Bloodroot (15 page)

“I never did take to that part of the program,” he said. “And fuck you and your straw very much, by the way.”

“So, you drink, you don’t go to meetings,” I said, “you do other things I’m pretty sure aren’t in the twelve steps. What parts of the program did you take to, exactly?”

“Aren’t we a ray of fucking sunshine this morning.” He raised a finger, a hunk of bagel inflating his cheek. “I got the ‘heroin is real bad for you’ part. And that the people around it are as poisonous as the drug.” He shook his head, reaching for his coffee. “I don’t want to be poisonous anymore.”

“So Al isn’t into any of that stuff?” I asked. “Santoro, either?”

“Al doesn’t deal, if that’s what you’re asking,” Danny said, layering butter on his second bagel. “And he doesn’t use. I don’t think he ever did. Back in the day, he just liked throwing parties in that giant house, playing the big shot and getting his Gatsby on. He doesn’t even do that anymore. I know that for a fact.”

“And Santoro?”

“He’s partial to real estate, contracting, shit like that. Couldn’t say for sure, but drugs seem dirty for him.”

“Not like murder,” I said, picking at the rim of my coffee cup.

Danny set down his bagel, reaching out for a napkin. He wiped his hands and mouth, crumpled the napkin into his fist. “You give away that money yet?”

I stared at him across the table.

“Didn’t think so,” Danny said. “Far as I know, Santoro’s never killed a man in his life.”

“He gives the orders,” I said. “Like bin Laden. Are you going to tell me that prick’s not a murderer?”

“Are you calling yourself Al Qaeda, Professor?” Danny asked. “You did follow orders like a good soldier.”

Danny pushed up from the table and walked into the living room. He picked up the remote and turned on the TV, raising the volume way too high. I left my bagel half-eaten, grabbed my coffee and joined him on the couch.

“You think the three of us will ever watch another game together?” Danny asked

“Me, you, and bin Laden? Probably not. I hear he’s more into horses and soccer.”

“No, asshole,” Danny said. “Me, you, and Dad.”

I took a deep breath. “If the Jets make the Super Bowl, maybe.”

“So pretty much never,” Danny said. His shoulders slumped. “It’s un-American, fathers and sons not watching football together. It’s borderline criminal.”

“How’d you meet him?” I asked.

“Dad? Well, Kevin, when a man and a woman really love each other—”

“You’re fucking killing me.”

Danny muted the TV, tossed the remote on the coffee table. “I can’t tell you anything about Santoro that’s gonna make you feel better, Kevin. I’m sorry. I’ve never met him, never even seen him, and I don’t want to. All I can tell you is he’s got reach, big reach, and there’s not a cop or criminal that doesn’t know his name. And I owe him everything I have.” He stood, picked up the envelope of cash and ran his thumb along the bills. “No offense to Mom and Dad, but I’m better protected and better taken care of now than I’ve ever been in my life.” He laid the money on the table. “And now you are, too.”

Sitting before me on the edge of the coffee table, Danny reached out and palmed the back of my neck. Our knees connected. “This is who I am now, Kevin. I’m not evil. I’m not a hit man, or a drug dealer, or a terrorist. And I am off the shit. I swear it.”

I lowered my eyes. Danny’s fingertips pressed into the base of my skull.

“Why’re you doing this to me?” I asked.

“Look at me,” Danny said.

I did, seeing nothing but those haunted blue eyes.

“You wanna know things?” Danny asked. “I sucked dick in doorways for heroin, Kev. Married guys, cops, and, yeah, teachers. I robbed dope from a guy with a broken bottle in his throat. Who knows, I might’ve put it there. I stole everything I could get my hands on from our folks, used you till you almost went down with me. I killed a fucking kid and ditched the body. After what I’ve seen and where I’ve been you think
illegal
means anything to me? It’s like that night in the car three years ago. We’re all guilty, Kev. The only difference is some of us get caught and some of us don’t.”

I jumped up from the couch. “Wait, wait, wait. You
killed
someone?”

Danny rubbed his palms into his eyes. “Yes, I did. By accident. With a needle.” He looked at me, his shoulders hunched, fingers splayed open on his thighs. “Remember that punk Tommy? He died in my arms, OD. I was the one that tied him off, that shot him up. Al, it happened at one of his parties, the last one, he helped me hide the body out at Bloodroot, right before he ditched me at the clinic. Tommy stayed hid and I got clean.”

“The favor you owed,” I said.

“You got it,” Danny said. “I get outta rehab, Al puts me up at his place, asks me to help
him
help a guy named Santoro, says there’s work to keep me off the street. I’m gonna say no? Because it might be a little shady? Might be, God forbid, illegal?” He raised his hands, gazing around my apartment like he couldn’t remember how he got there. “And now here we are. It’s not like I planned it. At least we’re in it together.”

He stood, hands out in front of him with his fingers curled. He stared at his hands like they held a crystal ball. “And I see the beauty of it, this new life I have. I see opportunity. It’s coming.” He looked up at me. “Al and I are more than even by now, but I got a lot to make up for, to you, to Mom and Dad, and Santoro’s the way. I just need a leap of faith, a little brotherly love. Like the leap I took coming back to you.”

WE WATCHED THE FOOTBALL GAME. WE TALKED NO MORE ABOUT
the big opportunity Danny saw coming our way. Danny yelled and screamed at the TV with the ups and downs of the game, absorbed in it. I sat beside him on the couch, vaguely aware of him and sick with the images he’d jammed into my head like, well, like a broken bottle. Had I heard anything about Tommy’s disappearance, what was it, about a year and a half ago? Maybe read something in the paper? I remembered nothing. Worse, I felt no sympathy for him; he’d come to the end he’d been headed for when I met him.

Had Danny left himself out of Tommy’s story my only response would’ve been some sarcastic joke. If anything, unfair as it was, I wasn’t anything but mad at Tommy. Like it was his fault, the goddamn lightweight, my brother had crossed paths with the mysterious and seductive Santoro.

Danny left not long after the Jets had taken their usual Sunday beating, me mute and nodding at his promise to call and check up on me later in the week.

I wasted most of the evening reading the Sunday
Times
cover to cover. In the book review section I saw a new Jefferson biography I wanted to read, maybe use for class. I wondered if the department would cough up the thirty-five bucks. Then I remembered the envelope from Santoro. Before I went into the living room, I grabbed a cigarette from the porch and lit it, carrying Danny’s leftover coffee to the couch for an ashtray. I’d thrown out all my real ashtrays when I’d quit. I counted the money.

Five thousand dollars.
Fifty
hundred-dollar bills. Same as what I got paid for each class I taught, five months’ work. Only this was cash, Ben Franklin’s honored visage, fifty times over, tax-free. And for one night.

The rest of the year’s rent with money left over. Food from a real grocery store, not that dirty bodega around the corner. A cab to and from work instead of the bus. Fuck that, a used car? I squeezed the bills in my fist. The insurance might break me; I’d have to be careful. Or make more money. It was an option. The money gave me choices. Instantly. A lot more than I had when I got home from work last Friday afternoon, a few crumpled Washingtons and a torn Lincoln in my wallet. What I had now was options.

I also had the option of finding the local police station and telling them everything I’d seen and heard over the weekend. I could leave Danny out of the story. Or tell them I’d come in on his behalf. It was a ridiculous thought, stupid and uninspired. Something people only ever did in the movies and even then it hardly ever worked out. Only a fictional conscience could be that strong, or that naïve. I’d never even told my folks about Danny stealing the paperboy money from the junk drawer in the kitchen. I was really going to turn him over to the cops? What would they do anyway?

Santoro couldn’t be who he was without having taken care of the cops a long time ago. No. He’d never be touched. Not him, not Bavasi. Danny and I would take the fall, or worse, if Santoro got ahold of us. What was done was done. There was no going back. Meanwhile, I held in my hand five thousand dollars that nobody knew I had.

Leaving the money on the couch, I turned off the living room light and peeked out the balcony doors, checking the block for any windows that gave a view into mine. I didn’t see a single one. I told myself I was being careful, not paranoid. Maybe if I lived in a decent neighborhood I’d be worrying too much. But I didn’t. I could though, if I did a few more jobs with Danny. I could get away from that bullshit on the corner. What if there was more innocuous work? It wouldn’t pay as well, but I could live with that.

God, what was I thinking?

Maybe at the dump I’d breathed some of that poison smoke Danny had told me to avoid. Maybe I’d stood too close to the fire.

I grabbed up the money and headed for the bedroom. In the dark, I stuffed the bills under the mattress. Enough gangster fantasies. I had real work to do, real responsibilities. I grabbed my book bag and hurried into the kitchen. I collected my student essays and stuffed them into the bag. I called a cab and found my keys. But before I went downstairs to wait, I went back into the bedroom. I dug the hundreds out from under my mattress and, rolling them up, packed them deep into the toe of an old shoe. Forty-nine of them. One I stuffed into my pocket. And then, before I locked up the apartment, I ran back inside for one more bill.

 

 

 

ON CAMPUS,
I waved to the security guard as I unlocked the front door of the history building. He was used to seeing me on weekends and in the evenings, when I liked campus the best. Some students hung around, but not many and none of them mine. Even better, most of the other teachers were gone.

I hit the mailroom first. An essay sat curled in my box. Fishing a pen from my bag, I scrawled
late
across the top. I hadn’t gotten through enough of the pile to even notice I’d been missing one. For a moment, it seemed unfair to penalize the student when I hadn’t noticed until Sunday night her paper was late. It wasn’t like she’d held up my progress. Still, rules were rules. Most of my students were freshmen. I had to teach them deadlines were serious business in college, even if I filed their grades late.

The spare, cold office I shared with five other instructors looked like we’d all bolted out the door for a fire drill; none of us was anywhere near organized. Except for Kelsey. Her desk always looked ready for summer vacation. It was her voice that scared me out of my skin as I unpacked at my desk. A dozen essays flew into the air.

“Jesus Christmas,” I said, student papers fluttering to the floor around my feet. “You scared the heart out of me.”

She shouldn’t have. She liked working at the same times that I did. In fact, sharing the department office with her on Sunday nights was the closest thing I had to a regular social life. I hadn’t even realized I was feeling so jumpy.

Kelsey leaned in the doorway, her hands jammed in the pockets of her faded jeans. Under her corduroy suit jacket, complete with leather patches at the elbows, she wore a Man United jersey. She’d wrapped her russet hair in a braid that reached the small of her back.

“Getting ready for midterms?” she asked.

I stood, tossing the papers on my desk. “Midterms? I’m still trying to get through their first set of essays so I can get on with grading the second set.” I sifted through the debris on my desk, searching for a copy of my syllabus. “When the hell are midterms?”

“Two weeks,” Kelsey said.

I breathed a sigh of relief. “That’s forever. You had me nervous there for a minute.”

“Seems you were already nervous. You feeling okay?” She frowned at me. “You don’t look so good.”

My hands shook and my face burned like she’d caught me holding that dead guy’s get-away head, not a stack of student essays. Like she knew everything I’d done that weekend. Impossible. There was nothing to know. As far as Kelsey was concerned, I hadn’t done anything that weekend. Nothing.

“There’s fresh coffee brewing in the lounge,” Kelsey said. “I made enough for both of us, but maybe you shouldn’t have any.”

“I haven’t had enough,” I said, rubbing my hands together. I felt my face contort into an ugly fake smile. “That’s the problem.”

“I’ll get us some, then.” She smiled and backed out of the doorway.

I listened to her combat boots echo on the tile of the empty hall, convinced for a moment that she was calling the cops or the fellas in the white coats. Well, nothing I could do about it now. Let the Fates decide. I cleared some space on my desk and sat down to work. Maybe if I looked sane and innocent when they broke down the door . . .