Car Trouble

by Robert Rorke

  “Thirty stitches because of some dumb fucking nigger, and you want to know why I brought home a gun? Are you kidding me?”

  The tears streamed down Maureen’s face, then Dee Dee started bawling. I checked Patty and Mary Ellen. Patty was scowling at him, and Mary Ellen bit her lip, eyes welling.

  “Stop it,” I said.

  “What did you say?”

  “You have to stop it. You’re upsetting everybody.”

  He slammed the table into my chest. “I’ll clean your clock, young man,” he said. Then he clutched his chest, knotted up with pain.

  “Cut it out,” Mom said, wiping Maureen’s face with a tissue.

  I’d never heard Mom talk back to him like that. He got up from the table. “Are you telling me how to talk to my children?”

  She walked right up to him, nose-to-nose. “I said that’s enough. They have to get ready for school.”

  He checked the clock. “Bullshit. It’s only six thirty.”

  “I said that’s enough.” She was screaming. “Did you hear me?”

  My head was splitting. I was sure Mrs. Garrett was in her kitchen catching every word of this. Maybe she would call the cops, the way she’d called the fire department.

  He turned back to us kids. “Now understand this: if anybody does anything to hurt you or to hurt this family, you tell me and I’ll take care of them. You just leave it alone and you come home and tell me. That’s what this is for.”

  The cops hadn’t found the guy who stabbed him, and he was going to try to finish the guy off himself. I saw it coming, the nights he sat in the wing chair after he came home from the hospital, glowering at the television and emptying one can after another of Budweiser—and then finally going out when that no longer did the trick.

  I pushed the table off my chest and stood up. “You have really lost your mind now.”

  “Don’t give me any back talk. If someone tries to hurt this family, they’re going to try to do it here.”

  “And this is your solution?”

  Mom told Mary Ellen and Dee Dee to go upstairs and get ready for school.

  The rest of us were trapped, listening to him drone on. “You will not see the gun; you will not hear the gun discussed. The gun will be hidden, and if we’re all lucky, you will not hear the gun, until such time as it is necessary to use it.” He gave the gun to Mom. “Put this in the buffet drawer for now,” he told her.

  Mom flung him one final, violent look and took the Magnum out of the room. I heard her open the drawer in the buffet, where she kept assorted junk.

  Himself turned to Maureen and said, “This was not done to upset you.”

  “Really? Well, it does.” Maureen left the table and disappeared upstairs.

  Mom came back into the kitchen with the ironing board, trying to get us back on course, ending the horror show before Himself rolled the final credits. She said quietly to Patty, “Do you want to start ironing your blouse?” She filled the iron with a cup of water. Patty went upstairs to get her blouse for the day.

  Now I was left alone with Himself. I couldn’t feign the excuse of having to get ready too: I wouldn’t get near the bathroom for another twenty minutes. Well, I could try to eat breakfast. That would kill some time.

  He watched me eating a bowl of Corn Flakes. “Who’s using drugs in your school?” he said. I looked up at him, incredulous. Only Himself could top Himself. “Now, I am being very serious here. I want you to write down the names of the people in your school who are doing drugs. I have a friend who’s a detective who will pull these varmints out of school and put them behind bars where they belong.”

  I didn’t know what to say. He leaned in. I could smell the sour contents of his mouth. “I am not fucking with you, young man.”

  Twice in the last two weeks I’d patrolled the streets of Brooklyn, as my grandfather had done when Himself was a teenager, pulling him out of bars, even the worst dive of all: Shanahan’s, where he disappeared for two days, and now he smelled like the back booth of that shithole.

  I couldn’t eat anymore. “I don’t know.”

  “Anybody offers to sell you drugs, I don’t care how easy it seems, I don’t care how friendly they are, I want to know.”

  Patty came down with her blouse and gave me a fed-up look. Dee Dee came down in her bathrobe, carrying a terry-cloth towel, to wash her hair in the kitchen sink.

  He finally left the kitchen, ducking under the cord of the iron after Patty had plugged it into the outlet.

  “Ah, yes, the morning ablutions have begun. I’d better give my daughters the floor before they take over. Have a nice day,” he said as he climbed the staircase with weary steps.

  Patty and I waited to say anything until we heard the back bedroom door slam shut. Mom returned to the kitchen with the dog’s leash in her hand.

  “Ma, you better do something,” Patty said. “He’s a drunken lunatic and I am sick of being woken up at the crack of dawn.”

  The words shot out of her so articulately, like tiny spears, as if they had been on her lips for a long time.

  “Sshhh,” Mom said. “He’s right upstairs.”

  Patty maneuvered the blouse from panel to panel on the ironing board as she continued to vent. “My teachers want to know why I look so tired. Maybe I’ll tell them, ‘Oh, Sister, my father woke us up early this morning because he wanted to show us how to use his new gun—’”

  Mom slapped a dish towel at her side. She glared. “Did you hear what I said?”

  Patty would not back down. “I don’t care if he hears me. I’ll tell him to his face. What the hell kind of house is this?”

  “Ma, she’s right. He’s completely insane. Like where did he get the gun?”

  Mom threw her arms up in the air. “How do I know? Do you think he tells me anything? Your father knows every gangster in Brooklyn.”

  Patty did not look up from the ironing board. “Yeah, well, what are you gonna say to the cops when he uses it on one of us one day? That you didn’t know where he got it?”

  Mom was livid. “That is enough. He is not going to use the gun, period. I will take care of the gun.”

  “Bathroom’s free,” Maureen called from upstairs.

  “You have to get it out of the house,” I said.

  Mom gave us a desperate look. “Stop tormenting me. I told you I will take care of it.” She looked up at the clock. “Jesus, will you look at the time? I have to get to work.” She went into the dining room to get the clothes she had to iron. Patty stomped upstairs.

  I watched Mom at the ironing board, getting on with the business of life. If she didn’t work, we didn’t eat. “Have you taken your shower yet?” she asked, without looking up. She began pressing her own blouse. “Well, I don’t know what you’re waiting for.”

  * * *

  I was the first to escape. I was in school half an hour early and hid out in the library, combing the shelves for something to distract me, and came across The Best American Plays, an anthology with works I’d never heard of: The Price, The Boys in the Band, Ceremonies in Dark Old Men. The actors pictured were nobody I recognized from TV or the movies; their expressions were so serious, like they were all getting bad news and had to act fast, but I kept seeing that name in the text: Juilliard. The school Mary Zaleski wanted to go to. One minute I was reading the first act of The Price, the next someone was tapping me on the shoulder. The school librarian, Mrs. Reynolds. “The bell rang for first period. Didn’t you hear it?”

  I jumped out of my seat and stumbled out of the library. My first class was biology. It met down the hall; fortunately, I had my textbook with me. The teacher, Brother Crane, was about to shut the door and get started when I slipped in, ignoring my classmates as I sank into my seat, grateful to have something solid beneath me. I barely paid attention; it was a good thing we didn’t have to dissect anything, and I prayed I would not get called on. And that’s pretty much how the morning went, with me present in body only. All I could think about was the gun
.

  I met Larry on the cashier’s line in the cafeteria. We hung out at school all the time, usually in the cafeteria, sometimes across the street in the playground; once or twice I was able to confide in him. One day in the playground across from St. Mike’s, I told him how Himself was stabbed and ended up in the hospital. I watched his expression: he was shocked, concerned, but there was something else flickering behind his Clark Kent glasses, especially when I filled in the blanks with the story of the holdup. He looked at me warily, as if he didn’t know what to do with the information.

  So of course I didn’t tell him about the gun and only half-listened as he told me about the weddings he played at this weekend. I was deciding to cut class, something I’d never done. The prospect filled me with anxiety. You were supposed to get a slip from the front office to leave the building. I knew Brian would cover for me.

  “You’re pretty quiet today,” he said, as he polished off his French fries.

  The lemonade I bought was a little watery. “I’ve felt weird all day. I think I’m coming down with something. If I don’t show up, could you tell Brian I went home sick?”

  “Sure. Is that all? You’ve been a veritable church mouse lately.”

  * * *

  The television was on when I walked into the house. The door to the basement was open in the kitchen. Mom—or worse, Himself—was down there. I dumped my books on the dining room table and began looking for the gun. I first checked the buffet drawer, where he’d told her to put it. The drawer was full of meaningless envelopes, kerchiefs not worn in years, group photographs of Mom and Himself on a date with other couples at some weird club with palm trees. Everybody wore leis around their necks.

  I heard footsteps coming up the basement steps—Mom, carrying a basket of wet laundry on one hip. She was home earlier than usual, but I wasn’t going to ask why. She looked at me without smiling. It was too late to shut the drawer. I felt like I’d been caught with my hands in a safe. “You’re home early,” she said.

  I closed the drawer and followed her into the kitchen. She lit a cigarette on the gas burner.

  “My English teacher was sick. They didn’t have a substitute.” I paused. “Ma, what did you do with the gun?”

  “Why do you care?”

  “I want to know where it is. It’s not here.”

  “Well, I wasn’t going to leave it in the dining room where anybody could find it.”

  She carried the clothes out to the back porch, where she’d rigged up a clothesline with a long plastic rope. I squinted in the warm midafternoon sun. “So where did you put it?”

  Mom hung a pair of Himself’s gray work pants upside down. “I took care of it.”

  Her voice had an edge. I knew the tone: she was answering questions but the controlled tone and clipped phrasing implied that each question should be my last. I knew she wasn’t going to tell me where the gun was, but I didn’t trust her to get rid of it. She let Himself run roughshod all over us. I could check the vestibule coat closet later. Inside, there were deep shelves where Mom had once hidden a bottle of scotch we received as a Christmas present from somebody who didn’t know how dangerous that kind of thing was around here. Maybe it was there.

  Mom hung up some socks next—navy, black, and the yellow pair I’d given Himself for Christmas. Then she moved on to female underwear. She raised her eyes above the hanging wet laundry, looking for a second like a veiled woman from the Middle East. “I just woke your father up and I want to talk to him,” she said. “I want to talk to him before your sisters come home, so if you wouldn’t mind, I wonder if you could take the dog for a long walk somewhere, maybe around the cemetery. It’s a nice day for that, right?” She turned to face me. “Do you think you could do that for me?”

  Her expression said I need you to do this. I was still her soldier.

  I went into the kitchen and got the dog’s leash. Queenie heard it jangle and roused herself from the living room floor. I heard Himself turn on the shower upstairs. I wondered what they really said to each other in these private discussions, whether she laid down the law. She kept telling us she would take care of it, but I no longer believed her.

  Twenty-One

  I had a dream that woke me up in the middle of the night the week after Himself brought home the gun. I was out riding my bike through the empty streets and I was being followed by a white convertible. I rode past the NBC studio on East Fourteenth Street and took a right on Elm Avenue, trying to get to Ocean Parkway. I rode against the traffic on the side streets to lose the car, but it always seemed to find me. The top was up, then the top came down, and when the car passed me at an intersection on Ocean Parkway, I couldn’t see the driver’s face, just his hands on the wheel. But I was sure who it was all the same.

  The house was drawing round us, the walls coming together. During the week, my bedroom was my refuge and I stayed there, reading and doing my homework until it was time to walk the dog.

  Come the weekend, I had to get out of the house. One of the last student dances of the year was happening at St. Mike’s and I went. The cafeteria was an open cavern, its tables and chairs folded and stacked away in the corners. It didn’t look like the place where I ate lunch every day. Purple and blue crepe paper hung from the ceiling. Posters of Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison and the Rolling Stones were taped to the walls. A platform set up in the middle of the room displayed a sparkly set of black drums, guitar stands, electric and acoustic guitars, and an electric keyboard, all waiting to be played.

  Larry said he was coming to the dance before we left school on Friday. Now I couldn’t wait for him to get here. Slowly, the room began to fill up. I nodded to one of two guys I knew, but I wasn’t starting any conversations. I was just going to listen to the music. Rock hits mixed with oldies blared out of the giant black speakers in the back of the cafeteria. “Woodstock,” “Instant Karma,” “House of the Rising Sun,” something insipid by Credence Clearwater Revival. One group of girls bobbed up and down with one another, impatient for the band to start playing. I was dressed down, just jeans and a denim shirt, but there were some squeaky-clean students in chinos and plaid shirts, and some of the Italian guys had gotten all dolled up in striped tight bell-bottoms and hip-huggers with white vinyl belts.

  I told myself if I didn’t like the dance, I didn’t have to stay.

  The guys in the band were coming out now, from behind a pair of silver doors that led to the kitchen—long-haired, lanky boys in jeans and faux-suede vests over button-down shirts. They called themselves Déjà Vu, after the hit album by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. They took their time getting started, tuning guitars, checking amps, and flashing smiles at their groupies, girls with long bushy hair whose loving gazes told me they would wait as long as it took to get their attention. It wasn’t like when we were doing the play and the girls in the chorus moaned for me when Brian gave them the cue—their shiny-faced infatuation was real. I wondered if I would ever give off that kind of charisma again on stage.

  The band kicked off its set with “Carry On,” the one song I knew by heart from the Déjà Vu album. The girls up front jumped and quivered with short screams. The harmonies weren’t anywhere near as good as the record, but the guitars, rigorous and rhythmic, made up for it. Moving in from the sidelines, I rocked back and forth on my feet with everyone else. This wasn’t going to be so bad, as long as I didn’t have to talk to anybody I didn’t want to.

  Somebody tapped me on the shoulder. Larry. Finally. I was so glad to see him.

  He usually shook my hand, one of his old-man gestures, but instead I gave him a hug, nearly knocking his eyeglasses off his nose.

  “Whoa. Hey there,” he said, nodding at the stage. “Who are these hippies?”

  “Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, in their dreams.”

  Larry wasn’t alone, but I couldn’t believe whom he was with: the black girl who’d waited on us at McDonald’s the day the fight broke out. Obviously, while I was dragging Himself out of bars, Larr
y had been sneaking across the street for more than his usual cheeseburger and fries.

  I jabbed him in the ribs. “You’ve been holding out on me.”

  He touched the frame of his eyeglasses. “Nicky, you remember Rolonda.”

  She still had that smile that wowed us at the counter, the kind that would make you switch lines just so she could wait on you.

  “Yes, I do. We’ll never forget that day.”

  “No, we won’t. Cops kept those doors locked for two hours.”

  Rolonda had to be the only black girl here, and I could see she was nervous. There were maybe three black guys total at St. Mike’s, and I put my hand on her shoulder to convince her she would be all right.

  I gestured to the room. “What do you think of our swanky accommodations?”

  “Looks like my school.” She had a slight accent, not quite Southern, and it was delightful to hear, especially when you thought about what most people in Brooklyn sounded like. Rolonda went to South Shore, in Canarsie, a neighborhood I didn’t know at all.

  “What do you think of the band?”

  “It’s like beach music, you know. Like when you go to Riis Park and all the girls have their radios. It’s pretty good, I guess.”

  The first song ended and the band segued into “Get Back” and more people were dancing, guys and girls, and girls without dates, in clusters. I wasn’t sure if Larry wanted me to get lost so he could take Rolonda out on the floor. I caught some of the girls near the front of the stage stealing glances at her, and I asked, “Aren’t you guys going to get out there?”

  Larry reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a ten-dollar bill. “Can I trust you to get us some drinks? And pick one up for yourself, sonny boy.”

  I snatched the bill out of his hand. “Only if I can have the next dance.”