Car Trouble Read online

  “I don’t really know,” he said with a yawn. “I think she may have been beaten when she did bark.”

  “Poor Queenie,” Dee Dee said.

  There was no question that the arrival of the collie was a blessing in our lives. We could all take care of her. Dad set up a schedule for the care of the dog. Queenie was walked five times a day; I had the late shift. Soon we wanted her outside with us all the time. If there was no one else for Dee Dee and Mary Ellen to play with on the block, they could run her up and down the sidewalk between our house and Snyder Avenue or try in vain to teach her tricks, like how to catch a ball. And Queenie was always good company, whether you wanted to hang out on the stoop or walk two miles around the perimeter of Holy Cross.

  There were only a few things Queenie hated: baths, firecrackers, and bars. I discovered that one night when Dad called home, asking Mom for money so he could stay out and drink. Mom was using her lowest possible voice as she talked to him on the phone; I knew she didn’t want to give him five cents. Then she hung up, called me over, and asked me to give her the pocketbook on the dining room table. She took a ten-dollar bill from her change purse and handed it to me. “Take this to your father,” she said evenly.

  “When?”

  “Now.”

  I had finished my French and geometry homework and was getting ready to watch The Avengers. Never missed an episode. Diana Rigg in a leather jumpsuit doing karate on the bad guys, then changing into something sleek at the end for a martini with Mr. Steed. I could walk from one end of Brooklyn to the other and not find any girl as cool or witty or elegant. I imagined her picking me up after school in her blue Lotus Elan convertible, long brown hair blowing in the breeze as we headed off to some adventure. She would call me Nick, not Nicky, and I’d feel about ten years older.

  The only place I was going now was the Dew Drop and Mom knew from my expression I didn’t want to go. “He says to take the dog with you.”

  Queenie, napping in front of the television, coarse wisps of hair rising off her coat, didn’t look like she wanted to go anywhere. “Why do I have to bring her?”

  Mom bit off her words. “It will take ten minutes. Do me a favor and take the dog.”

  Maybe I’d make it back in time for the second half hour of the show. Emma Peel would be kicking the villain of the week in the teeth by then and the show would really get good. Maureen could tell me what I’d missed.

  I walked up Church Avenue, heading toward Nostrand. Our neighborhood was more black than white now. The streetscape I used to know was changed forever. Roti shops had replaced grocery stores. Guy’s Hair Salon, with its sun-bleached pictures of women with blond beehives and champagne bouffants taped to the windows, was now called De Hair Wizzards and advertised weaves, wigs, and Afros. Himself wanted me to bring the dog for protection in case I ran into any trouble, but I didn’t think I’d have any problems. Now that it was colder, the corner boys who usually lingered in front of the bodega on New York Avenue drinking Colt 45s were gone. The few guys I passed sidestepped me as if they were afraid of the dog. Little did they know that she hardly ever barked when she first came to live with us, so it was hard to imagine her biting anyone.

  The Dew Drop was on the corner of Church and Fairview Place, six blocks from home. Queenie trotted along at my side, her coat shiny under a dark blue sky (I’d taken Gina’s advice and mixed a raw egg into her Alpo). I wore a red-and-black plaid jacket that used to belong to my uncle George; it was a little long in the sleeves but had a great scratchy feel I always associated with old-time wool. I wondered if he had contacted my father since he moved to Germany. I was sure Himself had never cracked open that book on Alcoholics Anonymous. I needed no further proof than the morning he brought home the dog and was unconscious on the kitchen floor.

  Something strange happened as we approached the bar. Queenie pulled at the leash. I looked down at her and said, “What’s wrong?” I took another step and she dragged her hind legs on the sidewalk, claws on her forelegs scraping the concrete. I stopped. She gave me a frightened look. She knew more about this place than I did. I didn’t know what to do, so I bent down and petted her.

  I glanced at the bar. Cardboard shamrocks were taped to the window, decorations someone forgot to take down; it was already October. Or maybe every day was St. Patrick’s Day at the Dew Drop.

  We went back to the corner and crossed the street. I walked the collie down to the corner of Martense Street and crossed back over. “Come on. It won’t take long,” I said, as if she could understand me. When we were near the Dew Drop’s side exit, she allowed me to tie the leash to a No Parking sign and I stayed with her a minute.

  I was hoping I could make this quick, give the old man his ten bucks, and scram. I entered the bar through the side door, not knowing what to expect on the other side. First surprise: it was a mixed crowd. I couldn’t even imagine Himself drinking with black guys, especially the ones here with Afros, when he was always making jokes about blacks, but I guess in the smoky confines of the Dew Drop, racial tensions were set aside as long as everyone could watch a replay of that afternoon’s Mets game against the Orioles. They’d finally made it to the World Series, giving hope to underdogs everywhere.

  I was the only minor in the joint, sure I stuck out like a sore thumb. Standing on tiptoe, I saw Dad sitting on a red stool at the bar, looking at a near-empty glass. Probably thinking about this ten-dollar bill every time he saw the foam slide down the inside of the glass. He was talking to some middle-aged white guy with a sunburn where his hairline was receding. A cigar stuck out of his mouth. The TV set was poised above the far right end of the bar. They were complaining about Ed Kranepool, the first baseman Dad always called lard-ass.

  I took the bill out of my pocket and placed it on the bar in front of him. I leaned in. “Mom said this was for you.”

  He stopped laughing and shot me a look. “Hey, who’s this?” the man sitting next to him asked, and I reached out to shake another hand of someone I didn’t really want to meet.

  “You haven’t met my son, the scholar?” Dad said, poking the shoulder of the guy next to him. “Nicky, can I buy you a drink?”

  Mom didn’t say I was going to have to stay. “Uh, maybe a quick one. I’ll take a ginger ale. I have the dog outside.”

  He called the bartender over. One of the Mets scored a home run on the color TV screen, and he shouted to everyone, in the booming voice we came to fear, “One to nothing, top of the eighth. We are home free.” I smiled and shook my head; when he was wound up like that, Dad was hard to resist. “Hey, Charlie, give me another beer. And a soda for my son.”

  Charlie was an older white man with liver-colored lips and thinning brown hair slicked back with some tonic with a medicinal odor like Vitalis; his nicotined teeth flashed garishly from the right corner of his mouth when he spoke. I bet Dad had known him for years, from one place to another. Charlie slapped another foamy beer on the bar.

  So this was Himself’s inner sanctum. A private world of men playing the away game from their families. Some customers were older than Dad, guys with thick-lensed eyeglasses, pudding skin, and chin lines lost to jowls, but many looked like they were about the same age, early to mid-thirties, still slim and well built. All eyes were on the television screen and the all-important game. I sipped my soda, trying to seem natural though the smoky air was bothering my eyes; it was hard not to rub them.

  Compared with some of the joints I would later retrieve Himself from, this place wasn’t terrible. The décor was standard: a jukebox, a pool table, dartboard, neon signs advertising Rheingold and Pabst Blue Ribbon. Two photos over the walnut case that housed the bottles of liquor and liqueurs caught my eye; they seemed so out of place. One was John F. Kennedy, in a fake gold frame, the kind we used for our school graduation pictures, lined up on the fireplace in the living room. The other was Martin Luther King Jr. The owner of this place wasn’t stupid; he wanted to keep his changing clientele happy.

  Dad was tel
ling the guy sitting at the next stool—his name was Molloy, Joe Molloy—what a fantastic student I was—“This kid got one hundred in Latin, I kid you not”—and I remembered how angry I was when he signed me up for the class, mailing in my freshman elective card, without telling me. Told me Latin was the root of all languages. Like he knew.

  “I’m lucky I can speak English,” Molloy said.

  The ginger ale tasted kind of flat. I drank it anyway and gestured to the dog when I finished. The side exit from the bar was open, and he glanced at Queenie resting on the sidewalk.

  “She’s some watchdog,” he said with a wink. “Best game of poker I ever won.”

  “What?”

  “I was playing cards here with Tommy Sullivan and Phil Cooney and Joe was flat broke. So he put his dog up as ante. You see, he’s the owner and she was kind of like the bar dog.”

  The bar dog. I wished he had the sense that she did about coming here. “And you won the game and the dog.” I couldn’t even smile.

  Dad gave a hearty laugh. “That’s the way it goes sometimes.”

  I wondered how long Queenie had lived here. We didn’t even know how old she was. My eyes stung from the smoke and I rubbed them. I looked at the guys sitting on the stools and wondered how many of them would go home now. Most, probably. So why couldn’t he do that?

  Standing up, I glanced at the singles on the bar, the change from our drinks. I was feeling nervy. “So I guess you’ll be home when the game’s over?”

  He did a double take, as if I’d cuffed him on the ear. “What did you say, Mr. Flynn?”

  I forgot about catching the last of Emma Peel. “C’mon. I want to take another driving lesson tomorrow. We haven’t gone out in a while.” We’d done Holy Cross and the Brooklyn Terminal Market, which had no yellow lines, just huge spaces between the vendors. “I don’t want to get rusty.”

  “Yeah, well. We’ll see what we can do about that.”

  As saves go, I was proud of myself, although my knees were shaking. An appointment with a car he could make. Spending the night with his wife and family, he was on the fence.

  Queenie looked fairly miserable out on the sidewalk, panting in the dark, but I wanted to see if I could get Himself to come home. It was the top of the ninth, the score unchanged. I ordered another ginger ale, chipping away at what was left of that ten-dollar bill. Tom Seaver, the cute Met my two eldest sisters had a crush on, was pitching so that was a good sign. He could knock out the other team and when he did, the guys in the bar cheered as if they were out at Shea Stadium. Then they started to leave, settling up, shaking hands with the bartender, and going on their way.

  I stood and nudged my old man. “Come say hi to the dog.”

  I went outside. Queenie jumped on me when I untied the leash, thinking we were finally getting out of there. When she settled down, I petted her under the collar, rubbing the white hair under her neck, which she loved. Then Himself joined us on the sidewalk and she got excited all over again. She was ready to go. I wondered if he was too.

  “Want to walk us home?”

  He stopped petting Queenie and looked up at me. “Why? You afraid of the dark?”

  “Game’s over, Dad. Your team won.”

  He stood, looking down at the sidewalk with his hands in his pockets, as if giving serious thought to my proposal. “You go on home, Nicky,” he said. “I’ve got to talk to Molloy about something.”

  When he raised his head, his eyes were full of regret; he knew what I was up to and he was still prepared to let me down. I wondered how much of that ten-dollar bill was left—enough for one more drink? Maybe he had to talk Molloy into giving him a free one. A buyback, they called it. Except that my mother was doing the buying here. He was doing the spending.

  He left me on the sidewalk. I was a fool to think I’d persuade him to come home. Voices came from the TV set inside the bar, sportscasters falling all over themselves about tonight’s game. I stood there like a jerk, looking at the mannequins in the window of Bob and Betty, the children’s clothing store across the street. A stock boy from the Big Apple dragged tied-up cardboard boxes to the curb for garbage pickup tomorrow morning.

  I had him, then I lost him, like an image that slips out of focus in the lens of a camera. All the elements were there to give me a clear picture of what I could expect the next time I was sent to get him. And the time after that. The corner bar, the sound of my own footsteps as I walked up the street, the kid taking out the trash as I would do when I had my own afterschool job, scooping thirty-one flavors at Baskin-Robbins. A lingering sense of futility, and the lonely certainty that these missions would end only when I grew up and moved away.

  I took the dog and headed back down Church Avenue. She pulled at the leash with the same force she showed when clawing the sidewalk. Home, that’s what she wanted. Me too. Neither of us belonged here.

  Seven

  After Grandma and Grandpa Flynn sold their house, we inherited their dining room furniture. But first we had to go get it. On a cold Saturday morning in November, I waited at the kitchen table for Himself to get ready. Mom was doing her usual five things at once. She placed two cake pans to cool on top of the stove; later, she would ice them for Dee Dee’s birthday. My little sister was nine years old.

  The house Grandma and Grandpa were moving to was too small for all the furniture they had, Mom said. Grandma was giving everything away that wouldn’t fit in the new place, a mobile home.

  I had already eaten a bowl of cereal but picked up a red delicious apple out of a bowl on the table. “What do people do in Florida?”

  Mom walked to the open basement door, a basket of dirty clothes under her arm. “Your grandfather’s going to play golf every day. I don’t know what your grandmother’s going to do. This whole thing is his idea.”

  I smiled and bit into the apple. It was a little dry, but I would finish it just the same. We already cleared a space in the dining room for the new table; the old one leaned against the china closet. Before Mom and I put the table aside, I folded the ivory lace tablecloth that adorned it and put it away in a drawer in the buffet. While smoothing the fabric, I found a yellowed newspaper clipping, an obituary notice for my mother’s mother. She’d died when Mom was still a teenager. “Jurgensen, Catherine” was the name in boldface. The newsprint was so faded I could barely make out the lowercase letters, except to find the name of the county in Ireland, Mayo, where she had been born Catherine Staunton. She’d saved it all these years, but I wondered why the notice wasn’t in some kind of scrapbook.

  The weekends were turning colder now, and none of us was in any hurry to go outside. Mary Ellen and the birthday girl were still in their pjs, watching cartoons in the living room. The collie napped on the rug. Patty was upstairs with the vacuum and Maureen was waiting for Himself to get out of the bathroom, so she could get in there and scrub it. I was excused from housework today because I was assigned the manly task of getting the table.

  Mom returned from the basement with a yellow basket piled high with folded clothes and looked at the empty spot in the dining room. “Well, I guess I can’t put these on the table.” She pulled out a kitchen chair and plopped the basket there.

  “Why does he have to get so dolled up just to go get a table?” I asked.

  She was back at the stove again, running a knife around the edge of the silver cake pan. “So his mother will think he looks like that all the time.” She turned the cake pan upside down and tapped the bottom. The spongy yellow layer fell into the palm of her hand; it was perfect. She removed the second layer and placed it on top of the first. Mom baked birthday cakes for all of us and they were all iced and presented on a bone china cake stand that once belonged to her mother.

  “What kind of icing?”

  She moved the cake stand to the middle of the kitchen table, where the dog couldn’t paw it. “Vanilla, but she wants me to make it green. It’s her favorite color. This week.”

  She picked up the basket of clean laun
dry and headed to the staircase. I could smell Himself coming into the kitchen, the Old Spice drumroll. Every hair was in place, expertly combed and slicked back with VO5. He was wearing black pants and a blue-and-white flannel shirt.

  “Let’s shake a leg, Mr. Flynn,” he said, heading out the kitchen door. We went through the back porch into the yard. There were leaves plastered to the sidewalk from last night’s rainstorm, and the sky was gray and sudsy, as if it wanted to squeeze out a little more water. The last of the roses clung to the bushes with a stubborn, battered look, and the Japanese maple had turned a burnished tangerine. He rolled up the garage door and disappeared among the bikes, the old tires, and the garden tools. The Black Beauty, parked in the driveway, had been around longer than the Green Hornet, but signs of its demise were already visible: one of the hubcaps was missing and the muffler’s rumbling could be heard a block away.

  He came down the alley carrying heavy yellow ropes, which I guessed we would use to tie something in the trunk, maybe the chairs. He threw them in the backseat and backed the car out of the driveway. I got in once he cleared the curb. The car smelled better than usual: no cigarette stink or sour alcohol smell. He had been home every night this week—we kept count now—and his mood seemed steady. When we had driven far enough away from the house, over by the quiet streets near Brooklyn College, he pulled over by one of the campus bookstores and told me to get behind the wheel.

  It was the first time I drove in traffic. I was ready but nervous. Although these illicit driving lessons didn’t come regularly, I never forgot what I learned. By the time I was old enough to take driver’s ed, I would be teaching everyone else how to do this. I made a left on Campus Road and then another left on Bedford Avenue, the longest street in Brooklyn. The street rose as we passed over an old freight rail line, and I pressed on the gas pedal.

  In the rearview mirror, I saw a bus sneaking up behind me. The red light at the upcoming intersection was flashing, and Dad told me to step on it. “Lights on Bedford are three minutes long,” he said.