Onion Street

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  The snow, which had been falling in lazy flurries for most of the morning, was now bombarding the streets of Midwood. I couldn’t see twenty feet ahead of me, the wind whipping the snow into little whirling white cyclones. My face was so cold that the flakes felt like pinpricks on my cheeks. I quickened my pace to a steady trot until I got to East 25th. By then, the big gulps of icy air I’d been sucking in were burning my lungs. More than a few times on my way over, I thought about heading down to Ocean Avenue to catch the bus toward home. Would’ve been the smart thing to do, but even I knew that doing the smart thing wasn’t always the right thing, that smart and right were often at odds with each other.

  When I came around the corner and saw Bobby’s Olds 88 parked across the street, I stopped dead in my tracks. Apparently, I wasn’t the only student skipping Myths of Post–Civil War Reconstruction. I’d cut class in part to avoid Bobby Friedman and now here he was; at least his car was. For some odd reason my heart was thumping itself out of my chest and, in spite of the cold, I could feel trickles of sweat rolling down my left side. My half-frozen feet didn’t seem to want to budge. I’d known Bobby my whole life, I thought, and what, suddenly I’m afraid to see him? How ridiculous.

  I was on the opposite side of the street, no more than thirty or forty feet away, when Bobby came trudging up the driveway toward his car. His long brown hair was blowing every which way. He didn’t see me because his face was pointed down against the weather. I slipped and struggled to keep my feet. When I steadied myself and looked up again, Bobby was just passing in front of his car. Something wasn’t right. I couldn’t say what it was for sure. I just knew it. Maybe it was the rumbling of an engine coming to life beneath the howling wind, or maybe it was the flash of lights I caught out of the corner of my eye. Whatever it was, it sent me running as fast as my legs would carry me. I tossed my books aside as I went.

  “Bobby!” I screamed. “Bobby, look out!”

  That was exactly the wrong thing to do, because he froze in his tracks. When I was within ten feet of him, I could see the headlights emerging through the swirling sheets of snow. Maybe it was all in my head, but the car seemed to slow down ever so slightly and swerve a hair to my right. They say that in battle the world slows down. Maybe that was it, for in that brief second the world slowed down. No matter. I took one last stride and jumped, arms forward. My palms hit Bobby squarely in the chest and sent him sprawling backwards out of the path of the oncoming car. I wasn’t that lucky. The car clipped my right ankle and spun me, slamming my shoulder into the front bumper of Bobby’s Olds. I was down, face first in the snow, my right shoulder barking at me. Stunned at my brave stupidity, I lay there for several seconds. Then brakes squealed, tires skidded, and there was a loud crash. The moans of twisting metal cut through the heart of the bellowing storm.

  Shaken, I forced myself up onto my hands and knees. Bobby was up too, and pulling me to my feet. We turned, looking down the street, but the snow was falling harder than ever and obscured our view. Without a word, we ran — he ran, I limped — to the corner. There, down Avenue I toward Ocean Avenue, was a silver ’67 Coupe de Ville. It had hopped up onto the sidewalk and smashed head-on into a big, old oak tree. The front end of the car was like a steel accordion, and steam gushed out of the radiator. The Caddy’s doors were flung wide open. Whoever had been in the car was gone now. They couldn’t have gotten very far, but the blinding snow made it impossible for us to tell how far. We carefully crossed to where the Cadillac had come to rest.

  “Look at this. There’s blood on the steering wheel,” I said, rubbing the driver’s blood between my fingertips, “and on the seat. A lot of it. The windshield on the passenger’s side is all smashed in too.” Then, pointing at the spotty red trails in the snow, “People got hurt here and they’re bleeding pretty bad too.” I dipped my fingers into the snow to wipe the blood away.

  “I hope the driver bleeds to death. What a dumb bastard, driving like that in this weather. What was he thinking? The schmuck nearly killed us.”

  “Yeah, Bobby. It almost looked like he was aiming for you.”

  “Don’t be an idiot, Moe. Why would anyone wanna hurt me?”

  I shrugged my shoulders, wincing as I did it. “You tell me.”

  He ignored that. “You all right?”

  “I’ll live.”

  “Come on, let’s get outta here before the cops show up asking questions. I’ve had my fill of the goddamn pigs. Anyway, we need to get some ice on that shoulder of yours.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “Moe, one more thing.”

  “What?”

  Smiling that smile of his, he said, “Thanks for saving my life.”

  He just had to say it, didn’t he? I guess he did have to thank me and I guess I would’ve been pretty pissed off if he hadn’t, but it weighed on me. I couldn’t recall just where or when I first heard about the old Chinese proverb: Save a man’s life, and his life becomes your responsibility. Probably on Captain Kangaroo. Yeah, thinking back, I’m almost certain it was on Captain Kangaroo. I don’t suppose it would have mattered one way or the other. In a flash of headlights and metal, Bobby Friedman had gone from being my friend to being my responsibility.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Driving would’ve been treacherous enough even if Bobby hadn’t consumed a six-pack of Schaefer while I iced down my shoulder and we waited for the storm to let up. My ankle was okay, and it didn’t swell up much at all. My shoulder was a different story altogether. I didn’t need to see the spreading purple bruise to know I’d been pretty badly banged up. It hurt like a bastard, throbbing as steadily as a bass drum.

  We had been listening to the Yardbirds, Bobby singing along as he straightened up the place. Who knows, maybe a close brush with death turned him into a neat freak. It certainly hadn’t improved his voice. He may have gotten past nearly getting crushed beneath the wheels of a Caddy, but I hadn’t. Never mind my aching shoulder; I kept replaying it in my head: the rumble of the engine, the pale headlights emerging from the white veil of snow, the car bearing down on us, the slight swerve. There was something else I couldn’t ignore — Mindy’s ominous warning.

  I brought up her name, but if I thought the mere mention of it was going to get a rise out of Bobby, I was bound for disappointment. He barely reacted, continuing to sing. There was no reason he should have reacted. He and Mindy were old pals — more than that, apparently — but given her warning to stay away from Bobby and his nearly getting turned into roadkill, I figured to see if anything had changed on his side of the equation.

  “What’s going on with you and Mindy, anyways?” he asked as Jeff Beck took a short solo.

  “I don’t know. She was kinda weird last night.”

  He cupped his hand around his ear. “Huh?”

  “Turn the goddamned music down, Bobby. You’re the one who asked me the question.”

  He twisted the volume knob on the steel-faced Marantz amplifier, its single dial glowing in the gloomy basement. “Sorry, Moe. What were you saying?”

  “I said she was kinda weird last night. Before I went to bail you out — ”

  “Shit! I owe you five hundred bucks,” he said, getting back to sweeping. “I totally forgot. I’ll get it to you soon, okay?”

  “Fine.”

  “So what were you saying?”

  “I was about to say that before I went to bail your ass out of the Tombs, Mindy and I had this really sweet phone conversation. You know Mindy, she doesn’t do sweet and romantic. We were all set for a little action and then to go out to dinner, but when I showed up here, she was crazed.”

  That seemed to finally get Bobby’s attention. His smiling lips went straight as a ruler. He stopped fussing with the broom and went to the fridge. “You want a beer to take the edge off the pain? I want a beer.”

  “Nah,” I said, “Suffering is my duty as a Jew.”

  He opened his first Schaefer and took a big swallow. “Suffering’s nobody’s duty, man. Mindy wa
s crazed. How do you mean crazed?”

  “I found her outside smoking cigarettes and drinking Four Roses. When we got inside she practically raped me.”

  “And you’re complaining? Half the guys at BC would give their right nut to — ”

  “No, Bobby. It wasn’t like that. Something definitely happened between the time I spoke to her on the phone and when I showed up here. I’ve seen her in bad moods. I’ve seen her sad, but I’ve never seen her like this. She was like a different person.”

  Bobby got started on his second beer. He seemed unwilling to take a stab at explaining Mindy’s behavior, so I pushed a little harder.

  “Then, when we were done screwing, she started crying.”

  “I heard you have that effect on women, Prager.” Bobby’s smile returned as he finished off his beer. He went for another. “Mindy’s a lot of things, but she’s not a crier. She must’ve been putting you on. Or maybe Mindy thinks it’s her duty to suffer too. I mean, no offense, but she is dating you.”

  Bobby was uncanny in his ability to dodge trouble, but I couldn’t let him off the hook that easily. Instead of giving him a little push, I gave him a full-on shove, much harder than the one I’d used to save his ass.

  “After she stopped crying, she told me about the two of you.”

  He moved the beer can far enough away from his lips to say, “What about the two of us?”

  “Cut it out, Friedman. You know exactly what I’m talking about. That you were her first.”

  Bobby dropped the charade and went for his fourth beer. “We were kids at camp, man. No big deal. It went the way those things always go. It hurt her and I lasted five seconds.”

  “No big deal for you, maybe, but it was for her. It always is for girls. You know that. It may be 1967 and the whole world might be going crazy, Bobby, but you know it matters. You have any idea why she would want to tell me that? Why she would tell me about you guys at that moment?”

  “Who can understand girls? When you find someone who does, let me know. Besides, she’s your girlfriend. Maybe you pissed her off or something.”

  “Or something,” I said. “Do you have any idea what could’ve happened between the time I talked to her and she showed up here?”

  “How the fuck should I know?” he barked back. It was the first time he’d ever yelled at me. Was it the beers? Maybe. He’d had four of them in record time, but I didn’t think so. His voice steadied and his smile returned. “As you may recall, dear comrade, I was a guest in the deep cold womb of the fascist state at the time. I have many talents, but knowing what Mindy Weinstock is up to while I’m behind bars isn’t one of them.”

  His words were reasonable, but rang in my ears like a cracked bell. He was pushing back too hard when a simple no would have done the trick. I didn’t know much, but I did know when people were full of crap. Bobby was no different than anyone else in that he was sometimes prone to little lies and minor exaggerations, but at the moment the needle on my bullshit-o-meter was off the scale. I left it at that for the time being. He had another beer and chased it down with one more for good luck. A few minutes later we were in Bobby Friedman’s rough beast, slouching toward Brighton Beach.

  • • •

  I’d smoked a little grass and hash, dropped acid twice — twice was enough, believe me — and done speed a few times. That was the extent of my drug use. At heart I was a gym rat, and preferred playing ball to getting stoned, but the pain in my shoulder was getting worse. So when Bobby offered me something to help, I didn’t hesitate. And almost like magic, I was feeling no pain. Trouble was, I wasn’t feeling much of anything else either. Suddenly there was more slush inside my skull than on the ice-slickened Brooklyn streets. The world was an out-of-focus tapestry of red taillights and slow-motion people blurred around the edges, their featureless faces blending one into the next into the next as we rode past. This soft weave of colors and vague figures was set against a slate gray canvas that seemed to darken with each blink of my eyes.

  All my senses were dulled but for smell. I was acutely aware of the beer on Bobby’s breath, of the sour stink of my own dry mouth, of the chemical pine scent from the green cardboard tree dangling on a string below the rearview mirror. I was conscious of Bobby’s mouth moving, of him talking to me, his voice like a muted horn set against the rhythm of the softly slapping wiper blades. It wasn’t unpleasant, exactly. I felt as if I was stuck at the edge of sleep, unable but not unwilling to take that last step into the well of dreams.

  Time passed in a lazy gallop, and when I looked outside again, I thought I recognized the part of the world we were in. There was thunder overhead, the thunder of subway wheels. I was aware that the car was no longer moving, though the engine kept running and the wipers kept the beat. Now looking right at me, Bobby spoke, the rank smell of beer filling up my head. I could tell there was some urgency to what he was saying, if unable to make sense of the phrases themselves. I was vaguely aware of some words dripping out of my mouth too, words like cold maple syrup. Then Bobby disappeared, and so did I.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Some days it just ain’t worth opening your eyes and no matter how fast you shut them again, it’s too late. So it was for me … way too late. Last night’s slush was gone. Now my head was filled with wool, my mouth with cotton. Apparently someone had shoved a harpoon through my right shoulder while I slept. Other than that, I was ready for action. Put me in, Coach. I’m your boy. Fuck that! I was nobody’s boy. I forced my eyes open again and time-traveled into the present. The air no longer smelled of beer breath or fake pine trees, but of Woolite linens and burnt coffee. The comforting clank and rumble, the ka-ching, ka-ching of subway wheels on rails, had replaced the slapping of wiper blades as the backbeat to my life. I was still in my clothes, my Chuck Taylors still on my feet. Not that I remembered how, but I’d managed to get from Bobby’s front seat into my bed. And there was something else. Unclenching my left fist, I found five one-hundred-dollar bills folded neatly in my palm — the bail money.

  When I sat up, Ahab stuck the harpoon in a little deeper. The white whale tasks me. That those were the words that came to mind only proved I was screwed. See, that was the thing about Bobby and my brother: they knew where they were going. I didn’t know anything, or how to do anything except quote dead writers and shoot a fifteen-foot fadeaway jumper. Not much of a job market for the former, nor for the latter when the shooter is a six-foot-tall, slow-footed white boy. There were days I wished I woke up with a hunger for adding machines and ledger books. I wanted to know where I was going, or even where I wasn’t. I guess that’s completely understandable when you’re on the verge of choosing a major and minor subject from the mootsville trinity of English, philosophy, and psychology. I hobbled to the bathroom as if on a wooden leg, and thought I was very badly in need of my own white whale. I needed to chase something in my life other than Mindy’s ass.

  Christ, I looked like shit, but at least no one was home to see but me. When I peeled back my shirt, I got weak at the sight of my shoulder. I was black, blue, yellow, brown, and orange from my right nipple across my chest, around my back, and halfway down my arm. My skin looked like a box of melted crayons. Though puffed and swollen, I could just about raise my arm without losing consciousness. No bones seemed to be broken or sticking out where they didn’t belong. I figured I’d live. I swallowed way too many aspirins, finished undressing, showered, and brushed my teeth. It improved my aroma, if not my appearance.

  I called Mindy’s number and got no answer. That was odd. I knew she was probably at school, but her mom was almost always home. For some reason I couldn’t quite explain, I got a sick feeling in my gut. Maybe it was the paranoid afterglow of whatever narcotic Bobby had given me. Yeah, I thought, that was it. Because of my shoulder pain and the drug hangover, getting dressed went about as smoothly as a thumbless man tying his shoes. Still, I managed to do it in less than a week. Of course, the aspirin didn’t kick in until I was done. There was the news
paper and a note for me on the kitchen table. I was confident the note was from Aaron, probably lambasting me for coming home drunk, for being a lazy, aimless piece of shit with no ambition and no future. I was getting a little tired of his notes and lectures, so I didn’t look at the note until I’d fortified myself with some of my mom’s coffee. Fortified being the key word, because if you could survive the over-percolated and burnt black goo that passed for coffee in the Prager household, you could survive almost anything.

  I looked at the back page of the paper, the sports section calling to me, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Aaron’s damned note. I figured I’d read it just to be done with it. The note was from Aaron. That much I’d gotten right. Everything else I’d gotten wrong, as wrong as getting could get. I was out of the apartment almost before I finished reading the note.

  • • •

  What’s in a name? Sometimes everything. Kings Highway Hospital was small and privately owned, not one of the bloated gas giants run by the city like Kings County or Bellevue, and it was where Aaron’s note said the ambulance had brought Mindy.

  Mindy’s mom was a heavyset woman who, with a babushka around her head and some gold teeth in her mouth, would not have looked out of place in the Ukrainian shtetl from which her grandparents or parents had no doubt come. Her large, doe-brown eyes were moist and bloodshot, her voice choked with tears and barely contained panic. She lit up when I came running toward her down the hall. Mindy’s father — his burden unlightened by my arrival — was there too: pacing, twitchy, blank-faced. He was a gaunt man, now a scarecrow. Her mother locked me in her embrace, my right shoulder burning in pain. I toughed it out. These people didn’t need to hear about my relatively minor woes. Mr. Weinstock gave me a ghost-like pat on the back.