Run You Down (Rebekah Roberts #2)(46)

“Guns?”

“Connie says it’s an investment. All this shit with Ryan and Sam has got him paranoid. I mean, race war is coming. If you look at history. And Connie says the first battle is gonna be with the Jews. He’s like, the Jews are organized, you know? Niggers can’t stop shooting each other. He’s got a connection down in the Carolinas and him and Hank have been bringing the guns up so when Obama really cracks down we can sell ’em to everybody who didn’t see it coming. We’ve already sold some, since f*cking Cuomo’s fascist new law. People are starting to see what’s happening, finally.” She sighs and sits down at her jewelry table. “So, I get it. I do. But honestly, I kind of wish Hank would just get a job.”

I’ve interviewed a lot of wacky people in the past six months at the Trib. In October I was on a day-long stakeout in Tribeca for a banker who’d been arrested for rape when some guy latched on to me and swore up and down he’d been “investigating” the bankers moving into the area and found a secret apartment they kept to take girls and torture them. He tried to convince me he had paperwork proving that Goldman Sachs was paying for everything and that if I came up to his apartment he’d give me an exclusive. Needless to say I did not go up to this man’s apartment. I expect conspiracy theories from people—but race war?

Mellie continues. “Hank practically blew himself up a couple weeks ago trying to make some stupid pipe bomb. I love him but sometimes he’s a f*cking idiot. That other trailer is, like, basically unlivable now.” She shakes her head. “I mean, I’d like my kids to grow up with a father, you know?”

Junior starts barking outside, announcing a car. It is, I decide, time to go.

“I should probably take off,” I say, setting my coffee down.

Outside, a man shouts, “Shut up, Junior!” The dog shuts up. A car door slams. Another creaks open.

“Oh wait, what about the earrings?”

I have the front door open. “My holes are actually a little infected right now,” I say, stepping outside. “I wouldn’t want to, like, contaminate them.”

In the dirt circle linking Mellie’s trailer, the old house, and the site of her boyfriend’s apparent attempt at becoming the Unabomber, a man who looks about fifty is lifting a wheelchair out of the bed of a pickup truck.

“Hank ain’t home yet?” the man asks Mellie.

“Nope.”

The man is wearing a long-sleeved Orange County Choppers t-shirt and jeans tucked into what look like surplus military boots. He is very lean, with a close-trimmed gray beard, and most of his skin not covered by clothing is inked. From here, I see a spiderweb with a swastika at the center on one side of his neck and a large shamrock on the other. Each knuckle is adorned with some kind of symbol or letter or God-knows-what, and the back of both his hands have skulls on them. In Roseville, the women seemed to assume I was Jewish, but apparently I blend in here, too. I look at Saul’s car and suddenly realize there is a very real possibility that something—a Yiddish language flyer or a parking pass for a shul—might be visible. I should get out of here.

The man rolls the wheelchair to the passenger-side door, then lifts an old lady who is missing both legs into it.

“Who’s your friend?” asks the old lady, her voice rattling like a lawnmower.

“Rebekah,” says Mellie.

“Love your hair, Rebekah.”





CHAPTER FIFTEEN





AVIVA


For several weeks after he left Roseville, Sammy barely went outside the yellow house. He did little but sleep and talk to Pessie on the phone. I told him I thought it was unhealthy to be so attached. I said it was unfair to her. But he said I was wrong and that they understood each other. She came to the house every week with food and they cooked dinner together. I told her I thought it was very nice of her to be his friend after what he had done.

“Sammy didn’t like to hurt me,” she said, looking down at her feet, which were still too long for her little body. She’d never grown into them, and at eighteen years old she barely looked fourteen. “Hashem has plans for him. He is going to help the other boys. But he cannot stay in the community. And I understand. Perhaps he is a little like you?”

I asked Sammy what Pessie meant by helping the other boys, and he said she wanted him to start a group for Chassidish boys who’d been molested.

“Are you going to do that?” I asked.

“Probably not,” he said.

“What are you going to do?”

Sammy shrugged.

“You know,” I said, “I had a very hard time after Mommy died and I went to Israel. I went to talk to a doctor and he gave me medication. It made me feel better.”

“I don’t need crazy pills, okay? I just need to be left alone.”

I decided not to argue, and a few weeks later I saw a HELP WANTED sign in the window of a Mobil gas station that was walking distance from the house. I convinced Sammy to go apply, and he got the job—which wasn’t much of a job: just a six-hour shift unloading trucks of beer each Monday and Thursday. On the second Thursday, Sammy met Ryan Hall.

Ryan was riding in the truck with his father, who worked for a beverage distributor out of Albany. He invited Sammy to a bar to hear a band that night. At first I didn’t realize he’d fallen in love. Sammy hadn’t said he was gay, and I assumed he broke off the engagement to Pessie because of the abuse, or maybe because he didn’t want to live a frum life and she did. But after that first night, all he talked about was Ryan. I didn’t mind Ryan. He was polite and I was glad Sammy had a friend who wasn’t Pessie. But then I saw the tattoos. Ryan was coming out of the shower with just a towel around his waist one evening as I was coming up the stairs to drop my things after work. He turned the corner to go into Sammy’s bedroom and there on his right shoulder blade was a swastika.