The Midnight Road

by Tom Piccirilli

  Marianne used to climb out of bed at two in the morning, after they’d finished making love, and stand there watching him for a moment. He’d watch the shimmer of sweat drying on her belly, a light salt drift fading to the right, thinking, What’d I do now? She’d run her hands through her hair and shake her curls out of her eyes, the fire building in them until she’d say, “I want to go out.” He’d look at the clock and she’d go, “Not now, just once in a while.” He always promised he’d take her somewhere nice, whenever she wanted, but the only time she ever seemed to care was at 2 A.M. when she was pissed off at him. It got so he’d get a little tentative about touching her in bed, knowing beforehand how things were bound to end.

  “You’re my unique story,” Jessie Gray said. “The one I need to tell.”

  Her expression seemed carefully conceived. It hit the right amount of self-confidence and dedication. She turned her face and gave him the entire good side. She was trying to work him from both angles—she could tell his story better than anyone, and he should allow her to do so because she was cute. Flynn realized he wasn’t social for a pretty good reason.

  “Actually, it’s my story,” Flynn said. “And I don’t want it told yet.”

  “But why not? You’ve read my work, you know I’m capable of presenting you in an honest, positive light.”

  “You already know the reason,” he said.

  She leaned back and cocked her head, maybe reappraising him. He got a very real sense that she wanted to be a broadcaster one day and was practicing all her moves in front of the camera she imagined was always trained on her. “Because it’s not finished?”

  “Because a woman is dead,” he said. His voice came down harder than he expected, sounding very much like the voice of his father. The voice of Danny when he got upset. He wanted to add, There’s more murder to come.

  “Don’t you understand? That’s what makes it so fascinating.”

  “Not to me. I find it infuriating.”

  “Just as I find you, Mr. Flynn!” She’d stepped outside of the lithe, silky facade. He saw the real Jessie Gray there for a second. Miffed but with a hint of respect. Like everybody, she liked the ones she couldn’t run roughshod over. She was interested in the men who gave her a hard time.

  She gave a little-girl huff and tried again. “What’s your personal journey been?”

  His lips framed the words but it took a while before he repeated them. “Personal journey?”

  “Yes,” she said. She waited. They both waited. It was the kind of impasse that could keep warring nations at bay for decades. He didn’t want to wait that long. “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

  “How have you changed?”

  “Since when?”

  “Since the incident.”

  “You’ll have to be more specific than that. My life is made up of incidents. So’s yours, by the way. So’s everyone’s.”

  “I believe you know what I’m talking about.”

  He really didn’t. She could mean the crash and the comeback or Angela Soto’s blood in his face or getting Harry Arnold to cough up the truth about why Grace Brooks died. The world had grown more compact with episodes.

  “Remember what I said about precision,” he told her.

  He stared at her. She was the kind of woman who always had guys sniffing around her but very few who ever made it onto her radar. He knew he wasn’t actually there yet. The story was, but he wasn’t. He could see why she’d had two bad marriages and why the husbands had both bailed in less than a year. He was already getting fed up with her, which was maybe why he was starting to get interested too. It was easy finding the wrong women when you went looking for them.

  “Tell me about your brother.”

  “I’d rather not,” he said, but he could feel the memories already surging forward. His mind buzzed with trying to put them in the correct order. Jessie Gray had opened the slit and now he wouldn’t be able to hold everything inside. It was another weakness. The need to always think and talk about his dead brother.

  She watched him, her features conveying a kind of incidental sadness. She was giving him the look that his mother used to give him every time his brother’s name came up. It was encouraging and embarrassing. It put a stitch in his side.

  “Tell me about Patricia Lee Waltz.”

  It had been so long since he’d heard the name spoken aloud that at first it didn’t register. It took a couple of seconds to hit him. She was saying another name now but he couldn’t quite hear. He knew she’d repeat it enough times that he’d eventually get it. He thought maybe he should get into therapy, he still had a lot of shit hiding out in his darkest spots. And that wasn’t even counting the dead talking dog.

  The other name was Emma. Emma Waltz. The girl flashed in his mind and he almost let out a yelp. Sometimes she came through right in his face, like she was about four inches from him. When she paid him a visit, she got way the fuck up close.

  He said, “Why do you want to know about Patricia?”

  “Your family went through a lot back then.”

  “Families go through a lot all the time.”

  “But—”

  She finally noted the look on his face. He was glad she was starting to take things seriously. She tried another tack and continued. “Do you see that what you’re doing for the CPS is in some way paying for his sins?”

  “No one can pay for someone else’s sins,” he said. “We’re responsible for our own. I do what I can to help because it’s what I do. Not because I’m trying to make up for my brother’s mistakes.”

  “He killed a young woman.”

  Flynn nearly argued the point, so strong was his love for Danny. The reality seeped into him second by second, growing larger until the truth of it nearly crushed the breath from him. Emma Waltz’s nose was almost touching his own. Her eyes were locked on his.

  “He got her killed,” Flynn said, his voice hoarse, as if he hadn’t spoken for weeks, “yes, he did.”

  EIGHT

  He would never escape the smile of his brother. Danny drew him in. Danny would always draw him into the mysterious harbors of his own history.

  Flynn struggled to contain his thoughts and keep them restricted to the safest memories. His mind would tentatively reach out along the avenues of pain, inching along, picking up speed, until he was racing toward them again.

  Flynn awoke that morning to find his mother seated on the side of his bed, her hands resting lightly on her legs, shoulders slumped and her chin up. It was the position she often took when Danny called to say he’d been nabbed by the cops again. She’d hang up and sit on the bed and let loose a sigh that filled the house like a hurricane. For some reason, it always made Flynn smile.

  Danny worked freelance delivery, finding jobs mostly out of the Pennysaver. So long as it would fit in the Charger, he’d haul it out as far as Atlantic City. He carried car parts, cases of sunglasses, vitamins, printing materials, birthday balloons, paintings and even shipments of live bait. Crates of nightcrawlers that he’d bring up to City Island in the Bronx for the fishing tournament every summer.

  Most of the jobs were sucker runs and hardly paid enough to cover gas, but it gave him something to put down on his taxes. At night, he’d race up and down Ocean Parkway, Deer Park Avenue, Sunrise Highway, dragging down at the beaches and out at Airport Road.

  Danny must’ve been as gut-hooked by the past as Flynn was. What tied Flynn to his brother also tied Danny to their father. It was a part of their genetic makeup, this need to skip backwards a few decades. Flynn remembered their old man pretty well. A couple of images stayed with him all the time. A smiling guy always with a cigarette in his mouth, propping Flynn on his lap to watch black-and-white movies on the late show. Memories came at him sideways. He’d be at the Paradigm watching Edward G. Robinson on the screen, and his old man would be right there with him.

  His father worked the graveyard shift at the L.I.R.R. train yard. He slept all day and got up as the su
n was setting. The only time he had to share with Flynn was after nightfall. Something about the dark theaters brought his father close.

  The old man had a call in his blood that turned him around to stare behind him. He had photo albums of his own father off the boat from Ireland. Pictures of a cop walking a beat in Brooklyn, posing in front of apple stands and playfully chasing kids through open fire hydrants. Danny had inherited that blood. After the old man went to the yard, Danny would page through the albums looking at photos of their father decked out in his fifties leather jacket, black boots, tight jeans and T-shirt, with a greased up D.A. and a cigarette hanging from his lip. A different girl slung across him on every page. Posing in front of a souped ’58 Comet.

  Anytime Danny talked about dying, he said it would be behind the wheel. The idea ramped him up, let him embrace death and stave it off at the same time. Too cool to go out of the game any other way but with the engine roaring.

  He knew his doom was waiting for him in the Charger. Flynn knew his own death would be in it as well. He realized it even back then when he was ten. In school they’d ask what he wanted to be when he grew up and he’d answer that he didn’t care so long as he could drive. In art class the teacher gave an assignment to draw something outside the window: the flagpole, the football field, a plane in the sky. Flynn would use up all the orange and yellow crayons drawing cars exploding into fireballs. The school counselor got into it. There was talk of taking him to a child psychologist. Flynn’s mother sighed.

  Common urges ruled the home. Danny would invite his straight-haired girlfriends back to the house while the old man was snoring and their mother was at work. Sometimes the girls were supposed to be babysitting their little brothers or sisters, and Flynn would have to entertain the kids. They’d watch television or play Wiffle Ball in the backyard. Flynn would feed them peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. If he really liked the kids, he’d let them read his comic books. Danny and the girl would come out of his bedroom and the old man’s snoring would rattle the paintings on the wall. The girl would have pink cheeks and look proud of herself. Danny would look a trifle bored and expectant. They’d grab the little brother or sister and move out the front door like a family of prospective home buyers. Danny would give Flynn a wink that made Flynn’s heart swell although he didn’t know why.

  Their father would wake up with a grunting cough that grew until he was spasming on the bed. Nobody knew, except maybe him, that he was already dying of lung cancer. He’d never spend a minute in a doctor’s office.

  Danny never got along with the old man, but at least there was no real tension. Just a mild indifference that every so often became barbed with a sneer or a sarcastic comment. Most of it went over Flynn’s head. He knew discouraging words were being exchanged but since no one ever seemed to get upset he didn’t know what was expected of him. Only his mother showed small signs of dismay. She’d ladle soup hard. She’d bang the dishes. She’d stare out the kitchen window into the backyard and call on saints Flynn had never heard of. She held a lot in her gut.

  Danny brought a date to the old man’s funeral.

  He was decked in a black suit, thin black tie, white shirt with the cuffs shot, and she was in a mandarin red paisley dress. They were going out someplace afterward. She wore broad sunglasses that hid most of her face even though it was a cloudy day. She was black and had a pretty big fro. She held Danny’s hand and frequently kissed his neck. There was a murmur among the elderly Irish. The priest didn’t look happy. Their mother acted like she’d expected something like this. Flynn cried a lot and tried to understand all the mystifying rituals. He failed and it was a failure that would continue to rear inside him whenever he passed a cemetery. Danny and the girl dogged out the minute they threw their flowers in the grave. Flynn never saw her again.

  The girlfriends and their little brothers and sisters breezed past Flynn in vague succession. He did the job he was implicitly given. He entertained the kids. Danny couldn’t control himself, didn’t even make an attempt to pretend that the girls meant anything to him. Flynn felt his brother was self-destructing through intimacy.

  Patricia Lee Waltz was somehow different.

  Flynn recognized her as having been to the house before, but Danny appeared to think it was her first time. She didn’t just want to hop in the sack. She moved around the house asking questions. Pointing out photographs and saying, “Who’s this? When was this taken?” It threw Danny off. He’d somehow forgotten and misread her.

  He didn’t know how to handle the situation and actually looked around trying to implore someone. Flynn was on the floor setting up Candyland. Patricia’s little sister Emma was a scaled-down version of her, with the same straight, long hair they had to constantly keep parting like curtains so they could see out.

  Flynn picked up on his brother’s dismay. He didn’t fully understand it but he noticed the tension in Danny growing. He wasn’t answering any of Patricia’s questions but that didn’t stop her, so she just kept asking more. Emma started playing the game without Flynn. She was taking his turn to pick his card and move his piece.

  Since the old man’s funeral, the house seemed infused with their father. His presence filled the rooms to an enormous degree, until you could smell his breath. Flynn found himself talking aloud, answering questions he thought the old man was asking him.

  Patricia wanted to see Danny’s room, really wanted to see it. She looked at his sports trophies, the local newspaper clippings yellowing on the corkboard, and asked why he didn’t get a scholarship to college. She asked if it was his knees. He never answered. She checked the nicks and dents in his bedframe. She pulled novels down off his shelves and wanted to discuss themes, characters, ambiguous endings. Her favorite book was Albert Camus’ The Stranger. His opinion seemed to matter. She had corn-flower blue eyes that were bright with a monstrous attention. Danny drifted from her and she put her arm out to grab his jacket. He fought for footing and lost. She pulled him closer. She told him she was pregnant.

  Emma turned a card and giggled. She rolled the die and slid pieces across the board, enjoying herself. Flynn heard his dead father cough.

  In the front window, glare from the sun framed the Charger at the curb with a wreath of golden fire. Flynn had to turn his head aside. Emma glanced at him as if to ask what was the matter. He looked back and the day had dimmed. She touched his shoulder and some kind of protective urge overcame him. He gently took her wrist. He didn’t know why.

  Stumbling into the room, Patricia wore a look of amused irritation. She went for Danny’s arm again and he shrugged free once more. Danny’s hand moved like a beaten animal slinking closer and closer. He took her elbow and guided her through the living room, giving her little jerks and shoves. She smiled more broadly and let out a giggle.

  Flynn knew it was time to leave. It had somehow become the only thing to do. He started collecting the cards and pieces even as Emma moved around the board. She didn’t really mind and began to help him. He folded the board and put it back in the box and put the lid on. The old man was still coughing. Maybe he’d never stop no matter how long he was in the ground.

  Danny said, “Let’s go for a ride.”

  They drove out east toward the Hamptons, Danny opening it up on Sunrise Highway and hitting triple digits. The girls loved it and screamed with excitement. He squinted and brooded the whole time, occasionally catching Flynn’s eye in the rearview.

  Flynn felt a dark and trembling sensation thrumming through him like a black nerve. He put his hand on the back of Patricia Lee Waltz’s neck and she half turned in the seat to smile at him. She gestured for him to move closer and she pressed her fingers to his lips, outlining them, smoothing them. Flynn thought he must be in love.

  He knew the facts about sex and pregnancy. He didn’t fully believe them, but he knew them. His father had given him the crude information one afternoon while they watched Rita Hayworth and Glenn Ford twisting through their love-hate relationship in Gilda. Gilda w
as supposed to be sleeping all around Buenos Aires while Glenn Ford kept the truth from her nutty husband. For some reason, the old man took this as the perfect launchpad for explaining the wet and awful realities of lovemaking and birth. Flynn was annoyed and wanted to watch the movie.

  They picked up a cop somewhere in West Hampton, where Danny gunned it through the area making sure the engine was roaring and could be heard by everyone in their mansions. He kept glancing at Patricia’s belly while she commented on the walled-in acres of the estates. Emma appeared oblivious to everything going on in the car and she continued a steady silence. The weight of it pressed in on top of Flynn. He told her to buckle up.

  The cruiser fell in behind them and hit his cherry top. The siren was almost loud enough to drown out the Charger’s rumbling cry. Danny burned rubber through a red light, narrowly missing a couple of well-dressed women in the crosswalk. Their hair swept up across their eyes and they spun on their heels. Everyone on the side walk stopped and looked. For a moment it felt like time had quit grinding across the world for everyone but them. A terrible rush of apprehension filled Flynn, but he didn’t know what he was afraid of. It wasn’t the speed. It wasn’t because he thought Danny would crash. He’d never crash, he was incapable of it.

  The cruiser peeled after them and Patricia braced her feet against the dash, biting back a groan of terror. Danny turned around, looked at Flynn, and grinned for the first time that day. Finally, he was having fun.

  Patricia yelled for him to stop and pull over. She started rapping him in the arm as they sped around traffic, hitting side streets and careening up on lawns. Danny’s lips were upturned in a small smile of desolate simplicity. It was their mother’s smile. It was their father’s smile.

  Emma reached out and gripped Flynn’s elbow. There was no expression on her face. She stared straight ahead between the front seats, through the windshield as the world raced by them. Danny kept glancing back at Flynn. Flynn knew he should probably say something to his brother, but he couldn’t find his voice, couldn’t find the words that might help him to discover his voice.