Fresh Kills

by Bill Loehfelm

  I don’t know how long I’d been there when the rain started, but my knees cracked and my thighs ached when I stood. I dropped my cigarette butt, crushing it under my boot out of habit. I stomped my feet, shook my legs, forcing my blood to get moving again. Another empty train rattled into the station. I turned my back and walked away, a little unsteady on my feet, a yellow kite tail stuffed in my pocket. I got as far as the other corner and the pay phone by the traffic light. I had a bad idea.

  I dug through the hole in my jacket pocket and fished out all the loose change I could find. I wiped the rain off my face and stacked the coins on top of the phone. Then I laughed at myself. Like there was any chance the phone would work. I lifted the receiver. The dial tone hummed in my ear. I should be back at the house, dry and warm in my parents’ den, drinking my father’s whiskey.

  When a voice from the phone told me what I should do if I’d like to make a call, I realized the receiver was still in my hand. I set it back in the cradle. I didn’t know Molly’s phone number. She’d never given it to me. I wasn’t allowed to call her. I could call information. I picked up the receiver again, set it back down. I stared at the pile of coins. Yeah, that’d be a big hit, a drunken phone call in the middle of the night. On a school night, no less. What would I tell her, even if she answered? What am I up to? Oh, nothing much, just heading home from hanging around my father’s murder scene in the pouring rain. So, I could ask, you alone? I could catch a train.

  I tossed the coins into the street. There was a slight chance, between the booze and the rain and the hour, I wasn’t thinking straight. The walk home would help me calm down. If I still wanted to make that call, I could make it from the house. I knew I wouldn’t, but the thought got my feet moving again. I’d go back to the deli, in the daylight, when there was someone there to talk to and I could find out some things. It took me three blocks to light a cigarette in the rain.

  I TRIED TO BE AS QUIET as possible coming in the front door, but the locks gave me trouble. Swearing, I finally got them open, shoving the door so hard it banged against the wall. I stood there awhile, listening. No sound came from upstairs.

  I grabbed my bag from the hall and stripped and changed into a T-shirt and boxers in the den. I dried my hair with a kitchen towel, then headed into the living room to raid the liquor cabinet. My father hadn’t left a will, but I knew he had left the cabinet well stocked. There they were, the unopened bottles of Jameson, when I opened the door. Beside the bottles was a set of dusty, seventies-era rocks glasses. I’d seen them before; I’d been raiding the liquor cabinet since I was fifteen. The glasses, like the rack of poker chips and the cork coasters on the shelf below the whiskey, were holdovers from the days when my folks entertained. It was just like my mother to never get rid of them, just like my father to forget they were there.

  I blew the dust out of a rocks glass, fingering the raised brown and gold designs. I cracked open the bottle, the spiced wood smell of the whiskey rising to my nose as I poured. I downed the shot, and immediately felt better. I squeezed my temples in the fingers of my free hand. I was damn glad I hadn’t broken down and called Molly.

  I poured another drink and settled on the couch. I put my glass on the coffee table and studied my trembling hands. It wasn’t that long a walk home but the rain had chilled me bad. I downed half the drink, trying to coax the warmth it put in my belly out through the rest of me, and resolved to forget what I’d done on the corner. I couldn’t understand it, and I didn’t want to hear Julia’s theories on what it might mean. It didn’t mean anything, other than I was drunk and restless, uselessly curious about an event that changed my life not at all.

  I draped my arm over my eyes, rested my drink on my belly. I wanted to think about things that had nothing to do with the house, with my father. His death or his life. I tried to think about Molly, but I couldn’t hold the visions I wanted. Nothing sexual. Molly resting her chin in her palm. Molly turning her cigarette against the edge of the ashtray, her eyes down as she listened to me talk. Grown-up Molly. Something recent. I wanted what was waiting for me at the end of this long, stupid week.

  But every time I searched for the Molly of the past three months, I couldn’t find her. The Molly of our high school romance shoved her out of the picture every time. I couldn’t look away from seventeen-year-old Molly. Her, walking ahead of me down New Dorp Lane, talking a mile a minute over her shoulder. A punk’s bright red streak dyed in her hair, a woman’s hips straining at her secondhand blue jeans, a girl’s arms swinging from her brother’s newly sleeveless red hockey jersey. The same butterflies came to me on the couch that came to me that day on the street.

  I saw Molly dancing to U2 at a party in the candlelit living room of a friend’s house, her Keds abandoned in the corner, her black T-shirt rising over her pale stomach, arms entwined over her head, a perfect picture of “Party Girl.” Molly, outside that house later that night, crossing the wet grass of the backyard toward me, her feet still bare.

  I saw Molly in the backseat of my father’s Cadillac, after he’d picked us up from the party. Her reflection in the window, her streak was blue by then, a curl at the corner of her mouth. Her hand creeping up past my knee. Molly pulling her hand off my thigh when my father’s suspicious eyes appeared in the rearview mirror. I’d hated him more in that moment than I had ever in my life. My stomach hurt as bad as it did then.

  I stared down into my drink. I’d wanted a few quiet pictures of what was happening now. Just something to ease my mind. But all I’d come up with was a list of lost moments, a sequence of images that had somehow morphed into a trail back to my father. I felt as pissed as I had that night in the car, the way he hung, even freshly dead, over everything. I closed my eyes, ran my palms over my thighs. I was worse than my sister with her photographs. I swallowed the last of the whiskey, pressed the empty glass against my forehead. Young Molly came to me one more time.

  She knelt on her parents’ kitchen floor, looking up at me. A red bandanna held her hair back from her pale face. Rage danced in her eyes. Muscles bulged at the corners of her jaw, as if she were chewing on curses and swallowing them as they rose from her throat. Bloody paper towels littered the floor around her. Blood smeared the plastic bag of ice in her hand. She pushed my sweaty hair from my eyes and said something about my riding the train in my condition. She asked if anyone had even offered to help me. I shook my head.

  She reached up and pressed the bag to my mouth, inching closer to me. Her other hand palmed my cheek, holding my head steady when I flinched at the ice. My eyes flitted from her face to my hands, curled in my lap. I was afraid to touch her and too exhausted to move. She said something about stitches. She said something about her brother’s latest hockey game. A joke. I tried to talk and she moved the bag away. Nothing came out. Droplets of blood, from the bag, from my mouth, peppered the floor between my feet. It seemed they’d never stop falling.

  I turned out the lights and curled up on the couch. That day in the kitchen wasn’t the only time Molly took care of me after one of my father’s rages. I often found my way to her after a beating. Sometimes, like that day, I just appeared at her parents’ door. Who knows what they thought? Other times, I’d call from a pay phone and we’d meet somewhere. I bloodied more than a few of her bandannas. She never seemed to mind, and I knew I could always steal new ones for her.

  Her anger sometimes rivaled mine, it seemed, the way her eyes and hands trembled. She went electric with fury. I could hear it crackling in her voice no matter how soothing she tried to sound. More than once, I half-expected to find her at my parents’ front door, calling my father out into the driveway. Sometimes, after she’d helped patch me up and calm me down, I wondered if she was angry at me, for letting it continue and for not finding a way out. More often, I was just ashamed of myself and my family. These things didn’t happen in Molly’s house.

  For a long time she asked about the beatings, asked about my father. Sometimes she asked when the wounds were still
fresh. Sometimes she asked after the cuts and bruises had healed. She asked why. She wanted reasons, wanted answers. Then one day, she stopped asking.

  Maybe she accepted the only explanation I had, the one I spat out over and over. My father was a violent, raging man and he hated me. Maybe she finally believed me. She’d certainly seen plenty of evidence. Maybe she just got sick of hearing it. Whatever the reason, I was glad when she stopped asking for answers. I wanted them, too, but by then more for her than for myself. Not having them for her only made everything more humiliating.

  We hadn’t said a word about him this time around until Purvis had shown up at the door. There was no talk of my father, no talk of Eddie. What was the point? She and I aren’t like we were then, wrapped up in each other’s lives, needy for each other’s teenage drama. We weren’t in love anymore. We’d grown up and streamlined. Like good adults, we kept our scars to ourselves. It was just as well. All these years down the road I didn’t have any better answers, about either my father or her brother.

  Five years ago, after she first moved to Boston for grad school, Julia used to call me with her psychobabble bullshit. Usually, it was right after she’d been to see her therapist, when she was just brimming with insight and hundred-dollar-an-hour wisdom. My father was afraid of his family, she said. And the fear he didn’t even know possessed him tore its way out of him masked as anger. This is what my sister told me, that my father kicked the shit out of my mother and me because he was afraid of us. Whatever.

  I indulged my sister her theories. I made noncommittal noises into the phone as she talked, wondering who she was really trying to convince of their veracity, me or herself. I didn’t much care what she believed or whether it was true or not. It didn’t change anything, and if it brought her some comfort, I felt she was welcome to it. I had no right to disabuse her of her illusions. But I didn’t believe a word of what she said. I was the one who got hit, who saw his eyes, blind and blank with rage, like the doll-eyes of a shark. I had all the real evidence writ in black and blue all over my body, and it all added up to one clear, simple fact. My father was mad as hell.

  There weren’t any hidden emotions, any identity crises, behind it. There was no mystery. My father was flat-out, full-on pissed off, at the world and everything and everyone in it. For all I knew he was born that way. Or maybe it started when the stadium lights went dark and he was left with nothing but real life. Maybe, in his eyes, he was an improvement over his own father—a hard man from the Irish coast who, drowning in bad debts, a cinder block in his embrace, stepped off a Staten Island pier a dozen years before I was born. That was one thing about my father—for better or worse he was always there.

  What I did know was that when he hit the boiling point, when he realized the world wasn’t going to crumple at his feet like a second-string running back, my father lashed out at whatever was closest. Sometimes it was Mom, sometimes it was me. He couldn’t hit his boss, he couldn’t hit all the people crushed up against him on the train, couldn’t hit the bank, or the car, or the government. So he hit us. And he kept hitting us. Because, no matter how many bruises I had across my back, the boss kept nagging, the train stayed crowded, and the bills kept coming. Despite all the bone-crushing tackles he’d handed out, despite all the plates he could stack onto the barbell, even into his fifties, my father couldn’t bury the dirty little secret that he wasn’t tough enough for the life of a middle-class husband and father of two.

  That’s the way I saw it in high school, when I was with Molly. I still see it that way. I didn’t think this way when I was a kid. Kids need reasons for things, the simpler the better. Kids live in the present, not the past. As a kid, I knew he hit me because I had done something wrong. Why else was I being punished? Most times I couldn’t tell you, for the life of me, what I had done, but I must’ve done something. Parents don’t punish their kids, don’t smack them in the face then punch them in the back when they duck when they’re eight years old. Not unless that kid has done something very wrong.

  In the dark, I’d sit on the edge of my bed, trying to stifle my sobs, my T-shirt pulled up to the bridge of my nose. I sure as hell didn’t want anything to cry about. I’d squint my eyes and clench my little fists, maybe do a little hitting on myself, and try to remember every moment of that day. What had I done? There must have been something. If I could find it, I could not do it again. There are lots of things you can find at eight. Did I come right when he called? Were all my shoes in the closet? Had I left my books on the kitchen table? Did he know my teacher took my baseball cards away during the math test? Was I stupid? Ugly? If I could find it, I could fix it.

  I never found it, though, because whatever it was, I kept doing it. I must have kept doing it. I kept getting hit. All that deep thinking ever got me was another handful of broken crayons, another pile of shredded baseball cards, to hide in the bottom of the wastebasket.

  Then, when I was ten and Julia was six, things clarified for me. We were all in the kitchen, the whole happy family. Julia was drying the dishes that Mom was washing. It was Julia’s favorite thing to do with Mom, the dishes. To this day, she does the dishes when she’s depressed. Even if they aren’t dirty. She’ll pull them out of the cabinet and wash them for the hell of it. It still works, she says. And my sister tells me I have coping problems.

  That day, Julia dropped a glass and it shattered at her feet. My father erupted from his chair at the kitchen table, spilling his coffee and whiskey, and belted my sister across the kitchen, splitting her lip in two places. It was the first and last time he ever hit her. Faster than I had ever seen even my father move, my mother had her nails at his eyes. One of the scratches on his cheek left a scar. And the screaming. She screamed at him over and over, “Not my baby doll, not my baby doll.” I crawled out from under the table and dragged Julia back under it with me, hiding her as best I could, her lip bleeding deep into my shirt.

  My father dragged my mother into the den by her hair, as if he could hide from us what he was going to do. They had a bad accident, and a few more things got broken. I thought it was the end of the world. It was only later that night, as I lay in bed, that my mother’s words meant anything to me. I doubt I thought the words, but I had the realization that my mother had given up on me. She had surrendered me to my father’s rage. Not your baby doll, sure. I didn’t want that bastard kicking the crap out of Julia, either. But where, over the years, had been the words not my son? Why had she never unsheathed those claws for me? That night in bed I discovered the reason. It was the only one, and as clear as the full moon outside my window. I was that bad a kid. Had to be. One parent hated me and the other had given up on me. Parents didn’t do things like that unless you gave them a reason. All the time I had spent looking for the things I had done wrong was wasted. I was wrong. Whatever a good kid was supposed to be, I wasn’t it.

  I remember looking at my classmates in the days following that night, studying Purvis and all the other ones who had seemed the most like me. Whatever secrets they had, they weren’t revealing them to me. I watched my sister, but I couldn’t see the difference between her and me. Our grades were the same. We kept our rooms just as neat. For all I knew, though I never looked, she could’ve had broken toys under her bed.

  All I learned was that I was, for reasons beyond my obviously limited capacities, different. Less than. My classmates knew it, my parents knew it, and my teachers knew it. My sister had to know it, though she never gave it away. I was the last to know. It was proof of how stupid I was.

  After that night in the kitchen, things were never the same between my sister and me. She grew wide-eyed and wary around me. She watched me like I was a sickly stray dog that maybe carried a dangerous contagion. I half-believed she was right, and wondered if I’d infect her. I was tempted to bite her. The difference hung, like gauze, between us. I hated myself for pulling her under the table, and hated myself over again for even thinking that way. I hated myself most of all for not getting her under the tab
le before she got hit. Maybe that was why she treated me different, because I’d been too slow. I vowed not to make that mistake again.

  I sat up on the edge of the couch, my head down between my knees. The room wouldn’t stop spinning. My thoughts spun even more wildly. I wondered if Julia and I could still fit under the kitchen table. I wondered if, that night long ago, we could’ve fit my mother under there with us. Why hadn’t I reached for her, too, that night? My gut boiled. I hadn’t been sick from drink in a long time, years. I did remember it well enough to know it wasn’t a sure thing just yet. I still had a choice. I could stagger down the hallway to the bathroom and get it over with, or I could fight it. I wasn’t in the mood to move, so I dug in for the fight, taking deep breaths and trying to focus on the floor.

  The first time I drank myself sick I was at a Halloween party my senior year. At Jimmy’s house. Molly’d left me by then, so she wasn’t in the car, thank God. She’d brought a date to that party, in fact, a contributing factor to my going overboard. My father had come to pick me up early, just to fuck with my good time. Jimmy’d already switched me to ice water, but my father’s early arrival had totally thrown off my recovery timing. Before we were halfway home, I got sick all over the side of the Cadillac.