Good Neighbors (2 page)

Once outside, Kat reaches back through the door, feeling the wall just inside, trying to find a protrusion. Then she does find it, a switch, and she pushes the switch down. Click. The windows looking into the sports bar go dark, and the light which had splashed out into the parking lot, painting the gray asphalt white, vanishes.

Kat pushes the front door closed and locks it, checking the knob to be sure, then swings a metal gate home, bang, and clips a padlock into place.

The gate and the padlock are less than six months old and don’t really match the decrepitude of the rest of the place. Also new are bars on the windows. Someone broke in through the back door, emptied the register, took a case of whiskey, and broke out through a window. Why they didn’t just walk out the door, no one knows.

The money lost in whiskey and cash was, in the scheme of things, not so big a deal. But the cost of repairs, that was a killer. Plus the lost revenue. The place had to stay closed for two days.

Kat’s only the night manager, but she still feels responsible for the place.

As she starts toward her Studebaker, tired, the long night finally catching up with her, the adrenaline of the evening spent, Kat sees that her car seems to be tilting rightward, but at first she can’t tell why, or even whether it’s real. Maybe it’s an illusion, a trick of shadows.

She has to halve the distance between herself and her car before she sees that the tilt is real, that her gee-dee car has a flat tire.

‘Son of a gun,’ she says, angrily stomping the asphalt, feeling the impact ride up her shinbone.

She makes her way to the car, heads straight to the trunk, slips the key into the scratched keyhole, turns it left, wrong way, then right, hears the lock tumble, and pushes the lid up.

She can’t see anything in there.

She fumbles for the flashlight she keeps stored on the left side of the trunk, tucked into the corner there. Her hand bounces around in the darkness for a while before her fingers finally find its cold smooth surface. She wraps her hand around it, flips it on. The light is weak and yellow, but at least it’s there. And now that she can see them, she grabs the spare tire and the jack, and as she does, a brief smile touches the corner of her mouth.

Kat’s always been a self-conscious person, always sort of watched herself from a distance, and the sight of her, five foot one, a hundred pounds even, wearing a blue wool dress with a white short-coat over it, carrying a tire almost as big as she is, and a heavy jack – the sight of it must have the same effect as a hippopotamus in a tutu. And thinking of that, a smile touches her lips. But it’s erased quickly as she thinks of the task at hand.

A moment later, Kat is sitting on her haunches, jacking her car up so she can change the gee-dee tire, watching the wheel well seem to expand while the tire stays firmly planted on the ground – and then finally it starts to lift, the bottom of the tire staying flat. It seems like it should fill with air, expand, as the weight is removed, but it doesn’t.

And then – a sound behind her.

She stops moving, hoping that it was nothing, that the sound won’t repeat, but it does, and she turns her head to look over her shoulder, afraid of what she might see, but having to look anyway. Kat is a person who’s always covered her eyes when the most horrible things happen onscreen at the drive-in movie theater – but she’s always sneaked a look through her fingers, too.

Newspaper pages skitter across the asphalt, carrying away yesterday’s news.

‘Just the wind, dummy,’ she says. Just the wind.

She turns back to the car and continues her work.

Kat dumps the flat tire and the diamond-shaped jack into her trunk, not caring how they fall, and slams the trunk lid shut.

It was a nail that caused the flat. The rusted, bent thing was hooking out of the inside wall of the tire like the lone tooth in a mouthful of gums. She vaguely remembers driving through a construction area on her way to work, men with tanned arms carrying broken chunks of wood with shiny nails sticking out of them to the back of a truck, working on repairing a half-burned row house.

Her hands are black with grime, with brake dust, and she’s afraid to touch herself, afraid she’ll smear black across her light blue dress or her white short-coat. Smear more black. She already managed to get a little on her dress when she carried the tire to the trunk.

Stupid effing flat tire.

She wants nothing more than to go home, slip out of her clothes and into a warm bath, wash herself clean, and then slip again, this time into her bed, beneath her nightcool sheets, where she can sleep till noon, maybe one, and if she’s lucky, from the time her head hits the pillow till the midday sunlight coming in through the window wakes her, she’ll have pleasant dreams.

But first she’s got to get home.

She opens her car door and falls into the driver’s seat, sticks the key into the ignition and turns it clockwise. The car groans, the sound of a three-pack-a-dayer clearing his throat. The engine turns over once – slowly.

‘Come on, baby,’ Kat says.

She pumps the gas pedal.

The engine turns over again, this time a little faster. And again. Gaining speed. She lets off the gas, doesn’t want to flood the engine. It turns again. Coughs. Farts. And finally it starts in earnest.

Thank goodness. Kat wipes her brow, glad she won’t have to call a cab, and as soon as she does, she remembers the grime on her hands, looks at herself in the rearview mirror, and laughs.

A black smudge drawn across her forehead like on a tramp in a silent movie.

And she can’t even wipe it off; trying would just make it worse. But Kat doesn’t care. It’s been a long night. She worked ten hours straight and she’s tired, but all she has left to do is get home.

That’s her one last task before the sun comes up.

2

Kat pulls a knob on her dashboard and the headlights create two yellow beams in the night. She can see dust motes and insects floating around in the light and she remembers a time when she was three, maybe four, lying on her parents’ bed, which seemed enormous, as big as an island. She was supposed to be sleeping – it was nap time; that’s why she was there – but she was awake, looking at a beam of white sunlight coming in through the window, falling on her bare legs. The heat felt good, and she could see dust motes floating in the light. She thought the dust motes were living things. She laughed watching them dance and reached out trying to grab them, but for some reason she never could. They always knew she was coming and floated out of the way of her pudgy fist just before it reached them.

Kat turns a different knob and the radio comes to life. A static-throated male voice, artificially deep, saying, ‘. . . and President Johnson said in a statement today that Cuba’s decision to shut off normal water supply to Guantánamo Bay Naval Base was unacceptable. In other news, Jimmy Hoffa, who last week was convicted of tampering with a federal jury in . . .’

Kat grimaces, turning the dial.

News is nothing but blah-blah-blah, confirming over and over again that she is small and the world is big, that she can do nothing to stop or even alter the most important things. Kat prefers to focus on things she can change, the lives of the people around her, her own life. Little changes, attainable goals.

Like pouring a drink. Like changing a tire.

‘. . . expect a low of forty-two degrees tonight, with early morning showers, and . . .’

Again, she turns the dial.

‘Here’s Buddy Holly and the Crickets with “Not Fade Away” recorded just two years before Mr. Holly’s untimely death. It’s hard to believe it’s been five years, isn’t it? Well, this is Dino on your radio, reminding you that here on WMCA, Buddy still lives.’ And then the song kicks into existence with its cardboard-box-banging Bo Diddley beat.

Kat turns up the radio and puts the car into gear.

As Buddy Holly sings from beyond the grave, explaining how it’s gonna be, Kat drives through a night city which is filled with silence and hollow, passing a theater advertising
Dr. Strangelove
on its marquee; passing a bookstore with a bunch of forty-cent Gold Medal paperbacks piled in its window; passing a stack of dewy morning-edition newspapers tied together with twine and dropped in front of a newsstand which is padlocked shut for the night.

In another forty-five minutes, a fat man with twenty-year-old pimple scars and the matching twenty-year-old anger of someone who got wedgies when he was in grade school will show up, unlock the newsstand, and cut the twine off the stack of newspapers.

The papers claim it’s March 13th, but looking at the dark horizon while she drives, Kat knows it won’t be March 13th for another three hours or more as far as most people are concerned, no matter what the newspapers say.

She thinks it would be neat if she could stop her car and read one of the newspapers and find out what will happen tomorrow while she’s sleeping the day away, but, of course, even papers with today’s date only contain old news, news about things that’ve already happened, things you can never change. Even at four o’clock in the morning.

As Kat drives along a lonely stretch of road, another car, a light blue 1963 Fiat 600, which has been gaining on her for the last half minute or so – she’s seen the small round headlights growing with each passing second – zips by with a whistle of wind and the high-pitched squeal of its straining engine and the whine of its exhausted whitewall tires.

A moment after it passes her, Kat turns her car left, onto a night-quiet street, and continues her drive home, southwest toward Queens Boulevard.

Had she continued straight, she might have seen the Fiat moving toward the next intersection. She might have seen the intersection’s green light turn yellow. She might have heard the RPMs kick up a notch as the driver of the Fiat strained the small car’s small engine further, pressing the gas pedal to the floorboard. She might have seen the yellow light turn red. She might have seen the Fiat fly into the intersection despite the red light. She might have seen a green pickup truck entering the intersection at the same time from the right. She might have seen it slam into the Fiat, right into the passenger’s side door, and heard a crash like thunder; seen the Fiat spin; seen it flip as the driver turned the steering wheel the wrong way at the wrong time; seen it roll three times before coming to a stop upsidedown on the side of the road, leaving a trail of glass and metal in its wake. She might have seen it sitting there, upside down, in the hollow night air, its sad little tires spinning furiously but gripping nothing, looking like an upended beetle beneath the lunatic moon’s yellow light. She might have seen the pickup truck that slammed into it, now with only one headlight, back up, straighten out on the street, and drive away from there. She might have seen the pale face of the driver in the truck turn to the carnage briefly before driving away. But she never would have known why the driver fled the scene when it was the Fiat that ran the red light. No one will ever know that. No one but the driver of the truck himself.

And, anyway, Kat didn’t go straight.

She turned her car left, and continued her drive, which is where she is now – moving along steadily toward home with reflections of herself in the windows of the buildings on both sides of the street to keep her company. Three Kats driving along in the same direction. No way she could see the accident. And when the thunderclap of a crash comes, she doesn’t know where it comes from.

She hears it, turns down Buddy Holly briefly and glances in the rearview mirror, and when she sees nothing back there but the darkness, not even a pair of headlights in the distant past looking like wolf eyes, she turns the radio back up, maybe even a little louder than it was before the unnerving sound of the crash, and she continues on.

Maybe what she heard was just thunder. Didn’t the man on the radio say there would be early-morning showers?

She looks at the sky, and though it’s filled with gray clouds illuminated by the light of the moon, they don’t look heavy enough for rain. Not yet. But maybe she’s wrong. If so, she hopes she gets home before the downpour starts.

She didn’t bring an umbrella.

3

Kat turns her car onto Austin Street.

She can see her apartment complex now.

She can also see one of her neighbors – she forgets his name, a colored man who’s always been very nice, who once even jump-started her car for her – pulling his Buick Skylark out of the Long Island Railroad parking lot, turning his car toward her, heading in the opposite direction.

As their cars pass each other, the two neighbors wave.

Frank! She thinks his name is Frank. She remembered as soon as she saw his face clearly, the orange glow of his cigarette cherry floating in front of it like a pet firefly.

She wonders what he’s doing out at four o’clock in the morning. She knows Frank’s wife is a nurse and often works the night shift – Kat has seen the lights in the apartment lit up when she gets home from her shift at the bar – but she has never seen either of them, Frank or his wife, outside at this time of night.

Kat pulls her car into the Long Island Railroad parking lot, which sits just across the street from her apartment complex, the Hobart Apartments. She pulls the Studebaker into the empty spot Frank’s Buick just pulled out of and kills the engine. The sound of the radio dies with it.

Only once has her short drive home from the bar lasted longer than a few minutes – the length of a song – and that was because she took a different route home so she could drop off one of the regulars who spent the last of his cash on a drink and couldn’t afford the cab fare. Or to tip her for the drink. Even though nothing bad happened during that drive, it was the one and only time Kat ever gave a customer a ride home. She felt nervous the whole time, her palms sweating as they gripped the steering wheel, but more importantly, she felt it somehow crossed a line that shouldn’t be crossed.