Reed Coleman - Onion Street

We didn’t talk much as we left the airport and got back on the Belt Parkway west toward home. I wanted to keep at him about the Committee, Susan Kasten, the late Abdul Salaam, and the more recently late Billy O’Day, but knew he wasn’t going to give me any more than what he’d already imparted. So I decided to take another tack.

“Before we got sidetracked, you were missing Sam bad. Why so blue about Sam today? It’s been months.”

“I don’t know. You know how you forget things sometimes? I used to really dig waking up next to Sam. She was always so warm and she smelled good in the morning even if we’d spent the whole night balling. Anyways, I must’ve dreamed about her and I forgot she was dead. When I rolled over in bed this morning, I expected to find her there. But the sheet was cold, and then I had to live it all over again in my head.”

“I’m sorry, Bobby.”

“That’s okay, man. Forget what I said to you before about you and her. It’s good to talk about her with you, Moe, because you appreciated her and how special she was.”

“You know that night with Mindy, the night I found her drinking and smoking outside Burgundy House …”

“The night you bailed me out, yeah. What about it?”

“It was weird, but Mindy said she was acting funny because of Samantha.”

“That makes no sense,” he said, shaking his head. “It was no secret that Mindy hated Sam’s guts. Mindy isn’t the jealous type, but when it came to Sam …”

“Tell me about it. I had to deal with it.”

Bobby smiled. “Yeah, man. One thing about Mindy, she’s not good at hiding her feelings.”

No matter how mad I was at him or frustrated I was by his deflections, seeing that smile made me smile. It didn’t last.

Bang! The front end of the car on my side smacked down on the pavement, the rear end fishtailing like crazy. Bobby struggled to keep control of the two-ton monster. Luckily we were in the far right lane when the tire blew, allowing Bobby to slow down and drift onto the shoulder near the Pennsylvania Avenue exit.

I started laughing. “Thank God this happened after we dropped them off. We would’ve had two heart attack victims on our hands.”

“I suppose.” But Bobby wasn’t laughing. “Stay in the car,” he said, pointing his finger at me. “Stay in the fucking car.”

Man, the day just kept getting stranger and stranger. I’d witnessed bigger mood swings and shifts in Bobby in less than four hours than maybe in the rest of the time I’d known him. Sure, he was upset about his car, but he wasn’t obsessed with it like the Italian guys in the neighborhood who would give up their Sundays to Mass and hand-washing their cars. Mass they did out of obligation. The hours they spent on their cars was devotion. That wasn’t Bobby, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why the hell he was so intent on me not helping him with the flat. Did he remember about my shoulder? Doubtful. And I’d been careful not to mention my encounter with Mr. Ski Mask, so he couldn’t know about those injuries.

I turned the rearview mirror — the little pine tree air freshener still dangling beneath it — so that I could use it to see through the back window. All I got for the bother was a great view of the raised trunk lid, but I did hear Bobby rummaging around in the trunk. I didn’t get it, because the trunk had been empty after we’d removed the old couple’s luggage at the airport. Maybe he was just having trouble getting the spare off the spindle. Yeah, I thought, that must’ve been it. I’d had to struggle with that occasionally myself. Finally, Bobby slammed the trunk lid shut and, as he rolled the spare past my window, rapped on the window with the tire iron for me to come out.

When I got out of the car, I was hit full in the face by the overwhelming stink of rotting garbage. We had come to a stop directly across the Belt Parkway from the Fountain Avenue dump, one of the largest landfills in the world. When Aaron and I were little, before Miriam was born, we used to call it Stinky Mountain. And man oh man, was that the right name for the place today. The breeze was blowing just wrong off Jamaica Bay, and we were straight downwind. The whirling swarms of opportunist gulls and other hungry birds wheeled across the tops of the garbage heaps like feathered tornadoes, touching down wherever the bulldozer blades churned up likely feasts.

“Here,” Bobby said, handing me the tire iron. “Pull off the wheel cover and get started on the lug nuts. I’ll get the jack.”

Fifteen minutes later, we were done. I carried what was left of the blown tire to the rear of the car and leaned it against the back bumper. He carried the jack and tire iron.

“Go back in the car. There’s a ton of those towelettes in the glove compartment. Take a few out for me too.”

I didn’t think anything of it and did what he asked. It was only when he popped the trunk back open and put the stuff away that it dawned on me that he had closed the trunk in the first place. I never closed the trunk when I changed tires and tried to remember if anyone else did. Aaron didn’t. My dad didn’t. In the end, I shrugged my shoulders to myself and went back to cleaning my hands. In spite of the faint lemony, chemical tang from the towelettes, I couldn’t get the garbage stink out of my nose. It was rumored that among the mounds of garbage in the Fountain Avenue dump were hundreds of bodies and body parts courtesy of New York’s Five Families. That thought sobered me right up as the garbage stink in my nostrils was replaced with the memory of Abdul Salaam’s ripe corpse.

I looked up again at the mirror and when I did I saw trouble. Bobby had slammed the trunk lid back down, his head turned to the left, his body gone rigid. In the next second, I understood. A black and green police car, cherry top spinning, was pulling off the Belt and right up behind Bobby’s Olds. On good days, Bobby and cops mixed kind of like oil and water. Problem here was that this wasn’t a good day, and the guy getting out of the black and green wasn’t just a regular cop. No, this cop’s hat was squashed down and set at a rakish angle. He had on jodhpurs and knee-high black boots shinier than polished silver. I kept an eye on things in the mirror. Highway Patrol cops were renowned for being psychos and ball busters, and this guy looked the part. He was a big man with broad shoulders and a let’s-pull-the-wings-off-the-helpless-fly expression that made me pretty uneasy. I opened the door, figuring it was safer for everyone involved if I went out and made nice. Bobby was out on bail, and I knew that wouldn’t stop him from pushing back if the cop gave him a hard time.

I got one leg out the door when the cop screamed, “Get the fuck back in that fucking car until I tell you to get out, asshole. You move and I’ll blow your brains out, you draft-dodgin’ mothafucka.”

I didn’t need to be told twice, but it didn’t stop me from watching in the mirror. And what I saw was strange and mysterious stuff. The cop gestured at the trunk and, jerking his thumb straight up in the air, motioned for Bobby to open it. Bobby smiled at the cop and began telling him some story. The cop didn’t like stories, indicating as much by shoving Bobby against the trunk and snatching the keys from Bobby’s hand. He pushed Bobby aside and popped the trunk. Much as Bobby had fussed with stuff when we first got the flat, the cop was doing so now. Then the trunk lid slammed down again. Then a really curious thing happened. The cop threw Bobby face first onto the trunk, frisked him, then handcuffed him. He grabbed Bobby by the collar, marched him to the black and green and threw him in the back seat.

I opened the door again. This time the cop didn’t bark at me. He just turned in my direction, unholstered his.38, and pointed it in my direction.