Zombie (31 page)

“This shit’s fully loaded,” I say, playing with the flat-screen TV in the visor.

“My dad loves his SUV,” she says. “He’s a stay-at-home dad, which means he needs his tricked-out family van. Mom makes the moolah. She’s a defense attorney.”

“What does he do all day if he doesn’t work?” I ask.

“He’s a carpenter. Builds and designs stuff to-order, like handmade furniture. He also cleans the house and makes dinner and picks me up from school and coaches my brother’s high school baseball team. He used to play minor league baseball himself, so he’s got a little giddy-up on his fastball, as he likes to say.”

“A real family,” I say. I hold my art in my lap and look at Dad and me and our fucked-up selves. No one’s safe.

“I have a secret too,” she says.

“I don’t believe you.”

“My dad’s also an alcoholic.” Aimee takes her hand away from mine. “He’s not allowed to drive because his license has been revoked. So he stays at home and works with wood and cleans the house and makes us dinner.” She laughs. “Fourteen months sober.”

“What did he do?”

“He was drunk—vodka and Hawaiian Punch. He was going to drive the team bus to an away game when he ran a red light on his way to the school. There were two kids in the backseat of the car he hit. Everyone was banged up good, but thankfully they were okay. Mom left him. Took me and my brother and moved in with her mother. The judge revoked his license and he ended up serving ten months in jail.”

“You are a complex thing,” I say.

She says, “A compound bone fracture will always heal, but it takes re-breaking the bone to get it to heal in the right place.”

T
he SUV jostles along the cobblestone street in front of the art exhibit as we slow to a stop. Several cars pull out of parked spots, holding up traffic. A door swings open and Mr. Rembrandt appears, walking quickly to a parked car, unlocking the door, checking his watch, and disappearing inside. His lights shock on and he, too, backs out into traffic, two cars in front of us. Finally, the line of traffic picks up and Aimee continues on toward Camden Yards. At the next red light, Mr. Rembrandt is only one car away from us. “Where do you suppose he’s going?” Aimee asks.

“No,” I say.

“It could be fun,” she says. “Come on. Let’s be bad together. We don’t even have to get out of the car.”

“You ever follow someone before?” I ask. “Never,” she says. Then, “You?”

“We need to be sure that he doesn’t see us, okay? This is serious.”

“This first date just got even better,” she says.

“We need to keep at least a car distance from him,” I say.

“You’re so nervous,” she says. “This is a night of firsts. You should be excited about this. And if we’re really good at this, we can open our own business.”

We kiss quickly before the light turns green, but no tongue this time.

“Let’s make a bet,” she says. “Winner gets a kiss whenever they want, no matter the company, no matter how awkward, no matter how uncomfortable the circumstances.” She thinks, stopping at a four-way stop and then proceeding through, speeding to catch up,
before saying, “I bet he is en route to a booty call. Mr. Rembrandt is getting some tail.”

“I bet not. I bet it’s bigger than we think.” I roll down the window for air—the cold air to keep me calm and collected and focused on what we are doing. “Drive slow,” I say. “Drive very slow. We don’t know where we’ll end up.”

Mr. Rembrandt moves like a shadow through the streets, past piles of garbage lining the gutters. We keep far enough back, the way we think spies would. We keep a distance in case he turns around.

He cuts through the Puerto Rican neighborhood—men and women dancing on the sidewalks to tinny salsa-type music from car stereos and boom boxes on stoops. A man smokes a cigarette and tries to coax women into joining, unsuccessfully.

Mr. Rembrandt passes the recently remodeled porn theaters and sex shops with neon-trimmed window displays with mannequins wearing purple strap-on dildos and hanging from sex swings bolted to the ceiling. The marquises to the porno theaters promote Sexy Saturdays with a matinee of one Coke, one candy, and one ticket for five bucks. The movies are
Fuck-motional
and
RoboTits III
. A street vendor sells exotic fruit next to several park benches where homeless men and women sleep sitting up, their grocery carts tied to their legs.

Mr. Rembrandt reaches the quiet community of Little Italy. Old men in slanted caps sit at glass tables outside their row homes, smoking stumpy, fat cigars, sipping on clear alcohol and tiny cups of coffee. Some play cards. Speak in Italian. Telling long-winded stories. Their friends, laughing. Old women gather inside, louder than the men, occasionally yelling through the screen doors to the men. The few children that are awake chase each other in and out of the parked cars, pointing flashlights at each other, yelling either
TAG, YOU’RE IT
or
NO, YOU MISSED ME
. Tourists step out from the Italian restaurants that smell of garlic and fried foods. Middle-aged men with slicked back hair and dark sport coats and women in bright dresses and unnecessarily tall high heels clip-clopping down
the sidewalk. The men buy flowers from the peddlers selling overpriced single red roses. At a red light, a peddler approaches me and says, “Don’t you want to buy your beautiful woman a rose?” I look away from him as he talks, hoping it hides what he’s saying, but I’m fairly certain Aimee hears him, which makes me feel bad because I don’t buy her one. The light turns green and we continue on.

We pass a parking lot and an empty building surrounded by barbed wire. Mr. Rembrandt crosses over a quiet street where a few whores flag down passing cars and pedestrians. The longer we keep going, the less I know where we are, and the farther back we need to keep in order to remain invisible as fewer cars are between us and him. He snakes through locked-up warehouses with broken glass windows and burnt brick until he finally turns down a side street where the homes are consumed by darkness and something else.

This is Tiller Drive.

A
imee parks behind a dumpster, filled with debris and broken scaffolding, kills the headlights, but keeps the engine running. Tiller Drive rolls out in front of us like a ghost town battlefield. Huge potholes crater the street like it had been bombed with heavy artillery. The street is empty except for the potholes. Immediately, I picture Goo Babies blood-screaming down the street. Two dozen abandoned row homes border the street on both sides, everything marked for demolition with notices stuck to the red brick. WARNING: WRECKING BALL. Cinderblocks and plywood cover where the windows and doors should be. Rembrandt’s brake lights burn up in the black as he slows to a stop. Where the fuck is this guy going? In a wasteland of warehouses, Tiller Drive and the few streets that surround it will soon be leveled to dust. No one would find us back here. We are nowhere. The demolition notices don’t lie—a wrecking ball waits patiently on the sidewalk, surrounded by a small army of Caterpillar construction trucks.

Rembrandt’s car reaches the end of the block and parks. His brake lights stay lit, red oval eyes, casting a blood glow across the street. Aimee and I look at each other, our mouths open, our eyes wide.

“Where are we?” she asks. “I thought I knew. I thought this would be different.”

“He can’t be out here all alone,” I say. “He’s smarter than this, I know it.” I look for any signs of light, from a highway or corner store or overlook or something but see nothing in any direction except blackness and the blood glow from Rembrandt’s brake lights.

“Jeremy,” Aimee says, her voice suddenly cracked. “He’s not alone.”

I follow her distracted eyes past the empty backseat to the road as a pair of headlights appear low to the ground. “What the fuck,” I say. The car passes the last warehouse and the alley behind Tiller Drive when another pair of headlights pops up and another. “Get the fuck down,” I say, grabbing Aimee’s hand. We get low in our seats as white light shoots through the darkness and cuts through the SUV. I can hear the soft growl of each car engine as they pass us and turn onto Tiller Drive. A careful parade of cars is making its way through the bizarre backstreets of gutted warehouses to this condemned street. Aimee closes her eyes and mouths the Lord’s Prayer, beginning again when she reaches the end. I time the headlights in Mississippi seconds as they cut across the inside of the SUV and darkness rushes back in on us. I peek out through my passenger side window to see Tiller Drive reanimated.

Cars park on both sides of the street, but no one gets out. They park and wait. From this angle I can still see Mr. Rembrandt’s car, but his brake lights are off. He appears to still be inside his car as well—a black shadow surrounded in darkness. Cars continue to coast onto Tiller for a bit until the entire street is full. Not an open space in sight.

Aimee opens her eyes and covers her mouth. She moves her hands only to ask me a question. “What do you see?”

“He’s not alone anymore,” I say. “They’re everywhere.”

Aimee makes fists with her hands and pushes up off her seat. We stare through the windshield, past the dumpster, to the block party.

A momentary calm settles over Tiller Drive, if only for the briefest of moments, before the men come to life one by one. The men exit their vehicles in a staggered progression. Car doors slam. A foggy, yellow light flicks on above a stoop next to Rembrandt’s car. Rembrandt stands and stretches, arching his back with his arms over his head, before pulling something over his head, covering his face. He hops a pothole and approaches the well-lit stoop. As he enters the yellow light, he looks back in our direction, like he
knows he’s being followed, like he can sense something’s wrong. This is when we see it—Rembrandt is wearing some kind of ski mask—bright blue. Two enormous men wearing black masks flank him—monster men. Their masks are unforgettably executioner’s masks, half-shading the face, sinister, protecting the eyes and mouth. They exchange words—God only knows what—before Rembrandt disappears into the foggy, yellow light.

Aimee and I sit back in our seats and say nothing, listening to car doors continue to slam down Tiller Drive. Nothing makes sense. The mathematics don’t add up. Not this street. Not the men. Not Rembrandt. None of it.

“You’re going to hate me,” I say.

“I really, really am, aren’t I?”

“Do you want me to apologize now or later?”

“Jesus Christ, Jeremy.”

“Stay close.”

We slip out of the SUV and work our way up the sidewalk, hiding behind the parked cars, only advancing if the cars are empty. It doesn’t take long for us to find the foggy, yellow light and see the entrance into a house at the end of the block. The men approach the light too, each wearing black masks of varying shapes and sizes, some covering their whole heads, others covering only their eyes. The men enter the house like ghosts—disappearing like Rembrandt. The two beefcake motherfuckers, the monster men, they stand guard at the base of the stoop, sizing up the masked men who bow their heads before them. Some men have to bow their heads longer than others, but everyone eventually ascends the stairs. Everyone, eventually, enters the house. No matter the man.

A suit with a Half-Windsor tied loose around his neck, carrying a brief case, wears a full head executioner’s mask. A man in jeans and a plain white T-shirt and shaggy hair. A man exits a jeep and stands by his car. He doesn’t go in the house. Instead, he checks his fingernails, digging out dirt. He looks at himself in the window of his car and adjusts his mask. He lights a cigarette, exhales smoke, and walks to the house. Another man appears, this one black, and
he wears one of those old-timer caps with his mask and carries a cane. Another man appears—old, but white with wispy hair and pants pulled up too high to his old man tits. A fat man in a tracksuit. A guy in flip-flops. A frat boy with a hemp necklace. A uniformed policeman minus his belt of weapons. An Asian man in ripped jeans and mustache. Another suit. Another cop. Men wearing sunglasses over their masks, further protecting their identity.

Gone. Gone. Gone.

Fucking gone.

All of them.

These men.

Gone. Gone. Gone.

The air hangs heavy and still on Tiller Drive, like a corpse—the stench of bleach whipping around us. Aimee grabs my shirt and points to the boarded-up windows next to the stoop. A familiar sign has been hammered into plywood, but from the looks of it the sign has been there for a long time—washed-out color, faded lettering. The sign is clearly no longer an option for this building or any building on Tiller Drive. The sign is a realtor sign. The sign is for my father. It reads:
FOR SALE. PLEASE CONTACT BALLENTINE BARKER, AGENT
.

“I need to get inside,” I say. My father’s property seems to be a meeting place for my English teacher and other whackjobs to wear executioner masks and do what exactly? Fuck each other senseless in an orgy? Fight each other for the fuck of it? Too many movie clichés present themselves as possible answers.

“I’m only going to say this once and hopefully you take me at my word. I mean this with all of the love in the world,” she says. “Don’t be a fucking moron.”

My heart feels like a slug crawling out of a salt bath.

“You can walk away. We can forget together. Move on and never look back.” Aimee touches my cheeks. “No one has to know about this but us.”

I cover her hands with my own and kiss her fingers. They smell like vanilla sugar. I kiss them until she pulls away. She knows that I’m not forgetting anything anytime soon. We make our way back
to the SUV, sticking to the shadows of Tiller Drive, passing only empty cars.

“There’s an alley not far from here,” she says. “It’s your only chance to do this.”

“You’re going to abandon me here,” I say.

“You’ll just have to trust me,” she says, offering me her hand. “Because you really don’t have any other choice.” She’s right. I don’t. So I accept her hand into mine and laugh at the fact that I was never going to deny her touch. Aimee revs the engine in short bursts and rolls down the windows, before banging a sharp U-turn away from Tiller Drive, before cutting a hard left into a black hole between two buildings—the alley.