Bloodroot

by Bill Loehfelm

  “Good Christ!” Danny screamed, lurching forward in his seat. “I love this country!” He pounded the dashboard with his fist. “God bless America! Everyone in this car is guilty of at least one drug-related felony and he’s nailing someone for fucking speeding. I love this FUCKING country.”

  He laughed like the Mad Hatter, leaning out the window as we passed the cop car pulled over on the shoulder with the Camaro sitting in front of him. Danny fell back in his seat, his hair wild from the wind. “That pig just missed the biggest bust of his career. So much for detective.” He fell forward. “Where’s my fuckin’ tea?”

  I lit a cigarette. I asked Danny for a bottle of tea. I needed something, anything, to wash the taste of fear from my mouth. I felt like I’d been puking bleach. Danny was right. The moment that cop landed on our bumper, badged, armed, and full of justice, we were transformed from three bored guys in a shitty blue Escort into a carful of felons. Under those awful misery lights, a blank, empty Tuesday night became ten years in jail—hard penance for the common sin of boredom. I knew my future was what I had felt burn up and flush through my stomach, flush through my seat and pour out along the highway, a trail of ashes blowing over the asphalt. But as quickly as we had been incinerated in those lights, maybe even before the panic had finished fully gutting me, harmless anonymity washed over us and the empty night again unfolded its wings.

  When Danny had yelled out the window at the cop, part of me wanted to put my foot in his ass and push him the rest of the way out. But another part of me hummed with the same thrill, the charge of having gotten away with it all, of narrow escape, of having the end of everything pass me by, even if it was never after me to begin with. But like the panic, the thrill didn’t last.

  We eased off the expressway at the Richmond Terrace exit, my exit, the last one. My eyes burned from the pot smoke and from the exhausting, post-adrenaline crash. Tommy suddenly remembered our destination and spouted out directions. We dropped him in front of his house, a small, gray-shingled place with a long front walk. A dog barked inside the house when he swung open the front gate.

  Danny said something to me about playing darts, about the party at Al’s. I ignored him, just piloting the car through the narrow streets of my neighborhood. Danny eventually went silent, scratching his fingernails at the inside of his elbows. It was only when we settled to a stop in front of my house that Danny realized where I was taking us. He looked at me as I unfastened my seat belt.

  “Fuck Al Bruno, huh?” he asked.

  “I’m beat. I gotta get up early. I go to Al’s, I’ll be there all night.”

  Danny and I got out of the car and we crossed paths in the headlights. He shook my hand. His eyes danced. He wasn’t twitching yet, but I could feel the itch building in him through his palm.

  “All right, man,” he said. “Happy birthday. It was good to fucking see you again. We oughta hang again soon. Maybe catch a game.”

  I backed away from him toward the curb. “Yeah, it was cool.”

  He nodded at me. “I’ll call you.”

  I started to say something, maybe please, or maybe don’t, but Danny was sliding into his car, in his mind already parked on the first dark street he could find. Standing on my stoop, I watched him get situated in the car. He gave a last wave, pulled away from the curb, made a wide turn around the corner, and was gone.

  THREE

  I SPENT THE NEXT THREE YEARS AFTER THAT NIGHT TRYING TO lock the door between us. I didn’t see or hear from Danny at all during that time. I didn’t try to forget him; that was impossible. But I tried to stop hoping, on my birthday and on his, at Christmastime, anytime I saw a little blue car drive by, that he would walk out of the ether and back into my life. I tried convincing myself that those hours in the car were the last we’d ever spend together and that somehow, some way, we’d had a simple, good time. That it was a normal and amicable parting.

  We were like brothers, I told myself, who lived in different countries, separated only by busy lives and thousands of miles. But Danny haunted me. I should’ve known that he would. I’d always believed his lies more easily than I believed my own.

  During the years he was gone, rumors about him trickled under my door like the shadows of passersby. I heard he was clean, and I tried not to hope. I heard that he was alive but rotting from the inside out in a Brooklyn shooting gallery. I heard more than once that he’d died: suicide, murder, OD. When I heard these things, I tried not to despair. When I visited our parents, I told them nothing. I refused to believe anything about him. I couldn’t picture any scenario the rumors described. I had a hard time, in fact, picturing him any way at all. I couldn’t see his life beyond that night in the car.

  In my imagination, Danny’s life seemed to stop after his car turned the corner. I hoped it was a failure on my part to let go of him and not that, in my heart somewhere, I knew he had no future. I felt as if that Escort had dropped off the edge of the Earth. Or maybe I just felt Danny had left my life like he had come into it that night, high, lonely, and desperate, lost in some eternal present where the night never ended and tomorrow never came. It seemed, in the depths of his addiction, that the never-ending night was what he both wanted and feared the most.

  Then, one warm October night, three years and six months after I last saw him, I walked out of that same apartment building and there he stood on the sidewalk. He seemed shocked to see me. We were both shocked.

  He pointed at the intercom beside me. “There are no names. I couldn’t remember which apartment was yours.”

  “Three years,” I said. “It’s a long time to remember your brother’s address. You also forgot the phone number. Mom and Dad’s, too?”

  He looked so different from the last time I’d seen him. No longer bloated and pimpled from heroin, no longer pale from the nocturnal, nomadic existence it commanded, he looked to me like he always should have. Like a six-foot, deep-chested, wide-shouldered version of the tough, funny, Irish kid I knew when we were boys. He looked like a fit and sturdy young man. Clean and well fed, rested, happy.

  Danny wore a black suit jacket over a dark green T-shirt, a new pair of jeans and black motorcycle boots. Gone was the white T-shirt stained with blood, vomit, and iced tea. Gone were the dirty jeans with the black scorch marks from his spoons. His brown hair was no longer sweaty and filthy, clinging in clumps to his forehead. It was cut short and clean, parted in the middle and gelled at the sides. His blue eyes were clear. He looked healthier than I had ever seen him.

  My relief at seeing him alive and breathing nearly knocked me on my ass. Seeing him looking that good made me ecstatic. I wanted to leap down the stairs and crush him in a hug, but I held back. I couldn’t make it too easy for him. Easy had never done Danny any good, and I wanted to hang on to my pride for a few more seconds. I looked up and down the block, but there was no sign of the Escort.

  He looked up the stairs at me from his spot on the sidewalk. “I owe you a beer.”

  It took me a minute to recall what he was referring to; I was surprised he remembered anything about that night. “You owe me more than that.”

  “I know, Kev,” Danny said. He opened his arms. “That’s what I’m here to talk about. I got a lot to make up for. I’m back and I’m staying this time.”

  “I’ve heard that before,” I said. “It’s gonna be a long walk home.”

  Danny stood his ground, arms still spread. “Then let’s get started. You lead.” I didn’t move; my brother didn’t, either. He swallowed hard. “Say the word and I’m outta here. Believe me, I wouldn’t blame you.”

  “Three years is a long goddamn time,” I said.

  “Would it do any good,” Danny asked, “to make it longer?”

  I took a deep breath. He had a point. I could keep talking, I figured, or I could do the right thing. I walked down the stairs and into his arms. Fuck pride. And history. This was my brother back from the dead. He had always been my breaking point. Even as kids, he asked and I gave. That’s
just how it was. Maybe he had changed over the past three years. I hadn’t.

  He squeezed me hard, lifted me a few inches off the ground. “You are the fucking man. Thank you. I mean it, Kev. I’m off the shit and back for good.”

  I stepped back after he released me. “I can see that you’re clean. As for the rest of it, let’s start with that beer and go from there.”

  “Good enough for me,” Danny said, waving his hand in the air. “I won’t even ask you to drive.”

  Headlights popped on down the street. The car, a black late-model Charger with deeply tinted windows, stopped in front of us. It gleamed and purred, immaculate, under the streetlight. Silently, the driver’s-side window rolled down. I stepped to the car.

  “You remember Al Bruno,” Danny said. “From back in the day.”

  I did, though he’d lost quite a bit of his hair. What remained was cut short, revealing a prominent widow’s peak. In the blue lights of the dashboard, in his black clothes, Al looked vaguely vampiric. He stuck out his hand across his chest, not turning to look at me.

  “How you been, Kev?” he asked, nearly crushing my hand when he shook it. Al had been hitting the weights, either at the gym or at the jailhouse.

  “Can’t complain. I’m still teaching, over at the college.”

  “Noble,” Al said, sliding a medallion back and forth along the gold chain around his neck.

  “What’re you doing these days?” I asked. Parole? Probation? Hardly anything noble, I figured. Definitely not community service.

  Al turned to look at me. “Little of this, little of that. I got a few things workin’.”

  Those few things working probably wore pricey watches and hung around supermarket parking lots. Danny’s choice of companions wasn’t doing much for my faith in him.

  Danny slapped me on the back. “New, different things,” he said. “Right, Al?”

  “You gotta change with the times,” Al said.

  “Okay then, this is cool and all,” Danny said, “but wouldn’t it be more fun over a beer?”

  “Danny,” I said, “talk to me a minute.” I took a few steps away from the car. Danny stayed put. “Over here.”

  “I know what you’re gonna say,” Danny said, “and I don’t blame you. But it’s all good. Al and I went through rehab together. The old days are behind us, Kev.”

  Al said nothing, just took a toothpick from behind his ear and put it in his mouth, his same old junior gangster act.

  Danny opened the back door for me. “Hop in. One beer. Let me pay you back that much.”

  I got in the car and Danny climbed in the passenger seat. Al rolled up his window and pulled the car into the street, spinning his tires on the pavement, kicking up a screech and a cloud of smoke as if he needed to announce his departure to the block.

  Squeezing between the front seats, I asked Danny where he’d been the past three years. He held up his hand, telling me it was not the time for questions. I thought maybe he didn’t want Al hearing what he told me. Maybe he couldn’t hear me over Kid Rock. But he smiled as he watched the island fly by out the window and I thought maybe he was just enjoying the reunion. He and I in a car again, heading out after dark, this time with a chance to make things right. I had to admit, I liked the feeling, too.

  AL EASED THE CHARGER up to the curb outside the Red Lion, the emerald neon of the bar’s Budweiser shamrock washing over the car’s gleaming black hood, gutter gravel crunching under the fat tires. He kept the engine running. Danny turned in his seat.

  “I mean, this was the original plan, right?”

  “Works for me,” I said.

  We hadn’t even discussed where we were going; Danny had no doubt planned the whole thing. Danny and I climbed out, careful not to catch the door on the high curb. Al stayed in the front seat, his cell phone open in his right hand, the neon striping his lap. He was reading a text message, brows knit, bottom lip puffed out.

  “Al, you coming in?” I asked, walking around the front of the car to his window.

  He snapped shut the phone, thinking hard about whatever he’d read. “Nah. I got a girl I gotta go see. I’ll catch up.”

  “Thanks for the ride,” I said.

  Al put the car into drive, nearly running over my feet as he pulled away. Danny stood outside the pub.

  “Used to be,” I said, walking over to him, “you couldn’t shut that kid up.”

  “That girl’s got him on a short leash,” Danny said. “Anyway, Al never could hold more than one idea in his head at a time. A girl takes up all the room he has. How about that beer?”

  He grabbed the brass door handle and pulled. Blurry conversations muddled under Shane McGowan’s singing drifted past us and over the street. “I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time.”

  I threw a soft elbow into Danny’s midsection as I passed him. He pretended it hurt.

  Inside, the voices and the music got louder. Flushed, heavy-lidded faces rotated in our direction, their mouths still talking in the other direction. Danny pointed out a booth in a back corner, then went to the bar for drinks. I slipped through several sets of hard shoulders and dropped into the booth, sliding into the corner. Waiting for Danny, I picked at the old cigarette burns in the green plastic of the bench and watched the door, hoping our folks would walk in. It was a foolish thought, founded on nothing. I’d been here with Dad a couple times, but Danny had never been with us. Dad and I had talked about him here, though. Maybe that was it.

  What was the rush? If Danny really was on the mend, we’d have our reunion eventually. If Danny had kicked junk for good, there was no longer a time bomb ticking underneath our family. Then I thought of our mother. The bomb ticked on, just with someone else holding it now. And there was no defusing Alzheimer’s; it didn’t matter what wire you clipped. There was no kicking it, either.

  Danny set a draft Guinness in front of me and sat on the other side of the booth. All he’d gotten for himself was a tall club soda with lime. I decided to hold back on the news about Mom, at least for the night. I didn’t want Danny and me starting over with the taste of bad news in our mouths.

  “Totally clean and sober?” I asked.

  “I haven’t done heroin in over a year,” he said. “Nothing else, either, no weed, no pills, no coke, no nothing.”

  I turned the pint glass round and round on the table. I should’ve asked for a Coke. “I’m waiting for it to settle.”

  “Go ahead,” Danny said. “No worries.”

  “You sure? I don’t want to fuck anything up.”

  “Nobody can fuck me up but me,” Danny said. He sucked down half his soda water. “I have a few drinks now and then, but nothing more than that.” He tilted back the glass, sliding some ice into his mouth. “I’m not supposed to, technically, but considering where I’ve been, I figure I’m doing pretty well.”

  I drank my beer, licking the foam off my top lip. “Where have you been?”

  “No place that matters, but lots of places, I guess,” Danny said. “Nowhere I wanna go back to.”

  “How’d you get back here then?” I asked. “From wherever you were.”

  “I got a ride,” Danny said.

  “C’mon, Danny, not to my house, not here here. You know what I mean.”

  “I got a ride.” He stabbed at the ice in his glass with his straw. “Ambulance.”

  I sat and waited, my stomach going sour, my beer getting warmer by the minute.

  “I died in Manhattan,” Danny said. “That was the beginning of the end, so to speak.”

  I leaned back against the bench. My hands fell into my lap, nearly pulling the Guinness into it with them. “You died? In Manhattan?”

  This is it, I thought. This is when the worms burst out of Danny’s eyes and the alarm goes off and I wake up sprawled across the mattress at home, exhausted, depressed, and defeated before the day even started.

  “So you’re dead,” I said. “And none of this is really happening.”

  “What?”
Danny reached for my Guinness, sniffing it, sipping it, then handing it back to me. “You find an old stash of mine or something? No, I’m not dead.”

  Danny rocked his head from shoulder to shoulder, assembling the story.

  “In Manhattan,” Danny said. “About a year after I last saw you, I died under the East River Bridge. OD. Got brought back in the ER.”

  “What the fuck were you doing under the bridge?”

  “Living, I think,” Danny said. “I’d been there awhile; I don’t know how long. A week? Maybe more.” He ate more ice. “It’s a big junkie hangout over there. It’s where I ended up. Junkies are like carnival freaks. Or cops. Or crooks. We prefer our own kind. Anyway, one night my appetite got too big for my heart. So my heart stopped. Or maybe I got a bad shot. Either way, the result was the same.”

  “How’d you get outta there?”

  “Some guy with a stolen cell called nine-one-one. Then he threw the cell in the river and split.” He grinned, shaking his head. “But not before they took my stash, my works, my wallet, and my shoes. That’s how the EMTs found me, anyway. Stone dead and stripped clean. I suppose I coulda lost my wallet and shoes long before then.”

  Danny stretched his arms across the back of the bench and puffed out his chest, watching a pair of giggling, whispering girls walk by. He was breathing hard, as if telling the story took the wind out of him. In the dim light of the bar, I couldn’t read his eyes.

  “Bumps in the bathroom,” he said. “I remember it well.”

  I did, too. The two of us jammed into a filthy stall in another bar. Another life.

  My hands went sweaty. “Jesus fucking Christ, Danny.”

  “Not where I was,” he said. “I didn’t see Him, no host of angels, no blinding light, nothing. The EMTs brought me back but they lost me again as they loaded me off. I got brought back for good in the emergency room.” He fished the lime from his glass and popped it in his mouth, chewing it without so much as a wince. “I remember noticing I was sitting in piss and pigeon shit while I stuck the needle in, then bam, these thick glasses and this big nose right in my face. I don’t know who was more surprised when my eyes popped open, me or the doc. I puked all over both of us.