"Who do you hang out with?" I asked.
"You."
"And who else?"
"No one, really," my brother said.
"And how do we get around?"
"In Dad's car."
"Ask me again why I care about curfew."
My brother scoffed: "Dad'll let you have the car whenever we hang out, especially because we hang out, whatever the fuck time we come home. What're you, dense?"
"And you're so wise on this how?"
Danny shrugged like the answer was so obvious he could barely speak it. "Dad thinks you look out for me. He thinks I'm safer when we're together. He wouldn't run the risk of separating us. Mom wouldn't let him."
"You saying you're not safer with me than you would be alone?" I swallowed hard. "Doing what you do these days?"
Danny turned one way in his seat, and then the other, glancing around us. "Didn't you just wreck the car?"
"I didn't wreck it," I said. I didn't know what part of my commentary his crack about the car had been meant to criticize. "Just dinged it up at most."
I decided I should get a look at how bad before I tried continuing the drive home, or continuing my attempt at a conversation with my younger brother about his growing drug problem. Just in case it was worse than I thought, worse than it had sounded. The car, I mean.
I opened the door, cool night air rushing into the car. I realized I'd been sweating, the breeze running up the sleeves of my T-shirt. I took a deep breath. When I turned to hang out the door and look, the seat belt caught. Danny stifled a giggle. I popped the belt free and leaned out of the car.
"You smell gas?" Danny asked.
"No." So far, so good. I hadn't even thought of that. Gas tank was on that side too. I heard the flick of a lighter and smelled cigarette smoke. Glad he was so confident. But things seemed okay. The back tire wasn't flat. I could see the hubcap. No dents that I could see in the back quarter panel, at least in the faint wash of the dome light from inside the car.
"Light me one," I told Danny. Without turning, I reached my arm across the car for the cigarette. The lack of obvious damage had me feeling better, more and more confident that nothing was wrong that we couldn't play off as a parking lot accident and pin on some other idiot driver. Dad would grumble, but he'd forgive. And small dents he could pound out himself in the driveway. He was handy like that.
Danny slipped the cigarette into my fingers. I brought the smoke to my lips, tapped the brake pedal. The taillights ignited, a red burst off the back of the car washing over the wild green bushes and trunks of the trees. Still working, that was good. None of the telltale bright white gave away broken glass back there. Amazing, I thought, how bright those lights actually are. I tapped them again. And then I saw it. My throat went dry.
A shoe. One shoe.
A sneaker, really. A blue Ked, adult sized. The cheap kind you see lined up in flimsy cardboard boxes along those long rows of shelves at the K-Mart or the Korvettes. Like old people wore. No big deal, I told myself, a shoe by the side of the road. Except this shoe stood on its heel, tilted a little to the left. I could see a bony, hairless, blue-veined ankle, the cuff of a pajama leg. An old person. Some poor, senile, old bastard who'd probably wandered away from one of the estates on the hill.
My throat closed and my heart stopped, a fist reaching into my chest and squeezing my heart down to the size of a grape, strangling it.
Fuck me. I'd killed someone.
I heard Danny getting out of the car. Air exploded out of my chest and my heart started again. I lunged for Danny, locking onto his forearm. He glanced down at my hand, not looking all that surprised I'd grabbed ahold of him.
"Get back in the car," I said.
"Lemme go," he said. "I gotta take a piss. Since we're apparently camping out here for the night."
"Get in the car."
I did not want him seeing that body. And I didn't want anybody seeing us anywhere near it. I'd decided to run from the scene. I couldn't even remember making the decision. But I was totally sure of what I wanted to do.
"Dude, I gotta go," Danny said. "One sec."
"Wait till we get home."
"Who're you? Fucking Mom?"
"Someone could see us."
"I'll go back in the woods." He chuckled. "You already took care of the guardrail. Easy-peasy."
He tried to tug his arm free, half an effort because he expected me to let go. I didn't. He bristled, and for the first time since we'd stopped he looked a little angry.
"There's gotta be a car coming," I said, "either from ahead or behind us."
We'd settled to a stop on the wrong side of the road, facing into oncoming traffic, our headlights burning bright down the side of the hill. It was mid-spring, the trees had only half their leaves. Our car was blatantly visible from every direction. Our voices probably carried far in the quiet night. The sound of the station wagon slamming the guardrail certainly had. People did live up here. They lived nearby over on Todt Hill, and on Lighthouse Road too. The Hill people. Rich people. Rich people who didn't tolerate late-night, side-of-the-road bullshit, people who didn't come to see if you were all right, if there was anything they could do to help. They just called the cops and went back to bed and let the paid help deal with it. That could've happened already. The cops could be on their way up the hill as we sat there bickering like one of us had gotten more chocolate milk than the other at breakfast.
I didn't want to be dealt with. I wanted my brother back in the fucking car. And I wanted both of us home.
Danny settled on the edge of the front seat, one leg in and one leg out of the car, cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. He had his outside leg in the middle of the road. "What the fuck?" He reached under his seat, moving his hand around under it. "We don't have any beers left in here?"
I thought I saw headlights break through the trees below.
"We're in a hurry," I said, trying to keep my voice light, and failing. "Remember?"
I watched my brother for a reaction to my bullshit. Could I have made it any more obvious that there was something at the back of the car I didn't want him to see? I hoped my guilt and horror, not only over what I had done by accident but what I was now doing on purpose, amplified my fears, like that remorse-ridden lunatic in "The Tell-Tale Heart." I realized gratefully that Danny had most likely never read the story. I also realized I was glad and relieved he was high and therefore if not easily led at least leadable.
That thought made me feel like shit. It made me sick.
"We're going," I said, my voice a croak. "Now."
I braked as I put the car in drive, using the sideview mirror to look into the cloud of red light and exhaust behind us. I saw the second foot as we inched away from the shoulder. Though it tilted away from the first foot at the toes, the heels were nearly touching, the feet therefore making a V shape, like feet did when their owner was flat on their back. On the soles I could see the Rice Krispies patterns in the waxy, honey-colored rubber. Or maybe I was imagining that last part. Our grandfather had worn those same shoes in the last years of his life. Before he died after two long, long years of stomach cancer, calling out for morphine till the bitter end.
* * *
Back in brightly lit Eltingville, streetlights and porch lights everywhere, I parked the car a few houses down from ours. It annoyed the neighbors to no end, seeing my father's beat-to-hell, twelve-year-old, 1977 gray behemoth of an Impala wagon parked in "their" parking spot.
Back in the day, long before us, before he'd even met our mother, our father had been a brawler, and Danny and I desperately wanted, just once, to see him throw down on the neighbors we liked least. Like the 'roided-out dude from my high school who washed his Monte Carlo SS twice a week, shirtless and cranking shitty club music, like the whole island was his personal health club/coke den/dancehall. Or the old guy who lived alone on mental disability checks and never drove and so sat behind his living room curtains all day, even when the kids on the block w
ere at school, the guy waiting for some Wiffle ball or street hockey ball to bounce onto his pristine lawn so he could crank the window and threaten to call the cops. Or, more specifically, his son, the cop, who we never saw, not once. But it never happened. Dad didn't fight anymore. At least not over parking spaces, and certainly not over the wiseassery of his silly sons.
After I turned off the engine, I sat behind the wheel for a few moments, a few breaths, willing myself to leave what I'd seen and done on the hill up there. I silently swore to never take that short cut again, curfew be damned. I had a brief, ridiculous thought that if we did get busted for hitting someone back on the hill, that we, that I, could somehow blame my father. If he hadn't been so anal about the curfew, I would never have been in such a hurry. That particular bizarre assemblage of necessary moments that led to me killing someone would never have coalesced and I would never have hit that person now lying there dead by the side of the road. My face got hot. Of all the rotten fucking luck. How many things had to go wrong for that person to be in that spot at that moment when the rear end of the Impala came smashing into them? If I'd tried to hit that person I never, ever could have done it. Not even head-on. What was that goddamn idiot doing wandering along a pitch-black road in the middle of the night? It had never entered my mind that there might be someone even more careless than me on that road. Certainly not someone I couldn't see coming. My head started to hurt. I had to stop thinking about it. Why was it so hot inside the car? I opened the door and stepped out into the street. Danny was already around the back of the car.
"Holy shit," I heard him say. It was an observation, not a weary summation of the night's adventures. That scared me. "Damn," he said.
A dent, probably. Maybe some torn-away piece of clothing. Blood, most likely. Worse, possibly. Body parts. I continued around the back of the car and saw what had arrested Danny's attention. The entire back bumper of the station wagon was missing. Gone. Shorn clean off when I'd fishtailed the Impala into the guardrail. And now lying by the side of the road at the scene of the accident. Could you trace a bumper back to the car from which it came? You could certainly get make and model and year. You could go around to body shops asking who'd come in for a replacement bumper for a '77 Impala station wagon. You could tell all your cop friends to keep an eye out for cars missing their rear bumpers. And then I realized no cop would even have to do that much work to find out what car had hit that dead person. Because, I realized, that bumper was lying there with the license plate still attached. I almost laughed. I'd killed someone, fled the accident, and left the license plate at the scene. I was too dumb to be a character in a Poe story. What had Danny said about our dad trusting me to look out for him? Talk about misplaced trust. I thought for a moment about walking into the house, waking him, and spilling everything, putting everything in his hands. But I didn't want this on him, and I didn't really want him to handle it. I just wanted it to go away. Getting him involved wouldn't make that happen. Now was not the time for wishful thinking.
Danny had a fistful of hair at the top of his head. He was staring at the back of the station wagon. "Wow. I betcha that's hard to do. Dad's gonna fucking freak."
"We gotta go back," I said.
"We?"
"Yes, we," I said. "I'm gonna need your help."
"Dude, I'm tired. How heavy can a bumper be, right? Toss it in the back. We'll hit the body shop in the morning. I'm still suspended. I've got the time. I'll take it in."
"You don't have a license," I said. "You're not allowed to drive."
Danny laughed. "That's your best argument?"
"I need you to look for the bumper," I said. "I'm gonna be driving in the dark."
"Wait till morning."
"Dad's gonna walk right past here on his way to the train. He's gonna see it."
"Then let's move the car around the corner."
"Then how do we explain getting home without it?"
"Bus?"
"Fuck! Danny! C'mon!" I kicked at the space where the bumper had been. "Help me out here."
Danny started laughing. I could've strangled him right there in the gutter. He'd played me right into a temper tantrum. He'd been doing it since we were little kids. I had a flash of us as eighty-year-old men, standing in this same street, me screaming at him, and him laughing. It would never end. He'd been willing to go back to Snake Hill from the moment I'd first asked. I should've known better. As if there had ever been a time when he'd rather go home and go to bed than traipse off on another adventure, no matter how minor. Well, this one wasn't as minor as he thought, but I saw no need to make him the wiser.
He walked to the passenger-side door, tried the handle, and found it locked. "We gonna go, or what?" He couldn't stop smiling. "I ain't got all night."
The words accessory after the fact scrolled across my brain. I tried to console myself with the fact that no cop, no court on earth, would believe Danny's denial that he knew nothing about the body. How would he defend himself? Well, your honor, I was on the nod from a head full of backroom crank. I told myself that in protecting myself I was protecting him too. And my father, whose name was on the registration attached to the wagon's license plate. Really, I was protecting the whole family by returning to the scene of the crime and cleaning it up.
I climbed into the driver's seat and started the car. Maybe you should have thought about protecting the family, a faint voice in the back of my head told me, before you took Snake Hill at twice the advisable speed while six drinks deep on a weeknight.
It's too late, I argued back as I pulled us away from the curb, to do anything about those choices now.
I took us back the way we came, the wide residential streets of our neighborhood narrowing into the older, winding commercial corridors of Amboy Road with its short canvas awnings hanging over the bricked storefronts, every building hugging the thin strip of sidewalk dividing it from the road. Coming around the curves, which I took slowly, it looked impossible to step out of the nail salon or the deli or the driving school and not walk right into oncoming traffic. At intersections, I lingered too long at green lights, petrified of committing some violation.
The streets we followed back onto Richmond Road were only one lane each way and usually bustled, jam packed with traffic in both directions, but at that late hour the streets were dead. We saw not a soul. And that fact only made me sure that Danny and I couldn't have looked more suspicious being out and about at that hour. Riding around in our damaged car couldn't help our image much. And should we get pulled over, how would we explain ourselves? Or the lack of a rear bumper, which was a great excuse to light us up in the first place. I wanted desperately to speed, to push our errand to its end. The knots in my stomach pulled tighter as we moved away from the homes and businesses and the road darkened.
We found the foot of Snake Hill and started our slow climb. I hoped we wouldn't encounter some version of my earlier, idiot self, careening down the hill road out of control at top speed.
"Think of it like this," Danny said. "Could've been worse. What if that guardrail wasn't there? Most of Snake Hill doesn't have any. We could've gone spinning off into the trees. Into God knows what else. What's the drop-off like over there?"
"I don't know."
"How steep you think it is?"
"I don't know that, either."
"Right," Danny said. "And now we don't have to."
"We should probably start looking for the bumper soon."
I slowed our progress to a crawl, barely enough for forward motion, and decided I'd move as far as I could onto the narrow shoulder should someone come up behind us. Danny kept a steady watch on the roadside. He was humoring me, as we still had a couple hundred yards to go before we came anywhere near where the collision had been. I was grateful. I needed him to be quiet so I could think. I needed to decide how much to tell him.
One of Danny's qualities that I most envied was his refusal to judge. I wondered if it was cynicism, optimism, or apathy that left him shru
gging off every atrocity and most acts of kindness that he witnessed on the news or saw in the papers. He'd always viewed most of the world from a peaceful distance, and that was even before he found the drugs. Maybe that was what he liked about them. Maybe they made that distance deeper or safer or made it feel permanent and right. Maybe that distance got harder to maintain as he grew older. Or maybe it was Grandpa's death, or what it did to our mother, the way it stoked her hot tears and her raging temper, that made him want his boat to drift even farther from shore. The agony in our house certainly made the fight look futile, even I could see that, and I believed in heaven.
As we both peered into the roadside shadows, I found myself wishing I had left Danny home. Not that he would've stayed there if I'd told him to. He'd never have let me back out into the night alone.
I heard a sharp "A-ha" from Danny and turned to see him pointing dead ahead through the windshield. And there, in the middle of the road, in all its slightly tarnished glory, was the Impala's bumper. Intact and lying there like so much chrome road kill.
"Nicely done," I said, pulling the car over to the side of the road.
There wasn't much of a shoulder and half the wagon hung out into the traffic lane. We'd have fair warning about oncoming traffic from either direction, though, and the later it got, the smaller our chances of encountering another driver, anyway.
I threw the car in park, hit the hazards, and jumped out the door. I glanced into the woods, searching for the shoes in the weak glow of the Impala's dome light. I didn't see them, but I knew that didn't mean they weren't out there, or that Danny wasn't going to see them. Unless, of course, they'd never been there to begin with, something I could convince myself was true if I worked at it hard enough. I'd prefer having had a hallucination to the reality that I'd killed someone.
I heard a groan. A faint, B-movie zombie groan.
There was no way. The old man I'd hit had to be dead. I'd hit him with an out-of-control, two-thousand-pound automobile. Christ, I'd never considered the alternative. A fucking miracle.
Staten Island Noir Page 2