Siegel, James - Derailed

That’s where I headed.

I took Canal down to the Manhattan Bridge, then up the Belt to the Verrazano. Traffic was light this time of night—a good thing, considering Winston was decomposing right next to me. Have you got half a brain? I used to complain to Anna when I lost my temper. And Winston did have half a brain, the other half spread in pieces around the car.

I was thinking ahead to the tollbooth. If it would be a problem paying—if the toll collector would be able to see inside the car. If he or she would be able to smell the car. Trying to take this thing one obstacle at a time — like Edwin Moses, whom I’d once heard on ESPN explaining his method in the hurdles as just that: one hurdle at a time and never look at the finish line.

The finish line for me was Winston safely disposed of and me back in bed. And Vasquez paid off in full — oh yes, a hundred thousand was seeming kind of cheap right at the moment — all of Anna’s Fund, maybe, but still kind of cheap, things being what they were.

The toll collector was humming vintage James Brown—“I Feel Good.” Not if she sniffed the car, she wouldn’t be. Not if she took a peek at my traveling companion and noticed the brain schematic sitting on his shoulders. I’d pulled out the money in advance and had it out there waiting for her. She’d had a kind of cool rhythm going with the cars in front of me—arm out, arm in, money in, change out, like one of those funky dances from the sixties, the swim or the monkey . But when I rolled up to her window with cash in hand, she told me to wait a minute. She started to count bills inside the booth and left my money sitting right where it was — in my sweaty palm.

It was maddening. I began to worry about the other toll collector now, the one to my right and therefore closer to the dead body. I wondered if they carried guns — toll collectors? It didn’t really matter, since I knew they carried radios. A simple message to the police station up ahead and I was dead meat.

Finally, after another half a song — Little Stevie Wonder circa 1965 — she reached out and took the money from me.

And I breathed again — shallow breaths, of course, head turned toward the window because the stench was enveloping me like steam. Winston was the second dead person I’d ever seen. I’d attended an open-coffin funeral when I was fourteen — a friend of the family who’d succumbed to cancer — and I’d more or less kept my eyes on my shoes, peeking just once at a face that seemed oddly happy. Not so with Winston, his mouth half-open as if caught in midscream, his eyes squeezed shut. He’d gone complaining about it.

I killed Winston, I thought again.

Just as if I’d pulled the trigger myself. Adultery, fraud, and now murder? It didn’t seem so long ago that I’d been one of the nameless good guys. It was a little hard to reconcile that Charles with this one — this one driving a dead man through Staten Island on the way to the dump. It was a little difficult to digest. Yet if I could only make it to the dumping grounds without being apprehended by the police; if I could dispose of Winston’s body and the bloody car; if I could make Vasquez go away with one hundred thousand dollars . . .

One hurdle at a time.

First I had to find a way into the landfill. It had to be close; the stench in the car had been joined by another one that was even worse.

I reached the exit for the dump. At least I thought it was, because the next exit said Goethals Bridge. I exited onto a deserted two-lane road with no street lamps. Winston slumped against the window as I turned right.

I followed the road for five minutes or so, not a single other car in either direction. I imagined the only traffic that found its way here was either coming or going to the landfill, and at this time of night no one was doing either of those things. Except for me.

I squinted into the blackness, looking for a gate that might let me in, slowing to a crawl so I wouldn’t ride past and miss it.

There.

Just up ahead, a gate all right — a barbed-wire fence ending in two swinging doors and a sentry box. A gate in — which might have made me weep for joy, or shout in exultation, or at least sigh in relief, if it wasn’t for the fact that it was locked solid.

Well, what had I expected? This was city property, wasn’t it, not a public dumping ground for anyone with a dead body to get rid of.

I got out of the stinking car only to find that it smelled worse outside the car than in it. It was as if the air itself were garbage, as if all the putrid smells of New York City were dumped here, too, along with all that solid stuff. Landfill and airfill both, and the seagulls feeding on all of it and crying out for more. Rats with wings — wasn’t that what they called them? And now I understood why.

An entire flock of them had descended by my feet — lifting their wings and cawing at me as if I were after their food. As if I were their food. Sharp yellow beaks all pointed at me, and I wondered if they could smell Winston’s blood on me, if, like vultures, they could sniff out the dead and dying.

I felt hemmed in, surrounded by encroaching seagulls and stench, and I yelled and flapped my arms, hoping to scare them away. But the only one scared seemed to be me; the gulls hardly moved, one or two of them beating their wings and lifting an inch or two off the ground. I retreated to the car, where I sat in the front seat and stared at the locked gate.

I reversed the car and began to meander up Western Avenue again, tracking the fence and looking for anything that might constitute a way in.

“Come on, surprise me,” I said out loud. Life had thrown me a few nasty ones lately — thinking that maybe I was due some good ones. Even one good one, right now, here in the asshole of Staten Island, where all the waste exited and lay rotting.

And then my headlights caught a piece of torn fence as the road curved right. Just big enough for one man to get through — even one man dragging another.

He must have a mother somewhere, I suddenly thought. I pictured her as a typical suburban mom. I didn’t know where he’d grown up, so maybe she wasn’t a suburban mom at all. But that’s the way I imagined her. Divorced, maybe, disillusioned by now, but still proud of her grade-school son with the 3.7 GPA. That pride tested through the years, of course, as Winston got into drugs, then into dealing drugs, and then, God help her, into prison for dealing drugs. But wasn’t he putting his life back together again? Wasn’t he the owner of a legitimate job these days — okay, just delivering mail for now, but you couldn’t keep a good man down for long, could you? Not with his brains. Before you knew it, he’d be running that company, sure he would. And such a good-hearted boy, too, and likable — everyone but everyone liked Winston — and he never forgot her birthday card, not once. She still had that lopsided clay ashtray he’d made her in second grade, didn’t she — sitting up somewhere on the mantelplace. Winston’s mom, who wouldn’t be getting a birthday card from him this year or any other year from now on.

I wished I’d asked Winston more about his life. Anything about his life. If he did have a mom waiting for his Christmas cards every year, or a girlfriend sitting up tonight and wondering just where Winston was exactly, or a brother or sister or favorite uncle. But all I’d asked him about was baseball and prison, that’s it, and then I’d asked him to do something that had gotten him killed.

I stopped the car right by the section of torn fence, then sat there for a while to make sure I was really alone. Yes, as far as I could tell, I was very much alone, alone at the dump, alone in the universe. “Deanna,” I whispered, my partner in life, but only the one she knew about — Charles the nine-to-five adman, as opposed to Charles the adulterer and accessory to murder.