standing outside his apartment on the sidewalk, smoking and talking shit with the homeboys from the Walt Whitman Houses, who were in their usual places, playing cee-lo on the sidewalk, sweaty piles of dollar bills clutched in their hands.
“What the fuck happened to you last night?” Pinky said, trotting over to Stone, who was having trouble parallel parking the car. “You just up and disappeared.”
Stone wanted to go inside and lie down and die a little, ease the oppression of his headache, but Pinky reached through the window, popped the lock, and climbed inside. Stone asked him what he was doing.
“I need your wheels.”
“I am really, really sick,” Stone said.
“Don’t come crying to me, pal. That’s what you get when you drink too much.” He chucked Stone on the shoulder. “At least you got laid last night, right?”
Now, in the bright light of afternoon, a piercing headache thumping in his skull—the ultimate reality check—Stone wasn’t even certain Zohar had followed him out of the bar last night.
“Where the fuck were you?” Pinky said. “You smell like shit.”
“It’s a long story,” Stone said.
“Well, I don’t have time for a long story, and I’ve got stuff to do.” Pinky hung his head out the window and spat. “You know, you’ll never get into this spot. Not in a boat like this.”
“Where am I supposed to park?”
“Slide over, let me drive.”
“This is my father’s car,” Stone said.
“You are fucked up. You’re in no condition to drive anyway. Just take a look at you.” Pinky saw the rearview mirror was gone and shook his head in disgust. “Slide over, shitbird.”
They switched places and Stone noticed with a creeping sense of disquiet that the hood of his father’s car was broadly dented, as if a large sack of potatoes had been dropped onto it. He was certain the exterior body of the Thunderbird had been absolutely pristine for the entirety of his father’s ownership. As far back as Stone could remember, the Judge had taken great pains to keep his car in immaculate condition. First the mirror and now this, Stone thought, a tidal wave of nausea gathering strength in his belly. His head pounded.
“Look at that,” Stone said.
“What?” Pinky said.
“The goddamn dent,” Stone said. “On the hood.”
“Where?” Pinky said. “I don’t see no dent.”
It bothered Stone more than it should have. The car was nearly twenty years old; it was bound to take its lumps driving the potholed streets of Brooklyn, but his father had managed to avoid any such damage. Stone could not imagine how it even got there.
“It’s right there,” Stone insisted.
“I don’t see it,” Pinky said. “Just chill the fuck out.”
“You must be blind, if you can’t see it,” Stone said, noting the contours of the impression, shaped, he thought, like one of the Great Lakes or an amoeba. “Forget it. Nobody’s driving, then. Let’s go inside. My head’s killing and I’m going to puke.”
Pinky slammed his hands onto the steering wheel. “I’m driving and that’s it. There’s nothing there.” He jumped out of the car and slammed the door, the sound cannonading through Stone’s head like a nuclear blast. “Look,” Pinky said, running his palm over the glossy sheen of the Thunderbird’s hood. “Nothing. Nada. No fucking dent.”
Pinky climbed back in the car and pulled a baggie of weed out of his pants pocket. He packed a bowl and handed it to Stone. “Listen,” Pinky said. “You need to fucking chill. This will make you feel better. I guarantee it.”
Stone put the pipe to his lips thinking, it’s there, it’s still there.
Pinky screeched onto Myrtle Avenue and floored the gas. They passed Fort Greene Park and the dreary brick towers of the Whitman Houses, stopping short for red lights. They turned left at Flatbush Avenue and Pinky gunned the engine through downtown Brooklyn. Stone slumped in the passenger seat, tried to spark the lighter, and failed. “Do I have to do everything?” Pinky said, lighting the bowl for Stone.
Stone drew in the smoke and held it, feeling afraid. What if this headache was a tumor? What if it got worse and worse, until his head split open from the pain? Where was the bottle? He wanted to pop one of those pills, to get back to the warm floaty place he had been. The insides of his eyelids itched, one of his kidneys itched, and some place in the center of his brain itched, but he couldn’t find a way to scratch them. He must have nodded off because when he next looked out the window they were driving along streets Stone had never seen before, and he had no idea how they had arrived there. Skinny, stunted trees stood naked before brownstones crumbling from age and neglect. A clutch of old Puerto Rican men sat on milk crates, flipping cards onto the sidewalk.
Pinky pulled the car over on a crooked one-way street where cars sat double-parked and a hydrant leaked water into the trash-littered gutter. “Back in a minute.” Pinky slammed the Thunderbird’s monstrous door. He crossed the tilted slate sidewalk and walked up the steps of a brownstone stripped of its facade. The walls were gray and rutted, with rusted ribs of iron showing through. He disappeared through a battered green door.
The dent was still there on the hood, the car as lurid as his impoverished surroundings. Stone fought the urge to close his eyes in the hopes it would just disappear. But out of the corner of his vision, he caught a group of pigeons rising from the roof of a building across the street. They formed a pattern against the sky, undecipherable, shifting and turning and finally breaking up into smaller groups and landing on an adjacent rooftop. It was fascinating how they moved, together and then apart, as if some sort of higher magnetism controlled their movements. How wonderful it would feel to be part of something like a flock of pigeons, to move with such grace and ease, to just know the correct thing to do.
Pinky returned to the car and they stopped at several more places, each stop more bleak and depressing than the last. Stone slipped deeper and deeper into himself. He imagined the pigeons were following, and each time the Thunderbird came to a stop, he tried to count and catalogue them, his mind doing anything to avoid the indentation on the hood. The birds all looked alike to Stone, but he was sure they were always the same ones. Were they following him, or was he following them?
Pinky drove with one hand on the steering wheel and the other, a tightly curled fist, holding a cigarette, which he smoked with intensity and portent, his brow furrowed in deep concentration as he inhaled the blue-gray smoke. They passed one of R. R. Nation’s storefront Brotherhood Ministries, a sign emblazoned with the words, TRUST NATION. HE WILL LEAD YOU!
A long black car that looked as if it had just rolled off the lot pulled up at the curb in front of the Brotherhood Ministry and two smartly dressed black men stepped out—they were tall and broad-shouldered, sturdy like former college football players. Stone told Pinky to slow down, and Pinky pulled over to the side of the road and asked Stone if he was going to throw up. From a distance, the two men looked to be moving in slow motion, as if grooving to their own private sound tracks. One of the men opened the passenger door and out stepped the Reverend Randall Roebling Nation, immaculate in a blue pinstripe suit, his hair gleaming in the afternoon light. Stone regarded Nation, watched
