Onion Street (10 page)

“What the fuck are you talking about? You didn’t even know Billy O’Day. How can that concern you?”

“I was there,” I said.

He was confused. “You were where?”

“They found Billy O’Day dead on the boardwalk on a bench in front of the Parachute Jump, a belt tied around his bicep and a needle sticking out of his arm. Here.” I shoved the story into Bobby’s face. “See?”

He took a second to read the story. “They mention the boardwalk, but it doesn’t say anything about a bench or the belt or a needle sti — ” He stopped talking when he realized how I knew those details.

“That’s right, Bobby. I was there. I didn’t actually see it happen because I got hooded and tied up, but I found his body. He didn’t OD. He didn’t commit suicide. He was murdered.”

“Murdered?”

“Yeah, while I was talking to him. So don’t tell me to stay out of this or that. This concerns me. It also concerns me that for the first time since we’ve known each other, you’re shutting me out and lying to me.”

“Kinda makes my point for me, man,” he said. “If Billy was murdered, the people who did it know you know. They were smart enough to hood you so you couldn’t identify them. I guess they figured you were an innocent civilian, but if you keep at whatever you think you’re doing, that civilian label will disappear and you’ll become a target.”

“Like you?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he said.

“That night when I bailed you out of jail and I was with Mindy, she warned me to stay away from you. She wouldn’t tell me why, but she made me promise.”

He actually smiled that smile of his. “I guess you broke that promise, huh?”

“This isn’t funny, Bobby. I think that day in the snowstorm, the Caddy was trying to run you down. That was no accident.”

He patted my cheek and laughed. “You worry about me more than my own goddamn parents, you know that? But don’t worry about me. I’ve got it covered.”

“What about the other stuff?”

“Leave it alone, Moe. Trust me. Leave it alone. C’mon, we gotta get a move on, or we’ll be late.”

The airport run that day was pretty much like the last one. We took an elderly couple to Eastern Airlines at JFK. They had come up to New York to visit their kids and grandkids, and were now headed back down to Florida. We parked Bobby’s Olds 88 in the same lot and followed the same routine. When we left the terminal to return to the car, Bobby confided in me that if the old folks’ plane went down, he stood to make a killing. No pun intended. Then, seeing the horrified look on my face, he put me in a headlock.

“Don’t be such a downer, man. I’m only putting you on. If it makes you feel any better, I really hope I never get to collect on any of these policies.”

I was not reassured. Bobby didn’t do anything out of the kindness of his heart, not for strangers, anyway. Sometimes I even thought the protests he was so good at organizing were mostly self-serving. They made him look good and if we didn’t have to go to Nam, neither did he. I don’t know. I guess I was feeling less love for Bobby that particular day than I’d ever felt before. Maybe if he’d answered some of my questions or’d given me some sense of what I’d gotten myself into, I might have taken a kinder view of my old friend. And for chrissakes, he was my age. He had to know that giving me that boogie man warning and all that mumbo jumbo about civilians and leaving it alone wasn’t going to work. Did anyone my age ever listen to those kinds of warnings?
Stay away from drugs. They’re bad for you
.

We didn’t talk much as we left the airport and got back on the Belt Parkway west toward home. I wanted to keep at him about the Committee, Susan Kasten, the late Abdul Salaam, and the more recently late Billy O’Day, but knew he wasn’t going to give me any more than what he’d already imparted. So I decided to take another tack.

“Before we got sidetracked, you were missing Sam bad. Why so blue about Sam today? It’s been months.”

“I don’t know. You know how you forget things sometimes? I used to really dig waking up next to Sam. She was always so warm and she smelled good in the morning even if we’d spent the whole night balling. Anyways, I must’ve dreamed about her and I forgot she was dead. When I rolled over in bed this morning, I expected to find her there. But the sheet was cold, and then I had to live it all over again in my head.”

“I’m sorry, Bobby.”

“That’s okay, man. Forget what I said to you before about you and her. It’s good to talk about her with you, Moe, because you appreciated her and how special she was.”

“You know that night with Mindy, the night I found her drinking and smoking outside Burgundy House …”

“The night you bailed me out, yeah. What about it?”

“It was weird, but Mindy said she was acting funny because of Samantha.”

“That makes no sense,” he said, shaking his head. “It was no secret that Mindy hated Sam’s guts. Mindy isn’t the jealous type, but when it came to Sam …”

“Tell me about it. I had to deal with it.”

Bobby smiled. “Yeah, man. One thing about Mindy, she’s not good at hiding her feelings.”

No matter how mad I was at him or frustrated I was by his deflections, seeing that smile made me smile. It didn’t last.

Bang!
The front end of the car on my side smacked down on the pavement, the rear end fishtailing like crazy. Bobby struggled to keep control of the two-ton monster. Luckily we were in the far right lane when the tire blew, allowing Bobby to slow down and drift onto the shoulder near the Pennsylvania Avenue exit.

I started laughing. “Thank God this happened after we dropped them off. We would’ve had two heart attack victims on our hands.”

“I suppose.” But Bobby wasn’t laughing. “Stay in the car,” he said, pointing his finger at me. “Stay in the fucking car.”

Man, the day just kept getting stranger and stranger. I’d witnessed bigger mood swings and shifts in Bobby in less than four hours than maybe in the rest of the time I’d known him. Sure, he was upset about his car, but he wasn’t obsessed with it like the Italian guys in the neighborhood who would give up their Sundays to Mass and hand-washing their cars. Mass they did out of obligation. The hours they spent on their cars was devotion. That wasn’t Bobby, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why the hell he was so intent on me not helping him with the flat. Did he remember about my shoulder? Doubtful. And I’d been careful not to mention my encounter with Mr. Ski Mask, so he couldn’t know about those injuries.

I turned the rearview mirror — the little pine tree air freshener still dangling beneath it — so that I could use it to see through the back window. All I got for the bother was a great view of the raised trunk lid, but I did hear Bobby rummaging around in the trunk. I didn’t get it, because the trunk had been empty after we’d removed the old couple’s luggage at the airport. Maybe he was just having trouble getting the spare off the spindle. Yeah, I thought, that must’ve been it. I’d had to struggle with that occasionally myself. Finally, Bobby slammed the trunk lid shut and, as he rolled the spare past my window, rapped on the window with the tire iron for me to come out.

When I got out of the car, I was hit full in the face by the overwhelming stink of rotting garbage. We had come to a stop directly across the Belt Parkway from the Fountain Avenue dump, one of the largest landfills in the world. When Aaron and I were little, before Miriam was born, we used to call it Stinky Mountain. And man oh man, was that the right name for the place today. The breeze was blowing just wrong off Jamaica Bay, and we were straight downwind. The whirling swarms of opportunist gulls and other hungry birds wheeled across the tops of the garbage heaps like feathered tornadoes, touching down wherever the bulldozer blades churned up likely feasts.

“Here,” Bobby said, handing me the tire iron. “Pull off the wheel cover and get started on the lug nuts. I’ll get the jack.”

Fifteen minutes later, we were done. I carried what was left of the blown tire to the rear of the car and leaned it against the back bumper. He carried the jack and tire iron.

“Go back in the car. There’s a ton of those towelettes in the glove compartment. Take a few out for me too.”

I didn’t think anything of it and did what he asked. It was only when he popped the trunk back open and put the stuff away that it dawned on me that he had closed the trunk in the first place. I never closed the trunk when I changed tires and tried to remember if anyone else did. Aaron didn’t. My dad didn’t. In the end, I shrugged my shoulders to myself and went back to cleaning my hands. In spite of the faint lemony, chemical tang from the towelettes, I couldn’t get the garbage stink out of my nose. It was rumored that among the mounds of garbage in the Fountain Avenue dump were hundreds of bodies and body parts courtesy of New York’s Five Families. That thought sobered me right up as the garbage stink in my nostrils was replaced with the memory of Abdul Salaam’s ripe corpse.

I looked up again at the mirror and when I did I saw trouble. Bobby had slammed the trunk lid back down, his head turned to the left, his body gone rigid. In the next second, I understood. A black and green police car, cherry top spinning, was pulling off the Belt and right up behind Bobby’s Olds. On good days, Bobby and cops mixed kind of like oil and water. Problem here was that this wasn’t a good day, and the guy getting out of the black and green wasn’t just a regular cop. No, this cop’s hat was squashed down and set at a rakish angle. He had on jodhpurs and knee-high black boots shinier than polished silver. I kept an eye on things in the mirror. Highway Patrol cops were renowned for being psychos and ball busters, and this guy looked the part. He was a big man with broad shoulders and a let’s-pull-the-wings-off-the-helpless-fly expression that made me pretty uneasy. I opened the door, figuring it was safer for everyone involved if I went out and made nice. Bobby was out on bail, and I knew that wouldn’t stop him from pushing back if the cop gave him a hard time.

I got one leg out the door when the cop screamed, “Get the fuck back in that fucking car until I tell you to get out, asshole. You move and I’ll blow your brains out, you draft-dodgin’ mothafucka.”

I didn’t need to be told twice, but it didn’t stop me from watching in the mirror. And what I saw was strange and mysterious stuff. The cop gestured at the trunk and, jerking his thumb straight up in the air, motioned for Bobby to open it. Bobby smiled at the cop and began telling him some story. The cop didn’t like stories, indicating as much by shoving Bobby against the trunk and snatching the keys from Bobby’s hand. He pushed Bobby aside and popped the trunk. Much as Bobby had fussed with stuff when we first got the flat, the cop was doing so now. Then the trunk lid slammed down again. Then a really curious thing happened. The cop threw Bobby face first onto the trunk, frisked him, then handcuffed him. He grabbed Bobby by the collar, marched him to the black and green and threw him in the back seat.

I opened the door again. This time the cop didn’t bark at me. He just turned in my direction, unholstered his .38, and pointed it in my direction.

“You, stay there in that front seat until I tell you to move. Got it?”

“Yes, officer,” I said, closing the car door.

I watched the cop get into the front seat, pick up his radio, and call in. It seemed to take a lot of time, but was only about five minutes. Next thing I knew, Bobby was out of the patrol car, the cuffs were off his wrists, and the cop was pulling his unit back onto the Belt.

“What the fuck was that about?” I asked as Bobby got back behind the wheel.

“You know the pigs. They just can’t help but hassle us. He got on his radio and made a big show of calling in my name for outstanding warrants and stuff. I think when it came back to him that I was out on bail he thought about really busting my balls. But then another call of an accident on the Belt came in.”

“Good thing about that accident, I guess.”

“I guess. Let’s forget it, okay. You all right?” Bobby asked, readjusting the rearview mirror. “You don’t look so good. The stink getting to you?”

“Exactly,” I said. “Exactly, the stink. That and having a gun pointed at me.”

Bobby pulled back onto the Belt when traffic allowed. We didn’t say another word until he dropped me off in front of my building. Even then, the words we did say were meaningless, goodbyes spoken between two friends who were suddenly wary of one another.

When I got back upstairs, Miriam and my folks were watching
Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color
. My mom said there was some chicken in the fridge I could heat up if I was hungry. I was pretty hungry, just not
that
hungry. My dad told me to read the messages he’d written down on the pad by the phone in the kitchen. The messages were mostly from Lids.

“Larry called several times.”

“Yeah, Dad, I can see that.”

“Oy, is that kid Larry a bundle of nerves or what? No wonder he went crackers.”

“You shoulda been a shrink, Dad,” I said, my voice thick with sarcasm.

“What? Huh? Miriam, lower the TV.”

“Never mind. I’m going to use the extension in your bedroom.”

“What?”

I sat down on my parents’ bed, which always made me feel a little creepy, and dialed Lids’s number. His mother picked up.

“Hello, Mrs. Lester. It’s Moe, is Larry around?”

“Wait, please wait,” she said distractedly, worry in her voice. Then she partially covered the phone with her palm. “It’s Moses on the line,” were her muted words. She came back on. “Wait, Moses, Larry’s father wants to speak with you.”

“Moses, I’ve always thought you were one of my son’s good friends and that I could trust you,” said Larry’s dad in his sad little voice.

“Thanks, Mr. Lester. It’s nice to be thought of like that.”

“Then can you tell me what’s going on with Larry?” The baseline sadness in his voice was compounded with worry.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Since this morning he’s … Well, you know he’s had some problems in the past at MIT and all, but he’s been doing much better since he got out of the hospital.”

“Yes, sir, he has.”

“But not this morning. He was manic, acting all
meshugge
again, spouting gibberish, things his mother and I couldn’t make any sense of. We called his psychiatrist, but it’s Sunday and he’s out of town. Something got him going. Do you know what could have set him off?”

Maybe the fact that one of his customers got murdered on the boardwalk last night and that he’s afraid he’ll be next
. “No, Mr. Lester. I’m sorry, I don’t,” is how I framed the lie. “What makes you think I would know anyway?”

“Well, he ran out of here hours ago and then called with a number to reach him at, but I am only supposed to give the number to you. Even I’m not allowed to call him. You’re supposed to call him three times, let the phone ring six times each.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Lester, I wish I could help you. Maybe after I talk to Larry …”

“Yes.” His voice brightened. “See, you are wise beyond your years, Moses. Yes, call him and see what’s the matter.” I tore off the top of one of the pages from the paperback on my dad’s nightstand. It had a lurid cover of half-naked women holding handguns. I wrote the number down on the scrap. “You’ll call after you’ve spoken with Larry?” It was more a prayer than a question.

“I’ll try.”

I hung up.

As instructed, I tried the number Lids’s dad had given me three times. I knew Lids was still a little crazier than he seemed, even when he wasn’t all agitated. Looking back, I realized that Larry having another episode didn’t come as a shock to me. How, I wondered, could his parents have been caught so unprepared? I thought about just how blind parents could be to who and what their children really were. Mine were of me, but my parents’ blind spots were more mundane. With not a shred of evidence to support their beliefs, they saw me as a younger version of Aaron. But the only things Aaron and I shared were a bedroom, good marks, and a last name. We didn’t look alike, didn’t act alike, didn’t think alike. Hell, Aaron had more in common with Bobby.

Lids picked up on the sixth ring of my third attempt. “Moe?”

Man, sometimes one syllable was all it took to suss a person out. And just the tentative, hushed way he spoke my name told me nearly everything.

“Lids, what the fuck is going on? Your parents are freaked out.”

“He’s dead. He’s dead. He’s dead,” Lids chanted in a lilt. “He’s dead. He’s …”

“Who, Billy O’Day?”

“O’Day ODed, O’Day ODed, O’Day ODed. O’Day O — ”

“Enough, Larry. Enough! I know he’s dead. I was there when it happened and just to be accurate, he was murdered.”

“You were there. There were you. You were there. There were you. You were — ”

“I didn’t see it happen, but I was there. What’s going on, Larry?”

“Don’t know. Don’t know. Don’t know. All confused. All confused. All confused.”

“Tell me where you are and I’ll come get you.”

There was nothing hushed or tentative in his reply. “No! Have to be alone. Have to figure things out. Have to be alone. Have to figure things out. Have to — ”

I understood why his parents were so scared for him. “Let me help you.”

“They’re coming for me. They’re coming for me. They’re coming for me.”

“Who’s coming?”

“They are.
They. They. They
. Aren’t you listening?”

“They who? Which they?”

“Don’t know. Don’t know. Don’t know. More than one they. More than one they. More than one they. Have to be alone. Have to figure — ”

I cut him off. “Why did you want me to call you?”

“Tony Pepperoni is a fat phony. Tony Pepperoni is a fat fat phony. Tony Pepperoni is a fat fat fat phony. Phony fat fat fat a is Pepperoni Tony. Phony fat fat a is Pepperoni Tony. Phony fat a is Pepperoni Tony.”

He was totally lost and now so was I. It seemed the sounds of words, the rhythm of words, how they rhymed, were more important than what they meant. I had no idea if any of this hung together, especially the part about Tony Pepperoni. While I listened, Larry had degenerated into the crazy toothless lady with the wire laundry basket who stood on the boardwalk by the handball courts and cursed at you in a language only she understood. You knew the words were curses because of how she said them.

“Larry, let me come and get you.”

“No! No! No!”

I was running out of things to say when it dawned on me there was something worth risking. Given how little progress I’d made with him to that point, I figured I had nothing to lose if it failed.

“Let me come and get you. Let me come and get you. Let me come and get you,” I fairly sang.

And for the first time since this mind-bending conversation started, there was a pause on his end. I could hear him take a deep breath. Then he sobbed.

“It is you, Moe. I couldn’t be sure. There are enemies everywhere and they can take any shape, speak in any voice.”

“It’s me, Larry, yeah. How can I help?”

“You can’t,” he whispered. “You’re not invisible.”

“Are you safe? At least tell me you’re safe.”

“As long as I’m invisible I am.”

Uh oh, he was losing it again. I went along with him because what else could I do? “Then stay that way.”

“I will.”

There was a click and dead air. Silence. Invisibility.

Aaron was in our bedroom, doing his weekly paperwork for a job he essentially hated. But that was my big brother for you. It didn’t matter that he hated the job. He was learning, getting experience, getting a paycheck. I couldn’t see me doing any of that, not for a second. Even when I was little I couldn’t understand doing things you hated doing no matter the payoff. That said, Aaron was really smart and a good big brother. He was especially good in bad situations, and a bad situation is what I had on my hands. I was worried about Larry, but I didn’t want to tell his parents how worried. He needed help, but to get him that help, his parents would have to bring the cops into it. Once the cops were into it, they might find out about his business and that would just make everything worse for everyone involved. Larry needed a stint in the psych ward at Kings County, not a stretch in Sing Sing.

I opened my mouth to say something to Aaron. Nothing came out. I couldn’t figure out a way to tell him what was going on and still protect everyone who needed protecting. Was there ever a way to do that, to protect everyone who needed protecting?

“What?” Aaron barked at me. “You just gonna stand there like a putz staring at me, or you gonna ask me what you came in here to ask me?”

“Can I borrow your car tomorrow?” I asked, because I had to say something, not because I needed or even wanted his car.

He shook his head at me, but reached into his pocket and threw me his keys. “Your lucky day, little brother. We have meetings in the city for the next two days. Taking the subway in and won’t be home until Tuesday night. But take good care of it and fill it up. Understand?”

“Thanks, man.”

“How’s your girlfriend doing?”

“Better, I think,” I said. “It’s hard to know.”

“Okay. Now get outta here and go watch Ed Sullivan while I finish my work.”

I closed the door behind me. I had his keys, but no ideas about what I should do to save Larry.