Making Nice (5 page)
Authors: Matt Sumell
When I got there he pointed to a space in the mosquito netting. “I heard Sparkles barkin’ around five,” he said. “Some chirpin’, too. But by the time I got down the stairs he was gone. Musta been a stray cat or raccoon or somethin’.”
“Maybe he got out,” I said. “Maybe he got away.”
“I don’t think so, kid.”
“Well you don’t have to think so. You just gotta help me look.”
So we looked, scouring the ground and the shrubs and the trees around the house, calling out for him. Whistling, like we were happy.
* * *
That afternoon I didn’t get drunk. I went to the mall for some reason, where I ran my hands along the clothes hanging in department stores and rode the escalators, cleaning my shoes on the bristles, giving people dirty looks. I ended up in the food court and bought a fountain soda, pushed down the little plastic bubble things on the lid—
COLA, DIET, RB, OTHER
—took a few sips, and threw it in an overfilled garbage can on my way into this specialty grocery store. I wandered around there for a while, then stood poking packages of meat, thinking all kinds of things. Like I couldn’t make him mean enough. Belligerent enough. The-right-combination-of-fearless-and-fearful enough. Like I failed him. Like I should have been there. Like I’m a cowbird. A man dressed in blood-flecked all-white asked if he could help me.
“No,” I said. “You can’t.”
Then I got drunk. I was sitting in the back room of The Wharf watching the raindrops race down the windows in stop-and-go jig-jags. I looked through them at the Great South Bay, the drops doing their concentric-circle thing on the blue-brown surface of the water as two mute swans swam by. Mute swans are an invasive species in North America and an altogether nasty, ill-tempered dickhead of a bird. Often they’re used as “watchdogs” to keep geese and other waterfowl out of private ponds. Their aggression isn’t limited to the water, either. On land it’s not uncommon for them to spread their wings and chase people down footpaths or across lawns. They hiss and bark. They’ve even killed people, kind of, knocking them out of canoes and kayaks and pecking them on the head until they drown. Growing up I used to hate them, but I understand now. It works. Mute swans are thriving.
I finished my drink and headed to the darkest part of the parking lot and punched a car window until my hand busted and the window didn’t. Then I started walking, the back roads quiet and slick, the puddles like little suns under the streetlights. When I got home I didn’t want to go inside, so I sat under a maple tree in the overgrown backyard and listened to the rain spattering the leaves, opening and closing my swollen hand, trying not to cry. I know he was just a bird. I know that. But he was the first good news we’d had in a year.
* * *
My sister thinks my father, in a drunken stupor, didn’t see Gary on the ground and stepped on him and threw his body in the river. “You know he’s a liar,” she said, barging into my room and waking me up. “He’s a fucking liar that ruins everything he touches, and I’m gonna put it on his fucking tombstone.” She continued to poke holes in his story and pointed to a spot on the porch and another on the bottom of his shoe. Over coffee my brother said she’s most likely right, and I suppose she most likely is. But I for one want to give him the benefit of the doubt. Because he, more than any of us, knows what’s at risk when you care about something. Because he knew better and cared anyway. His heart’s as good and dumb as anybody’s. And besides, “most likely right” is different than definite; “most likely right” leaves a little room for other possibilities. Just enough, it turns out, that every time I come across a telephone pole with a picture of a missing pet on it, or when I see an amber alert scroll across some road sign, my immediate sympathy gives way to something that feels better than bad, like my idiot heart is smirking, and I imagine Gary but grown-up, coasting the thermals, patrolling the patchwork fields, the Long Island Sound and the Great South—giant, and red, and terrible.
We took a drive along Ocean Parkway and, like always, counted the rabbits on the side of the road. Twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine. I blew into the mouth hole of the coffee cap, stuck my tongue in it, tipped up the cup until the tip of my nose touched the
x
in DIXIE and took a big sip.
“Thirty, thirty-one.”
“Dead ones don’t count,” my father said.
“Thirty then.”
Thirties one and two were on the far side of the Jones Beach roundabout as we circled the water tower and slingshotted ourselves back in the direction we’d just come from, like some kind of gravity-assist maneuver, the tug and pull of my latest fuckup forcing our return east. I had to be there at nine. I was nervous. I kept wondering if I would be looked down on, judged, made to clean toilets. Back then I had a friend who worked as a busboy in a local restaurant who told me about someone shitting in a urinal and wiping their ass with Italian bread. I didn’t know what to expect.
By the time we exited onto the Robert Moses Causeway we were at fifty-seven live rabbits. My father dropped me in front of the old Cutting House a good ten minutes before the hour, and as I was getting out of his car he patted me on the shoulder, and I climbed out and closed the door and peered in through the open window. He was looking at me, right in the eyeballs.
“Call me if you got any problems.”
“Thanks,” I said, then tapped the roof of the car and walked inside. When I was sure he had pulled away I walked back out and smoked a cigarette and finished off my coffee, which had gone cold because I’d forgotten to drink it. Then I went back inside and down the hall to Jim Chapin’s office, the Arboretum director, a short and thick cigar smoker with yellow-silver hair and a bum leg who—as I eventually figured from the betting slips on the floor of his pickup—spent most of everyday at the Bay Shore OTB. He didn’t look up from his newspaper when I knocked on the already open door.
I cleared my throat. Nothing. “Hello,” I said. Nothing. Nothing. Something—Jim shuffled, quickly looked me up and down, then returned to his paper. Without looking up again he said, “You’re Albert?”
“Yes sir.”
“Community service, right?”
“That’s right.”
“Five hundred hours?”
“Yep.”
He folded his paper and slapped it down on the desk. Cigar ashes loop-de-looped out of the ashtray.
“Wanna tell me what happened?”
“Not really,” I said, but then I told him all about it anyway.
* * *
I got my first car two weeks this side of seventeen: a rusted-out 1978 Toyota Land Cruiser FJ40, a four-speed manual straight six that got nine miles to the gallon and had holes in the floorboard big enough to dump cups of cold coffee through—including the cups—and where I lost pennies and cigarettes and one time a carnival goldfish in a plastic bag. What didn’t rattle squeaked, it leaked antifreeze and oil, backfired on the downshift, and there was a crack in the windshield that I wanted to look like something—the east coast of Ireland or a vein in my father’s forearm, a spider web even—but it didn’t, it was just a big black crooked line from top to bottom that sometimes caught the light of the low morning sun on the way to school or the setting sun on the way home, or the headlights of an oncoming car. I wasn’t good at wearing my seat belt or parking, stalled in stop-and-go and up-hills, and when it rained I liked to see how long I could go without using my wipers. I cursed men and the sun, stoplights and left-turners, Yankees bumper stickers and orange traffic cones. I middle-fingered slow ladies, and screwed up enough to be middle-fingered by them.
There were two bucket seats up front and a couple bench seats in the back that faced each other, and my mother made me drive my brother and a nice girl who lived a few houses down—Kristy Klein, a chubby freshman who made her money during lunch selling Jolly Ranchers for five cents each—to school. For gas I charged them both six bucks a week that I really spent on mini chocolate donuts and cigarettes. It was almost summer, and the paper’s five-day forecast was four smiling suns and one with a little cloud on it, so I took the hardtop off and stole my sister’s sunglasses. With AJ sitting shotgun and Kristy in the back putting her dark hair up in a pink scrunchie, I’d just made the right onto Idle Hour Boulevard when a wonky triangle of mallards flew overhead on their way to the river, and one of them dropped a Kelly-green-and-white turd on the hood. Driver’s side.
We all laughed, but after a while I told my brother and Kristy to quit laughing, that it wasn’t that funny, and when they didn’t quit laughing I yelled at them to quit laughing, and when they didn’t quit laughing again I swerved and ran over some garbage cans because I was young then and had worse impulse-control problems than I do now, also ’cause the cans were right there and that’s what occurred to me to do in that Wednesday morning moment—Wednesday morning because they were WRAP cans, beige with green tops. Recycle day.
The first one exploded newspapers into the air and rolled right. The other was filled with bottles and cans and buckled under the bumper and dragged a hundred-or-so feet before I swerved across the street trying to lose it. I overcorrected, of course, and came close to flattening a split-log fence on the opposite side, the split-log posts sounding like someone spitting sunflower seeds as I passed them
—pth-pth-pth
—recalling for me a long-ago summer day on the bench of a baseball dugout surrounded by friends, all of us sunburned and happy and parodying our favorite players, which I suppose has something to do with why I failed to notice that Kristy had fallen out of the car until my brother hit me in the arm and screamed her name. I glanced in the rearview just in time to see her roll to a stop, then hobble off the road clutching her elbow before collapsing facedown on someone’s front lawn. I drove a block and a half farther before pulling over, where my brother and I sat looking straight out the windshield not speaking for a while. Eventually he said, “We gotta go back.”
I knew almost immediately that he was right, but still I sat there wondering how it was that a girl just fell out of my car, also about blame and seat belts and things that she could have but did not grab on to: the seat, the roll bar, the tailgate. I imagined she must have gone out like someone impersonating—poorly—a salmon, launching herself into the air, arms pinned to her sides, flopping and noiseless.
But no, yeah, AJ was right, we had to go back. “We gotta,” he repeated.
But
, I thought again, but then nothing came after. I resigned myself to it, checked the mirrors, looked over my shoulder, signaled, and made a slow, careful, perfect three-point turn.
We heard her first, and when we were close enough to get a look at her, the left side of her face was scraped up but hadn’t started bleeding yet, like someone had just scribbled on it with a rock, or scribbled on a rock with her. Her right arm was cut badly enough to make my legs wobbly, and I sat on the grass and watched some tree branches sway just a little in a just-a-little breeze. Soon enough the neighbors came out their front doors and crowded around, and someone called me a stupid son of a bitch, and a woman in pink pants squatted. A black sedan pulled over, followed by two police cars, a little later by an ambulance. I apologized and I apologized and I answered questions and said I was sorry, and they wrote things on pads while newspaper pages somersaulted a few feet down the road before lying flat again. Then I got arrested.
* * *
“She OK?” Jim said. “The girl?”
“Yeah, she’s OK. Scraped up a little is all.”
He nodded, satisfied. “OK then. So I got you for five hundred. Show up at nine and as long as you don’t sleep under a tree you can leave at three and I’ll give you eight hours.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Appreciate that.”
“Guess you’re waitin’ for me to show you around the place,” he said, then stood up and limped past me and out the door. I followed behind him in the hallway and watched him hobble toward the white pickup truck parked in the handicapped spot. On the side of the truck was a green maple leaf, and under it
NEW YORK STATE OFFICE OF PARKS, RECREATION, HISTORIC PRESERVATION
. Keys jingled. I walked around to the passenger side, and when I opened the door a Styrofoam cup fell out and rolled and hopped and tumble weed-ed across the parking lot. I chased it down, brought it back, climbed in, and saw the OTB slips all over the floor, watched the orange pine-tree air freshener swing from the rearview, the headliner yellowed from years of cigar smoke. I asked him if it would be OK if I had a cigarette. He looked at me sideways, gauged my age, said it’d be fine as long as I had one for him. I did, and he lit it, took a drag, blew smoke out his nostrils, and said, “I used to kill ducks. I’d soak bread in beer and feed it to them. After a few minutes they’d be pretty drunk. Then I’d just walk over and break their necks.”
* * *
It was my father who picked me up at the police station. He didn’t say a word, didn’t even look at me, just signed some forms and walked out the double doors. I followed a safe distance behind him. He seemed large to me in a way that he hadn’t in a while—the trouble I was in somehow reestablished his authority and physical size, or reestablished my lack of either. He seemed huge. Outside in the parking lot he stopped and waited till I caught up, put his hand on the back of my neck, squeezed, rubbed my head a little and said, “Tell your mother I yelled atcha.”
Instead he took me to lunch at the Sayville Modern Diner with the little jukeboxes at each table and told me that when he was a kid, he and his buddy Ernie Fifer stole horses from Ryan’s Stable in Bergen Beach. They headed north on Flatbush for a few miles before deciding on Florida—for the weather and girls—got halfway over the Brooklyn Bridge before they were caught. The two of them ended up in William E. Grady Vocational High School with car thieves and people who’d stabbed people. They loved it. After they graduated they joined the navy together. The both of them tested for sub school but Ernie got afraid, ended up a boatswain’s mate on an aircraft carrier, was nineteen when he was swept off the deck in high seas.
