by Thomas Laird
“Are you all right?” the silver haired old lady asks.
“Yeah, thanks. Just fell on my fanny, this morning, but I’ll be fine.”
I go to the slicing machine and I put the loaf in. I like watching it come out in perfect, equal sized pieces, except for the two heels.
I bag the bread, and then I ring her up and she’s gone. It’s a little slow because we just opened, but it’ll pick up toward ten or eleven. It always seems to.
I look over at Barry, working with another customer who wants an assorted dozen doughnuts. He selects them as he’s told by the man making the order, and then he bags the sweets and hands it to the customer and then gives him his change from the register.
I’m not looking forward to my break at 10:30 because I’m afraid I’ll sit down and feel that jolt I felt when I tried to sit on a chair at breakfast back at the apartment. Casey never apologized again. In fact he never said anything at all to me, and then he just walked out the door.
I’m thinking he might be getting mean because I overheard him trying to get a hold of one of his partners on the phone, and it sounded like nobody was answering his calls. Then he had to go to work at his cousin’s, and he walked out the door, like I said, without a word to me.
Things are changing, I guess, like he said. Maybe he’s tired of me. Maybe that’s what that pain he gave me was all about, but boy it happened so fast I don’t really know what to make of it. That time was the only time I ever told him no, and I can’t believe he wouldn’t understand I was just tired out and then let it go for one night. I never tell him he can’t, and it always seems like I make him happy in bed or in the shower or on the floor or any goddam where he wants me.
Then he damn near makes me suffocate or bleed to death, whichever comes first, and he walks out in a huff like I did him wrong.
I almost wish he’d taken me to the ER and then I would’ve heard his explanation for what happened to me. Or I could’ve told the doctor that he raped me and that I was only sixteen. I could’ve told that lie, and then I could’ve watched him squirm when he figured they were coming to arrest him for statutory.
But I love him and I didn’t go to the ER and I couldn’t because I would’ve been too ashamed to let some stranger see what he did to me. I couldn’t say the words out loud because I still care too much for him. I still can’t see living without him.
Business picks up the way I figured it would, and the hurt in my tail seems to lessen as I move around on my feet, hustling to keep up with the orders. Casey says money is tight, and I need to keep this job, no matter what.
My lunch break is at one, and so is Barry’s, and the fast food joint is still the closest to the bakery, so he asks me if I want company, and I tell him yes because he really is a nice guy, and I like talking with him. He’s the only guy my age in the store—or anywhere else in my vicinity—so it’s fun to be with someone like him, age-wise, I mean.
The pain has really backed off, the last hour. I took a couple of aspirins, and they seem to help. I just feel raw, now, but it isn’t intolerable.
When we get to McDonald’s, Barry picks up the tab again.
“You gotta stop that. You’re a college kid. You need the money.”
“Actually, I don’t, so much. My dad’s a lawyer. So’s my mother. We live in Oak Lawn. I take the bus to work every morning, but I have a car. I figure I need to live the way most people do, around the neighborhood, here. I don’t want to live like some over-privileged kid, like a lot of my high school friends did. So I take the bus to work, and I make my own spending money, but my mom and dad pay my tuition and all that. Columbia’s expensive. They wanted me to go to Northwestern, but I liked Columbia better. I want to be a writer, and they have a first class fine arts program. I want to get an MFA, that’s a Masters of Fine Arts, and then I want to write and teach at a college. Maybe get a PhD someday.
“Christ, I’m talking too much.”
I laugh and then we sit down and eat because we’ve only got a half hour.
We’re sitting in a booth, and after he washes some of his burger and fries down with a Coke, I ask him, “What’s your whole name?”
“Gold. Barry Gold. No middle name. My parents skipped the middle name, but I write Stanislaus down on any documents I’ve got to sign.”
“Why Stanislaus?”
“It was my grandfather’s, my paternal grandfather’s, name. He was a Polish Jew who made it here to Chicago in the ‘30s before Hitler could kill him and his family.”
“You’re Jewish.”
“Yeah. Is that a turn off?”
“No. Hell no. Don’t be silly. But you’re not buying the next lunch for me. I’m paying.”
It really doesn’t matter to me what his background or his religion is. I don’t guess I’m prejudiced. I never asked anyone’s parentage when I was working the street corners. That thought brings a blush to my cheeks. I can feel it.
“What’s the matter?” he asks.
He’s tall, about six-two, and he doesn’t have a big nose like Jews are supposed to, and his hair is not curly, the way their hair is supposed to be. He looks just…He looks just regular. Cute and regular. The way he looks isn’t the best part of him, though. It’s the way he listens to me. Listening isn’t Casey’s strongest suit. When there’s talking, he does most of it.
Am I getting a crush on this Jewish college kid? I don’t know. I know I like him. It’s hard to be friends with a man. Mostly they’re all just looking for something strange. That’s the way it was on the street, and that’s the way it mostly is with Casey, too. I have to admit it. If I didn’t please him in the sack, I don’t think he and I would be sitting around talking about shit like college and what his religion is.
“You have a boyfriend, I’ll bet,” Barry says suddenly.
“Yeah. I do, actually.”
“Would he be mad if he knew you were having lunch with a guy?”
“Probably, but I don’t much care.”
“Things not going well? I know it’s none of my business.”
“We’re friends, aren’t we?” I smile at Barry.
“I like to think so, yeah.”
“I never had a guy friend before.”
“I never had a girl friend, either.”
He looks down at his hands.
“Look, Mary, if things don’t work out with your boyfriend…I mean if you’re ever free and all that—”
“I’ll let you know,” I laugh.
“I didn’t mean to pry into your life.”
“You’re not, Barry. Sounds to me like you’re in my life now, sorta. Don’t you think?”
“I hope so.”
We finish our Cokes and he throws away my trash, and I’m thinking how Casey never clears off the table at home for me, and then I get a little shock of electricity in my rear end, but then it goes away as quickly as it came on.
*
I’m lying in the bed next to him that same night, and I’m thinking about the cop again, about his stabbing brown eyes. I’m thinking they were getting into my head, like some kind of mental guy who can jump into your skull, and then I’m thinking that guy Parisi might actually give a shit about me, the way he came back again to try and talk to me, to warn me about the man I’m living with.
I don’t think I’m stupid, but I know I might have been thinking with my crotch instead of with my brain about Casey McCaslin. He comes on all sexy and dangerous, but maybe the dangerous was why I got involved with him in the first place. Maybe I wanted to jump over the edge because I didn’t give a shit anymore about where I landed. Hurting myself might have been the reason I got caught up in all this.
When he pushed my face into that pillow and kept hurting me over and over again, I struggled really hard to survive. Now I know I want to live. Now I know I wasn’t ever going to snuff myself.
Getting away from Casey, though, might be a different breed of animal altogether.
Chapter 24
Jimmy Parisi, 1980
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It’s Indian summer in November, at the beginning of the month. The weather is almost balmy, in the mid to upper sixties, and I see sun bathers on the beaches from the window in my office. The beaches have been closed since Labor Day, but that’s for swimming on account of the absence of lifeguards. But the Chicagoans and out of towners lie out on the sand to cop some rays and get a dose of skin cancer. These knuckleheads would’ve loved Vietnam. One big meltdown, everywhere you went in-country. It was always hot, blistering hot, except in the monsoons. Then it drowned our asses.
Nothing from our girl, Louise, even though Doc wants to take a run at her, this time.
We cruise by McCaslin’s three-flat occasionally, and see how Mary’s doing. I’ve driven by that bakery where she works, and once in a while I stop and do a walk-by and peek in the windows. I like looking at all the sugary shit that I’m not allowed to eat because I’m borderline diabetic. I saw her talking to a nice looking kid, once, a tall kid with straight black hair. I wondered if the kid was trying to put any moves on her, and I wished he’d try. Anything that would get her the hell out of McCaslin’s place would be good for her.
The Irish crew of Casey’s has literally gone underground. No one knows where any of them have fled, including Robbery, but everyone with a badge is trying to find them before he decides to locate them and start hacking away on them.
McCaslin has been sighted at the cousin’s butcher outfit, and pretty much nowhere else. He’s done everything but leave the city to stay under the radar. He and Mary O’Connor don’t go out very often, except to buy provisions, but they must be eating only at home. They’re never spotted out anywhere.
One thing did occur that grabbed our interest. Mary was spotted at an Emergency Room, at St. Aloyius’s near the Loop. One of the Robbery detectives that’s been working Casey’s crew saw her there. He asked the doc after she left, and he said he wasn’t supposed to talk about his patients, but when the cop flashed his badge the ER guy said she was after a prescription for an infection. The surgeon said she’d had some anal tearing, but the girl insisted it was from consensual sex. The doc tried to press her, he said, but Mary flashed ID on him, and he found out she was eighteen. She wouldn’t pursue something legal because she insisted the sodomy wasn’t forced on her. The detective wasn’t up on the law regarding sodomy in the State of Illinois, and even if he was, he didn’t much feel like pursuing the matter. The doc said the girl would be okay, but he warned her that screwing in the behind was a bit hazardous for her health and urged her to have more conventional sex, from now on.
I want to talk to her again, but I don’t want to make her think I’m pressuring her even though that’s exactly what I want to do. Whatever Casey’s up to with this kid, I think the bad stuff is escalating, and by making her have to go to the hospital, I’m thinking this act is just a taste of what she’s in for. I have trouble believing he’s let her survive this long, but he knows that we know they’re cohabitating, so it’d be pretty hard to make Mary just disappear under our noses. The other six were anonymous to him, so I’m thinking McCaslin thought they were disposable, but with Mary it’s more complicated. He knows her name.
I have fleeting delusions of using that throw-down on him, but I have a wife and a family, and so it’s not just me who’d suffer. I’m not a murderer, either, so that puts another crimp in that plan. If it were twenty or thirty years ago, we might have been able to bring him in and bat him around awhile. Now, they’ve all got civil rights—which they’ve always had—but my predecessors weren’t troubled by that kind of thing. Let’s just say phone books weren’t used to look up phone numbers, in eras gone by. Too bad, in McCaslin’s situation.
That doesn’t mean we can’t have a talk with him, however.
*
Doc and I go by the cousin’s meat packing joint. We want to talk to him while he’s not on break or at lunch. We want to see him when there are plenty of witnesses in earshot. When we arrive, McCaslin is hard at work carving up a pig.
“We need to talk to you,” I say, loudly. Loud enough for five or six other butchers to stop and watch and listen. One of the witnesses is the cousin, himself.
“I’m working,” he replies without looking up at us.
“Your girlfriend walked into the ER at St. Aloysius’s, the other day,” Doc says.
Now he looks up at us. I can feel the eyes of the other butchers on us. The stench of blood and death permeates what little air there is in here. Their white smocks are painted red, scarlet, blood-red.
“I told you I’m busy,” Casey retorts.
“Yeah, fuck your busy,” Doc smiles angrily.
“Now you got a new trick, huh?” I ask. “You prepping to become a homo, asshole?”
He grips his gigantic butcher knife tightly. We both move our hands in the vicinity of our shoulder holsters.
“Please, don’t stop,” I tell him.
“You got anything else to say?” he grins.
“Now everyone here knows what kind of a man you are,” Doc says to him. “What does she weigh? About 120? Huh, tough guy? That’s what the other kids went, more or less, wasn’t it? You like them young and tiny. Defenseless. You and your fucking knife. You did O’Brien when he was half asleep, didn’t you. You wouldn’t go at him unless you had some kind of complete advantage because you don’t have the balls.”
“You guys don’t get the fuck out of here—”
“McCaslin,” the cousin joins in. “The fuck’s the problem?”
“It’s all right. They were just leaving,” Casey tells him.
“Then let’s go. We can’t have this shit.”
“You get out or I’m calling—”
“Fuck you and your lawyer, Casey. Touch that girl one more time and I’m going to shove your straight razor up your ass until I cause you real major discomfort,” I warn him.
The butchers start laughing in derision.
“We’ll leave you to your fine work,” I say. “Remember what I told you, today.”
He doesn’t come back at us as we walk away.
*
The next week Doc gets an offer to teach a course at Northwestern. They’re even giving him a flexible schedule to work around his time on the job. It’s on a weekend day, so they can move the hour of the seminar on the short story to whatever he can handle. It’s only an hour and a half once a week, so he signs on.
“This might lead to a tenure-tracked lecturer’s job,” Doc says as we sit in my office.
“You think you might want to quit all this?”
“You mean quit chasing guys who kill teenagers and who butt fuck their live-in lovers? Now why would I want to leave all this for that?”
“Is the pay any good?”
“I wouldn’t be doing it for the raise, Jimmy.”
“Okay. When will you find out?”
“Maybe next summer. But I’m not sure I want to fuck up my pension, either.”
“Something you have to consider, Doc.”
“It’s a big chunk of change, and the college gig is dependent on my being regularly published, of which there is no guarantee. If I was twenty-five instead of the forty-eight I am, I might run right at it. But it really would be a little tight, money-wise.”
“You gotta do what you gotta. Isn’t that what the Duke would say?”
“The Duke never fired a real round in anger at an enemy in his whole Hollywood fucking life, Jimmy.”
I have to laugh.
“But it’s nice that you have choices. Me? I have to do this. It’s the only thing I know.”
“You’d be surprised what you can do, if the opportunity came up.”
“What? Work as a security guy at the fucking mall?” I ask.
“You’ll have options. You could always teach at the Academy, down the line someday.”
“Can’t see me lecturing youngsters how to avoid getting stuck or shot, out there.”
“You’re a bright young man, Buster. Don’t ever downplay yourself. Ther
e are too many sons of bitches out there and around here who’d be happy to do it for you.”
“We still have nothing, except maybe anger, on the McCaslin deal, Doc.”
“Nah. He feels the heat. He’ll do something stupid. If he was smart, would he be disemboweling porkers for his cousin?”
“He already did something stupid. He made another young girl bleed. He just hasn’t got around to finishing the job, with Mary. That, Doc, cannot happen.”
*
I keep up my drive-bys with Mary O’Connor, but I can’t tuck her in at night. I can’t be there when this guy gets the notion to go into the medicine cabinet or wherever he’s got that straight razor stashed and then slit her neck open so that a fountain of her blood will gush forth onto her chest.
I feel compelled to prevent all that, even though it’s not really my task as a Homicide. The unfortunate thing, for the victim, is that I’m only supposed to deal with the outcome. Cops aren’t bodyguards, unless it’s their assignment. Some Chicago police do it, and the US Marshals do it, and even the Feds on occasion have the task in their job descriptions.
Mary is on her own inside that three-floor apartment building, and she’s on her own during most of a twenty-four hour span. I’m just letting him know I’m out here and that he’ll never be able to anticipate when. I drive by during my shifts and I come by when I’m off, too. Erin wonders where I am, sometimes, and I have to do a lot of tap dancing about my whereabouts, sometimes, but I was straight up with my wife and told her the whole story.
“You in love with this girl, Jimmy?”
“I’m in love with you, nobody else.”
She saw in my eyes that I wasn’t lying.
“Has she been adopted into our family, then?” she laughs.
“Somebody has to adopt her,” I reply.
McCaslin sees me out on the street from time to time as I pass by in the squad or in my own, personal ride. He watches me go by, and he never takes his eyes off me until I’m out of sight.
If he ever does harm that girl, I tell myself, I’m not really all that sure what I’m capable of doing to him, regardless of the price I’ll pay.