Mortal Bonds (27 page)

The cop came up to my window.

“License and registration.”

“Oh, please. This is a rental. It was just a dumb mistake. Can’t I just pay cash and go?” I checked the mirror again. The white SUV was sitting back thirty feet, waiting for the resolution.

The cop gave a dramatic sigh. “It better be exact change. Four bucks.”

Shit! I had nothing but the ten and the francs. “Can you keep the change from a ten?”

He didn’t bother to answer. “Pull over to the side there while I write you up.”

“Wait. One sec. Roger, do you have four singles?” We didn’t have time for this. Tom would be waiting for us for another four minutes.

Roger looked like I had just asked for one of his kidneys. “Why can’t he make change? What’s his problem?”

The cop had finally noticed the SUV and was waving him around us. The vehicle didn’t move. The cop pointed directly at the driver, then pointed at the next lane, leaving no room for doubt about what he wanted.

“Roger, see if you’ve got four singles.”

“Jeez, you don’t have to shout,” he said, reaching into his pants pocket with the expression of a man about to undergo a colonoscopy.

“You have the shortest arms of anyone I know,” I said. “Here, take a ten. Just give me four singles.”

The cop was angry. The SUV still hadn’t moved. He held up his ticket book and waved it. It worked. The big vehicle slowly edged into the next lane and through the booth. The setting sun backlit the deeply tinted windows as it rolled past the tollbooth. All I could tell was that there were two big shapes in the front seats.

“Here’s the singles. Keep your ten,” Roger groused. “But ya owe me.”

“Roger, I owe you a lot more than four bucks. Thank you.” I handed the money to the red-faced cop. He waved us through.

I moved out slowly. The SUV was fifty yards in front of us, playing the same game, crossing the bridge just fast enough to not hold up traffic. It was time to play my last card. I sped up.

“What are you doing?” Roger cried.

“I saw some guy do something like this last year.”

“How’d it work out for him?”

“Ask me some other time.”

The SUV must have seen me approaching. It sped up as well and raced past the Kappock Street exit.

“Fuckin’ A!” I yelled, and took the exit ramp at fifty miles per hour. The car swayed as I raced through the tight turn, just catching the light at Arlington Avenue. The road in front of us was clear. I two-footed it, braking through the dogleg onto Johnson Avenue, and raced down the long hill. “Steve goddamn McQueen, Roger! You are riding with the KING!”

Roger had one hand on the door handle; the other was braced against the dash. “Don’t wake the Kid.”

I took the right onto 230th Street and headed for Broadway. “The next place for them to get off the highway is four blocks up, and they’ll be stuck on back streets with a ton of lights. By the time they get turned around, we could be on our way to New Jersey, or Boston, or Long Island, or who the hell knows. We’re in the clear.”

I pulled over in front of the bus stop and checked my watch. Twenty-eight minutes. “He should still be here.”

Roger was still getting his breathing back to normal. “Who?”

The rear doors opened on both sides and two men slid in on either side of the Kid. Roger jumped and uttered a frightened squeak. The Kid didn’t wake. It was Tom and another flat-eyed man with a bad haircut.

“It’s okay, Roger. These guys are on our side.” I made introductions as I sped across Broadway, under the elevated subway tracks and up the hill on the far side.

“Tom, this is my good friend, Roger. I’m glad you could make it. Who’s your friend?”

Tom thought for a moment. “Ivan.”

“Okay,” I said. “Ivan it is.” They could all be Ivan if they wanted, as long as they were willing to keep working to keep my son safe.

I made the right onto the entrance ramp to the Deegan, heading south, back toward the city—and Queens.

I
t’s just about impossible to get lost and end up in College Point. The only way to get there is to go there. You don’t just come upon it while looking for someplace else. It’s hidden behind the
Times
printing plant and surrounded by the Whitestone Expressway on two sides. The other two sides face water—Flushing Bay, where shorefront property is under the incoming flight path for LaGuardia Airport and has views of the jail on Rikers Island—and the east end of the East River, which is not a river but a tidal strait, and has a current that regularly clocks five knots, so a quick dip on a hot summer day down at Chisholm Park is taking your life in your hands.

And once you find it, the first question a stranger might ask is “Why did I bother?” Even the college for which it was named closed down in 1850. I grew up in College Point, and like most of my friends, all I ever wanted was to get out. But pulling in on Twentieth Avenue and turning up College Point Boulevard, I felt safe. I knew my way around there. There would be no more surprises.

“Roger, go in and let my Pop know we’re here. I’ll take these guys and the Kid upstairs and get everyone settled in.” Roger was looking a little the worse for wear. I had asked a lot of him and there was a lot more to go. “And tell him I said you can run a tab on me.” He brightened up just a tad.

My home was a three-story brick-faced, wooden-framed relic on a corner lot. The ground floor was my father’s business. It had been a bar ever since the building went up, surviving through the disastrous experiment of Prohibition with an expanded kitchen and menu. A man named Sweeney bought it when he got home from the Second World War, and spent the next twenty years drinking up all of his profits, then his inventory, and finally all of his capital. My father bought the place—business and building—with not much more than a promise. The widow Sweeney just wanted out. The restaurant-bar became The Top Hat, then, possibly in honor of College Point’s German heritage, The Rathskeller, and finally, in the late seventies, The Bistro. Everybody in the neighborhood called it Sweeney’s. In spite of the name changes, my father kept the place packed. He worked the stick himself six nights a week—and for the first two years, spent his days renovating the two upper floors.

We lived on the second floor in a rambling three-bedroom apartment—the aroma of stale beer and a deep-fat fryer still smells like home. The two smaller apartments upstairs—furnished with whatever became available at the Goodwill in Astoria—were occupied by a succession of tenants who were willing to trade the hardship of a third-floor walk-up for the benefits of cheap rent and a lenient landlord. My father was never cut out to be a landlord, and once I was out of college and he could afford it, he retired from that business. The apartments had been empty for years—the mailboxes still read
VINH
and
HERNANDEZ
. I sent Tom and Ivan upstairs to the vacant apartments and carried the Kid into my childhood home. Eventually someone would figure out we might be hiding there, but I was betting that we had at least a day. I didn’t plan on needing more.

The Kid—having slept through my Bullitt-like escapade racing through Riverdale—woke as soon as I laid him down on the bed. He woke up angry.

“Ennnnggggg.” He kicked, aiming as he always did, by accident or design, for my crotch. I felt the attack coming and rotated my hip, taking the force on the outside of my thigh. I might have a charley horse later, but for the moment, I could stand upright.

“No, no, no,” I repeated quietly, calmly. Then I moved quickly, wrapping him in the sheet.

He fought it, but without his usual vigor. He was tired. I pulled the sheet tighter, and threw a second and a third fold around him. He pushed against the restraint, and for a moment before his eyes closed and he fell back to sleep, I saw the light of pure pleasure on his face.

I sat with him in the dark room, listening to the muted evening sounds of the restaurant downstairs and the occasional passing car outside.

My father and I had worked together to redecorate and remove the most obvious signs of a nerdy childhood—at forty-five I regretted the loss of the signed Tina Weymouth photo that had caused me to cringe with embarrassment in my post-grad-school twenties—but there were still signs. The bookshelf held three math textbooks, one book of IQ puzzles and another on solving codes, a copy of
The International Mathematical Olympiad, Problems and Solutions
—not one of my great successes, but I made a respectable showing—and at the other end of the shelf the three volumes of the Sprawl trilogy. No wonder I was always the last one picked for the baseball team.

The Kid began to snore, a comforting sound, as he sometimes woke himself up by not breathing. His occasional apnea was not anatomical, the doctors said, and therefore not readily correctable. “Let’s keep an eye on it,” they said, which succeeded only in terrorizing me into repeated fretful checking up on him for the next month, until I finally accepted that this was just another one of the many things in his life that I could not control.

I dug his cars out of the pillowcase and spent the next ten minutes lining them up on the top of the bookcase, where he would see them when he woke. He had napped in this room, from time to time, when visiting my father, but this would be his first full night. His routine was broken, and the sight of the cars might help.

The linen closet door still squeaked loudly enough to qualify as a shriek, but the Kid was past disturbing. I set out a pillow, blanket, and fresh towel for Roger—he would still be up for hours and would be happy to sack out on the couch when he finally came up. Then I headed down the hall to what was called “the guest room,” a bit of fiction on my father’s part, as I could count on one hand the number of times we had entertained overnight visitors.

The baby furniture had been disposed of in a single day forty years ago—my crib, the folding playpen, the pink chest of drawers—and the room had been repainted once or twice, but the shadows and outlines of the rain forest–themed mural that my mother had designed and executed still showed through on the walls when the light was right. There was a butterfly—or a moth, I couldn’t remember which or whether I had ever really known—near where the headboard now stood. I couldn’t see it, but when I passed my fingers over the area, I could still feel the outline.

I tossed the tote bag on the bed and sank down beside it. The Kid and I were safe—for the moment—but I needed a foolproof plan to make the situation permanent. I opened the bag. The Swiss police car, still in the wrapper, sat on top. Only, sometime in the frenzy of the last few hours, at my hands or at Tom’s, the package had been crushed. The car was broken.

One of the Kid’s many phobias, which I had only discovered after a tantrum led to a wheel coming off his Camaro Z28, was a strong antipathy for broken toys. The Camaro could not be fixed, nor could it be merely dropped in the trash and ignored. I had to take the offending toy out to the incinerator chute and dispose of it immediately. Now I held a car he wouldn’t have wanted in the first place, which I had carried a third of the way around the globe, and which was now destined to go directly to the trash.

The front door of the apartment opened and closed again, and I heard my father’s tired steps as he approached down the hall. He stopped at my old room, and I could picture him checking in on the Kid, just the way he had checked in on me every night after he had closed up downstairs. It was too early for closing tonight, however. Many hours too early.

His steps came closer. He was tired. Or old. Was my father getting old? I realized that I had never framed that question before. He was who he was. Immutable. Then he was standing at the door.

“Hey, bud.”

“Hey, Pop.”

We were silent for a minute.

“Whatcha up to?” He gestured to the car.

“I picked this up for the Kid in Zurich. But it’s broken.” I showed him the bent roof, the misaligned door, the cracked plastic windshield.

He examined it and nodded. “It’s too big anyway.”

I took the tote bag off the bed and set it on the floor. “Come join me.”

He sat. “Your friend Roger is a funny man.”

“I hope so.”

“Oh? Why’s that?”

“He’s a clown. I mean a real clown. Jacques-Emo. He was in the big time. Now he’s semiretired. He does parties and whatnot. Be careful, he’ll drink your top shelf dry.”

“Oh, well. I left him in charge.”

“Roger’s tending bar?”

“I had to see that you two were all right.”

I nodded. “We’re okay.”

“And”—he cleared his throat—“Roger thought you and I might want to talk. About today. About Angie.”

That must have cost him a lot to say, because it was much too close to what we never talked about.

I don’t remember my mother. What I remember is the tone of her voice when she sang me to sleep at night. That Beatles song. “Now it’s time to say good night . . .” And I remember the first time I heard their version on the radio and I was shocked that anyone else in the universe knew that song. It was hers. Mine. Ours. I remember twirling her hair in my fingers when she let me sit in her lap while we watched
The Electric Company
. I remember listening to her belly and giggling with her over the sounds the baby was making. But I don’t really remember what she looked like. When I thought of her, I saw only a gray blur, or I saw the face of the woman in the photographs that my father still kept on the shelf in the living room. I was only six. The same age as the Kid.

The baby was due to arrive in February, and it was November and we were walking to school—PS 29—when my mother fell down on the sidewalk. She didn’t trip, she just sank slowly, her knees giving way. She moaned loudly. I must have been terrified, but I don’t remember that part. Neighbors saw us and ran to help. Someone called my father. After the ambulance left, he took me to school.

My mother never came home. Just before Christmas, they let me come visit her. Not in the ward, though. They wheeled her on her bed through big double doors and Pop and I were sitting on a hard bench against the wall and I just remember seeing tubes and machines with blinking lights and this little woman with lank hair who held my hand.

By then we knew that the baby had been a girl and that she wasn’t coming home. I wasn’t going to have a sister. Just as well; I’m sure I would have blamed her. Hated her.

I don’t remember my father telling me that my mother wasn’t coming home. I don’t remember a funeral. I’m sure he did and that there was one and I was there, but I don’t remember.

Pop and I sat together on the bed and stared out at the half-moon setting over the Bronx.

“She wasn’t much of a wife or a mother, but I don’t think she was a bad person. A sad person, maybe.”

I stifled my shocked reaction, realizing in the moment that he was still talking about Angie, not his wife, my mother.

“Yeah,” I finally forced out around the sob caught in my throat.

“You deserved better.”

“I made my choice. It wasn’t her fault. It’s not like I didn’t know what I was getting into.” Talking about Angie, or not talking about my mother, the words came easier. “Well, maybe I didn’t know. She was many things.”

“Your son deserved better.”

“He needed better, that’s for sure.”

Pop didn’t say anything for a long time.

“Did you talk to Skeli?”

I nodded. “She called.”

He nodded. “I like her.”

I nodded some more. “Me, too. So does the Kid.”

“You were six. Like him, I mean. Just six.”

My throat started tightening up again. “Uh-huh.” I cleared it. “He’ll recover. Right now I don’t think he knows. And if he knew, I don’t know that he would care.”

“Hmm.” He meant he wasn’t buying that, but he wasn’t going to dispute it, either.

“If anything happened to me . . .” I stopped, choked by a rush of conflicting emotions, not least of which was fear.

Pop didn’t say anything for a long time. Then he cleared his throat roughly and just said, “Shhh. Shhh.”

So, we sat in what was supposed to have been my sister’s room until the moon was down and we grieved, together and alone, for wives and mothers, and daughters and sisters, we had never known. I didn’t cry. Pop did. Silent tears. Just a few. After a while he squeezed my hand and said, “You know something, son. You’re not an idiot.”

“Thanks.” I gave him the smile he wanted.

“I need to go back downstairs and close up. And see if your buddy is protecting my interests.”

“He’s cheap, rude, and an almost constant whiner. But I trust him.”

“Then so do I.” He smiled. “And something else. You’re a good dad.”

“I learned from the best, Pop.”