Bloodroot (6 page)

“Those hoppers out there every night?” Danny asked.

“Mostly,” I said. “Forget it. It’s nothing. I hardly even notice ’em anymore.”

And I didn’t want them noticing me. These were street corner dealers, armed, arrogant, and angry. A whole different breed from that guy in the bar, a half-buzzed bricklayer who probably hadn’t been stepped to for real in fifteen years.

Al leaned his head out the car window, rolling his toothpick over his teeth. “Problem, D.?”

My knees went weak with relief when Danny walked my way, his head still turned to the corner. The dealers got back to business, satisfied Danny wasn’t a cop or a client.

“Cowards, every fucking one of them,” Danny said. “Heroin?”

“Who knows? It’s nothing. I get more trouble from the neighborhood strays.”

We embraced on the sidewalk.

“Let’s not make it another three years,” Danny said.

“That’s up to you, isn’t it?” I said.

“Indeed,” Danny said. “Friday, then? That’s cool?”

“Definitely. Look, Danny, I should maybe stop by the folks’ and tell them about this. Just to let them know you’re not dead.”

“Like they’d care.”

“Give ’em a break,” I said. “You broke their hearts.”

Danny looked down at the sidewalk, scratching his chin. “I know. You’re right. Feel them out for me, will ya?”

“Will do,” I said.

Danny climbed back into the car and Al drove them away into the night, slowing a little as they turned the corner.

 

 

 

INSIDE MY APARTMENT BUILDING,
I checked my mailbox. Empty. Same as when I walked out the door. I snatched empty beer cans off the apartment stairs on my way up. The lightbulb over the staircase flickered and went out when I hit the landing. I tossed the beer cans out the window and into the yard. In the dark, I climbed the last flight to my floor. I had no trouble finding my front door. It was hardly the first time that light had gone out.

My apartment was almost as dark as the hall. I hadn’t left a single light burning. I hated coming home to the dark but I did it to myself all the time. I turned on all the lights in the apartment and got a beer from the fridge. The Budweiser tasted flat and thin after that Guinness. I flipped on the TV, but only made it through five channels before I got bored. I killed the living room lights and opened my balcony doors, the balcony itself about the size of a crooked bookshelf. Still, it beat sitting on the porch like a kid who’d locked himself out of the house.

Not that I ever did anything worth looking at, but I didn’t like sitting in plain view of the whole block. Out on the balcony I could watch the nights go by in privacy and solitude. And I liked the idea of being able to see everyone else without them seeing me. I saw more than anybody probably knew.

Though it was long after dark and early October, the night breeze blew warm with the last heat of the extended Indian summer. The air tasted of the dirty harbor and car exhaust, but when I was ankle deep in the black slush of February, I’d remember this night as a free slice of Eden.

I tipped leftover rainwater out of my plastic chair and sat, throwing my feet over the railing, beer in my lap. With my left hand I reached up for the brown leaves of the hard-luck spider plant I’d hung by the door. Right down by the dirt, the leaves stayed green, but the life and the color never got very far. Danny’s return to the land of the living inspired a lot of questions in me, but it put to bed the biggest, most important ones. Was he dead? Locked up? Was there any hope? I felt satisfied with the answers I had. Deeply satisfied. But my contentment didn’t last.

Two teenaged boys broke off from the crew on the corner and sauntered up the street, shoving each other, yelling taunts at the neighborhood mutts that barked as they passed. One kid popped the other in the chest and darted up an unlit driveway. I lost sight of him. The other watched from the sidewalk, giggling, covering his mouth with his hands. Then I heard the first kid shaking and kicking the gate of a chain-link fence and the high, whiny howling of a dog driven to spasms of anger.

I felt guilty, like I always did when I sat there and did nothing while those same two punks tortured that poor dog. Like I often did after the ritual ended, I sat there wishing for a gun, all different kinds: a pistol, a rifle, a flare, or a speargun. Not to kill anyone, just to drill one of those kids in the thigh, teach him a lesson. I imagined Mrs. Hanson stepping onto the porch one night, cradling a big shotgun. Someone should stick up for that poor dog.

What I really wanted, though, was for Maxie to bust through that gate. Just once. Then we’d see how brave those boys really were, when there was no gate and no lock protecting them from those snapping, snarling jaws. Maxie was old and blind, but I believed in my heart that given the chance, he could still roll with the best of them.

When the porch light came on and the front door flew open, the kids took off down the street. Maxie kept howling. Mrs. Hanson, an eighty-something widow in an orange housecoat, waving a spatula over her head, screamed at the boys from her porch as they wheeled around the far corner. Someone else on the block threatened to
shoot that fucking mutt
. Cursing, Mrs. Hanson went back inside. Moments later, I could hear her in the backyard, singing in Polish to her ancient German shepherd. The howling stopped. Maxie’s collar jingled as he followed Mrs. Hanson into the house.

The block stayed quiet after that, the corner boys working car after car without a sound. I sat staring at the numbers above Mrs. Hanson’s front door. They commanded my attention more and more these days. 136. Across the island, the same numbers hung over my parents’ door.

It shamed me to think it but Mrs. Hanson reminded me of my mother, not where Mom was but where she might be headed. Or maybe it was Maxie and his hopeless striking out at the darkness, his failure to get his teeth into what tortured him. I should’ve had the nerve to tell Danny. He’d want to know.

Early Alzheimer’s, the doctors said, a tragedy but not unheard of. The disease would take its slow, sweet time. We’d have a few more years with her. It was their idea of good news. I could never decide if that was merciful or cruel. Her good days still far outnumbered her bad, but her bad days were awful. She’d wander the house like she still worked at the hospital, scolding my father for taking out his IV tubes and trying to help him from his chair to the bathroom. My father played along, holding his breath for the day she wouldn’t come back to him. Who knew what he’d do then?

Staring at the shining skyline of Manhattan, I wondered where Danny was and what he was doing at that moment. It had nothing to do with the family. Probably holding court in some fancy uptown club I’d never heard of and would never see, shaking the ice in his club soda. It’d be just like Danny, making soda water look cooler than any fancy martini, leaving everyone else embarrassed at ordering something as mundane as a fifteen-dollar cocktail. He was probably surrounded by the cool friends he’d made before his conscience prodded him into coming to look for me. Weren’t apologies part of those twelve-step programs addicts went into?

I leaned my elbows on the railing. That was a shitty way to think about him. He should have a chance to prove his sincerity about being family again. What did I have to lose? And if his return really was all about the apology, well then, that was the least I could do for him. Maybe that big talk about a big night out had been just that—talk. He could be home sleeping right now. I didn’t think so, though. One of those distant lights probably shone right on him. I wondered again where he was and what he was doing.

And where would he go home to after his big night ended? I had a feeling he wasn’t back on the island. But I didn’t know for sure because I hadn’t asked. Where did he live? What did he do? Was he dating anyone? He hadn’t offered any of that information. I watched a twinkling ferry cross the harbor on its way to Manhattan. Probably the eleven o’clock boat. I had to get up at six A.M. I poured the rest of my beer into the spider plant and went back inside.

On the kitchen table, my students’ essays on the American Revolution sat piled as high as they were when I’d left, the grading gremlins no-shows yet again. I cracked open a Cherry Coke and got to work. I could make it through Thursday on five hours’ sleep. I’d done it plenty of times before. I got through a paper and a half before calling it a night.

THURSDAY EVENING,
my father answered his front door in slacks and an undershirt. Though in his early sixties, he had a good four to five inches on me when he stood up straight, which was most of the time. Tufts of gray hair swirled on his bare, bony shoulders. Like a weight lifter’s, the thick veins in his long, powerful arms stood out against his ropy muscles. Those muscles and a modest pension were what remained of a long career of heavy lifting.

He didn’t open the screen door right away. Though it was fading, the daylight made him squint, the setting sun pouring over my shoulder and into his eyes.

“Whadda you doin’ here?” he asked. “I’m outta money.”

“Been hanging around the OTB again, have you?”

My father laughed and pushed open the screen door. “That was my brother, doofus. To think you’re a college professor. You cracked like your mother?”

I walked into the house and my father closed the doors behind us.

“You know I hate jokes like that, about Mom,” I said.

“Always the sensitive one,” my father said. He squeezed my shoulder. “I worry about you, boy.” He clicked off the TV on his way to his massive armchair, his throne. “You know for a fact she’d be doing it to me, if things were the other way around.”

He tossed the remote on the table between his chair and my mother’s, a smaller, newer version of his.

He was right about Mom’s sense of humor, but it didn’t make me feel any better about the jokes. I sat on the couch across the room. The rising dust tickled my nose. “And I’m not a professor, Dad. I don’t have a Ph.D.”

“Whatever,” Dad said, waving a hand as if a bad smell had entered the room. “Who cares what a bunch of eggheads think? Teaching college makes you a professor. A piece of paper don’t make you, or not make you, nothin’.”

“If I had that piece of paper,” I said, “you’d have to call me ‘doctor.’”

“Like your grandfather, the sainted Dr. O’Malley, the prince of Park Slope? Ah, what the hell for?” He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, shaking a finger at me. “Only piece of paper I ever got was a paycheck, but I got one every week for over forty years. Let’s see if you last that long.”

I remembered them together, my mother’s father and my father. Grandpa liked my father, a lot, I think. Dr. O’Malley just never quite adjusted to his only daughter, after years of piano, ballet, and expensive private school, marrying the son of immigrant Irish tavern owners. It had been my father’s double shifts at the bar and then on the docks that paid her way through nursing school, though.

“How’s Ma?” I asked. “She feeling any better?”

“I read the paper this morning,” my father said. “If there’s a cure, it didn’t make the morning edition.”

“Dad, c’mon.”

“I hear it in your voice, son. She isn’t getting any better, she’ll only get worse. You and I both know that.”

I got up from the couch. “Where is she? Out back in the garden?”

“She’s in Atlantic City,” my father said.

“You’re kidding me, right? You still let her take those trips? I thought we talked about that.”

“We did,” my father said. “And like I told you then, you have no say. She likes those trips. It’s only for the day. She goes by charter bus, with her friends. The church always sends a couple nurses to keep an eye.”

“You think that’s a good idea?” I asked.

“The nurses? Can’t hurt.” He smiled. “I always thought nurses were okay.”

“Dad, that’s not what I mean. Mom’s not well. She’s unpredictable. You know that.”

“You’re goddamn right I do. I live with it every day.” My father looked up at me, one eye half closed, elbows on his knees. “She’s sick, but she ain’t dead. She worked hard her whole life and if she wants to play the slots all day with her friends, I’ll drive her to the bus and slip forty in her purse every goddamn time.” He stood, crossing the room to me. “And next time you talk to me like a child, I’ll drag you out back by the ear and bust open your melon like goddamn Fourth of July.”

“Understood,” I said, dropping my head to conceal a smile.

My father had bruised his knuckles a few times in his life, but he’d never lifted a hand to family. As a pediatric nurse my mother had seen more abused children than she cared to remember. My father had too much respect for her to ever bring even a hint of such a thing into our house. Absurd physical threats were how he let Danny and me know we’d crossed a line. At least in the house, Danny and I had always respected that line. Even though we harbored no fear of violence, we also had no curiosity about the other side.