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Authors: William Boyle

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BOOK: Gravesend
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Bunker headed back to his car and drove away, kicking up gravel on the side of the road. Conway followed him up Route 17B. His phone buzzed in his pocket. He took it out and flipped it open.

“Where you at?” McKenna said on the other end.

Conway said, “Heading there now.”

“I should’ve come with.”

“No.”

“Listen, dude, I got bad news.
The Village Voice
, I just found out they did a spread on Ray Boy getting out. Had a thing remembering Duncan. Said the case didn’t get enough attention back in the day.”

“So?”

“That’s a lot of eyes on Ray Boy is what I’m saying. I’m gonna reemphasize I think you should wait.”

“Can’t wait.”

“They’ll send you up anyway.”

“I’m not going to jail,” Conway said.

McKenna said, “I’ll have Marylou put out her Mary statue.”

Conway closed the phone. He had this thing with McKenna where he just stopped talking. He’d always liked it, but now it was permanent, like he’d said the last thing he was ever going to say to him.

Could be he killed Ray Boy, got caught, went to jail at Sullivan Correctional. Or he got away with it, made a break for Canada. He had always wanted to see Nova Scotia. But maybe Ray Boy got him, strong-as-shit Ray Boy who could probably crush the gun out of his hand in a second flat, laughing at him for being puny while he did it. Cool-as-shit Ray Boy, grinning like he did on the way into the courtroom the first time Conway saw him after Duncan died, just grinning so no one could see, that grin saying,
I killed your fag brother, kid
.

The last stretch to Ray Boy’s place was down a broken road with no shoulder. Small houses on the side of the road looked left for dead. Sawhorses blocked driveways. Shattered windows were stapled shut with plastic. Roofs were buckled and crumbling. Conway shut the heat and the radio and focused on Bunker’s left blinker, waiting for the signal.

They made a quick left turn onto Parsonage. Bunker slowed down and flashed his blinker and then kept driving toward the river and the train tracks.

Conway stopped the car and looked up: a white frame house at the end of a long uphill driveway. A dump pile and a burn bin and a couple of abandoned trucks dotted the yard. The mustard-colored shades on all the windows were pulled. The white paint was ribbed with dirt. The front steps sagged. Wet wood was stacked on the porch. Other houses were scattered on the road, but they were not close.

Conway opened the gym bag and took out the duct tape and the .22. He turned the gun over in his lap and looked up at the house again. He tried to see through the walls. Imagined Ray Boy doing pull-ups on a bar tucked into a doorway. Imagined Ray Boy drinking coffee from a Styrofoam cup, legs up, watching the news. Imagined Ray Boy’s new prison fierceness, a thousand times harder than before.

Paralyzed wasn’t the word for how he felt, but he couldn’t move. Just like when he was a kid next in line for confession. Those days he’d choke and cough, get pushed into the confessional by Sister Erin or Sister Loretta, and he’d lie to the priest: “I had bad thoughts about Alessandra Biagini. I stole a comic from Augie’s. I told my mother I did my homework even though I didn’t so I could watch cartoons.” Now there was no nun to push him out of the car, but he wished there was.

The front door of the house opened. Ray Boy came out on the porch and turned on a swampy floodlight overhead and lit a cigarette. He wasn’t wearing a shirt. Just boxers. He was muscled up and had homemade-looking tats on his chest and forearms.

Conway crossed himself and said a prayer. He knew it was wrong to pray about this kind of thing, and maybe he didn’t even believe that prayer did anything. Probably he didn’t. But he’d never stopped going to church, never stopped praying, even if it was only as good as rubbing some bullshit lamp and making wishes. In church, when he was a kid, he’d stare at Duncan, who had these polished brown rosary beads and was always praying decades like a fiend, and he’d be amazed that his brother even believed.

The image of Duncan praying kicked Conway in the heart, and he got out of the car. He charged up the driveway, the gun in front of him and the duct tape in his jacket pocket.

Ray Boy, his eyes all squinty, seemed to notice him, and Conway was surprised that he didn’t bolt or charge, that he just leaned back against the porch rail, blowing smoke.

“Get down,” Conway said, approaching the porch behind the gun.

Ray Boy went to his knees. “Hey,” he said.

“You know who I am, right?”

“I’ve been hoping you’d show.” Ray Boy tossed his cigarette over the porch rail and got all the way down, hands locked behind his head.

“Been thinking about you, too,” Conway said.

Conway squatted over Ray Boy and jacked him in the back of the head with the butt of the gun to knock him out like they did in movies. It didn’t work. Ray Boy didn’t really even seem fazed by it. Conway told him to stay still and taped his feet and hands and mouth. Ray Boy didn’t move.

Conway pressed the gun against Ray Boy’s back. He still wasn’t struggling. Conway wanted him begging the way that Duncan was no doubt begging that night out at Plumb Beach. That was always what Conway had hated to think about most, Duncan down on all fours like a dog, Ray Boy and his buddies spitting and saying fag-this and fag-that.

Conway peeled the tape away from Ray Boy’s mouth a little and said, “Say, ‘Don’t.’ Say, ‘Please don’t.’”

But Ray Boy said nothing. His lips were against the rotted, peeling porch floor.

Conway noticed one of the tats on Ray Boy’s arm. Duncan’s full name spelled out in shaky green print. Below that, Duncan’s death date.

“Fuck’s this for?” Conway said.

Still nothing.

“What’d my brother say to you that night? He begged you?” Conway jabbed the gun deeper. “Answer me. Fuck did he say?”

Ray Boy said, “He went, ‘Remember third grade. We were friends. Please don’t do this.’” And started crying.

 

 

Two

 

The whole house smelled like dirty sponges. Alessandra was sitting in the living room with her suitcase at her feet. She had come in on a red-eye from Los Angeles and taken a taxi straight home from the airport. She looked up at her mother’s china cabinet. It hadn’t been dusted in years. A puzzle she’d done with her mother when she was ten or eleven was on a TV tray next to the cabinet. Dust bunnies poked from between the wilting pieces like weeds. Her father came over and sat next to her. He smelled like a dirty sponge, too. “I’m happy you’re home,” he said.

Alessandra put her face in her hands. “I’ve been a terrible daughter.”

“You were a joy to us.”

“The funeral went okay?”

“A lot of family. We celebrated her life.”

“I’m so sorry I wasn’t here.”

“You’re here now. You want something to drink? Black coffee?”

Alessandra nodded. “With Sambuca and a little lemon,” she said.

Her father went into the kitchen and got the espresso started. Everything he did made him look like he’d been defeated. His clothes were rumpled. He needed a haircut. His glasses were scratched and taped between the lenses. He’d cut himself shaving in five or six different places. It wasn’t working for him, not having his wife around.

Alessandra had gone out to Los Angeles when she was eighteen. She’d wanted to get far away from Brooklyn and she wanted to be an actress, so L.A. seemed like the place to go. Her parents, especially her mother, didn’t understand. Why leave the neighborhood? Manhattan was right across the bridge, be an actress there. But something about the neighborhood made Alessandra anxious to get away. She was accepted into USC and her parents even fronted her the tuition, but she dropped out at the end of her first semester and tried to get by on commercials. She got work here and there, mostly stuff on the Home Shopping Network, but she started singing in a wedding band to pay the bills. She didn’t have much of a voice, but the guys in the band liked her looks so they let her on board. It’d been almost a decade of scraping by out west and when her mother got sick she thought she’d just finally give up and go home. But she waited, kept doing what she was doing, and her mother got sicker and her father called her five times a day and she just couldn’t face it. Now, almost two months after the cancer had spread to her bones and her mother had died, nothing the doctors at Sloan-Kettering or Columbia could do, Alessandra was back home in Gravesend and things were sadder than she could’ve imagined.

Her father came back out with two espresso cups on saucers. He’d rubbed the rim of hers with lemon the way she liked and left the wedge next to the spoon. She thanked him and then said she’d like to go visit her mother’s grave.

“We’ll go to Holy Garden whenever you want,” he said.

“I’ll just get unpacked and take a quick shower.” Alessandra sucked on the lemon and then took a sip of espresso. She started thinking about all she needed to do now that she was back. She had shipped most of her stuff and it was supposed to arrive the next day or the day after that. “I’m gonna need to find work,” she said.

“One thing at a time,” her father said.

“And a place.”

“You’ll stay here. Plenty of room.”

Alessandra got up with her espresso and walked around the room. She looked out the front window. Her father had decided to have the big oak that hung over the driveway cut down and now there was just so much space that she could see in the windows of the house next door. She stared at Jimmy’s Deli on the corner across the avenue, the place where she’d bought quarter waters and ice pops as a kid, and thought of her mother walking her over there and then coming back to work on her tomato plants. “We should’ve buried Mom out there in the yard,” Alessandra said. “Where she gardened.”

Her father seemed shocked by what she’d said. “This cemetery, it’s a nice place, a proper place,” he said.

“We should bury people in places they love. Or scatter their ashes there. Mom loved the yard, she had to. She was out there all the time. With her plants. Or just sitting, listening to the Yankees.”

“Your mother liked Holy Garden,” her father said, getting fed up. “We chose it together. Rosie DeLuca and Jimmy Licardi are buried there.” He paused. “We don’t bury people in yards here.”

“I just thought it might’ve been nice.”

After unpacking in her old room, putting her clothes in a closet and drawers that were still full of high school prom dresses and cutoffs and New Kids on the Block T-shirts, Alessandra took a shower. The tub was small and her father had plastered vinyl curtains on all four sides, even around the shower nozzle, to fight against mildew in the grout. It was a very dark and confining space. She remembered taking showers in the morning before school and having to close her eyes because it felt like she was alone in a submerged tank. The darkening of the stall was—and always had been—the project of a man who had failed too often in life and wouldn’t be defeated by mildew to boot.

Alessandra changed into a black dress, something appropriate for the cemetery, and she brushed her hair and put on makeup at her vanity table. Her room was spacious and girly, girlier than she’d remembered it, and it was very unlike the places she’d stayed in Los Angeles. Studios where the bed and refrigerator were side-by-side. Houses that she shared with other actresses and actors, all of whom were astounded by how simply she could live. And she didn’t need much. Some nice clothes and shoes, good makeup in her purse, a trip to a spa every now and then, time on the beach. She’d especially miss the L.A. beaches. Here, she had Coney and Manhattan Beach not too far away, but it wasn’t the same. New York beaches were too gritty for her. Coney especially. But maybe they’d changed, been cleaned up.

They drove to the cemetery with the oldies station on, Alessandra’s father asking her questions every few minutes. She gave short answers. He wanted to know about her boyfriend, the one that surfed. She said that ended a long time ago. He wanted to know about the weather out there and the traffic. She said warm, everyone drove. He wanted to know about the one big picture she had worked on. She said she’d only been an extra, it wasn’t anything, you couldn’t even see her in the final version. He wanted to know why she hadn’t auditioned for that singing show with the judges. She said she had, four times, and hadn’t made the cut. Weddings were all she was good for.

After that, things got quiet. Alessandra fiddled around in her purse, wished she had a pack of American Spirits. Her father had quit years ago, she knew, but she figured he had a pack stashed somewhere in the car. Everyone who quit had a car stash. “You have any cigarettes?” she said.

He said, “You smoke?”

“Just sometimes.”

“No good.”

“I know. So?”

“Glove compartment.”

She popped open the glove compartment and there was a package of Top rolling tobacco on a stack of old Esso maps and no-good-anymore insurance and registration cards. “I can’t roll,” she said.

“I rolled a few already. They’re in the bag.”

She opened the package and found a few rolled cigarettes with homemade cardboard filters. A tobacco-flecked matchbook from Benny’s Fish & Beer was also in there. She lit a cigarette and opened the window. “You want one?”

“No,” he said. “Not now. Your mother wouldn’t approve.”

Alessandra laughed. “Serious?”

“It’s a disrespect.”

“Ma smoked.”

“Years ago, when you were just a kid.”

Alessandra blew smoke out the window. She looked beyond passing cars at a squatting strip mall built on what a sign said used to be a landfill. Where were they anyway? She thought they were on the Belt, but it no longer looked familiar. Traffic was heavy in the middle of the day. Cars rocketed around them. Her father was a cautious, slow driver. He was doing the speed limit but it felt like they were going fifteen. All this to stand at a grave and weep. What did it even mean to cry over bones? She wasn’t there when it mattered, when her mother was alive and asking for her, but she’d go through the motions, act like a grieving daughter who had been too busy to make it home for her mother’s last days or even for the funeral.

The cemetery was worse than Alessandra had imagined. Her mother, she knew, wanted to be buried at St. John’s in Queens—that’s where her whole family was—but her father had no doubt talked her into going cheap. As far as cemeteries went, St. John’s was beautiful. This place, Holy Garden, was a catastrophe of bleakness. Gray prison walls surrounded plots that looked like they’d been hammered out of the earth. Headstones were tacky. Only paper flowers were allowed.

“Nice place, no?” her father said. “Peaceful.”

“Jesus, Daddy. Why didn’t you guys just get plots at St. John’s?”

“What?”

“It’s awful,” Alessandra said. She went back to the car, got another cigarette out of the glove compartment, lit it, came back to her mother’s grave, and kneeled over it. She picked some pebbles from the dirt and arranged them in a circle on top of her mother’s tombstone.

“That’s supposed to be what?” her father said.

“An offering.”

“Jesus, Mary, and Saint Joseph.” He paused. “Your mother liked it here. She did.”

“Her whole family’s at St. John’s.”

“Yeah, well, St. John’s costs an arm and a leg. There’s only one spot left in the family plot and her sister Jenny had seniority. So we came out here. Mikey the Goose’s mother and father are buried out here. Rosie and Jimmy. Frankie’s kid, got killed.”

“Frankie D’Innocenzio’s kid’s here? Duncan?”

“Poor kid. I don’t remember you knew him.”

“Of course I did.” Alessandra stubbed out her cigarette and put the butt in her pocket. “I want to visit his grave. You know where it is?”

“Say goodbye to your mother.”

Alessandra touched the headstone and pretended like she was praying over it. Her father turned his back. “We should’ve got flowers,” he said.

“Those paper flowers?”

“They sell them up in the main office.”

Alessandra ignored him. “Where’s Duncan?” she said.

He showed her the way, down a broken brick bath, to a stretch of flat in-the-ground headstones under a collapsing sycamore with roots that were pulling the dirt up around Duncan’s grave. Paper flowers littered the patches of dead grass around the headstone, the kind old VFW guys sold outside of supermarkets on Saturday mornings. The stone said Duncan’s name and the date he died. Below that: BELOVED SON, BELOVED BROTHER. “Sixteen years,” Alessandra said. “Christ.”

“Shame,” her father said. “I mean, I don’t understand the gay thing, but he didn’t deserve this.”

“That’s a stupid thing to say, Daddy.”

He turned his back again and started to walk back the way they’d come.

Alessandra stared at Duncan’s grave. She remembered not believing it when she heard that he’d died. How it happened was the worst. It’d been a year since she’d been in school with his brother Conway at Most Precious Blood and she just remembered feeling sorry for him. Conway always sat behind her in homeroom because his name came after hers. And she knew Ray Boy, too. He was four years older, and she used to see him around the neighborhood. He had these glassy blue eyes and wore a gray mechanic’s jacket with red stitching and she crushed out on him like the kid she was. Those eyes. She knew he’d picked on Duncan for a long time, a lot of guys did, but he was the worst and back then it didn’t bother her. You were a fruit, you got picked on, that was just the way of it. Now she knew somebody should’ve stepped in. Poor Duncan, always having to avoid guys, making it to senior year and thinking he was in the clear. But Ray Boy wasn’t grown up enough to let it be. He had to get Duncan one last time. She bet Ray Boy grew up pretty fast in jail.

She walked away from the grave and back to the car. Her father was sitting behind the wheel, smoking a cigarette. He had the radio on WABC and was listening to the news. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“You don’t need to be sorry,” she said.

“I am,” he said.

“Don’t worry, Daddy,” she said, and she bummed one last cigarette.

 

Back at the house now, Alessandra and her father ate dinner. Pasta with gravy he’d defrosted that afternoon and
braciole
from her Aunt Cecilia. She’d forgotten how good it was to eat like this. In L.A. it had been all hummus and avocados and smoothies, quick and healthy stuff on the run, and she didn’t miss it. This gravy tasted silky and sweet with a garlicky bite and the parmesan from Pastosa was unlike anything she could get out west. They shared a bottle of red wine, something dark and bitter and unlabeled from a neighbor’s basement, and she could barely drink it, the taste was so off, but she forced herself because she wanted to be drunk.

After dinner, her father sat down in his recliner and watched the Yankees. She went upstairs and changed clothes and redid her makeup and decided she was going to go out and see who was still around. She thought about Bay Ridge but didn’t want to deal with car service. There weren’t many bars in the neighborhood, not that she could remember. A dive called The Wrong Number with graffiti on the sign. And Ralphie’s, a clammy sports bar full of fat cops and smooth Italian boys stinking of cologne. Those were the options back when. She went downstairs, dolled to the nines, and asked her father if any new places had opened up. He understood her needing a drink out and he said yeah those places were still there and there were a couple of new joints too, a Russian supper club and another sports bar called Murphy’s Irish. Alessandra thought that Russian supper clubs must have been all sweat and vodka and getting hoisted up on men’s shoulders, and she wanted to steer clear of sports bars, so she decided to slum it at The Wrong Number. She wished she had girlfriends from the neighborhood she was still in contact with, someone she could call and coax into hanging out, but part of what had been appealing about going to L.A. was leaving behind the kids she had grown up with. Anyhow, she was never that close with any of them. She’d had some laughs with the two Melissas, out in Bay Ridge or Canarsie, and she spent a lot of time with Joanne Galbo and Mary DiMaggio in the Kearney days, but that was it. Stephanie Dirello, who used to live right up the block with her family and maybe still did, was the one girl she’d gone to school with for twelve years, at Most Precious Blood and at Kearney, and she used to see her in church every Saturday night, and sometimes they’d do homework together after school on the bus, but they’d never really been close friends, just two girls who lived a few houses apart. But she was nice, Stephanie. Always wore a too-big Mark Messier jersey. Maybe she’d go knock on Stephanie’s door, see if she was still in the neighborhood.

BOOK: Gravesend
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