Mooney's Ride Home

Mr. Mooney was in a very bad mood. Driving home from work on the crowded West Side Highway north towards the Henry Hudson Bridge, he heard a funny clacking sound coming from under the hood that sounded suspiciously like the sound he heard the last time he brought the car into the shop. Damn that mechanic. I know he’s ripping me off, he thought. You just can’t trust anyone.

Alexander Mooney was never one to require reassurance or a softening of hard edges. He liked his lights harsh, his desk clean, and his coffee on time. So when his gal Rosemary hadn’t shown up that morning until nearly 9:20 with his morning brew, he knew this was going to be a particularly shitty day.

Rosemary was very efficient, pretty, and cheerful enough, but she had three children between the ages of 7 and 17, and something was always going wrong with one of them. If she hadn’t been so good at typing and shorthand, or hadn’t been in the habit of wearing particularly tight blouses (with what must have been a brassiere made of gauze for all the good it did her), he would have given her the boot a long time ago. The girl simply missed too many days of work. It was always something – one kid with the chicken pox, the other one who cracked his front tooth during a sporting match, and then that oldest girl with her mysterious female troubles – infection, or some such thing…

Anyway, this morning when Rosemary showed up almost a half hour late with his morning coffee, Mr. Mooney almost fired her on the spot. But then he noticed that her eyes were puffed up and rimmed in red, and she was still sniffling from what had obviously been a good cry. She had tried to cover it all up by coming in extra cheery, with a big plate of those butter cookies filled with raspberry jam she was always making (another plus in her favor, although he had told her so many times that he preferred apricot jam to the raspberry, which left too many seeds between his teeth), but he could tell that the girl was barely holding it together. Normally, this too would not have been enough to assuage his anger, but in addition to the cookies, she was also wearing that shiny, clinging mint green blouse of hers, and the sight of those full nipples so early in the day had taken the sting out of waiting twenty minutes for his coffee… Such is life – you had to constantly balance out the good and the bad.

Alright, only one of you gets in front of me, God damn it! You see what happens? You let one get in the lane and they all want to cut in! The entrance ramp to the highway from 79th Street often backed up with waiting vehicles, and Mr. Mooney’s rule was to only let one car in per exit. In this way, he felt he was doing his civic duty to contribute to the civilized flow of traffic, while not letting himself be taken for a fool. So when three cars cut in front of him at once, he had no choice but to step hard on the brakes as well as his horn. Oh, that really pissed him off. And then, he noticed that the clacking sound was getting worse. He prayed the car would hold out until home and stepped on the gas pedal, shifting to the center lane, and then again to the far left, where he planned to stay until he crossed into the Bronx.

The trees along the side of the highway bore fruitless limbs that jutted out like cold bones from their lonely trunks, with nary a spring bloom in sight. The knobby joints had a polished look to them that appealed to Mr. Mooney’s love of all things smooth and cool. Whereas others might find the sight disturbing, or at certain times of night, frightening, their seemingly lifeless state was actually quite reassuring to him – no illusion, no pretension.

There is nothing mysterious in the business of medical supplies. Sales are sales. Customers buy the products and pay for them. And then you make a profit. Alexander Mooney had been doing business in this way at the same Chelsea location for over fifty years, when he first started Parkside Medical Supplies. He had been able to last this long, he believed, precisely because he was a man of his word.

It had been a terrible shock to him, then, when his wife of thirty-five years, Faye, had divorced him ten years ago. She had complained to him that he, Alexander, had LIED to her. He had “promised her the moon,” promised her a big, fancy house and vacations and children and grandchildren, and never mind that the one child they did have had died from a rare blood disorder at the age of two and Faye had barely let him touch her after that. Thirty years later on the evening she announced to him that she was leaving, he had tried to talk some sense into her, but she had just tolerated him with that faraway look in her eyes and then gone upstairs to pack as if he hadn’t said a word.

It was just as well. Faye had been a terrible cook and a slob. He could say that now since they were no longer together. The day after she left, Alexander had a girl come in and clean up the entire place and take whatever clothes and jewelry she wanted. Then he called the Salvation Army and had them take the rest of the clothes and the heavy furniture. Within twenty-four hours of her leaving him, it was as if she had never existed. Alexander told himself it was better this way and purchased a new chrome and black formica dinette set, and a new black leather couch and reclining chair, and some sheer white curtains. He re-did the kitchen, also in a chrome and black theme. He couldn’t believe how much the new designer appliances cost, but then it was worth it to have all the memories of Faye’s bad cooking erased from the kitchen she had pretended to use for all of those years.

Alexander wondered how it was that a woman like Faye could reject everything he had offered her. Their wedding, it had been a massive affair, even more beautiful than the Kapinsky’s at the Towne House (where, everyone knows, the stuffed derma are always too salty)! She had been so radiant that day in white satin, like a princess. He could still see the rhinestone bodice of her dress, sparkling, her big, brown eyes shining up at him when she promised to love, to obey, until death…

He had seen that same sparkle in her eyes when she went shopping. Lord & Taylor, Saks, Bergdorf’s – 5th Avenue was her playground. In the summers they vacationed at the Nevele, never mind that other place, it was like a summer camp, she always said. No, they went top dollar all the way. The best hospitals, the best medicines – it wasn’t his fault that the doctors couldn’t save the girl. They had done everything they could, and Alexander had stood by helplessly as her little body just turned on itself, and slowly withered away.

He would always remember the way she looked when they wrapped her up in white linen, so thin and frail, her porcelain skin smooth and cool beneath the shroud circling her angelic face. Faye had insisted on packing the coffin with all of her favorite stuffed animals, and photos of the three of them at the Catskill Game Farm, feeding the sheep, with the one animal standing on his foot. It was the last good time he remembered them all sharing…

And then, just as he was passing the bottleneck at the entrance to the George Washington Bridge and preparing to pick up some speed for the last leg of his journey home to Riverdale, the strange clacking sound that had worsened at 79th Street suddenly broke into a full scale bucking and pounding of the right front end. Fearing that the entire wheel was going to fall off and his car would flip over head first, Alexander jammed down on the car horn and crossed to the right lane (over the wild protestations of the driver of a Hummer with Connecticut plates) and onto the shoulder of the highway, where he came to a thudding stop halfway into the grassy patch alongside the road.

His heart pounding so hard he could barely breathe, Alexander turned off the engine and leaned back in his seat with his eyes closed and listened to the steady hum and whoosh of evening drivers speeding past him. Slowly, slowly, his breathing returned to normal, and he opened his eyes to see his own glassy stare reflected in the rear-view mirror, which had somehow turned towards his face during the rush to safety. Then, with a flicker, he saw that his hardened gaze had been cracked open by the unexpected fright. He reached for the door handle and stumbled out of the car and away from the dangers of the endless, erratic line of impatient commuters, as he made his way towards the small patch of trees off to the side of the clearing.

But before he got too far away from the car, he heard an odd sound coming from under the passenger side. He hesitated for a listen, and then he turned back towards his disabled vehicle and saw something brown and furry moving just under the chassis. As he stepped closer, he saw that it was a big raccoon. He had apparently run over it in his hurried escape from the highway. It was making soft little yelping sounds and moving its hind legs in a way that seemed to indicate some kind of a struggle. Mr. Mooney thought that the animal was probably dying, and wished he had killed it all at once.

Upon closer inspection, Mr. Mooney saw that the animal was actually trying desperately to move away from the spot it was lying in. Curious… And then he saw that from between the legs of the dying creature, a small head was pushing itself out and he realized that he was witnessing the struggle of the mother raccoon to deliver one of her young pups into the world before she died. He froze in his tracks and watched, mouth agape, as this bleeding, convulsing thing pushed and pushed and cried out in pain and release until its little one spurted out of her, at which point she turned on her haunches toward its awkward young body and licked at its face to make sure that its mouth was clear and free to receive the meal she would provide for it.

Once the little infant had found one of her nipples and begun its instinctive sucking, the mother laid back on her broken side and allowed herself to forget about the rest of the babies that would no doubt perish squirming inside her, for her eyes were already beginning to cloud over with death, and her breath, increasingly labored, was slowly unwinding its hold on her consciousness. And then, with a final arching of her back and one last clear-eyed gaze at her progeny, the mother collapsed with an exhale as the afterbirth filled with unmet promise slid part of the way out of her and lodged there, spilling blood onto the ground underneath. All the while, the new raccoon sucked away at the milk, oblivious to the drama unfolding all around it.

Alexander watched in silence as the baby nursed with contentment at its dead mother’s breast. Then, all at once, the tears began to gush from his eyes, and though he tried to hold back the cries, they came, first hiccupping and then roaring out of him from deep within his heart. And that is where he stood, weeping, watching a baby raccoon take its first meal in the evening air alongside the Henry Hudson Parkway on the west side of Manhattan island, until the police finally showed up to investigate.

THE END


© Deborah Oster Pannell 2007