Authors: Bill Loehfelm
Fresh Kills (33 page)
As Julia lied to both of us, I forgave the lies in the same instant that she told them. My sister’s pain over our mother’s death was so severe, and I knew would get so much worse, it was impossible for me to hold anything against her. The fear that Julia and I were headed down the same path as Kate and Susan cut through my drug-induced fog just enough for me to keep my mouth shut. But I knew, and I knew Julia knew, my mother’s “anxiety” did not begin with the death of her last parent. It began long before Julia and I were ever born. It began with my father. It began the first time he yelled at her, his spit flying into her face, and she stood there only breathing, her eyes pinching back her tears. It got worse the first time he slapped her face and she stood there frozen, her cool palm held against the red swelling of her cheek. It started the first time he poured his venom into her and got worse every day until the day she died.
My father killed my mother and there was no other logical way to see it. He poisoned her, plain and simple. In doses big and small. So what if it happened over time, in small enough increments to hide it from the outside world. He may as well have reached into her and torn open that vein with his own hands. And I’d never done a thing about it, not when it was happening, not after it was done.
And neither had she. She had taken it and taken it, swallowed every dose. Swallowing and cooking him dinner. Swallowing and ironing his shirts. Swallowing and crawling into bed beside him. For what? Did she do it, like Julia had said, for love? Because she’d promised God she would? For us? A lot of good it had done. Julia wouldn’t look twice at a girl who wouldn’t walk all over her. Me? I walked around like a junkie, boiling with his poison every day of my life. I was polluted with it. And I couldn’t live without it.
In the bathroom stall, I stuck my cigarette in my mouth and stretched out my arms, pushing at the walls of the stall, trying to still my shakes. I dug my nails into the paint, clutching for fistfuls of the cheap metal. I let the cigarette smoke curl up into my face and burn my eyes. I wanted to kill the old man all over again. I didn’t care about anything Waters or Fontana had told me. None of it mattered. None of it was sufficient defense against what he had done. How dare he fucking die. I was so angry at him for dying I wanted to scream. I hung my head between my knees, locked my fingers together behind my head.
I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t live without him. I needed him to be the reason for the way I was, for the things I did. I needed him to blame. I needed his arms to run from. I needed his weight to crawl out from under. Without him I had nothing but what I wished for, nothing but the end of the war. With him out there to fight, I couldn’t be him. Without him, I was left standing in the field, alone, beating my chest for no one. As long as he was out there, I could tell myself he wasn’t where I least wanted him to be—inside me.
But trapped in that stall, my father was all I could feel. Crawling and oozing around inside me. Soaking into my bones. Curling into my fingerprints. I realized his invasion of me was nothing new. It had started my first day, my first hour alive. It had started the moment he gave his name as my name. I knew it had been happening my whole life, like ink falling onto paper, one drop at a time, building a stain. Like blood, falling one drop at a time, from a child’s mouth onto his cheap Sears T-shirt. Like blood falling one drop at a time from the mouth of a boy in love onto a kitchen floor. Falling and falling until the little drops disappeared and the stain they made was all you could see. Look at the stain, Junior, and tell me what you see.
How could I undo it? There was no way left to me. Could I cut him out? Bleed him out? Spit, puke, piss, curse, or scream him out? Hadn’t I been trying those things already for years and years and years? And I’d washed nothing away. All I’d done was make mess and noise. It was way too fucking late for any of it. My father was in the snot running from my nose. He was in the sour whiskey breath that clouded the stall. He was in the stink floating from my armpits. I was tattooed and stained, infected with him, forever.
There was no resolving any of it, no making peace with anything. Something had to give and I thought it might be my heart. I thought it might be the skin stretching across my stomach. I thought I would split open, spill my insides onto the tile floor. I hoped for it. Maybe he would pour out with them. And I could kick him, kick both of us, out under the door. I wished he had killed me. I wondered if he still might.
Someone beat on the door of the stall.
“Your ride’s here,” the bartender said.
I took a deep breath, dropped my cigarette and crushed it out beneath my boot. I pushed out of the stall and out of the bathroom, unsure of whose legs I was really walking on, or where they were taking me.
I turned to face him. Waters didn’t like Purvis any more than I did, but the kid was a fellow cop and his partner. Waters was going to beat me stupid, right in the middle of the street. I was sure of it. I couldn’t possibly take him, even under the best of conditions, but I wanted to put up a fight. Just so I could tell myself, while I was curled up on the jailhouse cot, that I had. I rolled my shoulders and tried to prepare.
“Don’t be stupid, Junior,” Waters said, pointing to the black sedan behind me. “Get in the fucking car.”
I stood my ground, debating. Of course. Why do it here, in front of witnesses? Waters was way too savvy for that. He was taking me somewhere he could pound me in private. Somewhere he could really work out on me.
“It’s too late to fuck around, kid,” he said.
Should I rush him? I didn’t have the strength to do anything but run up to him and collapse on him, but taking him on right here might minimize the damage by keeping things public. Puking on his shoes might diffuse the situation, or it might make things worse. There was already a crowd at the bar’s front window. Should I bolt? I’d had an awful lot to drink. I didn’t know how far I’d get. Maybe to the corner.
Waters stepped right up to me, breathing coffee in my face. He smacked me so hard across the mouth I saw stars as I sprawled on the pavement. My ears rang but I could hear laughter from inside the bar, and Waters’s heavy, impatient breathing. I raised myself to my hands and knees, a thin trail of blood and spittle dropping from my mouth to the street. I could feel Waters standing over me.
“Is that what you were worried about?” he asked. “It’s over, quit worrying.”
I sat in the street, my knees drawn to my chest, and squinted up at him, the streetlights shining over his shoulders.
“Pathetic,” Waters sighed. “Some kinda tough guy you are.” He reached down and pulled me up by my jacket. I turned my head and spat blood in the street.
“At least your asshole father had some pride. Get in the fucking car, Junior.”
He pulled open the rear door and handed me a handkerchief. I climbed into the backseat. I tossed the handkerchief on the floor and wiped the blood from my mouth with my sleeve.
“I’m glad your sister turned out halfway decent,” Waters said, climbing into the car. “Your mother deserves a better legacy than you.”
THIRTEEN
WATERS DROVE WITH A BEEFY ARM STRETCHED ACROSS THE BACK of the seat, holding an empty foam coffee cup between his fingers. Any second now, I figured he would drop it among the dozen or so others at my feet. I wondered where he was when he got the call, what he was doing. I could see him in a diner, maybe the Golden Dove, eating a late dinner alone, flirting feebly with the waitress. Not wanting to be home alone in his empty house.
“You always this difficult when someone tries doing you a favor?” he asked.
I stared out the window and said nothing.
“You gonna pout all the way home?” Waters asked.
I turned and looked at the back of his head. Home? “Purvis isn’t pressing charges?”
“He’s not,” Waters answered. “He can’t. Right after he called me, he plowed his car into a mailbox and then ran over a fire hydrant.”
“Jesus. Don’t tell me . . .”
“He’s fine,” Waters said. “A little worse for wear, banged up pretty good. How much from the accident”—his eyes met mine in the rearview mirror—“and how much from other things, there’s no telling.” He sighed. “But he’ll be up and around in a couple days.”
I swallowed hard. I told myself the accident wasn’t my fault, that Purvis was drunk and otherwise impaired when he got behind the wheel. The bartender had offered him a cab and an ambulance. The crash, and any trouble that came with it for him, was on Purvis. I had a feeling Waters saw it the same way.
“You got anything to say about this?” Waters asked. “Purvis said it was unprovoked. That you suckered him.” We stopped at a red light and Waters turned around. “Doesn’t seem like your style, and the bartender told me different.” The light went green and Waters faced front again, dropping the coffee cup. “I figure, as usual, the truth is somewhere in the middle.”
I leaned my head against the cool glass of the window, drunk and exhausted. My jaw throbbed where Waters had hit me. “Purvis took his mouth somewhere it shouldn’t have gone.”
“I don’t doubt it. The kid, he’s got an attitude problem. He don’t know when to stop pushing. Makes people crazy. It works with suspects, he’s actually not a bad little cop, but he can’t seem to turn it off.” Waters raised his shoulders, holding the shrug as he drove. He talked like he was trying to explain Purvis more to himself than to me. “So he gets on everybody’s nerves—mine, the lieu, the guys at the station.” He yawned. “Yours. For what it’s worth, I told him to stay away from you, but, as usual, he didn’t listen. I’m guessing your sister came up again?”
“That was part of it.”
“He crack wise about your old man?”
“Like I’d give a shit about that,” I said, straightening up.
“He come at you?”
“Like I’d give a shit about that, either. He came at my sister and my mother.”
I saw him smile at me in the rearview mirror. “At least some things are sacred to you, Junior. There’s hope for you yet.”
“What happens now?”
“Well, as we both know, Carlo’s got trouble keeping his mouth shut for his own good. But I’ll have a heart-to-heart with him in the morning, when the painkillers wear off. Explain how hard it’s gonna be to keep the drunk driving and the accident out of the rest of the story, the possible impact of things on his job. The accident gives him an excuse for the other bruises. I think I can make him see the sense of calling it a wash and we can all get on with our lives.”
I watched Hylan Boulevard blow by through the window, the rows of streetlights, mini-mall after mini-mall, their signs dark and their sprawling parking lots empty and at peace for the night. There had to be one store for every person on the island along the boulevard alone. One store and half a parking space. We passed Seaview High School. Rain started falling outside and I looked up at the sky. It had to be late, there were few cars sharing the boulevard with us. Getting on with my life. I was finding it hard to look forward to that.
“About the demise of the aforementioned John Senior,” Waters said. “Have you told your sister we’re getting somewhere?”
“More or less. I didn’t want to get her hopes up. What you told me didn’t leave me real optimistic.” I breathed on the window and wrote Molly’s name in the clouded glass. “I thought the shooter left a pretty cold trail.”
“He did. But he left one. That’s the important thing. I know a lot of guys. They know a lot more guys. I got guys, outside the department, that owe me favors. That many ears to the ground, things get heard. Of course, there’s the more complicated matter of substantiating those things.”
We made the right onto Richmond Avenue, turning toward my parents’ house. I cracked the window and lit a smoke. Waters reached his hand back and I handed him the one I’d just lit. I lit another for myself. I wished the ride home was longer.
“Any new details?” I asked.
“None that I can discuss.”
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