Car Trouble

by Robert Rorke

  “What are you doing here? I thought you were at a funeral.”

  “No, that’s Wednesday.” I explained why we were passing by. “It’s good to see you. So who held up the store? Was it the same guys as that night with my father?”

  “They were older,” she said, nodding at the cop car where one guy with dark curly hair sat in the backseat. “The other one was taken away in an ambulance.”

  I put my arm around her shoulder. Her hair smelled like sugar. “You must have been scared out of your mind.”

  “Never a dull moment,” she said, laughing. “I’m good at ducking behind a counter now. Can you believe this?” She looked back at the boarded-up window. “Is Morty even going to open up tomorrow?”

  “He asked me to come in this weekend, but I don’t know. This might be it for me.”

  She laughed. “Chicken.”

  I was. “Let’s get out of here,” I said, leading her away. When we turned the corner, my father was walking toward us. “Look who I found,” I said, releasing my arm.

  We piled into the Pink Panther, parked a block away. I sat in the middle and we waited for a bus to pass before pulling out. Valerie gave her address and we drove her home. To end this night of tears sitting next to her comforted me. We didn’t even say that much to each other. She put her head on my shoulder just before I was about to put my head on hers.

  The night strip of stores sheathed with riot gates was as long as the summer before me. I looked out at the corner boys milling about outside bodegas, drinking out of paper bags. I was damned if I was going to spend my summer walking up and down this street.

  “I’m going to get a new job.” I let the announcement hang in the air. “Broadway theater usher. Something with a little more pizzazz to it. And better uniforms.”

  “Amen to that,” Dad said.

  Twenty-Nine

  Mom packed his bags two days before he left, two dark blue suitcases that had been stored in the basement for so long first I had to wipe the dust off them with a sponge. The luggage was manufactured by a company called Amelia Earhart, the name embossed on a brass plate above the brass buckles. The suitcases were waiting upstairs in the back bedroom.

  Mom had phoned Aunt Julie, giving her fair warning. “I know Tim wants to get on the road, but Pat’s not here yet.”

  As usual, all we had to do was to get Himself to show up for his own appointment.

  When he did, it was after two days and some time out in the field—the Mermaid, the Dew Drop, Harkins. Any of them and maybe all of them. He came crashing home about six p.m. on a Saturday, forgetting to shut the front door behind him. He paced the first floor of the house like a grizzly, his hair in wild tufts, as if he’d been trying to pull it out, his white shirt a sweat-yellowed rag. His face was livid. His body teetered when he stood in one place like a loose chunk of masonry atop a building.

  It was time to go. He didn’t want to.

  Mom asked us to stick around, like she was going to need us to intervene. Patty and I were in the house. Dee Dee and Mary Ellen stayed outside, in front, by the garden. They were learning the value of making themselves scarce.

  The voice boomed throughout the house. Patty, hiding upstairs with Queenie, could hear him. Mrs. Garrett across the alley could hear him. The Provenzanos next door could hear him through the walls. This evening, we were all his enemies.

  “I am sick and tired of being sick and tired—”

  It was a hot evening, heavy with the threat of thunderstorms. A gray shadow had fallen over the day. Tonight I was going to see A Moon for the Misbegotten.

  Then again, maybe I wasn’t going anywhere.

  “You don’t like me hanging out on Nostrand Avenue. Well, who asked you?”

  He was talking to me but looking out the front porch windows. In any case, he didn’t wait for me to answer but went into the kitchen. An old argument started all over again.

  “You carried me, babe. You really carried me. None better by far—”

  Mom kept her voice level. “Pat, we’ve all been waiting for you to show up. And where are you? Everywhere else except where you’re supposed to be.”

  I stood in the dining room doorway, at the ready.

  “Well, I’m here right now. Does that meet with your approval?”

  “Pat, I don’t have time for this. God, I am disgusted with you. Absolutely disgusted—”

  “That’s all right, Mrs. Flynn, because I am absolutely disgusting—”

  He picked up the drainboard from the sink, half-full of glasses, plates, pot covers, and flatware, and flung it across the room. The glasses crashed to the floor with a woeful tinkling and the plates—they were Melmac—rolled and spun on the floor, settling facedown on the linoleum with a hollow clap.

  Mom slapped at his swinging arms.

  “You stop right there, mister—”

  Patty came halfway downstairs with the dog and peeked into the kitchen from the staircase. I stood in the dining room while Mom swept up the broken glass and picked up the scattered pot covers and plates. My heart hammered in my chest. Patty took the dog back upstairs with her. I hoped Mary Ellen and Dee Dee would stay outside.

  “I want to know what’s going on here,” he said.

  “You’re leaving, that’s what’s going on here.”

  The telephone rang. I jumped. Upstairs, Patty answered it on the first ring.

  “Yeah, well, how come I’m the one who’s goin’?”

  Mom shut the gas off under the pot of boiling potatoes and moved it to a back burner.

  “I don’t have to tell you why you’re the one who’s going,” she said. “I didn’t tell you to spend the past two days holed up in some frigging bar. You know you’re supposed to leave. Your brother’s on his way.”

  No reply. I stood in the dining room, ready to pounce. And then I heard a loud tearing sound. One of the seat cushions from the kitchen chairs flew across the room, hitting the rim of the sink. He was ripping them off their metal bases and throwing them around the room like Frisbees. Then he flung one chair over his head at my mother. It crashed into the closet door and down on the dog’s bowl, turning it upside down. A puddle of water spread under the half-stripped chair. I heard a terrible thud and Mom’s furious cry.

  “You stop right there, mister. What the hell is wrong with you?”

  “Leave it there,” he thundered.

  “Go to hell!”

  “I said, leave it there.”

  This was not going to be the night he killed one of us. I hoped Patty was calling the cops right now. I went into the battlefield. I said, “Knock it off! Leave her alone.”

  He swung around and gaped at me. “Well, look who’s here. If it isn’t the Anointed One.”

  The kitchen table was capsized, the toaster smashed up against the tiled wall. “You lay a hand on her, I’ll call the cops.”

  “You pick up the phone, I’ll break your arm.”

  My blood ran cold. He was that guy you could never trust, the one who could keep me company at the McManus funeral home one night and who could turn on a dime into this other creature: Himself. I had spent the past two years anticipating the arrival of the latter while longing for the former. After tonight, it would never be the same.

  He took a swing at me, and I ducked.

  “You’re out of line, mister,” he said. “I can still clean your clock if I have to.”

  “I’m not out of line and you know it. I dragged your ass out of every bar in Brooklyn. I saved your ass when you almost shot those black kids at Baskin-Robbins. I never told anybody when you vandalized the property at the Di Napoli house. Remember? So don’t talk that way to me.”

  He clocked me. Huge smack across the face. I staggered back against the basement door, and he was on me, pinning me against the wood. My right ear stung. “Stop it,” I said, trying to shove him off, but he was a silo of flesh. He landed a punch and blood rushed into my mouth. Mom was trying to get hold of one of his arms. I pushed my hands against his l
eathery face, contorted with fury, so he couldn’t see what he was doing.

  Then I heard someone calling his name. Uncle Tim had finally shown up. “Pat, Pat, goddammit, what are you doing?”

  Although he was several inches shorter than my father, Uncle Tim was able to seize him with both arms and get him off me. I broke free and ran. My fingers were covered with blood. I tripped on one of the dog’s toys in the living room and fell on the couch. My mother came after me with a wet washcloth filled with ice.

  “Jesus Christ. Put this on your mouth.”

  The cold wet cloth felt good, but the bleeding didn’t stop. “Get me some tissues,” I said, and she came back with a handful. I divided the wad in half and pressed it against my nose, still stunned.

  Patty crept down the stairs without the dog. “That was your friend Brian on the phone. He said he’s on his way.”

  He was driving everyone to the show. Great. I was going to have to get in the car with a swollen lip and a bloody nose.

  The racket in the kitchen got even louder as the Flynn brothers raised the rafters. I had to change for the play but couldn’t get off the couch. Queenie came in and sat at my feet, and I hugged her with my free hand. I wiped my eyes and waited for the trembling in my shoulders to subside. I wouldn’t say a word to him before I left. Gone was any sense of duty. Gone was pity or forgiveness. I had opened my heart and was met with a fist. I was done. Done with Himself.

  Thirty

  I opened the medicine cabinet. Razor, shaving cream, tube of VO5, even the trusty bottle of Old Spice: all gone. Already it was weird not having him here. We got what we wanted and now what?

  I closed the medicine cabinet, checked my lip in the mirror. It looked like a beesting. From a queen bee. I went downstairs. The kitchen was back to normal. Mom must have put the chairs back together herself.

  The keys to the Pink Panther lay on the kitchen table. I was amazed he remembered to do it, with the state he was in, but he was true to his word. I picked them up, examining them in my palm. There were two keys, white gold with a fan shape cut into the round part of the key and the letters FORD imprinted onto the metal. Horizontal lines rose on either side of the fan shape, a fancy key for a car that had been, in its day, the snazziest thing on the street.

  I put them in the pocket of my jeans and went through the back porch into the yard. A fresh load of wet laundry hung on the clothesline, detergent smell wafting toward me through the window screen. There was a fresh breeze: thunderstorms had rampaged in the night and cleared out the fetid, stale air. Mom was sitting with the door open, on the back step, drinking coffee and reading the comics.

  She was wearing her yellow duster. “You’re up early.”

  I went down the steps and stood in the yard. It was so cool in the morning shade on the cement. The dog lay there, with her paws crossed and her head shaking. For a minute, I thought she winked at me.

  “So he got off okay?” I asked.

  I was waiting for Mrs. Garrett to make one of her cameo appearances. “It took a while, but yes, he’s on his way,” she said, rubbing the purple bruise on the back of her leg where the kitchen chair had hit her.

  She looked up at me. “Say, I was walking Queenie, and I ran into Flo Martinucci walking Muffin. She and her daughter Carmella were all dressed up for church. Is Gina still doing that folk mass?”

  “I think so. She should be back on the altar by now.”

  She had a dreamy, distant expression as she skimmed through the news section of the paper. “If your sisters get up soon, maybe you can go and take them with you. You can stop at the bakery on the way back, get some jelly donuts and crullers. I’ll make a big breakfast. How would you like blueberry pancakes?”

  So we were going to celebrate.

  “Do we have blueberries?”

  She nodded. “I got them on sale at King Kullen. And after breakfast, we’ll take a ride out to the beach and get your sister.”

  The beach. I covered my mouth and looked at the peach tree in the garden for a minute. I hadn’t been to Rockaway since the accident and supposed I wouldn’t return for a long while. But if Mom wanted to go, I’d do it. We’d take the bus and I’d take an aisle seat, so I wouldn’t see Riis Park if I didn’t want to—or the asphalt strip where Larry died.

  I broke into a smile. That was the second best bit of news this morning. “You mean we’ll just go get her?”

  She flicked her cigarette butt across the yard. “I’m about to call your aunt.”

  I waited another instant and asked, “Is Dad gone for good?”

  There were no guarantees. “Who knows? Maybe he’ll straighten himself out down there.”

  I wanted her to tell me he couldn’t live here anymore. But that statement was not going to come today. I knew how hard it must have been for her to pack his bags. But true to her promise, she had taken care of the situation her way.

  * * *

  Gina Martinucci tightened the strings on her Wilson acoustic guitar, turning away from the parishioners at St. Maria Goretti to hear if the instrument was in tune. Then she strapped a capo across the top fret and gave the cue to her fellow troubadours, including her younger sisters Connie and Carmella. They had the same allure as Gina: good girls in summer skirts and dresses with long, flowing hair, the hope of Vatican II.

  The first chords had a tinny sound—maybe somebody needed to check their tuning again—but the congregation didn’t seem to notice. They didn’t need to check the words to the songs, printed on the back of the church bulletin. They knew the words by heart. As did I.

  Sons of God

  Hear His Holy Word

  Gather round the table of the Lord

  Eat His body, drink His blood

  And we’ll sing a song of love.

  Allelu, allelu, allelu, allelu-u-ia!

  I hadn’t been to mass in a long time, but I knew Gina’s greatest hits. There was the offertory song “Take Our Bread,” the post-Communion filler “They’ll Know We Are Christians by Our Love,” and the walk-down-the-aisle song “Allelu!” when the ceremony was over.

  Gina smiled at me and my sisters from the altar. I had to admire her. If anybody thought she was corny or square because she headed up the folk mass, she couldn’t give a shit. She was a believer and didn’t care how much anybody laughed behind her back.

  I smiled as the priest told everyone to give the sign of peace. Most people in the pews shook hands, but I kissed my sisters lightly on their foreheads. We smiled with a strange sense of relief, as if we couldn’t believe Himself was really gone. Had our lives really changed overnight?

  While Gina and her band played “They’ll Know We Are Christians,” my attention drifted to the stained-glass windows on the aisles. There was one for each of the apostles, St. Simon with his saw, St. Jude with his lance, St. Peter with his keys, and, overhead, the clerestory windows with angels clad in emerald robes with red and coral halos, their wings flat against checkerboard panes of sage, periwinkle, and maize. The laws of the church unfurled in gilt scrolls across their chests: Confess at Least Once a Year, Do Not Marry Kin or at Forbidden Times. All my life, I had regarded these figures as decorative, spooky bystanders to the unproven creeds of my religion. Pray and the Lord will take care of you. I was taught to revere them in school, even when the message about faith and redemption seemed to exclude what went on in our house. But now I thought maybe one of the angels up there had finally come through for us.

  It seemed like a long walk back home. I was starving and I could smell breakfast cooking in the apartment houses we passed on Church Avenue. On the way, we stopped at Sylvia’s Bakery and I ordered a baker’s dozen, crullers and donuts. I split a jelly donut with Dee Dee.

  She tapped me on my elbow and asked, “Is Daddy gone for good?”

  It was the question of the day and perhaps the rest of the year. Her blue eyes, so like my father’s in their shape and the intensity of their color, were rimmed with red. Another one of us who hadn’t slept through the
night.

  I patted her head, her dirty-blond curls. “I don’t know. He’s gone for a while, I know that much.” I didn’t know anything but didn’t want my little sister to think that. “Mom says we’ll have to see what happens.”

  People ask me why I never went to the cops or why my mother didn’t leave him and all I can say is we did everything we could not to make things worse. We fixed the little problems and covered the big problems, surviving one thing, then the next, like needles. The endurance made us numb. My youngest sisters would forget half the scenes we had witnessed. Me and Patty and Maureen, we’d never forget. Even when we were in college or nursing school or on the New York stage, where I eventually found my calling, we’d still talk about the night raids, the burning of the Blue Max. We’d never forget the story of a man, still young, who lost his place in the world and never found it again. Even though everyone offered to help, it was never the right kind of help. Because it didn’t come from Himself.

  * * *

  As custodian of the Pink Panther, I decided to drive everyone to Rockaway. The bus would be packed with people going to Riis Park, and I couldn’t see my mother standing in the aisle with a bunch of strangers and their beach gear. But I couldn’t drive the car in its present state. After breakfast, I went into the basement, filled up a yellow bucket with Tide and hot water, and carried it up the cellar steps. I faced the hood of the Ford. As I squeezed a hunk of soap onto the pink expanse, I wondered how many coats of paint it took to achieve this color. It wasn’t bright or soft like a flower or medicinal like Pepto-Bismol or industrial like the Pink Pearl erasers we used in school. The layers had built up over time to a deep, earthy, claylike color—nothing feminine about it. When I washed the front of the car, I tossed the sponge into the pail of suds at my feet to take in its gleaming authority. I had to admire Himself for picking it out among all the jalopies being auctioned at the Sixty-Ninth Precinct the day he brought this home. Even without a .357 Magnum, he always knew how to get noticed.