Gus shrugged. Butchie’s eyes were pale blue, and flat, like the surface of a beach pebble.
“I mean it, Gus. Nobody treats one of us that way and walks. You unnerstand?”
“Sure,” Gus said.
Butchie looked at his desk calendar, then leaned forward to study it.
“Well, by God,” he said. “About that time of the month isn’t it?”
Gus didn’t say anything. Butchie didn’t expect him to. He took out some keys and unlocked one of the desk drawers and took out a metal cash box. He opened it. Took out some bills, closed the cash box, and put it away. He put the bills in an envelope, and tucked the flap in without sealing it.
“Here you go, Gus,” Butchie said, and held out the envelope. Gus took it and slid it into his inside pocket without counting the money. Gus never counted it in front of Butchie, and Butchie never shorted him. There are rules for everything.
“I won’t be able to come to the wake,” Gus said.
“I unnerstand, Gus. It wouldn’t look right. You come across anything you’ll let us know.”
“Sure,” Gus said.
“Best to the missus,” Butchie said.
Gus
The first drink of the day. Scotch and soda. Tall glass, lot of ice. Enough soda to make the Scotch a translucent garnet. It felt clean and brisk, as if it would purge his system of the day’s accumulated toxins. Gus knew better, but it was pleasant to pretend. He put his feet up on the glass-top coffee table, and leaned back on the white couch. Mary Alice came over with a glass of white wine and sat beside him and put her head on his shoulder. With her left hand she rubbed the top of his thigh.
“Getting old, Sheridan?” she said.
“And fatter,” Gus said. “Every year.”
She moved her head a little on his shoulder, and rubbed her cheek against it sympathetically. Mary Alice worked in the mayor’s office. He never had known what it was exactly she did. And she was committed to dressing for success. Just home from work, she had on a tailored black suit, with a little kick pleat, and a white blouse with a little black-and-white polka-dot scarf simulating a necktie. She rubbed his thigh gently.
“I’m going to be sixty-one,” Gus said, “in the fall.”
“You don’t look it,” Mary Alice said.
Mary Alice had a penthouse in Longfellow Place, a high-rise warren of stewardesses and young stockbrokers that had jumped from the ruins of the old West End. It had a working fireplace and a big view of the Charles River, and the charm of a Ramada Inn. It cost two thousand dollars a month, which Gus paid.
Gus finished his drink, and Mary Alice made another one, and poured herself some more white wine. She wiggled a little when she brought it to him. It was not conscious, probably. Mary Alice had a little wiggle when she was standing still. She handed over the drink and cocked a hip.
“You seem low, Sheridan. Old lady giving you cramps?”
Gus shrugged. Mary Alice sat beside him again. The fire was working well now, and danced happily in the designer fireplace.
“The kid?”
“No,” he said. “Chris’s fine. He’s doing great.”
“Well, he should be, all that education. How old is he?”
“Thirty-seven.”
“And working already,” Mary Alice said.
“Don’t talk about my kid,” Gus said.
“He’s not a kid, Gus. For Crissake, he’s thirty-seven years old. Isn’t it time to let go of him?”
And hang on to what? Gus thought.
“Talk about something else,” he said.
Something in his voice scared her.
“Sure,” she said. “Sure I will.”
Gus put his head back against the couch, and closed his eyes, and put his hand over hers on his thigh and patted it.
“I saw in the paper some mobster got killed,” Mary Alice said. Very perky. “You working on that?”
“Corky O’Brien. Yeah.”
“How’s that going?”
“It’s going to get worse,” Gus said. He kept his eyes closed. Mary Alice was gently rubbing his thigh again.
“You know who did it?”
“I will soon.”
“You have a lead?”
Gus smiled with his eyes closed, and shook his head.
“Then why do you think you’re going to know soon?”
“He’ll turn up dead,” Gus said. “Probably killed the same way Corky was.”
“You know that?”
“Yeah.”
“And you can’t stop it?”
Gus shook his head again.
“That’s awful,” Mary Alice said.
“Corky’s no loss,” Gus said. “The guy who killed him won’t be either.”
“I meant for you, awful for you.”
Gus shrugged and patted her hand again.
“Doesn’t make any difference to me,” he said.
“What does, Gus?”
He opened his eyes and looked at her.
“Fucking’s nice,” he said.
And Mary Alice giggled and said, “You got that right,” and put her glass of wine on the table and turned her face up toward his.
Gus
It was almost the same as last time, except this time it was morning and it wasn’t raining, and they came in through East Boston and down Meridien Street. But the boatyard was the same, and the body was nearly the same.
“Jackie Malloy,” Gus said, looking down at him.
“Beaten up badly and shot behind the ear,” one of the detectives said. “Small caliber.”
The detective was John Cassidy. He was a thin guy with round gold-rimmed glasses, who looked like he should have been a priest. There was a harsh spring wind coming off the harbor and Cassidy had his hands in his pockets. His overcoat collar was turned up, and his chin sunk into it.
“Even up for Corky.”
“Don’t know that, Captain,” Cassidy said.
Gus didn’t say anything. The wind blowing off the harbor smelled of sewage. He turned and let the wind blow against his back.
“Stay on it, Johnny,” he said. “Come talk to me when you get through here.”
“Sure, Captain.”
Gus walked back up toward the unmarked gray Chevy that Billy drove him around in.
“We’ll go to the office,” Gus said when he was in the car. “Use the siren, I don’t want to fuck around in the traffic.”
Billy liked that, Gus knew. He liked to use the siren and the blue light and force through traffic as cars squeezed left and right for him. When he could, Gus let him do it. They went through Chelsea and up over the Mystic River Bridge, which was officially the Tobin Bridge, which no one called it. Even with the siren it was heavy going in the morning traffic, but better than the tunnel, where there was no place to squeeze. Gus sat in front, beside Billy, as he always did, and read the paper.
“So, you think it’s the O’Briens and the Malloys starting up, Captain?”
“Yes,” Gus said without taking his eyes from the newspaper. He had it folded over into a manageable size, the way people do on the subway.
“So it’s Butchie O’Brien’s turn again,” Billy said.
Gus was reading the real estate listings. He thought often about moving. West of the city someplace, Concord maybe, a big place with a lot of land sloping down to the river, fenced so the dogs could run loose. He held the image—a meadow and a river and the dogs running free.
“And they’ll buzz somebody, and then the Malloys will have to buzz somebody, and so forth and so on,” Billy said.
Gus ignored him. Billy didn’t mind. He talked because silence made him uncomfortable. He didn’t expect Gus to respond. Gus thought about his meadow. The dogs should be hunters, pointers probably, maybe a retriever in there too, and they’d course the meadow, bounding about with their mouths open, and then push into the river and swim with their heads up and come out and shake themselves dry and look up at him with their tongues lolling.
“And so forth and so
on,” Billy said again. Sometimes when he found a phrase he liked he said it several times. “And so forth and so on.”
Billy parked on Berkeley Street and Gus got out and went in to work.
Chris
“Why doesn’t your father tell her to shut up?” Grace said.
Chris shrugged. “Just make it worse. You try and shush her, or argue with her, she gets hysterical.”
“Do you think she knows she’s a drunk?”
Chris stopped for the light at Leverett Circle.
“Old bones,” he said in imitation of his mother’s girlish manner, “need a little lift.”
The light changed and he moved out onto Storrow Drive. Grace was turned in the front seat beside him, her hands folded in her lap. She always managed to look simultaneously lively and elegant, even when doing simple things, like sitting and listening.
“And,” Chris said, “he may love her.”
“God,” Grace said. “I hope not.”
“She was a lot of fun when she was younger. Like a playmate—very bubbly and playful and full of energy. She didn’t get fat really till I was grown.”
In the darkness to their right the lights from East Cambridge splashed on the thick black river surface. Traffic at this time of a weeknight was desultory on Storrow Drive, and the backs of the riverview brick town houses along Beacon Street to their left were mostly dark.
“I remember when I was a little kid, she came into my room late at night, home from a party, and gave me a big kiss and patted me and laughed. Her breath smelled of booze, and lipstick, which I remember as a very nice smell, very festive. And she was giggly and looked very pretty in the light from the hall, all dressed up. Jesus, did I love her.”
“Maybe you still do,” Grace said.
“I don’t think so. I’ve thought about it. And I don’t find any love in there.”
“And yet you let her treat you like a stupid child.”
Chris was silent.
“You let her get away with it,” Grace said.
“My father has always valued restraint,” Chris said.
“He lets her get away with it too.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s not right. You’re both grown, accomplished men. Who gives a fuck about Boopsie Poopsie’s son teaching in high school, for Crissake? You don’t drink a lot of beer. Your father’s not fat. She shouldn’t be allowed to say things like that to either of you.”
“Gracie,” Chris said, “feel free. Next time she’s abusive, jump right in.”
“I can’t do that. She’s not my mother.”
“That’s right,” Chris said.
“Oh, for Christ sake.”
“Don’t give me Oh, for Christ sake. She isn’t your mother. She’s not your problem.”
“She’ll be my goddamned problem if she’s my mother-in-law. She’ll be a bundle of laughs as a mother-in-law.”
“You wouldn’t have to marry her,” Chris said.
“So what do I do when she’s treating my husband like an incompetent child?”
“You let your husband handle it,” Chris said wearily.
“What happened to ‘jump right in’?”
“You want to not marry me because you don’t like my mother?” Chris said.
“Oh, God, Chris, don’t be such an asshole.”
They were silent. He drove up the ramp at the Anderson Bridge and turned right on red toward Cambridge. Chris felt his eyes stinging as if he would cry. He blinked to clear them, and felt himself going inside, the way he always did when he’d misbehaved and his mother had been sulky. His father had been like that, he knew. Probably his grandfather. Maybe fucking Adam, for all I know. Gotta go somewhere. At the duplex house on Walker Street, they got out and went in without speaking. Chris was still silent and deep inside when he fell finally asleep.
Gus
Pat Malloy sat in the front seat of Gus’s private car in the parking lot of a Dunkin’ Donuts shop in Union Square, Somerville, and drank a large coffee, black with two packets of Sweet’n Low.
“No doughnuts, Gus,” he said. “I’m trying to drop some weight. The old lady’s on my ass.”
Gus nodded. He broke a plain doughnut in half and took a bite from one half.
“How many fifty-year-old guys, she says, my size I see walking around?” Pat said. “And I say you don’t see many guys my size walking around any age. I take a size fifty-eight suit, you know? and she says you don’t see any that are fifty because they’re all dead, she says.”
Gus swallowed some doughnut, took a sip of coffee, put the cup back on the dash.
“She’s worried about you, is all,” he said.
“Shit,” Pat said. “Don’t smoke, don’t eat, don’t drink. Pretty soon it’ll be no fucking—and then what are we going to do with our spare time, Gus?”
Gus looked through the front window at the people waiting in line to buy doughnuts. He wondered why everyone always looked tired in doughnut shops.
“Patrick,” he said, “I don’t want this thing with the O’Briens to turn into anything more than it is.”
“What thing?”
“You kill Corky, they kill Jackie.”
“I didn’t kill nobody, Gus.”
“Sure,” Gus said. “And nobody did Jackie.”
“We’re taking care of that,” Pat said.
“That’s what I don’t want, Patrick. It’s one apiece now. Why not let it lay.”
“Fucking bozo kills my cousin, Gus?”
“Even up for Corky,” Gus said.
“Corky earned it, Gus. You unnerstand. Corky insisted on it. Jackie was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“It’s even, Patrick.”
“Hey, Gus. Am I a man or fucking what? Some asshole buzzes my cousin, Jackie, that I grew up with. And I say, ‘Oh, sure, okay, we’re even’? There ain’t no fucking even in our world, Gus. There ain’t no fucking tie games. You gotta know that much.”
“So you cap one of theirs and they cap one of yours and what? It’s a war. It spills over into the rest of the city. The press rolls around in it like a hog in shit. I can’t sit on that, Patrick.”
“You can’t, huh? You forget who you are, Gus. You unnerstand? You are thinking like you are a cop. Like you are a homicide fucking dee-tective. You ain’t. You are my fucking employee, Gus. I got a record of every dime I’ve paid you, since you were a beat cop in City Square. I pay for your pussy. I put your fucking kid through fucking Harvard. You take my fucking money and you do what you are fucking told. You don’t tell me what you want. I fucking tell you. End of story.”
Gus ate the other half of his doughnut in silence. He sipped another swallow of coffee from his cup.
“Go ahead, Patrick,” Gus said. “Give it to me straight, how you feel about my suggestion.”
Pat shook his head.
“Don’t you fuck with me, Gus. You’re crazy. We been doing business, what, twenty-five years? You always been crazy. All the time acting like you’re better than me and all the time with your fucking hand in my pocket. I’m telling you now, one time only, Gus. Don’t go thinking like you’re a cop. Don’t fuck with me.”
Gus nodded.
“Nice talking to you, Patrick,” he said.
Pat heaved himself slowly sideways and out of the car. He stood with the door open, bent over, looking in at Gus.
“Don’t fuck with me, Gus,” he said. His voice was flat. “Remember what I’m saying to you.”
“I’ll keep it in mind, Patrick,” Gus said. They looked at each other for a long, motionless moment. Then Pat shut the car door and Gus put it in reverse and backed out of the parking lot.
Chris
“Chris, we have to talk,” Grace said.
“Sure,” Chris said. “Let’s talk.”
“I can’t stand the way we are connected,” Grace said carefully.
“What the hell does that mean?”
“When I come toward you, you back away. When I pull back y
ou envelop me. I don’t know how to be, with you.”
“For Crissake, why not just be,” Chris said. “Follow your instincts.”
As he spoke Grace was shaking her head. There was no anger in her voice, but there was frightening certainty.
“No, that’s a rap you’ve laid on me for a while. It’s no good. You won’t let me be instinctual. I’m like some kind of Rorschach test for you, where sometimes I look like one thing and sometimes I look like something else. Since we were children I’ve been the bang board of your family pathologies. I can’t stand it. I have to get out of here.”
Chris felt the heaviness, the unalterable systemic closing down. He could think of nothing to say as he slowly imploded, his physical self collapsing in on his soul.
“You need to be alone, Chris. You need to be able to get along on your own….”
“Grace, Jesus Christ …”
“I’m going to go away for a while,” Grace said.
The silence came down upon him like settling dust.
“Just like that?”
“No. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time. I’ve gotten a place of my own, and I’m going there for a while.”
“Now?”
Grace’s face was gentle.
“Yes,” she said. “Now. I’ll stay in touch. I’ll call you in a while.”
“Is there someone else?” Chris said.
“I’m not leaving you for someone else. But I have to go now.”
“Can we not tell anyone?” Chris said.
Grace stared at him for a moment.
“Please,” Chris said.
“Okay,” Grace said. “For now.”
He stood and watched her go, and after she had gone, he stared out the window after her, so deep inside that he barely existed. This couldn’t be. It was supposed to be forever. He was going to be safe, forever.
Gus
It was Friday night, ten after six. Gus was in the mayor’s office. Parnell Flaherty stood with his back to Gus, looking through his big picture window down at Quincy Market. Gus had always assumed that Quincy Market was where overweight white suburban couples went if they died in a state of grace. Nonetheless, it was a hugely successful urban renewal project, and Parnell Flaherty was proud of it.
All Our Yesterdays Page 17