Siegel, James - Derailed

Just in case someone asked him to get rid of someone else.

Now I had to get rid of the car.

That sort of took care of itself. On the way back down Western Avenue, I passed the highway; it was dark, and I was replaying the sounds of canine feeding in my head — hitting the rewind button against my better judgment and listening to it over and over again. When you’re hearing the sounds of someone being eaten, it’s easy to miss things like highway signs. I ended up in a part of Staten Island I hadn’t known existed — farmland, actual rows of fallow field with an honest to God silo sitting in the distance. Two ticks from every sin of urban congestion, and I was suddenly in Kansas.

But not every sin of urban living was missing. I passed a massive car dump. It looked like a watering hole for wrecks, being as they were all grouped around a mud pond, some of them half-submerged in it. One more wreck would hardly be noticed, would it?

I gently swerved off the road and into the bumpy lot, driving the car to the very edge of the water. I took one last look around the car — trying not to touch the pieces of flesh stuck to carpet and leather, opening the glove compartment, and finding a surprise in there. A gun. Winston’s, I remembered, the one that must’ve never made it into his hand because another gun took his head off before it could. I delicately placed it into my pocket. Then I put the car in neutral, stumbled out of the front seat, and with a gentle push forward let the car slip quietly into the pond, where it finally came to rest with just its antenna poking out of the muck.

I wasn’t much for religion — I didn’t know any prayers to really speak of. But I stood there for a minute and whispered something anyway. In his memory.

I turned away and began to walk.

How I was going to get home?

I could have called a car service, I suppose, but I knew they kept records. I needed to find my way back to midtown, where Charles Schine taking a car ride home would be like any other late night at the office.

I passed a gas station. I could see a lone Indian-looking man reading a magazine in a barely lit cubicle. I walked around the side, looking for a bathroom. I found one.

Gas station bathrooms were much like bathrooms in Chinatown, which were much like black holes in Calcutta, or so I now thought. There was no toilet paper. The mirror was cracked, the sink filled with sludge. But I needed to wash up. I would have to find a bus or train that would take me back into the city, and I smelled like garbage.

The sink had running water. Even a little soap left in the holder, a thick scummy yellow. I washed my hands—I threw water on my face—I took my shirt off even though the bathroom was frigid and I was exhaling clouds of vapor every time I breathed. I rubbed my chest and under my arms. A whore’s bath — isn’t that what they called it? And I was a whore in good standing these days. I’d prostituted every single thing I’d believed in.

I put my shirt back on. I zipped up my jacket. I went back outside and began walking.

I just picked a direction. I wasn’t going to ask the gas station manager, who just might remember a shell-shocked-looking white man who’d showed up without his car.

A half hour later I discovered a bus stop. And when an empty bus came to a stop there a half hour after that, I took it. I was lucky. It was headed to Brooklyn, where it eventually let me off by a subway station.

I made it back to Manhattan.

Home.

Something I appreciated after a night of grave digging. Four solid walls of clear yellow shingle and black-pitched roof with one impressive chimney poking through. The real estate agent who’d sold it to us described it as a center hall colonial. A substantive ring to it — nothing much could happen to you in a center hall colonial, now could it? Of course, outside the center hall colonial, all sorts of things.

When the car dropped me off, I walked to the back door and tried to open and close it as silently as I could, but I could hear Deanna stirring from our upstairs bedroom.

I made one more foray to the bathroom — this bathroom a lot cheerier than the previous one. Cleaner, too. Nice fluffy yellow towels hanging from the wall and a Degas print over the toilet — Woman Bathing ?

This time I undressed down to my boxers and used a towel generously soaked in soap to rinse myself down. That was more like it — I smelled almost bearable. I took the gun out of my pants and put it into my briefcase.

Then I went upstairs to the bedroom, where I maneuvered my way through the pitch black — one stumble over a high-heeled shoe — and into bed.

Deanna said: “You washed up.” Not as a question, either.

Of course; she smelled the soap, she’d heard the faucet, too. Now, why would a working-late husband wash himself before climbing into bed? That’s what she was asking herself — and I was having trouble coming up with an answer.

Don’t be silly, Deanna, I could say. I haven’t been with another woman. (See: Lucinda.) I've been busy burying a body. This hit man and friend I hired to get rid of someone who was blackmailing me because I was with another woman before. Got it?

“I worked out today,” I said, “and I never took a shower.”

Not a great excuse when you thought about it — not at this hour of the night. I mean, why couldn’t I have just waited till morning? But maybe it would do.

Because Deanna said: “Uh-huh.” Maybe she was suspicious about it, maybe she was suspicious about a lot of my recent behavior, but maybe she was too tired to hash it out. Not at two in the morning. Not when she’d stayed up all night waiting for me to come home.

“Good night, sweetheart,” I said, and leaned over to kiss her. Milky and warm: home.

I had a dream that night, though — when I woke in the morning I could remember several details.

I’d been visiting someone in the hospital. I had flowers with me, a box of candy, and I was in the reception room waiting to be called up to the sick person’s room. What sick person, though? Well, the patient’s identity changed several times in the dream, which is what happens in dreams—first they’re one person and then they’re someone else. At first I was visiting Deanna’s mom, but when I finally got up to the room it was Anna lying there. She was plugged into a spider’s web of IVs, and she barely acknowledged me, and I demanded to see the doctor. But when I turned to look at her again, it was Deanna who was lying there in just this side of a coma. Deanna. I remembered the next part of the dream clearly: shouting in the hall for the doctor to come see me, even though there was a doctor there — Dr. Baron, in fact, who kept explaining that they couldn’t get hold of the doctor, not possible, but I was having none of it.

Finally my shouting seemed to do the trick; the doctor did come to see me. But he changed identities, too — first Eliot, my boss, then someone who might’ve been my next-door neighbor Joe, and finally and last, Vasquez. Yes, I woke up remembering Vasquez’s face there in the hall with me. By turns impassive and malevolent and snide, but consistently deaf to my pleas. Deanna was dying in there and he was doing nothing to help her. Nothing.

In the morning, after Deanna left for work and Anna for school, I made another trip into the file cabinet, another furtive visit into Anna’s Fund.

TWENTY-SIX

On the train in the morning, I did not read the sports page first. Did not read about the Giants’ last lamentable defeat, about the Yankees signing yet another platinum-priced free agent, about the Knicks’ eternal search for a point guard.

For one day, at least, my Hebraic reading of the daily newspaper (that is, back to front) was put aside, and I read the paper like a concerned citizen. Concerned about the festering situation in the Middle East, the ongoing congressional gridlock, the roller-coaster tendencies of the Nasdaq. And, of course, the recent upswing in urban crime. Murder, for instance.