“Today’s your day,” I said, palming the clutch of keys off to him. “You get to do the whole thing.” He unlocked and opened the Buick’s trunk, pried off the cooler’s squeaky Styrofoam lid, retrieved a Rheingold, took a long pull. He offered me a sip.
“Just don’t tell.” Immediately following the initial sip, my arms and legs felt heavy and achy, but they ached good. Another sip, and they ached real good. Another, and I became unsteady. I grabbed Danny’s arm so I wouldn’t skin my knees stumbling to the gravel.
I’d never seen so hairy an arm on someone so young. Up close. With my free hand, I touched the hair on the arm I held hostage, mussing the hair against the whorls of its natural growth configuration, then smoothing it back, as I’d done at home with the wall-to-wall shag. Back and forth, up and down his arm. I was simultaneously lost in and intensely concentrated on the beat, the rhythm of cyclically creating swirling arm-hair chaos and then returning it to tidy normalcy He didn’t stop me. His breath was raggedy. I continued stroking, ruining a pattern, restoring a pattern.
Distantly, Chicky hollered, “I said one beer, not the whole six-pack.” Danny neither responded nor registered hearing his father. Now he had gooseflesh, his soft, young, black arm-hairs standing straight up, a phenomenon I’d later learn was scientifically called piloerection. Chicky shouted, “You writin’ a book or somethin’?” Danny, who got to see his arms and their hair every day, was as transfixed as I was. His breathing steadied, slowed, deepened. Nearly but not quite rupturing my reverie, from afar Chicky yelled, angrily, “Danny? You deaf or just not listening to me today? If I have to come over there…” Wordlessly, Danny stared at my hand gliding along his arm’s shaft. Touching his arm-hair, and the arm-skin underneath, was awfully pleasant and vaguely disturbing, a brand new, unnamable inner commotion that started to spook me. I didn’t want to stop petting him, but I thought I should mention what I’d half-heard. “You’re dad’s mad. You’re in trouble.” Danny didn’t hear me. Chicky bellowed, “Hey, Lefty. People’s gonna think your girl’s the type who hangs around parking lots. See what’s doing over there, will ya?”
My father approached us, boots grinding gravel. Once the beer can came within his eyeshot, his face became a blade of disapproval, features finely sharpened and narrowed. And it cut. I’d done bad. I scrambled for a strategy to fix it.
Perhaps for the first and only blessed time, being a child spared me something. Still young enough to play innocuous tickle-wrestle games, without pulling my hand from Danny’s arm, I wiggled my fingers, ten desperate, panicked worms, deep into Danny’s belly, like I was tickling him, “Cootchie-cootchie-cooo.” Quick-footed, quick-witted Danny followed my lead, doubling over and laughing maniacally, then cootchie-cootchie-coooing my armpits. I shrieked, too, with crazy-person laughter. Although Dad seemed relieved that all Danny was doing was tickling me — the man had no idea that I was doing all the doing, or thought as much — I knew right then that it was officially and indelibly safe to say that I really had a problem, that I was disgusting, that there was poison in my putrefied blood, that I’d been born bad.
A bad seed. A bad egg. Three hundred million bad seeds in a grand hurry toward a head-on collision with one bigger bad egg. The blood-script of a messy but astonishingly idiot-proof recipe for bringing into being a being born bad An accident — a statistically improbable accident — waiting to happen. That would be me.
For decades I’d awaken with a start, sweatily, those two words in my mind, on my tongue. Born bad
When Dad first warned me that taking kids up on bridges was against the law, he’d explained, in his serious-man voice, “Here’s the tricky thing, Beetle. The laws weren’t made for People Like Us. Mostly, People Like Us have to obey the law, but we don’t have to respect it. And we sure as hell don’t have to like it. Ain’t one law says you have to respect the law.” I was proud. We were tough. We meant business. Me and my bad Dad. A tough team. Once pledged to the team, there’s no getting off. Ever.
Even after death, there’s no quitting the team. Danny loyally stuck by the Testaverde team, as the team did by him, long beyond his death — his premature payment of the ultimate union dues — two years after his transcendent ladder-climb. Violating child labor laws, and working illegally, without papers, Danny had quit high school to work iron. The walking bosses had looked the other way at his age, because Danny was a crackerjack cabler, skilled beyond his years, until the day he’d slipped and fallen off a too-slippery beam.
The men, as Dad recounted the story, struggled to catch him, nearly falling off themselves, but they only managed to grab hold of his shirt. His Alexander’s-boys’-department polyester shirt. In a wakeful nightmare, a day-mare, the men watched impotently as Danny plummeted, and his shirt flew off, and his naked back looked so startlingly white against the black water. Water as hard as concrete, water harder than steel, water that murdered bodies falling from such heights by breaking them into many pieces, even if the lungs managed miraculously to carry on functioning during the descent.
No one could bear to look at Chicky.
Finally, the men watched as, from deep within him, Danny’s intestines sprung pyrotechnically out of his insides and into the open air, unfurling like some kid’s birthday-party streamers, launching skyward, as if powered by a spring-loaded catapult. The remnants of his body sunk heavily into the water, piece by broken piece. His guts were the last part of him anyone saw. His guts — up, up, up — as they soared.
All the men removed their hard hats, tacitly arriving at a collective mandate that the workday was over — and not just for Danny. Most of them immediately headed down off the bridge, but some were immobilized, stunned still, including several who required hours of humiliating, never-to-be-mentioned-again coaching and hand-holding from other men. Three guys were physically incapable — it wasn’t emotional or anything, they swore, but sheerly, physiologically impossible — to unbolt their locked-shut eyes. The three had to be embraced and carried down the whole way.
Criminals. All of us.
“If we’re gonna climb a bridge together, I have to teach you the right way to fall off. Into water. When you know how to fall right, we can go up and know what to do if God forbid something goes wrong. But remember: None of these things are allowed. There’s rules against it, so you can’t tell anyone what we’re doing. Afterwards, you can’t tell anyone what we did.”
“If it’s not allowed on Canarsie Pier, let’s skip it. It’s rinky-dink anyway. We could jump off a real bridge in Jamaica.”
He grinned amusedly. “You think it’s legal across the county line? In Queens County, but not Kings County?”
I stood awhile, crossed and uncrossed my legs, which locked at my stiffened, knobby knees. I lost my balance a little during one crossover, caught myself, and swallowed hard. I hadn’t meant Queens. I’d meant the island. From the commercials. Ocean waves. Palm trees. Sunsets. And that music. I folded my arms across my chest. “I meant the beach.”
“Forget Bergen Beach. We’re good enough right here. Anyway, how’s stepping from flat sand into the ocean like jumping off a bridge? ’Slike taking a walk, not a fall.” I hadn’t thought through the spatial aspects that far — although secretly, anticipating our trip to the bay in for-real Jamaica, I’d packed my knapsack with my bathing suit and two towels and placed toothpaste, toothbrushes, shampoo, suntan oil, soap, and snacks in my Fonzie lunchbox. Peering down into this Jamaica’s bay, I saw that these logistics weren’t analogous to a work situation either. Canarsie Pier’s setup didn’t provide the slightest simulation of the long-distance free-fall from those heights to those depths, and that was what I’d wanted him to show me. The distance between Canarsie Pier’s cement banks and Jamaica Bay’s foul water was a matter of sad little inches — nothing compared to the vast expanses of absolute nothing between a bridge’s tensile steel and the suck of rushing, fluctuating open water. My stomach sat low, depressed with the first signs of starting-to-be-sad stomach syndrome.