New Jersey Noir (20 page)
Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
Seeing the gun, Rina let out a little gasp.
“Shut up,” Dom snapped, softly but authoritatively, moving his eyes snakelike for a moment in her direction.
“What’s going on?” Stacy said.
“What’s going on is what your late, great friend Mr. Ike would call a
superior opportunity
. For me anyway,” he said, laughing. “See, I can speak fancy too.”
“I don’t understand why you’re upset.”
“Upset?” Dom said, looking around the room incredulously, as if he were appealing to an audience. “You think I’m
upset
?”
“Your father likes me. I’m a friend of his. We never had a problem.”
“Oh, I know he
liked
you, matter of fact he fuckin’ loved you. I told him you weren’t worth a shit in the ground but he didn’t believe me. But it don’t matter what he thought anymore, does it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Weren’t you listening, bright boy? Old Ike is dead. He’s worm food now, so it don’t matter what he said or thought. I run things now. I run all his things: the business, this house, this gun,” he said, waving it in the air briefly like a pennant.
“What happened to Ike?” Stacy blurted.
Dom looked down at the floor for a second. “Cancer. You heard of that, ain’t you?”
“My father died of cancer too,” Stacy said.
Dom nodded curtly. “That so? You think that makes us brothers or something?”
Stacy realized then that Dom was definitely on some kind of powerful drug. He didn’t know what it was, only that it was strong.
“So I can see you’re upset but—”
“
Upset
?” Dom said in the same incredulous voice, as he looked around the room again. “You in love with that word or something? I ain’t upset. Just ’cause I took out my piece to show you? I’m just having fun. If you knew me you’d understand. But you never bothered to know me. Bet you wish you had now.”
“Hey you.” He pointed the gun at Rina. “Show me your tits. I feel like seein’ something pretty.”
She looked at Stacy uncertainly for a second but he said nothing, felt his face was frozen as if he’d had some kind of neurological attack.
“Come on,” Dom said, pointing the gun at her. “I wanna see ’em now.”
She took off her dress in a few seconds. She was wearing a black bra he’d bought her from Victoria’s Secret.
“Take your top off too. What’re you, deaf?”
She took off her bra. Maybe someone would walk by and stop it, Stacy thought, a cop or someone from the neighborhood. Even if the neighborhood really was all Mafia, they liked order and quiet, didn’t they, and wouldn’t want any unnecessary trouble or attention, certainly not a loose cannon like Dom, who could never fit in with them. Never.
“You know how to dance?” Dom said to her.
She looked at Stacy again and he nodded to show it was okay with him.
“I can’t,” she said.
“You can’t? Course you can. Every girl knows how to dance. I’m sure you know how to dance, yeah. I’ve heard about you. Fact is, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen you too. Yeah, I’ve seen all the dancers.
Summer Wave
I think your name was. I could have sworn that was your name in Atlantic City.”
“That’s not my name.”
“It’s not your name now, but it was once.”
“No, it wasn’t ever my name.”
“I think it was. I’ve got a really good memory for tits, especially unusual ones. Yeah, I remember your nipples, honey, remember ’em well. So, do me a dance.”
She shook her head back and forth then looked at Stacy. “I can’t.”
“What’s the problem? Is it Bozo over there?” he said, pointing the gun briefly in his direction. “I can get rid of him in a second.”
“No, no, it’s not him.”
“Hey, Bozo, tell the little lady to dance for me, okay? Tell her
now
.”
“Leave her alone,” Stacy said, more weakly than he wanted to sound.
“Hey.” Dom moved toward him and punched him hard in the stomach. “You don’t tell me what to do,
ever
.”
“Okay,” Rina said, beginning to dance. “I’m doing it.”
“See, I told you you could. Now bring it a little closer to me.”
Stacy was slumped over the chair.
She looked at him hesitantly, not knowing what to do, just like a little girl, he thought, as if the shock of the situation had drained her of her years.
“Don’t look at Bozo to see what to do,” Dom said. “Bozo’s a clown, a sad little clown who don’t know what to do. You want to live to dance again, you bring your tits to me now!” He pointed the gun at her again and she started to cry.
Stacy tried to sit up in the chair. There was a sharp pain in his ribs. He must have been hit more than once because his stomach hurt too.
Dom was hooting now like a cowboy at a rodeo as Rina continued to dance for him while she cried. Angel dust, Stacy thought, Dom must be on some kind of angel dust or maybe meth.
She looked at him one more time, while Dom was unzipping his pants.
“Hey, no staring at Bozo. I already told you that. Bozo don’t have what you need, bitch. He’s just got a little clown dick that don’t give nothin’ to no grown-up woman like you. You get on your knees now and open your mouth. I’m about to fill you up like you ain’t ever been filled before.” Dom laughed as he grabbed her head and, holding it firmly, put himself inside her. Stacy stared in disbelief for a few seconds then got up from his chair and charged at him with his head down, but Dom was surprisingly agile, moving away like a matador and then hitting Stacy on the head with his gun two times. Stacy landed on the floor but felt like he was still falling, like a pebble would keep falling in the depths of the ocean. Then he no longer saw anything.
When he woke up she was driving. She told him they’d left Dom’s house almost two hours ago, that Dom was worried he’d killed him. Then she told him that she’d stopped at the motel and thrown their things in the car as fast as she could. “If you want me to, I’ll take you to a hospital.”
“No,” he said, noticing that she was staring straight ahead (had barely looked at him once). She was also talking in an even, expressionless voice like a zombie. Then he wondered if Dom had finished in her mouth, but knew he could never ask her. Hated himself for even thinking about it. He felt a pain in his head and ribs though it wasn’t as bad as he’d remembered.
“I gave you a lot of ibuprofen,” she said, as if reading his mind.
“Thanks.”
It grew quiet in the car, as if quiet could grow like a spreading plant. It got so quiet Stacy felt like they were in some other kind of machine seated far apart, a Ferris wheel perhaps, somehow equipped to travel on the road.
No one wanted to hear the radio—they agreed on that without even talking about it. Nor did they speak about possibly stopping for food. He felt sorry that she had to be straight now, but she was afraid to drive a long distance on any kind of drug, and she wouldn’t let him drive, saying he was too beat up to do it.
After an hour or so, his thoughts about Dom faded a bit and he began thinking about Atlantic City and how he’d never gotten to go to the beach where he’d swum with his father, though that was the reason why he’d wanted to go there in the first place. It was funny, Atlantic City wasn’t what you’d call one of the beautiful places in the country like the Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls. It was probably beautiful once, of course, but that had all ended with the boardwalk and the casinos. It was as if that once beautiful Atlantic City had sunk and was now like Atlantis, the “lost island” he’d read about as a kid.
Rina began crying, but softly, as if they were tears shed during a dream. “I’m not going home with you,” she said. “I’m going to drop you off and stay with my sister in Brooklyn.”
“Don’t do that, please.”
“No, I am,” she said, with tears running down her cheeks now. “You’ll be all right … I mean, you can’t want to sleep next to me tonight, or
ever
, so what’s the point of pretending?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m trash, Stacy, I must be. That’s why trashy things keep happening to me, don’t you get it? That’s why you take drugs all the time, ’cause you’re depressed about being with me.”
“Hey, stop it. Stop talking like that, okay? That’s crazy talk. You think I blame you for what happened? If there’s any blame, I blame myself for bringing you with me when I went to see Ike. You’re innocent, Rina, totally innocent. I shouldn’t have gone to see Ike. I really just wanted to see where my father took me swimming.”
“Why didn’t you then?”
“I don’t know. I should have. Look, pull over, get on the soft shoulder, will you?”
“Why?”
“Just do it, okay? I wanna feel some real air while I talk with you.”
“You’re sure you’re strong enough to get up?”
“Yeah, I’m sure,” he said, though when they got out of the car he felt light-headed and took one of her hands in his. “I want us to forget about what happened. It was horrible but now it’s over and none of it was your fault.”
“Are you high?”
“I’m not, no, no, I’m not,” he answered, still holding her hand.
She didn’t say anything. He could hear the cars whizzing past them in the dark, their headlights flying by like little bonfires.
“Are you losing it? Are you all right?”
He had been shaking but he wasn’t now. He decided he would never ask her about what happened with Dom. “I’m not losing it,” he said. “But if you talk about leaving me, I will lose it. So don’t ever say it.”
She looked at him and nodded. “Yah, okay, I’ll try to believe you.”
“Good, that’s good.” He looked down at the ground for a moment. When he glanced up he saw a single car pass by with only one headlight. It was as if the car were headed to hell all by itself, he thought.
“Stacy, let’s go back to your place. That’s what I really want to do,” she said. “I’m sorry I called it a tomb.”
“It
is
a tomb, no question about it, but it’s our tomb, isn’t it?”
“Our tomb,” she said with a little laugh. “Yeah, I guess it kinda is.”
Pink dawn, tide coming in: big fish driving mullets up
into jetty rocks and onto sand, pulling back
in the undertow, jaws agape for small
fry they devour by the hundreds, water
whorling, gulls circling and dipping—
my two little granddaughters gleefully watching.
S
hezad Ansari—or Shez to his customers, fans, and friends—had once been a successful musician. He’d played keyboards in a psychedelic grunge band called Cold Warrior, which released a
Billboard
Hot 100 single in ’98. The next few years were good to Shez. Sandra, a film editor, finally agreed to marry him. He went to parties with distinguished actors and directors. He acquired a taste for champagne, caviar, and cocaine. But those days were long behind him. He was now thirty-eight and living, once again, in Jersey City.
He lived alone in the one-bedroom Newport condo his father had bought in 2001 and bequeathed him just two years later. Shez had two sources of income: royalty checks from Cold Warrior’s first album, which covered his property taxes and utilities, and cash profits from the three-and-a-half- and seven-gram baggies of marijuana he sold to the local bourgeoisie. This side business took care of his grocery bills and bar tab.
An unexpected phone call from his ex-wife Sandra made Shez decide it was time to stop selling pot. She called him on a Monday in late February and said she had a real job for him, playing the Hammond B-3 organ on a soundtrack for an independent film. The film’s director, who’d won a Sundance grant, owed her a favor. All Shez had to do was show up to a meeting in Brooklyn that Thursday, and the job was practically his. He told himself that Sandra’s phone call was the start of a new leaf. He grew excited for his renaissance. Life as a normal, functional adult suddenly seemed possible.
Thursday came, and Shez hadn’t sold a bag or restocked his supply of bud in three days. He woke up at noon and entered the bathroom. Mildew clouded the transparent shower curtain, and balls of hair and dust littered the floor. Shez powered up his father’s old transistor radio. WBGO was playing a Lou Donaldson song. He’d fallen in love with the track during his first and only year at Rutgers. He placed his hands on the sink, confronting his hangover in the mirror. The bags under his eyes were puffy from last night, and from countless other solitary nights. A tight ball blazed in his stomach. He was no longer inspired by the thought of a new beginning.
He tugged one of his thick black curls toward his cheek. His hair didn’t need cutting, but his beard was another story. It was unruly, a black and gray bird’s nest, and it made him smile with a mixture of disgust and pride. He looked psychotic, like the shoe bomber. He opened up the medicine cabinet and reached for his stainless steel hair clippers. His father’s expired beta blockers rested beside them though the man had been dead for five years.