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Authors: William Boyle

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Gravesend (4 page)

BOOK: Gravesend
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“Fuck you doing?” McKenna said, trying to stop him mid-toss with a forearm shiver, but it was too late. Conway let go as McKenna made contact and the .22 went arcing out, landing in the water with a chirp. “You gotta be kidding.” McKenna put his arms up over his head.

Conway said, “It’s over, dude.”

McKenna pushed him. Conway fell backward, landing in Ray Boy’s tracks. McKenna huffed, fed up, disappointed.

“I’m sorry,” Conway said.

“You’re sorry?”

“Sorry I threw the gun away.”

McKenna shook his head, walked back to the car.

Conway sat there, propped on his elbows, looked up at the dirty, starless sky. Just a quick cut of moon behind some cashew-shaped clouds. Conway remembered how Duncan would always tilt his head back on nights they sat out on the front stoop and say, “Look at the moon, man, it’s beautiful.”

Getting up, dusting himself off, Conway walked with no purpose back to the car. McKenna had the radio on loud, didn’t want to talk, made throat-cutting signals when Conway offered to drive. McKenna took off with spinning wheels, back into the tragic flow, away from Plumb Beach, the moon staying framed in the back window.

 

Pop was waiting up, standing at the door, looking out from behind the musty curtain over the glass. Conway could see him from the car. McKenna still had the radio on loud, the engine running, just waiting for Conway to leave. Conway wanted to apologize again, say something, anything, but he just got out of the car and watched McKenna drive away up the block, red lights fizzing out in the distance.

Pop turned off the alarm and came outside. “Been worried sick,” he said. His pajama bottoms hung low and he wore a heavy North Face coat, making sure Conway knew it was a lot for him to be outside this time of night.

“Sorry, Pop,” Conway said.

“Where you been?”

“Just taking care of some stuff.”

“You said you’d get my prescription.” Pause. “Stephanie brought it. I should’ve gone myself.”

“Pop, I’m sorry,” Conway said, feeling suddenly sore all over, hungover already maybe, or on the sour end of a cheap beer drunk.

“You stink like booze.” Pop put a hand on his shoulder and scrunched his nose up.

“I had a few. Let me be, huh?”

“Let you be. I got one son left, I gotta worry.”

The guilt trip. Conway couldn’t take it. He walked past his old man and went inside. Didn’t brush his teeth. Didn’t drink water. Just went to his room and flopped on the bed, feeling the headache settle.

It took Pop a few minutes to reset the alarm and close up the house, but then he was hovering over Conway in the bed, saying, “Where you been? Stephanie said she was worried. Said you sounded upset.”

“It’s nothing, Pop.”

Pop paced next to the bed, frantic, spry when he wanted to be. “I’m alone here, what can I do?”

Conway, eyes closed, tried to ignore it. He wanted to dream about something good. But what? Girls? He hardly knew any. He wasn’t going to dream about getting a blowjob from Stephanie, that was for sure. Actresses maybe. That cute redhead from the zombie movie he’d just watched. Her legs in those cutoffs. Conway tried to keep the picture of her up in his mind, saw it like a flickering image on an old drive-in movie screen, no sound. Pop’s voice killed it, droning on, the old man half-complaining, half-begging. Conway wanted, for once, to say,
Please please please shut the fuck up
, but he didn’t have the balls. He never had the balls.

Pop kept going strong: “I’m worried sick over here. I don’t know who to call. I’m thinking maybe an accident. I’m looking up numbers to hospitals. Victory’s closed. Where they gonna take him, I’m saying. Methodist? Maimonides? I’m sick.”

Conway’s eyes shot open, the ceiling fluttering. He said, “Please, Pop.”

“And you got a big head.” Pop sat on the edge of the bed. “That’s all. Out drinking. I’m here worried, you’re at a watering hole, no worries, no thought for your old man.”

“Please.”

“Sleep it off. Mass is at 7:30 tomorrow. Or you gonna give up on that?”

“I’ll be up,” Conway said.

Pop got up, paced some more, and then left the room. “Sleep it off,” he said on his way out.

“Night, Pop,” Conway said, closing his eyes again, trying to get the picture of the actress back, anything but Ray Boy.

 

Next morning, at Mass with Pop, Conway felt hammered flat as elephant shit. He hadn’t showered or brushed his teeth. He’d peeled himself from the bed and walked to Murphy’s Irish to retrieve his car and then went back home to pick up Pop, making them almost ten minutes late for church, walking in on the second reading. He’d taken three aspirins for breakfast, washed them down with Tabasco-spiked tomato juice, and tried to eat a piece of toast but found he couldn’t. His stomach was all knotted up. He had a tightness in his chest, too, like what asthma probably felt like. And he kept seeing Ray Boy everywhere he looked. Ray Boy just out walking. Ray Boy in passing cars. On the bus. Leaving a deli with the
Post
folded under his arm, blowing on a steaming cup of coffee. Ray Boy, alive in everything.

Eyes going squiggly, temples pounding, Conway looked around the church, trying to zone out on something. Only about fifteen other people were there. Mostly old timers. No one to mistake for Ray Boy. One woman, his age maybe, wore sunglasses and a scarf in her black hair and didn’t belong to the scene. She looked familiar. He wanted to nudge Pop,
who’s that
, but held off, going through an internal Rolodex of jerk-off material from the past. Had he gone to school with her?

When Mass was over, Father Villani greeting people on their way out, Conway’s eyes followed Scarf and Sunglasses, trying to place her. She put her small hand in Villani’s and spoke to him for a moment.

Outside, Pop was itching to get in the car. He’d walked right past Villani, never liking to shake hands with the priest on the way out, and Conway had followed him. Lapdog.

He looked back over his shoulder at Scarf and Sunglasses, her neck arched now, buttoning up her soft coat, no wrinkles on it, straight and clean like in the store.

“Hold up a sec, Pop,” Conway said.

Pop wasn’t happy about it but he went over to the car and waited, arms crossed, sitting on the hood.

Conway made a move toward the woman, not wanting to be a coward, wanting to say,
Where do I know you from
? Smooth, like that. But he stood in front of her, gawking. She was even prettier up close. “Hey,” he said.

“Sorry, man,” she said, trying to walk away.

“What’s your name?”

“Listen.” She took off her sunglasses and eyed him with suspicion. “It’s too early for this.”

He said, “I’m Conway.”

“D’Innocenzio?”

“I do know you?”

“Alessandra. From Most Precious Blood.”

“Holy shit.”

“I was just,” she said, putting her glasses back on, “I was just out visiting my mother’s grave and I saw . . . I mean, I was just thinking . . .” She trailed off with what she was saying.

“It’s been forever.”

“Last night I hung out with Stephanie Dirello.”

“I work with Steph.”

“What she said.”

“I heard you were out west. Where’s your dad? You were with your dad, I would’ve known it was you right away.”

“He doesn’t come to church anymore. Wanted me to go, though. Figured it was the least I could do, go to church for him. I haven’t been to church since high school. It’s weirder than I remember.”

Conway tried to play it cool. He said, “I come for my old man. Least I could do, too.” It all came back to him then. Grade school. Sitting behind Alessandra for years. Her in her uniform. Olive skin. Black hair. Little feet. Root beer eyes. Always turning around to say something to him, to laugh, him doing the latest
Saturday Night Live
bit, her loving it, saying he was so funny. All those years, him going home, writing in marble notebooks over and over and over again,
C hearts A, C hearts A, C hearts A
. His biggest crush from grade school. His only crush really, not counting Dana Zimmardi in first grade. Alessandra, shit, right here in front of him now, not knowing what a coward he was, but knowing he worked at a fucking Rite Aid, and her an actress. He had no shot, none at all.
Just tuck your dick between your legs and drive your daddy home, chump
.

“I got home yesterday,” Alessandra said.

“Crazy. For how long?”

“I don’t know. A bit.”

“I’m sorry, I’m . . . I heard about your mother.”

“Thanks, yeah. I was just saying, I was . . . I was out there visiting her at Holy Garden.”

“Holy Garden?”

“I saw Duncan’s . . . I mean, I paid my respects to Duncan. I didn’t remember he was out there.”

Conway ignored it, not wanting to think about Duncan or Ray Boy right now, just wanting to think about Alessandra’s killer body. “Crazy, crazy, crazy.”

“Well, I’m happy I ran into you.”

“You want to, maybe, go get a slice one day? Catch up?”

“Maybe,” she said. “Let me see. I’m kind of unsettled, but yeah, probably I could do that.”

Conway nodded, her being nice, he could tell, not really wanting to catch up beyond this. “You know where I work. Steph’s got my number.”

She smiled, white teeth like a commercial, and said, “Bye now.”

Conway walked back to the car, his old man about to explode, sick of waiting, tired of breaking routine.

“They’re gonna be out of papers,” Pop said, as if Augie’s would sell out of the
Daily News
in five minutes.

“Sorry, Pop,” Conway said. “That was Alessandra Biagini. From MPB. You remember her?”

“I don’t remember her. Who wears sunglasses in church?”

“Yeah, I don’t know,” Conway said, wanting to follow Alessandra as she walked the few blocks to her house, knowing maybe he would’ve if Pop wasn’t around, just wanting one more look.

“Pretty girl, though,” Pop said, softening.

Conway, casting Alessandra in his mind’s newest movie, something about her and him locked in a thrashing fuck session in the confessional box, said, “No joke.”

 

 

Four

 

Eugene was in Augie’s Deli. He tried to look like he was shopping for Ring Dings and Doritos and Gatorade, but Augie—with his big hairy hands and drooping chin—was on heavy-duty lookout, knowing Eugene would swipe whatever he could get his hands on. Spaldeens, Bazooka, porn mags. It was hard for Eugene to be any kind of graceful with his limp. Hard not to creak and claw through the aisles. Not to mention his headphones thudding. Eugene bopped his head to Scarface’s “Guess Who’s Back,” a joint from back when he was in second grade, and Augie tracked him by the sound even when he disappeared behind the tallest racks. The only shot Eugene had at getting away with anything was if Augie got distracted with another customer, some Chinese girl buying Now and Laters or an old man like Tommy DeLuca from the corner coming in and ordering a deli sandwich. Right now it was just him and Augie.

Augie said, “You getting anything today?”

Eugene sniffled, wiped his nose with the back of his sleeve. He pulled his headphones down around his neck. “What’s up?”

“You buying anything?”

“Maybe.”

“Buy something or get out,” Augie said, stomping out from behind the counter.

Eugene grabbed his nuts and yanked. “Suck my dick.”

“Get out,” Augie said.

“Make me.”

Augie got red in the face. He looked like he was about to have a heart attack. He reached around on the counter for something to wield as a weapon. He picked up a box cutter and showed it to Eugene.

Eugene said, “You gonna cut me?”

“Get out.” Augie moved closer. “I’ll call the police.”

Eugene laughed. “Six-Two ain’t shit.”

“Why don’t you act how you’re supposed to act? Your pants all low. That rap. From the projects, that’s what you think?”

Eugene pushed his pants down even further, showing the full fly on his boxers.

“I know your mother. She’s proud of what you are?”

“You don’t know my moms.”

“Get out, you little thug. How old are you? Fifteen? Fifteen and already a thug. You make me sick.” Augie put down the box cutter and went back behind the counter. He picked up his cell. “Just like your uncle. Look what happened to him. Same’s in store for you. Prison. You’re on the road. You ready for that?” He was dialing. “Few years, you’ll be in jail, guaranteed.”

Eugene threw his fists out and toppled a display. Packaged butter crunch cookies went everywhere, spinning across the sawdusty floors like pucks.

Augie said, “Little prick.” Paused. He was on the phone with a dispatcher from the precinct now. “I’ve got a kid here, little thug, over here at Augie’s, you know the place? Little thug’s shoplifting, getting ready to, threatening me, knocking stuff over.”

“Threatening you?” Eugene said, laughing. He limped out of the store, letting the door clang shut behind him. Outside, he kicked over a rack of newspapers with his good leg and said, “Fuck you,” loud enough so Augie could hear him through the front glass, loud enough so people sitting outside Giove’s Pizza across the street looked up and shook their heads. Little thug, yeah, the whole neighborhood seeming to nod. “Pull a box cutter on me,” Eugene said. “That’s some bullshit right there.”

Sirens tore up Bath Avenue. The Six-Two was taking Augie’s call seriously. Eugene tried to book it up the block, but his leg hitched him up, and he disappeared into an alley next to Mikey Elizondo’s house on Bay Thirty-Eighth. He hunched over behind a garbage can and took out his cell. He dialed Sweat Scagnetti, who was probably playing
Call of Duty
in his living room with a gallon of Pepsi and a Nutella sandwich.

Sweat answered with a huff. “What?”

“Pick me up.”

“Where you at?”

“Alley next to Mikey Elizondo’s. Augie called the cops on me.”

“Stupid motherfucker.”

“Come get me.”

“Chill, I’ll be there.”

Sweat pulled up in his Mazda ten minutes later, wearing a powder blue XXL cardigan, J. Crew pants, and loafers. His speakers were thumping last year’s Jay-Z. He had a Bluetooth in his ear and a stick of pepperoni in butcher’s paper in his lap. His father owned a pork store in Long Island City and they lived in Dyker Heights. Ten grand for tuition at Our Lady of the Narrows, where Eugene and Sweat went, was a drop in the bucket for the Scagnettis.

For Eugene, fatherless, living with his mother and aunt, that tuition was a big deal. He heard about it every day, especially when he got in trouble. Less than a month into being a sophomore at OLN, Eugene was sick of the place. The uniform, the preppies, the brothers with their curly hair and big crosses and blue-and-gold sweaters. But he’d lucked into being buddies with Sweat, who was driving at fifteen with no license. His mother and father had given him the okay. No biggie, they said. Rich bastards. Sweat gave Eugene hand-me-down iPods and phones and video game systems, getting the newest stuff as it came out.

Eugene got in the car, head down, slumping in the seat. He slapped hands with Sweat, whose squat fingers glistened with pepperoni grease.

“Where we going?” Sweat said.

Eugene said, “Wherever. Coney?”

Sweat swung the car away from the curb, not even checking to see if anyone was coming, and then made a left onto Cropsey.

“You see cops back by Augie’s?” Eugene said.

“One car. Just a guy talking to Augie. Didn’t look like they were gonna send out the dogs. What’d you do?”

“Nothing. Bullshit. Dude pulled a fucking box cutter on me. We should go back there, fuck the store up, Molotov cocktail right through the window.”

“They’ll know it’s you.”

“I give a shit?”

Sweat parked over by Gargiulo’s, his wheels up on the curb, and they got out and headed for the Boardwalk. It was pretty cold, low fifties, and the streets were mostly empty. A couple of guys were hustling at an empty pay phone bank. Old Russians were scattered on benches by the ramps up to the Boardwalk, shopping carts scissored at their feet, this weather beautiful to them. The sky was gray, mangled-looking.

Eugene was always embarrassed walking with Sweat because of the way he dressed and that Bluetooth. But the benefits outweighed the bullshit. Sweat was always quick to pay Eugene’s way for hot dogs, freak shows, arcades.

Eugene knew Sweat felt the same way about him. With his bad limp, he looked like he’d been shot. He was almost a bad enough crip that people stopped and stared. The limp was something he developed as a kid, something about his hip actually, the bones not developing correctly on his left side. His whole life he’d heard about it. They called him Limp or Gimp in grade school, Crip, Frankenstein, Fuck Leg, Drag. He always lied about it now that he was in high school. Told people he
did
get shot as a kid. Drive-by attempt on him and his mother outside Martin’s Paints. Kids started to buy it, saying wow and holy shit. So Eugene developed the story further. The Russian mob was after his mother for a loan she took out. He was unfortunate enough to catch a bullet meant for her. The docs said it was a miracle he lived, the bullet missed an artery by
this much
. It got so he enjoyed telling the story. He was even starting to believe it himself.

“Fuck we gonna do?” Sweat said.

“Talk to Lutz lately?” Eugene said.

“You can only hit that so many times.”

“Yeah, but.”

“True.”

“Call her, tell her get one of her friends over, we’ll have a party, whatever.”

Eugene had lost his cherry at eleven to a girl with a lazy eye named Cindy, a seventeen year old who hung out in the Cavallaro schoolyard and smoked cigarettes on the swings. Then there’d been Denise and Dyana, twin sisters who liked to tag-team Eugene. Sweat had introduced him to Lutz a couple of weeks after starting at OLN and she had an endless supply of friends. Eugene was learning to last. He was taking five, maybe ten minutes to shoot out in his rubber.

Sweat was on the phone with Lutz in a second, saying, “It’s Sweat. Me and Eugene. Little while. Your friend there?”

“Ask her to get the one with freckles,” Eugene said.

“The one with freckles,” Sweat said. “Quincy? Yeah, okay.” He shrugged. “In a few then.” Hung up.

“It her?”

“I don’t know. Whatever.”

They walked the few blocks to Lutz’s apartment building, part of the Monsignor Burke complex across from the aquarium. She buzzed them in.

When they got upstairs, Lutz opened the door. Her hair was piled on her head in curls, her makeup fresh. Eugene could see Quincy behind her, sitting at the kitchen table, not the one he wanted, but not bad. He could feel a great swath of warmth coming from the apartment, the heater going full blast in there.

“Hey guys,” Lutz said. “Come in.”

Sweat and Eugene walked in, getting swallowed up by the warmth.

 

About an hour later, back in Sweat’s car, Eugene was looking at himself in the mirror on the passenger visor. His cheeks were red and splotchy. “Feel like I been attacked by a lion,” he said.

“Where you wanna go?” Sweat said.

Eugene shrugged.

“Home then.” Sweat hunched over the wheel. “I got dinner soon.”

“Whatever, yo.”

They rode in silence back to Eugene’s house. Sweat turned up the music with a button on his steering wheel. The speakers went buzzy. The windows down, they moved their heads to some Raekwon.

Sweat pulled up on the curb behind Eugene’s mother’s ‘95 Ford Explorer with its faded
Rudy for President
bumper sticker. Blue plastic was taped over the broken back window.

Eugene and Sweat slapped hands, and Eugene said, “Peace.”

Sweat turned the music up even louder and nodded.

Eugene got out and walked down the alley next to his house, kicking a coiled hose out of the way, and he went in the back door on the deck. It was the only way he ever went in. His mother and aunt liked to keep the front door permanently locked. On the deck, tomato plants were growing in an old wrought-iron, clawfoot tub and dusty, rain-damaged deck chairs sat overturned. Eugene could hear something going on in the house. He wasn’t sure what. People were talking. He heard a guy’s voice that he didn’t recognize, and then he heard his grandmother and grandfather.

He walked in. His Uncle Ray Boy was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and eating a grilled cheese. Eugene stopped and took it in. His grandparents sat on either side of Uncle Ray Boy, and his mother and Aunt Elaine were standing by the sink, lit up, so happy.

“Yo,” Eugene said.

“You okay?” his mother said. “You look flushed.”

“I’m fine.”

“You remember Uncle Ray Boy, right?”

“Course.” Eugene hadn’t been born when Uncle Ray Boy went to jail, but he’d been with his mother to visit him in jail a couple of times. His mother didn’t like the idea of taking him there, but she’d had to once when he was six because she couldn’t find someone to watch him. The other time, when he was ten, she just got into her head that he needed to get to know his uncle. He was also already getting into trouble in school at that point so she wanted him to know what could happen to him.

Truth was his Uncle Ray Boy had become a hero to him. There was a lot of mythology surrounding him in the neighborhood. Stories of how wild he was. Some people thought he got a raw deal—he didn’t really kill the kid after all—and that he should’ve been out, back up to his old tricks, way sooner. Sixteen years. Fuck. Eugene was a year away from being sixteen. That was a lifetime. Once, Eugene had found pictures in his mother’s closet of Uncle Ray Boy looking like a badass in a wife-beater with girls in leather jackets on his arms, hair slicked back, smoking unfiltered Marlboro Reds. The pictures came from a time that didn’t even seem real. The early Nineties. There were more snaps of Uncle Ray Boy at Yankee games, sitting on the hoods of long, solid cars, playing stickball in the P.S. 101 schoolyard.

“Hey Eugene,” Uncle Ray Boy said. “You’re big.” He was wearing funny clothes, a loose T-shirt and too-big sweatpants. He wasn’t dressed tough at all. But he was cut, Eugene could tell, and tatted up and his face was scraped like he’d been in a fight.

“You’re back?” Eugene said.

“For a little while.”

“Hell yeah.” Eugene sat across from his uncle at the table. He said hey to his grandparents. They looked like they’d been put back together, their three kids and one grandkid all in the same room. A family.

“So, how’s things?” Uncle Ray Boy said.

“Solid,” Eugene said. “What happened to your face?”

“Nothing.”

“He won’t say,” Eugene’s mother said.

Eugene said, “How was the joint?”

Uncle Ray Boy laughed. “The joint?” Paused. “Joint sucked, man.” Moving away from it. “How’s the leg? I remember you had something wrong with it.”

Eugene thought,
This guy busting my balls right now?

“It’s okay,” Eugene’s mother said. “It’s been a lot of trouble. Eugene doesn’t like to talk about it.”

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