“I’m gonna find out what I wanna know,” I said, glaring at Mike as he inched away from me. “You run,” I told him, “I’ll chase you down and fucking kill you.”
“They didn’t do it,” Jimmy said. “Jesus, where’s your head? I just blamed them to scare them.”
“We didn’t burn it. We swear,” Mike said. “We just watched from over here.”
“Tell him what happened,” Jimmy said.
“Two cars parked across the lot, way over there, by where all the lights are busted out. One guy got out of each,” Mike said. He couldn’t talk fast enough. “One car was a Corvette and the other was boxy, like an old Monte Carlo, or a Cadillac. They torched the old car and took off in the ’Vette.”
I turned to Ronnie, who was up on his elbows, holding a cold can of beer to his chin. “That true?”
He nodded and wiped his nose.
“What color was the ’Vette?” I asked.
“Dark, like blue or black or something,” Mike said. “It was dark over there.”
“What about the guys?” I asked. “What did they look like?”
“Guineas,” Ronnie said. “For sure.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Mike said. “For sure. I figured it was some Mob shit. That’s why I waited to call the fire in.”
I glanced back and forth between Mike and Ronnie, not sure which one I wanted to strangle first. “I don’t give a fuck about the fire. What about the fucking guys?”
Ronnie eased out of the car. “They were both wearing those tracksuits, you know the ones with the stripes? They were both kind of big.”
I clenched my fists and dug them into my eyes. “Like a thousand other guys on this fucking island. Did you see anything specific? You hear any names?”
“No names. They had dark hair, I think,” Ronnie shouted.
“Kind of had bellies, um, um, big white sneakers, I think.” He was practically jumping up and down, desperately searching his memory, or his imagination, for something to tell me. “It was dark, man, and the fire made them all shadowy and shit.”
I felt Jimmy beside me. He put his arm around my shoulder and led me a few feet away from the boys.
“They don’t know anything,” he said. “Give ’em a break.”
“This is impossible,” I said. I spat. “Murder in broad daylight, arson in a crowded parking lot.” I looked over at Ronnie and Mike, huddled by the back of the car. “And nobody knows a fucking thing. It’s bullshit.”
“I don’t know what to tell you, John,” Jimmy said, his hands in the air. “This isn’t getting anywhere.” He looked at his watch. “Shit it’s late. I’m gonna be hurting tomorrow.”
Jimmy was right. This excursion had been pointless. I suddenly felt empty and stupid, marooned out on this desolate stretch of island. I felt guilty for asking Jimmy along. I didn’t know if I ever believed we’d get any answers. I’d never even considered what I’d do if I did learn something. I had thought that at least we’d have some fun.
“Mr. McGrath?” somebody called from the darkness. Jimmy and I snapped around to look.
“Oh, shit,” Jimmy whispered.
A boy stepped away from the two on either side of him. “Mr. McGrath? You all right?”
“Yeah, Matthew,” Jimmy said. “We’re fine.”
The kid tugged at the strings of his Tottenville sweatshirt, the same school where Jimmy taught English. I tried as hard as I could not to laugh.
“What’re you doing out here?” Matthew asked, a hint of curious insinuation in his voice.
Jimmy wiped his mouth. He glanced over his shoulder at Mike and Ronnie, sitting cross-armed on the bumper, glaring at us hatefully. “Over there,” he said, pointing over his shoulder at the Gremlin. “They promised me reports by last Friday. How’s your report coming, Matthew?”
I lit a cigarette to hide my face. Jimmy was some piece of work. I loved that guy.
Matthew swallowed hard. “It’s good, Mr. McGrath. It’s almost done.”
“I expect it on time,” Jimmy said in his best teacher’s voice, rocking back on his heels.
“Yeah,” Matthew said.
Jimmy touched a finger to his ear. “Excuse me?”
“Yes, Mr. McGrath,” Matthew said.
“Matt, man,” one of his friends said, “I gotta fuckin’ piss.”
Matt gave us a weak wave and backed away. The boys turned and ran for the boardwalk.
“Jesus, Jimmy,” I said, laughing, “I am so fucking sorry.”
“Are you kidding?” Jimmy said. “When this gets around the building, my street cred will skyrocket. I won’t have discipline problems for a month.” He looked over at Mike and Ronnie. Their music was roaring louder than before. “We done with those two?”
“For sure. Fuck it.” I stuffed my hands in my pockets and drifted toward the boardwalk.
Underneath it, crack vials and hypos crunched under my feet. Behind me, I heard Jimmy swear as he wiped God-knows-what, probably a used condom, off his shoe. The whole place stank of piss and rutting and puke and stale beer. Fifty yards from the sea and I couldn’t catch a whiff of it through the filth. At least I could hear the waves. I unzipped my jeans by a piling and, settlingmy eyes on the dark ocean, made my contribution to the ambience, like I had countless times in high school, just like the kids here tonight.
When I was done, I heard Jimmy walk up beside me. “I know,” I said. “We gotta get you home.”
“How many hours you think we spent in this parking lot?” he asked. “I can’t believe kids still hang out here.”
“I can’t count that high.”
“It’s funny,” Jimmy said. “This one time, around when your mother died, I was telling Rose stories about us and I told her about this place.”
“What did she say?”
“She couldn’t believe we drove all the way down to this huge stretch of beach and stood around in the parking lot. All those nights, I never set one foot on that sand.”
“She’s got a good point,” I said.
“I know. It never occurred to me until she said it.” He took a deep breath and grimaced. “Weird.”
I toed the sand, uncovering more broken glass and bottle caps with each swipe of my boot. Nobody walked on this ruined beach anymore, day or night. I couldn’t remember a time in my life when anyone had. I’d heard the Mob left bodies out here. Didn’t even bury them, just tossed them in the sand for the tide and crabs and the gulls.
“This beach is a wreck,” I said. “Who’d wanna hang out in a litter box? Glass, needles, oil slicks. You couldn’t walk knee-deep in that water without your skin burning off.”
“Still,” Jimmy said. “We were kids back then. We didn’t give a shit about any of that. I just remember being scared of what was happening in these shadows under the boardwalk.”
I patted him on the shoulder. “Now we know. Ain’t nothing happening. Let’s get outta here.”
WALKING PAST MIKE AND RONNIE, I thought about stopping to offer an apology. But they were engrossed in some heated debate, probably about which Green Lantern was the coolest, if people still argued about things like that. I didn’t want to bother them again. And I didn’t want to feel any worse about pushing them around, as I knew I would when they told me to go fuck myself. We cut a wide arc around the kids in the SUVs. There were a few shouts, probably insults, but we couldn’t decipher them over the bass. I was pleased to see the Galaxie sitting where I’d left it, engine humming. Jimmy and I made sure we kicked away the empty bottles that had been hidden behind my tires.
I climbed into the driver’s seat, but Jimmy didn’t get in. He just stood in the open passenger-side door, leaning on the roof. I got out of the car and assumed the same posture.
“More nostalgia, Saint?” I asked.
“Nah. Look, I was happy to come out here with you tonight. I understand why it seemed necessary. I don’t like what we did, but . . .” He stopped, squinting off into the night.
“All right,” I said. “Good to k
now.”
“But this, this thing has to end here,” he said. “You could have really hurt that kid.”
“I know. It was an accident; I didn’t mean for it to go that far. I won’t come out here again.”
“I’m not talking about here, about tonight,” Jimmy said. “I know where this is heading, and it’s someplace bad.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t insult me. I know you. You’re already looking for the next eye to poke. What’s next? You gonna go cruising for black Corvettes?”
“Maybe.” We stared at each other for a long time. I was thinking about the .38 that had gunned down my father. I had some ideas about it.
“You gonna go crack skulls at the deli?” he asked.
“Been there already.”
Jimmy threw his hands in the air. “I knew it. And what’d you get?”
“Nothin’.”
“See what I’m talking about?” Jimmy asked. “Your father just got killed, you’re drinking like a fish. You’re beating up on teenagers. You look fucking awful. Maybe you’re not thinking so straight.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I won’t drag you along on any more adventures. I know you got responsibilities.”
“Yeah, I do. And I’d forget just about any of them if I thought it would help you out. But this bad-ass Don Quixote shit is no good for you.” He drummed his fingers on the car. “Never mind that what we just did was probably criminal. You got responsibilities, too. Julia, your mother’s memory, your father. Molly. This does not qualify as making your peace with anything. It’s not what I had in mind. Finding the murderer is the cops’ responsibility.”
“If they’d get on with it,” I said, “I wouldn’t have to be out here.”
“Yeah, this is where you need to be. Riddle me this, Caped Crusader,” Jimmy said. “What’d Julia think of you coming out here?”
“She doesn’t know,” I said. I pointed a finger at him. “And she’s not gonna know. And neither is Molly.”
“Why not?”
“It’d upset both of them. Julia’d freak out, in fact. She’s upset enough.”
“Then why even take a chance on making it worse?” Jimmy asked. “Or say by some miracle, you find this guy. What if those two really had known something? What if you find someone who does? Then what? A citizen’s arrest? What if he’s not in the mood to pay his debt to society? You gonna drill him like he did your dad? That’s a lot bigger than knocking scared kids around.”
My eyes started to sting. They felt swollen. I rubbed my fingertips into them until it hurt, a lot. I wished Jimmy would just shut up and get in the car. “Gimme a break, Saint. I’m exhausted.”
“You’re a tough guy,” Jimmy said, “but are you a killer, John? You got that in you? He’ll kill you, too, if you don’t.”
“I don’t know what I got in me anymore,” I said.
Whatever I was carrying, I’d planned on getting a little lighter by leaving some of it in this parking lot, but that hadn’t happened. I’d thought the rot in my throat, in my nose, was from breathing in this filthy beach. Suddenly, I wasn’t so sure. My guts swelled and churned more than ever. Did I really need to kill the man who killed my father? Given the chance, the choice, to do that, what would I do? I couldn’t answer. But still, I was choking on something. I could feel it pulsing in my throat, every minute of every day. I couldn’t breathe again until I got rid of it.
I laced my fingers on the roof, dropped my forehead onto my knuckles. I started feeling sick from the booze and the hour. Everything I did made me feel better while it was happening, but ultimately left me feeling worse than when I started. This trip to the beach was playing out true to form.
“Let’s bail,” Jimmy said. “I’m not trying to browbeat you. Just ease back on the throttle some. I’m not looking to bury you, too.”
I looked up at him. “Kill the drama. Nobody’s burying me. Not anytime soon.”
Jimmy held up his hands. “I just want you to think about things, lad. Before you act.”
“All I do, McGrath, is think about things. I’m trying to stop.”
“How’s that working out for you?”
I stared at him a long time. “Get in the fucking car, Jimmy.”
I GOT THROUGH THE FRONT DOOR without making too much noise this time. The dark, silent house told me Julia was asleep. I got a beer from the kitchen and sat on the couch. I left the lights off.
There in the dark, my conversations with Jimmy swirled in my head, and I found myself clinging to pieces of them. I couldn’t shrug off anymore that things were getting to me. I’d pretty much lost my shit in the street four times in one day. Every time I gathered my trash back to me, in the parking lot, in the yard, in Joyce’s, it seemed, I spilled it back out again. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the tape. I wound it around my fist.
Molly, Virginia, Julia, I couldn’t chase them out of my head right now any more than I could get them out of my life. And now, Jimmy had worked his way in. I studied my fist. Even with the lights out, I could see half the word “caution” stretched in black letters across my knuckles. I had tried so hard the last few times I saw my father alive not to cower from him, to meet him on his own terms. I had grown so sick of running from him.
But what had I been doing for two days but running from him, from who he’d been, whatever that was? Wasn’t I cowering from what had happened to him, no matter what I told Jimmy, or myself? I felt sick, embarrassed for myself. For how easily he’d made me a frightened child again. For my complicity in the transformation. But what, I asked myself, was I going to do about it now?
That was what my father had always wanted to know. The bigger kids at school were picking on me. What was I gonna do about it? My locker had been broken into, I’d failed a test, the train had made me late for school. What was I gonna do about it? Molly had left me for a college kid who took her out in Manhattan every weekend, instead of to the same movie theater and the Mall. I had told myself I was running after the killer, but now I thought maybe I was just running away from my father. So what was I gonna do about it?
I put my feet up on the coffee table, cradling my beer to my belly. When I shifted my feet, to press myself deeper into the couch, I knocked something off the table. My head spun for a moment when I bent down to look. Julia’s pictures. I held my beer between my knees and collected the photos back into the box, glad I’d left the lights off. I set the box back on the table, but it just fell again, dumping its cargo again and this time taking a notebook with it. Cursing, I turned on the light and gathered up the photos. I picked up the cloth-covered notebook in my hands. It was obviously my sister’s. The spine cracked as I opened it; it was new, maybe another purchase from the Mall. I was reading what she’d written before I realized I shouldn’t be.
The first two pages were just Cindy’s name, and my mother’s and my father’s, drawn over and over again in large letters. In some places names blotted out parts of other names, in others the letters connected. Pages of neat, detailed notes followed the names, notes on what Julia had eaten every day and how she felt before and after each meal. She’d marked each meal she’d thrown up. There’d been two, the two she’d forced down after I’d gone out for the night. My heart stopped. I set the book on my knees and covered my face with my hands. I remembered Jimmy asking me why I wasn’t home, instead of at the bar. I wanted to crawl in a hole. What was I going to do about this? Could I force a grown woman to eat? Babysit her until she digested it? I would if I had to. I’d find a way.
Fresh Kills Page 18