Fresh Kills (35 page)
Authors: Bill Loehfelm
I tossed the matchbook into the grass. I wandered around the side of the house and pissed on the wall. If I was gonna be a disgrace, I might as well go all the way. I wasn’t even sure I should be there. My sister had done what even my father never had. She’d thrown me out of the house. Could she do that? Wasn’t it my house, too?
I staggered back to the chair and sat. I’d leave in the morning, my house or not, if Julia wanted me to. I had to go get my car, anyway. But I’d go to the wake. I’d give her that, show her something, at least. Maybe I’d even get a suit, if I could find one. I drank the last of my beer and flicked my cigarette butt into the neighbor’s yard. I’d had enough of my life for one day, enough of my own head. I wanted to pass out right there in that chair.
So I did.
At sunrise, the daylight chased me inside.
at noon. I couldn’t hear Julia in the house. I wondered for a second if maybe she’d had enough of this silly production and had gone back to Boston. I certainly wouldn’t have blamed her. When I stumbled into the kitchen, I saw a note on the table. She’d simply gone to the store.
I pulled open the fridge. The sight of beer made me queasy. Disappointed, I remembered everything. The bar, Purvis, my mother, Waters, Julia, the backyard. That made me queasier. As much as I drank the previous night and as bad as I felt that morning, I felt entitled to a blackout. I swallowed a glass of juice, belched half of it back up, and put on a pot of coffee, wondering if Dad had left anything in the liquor cabinet that wasn’t too harsh to drop in my coffee. Just to still the shakes.
On my way to the liquor cabinet, I noticed my travel bag sitting on the couch. I unzipped it and pulled out a T-shirt, holding it to my nose. Everything in my bag had been washed and folded, and neatly packed. I got the message, and I agreed. Maybe there was nothing left to talk about. I put the T-shirt on and walked back into the kitchen for my car keys. Then I grabbed my jacket and my bag and headed for the door, leaving the coffeepot gurgling on the kitchen counter.
train station on Richmond Avenue, through the scraggly, budding trees, I stared at the corner where my father was murdered. The sun beat down on me hard, and even with my jacket off, I sweat bullets. My fresh T-shirt was soaked and I couldn’t smell anything but the stink of sour liquor.
On my way to the station, I’d forced myself into the deli on that corner, for a paper and a cup of coffee. Everyone inside was a stranger, but I felt accused and exposed before their eyes. I tried hating them. I tried glaring at them, but I couldn’t lift my eyes to theirs. All I felt was ashamed, like I owed every one of them an apology and an explanation for being alive. The bag I carried gave me away, marked me like Cain. I knew they saw it and knew what it meant. That I’d been sent away, that somewhere I was unwanted and unwelcome.
But I had waited in line, paid for my coffee and
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, considering the whole experience a minor victory. In front of the store, I tossed away the lid of the coffee and opened the paper to the sports section. There’d been a Met game the night before. They’d gotten killed, 12-3. Gave up eight runs in the first, went through three pitchers before they got three outs. The Yankees had won their fifth game in a row. I saw there was another Met game that afternoon. I stuffed the paper into the trash, picked up my bag, and walked away.
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, considering the whole experience a minor victory. In front of the store, I tossed away the lid of the coffee and opened the paper to the sports section. There’d been a Met game the night before. They’d gotten killed, 12-3. Gave up eight runs in the first, went through three pitchers before they got three outs. The Yankees had won their fifth game in a row. I saw there was another Met game that afternoon. I stuffed the paper into the trash, picked up my bag, and walked away.
No one else was on the train platform, and I was glad for it. I was feeling bad, bone-deep bad. My sister’s words clung to the walls of my skull like bats. I felt too grotesque to be looked at, like every ugly thing I’d thought and felt and said over the past three days had sprouted legs and was crawling around on the outside of my skin. More were popping out into the sun every minute. I felt like soon their weight would crush me to the ground. I’d still be lying there when the sun went down and the evening trains brought the commuters home. They’d step over me on their way to their cars. I turned my back on the corner and leaned my weight on the platform railing, studying Amboy Road.
The Amboy Twin movie theater was gone, replaced by the shrill green-and-white neon of a diner. I remembered sneaking pony bottles of beer into that theater. And the time, during a Godzilla double feature, that Molly knocked over an empty and it rolled, highly audible, under the seats and broke against the wall under the screen. Then Jimmy somehow convinced the usher we weren’t responsible, though we were the only people in the theater. Jedi mind trick, Jimmy said.
There was a video store where there used to be something else. The yard of the tire store still swelled with tires but obnoxious purple neon now framed the roof. Next to it sat a Quickie Lube that was formerly a beauty salon. Up and down Amboy it was the same story. The buildings had new proprietors and so they had new signs, new lights, new uniforms for their employees, but the same graceless, boxy shapes; their yards and parking lots still littered with trash and encircled in rolling coils of barbed wire. So much had changed, but really, from where I stood, the neighborhood didn’t look, or feel, any different.
I glanced up and down the tracks. There was no train coming. I knew that you could hear them vibrating the rails before you could see them, but I looked anyway. I knew it might be a while, that the trains ran infrequently during the afternoon and late at night. The line existed mostly for the morning and evening rush hours. Herds of commuters packed it every morning and rode it to the boats that carried them en masse to Manhattan, where they rode the subway to various cubicles, where they sat, like cubes in an ice tray, for the day. Every evening the process was repeated in reverse.
In high school, I rode the train to high school every day, from Eltingville to Oakwood Heights, a miniature of my father in my jacket and tie, going somewhere because I had to, not because I wanted to, and never thinking much about the difference. Sometimes Molly met me at the Oakwood Heights station after school and we would make out on the platform while train after train rattled away beneath out sneakered feet.
After Molly left me, the fall of my senior year, right when I turned eighteen, I took to riding the train, just to ride it. To get out of the house. I’d get on at Eltingville, maybe with a pack of cigarettes, maybe with a beer or two, and ride toward St. George, the ferry stop, the last stop. Then I’d cross the tracks and ride the train all the way back in the other direction. Both ways, all the way up and down the line, I’d gaze through the window at the passing buildings and roads and lights and think. Think about the girl. The end of high school. Where I was going. What I was not going to be. I’d curse the island. Everyone and everything on it. A deep thinker without many deep thoughts to think.
I was going to be bigger, better. I was going to be unique. How that would happen, I never figured out. I never got as far as planning the future, but I had clear snapshots in my head of how it would be. I had sharp clothes and a cool haircut. I raced around Manhattan, always on the move, in and out of the shadows of skyscrapers, flicking half-smoked cigarettes into the gutter as I caught cabs and hustled down train station stairs, gliding from someplace merely impressive to somewhere important. I wasn’t rich or famous, but I was Big Time, whatever that meant, another free and fearless, whip-smart prince of the City. One of the many I had never met but knew lived over there just across the water, just beyond my vision, walking through their days with six inches of ether under their Spanish leather shoes, nodding to one another as they passed on Park Avenue. I’d be unassailable and invincible inside the grand castle of concrete, steel, and glass that was Manhattan. I’d be home, and I’d belong there.
I was not, in any way, shape, or form, going to be my father. I wasn’t going to be loud, frustrated, or cruel. I had no idea what I was going to be but I knew damn well what I wouldn’t be. I defined my future by contrast. I wasn’t going to be my friends, my teachers, my enemies. I wasn’t going to be middle management. I wasn’t going to be like everyone else: a debtor, a pawn, a servant, a lemming. I wasn’t going to be bored, lonely, impatient, or angry. I wasn’t going to be, I guess, human.
I finally heard a train. I picked up my bag and looked toward the stairs, suddenly deciding my sister was way out of line. She had no right to tell me where to go or what to do, I thought. What I needed to do was go back to the house and tell her so. But I didn’t move as the train rolled closer. My anger died and I knew it was because my sister was right about me. Her words rang in my head and I couldn’t get rid of them, couldn’t shout them down. She had nailed me.
So I stood there at the station, rails humming and lights coming around the corner, black leather jacket, black leather boots, a cup of coffee, a Camel, and the feeling that I was the biggest fool in the world. When I flicked the burning filter of the finished cigarette onto the tracks it landed among hundreds of others tossed there by bored, lonely, frustrated people. When I tossed the empty coffee cup into the trees behind the platform, I saw the others lying in the dirt. Hundreds of them. Nothing special, nothing romantic about any of it.
Had I been there a month ago, a week ago, anytime before my father’s murder, I would’ve felt completely different, leaning against the No Smoking sign while lighting a cigarette. Dirty jeans, dirty habits, bad attitude. Waiting at the station, like a timeless character out of a John Lee Hooker song. Most important, I would’ve felt different from the people I watched walk and drive along Amboy Road. Now, as the train rattled to a stop in front of me and the doors hissed open, I didn’t feel any of that. I felt like what I was, another aimless, restless, self-absorbed, pissed-off dope. A coward, riding out to the edge of town then, reaching the border, turning around and riding right back into what I sought to escape.
As we pulled out of the station, as the streetlight that marked the corner where my father died disappeared around a bend, I thought of his chalk outline, drawn in ghostly white under the No Loitering sign outside the deli. I thought of the family photos full of strangers that Julia had shown me on Sunday. I recalled the ugly shirt my father had worn on the carousel; I wondered what number he had worn on the football team.
I dropped into a window seat, so I could watch the island go by through the bulletproof glass. The train rumbled along the eastern edge of the island, high enough that I could see past the houses and roads and stores and look out over the vast blue sea. Farther down the line, we’d bend west and run along the docks and wharves, toward the end of the line, and the skyline of Manhattan would rise into view.
I reached into my jacket pocket and pulled out the scrap of police tape. I wound it around my scabbing knuckles as I listened to the disembodied voices of the other riders in my car. I was surprised at their number. Baseball scores and the mayor. Friends and enemies. Wives and husbands, sons and daughters, mothers and fathers. I wondered where they were all going, who they were going to. Their conversations comforted me; they didn’t seem to care who heard them. It made me feel invisible.
There were certain things I’ve always prided myself on, I thought. The guys I knew in high school, the poets, the musicians, the outcasts and rebels, they’d become those faceless commuters who nodded off over the
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on the Boat, drooling on their ties. At work, I pulled their evening drafts as they snuck in a round or two, not talking to me or anyone else, before the wife got suspicious. I’d kept the faith, I told myself. I lived a life where I answered to no one. I’d never made the easy choice.
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on the Boat, drooling on their ties. At work, I pulled their evening drafts as they snuck in a round or two, not talking to me or anyone else, before the wife got suspicious. I’d kept the faith, I told myself. I lived a life where I answered to no one. I’d never made the easy choice.
One day, on our way to detention, I told Jimmy I hated the football players with every fiber of my being. The connection to my father was obvious, but I’d also decided they were the biggest jerks in the school all on their own. Yet they had everything handed to them: A’s from the teachers, cars from their parents, headlines from the
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, coke from the dealers, pussy from the cheerleaders. They were the young gods, the screaming emblems of everything that was wrong with America.
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, coke from the dealers, pussy from the cheerleaders. They were the young gods, the screaming emblems of everything that was wrong with America.
“Look at us,” I’d said to him. “We get detention for fucking leather ties while those fuckers don’t wear ties at all.”
Jimmy just smiled. “Think of how miserable they’ll be when they realize they peaked at seventeen. We still got the rest of our lives.”
He had a point. They didn’t know that ninety-yard touchdown or that game-saving tackle had put such a charge in their bloodstream they’d not only never get it back, they’d never let it go. Now, years later, when their humanity bubbled to the surface, when they longed for people and places, longed for things that happened instead of things to own, they strapped on those old letter jackets, met their old teammates at the bar and relived the last and maybe only time they ever felt truly alive. I saw it all the time at work, Friday nights especially. And I laughed at them through the wee hours of Saturday morning, as I washed the last of their glasses and counted the tips they left.
As the train rolled on, it was their yards, their flower beds, their pools I looked past to see the ocean. But I wasn’t laughing at them now. So what if I put on a leather jacket and went looking for a fuck or a fight, went out looking to play conqueror for a night? So what if hatred was my lightning bolt, the only charge that really made me feel alive? What was the difference? One part of my life, one part of my heart, ruled all the others.
Did I really pace that different a cage than those guys? I saw them as cowards because they had fallen so easily into the trap. In high school, I mocked them because I envied them. I mocked them now because they’d walked into the middle-class cliché without a second thought. But had I done anything different in becoming the angry young man? Different clothes, different schedule, different attitude, same set of blinders. I had been so fearful of becoming certain things that I hadn’t become anything at all. I had run so hard from becoming one cliché that I ran right into another. Hadn’t my mantra at one point been the complete opposite?
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