CHAPTER TWELVE #3
“Please just kill me or something. I can’t have this conversation anymore.”
“This is not a normal way to react to anything,” she said.
“I don’t give a fuck. Just let me go.”
“Go where?” Doug said.
“Back to the city. Somewhere. I can’t be here anymore.”
“This is your home,” Nora said.
Carver let out a laugh of pure anguish, and his mother threw her hands in the air in exasperation. He missed Scott, he couldn’t understand now why he’d run from him, straight into the jaws of whatever this was.
“Carver,” Doug said, “either snap out of this hysteria or one of us is going to have to smack you.”
“I’ll hit you back,” he cried out, “you worthless fucks.”
“Excuse me?” Nora exclaimed.
“You heard me!”
“You are making a scene! This is your cousin’s wedding! Calm yourself for her sake, please!”
“I don’t give a fuck,” Carver said, freshly furious.
“I don’t. Fuck her. You let her get married.
You paid for it.” He started working to tear himself free from Doug again, staggering backwards, dragging his dad along.
Doug was a senior citizen now — it would only take one good feint and twist, one good ankle-breaking move. “You wouldn’t let me get married.”
“You are married!” Nora exclaimed.
Carver hit the panic button again, listened very closely to where the alarm sound originated from, then head faked his father before heaving himself in the opposite direction. He tore loose from Doug’s grip and sprinted toward his car. His parents resumed their anxious shouting.
Finally he saw the Maybach. He ran flat-out, ignoring the protests of his injured knee, then flung open the door and leapt into the car.
He locked the doors, then began to pull out of the spot before his parents could box him in.
They ran into view, yelling at him, but they were too late.
Carver drove right by them, enjoying their wide-eyed, open-mouthed looks.
Carver pulled out of the country club’s driveway going about 15 miles per hour, and continued at that speed as he made the journey back to his parents’ house.
He left the radio off and rolled the windows down, to better keep his wits about him.
He did, in fact, not want a felony DUI. He didn’t even want to risk hitting a deer.
He didn’t want to deal with anything else tonight, he just wanted to lock the door to his childhood bedroom and crawl into bed.
He tried to blink as little as possible, but this only made his vision more blurry.
As he rolled to a halt at a stop sign on the precipice of a particularly wealthy neighborhood, he took a moment to blink furiously, squeezing his eyelids together.
When Carver opened his eyes, he saw police lights in his rearview mirror.
His stomach plummeted in sheer disbelief.
It simply wasn’t possible, God could not be this cruel.
For the first time in his life he wondered what it cost to bribe an American police officer.
Whatever the number was, he probably didn’t have enough cash on him. No, this couldn’t be happening.
The lights persisted, though, so he pulled over onto the shoulder and turned the car off, then gripped the steering wheel with both hands and tried to make himself sober.
The cop was probably pulling him over for driving too slowly — as far as he was aware he hadn’t broken any other traffic laws.
He was bleary-eyed and smelled like alcohol, so he couldn’t deny drinking, but if called out he could call it a few small drinks.
He could claim he was driving slowly out of an abundance of caution.
He practiced saying “abundance of caution” out loud a few times.
Jesus Christ, he sounded drunk. He was saying caussssshun. He was fucked.
Carver watched in his side mirror as the cop got out of his cruiser. He was burly and mustachioed. He swaggered up to the driver’s side door, then knocked on Carver’s window with two light raps of his knuckles.
Carver rolled the window down. “Officer,” he said.
“Hi there,” the cop said, smiling at him. “My name is Officer Rizzuto, can I get your license and registration?”
Carver retrieved both and handed them over. He expected the cop to go run them, but he just examined both and stayed put.
“Any idea why I pulled you over tonight?” Rizzuto said. His radio chirped on his belt, and he turned the volume down.
“I think I was driving a little slow back there,” Carver blurted out, despite having lawyer parents and knowing that the correct answer to this question was no.
“You were driving a little slow, and you were weaving.”
“Was I?”
The cop snapped his gum. He looked like he was enjoying himself. Fascist pig. No, something worse: one could at least bribe a fascist.
“That’s weird,” he said. “I might have been messing with the radio.”
“Uh-huh,” Rizzuto said. “Can you step out of the vehicle for me, sir?”
Carver exhaled and gave himself over to this turn of fate. Whatever. This wasn’t even the worst thing that had happened to him in the last hour. He would just have to fight it out in court with a $1,000-an-hour lawyer.
He stepped out of the car and allowed the cop to manhandle him.
“Got any weapons on you?” Rizzuto said, patting him down.
“No,” Carver said, staring down at the bright yellow lines which divided the road.
“You been drinking tonight, Mr. Novack?”
“No.” Fuck you, prove it.
“Oh, I think you have,” Rizzuto said, walking around him and getting in his face, shining a flashlight in his eyes. Carver shut them against the searing pain of this and saw bright red eyelid. “I think you’re drunk.”
“I’m not.”
“Drunk driving is a serious offense, Mr. Novack.”
Carver said nothing.
“And you’re lying to a sworn officer about it. Just lying right to my face. I think I’m gonna have to bring you down to the station so we can teach you a lesson.”
Carver cracked one eye open, startled. “Excuse me?”
Rizzuto lowered the flashlight, grinning at him. “You know what I mean. Me and my boys are gonna have to make sure you don’t do this shit again. I’m gonna throw you in the back, rough ride you for a while, and then we’re gonna take you to a parking lot and beat your sorry ass with batons.”
It was as if the porn Carver liked had come horribly to life. “What?”
Suddenly he heard a voice going, “Come on, dude,” from somewhere in the vicinity of the squad car. It sounded inexplicably like Chip’s voice. Carver looked around wildly, big blotches of light sweeping across his vision.
“Too much?” Rizzuto said, laughing.
“You blew it,” the voice said, closer now. It was definitely Chip’s voice.
Carver blinked furiously and squinted to see the blurred shape of his brother in front of him. “What the fuck is this?” he said, more disoriented than relieved.
“Aw, I was having fun,” Rizzuto said to Chip, ignoring Carver. “They don’t let us talk to people like that anymore.”
Chip knocked on Carver’s forehead. “Dipshit,” he said. “You don’t fucking remember Tommy Rizzuto? The Zute?”
“Me and your brother played football together,” Rizzuto said, spreading his arms. “Come on. Pussaaay?” He said this in a ridiculous voice and seemed to feel that it was a familiar catchphrase of his. “Where’s the love?”
Carver, who did not remember this person at all and wanted to kill both of them, just shook his head.
“And what are you doing,” Chip said, seizing him in a headlock and bringing him low, “driving around drunk when you’re not even any fucking good at it, you stupid little prick, we were following you the last half-mile, we saw you swerving —”
Carver struggled in his grasp. “What do you mean, you were following me?”
Chip let him go. “Mom called me when you were losing it. I figured you’d make a run for it, so I called Tommy and had him meet me. He patrols around here Saturday nights.”
“Keeping you all safe and sound,” Rizzuto said.
He adopted a serious posture and started poking Carver in the chest with a thick forefinger, to Carver’s displeasure.
“Seriously — you can’t be out here drinking and driving.
A few beers is alright, but police aren’t as dumb as you think, alright?
I can tell you’re drunk. You think I don’t see drunk people almost every day?
And you know how serious this shit is? I was just on a parkway scene a few weeks ago, drunk guy doing one-forty flew off the road and went airborne into a ravine.
You know what that looked like inside the car?
Like a fucking Hefty bag full of meat exploded, okay? ”
“Jesus,” Carver said, making a face. “I was going fifteen miles an hour.”
“Yeah, that’s how it starts, pal. Then next time you think, hey, it’s okay, nothing bad happened last time. Get it?”
“I get it.”
Chip was stifling a laugh. “You actually talk like that?” he said to Rizzuto. “You say ‘pal’ and shit?”
“That’s just what we say when we want to say ‘motherfucker’,” Rizzuto explained as he handed Carver back his license and registration.
Chip shook his head. “Alright, I got it from here,” he said. “I’ll drive him home. Thanks, man.”
They hugged and dapped each other up. Rizzuto patted Chip hard on the back, then returned to his cruiser, staring Carver down and pointing at him as he did.
Carver allowed Chip to herd him over to the passenger side door of the Maybach and put him inside.
He sank into the plush seat and leaned his head back, utterly spent.
Chip got in and started the Maybach up. “Oh, this is smooth,” he said when the engine kicked on. “Beautiful girl. You want to go for a little joyride?”
“Only if you promise to drive us into a ravine.”
“Bitch bitch bitch, moan moan moan.” Chip pulled out, passing the stop sign and making the requisite right turn. “What happened now, what’s the big disaster?”
“I don’t even think you would get it.”
“You know, you always talk to me like I’m this idiot, but you do realize I’m more educated than you are? I have a JD, that’s a terminal degree. Call me when you get a PhD in economics, numbnuts.”
“Please, dude,” Carver said, closing his eyes. “I wasn’t calling you an idiot. Christ. I was saying it’s shit you have no personal experience with.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And maybe if you were so smart you would have passed the bar.”
“I knew that was coming. You little prick, you try passing the bar.”
“I could.”
“Then do it.”
“I don’t want to go to law school,” Carver admitted, and Chip laughed. “You made it sound like hell.”
“I think it was. I blocked most of it out. Probably why I can’t pass the bar.”
Carver opened his eyes and looked at the window as they passed dark trees, low stone walls and stately houses. “I fucked everything up tonight.”
“What’s everything?”
“Uh… my marriage, my working relationship with my wife, my relationship with Mom and Dad.”
“Okay,” Chip said. “So — white-collar crime, or everybody found out you’re a homo?”
Carver sighed, his heart twisting as if wrung out by hand.
“Second one?” Chip said. “‘Cause that’s not actually a bad thing for you, seriously. I’ve known a lot of closeted homos, they were all miserable. The ones who are out are fine.”
Carver could not and did not respond to this.
Chip’s phone rang, and he picked it up and said, “Yeah, I’ve got him, he’s fine.” He paused while someone spoke on the other end. “Yep, everything’s good. You’re welcome. I’m driving him back in his car, I’ll call you later.” He hung up.
“Was that them?” Carver said.
“Yeah, they’re all worried about you.”
“Like they care.”
Chip snorted. “No, they care. Their problem is not that they don’t care.”
“Yeah.” Carver let out another sigh. Each one felt like it cleared a few milliliters of toxins from his body. On a sudden impulse, he said, “Do you, uh… do you know what their problem, like, actually is with me?”
“Huh?”
“Sexuality aside… is there something else? It’s just always felt like there is, but nothing I could put my finger on.”
Chip didn’t respond. Carver looked over at him and saw that he was staring at the road with his brow knit. Passing streetlights and headlights washed over his face, illuminating him for a moment before leaving him in shadow again.
“Yeah,” Chip said in a strange voice, just as Carver had given up on him answering. “Yeah, now that you mention it, I actually do know what their problem with you is.”
Carver went very still. Chip never sounded so sincere and circumspect — it was unnerving. He sounded the way he had when he’d called Carver from the ambulance during Doug’s cardiac scare, which turned out to just be intense heartburn and a panic attack.
“So there actually is something?” he said.
Chip blew out a breath. “Yeah.”
“You’re serious?”
“I’m serious.”
“Then could you, like, tell me?”
“I will,” Chip said, still not taking his eyes off the road. “When we get back to the house, alright?” He reached over and patted Carver on the shoulder. “They’re gonna cut my nuts off and fry them in a little pan for telling you, so I need something to take the edge off, first.”
Carver sat up with a stab of anxiety. “Jesus, how bad is it?”
“Shh,” Chip said. “Relax, sit back. We’re five minutes away.”