Car Trouble

by Robert Rorke

  The living room was conspicuously empty, the only sign of Himself a half-filled handmade mosaic ashtray on the end table next to his chair. I decided to wait in the rocking chair, but I dragged it to the front porch, where it had been before the fire, and wrapped myself in Mom’s afghan. I gazed at the cars and the stoops across the street till I drifted off.

  Patty woke me sometime later, when the streets were fully light. She was wearing a flannel nightgown with a yellow ribbon around the collar.

  She pushed her hair behind one ear. “Where’s Ma?”

  I sat up straight and told her. She turned away and burst into tears. “I knew this would happen,” she said. “I didn’t know how, but I knew.”

  I stood up and hugged her. She smelled like sleep. “Uncle Tim is with Mom at Kings County. We have to wait. I’m going to get dressed and walk the dog.” I went up to my bedroom and put on a pair of pants.

  It was one way to kill time, walking the dog up and down the length of Holy Cross, reading the names on the tombstones while Queenie did her business. It was a fine morning. The air made my eyes tear. Crocuses were blooming around some of the graves and many of the trees—soaring oaks and black maples—had budded. When I came back home, Maureen was at the stove, pouring pancake batter from a Tupperware mixing bowl into a frying pan. She looked up at me, teary-eyed but focused, her right hand gripping the spatula like a sword. Queenie jumped up on her, and she stroked the fur under her chin with her free hand. The batter was already bubbling up in the pan, and I reached over and turned down the gas. Suddenly, I was famished and sampled a discarded pancake on a plate on the dishwasher.

  “Don’t eat that. It’s burnt,” Maureen said.

  I gobbled it down. “I don’t care. I’ve been up for hours. Where’s everybody?” The clock over the cabinets said 7:30 a.m.

  “Getting dressed,” she said, flipping over the pancake. It was the right shade of golden brown.

  We were going to pretend it was a normal Saturday, as if Mom had already left for work and we were about to do our chores after breakfast.

  “At least he wasn’t shot,” Maureen said, placing the cooked pancake on a stack of six that she was keeping warm under a pot cover.

  I got out some plates and set the table. “So we have to look on the bright side?”

  Breakfast was like a wake without a body. No one sat at the head of the table. Dee Dee and Mary Ellen looked truly bewildered as Maureen set a plate of pancakes in front of them, like they didn’t know whether they should be eating because she had cooked for them or crying because we hadn’t heard anything yet.

  Patty drowned her pancakes—three of them, more than the rest of us—in syrup and dug in. “Maybe we should walk up to the hospital. It’s only three blocks away.”

  She was all of twelve years old. Very bold.

  “Yeah, let’s go,” Dee Dee said.

  “Mom told me to wait here, so we’re waiting,” I said. “Kings County’s a really nasty place.”

  “How do you know?” Maureen asked, a forkful of pancakes held in midair. “Have you ever been there?”

  “You read about the place all the time in the paper. They see the worst of the worst.”

  “I don’t want to go,” Mary Ellen said.

  “Neither do I.” I was almost finished eating. I couldn’t stop anyone from going, but I was still going to try to talk them out of it. Besides, Mom would have a fit if we showed up at the emergency room. “We could get there and they could already be on their way home, while we are walking around looking for them.”

  “Yeah, but if they’re there, we can sit with Mommy so she’s not by herself,” Patty said.

  “She’s not by herself.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “What about the dog?” I asked. “We can’t just leave her here.”

  Maureen volunteered to stay with Queenie and Mary Ellen while she did the laundry; three loads were waiting. “Patty really wants to go, so take her,” she told me.

  I did the dishes and cleaned the stove in five minutes. Maureen went down into the basement to load the washing machine. Patty, Dee Dee, and I put on our shoes and got our coats. We all looked pretty scruffy. No one had combed their hair, and I hadn’t showered. Well, Kings County was no fashion show, so at least we wouldn’t stick out.

  The hospital was a ten-minute walk from our house. We crossed Linden Boulevard, Lenox Road, and then Clarkson Avenue, facing the fortress of hospital buildings, buildings named with a single letter, like G or M. Kings County’s main building looked like it could hold off an army, a carnelian red-brick box with a sloping slate roof topped with a weather vane. Three cop cars were parked out front. A lone vendor sold hot coffee and pastries out of a portable silver cart. Across the street, a beaten-down diner and candy store looked defeated in the sunlight.

  I turned to my sisters. “Are you really sure you want to do this?”

  Patty’s freckled face was resolute. “If we can’t find her, we’ll turn around and go home.”

  “Maybe I should go in first. In case it’s really gross.”

  I’d never been in a hospital and braced myself for the worst. But when I went inside, I found a huge waiting room, already half-full, and all I saw was strung-out people, half-asleep in their coats, dressed in the shiny clothes they wore the night before. The room had a high ceiling and pale blue walls, and it was very warm with that old radiator heat that has a certain stale odor. I didn’t see Mom or Uncle Tim, and I gave the nurse at the counter Dad’s name. She directed me to admitting, which was down a corridor to the left. I went back outside for Patty and Dee Dee.

  “He’s been admitted.”

  This was good news, I told them, smiling, but they didn’t look convinced. They wanted proof. So I took them down the corridor, skirting the edge of the ER waiting room and heading where I’d been directed. The smell of ammonia tickled my nostrils. We stepped aside for an orderly wheeling a gurney past us, accompanied by a pair of nurses.

  A black kid with a bandaged head lay on it, under a snow-white sheet. I caught the horrified look on Dee Dee’s face as she took it all in. We were distracted again by doctors, some in scrubs, others in white coats, striding in our direction and a young Indian nurse with a red dot painted on her forehead pushing an elderly woman in a wheelchair. A priest on crutches trailed after them. Patty and Dee Dee stuck close behind me as I searched feverishly for the admitting desk, hoping it would be around the next corner. And it was. The desk faced another lobby of seats. These had cushions, unlike the plastic bucket seats in the ER, and fewer people were waiting in them. I was feeling a little light-headed and thought if I were to sit down, I would conk out in two minutes.

  The lady behind the desk was older than Mom, but maternal-looking, wearing a simple, striking navy suit. Her curly brown hair fell in her face as she looked up Dad’s name.

  “He’s on the fourth floor,” she said, smiling. She gave me the room number, and we went back to the elevator bank, this time without a crowd of hospital personnel.

  “Stop rushing,” Patty said, behind me. “Dee Dee can’t keep up.”

  The elevator opened on the second floor for another patient on a gurney—this time, a fat, dark-skinned woman whose head lolled about on the sheet. She emitted a faint medicinal, stale odor. We backed against the elevator wall to make room for her team of nurses and orderlies and then squeezed past them when we got off. Room 423 was easy to find: the one with the cop outside the door. He was talking to Mom and Uncle Tim. Mom was holding her coat over her folded arms. Maybe they were getting ready to leave. I called her name and Dee Dee went running to her, hugging her from behind.

  “Oh, Jesus,” she said, jumping back, her shocked face taking a minute to register that this little girl at her waist was, in fact, her daughter.

  She looked up at me. “Nicky, what are you doing here?”

  I knew she wouldn’t like it. Five minutes and we would go. “They made me.” I sounded like an eight-year-old. />
  Patty stepped up, next to me. “Is Daddy okay?”

  Uncle Tim came over, smiling, amused at our nerve. “Well, he’s had a rough night, but they fixed him up and he’ll be himself again in a few days.” He squeezed the back of Patty’s neck. Always the optimist. He yawned widely and said, “Excuse me.”

  A chunky nurse came out of the room and in a thick Jamaican accent said we could go in.

  “I hear voices,” Dad said from within. He sounded really groggy.

  I smiled and poked Dee Dee in the ribs. “He hears voices.”

  The cop was watching us like we were suspects. Under his blue cap, he had very bushy black eyebrows and a dark, focused gaze. He towered over my uncle, but not me.

  “These are my nieces and nephew,” Uncle Tim explained. “Pat’s kids.”

  The cop tried to smile, but it wasn’t a natural reflex. He shook Uncle Tim’s hand and sauntered down the hall, as if he were on a break from fighting crime that Saturday morning.

  “Let me go in first,” Mom said. Uncle Tim said he was going down the hall to use the pay phone. There were no lights on inside the room, and Dad appeared to have it to himself. Mom stood at the foot of the bed and said, “The kids are here. They wanted to make sure you were in one piece.”

  She waved us in. Dee Dee went first, holding Patty’s hand. “Hi, Daddy,” she said, standing next to Mom. I was the last to enter. He was a sight, prone in the bed with a huge bandage covering his chest. The bed was partially raised and his hair was sticking out all over the pillow, the way it did when he was stationed in front of the television on a Sunday afternoon watching football. Or baseball. An IV drip stood next to the bed, the bag three-quarters full, the tube tracing down to a spot above his wrist.

  Patty went over and kissed him on the cheek. I shook the hand that wasn’t hooked up to the drip. He could barely grip mine. “Hey, Dad,” I said.

  “No hugs today,” he said. His eyes were half-open, the blazing blue dimmed. Maybe it was the room’s semidarkness, maybe the pain medication dripping into his veins, but I half-expected him to pop out of the bed and start railing against the guy who pulled the knife and took his money. My memory of him striding across the Belt Parkway to pick up that kid who was thrown from his motorcycle seemed very, very far away. The patient in the Kings County Hospital bed was someone else: a man who’d had the life force knocked out of him. He would never be the same.

  I got a good look at the bandage. It stretched from the left side of his body almost to his right armpit. My eyes started to film over. Who could have done this? I glanced at Mom, who was sitting in one of the room’s two chairs and reaching for a cigarette in her pocketbook. She was still young, but the fatigue of worrying about Himself, getting him off the kitchen floor and up to bed, and now, keeping him alive, was beginning to show—in the bags under her eyes, in the bewildered expression she wore when she wasn’t busy keeping the house running. She had it now. Staring at the bed and the man in it as if at an abyss.

  I leaned against the window ledge, very dizzy now, and tried to steady myself. I cracked open the window for a little air. From this vantage point, I could see the homes on Winthrop Street and the main building of Wingate High School, white brick and circular; the track team was doing laps outdoors in sweatpants. I looked back at Dad, dozing, a hidden trail of stitches across his stomach and chest, and wondered what was next. Would the cops find the guy who did this—or would my father find him first? We all knew he wasn’t going to let it rest.

  Uncle Tim slipped into the room and said he was heading back to Rockaway, if anybody wanted a ride. I couldn’t wait to get home and crawl into my bed for a while. I left with my sisters while Mom and Uncle Tim talked to Himself. I made it out to the hallway, but then the floor slipped out from underneath me. I reached out for the wall before I fainted.

  Twenty

  “Hello, the house!”

  The voice came booming from the bottom of the staircase.

  It was still dark out, but I was already awake.

  “Nicholas Flynn, get thine ass out of bed and bring your sisters with you.”

  I was still in bed when Maureen whispered from the hallway, “Didn’t you hear him?”

  This wasn’t the usual morning shakedown, I knew. I got out of bed and found my slippers. Four tangled heads of hair bounced ahead of me down the staircase. Queenie was waiting for us at the bottom of the stairs, tail wagging, thinking it was time to play. Maureen patted the dog’s head, but Queenie did not follow us into the kitchen. Smart dog, I thought.

  Mom was at her usual station, leaning against the sink, smoking a cigarette, in her bathrobe and black wire rollers, cup of coffee on the counter. We filed into the kitchen, faces still pasty with sleep, lips glued together and blubbery. The yellow enamel of the kitchen cabinets was enough to make you queasy. The kitchen clock said 5:45.

  Himself sat at the table, drinking a glass of grapefruit juice. “Well,” he said, a broad, sardonic smile breaking across his face, “good morning, everyone.”

  “Good morning, Daddy,” Dee Dee said, trembling in her nightgown.

  Nobody else said anything. I sat down across from him and tried to remember if me or one of my sisters had done something specifically wrong, but my mind was a blank.

  Himself arched his eyebrows, his voice extra husky, spittle flecking the corners of his mouth. “And how is everybody this morning?”

  “Fine,” said Patty, more than a little ticked off.

  “That’s good,” he said, dragging out the os. His eyelids were droopy. “Me, I’d have to say I’m a little tired.”

  He was without wheels these days. The Red Devil was stolen one night when he was shacked up at the Mermaid. Every time he came home now it took that much longer, by subway or bus. I looked over at Mom. She was biting her nails. “Pat, why don’t you go up to bed?” she asked sharply.

  “Sios siogh, for Pete’s sake.” It was the only Gaelic he knew. It meant: Sit down.

  Then he brought out the gun.

  He pulled the gun out of his shirt and rested it on the table, on the plastic flowered tablecloth. We froze in terror. He was going to shoot us. That’s how this story was going to end. No one dared move.

  “Jesus Christ,” Mom said. “What the hell is that?”

  “This here, Mrs. Flynn, is a .357 Magnum,” he said, picking up the firearm. “It is for this family’s protection. My family.” He eyeballed us—always the challenge to see who could eyeball him back. If you cast your eyes down or looked somewhere else, he won because then he knew you were hiding something.

  He caressed the trigger with his thumb. “The .357 Magnum, this here is a powerful weapon.” He held the gun in two hands and trained his eyes, no longer droopy, on us. “And by the way, it will most certainly kill you. Or anybody else who comes in this house and who doesn’t belong in this house.”

  I stared at him, like he was a disturbed stranger in the middle of Church Avenue threatening passersby—not my father. I wanted to scream at him but knew I had to keep it together or God knows what else would happen. My sisters were not going to be able to take this and would start cracking. The last thing I could do was set him off.

  “There are no bullets in this gun—yet,” he said, as if he were threatening a group of hostages, not talking to his wife and children.

  I didn’t believe him, but then he flipped open the gun’s chamber; mercifully, it was empty. Where were the bullets? In his pocket? Was he going to load them and pick us off, one by one? I thought my skull was going to split open with the pressure building inside.

  He passed the gun across the table to me. I did what he wanted, picking up the weapon like it was a live snake. How heavy and smooth it was. My fingertip touched the trigger. The gunmetal gleamed in the overhead light. You could probably kill somebody just by cracking them over the head with it.

  “Never point a gun at anybody unless you’re prepared to use it,” Himself said intimately, as if marksmanship was one of our
after-school activities. “Do you feel how heavy it is?”

  I swallowed and nodded.

  “That’s why it’s important to have control of your weapon and not get sloppy. People who get sloppy—well, we know what happens to them.” He nodded and sipped his juice. “Pass the gun to your sister.”

  “C’mon.”

  “C’mon, what? Pass it,” he said.

  I obeyed, handing the gun to Maureen, sitting on my left. I snuck a glance at Mom. Her bewildered face told me she didn’t know where the gun had come from either. Maureen took the gun and put it down on the table, her hand shaking. She looked up with tears in her eyes.

  Himself put the glass down. “What are we going for here, the Academy Award?” he said.

  “I’m not touching it,” she said, silent tears rolling down her cheeks.

  “Pat, that’s enough,” Mom said, coming over to the table. “Goddammit, what’s gotten into you? These kids have to get ready for school.”

  “Why are you always doing these things to us?” Maureen asked, sobbing now, her nose running, her face crabbed and red. “Why do you hate us so much?”

  Himself paused, lips parted. I was afraid he was going to knock Maureen out of the chair.

  “And where did you ever hear that?” he shouted, glaring at Mom, as if she’d been talking to us behind his back.

  Maureen’s voice was choked with sobs. “Then why did you bring that home?”

  “Why did I bring it home?” he said, mocking her, his eyes huge and full of pain now, blood vessels stretched against his eyelids. He was talking to us like we were strangers, as if we hadn’t seen him in the hospital, bandaged and on the IV. “Gee, I can’t imagine why I brought it—” He suddenly shoved the table into my chest and lifted his shirt and undershirt to brandish the foot-long scar he had from his knife wound. It was ugly and red, with crude stitch marks in the hairy flesh. The scar ended just inches below his heart.