Potter's Field

by Rob Hart

  Once she’s put the tops back on, she takes a sip, makes a face, like it’s still a little too hot, and settles into her seat. Stares out the window. I wonder if I should start talking but I think I’ve said enough.

  “You wouldn’t know this,” she says. “You were just a baby. But your father said almost the exact same thing to me when he got the call. You know, you take the exam and sometimes you wait years for a spot to open up. He had been driving oil trucks at the time. The day before he went to the academy he took me out to dinner and he told me that if I didn’t want him to do it, to say the word, and he wouldn’t.”

  She looks at me. Her lip quivers but she forces it into a smile.

  “How could I say no?” she asks. “That’s who he was. It was his dream. It wasn’t a fair question because if I told him not to do it, he would have resented me. But the truth is, I didn’t want to say no. I admired that about him. Your father was such a good man.” She squeezes her eyes, pushing out some tears. “And so are you. Even if you can be a bit of a dunce.”

  I laugh to keep from crying. “Ma…”

  “Just because I didn’t say no to your father doesn’t mean I wasn’t afraid,” she says. “I was afraid all the time. Every time he left the house, I was worried it might be the last time I saw him. And then one day…” She puts her hand to her face, hides her eyes from me. Takes a second. “Then one day, it was.”

  She takes a sip of coffee, looks back out the window.

  “I’m not going to say no to you,” she says. “I admire that you want to help people. Even if I’m afraid. Even if I think this is a little… stranger than the path your father chose. I’m not going to say no. I can come around. But I need you to make me a promise, right here, right now. Promise me you will be careful. And you will pursue this like a real job. No more of this amateur nonsense. And, dammit, you will stop lying to me.”

  “Yeah, Ma,” I tell her. “Of course. I promise. And I’m sorry… I wish I had told you all this sooner…”

  She takes a long sip of her coffee, peering at me over the top. She puts down the cup and smirks. “I have a surprise for you, you know. Not even sure you deserve it.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Come to the house,” she says. “Maybe I’ll be in a better mood after dinner.”

  When I step onto the back deck I feel fifty pounds heavier in my gut from lasagna and garlic bread and salad, and about a hundred pounds lighter in the region of my conscience. Not that my mom is all the way there yet, but by the end of dinner we were talking the way we used to.

  The snow has stopped. There’s a dusting on the deck. As we walk across it to the garage my mom asks, “So what happened to the girl in Portland. Ruby? Sapphire?”

  “Crystal.”

  “I knew it was a stripper name.”

  I turn to throw an eyebrow at her and she smiles. She remembered it was Crystal. Her memory is relentless. She just wanted to make the joke.

  “It didn’t work out,” I tell her.

  “That’s too bad,” my mom says. “I could tell from the way you talked about her, you really liked her.”

  The garage door is an ancient, heavy monstrosity. I have to wiggle the key to get it to unlock, and then nearly throw my back out getting it open. It’s a wonder my mom even gets inside. The door slams into place and I flip the light switch.

  My dad’s old Chrysler LeBaron convertible sits in the light like a dull brown slab on wheels. It doesn’t really show its age. Still in pretty good shape. His first car, and he never wanted to part with it. Since he died my mom and I have pretended it wasn’t here.

  Because right now, looking at it, I’m smacked with memories of driving out to Coney Island, out to Long Island, up to the Catskills. Summer with top down, wind in our hair, my dad blasting Springsteen and Led Zeppelin and Guns and Roses. I can smell the saltwater, the mountain air. I can get lost in moments like that.

  “Does this even still run?” I ask.

  “Just had it looked at,” my mom says, standing behind me, holding up the keys. “Needed a new battery and had to do a little work on the engine.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “He’d have wanted you to have it. But when you were living in Manhattan, there was never a reason to give it to you.”

  I take the keys. I don’t know what to say. I’m so tired of taking buses everywhere. It’ll be nice to have something I can drive around.

  More than that, it’s nice to have something of my father’s.

  I pull my mom into a hug.

  She feels so fragile.

  After a moment I realize that’s actually me.

  I kiss her on the cheek, say, “Thank you.”

  “I love you Ashley. You’re so much like your father. For better and worse.”

  “I’ll take that,” I tell her.

  My old room is untouched. The door has been closed so long there isn’t even really much dust. Frozen in time. Wood paneling, a twin bed bowed a little in the middle. A dresser stuffed with some old t-shirts. A small television and an Xbox, the controllers sitting in front of it, the cords carefully wound up. I suspect that was my mom. I wouldn’t have left them like that.

  All the clothes in my bag are dirty. I root around in the dresser, find an old pair of jeans and a t-shirt. They’re musty but they’ll do.

  In the corner of the room is a small green plastic box. On the top is my name, painted like a cartoon. A gift from my aunt. I open it up, find the detritus of my life. Random odds and ends I didn’t want to throw away but didn’t have any use for.

  My first cell phone. A set of darts. A few dollar chips from a casino in Atlantic City. A USB drive. Who knows what the hell is on that.

  There’s a pile of pictures. Me and my friends acting like idiots. Our features washed out by the cheap, harsh flashes of disposable cameras. My face is slimmer, facial hair lighter. I almost don’t recognize myself. I look happy in a way I don’t ever remember being happy, and after a few minutes of flipping through them I’m surprised to realize that many of them are from when after dad died.

  There are pictures of him, too. I kept a few with me, while I was traveling, but here are more: in the back yard, building the deck, barbecuing. For a long time now I’ve felt like he was getting lost in a fog. Like I could still see him but his features were growing dimmer with time. Seeing these makes it all come rushing back. The way he used to smoke cigars but never around me because he didn’t want to set a bad influence, but I could always tell, because he would smell like them. The way he would ruffle my hair when he was proud of me. He never said it. The ruffle said it.

  The way he loved me like I was the best thing he ever did.

  I put the pictures away. When I find a new place, I’ll bring them. They’ll be nice to have.

  Time for bed. Tomorrow, I get to work fixing things.

  I glance at my phone, to check the time, and realize it’s off. Turn it on and I have three voicemails.

  One from Bombay. One from an unknown number. One from Timmy.

  The one from Bombay is a hang-up. My heart dips.

  The unknown number is Reese.

  “Got an interesting call about you today. Come by my office tomorrow. I’d like to have a chat.”

  Then:

  “Ash, man, listen. Can you come by tomorrow? We need to talk. Look, I fucked up. I know that. But, you know, I’ve made a fucking wreck of my life… I want to make good. I want to make it up to you. I know I can barely do that, but I found something out. Something important. You really need to hear this.”

  There’s a pause. I think the call has been disconnected.

  But then it comes back.

  “A lot of people are going to die,” he says. “Come by tomorrow, okay?”

  After two hours of not sleeping I get in the car, wince as I start the engine, afraid it’ll wake my mom. But my cell doesn’t light up by the end of the block so I figure I’m in the clear.

  The roads are empty and I make quick work to t
he middle of the island. I park the car on an abandoned service road running alongside the expressway.

  I wanted to come sooner. I didn’t because it’s hard to get to without a car. That’s what I tell myself. It’s probably not the whole truth. I feel a little bad coming here without my mom, but I’m sure we’ll come here together in the near future. Right now I want to be alone.

  The car locked up, I start walking. Sprawling before me are the rolling hills of the former Fresh Kills landfill. The only thing people outside of Staten Island seem to know about it. That we’ve got the biggest dump in the world. When I was a kid, you’d come out to the mall in the middle of summer and you would have to run from your car to get inside, the smell was so overwhelming. Great masses of seagulls feeding on the trash seemed to blot out the sun. People said it was one of the only man-made structures besides the Great Wall of China you could see from space, though I’m not sure I believe that.

  Not that it’s still active—Giuliani closed it back in the 90s as a gift to the local Republican lawmakers who got him elected. One of the only positive things that rat-faced fuck ever did for this city.

  When the landfill was slated to be closed, someone decided to turn it into a park. Supposedly it’s going to be three times bigger than Central Park when it’s done. The mounds of garbage will be capped and vented. The area will be remediated so that people who visit it won’t even know they’re standing on old diapers and rotting takeout and the corpses of buried mobsters.

  It sounds crazy, but a lot of this city is built on trash. Ellis Island was constructed on top of debris dug out for the subway system. The FDR Drive was built on the rubble of European cities bombed during World War II, which ships crossing the Atlantic used as ballast. Battery Park City was built with dirt excavated from the site of the original World Trade Center.

  None of this city is new.

  The dump was supposed to stay closed, but after 9/11 the city carted debris here to sift through. Not the most dignified thing, but there were sorting facilities and plenty of space.

  The question is, the question always is, what to do with the remains?

  Workers sifted for anything down to a quarter of an inch. But mixed in with the dirt and the rubble were microscopic pieces of people, vaporized when the planes slammed into the buildings, when the buildings fell.

  They’re still here.

  My dad is still here.

  I find a hole in the fence. Climb through. Set off toward the top of the hill. I know where I’m going. I’ll know it when I find it. I visited it with my mom a few years ago.

  My dad is here. But maybe he’s not. I have no idea where he is. They never found his body. One of his buddies speculated it could be he got too high up in the building, where he was assisting with the evacuation. So when the tower collapsed he turned to dust.

  Here, but not here.

  A woman sued the city over this. Her son died. She thought it unfitting that a landfill be his final resting place. She said the city should sift through the rest of dirt and move everything over to the memorial down by the new Freedom Tower. The city refused to do it. Said it was too much money to spend on something you couldn’t see.

  I’m not sure how I feel. Looking at it dispassionately I see their point. It’s a few metric tons of dirt with microscopic particles.

  But it’s a woman’s son, her family, and how the fuck am I supposed to argue with that?

  How can anyone?

  Besides City Hall.

  I stop at the crest. This doesn’t look right. Nearly right but not right enough. I keep walking. Down one hill, up another, the wind pelting me in the wide-open space, threatening to send me tumbling down. I move slow, careful of my footing, trying not to trip in the dark.

  Probably would have been smarter to do this during the day.

  I stop. Rolling hills and trees beyond, snow lit blue by the moon, the Manhattan skyline sparkling in the distance. A cold, clear night. The way the city glows, so sharp and so precious.

  This is it.

  I wipe my nose on the back of my sleeve and stick my hands in my pockets, fall into a sitting position on the hard earth. Take my hand out of my pocket and press it to the ground. Dead grass brittle underneath my fingertips. I would push my fingers into the soil if I could, but I can’t because the ground is frozen. It’s all I can do to press my hand down hard until my palm is flat against the earth. As close to it as I can get.

  “Hey Dad,” I say, the words snatched from my mouth by the wind, barely audible, but still, it doesn’t feel like I’m saying them to myself.

  I see morning coming from a mile away, peering through the venetian blinds and white lace curtain. A few hours of sleep and a little time to think, during which I reached a couple of conclusions.

  The big one is, no more lying to my mom. No matter if it hurts, no matter if it’s painful. No more lying.

  Next: I have to see this thing through.

  Not just because Timmy said the magic words, that people will die. The way he said it felt too damn ominous for me to sit on the sidelines. And anyway, with the current interest the NYPD has in me, I get the sense none of this is going to end for me until it’s over anyway. May as well lean into that.

  Plus, now Ginny is missing. For all the shit that’s gone down between us, she’s my friend. And I won’t abandon her. So, now I’ve got two people to look for.

  My jeans are lying in a bundle on the floor. I fish the now-crumpled list out of the pocket and cross off the first item I’ve actually been able to accomplish.

  Find a place to live?

  Get a job?

  Find Spencer Chavez again

  See my mom

  Check on Crystal

  That feels nice. Not that I foresee a whole lot of progress on the rest. Still no idea where I’m going to live, or how I’m going to make a living. I doubt Reese has had a change of heart given I ended up a suspect in a murder investigation. But she did ask to see me today. Maybe there’s something to be hopeful for. More likely she’s going to yell at me.

  I take a shower. Find my clothes are cleaned and folded, lying in a laundry basket on the living room couch. Get dressed and go into the kitchen where I give my mom a kiss on the head as she reads the newspaper, her hair smelling like Pert shampoo. That smell so entwined with this house, like my childhood in microcosm. Funny the way a smell can do that. Make the past into a set of clothes you can slip on and off.

  As I’m leaving she looks up at me. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

  “I promise I will never lie to you again.”

  “That’s good,” she says. But then she gets what I mean, and she frowns.

  “Don’t worry,” I tell her. “I’ve made it through worse.”

  I give her a smug little smile. She rolls her eyes in response.

  The car feels good, even with a little bit of snow on the ground. It’s not fast and it’s not flashy—even with the top down it’s not that much to look at, like an electric razor from the 70s—but it’s nice to have a car.

  It takes forever to find a spot around Bombay’s apartment. After I do I consider calling ahead, but even if he’s not there, fuck it, I’ll risk it and pick the lock. Hang out until he gets here. It’s not like I actually did the heroin. I fucked up a little, not a whole lot.

  I slap my palm against his door. There’s a shuffle, then the sound of the little metal disc being lifted off the eyehole.

  “Fuck off, bro.”

  “Let me explain.”

  “Nothing to explain.”

  “Goddammit, for all we’ve been through, can you spare me two fucking minutes to tell you what happened?”

  Silence on the other end.

  I’m reaching for my lock pick kit when the door swings open. I expect Bombay to be furious, but he’s not. He’s hurt, his eyes wide and wet and sad, and that’s even worse.

  “You told me you were clean,” he says.

  “I am. Technically. Two minutes.”

  H
e stands aside. Lets me in.

  “Sit,” I tell him.

  He sits on the couch. I remain standing.

  I tell him what happened. The forced OD. That feeling like I wanted more. The stupid decision to bring it into his house. I apologize at various points. He listens, his face a blank expanse of stone. After I’m done he nods slowly.

  Says, “Good.”

  “Are we friends again?”

  “You shouldn’t have brought it here.”

  “I know. I fucked up. Again, I’m sorry.”

  I fall into the couch next to him. We stare at the wall for a few seconds.

  “So what the hell happened to you yesterday?” he asks. “You got arrested?”

  “Let me guess,” I tell him. “My mom called you.”

  “Soon as the cops showed up. She didn’t have your new number but thought I might have been in contact with you.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “I didn’t answer. She left a voicemail. You know I can’t lie to your mom.”

  I run him through the interrogation. When I’m finished he laughs. “How the fuck do you get tied up shit like this, bro?”

  “Everyone’s got a talent.”

  “You’ve got, like, the worst fucking talent. Ever.”

  “I know.”

  “What’s on the docket for today?”

  “This private eye wants to see me,” I tell him. “Not sure why. But I figure I’ll swing by, see what’s what. Then I’m going to see Timmy.”

  “Oh shit, man, Timmy.” He trails off for a second, then nods. “Can I come with?”

  “You know, yeah. That might do Timmy some good. Sure. I’ll go see the detective, then come get you?”

  “Got it.” He looks at his watch. “Also, I’ve got a surprise for you. I mean, I was already in the process of doing it, and after I found the heroin I wasn’t going to fucking give it to you. But knowing what I know now… you got a second?”