The City Below

by James Carroll

  Packy Nolan was behind the bar. When he saw what it was, he hit the floor while others screamed and scattered. Nolan covered his head, but remained cool enough to begin his act of contrition —but also to flash on that wop bastard's face from the day before, a mortal sin, one final act of hatred. Seconds passed as the sound of panicked scurrying was replaced by an eerie silence in which, even from his place behind the cold metal beer kegs against which he'd crushed his cheekbone, could be heard the sputtering hiss of the grenade's unwinding detonation device.

  And finally that sound stopped too. An eternity.

  "Shit," someone said, "it's a dud."

  Nolan got to his wobbly knees, inching upward slowly to bring his head level with the bar, then above it.

  Two dozen Irish tough guys were hiding in the corners and under tables, behind benches and the low walls of booths. The grenade lay inert in the center of a well-cleared circle. It had not exploded, and Nolan was among the first to understand that it was not intended to.

  The men, when they recovered, were too embarrassed to hang around. No one had exactly thrown himself on the potato masher to save his buddies. No one had scooped it up and hurled it back outside. After an initial burst of relieved chatter, no one much wanted to talk about it either. Fragging, Irish style: the fucking leaden pineapple had shown them up for what they were, Nolan included. By nine o'clock the Nail was nearly empty, so he made the stragglers leave and he shut the place down. Incredible. On a Friday night. Nolan pocketed the grenade and walked up Winthrop Street toward Squire's.

  Ned was in his chair, inside the blue glow of the TV, the same Morley Safer documentary blaring away, the chugging of helicopters, the foop of mortars, the endless footage of the green jungle carpet. When Squire looked, the screen was filled with a close-up of a GI's haggard face. The camera moved in on his helmet and the hand-scrawled letters FTA, which framed a Zippo lighter stuck in the band.

  Ned Cronin was holding a can of Narragansett. Next to his chair were four empties. At six, he would go to bed.

  "Good night, Gramps."

  "Oh!" Cronin jerked in his chair. "I forgot you was up here."

  "I just wanted to remind you again about tomorrow. We'll be leaving at eleven. The ceremonies start at noon, but Terry said we should get there early."

  Ned took his grandson's hand. "I knew I could count on you."

  "I did nothing, Gramps. Terry worked it out himself. He said the cardinal called him and the others in today. That's what the cardinal should of done in the first place. Terry's no rebel, you know that."

  "But I knew you could fix it."

  Squire's heart sank as he saw once more how lightly his grandfather held to what was real. That fiercely, on the other hand, he squeezed Squire's fingers.

  "Terry wanted to obey them, Gramps." As if Cronin saw the issue, or cared about it "They just had to give him a way to do it"

  Cronin nodded vaguely, letting his gaze drift back to the television screen, a fire engulfing a nest of thatched roofs. The old man said, "Cuff Matson told me to watch this in case they show his Ernie."

  Squire crossed to the television and changed the channel. "You don't want to watch that crap. Here's Bonanza. Watch this."

  Cronin did not react. He stared indifferently at the kaleidoscope eye.

  "How's your beer?"

  "All set," Cronin said.

  "Get your sleep when this ends. See you tomorrow. Big day."

  "Thanks to you."

  Squire kissed his grandfather's head, then went downstairs.

  Didi was just coming out of the jakes, wrapping her robe around her. She was so big now that its belt barely fit.

  "Christ," Squire said, passing her, "he's giving me the credit."

  She cupped his cheek. "You poor dear."

  "No, really, this is screwy. Charlie's the one lighting a match to the rest of his life, and the old fart thanks me."

  Didi's hair was in curlers, which made her look middle-aged, which was how she felt "Nicky, when I had Molly, he thanked you for that too. As if the UPS guy —"

  "Don't start in on that."

  "You brought it up." She went past him to check on Molly.

  At that moment the glass in the door downstairs rattled, an urgent knocking.

  She looked sharply at him. "Who's that?"

  "I don't know."

  "They're not supposed to come here."

  "Hey, I don't know who it is, all right?"

  "Just tell them not here," she said, disappearing into the tiny bedroom, leaving him alone —a specialty of hers —with his resentment.

  A moment later, at the foot of the stairs, in the narrow hallway, Squire peered through the foggy glass, but could not make out who it was. At the next knock, he jerked the door open.

  "Jesus, Squire, you scared me." A bug-eyed Packy Nolan stood in the circle of light.

  "Packy, it's ten o'clock at night."

  Instead of answering, Nolan took the grenade out of his windbreaker.

  "What the hell is that?"

  "A fucking hand grenade, is what."

  Squire glanced up the stairs behind him, then went out onto the sidewalk, pulling the door shut. To the left was the large window of the flower shop and, a dozen yards along, its doorway. The pink glow of the fluorescent tubes illuminating the plants and flowers washed into the street, and it was into that light that Doyle and Nolan stepped.

  Squire took the thing. He turned it upside down, studied the dime-size hole that had been drilled in the bottom.

  "It didn't go off," Packy said.

  "I can see that."

  "Jesus, it looked like it was going to, though."

  "So that was my point, Packy." Squire tossed the grenade back to him. "Now do you get it?"

  "I thought you was going to hang on to City Square. I thought you was keeping the Town. That's what Jackie said."

  "I'm working on it, Packy. But I told you, for now all bets are off. If Frank Tucci says jump, you say thank you."

  "I told his scumbags to fuck off."

  "How do you know they were his scumbags?"

  "They were these two greasers."

  "But who, Packy. Figure that first Always know who you're telling to fuck off." Squire indicated the grenade. "You asked for it, didn't you. These bastards aren't like us. They're killers. But they're stupid. You got to play it smarter than them, that's all."

  "What, fork over the juice?"

  "For now, sure. Give me some time, will you? That's what Jackie asked you. Now I gotta ask you myself? Old man Tucci's not even buried yet, not until tomorrow. Frank has a tribe of savages who are all maneuvering for a bigger piece of the play now. They're his problem, not us. He probably doesn't even know about the fuckers you saw. The discipline is broken down, so anything can happen. You're lucky, Packy, Beantown being what it is, they gave you the warning. So pay attention to it."

  "You mean I should pay them?"

  "Fucking A, you should pay them. But know who it is, and make sure that they know that you know. Because, sure as hell, the discipline's coming back And when it does, we come back too."

  "We? You got a turd in your pocket?"

  Squire smiled. "Papal 'we,' kid. I'm a Catholic, aren't I?" Doyle punched Nolan's shoulder. "Give them what they want, Packy. It's rope. Think of it as rope. We'll get it back Hey, it's a tug o' war. You got to know when to let the slack out."

  Nolan nodded. With a forced jauntiness, he tossed the grenade and caught it "Meanwhile, I think I'll keep this, as a reminder."

  "Of what? The way you threw yourself on it to protect your customers?"

  "Yeah. Right."

  By the time Squire returned upstairs, Didi was in bed, rolled away from the light. In the old days she always waited for him on her back, but the pregnancy had thrown off her ballast, and not only that. He undressed in silence, turned off the hall light, and slipped into bed. He listened to her breathing and knew she was awake.

  After a few minutes of staring into the darkn
ess, he could see the cracks in the ceiling, thought of them, like always, as wounds, the scars on the body of their marriage. Squire Doyle had not wanted them to settle into this, this ... He hated how let down she was now by everything but babies.

  Those cracks in the ceiling, branches of a tree splitting and splitting again, lightning bolts, the tributaries of a river seen from above —they were his rosary, what he moved through at night, waiting for sleep. He was determined not to think of what mattered more, that fuck Tucci. He didn't want that bastard inside his head until he'd figured a way to move.

  He followed one particular line in the plaster, thinking of Terry, tracing the crack back through the week, Terry's week, how the wop creakers had finally cut his balls off. And wasn't I the helpful brother, he thought with the self-contempt he felt only at these last moments of the day, under that cracked ceiling of his sad life with Didi. Once it had only been his brother, whose late night, false-sleep breathing had unleashed this kind of loneliness. Now it was her, yet Squire knew that his connection to Didi was nothing compared to what bound him still to Terry.

  "Nick?"

  "Yeah?"

  "Who was it?"

  "Nobody. One of the guys."

  "Tell them not to come here, would you?"

  "I thought you were asleep."

  She rolled toward him. The abruptness of her movement, more than her oddly passionless voice, conveyed a depth of anger that surprised him. "How can I sleep with your clippers coming around here?"

  "It was Packy Nolan, for Christ's sake. Go to sleep."

  "What did Packy want?"

  "Go to sleep, will you?"

  But now she was up, hauling on her stomach, pushing back against the headboard. "I can't sleep."

  Didi was too fucking sharp not to have whiffed the nervousness in the Charlestown air that week, but she was also, Squire knew, bound by her own iron determination to discuss nothing of what involved him or her brother outside the flower stores.

  "So what else did Terry say?"

  Ah, she would let her frustration spill off into the shallow channel of Terry's trouble. Poor Terry.

  "He said it was all over, no problem."

  "Just like that?"

  "I guess he finally came around. He saw if he got bounced, he'd get drafted and go to Vietnam."

  "That's not true. He'd never —"

  "It's a factor, got to be. To avoid the draft, Didi, some guys even get married and have a kid, even two."

  His remark was followed by a long, deep silence. Finally she said, "If he defied the cardinal, as far as I'm concerned he was right."

  Squire stretched for the lamp on the table. He switched it on, then looked at her. "Didi, he was being stupid."

  "Saying what's true, you mean?"

  "Since when do you believe in birth control?" He reached across to put his hand on her stomach. She covered it with one of her own.

  "He wasn't being stupid," she said quietly.

  "It's their Church. Either he plays by their rules or folds his hand, one or the other."

  "What did you say to get him to go along?"

  "Christ, I said nothing."

  "You reminded him about your mother, didn't you?"

  "The old choke chain, you mean? Terry doesn't need me to remind him that there's a special place in heaven for the mothers of priests. He does that himself."

  "You need him in the Church as much as she did."

  "Bullshit."

  "It's true. That's why you snapped into action this week You can't stand the idea that he might come out."

  Squire withdrew his hand. For a long moment he said nothing. Then he asked, "What does that mean?"

  "You'd have to deal with him, Nick You'd have to take him into account Terry's not like the rest of us."

  "The rest of who?"

  "Me, Gramps, Jackie, Steely, Paul, all your puppies up and down Main Street. Everybody on your choke chain."

  Squire laughed bitterly, throwing his legs off the bed. "Oh Christ, woman, that shows what you know. I'm the one on a chain around here."

  "Right."

  "You're damn right." He hit the bureau with the palm of his hand, banging it against the wall. Then he whipped around at her. "He is like us, don't you see? He thinks he's not, but he is. The Church has him by the balls, just the way —" Tucci, fucking Tucci. Not Didi but Frank Tucci, that prick.

  But she was the one coming at him now. She leaned across his pillow. "Just the way who? Who? Who's got you by the balls, Nick? It sure as hell isn't me."

  "Shut up."

  "I'll tell you who it is." She pushed closer to his edge of the bed. "It's your dead mother, that's who! Gramps is obsessed with her, and so are you."

  "Shut the fuck up."

  "I used to think you wanted Terry in the priesthood because you were afraid of losing me. But that isn't it, is it? It's her! You're afraid of losing her. As long as the dream of her son the priest lives, she lives —is that it'"

  "Fuck you! Shut up!"

  "You've never gotten loose of her. That's why you're no husband!"

  "Oh, yeah?" Disgusted, he threw his hand toward her belly. "What's this, the Virgin Birth?"

  "It is a miracle, considering how often —"

  "Not enough fucking? Is that your complaint?"

  "No."

  "What is it, then?"

  But she could not say. Her complaint had to do simply with who he was, with what Charlestown was, with who she was. She began to weep, and then found herself saying, "My complaint is our children. Molly, and now ... We can't bring our children into this. I hate this."

  "These are all my people, dammit The Town is my —"

  "Not them. Not the Town. They're not what I mean."

  "Say what you mean, then. What do you hate? Who?"

  She wiped her cheek and looked up at him. All the ways she could put it, what this awful neighborhood did to its men, what his thin smile hid from everyone but her, how all the others thought her so lucky, such a husband, not stubborn, not drunk, not gone all the time. But they knew nothing of how he could be gone while in the room with you, in the bed. Her friends would say she had no right to what she felt, but she felt it, was all she knew. She felt condemned, except for Molly. Except for Molly, she felt filthy. She could think of only one way to say these things. "I hate you," she said.

  Her straightforward statement shocked him. He was Squire Doyle, born to bring flowers, irresistible to everyone. Hadn't he built his life on how they all liked him? Well fuck you, he said inside himself, more out of reflex than feeling. He stepped to the bed, close enough to touch her. The sea of his emotions, so tumultuous only moments before, had turned in an instant to ice.

  She had his attention at last, his complete attention.

  "Why? Why do you hate me?"

  Instead of answering with what she knew he was, a doomed soul if ever there was one, a fraud, a liar, she answered with what he wasn't. "For not being him."

  "Who?" His perverse need to make her say it all, out loud, the name, the name he knew best, the first word he'd ever said, the name of what he wasn't, as if news, and not knowledge he carried in his bones.

  "Terry."

  Squire hit her face with his closed fist She slumped onto the bed, unconscious.

  ***

  Squire waited for Didi to come to. He knew better than to apologize, but when he brought her an ice pack, she accepted it He dressed, and without a word, he left.

  An hour later, with Jackie riding shotgun, he was driving across Boston. He said nothing to Didi's brother about what had happened. The night was warm, the car windows were open. At the BU intersections on Comm. Ave., hippie students crossing the street, with their hair and bell bottoms, passed around Doyle's car.

  "Faggots," Jackie called toward one knot of jiving kids, but if they heard, they ignored him.

  Squire looked across at his friend. "You should let your hair grow, Jackie."

  Mullen ran his hand over his close-cropped head. "Mis
sed my chance, boss, because of you."

  "How's that?"

  "I saw Jerry today. He has me on the list for next week Baldysour forever."

  "So you take the test, then what?"

  "First, I pass." Mullen cackled. "Then the academy in Hollis for six weeks. Then they give me my boots, gun, and Smokey the Bear, size seven and a fucking half."

  "And badge."

  "Fucking A."

  "You won't be wearing the dugout coat."

  Mullen looked down at his jacket, the battered leather sleeves, the football patch, his name in thread, and the number 61 on the sleeve. "I guess it's about time anyways, huh? That's what Didi says. Your wife gives me shit about this coat every time she sees it, which frankly is a pain in the butt"

  "She gives everybody shit," Squire said with such deadly coldness that Jackie looked over at him.

  After a moment Mullen said, "Didi'll shit herself when she finds out I'm going to be a cop."

  "Don't tell her yet Don't tell anyone until you get the appointment."

  "Why?"

  "You've got it, Jackie. The skids are greased. But you haven't been talking, have you?" With that coldness again, Squire glanced over as he stopped the car at a light.

  "No."

  "I don't want noise about it, Jackie. I want you to just ease into the thing, okay?"

  "Whatever you say. You're the boss."

  "Sounds like you're starting to get into it."

  "I am. I have to admit, I am. I just wish..." As his voice trailed off, Jackie gave himself over to watching the college kids milling in front of one of their high-rise dormitories.

  "Your old man?"

  "Yeah. He'd never have fucking believed it I can't believe it myself. I'll owe you, Squire, if you get me into the troop. I'll realty owe you."

  Squire laughed. "I'm counting on it."

  "We'll still be partners, though."

  "That's the point, Jake."

  By chance Mullen had made eye contact with a passing boy dressed in a fringed leather jacket, long blond hair brushing his shoulders, and a wispy beard —a self-styled Kit Carson. Hie boy stared back with eloquent sullenness, and Jackie flipped him the bird. The kid looked quickly away, picking up his pace.