Julia wouldn’t know who the guy was, either. That was probably why she’d left the picture out, to remind her to ask me about it. There was nothing for me to tell her. It occurred to me, standing there in that empty kitchen, that there was no one left but me to ask. It was a shame. I didn’t have any answers. I put the photo back into the box, burying it under a pile of the others. I switched off the kitchen light, grabbed my jacket, and headed out the front door.
I decided to forgo the car and its busted taillight and its expired registration. Minus my few pleasant hours passed out next to Molly, I’d pretty much been drinking for twenty-four hours or so and I’d seen enough cops for one day. So I walked, head down, hands in my jacket pockets, the few blocks along Richmond Avenue down to Joyce’s Tavern.
THE PLACE WAS NEARLY EMPTY when I walked in, just two old drunks at the end of the bar and one couple leaning close together at a side table. Old Joyce himself stood behind the bar, white apron stretched across his plump belly, the soft colors of the Christmas lights over the liquor shelves shining on his bald head. He watched me, digging fingers into his black beard, as I took a seat at the bar under the TV. Then he whispered something to the drunks.
They looked at me, the watery eyes of the old men dark in the dim light of the bar. I stared back at the three of them. Joyce was either trying to recognize me, or already had, and was debating whether or not to throw me out. One of the drunks said, “Sanders’s kid,” to him and he nodded some more. Like it was on the rest of the island, “Sanders’s kid” was a strong indictment at Joyce’s.
For half a year or so my father had been a regular, picking this joint after he’d worn out his welcome somewhere else. I’m surprised it took him so long to get here. It was the bar closest to the house and literally on the way home from the Eltingville train station. My father had walked right past Joyce’s Tavern on his way home from work every weekday for years. It would be his last stop, his last regular bar. His reputation preceded him, but my father paid his tab and didn’t misbehave any more than the other regulars, so Joyce gave him a chance. But my old man had a special talent for getting under someone’s skin, for picking the one thing that drove them craziest and latching on to it like a pit bull. For Joyce, that thing was Northern Ireland.
Born on the Catholic side of Belfast, Joyce finished high school there before joining his older brother on Staten Island, taking over the bar when his brother died years later. All in all, Joyce had adjusted to the island well enough. He lived with the traffic, the frantic pace, the pollution, and the smell of the Dump in summer. All of it was easier to take, I guess, than riots and kneecapping.One thing he always hated, however, was drunken spouting about “the Troubles.” He once smacked a guy right in the mouth for ordering an Irish Car Bomb.
The “barstool Irish” Joyce called them, the Irish-Americans, three or four generations removed from Ireland, who’d never even been to the Republic, never mind the North, but who loved to get shamrock tattoos, shout about getting the Brits out of Ireland, and ask him how to send money to the IRA. Of course, barstool Irish were also the lifeblood of the tavern’s business; Staten Island was loaded with them and my father could’ve been their king. I had the pleasure of being there when, after my mother’s funeral, my father wore out Joyce’s patience and his reign came to an end.
My father was three-sheets and on his soapbox. The early negotiations for what became the Good Friday Accord had already begun, but it wasn’t like my father to learn anything about what he chose to pontificate about. And that day he was eager to make noise about anything other than my mother being dead, to do anything that deflected the accusing stares that followed him.
He stood on the bar rail, waving his wallet in the air, hollering that he would match any donations to the “beloved boyos fighting for the union of the motherland.” I sat two stools away, my face in my hands. Julia stormed out. Joyce had already asked the old man three times to sit down and shut up, only to be told to fuck off. Joyce finally got my father’s attention by walking away with his whiskey.
When my father jumped down from the rail and protested, stumbling over his own feet, Joyce barreled out from behind the bar. He leaned right into my father’s face, demanding to know when the righteous Mr. Sanders would be flying off to Ulster to join the fight.
My father blinked at him, silent for a long moment. “Ulster?” he finally said. “What the fuck’s gotten into you, Joyce? I’m talking about Ireland. Where the fuck is Ulster?”
Joyce went right for his throat. It took me and three other guys to pull them apart. My father was banned for life from Joyce’s Tavern. I started hanging out there more often.
As he studied on me from the far end of the bar, I wondered if Joyce would remember that I’d helped drag my father off him and out the door. From the look on his face, the jury was still out as he headed my way.
“Harp,” I said. He didn’t move. Okay, I thought, be that way. I tossed my cigarettes on the bar, took one out and lit it. I thought about spitting on the floor. If he was gonna eighty-six me, it was gonna be for something I did. Joyce didn’t say a word. He set an ashtray on the bar then went off to pour my beer. I laid a twenty on the bar.
“Who’s gonna check on a Sunday night?” he said. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Won’t catch those two complaining.” He took my money, pouring fresh drafts for the drunks before he made my change.
“I got theirs, too. Keep the change.” He did, dropping two fives into his tip jar. The drunks raised their empties in my direction as Joyce set the full glasses in front of them. There. Now everyone was happy. We could all relax.
“I’m sorry about your father,” one of the drunks said. “It’s a terrible thing.”
I turned my back and looked up at the TV. Inning fifteen. Each team had scored one in the fourteenth. This game might never end. Joyce brought me a full beer when mine was empty.
“How come I hardly see you anymore except when someone dies?” he asked.
“I moved to the North Shore, up by the Boat,” I said, “a while ago.”
“Your old man’s at Scalia’s then?”
“He will be.”
Scalia’s brought Joyce a lot of business. We’d waked my mother there, waked her parents not long before her. It was where we’d waked my friend Mike after he flipped his car, where we waked Molly’s brother, what they found of him, after 9-11.
“How’s Julia doing?” Joyce asked.
“Fine,” I said, surprised he remembered my sister’s name. “You know, as well as she can, considering. She’ll be in this week with me, I’m sure.”
Joyce stared at me, grinding his jaw. “Good. I’m glad she’s doing all right.” He glanced at the drunks, then back at me. “She looked like hell this afternoon.”
“She was in here?”
“Briefly,” Joyce said. “Talking to that big-nosed detective. Purvis. The one you used to know. He bought her a glass or two of wine.”
I turned, looked at the front door, wiped a hand down my face. Well, shit. Halfway between Joyce’s and Scalia’s was the Optimo deli where my father liked to buy his beer and cigars, the place where he’d been shot. I straightened on the stool. That deli was practically next door. Only the pharmacy and the hair salon stood between it and Joyce’s. What was Purvis doing, bringing her to the crime scene? I wanted to strangle him. I thought maybe I would next time I saw him, which explained why Julia hadn’t told me much about it.
“What did she see?” I asked. “What was out there when they came by?”
Joyce hemmed and hawed. “Probably not much. Of course, he was long gone, your father, by then. The meat wag—ambulance— came right away. There was nothin’ left but a bunch of cops, some police tape.” He shrugged. “I don’t know what to tell you.”
“Had she been there? To the corner? Did Purvis take her there?”
“I dunno,” Joyce said. “I didn’t talk to her. I recognized her, you know, of course, but what do you say?” He rubbed s
ome stray ashes into the bar. “They came in and they left together. I poured her drinks. I didn’t know what else to do.”
“Fair enough.” I drained the last of my Harp and asked for another, with a shot of Jameson on the side. Joyce hesitated. “Please. I’m not gonna wreck the place. I’m not my old man. I don’t give a shit about Ulster.”
Joyce raised his eyebrows at me.
“What?” I said. “Both sides have been throwing bombs at each other so long, they probably don’t even remember what for. It’s fucking pointless.”
He looked at me for a long time. “Seems they’ve been getting somewhere in the past few years. No one’s thrown any bombs in a while. Sure, there’s been Omagh, the murder, the robbery. But even Paisley finally retired. People are trying.”
“Trust me,” I said. “It’ll never end. Not there, not with the Arabs and the Jews, not with the Sunnis and the Shiites. People love to hate each other. It’s too easy.”
He set the beer down in front of me and next to it an empty rocks glass. “It’ll end. Either they’ll work something out, or they’ll just get tired of fighting.” He tilted the whiskey over the glass, pouring me what was easily a double shot. “One way or another, every fight eventually ends.”
I started to say something else but thought better of it and reached for my wallet. This time, Joyce wouldn’t take my money. He walked over to the drunks. A rerun of M*A*S*H played silently on the television over my head. I wondered who had lost the ball game.
At closing time, outside the bar, I shoved my hands in my jacket pockets and looked down the street. I shivered. The weather had changed. Heavy clouds blocked the stars and moon. The wind blew hard and steady, and way too cold for May, even at half past midnight. I could smell the rain on it, and a hint of the Dump.
When he turned from locking the door, Joyce caught me staring at the torn yellow police tape that cordoned off the corner. Loose ends snapped in the wind.
“You all right?” he asked, taking my elbow.
I jerked my arm free, my eyes locked on the corner. “Fine. I hadn’t really thought about it being so close.” I turned to him; he had backed a few steps away. “What did you see?”
“Nothing,” he said, his fingertips worrying his beard. “I was still at Mass when it happened. The cops were already here when I came to open up.”
“You see him carted off?”
“Nah. Who wants to watch something like that?”
I thought Joyce might make his escape but he just stood there. “What did you hear?” I asked. He looked away. “C’mon, Joyce. Your bar was full of cops and people from the neighborhood all day. People who knew my father. I wanna know what they’re saying.”
He sighed through his nose. “It happened real fast. Car screeched up to the curb. Guy got out, hit your father twice in the back of the head, drove away. There were people around, but everybody ducked at the shots. Nobody even saw the gun till it was spinnin’ on the sidewalk and your dad was down. The car was long gone.” He held out his hands. “Nobody could’ve done a thing for him.”
“Anybody get a good look at the guy?”
Joyce shook his head. “He was white, big. That was the best anybody could do.”
I tossed my cigarette in the street and stepped up to Joyce. To his credit, he just set his shoulders and tilted his chin up at me. “All night I sit in your bar and you never think to tell me any of this?”
“It’s my job?” Joyce said. “What about the cops? You talked to them. You talked to Julia. I figured they’d told you.”
I backed off. “You know any names? Anybody who saw something?” We stared each other down awhile, then I saw the question move across his eyes. I was asking myself the same thing. Why was I asking? “Because I want to know what happened,” I said. “I’m thinking I might want to talk to people.”
“Not that I know anything anyway,” Joyce said, “but I don’t think that’s a good idea. It ain’t healthy. That’s what the cops are for.”
“Look,” I said. “I’m not looking to make trouble. I just want some answers. You know? For my sister.”
Joyce squinted up at me, his mouth turned down at the corners. He didn’t believe a word I was saying. “It’s not always easy with you, Junior. Who can tell how you’ll react to things? That way, you’re just like your father.”
I lit another smoke. My father got drunk and hit things. That was how he reacted. What was unpredictable about that?
Joyce offered me a lift home. When I declined, he patted my shoulder, told me to take it easy the next few days, and asked me to extend his condolences to my sister. I said I would, but I didn’t move from the doorway. He looked at me over the roof of his car.
“Go home, Junior,” he said. “Leave it alone. Take care of your sister.”
He drove away, leaving me in the doorway, smoking and trying to decide what to do next. Richmond Avenue stretched before me so empty, so quiet, that I could hear the traffic light at the intersection changing colors. I heard the echoes of a train in the distance, but I couldn’t tell if it was coming closer or heading away, the wind confusing things. I wasn’t ready to go home. I was hammered, but felt like I couldn’t possibly sleep, like I might never sleep again. I felt more restless than I had when I’d left the house.
Down the street, a late-night train rattled into the Eltingville station. It had been coming this way after all, had been closer than I’d thought. I watched as it creaked to a stop, the silver cars shimmering under the amber lights of the station. All the cars looked empty. The doors hissed open. After a few moments the two-note warning bell sounded, the doors closed, and the train groaned into motion. More than a few nights, when I was younger and still living with my folks, it had carried me home from some bar, or from the ferry terminal at the north end of the line, the only rider in my car, and in the cars on either end of mine.
Then I heard footsteps echoing from the station. Someone coming down the stairs. A slightly inebriated gait. A young woman, short-haired, pulling a denim jacket tight around her, emerged from the shadows at the foot of the station. She paused at the corner, pulled a pack from her jeans and lit a cigarette. She looked familiar, the way she cocked her hips as she flicked the lighter, but I knew it was only a trick of the shadows and streetlights. I didn’t know a soul down this end of the island anymore.
She stepped into the street, heading my way, then stopped dead in her tracks. I thought maybe she had spotted me in the doorway and taken me for a mugger, or worse, but when I backed farther into the darkness, she didn’t react at all. She was staring at the corner in front of her, at the broken police tape. She turned and disappeared into the shadows of the side street, her steps quick and steady now, gravel crunching beneath her boots. When she was gone, I walked to the corner. I wished I had packed a flask.
A streetlight hung over my father’s murder scene, glaring down on it like a spotlight. Strands of tape blew in the wind like the tails of cheap yellow kites. I caught a tail in my hand, pulled it free, and wound it around my fist. I stared down at the concrete. The chalk outline of his body was already smudged, fading away. At the head, someone had tried washing the blood off the sidewalk. They’d done a poor job, the dark stain still a shadow on the concrete. A rusty, graffiti-covered security shutter guarded the front of the store, and I wondered how much of my father’s blood and brains had splattered against the building. Joyce’s whiskey lurched in my belly.
I passed through the tape, squatted down beside the chalk and the stains, arms draped over my knees, cigarette burned down to the filter, burned out, between my knuckles. I could still smell the bleach. A headache rose behind my eyes and I tried to breathe shallow. My leather jacket creaked at the shoulders when I reached out and rubbed my fingers in the stains on the sidewalk. My fingertips came away clean. I wondered how much longer the outline and the stains would last. The deli would open in the morning, and people would walk right over the bleach and the chalk and the blood, rushing for their coffee and
bagels and their Daily News before they caught the train.
The chalk would fade away under their footsteps. Whatever tape lasted the night would be stuffed in the trash. In a couple of days the blood would look only like so much spilled coffee.
Fresh Kills Page 5