The Lonely Witness

by William Boyle

  “No word,” Dom says. “Mugging, I guess.”

  “Mugging for what purpose?” Lou says. “What’d the guy ever have on him?”

  “Who the fuck knows?”

  Bernie puts the drink in front of Dom and then pours himself a shot of rack whiskey. “Well, here’s to Vincent. I never had any hard feelings toward the kid. He took me that one time on the Super Bowl pool. That was dirty. Aside from that, I mostly just felt sorry for him.”

  They drink up.

  “How’re your folks doing, Dom?” Bernie asks. “Ain’t seen your mother in here in a few weeks. Her and Vincent were tight, no?” He winks. “And Tony, he called me and I called him and, ah, fucking phone tag pisses me off to no end.”

  “They’re how they are,” Dom says, looking away. “You know.”

  Amy hadn’t intended on coming here as a spy. Or maybe, subconsciously, she had. She couldn’t have planned it this way, and it couldn’t have worked out any better. She’s nervous, but she feels protected by her costume. She’s safe in the arms of anonymity. Even if Dom had seen her on West Tenth, he hadn’t seen this Amy. No one has seen this Amy in a long time.

  “Let’s not talk about that loser Vincent anymore,” Lou says. “Or Dom’s folks. No offense. Let’s get back to me hitting on Rosie the Riveter over here. Rosie, you were about to spill about your getup.”

  “I’d like to hear about your outfit, too,” Dom says.

  “Can’t a broad just come get a drink without being assaulted by you douchebags?” Bernie says, whipping a dish towel at Lou.

  “You know better than to throw that towel at me, Bern,” Dom says, laughing.

  “There’s no story,” Amy says. “It’s just the way I dress.”

  “Fair enough,” Dom says. His phone goes off in his pocket. His ringtone is “Eye of the Tiger” from Rocky III. He takes out his phone—it’s in a gaudy blue Yankees case—and says a couple of abrupt things to whoever’s on the other end.

  When the front door opens again, Amy is shocked to see Fred standing there, hands in his pockets. He comes over and takes the stool next to her. Lou backs away.

  “What are you doing here?” Amy says.

  “This bum giving you trouble?” Lou says.

  “Mind your own business,” Bernie says, pelting Lou with a handful of ice.

  Lou laughs and puts up his hands, almost dropping his beer. “I get it. Rosie likes the old-timers.”

  Bernie asks Fred if he can get him anything. Fred just shakes his head, sullen.

  Amy leans close to Fred. “You followed me?” she says.

  “I’m sorry,” Fred says, barely audible.

  “What the fuck, Fred?”

  “Can I just say, I didn’t realize it was you at first. I thought, That looks a little like Amy. I thought, That can’t be Amy.”

  “Jesus.” Amy takes a long pull of her beer.

  “You’re drinking again?”

  Amy can see that Dom is listening in on their conversation. Lou, too. And the dudes in the Rangers jerseys. “Let’s go,” she says to Fred, getting up and grabbing him by the arm.

  Outside, she sits on the bench, staring across at the yellow 3 Stars sign, where Other Her stood just the day before and watched Vincent. It’s dark out. She’d be afraid that someone was watching now from that same spot, if not for the fact that the man who might be watching her is in Homestretch drinking a Jack and Coke.

  Fred hovers over her, dancing nervously in place. “I know it’s not right,” he says, “me following you here. I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking straight.”

  Amy looks over her shoulder through the neon Budweiser sign at Dom. He’s working on a scratch-off with a nickel. He blows the black scrapings across the bar, and Bernie scolds him.

  “You know him?” Fred says.

  “Who?” Amy says.

  “This guy you’re staring at.”

  “I’m not staring at anybody. I thought I left something on the bar.”

  Fred motions to the bench. “Okay if I sit?”

  “Do what you want.”

  Fred sits next to her. “So, you live a double life or something?” he says.

  “This is just the way I used to dress,” Amy says. “I felt like being who I was for a little while tonight. I don’t know why.”

  “I get it. But the drinking.”

  “I’m not in AA. You’re not my sponsor.”

  “True. How’d it taste, the beer? I miss it.”

  “Tasted like shit. It was Bud.”

  “I had a friend named Whitey used to drink Bud by the pitcher at this one joint we frequented. He’d just walk around with this pitcher, swilling from it, beer blotted all over his shirt. His beard always smelled like beer. Some point in the evening, he’d throw an arm around you and start singing an Irish song and he’d have the pitcher over your lap, splashing you.”

  “I don’t want to do this,” Amy says. She’s worried again. She stands.

  “I’m sorry,” Fred says again.

  Amy rushes away down Kings Highway, looking over to make sure Fred’s not following. After a couple of blocks, she cuts a quick right on West Seventh. She knows she can catch the N train right before Highlawn, not far from Vincent’s. No sign of Fred behind her. She starts to wonder if maybe Dom is toying with her, if maybe he knows who she is and he’s just testing her.

  She ducks into the station and buys a MetroCard at one of the machines. She goes through the turnstile, getting the once-over from the lady in the glass booth. She notices a poster that says Manhattan-bound trains aren’t stopping here until the spring. She’ll have to take a southbound train and switch in Coney Island for one heading into the city. She doesn’t care. Her only desire now is to be on a train into the city and away from her life here as she’s known it, away especially from the various mysteries and horrors of the last thirty-six hours—or however the hell long it’s been—since Vincent and Fred and Dom and Diane jumped out from the darkness.

  She runs down to the southbound platform, still watching over her shoulder. The station is lonely and sad. Not underground and not the El, it’s one of those ground-level N-line stops she doesn’t know the name for. Open-cut, maybe. Concrete walls. Blue columns. Graffiti. Tracks that seem extra desolate. Yellow lines to keep you from standing too close. Garbage overflowing out of cans. Noise like silence. She can look up into apartments with torn shades and child safety bars on the windows. She can see clotheslines and telephone wires. She’s sure she heard a story, not that long ago, of a man hanging himself here. She can’t help but wonder where. From which exact beam? She stands and waits for a southbound train. When it comes, she feels relieved that she can go be her old self in the place where her old self existed once, even if it’ll take a while to get there.

  11

  Switching in Coney Island isn’t that much of a pain. She feels immediately more comfortable and less watched, less observed. In the middle car of the northbound train she’s on, there are hipsters headed back to wherever from a day spent in Coney, eating hot dogs and probably drinking forties on the beach or going to the freak show. This time of year, there’s not much else to do. But there’s always the allure of taking pictures on the Boardwalk, of saying you’ve spent the day in Coney. Truth is, she lives so close by, and she’s hardly ever been. Alessandra dragged her there a couple of times. They went on the Wonder Wheel and rode the Cyclone. They’d been there for the Mermaid Parade only once. She heard that good bands used to pass through MCU Park and play the now-defunct Siren Festival, but nothing like that seemed to happen anymore. Not that she was paying much attention.

  She can’t sleep. She feels wired to the rumbling of the train. She watches the faces of the people around her. They don’t care who she is or where she’s going. Even this one kid who looks kind of like Morrissey, he could give two shits about her and how she’s dressed, and it’s a fucking relief.

  In the city, she gets off at Prince Street and Broadway. Everything feels alive. She feels alive. S
he walks down Prince and makes a left on Lafayette. It’s been a few years since she’s been here, but the route is etched in her memory. People walk with their heads down, looking at phones. Cabs zoom by. Right on East Fourth. Left on Second Avenue. Right on East Seventh.

  Seven Bar is where she left it, between Second and First Avenue. Tailor across the street. Cupcake place next door; that’s new. Cupcakes. Unbelievable. New frozen yogurt place on the other side with two sidewalk tables. The exterior of Seven Bar has changed. The old hand-painted sign is gone. Now there’s a lit blade sign, seven bar printed in a bubbly white font.

  The inside’s changed more. First thing she notices is that the jukebox is gone. Music plays over the house speakers, a Sirius nineties grunge station. The little nook of a bar has given way to a gleaming horseshoe. Used to be there was a big chalkboard with the prices of everything up over the dusty bottles. That’s gone, too. You used to be able to get a cheap pitcher. The Dirty Hipster Special was big. A shot of Jäger and a PBR. The bartender wears a vest and a bowtie. His hair is in a bun. He claps his hands together and smiles, holding out a laminated cocktail menu.

  “How’re we doing today?” he asks. The rest of the place is empty. The pool table is gone. The shitty old Naugahyde booths have been switched out for the sorts of sleek wooden booths found in airport steakhouses.

  “I used to work here,” Amy says.

  “Excellent,” the bartender says.

  “Yeah,” Amy says. She takes the menu and scans it. The Dirty Hipster is now a fifteen-dollar cocktail that includes egg whites. All the cocktails range from fifteen to twenty bucks. Amy laughs reading through them. One worse than the next. The Seven Sweet, the St. Mark’s Place, the Joey Ramone, the Coney Island High, Kim’s Underground, the East Village Eraser, Sympathy for the Strawberry. It feels like a foul joke. “Can I just get a beer?”

  “I just tapped an Eppinger’s Pumpkin Stout. I highly recommend it.”

  “What’s the cheapest shit you have?”

  “We have pony bottles of Miller High Life for two dollars.”

  “Perfect.”

  He brings her one, and she pays and sits at the bar, looking all around. A lot of nights in this place. Meeting Alessandra here. Merrill, too. A lot of ghosts. A lot of memories. Totally antiseptic now. She’s guessing the place has been taken over by new owners; “keep the name and change the vibe” being their guiding principle. Make it more of a theme park dive than an actual dive.

  “How long’s the place been like this?” she asks the bartender.

  “Only about six months,” he says.

  She nods.

  “I know,” he says. “I just work here.”

  She downs her tiny beer and leaves. She stands out on the sidewalk near a tree. More people on phones. A bad painting leaning against a nearby garbage can. Now the city feels slumped with sadness. What she’d mistaken for electricity is actually more like a buzz of destitution. Everything’s changing all the time. She’d half expected to walk back into her bar, to see her regulars. She thought wearing these clothes might be a key into that old life. It’s nothing like that.

  A coffee shop up the block that she used to frequent, Holy Grounds, is still there and appears unchanged, with its red awning and flyers for shows and readings in the window. She wonders if any of the same people still work there. Gwen, Troy, Leesa, Liz, any of them will do. She doubts it. Probably just some NYU kid with a hangdog look.

  The door clangs when she walks in. A few people sit scattered at the little round tables, working on laptops and tablets. Gwen is behind the counter. She hasn’t changed much. Dreadlocks. Black lipstick. Nose ring. She notices Amy and smiles. “Holy shit,” she says.

  “You’re a sight for sore eyes,” Amy says.

  “Tell me you didn’t go into Seven Bar.”

  “I went in.”

  “You believe it?”

  “Pretty horrible.”

  Gwen comes out from behind the counter and gives her a hug. She smells like kush oil. “I get off in an hour,” she says. “Hang out, and then we’ll go get a drink somewhere real.”

  “That sounds great.”

  Amy sits at a table while Gwen dances over to the espresso machine. She checks her phone. It’s after eight. Two missed calls from Diane. One from Mrs. Epifanio, probably calling because the news about Vincent has made its way to her. One from Connie Giacchino. No voice mails. She powers it down and considers tossing it in the trash. It feels like the only link to anything that’s happened.

  Gwen brings her back a mug of coffee. “Americano with an extra shot,” she says. “Still your drink?”

  “Exactly what I wanted,” Amy says, wafting her hand through the steam.

  “Nice flip phone.”

  “Don’t make fun of my phone.”

  An hour later, Amy leaves Holy Grounds with Gwen, and they walk down the block to International Bar on First Avenue. It’s the same place Amy remembers. It had reopened under new ownership in 2008, but they’d done it the right way. No TV. Long, narrow scuffed bar. Purple walls. Movie posters. Dark as shit. Smells like a bowling alley. Gwen orders a Schaefer and a shot of well whiskey for five bucks. Amy gets the same. The bartender’s cool. He’s wearing a Gun Club Fire of Love T-shirt. The Shaggs play on the jukebox. A dude is passed out at the bar. Amy used to come here after getting off at Seven Bar a lot of nights. Mostly she remembers the killer jukebox. Amy goes over and punches in three songs: Nina Simone, Lou Reed, R.E.M. There’s a little patio out back, but they sit at a table inside and clink their shot glasses and down the whiskeys. They work on their beers slowly, playing catch-up.

  Gwen fills her in on what’s changed and what hasn’t. Most things have. The city sucks. Everything’s closing. Rents are out of control. Chain stores spread like a virus. Whatever good places stick around, it seems like a miracle. She lives in Williamsburg, shares a place with these guys Mike and Danny. She broke up with Michelle two years ago. She’s in a band called A Woman Under the Influence, after the Cassavetes movie. She had a little heroin problem, and then she kicked it. Now it’s just booze all the way. She has a blog and an Instagram with her pictures of old NYC signs and storefronts, stuff that’s fading away. She just uses her iPhone, nothing fancy, but she’s discovered that finding places to photograph has given her some purpose.

  Gwen checks her phone. She responds to a couple of texts. She scooches over next to Amy and holds out her camera and takes a picture of them with the flash on. The whole place seems to flash white for a sec. They look at the picture together. Amy’s eyes are half-closed. They try again. This time, a better one. Gwen posts it on Instagram.

  “Leesa’s gonna go crazy,” she says. “She always loved you.” Within a minute, she shows Amy that Leesa’s already commented on the picture: Amy Falconetti!!!! Holy shiiiiiiiit!!!!

  Gwen asks about Alessandra. She says she follows Alessandra on Instagram, so she knows she’s back out in Los Angeles. Do they keep in touch? She says she used to really like Alessandra, but it bums her out that her whole Instagram page is pictures of her doing yoga and all these cute little dogs and salads she’s made or smoothies she’s drinking. That’s a lot, she says. One of those three is deadly, and she does them all constantly. Amy tells her they’re not in touch since they split and leaves it at that.

  “Tell me all about Amy,” Gwen tries next. “You look the same. Except for the hair. I like it.”

  “There’s not much to tell,” Amy says. She guards her recent life fiercely. She doesn’t lie, but she doesn’t give anything up. Not that Gwen would believe her.

  They get another round. And then another. Amy’s songs have come and gone on the jukebox. They talked through them. She plays three more by Nina Simone and sings along. They go out to the patio so Gwen can try to bum a smoke. She succeeds. Amy watches her smoke and smiles dumbly. The world feels slowed down and almost pleasant.

  “What?” Gwen says.

  “I’m drunk,” Amy says.

  “Good.�
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  “I haven’t been drunk in a while.” Her thoughts go back to Dom. There’s no concrete threat yet hanging over her about reporting the murder, but she’s conditioned to avoid talking. She imagines Bob Tully putting an apple slice in his mouth and telling her that she could wind up in a tree.

  “What are you thinking about?”

  “I don’t know. Nothing. I don’t want to go home.”

  They walk to Essex Street and take the J train back to Williamsburg, getting off at the Hewes Street station. Gwen’s apartment is on Marcy Avenue. Her roommates, Mike and Danny, are up, dicking around on guitars, when they get there. It’s a dump of a place. Smells like wet towels and Febreze. Lots of empty pizza boxes and records and overflowing ashtrays. Gwen gets them cans of PBR and they go into her room, which is pretty small. Her bed’s on cinderblocks. The wall is full of show posters and drawings by Leesa. It feels like the bedroom of a teenager. Five Styrofoam wig heads are lined up on the dresser. Only one holds a wig, golden peroxide blond. A bob cut. Like something a character in disguise would wear in a spy movie when they’re dropping off a briefcase or a secret key: this wig, trench coat, dark sunglasses.

  Gwen puts music on her laptop. It’s low enough that Amy can’t really make out who it is that’s playing. Still, she misses being around music all the time like this.

  “You okay?” Gwen says. “You look worried or something.”

  “Do I?” Amy sits on the bed. She takes a long pull of her beer and leans back, the can between her legs. The bed is so much more comfortable than hers. It’s memory foam. The sheets are black. The comforter is soft and cold.

  “You tired?”

  “A little. I haven’t really slept in a while.”

  “What’s going on, Amy?”

  “It’s nothing. I’m just tired, I guess.” Amy closes her eyes. She can feel Gwen’s hand between her legs, plucking up the can. She hears Gwen put down the can on the bedside stand. She hears Gwen’s fingers on her phone. The sounds of typing. Of texts being sent. The phone buzzing when she gets a message. Amy’s not asleep yet, but her head feels swimmy and she feels something that must be close to contentment. She fades off to sleep.