Loving Day (11 page)

“So what the hell happened to it?” she asks. I don’t know what she’s talking about. I keep listening, waiting for her to make sense.

“Your dad’s car? You said he never threw anything away.”

When she drives off, I get the gate open, but it takes a minute because my hands are shaking. Instead of heading straight for the mansion, I follow the dirt path that goes alongside the property to the garage. Its windows are broken and boarded; dirt sticks to the surface of the doors as if they haven’t been opened in decades; but I still can’t believe I hadn’t thought to do this before. There’s a lock, a padlock. I have my father’s keychain looped into my own. I take it out and try a few of the keys on it and start to consider the possibility that I’ll have to kick the glass out of a windowpane to get in, but then a key fits and turns. I pull off the lock and the garage door opens out. I can feel the dust filling my nostrils but through it I can already smell my daddy’s car. I can feel what it was like to ride on the cobblestones of Germantown Avenue with its spring suspension, what it was like when I fell asleep in there and he would pick me up and carry me to bed inside.

I get the garage door up all the way and there it is. The 1968 black Volkswagen Beetle. And there are the two crackheads, sitting inside. Their eyes ghostly and wide and frozen as they stare at me from its front seats.

My eyes are even wider.

—

I slam the garage door down hard, fast, quick, like the scream that shoots out of my mouth. I slam it down like the force will fuse it shut again, lock it and the vision away from me. I slam it so hard I fall backward to the ground, but I don’t care about that because I can crawl away without taking my eyes off the door if they come for me. I get a good fifteen feet away, and the wood’s still shaking. I should get up, but if I do I won’t be able to stare as hard at that garage door and part of me is certain that’s the only thing sealing the barrier. And then the wood stops. It’s stopped shaking. And it’s silent. And maybe this whole thing is a mistake, the vision a weird reflection of my own face. That when I stop breathing like this, it will return to normal. But the door springs up again before that can happen.

My dad’s black Beetle flies toward me.

I roll over. I roll and roll. Everything is spinning. I can feel the air, the wind of it as it passes. The Beetle’s still going. The Beetle shoots down the hill. That’s my father’s car. They’re taking my father’s goddamn car. I push to my knees and then to my feet to chase after it before they can get the gate open, before they take him away from me. But they don’t stop at the gate. They’re going to ram into it.

The gate’s iron clasp is rusted shut. The thick chain lock sealing it just adds to the message of closure. The Beetle’s got a good speed going by the time it gets to the entryway, aiming for the middle. I hear the crash, see broken glass powder out in the streetlight. The whole length of the fence surrounding the property shakes in response, angry at moving after a century of reliable immobility.

I stop running toward them, because I’m pretty sure I am now the owner of a his and her set of dead crackheads. I keep standing where I am. I keep waiting for the door to open. Now I just want to see them. I want to see their faces. I want them to see my face. I want them to know I’m standing now. I stare at those car doors. Just keep staring. Then I see a man standing fifty yards away, but over to my right, past the house on the other end of the lawn, who stares back at me.

I stand, his mirror, across the expanse of lawn. How he got all the way over there, I don’t know, I have no idea, none. But I stare back at
him. I insist to myself that I’m not scared anymore. I have my cell in my hand now, gripped hard enough to break the glass, and it has magical powers that transmit sounds and visions into space. I stand and I don’t move because Tal is in the house, and I have something to stand for. I see the white woman. She also stands, twenty yards to his side. Just as still. Just as silent. If she was there before I don’t know because she’s just a dirty rumor in my peripheral vision. But he keeps standing there, staring at me. It’s too dark to see his face, to see much of anything but his dark bare chest and pants. He’s standing there, arms at his sides, chest out. So still. Standing there like he is waiting for me to state my intent. To tell him why I’m on his land. Tell him what kind of decent man disturbs the peace at this hour. Frozen in that inquiry.

“What the fuck?”

Tal’s voice. I jump. I put my fists out at the sound of her voice, almost as startling as the car crashing. When I finally see her face, dimly through the screened door on the porch, both my fists are aimed in her direction.

“What the hell was that?” Tal asks.

“Do you see people?” I have to know. But she doesn’t look at the lawn. She looks at me.

“You are so wasted,” Tal responds, then shuts the window back on me. It thunders on impact and I hear it echo, off the rotting porch, down the hill, bouncing to the row houses across the street, then coming back again.

I look back at the guy. I look back at the woman. Both gone. Both nothing.

AT THE ENTRANCE,
the Bug sits crumpled and indignant. One of my keys goes to the chain sealing the driveway’s padlock, and I take the chains off so I can yank the twisted metal off its grille. I’m not even scared anymore. Just tired. If I wasn’t, I would take Tal and we would leave this house right now. Run. That’s what we should be doing. Running. This is what I really have to teach her. You can even run away from yourself—eventually, yourself catches up to you, but then you just run once more.

This house is going to burn because I refuse to be trapped inside its crumbling walls. I’m not going to wait years for this place to sell. I’m not going to rent it, and be haunted by tenant complaints every time something breaks, be indebted to it for life. I am not my past. I am not my hometown. I don’t want any crackheads in my future. I’m not going to be stuck back in Philly for the rest of my life, back in Germantown, dragged down by everything I’ve worked so hard to be free from. More important: Tal is not either. It simply cannot happen. There will be fire.

After I call the cops I take the coffee can of dead matches and cigar
butts off the porch, remove the cigar butts, then I walk to the side of the house and dump the remains there. I don’t want to go near the garage because of the crackhead infestation, but I risk it and it’s okay, no one’s there. I dump the rest of the butts and matches inside the garage, in a corner, kick them around a bit for a more natural look. Evidence. When I get back in, I make coffee while we wait for the police.

The crackheads haven’t stolen anything from me. No, they’ve given me the gift of a documented incident to later prove probable cause. Crackheads destroy things. First, their lives, obviously. And then their families. But they also destroy houses. They light fires and they have poor judgment; both things are required if you’re going to be a crackhead. They make houses burn down. They’re not as thorough as meth heads, who have the benefit of their exploding labs, but crackheads have left a respectable number of ruined buildings in their wake.
A crackhead did it
is a reasonable cause of destruction on any forensic report. A history of crackhead infestation is a legitimate explanation for loss of property. It’s all so exciting I catch myself whistling.

“Are you still drunk?” Tal’s wide awake, standing in the kitchen doorway, her hair hidden under the wrap of a pink scarf.

“What? What kind of thing is that to say to someone? To someone who’s your father?” When Tal’s quiet in response, and stands there till I feel my guilt starting to answer for her, I say, “I’m not drunk, okay? Anymore.”

“You’re not high, are you?”

“Jesus, Tal!”

“It’s just, you were a mess last night. And now you’re, like, entirely too upbeat for seven o’clock, Saturday morning. You’re, like, serialkiller upbeat. It’s freaking me out. Please stop.”

“I’m just looking on the bright side. Of things.” In response to that, Tal keeps staring at me. I go back to putting the milk away. Then drinking what I’d poured into a glass. Tal keeps watching, motionless, without comment.

“I need things. And I’m going to tell you what they are.”

I put down the glass, say, “Okay. Hit me.”

“I need quiet. At night. Late at night. After midnight.”

“That’s totally understandable. I do too.”

“And no drinking. Not like never, but not like, on the regular. I mean, wine, that’s okay, but no heavy stuff. Of any kind. I’m done with that. With how it was with my mom, even with Irv. Not doing that again.”

“I don’t drink often,” I lie. “I usually don’t get drunk,” I clarify, which is closer to the truth.

“It just turns people into assholes.”

“Glad you don’t think I’m already an asshole,” I tell Tal. Her response is just to continue staring at me, the process judgment visible in her eyes.

“Good,” Tal says, and keeps standing there. I take another drink of milk. I don’t know what else to say. I don’t know what her life has been like. I know that I wish I had been in it, but I don’t know where she was all that time, really. I know what it is like to lose a mom, but not to lose her mom, and not the way she did.

Tal steps forward, hand outstretched. We shake. And it’s not enough; it shouldn’t be enough. So I pull her in, wrap my arms around her. After a moment, her arms lift up and hold my back. I’ve never held my daughter this long before, and it’s only a few seconds. The thought makes me grip tighter.

Before Tal can pull away, I say, “I’m going to have to go out, get some things this afternoon. But I’ll be back to take you to dance practice, okay? I’ll give you a ride to campus.”

“Oh God, not on the bike. I can’t sit for an hour after I get off that thing.”

“Don’t worry, I’ve got a car now.”

“That car?” Tal says, and releases me to point out the window, where the Constables of the Police of the City of Philadelphia are hooking up their tow.

—

I don’t call George. I call Tosha. I ask Tosha to talk to George, tell her that they’re trying to impound my dad’s car just because of an overdue inspection, a missing registration, and twenty-seven unpaid parking
tickets dating back to 1982. Sirleaf Day’s number leads to a recording of him saying “Hello?” followed by a three second pause. I fall for it, talk into the space, then hear the beep. The joke is old, but young compared to him. Into his voice mail I beg him to get over here before I’m stuck on a bench at the 14th Police District, staring at a linoleum floor. All I get in response is a beep, which is more than the dead expression I get trying to explain that my dad is deceased to the cops. The officers seem pretty intent on having me take “a trip” with them to “sort everything out” until George pulls up.

He’s wearing a fedora and a raincoat. He’s been a detective for four years and yet he’s still playing at it. The awkward part about talking to George is that our friendship is based entirely on the fact that, despite my closeness with Tosha in those younger years, I never tried to seduce the girlfriend who became his wife. What George and I have is not even a real friendship, more of an established truce.

“Sins of the father,” he says, and he laughs at me. It’s the first smile he’s broken since the uniformed guys pulled away. “Man, you got a $3,439 bill on a car that hasn’t had legal tags for two years.”

“Well, it runs. It did last night. Or rolled, at least.”

“It won’t again if you don’t pay in ninety days.”

“Yeah, well, we all got our problems.” I try to shrug this one off. He laughs again. Harder this time, longer. Sighs at the end of it. “So Tosha told you.”

“She told me. Sorry man.”

“You are sorry, but not as sorry as my ass. My life is all kinds of fucked the hell up.”

He slaps his hand on my back as we walk up the hill to the garage. It’s a relatively weak tap, like he knows not to push me too far right now. “What else did she tell you? I mean, what specifically?” he asks.

“She said you moved out. That you come in the mornings so the kids don’t know. She thinks you met someone else. She thinks,” I start to say, and then I pause.

“You want me to help you? You got to help me. Just tell me what’s going on so I can fix it.”

“She thinks you might be fucking some white dude.”

“ ‘Some white dude?’ She thinks I’m gay? What the hell?”

“Hey, I don’t know what’s—”

“You don’t know because it’s none of your business. Man, just show me what you got to show me.”

I open the garage door. I bring him over to the corner to look at the cigarette ashes, but he’s sighing, barely paying attention. I stand on the perimeter of my imaginary crime scene and point to them, like on cop shows. I give him my theory: that the crackheads moved in when my dad was gone. Maybe they were here when he was sick, but he couldn’t do anything about it. “And they smoke too. By this old, wooden house. That’s really dangerous, you know? I don’t want there to be a fire,” I tell him, and say it louder to break him out of his distraction. I try to sound as somber as possible on the
f
-word.
Fire
. Glorious fire. All-changing fire, destroyer of worlds, lifeblood of the phoenix, god of renewal. All that.

“Of course they smoke. They’re crackheads. It’s not like they’re shoving rocks up their noses,” and with that, George pulls his own cigarette out, pads himself for a lighter. He turns, barely even looks at the evidence I have so generously provided.

“That’s some shit, that I’m gay. Man, I
wish
I was gay. I wish I got a pass like that. I’m the opposite of gay: I’m not happy. I’ve been unhappy for a lot of years now; she knows that. And I know—and trust me I know this—I got no no good reason to be unhappy. I got a beautiful wife, beautiful kids, beautiful house and all that, but I’m unhappy. That’s the fucked up thing. If I was gay, I could point to that and say, ‘Sorry, I fucked up. Turns out I’m gay,’ and no one would be mad at me. Instead I’m unhappy with the perfect life and everybody hates me.”

He’s right about this: I hate him right now. That could have been me in his house. Those could have been my kids, even the ugly one. He took that. George is a good cop, because he can read minds. He turns to me and says, “Don’t get no ideas. She ain’t single.”

I know she isn’t single. I knew when I went to Wales, got drunk
every night, then eventually married a woman who would give me her own well-earned “I’m not happy” speech. He gave his wife kids and yet fared no better. You start with “I love you” and then you build everything on those three words, but then it only takes those three other words to strip it all down. “I’m not happy,” and then the misery goes from the speaker to the recipient. Speaking it wasn’t the end to unhappiness, it was the transfer of it.

“Look, man. That’s between you and her. I’m sorry this is happening, but you’re right, it’s none of my business. So…what do I do about the crackhead thing?”

“You move, nigga.”

“That’s not an option.”

“You know how to leave town. Just do it again.”

“I can’t fucking move, George. I’m broke. I got to spend all the money getting this place good enough to sell. I got a seventeen-year-old girl in here to protect and this place is infested with crackheads. So now what?”

“Warren, you’re on the border between Germantown and North Philly. You’re dealing with the side effects of centuries of economic and social disenfranchisement. So yeah, there are drug addicts here. You know this. It’s like complaining there are chipmunks in the woods. Don’t get a gun. You’ll miss and wound them and then they’ll sue you and then you’re really screwed. Just get a security system. Protect yourself, protect your daughter. Buy a Taser if you want—but don’t get a gun unless you’re willing to kill somebody, and trust me, you’re not. Head to a security store. Matter of fact, have Tosha help you, because that woman knows all about that shit. I know she knows all about that shit. You can tell her I told you, that I know, that she knows, all about that shit.”

“You know she loves you,” I tell him. It seems like the right thing to do. Not for him, but for me, because he’s starting to piss me off and Tosha is my true friend and I like the way he flinches when I say it. I know Tosha does, though. I’m sure no matter how bad he’s done her over the years, she still does, and would take him back. I say it also because
I want someone to say that to Becks every time I come up in a conversation.
I know he still loves you
. And I want it to hurt when she hears it, too.

“I know she loves me. And I love her. But saying that shit is easy and doing it, working on it year in and out, keeping it alive when it feels like it’s slowly killing you, that’s fucking hard. I’m tired, bro.”

George sniffles that broad nose and walks off down the hill toward his car. He’s bald, but shaves it so you can’t tell, and there are enough brown men still doing that for style that he gets away with it. He puts his fedora back on, and between that and the raincoat he probably never has to pull the badge to prove he’s a detective. Still, it doesn’t look like a costume on him. It just looks like detectives must face some sorts of rainstorms they haven’t told the rest of the world about. When George turns around to stop and look at me, he’s got a dramatic strut going too. All he’s missing is a synthesizer soundtrack and he’d be a living embodiment of the investigators we watched on prime-time television in our childhoods.

“ ‘Are you gay?’ ”
he repeats, yelling to me over his shoulder. And then he laughs again, pointing at me like he’s caught the playful prank I was setting. “Man, I’d suck a thousand dicks if I could get away with that excuse.”

—

With Tosha’s credit card, I buy sixteen closed-circuit video cameras with night-vision and thermal detection, all of which feed wirelessly to an external hard drive connected to my laptop. I get the cheapest cameras I can because I want low-quality images. I want blurry faces and dark shapes. I don’t want proof that any specific crackhead is haunting my house, I want proof of a general, unknowable infection, something to show the insurance company later without making some pathetic wretch’s life even worse. I buy Digital Night Vision Binocular Goggles, 1x24 zoom, with head straps and a carrying case. I buy a M26c Taser gun with laser targeting, and a baseball bat—Triton Senior League model SL12T aluminum composite—the only sporting equipment in
the store. Then I buy two more bats, one for each door in the house, another for upstairs.

“So he says I know surveillance? Damn right I know surveillance. Glad he knows I know surveillance,” Tosha says a little too loud. She’s been talking too loud since she picked me up, arriving a few minutes after George drove away. Tosha laughs and the sound is red, bitter, dry. It scares the clerk behind the counter and he motions to go help another customer, but she won’t let him leave either.

“Can we get a GPS tracker? A little one. Real little. Hardly noticeable. Something like that.” Tosha points to the one she likes. It’s as small as a cigarette lighter. To me she says, “Oh I know all about George. I know all his secrets now.”

“You still think he’s screwing some dude?”

“Come on,” she tells me, brushing off her earlier theory. “The only man that bastard loves is himself. This isn’t about another man. It’s even worse. It’s a goddamn white woman.” The white guy on the other side of the counter pretends he didn’t hear that, keeps his expression passive and servile. We have truly arrived in a new age.