Ted and I liked to motor around town at night. In our state, the drinking age had been lowered to eighteen because of the war, so I was legal. We’d ride with open cans of Schlitz between our legs, the windows down, Ted’s hand cigaretted and resting on his side-view mirror, the deck playing Allman Brothers, Robin Trower, Johnny and Edgar Winter, Deep Purple, and Zeppelin. Ted used all three speeds of the automatic, as the Slick Shift was engineered to prevent accidental slippage into reverse or neutral when moving up the ladder. My father kept the ’Cuda tuned just right, and Ted knew how to drive it. I clearly remember the feel of those nights, the wind warm in my face and hair, the streetlights dancing like fireflies off the buffed black hood of the Plymouth, the smell of Ted’s cigarettes, Johnny Winter’s “It’s My Own Fault” on the stereo. And always, under the music, the rumble of the ’Cuda’s dual pipes.
There was a quiet road about five miles north of our town where the suburbs turned to country, a straight quarter-mile strip of two-lane without traffic lights. That was where the kids in our crowd congregated and raced. Ted and I ended up there one night in August and ran into the Mahoney brothers, who were standing around a ’68 cream-over-red AMX, looking to drag someone. Walter Mahoney, the oldest and toughest of the brothers, owned the car.
The Mahoneys were Irish Catholic, just like us. We went to the same church and had known one another all our lives.
Ted pulled alongside them and let the engine run so they could hear it. He was looking to cop an ounce of weed. The Mahoneys sold pot and always had the best shit. Ted was smoking regularly since he’d come back to the world, and I had fallen in love with it too.
Walter stepped forward. The middle brother, a spent-head named Jason, came with him. Mike, the quiet one, hung back. Walter was built in the shoulders and chest. His hair looked home-cut and it was military short. Jason’s hair was long and receding, and he wore a bushy Vandyke beard. Though not yet twenty, he would soon be bald. Mike had long curls, which furthered the impression that he was soft. They were all wearing Levi’s, patched in places, and pocket T-shirts with Marlboro hard packs wedged in the pockets. Walter was smoking a cigarette now. He hit it down to the filter and kind of flipped it off his fingers as he approached. A flip, not a flick. Walter had perfected the move.
“Ted and his trip-black ’Cuda,” said Walter.
“What’s good, Walter?” said Ted.
Walter bent down into the window frame, looked at me, and smiled in a way that no guy likes. “Hi, Ricky.”
No one called me Ricky, not even my mom when I was a kid.
Ted said to Walter, “You holdin’?”
“I could be,” said Walter. “What are you looking for?”
“An O-Z,” said my brother.
“I have it at the house,” said Walter. “Columbian. Price went up. It’s fifty this time.”
“For an ounce? Shit.”
“I can get you some Mexican if you want a headache. This is primo. You’ll trip, Tedward.”
“Kind of rich for my blood.”
Walter looked at Jason, who smiled in his way that said serial killer. Girls walked backward when Jason entered a room.
The kid brother, Mike, lit a cigarette and stared at his shoes, a pair of saddle-colored stacks that I’d seen in the window of the Hanover store in the shopping plaza.
“Tell you what,” said Walter. “You can have the ounce for nothin’ if your ’Cuda can take my AMX in the quarter-mile.”
“What if I lose?”
“You owe me double. A hundred.”
“So you want me to race with your Rambler.”
No one called the AMX a Rambler or considered it one. AMC had replaced the ultra-vanilla Rambler badge years ago and was making pretty good cars now. Ramblers were slow and boring. Ramblers were for guys who only stuck the head in when they fucked their wives.
“Can you handle it?” said Walter.
“When?” said Ted.
“Right now.”
Ted shrugged. “Pull it over to the line.”
“Ricky might want to get out,” said Walter, “so you’re not carrying the extra freight. ’Course, he don’t weigh but a hundred pounds.”
I reckon I was around one thirty-five then, but the comment cut me, just as it was meant to.
“Rick’s my copilot,” said Ted. “He can stay.”
Walter and his brothers walked away.
“Fuckin’ slopes,” said Ted, and shook his head.
The Mahoney brothers had an Irish last name but slanted eyes. Their father, retired army, had been stationed in occupied Japan after the Big One and had brought home a bride.
The crowd, standing around their Chevys, Fords, and Mopars, sensed an imminent race and shifted their attention to our cars. Walter got into the driver’s bucket of his ride and cooked the ignition. It was a 390 four-barrel with a four-speed BorgWarner stick and Go Package trim: Magnum 500 wheels and hood stripes. Like the Vette, it was a two-seat American muscle car.
We pulled up to the starting line, drawn in chalk on the road. The end point was a street sign by a utility house a quarter mile ahead. No one worried about oncoming traffic. Few used this road at night.
A peroxide blonde named Helen stood between our cars and raised her arms, just like that girl in the James Dean movie had done. We’d all seen that flick on TV.
“Strap in, Rick,” said my brother, and I pulled the seat belt across my lap and clicked it home. Ted had pulled the shifter down into first and gripped it. He stared straight ahead. He didn’t once look over at Walter Mahoney, who was revving the AMX.
Robin Trower’s “Daydream” was playing from Ted’s eight-track deck. I remember that to this day. Trower was making love to his Strat, going into his delta-to-the-universe, blues-drenched final solo as Helen dropped her arms and we came off the line in a rush that pinned me back against my seat. Ted punched the accelerator as he upshifted into second and left rubber on the street. He didn’t fishtail and kept us straight. For a moment I saw the AMX in my side vision, a blurred steel sheet of cream, and as we hit third it was gone, I mean disappeared, and we were in a black tunnel of speed. My heart thumped in my chest as I felt my smile go ear to ear. We crossed the plane of the street sign and it was over. Ted was a wheel artist. He had it.
We turned around in the parking lot of the utility house. When we came back onto the road, Walter was idling and waiting. We went nose to asshole beside him.
“You caught second pretty good,” said Walter. His tone was flat.
“I did get it,” said Ted. “When can I pick up that weed?”
“Come by the house tomorrow, in the afternoon.”
“See you then.”
“War hero,” said Walter under his breath as he pulled away.
Ted and I drove home. I thought that was the end of it.
The Mahoneys lived in their parents’ brick rambler on a street lined with them. Late in the afternoon the day after the race, we went around the back of the house, where the property graded down. Jason’s Harley, outfitted with ape hangers, was on its kickstand there. We entered the open back door and walked through a laundry and storage room to a large finished basement. This was the Mahoney brothers’ lair.
Walter was seated on a torn-up couch beside Jason, who was spooning ice cream directly out of a tub. There was chocolate dripping in his Vandyke. The youngest, Mike, was seated in a chair that was as shredded as the couch, staring at a cigarette between his fingers as if it held meaning. A fog of pot smoke hung in the air, and Uriah Heep, hard rock for burnouts, played from a compact stereo set in a corner of the room. A purple bong was on a cable-spool table beside an upturned shoebox cover that held a bunch of weed.
Ranger, their shepherd mix, got up on all fours and growled at us as we entered the room. The brothers had been blowing pot smoke in Ranger’s face since he was a puppy, which had made him the opposite of mellow. Cannabis had done the dog no favors.
“Ted the man,” said Walter by way of greeting,
and added, “You too, Ricky.”
Ranger, still growling, edged toward us and bared his teeth.
“You got my ounce?” said Ted.
“Do a couple of bongs with us first,” said Walter.
“Yeah, sit a minute,” said Jason.
“Put that fucked-up animal away and we will,” said Ted.
Walter got up off the couch, chuckling, and said, “Ranger, come.” The dog followed Walter to the stairs and with the command of “Up,” he went to the second floor. We heard a door open, then the Mahoneys’ mother yelling something fast in Japanese, and the same door slamming shut.
“She wants us to turn the music down,” said Walter.
“Fuck her,” said Jason.
I looked around the room. Behind the couch, in the center, was a clean wrestling mat with nothing on it. Against the walls, several terrariums held tarantulas and poisonous snakes. A half-deflated blowup doll with a big O mouth had been tossed in a corner. There was a Super 8 projector facing a wall-hung white sheet on which the brothers projected porn: young teens and dog-on-girl action were among the favorites. Down here, no stone of degeneracy had been left unturned. Mr. and Mrs. Mahoney, who rarely ventured into the basement, had lost control of their own house.
Ted sat on the couch and I took a chair near Mike. He didn’t acknowledge me. I couldn’t figure out if Mike was retarded or shy.
Walter squeezed himself onto the couch between Ted and Jason. He picked up the shoebox top and shook it like a miner panning for gold. The seeds became separated from the bush and buds. Walter filled the bowl, handed the bong to Ted, and fired it up. Ted let the bong’s tube get cloudy, took his finger off its hole, inhaled a shotgun of smoke, held it in his lungs, and coughed it out. The bong went around to each of us and soon we were all high. Ted and the others lit cigarettes.
Jason got up, put on an Aerosmith record, and dropped the needle on the third track.
“This jam is bad as shit,” said Jason. “Dream On” came fully into the room.
“You like the stereo?” said Walter to my brother.
“It’s okay,” said Ted, without enthusiasm. They owned a Soundesign compact system with horn speakers. The sound was treble dominant. It wasn’t even okay. It was one step up from a clock radio. Ted was being charitable but he wasn’t the type to lie.
“I guess you’d know,” said Walter. “On account of you’re like a manager of that Audio Chalet.”
Some guys got quiet when they were up on weed. Walter became more aggressive.
“I’m just a salesman,” said Ted patiently. “It’s called the Audio House.”
“Ze Audio Haus,” said Jason with a German accent, laughing at his own illogical joke, then digging his spoon into the tub of chocolate ice cream.
“Ricky, you should get a job up there too,” said Walter. “But, wait, you’re working at your old man’s station, right?”
“Uh-huh,” I said.
“Rick’s pumping ethyl,” said Jason, and now he and Walter both laughed.
“Nah, Ricky’s pumping that little Jewish girl,” said Walter. “Diane Finkelstein or whatever her Hebe name is. Ain’t that right, Ricky?”
“It’s Finkle,” I said. Warmth came to my face.
“Aw, look at him,” said Jason. “You made Ricky mad.”
“Lay off him,” said Ted.
“Okay,” said Walter. “How’s Francesca?”
“She’s fine,” said Ted.
“You two are hot and heavy again,” said Walter. “That’s nice. I guess she got it all out of her system while you were over there in Nam, keeping America safe.”
“What’s that mean?” said Ted.
“Nothin’,” said Walter, then winked at Jason.
Ted let it go. No one said anything for a while after that. The song built up a head of steam and Jason, his eyes closed soulfully, began to sing along. It was the part at the end where Steven Tyler repeats the title over and over in a scream. When it finished, Jason got up and took the tonearm off the record and now it was silent in the room.
“I’ll take that ounce,” said Ted.
“Wrestle me,” said Walter.
“What?”
“Wrestle me for the ounce.”
“I already won it. We raced for it last night.”
“If you beat me, I’ll give you two ounces for nothin’.”
“I’ll just take the one,” said Ted.
“Chickenshit.”
“Say what?”
“Big Marine,” said Walter. “What, they let faggots into the Corps now?”
A look back in time is in order now. In our day and where we came from, when you got called a faggot, it didn’t mean homosexual, exactly. It meant you were a pussy, a coward, and a weakling. It meant you had to fight. On top of that, Walter had implied that other Marines were that way too. And Walter had said all of this in front of me, the kid brother. It was too much for Ted to walk away from or ignore.
“All right,” said Ted.
We stood up from our seats at once. Even Mike. There was a physical contest about to happen. We were young men, and the promise of it jacked us up.
The group moved to the mat, marked with a circle in the middle. I assumed that Walter had boosted it from our high school, where he had wrestled his senior year, without distinction, in the 160 weight class.
“I’ll ref,” said Jason, and he made a thumb-up, thumb-down gesture with his hand to Walter. “Top or bottom?”
“Bottom,” said Walter, and he got down on all fours on the mat.
Ted glanced over at me and wiggled his eyebrows, as if to assure me it was all a game, and then he dropped to the mat and took the dominant position over Walter. Both of them looked up at Jason, who had raised his hand.
“What about a clock?” I said.
“No clock,” said Jason, his eyes pink and his pupils dilated, chocolate ice cream staining his beard. “A pin ends it. Go!”
Jason dropped his hand in a slashing movement and Walter immediately scooted onto his ass. Ted tried to hold him but Walter broke free and got up on his feet.
“Escape,” said Jason, and he held up one finger.
Ted had gotten to a standing position and he and Walter faced off. Walter’s legs were bent and he was moving his hands in a circular motion. Ted was standing straight. I knew little about wrestling, but I sensed that Ted’s stance made him vulnerable. He’d made a mistake.
“Shoot him, Walter,” said Jason, and Walter went in low on my brother, wrapped his arms around his thighs, and lifted him up off his feet. Walter then drove Ted hard down into the mat. Ted turned onto his stomach to avoid the near fall and pin. Walter straddled him and remained in control.
“Takedown,” said Jason. “Two points.”
Walter clamped his thighs around Ted’s legs and put one hand on his upper back; with his other hand he grabbed the biceps of Ted’s right arm and pushed up on it like he was raising a pump arm on a well. Ted’s face was crushed into the mat and I heard him grunt.
“Stop,” I said.
Walter pushed harder. I saw Ted’s face contort in pain.
I shouted at Ted and told him to tap out.
Ted didn’t do it. Walter, his face a distorted mask of concentration, pushed the arm to its limit and then wrenched it violently to the left. We all heard something tear free.
Walter stood up, sweaty, his eyes wide with excitement. Jason slapped him five. Mike, sickened, looked away.
I went to Ted, whose arm had dropped but was hanging at an impossible angle to his shoulder. I helped him to his knees and then got him up on his feet. He was in great pain. “You broke his fucking arm,” I said. “You happy now, Walter?”
“He’s all right,” said Walter. “It just needs to be reset or somethin’. Right, Ted?”
Ted didn’t answer. Walter and Jason went back to the couch without another word. When we left the house through the basement door, we could hear their brain-damaged dog barking maniacally from up on the sec
ond floor.
I drove Ted’s ’Cuda to the hospital, Ted in the bucket beside me. Walter was right. Ted’s arm wasn’t broken. It had been dislocated. It just needed to be reset.
Things happened very quickly after that.
In the ER, Ted mentioned that he had been feeling dizzy lately and that he had been running a low-grade fever off and on for the past few weeks. The doctor on duty did a blood test and saw something he didn’t like. Our family physician referred Ted to an oncologist, who, after further lab work, determined that my brother was in the advanced stages of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He had cancer.
Ted died three months later in the bedroom we’d shared since childhood. The details of his illness and rapid decline are too painful for me to recall on these pages. We buried him next to our mother in the Catholic cemetery on the grounds of our church.
I don’t remember how it got into the head of my father that it was Walter Mahoney who had triggered the cancer in my brother. The doctors never implied that a dislocated shoulder could cause cancer, and there is no medical evidence that I know of to suggest that this could be the case. But my father believed it, and, because I loved and respected him, I began to believe it too.
The allegation got around the community and for many it became fact. Maybe I fueled the rumor, I don’t know. Walter Mahoney, the lowlife, had killed Ted Donnelly, a clean-cut, standup guy who had done the right thing and served his country during an unpopular war. It quickly got pretty bad for Walter, a guy few people had liked to begin with. He was even shunned by the car crowd who were his peers. Eventually, he moved out of his parents’ house and left the neighborhood. But his absence didn’t do a thing to take my father’s mind off Ted.
The Highway Kind Page 11