Deadly Debut Read online

  “Hey, man, great party!” they said.

  I still couldn’t figure out how the girl had gotten into the closet. If she’d been in my apartment before, the party remained the most likely occasion. So I asked.

  “This may sound dumb—” or “Things got kind of wild that night—”

  Whichever way I put it, I felt like a jerk. But I persevered.

  “Did you happen to see a girl, not too tall, spiky hair?” My fingers sketched a rooster’s comb above my head. “Pierced all along the ear?” I ran my thumb down my own left lobe. “Little silver star right here?” I tapped the side of my nose.

  “Hoo hoo,” the first one chortled. “Lost your Cinderella? Gotta get that glass slipper out and hit the bars, man, maybe you’ll find her there.”

  “Punk chick, huh,” said the second. “Real standout in this part of town—maybe she was reverse slumming up from Alphabet City.”

  “Nope,” said the third, “but I met a real hottie from New Jersey, one of them H towns the other side of the bridge. Practically broke the mattress. Didn’t come up for air till Christmas. Hey, that was some party. Ya gonna have another soon?”

  Assholes.

  Seven days later, one day at a time, another Saturday. Damned if I’d spend this one cleaning. Apart from my reluctance to go anywhere near the closet, the dust had hardly settled yet from last time. I roamed restlessly around the neighborhood. March was almost over, but it wasn’t quite spring. Wind nipped at the puny trees, just coming into bud along the side streets in the Eighties, and pounced on crumpled fast food wrappers plus flapping sheets of newspaper beside the curbs. I spent more than an hour in Carl Schurz Park, just leaning over the railing staring at the East River, where wicked currents eddied between Ward’s Island to the north and Roosevelt Island stretching down past the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge.

  Late in the afternoon, the wind died and the sun came out. I hadn’t slept well the night before. Getting unconscious every night without passing out still presented a challenge. In AA, they say that everything you ever did drunk, you have to do sober. So I did something I’d never done sober before. I stretched out on a bench and went to sleep.

  I didn’t really think I’d doze off. I doubt I slept for more than twenty minutes. But it was long enough for me to dream. I was walking through a thick white mist toward Avalon. Or was it Brigadoon? I knew I had to get there, and I would, if I only went far enough. But the mist went on and on. I thought about giving up. I almost did. Then Jimmy’s voice said, “You didn’t pass the lamppost.” And I woke up.

  “You didn’t pass the lamppost.” What the hell was that about? Where was there a lamppost? Hey, wait a minute. Avalon . . . Brigadoon . . . Narnia! You got to Narnia through the back of the wardrobe, which was just Britspeak for a closet. If you didn’t pass the lamppost, it meant you hadn’t gone far enough.

  I leaped off the bench fast enough to traumatize the nearest pigeons and went tear-assing through the streets toward home. My fingers shook as I stuffed my key into the lock. The hall was empty, but next door, Clark Kent had the heavy metal on. I could hear the thumping of the mega-bass. I finally got the door open, slammed it closed behind me, and double-locked it. Then I made a beeline for the closet.

  I pushed impatiently through the first row and the second. In the dark, the clothes on their hangers pressed close around me, like trees in the nastier kind of fairy tale forest. Yep, there was a third row. I could make out the dresses and coats from the forties and fifties that my mom hadn’t bothered to take with her when she’d moved out to Long Island. They smelled stuffy and old-fashioned. I guess the actual fragrance was mothballs. I even found a few of my father’s suits that my mom had never gotten around to giving away or throwing out. I thrust them all aside to left and right.

  Beyond all that, I finally found a door. I’d had no idea that it existed, though I’d lived in this apartment my whole life. Yorkville old-timers like me had accumulated a lifetime’s worth of junk and treasures we hadn’t seen in decades and never looked for, because we didn’t remember we had them. But Upper East Side yuppies moved into empty spaces.

  I groped for a knob or lock. When I found it, the whole thing came off in my hand. I took a startled step back and almost tripped. The screws that had held it rolled around under my feet. When I stepped on them, they fled like mice. From beyond the door, I heard the thump of heavy metal. It was a wild night in Narnia. And I smelled garlic.

  An hour later, Jacky Doyle and another cop came knocking on my neighbor’s door.

  THE LIE

  Anita Page

  WHEN my father said, “Becka, we have to talk,” I thought I was going to hear yet another installment of the Last Will and Testament. It was the day after Christmas, 1989, and we were sitting in what he called his Florida room, sipping beers and listening to the whirr of the sprinkler system on the golf course outside his West Palm condo.

  I fought off impatience. At eighty-four, he was entitled to his obsessive concern about leaving his affairs in order. But he didn’t want to discuss codicils. Instead, in the restrained and slightly ironic tone he always used when talking over matters that deeply moved him, he told me about the guilt he’d been living with for forty years, ever since that summer night in Queens in 1949.

  I was surprised. We’d never before spoken of that night, except obliquely. And in my mind, he bore no guilt for what had happened. I reminded him that he’d tried to talk Lou Labowski into not taking his gun.

  “Did I?” my father asked. He didn’t remember standing up to Lou. Knowing he’d done that helped a little, he said. “Lou was a dirty cop, a thug. There’s nothing worse.” Then my father looked at me, confused. “But you were just a kid. I’m surprised you remember any of it.”

  I remember every minute of that night, I wanted to say. All the details, all the shadows.

  ON the last day of school, Tommy Labowski and I, both nine years old, celebrated summer by going into the woods behind our street to collect bottle caps. We were scrabbling through dry leaves when we heard the crack of a branch and looked up to see a man in a brown jacket watching us. We got to our feet, surprised, but not scared. This was Queens, USA, and our fathers and uncles were home from the war. We thought our world was safe.

  Tommy looked at me significantly and made a slight gesture with his head. I saw then that the man’s fly was open and he was exposing himself. “He was playing with his thing,” was how Tommy later put it to his father.

  As the man started talking, asking our names and how old we were, Tommy yanked my arm, saying we had to go home, because our father was a cop and he was waiting. There were some lies in the statement and some truth. For one thing, we weren’t brother and sister. And while his father was a cop, he wasn’t waiting for us. My father was an accountant, and I realized that the man in the woods wouldn’t have been scared at the thought of an accountant in a suit coming after him.

  When Mr. Labowski finally got home and heard from Tommy’s mother what had happened, he, my father, and Kathleen’s father from down the street went to search the neighborhood. Later, I heard my father say to my mother, “Thank God we didn’t find him. I don’t know what the hell Lou”—Mr. Labowski—“was going to do if he got his hands on him.”

  A picture came into my mind then that made me sick: Mr. Labowski clobbering the guy with his nightstick. The man had been pale and wore strange clothes for a hot June afternoon in the woods—a brown suit jacket, dark blue pants, and a white shirt buttoned to his neck—but he hadn’t hurt us. So he’d been playing with his thing. I didn’t see what the big deal was.

  After the fathers got back, Mr. Labowski laid down the law to the whole gang of us: me and Tommy, Freddie from across the street, Kathleen, and Joey Boy—who was always hanging around the edge of the group. The woods were off-limits.

  “You’ve got a whole street to play on, including your own backyards.” Mr. Labowski made a sweeping motion with his meaty hand to show us just how big the street was. H
is sleeves were rolled up and we could see the anchor tattooed on his arm. “Plus, those woods are private property. You kids don’t even belong there.”

  Before the war, our part of eastern Queens—Cambria Heights, where we lived, and Queens Village and Laurelton—had been farmland: potato farms, according to my parents. The farms had disappeared after the war, replaced by streets, each having a particular style house. On our long, wide street, the houses were small brick bungalows with patches of lawn at the front and narrow driveways on the side.

  Ours was the last street in the development. Behind it were the woods, old houses that had been there before the war, and the dark grocery store where our mothers sent us for bread and milk that was sometimes sour and had to be returned. We didn’t know anyone who lived back there, except for Mrs. Giacomelli, who always wore black and eyed us with distrust when we stepped into her store.

  Mr. Labowski was right about one thing. We had a whole block where we could play ball, ride bikes, and roller skate. By the next summer, our mothers would let us ride our bikes down to the storefront library on Linden Boulevard and the playground at P.S. 147. But that summer, the block was still our world, and we felt as if we owned it. No one minded that we played in the middle of the road, because hardly any traffic came that way. Our street dead-ended at the service road to the Cross Island Parkway. On the other side of the parkway was Nassau County, a foreign country, not part of Queens or even New York City.

  WE missed the shady mystery of the woods. Some of the fathers, including mine and Tommy’s, had planted trees on the narrow strip of grass between the curb and the sidewalk, but only years later did those trees cast shadows big enough to count as shade. The woods were where we found bottle caps that we used for treasure in our games and the dead branches we needed to build Flash Gordon’s spaceship.

  A week or two after the off-limits law was invoked, a group of us were poking around behind Mr. Labowski’s tool shed. Maybe we hoped to find something we could use for the spaceship, or maybe we were just feeling restless. The woods had never seemed so desirable, now that we weren’t allowed to go back there. When I saw Freddie whispering to Tommy, I knew they were cooking something up. I guessed that next they’d get rid of Kathleen and Joey Boy, who always told their mothers everything.

  As soon as Joey Boy saw they were hatching a plan, he started whining, “No secrets, no secrets.”

  But Tommy ignored him and announced that everyone had to go home. Kathleen, who never seemed to catch on, just shrugged and dragged her heels down the driveway to the street. But Joey Boy sat down in the middle of Tommy’s yard and announced that he was staying right there.

  “PRIVATE PROPERTY, runt. Beat it!” Freddie shouted in his face.

  Joey Boy left, then stopped at the bottom of the driveway and yelled back, “I’m telling my mother what you said.”

  Freddie jumped up and down, waved his arms, and yelled, “Oooh, oooh, I’m scaaared.”

  Tommy and Freddie and I made a big show of going home, too, but ten minutes later, we met on the grassy verge that separated the parkway from the service road, and Freddie announced his big idea.

  “We’re going to the woods,” he said to me, wiping his nose on his arm. He was tall and already muscular.

  I knew he hoped I wouldn’t come and he’d have Tommy to himself. I remember looking at Tommy, trying to send him a silent warning. It was his father who’d said the woods were off-limits, and he was the one who’d get the strap if his father found out.

  When Tommy shrugged, I knew he was acting tough for Freddie. “He said we couldn’t play there, but we’re not playing. We’ll just get some branches and take them down to Freddie’s yard. We’ll build the spaceship there.”

  “You don’t have to come if you don’t want to.” Freddie gave me his coolest stare. He was the kid who climbed the fence by the haunted house, chased balls onto the parkway, and stole gum from Mrs. Giacomelli’s store. His parents both worked, and his grandmother was in charge of him and his brother. I’d heard my mother say that the old lady let those boys get away with murder.

  Tommy, on the other hand, never got away with anything. I knew that because my bedroom was right across the driveway from his. Whenever I heard his father yell, “How many times do I have to tell you . . .?” I knew Tommy was going to get a beating and I put my pillow over my head so I wouldn’t hear him cry. But I guessed Tommy was more afraid of Freddie thinking he was a baby than of his father’s strap.

  “I’m coming, too,” I said.

  The patch of woods butted up against the backyards of the last three houses on our street. We thought of it as a deep, dark forest, but it was more like an overgrown wooded lot. As soon as we walked down the short path to the clearing where we’d collect dead branches, we heard the black dog bark. The dog belonged to the old man who lived in the house just behind mine. Sometimes I watched him, half-hidden by the shrubs my mother had planted against our back fence, working in his garden, pulling weeds, or watering his tomatoes. His garden ended just where the woods began.

  I wondered whether the woods belonged to the old man. Whenever we went back there, the black dog would bark and the old man would yell, “Tacere. Shaddup you.” But he never came out and scolded us kids.

  I remember walking around the clearing, kicking dead leaves and picking up branches, even if they were too short for the spaceship. The worst that would happen to me if we were caught was a lecture, but I knew exactly what Tommy would get. I told myself that we were safe at that time of day, with the fathers at work and the mothers glad to have us out of their hair. But still, I wanted to get out of there. “Let’s just go,” I urged Tommy.

  Freddie wasn’t in any hurry, though. One of the trees, with thick, low branches, was good for climbing, so he shimmied up, straddled a branch, and started making monkey noises.

  Then we heard a sound behind us, and Tommy and I spun around. I felt my heart pound and hoped it was the man in the brown jacket, not Mr. Labowski.

  But it was Joey Boy who jumped out from behind a tree, his face wild with triumph, yelling, “I’m going to tell!”

  In a second, I planted myself in front of him, fists on my hips. “Number one, if you tell, you can never play Flash Gordon again for the rest of your life. Number two, everyone knows you’re a liar anyway, so no one will believe you.”

  Just then, Freddie yelled from his tree branch, “He’s coming after us!” He pointed in the direction of the old man’s garden. “And his THING is OUT!”

  Even before Freddie hit the ground laughing, Joey screamed and started running, but didn’t get far. He tripped over a tree root, flying forward. As he fell, his head hit a large rock just off the path.

  We started to laugh at the sight of him lurching forward, but then froze when we heard the clunk of his head against the rock. We stood silently, waiting for him to get up. When he didn’t, I walked over and knelt down next to him, willing him to get up or at least move, but he didn’t move an inch.

  I looked over at the boys and said, “I don’t know if he’s breathing.” I felt myself tremble, afraid to say the word dead.

  Of the three of us, it was Freddie who panicked and wanted to run. Years later, when we were in high school, Tommy told me that Freddie had an uncle who’d done time on Rikers Island. Whenever he was bad, his father would yell, “You’re gonna end up just like Frankie.” Maybe the sight of Joey on the ground, head bloody, convinced Freddie that Mr. Labowski was going to cuff him and ship him off to Rikers with his uncle.

  I grabbed Tommy’s arm. “What if he’s not dead yet?” I demanded. “What if he dies because we leave him here?”

  Freddie was bawling by then, and I told him to shut up so I could think. I knew we couldn’t just leave Joey, and I also knew we had to come up with a story that would keep Tommy out of trouble. I remember that moment in the woods, with the light filtering through the trees and the black dog barking in the garden. That was when I figured out what we would tell our parents. />
  We saw Joey going into the woods, I told the boys. We followed him to tell him he wasn’t allowed. While we were talking to him, the man in the brown jacket came back. Then we all started to run away, but Joey tripped and fell and hit his head.

  “What happened to the man?” Tommy’s face was red like his father’s and he was sweating.

  “He ran away when he saw Joey fall. He probably got scared. Okay?”

  Okay. They agreed. It was a good story. The worst part was telling Joey’s mother, who we hated. She was like Joey, skinny and small. Her eyebrows made her look surprised and her black hair was always in rollers on top of her head. Every time Joey ran home telling on us for some insult or slight, she’d come down the street after us, yelling, “You lousy kids, picking on him because he’s smaller than you.”

  I was sure she’d yell at us when we told her what had happened to Joey, but she didn’t. She ordered me to take her to where he was and, as we ran down her walk, shouted back to Tommy, “Go tell your mother to call an ambulance.”

  WHEN Mr. Labowski got home, he sat us down on the front stoop and started asking questions. He asked about the man and not about going into the woods, but I made sure to say that we hadn’t gone there to play but just to get Joey out. I’d never told a lie before, not to an adult and not on purpose. I was surprised at how easy it was.

  Mr. Labowski twisted his mouth and said to Tommy, “You got yourself a lawyer, huh?”

  When he asked if we were sure it was the same man we’d seen the other time, I said quickly that Tommy and I hadn’t actually seen him. Only Freddie had seen him from up in the tree. Since Freddie said he’d been wearing a brown jacket, it probably was the same guy. I thought I was being clever, making the lie as close to the truth as possible, but as soon as I said “up in the tree,” I knew I’d made a mistake.

  “Oh yeah, up in the tree?” Mr. Labowski said, in a voice that told us he knew we’d been playing there after all and would deal with us later. Then he started asking Freddie questions about the man.