“Through the kitchen to the right,” he said. “Take your time. There’s no hurry now.”
THROUGH A HEAVY DOOR
marked STAFF I found a long row of tall, narrow lockers. Three shower stalls stood off to my right, clean towels stacked by each one. Hanging from the nearest locker was a fresh set of clothes: dark pants, a long-sleeved, deep green T-shirt, a black suit jacket. Inside the locker waited new underwear, socks, and a brand-new pair of black leather shoes. At first, I thought I’d found Danny’s stuff but everything was in my size, all of it too small for him. There was even a fresh stick of deodorant and a new razor. A goddamn toothbrush. A few lockers away hung new clothes for Danny and Al.
Listening for anyone coming through the door, I walked the lockers, peeking through the vents. I jiggled a couple of the latches but they were all locked. Through the narrow vents, I couldn’t see anything other than white clothes I took to be chefs’ jackets and waiters’ coats. Did Bavasi’s regular employees know what went on here late at night? Were they part of it? When they came into work tomorrow would there be any sign of us? I couldn’t see Bavasi letting that happen. He probably knew everything I was and wasn’t doing at that moment just from the sounds he didn’t hear.
I headed back up the aisle to my own locker and undressed, leaving my old clothes in a pile on the cold concrete floor. The room felt plenty warm, telling me the goose bumps on my naked flesh weren’t from being cold. I was afraid of being alone, and afraid of walking back into the restaurant not having done what I was told. Was Santoro out there, waiting to meet me?
Who had Santoro really had in mind when he built this room? Was it for Bavasi’s cooks and waiters and bartenders, or was it for their other, more specialized employees? Who hid behind whom? Where had it all started? I couldn’t even conjure a face for Santoro. All I saw when I thought of him was a pair of long, long arms. I reimagined Bavasi at twenty, thirty, a backroom butcher for some neighborhood meat shop in Italian Brooklyn—his thick, hairy forearms coated in the blood of his work, his white apron splattered with crimson gore as he stood at the butcher’s block. Santoro walking in, eyeing the blood, offering his hand and asking for a favor.
The shower smelled of bleach and disinfectant. Waiting for the water to warm, I ran my fingertips along the cool white tile. Was this what a gas chamber was like? Did anyone use gas anymore? I stepped under the steaming water, washed those questions from my mind. Surely what we had done, gruesome as it was, didn’t warrant that kind of punishment. But it was a crime. A serious crime that covered others. Like murder, for instance. I was a criminal now. A felon. Guilty of aiding and abetting, accessory after the fact, and probably plenty more charges I couldn’t name. I studied my hands. They looked the same as they had that afternoon, back when they were just a teacher’s hands.
I unwrapped the soap and lathered up, scrubbing every nook and cranny. Bowing my head I let the water pound my shoulders. Through half-open eyes I watched the suds and water pool at my feet before it ran down the drain. How many people had washed the filth of the dead off their skin in that shower? My brother had. I lathered and rinsed again.
If things went bad for Danny, I’d have a lot more than student complaints on my permanent record. I had to keep him close, figure out a way for both of us to break free of Santoro’s orbit, though I had no clue how and when I would do that. One major complication was that Danny seemed happy where he was. Good luck getting him to do something he didn’t want to. Another problem was the fact that crossing Danny’s superiors was a quick way to make us both dead. Even I, minor player that I was, could see that. I was washing off the proof in their shower.
I turned off the water and stood there dripping, staring at my hands again. What did any of it matter to me? I’d never be here again. The graveyard, the dump, Santoro’s, “putting the kids to bed”—this wasn’t my world. I was a teacher. I taught American history for Richmond City College in Staten Island, New York. I lived in a crappy apartment in a forgotten neighborhood in a minor borough of a major city where I graded papers, reread the same old textbooks and lesson plans, jerked off, and watched TV. Sometimes I varied the order, but not often.
I sat on my balcony and watched my neighbors throw their despair all over each other between drug deals. Sometimes I went out to a bar down by the water. I had nothing to do with this world. I was only visiting this other place, like going to a museum or a movie. Those bodies would’ve burned with or without me. Right at that moment, some other poor schmuck was probably sinking into the swamps of Jersey. And the world kept right on turning. What I’d done that night didn’t matter to anyone, and no one would ever know. I lived on scraps and needed new clothes, but I wasn’t a foot soldier fighting for a place in history in any general’s rebel army. I wasn’t even a footnote in Santoro’s story.
I took a few minutes to smell my skin everywhere I could reach with my nose. Nothing but skin and soap. Everything else had gone down the drain. I was clean.
Millions of people across the city smelled like I did. I was just another one of the freshly washed masses. Nothing of the night clung to me, not even under my nails.
I toweled off and dressed in my new clothes, happy to have them. They made me feel that much further away from the graveyard and the dump. I wiped the fog off a mirror over the sinks. I looked pretty good, not much the worse for wear considering the night I’d had. I checked the whites of my eyes, like what we’d done would leave traces. There was nothing to hide in them. I stepped back from the mirror. I would walk into the dining room looking a lot like my brother, wearing his uniform.
I left my old clothes in a pile by the back door, like Bavasi had said.
BAVASI, DANNY, AND AL
were laughing when I walked into the room.
“That’s fucking disgusting,” Al said, rising from the booth, jamming half a breadstick into his mouth. “Kevin, there better be hot water left.” He walked into the kitchen. I took his seat at the table.
Bavasi poured another shot and walked away from the table, wiping his hands on his apron. I protested when Danny slid the glass toward me.
“Sip this one,” he said. “There’s nothing better after a hot shower.”
I left the glass on the table.
Danny sipped his own shot. “Okay, I’ve got one more slice of advice for you. Easy to follow, but important. As we leave, which we will do right after I get cleaned up, Bavasi will hand you an envelope. In it will be cash. Not enough to retire on, but probably more than you’ve ever seen. Put it in your jacket pocket. Don’t protest, don’t even thank him, just put it away. Remember the guard at the dump? Do it like him. Count it when you get home.” I started to say something, but Danny cut me off. “If you have moral troubles over the money, throw it in the trash, give it to a bum on the corner. Nobody will ever ask you about it. Just take it when Bavasi offers it. And, yes, you get to keep the clothes.” He pulled back the lapels of his jacket. “Obviously.”
“I think I can handle all that,” I said. “Listen, Al said something about a three-way split in the car. I’m taking a cut of his money, aren’t I?”
“And mine,” Danny said, sinking back into the plush leather of the booth, seeming to grow larger as he did so. “But don’t worry about it. Al defied an order. He’s lucky it’s only his pay and not his throat that’s getting cut.”
Danny leaned his head back and closed his eyes, putting his feet up on the bench, a man comfortable and at home. I realized, suddenly, I was witnessing something I had rarely ever seen: my brother still and at rest. I enjoyed it, regardless of the circumstances. Like with heroin, there’d be no forcing or tricking or fooling Danny into leaving Santoro behind. Danny had to make that decision for himself. What I had to do was be there when the moment came and give my brother a push in the right direction.
“Now, finish your sambuca, big brother,” Danny said. “You don’t wanna hurt Bavasi’s feelings.”
FIRST SUNLIGHT STAINED
the eastern sky when Danny and Al dropped me off at my apartment. I tossed Santoro’s envelope on the coffee table, ashamed to open it. I would keep that money. What that said about me I would worry about later.
Holding a beer I didn’t want, hoping the sambuca wouldn’t wear off before I went to bed, I watched the rest of the sunrise from my balcony. I smoked half the pack of cigarettes Danny had bought for me on the way home, reaching over my head to bury the butts in the spider plant.
I’d never seen my street at sunrise. As the burning orange light crept along the cracked sidewalks and the weedy front yards, I noticed things I’d never seen before. Across the street, a mailbox hung askew on one nail, white envelopes scattered beneath it on the porch. In the window of the house next door, someone had taped up an American flag cut from a newspaper. Underneath the flag a photo peeled away from the glass: a daughter lost in the Towers, a son serving in Iraq or Afghanistan. Another house down, the morning light glinted off the brown glass of beer bottles piled high in a recycling bin that hadn’t been to the curb in weeks. Someone had broken into a car, pebbles of broken glass glinting like diamonds in the street. In a week the diamonds would be pulverized to dust under passing tires.
The streams of morning light merged into a flood, setting the windows of the ramshackle homes on my block ablaze with reflected sunshine. The weathered houses, crooked on wasted plots and afire with borrowed light, reminded me of lonely old women all in a row, their unlucky faces hidden behind drugstore sunglasses and turned toward the sun while they waited on the Atlantic City bus. Something rustled around behind those big window-eyes, fighting to recall how to come to life. But with each passing day it got harder to remember. And so the morning fires went out and a million minor distractions instead filled the day—noisy and empty of promise—just like all the days before it. Each day another dull coin offered in worship of a stingy spinning wheel. Each day the pocket that much closer to empty.
I could take a lighter and gasoline to the whole damn block and the flames would be thirty feet high before anyone noticed. Most of my neighbors would die in their sleep. I wondered who would miss them. Mass arson. Would that be criminal enough to make me ashamed of myself? Because, despite what I had done, sitting in the morning sun with a buzz and an envelope of cash, I felt no shame at all.
Mrs. Hanson’s back door squeaked as she let Maxie out into the yard. He ran in circles in pools of light, barking like mad. Maybe catching up on whatever he missed overnight. I could picture him sleeping the night through curled at the foot of his mistress’s bed, keeping a list of all the things—squirrels, cats, rats, and bats, thugs and thieves—he heard in the night. Or maybe he was giving the day fair warning.
It’s a new day
, I could hear him saying.
Today is gonna be different around here. Today, I’m tellin’ all you motherfuckers I ain’t taking no mess.
I had more respect for that broken old mutt than I had for any of the people on my block. I wondered if that was an indictment of them or me. I gave up on my plans to burn everything down. I couldn’t do that to Maxie.
Finally, the dramatic colors of sunrise gave way to the pale, blank daylight. I rose from my seat and went to the railing. “Go ahead, Maxie,” I yelled. “Go ahead.” The dog let loose a long howl. My howl died in my throat and some other dog in some other yard answered in my place. Mrs. Hanson called her dog in for breakfast. I went inside and passed out on the couch, destroyed by exhaustion.
AT SOME POINT DURING
the day, I must’ve moved to my bed because that’s where I woke up at sundown. In the bathroom, I avoided the mirror. I took off my clothes and staggered into the kitchen for a bowl of cereal. As I ate, I stared at the pile of essays on the kitchen table. I tried to forget the stack of money on my coffee table. I left the cereal bowl in the sink and went back to bed, where I stayed until Sunday morning. I only got up then because of the doorbell. I knew it was Danny.
“You look like ass,” he said when I opened the door. “Why is it every time I come over you’re in your underwear?” He held up a brown paper bag as he walked into the apartment. “I brought bagels.”
He set up shop in the kitchen, pushing aside my essays. “Remember how Mom and Dad used to take us for bagels after Mass at Saint Brendan’s? Then we’d get cold cuts for lunch at Pastorelli’s. Ain’t that New York in a nutshell?”
He’d thought of everything: hot coffee, butter, cream cheese, a Sunday
Times
. The way he chattered reminded me of our mother. She did the same thing when she fed us, anxious to capitalize on the attention attracted by the food. He smiled at me, buttering an onion bagel. “Jets are on in half an hour.”
I tossed my essays on the counter, reaching for a coffee as I sat. Danny snatched away the cup I grabbed and handed me the other.
“You don’t want mine,” he said. “It’s loaded with low-fat milk. And a little hazelnut creamer. All those years shooting heroin and I still drink my coffee like a pussy.”
I pulled the plastic top off my cup. Black as tar. Danny dumped about ten sugar packets out of the paper bag. “Enough to make the spoon stand up, right?”
I nodded, smiling, tearing open one packet after another. It was a line I’d beaten to death when we were teenagers, after I was blown away by
True Romance
and wanted to be Christian Slater. That movie may have started me drinking coffee in the first place. Danny sat across the table from me. I wanted to reach out and tousle his hair. I ached again for the years his addiction had cost us.
“I thought they taught you to drink coffee like a man in rehab. You want a straw?”