Good Neighbors (6 page)

‘Damn it,’ Peter says.

Another stain to clean up. This one he should take care of now. If he lets it soak into the carpet, it’ll never come out. Even if he manages to scrub out the stain tomorrow morning, dirt will always collect there, and every time he walks to bed he’ll see that Rorschach smudge and curse himself. He starts to move off the bed.

But Bettie grabs him by the back of his neck and pulls him down to her moist sex.

‘Don’t worry about the fucking drink,’ she says.

Suddenly it’s a very easy thing to forget.

‘Does your husband do this for you?’ Peter asks, burying his face in her folds, in her scent, her black pubic hair tickling the bridge of his nose.

‘Not like that,’ Bettie says, and pushes her pelvis into his face.

She doesn’t look at him when she says it; she is looking out the window and into the courtyard. Her eyes are glassy and far away but she continues to rhythmically grind herself into his face.

He wonders briefly what she’s thinking, but then decides he doesn’t care.

8

From his living-room window, Frank Riva, a black man closer to fifty than forty, stares out across the courtyard, past his own reflection, past the lamplit courtyard itself, and into a bedroom, where some soft lawyer-type has his face buried in pussy.

Frank wears only a pair of jeans. His torso is bare but for a small patch of black hair on his chest and a barely-visible tattoo above his left pectoral muscle that he unwisely got when he was in the army.

After a moment, he turns away from the window and toward his wife, Erin. She’s about five years younger than him and white. She’s also six inches shorter than him, her sandy blonde hair cut into a cute bob. She is still wearing her nurse’s uniform, which Frank has always found sexy. Even when she hasn’t worked he sometimes asks her to put it on before they make love just so he can take it off again. She is also still wearing her work shoes, which is unusual. She normally has them off before she’s closed the door behind her, but tonight she’s got more important things than her shoes on mind.

They met in 1943, before either of them had turned thirty, though Frank wasn’t far off. He was fresh out of the army and working as a mechanic on Erin’s family’s farm at the time, fixing tractors and other equipment, living in a shed behind the house and sleeping on an itchy green blanket that he laid over stinking wet hay, using an army duffel bag as a pillow, one of his two pairs of pants its stuffing, brushing away the rats that came out from the hay at night and praying he never got bit, saving up the cash he earned, hoping to start his own business, a mechanic shop, with a sign on the front and everything. That’s what he’d been trained as in the army, a mechanic. He spent his two years in the service – January, ’41 to January, ’43 – fixing jeeps at Camp Gordon, Georgia. He never left the country, never met a German, much less shot one. He first saw Erin three months after his arrival on the farm. She was home from college for the summer. He saw her picking figs from a tree near the back of the house, and that’s when she first saw him, too. They both stopped what they were doing and looked at each other. It was a moment and then the moment was over, and Erin’s daddy, Mr. Gregory, was asking Frank a question.

‘When you think that tractor’ll be back up and runnin’?’

‘Should have it going within the hour,’ Frank said.

But Mr. Gregory must have seen something because he looked from Frank to Erin, and then back to Frank again, and even though Erin had gone back to picking figs and wasn’t looking in their direction, Mr. Gregory said, ‘You’re a good guy, Frank. Hard worker. Honest. I like you, Frank—’

‘I like you, too, sir.’

‘—but I’ll be damned if my daughter ends up with a nigger. No offense to you personally, of course. Like I said, I like you. But don’t even think about it. You understand me?’

Frank was holding a wrench in his right hand at the time, and it took all the restraint he had to keep his arm down, to keep from swinging that wrench around toward Mr. Gregory’s left temple, to keep from cracking his skull like an egg, to keep looking relaxed and to keep the anger buried deep down where his boss wouldn’t see it.

‘Frank,’ Mr. Gregory said, ‘are we clear?’

‘Yes, sir,’ Frank said.

Mr. Gregory smiled, patted Frank’s arm a couple times.

‘Good man,’ he said. ‘I’m glad to hear it. If you was white,’ he said, ‘I’d introduce you to her myself. I think that highly of you.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ Frank said through gritted teeth.

Mr. Gregory nodded and walked away, no doubt thinking they’d just had a good talk, man to man, and that they understood each other.

But it was only seven weeks later, six weeks after his first conversation with Erin, that Frank woke up surrounded by flames. Mr. Gregory had found out. Frank didn’t know how. He’d only been talking to her. Quietly, sure. About what kind of future they might have together, sure. But only talking. The first time was a week after Mr. Gregory warned him to stay away from his daughter, but after that, they’d found time together almost every day. Someone either told or Frank and Erin just weren’t as careful about not being seen together by Mr. and Mrs. Gregory as they thought they were; either way, Mr. Gregory poured gasoline all over his own barn and struck a match. The wood was dry and burned quickly and by the time Frank woke he was surrounded by orange and white flames and the popping sounds of exploding lumber, and parts of the roof were falling down around him, and he was coughing, hacking, couldn’t breathe, and his eyes were burning and watering, and he had no idea which way was out, but he stood, stood up blindly on his bare feet, and stumbled, feeling with his arms, going this way, too hot, fire, there’s fire there, and then that way, following the sound of squealing rats as they made their escape.

He managed to get out all right. Only his right leg got seriously burned. But he lost all the money he’d spent the last several months saving, lost everything but the clothes on his back. And he had to leave town. If he didn’t, he’d find himself strung up from a tree.

But he hung around for two days after the barn burned down, anyway, sleeping in the woods at night. He lurked around during the day, and when he found a chance to get Erin alone he took it, and he asked her to come with him, to leave town with him so that they could be together.

They headed north that night. Hitchhiking.

They found out quickly that they had to use Erin as bait, and once the car or truck stopped, Frank would come out of hiding. Even then, the driver would often say something about not giving no nigger a ride, nor no nigger lover, and drive off. But the rest of the time they managed to get down the road a stretch. If they both stood out on the road together, though, no one would stop at all.

And now, here they are, twenty-one years later, in trouble again – big trouble.

‘Are you sure,’ Frank says, ‘that it was a person you hit?’ Erin nods at him, panic in her eyes.

‘How do you know?’

‘I could . . .’ She stops, closes her eyes as if to replay the event in her head, and then opens them again and looks at Frank. ‘I could see the stroller in my rearview mirror.’

‘You hit a baby?’

Erin nods and immediately starts crying.

‘Oh, fuck,’ Frank says.

Which makes Erin cry harder.

‘Calm down,’ Frank says. Then: ‘Fuck, fuck,
fuck
.’

He walks to the window.

Across the courtyard, he can see a naked man pumping away at a naked woman. The woman is looking out the window, actually seems to be looking at him, her white eyes emotionless.

He turns away. Paces. Turns to Erin.

‘Did anyone see you?’

Erin looks up at him, wipes her eyes, smudging her mascara and making herself look a bit like a raccoon. She breathes in and out to calm herself, her chest rising and falling.

Finally, she says, ‘I don’t know.’

‘Of course someone saw her,’ Frank says to himself. ‘Baby didn’t roll itself out into the street, did it?’

He looks up at Erin but she doesn’t respond.

‘You didn’t see anything but the stroller?’

‘No,’ Erin says. ‘I was scared. I just . . . drove away. I’m sorry. I was so scared.’

‘So you don’t know for sure the baby got killed.’

‘No, but . . .’

‘Is there any blood or anything on the grille of the car?’

‘I don’t know. I didn’t look. Jesus, Frank, do you think I killed it?’

‘I don’t know, honey,’ Frank says, walking to the window, looking outside, and then turning back to his wife, who he is both furious at and scared for, ‘but I’m going to find out.’

He walks to the couch and peels his dirty t-shirt from its arm. The t-shirt is stained with car grease, the armpits yellow with sweat. He flips the shirt right-side-out and slips into it.

‘What if someone recognizes the car and thinks you did it?’ Erin asks.

‘Then I’ll let them think it,’ Frank says. ‘Sometimes people pay for other people’s mistakes. You’re my wife. I’ll pay for yours if I have to.’

Frank grabs the keys from the hook by the door and then pulls the door open.

‘I’ll be back in a while.’

‘When?’

‘I don’t know,’ Frank says. ‘If no one is around and the baby is dead, or if no one is around and the stroller is gone, then I’ll be back pretty soon. There’s nothing I can do in that case, is there? If someone is around and recognizes the car, maybe I won’t be back for several years. So I don’t know when. What I do know is this. There might be an injured baby on the side of the road right now, and I might be able to save its life. Slim as the chance may be, if I don’t go out there and find out, and it is but dies because I’m afraid of getting in trouble, don’t you think that puts blood on my hands?’

‘I don’t know, Frank.’

Frank nods.

‘Well, I do,’ he says. ‘I’ll be back in a while. You said it was on the twenties?’

Erin nods.

‘Okay,’ Frank says.

Then he steps out through the front door and closes it behind him.

9

Behind the wheel of a light blue 1963 Fiat 600 sits Nathan Vacanti, damn near sixty-five, but looking pretty good for his age if he may say so himself, and he may, because he denies himself nothing – almost nothing.

It’s just past four o’clock in the morning and Nathan is drunk.

It’s amazing how much teachers drink, as a rule. Every time Nathan goes to a party with a lot of teachers, doesn’t matter what grade level or subject (though primary school teachers seem to really like white wine, history teachers whiskey, and English teachers merlot or cabernet), he is amazed by the sheer volume of alcohol consumed.

Except for the red taillights of a car about a quarter mile in front of him, he sees no other evidence of active life. The buildings on either side of him are dark. He could be driving through the remains of the apocalypse. Except for the red taillights in front of him.

He grins at the idea of the apocalypse – it’ll come if the Russians want it to – and pushes his penny loafer against the gas pedal.

He gains on the taillights.

He turns up the radio, which is playing Buddy Holly and the Crickets. They’re doing ‘Not Fade Away’, recorded just two years before Mr. Holly’s untimely death according to the late-night DJ, Dean ‘Dino’ Anthony.

Now the taillights are only thirty yards ahead of him. Now twenty. Now ten. And now he’s passing a Studebaker on the right, and he glances out his side window and looks at a pretty brunette woman, tiny little thing about the size of your average twelve-year-old, and then the only place she exists is in his past because he just left her in his dust.

You’d never know it to look at him right now, drunk as a skunk and needing a shave, eyes veined, lips wet and purple, but Nathan, or Mr. Vacanti as he is used to being called, is a seventh grade English teacher, and has been for the last thirty-two years. He’s made some mistakes in that time but he reckons he’s done more good than harm. He hopes so, anyway. That’s what he tells himself.

Up ahead of him is an intersection, a light-box hanging from a pole, swinging back and forth gently in the night breeze, hanging directly over the asphalt. A bird sits perched on a ledge in front of the green light, a back-lit silhouette. Then there is no green light; there’s a yellow light instead. Nathan pushes his penny loafer down to the floorboard, gaining speed.

Yes, he’s been a pretty good teacher to most of his students; a few mistakes don’t take away from all the good he’s done, do they?

The light turns red, but Nathan doesn’t even consider stopping. He flies right into the intersection, and he almost makes it across, too, but a large green truck comes at him from the right. Its headlights illuminate the inside of Nathan’s car in the moment before collision like the light from a UFO in a B-movie just before abduction.

‘Oh, shit.’

Then a sound like the world cracking open fills his head and he’s spinning in circles. Everything is a blur of nonsense and lights and pain throbs through his body as it’s slammed around the car’s interior. He’s spinning clockwise and idiotically he thinks if he just turns his steering wheel the other direction he can right himself, but instead the momentum of the spinning and the turn of the tires ends up flipping the car, and suddenly the world is upside down. He can see, momentarily, the single remaining headlight of a green truck shining on him. But then he’s right-side up again, looking at the darkened windows of a building, seeing the reflection of his own car in motion. And then asphalt. He can see it so clearly; he can see every pebble imbedded in it; he can see the black smudges of bubble gum pressed into it; he can see where it has been stained by leaking oil. And then it’s gone and the world is upside down again. The car rolls three times before finally coming to a stop on the side of the road, down-side up, rocking back and forth ever so slightly. He can hear the whir of his car’s tires spinning but gripping nothing. He can hear the tinkling of glass. Through the shattered windshield he can see the green pickup truck that hit him sitting motionless, though rather cockeyed, in the middle of the road, its single good headlight shining on the trail of damage Nathan left behind. Bits of glass, chunks of metal. His spare tire rolls in smaller and smaller circles on the gray asphalt before falling onto its side, wobbling, then going still.