The kid with the joint exhaled. “What are you looking at, fat fuck?” he said.
Bob Foote recoiled—he hadn’t realized he was staring. “Sorry, sonny,” he answered, shaking his head. “Merry Christmas.”
“Hey,” the kid said, cupping his crotch, “sonny this.”
The other teenagers laughed. “Sorry, sonny!” they shouted. “Merry Christmas, sonny.”
Bob Foote moved on. To himself, he counted
one, two
, and a snowball caught him square between the shoulders. Another two flew past.
Punks, he thought. Complete punks.
At the mall’s entrance, he stomped the snow off his shoes. Then, as if he’d forgotten something, he tapped his trousers and dug his hands into his coat pockets. Shaking his head as if he couldn’t believe what a putz he was, he started back in the direction of his car, taking care to avoid another embarrassing exchange with the teenagers. The well-wrapped box in his arms reminded him, he had his own prank to pull.
He squeezed between a pair of cars and turned back into his own lane, cursing the snow edging over the tops of his desert boots and into his socks. Opposite the Monte Carlo was a large Buick and a small Toyota, each covered with snow, parked front end first. He set the gaily-wrapped box down in the snow and leaned it against the Buick’s rear bumper. Undetected, he crossed the lane and returned to his Monte Carlo, where the dogs waited behind fogged windows.
Back in the car, he tapped the front seat for the dogs, and started the car. He set the heat on high, blasted defrost, turned the windshield wipers on low. He pulled the desert boots from his feet and set them under the floor heat vents, then draped his socks over a vent on the passenger-side dash. The poodle got on the floor between his feet and licked his toes.
“Atta girl,” he said, laughing against the tickling sensation. “Atta girl.”
The schnauzer settled into his lap. And Bob Foote settled back for the show.
When he retired, six months earlier, he’d canceled garbage collection and began dumping the trash himself. He gathered it into large lawn-leaf bags and flung it into dumpsters behind strip malls or 7-Elevens or at the ends of the drives of local schools. He did a rotation, making sure not to visit the same place twice in a month. He found the routine relaxing and refreshing. New places, new views, fresh issues to ponder, such as the relative merits of plastic dumpsters on wheels, as opposed to the heavy metal dumpsters plonked directly onto pavement.
But before long, it started to seem like a pain-in-the-ass obligation, and he hit on a new idea: regifting the trash. Instead of bundling it up into one big bag, he created small parcels, little boxes, neat grocery bags. He made some trash look like postal packages, with tight string securing the flaps. He made other trash look like recent purchases in shopping bags with the tops folded down evenly. He took these creations to shopping areas and left them in conspicuous places—in carts, on top of car trunks, or against the walls near pay phones. And then, from the front seat of his Monte Carlo, one dog licking his feet, the other curled up on his lap, he watched the parade of phonies, thieves, con men and women, make their discoveries and hatch plans for sneaking his trash into their cars and, eventually, home. He loved watching the shenanigans—the abrupt halt, the slow circling, the pacing back and forth looking for outraged observers. Then the pounce, the tension between the casual departure and the racing heart. The careless deposit into trunks, or onto backseats. The slow exits from the parking lots into the safety of traffic. Sometimes he followed them. They drove around the corner, parked in front of a house, or up the road to another strip mall, a gas station. They couldn’t wait to see what they’d scored. The anxious unwrapping, the tearing away of paper or tape, the sawing at string with the edges of keys. And then, revelation—the looks on their faces! The frantic looking around. Who did this? Or worse, who’s observing this? Who’s seeing them for what they really are: moral amoebas without a scintilla of virtue. God, did Bob Foote love those moments! The best were the ones he tailed all the way home, the ones who slid into their houses with packages under their arms, the lights flashing on and the furious unwrapping, followed by the exclamations and the expletives. Sometimes he covered his schnauzer’s ears.
And the range of them—the doctors and lawyers didn’t surprise him, but twice he’d seen close friends of his wife, and once a pair of nuns. He had to rub his eyes and make sure he wasn’t the one getting duped.
Today’s package was the
crème de la crème
, if he could get French about it. This one packaged all the wrappers, all the bows, the cards (with the names crossed out), and all the tinsel from the meaningless gifts that had been exchanged over the previous two days—excluding the Whitman Sampler, whose chocolates remained good, if compromised. There were the gifts from his two sons. From Cliff, the younger punk, a book about nautical semaphores. Always something about the sea from Cliff, as if someday they might ship out together. On the back it said,
Used
. From Wally, the older punk, a subscription to a golfing magazine he didn’t read—he didn’t golf. By chance, Wally did. He’d pissed on them both, wiped the dogs’ asses with the pages, tossed them into the box. The gifts from his wife—a card without his name or hers, and a book about famous battles of the U.S. Navy (The fucking Navy! He’d been a Marine) … he used the card to scoop up a few frozen turds from the backyard, bing bang boom, into the box. The box had come with the gift his sons had given their mother, Samsonite luggage that must have fallen off a truck and had about as much utility for his wife as tits on a nun. To that mess, he added the past several days’ debris: chicken bones, the heels and waxes from cheese, cracker boxes, broken ornaments, tissues, napkins, plate scrapings, turkey bones, chicken gizzards, stale bread, burnt lasagna, half-chewed meatballs, pie tins, cupcake wrappers, soup cans, empty milk cartons, half-a-week’s kitty litter. For good measure he threw in the watch he’d received for thirty years retirement, a gold-tone Jules Jurgensen with a twist-o-flex band, water resistant to ten meters, that fogged up and stopped the first time he wore it in the shower—a piece of crap. Like his job, his sons, his life. And that’s what he felt about Christmas, a piece of crap—a holiday when garbage got wrapped up and recycled and presented as gifts to hapless suckers who oohed and ahhed at it, then returned it or gave it away to some other loser.
He’d wrapped the box carefully in the garage, his sons and his wife shaking their heads. And now he was sitting back, waiting to enjoy the fruits of his labor.
Two women spotted the box at the same time. One came from the shops, her arms full. The other came from her car, she was just heading in; she had two boys who ran in the snow in front of her. Bob Foote saw the boys first, or rather his schnauzer did, and started barking. Bob Foote shushed her, and she curled back down on the seat beside him, her throat grumbling until his fingers tickled her calm.
Then the women converged. Bob Foote couldn’t hear what they said, but he could imagine. “That’s my box.” “You’re full of shit.” “Well, it’s not your box.” “It is now.” “No, it’s not.” “Yes, it is.” “No, it’s not.” Each with a hand on the ribbon, pulling this way, pulling that.
Someone, Bob Foote thought, is going to get hurt if this keeps up much longer.
So he honked the horn. Both women jumped, startled. The woman with the bags lost her grip, and her feet seemed to shoot straight out from below her hips. She fell straight back, flat as a plank. Then the soft dull thunk of her skull hitting the Buick’s bumper. The other woman covered her mouth with her hand. She screamed for her boys to come back. She turned and ran. She didn’t forget to take the box.
Bob Foote jumped out of the car and rushed toward the fallen woman. His bare feet in the snow sent his mind hurtling back to Korea. So did the blood, the helmet-like puddle seeping into the snow around the woman’s head. He slid his fingers under her scarf and felt for a pulse—he pressed on one side, the other, nothing. A pair of headlights glowed blurrily at the end of the lane, coming his way. He straightened up, hopped back to the Monte Carlo. The oncoming car slowed, and Bob Foote slid below the wheel.
Lonnie Lonigan sat in a booth of the Good Steer Inn on Jericho Turnpike. A True Blue curled smoke from his lip. He hated True Blue—the smoke was so thin he barely squinted. But his Lucky Strikes made him hack like he had a pint of pus in each lung.
On the wall at his elbow was a personal jukebox. He flipped through the offerings looking for the Italian love songs that gave Bob Foote such a kick. They’d both married Italian girls from Bushwick. Lonigan got stuck with a mutt. Janet Scaturo—one pregnancy and she pooched out. Two, she pigged. By the time she divorced him, she was pulling a caboose wider than a Volkswagen bus. Bob Foote got Jackie Capello, pick of the Bushwick litter. A pain in the ass, worse than a Jewish princess, but two kids hadn’t blown her figure, and she held on to her looks, more or less. Even back then, eighteen, nineteen years old, she knew how to lick an Italian ice. It should have been the two of them, Lonnie always thought, but Korea, all the rest, shit got mixed up. Now all he cared about was the dirty movies. Was there a greaseball song about that? He punched in “Amore Scusami,” “Mala Femmena,” and “Addio, Mi’ Amore.” These days, three was all you got for fifty cents. There’s your morning in America.
With his sleeve he wiped off a clear spot in the window. Thick fat snowflakes fell. Headlights glowed on traffic slowed to a crawl. Bob Foote was ten minutes late, but that was okay. No rush. The plan was a lunch, a few beers, and Bob Foote would go home to the wife he couldn’t stand, Lonnie would pick up a six-pack and head to the dirty movies—the second best thing about being divorced. For the holidays the Rocky Point Adult Cinema featured all the skins nominated for the Adult Video Awards. And every day they drew stubs for a free first-class flight out to Vegas for a stage-side table at the ceremony. Ginger Lynn, Nikki Charm, Christy Canyon—the winner got to sit with them all, three nights, in the flesh. And since seeing this year’s
New Wave Hookers
, Lonnie had become obsessed. Every time he closed his eyes he saw Traci Lords doing very interesting things. It was going to take more than a blizzard to keep Lonnie Lonigan away from a crack at that freebie. And he had to win—Janet had cleaned him out.
He’d thought of asking Bob Foote for a loan—he knew his friend could spot him. But there was a funny thing about Bob Foote: he didn’t approve of the skins. Even in Korea, when they were twenty, twenty-one years old. He wouldn’t go along to the brothels. He wouldn’t look at the magazines. The guys both hated him and respected him for it. And Lonigan learned it was best just to avoid the topic.
Outside, a Suffolk County Police patrol car crept by, blue light flashing, the siren muffled in the snow. Then another cop car. And another. An ambulance followed. Lonigan shook his head—he’d driven a jeep at the Frozen Choisin, snow up to his kneecaps, and the only accident he had was pissing his pants when a bomb blew his vehicle into the drifts. This snow—he could drive it blindfolded, he could drive it drunk, and would.
Bob Foote couldn’t. Lonigan saw him pull into the diner’s lot, watched him slide and fishtail, then try to wedge into the space close to the entrance.
“Slow, you dumb bastard,” Lonigan muttered.
Bob Foote spun his wheels again and again, and gave up. He motored over to a wide open area in the lot’s far corner, then lingered outside the car, saying goodbye to that blind goddamn poodle. The guy was becoming a crackpot. When he came through the door near the register, his hair and beard glistened with snow.
“Bob, you fat bastard,” Lonnie said, “I thought I was going to have to come out and park for you.”
Bob Foote fell into the booth. He tried to speak, and choked back a sob.
Lonnie jumped up and waved off the waitress. He threw his arm around his friend and said, “Okay, Bobby, okay. Whatever it is, you hear me? Okay.”
Lonigan knew all about his tricks with the garbage. Sometimes they went together, drank quarts of Schaefer and watched the show. But from what Bob Foote was blubbering, this one went haywire. His friend had crossed a line. He’d made himself vulnerable. Shit could happen.
When he finished, Lonigan returned to his side of the booth. “Look,” he said, “it’s two ways. Either she’s dead and you did the right thing, ’cause no use getting fucked for something not your fault. Or she’s not dead, which case someone finds her, they call the cops, she’s all right. You keep your name out of it.” He sat back and put a match to a True. “I’d rather get the cancer than smoke these goddamn things. I gotta suck twice to get half a puff.”
“Can we keep the focus here?”
“I’m saying, Bob, you got nothing to worry about.”
“She had no pulse, Lonnie, did you hear me?”
“Yeah, I heard you.”
“The woman died.”
“That we don’t know.”
“What do you mean,
we don’t know?
” Bob Foote said.
“Were you there? Did you feel her?”
“Let me ask you something: are you a doctor?”
“She had no pulse.”
“Oh, so you are a doctor. Maybe you could have a look at these hemorrhoids?”
“She didn’t have a pulse, Lonnie.”
“You didn’t
feel
a pulse. You, a retired schmuck used to climb poles for the lighting company. You don’t know a pulse from a putz, my friend.”
Bob Foote smiled weakly. “I know a putz,” he said.
“I’m a putz, I know. But seriously, Bob—nothing. All right?”
“How do you figure?”
“Nothing legal, I’m saying. Spiritual, that’s between you and
Il Papa
.”
“It’s not the Pope I’m worried about.”
“Look, legal—they got dick. Two women fighting over a box not even theirs. Freaking blizzard, no one sees past their nose. One falls, cracks her skull.”
“And they call that manslaughter, Lonnie.”
“No fucking way.”
Lonnie Lonigan signaled for the waitress. She brought two schooners of Pabst.
“Remember,” Lonigan said, “my brother-in-law’s on the Suffolk County force. I’ll give him a call, see what they have, careful like …”