Car Trouble Read online

  The Green Hornet swerved to the right and onto a ramp that should have taken us to the BQE. But the road kept rising, higher and higher, above aluminum-sided homes, and then it curved, away from the streets. I saw a strand of white lights, the skyline of Manhattan, and the tarnished towers of the Williamsburg Bridge.

  We were crossing the East River.

  Dad’s mouth hung open. He said, “I must be Mickey the Dunce.”

  “You said it, not me,” Mom said.

  I thought, Maybe we’ll go back over the Brooklyn Bridge. He would know how to get home from there. But no. That would have been too rational. He made a U-turn on Delancey Street and went back over the Williamsburg.

  “Jesus, Pat, where are we going now?” Mom said, her voice sharp. “We’re going to get lost again.”

  “Daddy—” I said.

  On our left, a train rumbled up out of the guts of the subway system and onto the bridge, oxblood-red cars scarred with graffiti. The train rode sidesaddle with us on an elevated track in the middle of the bridge. On the Brooklyn waterfront, I saw the yellow neon letters of the Domino Sugar factory. I looked back at my sisters’ bewildered expressions. The shouting between Mom and Dad had wakened Mary Ellen, and she moved off Mom’s lap onto the seat, rubbing her eyes. “When are we going to be in our house, Mom?” she asked.

  “I was just about to ask your father the same question.”

  He tuned everybody out. He stared out the windshield, hugging the steering wheel. The needle on the speedometer fell back to forty-five, forty mph. We came off the bridge into a large plaza where buses from points all over Brooklyn ended their routes. They were lined up, ten across, lights on, cabins empty.

  The car stopped. “I have to find Flushing Avenue,” he said. “That’s what I have to do.”

  I really had to pee. Thinking that if I told him I needed to go to the bathroom, we would get home faster, I told him I had to go.

  “You’re going to have to hold it, mister. Till I can get out of here.”

  Storefront signage in Hebrew sluggishly passed by as he searched for the right street. “What else did your uncle say?” he asked suddenly.

  “Say about what?” I was distracted. I was thinking how long I would have to wait until I could get out of this car and take a leak.

  “About anything. The sun, the moon. Your LSD shirt.”

  “He didn’t ask me about my shirt.”

  He reached over and slapped my face.

  “Pat—”

  Mom’s warning voice. I shot up in my seat, the tears pricking. “What was that for?”

  “Don’t be facetious, young man. I am asking you a question. Did he say anything to you when he gave you the package?”

  “What package?” Mom asked.

  Himself didn’t answer and I couldn’t think straight. He had a heavy paw and I felt its sting on my cheek. I turned my face to the window. “He didn’t want you to leave without it.”

  He said nothing. We drove along a dark brick wall that I thought was a prison. It was the Brooklyn Navy Yard. He pulled over on a nearby street.

  “Now where’re we going?” Mom asked, exasperated.

  He ignored her. “Okay, Mr. Flower Power, get out and take your piss.”

  I looked out the window, my face still warm, at a series of desolate loading docks. “I am not peeing in the street like somebody’s dog.”

  He wouldn’t look at me. “You’re the one who said you have to go.”

  Why was he pulling this stunt in front of my mother and sisters? I wiped my face and looked back at Mom for some intercession. Let her play referee. “Knock it off, Pat, and get us out of here. These kids need to go to bed.”

  He eyeballed her in the rearview mirror. “You sure? Once I start this car again, I am not stopping until we are home.”

  It was another fifteen minutes before we turned the corner onto our block. I was the first one out of the car, before Himself backed it into the driveway. I made it up the stoop and into the darkened house, Mom’s set of keys in my hand. With all the windows shut, the house was hot and stale-smelling inside. I slammed the bathroom door. One of the loose tiles in the wall behind me fell to the floor as I fumbled with my fly. After I flushed the toilet, I washed my face.

  I picked up the two pieces of glazed white ceramic tile and added them to the pile of broken tiles on the floor next to the radiator. There were ten now.

  Himself was standing in the hallway when I opened the door, shirttail out of his pants, sweaty face creased by a smirk. The last person I wanted to see tonight. The driving, the panic on the bridge, seemed to have sobered him up, but I still didn’t want to get too close.

  “C’mon, Nicky. You think you’re the only person who has to take a piss?”

  He was half-smiling at me, as if he hadn’t just hit me half an hour ago. I had to pass him, uneasily, in the hallway. He closed the bathroom door behind him and turned on the faucets at the sink, which he did sometimes when he didn’t want everyone to hear he was going to the bathroom. I looked over my shoulder into Mom and Dad’s room. The beam of light from the lamp on the end table fell onto the white bedspread where the brown paper package lay, tantalizing as a diamond. I poked my head in the doorway. I had to know why Himself had rushed it upstairs. He never cared where he left anything: dirty underwear, dirty dishes, kicked-off shoes.

  The faucets were still running in the bathroom. I had a minute, maybe less, to see what the mystery was all about. I walked to the edge of the bed and picked up the package. It was a book all right, a hardcover. Well, so what? I pulled it out. The dust jacket was blue and the first word on the cover was Alcoholics, written in large letters. The word made me shiver and my face went hot with shame. This was bad. Not just for Himself, but for Mom and the five of us kids. I couldn’t explain why. I just knew it.

  I slid the rest of the book out. The second word on the cover, stacked underneath Alcoholics, was Anonymous. Alcoholics Anonymous. AA. Now I didn’t just suspect; I knew. Uncle George had given this to Dad so he knew too. And Aunt Regina. Your father could have shaved. The entire family knew and they’d elected George to make an appeal. Or maybe Mom had called him. That’s what they had been talking about back at the party, just Uncle George, Mom, and Himself—it must have made him furious. And he took it out on me.

  I heard the toilet flush and slid the book inside the paper bag, dropped it on the bed. Back in my room behind the closed door, I turned on the fan and changed out of my flower power shirt, tossing it on the bed. And that’s where I sat, listening, while I slipped a T-shirt over my head. The book wasn’t in the exact same place where I’d picked it up, but I hoped Himself wouldn’t notice.

  At last, I heard his customary trudge down the stairs. I went barefoot into the bathroom to brush my teeth. The light was still on in my parents’ bedroom, but the brown paper package was gone.

  III.

  The Black Beauty

  Four

  I took my first driving lesson in the Black Beauty—Himself’s idea. We were on the way back from a nursery in the Brooklyn Terminal Market when he made an unexpected left turn on Schenectady Avenue into Holy Cross Cemetery.

  I had to ask: “Are we taking a shortcut?”

  He stopped the car in the middle of the road and cocked his head at me. “Let’s see how you do in the driver’s seat.”

  I put my hands on the dashboard. “What? You’re kidding, right?”

  “I kid you not.” He was already getting out of the car and walking around the solid black hood of the Pontiac—his latest newish old car—to the passenger side. I pulled up the button, and he opened the door. “Slide over.”

  I had to move the seat up. He helped me adjust the rearview mirror. This was a crazy, crazy idea. The steering wheel, worn smooth from the many hands that had turned it, felt peculiar under my fingers, and the dashboard, with its fuel gauge, speedometer, and other, mysterious dials, looked strange now that I was behind the wheel.

  The Black Beauty w
as a sporty, two-door tank with the improbable French name Pontiac Parisienne. The pride of Detroit, circa 1958. It had appeared in our driveway early in 1969, not long after the loud, wheezing death of the Green Hornet, when the floor of that car was rotting out and anybody in the backseat could see the asphalt beneath their feet as we drove along. Naturally, the Black Beauty came courtesy of one of those police department auctions that Dad preferred to a used-car lot or actual new-car showroom.

  We had Holy Cross to ourselves. It was May, my favorite time of year, and the cemetery couldn’t have been more beautiful. Through the windshield, the new green leaves had a bluish tint. The trees were massive, staggering—sweet gums, scarlet oaks, silver lindens, and black maples. Dad had picked a good day for this impromptu lesson—Saturday. There were no burials, no chance of running smack into a hearse or upsetting a funeral cortege.

  The engine was humming. “Anytime you’re ready,” he said, reaching in his shirt pocket for a Lucky Strike. I pressed down on the accelerator and the Pontiac lurched. I took my foot off, like I had touched a hot pot. Dad clapped his hand on the steering wheel. “Easy,” he said, laughing. It was good to hear him laugh. I hoped his mood would last.

  “It figures you would have a heavy foot like your old man.”

  I took a deep breath and pressed down lightly on the gas pedal. We were moving. The car was moving—past the beds of new crocuses and daffodils blooming in front of the polished tombstones. I wouldn’t be allowed to touch a steering wheel at St. Mike’s until I was a junior, and that would be with Mr. Monroe, the bovine driver’s ed teacher, and a car full of pimply upperclassmen. Getting behind the wheel with Himself, without a learner’s permit, that was a gas. And no one knew, except the majestic melancholy stone angels watching over the dead, and the blinking pigeons perched on their heads.

  The car moved like a turtle, ten, fifteen, twenty-five miles per hour.

  “How does it feel?”

  “Really weird.” The roads in Holy Cross were old and narrow and the Black Beauty’s hood eclipsed the asphalt. As the big car moved beneath me, I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to steer this thing in traffic. Did all other cars get out of its way?

  “Looking down this hood is like staring into an abyss,” I said.

  “You have to leave yourself extra room when you park,” Dad said.

  A green flatbed truck with a couple of gravediggers in back crossed in front of us, but not so close that I had to brake. Dad told me to make a left turn, away from the Albany Avenue gate, and I did, but it was very wide and the Pontiac came up on the sidewalk. I kept waiting to get yelled at, but Dad did not make a peep. He smoked his cigarette, right arm dangling out the window. I went up and down on the sidewalk, and the trees and road came at us in a leisurely fashion, as if I were watching someone drive in an old movie. What a change from the Green Hornet’s Death Seat. I didn’t have to grip the door handle. Here in the driver’s seat, white leather with black contrast stitching, I was surprisingly calm.

  We passed the statue of St. Patrick holding a stone shamrock and on the right, a massive white stone building called the Cloister, which had two floors of graves stacked behind white marble walls. If Dad was surprised at how well I knew the turns in the road, he didn’t let on. You don’t grow up down the block from a cemetery without exploring it, and I had first come to Holy Cross with my friends from St. Maria’s during my gothic period, when we were all watching Dark Shadows after school. We’d pretend that we were the characters in the show—vampires, werewolves, witches, and their unfortunate mortal companions. We’d go to Holy Cross on a stark Sunday winter afternoon, bundled up, crunching on the frozen grass and then hide behind the tombstones, shrieking the names of the characters—Barnabas! Angelique!—until the groundskeepers chased us out. Now I just slipped inside through a break in the fence on Cortelyou Road and wandered through the field of graves until I saw the back of St. Patrick’s mitre.

  “Once you get your license, we can get you a cheap car, and you can see the USA in your Chevrolet!” Dad said, keeping his eye on the road. We were back at the Schenectady Avenue gate. I wasn’t sure how much longer he’d let me drive. We had a trunk full of gardening supplies—bags of peat moss, a flat of portulacas and phlox, and two rosebushes I picked out myself. Mom was waiting for us to bring them home. No doubt we should have been there by now.

  “Let’s go around again,” he said. “You’re handling the wheel well.”

  “I’m not going very fast.”

  “You don’t want to speed in the cemetery. The residents don’t like it.”

  I smiled. “Where did you learn to drive?”

  “My old man, your grandfather, used to take me and your uncle George out to Breezy Point and we’d practice out there, by the bungalows, and then in the parking lot at Riis Park. We used to chase after the pigeons with the car.”

  I smiled, thinking of Himself and Uncle George as teenagers—shorter, skinnier, with their Flynn ears sticking out like open car doors—taking turns behind the wheel in the windy parking lot at the beach.

  “What kind of car?”

  “A ’48 Packard. He eventually gave it to your uncle and bought an Oldsmobile.”

  I was getting used to the size of the Black Beauty. The massive hood that stretched far out like a dusty black carpet. We were back at the road that led you out of the cemetery and I was sure the lesson was over.

  “Let’s go over by Brooklyn Avenue.”

  That was the other side of Holy Cross, the one closer to our house. It had its own, grand entrance. I crossed the road, passing pristine limestone mausoleums with the names Sweeney and Anzalone engraved over slender doors. They were fancier than any home on our block, with its strip of semiattached A-frame houses in brick or stucco, and must have cost a fortune. Sweeney’s house looked like a Greek temple with Doric columns and Anzalone’s was like a miniature church with stained-glass windows, statues of saints stationed out front, and oxidized doors with windows, as if you might look inside and find parishioners attending mass. All this decoration for people who would never see it. But I appreciated the attempt to create some lasting memory, however extravagant. I felt like I was transported to another country, where imagination gave weight to sorrow and produced these mansions of the dead.

  On my right, a large field of tombstones ran all the way to the Snyder Avenue cemetery fence. Somewhere in there the Flynns were buried, dating back to my great-grandparents. Mom’s real mother was buried on the other side of Holy Cross, next to the Cortelyou Road fence. I knew that modest tombstone by heart.

  The road curved, and I saw a man and a woman getting out of a parked car. They were dressed in blue windbreakers. The woman was carrying a potted lily, the white trumpet flower standing out sharply against the green afternoon. The man carried a small red canvas duffel bag. They disappeared among the angel-topped tombstones.

  It was time to go home, switch places behind the wheel. People were starting to pay their respects on a Saturday afternoon, and we didn’t need to practice my driving, but Dad said, “Pull up next to that Buick. Let’s see how you do with parking.”

  The Buick, a Skylark, was parked next to a large limestone mausoleum with the name Cutrone engraved above the entrance.

  “I don’t know if I’m ready to do that.”

  “You’ll never get your license if you can’t parallel park. Give it a shot.”

  It was useless to argue. And everything so far had gone so well so I didn’t. I hadn’t crashed into any bushes or graves—or even knocked over a garbage can. If I didn’t at least try this tricky maneuver, his good mood might change for the rest of the day, possibly the weekend.

  He helped me position the Pontiac next to the Buick, put the car into reverse, and back it up slowly until the cars were aligned. Then he had me turn the steering wheel all the way to the right as I backed up the car some more. He looked out the passenger’s side to check the clearance. The Pontiac sat at a funny angle to the Buick. The Bla
ck Beauty was longer than the Green Hornet, with a once gleaming black body, a white hardtop, and sleek white side panels that extended from the taillights to the front tires. A pointed white strip trimmed in chrome bisected the black, again, from the front door to the headlights so that the sides of the car gleamed like white daggers. In a street fight between the two cars, the Black Beauty, named after the car driven by Kato, sidekick to the Green Hornet in the radio serial, would easily take the Buick.

  After I turned the wheel as far as it would go, I braked. My palms were moist. I hoped that the man and woman still had a couple of Hail Marys or Our Fathers to say because I didn’t want them to see a kid without a learner’s permit trying to park this big old car.

  Himself was ready for the next step. “Okay. Now crank it all the way to the left.”

  The only thing I had cranked up to that point was the volume on the stereo in the front porch, but whatever I did to the steering wheel, it worked. The Black Beauty smoothly rolled into place behind the Buick.

  Dad was grinning. “Damn if you didn’t get it on the first try.”

  He was delighted, nodding, the corners of his mouth turned down. This was awe; this was respect. This really meant something, but what I didn’t know yet. No matter. I would always remember this moment as one of the times Himself and I approached something like harmony.

  We switched places with the engine still running. The couple appeared from behind the Cutrone tomb and got back in the Buick.

  I decided I was going to have a Ring Ding after lunch, the hell with the pimple patrol. I had just parked a ’58 Pontiac Parisienne and the austere angels at Holy Cross Cemetery were my witnesses. I sat back in the Death Seat and looked out the window at the sky. A light scudding of cirrus clouds across the blue heavens promised a good afternoon of planting. We could probably get the rosebushes—one yellow, the other coral-colored—in the ground and watered in an hour. Then I could take off on my bike, down Ocean Parkway to Brighton Beach, until it got dark. I’d do my homework—algebra equations and Act III of Julius Caesar—tomorrow.