Bio-Justice Read online

  “Hey, man. You ever see one of those nature programs—National Geographic, shit like that? They’d be in Africa and they’d show this crusty old water buffalo with the big twisted horns surrounded by a pack of hyenas. Shit, that old water buffalo could hold his own, even gored one of the hyenas. But here’s the thing—the hyenas were patient. They just…kept circling and the old buffalo kept lunging and running until he wore himself out. And when the time came—and it always comes—those circling, patient hyenas…they just moved in and tore that old water buffalo to pieces.”

  The gang leader smiled as he tilted the hat lower on his head. The other three, as if to make the story’s point, glared at Danny while their fallen member slowly staggered to his feet.

  One of the gang members figured it was his turn to get in on the action. “Fuck this shit,” he fumed. “I’m taking you out, old man.” Producing a formidable hunting knife, he advanced on Danny and made a wide sweeping arc with the jagged blade that fell just inches short of his target’s throat.

  Danny felt his instinct memory kick in, from the battles he had won as a kid fighting his way through the streets—when he was left standing numb from deadened nerves caused by the endless punches, his exposed skin streaked black with dried blood. Sometimes there had been weapons, most of the time not, but he had always felt confident in his powers of endurance and skill. Now grabbing the youth’s wrist, Danny twisted it with a crack, the blade falling to the ground. Kicking down, Danny smashed the youth’s kneecap, causing the screaming attacker to tremble precariously on his shaky legs. Danny then made a compact arc with his fist, making hard contact so that the gang member lay sprawled out, a sputtering, heaving banner of defeat.

  While some contemplated retreat, the gang leader again winced his appreciation. “Bravo! Very nice. I’ve gone up against some of the toughest punks in the neighborhood. Hey, some of them were pussies next to you.” And here, his expression became dangerously grave. “But now it’s time to stop this silliness.”

  The leader slid a Smith and Wesson nine millimeter pistol from inside his coat and quickly fired, blowing a hole through Danny’s left hand. Danny grimaced from the pain and held his wrist with the uninjured hand.

  “It’s all over, you old water buffalo.”

  Now the other four were on their feet, although one of them favored one knee over the other. They circled Danny as their leader cried out his sentence.

  “Bust him up good!”

  The unleashed gang members immediately descended upon Danny. Danny connected with a punch from his right hand but the group was overwhelming. In seconds, he was helpless on the ground. The youths punched, kicked and stomped Danny so hard, it didn’t seem as if he could possibly survive. The sound of his head being whipped back and forth made an awful thudding which echoed on the street.

  After getting in a kick himself, the leader stepped back, measuring the duration of the beating, wanting the satisfaction but not a murder rap. “All right,” he called out, “that’s enough.”

  The beating stopped and Danny’s body was as still as a corpse. The youth with the damaged kneecap leaned over and spit on Danny.

  “What about his money?” one said.

  “Let him keep it,” the leader said. “He’s gonna need it to buy him some bandaids.”

  As they left the scene laughing, one of them kicked Danny’s body to make sure he was still breathing.

  A small crowd gathered and watched as Danny labored to get to his feet. He had been on the ground for nearly three minutes. At least two people had filmed him with their phones. One felt compelled to ask if Danny wanted him to call 911. They muttered to themselves as Danny, without speaking, staggered away with a shamble down the street. Some of the crowd lingered, not sure if the street theater was truly over.

  The hole was clean and the bullet hadn’t shattered the bone. Seeking refuge in an alley away from the street, Danny wrapped the hand with his stripped-off undershirt and was able to stop the bleeding. He thought about returning to Hodge Memorial after having collected what remained of himself from the sidewalk but for some perverse reason, a violent death—from blood loss and internal hemorrhaging—seemed more tolerable than more of the strange, insidious care Bio-Justice was providing its tenuous processees.

  The warm, dank alley started to grow narrow before his eyes. His head started to spin wildly and he leaned against a rust-scabbed dumpster for support. Suddenly, he was falling where he stood and a blackness, silent and immense, swallowed him up. He lay for several hours undisturbed and when he opened his eyes again, the sky had turned dark and the stars looked down upon him with a terrible beauty. He felt tiny, a speck among the stars, a part of the useless rubble that littered the universe.

  He shuffled with effort towards his apartment building. People who passed him stared at the caked blood matting his hair and the swollen, purple face that appeared in the sudden light of store windows. His clothes were ripped and stained, and although he hadn’t lost his shoes in the scuffle, his footsteps were a clopping disaster as he hobbled home. He might have been killed and maybe that’s what he had wanted all along when he chose to walk straight toward the end of that block. What was death to a man who hadn’t lived life, who had leap-frogged thirty years to the front steps of his own mortality?

  Grabbing hold of an iron fence, Danny felt his legs wobble, his head spinning tiny orbits. Danny was a few steps from his building. He could see the front door with the illuminated globe over the portal when he heard her voice, wondrous and familiar.

  “Danny.”

  Sonya stepped out from the shadow and her mouth gaped open at the sight of the older Danny, smashed up and broken.

  “Help me inside,” he said, before collapsing at Sonya’s feet.

  Sonya waited in the emergency room while Danny was mended by the hospital staff. They cleaned his wounds, gave him pain killers, made a cursory attempt at cleaning the filth and blood on his body and bandaged him up before releasing him to Sonya. Because of the bullet wound, Danny was interviewed by two police officers but he proved uncooperative as he insisted he could not identify his assailants. He had escaped damage to his internal organs and while his arm was twisted and badly sprained, it survived any breakage.

  A cab returned Danny home, where Sonya helped him up the front stoop into the building. She removed his outer clothes in his apartment and took a dish tub filled with hot water and used a facecloth to wash off some of the dirt and blood the hospital had ignored. Then, gently putting his head under the kitchen faucet, Sonya washed Danny’s hair. A pink swirl of water and blood flowed down the drain.

  After she had dressed him in clean dry clothes, Sonya cooked a hot meal for Danny, using whatever she could find in the cupboard and fridge. Danny smiled with his swollen mouth and cautiously chewed, sometimes wincing from the persisting pain.

  “How did you find me?” Danny asked.

  “It wasn’t hard,” she said. “I followed you one day. You told me where you worked.”

  “I’m glad you’re here.”

  Danny’s bed was a few feet away from the table where he sat. The studio apartment was even small by New York standards but Danny, who had been crammed into a seven-by-ten concrete box, luxuriated in the extra square feet and was comfortable there. Sonya invited Danny to lay down on his bed to rest, guiding him with care, stepping over his carelessly tossed shoes.

  Lying on his back, Danny looked up as Sonya touched his face with her soft hands, her fingers lingering on his skin.

  As he fixed upon Sonya’s hurt but compassionate eyes, Danny silently prayed that Sonya was seeing the beautiful young man she had once desired still vibrant in her memory and not the reality of the worn, weary frame of a man trying to hold onto some residue of youthful vitality.

  Sonya searched the room and turned on the cheap portable radio Danny had picked up at the pawn shop for five dollars. She found a station with soft rock ballads and approached Danny slowly, her blouse and skirt stained with some o
f his blood. Suddenly, she was working his belt and pulling his pants from his legs. Her skirt came off and then her blouse. Reaching behind her, Sonya freed her breasts so they swayed slightly, and shook her hair, an image Danny had conjured often at the lowest, most dire moments of his confinement. She slowly worked her panties downward and then stepped out of them. After Danny’s shirt and underwear had been removed, Sonya mounted the bed and sat with her folded knees on either side of his waist. Danny needed assistance from Sonya’s hand which inserted him into her descending pelvis, until he was all the way inside of her. Danny’s head sunk into his pillow from the silken pressure of Sonya as she lowered herself and rose again and again. Danny could smell her thick intoxicating scent as if the heat from her body were releasing her essence into the air. He looked up at the benign calm of Sonya’s face, the flow of her hair, and he knew in his heart there was no heaven, real or imagined, better than this. And then his delicious but short ecstasy was signaling its end and Danny kissed Sonya’s lips while his undamaged hand reached to cradle one of her breasts. The kiss was soft and liquid, just the way Danny liked it, and he would not release her mouth as he thrust in syncopation with the ejaculate shot into her. Then it was over and Danny closed his eyes as he savored the sensations that rippled over his body. He suddenly felt blissfully sleepy and he seemed to drift as he felt Sonya’s fingertips rake his chest and arms.

  It was the sound of rustling and clasping hooks that stirred Danny out of his twilight slumber. His eyes cracked open and saw Sonya finishing the final buttons on her blouse. She slipped her shoes on and swiped the hair from her eyes.

  “Danny,” she said. “This is goodbye.”

  “But—”

  “You may hate me or you may think back kindly about this, but this is the last time we will see each other.”

  “Sonya—”

  “No arguments, no fighting. Please, Danny. Just let me go.”

  Danny wanted to leap up and grab her, but he just lay there, not moving at all. Sonya picked up her purse and gave him one last look before turning toward the door and leaving.

  His eyes remained fixed on the front door, the melancholy image of Sonya’s departure in perpetual rewind. In the numbing silence of the room, he didn’t move for the longest time and when he finally did, it was to wipe the tears from his eyes that were blinding him.

  CHAPTER 11

  The next day, Danny showed up on time for work at Henry’s Diner. It was Dorie, one of the waitresses, who told Tom the shift manager about the woeful appearance of their dishwasher. “He looks like he walked into a chainsaw,” Dorie reported squeamishly. Alarmed, Tom came around back and found Danny already pushing his first load of beverage glasses through the dishwashing machine. When Tom called out his name, Danny’s misshapen face appeared through a billowing cloud of steam like a low grade zombie movie.

  “Jesus,” Tom said. “What happened to you? You’re scaring all the waitresses.”

  “I was wondering why they wouldn’t date me.”

  “God, your face! And what’s wrong with your hand? You shouldn’t be working in scalding water with that hand.”

  “I need my job,” Danny said plainly.

  “Stop. Stop a minute,” Tom said. “Come here.”

  Danny complied with Tom’s request and joined him just outside the dishwashing room.

  “What happened, man?”

  “The truth?”

  “The truth.”

  Danny looked up and found something. “I had a little too much to drink and these guys worked me over. I think I said something about one guy’s girlfriend that they didn’t appreciate.” Danny was satisfied with the neatness of the lie.

  Tom sighed, nodding his head. “I’ve been there myself.”

  Danny stood waiting for Tom’s verdict.

  “I should fire you. Right now, on the spot.”

  “I wouldn’t blame you.”

  “But you showed up for work. Even looking like this. That tells me something.”

  “Thanks, Tom.”

  “I’ll help you with the machine. Maybe you can help the girls with their stations. No, shit—you’ll scare the customers. Look, today, just make yourself useful. Find things to do. Clean the restrooms. Organize the stockroom. Help Jeff clean the mats. You get the idea. Tomorrow—I don’t know. Let’s just take it a day at a time.”

  The following Thursday in the mid-afternoon, Danny walked down Fourth Avenue from the Atlantic Avenue station. In the daytime, the wide street, two lanes in either direction, vibrated with rumbling traffic—from the steady flow of cars and delivery trucks to the foot traffic: school kids, grandmothers, the homeless. When he turned around, he could see the Williamsburg Savings Bank tower, now converted into condominiums for privileged twenty-somethings, point him like a massive compass towards his destination.

  When he was a block away from the intersection, Danny started to slow down his gait to the point where he resembled an indecisive vagrant. He looked at the hastily converted storefronts—the women’s health center, the Thai restaurant, the check cashing office, the nail salon. Above them were one or two floors of residences, apartments housing families too large for their originally intended capacity. Children spilled in the street, playing games on the sidewalk and negotiating fanciful deals with sweets.

  An old woman left a corner grocery store run by a second generation Asian family. The store had security gates at the windows like most buildings Danny recalled in neighborhoods he grew up in. The gates were a recognition of the presence of crime in the community but it was not meant to inspire apprehension or fear, merely caution and pragmatism. Danny stopped when he saw the old woman, her hands anchored down by the handles of plastic bags holding food staples and cleaning fluids. Only a few yards away, Danny tracked the woman who stooped a little—the osteoporosis already setting in. Just before the woman stopped at the door leading up two flights to her apartment, she turned around as if she sensed something. Her eyes locked onto Danny who blanched at the discovery. He felt a sickening feeling seize him and he wanted to run. But then the woman’s eyes moved past him as if nothing had registered and her face winced as she seemed to discount whatever psychic premonition had triggered her subconscious alarm system. She pivoted on her thick ankles and entered through the door, disappearing inside.

  Danny could feel the people making wide turns around him, turning in annoyance as he stood against the continuing flow. Turning, he merged back into the stream of humanity, grateful to again be engulfed in his own anonymity.

  Joey looked at Danny’s face in his office from behind his desk and his expression was grave and uncomfortable.

  “Jesus, Danny. You’re lucky you didn’t lose that eye.”

  Beyond the wounds from his beating, Danny could tell Joey was taking a slow, five miles an hour drive around the contours of his aged face. “Yeah, it was just something I needed to prove to myself.”

  “What, that you could bust up what you had left?”

  “You should have seen me a couple of weeks ago. It was stupid.”

  “Why are you here, Danny?”

  “Joey, we go back a long ways. I was grateful when Milo introduced me to Alonzo and you. I always felt like I had a home with you guys.”

  “Milo—God rest his soul.”

  “Yeah.” Danny’s eyes hit the floor.

  “I’m not surprised. He was always a hot-head. Clouds your thinking.”

  “Joey, I’m working at a greasy spoon, shuttling dishes ten hours a day. I was wondering—”

  “Danny, I’d like to help but you know as well as I do that this is a young man’s game. You’d be a liability. And then, sooner or later, you’d be pointing the finger at us.”

  “Joey, I know I’m not young anymore. Look at me. Don’t you think I know when I look at this in the mirror every morning that my best days are over?”

  “You’d be worried all the time. About getting sent back. A young guy, he doesn’t think that way. You know that. That’
s why you were so good, Danny. Fearless—that’s the way Alonzo used to describe you and Milo.”

  “But I could teach some of the younger guys the ropes. You know, like a mentor. Just show ’em how to do things the right way.”

  “Like the way you guys handled that cop?”

  Danny looked like he took another punch to the face. “I’ve got something to give, Joey. I wouldn’t ask for much. I’ll let you and Alonzo pay me what you think is fair.”

  “I don’t know, Danny.”

  “Please, Joey. Don’t make me beg. I can’t live off eight bucks an hour after taxes. That just pays for a crummy room and a pack of cigarettes.”

  Danny suddenly looked ancient in Joey’s eyes, like the manager’s own beaten down father screaming at the dinner table for respect.

  “OK,” Joey said reluctantly. “Come by Wednesday. There’s a kid I want you to talk to. He’s not ready for live jacking yet but he could be a decent driver—you know, strictly break-ins.”

  Danny laughed with gratitude. “Joey, you were always good to me. I won’t forget this.”

  Joey moved his large stomach around behind his desk. Danny had been the young Adonis who reminded Joey what a fat fuck he had turned out to be. Joey had admired Danny every time he glided in with that muscular swagger and that confident grin. Now Danny sat before him, an old man grateful for the quarter that had just been tossed into his hat. It was like watching a beautiful model after a disfiguring auto accident. And inside, Joey felt repulsed, compassionate and gleeful at the same time.

  Danny set his alarm for eight o’clock but he was already awake by six-thirty and he lay, eyes wide open, until seven-fifteen, when he made himself get up. He took a shower, shaved and put on his least worn clothes, ultimately choosing a black dress shirt and slacks. His face was still badly bruised. He would have to come up with a solid story so it wouldn’t work against him. He buffed his shoes and spent nearly five minutes getting his hair to lay impressively against his head with not a strand out of place. Now he was having second thoughts about not picking up the hair coloring that would have presented him looking ten years younger.