Saturday was dreary but profitable; I was in my car most of the day. My last call was an airport run and I didn’t get back from JFK until six-thirty, a half hour after my usual quitting time. The night dispatcher was on with two drivers. The day crew had gone home, and it didn’t look like there was enough coverage, but that wasn’t my problem. I turned in my commission and got my ass out of there before anyone tried to push calls on me. I was getting in my car when I noticed that Lou was still hanging around. He was sitting in his Caddy, parked in front of me, warming it up. He slid his window open and waved me over.
“What’s doing, Lou?”
“Get in a second, Mike; I wanna talk to you.” The door locks popped open loudly. I got in and tried to close the door as gently as possible. Nothing intimidated me like a new car. “Mike,” he said, “I gotta ask you a big favor tonight.”
I thought of the two-man night crew I’d just seen and started to make my excuses. My date with Kathy of the Unique World View And No Roommate was for eleven, and I couldn’t let myself get stuck working a double.
“I need a driver tonight.”
“Lou, any other time but tonight. I got a date. This girl lives alone.”
“I wouldn’t ask, it wasn’t important.”
“There must be ten guys you can call to drive tonight.”
“I don’t want you to drive here,” he said impatiently. “I want you to drive me somewhere.”
That was new. “Why don’t you want to drive?”
“It looks better I get driven.”
“This isn’t one of those guinea things where I’ll catch a bullet in a seafood restaurant?”
“Yeah,” he said, “that’s it. We’ll go out inna blaze a’ glory with clam sauce on our chins.” We both laughed. “Will you drive?”
He wasn’t going to tell me what it was about. “What time?”
“Ten o’clock.”
“How long?”
“Twenny minutes. No time at all.”
I gave in. “Okay. But I really have to be on the road by ten-thirty.”
“Piece a’ cake.”
I was showered, shaved, and dressed for my night out when Lou turned the corner and stopped in front of my building. He awkwardly slid over and I got behind the wheel. There was a mountain of a guy in the backseat whom I didn’t know. Lou introduced him as Edward and he grunted at me. I smiled as politely as I could.
“We got one more stop,” Lou said. “Pass by the store.”
When I pulled up, Little Joey strutted out and climbed in the back with Edward. Joey and I looked at each other with equal surprise.
“Lou,” I said, “what the fuck’s going on here? Am I driving you somewhere or are we having a reunion?”
“I asked you to do me a favor,” he said. He didn’t look at me or Joey. “You gonna do it or you gonna ask questions?”
“No questions,” I said. “But please drop the Don Corleone. You sound silly.”
Lou grinned, but then looked back to see Edward’s reaction. He was looking out the window as if he were alone in the car. Edward definitely had me worried.
Following Lou’s directions, I drove under the El tracks along New Utrecht Avenue to Sixty-second Street. We parked across from the subway station, in front of the mouth of an alley that ran between a deli and a video store. Every shop on the block was closed and the place looked deserted. I glanced back at Joey and realized he was frightened. He looked like a dwarf next to Edward.
Lou told me to cut the lights. We sat that way, in silence in the dark, for about fifteen minutes. Then two people turned the corner from Sixty-third Street and walked down New Utrecht towards us. They looked completely bombed, weaving and tripping and mostly leaning against each other to stay upright. As they drew closer I saw that one of them was Shades. The other looked like a hippie, with long hair pulled back in a ponytail. When they were next to the car the rear door opened and Edward got out. I tried to say something then, but I couldn’t. I felt like one of Edward’s huge hands had my throat squeezed shut. The guy walking with Nicky suddenly straightened up and veered away from him. Nicky practically collapsed into Edward’s arms. The hippie walked over to the car. Lou handed him an envelope and he turned and ran back to Sixty-third and out of sight. Edward was walking Nicky down the alley. Lou got out of the car and stuck his head back in the window.
“Joey, I want you to walk around the block to Fourteenth Avenue. You stand at that end a’ the alley. Nobody comes down the alley, you unnerstan’?”
Joey stepped out of the car and began walking around the corner. After he’d gone a few feet he started running. Lou turned to me.
“Keep the motor running. Lights off. Keep your eyes open. Hit the horn twice if there’s trouble.”
As he was turning away I tried to talk again. My throat still hurt and his name came out in a stage whisper. He turned back.
“I know, kid. You gotta be on the road by ten-thirty.”
He walked to the back of the car and opened the trunk. I thought for a moment they were going to throw Shades in, but when I looked down the alley, Nicky and Edward were disappearing behind a dumpster. Nicky seemed to be talking to him. They looked like old friends. Lou slammed the trunk. He walked down to them with something bulky under his coat. They all moved out of sight around the bin.
I wanted to move, but I couldn’t seem to take my hands off the steering wheel. There wasn’t anything I could do, I told myself. I was a driver. I couldn’t stop them.
Overhead, I heard the roar of the B train approaching from downtown. It passed and continued south to Coney Island. I closed my eyes and tried to will myself onto it. Nathan’s, chili dogs, whorehouses. As the sound faded, I thought I heard another screaming that lasted a few seconds longer than the wheels on the rail marking the turn at Fifteenth Avenue. I looked down the alley, but saw nothing. I hoped I was mistaken.
About five minutes later Lou stepped out and trotted to the car. He was getting in next to me when I saw a flash of light—fire flaring from behind the dumpster. Its glow framed the mammoth shape of Edward as he plodded down the alley toward us.
“Go,” Lou said, the second Edward slammed his door.
I pulled out, keeping the lights off. I made a right at Sixty-third and another at Fourteenth.
“The fuck you going?” Lou screamed.
I didn’t answer. I just pulled up at the other entrance to the alley. Little Joey ran over and jumped in.
“Oh,” Lou said. “Yeah, right.”
His hands were shaking. Joey was bouncing up and down on the backseat. I drove away. After three blocks I turned the lights on. I looked at Edward and saw that he was staring out the window again, impassive as when they picked me up.
I went totally numb. That must have been the way Edward felt all the time. Me and Edward. Maybe we’d become buddies. Physically I was calm, and I seemed to be outside of the car watching this scene from a distance. I glanced over at Lou. He turned his face away quickly, toward the window. I knew better. He’d never find what Edward saw out there.
We dropped Little Joey off. He bolted without saying anything. I drove back to my building.
“We’ll talk tomorrow,” Lou said, but he didn’t meet my eyes. I got out, and he slid over in the front seat and drove away. Edward never turned his head from the street. I watched their taillights vanish over the hill on Twelfth Avenue.
I stood there alone on the sidewalk for a few minutes and tried to orient myself. My block looked different. The buildings were unfamiliar and everything seemed to be at crazy angles, as if I were looking down at the street from a great height. I leaned against a parked car and took several deep breaths. That made me much more dizzy at first, in a blinding wave, but it receded almost immediately and in a minute or two the whole thing passed. I looked up and down the block, but there was no one around. A couple of people passed by up on the avenue, but nobody turned down the street.
It suddenly popped into my head that Nicky was probably alive, and needed my help. I ran to my car, started it, and headed back to New Utrecht. They probably roughed him up good, I thought. He had, after all, robbed the club. That couldn’t go unanswered. They had to send a message. That was why that guy Edward was there. He was a leg-breaker if I’d ever seen one. Lou probably couldn’t do it. No more than Little Joey or I could have. He could’ve slapped him around some. He was pissed off enough about the cars for that. But I doubted he could have broken anything or really hurt him. So they brought that scumbag Edward. He did the number on Shades. I looked at my upholstery. Nicky would make a real mess of it on the way to the hospital.
I parked this time on the Fourteenth Avenue side of the alley, where Little Joey had been stationed, and on the opposite side of the street. As I got out of the car I noticed a faint smell of smoke lingering in the air, and a slightly visible haze at the mouth of the alley. There were no flames that I could see. I hadn’t thought about the fire, and I didn’t let myself think about it much now. It was another message, just one more scare tactic.
Whatever occurred had been obscured from my line of vision while it was happening by the large green dumpster that was halfway down the alley. I assumed that meant that it had been in full view of Little Joey from the other side. When I approached from that direction, however, I discovered that there were two steel doors recessed a good four feet into the wall next to the dumpster. There was nothing to be seen from where I stood, so Nicky was either in the trash bin or in that doorway. I moved further slowly, my feet making exaggerated crunching sounds on the broken glass and other debris that covered the ground.
“Nicky?” I whispered. No sounds but city noises. In the distance another B was moving up from Fifty-fifth. I went past the doorway and had one hand on the dumpster lid when the smell hit me. I turned back to the doorway and saw him crumpled in the far corner. He’d been out of my line of sight until I’d moved past him.
We used to have an elaborate fireworks show on my block every year on the Fourth of July. Recently it had degenerated into twenty little displays outside people’s houses, but it used to be a fairly organized—if not well thought-out—event. One year, when I was maybe ten, Stevie
Bosco’s father John walked into the middle of the street and dropped a mat of firecrackers into a burning wooden crate. He then produced a can of lighter fluid from his back pocket and, swaying drunkenly, squirted a stream of it into the carton. I remember his screams when the fire ran up his right arm. Other men, including my father, had been heading toward him to pull him away. As his arm, then his electric blue Hawaiian shirt, went up in flames, they stopped moving toward him and backed off. The mat began exploding and he was thrown to the ground. Once he was down the men approached him again. They rolled him around and poured soda on him until the fire was out. He lived, and didn’t even look that bad after five or six operations. He had to wear a rubber shirt, like a scuba diver’s outfit, for about two years. I never forgot the smell in the air that day. It was sickening. I smelled it again in the alley, a hundred times stronger, and I knew Nicky was dead.
I resisted the impulse to gag and the impulse to run away. His legs were tucked under him, out of sight, arms at his sides, palms up, like he was praying or asking forgiveness. His eyes bugged out wildly, making me wonder if he’d been throttled, and all of him below his head had been burned. His imitation leather jacket had melted open in spots, revealing either a dark shirt or charred flesh. Wisps of smoke still rose around him as if he had dry ice in his pockets. I leaned in more closely, then leaped backward, lost my footing, and fell. I wound up sitting on the ground facing Nicky. I quickly pushed myself across the concrete with my feet until my back touched the wall on the other side of the alley. I braced against it and stood up, then froze there and stared. Shades looked more indistinct from that distance. More acceptable. Only dead.
Nicky’s eyes weren’t bugged out. His sunglasses had been removed, his eyes torn out, then the glasses replaced and the eyes set on top of the lenses. This was a message, a personal touch—specific punishment for a guy called Shades. Tony must have wanted that very clear. I hoped to God they’d killed him first.
Another train approached. I started shaking. At first it was just my arms, then my chest and shoulders. It seemed that the louder the noise of the train got, the more intense my trembling became. By the time it came to a stop at Sixty-second, my body was wracked and I didn’t trust my legs to support me if I moved off the wall. The B seemed to sit in the station a very long time, and I felt naked and spotlighted in the protracted silence. The shaking wouldn’t stop. When the train finally began to pull away I pushed myself off the wall and stumbled back toward my car.
The first time I tried mescaline I’d gotten marshmallow feet, the sensation that my legs were boneless strips of rubber and that I had powerful springs on the soles of my shoes. That was how I felt moving out of the alley. When I reached the curb I ran across the avenue to the car. I must have looked like the first lungfish trying to evolve. I’d left the door unlocked, which was good, because I wouldn’t have dreamed of screwing around with the key. I sat there for about ten minutes before I began to feel the shakes diminish and I regained some control over my muscles. As soon as I could I pulled away and drove down the avenue eight blocks. Then I parked again and waited until the shuddering completely stopped. I looked at my watch. Eleven o’clock. Kathy was on line for her movie.
I pulled out and began driving again, aimlessly at first. I found myself heading toward Manhattan, but before I hit the highway, I turned around and drove straight to Gina’s house.
I had to lean on the bell for two minutes before she came to the door.
“I knew it was you,” she said. “My mother’s got people over.”
“Fuck your mother’s people.” I reached behind her and pulled the door to the apartment closed. I walked her farther out into the hallway, over to the stairs leading to the empty second floor. I started to pull at her clothes.
“What’s the matter with you? Are you stoned? Knock it off!” She grabbed my wrists and was trying to hold them against either side of her waist.
“Nothing’s wrong. This is gonna be our apartment.” I kept my hands where she held them and picked her up, carrying her up the stairs. “We’re gonna try it out, that’s all.”
“No,” she said, trying to squirm free. “My mother...”
“Fuck your mother,” I hissed.
She put her hand over my mouth, but she stopped fighting. We got to the top and sprawled on the floor in the dark. Her blouse ripped coming off. After I yanked at her jeans a couple of times she unzipped them and I got them down. She was dry and the position was awkward, but I managed to get in and we fucked on the landing, my forearm cushioning her head from the wooden banister. It seemed to go on forever but I just couldn’t come. After a while Gina started to cry. Finally she pushed me off of her and rolled away from me into a ball. I couldn’t see her clearly, it was so goddamned dark up there.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “What’s wrong with you?”
“You want to get married? If you want to, we’ll do it. Pick out a ring tomorrow.”
She lay there sniffling in the dark for a long time. “Okay,” she said.
I stood and pulled my clothing together. I ran down the stairs and heard her calling after me just as I cleared the door.