Car Trouble

by Robert Rorke

  An engine rumbled outside. My first thought: It’s Himself, hunting me down in the Red Devil. I left the pew, tripping over the kneeler, and moved to the corner of the chapel, next to a stand of blood-red votive candles. A gust of cold air blew in as the chapel doors opened. Dried-up leaves skittered across the stone floor in the vestibule. I realized it couldn’t have been Himself driving. He was conked out. Not even he could bounce back that quickly.

  An older man with a green cap and a heavy burlap-type jacket walked down the aisle and genuflected next to one of the pews close to the altar. I pegged him for a maintenance worker. He went into the pew and knelt, bowing his head in prayer. I eased my way toward the vestibule, behind the brass stand of candles, and slipped outside. A pickup truck like those I had seen when I took my first driving lesson in the Black Beauty was parked next to the chapel.

  It was nearly dark. I jogged down the street, past graves on both sides, many of them taller than I was, heading for the Tilden Avenue gates. The sky was streaked with silvery yellow light and the moon, white as a cue ball, rose over the hulking edifice of the Cloister. The only sound was the crunch my sneakers made on the occasional patch of old snow. I reached the main road in a few minutes. A bright spotlight shone down on the chunky stone archway and the adjacent yellow brick building where the cemetery kept its records, but I could see that the gates, black as night, were closed. That meant the gates at Albany Avenue were closed too. There was no point in even looking. The only way out was to climb the fence.

  I headed into a labyrinth of headstones. The path between graves was not always clear, and I had to straighten myself out, keeping an eye on the houses across the street from the cemetery on Snyder Avenue. A horn honked behind me, and I turned. The truck I had seen parked outside the chapel was advancing; its headlights appeared between the graves like twin suns. I didn’t feel like stopping or getting to know the driver, and I moved behind a crumbly, oval-shaped mausoleum with ridges in its cement façade. The fence, black and peeling, even in the poor light, wasn’t that far away. Maybe a hundred feet.

  Then he called out to me. He was out of the truck.

  “Cemetery’s closed, son.”

  He thought I was trespassing. I looked over my left shoulder but didn’t see him. “I was in the chapel,” I called out. “I lost track of time.”

  I kept moving, walking as quickly as I could. It was going to be awkward climbing the fence in my parka, and I unzipped it all the way so my hips would be free.

  “Why don’t you come over here?” His voice was closer and sounded ragged, as if he were out of breath from trying to catch up with me. “Come with me and I’ll let you out by the gate.”

  I didn’t like this guy. My scalp tingled: I was beginning to sweat and something bad stirred in my stomach. I looked over my right shoulder and there he was—tall, stoop-shouldered, and very pink in the face, like he’d been digging graves all day in the cold. He carried a flashlight, and I backed away from its beam, behind a tree. He stood behind a headstone that almost came up to his waist. He wore wire-rimmed glasses that made his eyes look very small. He wiped his nose with the sleeve of his jacket.

  I kept moving. The fence, about seven feet high, was a few feet away. The flashlight beam bounced on the dirt, along the bottom of the graves.

  “Son, there’s no harm in getting locked in, but you could hurt yourself trying to get out that way.”

  I shouldn’t have turned around, but I was having trouble shimmying up the fence. My palms slid down the black wrought-iron bars, so I wiped them on my coat. Then the coat seemed too heavy. I took it off and tossed it over the fence. That’s when I looked over my shoulder. The gravedigger was leaning on the other side of the headstone now and I could see the brass teeth of his open zipper and the white cotton of his briefs.

  “Get away from me,” I shouted.

  “You don’t want to be climbing up there, son. I could pull you down in a minute.”

  When I thought of him touching me, I found my way out. Two back-to-back tombstones, one a little shorter than the other, stood close to the fence. I climbed on top and put one foot on a slanted black rod that branched out from the fence. I leaned over and grabbed the top of the fence and hauled myself up, lodging my left foot on top in the thin space between spikes. When I had both feet on top of the fence, I jumped, landing on the dirt path where I walked Queenie. I broke my fall with my hands.

  I stood up and wiped the dirt and pebbles from my hands. Inside the cemetery fence the cold granite graves stared back at me. The perv was gone. I gathered up my coat and took off down my block. The fire engine was gone. When I squeezed past the Mercury in the driveway, I saw that someone had carried the charred recliner out through the back porch door and left it on the cement, next to the garbage pails. That couldn’t have been easy; the chair was heavy and cumbersome. I wondered if Himself did it or whether that job fell to the cleanup crew of my mother and Maureen. I felt a twinge of guilt: I should have done it.

  The light from Mrs. Garrett’s kitchen—she had raised the shade—shone on the burned fabric. An old kitchen towel masked the crater of fried stuffing, like singed cotton candy, where the cushion once provided a seat.

  I heard a screen door squeak and snap shut and soon Mrs. Garrett was inching down her back steps, on the pretext of throwing out her garbage. She dropped a brown paper bag in the can next to the stoop and came over to me.

  “I called the fire department. Your daddy could have died.” She was originally from Virginia and still had traces of her Southern accent.

  “I know,” I said. “You probably saved his life.” Then I burst into tears again.

  Mrs. Garrett was somewhere in her seventies. She had worked as a nurse at Kings County for forty-five years and bought this house after she retired. Her husband had died last year while pruning a tree in the backyard. She knocked on our back door and asked for Mr. Flynn. “I found John in the yard,” she said, her voice shaking. We weren’t allowed back there—the Garretts’ yard extended behind our garage and garden, and actually was a remnant of an old Indian road that led all the way to Canarsie—while Himself carried the body into the house and waited with Mrs. Garrett for the coroner.

  Now she lived alone in the big house, which was not semiattached like ours, but freestanding, with four bedrooms and a dining room with mahogany beams in the ceiling.

  She took my hand; her skin was dry as paper. In this light, the silver of her eyeglass frames was sharply etched. “You came down the block in such a fright, but everyone’s all right now. Nobody got hurt.”

  “I guess so,” I said, wiping my eyes on my sleeves. “But it’s been one thing after another, all day.”

  I heard another door open, on my side of the yard. There were footsteps on the back porch, then Mom’s solemn voice. “Are you ready to come in and have your supper?”

  She did not say hello or anything to Mrs. Garrett, but waited for me to end my conversation and walk up the steps. I couldn’t tell if she was angry or just impatient. Had I been gone that long?

  “You take care, then,” Mrs. Garrett whispered.

  Fifteen

  The rearrangement of furniture made it easy to pretend he hadn’t almost set himself—and the house—on fire. Mom moved the wing chair over to the spot where the recliner stood and I carried the rocking chair from the front porch into the living room. She didn’t talk about what happened. And we never, ever mentioned the fire to Himself. The only trace was the ointments Mom had purchased to help his skin heal and in his walk: slow, creaky, every step a reminder that he was a lucky devil.

  A week or so later, he needed our salvation again.

  Mom woke me up in the middle of the night. I turned over in bed and saw the black frames of her eyeglasses.

  “I need you,” she said in a low whisper. “Your father’s been hurt.”

  I didn’t even know he was home. Usually, I heard the front door open, and then the groaning staircase as he dragged himself upstairs. />
  “What’s going on?”

  I followed her into the bathroom, the overhead light catching on her pink plastic curlers and the collar of her blue flannel bathrobe. Himself was lying on the floor between the pedestal sink and the radiator; the tub was behind his head.

  I thought he was having a heart attack. I gasped and Mom turned to me and said, “Don’t wake up the whole house.”

  He was bleeding from a cut on the bridge of his nose. Blood ran down the side of his face onto the tile floor. He stared at the ceiling, mesmerized, as if the Almighty had him under a microscope. He didn’t seem to know we were there.

  “What happened to him?”

  “There was a fight at the bar. He tried to break it up.”

  “He needs stitches,” I whispered.

  She handed me some tissues to mop up the blood. “I already told him that.”

  I crouched down. “Dad, are you all right?”

  His breathing was ragged. “Son of a mutt clocked me good.”

  “Hold his shoulders down,” Mom said. She took a handful of cotton swabs, poured some boric acid on them, and knelt down next to the sink. It was a tight squeeze, the three of us there on the tile floor. My back was flush with the cool marble of the tub. Himself instructed her how to clean the cut. She pressed the swabs down on his nose and cleared out the dirt and blood. He hissed and kicked as I held him down. It looked to me like he’d been cut, not hit with a fist, but now wasn’t the time to ask.

  And then he did something I’ll never forget. He pressed the torn flesh together and turned purple from the pain. I winced, but he groaned, like a wounded animal. “Mother of God.”

  “Now, put this on.” Mom handed me a peeled Band-Aid to put on his cut. Her focus was impressive, like she’d done this kind of patchwork before. Me, I was a little dizzy.

  A voice whispered in the hallway. “What’s wrong?”

  Maureen, in her yellow flannel nightgown and socks, stood in the hallway. She pushed loose strands of hair out of her face.

  “Go back to bed, please,” Mom said, without looking back.

  I looked at Maureen and shook my head. She crept away.

  Mom screwed the top of the bottle back on and put it back in the medicine chest. The circles under her eyes looked deeper than ever in the harsh light. In a few hours, she and I would be getting up again for our lives in the daylight world. “Pat, you’re gonna be the death of me yet.”

  “Yeah, well. Don’t get your hopes up,” he said. “Help me up, Nicky.”

  I hooked my left arm under his arm and gripped his shoulder. I placed my right hand around his shoulder. He weighed a ton, and I had to plant my foot against the tub to get enough traction. Once he was able to put his hand on the sink, he stood up and I was able to get out from behind him. He checked his face in the mirror and approved of the emergency wound cleaning. Ever the pretty boy. “Scar won’t be too bad.”

  “You can go back to bed now,” Mom said, nodding toward the door.

  Like I would ever fall asleep now. I had to say something before I left. I put my arm around his shoulder, looked in the mirror, and said, “Dad, I think you need another line of work.”

  “You might be right about that,” he said, almost laughing.

  As I left the bathroom, I looked back at them, and saw the way Mom tenderly finished cleaning his face with a washcloth. No matter what shape he came home in, she would fix him up. And now I was her accomplice too, the good soldier being trained to mend Himself and send him back out into the world for another day on the battlefield.

  Sixteen

  The night he spent on the bathroom floor while his split face was repaired seemed to give Himself pause. He stopped: drinking, carousing, closing out the night. He came home after locking up at the Mermaid, ate something, and went to bed. Maybe he had been scared straight.

  “Maybe this time he’ll stop,” said Dee Dee one afternoon in the girls’ bedroom. We were discussing the alcoholic weather report. Forecast: partly sunny.

  The other three sisters were looking at me for my verdict.

  “It’s hard to say,” I said. Their expectant faces told me I wasn’t telling them what they wanted to hear. And I remember how I thought there wasn’t much more I could take, but from day to day you never knew how much more you might be asked to process. I mean, if Tuesday was good, Wednesday would be bad. Before you digested that he had set the house on fire, he would wind up on the bathroom floor, his face gushing blood. The close calls were growing more frequent and they set me on edge. That day talking to my sisters in the front bedroom, I was feeling pretty numb from having absorbed one shock after another. If it wasn’t for the play, I don’t know if I would have made it. That land of make-believe was the only reality I could take.

  While we waited to see whether sobriety was a commitment or just a hiatus, we had to get used to him being around more often. He was intent on playing the patriarch. He told us to turn down the kitchen radio, which we blasted when we did the dishes after supper. And watched us as we went to the telephone bench to talk to our friends. We were no longer getting free service and he began to ration how much time we could spend on the phone, especially when Maureen was using it. He also hadn’t been home when she started going out at night with her friends, wearing makeup and perfume and a vintage black velveteen coat that had once belonged to my mother. But he didn’t like it.

  One night she was heading out, and the closest she got to the front door was the wing chair in the living room. He glanced away from the television screen. “What do you have on your face, young lady?”

  Maureen looked over at Mom, stretched out on the couch, wrapped under a multicolored afghan—crocheted by Grandma Flynn—with an ashtray balanced on her lap.

  “Don’t look at your mother. I’m the one who’s talking to you.”

  I was sitting in the rocking chair between Himself and Mom, reading my European history textbook. Queenie sat at Dad’s feet.

  Before Maureen could even say the word “eyeliner,” Himself ordered her to go upstairs and wash her face. “You’re not walking down Church Avenue looking like that,” he said.

  Maureen wasn’t wearing that much makeup, but she did a quick save, turning around and stomping upstairs to the bathroom. When she was done, she left the house by the back door. If he was going to be like this with her, my other sisters were in for a hell of a time. We were all growing up, bodies changing and maturing, involved in athletics and theatrics, but it was clear Himself wasn’t going to keep up with us.

  Maureen needed another place to hang out besides Church Avenue, and I invited her to come with me to dress rehearsal. We left early on a Saturday morning, the only white people on the Church Avenue bus. The passengers were doing their errands, carrying bags of groceries and dry cleaning. We sat side by side toward the back, the garment bag holding my costume folded on my lap. When the bus stopped at Utica Avenue, I looked out the window and saw construction workers putting a new plate-glass window in the frame of an empty corner store.

  “So tell me about the play. Who am I going to meet?”

  “Well, there’s Larry, he’s a total crack-up. He has these Clark Kent glasses and he kind of talks like a radio announcer.” I tried, lamely, to imitate him, calling me “sport” and his other nicknames. “He’s in my English class. He has the Paul Lynde part and he’s just as loud.”

  Maureen laughed.

  “So I hang out with him backstage. He knows everyone in my school and seems to know all the girls from the high schools. He knew them at the audition.”

  “All the girls in the play are from Catholic high schools?”

  I nodded. We had to get off at the next stop. “The star of the show is from St. Brendan’s. This other girl, her name is Immaculata.”

  “Jesus. You’re kidding?”

  I walked to the rear door exit. “No. That’s really her name.”

  “We have Scholastica Del Vecchio at St. Edmund’s.” She made the sign of the cross. “
Very pious. The nuns love her.”

  I opened the back door and we stepped out into the windy morning on Kings Highway. “Oh, Immaculata’s nothing like that. Between her and Larry, I’m laughing all day long.”

  The blocks leading up to St. Mike’s were always so quiet I sometimes wondered if the houses were empty. “They’re very, very dramatic. They all think they’re going to go on to Broadway.”

  I told her about the day a bunch of us went to the movies after rehearsal and Mary Zaleski told me she was going to go to this school Juilliard. We were at Kings Plaza, the new mall, sniffing the candles in the Plum Tree afterward and she spoke with such conviction I forgot about her three-octave range (we all knew she could sing high, but Immaculata gave me the exact number) and her gymnast’s figure, those balloons in her shirt swelling against the pink corduroy, protected by the good-girl crucifix. She took ballet and voice lessons. She could play piano. All of the guys in the show were trying to get with her, but she only had eyes for Brian. It made me think she was a little ridiculous, even though she was obviously a hot girl. Especially when she started asking me where Brian lived. And did he have a girlfriend? Was it true that he was in the seminary?

  “What’s his astrological sign? I’m a Leo,” she said, tossing her blond mane behind her shoulder. “We might be compatible.”

  I answered some of her questions and that’s where I made my mistake. I became more invisible in her eyes.

  Maureen and I crossed Tilden Avenue and passed the high school. I heard a coach blowing a whistle behind the brick wall circling the football field, and the thud of bodies hitting the ground.