by Nick Mamatas
Sirens are already everywhere, and Dave’s lungs feel like they’re full of hot coals. He zig-zags his way through the crowds on the streets, his borrowed coat flapping like broken bat wings. A familiar car roars his way. He thinks it’s Jeremy’s at first and is ready to empty a clip into the windshield, but this is an older, dumpier Nissan, and it jumps the curb right in front of him.
Uncle Bill sticks his head out the driver’s side window. “Get in!” he shouts. Dave makes a grab for the back door and throws himself onto the seat. The car takes off before he can slam the door shut behind him, and he nearly gets the edge of the duster caught, but he finally closes it.
Uncle Bill takes a portable blue light from the seat next to him, puts it on the dash, and clicks it on.
“Holy shit, you’re a cop!” Dave trembles hard, vomits a little. I scream at every one of his nerve endings Don’t shoot! and he manages not to.
“I was a cop. Then I got mixed up with a little bitch of our mutual acquaintance,” Uncle Bill says. “Ended up working for her papa in the restaurant, just to be near her. Then they moved to Jersey, and I didn’t get to see her nearly as much.” He looks old and worn out now—a young face, but his skin is a little ashy, there are wrinkles around his eyes, and his black hair is splattered with grey. “Sorry about the stabbing. I did it for her.”
“She told you to stab me . . .”
“Naw,” he says. “I just did it because I had the feeling she wanted me to.”
“Where are you taking me?”
“First, out of Hudson County. Then out of New Jersey.”
“Are we going to meet her somewhere? In the city?”
Uncle Bill just laughs and laughs.
The siren makes the traffic part, renders traffic lights irrelevant, and even lets Dave zip by real police cars. But there’s no radio in the car, no barrier between front seat and back, nor any of the other stuff he expects to see even in an undercover cop car. Uncle Bill is silent, his eyes slits as he drives.
They get on the turnpike, and the light isn’t enough. Bill clicks a button and a siren starts, but it sounds like it’s coming from the car radio speakers, and doesn’t quite match the siren sounds Dave has heard before. Regardless, the cars part like the Red Sea and the Nissan blows past commuters by the dozen.
“Where are we going? Pennsylvania?” Too far. Dave knows nobody down there, doesn’t even know where the good neighbourhoods and the bad ones are. In the distance, the Meadowlands. Dave knows it. Uncle Bill’s police stunt has cleared the traffic on both sides of the vehicle. In the air, a helicopter swoops in. News or police, Dave can’t tell.
Do it! I tell him, and amazingly, he does. He opens the door and throws himself out. Adrenaline takes over. Even in the Ylem, I’m as drunk with it as he is. He doesn’t feel the wound on his side re-opening, or the tooth loosening when he hits the asphalt. He’s back up, gun out to ward off traffic in five stumbling steps, and he runs for the guardrail. Uncle Bill’s Nissan screeches as it fishtails. Dave hops the guardrail and hits the grass hard.
On your belly! I tell him. Crawl! One of us had some military training—National Guard when Jeremy refused to pay for college, and what one Dave Holbrook knows, I know, and I told Dave the routine: I’m up! He sees me! I’m down! Uncle Bill drove up to the railing, got out of the car, and vaulted over the rail. We were extremely lucky. He had his hazard lights on—still putting on the cop act—and left his keys in the ignition. Dave wanted to take a shot, but it was hard enough to crawl in the muck, to push forward on elbows and knees, hard to breathe in the shit. He almost passed out, but managed to loop around while Bill searched the underbrush. Another burst of speed was all he needed to get into the car and lock himself in.
Dave had some small experience behind the wheel—no driver’s ed class, but a few spins around the parking lot and one harrowing night when Ann made him take the PATH to Hoboken and drive her back home from a bar—but I had a lot more. I pushed as hard as I could from the femtosecond in front of him. He got the car in reverse and slammed on the accelerator. The light afternoon traffic gave Dave a wide berth.
Dave had never been to Kearny, but I knew something about it. As an adult—as the man who’d brandished his gun at Mr. McCann but did not shoot—I’d been there once on an abortive third date. Third dates are dealmakers or dealbreakers. Either you get laid or get laid off. The woman, her name was Louise and we’d met at work, revealed the existence of her five-year-old son by way of introducing him. Cute kid, looked more like his white father than his black mother. His name was Louie, named for his mother. And we went to a local carnival. It was a typical Jersey night—hot and sticky and swarming with mosquitoes. Kearny is just twelve miles from Manhattan, and about one hundred years away.
We were walking down the midway, mostly pulling the boy past the crooked games and other joints the charms to which long hours and low wages at the state lottery commission had immunized us, when a barker outside the dark ride called Summer Tentacular started to tell a joke into a megaphone.
“Hey, I got a funny story for you all! This nigger walks into a bar—” Louise’s head snapped to. “Oh! There’s one here!” he blurted out. The boy started to cry. Louise picked him up and started walking back toward the parking lot. A few people dared jeer and call out to her, “Hey, it’s just a joke! What’s your problem!” Her face was stone. We didn’t kiss goodnight. I didn’t know what to say except “Sorry” and she wasn’t interested in even that. “Did you know that this fucking town,” she told me as she put Louie in his car seat over his wiggling, wailing, protests, “is named after a Civil War general?”
So yes, Kearny would do. We found the exit quickly enough and drove through Harrison, which I remembered well, right into the centre of town. Then we abandoned the car, parking it in front of the pork store from The Sopranos. Kearny is all squat little brick buildings, and the occasional public monolith—a small town that once had hopes to be a bigger one.
The high school wasn’t far, and it had recently been let out, probably thanks to reports of a shooting in Jersey City. Dave heads there for no other reason than school is familiar. If he has a plan at all, it belongs to me, and if I have a plan at all, it’s because I’ve seen this particular strand of life—including my own ghostly role in it—play out over and over. Do you root for Luke Skywalker when you watch Star Wars? So do I, even though the scenes of his defeat, and victory, have already been shot, edited, developed, printed, scanned, uploaded, and digitally toyed with a dozen times.
There’s a peculiar sociological inevitability when it comes to schooling in New Jersey, where the rich snobs and the street kids and poor immigrants and fourth-generation Princeton legacies still occasionally find themselves sentenced to nine hours a day in the same prison. But it’s the ones least prepared for school who stick around. Rich kids have their lessons and hobbies and PlayStations; ambitious ones go home and get their homework done, or work for their parents in a little store. The kids who are nothing but trouble in school, they have nothing to do but mill around the bleachers, the handball court, the parking lot when it lets out early.
Oleg’s coat is in tatters, so Dave just uses it as gift-wrapping for the gun. He removes the magazine and drops it into a mailbox about a block from the school, then he finds a likely crowd.
There’s a quartet of excitable kids with pasty Irish faces milling around the school. They see Dave and their conversation stops. He’s a sight—nose still bandaged, new bruises and swamp mud all over his pants, and he’s carrying what probably looks like a dead animal from a distance. If he were an adult, the kids would probably just assume that Dave was homeless and crazy. Their parents would call the police, or seriously contemplate moving. Kearny is where one goes to get away from the scum of Newark and Jersey City.
Dave is beyond caring. He can talk to people, finally. Face the day without cough syrup, for now. He needs money and knows of two ways to get it. Along t
his branch of time, he chooses the safer way.
“Hey, guys,” he says, his voice dry and squeaky. “Wanna see something cool—that’s for sale?” He looks over his left shoulder, then right, and then unwraps the Uzi.
The guys are stunned. Dave is surprised too, when the smallest of the quartet steps up to speak. “What the fuck?” says the kid, who looks like someone carefully put a T-shirt on a mailbox.
“It’s real.”
“You want us to buy a machine gun from a stranger?” the kid says.
“You don’t want one?”
“What the fuck would we do with it?” one of the other guys says. He’s a tall one, and he speaks slowly like every word is invented just before it’s enunciated.
Dave just shrugs. He turns the gun’s barrel toward himself, offering the grip.
“You’re the kid from Newark who just killed everyone at his school, aren’t you? How the hell did you get out to Kearny?” the lead kid says. The others have gone from surprised to simmering, sneaking half steps around Dave, flanking him.
“Magic,” Dave says. “Don’t worry guys, the gun isn’t loaded. See, no magazine.” And he pulls the trigger. Nothing, but the kids jump back. “See, nothing,” Dave says.
“Then we can take the gun from you,” the lead kid says.
“You can try.” There’s steel in Dave’s voice now. “Better men than you lot have tried to fuck with me. Guess what happened to them?” The Kearny kids could guess, but I knew—nothing.
“I want that gun,” one of the kids says. He had been silent till now. His eyes met Dave’s, and Dave knew. This kid, with his shock of red hair and weird tooth and awkward limbs and slightly older clothes, had to be somebody’s cousin. He wouldn’t have been tolerated otherwise. They would have chewed him up in middle school and left him ruined and alone. “How much?” He licks his lips when he talks.
“I’m a motivated seller,” Dave says. Indeed, he’s half-ready to just hand over the Uzi and run. But he needs money to live. There’s a new life ahead of him—a life on the streets, of sleeping in garbage bins, of keeping an eye out for the cops, of pissing and shitting in alleyways and on street corners. He can’t wait to start, actually. “How much do you guys have?”
The tall slow guy opens his mouth again, like he’s inventing language. “But . . . this is an escalation. We got a gun, then what will happen if the Avenue Boys find out?”
“How many times a week do you think someone’s going to show up in town offering an Uzi for cheap?” the lead kid says. “They ain’t gonna get a gun like this. Tommy’s right. Let’s buy it. Turn out your pockets, dudes.” Together the kids have seventy bucks—the one who never said a word coughed up two twenty-dollar bills on his own. Dave hands the gun to the red-haired Tommy, tells them where the clip is, and the trade is made. Somewhere in his mind he giggles and thinks, A Tommy gun for Tommy! He takes off before being roped into an argument about where the gang is going to keep their gun, and how best to get the magazine out of the mailbox. That’s the thing about even numbers: lots of tie votes.
Dave thinks he’s one, but he’s really two, and I’m really many. There won’t be a tie vote with us anymore. Mr. Holbrook! I tell him. Get out of this city. Kearny is too small for a strange runaway with no connections to anyone in town, with no friends. I’m getting better, maybe thanks to the fact that Dave’s own mind is shutting down. All it can conceive of is a great red spot spreading over the guard’s belly, a tiny gurgling noise, the smell of metal and fire.
He heads over to a drugstore and buys a cheap hoodie, some Robitussin, and two small packages of Hostess Cupcakes. Calories and sugar is what he needed now. He tries out his Spanish on the cashier—En dónde está la parada de autobús?—and she answers at a fast clip Dave can’t understand. He shrugs and says, “Any English,” and she says, “You can get the cheap bus to the city one block down.” That’s what he wanted. The official NJ Transit buses are probably under surveillance. The semi-illicit minibuses that bring maids and manual workers to and from the city for a dollar or two were safer. Dave, with his filthy clothing and crumpled paper bag and chocolate on his lips, would stand out, but his fellow passengers were less likely to talk about it. That’s what Dave hopes anyway.
The bus comes quickly enough, and the driver collects Dave’s two dollars without looking up. Dave is sick to his stomach again. He wishes he had a radio, or at least that there would be a breaking news announcement on the station the bus driver is listening to. It would have to be about him, if there was one. Right?
Maybe, I tell him, playing the executive function. Just take it easy. Put your hood up.
The Meadowlands come into view, then Secaucus and Weehawken, which looks just like Jersey City except that Dave doesn’t recognize any of the buildings. There are cop cars at the Lincoln Tunnel, but aren’t there always, since 9/11? Dave tries to remember if there were any cameras in the hallways back at Hamilton. It hardly matters—there are roll calls and Delaney Cards, and two parents back at home ready to blabber about months of awkward behaviour and lone-wolfisms. There’s a plastic bag in the bedroom closet full of sticky empties from his cough syrup habit. He even wore a long coat to school. His computer has Limewire, and he’s downloaded not only songs, but porn from the Internet. It’s all on his hard drive.
Dave pukes into the paper bag on his lap, earning a glare from an older man two rows ahead of him. The bus slows as it curves around the long road to the Lincoln Tunnel and reaches the bottleneck at its mouth. A cop walks between lanes, but not purposefully. I tell Dave to look away but he can’t help but stare as the cop walks by. The cop stares back, but doesn’t raise an eyebrow or point or reach for his walkie-talkie. Dave wishes that the cop reached for his gun and put a bullet in his head. The big red bloom on his mind again, this time erupting out of his own skull, like cough syrup splattered against a bathroom wall.
Dave makes it to the Port Authority. The buses are expensive. Everything is expensive in New York. Four dollars for a cup of soup at a restaurant, three bucks for a slice of pizza. He thinks about choosing some random chock-full-of-snore town: Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, or Danbury, Connecticut, and just vanishing, but it’s thirty or forty bucks. He has only sixty to last him. The McDonald’s dollar menu and the twenty-four hour toilets will be better bets for him. He could last a month out here in the city, and that’s if he never makes another dime.
We have a plan. Downtown, the Barnes & Noble stores on 23rd Street and Union Square. That’s the day shift. Read books, listen to music, check the couches for loose change, the trash bins by the Starbucks for scraps. Wash up in the restrooms. Night shift, St. Mark’s Place. Where the crusty punks hang out. Make some friends. Do some begging. Maybe find a dreadlocked girl with a pet pit bull who likes her guys skinny and smelly and tasting like synthetic grapes. Make friends. Sleep on couches if possible, in doorways if not. It’s unanimous. We have chosen to stay and fight.
CHAPTER 23
What is it about the number twenty-three? Nothing, really. It’s just that most world events are directly tied in with the number somehow. That was in a book I read once—one Tigger had pushed into my hands in school and said I just had to read. The enigma of twenty-three is well-known enough that Hollywood even made a shitty movie about it a few years after Dave fired his Uzi and ran.
Four years on the street was hard for Dave. He lost a tooth the hard way. East Village street life, as it turns out, wasn’t full of clever punk rock girls who delight in sucking off unshowered boys from New Jersey. Dave was on the news quite a bit, for a while. His awkward school ID photo loomed large in the public consciousness for nearly two months. None of the journalists, none of the reporters, ever made any mention of Erin, though she did spring him from the hospital, didn’t she? Though the second Uzi was eventually found in Hamilton High School’s basement, and that should have been easy enough to trace back to a certain employee at Washington Place Diner and Resta
urant.
After a cold week on the streets, after nearly being arrested for sleeping at Barnes & Noble, after five days of literally not uttering a word to anyone, Dave tries the diner. Erin isn’t there. Uncle Bill isn’t there. Mr. Zevgolis is. He’d just rung up someone’s bill—twenty-three dollars—on the old analog cash register. Dave walks in, ignores the sign reading PLEASE WAIT TO BE SEATED and hops onto the stool right next to the register, in front of a dirty plate. Zevgolis eyes him. Dave takes a crescent-shaped bit of silver dollar pancake from the plate, takes a second to admire the jagged bite mark on its interior curve, and then puts it in his mouth. Killing someone changes you. We’re all different now, except for the Dave Holbrooks in cosmically parallel Middlesex County Juvenile Detention Centers—they’re the ones who never took their shot.
“No homeless,” Zevgolis says, and for a moment Dave doesn’t even realize that the man’s talking about him.
Dave doesn’t bother looking at his own reflection in the napkin holder, or in the mirror behind the soda machine. Instead he just says, “Yes homeless,” and scoops up some remnant syrup with two fingers, then sucks them clean. Zevgolis snatches the plate away and barks a command in Greek. A girl comes out. She’s young, plain, with dark hair and dead eyes. She takes the plate and hustles it to the back. She looks quite a bit like Erin, but not quite. A cousin. Maybe even a sister.
“Where’s Erin?” Dave asks.
“None of your business,” Zevgolis says. “I call the police.”
“Okay,” Dave says. “Call. You think they won’t want to talk to her when I start talking to them?”