Authors: Tom Piccirilli
The girlfriends and their little brothers and sisters breezed past Flynn in vague succession. He did the job he was implicitly given. He entertained the kids. Danny couldn’t control himself, didn’t even make an attempt to pretend that the girls meant anything to him. Flynn felt his brother was self-destructing through intimacy.
Patricia Lee Waltz was somehow different.
Flynn recognized her as having been to the house before, but Danny appeared to think it was her first time. She didn’t just want to hop in the sack. She moved around the house asking questions. Pointing out photographs and saying, “Who’s this? When was this taken?” It threw Danny off. He’d somehow forgotten and misread her.
He didn’t know how to handle the situation and actually looked around trying to implore someone. Flynn was on the floor setting up Candyland. Patricia’s little sister Emma was a scaled-down version of her, with the same straight, long hair they had to constantly keep parting like curtains so they could see out.
Flynn picked up on his brother’s dismay. He didn’t fully understand it but he noticed the tension in Danny growing. He wasn’t answering any of Patricia’s questions but that didn’t stop her, so she just kept asking more. Emma started playing the game without Flynn. She was taking his turn to pick his card and move his piece.
Since the old man’s funeral, the house seemed infused with their father. His presence filled the rooms to an enormous degree, until you could smell his breath. Flynn found himself talking aloud, answering questions he thought the old man was asking him.
Patricia wanted to see Danny’s room, really wanted to
see
it. She looked at his sports trophies, the local newspaper clippings yellowing on the corkboard, and asked why he didn’t get a scholarship to college. She asked if it was his knees. He never answered. She checked the nicks and dents in his bedframe. She pulled novels down off his shelves and wanted to discuss themes, characters, ambiguous endings. Her favorite book was Albert Camus’
The Stranger.
His opinion seemed to matter. She had corn-flower blue eyes that were bright with a monstrous attention. Danny drifted from her and she put her arm out to grab his jacket. He fought for footing and lost. She pulled him closer. She told him she was pregnant.
Emma turned a card and giggled. She rolled the die and slid pieces across the board, enjoying herself. Flynn heard his dead father cough.
In the front window, glare from the sun framed the Charger at the curb with a wreath of golden fire. Flynn had to turn his head aside. Emma glanced at him as if to ask what was the matter. He looked back and the day had dimmed. She touched his shoulder and some kind of protective urge overcame him. He gently took her wrist. He didn’t know why.
Stumbling into the room, Patricia wore a look of amused irritation. She went for Danny’s arm again and he shrugged free once more. Danny’s hand moved like a beaten animal slinking closer and closer. He took her elbow and guided her through the living room, giving her little jerks and shoves. She smiled more broadly and let out a giggle.
Flynn knew it was time to leave. It had somehow become the only thing to do. He started collecting the cards and pieces even as Emma moved around the board. She didn’t really mind and began to help him. He folded the board and put it back in the box and put the lid on. The old man was still coughing. Maybe he’d never stop no matter how long he was in the ground.
Danny said, “Let’s go for a ride.”
They drove out east toward the Hamptons, Danny opening it up on Sunrise Highway and hitting triple digits. The girls loved it and screamed with excitement. He squinted and brooded the whole time, occasionally catching Flynn’s eye in the rearview.
Flynn felt a dark and trembling sensation thrumming through him like a black nerve. He put his hand on the back of Patricia Lee Waltz’s neck and she half turned in the seat to smile at him. She gestured for him to move closer and she pressed her fingers to his lips, outlining them, smoothing them. Flynn thought he must be in love.
He knew the facts about sex and pregnancy. He didn’t fully believe them, but he knew them. His father had given him the crude information one afternoon while they watched Rita Hayworth and Glenn Ford twisting through their love-hate relationship in
Gilda.
Gilda was supposed to be sleeping all around Buenos Aires while Glenn Ford kept the truth from her nutty husband. For some reason, the old man took this as the perfect launchpad for explaining the wet and awful realities of lovemaking and birth. Flynn was annoyed and wanted to watch the movie.
They picked up a cop somewhere in West Hampton, where Danny gunned it through the area making sure the engine was roaring and could be heard by everyone in their mansions. He kept glancing at Patricia’s belly while she commented on the walled-in acres of the estates. Emma appeared oblivious to everything going on in the car and she continued a steady silence. The weight of it pressed in on top of Flynn. He told her to buckle up.
The cruiser fell in behind them and hit his cherry top. The siren was almost loud enough to drown out the Charger’s rumbling cry. Danny burned rubber through a red light, narrowly missing a couple of well-dressed women in the crosswalk. Their hair swept up across their eyes and they spun on their heels. Everyone on the side walk stopped and looked. For a moment it felt like time had quit grinding across the world for everyone but them. A terrible rush of apprehension filled Flynn, but he didn’t know what he was afraid of. It wasn’t the speed. It wasn’t because he thought Danny would crash. He’d never crash, he was incapable of it.
The cruiser peeled after them and Patricia braced her feet against the dash, biting back a groan of terror. Danny turned around, looked at Flynn, and grinned for the first time that day. Finally, he was having fun.
Patricia yelled for him to stop and pull over. She started rapping him in the arm as they sped around traffic, hitting side streets and careening up on lawns. Danny’s lips were upturned in a small smile of desolate simplicity. It was their mother’s smile. It was their father’s smile.
Emma reached out and gripped Flynn’s elbow. There was no expression on her face. She stared straight ahead between the front seats, through the windshield as the world raced by them. Danny kept glancing back at Flynn. Flynn knew he should probably say something to his brother, but he couldn’t find his voice, couldn’t find the words that might help him to discover his voice.
This all seemed to have been acted out many times before. Flynn could feel the wide turns coming up before they actually happened. He knew when they were going to take a left or a right, or when Danny would rip out on the straightaway.
Another cruiser joined the chase. And another. Every time a new siren went off Danny let out a thick laugh from the center of his chest. The Charger was filled with flashing lights. The police tried to close in and bump them, until one of the drivers spotted Emma and Flynn in the backseat. Flynn let his gaze drift over the police officers’ faces and thought they all looked worried as hell but just angry enough to make drastic decisions. Danny let out more quiet laughter as Patricia begged him to slow down, to give up, to stop and think of the baby. Whenever she said the word
baby
the Charger would zag and the tires would squeal.
Flynn wondered what the baby would look like. With almond eyes and a buried temper that would release itself in strange but memorable ways. Flynn tried to calm Patricia by reaching forward and rubbing the back of her neck. She lunged from his touch and let out a small scream. In the confines of the car the sound went on as if she was being slowly knifed.
Flynn sat back and stared out the window again. They were near the ocean. He watched the saw grass and cyclone fencing go by, the sand sweeping across the road. There were four cruisers behind them now, the cops no longer bracing the Charger but staying no farther back than two car lengths. Everybody really hustling.
He knew that Danny still had more to do. That his brother hadn’t, in fact, done anything yet.
Emma stared at him as if to ask,
What’s going on?
“I don’t know,” Flynn answered, although he understood the wasted tension within his brother and inside the car. Deep in Flynn as well, and it had also lain within their father. The old man was still coughing. Flynn put his hands to his ears to drown out his father. The sirens couldn’t do it. Nothing could do it. He wanted to yell for his daddy. He wanted to dig up the coffin and relieve his grief. He hoped Danny would drive into the sea. He wanted to go into the water with him.
There is a futility in having no enemy. Danny didn’t hate the cops, he wasn’t even angry with them. He had grown too lonely for fate. He could no longer bear the strain of their mother’s sighs. His own second-rate failures had surmounted his capacity for belief. His regrets were shallow but numerous. His mediocrity had driven him out of his head.
He found an estate that had its sprinklers going. He let out a bark of real humor and jumped the curb, then downshifted to get enough traction to tear up the lawn and spit mud everywhere. The police followed across the grass. Danny didn’t even hate the rich, it was just something fun to do.
They had the bullhorns blaring, shouting orders. They’d run his plates, and knew he was a speed demon and airport dragster. Everyone was shouting at the same time so that the sky filled with the rumbling, irritated voice of God.
Danny let out a nasty snicker. It held more meaning than anything else that day. He’d come to a decision, and Flynn, somehow knowing the sound—that laugh being in his own blood—sensed what was coming next.
Danny swung out behind some shrubs trimmed to look like lovers twined in each other’s arms and got the Charger back into the street. He hit seventy on a groomed road of million-dollar homes that ran a quarter mile toward the ocean.
Flynn put his arm out across Emma Waltz, the way Danny always threw an arm across Flynn’s chest whenever he was about to hit the brake. Emma put her hand over Flynn’s and the sudden depth of feeling made his head swim. He shut his eyes and braced his feet, gritted his teeth against the abrupt lurching and halting of the car. Patricia screamed Danny’s name.
A row of four cruisers were parked across the end of the street, backed by saw grass and sand. Twenty-foot-high wrought-iron fencing, stone lions, topiary hedges, clinging ivy, imported Italian-tiled retaining walls and huge sconce planters bordered the road. There were five police cars behind them now, all of them skidding and bashing bumpers. The tension was concentrated and insane. Rage wafted through the air, you could pluck at it with your fingers. It had happened so quickly, and all for nothing. There was no reason for it and never would be.
The entire day seemed like a dream Flynn had declined to awaken from. He kept thinking it shouldn’t be so hard to change what was happening. The sirens and lights and shouting filled the interior of the car but nothing could drown out Danny’s snicker. It was still going. It would always be going. Danny was going to take it into the ocean with him.
Tears filled Flynn’s eyes but refused to fall. In the years to come, this would be the moment of his greatest guilt. That he did not cry. The fact would torment him at the oddest moments: the afternoon he lost his virginity in the back of the Charger; on his wedding night as Marianne sat on the hotel bed, pulling off her shoes; the day his boy Noel wasn’t born; in the hospital the first time he visited his mother, carrying flowers, and she told him he shouldn’t have gone to such trouble. You can deny nearly everything, but you can’t dismiss your own failure to weep.
Patricia had blood on her lips. Flynn saw that she was trying so desperately to love and save his brother that she actually believed she could do it. That it could be done. Perhaps it was a function of her fear. Perhaps in her own way she was as reckless as Danny was. They both struggled against the clichéd unimportance of their own lives. He could never be a bitter, unemployed ex-jock sitting in a recliner sucking down beers in front of daytime television. She would not exist without the romantic drama of an
amour feu
between strangers. Flynn felt a strange respect for the wild courage of their stupid convictions.
Danny told her to get out and she wouldn’t. She mentioned the baby again. He shouted that there was no baby and she screamed that there was, there was. Danny reached back and undid Flynn’s seat belt with the barest brush of his finger and grabbed him under the arm. It hurt but Flynn didn’t make a sound. Painfully, Flynn slid across Danny’s lap until he was nearly behind the wheel. He took the steering wheel in his hands and Danny started to push him out the window. Flynn refused to let go. He struggled to hold on, biting his lip, clamping his eyes shut. Danny yanked and shoved and finally broke Flynn’s grip. Danny kissed him on the top of the head, said, “Good boy,” and threw him out the window.
The wealthy filled their windows, eased out onto their lawns, and watched with eagerness. The cops drew a bead on Flynn like he might be a lit stick of dynamite. When they finally realized it was a ten-year-old boy, they made whining doggie sounds and gestured to him, holding their arms out like he was a baby taking his first steps. He heard wind chimes and ringing phones. He held his ground and took Emma from his brother’s arms, helping her to the ground. Together they walked away without another word. Flynn started up the street, with Emma Waltz close on his heels. She still appeared intensely calm.
The police rushed toward them with their guns drawn and Flynn managed to wag his head. They kept coming closer and he turned and bolted back toward the Charger. It was a moment of weakness. It wouldn’t do Danny proud, seeing him like this, but Flynn couldn’t help it. He called his brother’s name and saw Patricia turn her head to peer back at him through the rear window. She smiled at him.