Good Neighbors (7 page)

‘Help,’ Nathan tries to say, but it’s only a croak. ‘Help,’ again, and this time he gets it out.

But the person in the truck doesn’t help. The truck backs up, straightens out on the road, and drives away from there, screeching as it goes.

Goes.

Gone.

Nathan looks at the place where the truck should be for a moment, blood running into his eyes from somewhere, and then he tries to open the door, but it won’t budge. He doesn’t need it to. The windshield is gone; he just needs to get through it.

He spends some time trying to straighten out his contorted body.

There is blood everywhere and he thinks it must be his, there’s no one else in here whose blood it could be, but he doesn’t feel any pain, and he can’t really imagine where it could be coming from. It seems like more blood than a single person could hold.

Finally, he manages to get his body into some sort of human shape, and he crawls out of his car through the shattered windshield, glass digging into the palms of his hands and through his pants into his knees as he goes.

Once out of the car, Nathan struggles to his feet.

Blood immediately pours down his face from a deep wound in his forehead. He reaches up to feel where the blood might be coming from and his fingers brush across what must be a shard of glass sticking out of his head. He considers pulling it out, but decides against it. If he’s bleeding this badly with the cork in the wine bottle, it seems the last thing he should do is yank it out.

A bread truck rolls by on its way to making deliveries to grocery stores and Nathan sees the driver’s face turn toward him and look, and he tries to raise his arms in a wave for assistance, but before he can the truck has passed and made a left and is gone, heading toward Queens Boulevard and beyond. Nathan can hear the light late-night whine of traffic on that busy road maybe three blocks away, but he can’t make it three blocks.

He looks around at the darkened buildings, all businesses so far as he can tell, but business hours have long passed. He could knock on every door on the street and never get an answer. And he doesn’t have the strength to knock on every door, anyway.

He stumbles, bleeding, toward a window with bicycles displayed behind it. As he nears the window, he looks for something with which to shatter it. A rock would do, but he doesn’t see a rock. Then he reaches the window and presses his palms against it, smearing blood across its cold, smooth surface. He can see his own reflection looking back at him. He can see several inches of bloody glass jutting from his forehead like a shelf. He wonders if it’s in his brain, and suddenly his head is throbbing with pain. Has it been throbbing this whole time? He thinks so. He thinks every part of him is probably in pain, but the mind simply can’t handle pain everywhere, so it picks focal points, and seeing the shelf of glass jutting from his forehead made his head just such a focal point.

Suddenly Nathan feels very sick. Dizzy. He has to get inside that store before he passes out. He has to get inside, and he has to call for an ambulance. Or he’s a dead man.

He looks around again for something to break the window with, and again he finds nothing. He looks out toward the street. Another vehicle passes – this one a Cadillac Fleetwood driven by someone so small Nathan can’t figure out how the guy can see over the dashboard – and the driver looks toward Nathan, and Nathan waves, but the car doesn’t slow down. Nathan is pretty sure the car actually speeds up. And then it’s gone. He’ll just have to punch his way through the glass. He’s already cut to shit; he can’t imagine the damage caused by the store’s window making it much worse.

He pulls back and punches, and the window bows in and makes a strange saw-like warbling sound, bouncing back, vibrating, shaking the reflections of Nathan and the street behind him like a horse trying to rid its hide of flies.

Light from the moon bounces off the glass jutting from his forehead; he can see it in the warbling window. How deep is it? Is there another six inches of glass inside his head, deep into his brain? Has he just gotten a car-wreck lobotomy?

Jesus fuck.

He falls to his hands and knees, sending sharp pain into his body as small shards of glass already imbedded there are pressed further into him, and he vomits onto the sidewalk. His entire body tightens with each gush, his mouth locking open, and his body evacuates itself in three contractions.

Then it’s over.

He breathes hard, spits, blows his nose onto the sidewalk.

He’s going to die out here. That’s all there is to it.

But then he sees it. The metal-framed sandwich-board sign sitting out on the sidewalk. Apparently there’s a spring bicycle sale on. Apparently every bike in the store is twenty percent off. Every fucking one of them.

Nathan struggles to his feet. Limps to the sign.

Has it been here the entire time? Dumb question. It has to have been.

He picks it up with his bloody hands, spins his entire body around, toward the window, and lets go. As he lets go, he continues a half spin and falls to the sidewalk a second time.

He looks up.

The metal-framed sign fumbles through the air in a weak arc, hits the window, and then simply drops to the sidewalk like Wile E. Coyote after he’s noticed he’s past the cliff’s edge and is walking on air. It clatters a little as it settles, and then goes silent. The window warbles again, but seems to hold together.

‘Oh, goddamn it,’ Nathan says. ‘Fuck.’

He’s going to die out here.

But then the window splinters – just a small pinpoint crack where the sign made impact at first, but then it splinters – and the splintering spreads, spiderwebbing in every direction, out and out from the point of impact, and pretty soon the entire window is covered with cracks. Pretty soon you can’t even see through it – it’s just frosted with cracks – and pieces, small pieces, start to fall out, tinkling to the ground like snowflakes.

Nathan grabs chunks of shattered glass and pulls them away, not caring if they cut his hands more than they’re already cut – he wants to live – and then crawls into the darkened store, falling over bicycles, picking himself back up, crawling his way in.

He sees a telephone hanging on the wall behind the front counter, stumbles to it, picks it up, puts it to his bloody ear and dials an operator.

‘Hello,’ he says. ‘Help. I’ve been killed in a car accident. Please. Please.’

He might even manage to give his location before he’s gone. But then there’s just blackness for him, and the sound of his own body crumpling to the floor.

Then silence.

10

Frank walks from the Hobart Apartments and toward the Long Island Railroad parking lot across the street. He’s thinking about a knocked-over stroller on the side of the road only a few miles from here, thinking about that stroller and what might be strapped inside it, but as he walks he sees a man standing in the shadows, leaning against the trunk of an oak tree, smoking. He sees the orange glow of the cigarette in the night, the whites of the man’s eyes.

‘Excuse me,’ Frank says. ‘Sorry to bother you, but do you think I could bum one of them smokes from you?’

The orange glow of the man’s cigarette bobs up and down and a moment later a pack of cigarettes juts out of the shadows. Frank takes one.

‘Thank you,’ he says, loading the cigarette between his lips. ‘Think I could get a light?’

A flame flickers into existence. Frank lights his cigarette on it.

He also sees the other man’s face for the first time. He’s a black man with bloodshot eyes and a nonexistent chin that looks like someone hacked it off at a forty-five degree angle with a machete and a nose shaped like a tipped-over three. It’s a face you could forget – except there’s something wrong with it. Frank isn’t sure what exactly. There’s nothing to point to – that there’s the problem, sir; I’ll have it fixed in a jiffy – but the combined parts are somehow almost disorienting, like an optical illusion, like something Escher would create.

Then it’s gone, and the man’s hand is pulling the lighter back into the shadows.

‘Thank you,’ Frank says, wondering what this guy is doing standing in front of his apartment complex at four oh something in the morning. But it’s a big complex and for all Frank knows the guy lives here too and just came outside for a breath of fresh air. Besides, he’s got more important things to worry about.

He takes a drag from his cigarette and crosses the street, heading toward his 1953 Buick Skylark, its white canvas top up, its red paint beginning to oxidize but still managing a little shine beneath the moon’s pale light. The car’s a little rusty around the edges but it’s in pretty good shape nonetheless. Someone brought it into his shop on Fortyseventh Street five years ago to have the transmission worked on and never returned. Frank claimed it.

He lets himself take one more look over his shoulder at the man with the bad face before he arrives at his car. Then he finds a flashlight in the glove box – which has never seen a glove as far as Frank knows – and walks around to the front of the car.

He flips the flashlight on and drags the beam across the chrome front of his car. There’s a fist-sized dent there, on the right side of the bumper. Fist-sized – or maybe about the size of a baby’s skull. It’s a shallow dent, a couple centimeters deep at most, a dent that might have been there for years. He’s just never been a man to look for things like that. He regularly tunes the car up, or has one of the boys do it, but a dent here and there is nothing he’s ever paid attention to. And yet, he’s almost certain the dent is new – less than an hour old – and about the size of a baby’s skull.

He turns the flashlight off and puts it back in the glove box. He walks around to the other side of the car and squeezes his large frame in behind the wheel. He sits there a moment thinking.

About the size of a baby’s skull.

Then he sticks his key in the ignition and starts the car. Looking over his shoulder, he backs out of his parking spot, shifts into drive, and turns left onto Austin Street.

Buddy Holly is on the radio, singing ‘Not Fade Away’ but that’s the last thing on his mind.

At least he found no blood or hair or flesh.

As he drives down Austin Street, he passes one of his neighbors in her Studebaker. He thinks her name is Katrina, but she goes by Katy or Kat. Something like that, anyway. He jump-started her car for her once. He waves and smiles behind his cigarette – as if I’m just heading to the store to get a bottle of milk, he thinks – and Kat waves back at him. Then they’ve passed in the night.

Frank glances in his rearview mirror and sees Kat’s Studebaker pulling into the Long Island Railroad parking lot, pulling into the spot he just pulled out of, and then he makes a right onto a side street, passing a cop car which is making a left off of it. Which is making a left onto Austin Street. Which is now driving toward his apartment complex.

What if the fuzz are coming for Erin?

Frank pulls the Skylark to the side of the street, puts it in park, and, leaving the car running and his door open, walks to the corner so he can look down Austin Street, so he can see where the patrol car is heading. It continues on past the Hobart Apartments without even slowing and keeps on moving, taillights shrinking.

Thank God.

Frank allows himself to breathe, heads back to his car and gets inside. A moment later, his left turn signal clickclick-clicking, he pulls back out into the street and continues on.

11

Inside his police cruiser, Officer Alan Kees makes a left onto Austin Street and continues on at about fifteen miles per hour. He glances toward a parking lot as he drives and sees a pretty brunette woman just getting out of her Studebaker. He considers having a little fun with her – your left brake light’s out, ma’am; normally I’d have to write up a ticket, but I think we might be able to work something else out – but decides against it. He’s got business to attend to elsewhere, and besides, she looks like a fighter, which always turns ugly.

He drives by without giving her another thought.

When Alan Kees joined the police force five years ago, at the ripe old age of twenty-two, he actually had an idea that he might be able to do a little good – protect the citizenry, keep them safe – but within six months, the idea seemed nothing but a quaint concept for a more innocent time. He realized quickly that there are two kinds of people in the city: cops and everyone else. And everyone else just can’t be trusted. Cops might lie, they might steal, but they’ve got your back. If you get put into a corner, there will be another cop there with a sledge hammer, banging an escape hole through the lath and plaster – and ten times out of ten it’s a civilian that gets you backed into that corner in the first place, not another cop. It ain’t just the criminals, either. Those asshole civil libertarians (commies, more like it, if we’re gonna call a spade a spade) at the ACLU and other organizations with their screeches and cries about rights and police abuse and other nonsense are just as bad. They’re worse. You can at least understand your criminal. Their motives are clear and obvious. They live in a hard world where you grab what you can and you hold on to it as long as you can, and if someone tries to take it away, you view that as a threat to your life and you go at them red in tooth and claw and you don’t stop when they’re down – no fucking way, pal – you only stop when they’re no longer capable of getting back up, you only stop when they’re down for good, even if that means putting them under a half ton of moist soil.

Think of God’s red right hand.

That’s what Detective Sampson told Alan five years ago when he first entered the force, and when he asked Sampson what that was supposed to mean, Sampson said, ‘It’s from Milton. He calls the vengeful hand of God His red right hand. Well, if God’s right hand is red, is violent, is vengeful,’ he slurred here, a little drunk, always a little drunk, ‘then those who grab the most power through violence are closest to God, aren’t they? Remember that. The criminal is closer to God than any of those goddamn pacifists will ever be – than they’ll ever understand. Respect the criminal enough to kill him, Alan, because if you don’t, he’ll kill you. He’ll kill you and he’ll be the one standing at God’s side when it all comes down. Read the Old Testament. God respects nothing so much as violence.’ He stared off at the corner for a minute here. ‘Read the Old Testament,’ he said again, and then took a hard swallow from his flask, his throat making a clicking sound as he did.