What I found was Fighting Harry Conahan, a bowlegged drunk with a high-pitched raspy voice, a beat old wooden fishing boat dubbed the Left Hook, and who, in the distant past, was one Sugar Ray Robinson straight right to the jaw from the middleweight boxing championship of the world.
“So what’s got your cat all in a twist there, Johnny? What are you running from?”
“Someone from my past. It’s not important.”
“Important enough to the guy chasing you. What’d you do?”
“Only what anyone else would have done.”
“Then why is he after you?”
“Because I did it to him.”
Harry lifted up one of his clear shots of tequila and tossed it down his throat with a clatter of coughs. “God that feels bad, God that feels just awful. I’m getting too old to drink like this, and too old to stop. You sure you two just can’t work it out?”
“It’s too late for that.”
“And you can’t stand up to him?”
“It wouldn’t be much of a fight. All I want to make certain is that you and I are set.”
“You and me, we been planning about this for years, haven’t we? Sure we’re set. And tomorrow, is it?”
“The sooner I get away, the better.”
“Tomorrow, then.”
“Two-ish.”
“What does religion have to do with it?”
“Harry?”
“Some of the toughest lugs I ever fought was Jewish. Herbie Kronowitz, with a left as hard as a hammer. And LaMotta’s mother was Jewish, though not everyone knows that.”
I stared at the old man for a bit. Sometimes I thought he was certifiable, and sometimes I was sure he was just playing with me, and then sometimes I…
“Two, Harry. Two. I’ll be at the spot we worked out at two. We’ll capsize my boat, spill some blood, and then you’ll take me to that fishing shack you have up the Chickahominy. I’ll stay there until the story dies down. Does your friend still have that sailboat we talked about, the one that we planned on taking down?”
“Sure he does, if he’s still around.”
“Harry?”
“I mean, who the hell knows? My friend with the boat, he might not be alive no more.”
“Might not be alive?”
“He might have got hit by a van out in Suffolk, a white van coming out of nowhere when he was just crossing the street to an AA meeting.”
“Harry.”
“I always knowed them meetings were trouble. I don’t know why we just can’t take mine.”
“It’s too small and it’s too old. And I was sort of counting on a sailboat for going island to island. In any event, if you and your boat disappear right after I disappear, people will get ideas. That’s why you’re putting your boat in storage and telling everyone you’re visiting family in Michigan.”
“All right, don’t be fretting like an old hen, now. You still got the cash we talked about, right?”
“I still have the cash.”
“One thing you can always get around here is a boat. The only thing they got more of in this world than people buying boats is people selling boats. You sure you want to do this, Johnny?”
“I don’t want to do this; I have to do this. One man is dead already, and they just missed their shot at me. I stay, my family’s in danger. I run, same thing, the message will be relayed somehow: come back or your family’s dead. But if I die, Harry, if a terrible accident befalls me when I’m out fishing, then the danger ends. My family will mourn for a bit, sure, but the life insurance will see them through. It’s not like I’m doing them much good anyway.”
“You’d be surprised.”
“I’ve been out of work for over a year.”
“I been out longer than that and damn proud of it.”
“And, to be truthful, I haven’t been getting along too well with any of them.”
“All the more reason to stay and work it out. Don’t want to be leaving on bad terms.”
“That’s the only kind of terms we have anymore. You’re not getting cold feet, are you, Harry?”
“Me? I don’t get cold feet, except for them circulation issues I been having. I’ll be there, just like I promised. After all, you’ve been paying me all these years. What did you call it?”
“A retainer.”
“That’s it. So I’ll step up like we talked about.” He looked around. “But I’ll miss it here.”
“Schooners? It’s a dump.”
“But it’s my dump.”
“We’ll find you someplace better with an island beat. When the coast clears and everything’s set we’ll head on down. To someplace in the Caribbean maybe, or Central America. Or Brazil. I hear the girls are hot in Brazil, Harry.”
“I bet they are.” He nodded gleefully for a moment and then thought better of it. “And they sure would be hot for me if I was fifty years younger.”
“Didn’t you tell me that everyone loves an old man on a boat?”
“I told you that, sure, but that don’t make it true.”
“Just bring your passport, Harry, and we’ll have a time together.”
“No disputing that,” said Harry, as he picked up his second shot and stared through it like it was a crystal ball. “And you never know, maybe even a good time, too.”
16. Splitsville
AFTER MEETING WITH Harry and plotting my escape, I drove slowly back to Patriots Landing, thinking about my sun-drenched future, my blighted present, the disappointments of my past. The failure at the heart of my relationship with my wife was too familiar not to have been solely mine. What had happened between Caitlin and me, twice now actually, was the same thing that had happened with all the girls in between our two stints together, and the girl before ever I laid eyes on Caitlin with whom the pattern had started. As I drove ever closer to my new life, my thoughts inevitably drifted back to her. There is always one lurking in some hidden crevice of a man’s heart, the avatar of perfect, youthful love, the one that got away and forever after remains the standard by which other lovers are judged, and for me that one was Madeline Worshack.
Madeline Worshack was the prettiest girl in Pitchford. She didn’t have the insistent good looks of the cheerleaders, with their aggressive curves, their bright blonde hair, their lips like glossy cherries ready to be plucked with your teeth. But Madeline’s eyes were green and her hair was red and her cheekbones were high and lightly freckled and sometimes when I looked at her my breath caught in my throat. I had been in crush with Madeline since junior high, but had pined at a distance as she went out with a series of boys both older and better looking than I was. As a sophomore in high school she dated the captain of the football team. Compared with the captain of the football team, what the hell was I?
Shit out of luck.
But somehow something changed in me after that night at the Grubbins house. Whereas before, Madeline knew me as just another of the boys who was tongue-tied in her presence, late in the spring of my junior year she looked at me anew and, even though she had a boyfriend at Penn State and a rash of admirers that spanned the spectrum of high-school achievement, when she looked at me she suddenly liked what she saw.
“Hey, J.J. How’s it going?”
“Who? Me?”
“Yes, you, silly.”
“I’m okay, I guess.”
“Have you been working out? You look…different.”
“I guess so, yeah. Pumping that iron. Doing those reps.”
“Are you going to Francine’s party tonight?”
“I wasn’t really planning on it.”
“Did she invite you?”
“It must have slipped her mind.”
“I’ll talk to her.”
“No, it’s okay. I’ve got something going on anyway.”
“I’ve been thinking about you.”
“About me?” I said, my palms beginning to itch.
“What have you been up to?”
“Nothing.”
“I bet not. You look like you’ve been up to all kinds of things. We’ll talk at the party, okay?”
I hadn’t developed a six-pack overnight, or biceps, or a fastball to blow away the opposition, or even a shining intellect that made the debaters step back in awe, but there was something surely different about me. Nothing is more alluring, I suppose, than a secret. If I could take a stack of cash and bury it in every high-school kid’s basement, there’s no telling what the youth of America could achieve.
What I achieved—fist pump—was Madeline Worshack.
I’d had other crushes in my life, and by then I’d had sex with a girl I didn’t much care for, but you could say Madeline, as the first girl whom I both dated and loved, was my first real girlfriend. Inevitably, having no idea what I was supposed to do as a boyfriend and overcome with that potent combination of desire, cockiness, and fearful jealousy, I ended up spending as much time as possible with her, primarily at the expense of my time with Augie and Ben. It would be easy enough to cast Madeline Worshack as the Yoko Ono of our little gang, she sure had the cheekbones for it, but it wouldn’t quite be accurate. Even before Madeline, things had changed between the three of us, and not for the better.
You know how when you’re in high school and you have sex with someone one night, the next day you end up avoiding your partner in the hallways? It’s not a purposeful snub, it’s just that after such raw intimacy, you’re not sure how to act in less intimate surroundings, so you punt. That’s sort of the way we felt, Augie and Ben and I, the first couple of days after getting away with the money. The three of us had crossed a line together and we weren’t sure how to behave with each other thereafter. Maybe it was simple awkwardness, or maybe we were trying to cover our tracks, make ourselves less believable as a criminal crew, but it felt to me like some deeper chasm had opened. It was as if each of us was a mirror for the other’s soul and we suddenly didn’t like what we saw.
So we were finding fewer reasons to hang out together as the saga of the Grubbins house played out for all of Pitchford to follow. The day after the police swarmed along Henrietta Road, the DA announced a drug seizure of epic proportions and flashed pictures of the haul on all the television stations. Tony Grubbins was sent to juvie in a different part of the state. Derek Grubbins was arrested at his jamboree, extradited to Pennsylvania, and sent to jail, directly to jail, without ever passing home. The Grubbins house was seized by the state and the whole aftermath looked to be as clean as we could have hoped, until the weirdness began.
First, the neighborhood was infested with motorcyclists, Devil Rams buzzing through the streets of Pitchford like wasps, eyeing everyone with suspicion. Whenever I heard the whine of a motorcycle engine I ducked inside the house, hoping to avoid getting caught by one of those maniacs with a guilty look splashed across my face. Then the empty Grubbins house was broken into, not once but repeatedly, over and again, as if something was being desperately searched for. The place would be plagued by break-ins for months, for years actually, as first the motorcycle gang, and later treasure seekers, sought out the missing money.
But the burglaries didn’t stop at the Grubbins house. There were rumors that the cops who had found the drugs had stolen boatloads of cash, rumors that spread like wildfire throughout the community and were reported in the press. And the rumors only increased when the houses of a number of cops were broken into and their families violently threatened by gangbangers with bandannas over their faces. No one was seriously hurt, thank God, but we three knew what it was about, that the gang was blaming the cops, just as Ben had expected when he made the call. There was cash in the crawl space, the police showed up, the cash went missing; what other conclusion could be drawn?
Eventually the state police were called in to calm the waters. The cops who found the stash were questioned by the attorney general’s office and publicly cleared. At the same time, the press reported an all-out search for an elderly male who made the 911 call to the police. It was all such a mess, no one could figure out what the hell was going on. No one but Augie, Ben, and me. Though we never talked about it, not even when we were alone. It was all too big, too scary, we were too afraid of being overheard, afraid of being seen even whispering one to the other. All we said when we passed each other in the hallway was a soft “Still here,” which was both mordant as hell and amazingly comforting.
The first time we lit up after, together, in the woods by the cherry tree, we were all so freaked about the possibility of lurkers that we ended up not talking at all. No snarky opinions about movies, no rude fantasizing about girls. Sitting in silence as our brains got wacked by the weed, it was like getting high alone. Even so, when the drug hit I was filled with such an acute paranoia—every corner of my body screaming in panic—that the whole experience was far more terrifying than sublime. In every brush of the wind through the trees I heard the roar of motorcycles. After a few more attempts, where I ended up curled in a petrified ball as the world rose up high to crush me, I stopped smoking weed altogether, and so did Ben. And Augie, not willing to quit getting high, started hanging out with a different group of heads, using, according to the rumors, far stronger stuff.
And then the newspapers reported that Derek Grubbins had turned state’s evidence and was spilling all he knew about the drug operation of the Devil Rams. Half the cyclists were arrested based on his testimony and the other half stopped hanging around Pitchford. The Grubbins house was finally sold to a family named Morris, and Pitchford gossip moved from the theft to more intriguing matters, such as the Madigans and the Digbys switching partners like at a square dance. Everything calmed, leaving the three of us one final task.
“What are you doing?” said Ben.
“I’m counting up my share,” said Augie.
“What does that matter?” said Ben. “We’re going to be here all night as it is; just help us split it up and get on home.”
“I want to know how much we have.”
“A heap,” I said. “We’ve each got a goddamned heap of money.”
We were in Augie’s living room with the doors locked, the curtains drawn, the lights low, the furniture arrayed around us as a shield, and music playing loudly from the stereo to drown out any of our words that might actually reach past the front door. Augie’s parents were in Pittsburgh for a couple of nights as his father received treatment for the kidney ailment that would eventually kill him, which would have been a perfect excuse for a party, but that night we three were attending to more serious business. Ben and I were taking scoops of money out of the buckets and dividing them into equal piles of three. Even with all the bundled bills, the job wasn’t as easy as you would think. Some of the bundles had a few bills missing that we had to account for, and there were a lot of loose bills, too, hundreds and fifties and piles of twenties and tens, so we had to go through every bill to make sure the division was even. Ben and I figured it was more important to get our splits exact than to get an exact count. We could estimate the thing pretty damn well, and the numbers were boggling.
“I want to know exactly,” said Augie. “Unlike you dolts, I’ve got plans for my share.”
Ben lifted his chin and calmly put down the stack of bills he was working on. “What kind of plans?”
“You know, bub,” said Augie. “Plans.”
“No,” said Ben. “I don’t know. What plans could you mean other than burying your share back in your crawl space like we all agreed?”
“That would be such a waste,” said Augie. “I’ve been reading up on this money shit at the library.”
“You’ve been in the library?” said Ben. “That’s enough of a story right there to make the Daily News. What did you do, Augie, ask the librarian for everything she had on what to do with a huge haul of stolen cash?”
“I’m just getting myself informed about handling money, now that I’ve got me some. Inflation’s almost five percent, man, and it was double that just a couple years ago. Do you know what inflation can do to cash? And
the market’s shooting up like a rocket ship. We’re losing value every day this crap sits in a hole. But there are banks in the islands that will keep our IDs safe and pay interest to boot. We can make stock plays from there.”
“Stock plays.”
“Have you guys ever heard of this guy called Buffett?”
“Jimmy Buffett?”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“But you’re the one talking about islands, right?”
“Yeah, man. Aruba.”
“And you’re going to take your share down to Aruba?” said Ben.
“Or Bermuda,” said Augie. “Or the Caymans. We could make a load and at the same time grab a couple days at the beach to work on our tans. You need to think these things through, Ben. You need to be smart. I’ll take your split there, too, if you want.”
“And what if they catch you at the border with all that cash?”
“They won’t.”
“And what if it gets in the papers that you had in your possession hundreds of thousands of dollars? What do you think happens to us?”
“It’s my money.”
“The minute you get picked up, Augie, we’re all dead. You can’t just think about yourself anymore.”
“No one else is thinking about me, that’s for sure.”
“I hear you’ve been shoving coke up your nose like it’s Afrin.”
“Who told you that?”
“Is it true? Have you been taking the money and spending it on coke?”
“No. Ben, man. No. I haven’t spent a penny. I haven’t even looked at the buckets since we buried them. I swear.”
“Then how are you getting the shit?”
“I just am.”
“How?”
“What are you now, a fucking lawyer?”
“You took some from the stash, didn’t you?” I said.
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