I kept my mouth shut. I wanted to make sure I remembered the creep’s voice.
“The kid is garbage,” said the voice on the end of the phone. “You don’t leave garbage around the house. You don’t bring it into the neighborhood. I don’t want none in mine, so get him the fuck out.”
I told him to work it up his ass and hung up, but I was scared. I knew who it was. It was Stanley Shank, the brother of Heshey, the guy that died, the guy they said Billy killed.
I thought about Shank’s tone. He had expected me to answer the Farone phone. He wasn’t surprised. He knew where I was. He knew Billy was with me. The maroon car that had followed me belonged to Shank. Why the hell didn’t I talk to Shank on the phone? I should have calmed him down instead of telling him to shove it. He was a crazy, volatile guy who would stick a knife in you if he got mad.
Shank was a big fat ugly man, with a head like a cantaloupe between soft heavy shoulders like mashed potatoes, but he was solid. Mean. He used to run a fishing boat out of Sheepshead Bay, docked it the other side of the inlet from Manhattan Beach where the Farone house was. Half a mile away, not more. Shank knew his way around fishing knives, the kind he kept on board.
I’d seen Shank clean fish on the dock one time. He worked fast with the knife, his face full of concentrated glee. I’d also seen the kind of damage he could do to people with it.
Someone had told me Shank went bust and had to sell the boat to rich Russians and that it made him more pissed off than ever.
I didn’t think Shank would do physical harm to Billy – it was too easy to trace it – but what sacred me was he’d call the tabloids and tell them Billy was out. Shank would make Billy seem like a freak, a kid who only got out on vacation because he was connected. After that, there’d be no place for Billy to go except back to the institution in Florida. Maybe not even there if Shank wanted to press the case that Billy should have been in a real prison all along.
I wanted Billy out of Brooklyn.
From the kitchen, I watched as he emerged from the pool, dripping, wrapped a blue towel around himself, dried off, then he put his clothes back on. He glanced at a large rectangular object that stood against the back of the house. It was neatly covered with a heavy black plastic sheet. Billy pulled it off carefully and stood, not moving. I couldn’t see what was under the plastic.
I pushed open the patio door.
“What are you looking at?” I said.
Billy turned around. “My aquarium. The tank’s empty. There are no fish left in it, Artie. It’s empty and cleaned out and put away like I would never want it again. You think my dad really took the fish to his restaurant?”
“We can call, if you want.”
“I don’t think so,” said Billy. “No, let’s not do that, Artie.”
“How come?”
“I’m pretty sure the fish are dead.”
“So let’s go back to the city,”
Billy told me he was ready.
“Can I drive?” he asked. “Can I?”
On the way up from Florida, I let Billy drive some of the time. I picked him up on the Saturday of the July 4 weekend, and we drove home together, him and me, me driving mostly, up from the swampy heat, me wanting to stop at Cape Canaveral and see where they launched the shuttle. Instead, because he was restless and wanted to get to New York, we kept driving.
When we hit a stretch of empty road, I let him take the wheel. Billy said I’d taught him how and that he remembered sitting on phone books and I let him drive around empty streets in Brooklyn early in the morning.
He was a good driver. Tall enough to drive without the phone books now, he drove gracefully, one arm resting on the window ledge, both hands on the wheel, looking ahead, never distracted by the radio.
In small towns where we stopped to pick up food or eat at some diner, American flags sprouted from houses and lawns. In one dusty town the lamp posts and stop lights were hung with pictures of soldiers fighting in Iraq. Hispanic guys most of them, women too. They were young, nineteen, twenty. Some were dead, others waiting. For a mile, as far out as the strip malls, the pictures fluttered along with limp yellow ribbons.
Once, we hit a parade coming up the block, a fire engine decked out with bunting, a few old guys in World War Two uniforms walking behind the engine, and little kids tagging along. It was like a movie.
“July 4 is on Monday. My independence day,” Billy said. “Right?”
I had picked Billy up at old man Farone’s house – Johnny’s father, John Sr – in a development in Florida where a lot of Italians from New York had retired. The streets were named for romantic Italian towns: Pisa, Bellagio, Siena. The houses all had cheap stucco fronts, red tile roofs, mangy front lawns.
Donna Farone, one of Johnny’s sisters, lived with the old man. Her name was Maria LaDonna, but everyone called her Donna. It was because of her Billy was allowed to see his grandfather. He had always liked the old man who took him fishing, like I did, when he was little.
John Sr had moved to Florida when his wife threw him out of the house after forty-seven years; she said he liked little girls. No one ever proved exactly what the old man did, and anyhow, after he got to Florida, he’d had a stroke. Most of the time he sat in a wheelchair in the house and tried to form words.
When I got there, Billy was sitting outside on the steps. Next to him was a young guy who turned out to be a shrink. He got up and introduced himself – Andy Swiller, nice to meet you – and the two of us walked a couple yards from the house.
A tall skinny guy in chinos and a short-sleeved green plaid shirt, he said he was a doctor doing some of his training at the facility – a lot of interns came to spend a year. Behaviorists, genetics, psych; we got all kinds of modalities. That’s what he called it.
I asked him what Billy had. He told me it wasn’t Asperger’s. It wasn’t some other form of autism. It wasn’t one thing or the other. There were co-morbid diagnoses when one didn’t fit. Shrinks start talking co-morbid, I get crazy.
“So what is it?” I said.
“You can’t always slot the kids in,” said Swiller, said it wasn’t the time to talk about it, said he was hoping Billy could eventually come out whole and have a real life. There were kids like that, he said. Told me he liked Billy a lot; they got along great, both being from Brooklyn and Yankees fans.
I tried pushing him. “How is he?”
“You want my professional opinion or just how I feel?”
“I figured in your business they’re the same thing.”
“Fair enough,” Swiller said, “I think he’s good. I think he’s better.”
“Cured?”
“Make sure he gets a good pastrami sandwich when he’s in New York,” said Swiller, and scribbled his name and numbers on a card that he handed me. He wished me luck and shook Billy’s hand, told me to call him any time and got in his car.
“Ready?” I said to Billy.
“Am I ever!”
Through the screen door of the house, I could see Donna Farone. I could see an elderly man in a wheelchair. Old man Farone, I figured.
“Everything OK out there, Billy boy?” he yelled out. He could talk after all.
It was around four a.m. at a motel somewhere in Virginia when Billy woke up screaming. He sat up in bed, sweat pouring off his forehead, and told me about the dreams in which he’s executed. Taken to a death chamber, stuck with the needle, killed.
It started a few days after he got there. He had never been away from home except for one night on a sleepover with a boy down the street in Brooklyn. He had always had his own room. He didn’t know about other kids, especially not the kind of kids in the facility who could barely read and write. He felt surrounded. People watched him. The dreams began.
It happens every night in Florida, Billy said. Every night, while the noise of other boys he shares a room with creeps into his sleep, and he can’t tell if he’s still awake or dreaming. The night noises of the boys, coughing, snoring, sneezing, yell
ing, reminds him of the noise of his mother’s refrigerator at home: first a steady hum, the whir of the motor, then, suddenly, the clunk of machinery before it turns over and settles back into a steady drone.
Waking up those nights in Florida – and he wakes up every few hours, he says – he turns over, looking for quiet. His feet are cold. The blanket is too short for him and leaves his big feet uncovered, as he tumbles down into sleep again. For a while there’s nothing, just the hole of sleep.
Then the dreams. Walls moving in. Crowds of boys taunting him. Billy himself in the locked ward, doors at the end of the corridors bolted shut. He feels trapped like a boy caught in a net, like a fish on a hook, and he thrashes around and can’t get free.
Gangs of boys chasing him to the end of a long hall, all the boys whirring, clunking, sucking, snoring. They’re running after him to the death chamber, which is when the screaming starts. He can’t tell if it’s a real death chamber or a video game, but it’s him and they will stick a needle in his arm and make him die. Every morning, his sheets are soaked with sweat.
Billy has read the books, seen the movies, knows how people will watch him die through a little window. This is the worst part, people watching while he’s tied down flat as a board, and they stick the needle in.
Inside his dreams, Billy wakes up screaming. No one comes. He reaches for a word, can’t grab it, it hangs in front of him, letters made of ice that begin to drip, just beyond his grasp in the dream world of unremembered phone numbers and lost names, and he reaches harder because it’s the only thing that can save him, can make him safe. The background noise gets louder, boys closing in on him.
Every night. Billy hates going to bed. He can’t fend off the dreams. He refuses. Is punished. They take away some of his books. He can’t sleep. He can’t get hold of the word.
That night in the motel on the way back to New York from Florida, I finally got Billy to lie down in bed. I sat with him all night. As it got light outside, he drifted into a light sleep.
And then everything seemed better. We kept driving. I thought maybe Billy’s worst time was over. On the road, we talked and laughed and ate potato chips out of huge bags and peanuts in the shell and by the time we got to the Holland Tunnel, the car was a mess. I had almost convinced myself that the newspapers had been right: all Billy had done where Heshey Shank was concerned was defend himself. Or else he had been nuts, had been out of his mind when he killed Heshey.
On the Manhattan side of the tunnel, I turned east on Canal Street. Billy put his head out of the window, pulled it back, and started laughing.
“What’s up?”
“I’m happy,” Billy said.
“How come?”
“New York,” he said. “We’re home.”
7
“I’ll lock the door,” said Billy as we left the Farone house.
He locked up carefully, maybe showing me how careful he was, while I went ahead of him towards the street and my car. Most of the houses on the block were lit up and there were street lights every few yards that made pools of yellow on the sidewalk.
Did I smell it before I saw it? The sewage smell of rotten garbage hit me first. On the edge of the front lawn where Genia had planted pink roses – the neighbors appreciated these elegant touches, she had said – was a pile of trash. Wet garbage – cold, half-eaten burgers, banana skins, egg shells that gleamed weirdly white in the night light – had been dumped along with beer cans and wet newspaper and what looked like diapers. You could smell the shit.
I looked for the garbage cans and couldn’t see any and remembered the plastic bins that belonged to the house had been placed neatly near the garage. Someone had trucked the garbage in and dumped it.
“Let’s get out of here,” I called to Billy. “Now.”
“What’s the matter?” he said, coming down the steps of the house.
“Get in the car.”
“OK, sure,” said Billy and then he saw the garbage. “Garbage men are all fucking idiots.”
“Some guy probably just trying to dump stuff into the truck missed,” I was running my mouth, making stuff up, trying to reassure Billy.
“It’s OK, Artie. I’m OK. I think we should clean this mess up.”
“Just get in the car,” I said. “Please. Let’s go.”
From the car, I put in a call to a young cop I knew in Brighton Beach. Bobo – his real name was Boris Borisovitch Levin, the parents were Russian immigrants – was a good guy I’d helped train on the job. He still lived with his parents, and he knew everything that went on around Brighton Beach. I asked him to get someone to clean up the lawn at the Farones. I also asked him to drive over and make sure everything was OK.
On the way into the city, Billy slept. The radio was on, but he didn’t hear it, his breathing deep and even. Asleep, he looked sweet, like a little boy. I knew the doctor in Florida was right. Billy could come out whole. The sickness was gone. “He’s good,” the shrink had said. In the city at my place, he’d be safe.
I looked in the rearview mirror. I wanted Billy out of Brooklyn, away from Stanley Shank and his crude phone calls and the creeps who were Shank’s friends.
Looking at Billy, I knew I had never cared about anyone more than this kid. He felt like my own; he always had.
By the time we got to the bridge, the weather guy on 1010 was predicting a couple of dry days. The sports guy said the Yankees were doing lousy. On the news was an item about the plane crash in Coney Island and something about a little kid found dead in a vacant lot in Midwood. Battered with his skateboard, the kid was only eight. It could have been one of the boys I’d seen earlier. It could have been Billy who got beat up.
I drove over the bridge, and watched Manhattan’s lights come towards me, and I was feeling a lot better when my phone rang.
“I went by that house like you asked me,” said Bobo Levin, the young cop from Brooklyn. “I cleaned up the garbage myself for you, Artie. What bastard did that?”
“You see anything else?”
“Not much. There’s a few scratches on the mailbox, and the garbage thing. Looked to me like somebody wanted the Farones, is that their name, to know they’d been around. I checked the doors and windows,” said Bobo anxiously, wanting to impress me. “Is that OK with you, Art? Anyone living there? The pool was full of water.”
“Yeah, it’s OK, thanks, man,” I said. “The people who live there are away for a couple days. Business trip, something like that. London. I’ll get in touch with them; you don’t have to bother about it. You did great, Bobo. I owe you.”
“You don’t owe me, Artie. You don’t want me to write it up?”
“Maybe not. That good with you?”
“Sure, man, sure, of course,” Bobo said. “Friends of yours?”
“Relatives.”
“Jeez, you’ve got family that sure lives nice,” he said, not envious, just appreciative. “One weird thing.”
“What’s that?”
“I almost killed myself when I tripped over some hunks of glass in the back yard. I mean I had to do a little breaking and entering, but I figured you wanted me to take a good look around the house, right Artie?”
“Right,” I said to Bobo. “Go on.”
“There’s like a lot of broken glass there, heavy stuff, you have any idea what it could be? I almost cut off my hand on it. Bastards who do this, I’d like to kill them,” said Bobo. “You know?”
“I know.”
“Is it a problem?” he said. “You want me to go back?”
“You think the glass could have been an aquarium?”
“A what?” he said.
“Like a tank for fish. A fish tank?”
“Sure, could have been.”
“What did you do with it?”
“I put it in with the other garbage. Is that OK?”
“Yeah.”
“Which kind of bastard did this, Artie?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I didn’t want Bobo raising an al
arm, so I added, “Maybe just some garbage man that was a slob, you know?”
“Yeah, Artie, that sounds like what it was.” He was eager to please me. “One other weird little thing.”
“Yeah?”
“Near the glass I found this plastic, I don’t know, like a toy castle or something. That’s what it was, come to think of it, Artie, it was like this little toy castle with turrets and all.”
Later that night, when Billy was fast asleep, I wandered around the apartment feeling restless. I turned the TV on, then turned it off, sick of the news. I put on a Stan Getz album called Spring Is Here that always made me feel better. Over the speakers was the photograph of Getz by Herman Leonard. Sid McKay had given it to me when I got married. Poor, dead Sid.
Music still playing, I went and took a hot shower, made coffee. I wondered if I should take a trip out to Brooklyn to confront Stan Shank and knew it was a stupid idea. I had no real evidence it had been Shank who threw garbage on the Farones’ lawn.
Let it go, I told myself. Leave it be. All I wanted was to protect Billy and he was safe now in the city, in my apartment, mine and Maxine’s and the twins’. I went and checked on him in Millie’s room where he was sleeping. He didn’t stir.
There was plenty of space for him here. The girls could double up for a while. If things went OK while Billy was out of the facility in Florida, they might parole him. It was a fantasy, it wouldn’t happen, but I hated for him to go back to the place where he had nightmares about dying.
I had called Maxine when I went to Florida to get Billy. I knew she didn’t like the idea of him and wouldn’t want him in the apartment, but she didn’t say it, assuming he’d be with his parents in Brooklyn. I didn’t mention he was with me. He’d go to Brooklyn Friday when Johnny and Genia got back. Maxine wasn’t due in until Sunday. Anyhow, maybe she’d change her mind when she met Billy.
I wanted a drink, but there was no Scotch left and I didn’t feel like a beer. Being in the apartment without Max and the girls and the noise they made depressed me. I had hated leaving my loft for this apartment, but Maxie wanted it so bad. It was a condo with her name on the deed, a view of the river, a good school close by, a bedroom for each of the twins. She could walk to work, something she had never done in her whole life, she told me. She had always taken the train, sometimes two subways and a bus.
Fresh Kills Page 6