Fresh Kills (3 page)

Billy was talking to a guy in uniform, very serious, very interested, the two of them glancing over at the wreck. He stuck his hands in the pockets of his jeans, and pulled his jacket across him like he was cold. He waved at me and started in my direction. When he shambled up to us, I put my hand on his shoulder.

“This your boy?” Clara said.

“Hi, I'm Billy,” he said.

Clara shook his hand, patted my arm, and walked away towards the wreck.

Lippert shifted his attention. “You going to introduce us, Art, man? What's your name?” he said to Billy.

Billy put out his hand to Lippert and said, “Billy Farone.”

Lippert didn't move. His face looked gray. The muscles in his forehead twitched. I thought he was maybe having another heart attack. He just stood and stared at Billy, then suddenly moved back, maybe an inch. No one would have noticed, except me. Me and maybe Billy.

It unnerved me, the way Lippert looked, what he might do, the way he retreated from Billy, the way his eyes flickered.

Everything seemed to go quiet. The noise around us, Russians gabbing, the cops, the ambulances, the people on phones, the wind, all faded. It was as if the soundtrack on a movie had shut down. The three of us stood on the beach not talking. I could see that Lippert was literally shocked. He didn't say anything.

Maybe Lippert didn't know that Billy was temporarily on vacation from the facility in Florida. Maybe no one had told Lippert and he was pissed off because he was out of the loop. Maybe I should have called him. So we stood, Lippert unmoving, Billy smiling and holding out his hand.

I knew that Billy was cured. In the facility in Florida, school, juvenile center, prison, whatever the hell it was called, they had made him better. Kids could change. Billy was better. When I had picked him up in Florida a couple of days earlier, I'd met his shrink and his shrink said Billy was OK. He was funny and easy and charming and intelligent, like the little child he had been once a long time ago, before everything got screwed up. I saw it almost right away. It wasn't an imitation. It was for real.

“Hi,” said Lippert finally. He shook Billy's hand, and tapped him on the shoulder, a weird gesture, not really a pat, more like a doctor testing your knee to see if your reflexes were good.

“Yeah, nice to meet you,” Billy said.

“I'll call you,” Sonny said to me.

“Fine,” I said.

Lippert walked off with a backward wave of his hand, not saying anything, just walked away towards the crash site. He didn't say why he had wanted to see me. Maybe he didn't want to talk in front of Billy.

Two years ago, when I found Billy at the beach club at Breezy Point, Sonny had been there. More than two years. It had been the end of the trail that started with the pile of clothes on Coney Island beach. Sonny was there when I found Billy sitting by the body of a dead man.

“Who was that guy, the little skinny one on the beach?” Billy said when we were sitting in a cafe on the boardwalk in Brighton Beach about a mile from Coney Island. “He was like kind of weird with me. You think I did something wrong, Artie? He was looking me over like I was some kind of specimen. I don't think he liked me a lot.”

“You were fine.” I handed Billy a menu. “What do you feel like eating.”

“But who was he?”

“His name is Sonny Lippert. He's sort of my boss. Don't worry about him. He's pretty strange some of the time, like people are when they get older, you know? You didn't recognize him?”

“Why should I?” said Billy.

“Are you OK?”

“Yeah, I'm so happy to be home, honest, but I'm like a little scared.”

“What of?”

“You know, if people will be OK with me, if people don't want me around,” he said. “Hey, so can I have the
lamb, is that OK?” He looked over the menu at me and smiled.

It was early evening, the beach emptying, people beginning to arrive at the cafes and restaurants spread out along the boardwalk. Near us, tables filled up, people talking English and Russian, tourists gazing at the menu, locals ordering beer and vodka. Groups of musicians played on the boardwalk, a trio of girl violinists, some folkies.

“You know who Vladimir Vysotsky was?” I said to Billy.

“Who?”

“He was like a Russian Bob Dylan,” I said and Billy nodded knowingly and we both watched as families crowded the boardwalk, women pushing strollers, men hoisting bottles of Baltika beer, others eating sunflower seeds from sacks and spitting the husks over the railing onto the sand. From loudspeakers at a cafe down the boardwalk pop music blared, the kind sung by mustachioed men with balalaikas for backing.

Old men sat on benches at the edge of the boardwalk; once they had talked about going home, but their home had disappeared. The Soviet Union had simply stopped existing. Like spacemen without a country to land in, they just sat here on the coast of America, staring at the ocean.

“Do you think I can have the lamb, Artie?” Billy said.

“You can have whatever you want, you know that, anything, you don't have to ask.”

“Honest?”

“Honest,” I said.

Billy ordered his dinner from the waitress in Russian. His accent wasn't bad though he stumbled some with vocabulary. The waitress, who wasn't more than twenty, blonde, pretty, with brown eyes, and a pair of very tight white jeans, looked at Billy as if he were a grown man she wanted. He asked for a Coke.

“Your Russian's really good,” I said to Billy and ordered a beer.

“I worked on it,” he said. “I wanted my Russian to be good, like yours.” He took a piece of bread from the basket and ate some. “At home, it's so weird, my mom talking Russian half the time, my dad not really understanding anything. In any language, you know, I mean his English is funny, and he says stuff like ‘ain't', doesn't he? I mean I love him, but he's not so smart, except with the restaurant. He does that really great, right?”

The waitress came back with the drinks.

“Your dad is really famous for his food,” I said to Billy. “Johnny makes terrific food. He's a twenty-six in
Zagat
.” I said. “You know what that means?”

“Sure, it's that restaurant guide thing. Course I know. Can I have a sip of your beer?”

I pushed the glass towards him, he tasted the beer and made a face, gave it back to me and drank some of his Coke.

“See, it's kind of hard with them,” said Billy earnestly. “I'm not saying it's their fault, but my mom with her all her crazy Russian stuff, history, language, everything rattling around in her head like, I don't know, dried fish bones. She's scared they're going to send her back to Russia or something, then she gets scared we'll still be fighting in Iraq when I'm eighteen and I'll have to go. She is so screwed up, Artie, and she makes up for it buying clothes and going to psychics.” Billy gulped down the rest of his soda. “My dad isn't like that but his family, you know, it's all religion, his mom wanting me to see priests. You know her? My grandma, Big Tina? The crazy one whose house smells of vanilla candles? I mean, who wouldn't be a nut job around them, right?”

“You're definitely not a nut job.”

“Thanks,” Billy said. “I don't want to seem spoiled, they're OK for parents, they give me nice stuff, I just kind of wish I
could help my mom understand so she wouldn't be so totally upset all the time.”

“Yeah, me too.”

“They just can't read me at all,” he said. “They don't have any, what's that word? Empathy. My mom and dad, they can't see how I feel, they never could, you know, so if I seemed different from other kids, they got scared I wasn't just an ordinarily weird kid, but beyond strange.”

“So talk to me,” I said.

Billy took a deep breath, picked some ice out of his Coke glass and put it in his mouth, crunched it up, swallowed.

“When I was a little kid, I thought everything had feelings, including the fish in my aquarium,” he said. “I gave them names, I got them little plastic castles to live in.” He stopped suddenly. “I'm talking too much.”

“Go on,” I said to Billy.

The waitress appeared and put down two plates of grilled lamb kebabs and rice pilaf. We ate. Billy ate like a kid who never got enough. At his age I'd been the same way, my mother joking around, telling me I probably had tapeworm. In the late 60s, there had been plenty of food in Moscow; for breakfast, along with boiled eggs, my mother served up caviar, red, black, whatever I wanted. At school I ate big plates of stew. All winter long I ate ice cream on my way home. Even now I could taste the sour vanilla flavor of Russian ice cream.

Finishing his last forkful of rice and green peppers, Billy sat back slightly and yawned.

“Tired?”

“Yeah, a little. I get sleepy a lot. In Florida, you have to get up for school early, and I always think how I wish I could just have five more minutes. I can sleep absolutely anywhere, anytime. It's like I never get enough.”

“Maybe it's growing pains.”

“You think? Sometimes I think I can hear myself getting taller.”

“Billy?”

“Yeah?”

“How come you wanted to go to Coney Island as soon as we got back to the city? I mean, was there a reason, except for going to the beach?”

“Like I said, it was for the pizza.”

“And?”

“I don't know, see places I used to like,” said Billy, yawning again. “I thought maybe we could go over to my house. There's stuff I want to pick up. See my fish. I don't know if mom kept my aquarium going. Do you know? You think the fish are all dead? Do you think anyone took care of them? I wrote and wrote and wrote, lots of e-mails and even some letters saying what to do with the fish. I told my mom what fish food to buy and how she should put the lights on at certain times. I just wanted to come and hang out and maybe take a swim. See my fish, like I said. Did I say that? Get a whiff of the ocean.”

“You don't swim in Florida? They don't have a beach?”

“Do you think the fish are all dead?” he asked again. “What? Oh, I'm sorry, you asked me about swimming. They don't take us to swim,” he said. “Except in the pool inside the school, which is plenty far away from everything including a beach. You get told it's rural so the kids can fool around out of doors, but what they mean is we can't run away. You see, Artie? And like who can blame them, I mean there's a lot of very bizarre kids in there. Dumb, and seriously strange. There's this kid who was a habitual shoplifter – that's a good word, habitual, right? Anyway, he only ever shoplifted major amounts of school supplies. What kind of kid wants school supplies, unless he's selling them cheap? He's nuts. He does a lot of weed, and he gets punished plenty. Can we not talk
about it right now?” Looking at me, Billy shrugged his shoulders apologetically.

“Of course.”

“I'm sorry,” he said very softly. “I don't mean to like shut you out or anything, it's just too soon. I just need to forget about it for a little while.”

“That bad?”

“No,” he said. “It's fine, I just don't want to think about it right now.”

“You want dessert?”

“Can we maybe go get some cones? There's this place that has the best mint chocolate chip.”

“Sure.”

Billy didn't move.

“What is it?”

“That man, Artie. Look.”

I turned around. A fat guy on the boardwalk was staring at us, but as soon as I got up, he walked away. I put some money on the table and looked around for the waitress. Billy was on his feet.

“Can we go, Artie? Please?”

After we left the cafe, we walked along Brighton Beach Avenue, under the elevated train tracks that made a metal canopy over the street. Calmer now, Billy looked for the ice cream store he remembered. I asked him why the man on the boardwalk had scared him, but Billy shook his head. Said he was OK. It was nothing.

In the store windows, the banks, the restaurants, most of the signs were Russian. Laid out in a deli window were fish – gilded chubs, oily succulent sturgeon, orange smoked salmon. Alongside them were heavy black breads, Russian cookies and tubs of pickles swimming in brine.

You heard Russian on the street, but some of the people
looked Asian; immigrants from remote republics, which had been part of the USSR, had begun replacing people from Moscow and Odessa. Pakistanis, Hispanics, Chinese were moving in, too; Brighton Beach was layered now like an anthropological dig. A lot of younger Russkis had gone, moved out, to other parts of Brooklyn, Staten Island, Jersey or Long Island.

A few elderly Jews still sat on fold-up stools along the sidewalk and gossiped in Yiddish. Their parents had settled here in the early part of the twentieth century when Brighton Beach was the end of the streetcar line.

Waiting for a red light to change, an old woman glanced at us suspiciously. No one I knew, no one Billy knew, just a Russian woman with a headscarf and broken shoes.

Billy kept close to me. I put my arm around his shoulders for a second, then took it away. I didn't want him feeling I was nervous. Whenever I came to Brighton Beach, though, and I didn't come if I could help it, I always got a toxic whiff of the Soviet Union. Toxic for me, anyway; it smelled like fear and boiled potatoes.

Ugly clothing, angora sweaters in turquoise with big shoulders and gold sequins, fox fur stoles, leather pants, fancy china, was set out in store windows along the avenue. Inside I could see women trying on the clothes and examining the black and gold porcelain. Tourists bought overly salted caviar in the shops and ate pirogi at Cafe Arbat. They went to The National or Rasputin, the fancy nightclubs where vodka flowed and the floorshow included flame eaters, jugglers and long-legged showgirls. Hookers worked the side streets. But the Russian mob, having extracted what they could out here, had moved on. Crime was down.