Fresh Kills (16 page)
Authors: Bill Loehfelm
Fontana had a bad back and so throughout junior high and high school my father shoved me out the door to mow his lawn in the summer and shovel his sidewalk in the winter. Five bucks every time. I hadn’t laid eyes on him in years. He was stooped; his long arms hung thin and limp from his short sleeves. A cigar poked out of his shirt pocket.
“Mr. Fontana,” I said. “I need to know what you saw when my father was killed.”
Fontana looked away from me, up the block. “I don’t know nothing. There was nothing to see.” He bent down, groaning, and snatched up a gum wrapper that had blown onto his lawn. I wondered who cut it for him these days. “It was so fast,” he said. “I never saw a gun, nothing.” He stuffed the wrapper in his pocket.
“What about the car? The man who got out of it?”
“It was too fast,” he said. “Cars, they drive like crazy there all the time. Screeching up, guys jumping out. Everybody always in a hurry. Why look?”
I wiped a hand down my face. “So you were outside the store when it happened. Anybody say anything when the car pulled up? When it drove away?”
“Junior, the cops asked me all this already,” he said. “I’m telling you what I told them. I didn’t see anything. I didn’t hear anything . . . other than the shots. Your father was there talking to me.” He looked down at the sidewalk, a grimace on his face. “The next minute he was . . . he was gone.” He put a hand on his back. “It’s a terrible, terrible thing. I don’t know why someone would do that.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry. Please let me know when the services are. I’d like to pay my respects.”
I looked at him. His crooked back, the slippers on his feet. There was no car parked in front of the house. “Mr. Fontana, if you don’t mind, how’d you get down to the store on Sunday?”
“Same as always,” he said. “Your father and I walked down there together.”
I blinked at him, stunned. I couldn’t figure out why. It was the answer I had anticipated. I thought maybe it was the “same as always” part. I’d always assumed my father took his Sunday walks alone. That was their point, to get him away from everyone else. I struggled so hard to see the two of them together, I squinted at Fontana, blurring him. I could imagine them, as if seeing them from a few blocks behind—my father inching down Richmond Avenue, cars speeding by, Fontana shuffling along beside him, a hand resting on my father’s arm. Did they talk? What the hell about?
It was such a strange image I wanted to remind Fontana who he was talking to, and about. A lot of boys and their fathers had come and gone on this block. But Fontana was looking at me like I was the one gone senile. I just stood there embarrassed, feeling exposed. I fought to remember if my mother had ever mentioned this, if I had ever been invited on those walks. It didn’t much matter. I wouldn’t have gone.
“Every Sunday?” I finally asked.
“When the weather and my back would let us,” Fontana said, pulling the cigar from his pocket. “You got a match?” I dug my lighter from my pocket and lit his cigar. “While I’m outside anyway,” he said. He waved a hand toward the door. “The wife.”
“So you were there most of the time,” I said. “My father have any problems down there? Guys he didn’t get along with?”
Fontana sighed. “Far as I knew, he only talked to me down there. He didn’t like most people, your father.”
I waited again, but Fontana just puffed on his cigar.
“So nothing, you know, the cops might take issue with, goes on there,” I said. “Nothing of a financial nature that anybody might not want talked about.”
Fontana leaned over, releasing a long gob of brown spit onto his lawn. “Junior, I don’t understand what you’re saying.”
“Look, Mr. F, you and I both know what my father’s murder looked like,” I said. “People who die like that, they usually owe somebody something.”
“I was your father’s friend,” Fontana said, “not his babysitter. He was a grown man. I wouldn’t poke my nose in his business even if he let me. I can tell you this, your father hated owing people, and he hated losing.” He grinned, tapping his finger on his forehead. “I heard the stories so often; I know every play of every football game he lost in college.” He puffed on his cigar and leaned closer to me. “I would tell you anything I knew, even about financial things or whatever, even stuff I wouldn’t tell the cops. But I don’t know nothing. I don’t know anything more than you.
“It’s hard, I know. So senseless.” He reached out and patted my arm. “He was a nice man, your father. It’s a shame you two weren’t closer. He talked about you a lot.” He grimaced again. “I’m sorry, I have to go in and sit. You’ll let me know? The services?” He patted my arm again and turned to go back inside.
He stopped in the doorway and stood there awhile. From somewhere inside the house, Fontana’s wife called his name. He called me to him. I went. He settled his old, brown hands on my shoulders. He waited until he had my eyes before he spoke.
“Junior, we all die owing somebody something. Who knows what debts your father left behind? Who knows what I will, or what you’ll leave behind? It’s best to let go of the dead and their secrets.” With that, he went back inside.
I stood there for a while, looking at his front door, his lawn. I heard the TV from inside. So now I knew some of what they talked about, at least. It wasn’t all football. Part of it was me. But what was there to discuss? How far back did these walks go? My father and I barely saw each other in the five years since Fontana retired. When we did, it was accidental, the meeting always short and violent. I couldn’t imagine Fontana wanting to hear stories about father-son fistfights.
I thought about what he’d said about my father, again wondering if he’d confused me with some other kid. I tapped my fingertipon the doorbell, not hard enough to ring it, feeling like there were questions I’d forgotten to ask. But I couldn’t remember what they were. I felt like I knew less than before he’d answered the door. Still, it didn’t seem worth getting Fontana out of his chair again. He’d already said he’d told me all he knew. I stepped back from the door. I’d come back when I had something to tell him, about the services.
I took my time walking back up the block. It occurred to me that none of the neighbors had called or stopped by the house. Not to ask about the funeral, not to check on me and Julia. My sister would’ve mentioned it.
I stopped and looked at the houses on our side of the street. Five exactly the same model as ours, one old brick number, and another six exactly the same after that. Across the street, another half dozen just like ours, and another six in a third model. I wondered if I could still name all the families, then realized I never knew all the names to begin with.
But I remembered some of them, more than I thought I would. Fontana, Rizzo, and Riordan. Hopkins. Carlucci, Norris, Balaban, Ellis, and Grabowski. Ruth Balaban had a crush on me in junior high. Mr. Rizzo wore blue running shorts and a white T-shirt every day of his life. Rumors went around that he slapped his wife senseless after she backed the Caddy into a mailbox. Mr. Ellis ran off with Mrs. Grabowski. Well, ran as far as next door. Ellis’s oldest son had done some time. The middle Grabowski girl was pregnant by nineteen. Maybe the Sanderses weren’t the screwiest family on the block after all. I wondered what rumors circulated about us. I never heard them, but no one ever hears their own worst rumors. Maybe there weren’t any. Maybe we hid things better. That was what I always told myself, anyway.
The old block looked the same to me as it always had, but all those kids, the kids my age, were grown now. And a lot of the parents were grandparents by now. Some must’ve moved to Jersey. These houses were big for two people. They were built for families. Except for Fontana, there might be no one I knew left on the block. I laughed at myself, offering excuses for the neighbors, old and new, ignoring my father’s murder.
Could I blame them? I didn’t want any part of it myself. But they’d show up. For the wake, if not the big day. They’d see it in the paper, or hear about it at Mass, or in line at the grocery store. Word would make its way around, the way those rumors used to. Husbands would float the idea past wives at the dinner table, wives would float the idea to their husbands over the ironing board. They’d talk about the right thing to do. They’d agree to think about it, to look into it, but they’d never talk about it again. They’d just find themselves dressing for it when the day came. Maybe getting a belt at Joyce’s beforehand.
I knew most would go because they didn’t want to admit, as they would by staying home, that they couldn’t care less that a man who’d been married with kids, who lived two doors down, who they saw every evening walking home from work, was shot dead on the street. They’d go out of fear of being found out. Of getting caught not going by someone who went. Out of fear of rumors and whispers that they didn’t go to John Sanders’s funeral, when he’d lived practically next door for ten whole years. Of someone saying,
I
barely knew him, and
I
went. Or worse. They feared running into me, or Julia, and that we’d hold their absence against them. That it would matter so much to us that
they
weren’t there.
I
barely knew him, and
I
went. Or worse. They feared running into me, or Julia, and that we’d hold their absence against them. That it would matter so much to us that
they
weren’t there.
And they’d go because they knew, somewhere deep inside, he was one of them. They’d never admit it, but that grainy fact made them afraid for their own exit. And showing up for his funeral would prove, at least to them, at least for a day, that they were still alive. And it would reassure them that if they showed up for him, someone would show up for them.
Well, fuck ’em all, I thought, heading up the walk to the house. I’d rather the neighbors didn’t show up. I sure as hell didn’t want to see them at Joyce’s, whispering over their glasses, their staring faces shadowed in the dim light. Julia was forcing me to pretend I cared about the services. I wasn’t going to pretend I cared about seeing slimy old Mr. Ellis. And I wasn’t going to help him pretend he cared about seeing me. I’d make sure Fontana knew dates and times; the rest of them could go to hell. Their fears and guilt were their problems, not mine.
Julia smiled at me. “C’mon, Junior. You know he always had a thing for Mom. This is probably just his way of doing right by her. He kept an eye out for us after she died, too.”
“News to me,” I said.
“I’m not surprised,” Julia answered. “You were drunk for, what? A month after the funeral?”
It wasn’t a shot, just a statement of fact. I took no offense. A month seemed about right.
“He called me every week at school for two months. More often than someone else I know,” she said. That was a shot. “Who do you think lost the paperwork on that brawl you started at the Loft after the funeral? And had your car towed when you wouldn’t quit driving around drunk.”
I vaguely remembered the incidents she described. “I always suspected your hand in the car.”
“Wish I’d thought of it. But that was all Waters.”
“Weird way to play guardian angel,” I said.
“The Lord works in mysterious ways, she does,” Julia said.
My sister went upstairs to try on her new dresses, again. When she didn’t come back downstairs to ask me how she looked in them, again, I knew she was calling Cindy. Fine with me. I cracked open a beer and plopped down on the couch. I flipped on ESPN, realizing I’d never gotten the score of the game from the night before. As realistic as I tried to be, that last glimmer of hope for a win wouldn’t fade until I knew the final score.
I still hadn’t gotten it, but I was all caught up on my golf and NASCAR when Julia came back downstairs. She was in sweats, her eyes wet. She sat next to me on the couch. I sat up and slung my arm around her shoulders.
“Y’all right, sis?”
“I feel so much better,” she said. She blew her nose. “She always was a good listener.”
“Long as you weren’t asking where she’s been all night,” I said.
“Not funny,” Julia said.
I apologized, and decided not to mention that she hadn’t disagreed with me. Cindy was in California, the relationship didn’t need my help being over. I squeezed her closer to me.
“You wanna come to the Dove with me? It’s about that time,” I said. “Talk to Waters? You gotta have dinner anyway.”
“No, that’s all right.”
“Want me to bring you something back?”
She shook her head. “My stomach can’t do greasy spoon like it used to.” She grinned. “Too many years of too many meds.” She sat up straight and tried to pull herself together. “Or something like that. I’ll fix something here.”
“Promise?”
She patted my knee and stood. “I promise. You going out after you talk to Waters?”
“Probably.”
She walked into the kitchen and peered into the fridge, disappearing behind the door. “Joyce’s?”
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