Gravesend (18 page)

“Save it.”

Stephanie closed her eyes again.

“My Stephanie,” Mrs. Dirello said.

Stephanie straightened up and pushed her shoulders back and forth, trying to work a kink out of her neck. “Ma please,” she said, her voice raw. It sounded like her throat had been scraped out.

“The scare you gave me.”

“I know, I know.”

“It was this one, wasn’t it?” Mrs. Dirello refused to look at Alessandra now. “She got you started on pills?”

“No, Ma,” Stephanie said. “Nothing like that.”

“What happened? What was this about?”

“Give her a little time,” Alessandra said.

Mrs. Dirello said, “Listen to this one. Like it’s her daughter here.”

“Ma, I do,” Stephanie said, tweaking the IV needle in her arm, “I need a little time.”

“Time?”

“Just let me get my head straight a little here.”

“I’m your mother.”

“I’m just, I don’t feel good. Maybe you could go downstairs, get us some coffee, give me just a few minutes.”

Mrs. Dirello looked like she’d been hit by a truck. “Downstairs?”

“Yeah, just grab me a coffee and a
Daily News
.”

“Send this one downstairs,” Mrs. Dirello said, pointing at Alessandra, “and I’ll stay.”

Stephanie put up a hand. “I can’t. Mommy, just please.”

Mrs. Dirello trudged out of the room, looking like a fat nun on her way to the gas chamber.

“Christ,” Alessandra said when Mrs. Dirello—pausing once to gather her rosary and then again to tie her shoes—was finally gone, “I don’t know how you—”

Stephanie said, “Just forget it.”

“Steph, what happened?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“I just, I just saw what I was responsible for.”

“You?” Alessandra petted Stephanie’s hand. “You weren’t, you aren’t responsible for anything that’s happened.”

“I just kept saying to myself, ‘What if?’”

“Come on, Steph. Don’t do that.”

“I’m pathetic. Look at me.”

Alessandra stroked the hair on the back of Stephanie’s hand. It was above and below her knuckles. It was black and fine. It didn’t look beautiful anymore. “You’re not, you’re not.”

“I wish I’d died.”

“Don’t say that.”

“It’s what I wish.”

“Why would you say that?”

Stephanie closed her eyes. “I’m tired.” She opened them and yawned. “Did you hear anything about Conway?”

“No,” Alessandra said.

“Are you lying?”

“I’m not lying.”

“Where were you after you left the fire? I tried to call you.”

Alessandra thought back to her messages. Maybe if she’d picked up, Stephanie wouldn’t have taken the pills. “I went to the city.”

“I really wish I would’ve died.”

“Please don’t.”

“How dumb am I? I’ve always been dumb.” Stephanie started to pick at the IV needle in her arm.

“Leave that alone,” Alessandra said.

“I can’t even kill myself,” Stephanie said. She gave a little laugh, but there were tears in her eyes.

Alessandra stroked Stephanie’s hand again. “Stop.”

“Look at my hand.” Stephanie held it up. “The hair.” She rolled up the sleeve of her gown. “My arms too. Mary Parente used to call me Teen Wolf back at Kearney.”

“Forget that.”

“I have a mustache.”

“You don’t.”

“I do.”

“Stop saying bad things about yourself.”

“Conway—”

“Conway what?”

“I made Conway sick, I bet. I make everyone sick.”

“You don’t.” Alessandra hugged her. “Stop talking down. You’re okay, everything’s going to be okay. You need some rest, that’s it.”

The person in the next bed put the TV back on. They sat there and didn’t say anything else to each other. Mrs. Dirello came back into the room with two coffees from a machine and two push-up ice pops. Stephanie didn’t want anything. Alessandra went out to the waiting room at the end of the hallway and curled up on a vinyl loveseat scattered with magazines. She couldn’t sleep.

Sixteen

The lady cop didn’t even give Eugene or Sweat a second look. Sweat was hunched at the wheel with his right hand at twelve and his left arm out the window as they passed an accident at the on-ramp to the GWB. No tolls this way, thank God, but there were cops in windbreakers scattered around because one fuckhead had rear-ended another fuckhead. The Brooklyn Bridge hadn’t been a problem, and the FDR had been a zipping mess of taxis and thumping car service cars—you weren’t doing a hundred on the FDR, you were in the clear. Now Eugene wondered if their luck had run out.

But it hadn’t. No one noticed them.

Eugene sat up in his seat as they passed over the bridge and tried to look through the dark down to the Hudson. “You ever been over here?” he said. “This side of the bridge?”

“Give me a sec,” Sweat said. “I don’t want to miss this.”

There were signs for the Jersey Turnpike, for the Palisades Parkway, lanes and lanes of headlights and brake lights and silvery glints from the road. Sweat had the GPS on and followed signs for the Palisades, looking nervous behind the wheel for the first time Eugene could ever think of.

“Went up to Westchester that once to visit Uncle Ray Boy in jail but it’s my first time this side of the river, first time going upstate,” Eugene said. “My mother and grandparents stopped going to Hawk’s Nest after he went away.”

“Got a cousin in New City.”

“Where’s Old City?”

Sweat didn’t laugh. “Cousin’s got a treehouse. It’s got like electricity and shit. Got a basketball hoop out front, too. And a movie theater in the basement.”

Eugene rolled the window down. “Nice air over here.”

“Cold. Shit ton of trees.”

They were on the Palisades now—Eugene was following along on the GPS—and Sweat was doing the speed limit, fifty, as cars rocketed by him in the left lane doing seventy, eighty.

“These motherfuckers are crazy,” Sweat said. “Deer just jump out at you up here. They’re in the trees, waiting.”

Eugene had never thought about deer. “No shit?”

“My cousins have hit deer up here about thirty times. Fucked up a Camry. Fucked up an Explorer. Fucked up a Maxima. Deer everywhere. You can see their eyes.”

Eugene scanned the treeline for deer eyes. “What color?”

“What color what?”

“What color are their eyes?”

“Green or some shit like green.”

Eugene swore he saw eyes everywhere now, little pinpoints of green off in the trees. He wasn’t nervous about anything else—Uncle Ray Boy, the card game, being on the lam—but these deer had him almost shitting his pants. What if one of them just jumped out at the car? Fuck would happen? He’d seen movies. Broken glass and blood. Flipped over cars. “They’re all over,” he said.

“Tell me.”

“What if one comes at us?”

“Heard you’re supposed to just plow through it, don’t hit the brakes.”

“Damn.”

“These fucking deer.”

“Why they got so many?”

“Overpopulation, yo.”

“Damn.”

Eugene felt tense, on edge. So this was Big Bad Upstate. Deer and trees. Dark roads. Ticks. Families in minivans. It was probably really just the suburbs but everything over the GWB was upstate to him. It was pitch black out now but he tried to imagine trees changing colors, houses on cliffs, rivers that weren’t nasty, towns where people wore fall sweaters and took their kids trick-or-treating on Halloween. Halloween was coming up, and he’d loved it as a kid. Dressing up like a ninja or soldier or some shit. But his mom and grandparents never let him out to hit up houses for candy because the older kids would be out bombing with eggs and shaving cream. And once he was ten, it was too late. He wanted to be the one out bombing. That shit was done by the time he was of age. Dead like things got dead. Cops crawled the streets, were on the lookout for punks in hoodies looking to bomb. Up here, though, he bet that little kids got dressed up and walked through the fall weather with pumpkin buckets and got good shit at houses where there were pumpkin lanterns on the porch and that older kids toilet papered trees and threw eggs at gas stations and cars and front doors.

“You ever get a tick?” Eugene said to Sweat.

“At my cousin’s. Just standing in the backyard. My cousin held a lighter to it and then got the thing out with tweezers.”

“Must be so many up here.”

“Everywhere. All those eyes, times that by about a million. A billion ticks out there right now.”

“Fuck, dude. My skin’s itching.”

“Ticks are some scary shit. My cousin’s good friend’s sister caught Lyme’s disease and got crippled from it. Can’t walk no more. Drools. Eats apple sauce only.”

“What?”

“I’m telling you.”

Eugene rolled up the window. “Those shits fly?”

Sweat nodded.

The GPS was bright in the car. A little cartoon map. Eugene thought about the names of things. Palisades Parkway. Nanuet. Rockland County. Brake lights blasted the road in front of them. He wrapped his arms around his chest.
Ticks. Shit.
The road got darker and the speed limit went up as they passed Sweat’s cousin’s town, New City. Eugene wanted to make the joke again about Old City, but he skipped it.

“They got snakes up here too?” Eugene said.

Sweat looked away from the road and nodded. He made this-big hands over the steering wheel. “Rattlers. Copperheads. Cobras probably.”

“Cobras? You’re bullshitting.”

“I’m saying there’s cobras.”

“I got a one-eyed snake right here for you.” Eugene pulled out his waistband and aimed a thumb down his pants.

“Inchworm’s all that is.”

Eugene punched Sweat in the arm, and Sweat swerved the Mazda into the left lane. “I got me a seven-inch monster.”

Sweat said, “Chill.” He got the car back under control.

Eugene looked back at the treeline and saw green eyes piled deep. He thought about the deer and wondered what they were waiting for. “You gonna slam on the brakes if a deer comes out at us?” he asked Sweat.

“Don’t know. Gonna try to keep going like they say.”

“Must be hard. There’s only like a second.”

“Less.”

“Part of a second. We’re fucked we hit a deer. Changes everything.”

“Maybe we get lucky.”

“Not everybody up here hits them, right?”

“People hit deer
all the time
.”

“But not
all the time
. No one’s hitting one now.”

“Someone’s hitting one somewhere.”

“Man, you’re probably right. Just not in front of us.”

“You ever eat deer?”

Eugene said, “Eat it?”

“Venison,” Sweat said. “Shit’s good. My father comes upstate, hunts, comes back with all this deer meat. Got a freezer at work full of it. Mostly keeps it for us.” He quieted down and focused on the road.

Eugene saw signs for Bear Mountain. He pictured a mountain crawling with bears. Bears rising up and growling. Bears killing fish. Bears sniffing out campers. Deer everywhere and snakes probably and now bears. He couldn’t imagine being lost in the woods here. He’d have to climb trees and jump from branch to branch to escape the bears and snakes. He was going to ask Sweat about bears, if they jumped out in the road too, if he’d ever eaten bear meat, but he stopped himself. He didn’t want to give a fuck about bears.

He curled up against the window and switched his thinking. He thought about Uncle Ray Boy. He wondered what Uncle Ray Boy was doing right that minute. Probably push-ups or sit-ups. Maybe smoking a cigarette. Maybe having a cup of coffee. He got the impression that Uncle Ray Boy didn’t sleep much, if at all. He’d wanted to lay down when he first got back to the house but that didn’t mean sleep. Probably part of why he was so fucked up was because he never slept anymore. Holding up the card game would bring him back to life, Eugene knew it. Uncle Ray Boy would sleep well at the first motel they stayed at on the road.

Trying to picture the house in Hawk’s Nest wasn’t easy. Eugene had seen pictures of it in old crumbling albums with black pages but those pictures were thirty or forty years old. The house had a strange history. His great-grandmother, who ran a roominghouse there, sold it to his great-grandfather before his grandfather and grandmother even met. That was in the 1940s and his great-grandmother had already owned the house for twenty years then. So it had been in his family for ninety years. For a long time it was where everyone—the Calabreses and all the cousins—went on weekends. Grandpa Tony drove them up in his old Chevy Caprice and stopped at bars along the way. Great-Grandma Mary, they called her Big Grandma, was in the backseat with Eugene’s mom, Uncle Ray Boy, and Aunt Elaine. They’d play board games. At the house everyone played volleyball and they had Sunday dinners around a big oak table in the kitchen. Grandpa Tony burned the garbage in a barrel on the side of the house. Eugene had grown up hearing these stories. In the early Eighties, the house got robbed. Things got stolen that no one expected. The big oak table. A couch. A china closet. Antiques. Trips were cut down to once a month and then twice a year. Uncle Ray Boy got too cool for it and stopped going when he was in fourth grade. If the family went, they’d leave Uncle Ray Boy with Teemo and his mom. When Uncle Ray Boy got in trouble-trouble, no one went to the house anymore period. Eugene imagined that it just got really cold inside with no heat and the paint peeled off and the wood rotted and mice ran wild and bats lived in the attic. He tried to picture it now and he couldn’t really. He thought maybe there was an axe leaning up against the wall by the back door. Other horror movie stuff like that. He figured that Uncle Ray Boy probably brought girls up there and they probably took showers and he thought that girls taking showers in the country had to be better than girls taking showers in the city. He pictured flimsy shower curtains, mealy soap, no mold on the walls. He wondered about the woods around the house. He wanted to ask Uncle Ray Boy about deer and bears and snakes. He dealt with them how? That axe? A shotgun?

Eugene knew that Uncle Ray Boy would be happy to see him and Sweat. It was a good thing they’d gone back and staked out Mr. Natale’s some more. He didn’t want Uncle Ray Boy to think he hadn’t prepared. Even if they hadn’t learned anything useful, he wanted to be able to say to Uncle Ray Boy that they’d watched the place for hours.

“You did good work, kid,” he could imagine Uncle Ray Boy saying.

He’d always wanted to be called
kid
like that.

Eugene fell asleep and woke up as they passed the Monticello Raceway.

“Dead up here,” Sweat said. No one else was on the road. They were on Route 17B.

Eugene angled his head out the window, trying to see horses in the stables.

“Look at this place.” Sweat pointed at a strip club as they passed it. It was a shitty house with a trailer next to it. The name of the place was Searchlights and a faded sign close to the road said: “Clean girls, topless only, no cover, $3 beer.”

“Imagine what that shit’s like,” Eugene said. Then he settled back into the seat and didn’t say anything else. He went back to worrying about deer. This road was the darkest yet.

Uncle Ray Boy’s house was frightening. They pulled up the sloping driveway, overgrown with weeds and high grass, and parked next to a Honda Civic. The GPS had gotten them there, but it hadn’t been easy. Abandoned-seeming roads with crumbling houses and forgotten mills. Sharp turns. Narrow roads with drop-offs on one side and no guardrail. The sun was coming up now, but it’d been hard to follow directions with no streetlights. They were here, though. And the house was a piece of shit. Paint chipped away. Rotting wood. A limp roof. Dirty shades on the windows. A barrel in the yard for burning stuff. Broken down trucks with tarps over them.

“This is where your Uncle Ray Boy stays?” Sweat said, cutting the lights.

Eugene said, “Guess it is.”

“Looks like
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
. Some shit like that.”

“We get in there, I try to convince him about the card game, just let me do the talking. Take that shit outta your ear, too.”

Sweat plucked the Bluetooth from his ear and put it in the center console.

“We get the piece from the trunk,” Eugene said.

“Why?”

“Show it to him. Prove our level of commitment.”

“What if he says no?”

“We convince him.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. The gun maybe.”

Sweat didn’t say anything.

They got out of the car, quietly closing the door. Eugene watched his breath in the air. He went over to the Civic and looked in the window. “He must’ve stolen this shit right here.”

“Civics everywhere,” Sweat said.

Sweat went back and opened the trunk of his Mazda. Eugene followed behind and then dug around under the spare tire. He took the gun out. “Sweet,” he said, laying it out in his palm. He tucked the gun in his waistband the way they did in the movies but he had trouble making it stay. His pants were too baggy and his boxers weren’t strong enough to keep the gun from flopping out. He put it in his jacket pocket instead.