by Kaylie Jones
“You got a call from someone,” she said. She slid a note on the table his way.
“Who?”
“Your friend from the mall, he said.”
“My friend from the mall?”
“That’s what he said.”
“I don’t have any friend from the mall,” Bob Foote said. “What mall?”
He punched in the number he didn’t recognize.
“Hello, asshole,” a man’s voice said.
“Who’s this?”
“No,” the voice said. “Who are you?”
Bob Foote pulled the phone from his ear. He looked at the receiver. Something about the voice was … peculiar. “If this is a joke,” he said, “I’m not laughing.”
“No one’s laughing on this end either, motherfucker.”
“Hey, there’s a woman in this room, you son of a bitch. If I knew who you were I’d smack you in your goddamn mouth.”
“You want to know who this is?” the voice said. “This is the guy whose wife picked up what you dropped at the mall.”
“The mall?”
“Ah, we’re gonna play games now, asshole? The mall, where the blood is still wet in the snow.”
“You must have—”
“Okay, so we play games,” the voice said, and the line went dead.
Slowly, Bob Foote set the phone back in the cradle. He stared at the side of the refrigerator with the calendar. For months every day was blank. The kitchen was yellow. The refrigerator was yellow. You open the fridge, the Saran wrap is yellow. He fought for his country so his wife could match the Saran wrap to the wallpaper. So his kids could become punks.
“Who was that?” his wife asked, not looking up from her paper.
Bob Foote said, “Wrong number.”
“Wrong number?”
He grabbed the leashes hanging off the front door knob and his dogs jumped up.
Every car that passed him on his walk to the Wading River Beach scared him shitless. With the snow, it was like they were driving on cotton—he couldn’t hear them until they were right at his back. And how could they see him? He could hardly see the dogs at the end of the leash. Any one of the cars, he thought, could be the caller. And any one could strike him, run his fat ass over, and who could ever accuse the driver of negligence?
It made perfect sense, when he thought about it. He always expected a bum deal. In this life, you don’t get even laughs free. And if you live honestly—a simple life full of sacrifice, climbing poles all winter with your fingers numb so your wife can drive a Volvo and your sons can study poetry in college—you deserve what you get. He had nothing but disgust for his life, and resigned dread for his future. He was almost better off back at work. At least there he had guys he could talk to about how there was nothing to talk about.
At the beach, he unleashed the dogs and they charged down to the shoreline. How did they even know the way? He started walking blind, and every now and then one of them raced by, the wind lifting the dog’s fur. He should have helped the hurt woman. Lonnie was right—what was he afraid of? But it was the whole horror of it—the utter nonsense of the fight over a booby prize, and then the sound, the dull thunk of her skull catching the Buick’s rear bumper, like a softball pinging off a backstop pole. How in the hell, he kept wondering, did someone know it was him? Was it the woman in the car? Did she make his plates? If she made his plates, how did she track them?
When he’d had enough of the cold and the wind and the paranoia, he turned back toward the parking lot. His eyes were half frozen. He whistled for the dogs. Only the schnauzer appeared. He called and whistled after the other. But she’d done this before. She was getting old, she was less enthused about challenging walks in the weather. More than once she’d turned around, slipped past him, found her way back home alone.
His wife’s car was gone, the garage empty. He thought, I don’t even get dinner in a snowstorm.
He went out back and called for the poodle. Nothing. A hedgerow of hemlocks trimmed the backyard. He slipped through a pair that had been chewed away by the red spider, and kicked several yards into the woods. He called for her again, but the heavy snowfall threw a blanket over his voice.
Inside on the stove, a can of Campbell’s Chunky—beef and country vegetables—sat inside a small pot with dark burn marks across its bottom. On the top of the can was a Post-it. Don’t forget to add water. The boys are out with friends. Your friend called again.
He threw the note, the can, and the pot in the garbage. He crumpled two slices of Kraft’s individually wrapped American cheese together in each fist and dropped them in the dogs’ bowls.
“Don’t eat your sister’s,” he told the schnauzer.
The schnauzer ignored him. She went straight to the poodle’s bowl and cleaned it out, then she cleaned out her own.
Bob Foote slid out the side door.
At Bernie’s on Sound Avenue, a pair of young couples hugged each end of the shuffleboard table. The guys and the gals wore flannel shirts and jeans. Bob Foote was glad he wasn’t a young man now. The way they dressed, how did they know who was who, which was which? And when they figured it out, what would it matter.
He ordered a boilermaker, threw back the whiskey and sipped the beer. Then he ordered another. The boys are out with friends, she wrote. So what? What did he care? What did they care? It was another phony Christmas, just like all the other ones. Once, they gave him a bathrobe—it had the hotel’s name on the pocket. A pair of punks. Did they think he was that stupid?
The news was on. During his second beer, the incident at the mall appeared—a woman in the parking lot, found dead from injuries sustained from a fall. Anyone with information could call this number. Bob Foote took change from the bar and entered the phone booth.
He dialed Lonigan while watching one of the flannelshirted gals lean over the shuffleboard, her ass like twin halfs of a large cantaloupe. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad time to be a young man after all.
Lonigan picked up on the second ring. “You watching the news?”
“I thought you was at the dirty movie,” Bob Foote said.
“I went to the mall. See what I could see. A buddy of mine’s in trouble.”
Bob Foote said, “Semper fi.”
Lonigan said, “You got that right.”
“So what did you see?”
“Cops eating donuts behind yellow tape.”
“You know ’em?”
“I know all the cops.”
“And?”
“And nothing. They think the broad slipped by accident. The bumper she hit was her own. They scraped some hair and skin and blood off it, but no one suspects shit.”
Bob Foote said, “Not no one.” He told Lonigan about the call his wife took, about the conversation he’d had with the caller, about the new note.
Lonigan went bat shit. The kind of this-is-what-we-foughtfor obscenity-laced rant he threw when things got grim. In the background, he could hear Lonigan throwing things, breaking things, stomping on their broken pieces.
“For Christ’s sake, Lonnie, stop. You wreck anybody’s house, make it the caller’s.”
“You know what you do?” Lonigan said when he’d calmed. “You set up a meet.”
“A meet?”
“Call his ass back, ask what he wants, and where.”
“And then what?”
“Then I show up and break his goddamn nose.”
“What if—” Bob Foote said, but his friend was already off the line.
He bought a round for the girl with the cantaloupe ass and her friends and took his change. The back roads hadn’t been plowed for hours. He crawled the five miles home to Wading River in second gear.
His low beams swept along the front yard. Scattered across the snow were the contents of the package he’d left at the mall. He idled the Monte Carlo and kept the headlights on the mess. Sinking to his knees in the snow, he grabbed at the debris. There it all was again, the paper and wrappers and pie tins. He carried it
with both arms to the garage where he dumped it into a large refuse bag.
That’s when he saw the poodle, on its back, four paws in the air, rigid. Its head had been twisted completely around. The schnauzer crept over to Bob Foote’s boots and nuzzled. He picked her up and lightly scratched her belly while staring at his dead dog.
Somehow it all made sense, he always knew he’d get a bum deal.
He stuffed the dead dog into a grocery bag and hid her body behind a row of hemlocks in the backyard. He’d bury her when the ground thawed. Then he called his friend from the mall.
“Hey, we missed you, big guy.”
“You won’t miss me again,” Bob Foote said.
“Ooo,” the man said. “That’s the way, uh-huh, uh-huh, I like it, uh-huh, uh-huh.”
“What do you need me to bring, asshole?”
“Uh-huh, uh-huh,” the man sang again.
The morning was cold and quiet. Nothing in the harbor stirred. Way off at the breakwater, the fresh white snout of the Port Jefferson-Bridgeport ferry pushed into the calm harbor, its horn a flat wonk, wonk, wonk. The docks and the boats in their moorings were heavy with snow. Everything seemed dulled, arrested, killing time. Pylons looked like they were wearing chef’s hats.
From a second-story deck of Danford’s Hotel, Lonnie Lonigan swept the marina parking area with a cheap pair of field glasses, the kind that pop out of a wallet-sized packet.
“I can’t see a fucking thing with these,” he said. “This is what they give you on the force?”
His brother-in-law Jimmy, the cop, said, “Fix the focus. You gotta fix the focus.”
“I did fix the focus.”
“You can’t see the ferry?”
“Of course I can see the ferry,” Lonnie said. “Of course I can see the ferry. The ferry’s big. We’re not looking for big things, are we?”
“I’m just saying,” Jimmy said. “Let me see.”
He took the glasses from his brother-in-law. Lonnie was more like his older brother—fourteen years separated Lonnie from his sister, Jimmy’s wife. Sometimes he acted like Jimmy’s father. Lonnie had walked his sister down the aisle, and the one time Jimmy got caught cheating on her, Lonnie broke his nose. Bob Foote held his arms, and Lonnie broke his nose. “Not for cheating,” Lonnie had told him, “for getting caught.” Jimmy never forgot it.
Jimmy peered into the parking lot with little satisfaction. “They worked okay in Vegas.”
“You brought these to Vegas?”
“Fucking A, I brought ’em. I wanted to see everything up close.”
“How much closer can you get to a hand of cards?” Lonnie said.
“Not for the tables—the shows, the shows.”
“You saw shows?”
“Sure I saw shows. They got shows everywhere.”
“What kind of shows?”
“Everything, Lonnie, I told you.”
“Tell me again.”
Jimmy’s shoulders slumped. “Is this some kind of test?”
“I’m interested,” Lonnie said. “I’m just asking.”
“You’re never just asking.”
“Come on, Jimmy, tell me. I can’t stay at the skins show the whole time.”
“You will.”
“But if I don’t—what else they got?”
Jimmy shook his head. “I told you. They got tigers, white tigers … everything.”
“You’re a goddamn idiot.” Lonnie grabbed the glasses.
“You know—” Jimmy stopped himself.
Lonnie asked him what.
“Nothing.”
“No,” Lonnie said, “what? I want to hear this—are you fronting off?”
“I’m a goddamn cop, Lonnie, you know that? You could show a little respect.”
“Or what?”
Jimmy pointed to the parking area’s entrance. “There he is.”
“There’s who?”
“Your friend.”
“I don’t see shit,” Lonnie said.
Jimmy pulled the field glasses from his eyes. There, in the distance, was Bob Foote’s Monte Carlo, smoke puffing from its exhaust.
Lonnie said, “Right on time.”
“You sure he don’t know who’s calling?”
“Bob? He don’t know shit.”
“He’s smarter than he looks,” Jimmy said.
“You’re smarter than you look. What’s that tell you?”
Bob Foote rolled to a stop at the pair of orange traffic cones that reserved a parking space. The car next to the reserved space, a Plymouth Gran Fury, was just like the voice had described it: a cream-colored, four-door sedan with cardboard folded over the license plates. He put the Monte Carlo in park, got out and moved the cones, got back into the driver’s seat, and pulled alongside the Fury and cut the engine.
Bob Foote got out of his car. He went to the passenger side, opened its door wide, and stepped aside. He counted to ten, then he pulled the seat forward and stepped aside again. This, he assumed, was in order to indicate to whoever was watching that no one was in the car with him. He counted to ten again. Then he opened the trunk, stepped aside, counted. He got back inside his car, his heart pounding.
On the seat alongside him was a shoebox, wrapped in Christmas paper, a big red bow in the middle. He’d followed the instructions exactly, exactly how his “friend from the mall” told him. He’d gone to the bank, he’d withdrawn $5,000—almost every nickel in his account—and he’d stacked it in the box, using newspaper to fill up the open space. Now he waited, his eyes fixed straight ahead at the ferry. It seemed almost still in the water, but a few more loud blats on the horn and into the dockside it bumped. Moments later, its wide mouth opened slowly, slowly, slowly, down toward the algaegreen and brown concrete ramp.
Three sharp taps on the Monte Carlo’s trunk startled him. A hooded man walked briskly past. When the man had reached the docks, Bob Foote got out of his car, the box in his hands. He didn’t look anywhere but at the ground. He approached the hood of the parked Fury, placed the shoebox just behind the ornament, and returned to his car. He started up, backed out, and gave three toots on the horn.
Lonnie watched the Monte Carlo roll the length of the parking area. It followed in line behind the half-dozen cars that had disembarked the ferry, and turned right onto Main Street heading up the hill toward Setauket.
“Good boy,” Lonnie said. “And my apologies to the Missus.”
He was about to pocket the field glasses when he noticed the punk—a greasy kid with hacked-up hair, jeans painted-on tight, and an earring reflecting sunlight off his lobe.
“What the …” Lonnie muttered.
The punk lingered at the Plymouth’s hood, looking this way and that. Then he went for the box.
Lonnie burst out onto the Danford’s deck.
“Hey!” he shouted.
The punk tucked the package under his arm and ran.
He ran like a gazelle.
Lonnie ran too. He ran like a hippo. Three car lengths, he was sucking air so hard it burned. Four, he doubled over, clutching at his left arm, coughing from his throat into his colon. He tried to call out to Jimmy, but he couldn’t get enough air to squawk. The kid hit the docks, his feet flying, before Lonnie hit the pavement facedown.
The moment he heard Bob Foote honk, Jimmy started back toward the Fury from the docks. He walked slowly, the hood pulled tight around his face. He wanted this to work perfect, he wanted to pay Bob Foote back, even if it wouldn’t get him a nickel. He wasn’t sure how, but he was certain Lonnie would scam him on his cut. By the time he saw the punk with the package, the guy’s Converse sneakers were slapping the dock and coming straight for him.
“Hey!” he shouted. “Police!”
The punk threw a shoulder into Jimmy’s rib cage and sent him flying onto the deck of a moored cruiser. The snow broke Jimmy’s fall, but the thud took the wind out of his lungs. The kid swung onto the ferry, and took a staircase up to the passenger deck.
* * *
That’s when Bob Foote returned in the Monte Carlo. He took the same spot alongside the Fury and leashed up his schnauzer. He walked her over to the fallen man, Lonnie Lonigan, facedown in the snow. Several people had gathered around.
“Shouldn’t he be faceup?” Bob Foote asked.
One of the onlookers said he didn’t have a pulse.
“Oh,” Bob Foote said. “You’re a doctor?”
He continued to the dock, where he advised the dockmaster to call an EMS.
Jimmy pushed himself up from the deck. He brushed snow from the rungs that led back to the dock, and carefully pulled himself up one slow, slippery step at a time. Something had gone out in his back; it hurt him to reach, it hurt him to step, it hurt him to breathe. Probably a busted rib at least, he thought, maybe two. When he reached the top rung, his face even with the dock, he looked straight into the tips of a pair of desert boots.
“Oh, hello, officer,” Bob Foote said. “Do you need a hand?”
He snapped the right boot square into Jimmy’s teeth. The cop flew back flat on the deck. The schnauzer peered over the edge and barked at Jimmy’s prostrate form.
“You have a happy holiday,” Bob Foote said, “you hear me?”
He turned and boarded the ferry. It felt colder than he’d expected. With the successful outcome of their little prank, the idea of taking a ride on the water seemed a bit unnecessary, if not absurd. But it’s what his son had insisted—his price for helping out—and he climbed the steps to the passenger deck to find him. That might not be as easy as it seemed. Cliff wouldn’t be the only greasy little punk with hacked-up hair and the jeans painted-on tight. But he would be the only one who’d ever given him a Christmas gift worth a shit.
About the Contributors
QANTA AHMED, MD is an associate professor of medicine at Stony Brook University. Her first book, In the Land of Invisible Women, was a memoir of life as a doctor in Saudi Arabia. She contributes regularly to the Huffington Post, and her articles and essays have appeared in the Jerusalem Post, the Christian Science Monitor, the Guardian, and the Wall Street Journal. She is the first physician and Muslim woman to be selected as a Templeton-Cambridge Fellow at the University of Cambridge, England.