Bloodroot (13 page)

Danny and I passed the whiskey bottle back and forth as Al tore open the tarps, exposing the bodies. Holding his breath, he stuck out his hand. Danny passed him a bottle of lighter fluid.

“Anybody see you buy that?” Danny asked.

“Jesus Christ. I stole it off my neighbor’s porch, okay?”

Al doused the corpses and stepped back, tossing the empty bottle high into the darkness. Danny pulled his lighter from his pocket. I felt his hand on my chest.

“Step back,” he said. He licked his finger and held it aloft, gauging the wind. There didn’t seem to be any.

“Your brother?” Al said to me. “He likes this part the best. The fire.”

“We should be okay,” Danny said, “but be careful not to get the smoke on you. And for godssakes don’t breathe it in.”

He handed me the lighter.

“I don’t want it,” I said, raising my hands. “I’ve done enough.”

“You have to take it,” Danny said. “It’s important.”

“What?” I asked. “Digging up corpses and hauling them around isn’t enough to pass the audition?”

“Calm down,” Danny said, stepping closer to me. “You’re making Al nervous. Tonight isn’t some tryout, that’s your imagination running wild. Tonight’s just tough timing.” He grabbed my right hand, pressed the lighter into my palm. “It only takes a second. Do it. For me.”

My fingers closed around the Zippo. But I just stood there holding it, staring at my fist. Sweat beaded on my forehead. Suddenly, I wanted to run, even more than I had in the graveyard. But there was nowhere to go. Acres of darkness and wasteland surrounded me.

“Let ’er rip,” Al said. He didn’t sound nervous.

I stood there.

“Go ahead,” Danny said quietly. “Do it and we can bail, get back to civilization.”

“Won’t somebody see the fire?” I asked. “Won’t they ask questions?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Danny said. “There are spontaneous fires all over this place every night, chemicals, methane pockets, poison bird shit. It’s all just garbage. Nobody even wastes their time putting them out.”

I licked my lips, tasting rot on my tongue. Danny’s eyes twitched at the corners. His hand reached behind his back. Al had moved out of my line of sight. At least in the movies, this was when the hero heard the click of the hammer. I didn’t feel like a fuckin’ hero and I didn’t hear anything but the growling of the distant machines. No footsteps, no breathing, nothing. The stench swallowing us had even subsumed Al’s cologne.

It dawned on me that Al would have no problem leaving me here as body number three. Maybe Al wasn’t as dumb as I thought. He’d fooled his third corpse into coming out here under its own power. He worked with Danny, seemed to follow his lead, but it was Bavasi and Santoro who scared him. I didn’t know what, if anything, Danny could do to protect me. I watched Danny’s eyes, trying to find Al through their motion. But all Danny’s eyes did was plead with me.

Danny was right. It didn’t matter. Those bodies were nothing but empty shells. I wasn’t hurting anyone. If I didn’t burn them, Al or Danny would and maybe burn me with them. What had Danny told me in the car? None of us had ever been here, ever in our lives. Anything that happened here couldn’t be our doing. We were never here. What choice did I have but to believe him? Any chance to get out of this had passed me by long before Danny handed me that lighter. The lighter. I looked down at it, sitting, silver, innocent, and cool, in my palm. It was an expensive Zippo. What a waste. I pushed back the hood with my thumb, ignited the flame, watched it burn for a long moment, and tossed it onto a dead man’s chest.

He went up fast, low blue flames running frantic only briefly before igniting into leaping golden waves.

I backed away until Al and Danny’s dark forms merged into one black shadow before the fire. The trash around the bodies began to burn. The stench hit me like a kick to the back of my knees. I thought it might make me blind. I forgot not to breathe. I spit up a mouthful of bile and whiskey, wiping my mouth on my arm. What the fuck had I done?

The shadow broke in two as Al headed for the car. Danny waited for me by the fire. The fire gurgled and spat, feeding. The heat made me squint. It ruffled Danny’s hair.

“I need to know,” I said. “Who were they? What did they do?”

He threw his arm over my shoulder, walking me away from the car. He nearly pulled me down as he stumbled over something. I looked down. The head. We had dropped it again. Danny grabbed it by the hair. This time I didn’t look at the face. Al started the Charger.

“Remember how I told you,” Danny said, the head hanging from his fist, “how I took over for Santoro’s other tech guy?” He held up the head. “
This
is Santoro’s other guy.” Danny tossed the head into the fire. “He talked too much. Mostly to that other guy next to him.”

I doubled over, dry heaving.

“I know you can keep secrets, Kevin,” Danny said, rubbing my back. “I remember it well.”

“Let’s roll,” Al yelled, gunning the engine.

ON THE RIDE BACK TO BROOKLYN, DANNY AND AL ABANDONED ME
to my thoughts and the last few swigs from the whiskey bottle. I drank it all, hoping in vain the alcohol would put me to sleep. Alcohol was how you treated open wounds, right? Hadn’t Grandpa taught us that? And I felt wounded, all right. The Continental Army, all they’d had for bullet and bayonet wounds was bad rum. If cheap liquor was good enough for George Washington, it was good enough for me.

As we crossed over the Verrazano, I curled up tight against the door, my forehead resting on the cool glass of the window. I stared straight down at the white lines passing underneath us. I thought about opening the door and falling out. I saw myself bouncing once off the pavement and dropping over the side, tumbling down through the night and splashing into the cold, deep Narrows. But that bastard Al had power locks on all his doors.

As a boy, I had loved crossing the Verrazano, the mammoth, sky-blue arc of steel and asphalt stretching from the northern end of Staten Island to the eastern edge of Brooklyn, its wide roadway hanging on heavy cables over the water. The Verrazano spanned the space where the Colonials and the Redcoats had fought the Battle of Brooklyn. I used to look down from the car and picture the British warships sailing from the coast of Staten Island and into the cannon fire from the Colonial forts dug deep into the Brooklyn soil.

On those Sunday drives, after we passed through the tollbooth, the road would rise onto the bridge and Staten Island would shrink away behind us, the world opening wide in the dirty windshield of our Dodge Dart. The gleaming silver spires of Manhattan spiked the sky on my left, the limitless slate expanse of the mythic Atlantic unfurled on my right. In front of us waited Brooklyn, sunlight washing over a thousand different hues of brick and brown and gray. A place of parks and pizza joints, of museums and libraries. The home of my grandfather’s fireplace and my grandmother’s grand piano. Of Easter egg hunts and twenty-foot Christmas trees. Staten Island only seemed to me a place still in search of a king, kneeling before the silver crown of Manhattan.

Riding over the water with Danny and Al, I felt like one of Washington’s naïve, terrified soldiers staring down the British fleet: overwhelmed, outgunned, caught in the current of forces far beyond my control or comprehension. Like one of those poor, dumb farmers, I’d marched into a world far more brutal than the one I thought I saw from my porch, a world inhabited by people far more dirty and dangerous than me. I worried that even if I survived my stint in Santoro’s army, I’d already started leaving important pieces of me on the battlefield.

Far below me, the ruby and white lights of the bridge shimmered, reflected on the hard black face of the Narrows. The steel cables rushed by like the bars of a cage, of a jail cell. Every time oncoming headlights swept through the car I sank deeper into the backseat, hiding from the eyes of the drivers. The dark void over southern Manhattan choked on stars. Brooklyn still revealed herself shadowy and seductive before us, her white lights clustered like jewels against her Indian red flesh. But as we cruised down the highway and off the bridge the lamp-lit road stretched out like a bruised blue vein under papery, yellow skin.

Taking me to that graveyard, Danny had put me through something that should’ve driven us apart for good. But I knew it would only draw us closer. He knew it, too. It was why he’d insisted I go. Secrets, no matter how terrible, can bind as strong as blood.

Al opened his cell phone, projecting an eerie blue glow. The light faded when Al moved the phone to his ear, waiting for an answer to his call. I closed my eyes.

“It’s done,” he said. “We just crossed the water.”

There was a pause as the person on the other end spoke.

“Three,” Al said. Another pause. “Aw man, now you tell me that? No, of course I’m not complaining, it’s just—” Al snapped his phone shut and tossed it on the dash. “Motherfucker hung up on me. Fuck.” He slapped Danny on the arm. “Three-way split. Did you know about this?”

Danny shook his head, rubbing his eyes. He’d been asleep.

Three
, Al had said.
Three-way split
. I wondered how close I had really come to Al’s answer being
two
instead of
three
. I wondered again, had I failed, what my brother would have done. Would he have let Al shoot me down like a deserter? A meaningless question, I told myself. I hadn’t failed and I had saved Danny from having to make that choice. For once in my life, I’d gotten to him before the needle did.

 

 

 

BAVASI WATCHED US CAREFULLY
as we climbed from the car and walked toward the restaurant, slouched and plodding like zombies, the only noise on the street the buzzing of the streetlights. He pulled open the door and turned his head to double-check the empty street as the three of us filed into the restaurant.

In the lobby, Danny and Al took off their shoes and socks, so I did the same. Bavasi locked the door behind us. Instead of frightening me, the heavy shot of the bolt hitting home was a comfort. I was safe from the gaze of strangers.

Bavasi had the lights turned down, the wall lamps painting the restaurant in a warm, golden glow. The room smelled of buttery garlic and sharp pepper and fine coffee. We followed Bavasi to the booth where Danny and I had eaten steaks that same evening. As I slid across the rich leather, the memory of that meal drifted far back in my mind, floating ethereal among recollections I had of Danny and me from long ago, reading not at all like the newly minted memory that it really was.

A crystal decanter sat at center table surrounded by four shot glasses. A lone coffee bean sat in the bottom of each glass. Bavasi removed the decanter’s top and poured a shot of foggy, syrupy liquid for each of us. It smelled like burning licorice. Bavasi lifted his glass. We all did the same.
Salud
, he said quietly, and we all drank. The liquor coated my mouth and throat with a warm, simmering heat that was unlike the sharp, electric tang of the whiskey I’d drunk before. My whole head and throat felt purged and clean. The vomit, the dump, the smoke, they were all scorched away. I wanted a few minutes to recover but our host poured another round. He toasted again, we swallowed, and I reached for the pack of cigarettes my brother had thrown on the table. Bavasi capped the decanter and walked away from the table.

I stuck out my hand to Danny for a lighter but he just shrugged at me.

“That Zippo I gave you was the only one I had on me.”

I looked to Al. He shook his head.

Bavasi returned to the table and set down a pitcher of ice water and three glasses. He slid a glass ashtray, a pack of matches from some other restaurant in it, across the table to me.

Danny sighed as I lit up. “If you get back in the habit because of me, I’m gonna feel really guilty.”

I exhaled a long cloud of smoke and shook out the match. The alcohol was making things distant and fuzzy. “Don’t worry about me. I’m a grown man. Besides, I’m the oldest, you can’t tell me what to do.”

After pouring us each a glass of water, Santoro leaned on the table, his weight heavy on his palms. Like my father, thick veins roped his hands and forearms. There was plenty of room in the booth, but he showed no desire to sit.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “I know you wouldn’t be here accepting my hospitality if the work wasn’t done”—turning to Al—“and done right this time, so I congratulate you. I know you’re anxious to get clean. Everything is ready for you in the locker room. Leave your clothes by the back door, as usual.” He turned to me. “Kevin, you are the new man here so I’m sure you’re the most eager to get started. Why don’t you go first while I review the night’s events with my
paisans
here?”

I knew a polite dismissal when I heard one and got up from the table. The colonel wanted a moment with his senior officers. Bavasi rested a hand on my shoulder. His grip was firm.