Car Trouble

by Robert Rorke

  “You don’t need any more trouble.”

  He found a spot next to the public school and around the corner from the address on the piece of paper. He lined up the car with one that was already parked. Looking over his shoulder, out the back window, he said, “What I need to do is find the son of a bitch who kicked my ass.”

  I was going to get killed for opening my mouth, but I did anyway. “If you ask me, you need to get some help.”

  He finished turning the steering wheel until the front wheel was straight. “I’m a broken-down alcoholic without a friend in the world, Nicky. No one’s going to help me.”

  The last thing I was expecting was self-pity. I no longer felt like the kid in the front seat. “C’mon. Don’t think that way. You can turn this around.”

  The car slid into place and he straightened the steering wheel. All he had to do was pull out, and this would all go away.

  He opened the front door. I had one more chance.

  “What does Mommy do if you get arrested? Have you thought about that?”

  He didn’t say anything; the last person he was thinking about was my mother. And then he cuffed me on the ear. I put up my hands and backed myself against the car door. My ear was stinging.

  He was breathing in my face. “Listen, pal, I need you to watch the car while I take care of this. That’s the only help I need right now. You got it?”

  I nodded and he got out of the car. But he left the motor running. “I won’t be long.”

  He walked back to the trunk and opened it. I looked out the back window but couldn’t see much. He closed the trunk and began to stride down the street, carrying a flashlight in his right hand and something heavy in his left. A crowbar? A two-by-four? He disappeared around the corner.

  I wanted to get the hell out of there, but if I did he’d really beat the shit out of me.

  I hoped whoever he was after wasn’t home. I looked at the dashboard, missing the portable record player we’d had in the Green Hornet, and settled for the radio. I found the oldies station. First song? No lie. “Rescue Me,” Fontella Bass.

  I was tempted to get out of the car and follow him but knew that whatever I saw would ruin him in my eyes forever. And I wasn’t ready for that. So I waited, expecting to hear the sound of breaking glass and popped car tires. Then I decided I didn’t want to know the minute things started going wrong. I raised the volume on the radio till poor old Fontella was bleating, high distress with a backbeat. Maybe she would drown out the police sirens when they came. Himself was turning into a criminal—and he didn’t care if I knew it.

  I turned the radio off when Fontella faded out and listened to the branches creaking on the trees. The silence was so wintry and deep I expected to look at my watch and see it was midnight, but it was only six thirty. Where was everybody? I didn’t hear another car or even a city bus.

  The door on the driver’s side suddenly jerked open and he got in. I shot up and moved over, as if he was going to set something down on the seat between us, like the flashlight he took with him. But he was empty-handed.

  He put his hands on the steering wheel. Snow melted in his hair and on the shoulders of his jacket. A white handkerchief was wrapped around his knuckles; dark spots soaked through the cloth. He looked in the rearview mirror for a long minute, as if someone was following him. Then he pulled out, taking the first left. The roads were deserted, and the snow was sticking.

  My stomach growled; maybe I should have finished that cheeseburger back at McDonald’s. “Are we going home now?”

  “Yes. I did what I came to do.”

  “You shouldn’t have made me sit there,” I said.

  “Why? Did somebody try to steal you? It was ten minutes.”

  More like twenty. I remembered that day in Holy Cross, when he hit the car parked by the mausoleum: Not a word about this to your mother. “Mom must be wondering where we are. I mean, does she even know I’m with you?”

  The speedometer climbed as we headed east. “I might have said something.”

  I didn’t believe him; it was silly to ask. He was never going to tell me the truth. All I knew was this afternoon, I was pretending I was a rock ’n’ roll star in the school play. Now I was an accomplice in his getaway car.

  Thirteen

  After that adventure in the car, staying on his good side wasn’t so important anymore. He was going down some scary path and I wasn’t going with him. Even when I helped him—I did what I was told to do—I still got smacked. But as much as I wanted to walk away, I didn’t. And as we discovered, he couldn’t be left alone.

  One Thursday a week or so later when I came home after school he found me in the kitchen. It was my mother’s late day at the bank, none of my sisters were home yet, and I was headed down to see her to get the money for groceries. I agreed to do the cooking as long as one of my sisters lit the pilot light on the stove. I was afraid of fire and wouldn’t even light a match. I feared the flame would spread from the matchstick to my fingers and soon my whole hand would turn into a red-hot burning coal. It made no sense, I knew, but I couldn’t shake that feeling. I just wanted to be able to function, hold up my end of the domestic bargain.

  I was on my way out the door, shopping list in my hand. He came downstairs and stood in the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room. His eyelids were falling down like broken window shades and he was wearing the same clothes he wore when he left the house the night before.

  “Well, if it isn’t the Anointed One,” he said.

  I looked up from my shopping list. “What?”

  It was three thirty. Now that he was a “bartender,” you never knew what time he was coming home; our encounters with him mostly took place at the crack of dawn, when he would stagger in and sometimes summon us to the kitchen. We would troop downstairs and park ourselves at the kitchen table, pasty-faced and bleary-eyed, while he delivered a lecture on how to properly wash a kitchen floor or how to defrost a steak. Or he might check our arms for needle marks. “If I ever find that any of you have been fooling around with drugs, I will have you put in jail. I kid you not. I will call the police. If I find a mark from a needle on your arms, you are dead. Do I make myself clear?”

  The response to this threat was always the same. “Yes, Daddy.”

  The obsession with drugs took me by surprise. He just wanted to scare the hell out of everyone, now that he was spiraling down, but I still couldn’t believe he would talk to my little sisters with such vehemence. Me and Maureen, we were getting used to being browbeaten and if it wore us down, I can only imagine how he intimidated Dee Dee and Mary Ellen, who were nine and seven years old. A lifetime of being afraid of your own father.

  “Let me ask you a question: How’s your peripheral vision?”

  “I don’t know, I never thought about it.” I glanced at my list; I forgot to add Alpo to it. Himself was standing in the doorway, scratching his back on the doorjamb, moving back and forth against the wood. “Well, come over here and let’s see how you do.”

  I sighed. “Do I have to do it now? I sort of have to get going.”

  I couldn’t tell him to go to bed even though he’d been out all night; it would sound too much like a lecture and that would turn into an argument, and I would never get to the bank or the store.

  “Oh, come on, give it a try. It couldn’t hurt.” There was no way around it. I knew he wouldn’t give up unless I tried. I put down the pencil and turned around in the doorway.

  He stood behind me. The fumes coming off him made me tilt my head away from him.

  “Now, look out of your left eye and tell me what you see.”

  I saw the old enamel paint job and the side of the buffet. “Can you see the dining room table?”

  “Not unless I turn my head,” I said.

  “Okay, now look out of your right eye and tell me what you see.”

  More enamel and some of the beige dining room wall. I dropped my hands and looked back at him. “Guess your peripheral vision isn�
��t so good,” he said, smirking.

  “Why does it matter?”

  “Because it’s good to know who’s coming up behind you, that’s why.”

  Like when you went to find the guy on Nineteenth Avenue who supposedly ruined your life? I kept expecting the story of what happened that evening to surface in the newspaper, and I looked for it, scrutinizing the pages of the Daily News, but whatever happened slipped by, unrecorded.

  He lumbered over to the refrigerator like a tugboat moving through wet cement, shifting his weight on swollen ankles at the open door. He grabbed the bottle of grapefruit juice, the antidote to the booze he’d consumed the night before, and sat at the table.

  “Vodka. Drink enough of it and it swells up in the ankles, the fingers,” he said. Then he asked me what I was cooking tonight.

  “It’s called Chicken Marengo,” I said politely. I had found the recipe in Family Circle, one of Mom’s magazines.

  “You’re really getting into this cooking thing.” He knocked one glass back and poured himself another. “First the play, now Chicken Go Tango. I know you like it, so I figure I’ll let you cook. But you sure do like to lay on those spices.”

  I doubted if he’d ever eaten anything I’d prepared, but I was more annoyed that he thought I was waiting for his permission to do anything. He was baiting me and I decided to let the moment pass. I checked the kitchen clock again and reached for the food stamp booklet.

  It was ten after four when I got to the Lincoln Savings Bank. I loved the smell of the place, with its waxed marble floors and freshly shampooed rugs. The bank had two large rooms, one in front with desks where customers opened new accounts and a rectangular room in back where the tellers worked behind a high, wood-paneled counter. Mom came to the marble-topped ledge of the teller partition and handed me a white envelope containing fifteen dollars.

  “This should cover what you can’t get with the food stamps,” she said. “Remember we need dog food.” She paused a minute. “What’s going on with Himself? Is he home yet?”

  “He just got in.”

  “Terrific.” She sighed. “Well, I hope he goes to sleep. I don’t know how he does it, living on no sleep.” She seemed distracted. The bank was hopping, the line of customers snaking behind burgundy velvet ropes. “God knows what time I’m getting out of here tonight.”

  She went back to her customers, and I went to the Big Apple. I bought chicken legs and crushed tomatoes and onions, frozen spinach, dog food, soda, and a half gallon of ice cream for dessert. I bought Himself a steak, not too thick. He could send somebody else to the store for his beer.

  It was a seven-block walk home. I could see the back of the house from the corner of Brooklyn Avenue. The missing green shingles by the back bedroom, the exposed tarpaper beneath. I saw smoke drifting up to the back bedroom window. At first I thought it was the incineration from the apartment house on our corner; but they only ran that at night. I panicked and rushed home, cradling the groceries against my chest.

  There was a fire engine parked directly in front of our house. The Red Devil was in the driveway. “Oh, Jesus,” I said.

  Mrs. Garrett from next door and some of the other neighbors were standing out in front, gazing at the house, as if waiting for a sign. They touched my shoulders, saying things to me as I raced past them up the stoop. The front door was wide open. A fat hose limped up the steps and into the front porch. Then I was inside, choking on smoke.

  The rooms on the first floor were full of it. My eyes stung. I tried blinking through the haze. Two hulking firemen wearing black slickers and tall hats stood in the living room, one hosing down Himself’s chair; the cushion glowed with burning embers under the right arm. Himself lay in a heap on the rug, with the coffee table pushed up against the couch.

  “Daddy!” I cried, stepping closer.

  He didn’t move. One of the firemen spoke to me. Beads of sweat ran down his face. “He was in the chair when we came in. We hauled him out. Who is he?”

  I nodded. “It’s my father.” Then I looked around; the house was fractured, like someone had thrown it up in the air and it had landed with a thud, dislodging the foundation. “Queenie!” I put the groceries on the coffee table. My mind was reeling. Was anybody else home yet? “Where’s the dog?”

  “Do you know what’s wrong with him?” the fireman asked.

  “He’s drunk,” I said, mortified. I could picture these men breaking into the house and seeing Himself sleeping in the burning chair, too crocked to know he was about to go up in flames. I took a good look at him. His pants were singed on the left leg all the way to the hip. How could he still be conked out?

  I heard Queenie whimper. The dog poked her head into the dining room from the kitchen. Then she backed away.

  “Looks like he fell asleep with a lit cigarette,” the fireman said. He was the older of the two, with deep crow’s feet around his eyes. “What’s your name?”

  I felt like I couldn’t breathe. “Let me call my mother. She’s at work.”

  The two firemen picked Himself up off the floor and settled him on the couch. He slumped over. The fireman with the crow’s feet shook his shoulder, calling his name. Maureen and Patty came running into the living room from the stoop, coats half-unbuttoned. “Oh my god. Where’s the dog?” Maureen said.

  I nodded to the kitchen. Maureen went running out of the room. “Here she is,” she called from inside. “She was under the kitchen table.”

  “What’s wrong with Daddy?” Patty said.

  “What do you think?” I snapped at her.

  While the firemen gradually roused my father, I phoned the bank. I heard Mom’s work voice, cool and controlled. “Mrs. Flynn speaking.”

  “You’d better come home right away. Daddy set the house on fire.”

  “What!”

  The receiver shook in my hand. My voice was cracking. “He fell asleep in his chair with a cigarette. I came home and there are two firemen in the living room with Daddy.”

  She muttered something away from the receiver. Then her voice came on, hard-edged. “I’ll be right there.”

  I hung up. My hand was shaking. I went back into the living room. The smoke was dispersing as cold air came in through the open front door. One of the firemen was fitting an oxygen mask over Dad’s face. His eyes were partly open. “My mother’s on her way. She’ll be here in five minutes,” I said.

  I wasn’t sure what I should do. I had reached my limit and all I wanted to do now was be with my sisters. I went into the back porch and found them in the yard, wrapped in their coats, standing around in the cold with Queenie. Their schoolbooks were stacked on the back porch steps. Maureen had brought the dog’s bowl outside, filled with fresh water.

  I sat down on the steps and started crying. In front of my sisters. I hated it, I couldn’t stop. Maureen came over and put her arm around me. All the weird things I alone had witnessed—with the man he paid off at Holy Cross, when I couldn’t get him to come home from the Dew Drop, waiting for him in the front seat of the Red Devil—crystallized in that moment. That guy lying on the living room floor, who was he? If he was my father, I didn’t recognize him.

  “He’s gonna get us killed one of these days,” I said. “You know that.”

  “Don’t say that, Nicky,” Patty said.

  “Why not? It’s true. You were there when he almost drove into the East River. We were lucky there was a fence. Next time, there won’t be.”

  The light came on in Mrs. Garrett’s kitchen, which faced the backyard. She pulled down the window shade to give us some privacy. My sisters made me tell them the whole story and I tried but Mom came down the alley, beige car coat not even buttoned, black pocketbook swinging on her left arm.

  “What are you doing out here?”

  “It’s pretty bad in there,” Maureen said.

  Mom glared at me as she stomped up the back porch steps. “I suppose none of you checked on your father,” she said.

  “He’s in there with
the firemen,” I said as she went charging into the house.

  “What the hell is the dog’s dish doing on the concrete? Come inside now,” she said. The door connecting the porch to the kitchen smacked against the wall. My sisters filed in, Maureen carrying the dog’s dish.

  “C’mon, Nicky,” she said, touching my arm.

  “I’m not going in.”

  “Where’re you going?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t go in there.”

  I squeezed past the Mercury in the alley and gripped the car’s red hood. I kicked the fender and then kicked in the left headlight. Nothing I did mattered. Our father would burn it all down.

  Fourteen

  The smell of the fire followed me. I could smell it on my shoulders, I could smell it in my hair. It was like having Himself’s hands on me, pushing me down on the floor with him. I unzipped my coat halfway and walked toward Holy Cross, not sure where I was headed. If I walked around the cemetery—about two miles—my head would probably clear.

  The Tilden Avenue gates were still open. I had just enough time before Holy Cross closed to walk to the chapel and maybe out the Albany Avenue exit, by the big tombs.

  The chapel was a ten-minute walk from the entrance. The room was empty and dimly lit, with a modest-sized altar and a plain gold tabernacle. Some sharp fragrance—incense from morning mass—still lingered. I sat down in one of the light wood pews. The colors on the stained-glass windows—square panels of lilac and mint green—offered some cheer, but the red, blue, and yellow figures of the saints trapped there seemed tortured and remote, more intent on brandishing their wings than offering consolation. They didn’t know how this story was going to end and neither did I. I wondered if Mom was going to tell someone—Uncle Tim or Grandpa or even her own father—what was going on. As the light faded from the glass, I imagined myself knocking on Uncle Tim’s door. Would the story of what was happening to his brother shock him, after that drive home on Christmas? He was already lending Himself money, I was sure, and moral support. What else was there to be done? I didn’t know.