First I peeked over one side of the car, then the other. No one. I was thankful for that, at least. Quietly as possible, I got onto my knees and scanned the yard. Again, nothing. I reached into my coat pocket, pulled out a stone, and hurled it into the night. I wasn’t trying to hit anything in particular. I was just trying to hit something. Mission accomplished. It clanged off metal and the clang echoed through the yard. That set off a chain reaction: the crunch and scrape of running feet on gravel, a short flash of fire, a small explosion, and screams.
“You stupid prick. You shot me! You fuckin’ shot me.”
“Oh, shit, man. I’m sorry. Where are you?”
“Where did you aim the gun, you moron?”
“Oh, yeah, right. I’m coming. I’m coming.”
That was my cue to exit. I jumped down off the top of the subway car and ran for the hole in the fence. I was no longer worried about being stealthy. Five minutes and another climbed fence later, I was heading along the bank of Coney Island Creek. When I made it to Neptune Avenue, I walked back out onto the street and I let myself exhale. I didn’t relax, not totally. I wasn’t sure I would ever fully relax again, or stop looking over my shoulder.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
No ringing telephone this time, just Aaron shaking me awake. Given a choice, I preferred the phone.
“What? What’s up?” I said, my head still foggy with sleep.
Aaron dropped me and I collapsed back onto my bed. My big brother didn’t let me go back to sleep, though.
“Get up, Moses. Get up right now,” he barked at me.
When I didn’t respond quickly enough to suit him, he dumped a glass of cold water on my face. The water did a better job of getting my attention than the shoulder shaking.
“What the fuck?” I sat up, wiping the water off my face with my T-shirt.
“Go do your business and I’ll meet you in the dining room in five minutes.” It wasn’t a polite request. It wasn’t a request at all.
Normally, I don’t respond real well to my brother bossing me around or his attempts at being a third parent, but there was something, maybe the tone of his voice, that compelled me to do as he said. So five minutes later and slightly more awake, I found myself at the table. Aaron had a cup of my mother’s reheated death coffee waiting for me. I drank some of it, too much of it, and wondered how much worse could Drano have tasted and how much worse for you could it be.
“Okay, big brother, what’s the word?”
“You may be fooling Mommy and Daddy, but not me. What’s going on with you? Is it drugs? Are you in some kind of trouble?”
“Nothing’s wrong.”
“Bullshit.”
Of course it was. I didn’t believe it myself. How was he supposed to swallow it? He held up a piece of paper and read his car’s odometer numbers to me.
“Thanks for the wine. It’s a nice gesture, little brother, but I’m not stupid. Where the hell did you go to put on all that mileage?”
“The Sea of Tranquility.”
“The moon shot’s not scheduled until two years from now. I want the truth.”
That’s what I gave him, if only a little piece of it. “I went to Koblenz, Pennsylvania.”
“Never heard of it. Why would you go there?”
“Because Koblenz, Germany, is too far away and I don’t have a passport.”
“You’re especially not funny in the morning, Moses. What were you doing in Koblenz?”
I gave him another sliver of truth. “I went to visit Samantha Hope’s grave.”
“Wasn’t she the girl who — ”
“Yeah. Bobby’s girlfriend, the one who got blown up in December in Coney Island.”
“Bobby has a car. Why didn’t you take his?”
“I didn’t go with him. I went alone.”
“Why?”
“Because.”
“Don’t be an ass. You sound like a five-year-old.”
“Sounds about right,” I said.
“Okay, forget that for now. What’s this?” Aaron held up my coat. “And don’t say ‘it’s my coat.’ I know it’s your coat, but it’s filthy and it’s torn and there’s dried blood all over it. Your sneakers are caked in mud, and the bottoms of your Levis are still damp. Your shirt stinks from sweat.”
It was tough to argue with the truth. I had been so full of adrenaline last night, and then so exhausted when I got home, that I hadn’t given a second thought to my clothes. Apparently, my brother had done that for me. I had to say something or Aaron would keep pushing. He was like the prosecutors on Judd, for the Defense. He was better than them because he didn’t lose. He’d missed his calling in life.
“I guess I got into a fight last night.”
“You guess?”
“I got into a fight.”
“With who?”
“With whom,” I corrected. “It’s ‘with whom did you get into a fight.’ It doesn’t matter anyway. It’s over now. It’s done.”
“This is Brooklyn, Moe. Fights are never over.”
He was right about that too, especially this time. Susan Kasten wasn’t done with me, nor did I think Jimmy — George Wallace — was going to forget that I broke his nose and nearly smashed his windpipe. I decided to go on the offensive, or I knew Aaron would wear me down.
“We’re not kids anymore, big brother. You can’t fight my fights for me. You can’t protect me.”
“Well, you need protecting because you’re acting like an irresponsible idiot. Like I said, you may have Mom and Dad snowed, but I know you haven’t been going to school. You can’t just not go to school like that.”
“How would you know? You haven’t taken a fucking risk in your whole life. You’ve never drawn outside the lines. All you ever do is follow the rules and toe the line.”
“I’m not going to apologize for doing the right thing or for having goals and trying to achieve them. What do you have? Do you even know what you want? You’re wandering around BC like a moth looking for a flame. Now you’re not even doing that. Do you want to be like Dad?”
“I know who I am.”
“You don’t know anything, least of all who you are.”
“You’re right,” I said, “I don’t. The joke is that you don’t either. You just think you do. You think you are defined by the rules you follow and the plans you’ve made. You think being good defines you. It’s the other way around. They stop you from defining yourself.”
“I hear Psych 1 and Introduction to Philosophy, but I don’t hear my brother talking.”
“You can hear whatever the hell you want. I wanna go back to sleep.”
Aaron shook his head at me in disgust. “Go back to bed. Go do what you want. You’ll just do it anyway.” He walked away.
“Hey, big brother,” I called after him. “You using your car today?”
He stopped and turned. “Why?”
“I need it.”
“For what? Wait — ” He held up his hands. “I don’t wanna know, do I?”
“Probably not.”
He tossed me the keys. “If this will help get whatever is going on with you out of your system, fine. Just bring it and you back in one piece. Understand?”
“Loud and clear.”
• • •
The next time, it was a ringing phone that woke me up. I wasn’t in a really deep sleep, anyway. I was never very good at going back to sleep after my mind was alert. My mom’s coffee hadn’t helped. I was tossing and turning over how things had deteriorated since I began digging into what had happened to Mindy. I had found the guy who’d beaten Mindy into a coma. So what? Abdul Salaam was in worse shape than her. There would be no waking from his sleep. I’d practically watched Billy O’Day murdered. Susan Kasten’s Committee, whoever the fuck they were, wanted to interrogate and now probably kill me. But everything seemed to come back to Bobby somehow.