Coney Island Avenue

by J. L. Abramo

  Inside, hope killed. Outside, it was all he had.

  The truck bullied its way through a yellow arrow and double parked near the drop-off lane of the bus station. Cars honked in vain. The driver shifted into park.

  “Thanks for the ride, fellas.” Jay tugged the door handle. As he expected, the lock didn’t disengage.

  “Out the other side,” Driver said. “You been inside since what, high school?” He jacked a thumb toward Brush Cut. “Lucky here, he gets to escort you all the way to the Big Sleazy.”

  Brush Cut grinned and popped the door on his side. Stuck one leg out. Made a little waving motion with his hand.

  Later, Jay thought that was what set him off. The condescension of it. The same smug dismissal he’d seen in Joey Bello’s eyes as he’d tortured Jay’s friends. The look that said, you deserve this. You know it, too. You’re the shit beneath my shoe, and you know it.

  Ice cold indignation flared in his chest and misted his eyes red at the corners. The unquenchable rage that brought the axe down on Joey Bello now fired his fists without thought of consequence or damnation.

  Jay mule kicked Brush Cut with his prison brogans, one lugged sole hitting his chest and the other cracking his face. His head bounced off the door and his broad chest thumped on the pavement.

  Driver tore open his fanny pack to reveal a black pistol. Jay right hooked him three times in the nose. The seat rest blocked him from using his iron left cross, but he felt the man’s neck weaken on the third blow, and his head lolled onto the steering wheel.

  Jay grabbed his duffel and jumped out the back door, one foot landing on Brush Cut’s solar plexus. The big man was fast. He’d already recovered and drawn his pistol. Jay heel stomped him in the liver until the pistol fell, then kicked it across the pavement. Other commuters squinted and stared, unsure of what they were seeing.

  Jay opened the driver’s door and unbuckled the dazed man’s safety belt. Underhooked his right arm and heaved him on top of his vomiting partner. Dropped an elbow or three into his kidney to keep him down.

  “If y’all mean the old ‘friend’ who left me flat,” Jay said, “You tell him it’s a little late in the game to start giving favors.” He half-stepped into the truck and levered the column shifter into reverse. He hopped out with the vehicle in motion, then jogged between parked cars toward the taxi lane.

  Car horns blared as the big truck rolled. Pedestrians scattered as the black Chevy crunched into a utility pole.

  The green cab at the front of the line was a repainted police car on saggy springs. A thin black man with gold-framed glasses and a pencil mustache sat behind the wheel. Jay slipped in the back seat.

  “Whoa,” the cabbie said. “Hell was that?”

  “Some jagoff drove the wrong way out the parking garage,” Jay said. “Nearly hit me.”

  The cabbie leaned out the window to stare. “Crazy.”

  “Let’s get moving,” Jay said.

  “Gotta tell me where we’re going first.”

  “Nutley,” Jay said. Home. First thing that came to mind. Old cons lamented how weak the human mind became in times of stress, sending you headlong toward familiar hiding spots that were always the first place the police were sure to look. But he knew no place else. He and his folks left Louisiana when he was seven years old. New Jersey might have attempted to imprison him for life, but it was home, at least for now.

  The cabbie eased away from the taxi line and paused at the exit ramp.

  Jay took a twenty from his bankroll and held it over the seat rest. “This thing burn rubber?”

  The cabbie snorted. “Maybe if I set it on fire.”

  Jay wagged the banknote. “Give it a shot.”

  The driver snatched the bill. When he saw an opening he revved in neutral, then dropped the shifter into drive. The tires chirped as the cab lurched into traffic. Behind them, a small crowd gathered around the two downed men, one unconscious, the other dry heaving in the street.

  Chapter 2

  Jay stuck his face out the window and breathed in the perfume of diesel soot, car exhaust, and fryer grease. Prison smelled of unwashed bodies and stuffed toilets. Disinfectant over mildewed walls.

  No one else would think New Jersey smelled like heaven.

  “Get your head in here,” the cabbie said. “What you doing?”

  Jay slumped into the worn seat and rubbed his knuckles, listened to the sweet V8 rumble of the Crown Vic’s Ford 302. He hadn’t thrown a punch in anger in years. It had come back all too easy. They disappeared into the crush of traffic. Jay looked back. No sirens, no police. He breathed his four fours, like the guy who ran the Zen class taught him to.

  Four seconds in, four count hold, four seconds out. Four more before you breathed again. Four sets of those and the pounding of his heart settled.

  “What’s your name, brother?”

  “Herschel,” the cabbie said. “You?”

  “Desmarteaux,” Jay said. “I mean, Jay.” Old habits die hard. At least he didn’t give him his inmate number.

  “Well stay inside the car, Jay. Truck mirror almost tore your head off.”

  Jay stretched his arms behind his head with a thin smile. “Thanks, Hersch. Needed a little thrill. Been away a quarter century.”

  “Where you been?”

  Jay thought on it. He was a free man, at least for the moment. “Rahway.”

  “No shit?” Herschel tucked the twenty deep in his sock. “What the hell you do, a white boy going to jail that long?”

  “Rather keep that behind me, if it’s the same to you.”

  “You don’t wanna say, that’s fine with me. Man’s got a right. You done your time.”

  Cee-Lo Green crooned on the fuzzy stereo as they headed up Route 21. A billboard with a tricolor harem of dancers advertised Cheetah’s: A Club for Gentlemen. Jay made a note of the phone number before looking away, watching traffic. A woman with her hair tied back passed in a Mustang convertible. The perk of her nose and gleam of her hair made Jay ache deep inside.

  “Mind if we make a side trip?”

  “Depends,” Hersch said. “You need to score, I don’t truck with that. I’ll drop you off wherever you want, but you get another ride out of there.”

  “Nothing like that. Wasn’t in for drugs.”

  “Lemme guess, strip club? There’s one just up the road. I’ll wait, but you can’t bust your nut in my car.”

  “Nope,” Jay said. “Been so long, I figure I can go a while longer.”

  Punks inside dolled up and offered suck jobs for barter. Jay had politely demurred. A Latin queen named Rene had grown fine little breasts on smuggled estrogen treatments, and fixed up real nice. Rene liked to say it was all the same under the sheets in the dark, but Jay never found out.

  “I’ve done some pickups from the county jail. Most of them want to find a girl or stop for a drink right away. A drink I can handle, but you get sick in my car, I’m driving straight to the police. Tired of cleaning filth out the back. So you feel queasy, you tell me so I can pull over.”

  Jay’s last drink had been Irish whiskey, with the girl who’d saved him from doing time a virgin. Memories of her had been enough to fend off temptation from both the punks and the throat-clenching stink of jailhouse hooch, which was usually orange juice fermented in a toilet tank.

  “I’m good,” Jay said. “I’m thinking Rutt’s Hut. You know it?”

  Herschel laughed in three short chops. “Twenty-five years in jail, man wants a hot dog. Only in Jersey.”

  “They better be as good as I remember,” Jay said. “The food at Rahway tastes like wet toilet paper.”

  Herschel nosed the cab down a side street and hugged the Passaic River until he got past the traffic snarl, then popped back on the highway.

  “Take the Nutley exit,” Jay said.

  “Next one’s closer.”

  “I wanna see something.”

  “Okay.”

  Nutley had a new bridge and a lot more clutter, but
the heart remained. Graffiti marked the overpass off the highway. Rust stains on the concrete like honey brown hair flowing down a woman’s back. Houses with neat little yards huddled in a phalanx on the border.

  As they cruised River Road, Jay frowned at the hole in the sky where the steel rocket of the International Avionics tower had once stood. The defense contractor’s sprawling campus was gone, with townhouse condos posed in their place. Most people worked there, or across town at Roach Pharmaceuticals, makers of the tranquilizer made famous as “Mother’s Little Helper” by the Stones. One side built tools for the Cold War, and the other cranked out the pills required to live in the shadow of the mushroom cloud.

  They swerved past Kingsland Park’s waterfall, where police had emptied their guns into a Newark carjacker when Jay was in sixth grade. The shootout stood as a warning to interlopers, an invisible moat that made the denizens feel safe in their homes. Nutley had been a good place to grow up, rich or poor. Parks to roam, ponds and streams to fish in, a pizzeria in every neighborhood. The town had been a little too proud, a little unfriendly to outsiders, but Jay felt a twinge inside at no longer being welcome there.

  “Thought I recognized the name,” Herschel said. “You’re the guy who…you’re him.”

  “That I am,” Jay said. “You’re pretty sharp, Hersch. I don’t remember you from school.”

  “I’m from Belleville,” Herschel said. “But we all heard about it.”

  Everybody had. Jay’s rep preceded him to Annandale reformatory and followed him into Rahway.

  Their eyes met in the rearview mirror.

  “C’mon, Hersch. I ain’t gonna kill you with a hot dog.”

  “Sorry, man.” Herschel laughed and held up an open palm. “Looks like you’d do just fine with your bare hands.”

  “I only use my hands under the hood,” Jay said, and slapped Herschel’s palm. “You pull over, maybe I can hunt down your vacuum leak. This heap whistles like it’s got a chest wound.”

  “You’re all right, Jay,” Herschel laughed again in three short chops. “You’re all right.”

  The soot-stained brick of Rutt’s Hut squatted on a ledge overlooking the highway. Construction workers rubbed elbows with suit-and-ties in its yellowed tile interior, lining up for the lunch counter. The low scent of fry oil filled the air.

  Greeks in stained aprons tortured hot dogs in the deep fryer until the skins burst and split up the middle, calling out orders in clipped jargon.

  Six rippers. One Frenchy, traveling. One Coke, one Marvis, cap.

  Jay slathered the dogs with spicy mustard and nuclear yellow relish. They ate in the parking lot, staring out at the slick brown ribbon of the Passaic River painted alongside the highway. Seagulls cried, begging for scraps.

  Jay took a bite and moaned. The snap and crunch of the fried skin, the soft yeast roll and the sweet relish outshined his faded memories.

  “Good as you remember?” Herschel said.

  “Better.” Jay looked over the edge at the cars and trucks roaring toward Newark.

  “Lot’s changed since you went in,” Herschel said through a mouthful. “It’s a whole different world now.”

  “That suits me just fine,” Jay said. “I didn’t like the other one all that much.”

  “How old were you?” Herschel asked, and picked at the paper boat of fries.

  “Fifteen,” Jay said.

  “You even know how to drive?”

  “Nope.”

  “They don’t teach that in there, do they.”

  “Just how to steal.” Jay watched a high school kid with spiked blond hair rumble out the lot in a red Camaro.

  “I don’t mean what you did was right,” Herschel said, and chewed his lip a moment. “But I just wanna say, I kinda understood what you did. In middle school there was this boy named Joseph, he had it in for me. Made life hell.”

  “Some folks just need killing.”

  Herschel’s eyebrows came together, then he laughed. He watched Jay like he would a strange dog.

  “Well it’s true.”

  “Yeah, but most of us just think about it. Guess twenty-five years didn’t change your mind.”

  “Oh I learned my lesson,” Jay said, around a bite of ripper. “Doesn’t change the fact that the world’d be better off with some people underground. Paid my debt, but I’m glad the evil sumbitch is dead.” He started on his next hot dog. The first hit his belly like a lead sinker.

  Herschel cocked his head and chopped one nervous laugh. “You’re something else. Making me think twice about completing this fare.”

  “That boy got what was coming to him for what he done,” he said, and tossed a piece of hot dog roll to the gulls. One snapped it up and flew away. “You only know what you heard.”

  Herschel parted his lips to ask, and Jay cut off the question with a steely glare.

  Joey Bello had always grinned like he’d gotten away with something, and he usually had. Flat little squirrel eyes, and fingers lumpy with burned-off warts, quick with a flick to the ear or a pinch and twist of tender belly meat. If playground torment had been the extent of Joey Bello’s transgressions, Jay might have tolerated him to walk the earth. With what Joey had done, the world was considerably better off for his absence.

  Jay looked out at the Passaic. The carpenter’s hatchet Papa Andre had given him on his tenth birthday was somewhere in the muck. The police had never recovered it.

  Herschel gave a playful smile. “So was it worth it?”

  “I was a dumb kid,” Jay said. “Thought I could take it. My friends’ folks, one was a cop, another was rich. They said they’d grease the wheels, but they let me swing in the wind.”

  “You gonna do anything about it?” Herschel said.

  “A good friend of mine once told me the best revenge is living well,” Jay said. “Reckon I’ll try to do that.” He tossed the burnt dregs of the fries to the gulls and watched them squabble and fight until they tore the last one apart.

  “Good luck. Ain’t easy, these days.”

  Four rippers gone, Jay popped the hood and fumbled around until he found the loose vacuum hose. Herschel gave him a rubber band from the glove box, and Jay wrapped it around until it stayed put. The whistling stopped.

  “It won’t lug down so much now,” Jay said. “But this thing needs more work than I can do in a parking lot.”

  “Ain’t mine,” Herschel said. “We rotate, and today I got the shitbox.”

  Jay brushed his hands off on his jeans. “Let’s motor,” he said. “If I’m gonna live well, I might as well get started. Friend’s got an auto shop, somewhere in Belleville, in the valley.”

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