That made sense, didn’t it? It was hard to tell if it really made sense, because I was scared senseless.
I was almost suffocating from the stench inside the car now. And it was then that I remembered another awful smell sniffed from the front seat of a moving automobile. The mind worked like that sometimes, playing a kind of charades with you — stench and car and what do you get?
Memories of Sunday afternoons spent motoring down to Aunt Kate’s house in southern New Jersey. To get there, we had to take the Belt Parkway down to the Verrazano Bridge, then go straight through the heart of Staten Island. Passing not much of anything along the way, just a supersize mall here and there with a megaplex cinema showing seventeen different movies all playing at once. Then, smack in the middle of nowhere, it would hit with terrifying swiftness. A vomitous odor would suddenly assault us through the cracked-open windows, through the air-conditioning vents and sunroof. The odor of garbage, the stench of landfill. Huge mounds of dun-colored earth on either side of the highway circled by clouds of screaming gulls. Fishkill.
I’d close the windows, Deanna holding her nose right next to me and Anna screeching in the backseat. I’d turn off the air-conditioning and make sure the sunroof was locked tight, but the odor would still come in. It was like sticking your head in a garbage pail, and no matter how fast I drove — and I’d hit the accelerator for all it was worth — I couldn’t drive fast enough. I couldn’t outrun the smell, not until I’d traveled a good fifteen minutes or so and the landscape turned sweetly suburban.
An hour later, drink in hand on Aunt Kate’s backyard deck, I could still sniff it on my clothes.
That’s where I headed.
I took Canal down to the Manhattan Bridge, then up the Belt to the Verrazano. Traffic was light this time of night—a good thing, considering Winston was decomposing right next to me. Have you got half a brain? I used to complain to Anna when I lost my temper. And Winston did have half a brain, the other half spread in pieces around the car.
I was thinking ahead to the tollbooth. If it would be a problem paying—if the toll collector would be able to see inside the car. If he or she would be able to smell the car. Trying to take this thing one obstacle at a time — like Edwin Moses, whom I’d once heard on ESPN explaining his method in the hurdles as just that: one hurdle at a time and never look at the finish line.
The finish line for me was Winston safely disposed of and me back in bed. And Vasquez paid off in full — oh yes, a hundred thousand was seeming kind of cheap right at the moment — all of Anna’s Fund, maybe, but still kind of cheap, things being what they were.
The toll collector was humming vintage James Brown—“I Feel Good.” Not if she sniffed the car, she wouldn’t be. Not if she took a peek at my traveling companion and noticed the brain schematic sitting on his shoulders. I’d pulled out the money in advance and had it out there waiting for her. She’d had a kind of cool rhythm going with the cars in front of me—arm out, arm in, money in, change out, like one of those funky dances from the sixties, the swim or the monkey . But when I rolled up to her window with cash in hand, she told me to wait a minute. She started to count bills inside the booth and left my money sitting right where it was — in my sweaty palm.
It was maddening. I began to worry about the other toll collector now, the one to my right and therefore closer to the dead body. I wondered if they carried guns — toll collectors? It didn’t really matter, since I knew they carried radios. A simple message to the police station up ahead and I was dead meat.
Finally, after another half a song — Little Stevie Wonder circa 1965 — she reached out and took the money from me.
And I breathed again — shallow breaths, of course, head turned toward the window because the stench was enveloping me like steam. Winston was the second dead person I’d ever seen. I’d attended an open-coffin funeral when I was fourteen — a friend of the family who’d succumbed to cancer — and I’d more or less kept my eyes on my shoes, peeking just once at a face that seemed oddly happy. Not so with Winston, his mouth half-open as if caught in midscream, his eyes squeezed shut. He’d gone complaining about it.
I killed Winston, I thought again.
Just as if I’d pulled the trigger myself. Adultery, fraud, and now murder? It didn’t seem so long ago that I’d been one of the nameless good guys. It was a little hard to reconcile that Charles with this one — this one driving a dead man through Staten Island on the way to the dump. It was a little difficult to digest. Yet if I could only make it to the dumping grounds without being apprehended by the police; if I could dispose of Winston’s body and the bloody car; if I could make Vasquez go away with one hundred thousand dollars . . .
One hurdle at a time.
First I had to find a way into the landfill. It had to be close; the stench in the car had been joined by another one that was even worse.
I reached the exit for the dump. At least I thought it was, because the next exit said Goethals Bridge. I exited onto a deserted two-lane road with no street lamps. Winston slumped against the window as I turned right.
I followed the road for five minutes or so, not a single other car in either direction. I imagined the only traffic that found its way here was either coming or going to the landfill, and at this time of night no one was doing either of those things. Except for me.
I squinted into the blackness, looking for a gate that might let me in, slowing to a crawl so I wouldn’t ride past and miss it.
There.
Just up ahead, a gate all right — a barbed-wire fence ending in two swinging doors and a sentry box. A gate in — which might have made me weep for joy, or shout in exultation, or at least sigh in relief, if it wasn’t for the fact that it was locked solid.
Well, what had I expected? This was city property, wasn’t it, not a public dumping ground for anyone with a dead body to get rid of.
I got out of the stinking car only to find that it smelled worse outside the car than in it. It was as if the air itself were garbage, as if all the putrid smells of New York City were dumped here, too, along with all that solid stuff. Landfill and airfill both, and the seagulls feeding on all of it and crying out for more. Rats with wings — wasn’t that what they called them? And now I understood why.
An entire flock of them had descended by my feet — lifting their wings and cawing at me as if I were after their food. As if I were their food. Sharp yellow beaks all pointed at me, and I wondered if they could smell Winston’s blood on me, if, like vultures, they could sniff out the dead and dying.
I felt hemmed in, surrounded by encroaching seagulls and stench, and I yelled and flapped my arms, hoping to scare them away. But the only one scared seemed to be me; the gulls hardly moved, one or two of them beating their wings and lifting an inch or two off the ground. I retreated to the car, where I sat in the front seat and stared at the locked gate.
I reversed the car and began to meander up Western Avenue again, tracking the fence and looking for anything that might constitute a way in.
“Come on, surprise me,” I said out loud. Life had thrown me a few nasty ones lately — thinking that maybe I was due some good ones. Even one good one, right now, here in the asshole of Staten Island, where all the waste exited and lay rotting.