Onion Street (20 page)

Bobby’s parents visited only once during his stay in Coney Island Hospital, and then it was only to fill out the requisite paperwork. There was no tearful hand-holding or get-better-soon bouquets, nothing that even remotely resembled what had transpired between Mindy and her parents. There was only the superior disdain that Bobby’s parents exuded. I had known these people nearly all my life without really knowing them at all. They were disappointed in Bobby. Believe me, they did nothing to camouflage it. But I had created a fantasy that beneath their icy, Warsaw Pact exteriors, they loved their son beyond description. That they secretly held dear all those bourgeois rituals and milestones — Bobby’s first day of school, losing his first tooth, his high school graduation — that other parents so proudly celebrated. Now I came to see that my stubborn belief was naive and self-serving. The equation was simple: If Bobby’s parents really loved him, mine loved me. It’s not that my folks were stoic and unexpressive. They told me they loved me. It was just that they were such damaged goods, always so hungry for love and approval themselves, that I never trusted theirs for me. I couldn’t speak for Aaron and Miriam.

For the first few days, the hospital was crawling with cops and it was impossible for me to get anywhere near Bobby. I stopped trying. I wasn’t even sure why I wanted to see him other than to tell him to go fuck himself. Below the surface, I think I felt almost as betrayed by him as Susan Kasten had. It was one thing for Detective Casey to have done what he did. It was his job. He believed he was doing right. It was different with Bobby. I still couldn’t get a handle on the angle he’d been playing. Look, I knew Bobby believed the war was wrong and that America was a profoundly inequitable place. On some level he might even have truly believed in revolution, but he wasn’t a bomb thrower. Nor was he Dudley Do-Right. At first I just assumed Casey had coerced Bobby into it, that he had something to hold over Bobby’s head to get him to act as an informant. I don’t know. Maybe he’d caught Bobby moving some real explosives, or transporting a fugitive. Something like that. Something where Bobby had no choice but to cooperate, or go away to prison for twenty years.

“He volunteered,” Casey’d told me the night it all came down.

“Get the fuck outta here!”

I could only imagine my ancestors spinning in their graves at the disrespect I was showing to a cop. Such a display flew in the face of the Diaspora’s mantra:
Keep your head down and keep your mouth shut
.

Casey laughed at me. “It’s true, Moe, whether you believe it or not. He came to me.”

“How did he find you?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

I wanted to believe the detective was lying to me, but in my gut I knew he wasn’t. That really sent me spinning off my axis. It might have been the Age of Aquarius, but not in my dark corner of the universe. Not only did I feel used and betrayed by Bobby, there was Mindy too. Forget that she was willing to kill Bobby, that she had tried. I could almost understand the rationale behind that. For a few days I pretended that what I couldn’t get over was her willingness to kill innocent people, whether they wore uniforms or not. But that was only part of it. It was more that I felt so completely stupid. It was one thing to be Polonius, to be unaware that you’re the fool. It’s another thing to be the fool and know it. Here were my best friend and a woman I thought I loved, and I didn’t know either of them, not really, not deeply. It made me start to question everything I thought I knew.

I was no longer even feigning interest in school. Oddly, my parents didn’t pester me about it. My parents were uneducated people, not dumb people. And when my dad read those articles in the papers about the failed bomb plot and the murders in Manhattan Beach, he seemed to sense that the missing thread in the fabric of those stories had a connection to his youngest son. Only Aaron bothered asking me about it at all, and when I refused to say anything, he let it go. Aaron never let anything go. Not anything. Not ever. On Saturday morning, when an unexpected visitor showed up at our apartment door, no one needed to guess or speculate in silence any longer.

When my mom came into the room I was still in bed. I was half-watching a rerun of
Sky King
. People said my mom kind of looked like a cross between the young Joan Crawford and the aging Shelley Winters. Her weight was definitely more on the Shelley Winters side of that equation. But the expression on her face was purely and distinctly her own. It was an odd mix of panic and smug satisfaction, like the look on Chicken Little’s face when the sky actually fell.
See, I told ya
. It was as if the worst coming to pass was worth it because it confirmed her darkest fears.

“Someone’s at the door for you.”

“Yeah, I heard the bell.”

“He’s a detective.”

That got my attention more than Sky King’s plane
Songbird
, or his niece Penny. I sat up. “What’s he look like?”

“He’s a big — ”

I didn’t hear what she said after that because I was already out of the bedroom.

Casey stood just inside the door. He curled his lips into a small smile and then quickly undid it.

“Throw on some clothes,” he said. It wasn’t a request.

I opened up my mouth to ask the first of ten questions that came to mind. When I did, he shook his head at me not to bother. I about-faced and headed into the bedroom to change. My mom was still there as if hiding out.

“Ma, get outta here. I gotta get dressed.”

“Why is that cop here? What did you do? Is it Mindy? Was it you who —
Oy gevalt!
It was you who did this to her. Was she cheating on you? I never liked her, you know. I knew she was no good.”

“Sorry to disappoint you, Ma.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“That the sky’s not falling. C’mon. I gotta get dressed. I have to go.”

• • •

I never experienced the same kind of buzz or rush my friends claimed to feel the few times I smoked pot, but, man, I felt it there in the front seat of Detective Casey’s chestnut Galaxie. Somehow I was a part of something in a way I’d never been before, something bigger than me. It was good to crawl out of the little hole of self-pity and bewilderment I’d dug for myself. It was good to feel important. Maybe this was what Aaron and Bobby felt like. Maybe this was what it was like to have purpose. Fifteen minutes into the trip, Casey still hadn’t explained to me where we were headed or why we were going there. Didn’t matter. He needed me.

We pulled off the Belt Parkway at Pennsylvania Avenue. In D.C., the White House is on Pennsylvania Avenue. In Brooklyn, Pennsylvania Avenue leads to the Fountain Avenue dump. These days, there were plenty of people who had more respect for the latter than the former. I remembered back to the day Bobby and I stopped on the opposite shoulder to fix his flat tire, the day Bobby was almost arrested and then let free. At least now I understood why the cop let him go. Bobby must have given the cop a code word or a number to call that gave him a free pass. I asked Casey about it.

“If Bobby got snagged by a cop when he was carrying the dummy explosives, did he call you?”

“He had a number to use, yeah. It couldn’t be me directly because if I was out in the field I might be outta reach, but there was always someone there to clear his way if he got jammed up. Why you wanna know?”

I ignored the question. “Why didn’t he use it the day he got arrested at the demonstration? I had to go bail his ass out that day.”

“Because getting Bobby arrested was the whole point,” Casey said, turning the car toward the dump instead of away from it. Although all the windows in the Ford were rolled up tight, the stench of rotting garbage seemed to seep through the glass and metal as if through tissue paper. “As the plot to bomb the Six-One was getting closer, I needed a way to reassure Susan Kasten and her crowd that Bobby hadn’t betrayed them, that he wasn’t the mole. I figured if Bobby got arrested and they saw that he didn’t have a magic get-outta-jail card, it would erase any doubts they mighta had about him.”

“Didn’t work.”

Casey shrugged his shoulders. “Guess not. He’d already been ratted out.”

We pulled up to a little shack. A guy with bad knees in a green sanitation uniform limped out of the shack and motioned for Casey to roll down his window. When he did, it was all I could do not to puke my guts up onto the floor of the front seat. The detective turned a few shades of green himself as he waved his shield at the gate man. The guy waved us through and Casey set a world’s record getting his window rolled back up. We both took big gulps of air to no good end.

“Listen, Moe,” he said as we snaked our way along the rough dirt road deeper into the huge mounds of garbage. “This isn’t gonna be pretty.”

“Is it Susan Kasten?”

“Nah. I wish.”

And suddenly, even before he said another word, I knew why he’d brought me here. It was Lids. Had to be. It was the only thing that made sense. In all the commotion of the last few days, I’d almost forgotten about Lids. His parents had called a few times, but I’d been so freaked out by things that I never got back to them. Trust me, nearly getting killed screws with your head and tends to rearrange your priorities. The other night, when I’d recounted how I’d stumbled onto the bomb plot for Detective Casey, I’d fudged Lids’s part in helping me. I’d strategically neglected to mention Lids’s connection to the late Billy O’Day. I’d emphasized Lids’s nervous breakdown and his paranoia, and left out the part about him being a pusher. The way I’d told it, Lids was pure as a spring lamb, sort of an innocent bystander who got caught up in stuff he had no part in.

“If I hadn’t asked Bobby to find Lids for me and to keep an eye on him, I wouldn’t even be mentioning him to you,” was what I said to Casey the night we’d met at Coney Island Hospital. “Bobby told me Lids was safe, but that was all he told me. He didn’t tell me who he was with, or where he was. Do you know where he is?”

Casey had sworn he didn’t have a clue. That was days ago. Now I was pretty sure he had a good idea of exactly where Lids was.

“It’s Lids’s body, isn’t it? You found him.” That strange smile of Casey’s cracked across his lips, so I asked, “Why are you smiling?”

“I know he was your friend and all, but you’ve got a good head for this work. You’re sharp.”

I didn’t say anything to that. As we came over the crest of a last fetid hill, he eased off the gas. About a hundred yards ahead of us was a huddle of official-looking vehicles: two black and green patrol cars, a ridiculously conspicuous unmarked police car, a city ambulance, a bulldozer, and a few Department of Sanitation vehicles. There was another car parked there too, one that was foreign to me: a black or dark brown station wagon with blackened back windows.

“What’s that car there?” I asked.

“The meat wagon,” he answered as if those two words explained it all. I suppose they did. The Galaxie came to a stop. “Listen, Moe. The first time is a little rough. It’s rougher when it’s someone you know. You sure you wanna do this?”

Of course, this wasn’t my first time. There was Billy O’Day and Abdul Salaam. “No, but I’m gonna do it anyway,” is what I said. “You didn’t drive me all the way here to have me sit in the car.”

“This kid, Lids. He’s not my case, you understand?”

“Yeah.”

“This isn’t my crime scene either. After we spoke the other night, I put the word out on your friend and I got a call this morning. These guys called me as a courtesy. The detectives will want you to take a look before they contact his parents.”

“Okay.”

“You listen to what the detectives tell you. Your friend, he’s in pretty rough shape. That’s what they told me over the phone. You understand what that means?”

“I can imagine.”

“No, you can’t.”

When I opened the door, I got smacked full in the face with that rotting garbage smell. The odor was acrid and sour and sickly sweet all at once. It was burnt rubber and curdled milk and rotted vegetables and decayed flesh blended together. And it was worse than just a smell. It hung heavy in the air like a film, tainting my exposed skin, my clothes, my lungs. I could taste it too. It was meat spoiling on my tongue, maggots and beetles sliding down my throat as I swallowed. I didn’t make it five feet before I bent over at the waist and heaved up my breakfast. Man, was I happy I’d only had toast. Looking up, I noticed a group of older men — some in uniforms, some not — having a good laugh at my expense.

“Don’t sweat it, kid,” one of them said. “Welcome to the club.”

Then, having had their laughs, the old men turned back around to whatever was the focus of their attention. It wasn’t hard to guess what that was. Detective Casey stood me upright, urging me forward. Above our heads, set against a steel gray sky, swirling gyres of feathered scavengers chirped and cawed and wailed, raining stained white streaks of feces down on the piles of garbage below. What from a distance looked so poetic, so much like an aerial ballet, was raw and feral, a thing much more menacing and desperate from where I now stood.
Nature red in tooth and claw
. I think I finally understood what that meant.

I walked up just behind the line of uniforms. Casey stopped me, asking me one more time if I was ready for this. I wanted to ask him if anybody was really ready for this. Was he? How could anyone be ready for this? Some people were. Some people had to be.

“Malone,” Casey called out.

“That you, Casey?” a voice asked from beyond the line of uniforms.

“Yeah.”

“Hold your water, I’m comin’.”

A few seconds later the line of uniforms parted, and through them stepped a rotund, bald man in a cheap, ill-fitting overcoat. He couldn’t have closed the buttons on that thing for all the money in the world. He was smoking the shit out of a cigar that wiggled like a hula dancer when he moved his lips. Never in my life had I so welcomed the smell of cigar smoke.

“You Casey?” Malone asked, holding his hand out to the man who brought me. He jerked his head at me and spoke as if I wasn’t there. “This the friend?”