Headstone City (14 page)

“You love me?”

That got him stomping the pedal even harder, swinging through traffic as it thickened around them. “Yeah, of course.”

“I mean . . . me.”

“You.”

“Not just 'cause I . . . look like Maria.”

“You, Angie.”

“She thinks you're . . . funny . . . but not tough enough—”

He grimaced and clenched his jaws until it felt like his fillings were about to buckle. “I knew I should've gone inside with you.”

Smiling, the foam smearing her face. “You love me.”

He'd been working the lights pretty good, catching them as they turned green, but Brooklyn always had to do what it could to make you go insane. As he wheeled to the top of a rise, an ocean of brake lights in front of him, all the signals as far as he could see all went red at once. The cars piled up while he tried to make it out of this shithole neighborhood, still unsure of where he was going.

He spotted a traffic cop getting up from a bus stop bench on the corner and stepping into the middle of the street, grimacing at drivers that passed too close to him. The light changed and he held his hand up, stopping everybody dead.

Dane let go with a grunt, wheeled around the Honda Civic in front of him, and drove out to look the cop in his eye.

The cop ignored Dane out there in the intersection, two inches away. Horns blared. He just put his hand out, blowing his whistle, and started gesturing for the cross traffic to proceed.

“I need a hospital,” Dane said, knowing he should wail to get the guy's attention. But he couldn't let it out.

“What? You got a pregnant lady in there with you?”

“A girl who's sick.”

“All you hacks, every one of you's got pregnant women in back during rush hour. Today alone there musta been twenty of 'em. I couldn't spit across the street without hitting a lady who was preggers.”

Dane reached out, took hold of the cop's tie. “You prick, point me to the hospital.”

“Hey, you want me to run you in? You accosting a police officer? You know what you could get for that?”

Like he was a cat burglar. Like this was a bank heist, instead of a guy trying to save a young girl's life. But this fucking
stugots
traffic cop has to puff out his chest.

The cop was about thirty, with a sour face and the pale outline of a mustache he'd recently shaved off. Full of impatience and annoyance, not one of those guys you see dancing and singing the traffic along, blowing their whistles to some funny tune. This one must have been recently busted down for doing something serious. They put him out in the middle of the street so they could see where he was all the time.

“Back this up and get out of the intersection, buddy! Now!”

Yeah, he was new all right, and trying to change the course of the world because he was pissed off at his commanding officer. As if anybody ever backed up in New York, for any reason.

“Tell me,” Dane said. “Which way?”

“Three blocks up, two right. If you don't know Bedford-Stuyvesant, the hell are you doing driving through here? Are you from the Heights?” Stepping out in front of the cab, shaking his head. “You people from the Heights act like you own the whole goddamn city. Hold on a second.”

Dane gunned it. The cop actually pulled a face and stepped forward, sticking his hand out again. One of those types who think the badge somehow makes them invincible. He still looked cranky and in control up until the instant he was lying up on the hood of the cab, spread over the windshield.

Dane drove two blocks like that and the cop finally fell off at the entrance to the hospital parking lot. A couple of attendants came running down the sidewalk to help him.

Engine shrieking, Dane drove up to the emergency room and almost plowed into the electric doors, his fist on the horn.

He glanced back at Angie and saw she was blue, foam coursing down her chin, her throat three sizes larger than normal. Blood leaking out of her nose.

The cops nabbed him for vehicular assault. The traffic cop had a broken collarbone and a fractured pelvis. During the trial he still wore a sour expression of impatience, pointing at Dane with his shoulder in a cast, screaming in a high, girlish voice.

Angie lasted almost a day and a half after going into anaphylactic shock from a speedball mix of heroin and flake cocaine. It had been slightly diluted with lactose and enhanced with amphetamine, ephedrine, and caffeine. Sort of a delicacy on the street, Dane found out, but she'd been fatally allergic to the ephedrine.

Twelve hours later, while he was still in lockup, his best friend Vinny Monticelli put a contract out on him.

TWELVE

O
n the night Ma died, the boy with the sick brain told him how much
he
loved Dane's mother, how wonderful she was, how beautiful she was there in the bed, her skin yellow, the machines forcing air into her lungs. Heaving her against the pillows like a careless lover.

The kid had sutures all across his head, bone showing through on one side. Jagged raw red scars crosshatching his frontal lobe. Pieces of his skull had been removed and replaced with plastic and steel. He walked like he had five angry people inside grappling for control. Dane followed him around the room where his mom was dying and he was walking the same way.

Dane was seventeen and didn't know his mother well at all. She'd been ill for years and had spent most of her time in the back room, waiting to die. Their conversations consisted of lists and catalogues of delirium.

What did you do today? Today I went to math class, gym, went down to the pier with Maria, stole another car, and played stickball in Venucci's parking lot. What did you do today? Today I dreamed an angel with golden wings as shiny as coins sat with me on the end of the bed. In its hand was a burning sword. I watched the television for a while, but it wasn't on. I bled in the toilet. Go out and play.

He came home from a weekend in Atlantic City, where he'd stayed with Vinny in one of the Don's hotels, and found her on the bathroom floor. Eyes shadowed and skin turning a delicate shade of blue. Dad in his grave only a few months, Grandma at bingo. Dane drove her over to the hospital, stunned by how quickly they set her up in ICU.

They allowed him to stay with her while the symphony of mechanical discord spiked his skull. Red lights snapped on and glowed like eyes of furious judgment. You could go crazy in this room waiting for your mother to die.

He learned more about his mom from the ill kid, who spoke as if he'd known her all his life. He'd spent much of his youth in the hospital, where they tore at his skull and pulled out pieces and jammed transistors in. Other people lived between his ears. He understood how to read the medical charts. What each machine's purpose was. The kid had strange eyes, one staring straight ahead, the other never quite settled, always jumping.

The room flashed with wild hands. The kid kept reaching over and running fingers over Dane's scalp. His own jagged stitch marks hadn't completely healed yet. The wounds were still a bright pink, his hair coming in choppy and discolored in those areas. The boy with the sick brain giggled and did a little rumba around the room, excited to see somebody else with a fucked-up head.

Dane kept rubbing his mother's hand with his thumb. He couldn't stop, the rhythm of his motion timed to the beeping machines. He looked down at the floor, searching for the pool of blackness that shuddered beneath his feet. Sometimes he had a shadow, and sometimes his shadow had him.

The kid spoke with a beautiful voice, in English and other languages. Occasionally hissing his words, with a deep meaning and an awful emotion. He told Dane that Ma had spent so much time crying that she couldn't stop, not even now, in her coma. Her sleep would never be pure. She'd always struggle, restless and weeping, for the remainder of her hours in the hospital bed, and afterward into purgatory.

Thumb moving back and forth on your mother's yellow, bloated flesh. The machines speaking in ancient rhymes you can almost comprehend.

The boy touched your scars, matching them against his own. You're glad that he keeps talking.

“Was wünschen Sie von mir?”

“I don't want anything from you. What the hell do you want from me? Why are you even here?”

“É bonita. Eu quero-a. Você não merece uma mulher tão maravilhosa. É minha. Mãe. Mãe.”

“She's not your mother. She's mine.”

“Mère. Mère.”

“She's my ma, damn it.”

“Mia madre. La mia madre!”

“No matter how many times you say it, she's not yours, she's my mom.”

Thinking about how easy it would be to snap the boy's neck, Dane waited for somebody to come save him. His grandmother, with her red fingers. Uncle Philly, who would be off shift in a half hour. The nurses out in the hall gossiped loudly about possible pay cuts and breast enhancement.

A doctor who looked maybe twenty-five peeked his head into the room and flashed a brilliant smile at Dane, showing off his caps. His hair had some kind of wet- look mousse in it, sculpted into small curved thorns rearing in every direction.

In Jersey, when Dane and Vinny were laid up in the emergency room, there had been a doctor with the same kind of haircut who'd wandered around smirking. Did the hospitals hire these guys just to roam the halls like maître d's?

Dane wanted to pace. He stood and tried to move, but it was like he was fused to the spot. It took him a minute to realize he couldn't stop rubbing his mother's hand, not even if he wanted to. He had to keep this contact, no matter how long he had to stay here.

A voice came from under the bed.

Dane couldn't understand it. He lifted the hanging sheets and saw the kid crouched under there, arguing with the floor, pausing between incomprehensible sentences as if the floor was talking back. Maybe it was. Dane tried to listen, but the cruel grating of his mother's respirator kept dragging his attention back to her frail chest.

The kid's head was coming farther apart, sutures and staples pulling away. He crawled out from beneath the bed and stared at Ma's body, then turned away, beaming, needy but appearing innocent.

Dane knew what the boy wanted.

The rage and grief grew inside him until he was grunting and groaning in his seat like a pig. He tightened his free hand around the arm of the chair. He wanted to smash the kid with one of the machines and scatter the shards of his skull across the wall.

“Go on, damn you,” Dane whispered. “Do it, if you have to.”

The boy with the twisted head crept into bed with Dane's mother.

He held her tightly and began to weep, whining and mewling. In time his sobs became a single word, repeated over and over but never growing any louder. “Mama, mama.” His tears rolled off her bony chest each time the machines drove her to take in another breath. “Mama.” He cried for almost an hour until finally, exhausted, he slept.

Dane sat there watching as her body functions grew even slower, and though it felt as if they would never stop, eventually they did. It really hadn't taken that long, he realized, checking his watch. His hand was free to move again.

The respirator still forced her lungs to heave, although Dane knew she was dead. The boy with the sick brain grinned in his sleep. His eyelids fluttered as he dreamed. The flaps of his head barely held together, the meat of his mind throbbing, flesh trying to pull open.

For an instant, Dane saw a black, indistinct shape in there waiting to be born into existence. Perhaps it was the boy's soul. Or Mom's. Or his own.

Scar tissue could be more alive than the rest of your skin. Itching, dead, but full of answers. Cut it open and it reproduces. Not alive, but giving birth.

He left before he was certain. There were some questions that should never be answered.

That leering doctor met him in the doorway again and bared his teeth. Dane looked at him and said, “I ought to kill you, you crazy grinning fuck.” The guy still didn't drop his smile, but he vanished quickly down the hall.

As Dane drove home from the hospital, it felt as if the neighborhood were slowly growing aware of the death of his mother. As if the streets were learning of it mile by mile, as he made his way to the house.