by Chuck Hogan
DOUG PLAYED A RARE street-hockey matinee up where Washington Street dead-ended beside the rink on a paved bluff. In terms of the neighborhood, this was an event, like if native son Howie Long had come back to play touch football over at the Barry Playground. Doug didn’t skate much anymore, and never out on the streets, because the game to him was freighted now with too many negative connotations: his youth, faded dreams, his father. Pulling on the skates and pads was like climbing inside his younger self again, and that kid was a royal screwup. Doug had to be feeling good to want to play—and today he felt really, really good.
A kid from Chappie Street who fancied himself a street Gretzky faced off against Doug, and got schooled. Doug put on a clinic. Jem, who lived for this shit, was a conspicuous no-show, leaving Gloansy to dust off Doug’s old high school handle, hooting, “Stick came to play!” as Doug finished the third game with a rising slap shot that nicked the crotch of the goalie’s droopy jeans—a wannabe-black white kid from the Mishawum houses—the orange-ball puck finding a tear in the net and arcing away down the slope to the streets below. Doug skated a victory lap backward, pumping his fist under the wide blue sky.
Fast-forward to a quarter after eight that evening, Doug MacRay rearranging the appetizer card, the glass salt and pepper shakers, the purple petunia in the tiny black vase. He had sent the aproned server away twice and now felt the other Tap diners looking his way, entertaining themselves, watching some Townie bozo get stood up but good.
He tried hard to appear relaxed, not pissed, like everything was cool and going according to plan. But first of all: Why the Tap? Why pick a place where he might get made? Secondly: Why Upstairs? Who the fuck was he trying to be? These frauds he despised?
Bottom line was, he’d panicked at the Laundromat. She said yes and he blanked, because he had no strategy beyond that, the Tap Upstairs the first thing that jumped into his head.
Like a teenager, he had been idealizing their date. S he’ll sit there, I’ll sit here. I’ll say this, s he’ll laugh. A fucking little boy. And this “oatmeal”-colored pullover tugging tight across his shoulders, that he had bought off a headless mannequin on a last-minute run to the Galleria—after spending half an hour going through his closet? Fucking God—look at yourself. Black pants with the crotch cut too high. A braided leather belt, soft black shoes.
Huge mistake, this whole thing. Hiding in the back of the place, taking this table because he couldn’t risk being seen up front. He scanned the appetizer menu for the eighth fucking time. He watched the glass doors, the color bleeding out of his vision.
He deserved this humiliation. He deserved to be stood up. A mistake from the word go.
Five more minutes he waited. Then another five beyond that—his punishment, sticking his nose in it, forcing himself to soak in his own shame. Learn from this. What was it Frank G. had said? Aside from not walking into a bar alone, this is the most important decision you’re ever gonna make. Nice work. Fucked up on both counts.
Two choices: either resume drinking, hard, and right now—piss away two goddamn years for a stuck-up yuppie bitch—or get up, walk to the door—Maybe stop at the ladies’ room on your way out—and walk his tight-crotch pants back home.
As always, Doug fell back to the one thing he knew he could count on. The one thing Doug had that no one could take away from him. His criminal eye. Others—maybe it was a wife or kids they took shelter in. Someone or something to run to where they could feel like a success no matter how often the rest of the world humiliated them.
Double up on the armored-car surveillance. Focus on the big multiscreen movie theaters, Revere, Fresh Pond, Braintree. With the “summer” releases starting in early May, all he needed to do was zero in on a place and a time.
The front windows were darkening with night, headlights finding their way along Main. Dim enough for Doug to make a clean escape and drag his sorry ass back up the hill. He waited for his server to get busy at another table, then stood and started heavy-legged for the door, head down, his exit slowed by two chicks picking through the basket of mints at the hostess station.
That’s where he was when Claire Keesey came rushing in. She gave the tight-skirted hostess a quick once-over, then looked right past Doug to the central bar.
The chicks in front of him exited, and he could smell the street and the night, and he started to follow them out, wanting to be done with it. He had already torn her down beyond repair in his mind—himself too—and the moment had passed.
“My God! You’re right here!” She reached out and squeezed his elbow. “I am so late, I know. Were you leaving? My God, I’m so sorry. I don’t even—but you’re still here, I can’t believe it.”
Believe it. Or, maybe, Hey, I don’t believe it either, cutting her dead—and then walk out on her, take his anger on home.
But she was looking up at him and smiling, catching her breath. “It’s Doug, right?”
“Right.”
“I didn’t, when I came in… you look different.”
“Do I, yeah.”
Sizing him up. “I didn’t… hmm.” Concerned about her own clothes now, a white cotton button-up blouse fitted nicely at the waist, distressed jeans, black shoe boots. “I was running late. I thought more casual…”
“Doesn’t matter. I think I folded those jeans.”
She checked them out with a smile. “I think you did.”
He started to feel good again, despite himself. “Searched the pockets for loose change and everything.”
She smiled brightly, her eyes fully involved. He realized he was standing inside the entrance to the Tap, the door to the Downstairs five steps behind him. He nodded to the back of the room. “Maybe I haven’t lost our table yet.”
They threaded through the tabletops to the back wall. She tucked her little red key-chain purse in next to the flower vase, Doug sitting across from her on a cushioned, bar-height chair, his back to the wall. The low-watt overhead lamp sprayed soft light onto her honeyed hair, the rest of the lounge room fading from view behind her.
Doug patted the table, smiling, exhaling.
“Well,” she said. She leaned forward a moment, the overhead lamp creating a mask of shadow around her eyes. Doug leaned back reflexively, not wanting her to see any masks on him. “So why am I thirty minutes late?” She looked away for the answer, but became distracted. “I’m still shocked you waited. I mean—I’m glad. And I’m sorry. But I’m also amazed.”
“Well, really only about fifteen minutes of it was me waiting for you. The other fifteen was me pouting, knocking myself in the head.”
“Oh, no! You warned me about that.”
“It’s a problem I have.”
“You don’t—I think I tried to tell you this at the Laundromat—but you don’t strike me as the type to be so, I guess, tough on yourself.”
“I’m a fragile sort.”
She smiled at his arms, his shoulders. “Right. You bruise easy.”
“I put too much pressure on myself, I guess. Some things I take too seriously.”
“Please, you’re sitting across from the original life-or-death, agonizing-over-everything girl.”
She went off searching for that answer again as their server arrived, a shorthaired platinum blonde with one ear rimmed with copper clips. She smiled at Claire. “You made it.”
“I made it,” said Claire, pleasant, appraising.
“He looked very worried,” she said, hugging her leather order pad, nodding cheerily at Doug. “Actually, he looked pissed off.”
Doug said, “Thought I was hiding it.”
Claire said, “Was he really hitting himself in the head?”
“Close to it. My name is Drea, what can I get you?”
Claire asked for a wine recommendation and settled on something Italian called a valpolicella.
“Glass or bottle?” said Drea, looking at them both.
“Bottle,” said Doug.
“Terrific.” Drea started to leave.
Drea paused a second before nodding and flipping her pad back open and scribbling that in. “I’ll be right back.” And she was gone.
Claire looked at the table, wondering about his order.
“I’m driving,” Doug told her.
She looked up at him. “Okay.”
“For the rest of my life.”
Claire nodding, then gesturing after Drea. “I don’t even have to…”
“Nope,” he said, rocking gently. “It’s cool. Really.”
“Why did you get a bottle then?”
“I don’t even know,” he said, his head pounding. She was looking at him differently now. Questions popping in her mind like flashbulbs. “You were saying…”
“I was?”
“About being…”
“Right, yes. About being late.” She crossed her arms on the table and leaned on them, damning body language. “Well… the truth is, I wasn’t even going to come at all.”
“Ah. Okay.”
“I was going to blow this off. I had decided not to come. That’s why I was late.”
Doug nodded, waiting. “So what was it that changed your mind?”
She took a deep breath, held it, smiled. “I guess, in a weird way—the decision not to come. In other words, deciding that I didn’t have to come here tonight. Realizing that I don’t have to do anything… sort of relieved me of any obligation. The longer part of the story is that… I’ve been through a lot of crap recently, and I’ll spare you all that—but my thinking’s been strange. Thinking and rethinking everything, examining my life to death, driving myself absolutely nuts. More so than usual, that is. So, fine—I’m not going to go, right? Okay, that’s decided. Then eight o’clock rolls around and I’m sitting at home, deliberately doing nothing, watching eight o’clock roll around, and I was like—‘Well, Claire, you don’t have to not go either.’ These are the conversations I have with myself. But it seemed like I was setting these rules, these arbitrary rules, putting up fences around my days, my nights. Following rules instead of following… the flow, you know? Doing what I want. Being me. So I decided—why the hell not? This is two people meeting for a drink, not life-or-death. Right?”
“Sure,” he said. “No.”
“People meet for drinks all the time, it’s not that mind-bending. I know I’m rambling. This happens a lot.”
“It’s good. Saves me from coming up with a bunch of clever things to say.”
“Long story short—I yanked my head out of my butt, and here I am.”
The wine arrived and she grew quiet again, circumspect, Drea opening the bottle at her hip with professional flourish, pouring a taste into Claire’s glass with that drip-saving twist of the wrist. Claire sipped and nodded that it was fine, and Doug drank some soda while Drea poured Claire a deep glass and said she’d be back for their food order.
At the end of this, in the background of Doug’s vision, two guys entered the Tap, saluted the doorman, and disappeared downstairs. Doug had made out an oversized Bruins jersey on one of them and, with a jab of anxiety, believed it to be Jem.
“Leave the iron on?” she said.
“Huh?”
“You had this look.”
“Oh.” Reading her smile. “Yeah. I think I left the milk out on the counter. Hey—are you even hungry?”
“Well, considering I didn’t plan on coming, I already ate.”
He checked the door to the stairs again, thinking, thinking. “How about getting out of here?”
“I—what?” She looked at her glass. “And going where?”
Good question. “Someplace with a view maybe. Of the city. Unless—I don’t know, your place, does it have a view?”
“I—” She stopped fast. “My place?”
“Whoa, no, hold up, I don’t mean—I only meant, I don’t want to be showing you the city if it’s something you see every morning when you wake up.”
“Oh.” Suspicious now. He was losing her, and fast.
“See,” he said with a glance at the surrounding tables, “I picked this place—I wasn’t ready for you to say yes, and so I went with here because it seemed like maybe the sort of place you’d like. You, who I don’t even know, right? And—do you even like it?”
She smiled through her confusion. “You don’t even drink.”
“Exactly. I lost my head. So what do you say?”
She looked at her glass again. “But what about… ?”
“Bring it with you.” He was pulling his cash roll from his pocket.
“Bring it?”
“I’m paying for it. Take the glass too.”
“I can’t—the glass?”
Doug unfolded his roll, discreetly but making sure she got a look at its heft, winding the thin red rubber band around his fingers and stripping a century off the top, standing it in front of the vase, Franklin out, then snapping the band back around the roll and tucking it away.
“Just smile at the doorman,” he said, lifting the bottle as she stood. “I guarantee you, he won’t see a thing.”
THEY MADE SMALL TALK going up the hill, walking slow, she with her arms folded, the wineglass in one hand. Their date had spilled out into the Town at large, potential complications on every block. An undercurrent of self-interrogation went on like radio chatter inside his head. What the fuck are you doing? And his answer became a mantra: Just one date. Just one date.
“So what about you?” she asked. “You’ve lived here—”
“All my life, yeah. You, before this?”
“I’ve lived all over the city, since college. Grew up in Canton.”
“Canton. That’s Blue Hills, right? There’s a rink there, off the highway. Skated there a few times.”
“Right, Ponkapoag, I think.”
“So, the suburbs, huh?”
“Oh, yeah. The suburbs.”
Doug plucked an overturned recycling bin out of the street, returned it to a doorway. Working hard to be smooth. “What do you do for a job?”
“I’m in banking,” she said. Then: “Wow.”
“What?” Doug looked around for wow.
“No, just that phrase. ‘I’m in banking.’ Not sure if that was meant to impress you or bore you. I manage a BayBanks branch. It’s a lot like running a convenience store, except I move money instead of calling cards and snacks. You?”
“What do I do? Well, that depends. We still trying to impress each other?”
“Sure, go for it.”
“I’m a sky-maker.”
“Wow,” she said again. “You win.”
“I’m in demolition. Blasting rock, bringing down buildings. Making sky, that’s from when you level a big building, opening up views. Suddenly you’ve made some sky.”
“I like it,” she decided. “Do you do those old hotels and stadiums they always show on TV, that detonate inward into their own pile of rubble?”
“No, I’m more hands-on. Basically, if you’ve seen The Flintstones, that’s me. When the whistle blows, I’m surfing down the neck of a brontosaurus and outta there.”
They crested on Bunker Hill Street, having climbed from about nine to almost eleven on the ticking Charlestown clock. He led her across the gas-lit thoroughfare to the mouth of Pearl Street, the outline of a plan starting to form.
Any thoughts he had of changing his clothes were dashed with one glance at Jem’s mother’s demo-worthy house halfway down the plunging street. The Flamer, Jem’s banged-up Trans Am, blue on blue with blue flames detailed on the sides and hood, was parked there like a flare in the road warning Doug away.
His own Caprice Classic was three cars down. “Just a sec,” said Doug, pulling out his keys, opening the driver’s-side door.
She stayed back on the curb, looking at the dingy white four-door and its fading blue, soft-top roof. “Is this your car?”
“Oh, no,” he said, reaching under the velour passenger seat, rocking the musky orange Hooters deodo
rizer dangling from the cigarette lighter. “I loaned this jerk I know some CDs.” He felt around the blue carpeting for them, then straightened, waving two jewel cases, too fast for her to read them.
He walked her back across Bunker, hiking up three blocks west under the gas lamps to the Heights, stopping before St. Frank’s steeple at the top of the hill. “Here we are.”
It was a clean brownstone triple with bowfront windows and blooming flower boxes painted fireball red. The double doors were black with buffed brass knockers, handles, and kickplates. Doug stepped inside the faux-marble entrance, nudging aside a couple of FedEx boxes with his new shoes.
“You live here?” she said, cautious, remaining on the sidewalk.
“No way.” He reached up, feeling along the top of the frame of the interior door. “No, friend of mine manages it.” He came down with the key, showed it to her, turned it in the door. “We’re just gonna use the stairs to get up top. What do you say?”
After a glance of concern up and down the sidewalk, she followed him inside.
The roof was rubber-sealed and lumpy, hedged on all four sides by two-foot brick crenellations. An abandoned wire-and-wood pigeon coop did not obstruct their postcard view of the city, Boston laid out against a silk screen of blue-black, from the financial towers to the mirrored Hancock to the dominant Prudential building, with the busy interstate a twinkling ribbon wrapping it all.
Claire stood at the southern edge, the city side, looking down at the rest of the Town like a woman on a high bridge, the now empty glass in her hand. “Wow.”
“That is the word of the night,” said Doug. He unfolded two lawn chairs from inside the coop, their blue-and-white nylon webbing frayed, the hollow aluminum frames predating cup holders. “Drops off pretty good down the hill, don’t it.”
The rooftops on either side were graded steps climbing to the sky, many with cedar decks, patio furniture, grills. Old, thorny TV antennas mixed with satellite dishes turned like hopeful faces to the southwest. To the left, looking east above Flagship Wharf in the navy yard, jet lights slid out of the sky, stars on a string. Other planes circled overhead in defined holding patterns, a swirling constellation.
The sounds of the Town rose to them as she walked back to the chair next to the wine bottle, her free hand in her pocket. “This sky—is it one of yours?”