Reed Coleman - Onion Street

Luckily, I didn’t smell it on Mindy. Her folks had met us out in the hall and though they looked completely spent, they were happy.

“She’s coming out of it, Moe,” her mom said, hugging me fiercely. “She’s moving her lips and blinking her eyes.”

“What did her doctor say?” Bobby asked.

“He’s not the most optimistic man I’ve ever met,” Herb Weinstock said, “but even he thinks these are signs she’s coming out of it. Of course, he followed that up with all sorts of warnings and caveats about the long road ahead and all the things that could still go wrong.”

We went and sat with Mindy for about an hour and there were times when it almost felt as if she were conscious of our presence. I know part of that was wishful thinking, but I allowed myself a little hope every now and then. Hope wasn’t usually an emotion on the Prager family menu. With my dad’s business failures and my mom’s dim worldview, it wouldn’t be, would it? Still, I’d like to think hope is a very human thing that not even my mom could completely kill in me the way she could cook the flavor out of chicken.

Before leaving the hospital, I stopped at the gift shop to buy a Sunday paper. I hadn’t had time to check the papers at home for word of Shakespeare’s murder. If there was a mention of it in the paper, I thought I could use it to restart my questioning of Bobby. If not, I’d figure something out. And given that the person we were chauffeuring to the airport lived about fifteen minutes away from the hospital, I had plenty of time to talk to Bobby. And there it was, buried a few inches down among the stories of shootings, rapes, and stabbings. I smiled sadly when I saw that I hadn’t gotten Shakespeare’s name completely wrong: his first name was William. He had been William O’Day of Gerritsen Beach, Brooklyn. Gerritsen Beach was like the Irish wing of Sheepshead Bay. The cops were treating it like just another OD, though there was some thought it might have been a suicide. His parents claimed that he’d been a good boy, deeply involved in politics at Brooklyn College, but that over the last year Billy’d lost his way. I loved that phrase, “lost his way.” It said everything and nothing. Now Billy was just lost.

“You know a guy named Billy O’Day?” I asked calmly as if the question was unrelated to what I was reading in the paper.

“Sure. Everybody knows Billy. His big thing is Irish liberation. He thinks the partition of Ireland was bullshit and that until Northern Ireland breaks away and joins the rest of Ireland that the true republic won’t exist. He believes in armed struggle against the British in the North. Why do you ask?”

“He’s dead.”

But if I thought Bobby would steer off the road or slam on the brakes, I was wrong. What he did say was, “Don’t tell me, he ODed, right?”

“How the fuck did you know that? Did you read the papers this morning?”

There was one other way he could have known that I didn’t even want to think about.

“I didn’t have to read about it. His addiction was the worst-kept secret on campus, Moe. He used to be a big wheel in campus politics, and I don’t mean student government.”

“I know what you mean. So he was in with Susan Kasten and Abdul Salaam and the other people on the Committee.”

That got Bobby’s attention, though you would have had to have known Bobby as long and as well I as did to catch the subtle change in his demeanor. Then Bobby made it worse by acting dumb.

“Abdul Salaam. Who’s that?”

“He’s the guy whose body you found the other night at 1055 Coney Island Avenue a few hours before it blew up. The guy who put my girlfriend in a coma. So you wanna tell me what’s going on?”

Bobby resorted to his first line of defense, deflection. “You’re following me around now?” he asked, smiling like he was teasing. He wasn’t, though. He was annoyed and maybe a little freaked.

“No. I wasn’t following you around. I had no idea you were involved in any of this. I was parked across the street from the place in Aaron’s Tempest when you showed up. I saw you go up and I saw you come out. I saw that look on your face, Bobby, so don’t try and tell me you didn’t see the body.”

This time he did yank the car over to the side of the road and slam on the brakes.

“Look, Moe, you’re the best friend I’ve ever had or probably ever will have, so I’m gonna say this for your own good. Stay out of it . No good can come of you sticking your nose in. Some people don’t have a sense of humor. They’ll do whatever they need to do to meet their objectives. There’s things going on here that … well, that just don’t concern you.”

“You concern me. What happened to Mindy concerns me. What happened to Billy O’Day concerns me.”

“What the fuck are you talking about? You didn’t even know Billy O’Day. How can that concern you?”

“I was there,” I said.

He was confused. “You were where?”

“They found Billy O’Day dead on the boardwalk on a bench in front of the Parachute Jump, a belt tied around his bicep and a needle sticking out of his arm. Here.” I shoved the story into Bobby’s face. “See?”

He took a second to read the story. “They mention the boardwalk, but it doesn’t say anything about a bench or the belt or a needle sti — ” He stopped talking when he realized how I knew those details.

“That’s right, Bobby. I was there. I didn’t actually see it happen because I got hooded and tied up, but I found his body. He didn’t OD. He didn’t commit suicide. He was murdered.”

“Murdered?”

“Yeah, while I was talking to him. So don’t tell me to stay out of this or that. This concerns me. It also concerns me that for the first time since we’ve known each other, you’re shutting me out and lying to me.”

“Kinda makes my point for me, man,” he said. “If Billy was murdered, the people who did it know you know. They were smart enough to hood you so you couldn’t identify them. I guess they figured you were an innocent civilian, but if you keep at whatever you think you’re doing, that civilian label will disappear and you’ll become a target.”

“Like you?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he said.

“That night when I bailed you out of jail and I was with Mindy, she warned me to stay away from you. She wouldn’t tell me why, but she made me promise.”

He actually smiled that smile of his. “I guess you broke that promise, huh?”

“This isn’t funny, Bobby. I think that day in the snowstorm, the Caddy was trying to run you down. That was no accident.”

He patted my cheek and laughed. “You worry about me more than my own goddamn parents, you know that? But don’t worry about me. I’ve got it covered.”

“What about the other stuff?”

“Leave it alone, Moe. Trust me. Leave it alone. C’mon, we gotta get a move on, or we’ll be late.”

The airport run that day was pretty much like the last one. We took an elderly couple to Eastern Airlines at JFK. They had come up to New York to visit their kids and grandkids, and were now headed back down to Florida. We parked Bobby’s Olds 88 in the same lot and followed the same routine. When we left the terminal to return to the car, Bobby confided in me that if the old folks’ plane went down, he stood to make a killing. No pun intended. Then, seeing the horrified look on my face, he put me in a headlock.

“Don’t be such a downer, man. I’m only putting you on. If it makes you feel any better, I really hope I never get to collect on any of these policies.”

I was not reassured. Bobby didn’t do anything out of the kindness of his heart, not for strangers, anyway. Sometimes I even thought the protests he was so good at organizing were mostly self-serving. They made him look good and if we didn’t have to go to Nam, neither did he. I don’t know. I guess I was feeling less love for Bobby that particular day than I’d ever felt before. Maybe if he’d answered some of my questions or’d given me some sense of what I’d gotten myself into, I might have taken a kinder view of my old friend. And for chrissakes, he was my age. He had to know that giving me that boogie man warning and all that mumbo jumbo about civilians and leaving it alone wasn’t going to work. Did anyone my age ever listen to those kinds of warnings? Stay away from drugs. They’re bad for you .