A Friend Is a Gift You Give Yourself

by William Boyle

  “Where you going?” Crea says, getting closer.

  Richie thinking if he pretends not to hear Crea’s voice, it’s not really there.

  “You wanna call a cab? We can split it. Fuck it. Let’s just take that Explorer. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, ‘What about your Town Car, Crea?’ That’s not my Town Car. It’s identical to my Town Car, but this one’s Clyde Finelli’s. You think I’d have a Mets flag on my vehicle?” Crea hovering over him now. “You know me better than that. You know my feelings on the Mets. Keith Hernandez, I met that fuck once. Richie, talk to me. Richie, where you going, guy?” Crea leans down over him, pressing his knee hard into Richie’s back and letting the hammer clank to the ground.

  Richie’s crawling is suspended. It’s as if he’s a mouse pinned down by a mad child.

  Crea continues: “Where are your balls now? You got the balls to go into Caccio’s and mow down our unarmed friends at a sit-down, where are they now? Say you’re a sad fuck.”

  Richie puts his mouth against the pavement. It tastes of grit and tires and darkness.

  “Say you’re a sad fuck. Say it.”

  Richie can smell Crea’s minty breath over his shoulder. “I’m a sad fuck,” Richie says.

  Crea hacks out a laugh. “Indeed. You saw the way I did old Enzio? That was me getting loose, warming up.”

  “I’m a sad fuck,” Richie says again.

  Crea cools it with his knee. Stands. Picks up the hammer. “You stay right here, okay? I’m gonna go get the Explorer. It’s a piece of shit, but it’ll do for now.”

  Footsteps moving away. Richie starts to crawl forward again. What he thought about Lucia back there on the bridge, he feels sorry about it. Lucia’s not his enemy. He wishes he could call her his daughter. He wishes they were on the road—him, Adrienne, and Lucia—with no trouble behind them. Or ahead. He wishes he could buy her a good dinner somewhere. Girl likes to eat. He wishes he could think of her as his real daughter now. Pray for her and ask her to pray for him. Prayer. That’s good. He’s going to die, and he guesses he’s glad she’s got the money. If anybody, her. Of course, Crea will go after it. Crea doesn’t let things rest. Richie’s going to die, yeah, but he’s got to take Crea down with him.

  When the Explorer pulls up at his heels, he can feel heat emanating from under the chassis. Crea beeps the horn. Richie can hear the electric buzz of a window. “Come on, get up,” Crea says, Richie able to tell there’s a smile on his face. “Who knows whose car this is? I don’t need to kill a stranger for a ’95 Ford Explorer. Hotwiring it was a bitch. I used to be good. Fast. Now I’m fumbling under the dash like I’m twelve, trying to unclasp a broad’s bra. You know who had a truck like this? Al Burke, that little Irish prick. His mother was always spilling holy water in there. I says to Al, I says, ‘Where the fuck’s your old lady get all this holy water?’ You know what this Mick says to me? ‘The priest comes over, he blesses all these jugs of water she’s got laying around.’ A priest blessing random jugs of Poland Spring, you believe that shit?”

  Richie tries to get back to a standing position. He wonders if Crea, still behind the wheel, will run him over for kicks. That’s something Crea would do. Like that sick flick The Toxic Avenger. What those gym rats do to that skinny twerp on the bike in the beginning. How they run over his head and pop it like a zit.

  “Okay,” Crea says, opening the door and getting out of the truck. “You need some help. I get it. I’m not gonna kill you, Richie. Don’t worry. Not yet. I’m gonna hurt you a little here and there maybe, but I’m not gonna kill you until I get the money back. I got myopic vision for that dough. Beyond that, I got my mind set on revenge. Beyond that, I never liked you, and I’ll take great pleasure in watching you die. But, first, we get the money.” He puts his hands under Richie and lifts, groaning. “I’m sore from the little accident we had. You? Beating Vic’s neighbor to death really took it out of me, too.” Another laugh.

  Crea leads Richie toward the rear right-side door of the Explorer, the glass missing, the plastic that was there ripped away. “You dream about beating people to death when you were a kid?” Crea asks. “I did. Real thing’s way more satisfying. I wish I could tell my kid self that.”

  “I’m not getting in that truck,” Richie says.

  “The hell you’re not,” Crea says, opening the door and shoving him in. “You’re my navigator.”

  Next thing Richie remembers he’s sprawled out on the back seat of the Explorer. They’re moving fast. Probably on the Palisades. He thinks he must have lost consciousness for a few minutes. He’s cold. Wind whips in through the broken window. The car smells like shit. Crea has the radio on loud. “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” He’s singing along and pounding the steering wheel.

  “Can you lower that?” Richie asks.

  “You’re awake, Principessa?” Crea says over the music, tilting the rearview mirror so he can see Richie. “What’d you say now?”

  “Lower the music.” Richie’s always had a distaste for this song. It’s not that he hates the Stones. He likes them. Saw them four times over the years. It’s just one of those songs that’s everywhere. Movies, supermarkets, tire shops, sushi joints. Makes him sad as shit. He’s gonna die, he doesn’t want to hear it. He wants to hear something unique, something you don’t hear on the radio every damn day. Hendrix wailing away on “Red House.” Or some metal maybe. Adrienne got him into metal a little back in the day. Dio’s “Rainbow in the Dark” or Iron Maiden’s “Wasted Years” or Motörhead’s “Ace of Spades” would be nice.

  “Listen to this guy,” Crea says. “‘Lower the music.’ You’ve got some balls, Richie. It’s the Stones. Who doesn’t want to hear the Stones?” He turns down the volume. “Now you ruined it.”

  The pain is still thumping in Richie. He crosses his arms over his chest.

  “I’m gonna stop for food and then you’re telling me where to go, okay?” Crea says.

  “I don’t know where they are,” Richie says, closing his eyes.

  “Don’t ‘I don’t know’ me. You know. You fucking know.”

  Richie drifts away.

  When he wakes up again, the car is heavy with food smells. Sausage, grease, hash browns. Coffee, too. Crea is biting into a sausage, egg, and cheese on a bagel. The melted cheese is dripping onto his jacket. He inhales the sandwich in a few bites. Then he plucks a forkful of hash browns out of a paper bag in his lap and washes it down with coffee. The clock radio reads 2:03. Richie can’t believe it.

  Crea’s looking at him in the rearview mirror again, noticing his eyes are open. “Finally,” Crea says. “Sleeping Beauty over here. Thought you were dead. Tried waking you up to no avail. Let a couple of good farts rip. Nothing. Rode the horn for five minutes. Nothing. Went into a gas station and freshened up, bought some more Listerine, you’re still snoring away. Got food at this all-night joint. Out like a light. As my old lady used to say, you must’ve really needed it.”

  Richie pushes back against the door a little bit. He’s not sure how he slept through this shattering pain in his knee. His head feels swimmy. His neck even worse than it was. He wonders if he has a concussion. He was dreaming of hockey, he remembers that. Going to a Rangers game with Adrienne. Standing on the steps outside MSG, Adrienne wearing a long red scarf and a fuzzy wool Rangers hat.

  His mouth is so dry, it’s tacky. His tongue clicks against his teeth. “Water?” he says.

  “You want water?” Crea says.

  Richie nods.

  Crea throws back a bottle of Aquafina. It bounces off the back of the seat and ricochets down onto the floor. Richie feels around for it. He gets it onto his chest and tries to unscrew the cap. He’s weak, and it’s hard to even accomplish that. Finally, he pops it off and the water splashes on his shirt. He sits up a little and brings the bottle to his lips, drinking deeply.

  “Drink up,” Crea says, taking another sloppy bite of hash browns. “You’re gonna need it.”

  “Where a
re we?” Richie asks.

  “Who knows? It’s all the same to me up here. Where are they going?”

  “I don’t know. I lost them on the bridge. You saw. They could be anywhere.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “I wouldn’t have had to chase them if I knew where they were headed.”

  “I’m calm, Richie. I’m gonna find them. Might not be tonight. But I’ll sniff them out. Kid and a couple of old ladies on the run with all that dough, what’re they gonna do? They’ll leave a trail. Maybe I will have to kill you first. But I’m gonna find them, and I’m gonna get the money back, and I’m gonna kill the girl like I killed her mother. And”—he waves his finger—“and, my friend, your Eldorado will be my Eldorado, and I’m gonna drive it all around Brooklyn proudly. Maybe I’ll hang your scalp from the antenna. People will know: this is what happens when you betray your friends.”

  “You were never my friend,” Richie says. “Sonny was never my friend.”

  “That’s true,” Crea says, slurping some coffee.

  Richie puts his hand down in his pocket and slowly removes the letter that’s there. He’s thinking if he can withdraw it without Crea noticing and slide it under the floor mat or between the driver seat and the center console that the fucking psycho won’t ever know of its existence. But if Crea finds it on Richie, that’s another story. Say they did go to this Mo’s house, and Richie’s betting they did given their trajectory. Say they’re just holing up there, hoping this will all blow over. People do unpredictable, stupid things in times of crisis and catastrophe. He gets the letter out of his pocket. His hand feels twisted and arthritic. He pushes it up his belly and then lets it fall to the floor carpet.

  “Fuck you doing back there?” Crea says, his eyebrows arching in the rearview mirror. “You got something for me?” He reaches over to the passenger seat and picks up his hammer, which—as Richie just now sees—is covered in Adrienne’s and Enzio’s blood and is propped there at the ready. Crea snatches it up by the handle and then wallops Richie in the stomach as hard as he can one-handed in this confined space.

  Richie scrunches up as he receives the blow, the gristly face of the hammer landing square in the meatiest part of his gut.

  “What’re you hiding from me?” Crea slams the wheel to the right, lurching the Explorer onto the shoulder of whatever road they’re on. He reaches over the center console and plucks up the envelope from the floor and takes the letter out and looks it over. “What’s this?”

  Richie turns on his side, facing away from Crea. He knows the hammer’s coming again. He doesn’t want to see it.

  This time Crea nails him in the arm. Right above his elbow.

  Richie flips back over, his eyes closing and then opening again.

  Crea laughs, picks between his teeth with a coffee stirrer, and bunches up the foil his sandwich came in. He rolls down his window and tosses the foil ball out onto the road. He reaches into the brown bag and pulls out a handful of hash browns, shoving them into his mouth like he’s the one that hasn’t eaten in twelve-plus hours. “Shit, I get it.” Talking with his mouth full. “This is your lead. This return address on the envelope. You’re not a hundred percent, but you think this is where they’re headed.”

  Richie hopes he’s wrong. He hopes Lucia and Rena are long gone in a new direction. “Monroe,” Crea says, scratching his chin against the handle of the hammer. “That was a president, right? Monroe. You into presidential shit? That clown we got in there now, Dubya”—he speaks in his best Brooklyn-doing-Texas twang—“fucking dumb shit, right? Reminds me of a runt I went to school with. Milty. Put a tomato in his drawers to make it look like he was packing serious meat, you know? You use a cucumber or some bunched-up socks maybe, but a tomato? My friend Tino goes over in class, right in front of Mrs. Pascione, kicks him square in the tomato. Splat. We laughed for months at Milty over that. Reminds me of this Dubya. Monroe, I don’t know shit about him. Got a presidential name. Let’s go to Monroe, what do you say?”

  Richie tunes him out, folding into his pain.

  More time gone. He must’ve passed out again. But he’s awake now and staring at the ceiling, the little dome light. Wind is whipping harder through the car. Crea’s going fast.

  “Tell me a story,” he calls back to Richie.

  “What?” Richie says.

  “You started banging Adrienne when she was fifteen, right? What was her snatch like back then? Must’ve been snappy like a rubber band.”

  “Don’t talk about her.”

  “I put her out of her misery, that’s all. Tell me a story about that tight fifteen-year-old snatch of hers.”

  Richie coughs, and his whole body rattles with pain. Especially his ribs. He wants to tell Crea to fuck himself. He wants to defend Adrienne. He’s failed at everything. Now he’s failing at keeping the beast from Lucia’s door.

  “We’re lost,” Crea says. “You believe that shit? I’m driving around like a rookie. No eye for anything. Just spinning the wheels. Where are we? Peekskill, that sign says. How’d we get here? I shouldn’t have crossed that bridge. Bear Mountain Bridge. Thought it sounded good. Sometimes I’m as much of a numbnuts as anyone, I’ll tell you. You see those lights over there?” Crea points out the cracked windshield.

  Richie, his head crackling with pain, can’t see what Crea’s pointing at.

  “Indian Point. You listen to the Yanks on the radio, they’re always doing commercials for it. ‘Safe. Secure. Vital.’ My balls. That thing goes, it’ll take out everything for a hundred miles in every direction. Fucking Chernobyl part deuce.”

  “Can I ask you something?” Richie asks.

  “Why not? I’m feeling generous.”

  “Why’d you kill Vic?”

  “He was in my way. He kept me cooped up. I felt like one of them calves they keep in a box for veal. He didn’t trust me. He thought I was an animal.”

  “You are.”

  “True enough.”

  “What happened that day? He knew it was you?”

  “Sure. He knew as soon as I pulled up out front.”

  “Little Sal wasn’t even there?”

  “He was driving.”

  “Vic say anything?”

  “I had the gun on him. He said, ‘Shit or get off the pot.’”

  “Sounds like Vic.”

  “He died noble. Didn’t beg. I threw the gun near the basil as a memento. I hadn’t really started with the hammer yet. It was very traditional. Now tell me about Adrienne’s snatch. What’d she taste like? You seem like a guy likes to eat a broad out. Like a watermelon Jolly Rancher, that’s what I imagine. Tell me. I need some entertainment here.”

  Richie coughs again, the pain tearing through him. Everything goes black again.

  Sunlight glare on the windshield. Richie works himself up into a sitting position. They’re parked across from Mo Phelan’s house. They must’ve been lost for three or four hours, Crea taking bad turn after bad turn.

  Crea is slumped over the wheel now. “I can’t believe this piece of shit didn’t break down,” he says.

  “No sign of the Eldorado,” Richie says. “They’d be stupid to come here.”

  “They would be, you’re right. But we came all this way, we’re sure as hell going in to check.”

  On the edge of the glare, Richie sees blinds open in an upstairs window of the house next door to Mo’s. He sees Lucia for a moment, just standing there, and then she slams the blinds shut again. Stupid fucking kid. She’s lucky Crea didn’t notice her.

  He thinks through his options. What he wants now is to sacrifice himself so Lucia can make it. Seems like the only viable option. He’s got to kill Crea. He knows Crea has a piece, but he’s not sure where it is. He needs the piece. It’s his only chance. Lucia’s only chance.

  LUCIA

  Lucia’s thinking about how life isn’t fair. All this money sitting here between her legs, and she can’t do anything with it. She can’t just go live in an expensive hotel and get room servic
e every night. She’d get burgers and steaks and put so much butter on her bread, and she’d drink soda and beer and eat chocolate lava cake and curl up on the bed in bright white sheets and let someone else clean up her mess. She can’t go buy a house on a beach somewhere and take a swim and come back and make a sandwich and count her money and smoke cigarettes. Not a beach like Silver Beach. A beach like somewhere you run away to. Quiet. Private. Blue water. Birds. Maybe some shirtless guy running in the surf with his cute dog. But maybe she can at least try to find her father.

  Money is strange. She’s worried that Grandma Rena will make her do something stupid with it. Not even like pay-someone-to-kill-Crea stupid. Like turn-it-in-to-the-authorities stupid. She’s seen that in movies. There’s always a person who doesn’t want to stumble into a fortune in the wrong way. A person who will insist it’s blood money blah blah blah and wants absolutely nothing to do with it. Grandma Rena could be that person, despite what she said about not trusting cops. Lucia wonders if there’s a bus or train station in this town and if it’s a station like in those same movies where they have lockers and you can hide your money in there and then wear the key on a string around your neck and lay low until it’s safe to go get it.

  Lucia wishes a million things. She wishes she was born in another place and another time. She wishes she’d been born in the subway tunnels. She took a book out of the library once about the Mole People who lived down there and had these little shacks with electricity and they showered in the water that dripped from pipes, and she thought that sounded pretty good. She wishes she’d been born to a mother who was a famous actress and took her to all her movie premieres. She doesn’t really even know how she was born. Her mother never told her anything. Victory Memorial Hospital, that’s all she knows. She’s never seen pictures of herself in swaddling, rosy-cheeked. She wishes she’d been born in Italy. She wishes she’d had a father who tossed a baseball around with her and bought her teddy bears or dolls or anything. She wishes she’d known her father growing up. That she could see his face when she closes her eyes. His face is a big blur. His hands are a blur. His body and the clothes he wears, they’re all something she’s created in her mind. Richie is just flashes. Something like a father, in that he picked up pizzas from Patricia’s and fell asleep on the couch watching the Yankees with his hand down his pants. But never father enough. She hopes he’s dead. She hopes the string between him and this money is cut forever. She doesn’t care how he died. Or how he dies. Maybe he’s dying somewhere now. She doesn’t imagine what happened to her mother happening to him and feel sick at all. What she feels is relief.