Good Neighbors Read online

  In another forty-five minutes, a fat man with twenty-year-old pimple scars and the matching twenty-year-old anger of someone who got wedgies when he was in grade school will show up, unlock the newsstand, and cut the twine off the stack of newspapers.

  The papers claim it’s March 13th, but looking at the dark horizon while she drives, Kat knows it won’t be March 13th for another three hours or more as far as most people are concerned, no matter what the newspapers say.

  She thinks it would be neat if she could stop her car and read one of the newspapers and find out what will happen tomorrow while she’s sleeping the day away, but, of course, even papers with today’s date only contain old news, news about things that’ve already happened, things you can never change. Even at four o’clock in the morning.

  As Kat drives along a lonely stretch of road, another car, a light blue 1963 Fiat 600, which has been gaining on her for the last half minute or so – she’s seen the small round headlights growing with each passing second – zips by with a whistle of wind and the high-pitched squeal of its straining engine and the whine of its exhausted whitewall tires.

  A moment after it passes her, Kat turns her car left, onto a night-quiet street, and continues her drive home, southwest toward Queens Boulevard.

  Had she continued straight, she might have seen the Fiat moving toward the next intersection. She might have seen the intersection’s green light turn yellow. She might have heard the RPMs kick up a notch as the driver of the Fiat strained the small car’s small engine further, pressing the gas pedal to the floorboard. She might have seen the yellow light turn red. She might have seen the Fiat fly into the intersection despite the red light. She might have seen a green pickup truck entering the intersection at the same time from the right. She might have seen it slam into the Fiat, right into the passenger’s side door, and heard a crash like thunder; seen the Fiat spin; seen it flip as the driver turned the steering wheel the wrong way at the wrong time; seen it roll three times before coming to a stop upsidedown on the side of the road, leaving a trail of glass and metal in its wake. She might have seen it sitting there, upside down, in the hollow night air, its sad little tires spinning furiously but gripping nothing, looking like an upended beetle beneath the lunatic moon’s yellow light. She might have seen the pickup truck that slammed into it, now with only one headlight, back up, straighten out on the street, and drive away from there. She might have seen the pale face of the driver in the truck turn to the carnage briefly before driving away. But she never would have known why the driver fled the scene when it was the Fiat that ran the red light. No one will ever know that. No one but the driver of the truck himself.

  And, anyway, Kat didn’t go straight.

  She turned her car left, and continued her drive, which is where she is now – moving along steadily toward home with reflections of herself in the windows of the buildings on both sides of the street to keep her company. Three Kats driving along in the same direction. No way she could see the accident. And when the thunderclap of a crash comes, she doesn’t know where it comes from.

  She hears it, turns down Buddy Holly briefly and glances in the rearview mirror, and when she sees nothing back there but the darkness, not even a pair of headlights in the distant past looking like wolf eyes, she turns the radio back up, maybe even a little louder than it was before the unnerving sound of the crash, and she continues on.

  Maybe what she heard was just thunder. Didn’t the man on the radio say there would be early-morning showers?

  She looks at the sky, and though it’s filled with gray clouds illuminated by the light of the moon, they don’t look heavy enough for rain. Not yet. But maybe she’s wrong. If so, she hopes she gets home before the downpour starts.

  She didn’t bring an umbrella.

  3

  Kat turns her car onto Austin Street.

  She can see her apartment complex now.

  She can also see one of her neighbors – she forgets his name, a colored man who’s always been very nice, who once even jump-started her car for her – pulling his Buick Skylark out of the Long Island Railroad parking lot, turning his car toward her, heading in the opposite direction.

  As their cars pass each other, the two neighbors wave.

  Frank! She thinks his name is Frank. She remembered as soon as she saw his face clearly, the orange glow of his cigarette cherry floating in front of it like a pet firefly.

  She wonders what he’s doing out at four o’clock in the morning. She knows Frank’s wife is a nurse and often works the night shift – Kat has seen the lights in the apartment lit up when she gets home from her shift at the bar – but she has never seen either of them, Frank or his wife, outside at this time of night.

  Kat pulls her car into the Long Island Railroad parking lot, which sits just across the street from her apartment complex, the Hobart Apartments. She pulls the Studebaker into the empty spot Frank’s Buick just pulled out of and kills the engine. The sound of the radio dies with it.

  Only once has her short drive home from the bar lasted longer than a few minutes – the length of a song – and that was because she took a different route home so she could drop off one of the regulars who spent the last of his cash on a drink and couldn’t afford the cab fare. Or to tip her for the drink. Even though nothing bad happened during that drive, it was the one and only time Kat ever gave a customer a ride home. She felt nervous the whole time, her palms sweating as they gripped the steering wheel, but more importantly, she felt it somehow crossed a line that shouldn’t be crossed.

  A breeze blows through the branches of the oak trees lining the street. A few leaves blow away, but most hold fast.

  Kat pushes her way out of the car just in time to see a black-and-white police cruiser roll quietly by, the red light on its roof jutting up like a lipstick. She sees the pale face of the lone policeman inside glancing in her direction, and then he’s gone. She watches the red glow of the taillights until the cruiser turns a corner at the end of the block.

  In the distance, a car horn honks.

  A dog howls at the moon, and then a shout, shuddup, a banging sound, the dog yelps, and then silence.

  She’s tired. Just so gee-dee tired.

  Kat believes that people should hibernate, like bears. Winter wears a soul out. If people could hibernate through it, they could wake in the spring refreshed, ready for the rest of the year. They could face it with hope, maybe even optimism. Instead, by the time spring rolls around, as it is rolling around now, people have been made brittle by winter. Cold and brittle. They’re ready to shatter.

  Kat slams her car door home, sees she forgot to lock it, pulls it open, hammers the lock down, and closes it again.

  She can hardly wait for her bath.

  But only two small steps nearer her apartment’s paintpeeling front door, Kat freezes.

  She swallows, afraid.

  Suddenly her mouth is very dry.

  In the shadows of the night she sees a hulking figure standing near one of the scarred oak trees that guard the front of the Hobart Apartments, that stand between her and her warm bath.

  The hulking figure steps away from the tree and moves toward her.

  It – he – seems to be pulled toward her, like a magnet, like a yo-yo on a string, seems to glide toward her rather than walk. She doesn’t notice the sort of lumbering brokenmachine flump-flump-flump a man walking normally has when he shuffles from one place another. He just floats toward her menacingly.

  Kat grabs her purse to her chest, as if it were some sort of talisman, a shield against the night, and she tries to weave around him, to get past him and into her apartment.

  And suddenly everything is bright. And loud.

  She can see every detail of everything. The pores in the man’s skin, large and filled with dirty oil, several blackheads littering his nose. The smudge on his jeans shaped like one of the midwestern states whose names she can never remember and the color of a coffee stain. The flecks of rust on the blad
e on the knife in his hand standing out like freckles. She can hear the sound of a radio playing somewhere. Muffled talking. A car engine dies three blocks away. She can see a spider on the front door of her garden apartment, building a web in the top left corner. She can hear the bathwater running inside, behind the spider and the front door, filling the tub with warm water into which she’ll soon be able to slide.

  But that’s not real, is it? That last thing isn’t real. Not yet. And it won’t ever be real if she doesn’t get to her apartment.

  The man with the knife redirects himself and continues toward her.

  But Kat is past him now, in the street, adrenaline coursing through her veins, and she’s unzipping her purse, trying to find her keys. A lipstick flies from the purse’s open mouth as she fishes inside; it clatters to the street, rolls for a while, and stops. She hears the foot of her attacker crunch atop it with one of his brown leather construction boots. So he must be walking, he must be human, despite the way he seemed to be gliding. Ghosts don’t have stained jeans and greasy pores and blackheads, do they? Ghosts don’t wear brown construction boots. Ghosts don’t need knives. A pink compact leaps out after her lipstick, hits the ground, and Kat thinks she can hear the mirror inside shatter.

  Seven years bad luck, she thinks insanely. I’ll be thirtyfive then.

  But now she can feel the keys in her right hand and she’s at the front door and she’s shuffling through the keys, trying desperately to find the right one, and she’s covered in sweat even though the night is cold, and there it is, the right one, the correct key, and she shoves it into the doorknob and turns the knob and pushes the door and the door swings open, come in, Kat, welcome home, and she takes a step toward her living room, toward the safe darkness of her living room, inviting like a womb, like a mother’s open arms, and soon she’ll be able to close the door on the dangerous world and sink into the warm water of her bathtub and forget any of this ever happened.

  Except a cruel fist grabs a handful of her hair and stops her. And that hand drags her away from the front door, leaving it there, open, keys hanging from the doorknob.

  I just wanted an effing bath, she thinks.

  And then the hand that’s not holding her by the hair rises into the night air above her. That hand is holding a knife, a large kitchen knife with flecks of rust littering its blade.

  The knife seems frozen in air a moment. Kat can see it in the corner of her eye.

  ‘Please,’ she says.

  And that’s all she says before the knife is hammered down, just behind her collarbone, and there is the grinding sound of metal against bone, and a wet sound, a nauseating liquid moan, and then those sounds are drowned out by the sound of someone screaming – someone screaming loud.

  And then the knife is pulled out of the new opening it made in Kat, and she hears a sound like a sword being unsheathed in an Errol Flynn movie. It doesn’t seem real. And then warm liquid begins to flow down her back.

  She smells copper.

  And then another scream fills the air.

  I wonder who that is, Kat thinks. Poor thing.

  4

  Patrick wakes to the sound of an alarm clock ringing and though he doesn’t know what he was dreaming of seconds earlier he’s sure it wasn’t any good because he’s got a feeling in his head like wadded-up fishwrap and socks, a sort of dirty ache. His mouth tastes like cigarette ash. His eyes sting.

  He fumbles with the alarm clock, not yet awake, just flipping it over in his hands repeatedly and pressing on protrusions as he comes across them. Eventually, he presses the correct button and the clock goes silent. He sets it back down where he found it.

  Where am I?

  He blinks several times.

  Living room. Apartment living room. On the planet Earth.

  Who am I?

  Patrick Donaldson. Nineteen years old.

  What am I?

  A human being who’s been asked to go to a foreign land to kill gooks – other human beings – for my country.

  When am I?

  Four o’clock in the morning.

  He looks at the TV and sees static.

  On the couch beside him, a well-read sheet of paper whose heading makes clear everything that needs to be made clear. ‘Order to Report for Armed Forces Physical Examination,’ it says.

  ‘Fuck you,’ Patrick says back.

  He gets to his feet, scratches at himself absently, readjusts himself – he got twisted around somehow while he slept – and pulls his underwear out of his ass. He cleans his filthy-tasting mouth with his tongue and swallows.

  And then, after one more glance at the Order to Report, Patrick pads across the brown carpet and into the hallway.

  ‘Is it time?’

  His mom (her name is Harriette, but, despite the fact that he’s technically a grown-up, he still just thinks of her as mom and is pretty sure he always will) looks up at him with her jaundiced eyes, not much more than slits buried in old folds of flesh. She does not look well. Patrick has often wondered how long she has left.

  She’s only sixty-two. If he dies when he’s as old as his mom is now, that means he’s already lived a third of his life. Just about, anyway.

  ‘Is it time?’ mom asks again.

  Patrick nods. ‘It’s time.’

  ‘Oh,’ she says.

  ‘Yeah,’ he says.

  Then he walks to a large machine in the corner, a machine that will keep his mother from getting any worse, or at least slow down the process.

  That’s what Erin says.

  Frank and Erin, their next-door neighbors, got it for them. Erin’s a nurse. She pulled some strings at the hospital to make sure mom got it because mom said she didn’t want to go away and spend the last days of her life in an antiseptic hospital room. She said she’d rather die than live in a hospital room that smelled of solvents, a hospital room from which the humanity had been scrubbed.

  Erin also taught Patrick how to operate the thing, which is what he does now.

  He pushes the machine over to his mom, then grabs his mom’s arm and flips it over, revealing the white fishbelly underside. Revealing radiocephalic fistulae: permanent tubes for the blood to flow in and out of.

  Patrick plugs his mother into the machine and gets it started, feeling, as he does every time, like he’s in a science fiction movie, like this isn’t quite real.

  One hour out of every four, he was told.

  By five o’clock, an hour from now, mom’s eyes won’t be quite so yellow; her skin will look almost human.

  ‘You must just be waiting for me to die,’ mom says.

  ‘You know I don’t mind taking care of you,’ he says, which is, most of the time, including now, mostly true. It makes him tired and sad, but mostly he doesn’t mind. Besides, he’s the man of the house. Who else would do it? His dad bailed on them both when Patrick was ten, went out for the proverbial pack of smokes and never came back.

  Sometimes Patrick can convince himself that dad never ran out on them. He was hit by a truck or something, didn’t have his identification on him, and from the time he hit the gutter dead his new name was John Doe. From an hour later, anyway, when his corpse was laid out on a cold metal table with built-in gutters around its edges for collecting whatever drains from the dead besides the soul. If dad’d had his wallet, Patrick and mom would have found out what happened to him, but as it was, dad had just been disposed of like every other John Doe since the Civil War: buried in the potter’s field on Hart Island. Buried in a trench – in a mass grave, pine coffins stacked three high – without ceremony or individual marker. The end.

  Yeah, sometimes Patrick can actually make himself believe that. Somehow that’s better than the idea that he just left them. That he just walked away and never looked back. That somewhere his father is alive and laughing with a new wife who isn’t ill, with a new son who doesn’t look like a woman he ran out on, in a new city that reminds him not at all of the one he left behind.

  But then he remember
s the day after dad left when he found dad’s half-full pack of Pall Malls on the kitchen counter. Went out for cigarettes he already had, huh? Got any bridges you want to sell?

  A week later Patrick smoked his first cigarette, sitting alone in an empty alley, hunkered behind some trash cans that smelled of puke and something sweet – fruit, perhaps, beginning to ferment. It made him feel like a grown-up to smoke. This is what men did, and now that dad was gone, he was the man of the house, wasn’t he? He would smoke Pall Malls and drink Pabst Blue Ribbon just like his dad.

  Only he wouldn’t leave mom.

  Real men didn’t leave.

  By the time he got to the end of his first cigarette, he felt sick to his stomach, but he also felt good. His head felt light, like it was filled with helium, like it could float off his neck and up into the air. He imagined his Zeppelin head floating around in the gray city sky. He imagined all the things he could see – the cars lined up like ants waiting to be stepped on, people’s rooftop gardens, little corners of the world that couldn’t be reached any way but from above. He’d be like a bird up there and there’d be no place he couldn’t go.

  But real men didn’t leave. Not unless they had to.

  ‘Where’s your book?’ Patrick says.

  Mom points.

  Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo sits on her nightstand next to a glass of stale water.

  Patrick picks it up and settles into a chair at his mother’s bedside. He moved the chair from the living room two months ago for just this purpose, so he could sit and read to her. It’s tattered and old and threadbare and smells like dog even though they haven’t had a dog for three years. It’s stained and it’s got the sag of a man who’s lost hope. But it does the job. He flips the book open to its folded page and begins reading.

  ‘ “When armies begin to move,”’ he reads, ‘ “and flags wave and slogans pop up watch out little guy because it’s somebody else’s chestnuts in the fire not yours. It’s words you’re fighting for and you’re not making an honest deal your life for something better. You’re being noble and after you’re killed the thing you traded your life for won’t do you any good and chances are it won’t do anybody else any good either.”’ And then he stops. Licks his lips.