Bloodroot (2 page)

I carried my beer and a fresh cigarette into the bedroom. I stripped off my wrinkled work clothes and grabbed my new David Wright jersey, a birthday present to myself, and a clean pair of jeans from the closet. Sitting on the edge of the mattress, I tied on my cracked and battered Docs. I needed a new pair, but the old boots fit so well and felt so comfortable I couldn’t bear to part with them. As I buttoned up the jersey in front of the mirror, an invisible finger tapped at my brain, drawing my attention back to Danny’s phone call.

There’d been something missing from Danny’s voice. It had none of the usual embarrassment when he finally called after another disappearing act. None of the sheepishness I always heard when he called to ask me a favor, one that usually involved the last of my cash. There was no shame in him this time. Why was that? Because he was coming to deliver good news? I tried to focus on the fact that
he
was doing
me
a favor that night. Figured it made us close enough to even for me to ignore what his voice sounded like over a cheap phone. I waited for him on the stoop.

When Danny’s blue ’84 Escort turned the corner I walked to the curb. He did stop the car, in the middle of the street. Leaning across the front seat, he threw open the passenger door. He pulled hard on the steering wheel to right himself. Bottles clinked at my feet as I stepped into the car. Bottles of Nestea Iced Tea. Half a dozen of them, all empty.

“Thirsty?” I asked.

Danny didn’t answer. He grinned at me, sweeping sweaty clumps of hair off his pimpled forehead. His ocean blue eyes quivered in their sockets beneath his raised black eyebrows, not focused on me but merely pointed at me.

“How about this,” I said. “I got a new Weber. Let’s hit the store around the corner, grab a couple steaks, and fire up the grill. Just take it easy and hang out at my place for the night.”

After a long moment Danny turned away and without saying a word lurched the car back into motion. I pulled on my seat belt. I wished I’d thought of the steaks while we were on the phone. The idea might’ve had a chance if I’d gotten Danny out of the car. I shouldn’t have agreed to meet him out front. Typically, I was having all my best ideas about handling my brother after we were already doing what he wanted. So I did what I always do, I kept my mouth shut and went along for the ride.

We rambled down Richmond Terrace, rolling lazily through stop signs and braking late for red lights. I nestled down in the seat, arms crossed over my chest. While we idled at a crowded traffic light Danny fished a tiny roach out of his ashtray and lit it up, pinching the paper and embers to his lips. It didn’t seem there was enough of anything to even ignite, never mind smoke, but Danny sucked hard. A thin wisp of smoke curled up between his forefinger and thumb. I wouldn’t have minded a hit or two but it looked like an awful lot of effort and so little was left the roach would’ve disintegrated into ashes in the passing. In fact it soon did, Danny absentmindedly wiping the detritus on his jeans.

“Why don’t we grab a beer?” I asked. “You talk to anybody else tonight? Anybody going down to the Red Lion?”

Danny’s eyes darted around in the car mirrors. I had made a mistake. I had asked too many questions at once. Didn’t matter that they weren’t very important, or that they were yes or no questions. Or that we’d been drinking at the Red Lion Tavern since we were sixteen.

“What? Where? Okay. No. I don’t know. We could call some people, I guess, maybe. You could. You talk to anybody today? Anybody?” He scratched at the inside of his right elbow. “Anybody call you, like, after I did?”

I looked at him across the car. The random fragments of concentration Danny struggled to string together were focused on navigating. He was concentrating so hard, in fact, I was sure our destination was already lost to him.

“Before we hit the bar,” I said, “do me a favor and stop by a cash machine.”

“Um, okay,” he said, his head bobbing up and down. “Wait, no. I mean, I got money. Hey, it’s your birthday, forget cash.” He wanted to look at me but couldn’t pull his eyes off the road. “I got someplace I gotta go first. Sorry, I forgot to tell you.”

We rolled to a stop at a red light. He was sweating like crazy now, the armpits and collar of his white T-shirt stained and soaked. He laughed suddenly.

“It’ll just take a minute. You won’t mind.” He grabbed me hard by the shoulder. “Yeah! Then we’ll go get that beer.” He dragged the back of his hand across his mouth. “Yeah, then we’ll play some fuckin’ goddamn darts.” The light turned green. “God, I love darts. You’re pretty good, aren’t you? Aren’t you on a team or something?”

“Nah,” I said. “Not anymore. They only play on weeknights.”

He nodded slowly. “School nights. You talk to the ’rents lately?”

“Dad and I went to the Met game a couple weeks ago.” I glanced at Danny. “They won.” I rubbed my hand over the 5 on my chest. “Got myself a new jersey.”

My brother stared straight ahead at nothing. My mouth went dry and I licked my lips. We had the green light but didn’t move. The driver behind us leaned hard on his horn. Danny’s eyelids fluttered.

“Hey, Danny, let’s get going,” I said. “Light’s green.”

“Fuck,” he said, snapping awake. We lurched through the intersection. Without warning, he double-parked outside a deli, the engine running. “I’ll be right back, wait here. Move the car if you have to.”

I smoked a cigarette and watched the traffic in the rearview mirror. One car got stuck behind us, the driver waving his arms wildly till he could slip over into the other lane. I leaned over and hit the horn. I could see Danny in the store, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, stuck at the end of a slow-moving line. I thought about sliding into the driver’s seat and making the block but I couldn’t be sure Danny would figure out where I’d gone. I considered rooting around the car and figuring out what had Danny sweating like a marathon runner. I decided against that, though. I already knew the answer. If I didn’t find any evidence, I could continue telling myself that I was wrong.

I could tell myself that we weren’t going to loop around back toward my house and swing through the Park Hill projects for another score, that we weren’t going to end up standing around under the East River Bridge, or sitting on a park bench by some broken-down Sunset Park basketball court in Brooklyn. I could continue to tell myself that Danny’s “errand” didn’t include any of these places, or any of the things that came with them. I wouldn’t have to admit that he’d sounded different on the phone because he’d gotten worse, not better.

Finally, he bounced out of the door with a brown bag in his hands and trotted to the car, turning his head wildly from side to side like a bank robber. He handed me the bag and settled in behind the wheel, muttering to himself. In the bag were four glass bottles of Nestea Iced Tea. We hung a wide right onto Forest Avenue.

“One of those is for you,” he said.

I handed him a bottle and took one for myself. He drained half of his in one gulp, dragging his hand across his mouth and sighing when he finished. He squeezed the bottle between his legs.

“Drink up,” he said. “That’s good shit. The fucking BEST! God, I’m fucking dehydrated lately.”

His eyelids fluttered again and I knew the stop at the deli wasn’t the errand Danny had in mind. We turned onto Victory Boulevard, where the traffic thinned and streetlights sputtered to life above us. I watched the storefronts and houses give way to the trees of Willowbrook Park.

I touched my knuckles to the cold window and squinted, trying to see through the wall of shadowy trees and into the park. “Shit,” I said. “Long time.”

Danny said nothing, his eyes focused on the road.

Twenty years earlier, when Danny’s new first-aid merit badge still gleamed on his belt, our Cub Scout pack took its first “camping trip” in Willowbrook.

 

 

 

ON A FRIDAY AFTER SCHOOL,
with six fathers keeping careful watch, the pack hiked to the cabins in the middle of the park. I would never have guessed that park, or any park on Staten Island, ran deep enough to hide us from the sight of buildings and the sounds of traffic, to let us feel like we had escaped from the rest of the island, but Willowbrook did.

Tall, thin trees knocked bare for the winter and packed tight as if for warmth crowded the narrow trail, sealing us off from the outside world. We’d been studying the American Revolution at school and as we marched I imagined us as George Washington’s soldiers on our way to ambush the Redcoats. I kept careful watch through the thicket of gray trunks for any sign of the enemy. Danny declared himself an Indian scout, slipped a broken branch up his sleeve, and announced he’d be taking scalps.

By the time we reached the cabins, the sun had almost set. I couldn’t believe that only hours before we’d all been gathered in the mall parking lot, our nervous mothers zipping up our stiff winter coats.

For dinner, we made hot dogs and s’mores in a woodstove fire, telling ghost stories by lantern-light as the marshmallows burned and the chocolate melted. We complained through it all, about the hike, the dark, the cold, too cool to admit we were enjoying ourselves. That we were actually having an adventure while safely nestled deep in the heart of Staten Island.

Hours after we went to bed, Timmy Mahoney’s dad scared the shit out of Danny and me when he rapped on the ice-misted window by our bunks, one arm hidden inside his coat, the other cradling an ax. Our screaming woke the whole pack. We all piled on Mr. Mahoney when he came through the door, laughing. Danny took Mahoney’s scalp and fell peacefully asleep long before I did.

A foot of white, powdery snow covered the ground when we woke up. Danny and I hiked for what felt like miles, yesterday’s fantasies gone from our minds. We’d discovered something real, animal tracks in the snow, and we followed them all afternoon, right to where they ended at the foot of a tall, gray oak in a patch of wet, black dirt, ragged-edged with pink snow. We stood over the stain, watching each other breathing in white puffs. Whatever we were stalking, something else had found it first.

After a few morbid moments Danny said in a whisper that perhaps the animal we followed had been the hunter and not the hunted after all. I was happy to believe him. We tucked our
Field Guides to Animal Tracks
back into our parkas and retraced our own tracks back to the cabin.

 

 

 

NOW,
so much older and as far apart as that snowy cabin and the dead end of those tracks, my brother and I traced the edge of the park in Danny’s car, sucking dead leaves off the shoulder and pinwheeling them over the double-yellow line unwinding behind us. Danny tossed an empty bottle onto the floor at my feet. I flicked my cigarette butt out the window as we turned onto Todt Hill Road.

Danny’s car struggled up the narrow, twisting lane. The wide sidewalks of Victory Boulevard disappeared. Old oaks lined the sides of the street, bulging against dented guardrails at the sharpest turns. High above, the twisted boughs stretched over the road, enclosing us. As we neared the top of Todt Hill the mansions appeared, the newer homes set right up against the road and the older ones hidden far back in the trees. Todt Hill was the only seriously, filthy
rich
neighborhood on the island, a tight, exclusive community of politicians, athletes, Mafiosi, and various combinations of the three. At the top of the hill Danny pulled over onto a shallow patch of shoulder. I wondered why we had stopped. I’d figured he needed to take a leak after all that tea but he hadn’t moved. He stared at me across the car like he couldn’t remember who I was.

“So,” I said.

“I gotta do something real quick,” Danny said. “Then we’ll hit the bar.”

He fell across my lap and popped open the glove compartment. It was nearly empty: on top of the car registration sat an unopened pack of rolling papers and a hard case for eyeglasses. Danny grabbed the case, slammed shut the glove box and lurched upright in his seat. Leaning forward, he held the case in his lap with one hand and reached under his seat with the other. He produced a short length of yellowing rubber tube. I tried looking anywhere but at him, watching half a dozen caterers in a driveway a few houses up the road. They were unloading covered silver trays from a van. A skinny guy in white coveralls hopped out of the van clutching a huge bouquet of foil balloons emblazoned with birthday cakes, teddy bears, and a number I couldn’t read.

“How nice, a sweet sixteen,” Danny said, not at all cynical but like a neighbor who had noticed the party while taking in the mail. “You gonna head out to Shea again this season?”

“Probably in a couple weeks.” I lit a cigarette, the flame from the lighter trembling at its tip. “I could get three tickets next time.” I waited. Nothing. “Maybe not the best seats, but pretty good.”

Danny chuckled. “Ah, what’s the point? All they do is lose in the end. Been losin’ my whole life, yours, too. Pay all those tolls, pay for parking, ticket prices go up, beer prices go up, for what? Bunch of fucking losers.” He looked me up and down. “That’s a sweet jersey, though.”

“They’re the hometown team,” I said. “I’ve been pulling for them my whole life. I don’t know how not to.”

I watched him. He had the case open in his lap, a bent and blackened spoon on his thigh. He stuck the tubing between his teeth. A hypodermic needle and several tiny bundles of foil waited inside the case. With deft, insectile movements Danny opened one of the bundles and sat it in the bowl of the spoon. He tied off the tubing around his biceps, pulling it tight with one end in his mouth. I watched his fist open and close, open and close, a beating heart straining to inflate his flattened veins.

I suppose I could’ve said something then. Made some bold statement about how if he wanted to stick a needle in his arm he could do it without me. About how I wouldn’t be complicit in his suicide by degrees. About how he could shoot fucking heroin on his own fucking time. But where was that righteousness when I got in the car? When I agreed to meet him outside my house? I knew he was high and what he was high on when I hung up the phone. I dragged on my cigarette and blew the smoke out my nose. Righteousness. Even that was bullshit. What I was feeling was fear. Stomach-burning, palm-dampening fear.