The Best American Mystery Stories, Volume 17 Page 22

  Northport

  My father told me around the time I seriously started reading books as a teenager that he used to know Jack Kerouac. “When I was a young man, he was living right here in Northport,” he said. When we were next on Main Street, he pointed to Gunther’s Tap Room as we passed it and said, “Petey, Kerouac used to play pool in there all the time, and sometimes he’d hold court on whatever subject bubbled up in his writerly brain.” There were even a few photos of Kerouac in the window, and a sign reading KEROUAC DRANK HERE, which I’d never noticed before. I was a kid; I had eyes only for Lic’s Ice Cream, the Sweet Shop, and the little newsstand that carried comic books alongside Newsday and car magazines. But then I started noticing the other Northport, the one day-trippers don’t see.

  That’s about when I figured out what my father did for a living. “Waste management, middle management,” he’d tell me, “boss of all the garbage men on the North Shore.” I’d repeat that line in school, knowing it wasn’t quite the whole story. I knew we were semiconnected, since Uncle Peter, for whom I am named, couldn’t stop talking about it. He was a cliché, central casting for The Sopranos, with a thick-tongued accent my father didn’t have, a penchant for tracksuits, a ridiculous silvery Cadillac, and rings too gaudy for even the pope to wear.

  I’d be working on my Commodore 64 or have my nose in a book when he’d come over for dinner and say, “That’s right. You do good in school, you hear me, and get a good job. A career.” Career was a three-syllable word to Uncle Peter. “Work to get laid,” he’d say. “Not to get made. It’s no life.” Even I knew what getting made was.

  Uncle Peter said he knew Kerouac, too. “That guy? Ha! Jim said he knew him?” Granted, my father was a little man, balding with a bundt cake of hair around the back of his head, and he dressed like an accountant. Not the kind of guy you’d think would be hanging out with the king of the Beats.

  “Yeah,” Uncle Peter continued, all wistful. “Me and this friend of mine, we’d seen Kerouac on TV, then two days later in his garden, wearing coveralls like some kid, then that night wandering down the street like a real stumblebum. The guy was stunad, so I thought we’d give him a shakedown.”

  “Why, Uncle Peter?”

  “Eh, we were just dumb kids. We thought writers had money! Anyway, he was a pretty big dude. A lot of muscle, and he could take a punch. I was waling on him, my friend was holding—”

  “Who? Dad?”

  “Pfft, no way. Nah, you don’t know this guy. He was my friend who died before you were born. Anyway, Kerouac was just standing there. It was like punching a car through a pillow. There were definitely muscles under all that fat, and he was just going on about Buddhism and how he was a pacifist. Anyway, your nonna had sent Jim to go find me, and he pulls me off and tells me that writers don’t have any money, and plus Jack is the only one left to take care of his old mother, so don’t hurt him, and especially don’t break his thumbs as he won’t even be able to do any writing if we did. Kerouac looked like a friggin’ bum—unshaved, ratty old navy coat, smelled like a vineyard, so I felt bad and I ended up putting fifty bucks in his pocket.” Uncle Pete ran his big palms over his face. “Man, that was a time.” Then, conspiratorially, “Don’t tell Elaine about any of this.”

  Elaine was Uncle Peter’s fiancée. The wedding took place a week after that conversation, in Queens where they lived. We had to park four long Queens blocks away from the church because every spot on the street was taken up by a sedan—some belonged to guests, others to pairs of men who sat in their cars the whole time, eating sandwiches, writing down notes on little pads, and occasionally taking photos of the church, the street, or one of the other cars.

  My mother fixed my tie, put a tired smile on her face, and said, “Stand up straight. Pretend that you’re famous and that the men across the street are paparazzi.” Left unspoken was and not federal agents.

  It was a great wedding. Tons of food, and dancing, and all sorts of guys coming up to my father at our table and shaking his hand, telling me what a good guy my dad was, how fair and honest and sweet, and that I’d be lucky to grow up to be like him. “Keep that nose clean! In the books!” My father bragged to them about my grades and that I had free access to the adult section at the public library. “Adult, eh?” a few of them said, snickering.

  That was a Saturday, June 16, 1984. Back in Northport Ricky Kasso was torturing and killing Gary Lauwers out in the Aztakea Woods. Kasso was the high school “Acid King,” a drug dealer and user who was into heavy metal and, supposedly, Satanism. Kasso stabbed Lauwers over a dozen times, demanding that he say, “I love Satan!” Lauwers was the good boy of the story—he would only say, “I love my mother!” The body wasn’t discovered till the Fourth of July, his eyes ruined, maggots in the wounds, animals picking at scraps of flesh. Kasso, who had been bragging to his friends about “human sacrifice,” killed himself in jail three days later. Then Northport really went crazy.

  Uncle Peter cut his honeymoon to the old country short. He was now always at our house, going off on sudden errands my father needed done. And Dad was on the phone constantly, talking to guys in the city. “Satanists in the fucking woods!” he bellowed, angry for the first time ever as far as I knew. “We got to get them out of there.”

  The local priest came over for dinner; I had to wear my wedding suit again. We’d only ever gone to church on Christmas Eve, but Father Ligotti was attentive to my father’s questions about Satan and “today’s kids” to the point of seeming frightened. Then it clicked—my father wasn’t just some pencil pusher in an office in charge of waste management, he was definitely part of the Mothers and Fathers Italian Association, and probably pretty high up. The town longhairs—that’s what they called themselves; us normal kids called them dirtbags—didn’t spend much time outside that summer, but when I’d see one on Main Street or over by the harbor or in the rich neighborhood pushing a mower across the lawn of someone else’s house, they’d be sporting black eyes, a missing tooth, or a broken hand. They never walked alone. There were strange things happening in the woods, all right, and soon enough every kid in town knew to stay the fuck away from Aztakea.

  I was too young to know the older kids except by face and reputation. They’d picked on a lot of us freshmen, but I never had any problems, thanks as I now know to Dad. I heard all the Kasso stories, most of which were just hysterical rumors. But one was true—Kasso was probably on drugs when he committed the murder. There was a boulder by the scene where he, or someone anyway, had tried to scrawl SATAN LIVES. But he spelled it wrong; it read SATIN LIVES.

  We had an assembly when school started that year to talk about drugs and watching out for one another. There was a big sheet hung in the hallway by the principal’s office and we were told we could write whatever we liked on it, as long as it was positive. No pentagrams, no band names, nothing like that. I wrote, Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night? from On the Road. My English teacher that year, Mrs. Hartman, congratulated me on my “apropos epigram.” I ate lunch in the library every day, so it was easy for me to look up apropos once I figured out how to spell the word.

  My mother went through my records and tapes, demanding answers. “What’s this?” she asked. “More heavy metal?” It was Van Halen’s 1984.

  “Mom, that music’s on the radio all the time! It’s not Satanic. There’s even an angel on the cover,” I said, probably whining, definitely embarrassed.

  She snorted. “An angel! That’s just the Devil’s way to lure you in.” The Stephen King paperbacks went into the trash; so did The Savage Sword of Conan back issues. She had her hands on Desolation Angels, too, but my father slid into the room and grabbed her wrist, my hero. “Mary. Maria. That one’s fine. That one’s okay. It’s a college-level book.”

  I read a lot of college-level books. They were still allowed; fantasy novels, Dungeons & Dragons, Freddy Krueger, Rambo, that was all contraband. I started reading real books, literature, more intently than ever, so
looking back I guess I don’t mind. My parents, ever overprotective, didn’t want me to go away for college, or even to the city. “Between the mulignan in the projects and the fruitcakes in the Village, you’ll end up a vegetable if you go to NYU,” Uncle Peter said. My father told him not to talk that way at the table, but he agreed with the sentiment.

  So I went to Hofstra and did well, then hit the road. I did a lot of scut work—janitor; a baton-twirling Wackenhut security professional for a town dump in New Jersey (my surname helped); out to Chicago as an SAT tutor; then on to California to work in a bookstore. And I wrote. I always wrote. I got over romanticizing poverty, and the road, but I never got over Kerouac. Like the book says, I knew there’d be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me.

  I got a few things published, too—poems in a haiku journal, stories in Oakland Hills Review and one in a C-level men’s magazine about D cups that ran the occasional lurid fiction feature. It was called “Satin Lives,” that story, and it was about a thinly veiled Ricky Kasso. I’d turned into what Uncle Peter called a “real smart-ass,” and over late-night coffees during Christmas when I visited for a week or three I let my father know what I thought of his work. My mother was already in bed. Cooking for forty fat cousins and their kids always took a lot out of her, especially after the lumpectomy. Nobody would lift a finger to help her either, not even me, I’m ashamed to admit.

  “I don’t hurt anyone, Petey. If not for me, there’d be a lot more people hurting, I’ll tell you that much,” my father said. “It’s what we call property rights. There’s a lot of money to be made hauling trash on Long Island. People here are pigs; they certainly generate enough garbage. The island used to be beautiful, all trees and little towns. Now it’s just a hundred-mile-long dump for hamburger wrappers and toxic waste. A lot of people want in on sanitation, and I keep everyone happy, working a certain territory.”

  “And if someone steps out of line?” I asked. “Or wants to just run an honest business?”

  He snorted. My family was full of snorters. My mother was the champion, but Dad was a top contender. “Honest business? Good luck. Look at Wall Street. And anyway, you weren’t complaining about ethics when I paid your college tuition; when you were able to gallivant around the country without a penny of debt thanks to me.”

  “What about the government? What about the law?”

  “Listen, if the government cared, they’d just municipalize garbage collection and put us all out of business. We’re more efficient than they are, even with the occasional present we have to buy, or a labor action here and there. You think garbage men could afford to live out here if Suffolk County paid them? Pfft.”

  “That doesn’t mean what you’re doing isn’t illegal. The law, the American way—”

  He laughed. He had a great laugh, my father. “You sound like Kerouac now. He was a real Republican near the end, all that beatnik business aside. He hated hippies, hated liberals. Let me tell you, what does the government do? It organizes property rights just like I do. And yes, it threatens violence when it has to. The difference is that the government doesn’t care about the people—they’re a violence monopoly, they don’t have to. We have to watch out for ourselves; we can’t just go crazy and invade the next town over for no reason, not like the Bushes invading Iraq whenever they want to feel tough.” George W. Bush was rattling the saber just then for what would be the 2003 invasion, just like his own father had back when I was in college.

  “It’s not the same, it’s just not the same.” I was tired, itching for a fight. “The government...” What? I thought to myself. The government doesn’t bully people? Doesn’t tax the hell out of them? Doesn’t dump toxic waste out in Aztakea Woods and pollute water tables and give nice suburban mothers breast cancer? The rest of my sentence hung in the air like steam from my mouth. Dad knew where we could take the conversation if I wanted, and so did I. It was nowhere good. I went outside to smoke a cigarette and stare up at the Long Island sky. The stars were pinpricks in the woolen blanket of the night here, but not in the metropolises of America, where you never dare look up. I wrote that down, and put it in an (unpublished) poem.

  I don’t know exactly what happened; it surely wasn’t our arguments. But the following summer my dad went to the DA and turned rat. He wasn’t offered a deal or pressured. He just showed up with a zip drive full of evidence and an eagerness to explain where “all the bodies are buried”—as it read on the front page of Newsday—right after he buried my mother. It was the breast cancer that killed her, like so many ladies from Long Island. No cancer cluster on LI, my prostate! Listen to that. Here I am, turning into Uncle Peter, who was coming tonight to kill my father, his own brother. Uncle Peter was always a kidder, always ready with a joke or a smart remark. But he took his oath seriously, more seriously than marriage or blood. Not like my dad, not like me.

  I was waiting outside, on the porch. I didn’t smoke anymore, but I smoked that night to keep my lungs warm. The sky was brighter than when I was a kid, thanks to the big-box stores and strip malls dotting the highway. My father didn’t rate any police protection—though it took a few months, the government got all they wanted out of him, and the local uniforms could be bought off with grocery money. He was inside, drinking his best wine, the stuff he used to kid he was saving for my wedding, and waiting to join his Maria. Uncle Peter’s giant boat of a Caddy, still all polished and gleaming, drove up the curve of the driveway. My mother always loved this house.

  “Hey, kid,” he said conversationally. “When’d you get in? Haven’t seen you since your poor mother, bless her in heaven, passed.” Uncle Peter wasn’t as huge as he used to be. He looked partially deflated, like a Macy’s Day parade balloon half an hour after the crowds left.

  “I just got here this morning. Took in the sights. Had some fresh snapper; the fish are better out here than in California, you know. Had a Crazy Vanilla ice cream down at the store, went to Gunther’s, that sort of thing.”

  “Gunther’s, eh? You a pool hustler now?” He edged forward, keeping his hands in front of him. Maybe he wouldn’t kill me here on this porch. Maybe Northport was still a nice small town, where a gunshot wouldn’t be written off as a car backfiring, where porch lights might blink on and screen doors swing open at one in the morning.

  “Nah, they had a reading tonight. I was one of the readers.” I lit another cigarette. “It was even listed in the paper; they ran my picture. Homecoming for Local Author.”

  “A reading?” He was confused. Good. Maybe a little drunk, too. I hoped he’d have to be to kill his own brother in cold blood, never mind having to kill me, too. “Like, people just sit there and read?”

  “No, Uncle Peter; we read aloud. It’s like a show. It’s for Kerouac’s memorial anniversary. They do one every October at Gunther’s.”

  “Was Louie there? Jess?”

  I shook my head. “Nah, the regulars clear out when the poets hit the stage. You know how Northport is...” I waved my right hand, the cherry of my cigarette bobbing along in the shadows, so he didn’t see what I reached for until my old extendable baton telescoped out and smacked him right in the shin. Uncle Peter was still a large man—it’s like trying to chop down a tree with a baseball bat. Something he would say! But he was old and slow, and I got up and swung the baton down on his head three, four times, and I shouted. I shouted, “I love my mother! I love my mother! I love my mother and father!” No porch lights went on. No screen doors swung open, except for the one behind me.

  “Pete...” my father said, his mouth heavy with wine. I didn’t know which of us he meant.

  The Cadillac is eating Pennsylvania for breakfast by the time the sky lightens. My father’s next to me, leaning his head out the window like a dog. His son’s crazy, the craziest man he’s ever known, but he’s alive. Alive and free and on the road. Forget property taxes, chemicals on the lawns to keep them green. Forget the police, forget the families of New York, who are all
dying or senile or in prison or watching better versions of themselves on the television and saying to themselves, Yeah, yeah. Al Pacino, that’s me. Forget Long Island, that little turd hanging off the end of America. California, here we come! We have a suitcase full of unmarked bills my father had hidden behind the drywall in the garage, my bandaged-up uncle in the trunk banging away on the lid. We have nothing to lose, everything to live for, my father and I. Dad figures his brother will calm down by the time we get to Ohio; then we can let him out and have a little “sit-down” about his future. I hope Uncle Peter decides to come with us. We’ll fall asleep and wake up again a million times. In the West, the sun peeks out distantly on the horizon, a great white pearl.

  EMILY ST. JOHN MANDEL

  Drifter

  FROM Venice Noir

  Ponte dei Sospiri

  When zoë’s husband died she decided to travel. She was twenty-eight years old and had seen very little of the world, and this seemed like the best possible moment to leave Michigan. A friend from art school had been to the Arctic in the summertime once and she’d told Zoë about the landscape’s clear beauty, the wildflowers, ice-blue lakes, and slate mountains. Now it wasn’t summer, but that was almost the point. Zoë boarded a series of flights to the Northwest Territories and found herself in a lunar kingdom of shadows and ice, scoured landscape. The sun behaved strangely. The days were short.

  “Trying to lose yourself?” Zoë’s brother asked, when she called from a hotel in Inuvik to tell him where she’d gone. Zoë’s husband, Peter, had been dead for four weeks. She had given up the apartment, sold or given away all of her belongings. People were concerned.

  “Trying to find myself,” she said, which wasn’t at all true but had the desired effect of slightly reassuring her family. Losing herself wasn’t enough. Zoë wanted to erase herself. She wanted extremity. She wanted to be eradicated, but she didn’t want to die. When she left the hotel she felt swallowed up by the landscape, by the absolute cold. By night she stared through the hotel room window at the northern lights, colors shifting across the breadth of the sky. She liked it here, but she was restless and she’d heard of a town that was even farther north: Tuktoyaktuk, on the edge of the Beaufort Sea.