Derailed

NINETEEN

When I disembarked at Merrick station I called Deanna to pick me up. I thought about walking, but a steady wind was whipping in from the ocean and I was nearly blown back into the train when I stepped off onto the platform.

But when Deanna answered the phone, she asked me if I could wait ten minutes. The chimney guy I’d hired was there, and she didn’t want to leave him alone in the house with Anna.

So I told her I’d walk after all.

Christmastime had turned what was generally a quiet and reserved residential street into something akin to the Vegas strip. All those flashing lights. All those plastic reindeer pulling plastic Santas on their plastic sleighs. A plastic manger or two. Several stars of Bethlehem precariously perched on once stately arborvitaes.

I pulled in gulps of air that felt strangely heavy and saturated with moisture as I walked past and took in the show.

And then, suddenly, rescue.

A car horn beeped, then beeped again.

I turned and saw my neighbor’s Lexus purring by the side of the curb.

I walked up to the passenger door as my neighbor Joe cracked open the window.

“Hop in,” he said.

You didn’t have to ask me twice. I opened the door and slid into a kind of primal warmth — what the first cavemen must have felt when they created those first licks of flame and finally, miraculously, stopped shivering.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Cold out there, huh?” said Joe, who was nothing if not observant.

“Yes.”

Joe was a chiropractor, which either was or wasn’t a legitimate profession. No one had ever been able to explain it to my satisfaction.

“How’s the kid?” Joe asked.

“Okay,” I answered, thinking I sounded like Anna now. One-word answers to any question. “And yours?” Joe had three children spaced a year apart, including a girl around Anna’s age who was academically oriented, athletically gifted, and disgustingly healthy.

Joe said they were fine.

“How’s things at the office?” he asked me.

“Fine.” People politely asked you things that they didn’t actually want answers to, I thought—but what if I did answer him? What if I said, Glad you asked, Joe, then gave him an earful about Eliot and Ellen Weischler.I was fired off the account I worked on for ten years, and now they have me working on a shit account that no one cares about. And while I was at it, I could fill him in on Vasquez and Lucinda, too. What would he say then?

But instead I said: “How are things with you?”

“People always have bad backs,” Joe said.

Even after they’ve gone to you for treatment, I felt like saying. But didn’t.

“Doing anything for the holidays?” Joe asked me. We were stopped at a traffic light that was generally acknowledged to be the slowest traffic light in Merrick. Whole days would pass and this traffic light would stay red. Kingdoms rose and fell, presidential administrations came and went, and the light obstinately refused to change.

“No. Going over to Deanna’s mom like we do every year.”

“Uh-huh.”

Then after I asked Joe the same thing, and Joe told me he was going down to Florida for a few days, the car went quiet as we both realized that was pretty much it — we’d run out of small talk.

“Boy, it’s cold,” Joe finally said, repeating his comment from earlier in the ride.

“Go through the light, Joe,” I said.

“What?”

“Go through the light." Something had just come to me.

“Why should I — ”

Deanna had asked me to wait at the station. Because the chimney cleaner I’d hired was there and she didn’t want to leave him alone in the house.

“Go through the fucking light. ”

I hadn’t hired a chimney cleaner.

“Look, Charles, I don’t want to get a ticket and I don’t see what the big rush is — ”

“Go!”

So Joe did. The evident panic in my voice finally spurred Joe into action; he gunned the engine and went right through the traffic light, swinging into Kirkwood Road just two blocks from our homes.

“If I got a ticket, you’d pay it,” Joe said, trying to regain a little of his dignity now that he’d blindly obeyed his neighbor for no good reason. What did I mean, coming off like that, ordering him around?

“Stop here,” I said.

Joe had obviously intended to steer the car into his own driveway and let me walk next door. But I couldn’t wait. For the second time in two minutes, Joe did as he was told. He stopped the car in front of 1823 Yale and I jumped out.

When I flung open my front door, I saw Deanna leaning against the banister, in the middle of telling someone that Curry didn’t like everyone this way, that he was selective with his affections.

And then the person she was telling this to.

“Mr. Ramirez said he’s giving us a special price,” Deanna was saying.

We were sitting in the living room, the three of us.

“But only because he likes Curry and vice versa,” Deanna continued. She was talking about the price of cleaning the chimney. Deanna always managed to settle into an easy rapport with handymen of one kind of another, befriending them, regaling me later with stories about their wives and children.

“Yeah,” Vasquez said. “I’m just a dog lover.” He was smiling, the same smile he’d had when he was propping Lucinda up against the bed to rape her for the last time.

“Mr. Ramirez — ” Deanna said, but she was interrupted.

“Raul,” Vasquez said.

“Raul said our chimney has a broken. . . what was that again?”

“Flue.”

“Yes, we have a broken flue.”

“Yeah. It’s an old chimney,” Vasquez said. “When was this house built?”

“Nineteen twelve,” Deanna said. “I think.”

“Yeah. It’s probably never been touched.”

“Then I guess it’s about time,” Deanna said.

“That’s right. Sure.”

I hadn’t said anything yet. But now they were waiting for me to say something, some acknowledgment of the problem at hand and what I was going to do about it. I hadn’t said anything yet because I couldn’t imagine what to say.

“So,” Deanna continued, “Raul is prepared to fix it and clean the chimney. But it’s up to you.”

“You don’t want to live with a broken flue,” Vasquez said. “The thing could be dangerous. All that carbon dioxide can back up, man—it'll kill you while you’re sleeping, understand?”

Yes, I understood all right.

“There was this family I knew that didn’t fix their flue,” Vasquez said. “One night they went to sleep, and in the morning they didn’t wake up. All of them, dead. A whole family.”

“So, what do you say?” Deanna asked me, looking alarmed now. “What do you want to do?”

Anna wandered into the living room, dressed in pajamas.

“What’s the capital of North Dakota?” she asked me.

Two questions before me now, but I only felt like answering one.

I’ll take state capitals for one hundred, Alex.

“Bismarck,” I said.

“Anna, this is Raul,” Deanna said, always the hostess.

“Hi,” Anna said, flashing him her most polite smile, the one she trotted out for distant relatives, old friends of her parents, and, apparently, handymen.

“Hello,” Vasquez said, and reached out and tousled her hair. That hand on my child’s head.

“How old are you?” Vasquez asked her.

“Thirteen,” Anna said.

“That right?”

He hadn’t taken his hand off her head. Instead of coming off the way it was supposed to, it was lingering there uncomfortably, five, then ten, then fifteen seconds; Anna was starting to squirm.

“Look just like your mom,” Vasquez said to her.

“Thanks.”

“You like school?”

Anna nodded. My daughter, who generally tried to refrain from offending anyone, obviously wanting that hand off her head now, but evidently unsure just how to accomplish that. She looked at me for help.

“Look . . . ,” I said.

“Yeah?” Vasquez stared right back at me. “You say something?”

I said: “Why don’t you run upstairs and finish your homework, Anna.”

“Okay.” She wanted to do that, yes, but the problem was that Vasquez hadn’t taken his hand off her head yet. So she stood there, her eyes still beseeching me for assistance.

“Goon, honey.”

“Okay.”

But Vasquez was still not removing his hand, still standing there and smiling at me as the room finally went quiet. One of those awkward moments — like watching a friend of the family kiss your wife just a little too intimately at a drunken party and not knowing whether to stand by and watch or challenge him to a fistfight.

“I have to do my homework,” Anna said.

“Homework? Aww . . . pretty girls like you don’t have to do homework. You gotta get the boys to do it for you.”

This was where I was supposed to act. Where I was supposed to say please get your fucking hand off my daughter’s head because it’s fucking making her uncomfortable and she wants to go upstairs, understand fucking English?

The silence was loud enough to split eardrums.

Then: “She likes to do her homework herself,” Deanna said. Ending it. And finally, mercifully, insinuating herself between Vasquez’s arm and Anna’s head, physically and decisively ushering our daughter out of harm’s way.

When Anna padded out of the living room, she glanced back at me with an expression that seemed to admonish me. Apparently, her face said, she’d been looking to the wrong parent for help.

I heard her footsteps going up the stairs at double speed.

Quiet again. Then:

“So . . . ?” Deanna said, clearing her throat. “Maybe you want to think about this, honey?” Apparently this was one hired help she wasn’t going to befriend after all.

“I wouldn’t take too long,” Vasquez said, still smiling. “You don’t want to take chances with your family’s safety, right?”

I felt something acidic deep in my guts, something ice cold and broiling hot at the same time. I thought I might need to throw up.

“No,” I said. “I’ll get back to you soon.”

“Okay, you get back to me, then.”

“Yes.”

“Why don’t you see Raul out,” Deanna said, evidently eager to get him out of the house.

So I walked him to the front door, where Vasquez turned and put his hand out, just as you’d expect from your friendly neighborhood chimney cleaner.

“Know what they taught us in the army, Charles?” he whispered. “Before I got kicked out?”

“What?”

Vasquez showed me.

Leaving one hand exactly where it was, proffered in friendship, but using the other one to grasp my testicles. Crushing them in his fingers.

My knees buckled.

“Grab ’em by the balls. Their hearts and minds will follow.”

I tried to say something but couldn’t. I wanted to cry out but couldn’t. Deanna was not twenty feet behind me and completely oblivious to the excruciating pain radiating down my legs and threatening to make me scream.

“I want the money, Charles.”

I felt my eyes begin to water. “I’ll . . .”

“What?Can’t hear you. . . .”

“I’ll . . .”

“I’ll never hang up on you again? That's cool, apology accepted. I want the fucking money.”

“I can’t breathe. . . .”

“A hundred thousand dollars, okay?”

“I. . .”

“What?”

“Plea . . .”

“A hundred thousand and I give you your balls back.”

“I. . .pl. . .”

And then he did.

He did give them back. At least temporarily. He opened his fingers, and I slumped against the doorjamb.

“Honey,” Deanna said, “can you bring the recycling bin out to the curb?”