by Chuck Hogan
“I guess I’m worried,” she said.
Maybe she did know. Maybe she knew and she accepted it and she was only waiting for him to come clean to her. Clear the air. Put all this behind them.
A fantasy. He turned slowly, giving her plenty of time to break off her scrutiny of him. “What are you worried about?”
She shrugged inside the dugout jacket. “Testifying, I guess. Living in the same town as these people. Things like that.”
She looked back at him on Things like that, searching him—was she?—and Doug held his expression, nearly impossible, looking into her eyes, wondering suddenly who was lying to whom.
Had Frawley put her up to questioning him? This was Jem’s voice inside his head, he knew that, and it twisted his stomach.
Would she wear a wire for Frawley?
“He told me there were some developments in the case,” she said.
Don’t ask.
Doug nodded, checking the game, keeping his eye on the ball. Developments?
Don’t. Let it go.
“Must be a long process,” he said, “an investigation like that.” He had hardly felt the words leaving his throat. “Probably still a long ways off.”
Why was she nodding? Was she waiting for more from him? Baiting him here?
Don’t.
Going crazy. “Maybe if you just don’t think about it,” he said. Were they communicating in code now? Don’t think about me that way—think about me the way I am now. “Put it out of your mind. Don’t deal with it unless you have to.”
Her eyes were on him again, and he tried to guess her emotion. Relief? Surprise? Was she hearing this other thing in his words?
Do not ask.
Developments.
He had to know. Maybe she wanted to tell him—maybe she was trying to warn him here.
Or maybe she didn’t know anything. His head was pounding like his heart had traded places with his brain.
Don’t.
His words caught her just as she was looking away in relief. “Why?” He shrugged it, like he didn’t have a care in the world. “What are these developments?”
And she came back to look at him—they were searching each other—and he could tell by her eyes that he had made a disastrous mistake.
She turned away first, looking down at the ballcap of the boy sleeping against his father’s shoulder in the seat before her. Doug had been found out.
“Fingerprints,” she told him.
Doug nodded, frantic to unmake his mistake, trying to swamp her doubts with forced enthusiasm. “Fingerprints, wow.” Whose? “I didn’t even know they still solved crimes that way.”
She shrugged.
“Anyway,” he went on, headlong, “you definitely shouldn’t worry. Not about your role in it. There’s really nothing to worry about, that I can see.”
The silence that came over them was charged, the game going on before their eyes and not mattering. Nothing mattered suddenly. The wave swept past and again failed to lift them. Then another sort of commotion—someone slapped Doug hard on the shoulder, and he turned fast, expecting Adam Frawley and federal badges and guns.
It was Wally the Green Monster, Fenway Park’s furry green mascot, demanding a high five.
People around them pointed to the electronic scoreboard over the centerfield bleachers, the seat numbers flashing there. Claire was one of four lucky winners of a free pancake breakfast at Bickford’s.
The guy inside Wally said, “Jesus, man, lighten up,” and Doug stuck out his hand, accepting the Green Monster’s salute and watching him dance away.
Claire looked bewildered.
“Free pancakes,” Doug said, riding the interruption. “Not bad.”
“Sure,” she said.
If he had any chance of salvaging things with her, it would have to be away from the ballpark crowd, alone. “You okay here right now, or… ?”
She turned and looked straight into his eyes. “Let’s go back to my place.”
Doug blinked. “Your place?”
Her hand came out of its sleeve and took his. “On one condition.”
“Okay, sure.”
“You can’t stay over.”
“Okay,” he agreed. He would have agreed to almost anything.
Only after driving back to the Town in near silence—his hand leaving hers only to shift gears—as he neared Packard Street, did he ask:
“Why can’t I stay over?”
She turned toward him. “‘Mornings after’ are so excruciating, and I don’t want that with you. Morning only raises questions. I’m tired of questions.”
He eased down her block, pulling up outside her door, shifting into neutral. He idled there, not turning off the engine.
“You’re not parking?” she said.
Doug looked over at the light shining above her front door. “Oh, man.”
“What?”
He couldn’t go in there. Not this way. There was no future in sleeping with her without telling her everything first.
Her hand went slack in his but he would not release it. All the cars parked up and down the block—the sleuth could have been watching from any one of them. “How about I come back first thing in the morning instead? We’ll make breakfast, we’ll do the whole ‘morning after’ thing first, get that out of the way. All those questions. What do you say?”
Disbelief in her eyes, but also concern. The dash vent fans floated the edges of her hair.
The urge was powerful, and for a moment he relented. “Oh, fuck it, no. Christ, what am I…”
But then he remembered the ballpark and how it had felt sitting there, thinking he had lost her. He still had a chance here. Don’t blow this too.
“No,” he made himself say. “I can’t.”
She yielded a little. “If it’s about leaving…”
He saw it in her eyes then: she was afraid it was ending. All she was doing here was trying to hold on to him a little while longer.
“Look,” he said, “there’s plenty of time, right? Tell me there is. Because I have a long night of second-guessing ahead of me.”
“What about work tomorrow morning?”
What was she asking him? Was she asking him something?
“I quit that,” he said. “I told you, I’m ready for a life change. I’m committed to it. What about you?”
“Me?”
“Your if-only place. Us blowing this town. Together.”
She searched his face, reaching for his eyebrow, touching the smooth scar. “I don’t know.”
Yet her indecision lifted Doug’s heart. Whatever she knew or had figured out about him—she did not tell him no.
“Pancakes, maybe,” said Doug. “You like bacon? Sausage or bacon?”
She looked at their intertwined fingers, then pulled her hand free. She opened her door, swinging one leg out, looking back for him.
“If I walk you up there,” he said, “if I get anywhere near your door …”
With the interior light on now, he felt anxious, exposed. She read more into it than that. “Is this good night or good-bye?”
He reached for her, pulling her back inside. The kiss was deep and allencompassing, and she surrendered to it, gripping him tight. She didn’t want to let him go. Maybe never, and maybe no matter what.
“Good night,” he told her, stroking her hair. “Definitely good night.”
35
DUST
JEM, IN MOTION.
On foot patrol in the Town, feeling the air currents curl around him as he walked. If it had been foggy, moisture giving character to the air, then others would have witnessed the slipstream in his wake, would have stared in awe at this native son trailing a flowing cloak of smoke. Then they would have understood.
Some knew already, a respect he felt but never deigned to acknowledge. Their hesitant glances, the quick look-aways. It hurt their eyes to stare. But their esteem for him was evident in their silence, the hush that fell over people and children as he passed.<
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He was carrying this Town on his back. All his concentration, all his brainpower was focused on remembering the Town as it had once been, and returning it to glory.
Fucking Duggy.
Jem fingered the tea bag in his pocket, the smooth plastic packet. As he walked, he envisioned the Town in flames. Cleansing flames, flames that built, destroying the unworthy, flames that cauterized and forged. The row houses and triple-deckers burning clean and new.
At the corner of Trenton and Bunker Hill, another new dry cleaner’s. Yuppies passing him unaware. In a purging fire the dry cleaners with their chemicals would be the first to go up. Then back across the bridge would go the yuppies, ants fleeing a burning log. On paper, they owned the properties, but Jem still owned the streets. In the way that animals own the forest, he owned the Town.
He felt the itchy flecks of Colonial brick flowing in his blood.
Fergie. Jem could listen to him talk about the old Town for hours, having just left the wise man sitting in his flower shop walk-in cooler. The Florist knew about tenacity, about pride. The ex-wrestler and ex-boxer wore it on his face, the defiance of a window all cracked up but unbroken. Fergie knew how to win and win ugly.
Fucking Duggy. Treason and betrayal all around Jem. Everyone weakening and succumbing to change, to progress, and Jem, the glue, single-handedly holding everything together. Patching up the cracks. After Fergie it would all be up to him.
On the fucked-up clock face of the Town—as off-kilter as Fergie’s—Pearl Street ticked up toward midnight. The witching hour was where Jem was born, lived, and would die. He was proud of the house’s disrepair, the way it taunted the refurbished triples up and down the street, houses that had gone condo like whores transformed into virgins. All the sellouts who bailed: the Kenneys, Hayeses, Phalons, O’Briens. If it had been firstborns the yuppies were paying top dollar for, these traitorous fucks would have placed their kids’ school portraits in the classifieds section of The Charlestown Patriot. Moving out ain’t moving up—it’s giving up, it’s pussy.
Where the sidewalk plummeted like the first drop on the old Nantasket Beach roller coaster, Jem walked in the door. He had duct-taped an old cardboard box where Duggy had busted out the glass—solved that window rattle anyway. At the bottom step, he stopped and looked at Krista’s door. Thinking about the next generation produced in him a powerful urge to see Shyne. His eye fell upon the old pictures standing on the hall table: the house as it had been in the sixties; an old jalopy parked on the slant with his dad unloading something—swag, most likely—from the trunk; his parents’ wedding-party photo, Kennedy/Johnson campaign buttons under each groomsman’s rose boutonniere; him and Krista in rompers, sitting on a blanket out on the back lot when it was grass.
He walked in without knocking, down the dark-wood hall, finding Shyne in her high chair as usual, abandoned in front of the tube. Her hands, face, and hair were smeared with bloodlike ravioli sauce while she zoned out on the goddamn purple dinosaur hopping around on a pogo stick. Sauce in her ears too.
“Hey, kid,” he said. She did not turn. He touched the back of her neck, a clean spot there, but he might just as well have been touching a Shyne doll. “Uh-oh!” sang the purple dinosaur, and she stared like she was receiving some coded message, unable to look away.
The toilet flushed and Krista came out of the bathroom wearing a Daisy Duck T-shirt and saggy-ass bikini underwear.
“You didn’t cook nothing, did you?” He didn’t even want dinner, only to point out one more thing at which she had failed.
“The fuck do I know when you’re gonna be home anymore?” she said.
But he had neither the time for nor the interest in fighting—and this, she noticed. A weird little moment of mind reading between the calendar twins, and suddenly she knew exactly where he had come from, whom he had met, what he had in his pocket. Almost like she could see inside his shorts to the little tea bag nestled there. A look crossed her face—hunger, want—and Jem saw it. She knew he saw it.
“What?” he said, more taunting than angry—another chance to punch home his authority.
She used to say, after every slow, smoky exhale, Don’t tell him, Jem. Every single hit. Stronger than her taste for dust was her fear that she would be found out by Duggy. Everybody needed a parent or a spouse to run around behind. Come to think of it, Jem spent a lot of his time running around behind Duggy’s back too.
He stared at his sister, the failure. To be a slut was one thing, but a failed slut? That took something almost like talent.
Now he is as disgusted by you as I am.
Jem almost said this. Yet even he held out hope for a turnaround from Duggy. It had happened before. The kernel of a plan was already forming in Jem’s head.
Maybe, Kris, I can save even you.
Anything was within his power. But now he was furious again, staring her down, hating the thing that he loved. He bent down and kissed the top of Shyne’s stained head and tasted sauce. The kiss said, She will not be a fuckup like you, and at the same time, I alone can save us all.
“I’ll be upstairs,” he said—knowing that she knew what that meant, knowing that she would sit down here in her saggy-ass panties and stare up at the water-stained ceiling knowing he was up there getting high without her. Because you couldn’t hold up your end of the deal. Because you couldn’t hold on to Duggy, and now it falls to me.
Upstairs in the cramped air of his hi-fi room, he dialed up the Sox on his stolen cable, his big-ass TV, and drew the tea bag from his pocket. He got his stuff from the cabinet over the kitchen sink and set it all out on the coffee table, slicing open the tea bag with the tip of his X-Acto knife. In a shot glass nicked from Tully’s years before, he mixed the milligrams of magic with an equal pinch of dry Kool-Aid powder. Then he worked up a little saliva, drooled it into the glass, and watched the dust take to the spit and fade, becoming one.
He thought of that dude at the halfway house those years ago, the four-eyed former CVS pharmacist who in his spare time made lung-busting bongs out of bicycle pumps, and who was eventually bounced back into lockup for cooking speed in his room. He had told Jem that dust was medically not a hallucinogen but in fact classified as a “deliriant.” Jem had never forgotten that. A deliriant. That was the fucking balls.
He swirled the glass, the mix turning cherry red. Then he tapped out a Camel unfiltered and dipped the tip into the scooped bottom of the shot glass, soaking up paste. His thumb came down on his Irish-flag Zippo, the bloody tip flaring as he inhaled.
He took it all in, so deep he thought he might never send it back out again, his chest expanding like the universe.
The atmosphere in the room depressurized as his head sank back and sighed. Things changed. Sounds—the TV, his heartbeat—separated from their sources, jettisoned like escape pods from the mother ship, tumbling free. Time stopped for him and he drifted out of it, watching it slide greasily by. The play-by-play man called a home run, and minutes later Jem watched the ball sail into the bleachers.
Wind back the clock. His words, speaking about the Town. Wind back the clock.
A Texas voice talked to him out of the TV, Roger Clemens yelling at him from the mound between pitches. “She’s the G, you stupid fucking dicksuck!”
Jem said, Fuck, Rocket—you think I don’t know that?
“The hell is Duggy? Where is he?”
What do I look like, his goddamn keeper?
“Fuckin’ A, man, you do. Don’t shake me off here. I will plunk you in the ass.”
You couldn’t plunk fucking Mo Vaughn’s fat ass, you washed-up has-been.
“Don’t Buckner this, bitch!”
Well, fuck you, you fat fucking… oh, shit…
Clemens was now a big, soft purple dinosaur in a Red Sox cap, singing, “Uh-oh!”
Jem’s jellyfish brain glowed in the room. The transformation had already begun, his blood turning into mercury. Jem stripped to boxers and flip-flops and flapped down to the basement.
He hit it hard, chest presses and forty-pound curls, heart thumping like a body falling down an endless flight of stairs. The dank basement smelled of the sea, the iron weights clanking like anchor chains.
The camo kids. His foot soldiers. It would start with them, this rebel army he was putting together. Roving bands of Townie kids taking back their streets. Patriots planning for the second Battle of Bunker Hill, winding back the clock. The red, white, and blue of their bloodshot eyes.
He finished with power squats and climbed back up the stairs, his legs and arms aching the way bent steel aches. He shut his door on the world and stood there as the hallway wavered at either end. Jem the deliriant.
He flipped on the hanging lamp over the mirror, his body so pumped that there was no longer any distinction between flexing and not flexing. Jem was flexed. Every part of him blood-tanned and tumescent.
Every part.
The shorts came off. Facing himself in the mirror under the swinging lamp, he gripped his ass with his other hand, and his third hand—had to be—pulled back on the bank manager’s hair, making her want it, making her work for it. The purple dinosaur pounding at the door threw him off, the bank manager momentarily becoming Krista, but he concentrated hard, and by the time he corrected himself he was too close for Kleenex.
His acid spew scorched the vanity in the shape of a question mark, Jem finishing and stepping back, decreeing, “That shit is fucked-up.”
In the hot shower, his pig’s dick hung swollen and pink between his legs. He gave the nozzle his back, shutting his eyes—the water jet turning to fire on his shoulders, the nozzle like a welder’s torch spewing flame. Sparks danced off his body like spray, the blue flame fashioning something of him, forging a new being, a man of iron transformed in a baptism of fire.
He knew now what he had to do. What the Man of Iron—formerly the Man of Glue—must do.
He dressed in black and returned to the basement, to his grandfather’s old steamer trunk under the stairs. He worked the combination on the lock, and the hinges—arthritic from the dankness—groaned as the trunk opened its mouth. He lifted his gramps’s uniform off the weapons and trophies the old man had brought back from the Pacific—his rifle, the swords, the half-dozen grenades cling-wrapped in an oversized egg carton—along with some other small arms he had tucked away, and some cash, that was the seed out of which the great rebellion would soon grow. From the bottom of this trunk, he pulled out the Foodmaster bag, then closed and relocked his treasure chest.