Bronx Noir

“Call the cops. Call the cops!”

It was my own voice I heard, disembodied and shrill. I wanted to make them stop, but I was terrified of the men turning on me as well. No one went to Brody’s aid, and Jenna was wrenched from his side. Once again, he was on his own. He didn’t belong on City Island, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to get a chance to be with Jenna Harding.

I don’t remember hearing police sirens. But the fight had lost its momentum and the men were weary. I couldn’t see Brody, but I knew I had to get out of there. Fear took over. I stepped over the debris that was now the backyard. The birthday cake had been smashed and destroyed, the colorful frosting a globby mess on the ground.

Jenna was crying hysterically and being comforted by her mother, but she kept calling out Brody’s name. Her father was slouched on a step at the back of the house. Another man sat bent over on the tree stump that minutes ago held the birthday cake. Brody was on his knees, silently hunched over and motionless. Two men stood over him, as if daring him to get up. Finally, I took a hesitant step toward Brody, but someone stood in my way to prevent my passage.

“It’s all over. Go home. There’s nothing to see. Just go home.”

“Brody? Come on. Get up. Let’s get out of here,” I heard my own trembling voice.

“Don’t worry about him. We’ll see that he gets home. It was a fight and now it’s over.”

“But he didn’t start it,” I said.

The man got right in my face. “Go…home.”

I hung around outside, shivering not from the night air but from having watched Brody outnumbered by five or six able-bodied men. There were still a couple dozen partygoers hanging around. I waited for Brody to come out so we could head back into the city together.

Maybe twenty minutes later a police car ambled its way up the street. The two officers got out and approached the house as if they were just stopping by for a friendly cup of coffee. No rush to see if a teen named Brody Miller was hurt and maybe needed an ambulance.

I decided that Brody would probably be okay.

I went home.

Jenna was not in school the entire next week. Neither was Brody. The talk was not about the ruined birthday party but about the fight, and Brody getting his ass kicked. There was also talk that Brody and Jenna had run off together. I preferred that story to the one that kept playing in my mind.

Jen returned, sullen and standoffish, for the last three weeks of school, and finally graduation. She had nothing to say about anything, except that she and Brody had broken up.

Okay, I could see that happening. She wasn’t going to defy her own father. She wasn’t going to take a risk, or stand up for what she believed or what she wanted. I can’t say if that was a mistake, but it was certainly her loss.

I, for one, never saw Brody again.

* * *

It was years before I thought I’d figured out what happened to Brody Miller. I couldn’t tell Jenna. Anyway, I kind of lost touch with her a few years after we graduated. Once I did ask her, flat out, if she ever heard from Brody. She said, simply, no. End of conversation. I heard that someone contacted his group home supervisor only to be told that Brody was no longer there. He was past being a minor, a ward of the state, and if he chose to take off without telling anyone, he had the right.

Jenna and I drifted further apart. What used to hold us together no longer existed. I guess that was as much by choice as it was by circumstance. I know now that you have to work at the things you want, like friendship or love. She landed a job at a law firm in New York. I finished college and returned home. Then one day I realized that I had never returned to the island since the night of Jenna’s birthday party. But that was also the start of some not-so-far-fetched thoughts that wouldn’t go away.

Like believing that Tommy Harding and his friends had killed Brody Miller that night and buried him in the Harding’s backyard.

After a while it didn’t even seem so crazy an idea. I’d already witnessed some of the terrible things people were capable of doing to each other, all to protect themselves, their families, their homes…or in the name of God.

Then, one day, I took a bus back to City Island, getting off the first stop outside a restaurant called the Sea Shore. That was as far as I got. I made myself sick wondering, What if I’m right? What if Jenna’s father goes to jail? What if her family is forced to sell their home, and they leave the island in disgrace? What if Jenna hates me? If Brody was really dead, could I be forgiven for catching and turning in his killer, the father of a friend?

But I wasn’t prepared for a full-fledged flashback of the night of the fight, chilling me to the bone on an eighty-degree day. I turned around and caught the next bus off the island. I was shaking like crazy.