Only Child

by Andrew Vachss

  “That motor ain’t from the Mopar factory, man,” he said, contempt cutting through his Appalachian twang. “Al deKay himself built this one.” I knew who he meant—a legendary Brooklyn street-racer, rumored to have switched coasts. “You got yourself an MSD ignition and a brand-new EFI under there,” he preached. “Nascar radiator plus twin electric fans, oil and tranny coolers—this sucker couldn’t overheat in the Lincoln Tunnel in rush hour. In July. Reliable? Brother, we’re running an OEM exhaust system, H-piped, through a pair of old Caddy mufflers. Costs you a pack of ponies, but it’s as quiet as a stocker with those hydraulic lifters. This piece, boy, you don’t need to even know a good wrench—you want, you could fucking weld the hood shut.”

  It was tall-geared, running a 3.07 rear end—which Lymon proudly gushed was “full cryo” while I pretended I knew what he was talking about—and a reworked Torqueflite off a column shifter. Oil-pressure and water-temp gauges had been installed in the dash slot that formerly housed the pitiful little factory tach. The replacement tach, one of those old black-faced jobs, was screw-clamped to the steering column, with a slash of bright-orange nail polish at the 6000 shift point.

  The bucket seats had an armrest between them that you could pull up to sit three across in a pinch. What you couldn’t see was the chromemoly tubing that ran from the rocker sills through the B-pillars right up under the headliner to form a rollover hoop.

  The windows had a tint that looked like Windex hadn’t touched the glass for years. The outside lamps of the quad headlights had been converted to xenon high-lows, like switching a cigarette lighter for a blowtorch. The inside units were actually aircraft landing lights, but you’d have to be close enough to notice the nonserrated clear glass with the telltale dot in the center to tell.

  No power windows, no air conditioning. The radio was the original AM/FM. If I wanted tape or CD, I’d have to bring a portable with me when I rode.

  From the outside, it looked like different things to different people. To a rodder, it would look like a restoration project—the beginning of the project, with the Roadrunner’s trademark “meep-meep” horn more hope than promise. To anyone else, it looked like a typical white-trash junker, just fast enough to outrun the tow truck. Steel wheels, sixteen-inchers all around, shod in Dunlop run-flats, with dog-dish hubcaps on three of them. Rusted-out rocker panels. A dented grille hid the cold-air ducting on either side of the radiator. Steering wheel wrapped in several layers of padded white tape. The front end was all primer, the rear the original red, since gone anemic. The left tailpipe was trimmed so that it looked like a replacement mill—probably a tired 318—was providing the power.

  It looked right at home on the patch of dirt that would have been the front lawn if the house we’d rented had been in a better neighborhood.

  Michelle hung around long enough to fully express her utter and total unhappiness with the dump. Nobody was dumb enough to point out that she’d been the one who rented it. She worked her cell phone, harassing the Mole unmercifully until he agreed to drive out and pick her up. I love my sister, but it wasn’t the first time I’d been glad to see her wave goodbye.

  Max and I went back to our life-sentence card game as if we’d never been interrupted by my disappearance. He was into me for a good six figures, but that didn’t faze him—he’d been down more than a quarter-million years ago, when he caught one of those mythical lucky streaks even the most degenerate gambler never dares to dream of. Once he felt it lock in, the Mongol kept me in my seat for hour after hour, afraid of offending the gods by changing anything. When the run finally had played itself out, he was damn near even. But it didn’t take him long to get back under the gun, especially after I’d taught him casino as a break from gin. Max with gambling is like me with women—love’s not the same as skill.

  He even dragged out the score sheets he always carries around like a religious medal. We had long since agreed to settle up when we met on the other side, and Max figures a running tab guarantees, no matter how long I’m gone, we’ll be together again someday.

  Today’s game was part of the proof.

  Nights, we rode. Me driving, Max charting. We knew what we were looking for—a place big enough to store a couple hundred humans. Remote enough so there would be no casual traffic, and close enough to the drop point to make it a quick trip. We found what we wanted easy enough. Only thing was, we found it a dozen times in the first few tries.

  Back at the house, I held my hands apart, then slowly brought them together, looking a question at Max. He shrugged, no closer than I was to any factors we could use to narrow down the search.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I told the Prof and Clarence. “It doesn’t matter where they mean to keep their stash. I know how it could be worked now. Only thing is...it’s not for us.”

  “Need too many guns?” the Prof asked.

  “Too many uniforms,” I said.

  “Let’s hear it run, son.”

  “Like you said already, it’s military-scale. But it’s still a hijacking. And the best way to work one of those is to have the drivers take a little taste themselves.”

  “Pay them off?” asked the man who’d taught me that trick.

  “The opposite,” I told them. “The way to make it work is to have INS—or what they think is INS, anyway—roll up and take them all down. So it’s a bust, right? We take possession of the cargo, and the snakeheads are all in custody.”

  “Here comes the mordida, right, Schoolboy?”

  “Sure. We let the snakeheads bribe their way free. The negotiations take a few hours, maybe.... That works easy enough; they’re not going to have that much cash on them, so they’d have to persuade us that they’re good for it. Meanwhile, the cargo’s on the move. We cut the snakeheads loose, what are they going to do? Go tell their bosses...what? Good way to get themselves killed. They’re likely to stay here in America, go underground.

  “Ever since nine eleven, INS isn’t exactly concentrating on Chinese. But whatever their choices, they’re bad ones. Main thing is, we get the cargo, nobody gets hurt...and nobody’s going to talk.”

  “Except...?”

  “Except that we’d need fifty men. Maybe more. All uniformed, full arms, and communication gear. Marked vehicles, the whole works. We’d have to pull a dozen jobs just to put the financing together. And even if we were bankrolled, we couldn’t find that many rat-proof professionals still working.”

  “Mama had to know that, going in.”

  “Amen, brother. I don’t get it any more than you do.”

  “I do not like to say this....” Clarence hesitated, looking around the circle for approval. We all gave it to him, silently. He nodded his head, as if registering the vote, then went on: “We would need many men to capture them. But, in the dark, by surprise, we would not need so many to...”

  “That’s crazy,” I said. “The way I laid it out, there’s nothing left to show anything happened. We leave a bunch of bodies lying around, we turn a no-case into a feast for the federales.”

  “That clue is true,” the Prof agreed, putting into words what we all thought—Mama would draw the line at stupidity a lot quicker than she would at murder.

  Max stood up, went into the kitchen. He came back with a box of toothpicks. In ten minutes, he had a whole scene constructed on the table. He looked up, made sure he had everyone’s attention, then showed us where we’d gone wrong, his fingers drawing it as clear as a blueprint. We watched the trucks line up near the shoreline. Saw the ocean-goer sit offshore, the smaller boats go out to it to vacuum off the cargo. The cargo got offloaded, and the trucks went to the warehouse. Max tapped my wristwatch, ran his finger around the dial a couple of times to show the passage of time. Then one of the trucks pulled out of the warehouse, loaded. He put himself behind the wheel, driving. Pointed next to him, shook his head “No.” Then he pointed at Clarence, touched under his left armpit, and shook his head “No” again.

  Sure, he was right. Each of the cargo-hau
lers would be alone. And unarmed. A thin smile spread across the Prof’s lips.

  Max’s toothpick truck motored along. He quick-built a little roadblock, spread his hands in a “Why not?” gesture.

  I bowed my head just enough to let Max know he was a genius. The bow wasn’t just out of respect—slapping five with Max was a high-risk move. “Max has got it,” I said aloud. “There’s a ton of ways to stop a single truck. Hell, a flat tire would do it. Taking down one driver...we could do that in broad daylight. And what’s he going to do after we’re gone, call the cops?”

  “We couldn’t keep dialing that number,” the Prof said, deliberate-voiced. “It’d be a one-shot. And we’d need some kind of watch on the plant, to know when the right one was leaving.” He took a thoughtful drag on his cigarette. “You think that’s what Mama wants? All this planning and scanning just to kick one of them loose?”

  “She’s done it before,” I reminded him. “And that’s her style, too, swooping in from the wings. But, even for Mama, this is extreme sideways.”

  “So...?” the Prof tossed out.

  “We ask her,” I said.

  The Prof rode with me on the drive back. When we got to the on-ramp for the LIE, I nailed the Plymouth, gobbling ground for the sheer hell of it. We were over eighty in a slow eye-blink, the tach laughing and loafing around three grand. I backed it off, listening to the restrictive mufflers mute the throb of the torque-monster.

  “Like your old ride never died, Schoolboy,” the Prof said approvingly.

  “Faster, actually. Corners a lot better, too.”

  “But it don’t feel the same, right?”

  I thought about it for a minute, avoiding where he was going, the only father I’d ever known.

  “No,” I finally said. “It’s sweet, but...”

  “...but it ain’t got no holes punched in the trunk,” he said, pinning me. I looked at my right hand. At the tiny heart tattooed between the last two knuckles, hollow and blue. My old Plymouth had the trunk all fixed up for her, complete with the air holes the Prof was talking about. Many’s the time I popped the trunk from inside the car so that Pansy could be a surprise guest at a party people planned for me.

  The last time I’d done that was the last time for her. She’d gone out the way she wanted, taking one of the enemy with her.

  I always see her. On the screen inside my head. A flash of dark gray against the black night, charging across that stretch of waste ground, hell-bound for the man who’d shot me. Dropping him as he tried to run. Rearing up, a chunk of the shooter’s throat in her mouth. Taking fire from the others who’d been in on the ambush. Going down. Getting up again. When they closed in to finish me off, I could still see her...trying. It was the last thing I saw before I went someplace else.

  I had come back. Pansy hadn’t.

  “You evened it up, honeyboy,” the Prof said softly.

  “Doesn’t bring her back,” I told him, through clenched teeth.

  “Go on Oprah, fool. That lame game ain’t for folks like us.”

  Truth.

  I breathed through my nose, centering myself.

  It wasn’t even midnight when I dropped the Prof off. Way too early to meet with Mama. I headed back to my place, figuring on killing a few hours.

  If Gateman saw me come in, you couldn’t tell it from his eyes; they stayed as neutral as cancer.

  I poured myself a beer mug full of ice water from the fridge. New York City tap water is as clean as any of that glacier-grown crap they sell in fancy little bottles. Tastes better, too.

  I fired up the TV, kicked back, and watched some of the races from the Meadowlands on cable. Reminded myself I would need to find a new bookie—if there was one guy on earth who’d know my voice on the phone, it was old Maurice.

  Later, on the drive over to Mama’s, I found CBS-FM, Don K. Reed’s Doo-Wop Shop. Caught The Heartbeats’ “Crazy for You” from the top. Street-corner perfect.

  That was another thing I’d missed about New York—radio stations where Dion was a first name.

  I drove past Mama’s, slow and careful. The white-dragon tapestry was in the window, barely visible behind smeared-streaked glass that had collected more fingerprints than a crime lab. All clear. If the dragon had been red, I would have kept on going. And if it had been blue, I’d have known exactly what the problem was.

  Mama’s a patriot. Same as we all are. The country we’re loyal to is the only one we vote in. And it’s never much bigger than wherever we stand.

  I parked the Plymouth in the alley without a second thought. Pulling out the ashtray toggles an on/off switch wired into the distributor; if it’s not in the right position, the engine will crank but never catch.

  And for that one spot, I had even better security. The driver’s door was now a replica of the alley wall—a white square against the dull-gray primer, with Max the Silent’s chop in gem-cut black inside. You’d think this would blow the whole anonymous deal, but you see quasi-Chinese ideograms on everything today, from clothes to skin. They usually don’t mean anything, but people who read comics for the ancient wisdom think they look cool.

  There’s a tattoo artist Mama knows in a basement off Mott Street. He always has a vast display of the symbols for customer viewing. They pick the one they like, and Hop Sing or Wo Fat or whatever he feels like calling himself that day makes up a story about what it stands for: Truth, Justice, Integrity, Honor, Power, whatever. Mama says there are hundreds of different symbols for “sucker” in Chinese, and this guy knows them all.

  The men on the door did their job, like always. But they hadn’t bothered with the threat displays since that first time.

  Mama was at the front, by her register, staying close to the only altar she truly worshipped at. And making sure any stray customers who wandered in got the message that they didn’t want to eat there. She and the tureen of soup arrived at my booth at the same time.

  “Damn! This is extra good tonight, Mama. You put something different in it?”

  “Always something different,” she said. “Not good last time?”

  “No,” I said, laboring. “It was superb the last time. It is never less than superb. This time, it was even superior to your usual standard, that’s all.”

  “Huh! So—want more, yes?”

  The soup was so hot it burned my mouth. My big mouth.

  I was deep into my meal of braised beef and bok choy when Mama dropped it on me. “While you...gone, people still call, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Not like, all right, okay. Okay, like, you understand, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Her eyes were black olives. I took the double-barreled scrutiny; looked back, blandly.

  “Sometime, people owe money, want to pay. Sometime, want time to pay, okay?”

  “Sure.”

  “Sometime,” she went on, ignoring me, “want work done, okay?”

  “Yeah. What did you tell them?”

  “Mr. Burke not here, okay? You call back, okay?” she parroted in her best Chinese-laundry voice.

  “You had a long time to be saying that.”

  “So sorry,” she said, in the same voice. “You maybe try again, okay?”

  “I get it. But most of the people I deal with, they’d want whatever they wanted right then.”

  “Too bad, so sad,” Mama said, her voice a perfect imitation of her granddaughter Flower. “Oh well.”

  “So, after a while, the whispers die down. And people stop calling. Is that what you’re telling me?”

  “New people, stop call. Old people, not same. You understand?”

  I nodded to tell her I did. Sure. Made perfect sense. My name had been in the street a long time. Someone coming up on it for the first time, if they needed what I was known for, they’d give a call, take a shot. If they kept getting sloughed by Mama, they’d give it up, go elsewhere. But old customers, they’d keep trying.

  Like old enemies.

  “Sometime, big job,” M
ama said.

  I nodded again, not questioning how she could tell all that from a few words whispered into a pay phone—Mama could smell a dollar bill in a slaughterhouse.

  “So! Big job, old customer, get different story, okay?”

  “What story?”

  “Story like I tell you before, okay? Burke not here. Long time. Not in country. Special thing. But somebody else do job.”

  “Who’d you send them to?” I asked, frankly curious.

  “No, no. Not send away. Tell to wait. Can’t wait? So, okay, I not know anything about Burke business. But now job come in, you do; like say before, okay?”

  “You mean, be my own...brother, or whatever?”

  “Not look so much like you,” she talked through what I was saying. A train on tracks, rolling. “Little bit, maybe. But same voice. Just like talk to Burke, talk to brother.”

  “All that for what, Mama?”

  “Money,” she said, black eyes glowing like a Geiger counter near a rich vein. “Big, big money.”

  “The snakeheads?”

  “Not now,” she said. “Snakeheads all the time come. This business, come only once, okay?”

  Three nights after my meeting with Mama, I nudged the Plymouth through the still-thick Manhattan traffic, taking my time. This was a quicker contact than I’d expected. When Mama told me who was playing, I’d been sure they’d use foot soldiers to screen me before going face-to-face.

  The upper roadway of the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge took me past the luxo highrises on my right as I crossed the river, into another country.

  I found the adult-video store wedged into a concrete triangle under the bridge extension on the other side, just before where Queens Boulevard starts its long run through the borough. The store’s back was crammed up against a no-star hotel. A long-abandoned gas station made up the third leg of the triangle.

  They’d told me I could leave my car at the gas station, but I didn’t like that option much. I turned left, up Skillman Avenue, and motored along, watchful. When I saw the white rag dangling from the door handle of an old brown Buick sedan, I flicked the lever into neutral and blipped the throttle.