Fresh Kills

by Bill Loehfelm

  What if the guy who helped Fontana down to the corner store every Sunday walked out, the quick-minded guy who would’ve made a great coach. The man who rode carousels with his daughter. What would I do then? Because him I didn’t know. Him, I’d never even met. And I wanted to. I had some things to say to him.

  I felt sicker. My hand shook against my forehead. I licked my lips, swallowed hard. Something stuck in my throat. Something hard that had risen up from my gut. I felt badly confused, off-balance. I wanted to ask my father something, but I didn’t know what. Or which version of my father to ask. Should I ask Where the hell ya been? Should I ask if the Jets would make the playoffs? Which man would answer? Which one did I want to talk to me? I didn’t know what answers I wanted.

  Then the light in the back of the funeral home went out and I was alone in the dark. Sick and sweating and afraid.

  And I remembered, as a train rolled into the station, that my father wasn’t walking out any doors, wasn’t picking fights or talking football with anyone anymore, no matter how long I waited. I felt a hole open inside me so wide I thought I’d disappear. It swallowed the hard thing I couldn’t swallow myself as it moved up my throat and it hurt like hell and I welcomed it. I closed my eyes and held my breath, waiting for it, wishing for it to happen. But it didn’t, because I lit up in the headlights of the car that turned the corner and screeched to a stop three feet short of where I stood.

  I think I screamed. The adrenaline charge sucked me right back into my boots. I stumbled away from the car and tripped over the curb, nearly toppling the makeshift 9-11 shrine by the sidewalk. The driver put her cell phone down long enough to shout a few choice curses at me as she drove away. I was too confused to answer. I rubbed the sweat on my forehead back into my hair and tried to catch my breath.

  Standing alone under the streetlights and stars, shaking in my boots, I watched a stray dog sniff around the trash can on the corner where my father died. I looked around at my feet for something to throw at it, but found nothing. The dog watched me as it lifted its leg on the can before trotting away out of sight.

  I turned to the memorial and righted the pictures and candles I’d knocked over. When I’d fixed things up as best I could, I lit a candle underneath a fading picture of a dead police officer. He was Eddie Francis, NYPD, age thirty-six years, father of two. Beloved brother. I’d known him well when we were both younger, different men. He’d always thought his sister and I made a good match.

  I hustled through the murder scene with my eyes closed and headed for Joyce’s to drink all the whiskey the Republic had to offer.

  NINE

  I EDGED OVER AS SOMEONE TOOK THE BAR STOOL NEXT TO ME, keeping my eyes fixed on my pint of Harp, well on my way to seeing double. There was no ball game. The home stand had ended and the Mets were traveling to Houston. I still felt better, more solid in my skin, sitting in Joyce’s, wrapped in a warm crowd of strangers, even without the distraction of a ball game. Each shot of Jameson blurred my thoughts of Scalia’s a little more. I worried they’d come looking for me again when I hit the couch that night, but what was there to do about that?

  The gathering pile of coins before me on the bar was enough to call Molly three times over. But with each drink, the bubble around me solidified, the gravity in my bar stool got stronger, and the hour got later.

  The voice next to me caught my ear when he ordered a double Jameson, neat. Then he told Joyce to back me up, and I turned to look. Jimmy McGrath, Jimmy the Saint, grinned back at me. It was a night for ghosts, and there was no getting away from it. “’Tis himself,” Jimmy said, settling back in beside me.

  Joyce brought over the shots. Jimmy raised his glass and I met it with mine. “Sláinte,” he said, and we drank. “Julia said you’d be down here.” He grinned again and half-stood, fishing for his wallet.

  Back in high school, Jimmy was the only close friend I’d had. Right off the bat, our freshman year, Jimmy and I bonded in the back of the detention hall. We learned quick that we frustrated the dean much better as a duo than we did individually. We were greater than the sum of our parts, bolder and more confident. It made all the difference to me, having someone share both the commission and the consequences of my minor crimes. I thought I didn’t care about anything? There was nothing and no one Jimmy wouldn’t laugh at. I admired the hell out of him and sometimes, when he was at his most dismissive of the world, burned with envy.

  I’d hung the nickname Jimmy the Saint on him our senior year. In the midst of a U2 fixation he took up Jesus, Causes, and black clothes, morphing from a mischievous teen into an insufferable little Bono right before my eyes. We didn’t see each other in detention anymore, though for different reasons. Jimmy straightened up and stopped getting sent. Bored there without him, I simply stopped going. I didn’t graduate from Farrell as much as I was shoved out the door.

  Jimmy went away to college in Florida, where he traded Jesus and Causes for keg beer and older women. I enrolled at the College of Staten Island, even pulling decent grades my first semester. On his holiday breaks, we’d get together and tie one on, but there wasn’t much to talk about. I didn’t know the people he knew down in Florida, didn’t do the things he did.

  We got some of the old magic back the summer of ’99, after he graduated. For a couple of sweet months, it was like those four years apart had never happened. We were eighteen again, running the same streets. We went out to Shea and the Garden together, played softball and darts for the same bars. We chased women and caught bands in Manhattan, riding back on the empty ferry at the crack of dawn, Bud tall boys in paper bags between our knees, Jimmy in a black leather jacket and wraparound shades.

  I didn’t know it then but that summer wasn’t a reunion; it was a last hurrah. He was gone again in the fall, this time to graduate school upstate. He didn’t come back to the island for three years. I blamed school for taking Jimmy from me. It made a good excuse to drop out of CSI after my third semester. Just when I figured I’d never see him again, he came back for a teaching position at Tottenville High, working like crazy to learn the ropes of a job he discovered he loved. I didn’t see much more of him than I did when he was upstate. Then, in December of his third year teaching, he met Rose Murphy. It wasn’t long before he discovered he loved her, too. He moved in with Rose the next summer, way down at the southern end of the island, near his school. They never answered the phone after ten.

  I called him every few months. Rose hung up on me if I was drunk. If Jimmy answered, he just apologized and talked about breaks from school. But those breaks always came and went without us getting together. We’d have a drink now and then if he could steal an hour to swing by whatever pub I worked in. We could never decide between resuming the old conversation and starting a new one. Sometimes it was months between visits, and as each year went by, we each sank deeper into our different worlds.

  In truth, I let myself be seduced by the action and steady cash of the bar business. I met Virginia over the bar. A tattoo artist in the East Village, she stopped in every night for a double Maker’s on her way home from the ferry. She was wilder, funnier, and more exciting than any girl I’d met at CSI. She had no use for school, either. She was, like me, into getting about the business of living. Her appetite for sex was monstrous and insatiable. I took Virginia as proof I made the right choice in leaving both school and daylight behind. We made the nights a lot less lonely for each other and every now and then, for someone else. For my thirtieth birthday, she gave me my first tattoo, inking my right shoulder with an elaborate mesh of Celtic tribal patterns and symbols. It covered my switchblade scars from high school.

  I thought being coupled-up might get me back in Jimmy’s good graces, but it never worked out. We squeezed in two late, rushed, uncomfortable dinners. Virginia rambled on endlessly about her various schemes for the future, as Rose just stared thin-lipped at her tattoos all night. Both times, Jimmy and I got way too drunk. I was disappointed, but Virginia filled my social schedule and sl
owly seeped, like ink, into the spaces of my heart. She made me laugh. She got me into trouble. We asked very little of each other. I didn’t worry about Saint Jimmy anymore. Three years went by like one long, slow day. Jimmy and I kept things barely alive with sporadic phone calls. Until Virginia walked out on me six months ago. I think Julia sent him to me then, too.

  He just appeared at my door the night Virginia moved out. The cavalry, with a case of beer in one hand and a copy of Brave-heart in the other. He stayed the weekend, drinking beer, watching hockey and violent, profane movies with me. I can’t remember a single thing he said to me that weekend, only that on Monday morning Jimmy was gone back to his world and I’d somehow managed a tether-hold on mine. I was able to clean the house and Monday night I was back at work, my life somehow moving again.

  With me back on my feet, Jimmy went back to his grown-up world on the southern end of the island and I held a small orbit around the bars at the northern end. Until he sidled up to me at Joyce’s, I hadn’t seen him since that weekend.

  “Bit of a shock,” I said. “Seeing you out on a school night with a drink in your hand.”

  “Extenuating circumstances,” Jimmy said. He covered the glass with his hand. “Just this one, though.” He picked up his drink and knocked it back. “Okay. Maybe one more.” He called for Joyce.

  “Rose’ll be mad,” I said.

  Jimmy shrugged.

  “You married yet?” I asked.

  Jimmy studied his left hand. “Nope, not yet. Maybe soon. We’ll see. It’s an odd thing, the continued success of our relationship argues both for and against matrimony.”

  “Rose buys that bullshit?”

  “Not at all,” Jimmy said. “She’s not big into paradox.”

  “So whenever she says it’s time?”

  “It’s time,” he said, laughing. He shook a finger at me. “Not that long ago, you were whipped as I am.” We laughed. It was true. I wondered for a moment if he was talking about Virginia or Molly. Jimmy had a way of making time disappear.

  “You doin’ all right?” Jimmy asked. “It’s a lot, you and Virginia and now this.”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “I just wanna get it all over with.”

  Jimmy looked at me. He knew there was more to it than that, but he had too much class to call me a liar to my face.

  “This powwow is overdue,” he said. “What happened to us?” He shook his head, took a tiny sip of whiskey. “Shit like this makes you think.”

  “Forget it,” I said. “Lord knows I could’ve tried harder. We’re all busy; life goes on. We grow up, or at least you did. You and Rose came to my mom’s funeral; you came by when Virginia split. ”

  “No, it’s not cool. That’s what I’m talking about,” Jimmy said. “I don’t want to be one of those people, paying my respects when tragedy strikes then disappearing back into the ether.” He paused. “We joke about Rose, but it’s not her fault.”

  “Look, I haven’t come looking for you much, either,” I said. “You and I both know I wouldn’t have called you this week. It goes both ways. And I know it ain’t Rose. She was good to me when Mom died.”

  “She’s always liked you,” Jimmy said.

  “Oh, I don’t know about that,” I said.

  “No, really,” he said. “She sent me down here tonight. I was just going to call you in the morning. She’s always rooted for you. She’s just, you know, protective.”

  “Rooted for me to do what?” I asked. “You need protection from me?”

  Jimmy grimaced, realizing he’d talked himself into a corner. “She wants you to, you know, find a girl, settle down. She just pulls for you to . . .”

  “Grow up?”

  Jimmy stalled. “Mellow out, maybe.”

  “Virginia and I lived together. I tried to settle down. She left me. Rose just never liked her.”

  “Believe me, I know,” Jimmy said. “Virginia was wild. And not exactly stable.”

  “Gimme a break,” I said. “What’s a couple tattoos? A nose ring?”

  “And a belly ring,” Jimmy said. “And a tongue ring.”

  “And a nipple ring,” I said, “and a . . .”

  Jimmy waved away the rest of my sentence. “Enough.” He laughed. “It’s a wonder she didn’t jingle when she walked.”

  We sat silent for a while, until Jimmy reached his arm across my shoulder. He leaned in close. “Look, lad, it wasn’t some catty thing. Rose never thought she was good enough for you, but it really had nothing to do with Virginia’s . . . accoutrements. Admit it, man. She tortured you. She’s going to Europe then she’s not. She’s going to Japan then she’s not. She’s going away to grad school in Bali or whatever fucking country half the world away, buying language tapes and everything, then she’s not.”

  “She had an adventurous spirit,” I said. “I admired it. I hoped it might take me somewhere, too.”

  Jimmy scoffed. “And now that she’s been liberated from the burden of you, where has she gone? Nowhere. Face it, she was a fake.”

  “She was like me,” I said. “She wanted more than this stupid island has to offer.”

  “Japan? Bali? The City’s a twenty-five-minute boat ride away. Answer me this, you ever get an invitation to these locales?”

  I had, sort of. Meet her there when she got settled, that kind of thing. We never got further than that. I knew she was being careful, wanting to be sure she was more to me than a ticket off the island. “Nobody’s perfect. It went both ways,” I said. “I wasn’t easy to live with, either.”

  “Who is?” Jimmy said. “I never knew how you lived so long with it. Her, always with one foot out the door.”

  “I held on hard to the one I had,” I said. I smiled. “Till she chewed it off.” We laughed, and I relaxed. Then Jimmy shone his troublemaker’s grin at me. The one I used to get before Bono happened, the one I used to get right before we got Saturday detention. “Now, Molly she likes a lot.”

  I blinked at him, startled. How in the hell did Rose know about Molly and me? Jimmy must’ve read the question off my face.

  “Tottenville held an in-service, about a month ago,” Jimmy said. “Molly was there. Bunch of us went out for drinks after and Rose met up with us. I introduced them. I didn’t know about you and Molly, your current situation, yet. Shit, I hadn’t seen Molly in forever. We told Rose how we knew each other, started talking about you, high school. Poor Molly, it just popped out of her.” He grinned. “Like she’d been just dying to tell.” He waved a hand. “Don’t worry. Rose can keep a secret. And me, you know I never see anybody but Rose.”

  “I don’t know how much of a secret it is, anymore,” I said. Jimmy and Rose knew. Waters and Purvis knew. Julia knew. I tried to relax. None of them were big talkers. Except for maybe Purvis, but he was all talk. And what did I care? I wasn’t the one with something, someone, to lose. Though who knew what Molly would do if David found out?

  “For the record, I don’t blame you,” Jimmy said. “The years have been more than kind to our Ms. Francis. Rose spent three days talking about her legs. You don’t know how hard it was pretending I hadn’t noticed them, or the rest of her.”

  “I’m glad you approve,” I said. I thought of Jimmy checking out Molly, noticing the shape of her from behind, the rise of her breasts, and realized I felt uncomfortable with it, almost offended. Possessive. I pushed the thoughts away. What would David think, as if I cared, about what I was doing with Molly? If anyone was violating someone else’s space, it was me.

  “Just so you know,” Jimmy said, leaning close again, like a conspirator, “Molly didn’t say anything explicit, but Rose got the distinct impression that she might be up for a little more than . . . well, what you’ve got going on right now.”

  “You can say ‘just fucking,’ ” I said. “Nobody’s feelings will be hurt.”

  Jimmy raised his hands. “It is what it is. I’m just saying, in case you were wondering.” He put his hand over his heart. “As for me, I, too, must come out
in favor of such an arrangement. And I think I can speak Rose’s approval.”