Swell Page 11

  Sandy is the word June picks for Jake’s brand of blond. “Sandy?” Regina repeats. Her own pale hair is too short to even describe. “Sand…aaaah!”

  Tim grabs the wheel. Kenny has drifted into the wrong lane and a bus, almost.

  “Righteous!” Kenny’s eyes shine. Tim must admit, adrenaline becomes him. But when he starts in boasting, “Our vehicle scared off the enemy vehicle,” Tim has to call him an asshole.

  “If I’m an asshole,” Kenny says, “you’re the whole ass.” Then he disinvites “everyone” to his séance tonight on the beach.

  “Why would I go to a séance?” June asks. “I already live in a haunted house.”

  “That’s exactly why. I’m gonna purge it!”

  “From the outside?”

  “You think I’m going in? With the ghosts of that murdered Gary and a dead Asian roaming your halls?”

  “You don’t know shit,” June says. “They’re in the wall!”

  “I heard the shots. When it happened. The night of the Golden—”

  “You live there?” Regina gasps. “You live in the Murder House?”

  “You were seven,” June reminds Kenny.

  “I had ears.”

  “Small ones.” Kenny’s ears are still small and part of the lobes are attached to his head.

  “So what’d you do?” Regina asks him.

  “Called the detective. Well, my dad did. The guy left his card before that, when they came by to check if we were hiding refugees.”

  “Were you?”

  The detective had been snooping around Tim’s house then too. And with him, wouldn’t you know, was Mike Sloane, Tim’s old lifeguarding partner. Back in the day, Mike was the self-appointed master of cruel ceremonies—hazing, death kegs, you name it. That he’d grown up to become a cop was, well, troubling. Tim told Mike to get the fuck off his property. Of course, that was before the gunshot that sent him stumbling upon two corpses in Rose’s dining room.

  NYPD hadn’t immediately notified FDNY about the beached freighter. By the time Tim’s crew arrived at the scene in Breezy, six refugees had already drowned and countless cadaverous others were leaping off the ship’s bow. Tim had rushed in, fully clothed, flashlight in hand. But instantly, his old lifeguard instincts returned. He dropped the light and dove under, feeling the familiar blast of cold salt water rushing into his sinus cavity. Whirling around, grabbing for limbs in the dark, he pulled in half a dozen men within minutes. Onshore, one had no pulse. Another vomited, then cheered, “U.S.A.,” genuflecting. A third, Tim discovered mid-CPR, was a female—eighteen, nineteen tops—wearing men’s clothing, her perfect tits flattened under a dirty, tight Ace bandage.

  Tim drags his mind back to the driver’s ed car. Tells Kenny to make a left at the light. Best to steer clear of the desolate, sketchy parts of Far Rockaway and the charred Belle Harbor block where the plane had dropped. First responder turned first preventer? Were that possible, Tim would gladly go back to work. But how many dangers come to light either too late or after the threat’s passed? (Take the asteroid that just missed Earth by a mere seventy thousand miles.) To imagine what unknown horrors they right now face—man-made and natural, from within, from without…Tim grabs a plastic fork that’s poking out between two seat cushions and whisk-whisks his itchy face. “Ahhh.”

  “Wait till Kenny spazzes again and Tim pokes his eye out,” Regina says. “Then he’ll be symmetrical. One eye, one nostril.”

  “Yeah, but,” June points out, “we’d already be history if Tim’s feet weren’t always hovering over that second brake.” Defensive driving, the real thing. He must get wicked cramps in his calves. And (talking more softly) he must be embarrassed by the car (a ’94 Honda Civic) when he “goes to pick up dates.”

  “Does he? Have dates?” Kenny joins in the speculation. “A date tonight?” Reasons for their suspicion: Tim’s collared shirt, clean hair, sport coat.

  And it’s Saturday!

  Amazing how they talk this way. Forget he’s there. Or they don’t care, maybe want to provoke him? If so, his refusing to get riled only makes the speculation wilder.

  Maybe Tim climbs up on the car roof after work to unscrew the yellow light-up Steer-Rite Auto School sign and burns rubber to her house…

  Does it unscrew? The sign? Could this be his weekend ritual? Stash those permit books in the glove compartment. Cover the extra brake with sheepskin. Air out their teen odors or blast them with the brown, jiggling, triangular car perfume that came with the lease, mysteriously attached to the back dash alongside the tissues.

  Kenny predicts Tim’s woman smells of small dangling air-freshener trees—pine, coconut, green apple. She’s a cabbie with mace stashed under the seat; an ace mechanic-ess, nothing on under the jumpsuit but grease; a slutty-mouthed monster-truck-circuit mama performing at the Meadowlands every weekend this month. She’s a racy race-car driver, a leggy car-show blonde, or some pixie jailbait driver’s ed protégée. She’s Regina.

  “Ha-ha,” Regina says. “Anyhow, he might ride a horse or a ten-speed on his time off.”

  Tim works hard to keep his reactions to himself. That way, he can retain some authority. But when Kenny misses the turn, all is lost.

  “Christ! No!” The kid’s driven straight to the plane-crash site, the very spot Tim was navigating around. Now he’s melting down. “Keep driving! Kenny! Go!” As if he could shield them from what they’re not seeing—the houses that had been there. Another hole in the skyline writ small. Tim knows that Regina and Kenny saw much worse rubbernecking postcrash. And Regina’s got June reined in so tight by the hair that she probably can’t see much more than a slice of burned tree and cyclone fence. But Tim still feels uncomfortable, responsible. Disregarding his instructions, Kenny drives extra-slowly past the plywood barricade.

  The Wailing Wall, Peg calls it. The thing’s covered in carnations, photographs of victims, teddy bears, and good-bye letters written in Spanish. Through the cracks, you can glimpse grass planted by the airline—four feet high already, obscenely green. No one is allowed over there, not even the people who own the property.

  “I changed my mind,” Tim tells Kenny. “Pull over. Your turn’s up.”

  “What?” The kid slaps the wheel edge with an open palm. Like Tim’s ex-wife did in traffic. Or for effect. “I can man this sled better than them!”

  Regina objects, “Don’t lump me in with Ju-ne! It’s her first day!”

  “I hate the way you say my name. ‘Ju-ne.’ Like ‘Eww, new girl, new Jew.’”

  Kenny: “Are you converting too?”

  “What’s it to you?”

  “We’re invited to the party.”

  “Who’s we? What party?” Regina wants to know.

  Tim gives up. “Just please get us away from here, Kenny. Go!”

  Zero to thirty, Kenny peels out like he thinks he’s in an action pic. They slam backward, the guys into their seats, June into Regina’s lap.

  “Seat belts, ladies!” Tim knows he sounds mean, but sad is all he is. As they speed past the Sunset Diner, he can’t resist narrating, “Picture a sleepy female park ranger”—Peg—“on the morning of the plane crash. She’s sitting by the window—”

  “Is she hot?” Kenny asks.

  “It’s been two months since 9/11. Two months and one day, to be exact.” A few streets down, at St. Francis, they’d recently held the last of thirteen funeral masses. “She’s a brand-new widow.”

  “That’s hot.”

  Dropped the kids at her mother’s, gassed up the car, stopped at the diner for breakfast. First bite, sip of black coffee, second bite—boom; the whole restaurant was shaking! An Airbus 600 roared past the window. Tail! On! Fire!

  “What was she eating?”

  “Kenny! What the fuck?” June sounds about to cry.

  “Oh, you know you’re curious too, Juuune.” Kenny’s way of saying June sounds like gargling.

  “Greek omelet, rye toast,” Tim says because, weirdly, Peg had told him
that very detail when she visited him the next day in the hospital. While she and the others ran toward an exploding house to try to be of service, Tim had lain in bed, uselessly watching the catastrophe unfold on TV. Mayor Giuliani. Matt Lauer. It was later that night—after Ox, with burns over 40 percent of his body, was wheeled in to share his room—that Tim decided to quit firefighting. He was tired of saving people and failing to save people, of being at the wrong place at the wrong time and the right place at the wrong time and the wrong place at the right time. He was out-of-his-mind (King Coward) afraid.

  Tim yanks a Fresca from the glove box, downs it all at once—glug, glug—then rolls the empty bottle around his sore face.

  Other eyewitnesses swore there were no flames, or the flames were on the fuselage or the engine or the right wing or the left. Pieces came off in the air or didn’t come off. The plane wobbled; no, spun. The plane was chased by a missile or was not chased before corkscrewing, almost vertically, onto the residential street. It was terrorism if you believed it. It was not terrorism if you believed it was rudder failure, human error, a poltergeist.

  “Ask me,” Tim says, though no one is asking him. “Ask me, these planes…well, cars too, trains, boats—they can’t cut it. Transportation needs another revolution. Bad.”

  “Badly,” Kenny corrects, squeezing a blazing neck pimple.

  “What about Jake’s skin?” Regina asks.

  Hopefully, it’s begun to dawn on June that every one of Regina’s questions is actually the same one. That is, how can June nail a boyfriend when Regina can’t? But June can’t, or why would she need to invent one?

  “Regular,” June says of Jake’s skin, which even Tim knows is meaningless. Back at June’s high school, smarty Stuyvesant, regular is a shade of chicken satay, whereas here it’s either driftwood brown (east—Far Rockaway) or fire-truck red (west—Rockaway Beach).

  They drive past the Texaco station where one of the plane engines actually fell, landing two feet away from a tank of gas. Really, it’s a CIA storage area, Regina says her uncle says. Really, the CIA put the engine there to make it look like it came from the plane.

  “That’s insane,” Kenny squeals. “Everyone knows bin Laden crashed it as payback for Moran’s dis!” Regina joins in to recite the firefighter’s now-famous line, delivered on stage at a televised 9/11 fund-raiser. “Osama bin Laden, you can kiss my royal Irish ass. And I live in Rockaway. And this is my face, bitch.”

  They howl with the manic glee of anxiety. Even Tim joins them, briefly; Moran’s bravery is magnificent. But as far as he can tell, the crash was unrelated. It’s time to bag the nonstop conspiracy crap: The terrorists were targeting all the Jews in the neighborhood. The aliens were trying to land. On and on.

  “Let’s learn to drive,” Tim suggests, “A quiz! For ten zillion points: What are you required to do at a stop sign?” He provides two minutes and (switching on the radio) “thinking music.” Pink is midway through singing “Get the Party Started.”

  “Uh! Pink, no.” Regina groans.

  But the others like it. Their heads bob in time to the beat. Tim slaps on his irritated neck in syncopation. Then: “Time’s up!” He chooses June, noticing how her name in his mouth shapes his lips for a kiss, then immediately trying to un-notice it. June is already making fun of him, giving her fake boyfriend his every feature—hair to muscles. “Your answer, please? June? At a stop sign you…”

  “Gun it!” June shouts. “Is this a trick question?”

  Tim decides to ignore her. As they zoom down Cross Bay Boulevard, he moves his shoulders, up and down, side to side, to the beat. Choppy bay on their left (a few seasick boats). Sewage-treatment tanks on the right—bright blue, looming. Smells like egg.

  “Stop!” Regina shrieks.

  The car skids some, then halts as Kenny brakes. A sound like “heh” presses out from June’s chest.

  “Bingo,” Tim says. Never mind that Regina meant for Tim to stop dancing or for Kenny to stop driving maniacally. He proceeds as planned. “And if there is no stop line?”

  Regina sighs, lets June’s finished braid drop. “Stop before entering the crosswalk.”

  “And if there is no crosswalk?”

  “Stop before entering the intersection.”

  Tim’s taught Regina well. Kenny too, if he’d just stop messing around. It’s June, Tim suspects, who’ll be the real challenge.

  Jake wasn’t here, she scrawls on the steamed window, 6/15/02.

  * * *

  Sue curses a thorny, overgrown bush at the back of the brick patio. A bloody cross pulses on her shin—same leg, already scalded by tea. She whacks at the plant with her plastic bag of mezuzahs. The thing attacked her right as she walked out that pain-in-the-ass door. Her pain-in-the-ass door, she reminds herself. She can replace it and the bush and even the patio bricks—in between which, she suspects, those biting black flies with green eyes lay their eggs.

  Cheered, Sue begins searching through the clanking sack for a mezuzah light enough to hang on the loose door frame. The temple claimed to be giving her a “major discount,” but who knows. They refused to take her cash on Shabbat. Behind her, Bibi sits and jeers while Sage and Ed feed “hay” to their “pony,” Blacky.

  What Sue didn’t tell Dan about temple was how she’d walked in to find his father in back, slumped and seemingly unconscious. In actuality, he’d been listening to Dan’s little radio, ingeniously wrapped in a sweater, with one earplug hidden between his head and the wall. “I don’t go to temple to be with God”—Sy’s defense. “I go to be with my friends.”

  But Sue didn’t see any friends other than Rabbi Larry up on the bimah with a squeaky bar mitzvah boy. “You mean your friends at WFAN sports talk?”

  Sy just patted the empty seat beside him. “You’re late, Sue.” Had he followed her there, sped ahead, and snuck in the side door? She wouldn’t have put it past him. When she sat down, Sy took her hand and, one by one, uncurled her fingers to reveal the iPod she thought she’d concealed there. “So alike, the two of us.”

  Sue looked away, at the stained-glass rendering of Eve and the Serpent. She and Sy “so alike”? Please, no. But their interactions with Dan were similarly composed of exasperated bullying and affection, Dan wishing they were more accommodating of others, they wishing Dan were less. As the rabbi’s remarks came perilously close to comparing Roger Clemens with Osama bin Laden (an eye for an eye), Sue had no choice but to admit that she and Sy shared a whole host of interests and traits: What they’d dreamed of (a beach house), what they found most irritating (other people), who they loved most in the world (Dan, June, Sage). Both Sue and Sy flew into rages, held grudges, were temperamentally sour people addicted to sugar.

  In the backyard, Sue continues halfheartedly rustling through the bag of mezuzahs. Her plan—to get real Jewish and scare the men—had worked on Dan well enough, but “so alike” Sy had plainly seen through it. The bush at her foot could spontaneously combust and start talking, and the old man would shrug and summon Dan to summon Tim to put out the fire. Luckily for him, Tim’s retired or he wouldn’t have time to do the Glassman bidding 24/7. On today’s list: teach June to drive, replant the garden, spray the tree, fix the back door, plus do whatever else they’re not telling Sue about for the surprise party she’s not supposed to know of. Why Tim’s so willing is a question only Sue seems to be asking. He likes us, Dan says. He’s kind. Isn’t that possible?

  Well…

  The baby is thrashing from every angle. Sneakers in a dryer are what come to mind. Then laundry—a mountain that needs doing—then chocolate pudding. Sue’s mouth fills with spit.

  “Too heavy,” Bibi says of the mezuzah she’s chosen—comparatively light, made from…composite? Wood? A human tibia? “Save your energy, Mommy. That will never work.”

  With pale purple chosen as today’s color scheme, the aide sits with the New York Post spread across her thighs, painting her fake nails accordingly. When she’s not bossing Sue, she’s threaten
ing to “prettify” Sage. Still in her undies (though a fresh pair) in defiance of Dan, Sage flips a coin to determine who will get the first pony ride.

  “An imaginary kid on an imaginary horse?” Bibi observes at Ed’s win. “You gotta love that. If you believe in reincarnation, Ed could be—”

  “Ed is not one of Rose’s relatives,” Sue says. “If that’s where you’re going.”

  Bibi waves around a wet, polished hand. “Actually, I was thinking of the Asian guy, the refugee.”

  “The boy who shot Gary?”

  Bibi pauses. “Well, Rose says she did it.”

  “Did what?”

  “Nuh-uh! Back up, Mommy!” Sue’s been inadvertently inching toward the aide’s chair. “Ve-ry bad for the fetus, this polish, you should know that, ve-ry noxious. You’re up next, Sage!”

  “Rose said she killed her son?” Sue asks. “Really?”

  “Now, you see?” Bibi twirls a pointer finger by her ear. “Cuckoo. Then again, who can know—”

  “We can know. The cops, the news, it’s all been—”

  “News? Are you serious? Who believes news?” Bibi slaps at the paper on her lap. Headline: “Rockaway Neighbors Scoff at Theory Plane Crash Was an Accident.”

  “That’s different. The Golden Venture story is all done. Everyone knows that the Chinese kid—”

  “Oh, those evil Chinese, is it? Watch out for the Russians too, and the Arabs, they’re the worst. Never trust one of those A-rabs or anyone resembling—”

  “Hold on. That’s…that’s not—”

  “No, you hold on, Mommy. You have no idea what crap I put up with daily. You think the guy who searched my purse at the bridge this morning cares I’m Guyanese American?”

  The earned outrage doesn’t make Sue like Bibi more but it does make her like herself less. Of all the post-plane-crash photographs, the one hardest to shake shows a dirt-caked back windshield upon which some foul finger has written Nuke ’em! What are you waiting for?

  “But we’re getting off topic,” Sue says. “Rose—”