Onion Street (6 page)

I told Aaron I needed his car to see Mindy. It wasn’t the first time I’d lied to him. It was unlikely to be the last. What my brother didn’t know was that I’d already spent two hours at Mindy’s bedside during afternoon visiting hours. Amazing how much time there is in a day when school is no longer a part of it.

I got back to the fix-it shop at around six and parked directly across Coney Island Avenue. It felt much later than six, as if night had already taken hold. That’s the thing about winter, isn’t it, how it always feels later than it is? Over the last few days I’d come to think that maybe life was like that too.

Now the flickering fluorescent light from inside the darkened shop gave it an eerie feel, like something out of a bad sci fi movie.
Oh, master, look, the creature lives!
I sipped my coffee, ate my bialy with cream cheese, and stared out the car window. At 6:10, the flickering stopped, the shop went completely black. Two minutes later, the hunched old man — Hyman Bergman, according to the business card I’d taken earlier — was on the street, fiddling with the lock. He walked a few paces away, stopped, turned, came back to the door, retried the door handle, and then went on his way. He limped along the street. My eyes followed him until he got into a beat-up ’63 Fairlane that was now more rust than steel. He pulled out into traffic and I quickly lost sight of him.

At least I had the good sense to wait a quarter of an hour before making a move. My mom, like old man Bergman, had the habit of checking and rechecking things such as doors and gas jets. I had observed her doing this for nearly twenty-one years and knew that she had a fifteen-minute threshold. If she didn’t come back to check something within that amount of time, she wasn’t coming back. It was stupid to judge Bergman’s
mishegas
by my mother’s, but what other measure did I have?

Just as I put my fingers on the driver side door handle, I caught sight of something across Coney Island Avenue. It was a car, a car I recognized — Bobby’s car. He parked the Olds 88 between two dirty snow drifts right in front of the fix-it shop. I did not move. I did not breathe. It was as if I hoped my stillness would somehow render me invisible. Not fucking likely, because as Bobby got out of his car he seemed to stare directly across the street at Aaron’s Tempest. I could swear he looked right at me, but there was no recognition in his eyes, no change of body language. Maybe it was the darkness, or maybe he didn’t make sense of my brother’s car being in that setting. Whatever the reason, Bobby acted as if I wasn’t there. I let myself exhale, if not relax. I didn’t dare risk moving, not yet.

Bobby walked past the fix-it shop’s door, heading directly to a white wooden door a few feet to the right of the shop’s front window. The white door was the entrance to the apartments above the shop. Bobby reached up with his right arm — to ring the bell, I guess — and waited. About half a minute passed and Bobby rang the bell again. A minute passed. This time, he stepped back on the sidewalk and craned his neck to look up at the apartments. He shook his head, reached into his coat pocket, and pulled out his keys. I recognized his key ring even from across the street. I recognized it because dangling from it was the same stupid rabbit’s foot that had been dangling from his key ring since we were twelve years old. It was white and plush back then. Now the fur that remained was dirty gray. He’d won the rabbit’s foot in Coney Island for shooting a red star out of a piece of paper with a BB submachine gun.

“Shooting a red star,” I’d said. “Don’t tell your parents or they’ll send you to Siberia.”

I remember he’d just kind of laughed, but I think he’d kept the stupid rabbit’s foot as a kind of
Fuck you
to his parents.

I was right about the keys, because soon enough, Bobby was stepping through the white door and closing it behind him. I fought my natural curiosity, sat tight, and waited. My patience was rewarded. Less than five minutes after he went in, Bobby came flying through the white door. His head was on a swivel, turning right, then left, then right again. He was breathless, panting, his chest heaving, but it was the panicked look on his face that really got my attention. Sucking in big gulps of frosty air, blowing staccato clouds of steam out of his mouth, he seemed to be trying to calm himself down before taking another step. Then, after he’d seen that no one was walking his way from either direction, Bobby rushed into his Olds and fishtailed away, smoking his rear tires on the slick pavement as he went.

I didn’t remember opening the car door or crossing Coney Island Avenue, yet there I was, standing in front of the door Bobby Friedman had just burst through in a panic. And in his panic, Bobby had neglected to shut the door behind him. That wasn’t like him. Whatever he’d found upstairs had scared the shit out of him, and he didn’t usually scare easy. Under any other set of circumstances, I would have gotten out of there faster than Superman, but these weren’t other circumstances. Maybe old man Bergman really didn’t know anything, but there had to be a reason Lids’s guy had given me this address. There was no chance I was going to walk away from this. No chance. Not now.

The staircase was fairly dark with some very weak light filtering down from the second floor landing. The stairs were crooked and cranky, moaning under my weight. The banister was loose and about as trustworthy as an aluminum siding salesman. The air smelled like my wet gym socks, but there was another raw scent too: the stink of an unflushed toilet. And present between the must and stench was one more pungent odor, one that I didn’t quite yet understand. It mixed and mingled with the other smells, but managed to rise above them and crown itself king. It was vaguely familiar. I remembered being at my aunt’s house as a kid and finding a broken jar of baby food in a kitchen cabinet. Ground lamb, I think it was. Not only did it reek, but the meat had seemed to be alive. I had noticed the little bits of white squirming about in the sickly gray meat like wiggly grains of rice. Only later did my aunt explain about fly eggs and maggots.

At the second floor landing I was greeted by an unadorned, low wattage bulb and, to my left, a black steel door with two serious-looking padlocks. There was a sign on the door:

God love Brooklyn. Anywhere else, the words “Keep Out” would have been warning enough, but here you had to turn a warning into a threat. Problem with Brooklynites is that we take threats as a challenge. I tried the door. No luck. It didn’t budge a millimeter. I had the sense that if a small nuclear bomb hit this building, that door would still be standing. I got down on all fours and sniffed under the door. Nope. Wherever the stink was coming from, it wasn’t here. Besides, there was nothing here that would have freaked Bobby out. I looked up toward the third floor landing. It was totally lightless up there, but sometimes there’s just no going back.

These stairs were in even worse shape than the ones leading up to the black door. I think habit was the only thing that stopped them giving way. They bent pretty good as I went. I noticed something else too: the stench was getting more intense as I climbed. The door to the top floor apartment was just cheap bare wood with a lock in the knob like you might find on a closet or bathroom door. It turned in my hand and I pushed it open. When I did, the stink hit me full in the face and it was all I could do not to vomit. Now I understood why Bobby had been breathing so fiercely when I’d seen him out on the street. I put my hand inside the sleeve of my coat and pinched my nose closed. It was incredibly hot inside the apartment, like a sauna at one of those bathhouses my
zaydeh
and all the old European men favored. I touched the cast iron radiator with the tip of my finger. No wonder the apartment felt like a sauna. The radiator was hot enough to cook on. It didn’t help that the windows were sealed shut.

I found a wall switch to my left and clicked it on. Two out of three bulbs in the old-fashioned ceiling fixture popped on. The room was barely furnished. There were two blue bean bag chairs, a few plastic chairs, a portable Zenith TV on an upturned milk crate with aluminum foil on the antenna, and not much else. Burgundy House looked like a designer showcase by comparison. I stepped further inside. To my right was a little galley-style kitchen. A few dishes were in the drying rack next to the chipped and rust-stained porcelain sink. In the fridge there were a few six-packs of Piels beer, a paper bag with a few ounces of pot in the vegetable bin, a carton of sour milk, and nothing else. I wished the sour milk was the reason for the awful smell in the place. It was just that: a wish. For when I finally got the courage to go down the short hallway, past the bathroom, and into the bedroom, I saw the real reason lying on the bed.

I was no doctor, and I was no mortician. Still, I knew a dead body when I saw one … when I smelled one. Now I understood Bobby’s panic. He’d run, and I guess if I hadn’t taken a second look at the dead man, I’d have run too. There were some ugly bruises on his face and a big gash across his forehead that was covered in crusted, dried blood. He looked like someone had taken a tire iron to his face. His brown eyes were open, unseeing, and clouded over. I guessed he was about my age and would’ve stood six-two or -three. He had on a pair of bell-bottom jeans, worn shiny at the knees, and tan work boots. He wore a gray, blood-stained sweatshirt with a horse head logo across the chest, with the words Effingham Mustangs printed below. Yet it wasn’t his wardrobe or the color of his eyes or his wounds that kept me there. It was his short-cropped Afro haircut, the light shade of his brown skin, and the once-pink blotches on his face and hands that got my attention. So this poor dead bastard was the son of a bitch who’d put Mindy in a coma. In the movies, they would have had me spit on him or kick him for good measure —
I’ll show you to hurt my girlfriend
— but I just didn’t see the point. Even though I was close enough to touch him, he was beyond my reach.

I couldn’t say if the stench was finally getting to me or what, but I suddenly felt the need to get out of there. I wasn’t stupid about it. I didn’t want my fingerprints all over the place, so I used my sleeve and wiped down every surface I’d touched: the doors, the light switch, the fridge, the milk carton … What was really weird was how the farther away from the body I moved, the more intense my nausea got. I could feel the vomit in my throat, taste it in my mouth. My head was pounding and I was sweating through my clothes. I made it down to the second floor landing before I could no longer hold back. I puked my guts out on the floor, some of it splashing onto the black steel door. OR ELSE indeed.

When I collected what was left of me, I wobbled to the ground floor on very shaky legs. My first lungful of the brutal outside air made me sick again and if I’d had anything left to give, I would have given it up right there on the street. Instead, I dry-retched some and staggered through the sparse traffic until I made it to the safety of Aaron’s Tempest. It was strange how much that stupid car seat felt like home. I was in too much shock to drive away, never mind make sense of any of what I’d just been through. My life lessons were now no longer restricted to the stickball court or the sand beneath the boardwalk.