by Brad Parks
“Roth, huh?” he said, and I could tell he was rolling it around in his head.
“You can scroll through my sent messages if you don’t believe me. Earlier today I was trying to convince Lunky that Portnoy’s Complaint was Roth’s greatest work.”
“That’s the one where that sick bastard whacks off with coleslaw or something like that?”
“Raw liver,” I corrected him, as if I were the most learned of Roth scholars.
McNabb breathed some more, mulling over whether to permit me my literary license. I took advantage of his indecision.
“You said you wanted this to be convincing, right? And you said you wanted it to distract people. Think about it: a frustrated writer commits suicide outside a famous writer’s childhood home? That’s nice, easy symbolism.”
“Okay,” he said. “Philip Roth’s house it is.”
I quickly hit the Send button on the message.
“Hey, I didn’t say to do that!” he said sharply.
“Sorry, I thought you-”
“You want to go in that trailer?” he shouted, grinding the gun into my head hard enough that it bent my neck forward and plowed my chin into my chest. “Is that what you want?”
“Just take it easy. Lunky goes home at six. Most of our reporters work ten to six. You know that. He won’t get this until tomorrow morning.”
“Never mind. Just give me the damn phone,” he barked.
I passed it back to McNabb, who promptly rolled down the window and tossed it outside. Even through my hazed windshield, I could see it sail over the weeds in the direction of the retention pond, where it would spend eternity stewing in toxicity.
“You won’t be needing that,” he said before I could offer comment. “Now let’s get moving.”
* * *
I reached forward with my arm and swiped a clean spot in my thoroughly fogged-over windshield, then started blasting the defroster so it would stay clear.
“How am I getting out of here?” I asked. “I’m not sure backing up is the best idea.”
“Drive down to the power transfer station and turn around,” he said. “Now, here are the rules: two hands on the steering wheel at all times, and keep them nice and high-ten o’clock and two o’clock. Nothing too crazy with the gas or the brake. If I don’t like what I see, I’m putting a slug in your kneecap, and I’m going to shoot first and ask questions later. So let’s not get cute.”
I eased the car back into Drive and began splashing my way forward. The road was waterlogged, and even at twenty miles per hour, we were tossing up spray like a powerboat under full throttle. The rain had slackened-it was now just a gentle drizzle-but the sky was still bruise blue, like it hadn’t yet released all its fury.
“You’re going to die tonight, Carter Ross,” he added. “You stick to the script, you die easy. You make it hard on me, I make it hard on you. That’s how it works.”
I didn’t know how this lunatic thought he’d get away with this. Except, of course, he had nearly pulled it off with Nancy.
“You know where you’re going?” he asked, when we made it back to the paved roadway.
“I told you, I’m a huge Roth fan,” I said.
Keeping my hands at the mandated position, observing all posted speed limits, and generally acting like I was taking my driver’s test all over again, I pointed us toward the turnpike-which was, as I suspected, trudging along well below the speed limit. The rain had all but stopped, though another line of storms was bearing down on us, putting on an impressive fireworks show in the distance.
Rolling along just above stall speed gave me time to start placing recent events in their proper order and to make sense of everything for the first time. As a newspaper reporter, I am trained to think in narratives. And narratives are best understood when you start at the beginning. So how had this started? Mrs. Alfaro said a man-who I now knew to be McNabb-began stalking Nancy on her paper route the Tuesday before she was killed. What event precipitated that? Peter Davidson of NLRB stopping by the diner on Monday.
But, of course, the diner probably hadn’t been his only stop that day. Davidson said he tried to investigate all aspects of an employee’s history. So the diner would have been a side stop, but if the complaint was primarily lodged against McNabb and the IFIW, that would have been Davidson’s main destination.
“It was the NLRB, wasn’t it?” I said. “The NLRB visited the State Street Grill on Monday. They came to you the same day, didn’t they?”
“Are we on the record, Mr. Eagle-Examiner reporter?” he taunted.
“Hell yes. The least thing you can do is grant a reporter his last interview.”
“Okay, I guess there’s no harm now,” he said. “On the record: yeah, that pencil-pushing prick from the NLRB came to my office on Monday, asking me questions about allegations made by Nancy Marino.”
“And what happened?”
“I stalled him. It was all crap anyway.”
We were picking up speed as traffic diverged into the enormous mixing bowl of roadways at Newark Liberty International Airport. I followed the signs for Route 78.
“Oh, come on, you’re not really going to deny sexually harassing her, are you?” I said. “Your union probably represents a couple hundred employees a year in sexual harassment cases. You know the rules.”
“Damn straight I do,” he said. “There’s two kinds of sexual harassment. One is quid pro quo, where your boss asks for sexual favors in return for a raise or a promotion. The other is creating a hostile work environment. Well, guess what? I’m not her boss-I’m just an employee of the union to which she belongs. Hell, if anything, she’s my boss, because she votes for the board that hires or fires me. So there could be no quid pro quo. And I couldn’t have created a hostile work environment for her when she doesn’t work for the union.”
There were at least a hundred holes in his argument, not the least of which was that union negotiations easily fit under the umbrella of a “work environment” as the courts had defined it. Besides which, you’re not allowed to grope a woman’s thigh without her permission outside the work environment, either. But I wasn’t arguing legal technicalities with a man so obviously deranged. Or so armed.
“So why did Nancy take all that to the NLRB anyway? Shouldn’t she have gone to the EEOC?”
“Because her complaint to the NLRB didn’t have to do with the harassment,” he said. “She was saying her harassment complaint had not been properly heard by the union.”
“Was it?”
He chuckled, like he was enjoying this. “Hey, it’s not my fault our human resources people didn’t see things her way,” he said. “She got a thorough exercising of due process.”
More likely, she got the runaround when McNabb cajoled and threatened his horsewhipped employees into ignoring her complaint. This was all becoming clear to me.
“So, if you were so much in the right,” I said, “why kill her?”
He actually laughed. “You ask good questions, you know that? In some ways, it’s a shame I have to kill you, too. You were one of the best reporters in my Rolodex.”
“Yeah, and I’m a good enough reporter to know when someone is dodging my question. So, again, why kill her?”
“Because I was tired of dealing with her,” he said. “She had gotten to be too much of a headache, and I realized she was never going to shut up. I just tried to give the bitch a few compliments and she went and made some big thing out of it.”
* * *
The line of storms I had been watching in the distance hit Newark just as we got off Route 78, while I was on the ramp for Exit 56. It reduced visibility to the few feet in front of my windshield, but that bothered me less now that we were back in Newark. I may be the whitest man alive, but Newark is still my hood. I could find my way to 81 Summit Avenue in a blizzard if need be.
So I hydroplaned my way into the Weequahic neighborhood that Philip Roth once called home. The Jewish population that dominated this area fled in the
fifties and early sixties, not long after Roth himself left for college and never came back. The street names and some of the old houses might still look familiar to Roth or any of the other aging Jews who still had a memory of the place. But it had changed in just about every other way. The Weequahic they knew was long gone.
We kept hitting red lights all along Elizabeth Avenue and on Chancellor Avenue. It occurred to me the storm had significantly improved my chances of being able to make a break for it at a stoplight. I just couldn’t figure a way to get out of the car. The Malibu kept the doors locked as long as it was in Drive, so I couldn’t just roll out. There was too much my hands had to do: unclick the seat belt, unlock the door, pull the handle. It was impossible to even attempt such a move while white-knuckling the steering wheel at ten and two. Not even Houdini could have pulled that sleight of hand.
We passed Weequahic High School and I glanced at the Malibu’s clock. What should have been a fifteen-minute drive had taken us closer to thirty. I just hoped it was enough time for Lunky to do something other than prepare a lengthy reply message about how Roth really intended for suicide to be used as an allegory.
But as I turned onto Summit Avenue, I didn’t see any kind of welcome party, just a long, wet, empty street teeming with raindrops. Up until that moment, my faith in Lunky had been total, perhaps inexplicably so. I thought for sure he’d still be hanging around the newsroom, like he was every other night, see my message, get the reference to Roth’s home and call in the reinforcements.
Instead, my life was going to end because Lunky either wasn’t reading his e-mail or didn’t understand it. He was a kid who couldn’t find his way out to South Orange Avenue without me holding his hand and who thought he could wait until the next morning to write a story for a daily newspaper. Just because he was well read and knew how to translate a Caesar cipher didn’t mean he had been handed enough street smarts to be of any real use.
I slowed as I approached the former Roth family home, which was on the right side. It was a three-family house with brick front steps and little in the way of a yard. Someone had added stone facing to the first floor at some point after the Roths departed. There was also a plaque marking the house’s significance.
“We’re here,” I announced as we approached. “I don’t suppose we could just call this quits, could we? You know, I’ll let you skate on Nancy if you let me walk away? I don’t need to tell the police anything. And I can forget I ever met a guy with the initials J.M. What do you say?”
But McNabb either wasn’t listening or didn’t feel like answering. I turned slowly to face him and saw that his eyes were scanning the street.
“This is good. This is perfect,” he said. “Now do exactly as I say. Park the car.”
“Okay. There’s no parking on this side.”
“Fine. Turn it around. Just pull a U-eey in this intersection.”
I followed his instructions. There were several parking spots available opposite the Roth house, and I stopped in one of them. Just then, a shock of thunder rattled the car with a sound wave so powerful it seemed to alter the air pressure as it passed.
Something about it jolted me out of the numbing sense of calm that had gripped me ever since McNabb pulled the gun on me. It finally occurred to me, This is it. I’m really going to die.
More than anything, I felt pissed. Joan of Arc was, what, sixteen when she died? Half my age, and she led armies. Jesus? He was thirty-three-only a year older than me-and look at all he managed to get accomplished in that time. I’m not saying I had delusions of grandeur, like anyone ought to be basing an entire religion-or a television miniseries-on my life. But dammit, here I was thirty-two and all I had to show for it was a few decent newspaper clips scattered across the course of a not-even-half-finished career. Now here I was, working my last story, and I’d never even get to write it.
At the very least, I was through with being obsequious. If he was going to kill me, it would be on my terms.
“Come on, let’s get this over with,” I said, ripping my hands from the steering wheel, hitting the button on my seat belt, shoving open the door, and swinging my legs onto the street.
“Hey, what are…” McNabb began to protest, but I was out of the car before he could finish.
I heard the back driver’s side door opening up behind me, and McNabb was already in midroar: “… ass back here. Stop right there.”
But I marched across the narrow street to the sidewalk in front of 81 Summit Avenue, and just as I was about to turn around and face my end, it suddenly occurred to me:
What do I mean, die on my terms? Why am I waiting around for this guy to kill me? Run, you dumbass. Run for all you’re worth.
“Stop. I haven’t cleaned my prints off the gun yet,” McNabb yelled, as if this was somehow my concern.
No, my concern-my only concern-was putting more distance between myself and McNabb. I felt my right thigh muscle flexing, then my left. Strides one and two were a bit of a misadventure, as my dress shoes slipped on the wet pavement. Strides three and four went better, with my feet gaining traction, enough that the sides of my vision began blurring. I was starting to move. Fast. Hey, if I could outrun a bear, I could certainly outrun a fat lump like McNabb.
I looked for something resembling cover, but there was none. Summit Avenue was just this long, straight street with nowhere to hide. So I concentrated on making it to Chancellor Avenue, my best chance to find a cop, a hiding spot, something. My arms were pumping. My legs were churning. I was going to make it.
I heard another thunderclap, only it was even closer than the last one. Then something tripped me and I went sprawling.
Only it wasn’t thunder. And I hadn’t tripped. It was McNabb’s gun firing. And he had shot me in the back of the leg.
For a moment, I saw nothing but wet, time-worn asphalt in front of my face. I was down. I tried to scramble up but couldn’t seem to get my left leg underneath me. It didn’t hurt or anything. I just couldn’t make it move.
All I could do was roll over. The rain was pounding me so hard I was losing track of where it was coming from. Now that I was faceup, there was so much water gushing on me it was almost like I was trying to open my eyes under a running showerhead. I propped myself on my right elbow and used my left hand as a shield, just so I could see McNabb marching toward me, scowling and red-faced. My mad dash had gotten me all of three doors down from the Roth residence.
“You want to do this the hard way? You want to do this the hard way?” McNabb screamed, keeping the gun aimed at me.
I had no answer for him. I just lay back down and started to feel an otherworldly pain emanating from my left hamstring, like a bad cramp, only fifty times worse.
At least I had tried, I told myself, no matter how lame the attempt was.
“I told you to follow the script,” he bellowed, now standing over me. “How are you supposed to commit suicide with a gunshot wound to your leg? How is that in the script?”
He steadied himself with his legs spread wide, gripped the gun in both hands, and pointed it down in the direction of my head. I didn’t want to watch anymore. So I looked up at the sky and tried to concentrate on something other than the growing agony coming from my lower half. I found myself tracking individual raindrops as they fell into my eyeball from a seemingly impossible height, watching as they cascaded down through space that seemed curved. And I waited for the lights to go out.
* * *
I’ve heard it said the moments before death are slow ones, stretching out far longer for the soon-to-be-deceased than they do for anyone else. This, at least, is what those who have experienced near-death come back to report-life flashing before their eyes, tunnels appearing, that sort of thing.
But I wasn’t experiencing any of that. I just suddenly became aware the lights hadn’t gone out and the guy who was trying to kill me suddenly wasn’t upright anymore.
A large, fast-moving shape had barreled into the small of his back, sending his chest
thrusting forward in a parabolic shape, his arms flying out at his side and his head tilting back. An explosion of air escaped from his lungs in a barely formed grunt. And then he disappeared.
I propped myself up on both elbows to look for him. But he was gone. All I could see was Lunky-Lunky! — and he had apparently executed an absolutely textbook tackle: head down, arms wrapped, body low for maximum leverage. He finished by landing squarely on top of McNabb, momentarily obscuring the smaller man. It was a quarterback sack that would have made any NFL Films highlight reel. McNabb had been thoroughly blindsided.
He wasn’t done fighting, of course. No, he was struggling against Lunky, wriggling and cursing and wriggling some more, trying to at least get himself turned over to face his assailant. But he couldn’t get any momentum. Lunky was so much bigger and stronger, he easily kept McNabb pinned, long past a ten-count. McNabb would have stood a better chance against a mountain gorilla. Lunky actually seemed to be taking it easy on the guy, like he pitied him.
I began opening my mouth to warn Lunky not to be too blase, that McNabb was armed. Then I saw the gun had come to rest a good ten yards away. McNabb had no more chance of reaching it than I did of standing up and winning Dancing with the Stars on one leg.
Lunky maneuvered into a sitting position atop his quarry, with his powerful legs keeping McNabb’s arms pinned. With one giant paw, Lunky smothered the side and back of McNabb’s head, keeping it pressed down into the street. Lunky could have kept McNabb there all night if need be, and McNabb seemed to resign himself to it. Either that or he had run out of energy for his struggle, because he was finally still.
The pain was starting to make it hard to think, so I lay back down and stared up at the rain some more. Soon, a head of curly brown hair was poking into my frame of vision and a very concerned-looking Tina Thompson was gazing down at me.
“Are you okay, honey?” she asked,
I wish I could report my reply had been something valiant, funny, touching, or memorable. But it was, in fact, a little more candid: “It hurts.”