by Thomas Pluck
“Aw, Tone. It’s got critters.”
“I’m sorry, alright? You even got a license?”
“I will soon enough.”
“See, you’re getting ahead of yourself,” Tony said. “I’m going back inside. I got a business to run.”
“I hope you run it better than you make coffee,” Jay said, and sluiced his cup’s contents into the weeds. “Tastes like you made soup out of assholes.”
“I wipe my ass on the filter. I should piss in it, too.”
“Might taste better if you did.”
Tony slapped Jay hard on the back, and pulled him along as he lumbered back inside. They worked away the afternoon. Jay helped Tony’s foreman, a chunky Puerto Rican named Guillermo, work the frame straightener on a T-boned Subaru. Jay squinted at the road any time a black truck cruised by. He let the work keep his mind off the Brush Cut twins, but kept a wrench in the hammer loop of his jeans in case they showed. It wouldn’t take Columbo to figure out where Jay had gone to ground.
When they broke for lunch, Jay followed the mechanics to a roach coach for a meatball sub. Tony drank a protein shake and ate from a can of tuna with fork.
Jay plucked a long strand of cheese from his mouth. “This computer you got. Think you can help find my folks?”
“I can try,” Tony said, looking away from Jay’s lunch.
“They’re probably back in Louisiana.”
“That don’t really narrow it down.”
Tony tapped the keys. “Google’s got nothing, on either Angeline or Andre Desmarteaux. Facebook, neither.”
“You might as well be speaking pig Latin,” Jay said. “They didn’t let me use those things. Look for woodworkers, maybe Andre’s got his own shop.”
“What was your mother’s maiden name?”
“I don’t know. Never met her side of the family. Just Andre’s brothers.” There was Pitou and Ti’ Boy. But those weren’t names, not really. “I ought to drop by my house. Maybe they left something, and the owner’s got it in the basement, or the garage.”
“You should stay out of Nutley.” Tony belched and swatted the air. “They made Mr. Bello mayor.”
“I paid my debts. More than I can say for some.” He peeled a layer of melted cheese off the tinfoil and ate it like a tortilla chip. “Speaking of, what’s Matty Strick up to these days?”
Tony shrugged. “He was a better programmer than I ever was. Wrote trading software for a hedge fund startup and made big coin. Then he went into real estate like his father. You see an office park, he’s probably behind it.”
Matt had been the kid who killed the curve in every class. He’d lived up to expectations.
“His old man still in town?”
“Nope,” Tony said. “Leo Zee’s chief, though.”
Leo Zelazko, the cop who’d shot the infamous carjacker, was the obvious choice for Nutley’s chief of police. His twin sons Billy and Brendan had been Jay’s friends since grade school. And the main target of Joey Bello’s torment.
“And Ramona?”
Tony’s eyes drifted over the old photo of them at the pool.
“She went back to her own. She’s with a big law firm out on Route Eighty.”
Ramona had wanted be an architect. Urged him to join her in drafting class, to design houses on paper. Now he was a convict and she was a lawyer who’d left him to rot. After how he’d behaved during her final visit, Jay wasn’t sure he blamed her much.
“I’m sorry, pallie. Twenty-five years is a long time.”
Jay stared out the dirty window at the Challenger.
“Maybe, you know, you ought to just fix her up and do like Fogerty said. Choogle on down to New Orleans,” Tony sang.
From “Born on the Bayou.” Choogle was a word whose meaning they’d pondered as teens while they worked on the Hemi, sneaking beers, a Creedence tape in the stereo.
“You can’t fight those kind of people. It’s like banging your head against the wall. Only feels good when you stop.”
“I got a pretty hard head,” Jay said, and rapped his knuckles on his skull.
Leo Zelazko and his partner had kept Jay up all night in the detectives’ office, detailing what would happen to his folks if he didn’t confess. Brought him out to see them both cuffed in the holding cell, with hangdog faces and tears in Mama’s eyes.
Pleading with him not to sign. Shouting that they could take care of themselves.
Jay crumpled the foil into a tight little ball.
“You should leave it alone,” Tony said. “These people were big enough shit back then and they’re bigger shit now.”
“Then I’ll use a plunger.”
“They knocked the Avionics tower down,” Tony said. “You see that? Things change. And there’s nothing we can do about it. Come on, let’s get the Challenger on the lift. Give you something to hammer on that won’t bring down a load of shit.”
They roped the Hammerhead to the shop truck and pulled it out of the weeds. Jay popped the old tires off the rims and put new shoes on, performance rubber. Then he walked underneath the chassis, checking the frame for rust. He wiggled the hammer beneath the engine bay. Something gray and fuzzy tumbled onto his shoulders.
“Shit!” Tony yelped.
Jay skipped aside and stomped the lump as it hit the floor.
“The hell was that?” Tony peered at the rear axle, brushed off his hair.
“Your last passenger,” Jay said, and held up the desiccated corpse of a bucktoothed squirrel. He thrust it at Tony. “Hide your nuts.”
“Gimme that.” Tony flipped the stiff critter into the trash bin.
They worked in silence, getting to know the car from their youth again. Wrenching seized bolts, razoring off old gaskets. The car had been Matty’s father’s. He’d sold it to Jay and Tony in exchange for yard work after Jay admired the wreck in his garage. It had been bent near in half from a passenger-side collision.
When Jay turned fourteen, Strick had it towed on a flatbed to his backyard. Andre chained the car’s frame to the old oak next to his wood shop and spun the tires until the frame was close to true. Jay and Tony bought a Haynes manual and picked through the junkyard when they had chore money to spend, but mostly they sat in the cracked vinyl buckets and dreamed of escaping onto life’s infinite highway.
Chapter 4
The taut clothesline ran from his swollen purple ankle to the leg of the sofa. The boy huddled under the sofa’s stained yellow arm. There he didn’t have to look at her. He dug at the knot with the carrot peeler. Crusted with blood.
He had to get free before the Gator man came.
Water dripped in the sink and tortured his dry throat. There was a warm glass of flat Coke on the other side of the sofa but he couldn’t reach.
Not without crawling on top of the Witch.
Flies buzzed over the hum of the television’s gray test pattern. The thick swamp heat had ballooned the Witch into a waxy purple slug seeping into the corduroy cushions. White holes where her eyes had been. Alive with maggots.
The stench coming off her was so thick the boy might drown in it. But it couldn’t hide the factory town’s rotten-egg miasma that had leached into the trailer’s walls and everything inside.
The boy pried at the knot, slipped and jabbed his swollen skin with the peeler. Black blood oozed to his feet.
He reeled at the pain and passed out.
Hands on him, soft. The boy woke with a snarl and stuck the peeler into the woman’s thigh.
A freckled face haloed in golden blonde. The boy bawled when he saw her face. The blood-encrusted peeler fell to the moldy carpet.
“It’s okay, little Jay Jay.” The woman bit her lip, wrinkled her forehead. Coughed into a bandanna. “You remember us, don’t you? I’m sorry we went away. Some bad folks made us go to school.” She turned to a tall man with a black beard. “Need your knife.”
The boy remembered the man. They’d gone fishing. He smelled good and never raised his voice. The man knelt and
squeezed the boy’s hand as the woman sawed away at the rope leading from the boy’s purple ankle to the leg of the sofa.
She carried the boy to the sink and held a jelly-glass of water to his cracked lips. He spat it up, then drank more.
“Sip,” she cooed.
The boy cried into her tied-off shirt, enveloped by her warm breasts. She carried him outside to a purple Jeep with no roof and cradled him in the passenger seat. An ax handle stuck from between the seat and the stick shift.
The man took a gas can off the back and stalked toward the trailer. A sulfurous wind flapped his denim vest, revealing a finger-grooved knife handle at his belt. When he returned, the trailer fumed black smoke.
“Her own boy,” the man said, sparkles in the corners of his eyes.
“Speak no ill of the dead,” she said. “You know who put her that way.”
The man nodded. He wore his hair long, tied back like an Indian brave.
The woman gently brushed the boy’s swollen toes. “Feel that?”
“Hurts,” the boy said, fading in her lap. The high sun gold through his closed eyes.
“No one’s gonna hurt you no more,” the man said.
“Baby, I’m your mama now,” the woman said.
The Jeep kicked gravel, pluming dust as they topped the levee and disappeared down the swamp road.
Jay woke screaming. He sat up in bed and squinted at the dark of the no-tell motel room Tony had found. The tang of sulfur in his throat dissipated in the cool night air. His head pounded and his belly ached. He turned the lamp switch. It clicked. The bulb had died while he slept. He hadn’t been in true dark for so long that it felt like a giant hand had snuffed out the world.
He stumbled to the bathroom and turned the light on.
Back in bed he stared at the bare ceiling, feeling like he’d been staked out on a desert plain with nothing for miles. Without the clang and clatter of men behind bars, the summer nightsong of traffic was an abysmal silence which set him on edge.
He tore the covers off the bed and stuffed them into the tub. He closed the bathroom door and curled in the tub to sleep with the comfort of four close walls crushing in.
In the morning he sprung out of the tub with a hoot and repped out his daily workout. Topped out with single arm pull-ups on the door lintel. He took a shower, hot as it would go, for as long as he damn well pleased. Finished it ice cold and felt ready to slap the Devil and kick his ass clear across the horizon.
He was free.
Jay killed his hunger in the red vinyl booth of a sprawling chrome diner. He hunched over a Denver omelet, two fat breakfast sausages, and a mound of home fries splashed with ketchup and hot sauce until the plate resembled a murder scene.
He thought about calling Martins on a payphone but figured the last thing the lawyer would want to hear was that the killer he’d worked two years to set free had committed aggravated assault on two men who were probably off-duty police officers, even if, as Jay suspected, they’d been in the employ of Matthew Strick, the former friend who’d testified against him at his first trial.
He worked at the shop all day. Tony found him a furnished studio apartment on Craigslist. A five-floor walkup in a brick complex in North Newark, on the edge of Branch Brook Park and its towering oaks and Japanese cherry blossom trees. The room had a twin bed, a galley kitchen, a clawfoot tub converted to a shower, a five-drawer dresser, and an armchair with a lever that tilted the seat to help you get out of it.
The rent was three hundred. Jay figured the previous tenant had died and the super, a fat man with lazy eyes and a sparse mustache, was still cashing the social security checks. The room smelled clean, had a window with a fire escape that looked out to the park, and a space for the Challenger.
Now he only learned to drive the damn thing.
Chapter 5
Herschel drove him to an abandoned lot with weeds poking through the asphalt where they exchanged seats. The cab was another ex-cop car with the spotlight installed by the driver’s side mirror. Something felt wrong about that.
Jay gripped the shifter.
“Whoa,” Herschel said. “You gotta adjust your mirrors. They failed me for that. And your seat belt, put your seat belt on.”
Jay cinched the belt tight. Held the wheel at nine and three, and eased into gear.
“Easy on the pedals. Smooth.”
They lurched away as Jay let off the pedal, feathering it as he circled the lot and looped around the light posts.
“Slow down on the turns,” Herschel said. “And don’t jerk the wheel so much. Easy around that pole, don’t take the mirror off.”
The cab drove like a boat. The tires squeaked as Jay palmed the wheel. Nothing like driving Mama Angeline’s Renegade from her lap while she worked the pedals barefoot. The Jeep had no speed but lots of torque, and it turned on a dime.
“Slower,” Herschel said.
“Gonna go back and do that turn again,” Jay said.
“Yeah. Try not to fling me around like Captain Kirk. Slow and smooth,” Herschel said.
Jay let the wheel slide to true between his fingers. Killed an hour as he learned to feel the car around him, the way the pavement crunched beneath the tires, and how the body swayed and righted itself.
“You got the hang of it,” Herschel said. “Next time maybe we’ll hit the street.”
“Come on, Hersch.” Jay rolled toward the exit. “It’s dead out there.”
Herschel looked up and down the road. “All right. Don’t do anything crazy now. This here’s my livelihood.”
“Promise,” Jay said. He eased out of the lot toward Nutley. The road was a wide ribbon of asphalt with aged and empty factories on one side and the concrete wall of Route 21 on the other. He eyed the speedometer and kept it to the limit. His old street was the next left over the border. He could cruise past the old house, maybe park outside a while. Grab a pear off the tree.
“You’re doing okay,” Herschel said. “Ha. It’s the other people on the road you gotta worry about, sometimes it feels like they’re all out to kill you.”
“I’m used to that,” Jay said.
A police siren blipped from behind. A gray cruiser filled the rearview, hidden flashers flickering blue in the grille.
“You gotta be kidding me,” Herschel said. “Should’ve known not to drive into Nutley. Pull over.”
The ice cube stuck in Jay’s throat told him to do otherwise.
“Stop the vehicle,” the cop barked over the loudspeaker, and blipped the siren a second time.
Jay white-knuckled the wheel, his work boot hovering between the brake and the gas.
“What’re you doing?” Herschel said.
Okie woke in Jay’s head. If you ain’t carrying contraband or got a serious warrant, running is a dumb play. You can’t outrun a radio. My last stand, I had a machine gun in my lap and a trunk full of cash. Had no choice. But there’s shit-for-brains in here serving time for running when they had nothing to run for.
Jay braked to a stop.
“About time,” Herschel snapped, and killed the ignition. “Keep your hands on the wheel. Let me do the talking.”
The ice cube sank to Jay’s gut and bloomed into a nest of cold snakes. The officer appeared in the driver’s side mirror. Suit and tie, tall and lean. Close-cropped brown hair.
Jay unsnapped his seat belt and popped the door locks. Pressed his shoulder to the door. A different voice than Okie’s told him to hip-slam the cop with the door and bounce his head off the sill. Snap his neck, take his piece and be gone.
The same voice that told him Joey had needed killing.
“License, insurance, registration,” the cop said. Flashed a Newark PD badge.
Jay choked back the snakes in his throat. “Ain’t got none, officer.”
Herschel leaned over. “I was giving him driving lessons, sir.”
“I wasn’t talking to you,” the cop said. “And I have a feeling Black & White Taxi isn’t a licensed driving instruct
or. Out of the vehicle, peckerwood.”
Jay glared at the cop. He stepped out with his hands up.
Gray around the temples. Hairline receding like surf at low tide. A smirk slashed across his sharp face. He pushed Jay’s shoulder toward the hood. “Assume the position, jerkoff.”
The same old big mouth. He had beefed out into a hockey goon with a regulation cop haircut.
Herschel leaned over. “Officer, I have registration and insurance.”
The cop slammed the door in Herschel’s face. “Stay in the vehicle.”
Jay kept his shoulders loose. “You gonna arrest me, you dumb Polack?”
The smirk faded, and the officer’s hand drifted toward his shoulder rig. “What did you say, asshole?”
“Aw shit,” Herschel said, and raised his hands.
The blinking red eye of the Avionics Tower glared from the beacon of ribbed gray steel as they rattled into town in a truck carrying everything they owned. Andre drove with slow precision, mindful of the limit. Mama Angeline kept her arms folded most of the way, tight-lipped over the sale of her Renegade. Jay sat between them, craning out the windows, chasing rock ’n roll on the radio dial on the two-day drive from St. Martin Parish.
“They got swamps here too,” Andre had said, as they circled the football stadium. “And no gators to bite you. I bet they got crawfish and sac-au-lait just like home.”
They moved into a cookie-cutter Cape Cod, one of three crammed on a lot neighbored by a truck repair shop and a lumber yard. Across the street was a white-sided A-frame inhabited by a squat old Italian woman who peered through her blinds like a mother warthog deciding whether to remain hidden or flay the intruders with her tusks.
They unpacked late into the night, then drove until they found a place called Rutt’s Hut that was open late. They took home a tray of hot dogs and ate them on the back porch with cups of Coke and watched the last innings of a local baseball league play out as the sun sank low.