Derailed

by Siegel, James

  The finish line for me was Winston safely disposed of and me back in bed. And Vasquez paid off in full — oh yes, a hundred thousand was seeming kind of cheap right at the moment — all of Anna’s Fund, maybe, but still kind of cheap, things being what they were.

  The toll collector was humming vintage James Brown—“I Feel Good.” Not if she sniffed the car, she wouldn’t be. Not if she took a peek at my traveling companion and noticed the brain schematic sitting on his shoulders. I’d pulled out the money in advance and had it out there waiting for her. She’d had a kind of cool rhythm going with the cars in front of me—arm out, arm in, money in, change out, like one of those funky dances from the sixties, the swim or the monkey . But when I rolled up to her window with cash in hand, she told me to wait a minute. She started to count bills inside the booth and left my money sitting right where it was — in my sweaty palm.

  It was maddening. I began to worry about the other toll collector now, the one to my right and therefore closer to the dead body. I wondered if they carried guns — toll collectors? It didn’t really matter, since I knew they carried radios. A simple message to the police station up ahead and I was dead meat.

  Finally, after another half a song — Little Stevie Wonder circa 1965 — she reached out and took the money from me.

  And I breathed again — shallow breaths, of course, head turned toward the window because the stench was enveloping me like steam. Winston was the second dead person I’d ever seen. I’d attended an open-coffin funeral when I was fourteen — a friend of the family who’d succumbed to cancer — and I’d more or less kept my eyes on my shoes, peeking just once at a face that seemed oddly happy. Not so with Winston, his mouth half-open as if caught in midscream, his eyes squeezed shut. He’d gone complaining about it.

  I killed Winston, I thought again.

  Just as if I’d pulled the trigger myself. Adultery, fraud, and now murder? It didn’t seem so long ago that I’d been one of the nameless good guys. It was a little hard to reconcile that Charles with this one — this one driving a dead man through Staten Island on the way to the dump. It was a little difficult to digest. Yet if I could only make it to the dumping grounds without being apprehended by the police; if I could dispose of Winston’s body and the bloody car; if I could make Vasquez go away with one hundred thousand dollars . . .

  One hurdle at a time.

  First I had to find a way into the landfill. It had to be close; the stench in the car had been joined by another one that was even worse.

  I reached the exit for the dump. At least I thought it was, because the next exit said Goethals Bridge. I exited onto a deserted two-lane road with no street lamps. Winston slumped against the window as I turned right.

  I followed the road for five minutes or so, not a single other car in either direction. I imagined the only traffic that found its way here was either coming or going to the landfill, and at this time of night no one was doing either of those things. Except for me.

  I squinted into the blackness, looking for a gate that might let me in, slowing to a crawl so I wouldn’t ride past and miss it.

  There.

  Just up ahead, a gate all right — a barbed-wire fence ending in two swinging doors and a sentry box. A gate in — which might have made me weep for joy, or shout in exultation, or at least sigh in relief, if it wasn’t for the fact that it was locked solid.

  Well, what had I expected? This was city property, wasn’t it, not a public dumping ground for anyone with a dead body to get rid of.

  I got out of the stinking car only to find that it smelled worse outside the car than in it. It was as if the air itself were garbage, as if all the putrid smells of New York City were dumped here, too, along with all that solid stuff. Landfill and airfill both, and the seagulls feeding on all of it and crying out for more. Rats with wings — wasn’t that what they called them? And now I understood why.

  An entire flock of them had descended by my feet — lifting their wings and cawing at me as if I were after their food. As if I were their food. Sharp yellow beaks all pointed at me, and I wondered if they could smell Winston’s blood on me, if, like vultures, they could sniff out the dead and dying.

  I felt hemmed in, surrounded by encroaching seagulls and stench, and I yelled and flapped my arms, hoping to scare them away. But the only one scared seemed to be me; the gulls hardly moved, one or two of them beating their wings and lifting an inch or two off the ground. I retreated to the car, where I sat in the front seat and stared at the locked gate.

  I reversed the car and began to meander up Western Avenue again, tracking the fence and looking for anything that might constitute a way in.

  “Come on, surprise me,” I said out loud. Life had thrown me a few nasty ones lately — thinking that maybe I was due some good ones. Even one good one, right now, here in the asshole of Staten Island, where all the waste exited and lay rotting.

  And then my headlights caught a piece of torn fence as the road curved right. Just big enough for one man to get through — even one man dragging another.

  He must have a mother somewhere, I suddenly thought. I pictured her as a typical suburban mom. I didn’t know where he’d grown up, so maybe she wasn’t a suburban mom at all. But that’s the way I imagined her. Divorced, maybe, disillusioned by now, but still proud of her grade-school son with the 3.7 GPA. That pride tested through the years, of course, as Winston got into drugs, then into dealing drugs, and then, God help her, into prison for dealing drugs. But wasn’t he putting his life back together again? Wasn’t he the owner of a legitimate job these days — okay, just delivering mail for now, but you couldn’t keep a good man down for long, could you? Not with his brains. Before you knew it, he’d be running that company, sure he would. And such a good-hearted boy, too, and likable — everyone but everyone liked Winston — and he never forgot her birthday card, not once. She still had that lopsided clay ashtray he’d made her in second grade, didn’t she — sitting up somewhere on the mantelplace. Winston’s mom, who wouldn’t be getting a birthday card from him this year or any other year from now on.

  I wished I’d asked Winston more about his life. Anything about his life. If he did have a mom waiting for his Christmas cards every year, or a girlfriend sitting up tonight and wondering just where Winston was exactly, or a brother or sister or favorite uncle. But all I’d asked him about was baseball and prison, that’s it, and then I’d asked him to do something that had gotten him killed.

  I stopped the car right by the section of torn fence, then sat there for a while to make sure I was really alone. Yes, as far as I could tell, I was very much alone, alone at the dump, alone in the universe. “Deanna,” I whispered, my partner in life, but only the one she knew about — Charles the nine-to-five adman, as opposed to Charles the adulterer and accessory to murder.

  I got out of the car, I walked around to the other side, I opened the door and watched helplessly as Winston fell over onto the ground. I would try to think of it as the body — the thing that’s left behind when the soul, what made Winston Winston, had already departed. It was easier that way.

  I lifted the body by its arms and began dragging, and I immediately realized that the term dead weight was not a misnomer. Dead weight was the immovable object, panic the irresistible force, but who said the irresistible force wins out? I could barely move the body; an inch or three at a time. It felt as though it were pulling back—tugging at my shoulder sockets, at my elbow joints and aching wrists. At this rate, I’d have the body through the fence by daybreak, just in time for a fleet of sanitation workers to point me out at the police lineup. That’s him, they’d say — the man pulling the deceased into the garbage dump.

  But slowly, torturously, I made progress, working out a kind of routine: one huge pull, then a dead stop to catch my breath, shake my hands, and rev up for another. In this fashion, I got the body all the way to the torn section of fence without suffering a single heart attack. And still hours from sun break, too—twelve-th
irty, according to my luminescent-dial Movado, a forty-second-year birthday gift from Deanna, who was probably starting to wonder where I was. She worried, and she did it better and with greater dedication than anyone I knew.

  I fished my cellular phone out of my coat pocket, flipped it open with a now throbbing wrist, and pressed 2 — my home number. Number 1 in automatic dialing was Dr. Baron’s office.

  “Hello?” Deanna, sounding, yes . . . upset.

  “Hi, honey. I didn’t want you to worry — it’s taking longer than I thought.”

  “Still at the office?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why are you calling on your cellular?”

  Yes, why was I?

  “I don’t know. I walked down the hall for coffee and suddenly realized how late it was.”

  “Oh, okay. How much longer do you have?”

  Good question. “An hour or so, maybe . . . we have to show these stupid aspirin boards in the morning.” I was kind of surprised how adept I’d become at telling lies, surprised too that I was having this perfectly normal domestic chat — I’m working late, dear — while standing over a man with half a head.

  “Well, don’t work too hard,” Deanna said.

  “Yes, I won’t.” Then: “I love you, Deanna,” saying her name this time, which on the scale of I love yous ranked somewhere near the top, uttered as something meant as opposed to just another way to end a conversation. Love you — love you, simply a more intimate version of good-bye, but not when you put a name there. Not then. . . .

  “I love you, too,” Deanna said, and I knew she meant it, no name necessary.

  I put the phone back in my pocket, put one foot through the open hole, reached down, and began to drag Winston through.

  The stench was worse over here — hard to imagine, but it was. Outside the fence I was smelling it, but inside the fence I was eating it, ingesting it smell by smell and beginning to turn sick to my stomach.

  I pulled the body farther into the dump, closer to the edge of the enormous mound of ground-up garbage. Now that I was this close to it, it looked like one of those temples to the sun I’d seen in Mexico City on a long-ago trip with Deanna. PreAnna, and we’d spent the mornings sight-seeing and the afternoons soaking our livers in tequila. Lots of lovemaking, followed by long drunken naps.

  Now what?

  You could think in the general all you wanted, but sooner or later the specific starts snapping at you for answers. I’d gotten the body to the dump, I’d dragged it through a barbed-wire fence, I’d brought it to the very foot of the temple of the garbage god.

  I looked down at my hands, the very hands that hugged Deanna, that gave insulin shots to Anna, that once upon a time had explored every inch of Lucinda, now being asked to moonlight on a very different kind of job. To shovel a grave.

  I dug in, scooping out handfuls of ground-up waste, sharp pieces of tin and bone, glutinous pieces of gristle and fat, man-made fibers of cardboard and Sheetrock.

  If I’d been trying to remain dispassionate before, I took it up like religion now. As if my soul depended on it, my very life, this objectification of tonight’s events. Merely smells, merely hands, merely a body. Focusing solely on the act of digging — so much material removed at such and such a rate, leaving an ever widening hole.

  By now, I had garbage all over me, up to my elbows in garbage—dangerously close to becoming garbage.

  I heard something from far off, the sound of a thunderstorm that might or might not be coming this way — but maybe it wasn’t a thunderstorm after all. The sound was a little too thin for thunder — and as far as I could tell, it was a more or less cloudless night. I heard it again — ears wide open this time — and finally recognized it for what it was. And in recognizing it, I pictured it, too: black pointy ears, snub tail, and sharp white teeth practically dripping with saliva.

  And it was getting closer. The junkyard dog of my nightmares.

  I dug quicker, scooping out the worst kind of shit with broken-nailed fingers like a dog digging for bones. And every passing minute I could hear the real dog getting louder — distinct barks and growls drifting around the mounds of garbage and over to me, just as my scent must have been drifting back the other way.

  The hole was big enough. I stood up and breathed once, twice — getting myself ready for my last physical expenditure of the night.

  A cloud of seagulls suddenly passed in front of my eyes — a screaming thundercloud of them, swollen with panic. I could see two glowing eyes staring at me from across the dump.

  All those clichés of fear — of where real fear first makes itself known to you: in the pit of your stomach . . . up and down your spine. They were all true. And I could feel it in places you might not expect, either. The back of my neck, where it felt as if each little hair were standing on end. The hollow of my chest, which was vibrating like a bass woofer.

  The two eyes advanced and with them a sound that grated on what little nerve I had left. Not a bark, no, one low, sustained growl. The kind that said, I am not happy to see you.

  I began to back up, slowly, one baby step at a time, even as the dog — I couldn’t make out what breed, exactly; let’s say human retriever — padded closer and closer.

  Then I turned — and ran. Maybe I shouldn’t have; maybe it would have been wiser to stare it down. Never show a dog fear — wasn’t that the old wives’ adage you’re taught from youth? It makes them mad, gets their blood up, stirs up their carnivorous impulses.

  But something else stirs up their meat-eating instincts even more. Meat. And I had magnanimously left the dog a lot of it. In the person of Winston.

  It took several minutes — several minutes I spent scurrying out through the fence hole and into the car — to realize that the dog wasn’t following me.

  And then I heard it. A sound of gnashing teeth — of tearing flesh — of lascivious guttural consumption.

  The junkyard dog was eating Winston.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  I had to get rid of the blue Sable.

  It had been rented from Dollar Rent A Car by one Jonathan Thomas. One of the four driver’s licenses Winston had stuffed in his otherwise depleted wallet.

  The easiest thing to buy—identities, Winston had confided in me. And Winston had four of them. Back when I was young and idealistic, searching for your identity was an expected rite of passage. Winston, on the other hand, simply bought his — or stole it — making sure he had a few extras just in case.

  Just in case someone asked him to get rid of someone else.

  Now I had to get rid of the car.

  That sort of took care of itself. On the way back down Western Avenue, I passed the highway; it was dark, and I was replaying the sounds of canine feeding in my head — hitting the rewind button against my better judgment and listening to it over and over again. When you’re hearing the sounds of someone being eaten, it’s easy to miss things like highway signs. I ended up in a part of Staten Island I hadn’t known existed — farmland, actual rows of fallow field with an honest to God silo sitting in the distance. Two ticks from every sin of urban congestion, and I was suddenly in Kansas.

  But not every sin of urban living was missing. I passed a massive car dump. It looked like a watering hole for wrecks, being as they were all grouped around a mud pond, some of them half-submerged in it. One more wreck would hardly be noticed, would it?

  I gently swerved off the road and into the bumpy lot, driving the car to the very edge of the water. I took one last look around the car — trying not to touch the pieces of flesh stuck to carpet and leather, opening the glove compartment, and finding a surprise in there. A gun. Winston’s, I remembered, the one that must’ve never made it into his hand because another gun took his head off before it could. I delicately placed it into my pocket. Then I put the car in neutral, stumbled out of the front seat, and with a gentle push forward let the car slip quietly into the pond, where it finally came to rest with just its antenna poking out of the muck.
r />   I wasn’t much for religion — I didn’t know any prayers to really speak of. But I stood there for a minute and whispered something anyway. In his memory.

  I turned away and began to walk.

  How I was going to get home?

  I could have called a car service, I suppose, but I knew they kept records. I needed to find my way back to midtown, where Charles Schine taking a car ride home would be like any other late night at the office.

  I passed a gas station. I could see a lone Indian-looking man reading a magazine in a barely lit cubicle. I walked around the side, looking for a bathroom. I found one.

  Gas station bathrooms were much like bathrooms in Chinatown, which were much like black holes in Calcutta, or so I now thought. There was no toilet paper. The mirror was cracked, the sink filled with sludge. But I needed to wash up. I would have to find a bus or train that would take me back into the city, and I smelled like garbage.

  The sink had running water. Even a little soap left in the holder, a thick scummy yellow. I washed my hands—I threw water on my face—I took my shirt off even though the bathroom was frigid and I was exhaling clouds of vapor every time I breathed. I rubbed my chest and under my arms. A whore’s bath — isn’t that what they called it? And I was a whore in good standing these days. I’d prostituted every single thing I’d believed in.

  I put my shirt back on. I zipped up my jacket. I went back outside and began walking.

  I just picked a direction. I wasn’t going to ask the gas station manager, who just might remember a shell-shocked-looking white man who’d showed up without his car.

  A half hour later I discovered a bus stop. And when an empty bus came to a stop there a half hour after that, I took it. I was lucky. It was headed to Brooklyn, where it eventually let me off by a subway station.

  I made it back to Manhattan.

  Home.

  Something I appreciated after a night of grave digging. Four solid walls of clear yellow shingle and black-pitched roof with one impressive chimney poking through. The real estate agent who’d sold it to us described it as a center hall colonial. A substantive ring to it — nothing much could happen to you in a center hall colonial, now could it? Of course, outside the center hall colonial, all sorts of things.