by Wenke, John;
“The kids are wound up and I got a migraine. I thought you said you’d be here by four.”
“Four? I thought I said five-thirty.”
“Joe, you said four.”
“I got the gifts. The car’s loaded.” He chuckled. “It’s like riding in a sardine can.”
“When you get here, unload everything in the garage. After we put the kids to bed, we can put the presents under the tree. At midnight, we’ll exchange our gifts.”
Joe Cantwell felt the vise-grip of panic. Molly’s gifts—they were still in the store. Whatever they were, they were still in the store.
“Molly, something came up. It’s thrown everything off. Mary’s parents had an accident. A car accident. I won’t be able to stay too long. I gotta get back.”
“What happened? I hope it’s nothing serious.”
“They’re not sure what’s wrong. They gotta do tests.”
“How’d it happen?”
“I’ll tell you when I get there. With everything that went wrong, I didn’t get a chance to wrap the gifts.”
“What! You told me you wrapped them last week. You said Mary helped.”
“I must’ve meant we were going to do it last week.”
In no time, Joe was driving as fast as the weather allowed. His sense of elation had been crushed by that jagged boulder in his chest. Maybe she’d simmer down by the time he got there. The quicker he arrived, the sooner he could leave. He stepped on the gas.
Out in the country, the roads were turning to ice. The sleet was changing into wet chunks of snow. Joe felt like he was driving through a tunnel. The encompassing darkness was a night cave. High beams were useless; the cave jingled with frantic flakes. Bad as it was, it was still okay. No one was out and Joe was a skilled driver in a high-performance vehicle. Even in this weather, he could eat up the miles.
Two taillights dotted the storm. In no time, Joe caught up. He downshifted to keep from climbing the back of an ancient Chevy wagon. The center line—was it broken or unbroken?—was covered. Joe was about to pass when the road snaked left in a tight curve. The Chevy fishtailed and slowed. Joe socked the wheel with the heel of his hand. Aggravation—there was aggravation at every turn. Then his thoughts braked and his stomach fell: a car came speeding at them from around the bend, high beams screaming, and crossed into Joe’s lane. The Chevy swerved right and looped into a spin. To avoid a head-on crash, Joe wrenched the wheel left. Skidding on the opposite shoulder, he traveled sideways. He downshifted again and brought the wheel slowly right. The Chevy twirled twice before leaving the road and smashing headfirst into a tree. The car that had crossed the center line kept going.
In seconds, Joe Cantwell had parked and hit the flasher. Coatless, he slid down the embankment and rushed through ankle deep slush. The wet cold cut him. Afraid to look, he yanked open the door and bent over. A man in his late fifties, silver hair and thin, was chest to chest with the steering wheel. His chin topped the wheel and his forehead rested on the mangled dashboard. On the passenger’s side, a dark-haired, middle-age woman had the top of her head pinned to the shattered windshield. Blood gleamed in the white snow.
“You okay?” Joe screamed. He touched the man’s shoulder and slapped his cheek. He leaned in. “Hey, lady, you okay?”
They might have been dead. Joe put his hand on the guy’s neck. He couldn’t find a pulse, though that didn’t mean much. He had a hard time finding his own pulse.
Joe stood and gathered snow from the roof of the car. The sticky blood rinsed from his hands in chunks and rills. He had to do something. He was a good fifteen minutes from Molly’s. There were no houses within five miles. In this weather, he couldn’t be sure he’d even make it. The hospital was back in town, more than twenty minutes away.
Joe Cantwell didn’t have a choice.
Soon the toys were piled behind the wrecked car. He would have preferred to put them inside, but he couldn’t get the back doors or tailgate opened. He got the man out first. Slipping and sliding, he dragged him to his car and shoved him across the back seats. The man lay open-mouthed in a semi-fetal curl. Joe put the passenger’s seat all the way back, skidded to the wreck, and lifted the thin woman in one puffing motion. He carried her across his chest like a sleeping child. When he got to his car, he settled her gently down, as if putting her to bed. Her head sagged limply to the left. He draped his coat over her, tucking it around. Shivering in earnest, soaked through to his pink bikini briefs, Joe climbed in and started the engine. Neither of the passengers moved nor mumbled. He turned around, shuddering to think he was ferrying the dead.
At the emergency room, Joe Cantwell wound up wearing a green surgical outfit and hospital issue slippers. He sat in the chair beside the receptionist’s desk, huddled inside a blanket, feeling like a TV Indian. The waiting room was all but empty. A young woman sat near the automatic door, staring ahead, fiddling with her fingers. Inside, her three-year-old daughter was having her stomach pumped. Earlier in the evening, she had scaled the kitchen cabinets and gotten her hands on an unsealed jar of pain killers. The red and green capsules looked like Christmas candy. At the desk, Joe was doing a poor job of answering questions.
“I have no idea who they are.”
“That’s okay. Didn’t you jot down their license plate number?”
“Didn’t think of it.”
Just then a nurse came in with a wallet.
“Everything’s here. William and Nellie Meyer. There are numbers to call. A son and a daughter.”
“Are they dead?” Joe asked. He wanted to know.
“The doctors think they’ll make it. She has a fractured skull along with those lacerations and we’re prepping him to remove a ruptured spleen. Both have multiple internal injuries. She’s going into surgery, too. It looks, though, that we got them in time. If it wasn’t for you, they’d be gone. They’re lucky you were out there. I have to get back. Have a Happy Holiday!”
“So there you are,” the receptionist smiled, leaning toward him, patting his shoulder. “How does it feel to be a hero?”
The hero sized her up: pretty, brunette, thin but sinewy, a slight overbite. She’d had some bad acne once, but she was still cute, very cute. The usual urge stirred. Joe wanted to ask her for a date, but he remembered Molly and Mary. And the clock. It was well after six. He decided to act modest.
“Being a hero feels cold. I should get out of here. Can you see about the toys? Can you get the cops on the line and tell them about the toys?”
“I already did that,” she smiled. “You were sitting right here when I talked to them.”
“Can you check again? I need to know where to go. I mean, they were going to get them the hell out of the snow. Tell them I need to go!”
But he didn’t go. First, he called Mary. She was excited and proud. Her fiancé was a hero. For good measure, Joe put the receptionist on the line. Just to back him up. A born liar is never comfortable with God’s honest truth. Mary was not upset about dinner. They’d eat at midnight if they had to.
“A stringer from the newspaper called,” Joe added. “They monitor the police radio. He’s on his way. He wants me to hang around and give him a few quotes.”
Joe was afraid to call Molly. No matter how many receptionists, cops, or reporters he got to back him up, she would never believe him. With Mary’s midnight dinner, he had plenty of time to make things right. He’d begin with the material evidence: his surgical outfit, the slippers, the blanket, the blood in the car, the bloody coat, and the snowy toys. She could call the hospital and read about it in the newspaper.
“Turn on the radio,” he’d say. “I might even be on the radio.”
Joe stayed at the hospital longer than he’d intended. Being a hero was a complicated, time-consuming business. First, he gassed with the reporter and then the Meyer kids showed up. They were grown, in their mid-twenties. They turned ou
t to be twins. They talked about life as twins. By then, Joe had gotten good at telling the story—the headlights, the slick, the swerve. With the parents both out of surgery and upgraded to serious but stable condition, everybody was laughing. Before leaving, Joe passed around his business card.
By 8:30 he was on his way to the police station. The receptionist had phoned and found out that the cops had left the accident site a half hour ago. When he walked into the station, he was still wrapped in the blanket. His wet clothes were in the car. His Harris Tweed was smeared with blood. He was taken to the lounge and told to wait. He poured some stale coffee and sat on a green vinyl couch. Soon, a hulking cop came in. His hair was wet. Carrying a clipboard he sat at a card table.
“Mr. Cantwell, it was a fine thing you did out there. We’re going to nominate you for a Good Citizen Award.”
Joe smiled. His lip twitched. He wanted out of there. The last time he was there, he had failed the breath test.
“Thanks, Officer. I appreciate it, but I’m concerned about the toys. I left twelve hundred dollars’ worth of toys in the snow. I gotta get them and get on with it. My wife is ready to kill me.”
“There’s a problem with the toys, Mr. Cantwell. We didn’t find any. They’re gone.”
“Gone! You mean stolen?”
“I don’t know if you can exactly say ‘stolen.’ The stuff was out there sitting on the side of the road. We did find this, though. It must have dropped out of your pocket.”
The cop slid a crumpled wad of paper from the clipboard’s metal clasp. Smoothing it out, he stood up, crossed the room, and dropped it in Joe’s lap. The credit card slip was stapled to the Toy Fantasia receipt—a computerized version of the Christmas list, complete with inventory codes, prices, and tax. They never forget to add the tax.
It was ten o’clock. With headlights out, Joe Cantwell slowly negotiated the long winding driveway. He didn’t want his lights to tell of his arrival. Molly didn’t need a few extra minutes to gather her rage. It would be best if he appeared at the door, swaddled in a blanket, a waylaid Santa bereft of his gifts.
He parked way down by the trees and made his way from shadow to shadow, his slippers cutting a path through the drifting snow. To his left, out in the open and away from the trees, the small satellite dish was a metal totem standing alone on a white alien waste land. It stood like a sentry, cup open to the heavens and collecting signals from hundreds of stations. The house was rimmed with red and green lights. In the picture window, the Scotch pine twinkled with white lights. A lopsided angel on top had her back to the outside world. Sneaking through the snow, slipping around the foundation flower beds, Joe climbed the steps and tiptoed to the window. Under the tree were mounds of gifts, perfectly wrapped and ready. Across the room, Molly sat in a rocking chair, swaddled inside a massive Afghan. Her pretty round face sank beneath long black bangs. She was staring at the fire, holding a half-empty glass of eggnog, rocking slowly, slowly, in time with the sad-happy Christmas voice of Nat King Cole. Joe slipped and grabbed the ledge. Molly started and squinted at the window. He rolled to the side. With difficulty, Joe hoisted himself and leaned his back against the wall. His feet were numb and his hands chilled. Ten feet away, the front door locks were clattering. He pushed off and sloshed over on unsteady feet. The last lock clicked and the door squeaked open.
Joe Cantwell’s plastered smile was ready-wrapped. He squeezed the crumpled kneaded receipt. He held up Exhibit A. The door yawned and his mouth opened. He was ready to let go, ring out the old, ring in the new, whatever it took to explain it all.
The Decomposing Log
Joey Merriweather lives in the Condominium section of Squat City, a cluttered corridor jutting from a subway concourse of failing terminal shops. At the far end of Squat City, a wrecked plywood wall no longer denies access to an unfinished tunnel. Back there, among the rodent caves and abandoned excavations, Trogs eat dirt and scavenge in the sewers.
To the passing eye, Squat City looks chaotic—a poltergeist aftershock of blankets, buckets, coats, pillows, cardboard boxes, stuffed shopping bags, wooden crates, and tangled tarpaulins. But chaos (like love and fame and wealth) is relative. Squat City is actually a segregated scheme of zones, pathways, boundaries, and protocols.
At the sequestered center is Rasta Joe’s Mansion, an interconnecting maze of five large ventilated crates. His expansive crawlspace world includes a living room, eatery, bedroom, study, and dumpster. His floors are sheathed with three-ply cardboard and covered with multicolored shards of tacked-down Stainmaster carpet. In the library, Rasta Joe keeps books and bongs; in the living room rests a love seat with sawed-off legs; the bedroom has a queen-size mattress; the kitchen contains a Coleman stove and an oriental table.
In the dumpster, Rasta Joe presides on a green porcelain throne. Below the seat waits a stainless-steel bucket. On the concourse side of the Mansion, a lawn chair sits under a sagging awning. On a normal day, protected from the screaming fluorescent glare, Rasta Joe will sip Jama juice, chew jerk chicken, fondle his stubble, and watch the frantic rush home race of the Upside mobs.
Every now and then, a commuter will wander near and stare.
Aiming to enlighten, Rasta Joe will rise and croon, “Don’t worry. Be happy.”
Surrounding the Mansion in a semi-circle arc are the Split Levels, a mismatched arrangement of large cardboard boxes. Here Jingo, Pinhead, Quacker, Stitch, Jolly, and Slick maintain trim cardboard patios. The boxes are mostly for sleep and storage. When a spot opens in the Split Levels, as it did with the sudden death of Trap Man, Jingo calls a council and the committee interviews applicants from the Condominium section, a respectable if unstable buffer separating the Other Half from the madding mayhem of the Ghetto.
Joey Merriweather, known to his neighbors as Huff, is among the more desirable residents of the Condominium section of Squat City. He always keeps a clean pad, folding his blankets before leaving for work, arranging his stuff in neat piles, seldom forgetting to empty his coffee can of spent butts. Though a strong candidate for upward mobility, Joey was aced out by Slick, the very first resident of Squat City to deck his condominium with plastic vegetation—holly, tulips, and carnations. It was a renovation worthy of the Split Levels. Even Rasta Joe was impressed. In no time, his crates were wreathed with shiny, rattling verdure, a color splash of red, yellow, and lavender roses. Never to be outdone, Rasta Joe extended the innovation with his silk flower statement.
It was Jingo’s job to break the news.
“You didn’t get the vote, my man, but you be waitin’ for next time. We expectin’ Quacker to hump to Florida in the spring. Then you in. Case closed.”
Like the twenty or so squatters, Joey Merriweather is content to dwell in the Condominium section, nestled at night on a safe cardboard base, warm under blankets, sleeping to the open underground air. He is pleased to have left behind those Upside winter nights—the bed-of-nails misery of rumbling subway grates, the keening intensity of gusting gales, the tornado roar of downtown trains, the suffocating terror of dormitory shelters, those rooms stuffed cot-solid with the lowest degenerates, the scariest psychos, the wildest thieves. It was street anarchy rolled up tight.
For all those months, until he could get an opening, the Ghetto was better, though not by much. It encompasses the Condominium section and at night resembles a makeshift Palestinian morgue. On the linoleum, inert bodies lay scattered as if by a mortar blast. With few exceptions, the Ghetto is for losers. They come; they go. They leave their trash. They puke and pee on themselves. Every now and then, there is an uncontested rape. They steal but only from one another. A Ghetto crackhead would sooner kiss a cop’s blue nose than zip the Mansion, rip the Split Levels or trash the Condos. In a former Upside life, Jingo was a Saigon MP and now he is Sheriff of Squat City. He and his deputies are always on watch. Transgressions are few and justice is swift. Joey has seen Jingo, Bo-Bo, and Quacker pound spooking sn
oops and dump them in the Ghetto, where they are left to prey on their own. He has seen Ghetto drecks fight one another over globs of used bubble gum. He has seen them chase rats for food. He has seen them stagger to the edge of Squat City, tumble through the torn plywood wall, and not come out. Back there, they become Trogs or maybe even food for Trogs. Joey doesn’t care to find out. In the downward declension of things, he’d rather be a jumper than a Trog. With a jumper, everything is over quick. You hear the roar and see the light and maybe start to feel all bashed. But the end comes quickly. Trogs die ugly-slow in the darkest underground caves.
Joey Merriweather lives to see the day. Always. No matter how badly his chest aches or how loudly the head-hammers pound, he rises early and hurries Upside.
Today, a ruckus gags him from the depths. Hacking, wheezing, he pushes up on elbows and sees two transit cops scuffling in the Ghetto. Exhausted, he shuts his eyes and sinks. This time they are harvesting Herbert-With-The-Crazies, an old ’Nam nut, total drug bug, and mean panhandle man. Six four and stick thin, he’s got a bald head and gray bush beard. He wears puffy camouflage layers and kick-crazy combat boots. In the concourse, he stalks the weak and demands all change. Last night, Joey overheard Bo-Bo tell Goat that Herbert-With-The-Crazies socked an old lady in the face with a large stale soft pretzel.
“He even call her street-walk names, man. I tell you, Goat, that old lady be jus’ as nice as my dead Mama.”
“Ain’t nothin’,” Goat croaked. “I seed him ass-kick a schoolboy in one of them sissy Catholic uniforms. That little boy, he kicked right back. Got Herbert in the shins. Did some damage, too.”
“The Herb be too long outa the bin,” Bo-Bo said. “He beggin’ to be bagged.”
“Ain’t that the truth! Yesterday, I seed him spittin’ meds on to the track. One by one. Tryin’ to get them in the drain.”
Joey struggles from under the covers and reaches for the Marlboro Man. He slips one out and flicks his dependable Bic. Again, he opens his eyes and squints. It’s all still fuzzy. Bo-Bo and Goat are standing at the edge of the Ghetto and singing, “They’re coming to take me away, ha ha, they’re coming to take me away.” Herbert-With-The-Crazies, however, doesn’t want to go. In fact, he’s resisting arrest. He punches one cop. The other dings him with the club. Herbert spins around, shakes his hands free and tries to karate-kick two cops at once. A cop grabs his heel, lifts and twists. He collapses and the cops pounce. Clubs club. Herbert-With-The-Crazies goes limp.