Staten Island Noir Read online

Danny was out of the car, looking at me over the roof and waiting for instructions. I didn't think he'd heard the groan in the woods. Maybe I hadn't either. Then I heard it again.

  "Fuck." I hung my head.

  "Fuck what?" Danny said. "The bumper's right here on the shoulder. We're golden. Let's dump it in the car and get the hell outta here."

  Another groan.

  "Did you hear that?" Danny asked.

  "It's nothing," I said. "Some animal in the woods."

  Danny laughed. "This is Staten Island, for Chrissakes. Animal in the woods, like this is fucking upstate or something. Gimme a break. Somebody's out there."

  We heard a faint rustling in the leaves. Faint enough that it could have been the wind.

  "Fuck this," Danny said. He went back to the car, pulled open the passenger-side door. He reached under the seat, and pulled out a gun from underneath it. A small black pistol.

  I was shocked to see it. "What the fuck is that?"

  "It's a Pez dispenser. What's it fucking look like?"

  "Where did you get that?"

  "I had it for a while, this dude at school bet me on the Jets game and didn't have the cash. What's it matter? You never saw it."

  He walked around the back of the car, peering into the dark woods. He stepped to the edge of the trees, to where I'd taken out the guardrail with the car, the gun held loosely at his side. "Yo! Fucknuts! You ain't scarin' nobody."

  Enough of this, I thought. I jogged over to the bumper, grabbed one end, started dragging it toward the car, the metal grinding on the asphalt.

  "Help me with this, Danny. Put the gun away. It's somebody's old dog or something. Open the back of the car."

  But Danny ignored me. He was staring into the dark woods, his head tilted to one side like a puppy that didn't understand a command. I stopped halfway to the car, bent over, panting, cradling one end of the bumper in my hands. I listened for what it was Danny heard. I heard it too. The old man's voice, a feeble attempt at words. Gibberish. Danny turned to me.

  "There's somebody out there," he said, quieter this time, no aggression or defiance in his tone. "What the fuck?"

  I set the bumper back down on the pavement. "I need your help. Me. Over here."

  Danny looked at me for a long moment then he started into the woods, picking his way over the dead fallen branches and through the underbrush, sloughing his way across the carpet of dead leaves.

  "Goddamnit, Danny."

  I looked at the bumper at my feet, looked into the woods, where Danny was now a slow-moving shadow among the trees. He'd gone right by the spot where I knew the old man was lying. Danny was probably still drunk, I reminded myself. And still high, as well.

  The battered gray hulk of the station wagon sat silent by the side of the road, the pulsing hazard lights making the car look like a UFO awaiting liftoff.

  I wasn't a horrible person. I thought the guy was dead. I didn't see any benefit to anyone in confessing that I'd killed him. I'd get in trouble, as would Danny, who got in plenty without my help. I felt bad for the old man, bad for his family. He had people who loved him, though not enough to keep him from staggering along a dark road in the middle of the night. But why should two families suffer? It sucked that someone had lost their grandpa because I was a terrible drunk driver. Was it any worse than going by cancer? Any worse than a slow, awful death that traumatized your kid so bad that she traumatized her own? And why should my parents, one of whom had just lost her parent, lose their sons over the same accident, if they didn't have to? Nothing I did would bring him back to life.

  But all that was moot now, I thought, because the old fucker wasn't dead.

  I left the bumper where I'd dropped it and moved into the woods, making my way toward the shadow I knew was Danny. It got easier to find him when his disembodied face appeared in the golden glow of his lighter. He watched me the entire time I made my way to him. We'd ended up several yards deep in the woods. I'd thought the old man had been closer to the road. Then I figured it out. He'd crawled. Danny let the flame go out.

  "Shit gets hot," Danny said. "Did you know about this? Is that why you were all fucking freaked?"

  I said nothing. Hands on my knees, I bent over the old man, listening to his raspy breathing. How could he not be dead? I'd hit him with a fishtailing station wagon, flipping him over a guardrail. And yes, I'd left him there, broken and bleeding. Danny hit the lighter again.

  The old man had gray eyes. They stared straight up. They stared past me and Danny, up into the night sky, maybe searching through the branches overhead for the stars. Maybe he saw something or someone coming for him. It did not appear that he saw me or my brother standing over him. I thought about how sad it would be if in his head, the last feeble circuits were firing and what he saw as the famed white light at the end of the tunnel was in reality just Danny's lighter, glowing there in the dark like the lantern on the ferryman's boat. No one would even look for him until the early morning. He wore thin blue pajamas and a ragged maroon robe that was thrown open, the top soaked dark purple with blood. His chest was caved in like someone had dropped a safe—or a station wagon—on him.

  "This is a fucking mess," Danny said.

  It was. The old man had misused the last of his strength crawling deeper into the woods and away from any chance of somebody seeing him in time to save him.

  "We did this with the car, didn't we?" Danny asked. "You saw him, you knew he was here." He shook his head. "We gotta take care of him."

  "Danny, listen. Look at him. He's got minutes left, tops. What're we gonna do? Drive all the way down the hill and find a pay phone somewhere? Nose-diving down this hill started all this. We gonna knock on doors up here on the hill? How do we explain how we found him? It ain't that tough to figure out he got hit by a car."

  "I can't believe what I'm hearing. I never knew you could think like this." He let the lighter go out. "What if he doesn't have minutes left, what if it's hours? He's hung on this long."

  "I can't tell you what to do," I said. Fuck it. "We can carry him to the car maybe. You wanna take care of him, we'll take care of him."

  Danny hit the lighter again. "That wasn't what I meant by take care of him." He held the gun out to me. "This is."

  "Jesus, Danny. Are you serious? I don't think that's the right idea."

  "You leave him here dying in the woods. Now you're squeamish? Look at the guy. We'd be doing him a favor." The lighter went out. "Remember how Grandpa hung on and hung on, for weeks, months after they gave him only days? You want that for this poor bastard? For his family? I wish somebody had come for Grandpa with a gun."

  I looked back to the road, at the squat gray mass of the car. Its flashing lights seemed to mark the seconds passing us by, silently beating the time like a lit-up heart. We were really pushing our luck. Another car would come over the hill sooner or later. I appreciated my brother making a moral argument on my behalf, giving me an ethical parachute. He meant well. I was the good brother, after all, the one who, till tonight at least, concerned himself with such things. But if morals or ethics or right and wrong were really my worries, I'd never have left the old man there in the first place. I was learning fast what I really cared about. From the moment I saw him handing it my way in the lighter's glow, I'd had only one real concern about the gun.

  "You misunderstood me," I said. "Somebody's gonna hear that gunshot. We can't have that."

  We stood there in the dark, the old man at our feet, his weak scratchy breaths growing farther apart. I had the power to end it, his life, the whole fucked up episode I'd gotten myself and my brother into. All I had to do was accept the power, and not leave all our fates, as predictable as they may be considering where we lived, to other hands.

  "Go back to the car," I said. "I'll meet you there in a minute."

  "Fuck that."

  "We can't leave him. We can't shoot him. Go. I'll take care of it."

  "I got this," he said, kneeling down in the dead leaves. "You go back to th
e car. I'm much, much better at living with ugly shit than you are."

  I kneeled across from him, speaking to him over the dying man. "Because it's only now that it's getting ugly?"

  Danny crouched there, hands on his thighs, waiting, giving me time to make my case.

  "You close and cover his mouth," I said. "And I'll pinch his nose shut. We'll carry it together. We'll never talk about it. Ever. That's my best offer."

  "He's barely even here," Danny said, moving. "This shouldn't take long."

  It didn't.

  By the time Danny was halfway through his third whispered Hail Mary, the old man was dead. I hadn't thought to use the time to pray. And then we were done and everything would be like it had been from the beginning, an accident.

  We stood, brushed the twigs and dead leaves from our pants, and crept out of the woods. We didn't speak. Danny helped me load the bumper into the back of the station wagon. It barely fit. As we drove home across the island, Danny helped me work up a story for our folks to explain what had happened—to the car. It was the only thing we talked about.

  SISTER-IN-LAW

  BY LOUISA ERMELINO

  Great Kills

  Get in the car.

  I started to turn but there was a gun in my back or something pretending to be a gun. I faced forward. The voice was familiar, a woman's voice, a cigarette voice. Philip Morris unfiltered. I think that's the only way Philip Morris comes. Smoking them was a grand statement, too big for me, but if I was right about the voice then we'd shared a few together, she and I.

  Angela?

  Just get in the car. On your left.

  She leaned over and opened the door and moved back. I got in. Her husband Joey was driving. He was a small guy and it was a big car. He looked like he was sitting in a hole. It was Buddy's car, a white Cadillac convertible with rocket fins, but the top was up, black and ominous.

  Joey? I said.

  Joey stared straight ahead, didn't even check me out in the rearview mirror. I was disappointed. I thought Joey liked me, but then I was always thinking people liked me when they really didn't give a shit. I felt better that I was in the backseat with Angela and not in the front with Joey. I knew about the piano wire around the neck, though this was no movie . . .

  I actually felt bad. Until just now, Angela had treated me like family.

  We were in the Village, on Barrow Street. I was on my way to meet Buddy at the gay club he used to own, before the feds subpoenaed him to testify. He said that was when he learned to sweat and gave up red silk lining in his custom-made suits. Maybe saying the club he used to run was a better way to put it. Only one group of people owned clubs in Greenwich Village, but it was undisclosed ownership. The State Liquor Authority kept close tabs on who got a liquor license.

  Why did I know all this? I shouldn't have. My criminal involvement began and ended with my father's Prohibition bootlegging days and his stint as a bookkeeper for Tony Bender in the '30s. Good with numbers and honest, my father wasn't looking for power and glory, just enough money to start a legitimate business and buy a house. So how did I end up in a white Cadillac with rocket fins and this crazy bitch who was about to become my sister-in-law holding a gun on me?

  I asked Angela where we were going. It was a legitimate question, I thought, under the circumstances.

  Does it matter? she said.

  I shrugged and she pulled my hair.

  Staten Island? I said.

  Bingo. She laughed.

  My brother bragged how you were a college girl, Angela said. Me, I always thought you didn't have the brains God gave you. Angela really laughed when she said this. Hard to believe we grew up on the same street, she said to me.

  I could have mentioned that she was a full ten years older than I was and her father wore overalls to work and gambled his paycheck before he got home Fridays, but her mouth was up close to my ear, her perfume was up my nose, and she was poking that gun hard in my ribs.

  I met Buddy in Manhattan but he said he lived out on Staten Island. Right away I knew something was up. He'd grown up in the Village. Staten Island? For me, Staten Island was Middlin' Beach and my mother's stories about the rented summer bungalow thirteen blocks from the ocean her first married summer when she was twenty and had a newborn baby (not me). My father took the ferry out every weekend. My mother thought she'd died and went to heaven. Her eight brothers and sisters thought so too, and came out every chance they got. No screens, no plumbing. I don't remember the amusement park or my cousins making human pyramids on the beach for the camera but there was an old 16 mm movie of me in underpants licking the block of ice that sat on the porch.

  What I'm saying is, that for me, Staten Island didn't conjure images of the high life. It was somewhere you went to if you were on the lam, it seemed that far away; where you went when you owed the wrong people money, the guys with the broken noses, Buddy called them, or when you couldn't go back to the neighborhood, like Angela, who needed a place to keep her husband straight after he got out of prison. Her mother watched the kids and the old man's insurance policy, which paid double after he was crushed between the ship and the pier, paid for the house on Florence Street that was a primo fixer-upper. Buddy said that when he came back from California after his marriage broke up, they were sitting on orange crates with candles stuck in cheap wine bottles.

  We drove through the Midtown Tunnel and onto the BQE and I could see the Verrazano—for my money, the best thing about Staten Island. We turned left off the bridge and drove down what always felt to me like a country lane. The houses were old, the colors of old houses, green and brown. They had patches of grass in the front. Hylan Boulevard curved and looped before it straightened out and you hit the traffic and the local guidos in muscle cars with music blasting, small strip malls with the same three or four stores, Chinese restaurants that would mix won ton and egg drop soup in one bowl, sandwich shops called Angelo's and Gino's, an overstuffed sub painted in primary colors on the plate glass window, bridal shops, catering halls, restaurants named Petruzzi's with lattice, cognac-colored windows and endless parking. The Staten Islanders loved outdoor parking. They loved parking lots better than garages because in a parking lot everyone could admire your good-looking, expensive car, and you could too.

  Hylan Boulevard flooded in a sudden rain; it flooded bad. The semi-attached condos that had been built on the graveyard of grand old houses flooded too, and the cars parked to the sides of the front doors were moved to higher ground with the first sprinkle.

  Angela?

  Shut up, she said.

  I turned my head and she rammed the gun in my side.

  Don't look at me.

  Why? Because I might recognize you?

  Funny. You think you're so funny. Watch me laugh. You know, smarty pants, you should have just stayed where you belonged and away from Buddy. So now just shut your big mouth.

  Someone should have warned me when I met Buddy that his family was crazy, but who knew they were this crazy? And let me tell you, when I met Buddy I wasn't planning on anything long term. All I wanted was a good time. And Buddy was a lot of fun. He knew everybody and had all kinds of connections. We went to after-hours bars and gambling parlors, clubs with private shows in back. We walked past velvet ropes and got the best seats; drinks arrived at the table compliments of the house. There were bear hugs and cheek kisses.

  But honestly, did I need a guy who was broke and living with his mother, his two kids, his sister, and a brother-in-law who had five-to-ten in Dannemora under his belt? Living on Staten Island no less? Buddy was pretty quiet about the Staten Island piece and hinted that it wasn't so bad and maybe we could live out there after we got married. He was awful grateful to Angela for taking him in when the ex-wife grabbed the stash, dumped the kids, and went AWOL with a South American disco dancer named Chico.

  We made the turn off the boulevard and onto Florence Street. I was starting to think Angela was really stupid. She kidnaps me at gunpoint and brings me to her h
ouse?

  When Joey pulled into the driveway, I could see the television flickering with the kids planted in front of it. Angela and Joey had four kids of their own and they all watched television together and made popcorn on Saturday nights. The kind in the aluminum pan that you hold over the stove and the top blows up like a balloon.

  Angela handed Joey the gun and he pointed it at my face. That was scary, the idea of taking a bullet to the face. I shut my eyes.

  Joey, I said, did you ever shoot anyone?

  I thought I told you to shut up, Angela said, which made me open my eyes.

  She was digging in her huge black alligator satchel (which for sure had "fallen off a truck," but who am I to talk?). Before she'd turned nasty, Angela would throw things my way when they came in pairs. Shit, I was wearing an 18 karat gold Rolex that had actually been special order, serial number and everything, from some guy who worked in the factory and swiped a few selectively every month. I was one to talk. Thinking about my watch made me look down at my arm that Angela was trying to duct tape to my other arm. We both zeroed in on the watch at the same time and Angela ripped it off my wrist.

  Last year, she said, this would have been mine. Buddy would have bought it for me, so I'll just take it now.

  I saw this as an opportunity and gave her an elbow to the lip and a slap on the side of her head, right on her ear. I had nothing to lose. I had read about serial killers. Once they get you tied up, you're done for. If only . . . Angela pulled back and punched me so hard that if I'd been a cartoon, the whole strip would have been nothing but stars.

  When I opened my eyes again, Angela had taped my wrists and tied me up. The rope was around my neck and connected to my duct-taped wrists, kind of a semi-hog-tie. A disgusting concept. I was hating Angela, not to mention Joey who was waving what I noticed was a very beautiful Beretta in my face. I recognized it as Buddy's gun. It was a pocket pistol—used, unfortunately. Buddy was going to give it to me—for protection, he said when he showed it to me. The only reason I didn't have it was that Buddy was waiting for a holster. Buddy liked everything just so.