by Paul Griffin
“Then you better figure out what’s making you mad, before it’s too late,” Dri said.
John didn’t look angry, though, and he didn’t need to get in the last word either. He shrugged and took up his lookout post at the back of the boat.
I brought Dri a tin of water.
“Are you hungry?” she said.
“You’re not?” I said. The last thing I’d eaten was that mouthful of turkey at Dri’s party, close to forty hours before.
“I was famished yesterday,” she said, “but today not so much. Does that mean I’m losing it?” She looked over the bow, into the water close to the boat. “I used to think the ocean teemed with fish, but it’s like the land. Everybody wants to live in the prime spots, and the rest is desert.”
“What did they tell you in your survival class about how long a person can go without food?” I said.
“A long time.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“What do I tell my uncle? When we get back, I mean. Do I tell him Stef killed herself doing something insane? Or was it insanely beautiful? Flying like that at midnight. The moon, the stars. She died like she lived. She lived like she could die at any moment. She didn’t squander life. She revered it. She was the one who got me interested in being a vet in the first place. She was always taking in stray dogs, feeding cats in the parks. If she found a sick pigeon in the street, she’d take it home and nurse it back to health, and if it died she’d be weepy for days. She was a year older, but that’s a big deal when you’re a kid. She was my hero.
“I think you would have liked her a lot. I think John would have too. If she said she felt connected to him, she was. Stef was rarely wrong about people. She came across as stuck-up at first, I know, but that was just her insecurity. Once you got to know her a little and she felt she could trust you, she would let you see who she really was, who she always would’ve been, that sad little girl who worried over the street doves.”
“Stef was right,” I said.
“About what, and why are you whispering?”
“I need to cool off. We both do.” We slipped into the water on the shady side of the boat and stayed low in it, our mouths just above the surface.
“Stef was right about John,” I said. “About the kinship she wanted to feel with him. It’s hard to talk about this with anybody except John, and even that’s almost impossible, but I want to tell you about the shooting.”
August 19, afternoon …
The water was cool and then cooler when Dri traced the starburst scar on my left shoulder blade with her fingertip. “That’s where it went in, the bullet?” she said. “Where did it come out?”
“It didn’t,” I said, “and that was the problem.” We kept our voices low and our heads above water by holding on to the side of the boat. With our free hands we gripped each other’s fingers like we’d known each other a lot longer than two days. Fear brings people together fast. I felt in every part of me, humming and whirring at the atomic level, that she was changing me. If it—if we—didn’t work out I wouldn’t be able to go back to being who I was. She had opened up to me, had let me into her beautiful, shiny life, into Stef’s tortured one, and now it was my turn.
“It was a .22 caliber bullet,” I said. “A .22 tumbles around when it hits you. The surgeons had to go hunting for it. I was on the table for six hours. They found it in my hip. That was after it went through my left lung.”
“But you’re okay now?” she said. “That was a stupid question. Of course you can’t be okay after something like that.”
“When it’s humid and I’m running or whatever, my rib cage aches where the bullet cracked it. Other than that I’m okay.”
“I meant okay in your heart,” she said. “How did it happen?”
I had to grit my teeth for a second to keep them from chattering. We’d drifted into an even colder patch of water. “It was messed up. John and I were fourteen.”
“Wait, John was there?”
“We were in the backseat of Mr. Costello’s Honda. John’s dad’s car, the minivan he used for work. His tools were piled around us: electric cables, a portable generator. Mr. Costello was driving. My dad was there too, in the shotgun seat. We were on our way home from a night game. Baseball, summer league. We would have lost if the rain hadn’t washed us out. My dad kept turning around to look at us. He was nodding and smiling, and so was Mr. Costello. I remember the fast food signs lit their faces red, grimy yellow. Mr. Costello said what we had done was beautiful, perfect. We were true champions or whatever.”
“What, you guys never gave up, even though you were losing like that?” Dri said.
“There was this guy getting picked on, in the bleachers. He was the assistant coach on the other team, and he had Down syndrome. He managed the equipment. He remembered everybody’s name, cheered for both sides, had a nice word for everybody. These idiots show up in the stands, and they start giving the guy a hard time, calling him retard, chucking pebbles at the back of his head, snapping at his ears or whatever when he isn’t looking.”
“That kind of thing makes me furious enough to where I think I could actually kill someone,” Dri said.
“Toward the end of the game the leader of this crew of knuckleheads spits on the back of the assistant coach’s neck. We stop play right there, all of us, and we say we won’t start until the idiots leave the ballpark. Now the umpires are getting into it, and the parents, and everybody’s screaming at these psychos that they better get out of there, or do they want the cops to come and make them leave? So they go, but not before they curse everybody out and knock over the water cooler, whip ice at everybody, and there’s shoving and threats and whatever.”
“Geniuses,” Dri said.
“Okay, so they’re out of there, and a little later the rain ends the game, and we’re on our way home. The rain is ridiculous. A pond’s growing in the middle of Woodhull Road, the main drag where John and I come from. The elevated train’s rumbling overhead. The tracks separate Brooklyn and Queens. Right there on the borderline I’m about to become somebody else, somebody I’m not ready to be.”
“Who’s this person you think you became?”
“Somebody who … I don’t know. Who feels safer when he’s alone, maybe?”
“Matthew, no. You’re not meant to be alone—especially you.”
“We stopped at a red light. I’m oiling my catcher’s mitt to avoid looking into our fathers’ eyes, their smiles. ‘Pizza or burgers?’ Mr. Costello says, and that’s the last thing he says. A white SUV pulls alongside.”
“The idiots from the bleachers.”
“Mr. Costello’s window sprays in on us. His neck sprays out. It’s happening all at once, you know? The train brakes are screeching, the pigeons are scattering, my face is burning. I can’t tell whose blood is in my mouth, Mr. Costello’s or mine. The windshield wipers keep going, tick-tock, tick-tock. The car’s still in gear, and the van’s creeping forward. The backseat window glass blows in, and I see the shooter, the gun in the dude’s hand, the grin. His arm comes down like a falling tree. The gun points into the backseat and levels out. He’s walking alongside the car, lining up his shot.”
“God, you’re shivering.”
The boat had gradually turned around in the water, and now we were hunkering on its sunlit side, but even the sun burned cold. “It wasn’t the blood that freaked me out. It was that the wind was knocked out of me, completely, like I’d been tackled by a linebacker, no pads, no helmet. I was dizzy from the whiplash. I’m trying to gulp that first breath when I see the car isn’t creeping forward anymore. It’s peeling out.”
“The shooter’s car?”
“No, the one we’re trapped in, Mr. Costello’s van, except my dad is behind the wheel now.”
“He didn’t get hit?” Dri said.
“Mr. Costello took all three bullets fired into the front seat. His body is pinned against the driver’s side door. My dad’s hammering the gas, because they’re
still shooting at us. We don’t get too far though. A tire blows out and the minivan coasts into one of the iron columns that hold up the train tracks. You know what? I’m sorry I’m telling you this all of a sudden, especially now.”
“Matthew, now is the only time, the best time. Keep going.”
“I’m walking away from where the car hit the train trestle. My dad’s following me. He’s covered in like this pinkish airbag dust. Freaky. He’s got a whip mark across the side of his neck from where a cable hit him when Mr. Costello’s tools went flying. Dad keeps telling me to sit my butt down on the curb there, but I’m pushing him away. I just have to walk it off and catch my breath, I keep telling him. Just leave me alone. Then these EMTs are trying to strap me down to a backboard. I can’t get them to understand it’s not my spine that hurts, it’s my chest. I’m a little winded, get your hands off me, right? I mean, I’m swinging at these guys.”
“I totally get it. Everybody’s trying to hold you down.”
“Except for the lead EMT. She’s calm, so calm. She tells everybody to give me some room, and they do. ‘Hiya there, Matt,’ she says. Her voice is soft but deep, and she’s in no rush to get the words out. She asks me if I remember what happened. I tell her somebody tried to shoot me, but I’m okay, I’m just a little short of breath. She says, ‘Let’s try to make that better then. Let’s breathe together, slowly, deeply.’ So I breathe. She has these beautiful tattoos. They’re hieroglyphs. They start at her fingertips and go all the way up her forearms and maybe higher, because I see the tips of them peeking out over her shirt collar. She’s a big woman, in her fifties. The way she’s standing there so at ease, you just know she’s been doing this a long time.”
“She sounds amazing.”
“My dad’s yelling at me to do what the lady says, and she puts a soft hand on Dad’s shoulder and says, ‘It’s okay. Matt’s okay. I got this,’ and my dad chills right out.”
“Where’s John in this?”
“He’s there. Right there. He’s solid.”
“All those tools flying around when the car crashed, and he didn’t get hurt?”
“I know,” I said. “It was otherworldly,” and it was. “The way this lead EMT is talking to me, so calmly, I just do whatever she says. I lie back and let them tie me up to the board, and I breathe with her. I quiet down inside. It feels good to be told what to do by somebody who so clearly knows what she’s doing. An oxygen mask goes over my mouth and nose, and now I’m on a stretcher, and they’re wheeling me toward the ambulance. My dad is shaking like its twenty degrees out, not ninety.”
“And John?” Dri said. “Is he shaking?”
“He’s a rock.”
“Of course.”
“He’s walking next to the stretcher. His hand’s on my shoulder. ‘You’re okay, Matt,’ he tells me, and the way he says it, I believe him. I ask him where his dad is, and he says, ‘Don’t worry about that now, breathe easy,’ like the EMT told me to do. I have to know though. ‘Just tell me,’ I say. ‘Did he make it?’ And John says, ‘No, now stop talking and breathe, like she said.’ I follow his eyes. He’s tracking her, the lead EMT. ‘Man, she’s good,’ John says. ‘She moves like she’s walking underwater.’
Dri squeezed my hand. “You’re shaking all over,” she said.
“I woke up two days later in the hospital, and I felt like … You ever hit your finger with a hammer? I’m ringing hot all over my body, but that’s nothing compared to how busted up I am about the fact that these maniacs are going to get away with killing Mr. Costello, that they’re still out there. That they’ll always be out there. My dad was able to grab a shaky shot of the SUV’s license plate, but the car turned out to be stolen. They’d planned it perfectly, how to hit us and get away clean, and I was a total idiot not to see it coming.”
“Matthew, there’s absolutely no way you could have known they would take it that far. I want you to listen to me now. It wasn’t your fault. They didn’t single you out. It was random. What happened could have happened to anybody else at the ballpark. Those guys were going to kill somebody that night; who didn’t matter. They just happened to pick John’s dad’s van to follow. You need to understand that.”
A horsefly buzzed by Dri and landed on my lip. It snapped me out of the memory of that night three years in the past but so not gone, so here with us in the water.
“You can tell me, okay?” she said.
“Tell you what?”
“The rest of the story. I won’t push you. Whenever you’re ready, you tell me what you need to say.”
How she knew there was more is just proof that she was from someplace else, someplace better, a world to come maybe, where people just know. Here her cousin died, and she’s worried about me. I might have told her the rest of it right then, the parts I left out, even the worst part, if I hadn’t noticed John’s shadow on the water. He was looking down at us. “I think you two need to see this,” he said.
I pulled myself up over the side of the boat. JoJo slapped the corpse’s face. That was the start of them, the flies.
To: [email protected]
* * *
From: [email protected]
* * *
Subject: Update on Missing Persons Costello/Halloway
* * *
Date: Friday, August 20, 10:53 AM—Day 3
* * *
The car turned up on Dune Road, home of Rafael Gonzaga. I got the transcript for the hearing related to the weapons charge on Costello. It was for a sawed-off pipe found in his backpack. He was fourteen at the time. He told the judge he was worried that the people who killed his father would try to get him too, if they saw him out on the street. The judge asked John if he thought he would be able to do it, to hit somebody in the head with a club. John said, “Definitely.” There’s a note in the transcription that John didn’t hesitate when he said that. The judge said, “Good for you, for telling the truth, but leave the pipe at home next time.” The charge was dropped.
Saturday, August 21, just after midnight and the beginning of the fourth day on the water …
The sky was too clear and the moon too bright. The body didn’t look anything like Stef now. It didn’t look human anymore either. It had swelled even more quickly than I thought it would. Its—her face had split at a laugh line. We’d wrapped her in the windsurfing sail to keep the flies off her, but they kept coming anyway, more and more of them. The sail seemed less a shield to them and more of a fast food billboard, stained brown with her blood and yellow with her plasma where the blood chips flaked away.
“Maybe there’s a ship nearby?” JoJo said. “A freighter transporting livestock?”
Nobody bothered to answer him. We hadn’t seen any boats for more than a day.
“Maybe they hitched a ride on a fishing boat,” JoJo said. He’d been going on like this since the day before, throwing out one theory after another about how horseflies could end up in the middle of the ocean. “The boat dumped a rotten carcass or a spoiled haul, right? The flies piggybacked on the dead fish until they picked up Stef’s scent.”
“God, Jo, stop talking about it,” Dri said. “Please, okay? How they got here doesn’t matter. They’re here.” We all were on edge, even John a little, after more than three days without food.
“I’m just saying maybe there’s a boat around, Dri,” JoJo said. Then he spoke to Stef’s corpse in Portuguese. He turned to John and said, “I was telling her that maybe there’s a boat around.”
John looked away from JoJo. I’d say it was a gesture of contempt, except his face was blank.
The flies were fast, uncatchable. They got under our clothes. If you’ve ever held a lit match too long, that’s a horsefly bite. The pain is almost unnoticeable at first, and then second by second the heat doubles and deepens until you want to claw the burning out of your skin. JoJo got the worst of them because he refused to leave Stef’s side. His face and arms were raw where he scratched
his welts. A fly landed on Stef’s broken lip. JoJo shooed it and cursed God.
“There’s only one way to get rid of them,” John said.
“John, I know, okay?” Dri said.
“We have to give them what they want.”
“I get it,” Dri said. “Just …”
“What?”
“Never mind,” she said.
“Okay,” John said.
“I was going to say just relax, but you’re sitting there like a vampire anyway.”
“A vampire. Great.”
“You’re too still. God.”
“Still. I can totally see why that would be a problem for you. Shall I dance for you, princess?”
“You can’t be nice, can you?” Dri said. “That’s a serious question, John. You know what? Don’t bother to answer. I feel bad for you.”
“You don’t need to, really,” he said. “In fact I’d prefer you didn’t.”
“But I do. Just when I really want to like you, you remind me of why that’s so very hard.”
“You don’t need to like me, Dri. You just need to finish this ride with me, and then we’ll never see each other again. Don’t sweat yourself on my account.”
“I do need to like you, though. You need to be liked, and it makes me so sad that you just don’t know this. I’m sorry for you, John. Truly I am. I can’t imagine what it would be like, my dad being killed right in front of me.”
John had no reaction to that. “The body,” he said. “We have to make a decision here. Matt, any chance at all you’re going to weigh in?”
“You don’t have to put him in the middle,” Dri said.
“I don’t want him in the middle,” John said. “I need him on my side.”