Gravesend (12 page)

“Just a girl,” Stephanie cupping her hand over mouth, “she slept with.”

Conway, angry, grabbed a couple of fries and stuffed them in his mouth, but they tasted pasty and he spit them out into his cocktail napkin. He needed his scotch. He pictured Alessandra fucking some other blurry-faced girl, using what, a strap-on the way they did in girl-on-girl movies he’d seen? Behind the girls, he saw Pop, curled up and bleeding on the floor, dead. And he saw Ray Boy sitting in the corner of the room, watching, his hoodie snapped low over his brow.

“What’s wrong now?” Stephanie said.

“That makes me mad.”

“She said she wasn’t really a lezzie, that she was just open to different experiences, but she was acting like a lezzie.”

The waiter brought the drinks back and Conway practically huffed his Dewar’s, spilling it out the sides of his mouth and down his shirtfront. “It’s just another thing.”

“You’re in love with her?”

Conway held back. Didn’t say anything. He couldn’t talk about the dreams he’d had about Alessandra all through grade school and high school. Not to Stephanie. He was still picturing Alessandra and the anonymous chick, Pop dead on the floor, Ray Boy peeping the whole thing.

Stephanie’s face went flush. “Why do you love her? I don’t understand. You don’t even know her.” She lifted her gin-and-tonic and drank some with a quivery flourish.

“Take it easy, Steph. Maybe don’t drink so much.”

“‘Don’t drink,’ he goes. I’m
finally
drinking.”

“Why are you upset?” Conway said, grinding his teeth, not believing—with all he’d been through—that now he had to talk Stephanie down.

She rubbed her chin with the heel of her palm. “You love her, you don’t even know her.”

“I know her. From school, you know that. I don’t love her, it’s just . . . I don’t know, a thing. It doesn’t matter. It’s not real.”

“How come you don’t love me? I’ve known you forever. I’ve never left. I’ve been here the whole time.”

Conway grasped what was going on and couldn’t really believe it. Steph? “I can’t, I don’t really, I just don’t think—”

“Forget it! Just forget I said anything! Please.”

People were starting to look at them, the waitstaff concerned, other patrons whispering about whether this was a break-up or just some domestic spat.

“Let’s get out of here, Steph,” Conway said. He left forty bucks on the table, more than enough to cover the bill, and led her outside.

There was nowhere to go. Conway had talked Stephanie down and had convinced her they should find somewhere quiet to talk. Just talk. Somewhere quiet wasn’t her house. They both knew that. Not with her psycho mother. And, Conway explained, it definitely wasn’t his house with Pop sick, resting, not up for any kind of company.

They were driving under the El in Stephanie’s mother’s car. She looked like a cartoon duck behind the wheel, elastic like Christopher Lloyd, her hands never seeming to settle in the right places. Conway wanted to ask her to pull over and let him drive, but he resisted.

“How about down by Nellie Bly?” Stephanie said.

Conway said, “Just park there?”

“I guess, yeah.”

“Stop at that liquor store on the corner of Bath and Bay Parkway first. Let me get something.”

She barely missed hitting a parked car as she made a right turn onto Twentieth Avenue, went through two red lights before she got to Bath Avenue, and almost rear-ended a car service guy idling his Lincoln outside the liquor store. Conway jumped out, ran in, and bought three short dogs of wine and a quart of scotch.

He came back to the car, opened one of the short dogs, and sucked it down in a snarling fit.

Stephanie said, “Gosh, I think you have a problem.”

“Golly gee, you think?” Conway said. “Have some.” He passed her the short dog, and she sniffed it.

“Don’t think I should. I’m already a little buzzed. It’s not smart to be driving like this.”

“Just taste a little.”

She took a mouthful and swished it around before swallowing. “Not as gross as I thought it’d be.”

“Let’s go over by Nellie Bly.”

She took them to the strange little amusement park buried on Shore Parkway. The slide you went down in potato sacks was the only thing Conway remembered from his own trips there as a kid. A junkyard fence surrounded sad carousels and bumper cars and gloomy splash pits and other worse-than-street-fair-quality rides. It made Coney Island look like Disney World.

Conway saw a couple of Hasidic families playing a shoot-the-clown-in-the-mouth water gun game through the fence.

The street was filled with close-together parked cars. No action otherwise. A squashed gloom hung in the air. The rush-heavy Belt thrummed nearby.

Stephanie had parked behind an abandoned white van, the hood torn off, the wheels flat and looking like lumpy black feet.

“Looks like they changed the name of the place,” Stephanie said. “Adventurer’s.”

“Christ, that’s terrible.”

“I always liked the name Nellie Bly.”

“I always pictured some old black-and-white lady with an umbrella,” Conway said, slugging wine and then passing it to Stephanie.

She took a drink. “I’m sorry for before.”

“Don’t be.”

“I know I’m ugly. I know you don’t want me. I know you have other things on your mind. Ray Boy. Alessandra.” She paused. “I’m not pretty. I’ve never been pretty. I tried to wax my upper lip once, I did, but it just made it worse.”

“You’re really nice, Steph. We’ve always been friends.”

Stephanie seemed like she was about to gag but then she regained her composure. “You come down here ever as a kid?”

“Few times, I think. Nothing special.”

“This was another place Nana Dirello brought us. I remember being pretty sketched out by it. All amusement parks are pretty sad but this was sad in a different way. Now it’s another kind of sad.”

“Everything’s some kind of sad.”

“I guess.”

They sat there and passed the wine back and forth. Conway almost wanted to tell Stephanie about Pop being dead at home, about how he was going to kill Ray Boy and then torch the house with Pop in it. He almost wanted to confide in her.

She was getting really drunk now, he could tell. The cheapo wine wasn’t agreeing with her. Her eyes were loopy. Her lips twitched.

“Kiss me,” she said. “No one’s ever kissed me.”

“Never?”

“Never.”

“I don’t think so, Steph.”

Stephanie whimpered. A tangle of spiderwebby snot dangled from her nose. “Please, please, please.”

“Like you said, I got a lot of things on my mind. I just, I just can’t.”

“Close your eyes. Pretend I’m Alessandra. Can’t you do that?”

“You don’t really want me to do that,” he said.

“Why not?”

“It’s too sad. Too strange.”

“I don’t care. It’s what I want.”

Conway said, “Fuck it. Fine.” He closed his eyes and leaned in, imagining Alessandra, that Hollywood look, the scarf, the black hair, olive skin, bright smile. It was working. Then came the kiss. Stephanie didn’t know what to do. She didn’t open her mouth. He had to push his tongue between her teeth. Clammy taste of rotgut wine and disco fries and gin. Stubbly feel of her upper lip. Dead fish stillness. Conway’s image of Alessandra shattered. Instead, he pictured Stephanie as she was: glasses, mustache, trembling drunken mouth. He pulled away.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know how to kiss.”

“It’s okay,” Conway said.

“Maybe we could do something else.”

“No, Steph.”

“We could have sex. I’ve seen movies. I could just—”

“Stop.”

“I could just turn around and you wouldn’t have to look at me. I don’t really have to know how to do anything. I just want to know what it feels like.”

“This is crazy. You’re crazy.”

She reached over and touched his arm. “Let’s,” she said. “Please.”

“That’s what you want? Fine.” He jerked around in the passenger seat—there wasn’t a lot of room to move—and got his jeans and boxers down. He wasn’t hard, couldn’t imagine that it was going to happen, but he popped the buttons on her shirt and felt around inside the cup of her bra. “Take your pants off.”

She struggled to get them down and then just sat there, her hands across her thighs. She was wearing pink underwear that didn’t really qualify as underwear. They were bloomers, not soft and cottony, but towel-thick and streaked with lint. Her bush spilled into the crack between her thigh and where the bloomers cut into her skin.

“How?” she said. “There’s not a lot of room here.”

Conway said, “Take your underwear off and climb on top of me.”

“Do we need, like, do we need protection?”

“I’ll pull out.”

Stephanie pushed her underwear over her knees. Conway saw her bush. It was like certain yards in the neighborhood that hadn’t been maintained. The only thing missing was windblown debris and a plastic statue of the Virgin Mary.

He opened the scotch, clicked off the cap, and took a good five second pull. He wiped his mouth with his sleeve and passed the bottle to Stephanie. She sipped a little.

“We don’t have to,” Conway said.

“I want to. I do.”

He took the bottle, replaced the cap, and put it on the floor by his feet.

“I do,” she said again.

“Come on then.” He reached next to the door and reclined the seat.

She scrabbled around to get in his lap and then landed there awkwardly, her doughy legs cradling him, her head down.

He reached up and lifted her bra over her tits. They were horribly white, her tits, freckled and pimply, with strange, big nipples that looked like cut-open half-grapefruits. He closed his eyes and played with them, trying to get hard. He thought of Alessandra.

Stephanie panted like an out-of-breath dog.

When Conway finally got something going, he spit on his hand and rubbed her puss open and then pushed himself in.

She grunted, fell onto him, trying to move rhythmically but failing, grinding in a sloppy circle, her puss gluey and tight.

Conway pounded upwards. Alessandra was moving on him in his mind’s eye. And she knew exactly what to do. She didn’t just flop around. She touched his neck and his chest, said things, smiled, her hands up in her hair and then back on his chest.

He finished quickly, forgetting to pull out, and pushed Stephanie from his lap.

She settled in the driver’s seat and collected her clothes. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“Don’t be sorry.”

“You finished?”

“I did. I didn’t pull out.”

“That’s okay?”

“It’ll be fine. Just sit up. It’ll be fine.”

“I’m sorry if it wasn’t good.”

“You deserved better than that for your first.”

“I’m glad it was you.”

Conway curled up and looked out the window, anywhere but at Stephanie, who was shaking, he could feel it across the seat. They were both bottomless in her mother’s car on the street outside what used to be Nellie Bly, now Adventurer’s, on creepy-as-fuck Shore Parkway, and Conway felt like a dead criminal, in the ground for years like landfill garbage, ashy bones you wouldn’t even spit on.

Ten

Eugene’s Monday was one for the ages. Phone off, he walked the streets of Bay Ridge and Sunset Park. He saw some sweet Puerto Rican girls, sitting on stoops, headphones on, drinking soda, and watched them from a safe distance. Then he circled back and went to the Sixty-Ninth Street Pier and just stared out at the water. The Statue of Liberty. Some big ass cruise ship passing under the Verrazano. Rats on slimy black rocks. Sketchy fishermen with red buckets and warm beers climbing over the railing to cast out. The rotten egg stink from the Owl’s Head Wastewater Treatment Plant. He bummed a cigarette off a Chinese guy in a Lakers Starter jacket and flip-flops. When the guy spoke up, it sounded like metal banging against metal. Dude wanted something in return, but Eugene couldn’t tell what, so he took off and snagged a light in the park.

When Sweat got out of school, they hooked up and drove back to Coney. Sweat’s cousin’s buddy, this dude Cesar Cisneros, told them about a girl named Knee Socks, eighteen, and they went to her, and Sweat screwed her first and Eugene got sloppy seconds and he discovered that she was called Knee Socks because she wore these ratty skull-and-crossbones knee socks from Target.

Eugene asked Sweat’s advice about Uncle Ray Boy on the way out of Coney. “I gotta get him back on track. Fuck am I gonna do?”

“You’re gonna get kicked out of school,” Sweat said.

“They won’t kick me out.”

“I think they’re gonna.”

“Fuck that. My uncle used to be the shit. What happened, you think?”

“Dude probably got butt-fucked so hard his brain’s a mess. Some big motherfuckers in jail. Cocks like
Lord of the Rings
axes.”

“No way.”

Eugene figured his mother was out looking for him and wondered if she would call the cops. Sweat’s would be the first place she’d look, so he had to be careful there. But he had to go there because there were no other options.

Sweat snuck him into the basement through the lift-open doors in the backyard. There was a crawl-space under the stairs, next to the rack of homemade wine that Sweat’s dad was so proud of. Eugene had tried the stuff once and thought it tasted like motor oil.

Sweat came down every hour with reports. Eugene’s mother had called. She was worried. She had Uncle Ray Boy out looking around the neighborhood. The image of Uncle Ray Boy driving around the neighborhood looking for him made Eugene laugh. Sweat said his mother acted like it was the end of the world but she told Eugene’s mother that he definitely wasn’t there.

On the next two trips, Sweat brought him down a smuggled slice of Grandma pizza, some porn magazines, and an old school Gameboy.

Eugene put on his iPod and listened to Ice Cube, Dre, Snoop Dog, Wu Tang.

Sweat’s mother came down at ten and did a load of wash. Eugene could hear her clomping around. He peeked through the keyhole and saw her leaning over the washing machine in frumpy boxers and an oversized sweatshirt. Her knockers hung to her waist. When she was done, she huffed up the steps. Sweat came down fifteen minutes later with a pepperoni stick, a blanket, and two frilly pillows from the upstairs couch.

Eugene put his head down and tried to sleep. He couldn’t. He played the Gameboy until his eyes got sandy and, even then, what must have been sleep didn’t feel like sleep at all.

When Sweat left for school the next morning, Eugene snuck out the lift-open doors into the cement-bright backyard and hopped a fence into a neighbor’s side alley. Sweat’s block was somewhere he didn’t need to be. Eugene’s mother knew him well enough to know he’d turn up there at some point even if Sweat’s mother wasn’t lying about him not being there when she called.

He hopped fences, came out a few blocks away on Fourteenth and Seventy-Eighth. His limp made him stand out. He was afraid some cops with nothing to do would spot him and give him shit for not being in school.

Trouble was he didn’t want to be found by anyone—not the kind of found where he got dragged home to his mother and some bullshit punishment, where he had to go back to OLN on his hands and knees, begging not to be expelled—but he wanted to, needed to, find his Uncle Ray Boy.

Uncle Ray Boy had no haunts that he knew of. He wasn’t sure he’d even been out
-
out since he showed up in the neighborhood, but Eugene figured if he went anywhere he’d go to The Wrong Number. Teemo bartended there. Say Uncle Ray Boy was looking for Eugene and needed a break, a cold beer (did the poor fucker even drink anymore?), he’d almost certainly go where his old wing man was pulling on-the-house drafts.

So Eugene headed to The Wrong Number.

It was a long walk, and it was damp out. Eugene felt the weather in his leg. He watched the ground as he walked. Counted cracks in the sidewalk. Catalogued cement etchings.
Yanks ‘96 World Champs. Sarah Ruggiero is a Cumbucket. New York Giants, Babeeeeeeee!. MAX LOVES MARIE. DREX WUZ HERE.

Eugene remembered more stories about his uncle’s glory days, how—according to Andy Tighe—they’d scale rooftops to tag places you could only see from the El, how they’d tag subway tunnels, how they’d go to Borough Park and throw bottles at Hasidic Jews, lean out the window and shout, “Heil Hitler!” That was some funny shit right there. Eugene had heard these stories from people all over the neighborhood—Andy Tighe and Teemo since they’d been out, yeah, but also brothers of guys he went to school with and guys he just ran into in the 101 schoolyard or over by Lafayette or even in Coney who somehow knew he was Ray Boy Calabrese’s nephew and wanted to share a tale.

Another thing he’d heard courtesy of Andy Tighe was how Ray Boy had fucked this girl on the hood of his car at a red light on Eighty-Sixth Street. Andy Tighe was in the backseat when it went down. He said the girl—just some chick from Kearney who Ray Boy had picked up that afternoon—slid over, put her head in Ray Boy’s lap, and started sucking him off while he was driving. He stopped at a red light and the girl kept slurping on it. Ray Boy threw the car in park, pushed the girl off, got out of the car, yanked her out the driver’s side, carried her to the front of the car and plopped her down on the hood. He ripped off her dress and just started having at her right there while cars stacked up behind them. The best thing, Andy Tighe said, was that the girl was really into it, that she didn’t give a fuck, that she was writhing around, playing with her tits, moaning. People on the sidewalks stopped to watch. Trains rumbled by overhead. The light changed a few times. Cars were honking, skirting around them, drivers leaning out their windows about to say something and then just being stunned into silence. It went on for like fifteen minutes and then Ray Boy pulled out and shot his load across the windshield. “Hand to fucking God,” Andy Tighe had said when he told Eugene the story outside HSBC one day. “Big glops of jizm right on the windshield.”

That was the guy Eugene wanted to know.

The other things Eugene had heard about Uncle Ray Boy flooded his mind. How he’d gotten blown on the Wonder Wheel by Sissy Taibbi. How he’d punched out Wajahat Hussein outside Loew’s just for being a goddamn Paki. How he’d run around the neighborhood waving an American flag when the Gulf War started and thrown eggs at an Optimo run by some Arabs. How he’d beat up a Mexican who worked at Deno’s for saying something out of line against Andy Tighe. And there were secret things he knew about his uncle as he was. He knew Uncle Ray Boy collected comics.
The Punisher
.
X-Men
.
Batman
. White boxes stuffed with comics in glossy slips filled a closet in Grandma Jean and Grandpa Tony’s basement, and they’d never let Eugene look through them. Eugene also knew that Uncle Ray Boy had kept a poster of Alyssa Milano in a Devils jersey over his bed. He’d seen pictures with it in the background and one day, when he was trying to break into the comic closet, he’d come across it, folded away in a box Grandma Jean had just thrown in the corner next to the water heater. Also in the box was Uncle Ray Boy’s Most Precious Blood yearbook, signed by everyone, girls leaving their beeper numbers. A Velcro Yankees wallet with fifty bucks and a naked girl’s picture folded in a Snickers wrapper was underneath that, an
Out for Justice
ticket stub in the outer pocket.

Eugene stopped on Twentieth Avenue to get a bagel and coffee. He was starting to feel sorry that he’d run out on Uncle Ray Boy the day before. It wasn’t that he didn’t think Uncle Ray Boy would’ve turned him over to his mother. He would have. But if Eugene had just taken a few more minutes, talked to him, made him see, if he wasn’t so stressed from the Bonangelo and Aherne bullshit, who knew what might’ve happened? Uncle Ray Boy might’ve said, “You know what? You’re right. Enough with this act.” And then they might’ve driven off, and Uncle Ray Boy might’ve shown him the ropes, all the good old ways.

Leaving the bagel shop, Eugene saw a Russian guy in a black tracksuit leaning against a telephone pole. He had a goldfishy face. The guy looked at him and smiled and then he started limping around, making fun of Eugene. “You have a very funny walk,” the Russian said.

“Fuck you, yo,” Eugene said, feeling his face go red.

“Fuck me! Fuck me!” The Russian came over and petted Eugene’s head like he was a mangled stray.

Eugene swatted his hand away. “What the fuck?”

“You are very tough. Why aren’t you in school?”

“I’m off.”

“You’re playing hooky, yes?”

“I’m off. Who are you?”

The Russian leaned in and whispered. “I have a job for you. You interested?”

“A job?”

“I give you something, you take it somewhere. I pay you fifty dollars. Yes?”

“You’re going to give me fifty bucks to bring something somewhere?”

“Yes, exactly.”

“What is it?”

“No questions. And you don’t look.”

“Why me?”

“You have a very good face. I trust you, yes? But you also look like you’re not afraid of the danger.”

“The danger?”

“A little risk, huh?”

“You’re just standing there, you say, ‘I’m gonna give this kid a job?’”

“Exactly.”

Eugene shook his head, confused.

“Very simple offer,” the Russian said. “Give a very simple answer. Yes. No.”

Fifty bucks would help. Maybe the Russian was legit. Shit like that had to happen. Eugene had seen it in the movies. Guys like this, they got kids to carry shit because if kids got collared it wasn’t a big deal. They got a slap on the wrist. They didn’t know what was in the package. They were doing a job for this guy who offered them fifty bucks and said don’t peek. What kid was gonna turn down fifty bucks? Fifty bucks meant armloads of candy, Gatorade, baseball cards, cigs, porn mags. For Eugene, it meant surviving on the lam for a couple more days. “I guess,” Eugene said.

The package was small, a manila envelope sealed with duct tape. Eugene turned it over in his hands looking for a sign of what it might be. He’d decided not to open it and take off with whatever was inside. Could’ve been drugs, cash, anything. But it was more trouble than it was worth to get these guys, whoever they were, after him. It was a much better option to go through with the job and get in their good graces. If they kept wanting him to do stuff, the dough would pile up and he could buy whatever he wanted. The Russian had given him a ten dollar down payment and he was getting the remaining forty on the other end. Going through with it would make him a little saint to these guys.

He looked down at the address the Russian had written on a torn piece of brown paper bag. Over on Cropsey by the Shell. The Wrong Number would have to wait. But he’d go there afterward with his fifty bucks and maybe Teemo would serve him.

Eugene was back in his neighborhood now so he had to be especially careful. If his mother had called the cops, Six-Two might’ve been out in numbers looking out for an on-the-loose kid.

He walked with his head down, stayed close to buildings, hugged corners, ducked low when he saw blue-and-whites.

On Cropsey, Eugene stopped at a deli and got an Arizona Grapeade and then continued to the address. The place was next to a crouchy church, a ramshackle little house converted into an old man’s club. Alkie-nosed dudes with hairy ears sat outside on folding chairs. They played rummy on metal tables and whistled. A thousand year old boombox at their feet blasted WCBS.

One of them, smoking a cigarillo, with a mole that looked like bloody birdshit on his cheek, said, “Help you, kid?”

Eugene held up the package. “I’m supposed to drop this off.” He was starting to think he knew who this place belonged to. Mr. Natale. The guy was a legend—he’d smoked Eddie Russo, stood by Gotti, done hard time, made his sauce in jail like
Goodfellas
with the razor-sliced garlic, had been the basis for a character in
Donnie Brasco
, was old school mobster royalty—but Eugene never knew where his base of operations was.

“Inside,” Bloody Birdshit Cheek said, nodding his head in the direction of a propped-open door.

Eugene walked in, package under his arm. The front room was a small kitchen. A fat guy, four hundred pounds at least, in a wife-beater with swirly discs of hair on his shoulders, stood in front of a stove, rolling
braciole
on a cutting board with one hand and stirring gravy with the other. Eugene held up the package. The guy, breathing heavily, waved him in the direction of a back room.