Authors: Bill Loehfelm
Fresh Kills (7 page)
“Not that I know anything anyway,” Joyce said, “but I don’t think that’s a good idea. It ain’t healthy. That’s what the cops are for.”
“Look,” I said. “I’m not looking to make trouble. I just want some answers. You know? For my sister.”
Joyce squinted up at me, his mouth turned down at the corners. He didn’t believe a word I was saying. “It’s not always easy with you, Junior. Who can tell how you’ll react to things? That way, you’re just like your father.”
I lit another smoke. My father got drunk and hit things. That was how he reacted. What was unpredictable about that?
Joyce offered me a lift home. When I declined, he patted my shoulder, told me to take it easy the next few days, and asked me to extend his condolences to my sister. I said I would, but I didn’t move from the doorway. He looked at me over the roof of his car.
“Go home, Junior,” he said. “Leave it alone. Take care of your sister.”
He drove away, leaving me in the doorway, smoking and trying to decide what to do next. Richmond Avenue stretched before me so empty, so quiet, that I could hear the traffic light at the intersection changing colors. I heard the echoes of a train in the distance, but I couldn’t tell if it was coming closer or heading away, the wind confusing things. I wasn’t ready to go home. I was hammered, but felt like I couldn’t possibly sleep, like I might never sleep again. I felt more restless than I had when I’d left the house.
Down the street, a late-night train rattled into the Eltingville station. It had been coming this way after all, had been closer than I’d thought. I watched as it creaked to a stop, the silver cars shimmering under the amber lights of the station. All the cars looked empty. The doors hissed open. After a few moments the two-note warning bell sounded, the doors closed, and the train groaned into motion. More than a few nights, when I was younger and still living with my folks, it had carried me home from some bar, or from the ferry terminal at the north end of the line, the only rider in my car, and in the cars on either end of mine.
Then I heard footsteps echoing from the station. Someone coming down the stairs. A slightly inebriated gait. A young woman, short-haired, pulling a denim jacket tight around her, emerged from the shadows at the foot of the station. She paused at the corner, pulled a pack from her jeans and lit a cigarette. She looked familiar, the way she cocked her hips as she flicked the lighter, but I knew it was only a trick of the shadows and streetlights. I didn’t know a soul down this end of the island anymore.
She stepped into the street, heading my way, then stopped dead in her tracks. I thought maybe she had spotted me in the doorway and taken me for a mugger, or worse, but when I backed farther into the darkness, she didn’t react at all. She was staring at the corner in front of her, at the broken police tape. She turned and disappeared into the shadows of the side street, her steps quick and steady now, gravel crunching beneath her boots. When she was gone, I walked to the corner. I wished I had packed a flask.
A streetlight hung over my father’s murder scene, glaring down on it like a spotlight. Strands of tape blew in the wind like the tails of cheap yellow kites. I caught a tail in my hand, pulled it free, and wound it around my fist. I stared down at the concrete. The chalk outline of his body was already smudged, fading away. At the head, someone had tried washing the blood off the sidewalk. They’d done a poor job, the dark stain still a shadow on the concrete. A rusty, graffiti-covered security shutter guarded the front of the store, and I wondered how much of my father’s blood and brains had splattered against the building. Joyce’s whiskey lurched in my belly.
I passed through the tape, squatted down beside the chalk and the stains, arms draped over my knees, cigarette burned down to the filter, burned out, between my knuckles. I could still smell the bleach. A headache rose behind my eyes and I tried to breathe shallow. My leather jacket creaked at the shoulders when I reached out and rubbed my fingers in the stains on the sidewalk. My fingertips came away clean. I wondered how much longer the outline and the stains would last. The deli would open in the morning, and people would walk right over the bleach and the chalk and the blood, rushing for their coffee and bagels and their
Daily News
before they caught the train.
Daily News
before they caught the train.
The chalk would fade away under their footsteps. Whatever tape lasted the night would be stuffed in the trash. In a couple of days the blood would look only like so much spilled coffee.
I don’t know how long I’d been there when the rain started, but my knees cracked and my thighs ached when I stood. I dropped my cigarette butt, crushing it under my boot out of habit. I stomped my feet, shook my legs, forcing my blood to get moving again. Another empty train rattled into the station. I turned my back and walked away, a little unsteady on my feet, a yellow kite tail stuffed in my pocket. I got as far as the other corner and the pay phone by the traffic light. I had a bad idea.
I dug through the hole in my jacket pocket and fished out all the loose change I could find. I wiped the rain off my face and stacked the coins on top of the phone. Then I laughed at myself. Like there was any chance the phone would work. I lifted the receiver. The dial tone hummed in my ear. I should be back at the house, dry and warm in my parents’ den, drinking my father’s whiskey.
When a voice from the phone told me what I should do if I’d like to make a call, I realized the receiver was still in my hand. I set it back in the cradle. I didn’t know Molly’s phone number. She’d never given it to me. I wasn’t allowed to call her. I could call information. I picked up the receiver again, set it back down. I stared at the pile of coins. Yeah, that’d be a big hit, a drunken phone call in the middle of the night. On a school night, no less. What would I tell her, even if she answered? What am I up to? Oh, nothing much, just heading home from hanging around my father’s murder scene in the pouring rain. So, I could ask, you alone? I could catch a train.
I tossed the coins into the street. There was a slight chance, between the booze and the rain and the hour, I wasn’t thinking straight. The walk home would help me calm down. If I still wanted to make that call, I could make it from the house. I knew I wouldn’t, but the thought got my feet moving again. I’d go back to the deli, in the daylight, when there was someone there to talk to and I could find out some things. It took me three blocks to light a cigarette in the rain.
I grabbed my bag from the hall and stripped and changed into a T-shirt and boxers in the den. I dried my hair with a kitchen towel, then headed into the living room to raid the liquor cabinet. My father hadn’t left a will, but I knew he had left the cabinet well stocked. There they were, the unopened bottles of Jameson, when I opened the door. Beside the bottles was a set of dusty, seventies-era rocks glasses. I’d seen them before; I’d been raiding the liquor cabinet since I was fifteen. The glasses, like the rack of poker chips and the cork coasters on the shelf below the whiskey, were holdovers from the days when my folks entertained. It was just like my mother to never get rid of them, just like my father to forget they were there.
I blew the dust out of a rocks glass, fingering the raised brown and gold designs. I cracked open the bottle, the spiced wood smell of the whiskey rising to my nose as I poured. I downed the shot, and immediately felt better. I squeezed my temples in the fingers of my free hand. I was damn glad I hadn’t broken down and called Molly.
I poured another drink and settled on the couch. I put my glass on the coffee table and studied my trembling hands. It wasn’t that long a walk home but the rain had chilled me bad. I downed half the drink, trying to coax the warmth it put in my belly out through the rest of me, and resolved to forget what I’d done on the corner. I couldn’t understand it, and I didn’t want to hear Julia’s theories on what it might mean. It didn’t mean anything, other than I was drunk and restless, uselessly curious about an event that changed my life not at all.
I draped my arm over my eyes, rested my drink on my belly. I wanted to think about things that had nothing to do with the house, with my father. His death or his life. I tried to think about Molly, but I couldn’t hold the visions I wanted. Nothing sexual. Molly resting her chin in her palm. Molly turning her cigarette against the edge of the ashtray, her eyes down as she listened to me talk. Grown-up Molly. Something recent. I wanted what was waiting for me at the end of this long, stupid week.
But every time I searched for the Molly of the past three months, I couldn’t find her. The Molly of our high school romance shoved her out of the picture every time. I couldn’t look away from seventeen-year-old Molly. Her, walking ahead of me down New Dorp Lane, talking a mile a minute over her shoulder. A punk’s bright red streak dyed in her hair, a woman’s hips straining at her secondhand blue jeans, a girl’s arms swinging from her brother’s newly sleeveless red hockey jersey. The same butterflies came to me on the couch that came to me that day on the street.
I saw Molly dancing to U2 at a party in the candlelit living room of a friend’s house, her Keds abandoned in the corner, her black T-shirt rising over her pale stomach, arms entwined over her head, a perfect picture of “Party Girl.” Molly, outside that house later that night, crossing the wet grass of the backyard toward me, her feet still bare.
I saw Molly in the backseat of my father’s Cadillac, after he’d picked us up from the party. Her reflection in the window, her streak was blue by then, a curl at the corner of her mouth. Her hand creeping up past my knee. Molly pulling her hand off my thigh when my father’s suspicious eyes appeared in the rearview mirror. I’d hated him more in that moment than I had ever in my life. My stomach hurt as bad as it did then.
I stared down into my drink. I’d wanted a few quiet pictures of what was happening now. Just something to ease my mind. But all I’d come up with was a list of lost moments, a sequence of images that had somehow morphed into a trail back to my father. I felt as pissed as I had that night in the car, the way he hung, even freshly dead, over everything. I closed my eyes, ran my palms over my thighs. I was worse than my sister with her photographs. I swallowed the last of the whiskey, pressed the empty glass against my forehead. Young Molly came to me one more time.
She knelt on her parents’ kitchen floor, looking up at me. A red bandanna held her hair back from her pale face. Rage danced in her eyes. Muscles bulged at the corners of her jaw, as if she were chewing on curses and swallowing them as they rose from her throat. Bloody paper towels littered the floor around her. Blood smeared the plastic bag of ice in her hand. She pushed my sweaty hair from my eyes and said something about my riding the train in my condition. She asked if anyone had even offered to help me. I shook my head.
She reached up and pressed the bag to my mouth, inching closer to me. Her other hand palmed my cheek, holding my head steady when I flinched at the ice. My eyes flitted from her face to my hands, curled in my lap. I was afraid to touch her and too exhausted to move. She said something about stitches. She said something about her brother’s latest hockey game. A joke. I tried to talk and she moved the bag away. Nothing came out. Droplets of blood, from the bag, from my mouth, peppered the floor between my feet. It seemed they’d never stop falling.
I turned out the lights and curled up on the couch. That day in the kitchen wasn’t the only time Molly took care of me after one of my father’s rages. I often found my way to her after a beating. Sometimes, like that day, I just appeared at her parents’ door. Who knows what they thought? Other times, I’d call from a pay phone and we’d meet somewhere. I bloodied more than a few of her bandannas. She never seemed to mind, and I knew I could always steal new ones for her.
Her anger sometimes rivaled mine, it seemed, the way her eyes and hands trembled. She went electric with fury. I could hear it crackling in her voice no matter how soothing she tried to sound. More than once, I half-expected to find her at my parents’ front door, calling my father out into the driveway. Sometimes, after she’d helped patch me up and calm me down, I wondered if she was angry at me, for letting it continue and for not finding a way out. More often, I was just ashamed of myself and my family. These things didn’t happen in Molly’s house.
For a long time she asked about the beatings, asked about my father. Sometimes she asked when the wounds were still fresh. Sometimes she asked after the cuts and bruises had healed. She asked why. She wanted reasons, wanted answers. Then one day, she stopped asking.
Maybe she accepted the only explanation I had, the one I spat out over and over. My father was a violent, raging man and he hated me. Maybe she finally believed me. She’d certainly seen plenty of evidence. Maybe she just got sick of hearing it. Whatever the reason, I was glad when she stopped asking for answers. I wanted them, too, but by then more for her than for myself. Not having them for her only made everything more humiliating.
We hadn’t said a word about him this time around until Purvis had shown up at the door. There was no talk of my father, no talk of Eddie. What was the point? She and I aren’t like we were then, wrapped up in each other’s lives, needy for each other’s teenage drama. We weren’t in love anymore. We’d grown up and streamlined. Like good adults, we kept our scars to ourselves. It was just as well. All these years down the road I didn’t have any better answers, about either my father or her brother.
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