Onion Street mp-8

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  I never told anybody this, but I think of my dad as the King of Shoulda Done and Mighta Been. As I walked home that night, mostly I beat myself up for being his prince and heir to his throne. That was my greatest fear, I think, that I would be just like him, that the unifying principle of my life would be regret.

  Standing in front of Sam’s old apartment, I wasn’t any more certain of what had happened that night or why it had happened. Thinking back on it, I wasn’t sure I believed the reasons Sam had given me for wanting us to be together. She’d kept subtly switching her reasons. First it was that our being together was inevitable. Then it was that we were both curious. Next it was she wanted to please me. Then it was that we were meant to be. Finally it was that we were drunk and horny. I think maybe I believed that last one most of all. Sometimes the lowest common denominator is also the most dependable. It seemed that she would have said or done almost anything to coax me into crossing that line. We’d never talked about it. The next time the three of us were together it was like old times. She knew I wouldn’t tell Bobby.

  I walked up the brick steps to the brick and concrete porch and rang the bell. A heavyset woman in a house dress answered the door. In her early fifties, she was overly made-up, and her hair was so black it was almost blue. It was a pity because she had a lovely, kind face beneath the too-black dye job and clown mask. I didn’t know her name, but I had seen her many of the times I’d been to Sam’s place. I thought I saw recognition in her eyes too. Then I saw the sadness.

  “You’re Samantha’s boyfriend, right?”

  No. “Yeah, right. That’s me.”

  “We never met, but I’m Mrs. Fusco. Call me Gloria. I used to see you and your buddy hangin’ around here with her all the time.” She held her hand out to me and I gave it a tender shake. “I’m so sorry about what happened … you know. I don’t believe a word of what they said about Sam. She just wasn’t that kinda girl.”

  “I know, Mrs. — Gloria. I still can’t get over it. I think that’s why I’m here.”

  “Come in. Come in …”

  “Bobby,” I said. “Sorry, I forgot my manners.”

  “That’s fine. I understand.”

  Her house was full of fussy, ornate furniture with bright red and green suede cushions covered in thick, suffocating layers of plastic. Still, the rooms were immaculate and as orderly as a museum. She gestured for me to sit on the couch. In the hot weather, I thought, bare skin would stick to the plastic slipcovers like glue. You’d have to get peeled off to stand up. She offered me coffee to drink and I said that would be fine. I noticed pictures of a boy about my age — her son? — wearing Marine dress blues. Some were of him in green fatigues.

  “That’s Rocco, my boy,” she said proudly when she noticed me studying the photos. Then her voice got brittle. “He’s in Vietnam. I hope he’s okay and that the damn war gets over soon.”

  “Me too, Gloria. I mean that.”

  “He volunteered.”

  “That was brave of him.”

  “It was stupid. I already lost his father. I don’t know what I’m gonna do if I lose him too.”

  “I’m sure he’ll be fine,” I lied.

  She handed me my coffee. “Thanks for sayin’ that. So what can I do for you?”

  I told her the truth. “I’m not sure. We only had a short time together. It’s funny, isn’t it, how you can be so in love with somebody and not really know them? It was like that with Sam and me. So I guess now that she’s gone, I’m trying to find out who she was.”

  Tears poured out of Gloria Fusco’s eyes, ruining her perfect mask. “Bobby, that’s so beautiful. What do you want to know?”

  First I tossed some easy questions to her about what kind of renter she was. Was she friendly? Did Gloria like her? Stuff like that. Then I got around to asking how it was that Samantha came to rent the apartment from her in the first place.

  “She didn’t,” Gloria said. “Her father rented it for her. Paid a month’s deposit and a year’s rent in cash.”

  “Her father? What was he like?”

  This was the first question that made Gloria squirm a little. Then when she answered, I got that her discomfort wasn’t about the question itself but about what she had to say. “Her dad wasn’t a very nice man. When I got to know Samantha, it was hard for me to believe such a hard, crude-talkin’ man could have been her dad. If I didn’t need the rent money so bad, I wouldn’t’ve rented to him, daughter or no daughter.”

  “Crude-talking?”

  “When he found out I was a widow …”

  “I understand. What did Sam’s dad look like?” I asked, as a throwaway question.

  Gloria frowned. “He looked as hard as he was. Short and nasty, with that pasty complexion and the map of Ireland on his face. He had these cold, gray eyes and a crooked mouth. The first thing I thought when I met Sam was that she must look and be like her mom. She sure was nothing like her father.”

  My head was swimming again. I’d never met Sam’s father, but I’d seen more than twenty photographs of him, and the man Gloria Fusco just described wasn’t Sam’s dad. Sam’s dad was tall and kind of regal looking. He was a state trooper, so I was sure he could be belligerent when he had to be, but I couldn’t ever see him being described as short and nasty. And then there was the map of Ireland thing. I looked more Irish than Sam’s dad, and I didn’t look very Irish. What about the fact that Samantha was buried in the New Lutheran Cemetery in Koblenz, Pennsylvania? There were probably more Jews in Ireland than Lutherans. It didn’t add up.

  “When Sam died,” I said, “I didn’t really have anything of hers to hold onto. I mean, I have some snapshots and stuff, but no clothes, nothing that smells like her perfume.” That got Gloria’s waterworks going again. “Do you have any — ”

  “I’m so sorry, Bobby, but the cops and FBI just came and took everything from her apartment. The furniture and everything.”

  “That’s okay. I under — ”

  Gloria cut me off. “Oh, my God! Oh, my God. I completely forgot something in all the excitement. Come on with me.”

  I followed Gloria up the stairs to the second floor and into a small, empty bedroom. She pointed at a short rope hanging down from the ceiling. “Can you grab that, Bobby?”

  When I did, I was amazed at the little chute and narrow ladder that swung down. What did I know about attics? I lived in an apartment building my whole life. If we had one of these in our apartment, it would have led into the Spiegelmans’s apartment above us. For a heavy woman, Gloria managed to get up into the attic pretty easily.

  “Watch your head,” she warned as I came up behind her.

  You had to love this woman. Even the attic was neat, if a little dusty.

  “Now where is it?” she asked herself, as she scanned the nooks and crannies. “There it is. See that suitcase, Bobby?” Gloria said, pointing to a pretty large, old-fashioned, leather-handled case under a stack of cardboard boxes. “That’s Sam’s. The first week she moved in, she asked me to keep it for her. I totally forgot about it until just now.”

  I fought the urge to fling the boxes off the suitcase and forced myself to carefully move the boxes above it. The suitcase was pretty beat-up, tattered, and frayed. I moved it aside, and put the boxes back in place. Gloria and I stared at it, both of us a little queasy, I think.

  “Take it,” she said. “Take it. I don’t wanna know what’s in it. I don’t think I could deal with it. I know it’s strange, but with Rocco in so much danger and everything, I don’t wanna be reminded of the dead.”

  “I understand.”

  When I went to pat Gloria’s shoulder, she hugged me with intense conviction. She was really hugging her son, but that was okay with me. We didn’t say goodbye. She handed me the case as I made my way down the attic ladder. When I was sure she was down safely, I took the last vestiges of Samantha Hope and let myself out.

  I resisted the urge to open up the suitcase only partially due to self-control. The other part
was that the suitcase might be locked, and I didn’t want to stand out on the street trying to pry it open. I put it in Aaron’s trunk and drove home. I got lucky for once and found a parking spot right out front of our building. I put the gift-wrapped bottle of Château Latour on the front seat for Aaron to find in the morning when he got into the car. That was a pretty expensive bottle of red grape juice, but I had kind of abused the privilege with his car. It was still a great shock to me that my brother had become so fascinated by wine. I suppose it appealed to his obsessive side. Although he wasn’t adventurous by nature, he did love studying and finding the subtleties in things. He confessed to me once that his dream was to get out of sales and to buy a wine shop. That was cool. The part that wasn’t cool was the part where I was supposed to be his partner. Yeah, sure.

  I was beat; all the mileage I’d covered over the last two days was catching up to me in a single rush. I felt like once I got upstairs, I would fall into bed and sleep for a week. The thing is, I never made it upstairs. I didn’t make it five more feet.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  I locked the Tempest’s door and took a weary step or two when I saw a car speeding right for me. I squeezed my eyes shut in anticipation of an impact that never happened. Instead, the car swerved past me, skidding, shrieking, screeching to a tire-smoking halt two hundred feet ahead. I was so preoccupied by not being dead that I failed to notice the man coming up behind me. Something hard and round jabbed me in the ribs.

  “Don’t turn around, you honky mothafucka. Just get in the car.”

  The car’s rear door was flung open and a strong hand hurried me along to it. I wanted to point out that getting pushed was just insult to injury, that I was already sufficiently motivated by the gun in my ribs. Before I got a chance to speak, I was shoved into the back seat of the waiting car, which took off even before the door shut. When I righted myself, I saw that I had plenty of company in the car with me. Besides Strong Hand on my right, there was another man next to me on my left. I assumed he was a man. He was built like one, but I couldn’t be sure because he was wearing an LBJ Halloween mask that covered his entire head and neck. The driver had on a Hubert Humphrey mask. Strong Hand was wearing a George Wallace mask — for purposes of irony, I suppose. The person next to Hubert Humphrey in the front passenger seat had on a Robert Kennedy mask. I was pretty sure the front seat passenger was female, her slight build giving her away. All of them were dressed in army surplus jackets and black turtlenecks below their rubber masks.

  I should have been afraid, but I just wasn’t. In spite of the gun in my side, I couldn’t take this bunch seriously. The tough guys I knew meant business. They didn’t worry about irony and political statements. Even when I tried to muster up some fear, the best I could manage was bemusement. I felt more confused than anything else and it wasn’t profound confusion at that. Mostly, I think my lack of fear had to do with the fact that I recognized the girl in the front seat, her Kennedy mask notwithstanding.

  “What does a guy have to do to get a mask around here?” I asked. “I’m feeling left out.”

  Hubert Humphrey laughed, but George Wallace was not amused. He shoved the barrel into my ribs and said, “Mothafucka, I warned you to shut up.”

  “What, I’m not a honky mothafucka anymore? And to be accurate, you warned me not to turn around. You didn’t warn me to shut up.”

  Wallace pressed the barrel so hard into my ribs I thought it might go through my coat. “I’m warnin’ you now. Shut up.”

  I turned to him and said, “Listen, man, I don’t think sticking the barrel of your gun through my ribs is what Stokely Carmichael meant by Black Power.”

  Hubert Humphrey laughed again. Wallace was even less amused than before, but he didn’t take it out on me.

  “Y’all keep on laughin’, just keep on laughin’ and we’ll see how you laughin’ with my foot in your damn mouth when I’m kickin’ your teeth down your throat.”

  Robert Kennedy whipped around, angrily shaking her head at Wallace. I guess abducting someone off the street at gunpoint was considered fair play, but insulting your comrade was verboten. I caught a good glimpse of the girl’s eyes through her mask before she turned back around. After that, I was sure I knew who she was.

  “So, Susan, what did you get on your final paper in Romantic Poetry?” I asked as if we were old friends who just happened into each other on the subway. “It’s Susan Kasten, right? I never forget a face.”

  Nobody was laughing now.

  LBJ blurted out, “Holy fucking shit!”

  “Shut up!” yelled Hubert Humphrey.

  “Man, ain’t nobody told you dumb crackers vaudeville is dead?”

  Kennedy slapped her hand on the dashboard. That got everybody’s attention and it shut them all up. I was a little less intimidated by her.

  “By the way, Susan, how’s Grandpa Hyman doing now that you blew his fix-it shop all to hell?”

  With that, she finally spoke, but not to me. “Pull over.”

  “But the Com — ” Humphrey stopped himself mid-word. “But didn’t they say to bring him straight to — ”

  “Now! Pull over right now,” she screamed at the driver. When he didn’t respond quickly enough to suit her, she yanked the steering wheel hard to the right.

  We slammed into the curb, the driver’s late braking doing little to slow the car down. When we came to rest, George Wallace said, “I told y’all we shoulda jus’ iced this mothafucka and been done with it.”

  Suddenly, my lack of fear wasn’t quite so lacking.

  “No!” Kennedy shouted. “We have to know what he knows. We’re not the pigs. We’re not fascists. We don’t just waste people on a whim or because they piss us off.”

  “I guess Stalin, Mao, and Castro didn’t get that memo, huh?”

  “Reactionary stooge,” scoffed LBJ.

  “I was always partial to Curly myself,” I joked.

  Wallace backhanded me across the side of my head. Some people have no sense of humor. “C’mon. Now let’s just ice his white ass.”

  “We’re not cowboys. We must act as we’ve been instructed.”

  “By the Committee, you mean?” I said.

  Hubert didn’t like that. “He knows about the Committee.”

  Susan was unconvinced. “No, he doesn’t. He’s fishing, throwing out a word he must’ve overheard to see our reaction. Well, now he’s got his reaction. But that’s not important. We have to find out what he really knows and how he knows it.”

  George Wallace didn’t give up easily. “I bet he killed Abdul. That’s all I need to know.”

  “I don’t even know who you’re talking about,” I lied. “Do I look like someone who knows people named Abdul?” Then I tried playing one of the few cards I had left to play. “Even if you find out what I know, you’ll have no way of knowing who else knows it.”

  Susan laughed a jagged, joyless little laugh like a shard of glass. “Are you really so stupid, Moe, to suppose we won’t do what we have to do to find that out as well?” When I didn’t answer right away, she asked, “What, no snappy comeback?” She turned to Humphrey. “Come on, drive. We’re late.”

  It now occurred to me that even if they weren’t going to kill me, they were probably willing to get as close as they had to. I was in no mood to find out just how close. As Hubert turned the wheel to pull back into traffic, I planted my elbow smack into George Wallace’s nose. It broke with a sickening, dull snap. He dropped the gun to the car floor and kicked it under the front seat as he writhed in pain. Blood gushed through the nostrils of the rubber mask. I hit him with my elbow again, this time in the throat. He slumped against the door, gasping for air. I twisted in my seat, pushed my back up against Wallace for leverage, and kicked LBJ with the flat of my sneaker square on the side of his head. The force of the kick sent his head into the window with a bang. I reached over Wallace, yanked the handle, and tumbled out the door.

  I hit the pavement pretty hard and although the car wasn�
�t moving very fast, I rolled into the curb with a lung-emptying thump. I forced myself to get up, to run. My lungs didn’t seem to want to work, but self-preservation is a great motivator. I refused to look behind me as I ran. No use wasting time or energy or getting any more frightened than I already was. I recognized where we were, and knew I was not in the best of places if I was looking for someone to help me. Even in broad daylight, the area around Avenue Z and Shell Road was a pretty deserted part of Gravesend. Ahead of me, to my left, under the el and across the old trolley tracks, were the South Highway Little League baseball diamonds, and just beyond their outfield fences, the massive Coney Island rail yards. Further to my left was an area I thought of as Desolation Row: the murky, polluted waters of Coney Island Creek, the litter-strewn underbelly of the Belt Parkway, and the Brooklyn Union Gas Company. I doubted that Susan and her band of unmerry men knew their way around here half as well as I did. There was the additional benefit that most of it was inaccessible to cars.

  If I had turned right and made it to Avenue X, I would have been safe. There would be plenty of traffic and people on the street even at that hour of the night. The problem was that there were four blocks separating me from the safety of Avenue X, four blocks where I would be totally out in the open, four blocks that were completely accessible to cars. It would have been easy for them to drive up to me and snatch me again. Somehow I sensed that if they got me a second time, I would have paid a big price for escaping. People with broken noses and bruised egos tend to lose their senses of humor. Still, the choice I made to head for Desolation Row was not without risks of its own. Between the buzzing of cars on the Belt Parkway and the din of subways passing on the el, it would be nearly impossible to hear someone coming up on me. Once caught, I could scream my head off and not a soul would hear me. And while that area wasn’t quite the Fountain Avenue dump, many a body had been left there to rot and gone undetected for weeks. It was too late to change my mind now. I was committed.