into at the station.
At the police station, in the men’s room, Tom Field stood at a sink, washing his hands, leaning toward the mirror, staring into his own bloodshot eyes.
However, this wasn’t when they spoke. First Carlo cleaned himself up and changed into the one-size prison overalls he’d been given, and then he went to look at albums of mug shots and identified no one. The car was dusted for prints, although Carlo knew his assailants would never be found. He was told there might be a few more questions for him, if he could hold on, and then he’d be given a ride home, but it was a busy night for crime in the city and he might need to wait. If he wanted fresh air, he could step out back, which was where he saw Tom again, smoking a cigarette. Tom offered Carlo a drag, which Carlo accepted. Carlo coughed as he handed the cigarette back.
“What are you in for?” Tom asked, gesturing toward Carlo’s prison fatigues.
Carlo’s arms were crossed tightly across his chest as if he were also wearing a straight-jacket.
“Oh, what’s wrong, baby?” Tom asked.
Carlo had the sense he was crying but no tears came. The back of the station was a rudely illuminated patio enclosed by a cinderblock wall. There were two metal chairs and a pail of sand for butts. He couldn’t speak. Tom smoked another cigarette and waved toward the chairs as if the patio were his parlor, Please. They both sat. Tom talked. He explained that earlier that night, he was in the process of being kicked out of a bar and engaged in a heated discussion with the bouncers when a squad car cruised by. No charges had been pressed but the police were detaining Tom until he sobered up enough to drive. Tom talked about nothing in particular—he was talking for the sake of talking. About Southern manners versus manners elsewhere in the country. How sobriety was a relative term. The way Los Angeles men were always looking to see who better was going to walk into the bar. He hated Los Angeles. Secretly he liked it, too. The old hound dog hills and the good-natured sun.
“Anyway,” Tom said. “So what happened to you?”
Carlo told him. Now he was crying.
“It’s over now,” Tom said. “All in the past, baby, you’ll be fine.”
Normally Carlo would have bristled at being called baby by someone he didn’t know (or for that matter by anyone), but at that moment, there was something calming about it. He liked the smoked-out tone of Tom’s voice. And they talked some more, Tom relating some story of his own about how once a long time ago he’d been mugged or fended off a band of hooligans. Tom was wearing a green windbreaker with two tan vertical stripes down the left side. He was fidgeting with the zipper, pulling it up, pulling it down. Up, down.
Then Tom said, “I bet you wish you’d had a gun.”
Carlo gave an automatic response, that he didn’t believe in guns, to which Tom responded guns weren’t something you believed in—guns were something you kept handy to blow away anyone who tried to mess with you. And they talked more about it, and Carlo said he wasn’t interested in purchasing a weapon for self-defense, but if he were, hypothetically, how would he, how would one go about it? Tom said he’d looked into it, recently, although he didn’t say why. It wasn’t that complicated and he knew where to go.
Carlo was still shaking and Tom took the liberty of reaching his arm around him, which like being called baby, under normal circumstances Carlo likely would not have abided. Yet Tom’s embrace allowed Carlo to relax.
Because Carlo was shivering, Tom unzipped his windbreaker, took it off, and said, “Here.”
At first, Carlo didn’t take the jacket.
“Here, here,” Tom insisted, and so Carlo put on the windbreaker and zipped it up. It was tight over the baggy overalls, and Carlo felt like he was costumed in a nylon bodice with canvas pantaloons. So be it, he was a little warmer. Tom had been wearing only a white T-shirt beneath the jacket but didn’t appear at all cold.
He fired off questions about Carlo’s life: Was he born in Southern California? Oh no, where then? What brought him to Los Angeles and what did he do here? How long had he and Robbie been together? No way, wow—there’s hope for the rest of us. Did they ever travel anywhere, where? Did they throw dinner parties? Did they garden? Did they read aloud books to each other in bed? And so on. In this way, Tom drew Carlo out. Carlo may have turned the interview around once or twice but mostly he responded to Tom’s queries, and gradually he stopped shaking so much.
When an officer at last was ready to take Carlo home, he and Tom stood, and as they stood, hugged awkwardly.
Carlo began to unzip the green windbreaker, and Tom said, “No, keep it for now. I’ll give you my address. You can mail it back whenever.” Inside the station, he wrote down his address on the back of a flyer for the neighborhood watch.
“Thank you,” Carlo said. “And thank you for talking to me.”
“No,” Tom said, “thank you for talking to me,” and Carlo never knew what he meant.
At home, Carlo slipped out of his overalls in the entry. He stashed them in the front hall closet with the plan to dispose of them the next day. He would hide Tom’s windbreaker in the garage until he had a chance to mail it to the Valley. As he got in bed, he noticed the sleep-inducing cold remedy bottle on Robbie’s night table. Robbie didn’t wake up and in the morning was still sick, and Carlo explained he hadn’t seen the phone message about the ginger ale until it was too late. And after only the merest hesitation, he also reported he’d been in a bad accident, thus the scrapes on his forehead and cheek, the red abrasions like bracelets around his wrist. He had been very lucky and was otherwise fine, although the car was destroyed for good. Robbie was alarmed, relieved, fevered. They would worry about the car later, but right now Carlo said he’d take the other one to the store and get ginger ale and so forth and Robbie went back to sleep.
A random act. The wrong place at the wrong time in a life of mostly being in the right place at the right time. Carlo could not undo what had happened to him, but he could protect Robbie from undue worry. Robbie in all his optimism, his trust, his naïve trust, Robbie was Carlo’s raft, and Carlo wanted him to remain precisely the way he was, unanchored, buoyant. And so Carlo decided he would live with his secret.
If Carlo had lied to the police Sunday morning, he explained, it was because it seemed neither the time nor place for Robbie to learn the truth about the carjacking and the circumstances under which Carlo met Tom at the police station. The truth could come out one day when there was less to cope with, only the living, not the dead.
• • •
THERE WAS OF COURSE MORE TO THE STORY about Tom Field that Carlo could have and should have disclosed. However, while he was offering his account, Detective Michaels’ neck reddened and she tapped the table with a steadily increasing tempo, so Carlo chose to stop there, hoping it would be enough.
“Presumably you don’t wish your partner to discover certain aspects of the situation here, which is why you haven’t been the most forthcoming,” the detective said.
“That’s exactly it,” Carlo said.
“And so you lied to us.”
“That’s why I came in. And I do apologize.”
“Is there anything else? After that night in April, did you ever meet up with Mr. Field again before last Saturday?”
Carlo blinked. The detective waited.
He blinked again and said, “No,” and so one more time, he lied to the police. He’d come in to set the record straight but ended up mangling it even more.
“Maybe, say, you had an affair with Mr. Field all summer long,” the detective suggested.
“Oh, no, no,” Carlo said and chuckled uncomfortably.
“And you certainly didn’t want your partner to find out about it—”
“That’s not the case, Detective.”
“Finally it was more convenient for Mr. Field not to be around any more. He might say
something inappropriate.”
Carlo’s face was hot, he was blushing.
“He was quite intoxicated, you’ve reported. But not so much,” Detective Michaels said, “that he couldn’t tie a rope to a tree and tie a rope around his neck, jump, and hang himself. Unless, of course, he had help with all of this.”
Again the detective pinched her nose.
Sunday the police had asked if the men heard anyone besides Tom in the house and they had not because they were asleep, and Carlo was asked when he took the sleeping pill, and he’d replied, “Not long after we went to bed.” This was the second lie he was hoping to shed, but now, given the detective’s line of inquiry, he didn’t think he should. It was best to keep the matter simple.
“Perjury is not a good thing to be getting into,” Detective Michaels said. “Obstruction, et cetera—not good at all.”
Carlo crossed his legs. His arms were folded, which looked defensive. He unfolded his arms, uncrossed his legs.
“You’ve nothing else to add,” the detective said.
“No,” Carlo said, perhaps a little too quickly.
“You realize you’ve made more work for me. We’ll need to corroborate your statement, you understand. As if I don’t have enough on my plate.”
Carlo apologized again, but shouldn’t he be given some credit for coming in to the station voluntarily? It didn’t matter. If you lied to the law once, chances were every subsequent statement you gave would be sieved through the original prevarication.
