Onion Street

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

What’s funny about Brooklyn is that it’s not its own place. Brooklyn is actually the westernmost tip of Long Island. Us Brooklynites don’t like acknowledging that fact, and it’s easy for us to pretend because we’ve got Queens as a buffer between us and the Nassau County line. Over the county line, Long Island stretches eastward beyond Nassau to the wild netherworld of Suffolk County. Coney Island isn’t an island, but a peninsula. Just don’t try and sell that notion to a Brooklyn native. If the world’s shape doesn’t suit us, we’ll reshape it as we see fit. Yet in spite of our willful ignorance of geography, there’s not another collection of people anywhere on earth who see the world or their place in it with a more honest eye. Good liars have to know the deeper truth of things. If nothing else, Brooklyn teaches you that, how to see those deeper truths.

I hated Long Island, not because Brooklyn was part of it, not for any good reason, really. I always saw it as a kind of suburban East Berlin, a place where parents coerced their kids to go live in the lap of torturous luxury. You will never again be allowed to wear hand-me-down clothing. You must never play sports on concrete and must suffer with pristine grass fields. You must sleep in your own bedroom. You will never be allowed to share a bathroom again. When you graduate from high school, you will be forced to accept a new automobile. And worst of all, you will be exiled to an actual university. I suppose if I gave it any serious thought, my hate for the Island had more to do with jealousy than anything else. Don’t get me wrong: I love Brooklyn, and I wouldn’t trade my childhood for anything. But by the time I hit Brooklyn College, the blinders had come off. Even as a kid I knew my dad was never going to make it big. He wasn’t ever going to come home from work one day and say, “C’mon, everyone, we’re moving. I just bought a house in Glen Cove.” We were doomed to rent, doomed never to have anything to call our own. We were never going to have a little plaque outside our door that read THE PRAGERS. Dad was never going to magically make our lives a little bit easier. No one would.

I took a little ride to Oceanside. It was on the south shore of Long Island, a couple of miles east of JFK airport, across the county line. The town wasn’t exactly bustling, but it was loud. Located directly under the glide path for a runway at Kennedy, Oceanside was almost as noisy as Coney Island on a spring Sunday. The difference being that graceful, soaring jets are more majestic than bone-rattling, earthbound subway trains. It wasn’t all that fancy a place, either. Many of the houses I saw were smaller than those in Midwood, Mill Basin, Dyker Heights, or Manhattan Beach. For the most part, the homes were modest, well-kept affairs with tidy front lawns and small backyards. Unlike in the city, though, these houses here weren’t squeezed in and shoehorned together. People could breathe a little in a place like Oceanside.

Wallace Casey’s house was very much in keeping with the other houses I’d seen in Oceanside. His street was a street of such houses. There was nothing showy or chesty about it. Nothing about it cried out for attention. Nothing about it made you want to turn away. I don’t know much about architecture, so I can’t tell you in what style the house was built. It had red painted clapboards with white trim and black asphalt roofing shingles. The aluminum storm door had some scroll work on it with a fancified letter C in a circle at the center. C for Casey, was my guess. The flashiest things about the place were the white-painted flower boxes that accented the street-facing windows. There was a small gravel driveway and an attached one-car garage. There was no car in the driveway. That didn’t mean no one was home. In fact, someone was home. As I watched the house, wondering what to do, I saw the shadowy figure of a woman twice pass by the front window.

I didn’t have much of a plan. I just sort of hoped Wallace Casey wouldn’t be home. After nearly getting run over and run off the road, after getting smacked in the ribs, getting tied up, and nearly getting kidnapped, I wasn’t in the mood for a confrontation. Sure, I’d been tough enough to break a guy’s nose with a single blow, but that was more a matter of surprise and survival: his surprise, my survival. But those clowns with their stupid masks were strictly amateur hour. If Casey was the menacing bastard I thought he was, I didn’t like my chances against him. And even if I was wrong about him and he was a flower child at heart, he was a man who had a fondness for sawed-off shotguns. Either way, I would definitely be the underdog.

When I looked over into the back seat and saw a writing pad from Aaron’s company, I got an idea, an idea I hoped wouldn’t get me in any more trouble or put me in any more danger than I was already in. I grabbed the pad, found a pencil in the glove box, and hopped out of the car. I crossed to the Casey house side of the street and approached it as if I had just come from their neighbor’s house. I rang the doorbell and waited.

“Who is it?” a woman asked, pulling the door back slightly, as far as the door chain would allow. This may have been the suburbs, but many, if not most, of the people who lived here came from the city. Old habits and caution die hard. “Can I help you?”

“Hi, I’m Joseph Jones from the Students for a Fair Draft. We’re an organization that — ”

She stopped me. “You mean the draft like for Vietnam?”

“Exactly. I’m in your town today to collect signatures for — ”

“I don’t know,” she said. “We’re for the war.”

It didn’t escape my notice that she said we, and not I. “That’s fine. Although I am against the war myself, our organization is neither pro nor con. What we are about is making sure that the draft is fair and that everyone has an equal chance of getting drafted. We don’t want the kids of rich and powerful people to be able to dodge the draft while poor kids go off to get killed far away from home.” I was encouraged. These were the first sentences she’d let me finish. “I was wondering if I could ask you to sign our petition, which we will present to Congress — ”

She stopped me again. “I’m sorry. I don’t think my husband would like me doing that. He’s a policeman and — ”

It was my turn to stop her. “Your husband’s a cop?”

“So what if he is?” She got understandably defensive.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Don’t get me wrong. It’s just that I think a cop, a guy who puts on a uniform and risks his life every day, would really be for our cause.”

“Maybe, but I’m sorry. If you want, you can come back in a few minutes and talk to him. He’ll be home soon.” She closed the door.

I stood there for a few long seconds, stunned, unmoving, completely confused. Then, like a zombie, I crossed the street and got back into the car. If there hadn’t been a very real possibility that Casey would be rolling down the block at any second, I might have sat there for hours going over in my head the implications of what his wife had just told me. Instead I twisted the ignition key, put the car in gear, and drove. A few car lengths away from the corner, I caught sight of Wallace Casey’s chestnut Ford Galaxie in my rearview mirror. The nagging question repeated itself: What was a cop doing mixed up with the likes of Bobby Friedman? More importantly, why was Bobby Friedman mixed up with a cop? It wasn’t so much the questions that bothered me. It was that I couldn’t think of many good answers. No, I couldn’t think of any.