Derailed

by Siegel, James

  The next day, I met Winston one block north of the number seven subway tracks in the mostly empty parking lot of a Dunkin’ Donuts in Astoria, Queens.

  Winston’s idea. Aren't you supposed to meet in out-of-the-way places? he’d said after asking me if I knew the only pitcher with five Cy Young Awards.

  Roger Clemens, I'd said.

  Winston was waiting for me in a white Mazda with non-matching hubcaps and a busted taillight. The windshield was covered with spiderweb cracks.

  I drove up in my silver Mercedes sedan and felt embarrassed about it. I parked at the far end of the lot, hoping Winston wouldn’t see me. But he did.

  “Over here,” he yelled.

  When I made it to the car, Winston leaned over and opened the passenger door.

  “Hop in, bud.”

  Bud hopped in.

  “Know my favorite song?” Winston asked.

  “No.”

  “ ‘Money.’ By Pink Floyd. Know my favorite artist?”

  I shook my head.

  “Eddie Money.”

  I said: “Yes, he’s good.”

  “My favorite movie? The Color of Money. Favorite baseball player of all time — Norm Cash. Second favorite — Brad Penny.”

  “Yes, Winston,” I said, “I have your money.”

  “Hey, who was asking for money? ” Winston said. “I was just making conversation.”

  A number seven train rumbled over the el, showering sparks down onto the street.

  “But now that you mention it,” Winston continued, “where is it?”

  I reached into my pocket. It's burning a hole in my pocket — isn’t that the expression? A messenger from Headquarters Productions had dropped off the manila envelope yesterday.

  “Five thousand,” I said. “The other half after.”

  “You see that in a movie?” Winston asked, still smiling.

  “What?”

  “The ‘other half after’ stuff? You see that in a movie or something?”

  “Look, I just thought — ”

  “What’s the deal, bud? I believe, when I said I’d do this, from the goodness of my heart, by the way—because you’re a pal and you’re in trouble—you said ten thousand.”

  “I know what we — ”

  “A deal’s a deal, right?”

  “I understand.”

  “What were the terms?”

  “I think one-half — ”

  “Tell me what the terms were, Charles.”

  “Ten thousand,” I said.

  “Ten thousand. Right. Ten thousand for what?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What are you giving me ten thousand for? Because you like me? ’Cause you want to send me back to college?”

  “Look, Winston . . .” I suddenly wanted to be somewhere else.

  “Look,Charles. I think maybe there’s some kind of confusion. I want to review the terms with you. You ask someone to do something like this for you, you have to know what the terms are.”

  “I know the terms.”

  “You do? Then state them for me so there’s no confusion. What are you giving me ten thousand for?”

  “I’m giving you ten thousand to. . . make Vasquez go away.”

  Winston said: “Yeah, right—that’s what I thought the terms were. Ten thousand to make Vasquez go away.” He pulled something out of his pocket. “Here’s my argument to make him go away,” he said. “What do you think? Think he’ll listen to it?”

  “A gun.” I felt myself recoil; I edged back against the window.

  “Hey — you’re good,” Winston said. “You sure you haven’t done this before?”

  “Look, Winston, I don’t want . . .”

  “What? You don’t want to look at it? Neither will he. What did you think I was going to do, Charles — ask him nicely?”

  “I just want . . . you know . . . if at all possible . . .”

  “Yeah, well, just in case it’s not at all possible.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Okay.” I had been thinking in euphemisms all this time — making Vasquez go away. Doing something about him. Taking care of him. But this was the way a Vasquez was taken care of, Winston was saying. Sometimes it was this way.

  “Okay what?” Winston said.

  “Huh?”

  “ ‘Okay, here’s your ten thousand, Winston’?”

  “Yes,” I said, giving up.

  “Great,” he said. “For a second there I thought you were only giving me half.”

  I took the envelope out of my pocket and handed it over.

  “You’re too easy, Charles,” Winston said. “I would’ve settled for three-quarters.”

  Then, after he’d counted it all, he said: “Where?”

  TWENTY-THREE

  Under the West Side Highway.

  One week into the new year.

  I was sitting next to Winston in a rented metallic blue Sable with leather seats. Winston had his eyes closed.

  I could see a lone tugboat chugging its way up a Hudson River so black, it was as if it weren’t there. Just an empty black space where the river ought to be. It was cold and sleeting; thin slivers of glass were exploding onto my face through the open window.

  I was shivering.

  I was trying not to think about something. I was trying to stay calm.

  There was a hooker standing on the corner across the street. She’d been standing there ever since I entered the car.

  I was looking at her and wondering where her customers were.

  A fair question, since it was only a little past ten, and she was wearing a sheer red negligee and shiny black boots. She’d been dropped off by a Jeep with New Jersey license plates and was waiting for some other car with New Jersey license plates to come along. But it had been ten minutes and she was still stuck out there in the sleet. Doing nothing much but looking across the street at the blue Sable, which didn’t seem to be moving, either.

  She looked as if she were freezing. She had a small fake fur wrap around her shoulders, but other than that nothing, lots of pasty white flesh out there where her customers could see it and put a price tag on it.

  But where were her customers?

  The insurance salesman from Teaneck, the broker from Piscataway, the truck driver on his way to the Lincoln Tunnel?

  I was under the West Side Highway because that’s where Vasquez had told me to meet him.

  Do you have the money? he'd asked me.

  Yes, I did.

  You’ll meet me ten o’clock at Thirty-seventh and the river.

  Yes, I would.

  You’ll tell nobody — understand?

  Yes, I did. (Well, maybe just one other person.)

  You’ll show up alone.

  Yes, I would. (Well, maybe not exactly alone.)

  How long had the hooker been standing there without a customer? I thought again. How long, exactly?

  Then she began to walk over to me.

  In the middle of the street now, closer to me than away from me, so I knew that she wouldn’t be turning back. Her boot heels echoing as she made a beeline for the blue Sable that had been sitting there all this time without moving an inch.

  “Want a date?” she asked me when she reached my window. I could see actual goose bumps on her breasts and legs, because her breasts were only half-hidden by the red negligee and her legs were naked save for those calf-length boots.

  No, I didn’t want a date. I wanted her to leave.

  “No.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said. Her face was young but old, so it was practically impossible to tell her age. Anywhere from twenty to thirty-five. “You got a cigarette?”

  “No.”

  But there was a pack of cigarettes sitting on the seat between Winston and me — Winston’s cigarettes. She could clearly see them there, one or two cigarettes even peeking out of the torn wrapper.

  “So what are those? ” she asked me.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. I reached for the pack, but when I picked i
t up I got a piece of Winston’s brain matter on my hand — the pack was smeared with it. I pulled one cigarette out anyway and handed it to her through the window.

  “Thanks,” she said, but she didn’t sound as though she meant it.

  Then she asked me for a light.

  “I don’t have one.”

  “What about him?” She meant Winston, who still had his eyes closed.

  “No,” I said.

  “Maybehe wants a date?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “What’s wrong with him? He drunk?”

  “Yes, he’s drunk. Look, I gave you a cigarette, so . . .”

  “What good’s a cigarette without a light? What am I supposed to do — eat it?”

  “We don’t have a light, okay?”

  I saw the reflection first — a flickering puddle of red in the middle of the street and then the sound of tires crunching glass.

  A police cruiser.

  “Get out of here,” I told her.

  “What?”

  “Look, I just want to be left — ”

  “Go fuck yourself,” she said. “You don’t go telling me to get outta nowhere. Understand?”

  “Yes, okay . . . I just don’t want a date, okay?” trying to be nice now, trying to be polite about this so that maybe she’d go away. Because Winston still had his eyes closed, and the police cruiser was almost up to our car. And the hooker — she wasn’t leaving, now that I’d made her good and mad at me.

  “I’ll stay where I damn please,” she said.

  And the cruiser rolled right up to the car; and the side window rolled down.

  I expected the policeman to yell at me. Tell me to get out of the car, maybe — me and Winston. I expected the policeman to get out of the cruiser and shine a flashlight into the front seat, where he’d notice that Winston had his eyes closed and, if he looked closer, something else. That half of Winston’s head was gone.

  “Hey,” the policeman said.

  “Hey yourself,” the hooker answered. Like old friends.

  “How you doin’, Candy?”

  “How d’ya think,” she said.

  “Great night to work, huh?”

  “You got that right.” Just making conversation, one pal to another.

  I was sitting there listening to them. But I wasn’t actually hearing them.

  I was remembering.

  When I’d arrived at the pier, I saw Winston sitting in the rented blue Sable, just as he was supposed to be. I watched him sitting there for ten minutes, then fifteen, before I noticed that a window was open. That Winston wasn’t moving a muscle—hadn’t moved his head in all that time. Hadn’t lit a cigarette, hadn’t coughed, or yawned, or scratched his nose. Stock still, still as a still-life: Man in Blue Car. Something was wrong. That open window, for instance — the sleet blowing straight in. Why was that?

  I crossed the street finally to take a quick look, quick because I was expecting Vasquez any minute, and I was supposed to have come alone. Winston’s eyes were closed as if he were sleeping. Except he didn’t appear to be actually breathing. And the window wasn't open; it was broken.

  I got into the car and tapped Winston on the shoulder, and Winston ignored me. And then I leaned across the front seat to get a better look at Winston’s hat, which was when I realized that it wasn’t a hat. It was pulp. Half of Winston’s head was gone. I threw up — my vomit mixing in with the various pieces of Winston’s head. And I was about to run out of the car screaming when I saw the hooker being dropped off by that Jeep. So I stayed put.

  Did you see anyone get in or out of the car? they'd ask her.

  And she’d say no.

  Unless she decided to walk across the street and ask for a cigarette.

  The Sable was starting to smell. Even with the broken window letting in steady gusts of frigid air.

  “You’re keeping safe, right, Candy?” the policeman was saying.

  “You know me,” she said.

  No one had bothered to say anything to me yet.

  I was tempted to turn the ignition and take off. There were two problems with that, of course. One was that Winston was sitting behind the wheel. And the other was that the policemen, who so far were still ignoring me, would more or less have to notice me if I suddenly gunned the engine and took off.

  But now, finally, one of them did look inside the car.

  “You,” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “You conducting a transaction with Candy here?”

  “No. I just gave her a cigarette.”

  “Something wrong with her?”

  “What? No . . . she’s fine.”

  “That’s right, Candy’s a honey.”

  “I just was . . . having a smoke.”

  “Are you married?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your old lady know you go around looking for hookers?”

  “I told you. I was just — ”

  “What about your buddy here? He married, too?”

  “No. No . . . he’s single.” He's dead.

  “Both of you out looking for hookers and you aren’t doing any business with Candy? Why’s that?”

  “Officer, I’m sorry if you misunder — ”

  “What are you apologizing to me for? Tell her you’re sorry. Freezing her ass out here and you two guys don’t give her the time of day. What’s with your friend over there?”

  “He’s . . .”Dead, Officer.

  “Maybe you should show Candy some appreciation.”

  “Sure.”

  “Well?”

  “Oh . . .” I fumbled for my wallet. My hand was shaking so hard, it was difficult to actually get it into my back pocket. I finally managed to grab an indeterminate bunch of bills and held them out to her.

  “Thanks,” Candy said listlessly, taking them and stuffing them into the top of her negligee.

  “What about him?” the policeman asked. “What’s your name?” he asked Winston.

  Winston didn’t answer him.

  “Isaid, What’s your name?”

  Winston still didn’t answer him.

  I was picturing myself in the back of the police car, being driven downtown — wasn’t that the expression? I was picturing myself being booked and fingerprinted and given one call. I didn’t even know a lawyer, I thought. I was picturing facing Deanna and Anna through a scratched plastic partition and wondering where on earth to begin.

  “Okay. Last time,” the policeman said. “What’s your name? ”

  And then.

  A sudden crackle, and a staticky voice broke through the excruciating silence like a clap of thunder on an oppressively humid afternoon.

  “. . . we have a . . . uh . . . ten-four . . . corner of Forty-eighth and Fifth . . .”

  And suddenly the policeman was no longer asking Winston what his name was. He was saying something to Candy instead—“Catch you later,” it sounded like. And the police car left—just like that, vroooom, gone. Mere seconds from discovering a man with half a head and another man sitting calmly next to him in a front seat covered with vomit and brain matter, and it was suddenly, inexplicably, over.

  And finally, at last, I could let it out.

  I could cry for Winston.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  It occurred to me almost by accident. I was driving to nowhere in particular. I was following the West Side Highway and trying to keep from shaking.

  Winston was dead.

  Winston was dead, and I’d killed him.

  Hadn’t I cornered him in the bar that night and more or less forced him into doing this?

  I tried to work it out — what happened, exactly? Vasquez had said come alone, but maybe Vasquez hadn’t trusted me to come alone, so he’d come early to sniff around. Is that what happened? There was Winston in a blue Sable just sitting there, and maybe Vasquez got suspicious and confronted him, and maybe Winston got belligerent — remembering this was a man who’d been in prison, who was used to doing things to people bef
ore they did it to him. Only not this time. And Winston had ended up with half a head.

  That made sense, didn’t it? It was hard to tell if it really made sense, because I was scared senseless.

  I was almost suffocating from the stench inside the car now. And it was then that I remembered another awful smell sniffed from the front seat of a moving automobile. The mind worked like that sometimes, playing a kind of charades with you — stench and car and what do you get?

  Memories of Sunday afternoons spent motoring down to Aunt Kate’s house in southern New Jersey. To get there, we had to take the Belt Parkway down to the Verrazano Bridge, then go straight through the heart of Staten Island. Passing not much of anything along the way, just a supersize mall here and there with a megaplex cinema showing seventeen different movies all playing at once. Then, smack in the middle of nowhere, it would hit with terrifying swiftness. A vomitous odor would suddenly assault us through the cracked-open windows, through the air-conditioning vents and sunroof. The odor of garbage, the stench of landfill. Huge mounds of dun-colored earth on either side of the highway circled by clouds of screaming gulls. Fishkill.

  I’d close the windows, Deanna holding her nose right next to me and Anna screeching in the backseat. I’d turn off the air-conditioning and make sure the sunroof was locked tight, but the odor would still come in. It was like sticking your head in a garbage pail, and no matter how fast I drove — and I’d hit the accelerator for all it was worth — I couldn’t drive fast enough. I couldn’t outrun the smell, not until I’d traveled a good fifteen minutes or so and the landscape turned sweetly suburban.

  An hour later, drink in hand on Aunt Kate’s backyard deck, I could still sniff it on my clothes.

  That’s where I headed.

  I took Canal down to the Manhattan Bridge, then up the Belt to the Verrazano. Traffic was light this time of night—a good thing, considering Winston was decomposing right next to me. Have you got half a brain? I used to complain to Anna when I lost my temper. And Winston did have half a brain, the other half spread in pieces around the car.

  I was thinking ahead to the tollbooth. If it would be a problem paying—if the toll collector would be able to see inside the car. If he or she would be able to smell the car. Trying to take this thing one obstacle at a time — like Edwin Moses, whom I’d once heard on ESPN explaining his method in the hurdles as just that: one hurdle at a time and never look at the finish line.