“By the way, we should go climbing sometime,” said Decker.
“I’m forty-five years old.”
“I’d take you up the easy routes. It’s better than just wasting away in the city.”
“I like wasting away in the city.”
“Whatever.” Decker pulled out a small bottle of Dr. Pepper from a combat chest rig he was wearing under his jacket, chugged it down in three big gulps, then fished a tin of Skoal Straight chewing tobacco out from his front pocket. He held the dip tin between middle finger and thumb and snapped it down rapidly several times, thwacking his index on the top of the tin with each flick of his wrist.
After lifting the top of the tin off, he inspected his work. “A damn nice pack,” he determined. Deck reached into the tin with his thumb and index finger and transferred a huge wad of tobacco to his mouth. “You want some?” he asked, speaking through the dip.
“That stuff stinks,” said Mark.
“Didn’t want to dip around Jessica or the kid. Been jonesing for one, so you gotta suck it up. By the way, Holtz and I had a bit of a falling out. He wasn’t too keen on me taking the kid.”
“I’m done with Holtz,” said Mark. “I’m going out on my own. You can work for me if you like.”
“Sure.” Decker turned away from Mark and spit a glob of dip juice onto the pavement. “So where’s our plane?”
61
Mark didn’t have to escort Rad all the way from Dubai to Elizabeth, New Jersey, but he wanted to. It was time to go back.
Elizabeth was an old town. It had been the first capital of New Jersey. George Washington and Alexander Hamilton had walked its streets during the Revolutionary War. But little of that history was evident now. Now, Elizabeth was the kind of place Mark guessed people thought of when they laughed about New Jersey being the armpit of the nation. The city of Newark and its busy airport lay on the town’s northern border. The Port Newark-Elizabeth Marine Terminal, a huge shipping port, was to the east. Massive oil refineries, and an industrial wasteland known as the Linden Generating Station, lay just to the south.
Mark could see the power plant now. He and Rad were being driven down the New Jersey Turnpike in a private ambulance. The smell of toxic smokestack emissions and rotting marshland near the plant reminded Mark of some of the old oilfields outside of Baku.
The ambulance turned off on exit thirteen. Minutes later, Mark was staring out the window at the streets of southeast Elizabeth where he’d grown up. His first reaction was that the place didn’t appear to have changed much. He even recognized some of the stores — Deanna’s Hair Salon, Joey’s Italian Sausage, the Cuba Bakery… Other shops, he didn’t — Payless Liquors, Gupta Auto Repair, a Portuguese deli, a pharmacy with a neon sign that read TARJETAS TELEFONICAS DE VENTA AQUI — but they weren’t so different from what used to be there.
Driving down the same roads he’d walked as a boy made Mark realize that, while he’d never regretted leaving, he liked his hometown.
It was on these streets that he’d first learned to fit in, to go unnoticed, to survive — where he’d learned that, even if a place looked a little rough around the edges, that didn’t mean it had nothing to offer. The town had a fast tough rhythm to it that Mark knew was still a part of him.
As he thought yet again of how and why he’d left, all those years ago, he realized he was dead tired. Tired of thinking about the past, but also just physically tired. The plane ride from Dubai had chased the sun, adding nine more hours to an already long day.
For the first part of the trip, he’d hung out with Decker instead of sleeping. When they weren’t playing electronic narde on Decker’s cell phone, or drinking beer from the minibar, Mark had been on the phone with Kaufman, making sure that the CIA was going to fix it so that Rad would be allowed back into the US without a passport.
After a refueling stop in Paris, Decker had gone to sleep and Rad had woken up. Rad had been more lucid at that point, and had been able to call his fiancée on the plane’s satellite phone. He and Mark had talked some — about what had happened in Bahrain, about Mark being a spy, about what Rad had been doing with his life — but Rad had mostly been focused on his pain. And a good hour of the flight had been devoted to figuring out how to get Rad safely to and from the bathroom.
As a result, Mark hadn’t gotten any sleep the whole trip.
“Jesus, you guys really fixed up the old station,” Mark said when they got to Coventry Avenue. Instead of seeing his dad’s old gas station with the lousy four pumps and the neon Save-A-Lot sign, there was a huge BP sign out front. And eight shiny new pumps. And a convenience store.
“Where are we?” Rad tried to look over his shoulder, to catch a glimpse of the gas station. From his prone position, however, Rad couldn’t see the street the way Mark could.
“Coventry Ave.”
“Oh, the old station. Yeah, we redid that eight years ago. You should check out the one right off the turnpike. That one’s got twelve pumps.”
Mark hadn’t even known that his father had expanded beyond the original station. He and Rad had mostly avoided the subject of their father during the flight.
“And you were the project manager for all this?”
“You bet.”
Rad began to talk about how their father had first secured the rights to a BP franchise, how that had led to the purchase of a second station, then a third, and how Rad had helped put together the business plans for the banks, how he’d gotten tight with all the Jersey contractors, how…
Mark wasn’t really listening. They were pulling up to the old house now. The same chain-link fence stood out front, with several plastic garbage cans lined up just behind it. The aluminum siding looked pretty much the same, just a little more chalky and faded. Up near the roof one of the aluminum soffit panels had fallen away, revealing intricate wood detailing badly in need of a paint job.
He wanted to think of this house, this town, his mother — the faded movie in his head that comprised the first seventeen years of his life — as something unrelated to the person he was today. But it was becoming increasingly hard to do so. He remembered the smell of freshly laundered clothes, the creak the basement steps had made when he’d sat down, the weak light from a forty-watt incandescent bulb in the stairwell, the drip-drip-drip from a leaky utility-sink faucet.
He remembered the textured ceiling in his room, the bathroom with the pink tile, the way his brothers used to splash bathwater out of the tub…
The ambulance came to a stop. The driver engaged the parking brake, walked to the back of the ambulance, and pulled open the doors.
“We’re here,” said Mark.
Rad lifted his head and squinted as he looked out the rear of the vehicle. “What are you talking about?”
“We’re here.”
The concrete sidewalk out front was riddled with black dots — old gum, Mark knew. He used to walk the sidewalks of Elizabeth and instead of trying not to step on a crack, he’d tried to avoid the gum dots.
“Mark, Dad doesn’t live here anymore. We moved when I was in college. That was like, over ten years ago.”
At the airport, Mark had recited his old address to the ambulance driver as the government orderlies had been securing Rad. He’d done so because Rad had said to bring him home to Elizabeth, home to Dad’s house. He’d said his fiancée was living there temporarily, while Rad was in India.
Mark had just assumed Rad had been talking about the home they’d both grown up in.
“Huh.”