Staten Island Noir (24 page)

Sunny was lithe and tall like a boy, and scared off most Staten Island guys with her ripped-up clothes and Dr. Martens. She teased her black hair up into a billowing Siouxsie Sioux coif, layered white foundation over her face, and finished things off with a thick smear of coal-dark eyeliner.

Her dad was just finishing his breakfast when Sunny came down the stairs. His mouth dropped open.

"Madonna! There's no way you're going to church like that, young lady."

"Whaaat! But Dad, it's my communion dress."

"I know, but that was four years ago. You're busting out all over it."

Sunny gnashed her teeth. Her dad was getting more conservative every year. It was as if he wanted to take all his anger at the counterculture of the last ten years out on his daughter, grinding her down into a Catholic schoolgirl Barbie doll. Life with him was becoming impossible.

Seeing Sunny smoldering, her dad called for backup: "Toni, get a load a this!"

Sunny's mom stuck her head into the kitchen. "O Dio!" she blurted out. "You look ridiculous. But we don't have any more time. We gotta hurry up or we'll miss the procession."

"No way. I'm not taking my daughter out looking like that."

"We don't have time to argue, Pippo. Senti, we gotta go now or we won't make it."

"Non mi frega, Toni, there's no way in hell we're gonna take Annunziata to church dressed like some kinda puttana."

He grew more and more red in the face as he argued with his wife. Sunny was left standing in the middle of the room while the two of them argued backward and forward, their voices rising and their vocabulary veering toward scatological Italian. In the middle of a tirade about his honor as a father that involved multiple references to his dick, Pippo suddenly choked and began coughing. Hacks wracking his body, he lurched toward the bathroom.

"Che cazzo, Pippo?" Sunny's mom yelled. "What the hell's da matta with you? This is the third time this week. Get your ass outta that bathroom."

"What's going on, Mom?"

"I don't know, Sunny, he's been coughing and getting sick for a few weeks now. You know him, though, of course he's trying to act like it ain't nuthin'."

"Wow, that's exactly the same thing that happened last night to Totò."

"Your cousin Totò is into some bad stuff. I'm not surprised he's sick."

"That's not fair, Mom. Totò doesn't do that anymore. Besides, last night he said he thought it might have something to do with the stink off the dump. Maybe dad got sick from the same smell."

"Look, Sunny, that's ridiculous. Your dad puts on a mask every time he goes to work. He couldn't smell a raw onion if you held it right in front of his nose. Besides, I'm gonna kill Pippo long before the Fresh Kills cough gets 'im. Pippo," she yelled, "you get your ass outta that bathroom! We're gonna miss communion at this rate and I ain't gonna burn in hell cuz of you!"

 

* * *

 

Around midnight, Sunny woke to a rain of pebbles on her window. She pulled on a leather jacket, slid down a drainpipe, and followed Totò into the dark alleyway behind her house.

In a heavy whisper, Totò told her the news: "My dad said he heard something's going on over at Fresh Kills. When I tol' him I been feeling bad lately, he said lots of other people been sick too. But I couldn't get him to say anythin' else, he just got real sad and stared off into space an' shit. I say we check the place out. You in?"

Sunny still remembered how confused she'd been as a young girl when Totò's dad Enzo started growing his hair out long. Enzo went over to Vietnam a year after his older brother, but he came back earlier and even more messed up in the head than her dad. Sunny's dad and Enzo had long shouting matches about 'Nam. Eventually, they stopped talking to one another entirely.

When Totò and his brother Vito were younger, their dad would often be gone, traveling around the country protesting the war. After the troops came home, Enzo still wouldn't settle down. He kept his hair long and refused to take a job working for the city like her dad and so many other men on Staten Island. He was unemployed for a long time, his wife left him, and Totò and Vito spent a lot of time with their grandparents. Totò went through a rough patch, and his brother Vito went completely off the rails. But now Enzo owned a small guitar shop and was trying to make things right with Totò.

"Yeah, sure, I'm in," she said.

It was a chilly night, winter not yet having loosed its grip on the city. The moon was scudding between clouds, casting a silver light on the leafless trees. It looked like a thin coat of snow had just fallen on the island. Totò and Sunny walked away from her pale blue two-story house in Tottenville, down Lighthouse Avenue, and then cut off the road and headed across the Jewish cemetery toward Fresh Kills Landfill.

Sunny's dad had worked for the Department of Sanitation for years, so she knew something about the history of garbage on the island. Fresh Kills was opened after World War II. It was only supposed to stay open for twenty years, but dumping is a hard habit to kick. Fresh Kills was still accepting hundreds of tons of garbage every day. It seemed like her dad had a job for life at the dump.

As they climbed through the jagged teeth of the chain-link fence that surrounded the place, Sunny whispered to Totò, "Ya gotta watch your ass. There's packs of wild dogs on the hunt at night in here."

"Yeah, lots of fresh-killed meat around here, I guess."

"No, wise-ass, that name means the place was filled with fresh creeks."

"Ain't too fresh no more."

"No shit, Sherlock."

"Oh man, it stinks!"

"Yeah, shit buried in Fresh Kills don't stay underground for very long," Sunny said.

"Hey, I think I hear something."

As they climbed over a rise in the rolling landscape created by decades of accumulated garbage, Sunny and Totò were blinded by a half-moon of arc lights. When their eyes had adjusted, they saw a couple of huge yellow bulldozers moving across the reeking piles of waste like giant prehistoric insects. The stench was overwhelming, hitting like a swift kick to the head.

"What're they doin' workin' here at night?" Sunny whispered.

"Looks to me like they're digging holes."

"Oh yeah, you're right, but what the hell for?"

Sunny and Totò crouched and looked down into the garbage valley until their legs as well as their lungs were ready to give. Just as they were about to walk back down toward the fenced-off perimeter of the dump, a truck came rumbling up the access road, its running lights a piercing red in the near total darkness. It pulled off the road and headed toward the brilliant circle of light where the bulldozers were at work. Sunny and Totò held their breath as the truck pulled up alongside one of the holes dug by the bulldozers. The bed of the truck cantilevered slowly into the air, and some sort of dense liquid began pouring out into the hole. The acrid smell of garbage, which had begun to recede as their senses grew accustomed to the reek, became overpowering. It was as if someone had flung acid into their faces.

After the truck had emptied all its foul liquid into the hole, one of the bulldozers pulled up with a jerky motion and began to push piles of garbage into the hole, gradually burying the sludge under a mountain of junk. All evidence of the truck's dark contents was soon obliterated.

Communicating with hand gestures, Totò and Sunny turned away from the infernal scene and headed back toward the hole in the fence through which they'd entered Fresh Kills. As they walked back across the cemetery, their lungs filled with relatively clean air.

"What the fuck's going on, Sunny?"

"I dunno. I don't get why they're dumping shit at night, and why they're bringing it in trucks. Usually all the garbage comes in on barges during the day."

"Whatever that shit was, it stank even worse than the rest of the dump."

"Yeah, that's the truth. Must be some evil stuff."

"Just thinking about it makes me wanna start pukin' again."

"My dad's been coughing too."

"What're we gonna do about this, Sunny?"

"I dunno, Totò, I dunno. You think I should talk to my dad?"

"Well, he works at the dump, right? Perhaps he knows about what's going on at night."

"Yeah, and even if he don't, maybe he can find something out. Okay, I'll talk to him."

 

* * *

 

The next morning, Sunny crawled out of bed at what felt like the crack of dawn. Her dad was busy putting on his heavy overalls when she stuck her head into her parents' bedroom. Sensing her presence, Pippo stopped dressing and turned toward his daughter.

"You going to school today dressed in your pajamas or what?" he said, an amused glint in his eye.

"Nah, Dad, I still gotta get ready for school. I wanted to talk to you about something."

"O Dio! Don't tell me you're pregnant."

"Naah, course I ain't pregnant! I wanted to talk to you about Fresh Kills. Some kids told me that they heard weird noises coming from the dump at night. And it's been stinking even worse than usual recently. You know about something strange going on there?"

Pippo's dark eyes flashed, all signs of amusement suddenly draining out of his face.

"Sit down, Annunziata."

Oh shit, Sunny thought. Now I'm really gonna get it. He's gonna take out all his shit on me, as usual. Don't dress that way, don't listen to that crap music, don't cut Sunday school.

It was worse than the Ten Commandments. Ever since her dad came back from Vietnam, he'd been obsessed with how he and his buddies who stayed to fight the gooks had been betrayed by the hippies and his sack-of-shit brother. He lashed out at anyone who questioned the hell he'd gone through and the sacrifices he'd made. Now that Sunny was no longer a cute little innocent kid, he was starting to see her as in league with the Great Betrayal as well.

"No, there's nothing strange going on at the dump," Pippo said. "I been working there for twenty years, and the place reeks worse every year. After a while, though, you don't smell it too much. So don't worry about me or Fresh Kills."

"Yeah, but Dad, it's not just you that's sick. Totò and a bunch of other people are getting sick. Shouldn't we do something if the dump is leaking poison into the neighborhood?"

"Listen, Annunziata: I don't want you nosing around there, okay? It's not just that the place stinks. Fresh Kills is like an iceberg. There's a lot more to it than meets the eye. You don't want to start digging up trouble. That's an order. Stai zitta, capisci?"

"Okay, Dad, I hear you," Sunny replied. She did her best to put on a sweet smile as she stood up to walk out of the bedroom. I shoulda known it's no use talking to him, she thought. Never question authority—that should be her dad's motto. He's just like all the other idiots on this island, Sunny thought. A buncha sheep. 'Cept he's worse: he probably knows how fucked up the situation is, but he's too chicken to do anything about it.

 

* * *

 

"Wha'd he say?" Totò asked when Sunny arrived at the playground, where they and the other students of Tottenville High waited before the first bell rang, summoning them to morning assembly. He, Sunny, and the rest of the punks always hung out in a corner of the playground as far away as possible from the other kids, with their elaborately blow-dried Farrah Fawcett and Leif Garrett hairstyles, their atrocious leisure clothes, and their spine-chilling love of the Bee Gees.

"He told me to shut up about Fresh Kills."

"Wha?"

"Yeah, he said there wasn't anything funny going on there, and that I should stop talking about it."

"No way. But what about his cough?"

"I get the feeling he's scared of something. It's like he knows something's up, but he don't wanna let on."

"I hate to say this, Sunny, but maybe there's a reason he ain't talking. Maybe he ain't scared. Maybe he's on the take."

"What're you talking about, Totò?"

"I mean, don't get offended or nothing, but we both know that the garbage biz is pretty mobbed up."

"No, Totò, he can't be a part of that."

"Look, I ain't saying he's a made man. I mean, you know how things work around here. You wanna keep your job or your business, you gotta learn to be a little cooperative. Sometimes you gotta learn to look the other way, or to take a little kickback that makes you part of the whole thing. You get dirty once, and you can't never get clean."

"I can't fucking believe it. If he did that, then he's even more of a jerk than I figured he was."

Maybe this was the explanation for the glint of fear she'd seen in her dad's eyes. Maybe he was terrified of what was going on at Fresh Kills, but also part of it. While the thought didn't make her feel much more sympathetic toward her dad, it did make her really angry. Who, she wanted to know, was screwing around with her dad? Whoever it was, they were victimizing not just her dad, not just her family, but Totò and the rest of the people living near Fresh Kills too.

"Listen, Totò, I wanna find out what the fuck's going on at Fresh Kills. I don't care what my dad says. Can you meet me again tonight?"

"Sure thing, Sunny."

"What about a car? Can you get us a car?"

"Yeah, I think my dad will probably lend me his. But we better not fuck it up. He'll fucking kill me. He don't give a shit about most things, but he really loves his Camaro. We ain't gonna take it into Fresh Kills, are we?"

"No, Totò, we ain't going driving through the dump. I wanna find out where those trucks are coming from."

 

* * *

 

That night, Totò parked his dad's Camaro on a dark stretch of Arthur Kill Road near one of the main feeder roads to the dump. He and Sunny slumped down in the seats and waited for something to happen.

"Hey, Starsky," Sunny said eventually, wiping some of the fog that was accumulating on the windows off with her sleeve, "it's starting to get cold in this fuckin' jalopy of yours."

"Yeah, I don't know 'bout you, Huggy Bear, but I'm getting cold
and
sleepy."

"We been sitting here for hours. Detective work ain't all it's cracked up to be."