Fear the Night

15

New York, 1989

Joel Vanya swung himself up onto the back of the trash hauler and watched the fog of his breath stream out into the crisp winter air. The compactor roared and whined on the truck’s bed, the sound so many New Yorkers woke up to in the morning. Joel sometimes added to the din by banging metal trash cans, but they were becoming scarce, what with all the plastic containers and trash bags.

Recycling, Joel thought. What a pain in the ass that is.

He glanced around. This was a nice block, rich people still sleeping in, hours after he’d had to drag himself out of bed and into work. He wished he had some metal to bang now, maybe a pair of trash can lids he could use as cymbals. Wake up the rich snobs, let them know he had some control over their lives. Even things out. One thing Joel was sure of was that the world was rigged; once you were born down, or knocked down, everyone higher on the dung pile wanted to keep you down.

With a roar, the truck lurched forward, rolled about fifty feet farther down the Lower West Side street, then hissed to a stop. Sal Vestamalo, the driver, dressed as warmly as Joel against the winter cold, opened the door and lowered himself to the street. A big man with a salt-and-pepper beard that seemed always to be crusted with frozen saliva or mucus, he swaggered around the front of the truck to start picking up the trash there, while Joel dropped back down to the street and headed for the mushroomed black trash bags piled at the curb behind the truck. It was a process they repeated, over and over, somewhere in the city almost every morning.

Joel had long ago decided this was a shit job even when the weather was good, but now he had seniority and no other marketable skills, so he couldn’t afford to leave the Department of Sanitation. He was stuck working for the city. He didn’t enjoy his work. The truth was, more and more, he didn’t enjoy much of anything.

Joel Vanya was a small man and had been a small child in a tough neighborhood in Newark, New Jersey. His father had deserted Joel and his mother when Joel was ten. The mean drunk wasn’t much of a loss. Joel’s mother repeated that often as he was growing up. Joel agreed. His father had beaten his mother severely before leaving, and permanently injured Joel’s right leg when he’d tried to interrupt the violence. In this weather, Joel’s artificial kneecap hurt almost as badly as when his father had struck his knee with a beer bottle. Joel still walked with the same limp that had drawn bullies to him as a child.

Every day, Joel hurt inside and out.

He swung a heavy black plastic trash bag into the back of the truck, turned to pick up another, and almost slipped and fell when he stepped on a patch of ice.

“We got no time for you to dance, short shit!” Sal yelled. “You wanna move that fast, do it with a load of trash.”

Joel didn’t answer. He was used to swallowing his hate.

Sal was already back in the cab and gunning the engine by the time Joel had returned with a cardboard box full of trash and another black plastic bag.

The crusher was coming down as he tossed the box in, then the bag. The steel lip of the compactor smashed the box and ruptured the bag, then began scooping the trash back toward the front of the truck’s hold, making room for more.

The truck lurched forward, then braked to a quick halt. Sal up to his tricks again.

“Better jump on board!” Sal shouted back at Joel, locking gazes with him in the rearview mirror.

Joel thought about flipping him the bird, but he didn’t want any trouble. He’d already complained to the boss, Frank Dugan, about Sal harassing him and had gotten nowhere. In fact, Sal had sold the idea that Joel was paranoid; then he’d stepped up his campaign of terror.

The truck roared and jumped forward again just as Joel clutched the grab bar and began swinging his body back on board. He lost his grip and stumbled backward, knowing the truck’s sudden acceleration, then stop had been deliberate. Sal would be laughing his ass off in the warm-or at least warmer-cab.

Joel walked toward the grab bar, determined to be more careful, and noticed a brown paper sack that had been in the plastic bag ruptured by the compactor. The sack had torn open. Something dark that it contained caught his eye.

He looked more closely as he prepared to get back up on the truck. The dark object was the barrel and cylinder of a blue steel revolver. With a glance up and down the deserted street, Joel plucked the gun from the litter of trash and stuck it in his belt beneath his jacket.

After the next stop, near the corner, he made sure Sal couldn’t see him in the rearview mirror and took the gun out for a closer look. It had a checked wooden grip and a snub barrel and looked to be in pretty good shape, the kind of gun that was easy to conceal and perfect for committing a crime. Most likely the owner had thrown it away for a reason, probably in someone else’s curbside pile of trash. A gun with a history that might interest the cops.

If the cops ever got their hands on it.

The truck’s motor roared, and the steel compactor screeched and bit down. Sal was yelling something unintelligible over the din.

Before slipping the gun back beneath his coat, Joel flipped the cylinder out and looked at it.

The gun was loaded.

Dugan the boss called Joel into the office when the truck had returned to the shed. Joel always felt inferior around Dugan, who was a tall, barrel-chested Irishman whose family had always worked for the city. Dugan had come to the sanitation department with certain advantages.

Twelve years ago, he’d started on one of the collection trucks, in a job much like Joel’s present one, but he hadn’t remained there long. From day one, Dugan had pull. Joel knew that was what it took to get ahead in a city job, pull. And that was what it took to get the assholes off you, once they settled on you as a target for their sick, cruel jokes.

Not only didn’t Joel have pull, but Dugan and Sal had turned many of their fellow employees against Joel, spreading lies, making sure Joel was passed over for any promotion. Joel considered himself a realist and saw the situation as something he had to endure. In some matters there was no choice.

Just as he always did, big Frank Dugan glanced up at Joel over the frames of his glasses and made the smaller man wait while he finished what he was writing. He sat behind a wide, cluttered desk. On the wall behind him was a large cork bulletin board with schedules and notices pinned to it. Alongside the corkboard was a bank of battered filing cabinets that were the same gray metal as the desk. A space heater was glowing over in a corner. There was a pair of wet leather boots on the floor in front of it, smelling up the place.

Starting to sweat in his heavy coat, even though it was unbuttoned, Joel waited.

“I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news for you, Joel,” Dugan said, when he finally put down his pen and looked up. His blue eyes were rheumy and his face flushed. He looked as if he’d been drinking before Joel arrived, not doing paperwork.

Then it suddenly struck Joel that when he had the revolver out, Sal might have caught a glimpse of it in the truck’s outside mirror. A gun in New York, concealed on the person of a city employee, was a serious matter. It was especially serious now, because the gun was in Joel’s black metal lunch pail, which was in Joel’s right hand.

Joel began to perspire even more. He could feel beads of sweat running down his right side beneath his waffled winter underwear. This was just the kind of thing Dugan and Sal must pray for every night, a chance to rid themselves of Joel and at the same time humiliate him and make it impossible for him to find any kind of city job.

But it wasn’t about the gun.

Dugan shrugged his bulky shoulders and said, “I got some bad news. We’re going to have to lay you off, Joel. I’m sorry.”

“Lay me off?” Joel was astounded. “With my seniority? You’d have to lay off a dozen men to get to me!”

Dugan nodded somberly. “The department’s laying off twenty.”

Joel could only stare at him. He’d been working for the Department of Sanitation for nine years. Getting flat-out fired for some lie cooked up against him was one thing, but the thought of a layoff had never occurred to him. His heart turned cold and dropped.

“It isn’t the best of times for the city,” Dugan said.

“I heard we were doing okay, with the new municipal bonds.”

“Yeah, it sounds like a lotta money, but it’s not.” Dugan stood up, looming even larger in the small, warm office. “Not enough, anyway.”

Joel nodded, swallowing loudly.

Dugan extended his hand. “I wish you luck, Joel.”

Joel shook his boss’s hand, feeling the powerful grip. Christ! What’s Doris going to say? And Dante? How are we all going to get by?

Dugan must have known what he was thinking. “You have union benefits, Joel. And there’s always unemployment. I’d like to tell you it looks like you’ll be called back soon, but in all honesty I can’t.”

Joel couldn’t get the words out-not the ones he wanted to say, that this was a crock of shit, that Dugan was a phony, that he and Sal probably got together to shaft him, that this was goddamn unfair! Joel should get the gun out of his lunch pail and tell Dugan what he really thought. Tell Dugan he was gonna fuckin’ die. Not that Joel would actually squeeze the trigger. But Dugan wouldn’t know that.

What Joel said was, “Yeah. . Yes. I understand.”

Dugan nodded, then sat back down at his desk and picked up his pen. He began to write. Joel was no longer a city employee. Joel wasn’t there.

Goddamn unfair!

Joel left the office. He felt empty inside. His life felt empty. Sal and Dugan had fucked him over, just as he’d been getting fucked over all his life. He should have expected it. In a way, he had expected it.

As he trudged toward the lot where his ten-year-old Ford was parked, the gun in his lunch pail was heavy. He recalled the gun’s cold heft in his hand when he’d plucked it from the trash, how heavy it felt for its size. How deadly efficient it looked. How serious. How. . important.

It was the only substantial thing in his world. It was his only source of comfort, though why it comforted him escaped him.

As he drove home he thought about the gun, what he might have done with it in Dugan’s office, what he should have done. Guns made a difference, right when they appeared. They changed the game entirely. Power shifted. The magic changed hands.

Not that he really would have used the gun.

But it was something to think about as he negotiated the bumper-to-bumper New York traffic that he’d come to hate.

When his father walked into the apartment, twelve-year-old Dante Vanya saw the look on his face and knew something was wrong. Something he’d done? He couldn’t be sure.

“School was okay today,” Dante said.

His father nodded, as if he’d barely heard. “Where’s your mother?”

“Walked down to the store. She needed something for whatever she’s cooking on the stove.”

For the first time, Joel noticed the pungent scents wafting from the kitchen. His nostrils actually twitched as he sniffed at the air.

“She’s making some kinda stew,” Dante said.

His father didn’t answer. He simply trudged toward the bedroom he shared with Dante’s mother. His shoulders were hunched and his head gave the impression of being bowed though really it wasn’t. What he looked like, Dante thought, was somebody with about a thousand pounds of lead stacked on his shoulders.

After his father had disappeared down the hall to the apartment’s small bedrooms, Dante stood up and pretended he was going to his room. It was the last door at the end of the hall, and it had one of the apartment’s few windows that didn’t look out on the brick air shaft.

He actually did go to his room, but first he paused in the hall and peered into his mother and father’s bedroom.

The closet door was open and his father was standing on his toes with one arm raised. His back was to Dante. Dante saw that his father was placing his black metal lunch pail, which he usually set on the kitchen table when he returned home from work, on the top closet shelf. He was pushing the lunch pail back as if trying to make it as unnoticeable as possible, toward the rear of the shelf where shadows were dark and light didn’t play.

An odd thing for him to do, Dante thought.

An odd way for his father to act.

He didn’t know his father’s unusual behavior had only begun.