The Dime

I think that the Mexican waiter behind the breakfast counter is kidding about Fuel City. I tell him I’ve been in the Lone Star State for only forty-eight hours and he says that if I want to see the real Dallas—la verdadera ciudad, the Dallas of truck drivers, Mexican laborers, lawyers, parolees, and cops mixed elbow to elbow with white privileged gringas driving expensive SUVs—I need to drive farther south, past the city jail, the bail bondsmen, and the highway construction sites, to Riverfront Street. There I’ll find the beating heart of the city.

It’s eleven o’clock when I walk back to my car, and already the elevated temperature is a monster wrapped around my head, all bristling mirrored scales, sliding tongues of sweat into my ears and down my neck. I go fishing in my pocket for my car keys, thinking how foolish it was to take a to-go cup of scalding coffee.

Driving the car down the Tollway toward Stemmons Freeway, I think of summers with my folks on the Jersey Shore, Bradley Beach or Ocean Grove, where the water was always a few degrees from stroke-inducing cold, a frigid slap against sunburned skin that made me and my brother scream in outraged delight. Buoyed in the murky waves for hours, we swam, our untamed auburn hair floating out from our heads like scarlet seaweed in the strong ocean currents. At noon we’d eat the sandwiches my mother had made—beach picnics being the only time lunch for us kids wasn’t five dollars and a note—and then run back into the waves, my mother screaming, “You’ll give yourself a heart attack.”

Jackie and I moved into our place only yesterday, a ground-floor, two-bedroom apartment with an outer breezeway, gated and locked at both ends. The thermostat by afternoon read 112 degrees. One of the movers, an off-duty fireman used to Fahrenheit 451 temps in a Kevlar suit, passed out just outside our door. The air-conditioning unit in our bedroom gave up the Freon ghost by four o’clock, and Jackie and I floated in our own sweat the entire night, despite the electric fans we had placed on each side of our bed.

Texas, we were cheerfully informed by the apartment manager—himself a transplant from New Orleans—was evidently the only place in the known universe, including Louisiana, that actually got hotter after the sun went down.

“Holds the sun’s rays like a giant warming plate,” the manager warned.

Jackie, ever sunny-side up, responded, “It beats shoveling snow.”

The manager looked at her, then at me, and smiled knowingly. “She’s cute,” he said, and walked away laughing.

As I drive toward Fuel City, the glass skyscrapers of downtown are to my left, the sun just above the tallest buildings. Reunion Tower, looking like a giant puffball on steroids, flares the sun like a supernova. Instinctively, I slow down near Dealey Plaza and wonder what it must be like growing up in a place where every visiting outsider, upon seeing the book depository for the first time, asks, “What’s it like living in the city that killed JFK?”

My thoughts keep returning to my uncle Benny, once robust and capable, spending his last days in hospice care. The man had been burly—there could be no better word to describe him. My father’s younger brother, a cop with the Ninety-Fourth Precinct his whole life, never bothered by so much as a hangnail, now desiccated and diminished by lung cancer. The last surviving member of my immediate family.

My intention had been to visit him sooner, before the last stretch of his illness rendered him semiconscious. But the move from Brooklyn—selling the old house in Greenpoint, processing all the papers for my new job with the Dallas Police Department—took longer than expected, and by the time I arrived at the hospital in Florida, his place of retirement, he had begun losing the thread of awareness due to all the pain meds.

He had been sleeping when I entered the room. Someone had covered him with a thin sheet up to his chin; his face glistened with the dew of a morphine sweat. One arm lay on top of the sheet, and the IV, threaded into a prominent vein on his hand, had backed up with blood. The bag hanging overhead was flaccid, empty of fluid. Before ringing for the nurse, though, I traced one finger gently over his knuckles. He stirred and opened his eyes.

He smiled. “Betty.”

I leaned over and kissed his cheek. “Benny. How’re you doing?”

“As you see.” He inhaled raggedly and grimaced.

I reached for the call button. “Are you in pain?”

He stopped me. “Not too bad yet. Talk to me awhile. Once they dose me, I won’t know you from Eve.”

He began to shiver and I found a blanket and tucked in the edges, like he was a child. I pulled up a chair at the bedside and took his hand in mine.

“You got the paperwork taken care of?” he asked.

“Yeah.” I nodded. “I leave for Dallas tomorrow.”

He smiled. “You gonna get a horse?”

I laughed. “The only horse I ever plan to ride is the coin-operated pony outside of Neergaard’s.”

“You still running?” he asked.

“Every day. Seven miles yesterday. Six this morning.”

Benny stared at me for a long while. “You look good, Betty. Grown into those long legs and wild red curls of yours. Just don’t expect things to be any different in Texas. You end up with the same shit on the bottom of your shoes you’d pick up on Franklin or any other street.”

“I know, Ben.”

“And don’t take any crap from the yahoos.”

My uncle privately called any cop outside of New York or Jersey a yahoo. But I hadn’t been too worried about the Texas cops. That is to say, I knew I was going to get crap. My biggest challenges had come from my own family members, many of them cops, who could dish out crap with the best of them.

I bobbed my head once. “Right.”

“Okay.” He nodded back, done with his lecture. “How’s Jackie?”

I smiled gratefully at him. He was the only one in my family who had ever mentioned her name. “She’s good. We have an apartment lined up.” I rolled my eyes. “But she’s already house-hunting.”

He wagged a finger at me. “Take my word for it, she’ll be wanting rug rats next.” His gaze drifted to the Saint Michael medallion hanging at my neck. “Your mom would be so happy to know you wear it. You’re the third Rhyzyk woman to have that medal.”

I made a face. “Yeah, but probably the first to wear tactical boots.”

“Don’t you believe it,” he says. “In World War Two, the Germans on the eastern front used to carry cyanide pellets in case they fell into the hands of the female Polish Resistance fighters. You come from a long line of fierce kobiety.”

Grimacing, he pressed his free hand over his chest and breathed rapidly, as though he were racing the devil.

“Christ,” he said. His breathing slowed after a moment and he turned his head to me. “Look me in the eye and tell me you’re happy.”

“I’m happy, Benny.”

“Good,” he said. “That’s good. You know, your dad at one time was a great cop—”

I began to nod my head in agreement, but he held up the finger again.

“But that’s what helped make him such a miserable human being. No, now listen. He was my brother and I loved him more than anyone. But he was devoid of certain feelings that would have made him a better family man. Having his work be the most important thing in his life did that to him. You have a chance to find some balance.”

He dropped his hand onto the bed. “Balance. Christ, listen to me. I sound like some New Age nut job.”

I placed my palm on his cheek. “You are a nut job, Ben. ‘Stuck in the abyss of your own morass.’ Isn’t that what you always used to say to me?”

He gripped my fingers tightly. His eyes were fever bright, shards of glass in a stretched, pain-filled mask, but he smiled. Soon the nurse came to administer more pain meds, and he fell asleep. I sat with him through the night.

In between his narcotic drifting, we revisited his more memorable cases, some of which were solved (a naked dead guy in clown makeup) and some of which were never solved (a dead guy who was found in pieces scattered throughout Greenpoint and Williamsburg and Park Slope and Bed-Stuy).

We cast into the ether familiar tales of other cops and families of cops, spinning out stories that I knew would never be told again unless I decided at some point to recount them to strangers, people who were not family. There was no more family, except for Jackie. Mother, father, brother, all gone.

He asked me to promise him one last thing: That upon arriving in the wilds of Texas, I would drive somewhere that was purely Dallas, a place that was immersed in the land’s history, floating in the warp of its successes, stewed in the woof of its failures, and confront the beast. Hoist up both middle fingers, he had said, and tell the sidewinding, belly-crawling, sand-blown Fates of the West that the Polish cavalry had arrived.

When I left him in the early-morning hours, he was sleeping fitfully. That was two days ago.

I turn off onto Riverfront Street and see two large, white cylindrical tanks with red and blue lettering announcing FUEL CITY WASH. The parking lot’s already full, so I drive around until I find a space next to a life-size bronze statue of a buffalo that’s planted in the shadow of a rusted oil derrick, before which stands a pay phone. The first pay phone I’ve seen since leaving New York.

The Dallas skyline behind the buffalo swells like a contained mountain range, and I can make out the red Pegasus sign, the old Mobil Oil logo, a tiny, wavering mirage on top of one of the office buildings.

The taco stand is a large convenience store and kitchen, with lines forming at several outdoor food windows as well, but I’m drawn to the back of the lot, where, standing behind some metal fences, are half a dozen longhorn steers. Beyond the steers is a concrete wall on which brightly colored balloons and beach balls have been painted around an inscription: WHERE DREAMS COME TRUE.

Next to the pen is the car wash humming like a North Korean nuclear plant; dozens of cars and trucks queue up for a rapid wash and rim polish. Most of the SUVs in line are white, the pickups red. The men and women scrubbing down the vehicles are all brown.

Leaning against the metal fence rail, I contemplate the nearest steer, wondering at the strength that keeps his head up under the weight of his sweeping horns.

My mind wanders to Jackie, who’s in our new apartment, unpacking. I told her this morning that I needed to do something for Uncle Benny. I had gotten the call from the hospice nurse that he had passed away during the night, transitioning peacefully out of his narcotic slumbers and into death. But I had cried angry, guilty tears that he had gone alone, without family, after so much suffering. Thinking on it now, I’m amazed that he lasted the forty-eight hours.

I stare at the huge, spotted red-and-white beast in front of me, expecting to feel derision, but instead I find dignity in his stillness—in his utter disregard for the chaos of the car wash, the determined picture takers, the shouts from the kids at the nearby picnic tables. The rheumy eyes gaze in my direction, shoulder hide twitching, the bony outgrowths as long as an elephant’s tusks. He has outlasted all comers, the upward-tilting ends of his horns already a dismissal to the taco stand, the oil derrick, the vans overflowing with overfed gawkers and underweight poseurs. Even to the life-size bronze buffalo hulking in the background.

“You magnificent old bastard,” I tell him.

So I turn and, in solidarity with him, hold up my two middle fingers toward the skyline.

“The Polish cavalry has arrived,” I whisper.

Then I take out my phone and send one final text to Benny’s old number: Message delivered. Love you always. Betty.

The setup is perfect. It should all be working, except for the woman who’s just crossed into our surveillanfce zone, a Good Samaritan with more free time than common sense. The kind of woman who wears full makeup and a diamond tennis bracelet to walk her dog. The well-intentioned, moneyed type who would lean over the homeless guy lying on the sidewalk to feed the hungry dog next to him.