They were my crew, my family, along with one of my last true friends, and the emotions that had flooded in when I said good-bye to Eric continued rising as the boat finally pulled away from the dock. Eric waved and Shelby waved and Harry waved and Caitlin turned to stare at the end of the harbor. And then they were heading out toward the mouth of the river, away, getting smaller and smaller, and my tears flowed. In the last few days I had become a faucet and it was embarrassing. I was tougher when I was ten. But there I was, tearing up as my family disappeared into the horizon, and I remembered what Harry had said the difference was between winners and losers in the prize ring.
“When you’re in a fight, Johnny—a real fight, I mean, where you’re both pounding the hell out of each other without an ounce of mercy—you’re going to see death in that ring. He’s standing there, true as life and ugly as a washerwoman. And if you step away from him, you step into the cross that puts you down. That’s just the common sense I was talking about, because there’s no safer place than on the canvas with the ref counting six, seven, eight. But the pug who steps up and gives death an embrace, that’s the boy what climbs the rope to standing and ends up on top. If you’re in a fight like you say, Johnny, make sure you’re the one giving death that hug, make sure you’re the one most willing to die.”
When the boat was gone, while still staring at the horizon, I took the phone out of my pocket and turned the thing on. MENU: OUTGOING CALLS: a Chicago number. I pressed SEND.
“Frenchy,” said Clevenger. “I’ve been waiting for your call.”
“I told you not to call me that.”
“It hurts your feelings?”
“No, it makes me think of Augie. And then all I want to do is slit your throat.”
“Oh, aren’t we suddenly feisty. Okay, boy, what’s on your mind?”
“A lot, but I’m not telling it to you. I’m telling it to the guy pulling your strings. Put him on.”
“No one pulls my strings, pal. The only one you’re talking to is me, and you better talk fast because I have an army of collection agents on your trail.”
I suddenly felt naked. I looked around at the docks and the boats and the houses along the waterfront. “Is that what you call your goons, collection agents?”
“That’s what we are. You have a debt you need to pay, we’re here to collect.”
“Whatever happened all those years ago, you weren’t involved. The guy who hired you was. He’s the one I want to talk to.”
“He doesn’t want to talk to you.”
“Does he know you killed Augie?”
“Don’t bother me with details.”
“That detail is going to cost you your neck.”
“Now you’re a comedian.”
“You hear yet from your boy Holmes?”
“I will.”
“You better lawyer up before you do. I left a note for the cops linking him to Augie’s murder. They’re going to be asking all kinds of questions, and the answer to each of them is you.”
“You know, friend, you’re turning into a thorn. We’re going to have that sit-down sooner than you think.”
“What are you in this for, Clevenger? The money?”
“What else? The same as you.”
“You willing to die for it?”
“I’m willing to kill for it. Isn’t that enough?”
“Not nearly. Put me in touch with the guy who hired you.”
“No chance.”
“Then I’m going to find the son of a bitch on my own.”
III. PHILADELPHIA STORY
“Keep in touch.”
—Augie Iannucci
25. My Strip
THE THOROUGHFARES OF the American landscape have been sanded flat by commerce. Wherever you go, there are the same bold trademarks fighting for your attention, signs for fast-food joints, casual dining joints, rib joints, steak joints, Walmarts and Kmarts, chain hotels and chain motels. You can hit a strip and not know if you are in San Jose or Santa Fe, in Virginia or Maryland or Delaware. And then you approach a strip as anonymous as all the rest and yet in the curve of the boulevard, in the rhythm of the signs, in the juxtaposition of that McDonald’s with that Target with that Sunoco, you feel a vibration in your chest. Because that McDonald’s is where you used to hang when you cut lunch in high school. And that Target used to be the Sears where your mom bought that cheap red bicycle you rode back and forth on your street all afternoon. And that Sunoco is where you filled up your mom’s Chevy that time you were so wasted you drove off with the hose still jammed into your car and tragicomedy ensued. This isn’t just any strip, this is your strip, and suddenly you know you are home.
It should have been no surprise that I was heading back to the old neighborhood. What criminal doesn’t have the urge to return to the scene of the crime? But what did surprise me were the emotions that welled as I drove along my old strip. There was fear, of course, and despair at ever fixing this thing, and a lingering nausea that hadn’t left me from that moment in the gun shop when I knew I had finally been found. But there was also excitement, a quickening of the pulse. If you asked me what I considered my home, I would tell you Patriots Landing, or maybe the leafy Main Line suburb of my early, prosperous youth, but the emotions I was feeling now would put a lie to all of that. Whatever the word home meant, for me, even against my will, it meant Pitchford.
I couldn’t resist a quick visit to Henrietta Road.
I expected the suburban slum of my memory, I expected desolation row, but what I found was a pleasant street of split-level houses in a wide variety of colors. The lawns were mowed, the siding kempt, the spindly trees grown lustrous. My old house, forever the Bernstein house, was well cared for, as were most of the others. In fact, the Grubbins house was the only one on the block that seemed in disrepair, as if our ghosts continued to haunt the place. But more surprisingly, there was none of the despondency I felt behind the FOR SALE signs in Augie’s old neighborhood, none of the hidden desperation behind the FOR SALE signs in Patriots Landing. In fact, on the whole of Henrietta Road there was not a single FOR SALE sign posted, as if the downturn had missed this small slice of the housing market.
A little slice of heaven?
It was difficult to relate the wholesome scene I was driving through to the hardscrabble street of my memory. Henrietta Road seemed an altogether decent place to raise a family. It was already after school when I made my pilgrimage and kids were jumping rope and playing football in the street, as if the game I had seen on my first day had been ongoing for the last thirty years without interruption. There were more blacks in the game now, in fact it was a pretty large majority, but when they interrupted the game to let me pass they eyed me with the same sly surliness with which we had eyed the cars that momentarily forced us from our playing field. I wondered how different Eric’s life would have been if he had grown up on Henrietta Road, playing ball on the street with lifelong friends instead of holed up in his room playing Call of Duty. I wondered if Shelby would have been happier had she jumped double Dutch on the sidewalk with the girls on the corner. The wide and well-curbed streets of Patriots Landing seemed suddenly sterile. What had my blighted aspirations as a boy done to my own children?
But I wasn’t in Pitchford to see the sights or wallow in regret. I had someone to find and I needed to find him fast. I took a left off Henrietta Road, passed Augie’s old street, drove a bit deeper into Pitchford until I took another left. I stopped in front of a split-level with a ragged brick facing and stared for a bit, and as I stared my palms started to itch.
The name DIFFENDALE was painted on a sign above the house number. I wiped my hands on my pants as I climbed the steps to the Diffendale door and waited a beat before knocking. Suddenly as nervous as a schoolkid, I might as well have been polishing my shoes on the back of my pants leg and checking my breath for stink. It is funny how sometimes no matter how far you run, you end up in the exact same place.
“Yes?” said the woman, standing in
the shadows as she answered the door so that only her glistening eyes were lit. And when I didn’t answer right away she spoke slow and loud, as if it was my hearing that was the problem, or I was French. “Can I help you?”
Then, as if through a haze, her eyes narrowed in recognition.
“Hello, Madeline,” I said finally. “Long time no see.”
26. Oh, Madeline
OKAY, I ADMIT, I had fantasized reunion scenes with Madeline Worshack over the years. One of the roles for old girlfriends in our lives is to be the raw meat that feeds our fantasies. We’d meet up by chance, by design, on a beach, in a hotel, behind a Dumpster outside a fast-food joint. She’d be married, she’d be divorced, she’d be something, it didn’t much matter, and it would begin. To be honest, I had fantasized about movie stars and folk singers, about my kids’ teachers and various Little League wives. They say men think about sex every fifty-two seconds, and I was determined to do my share. I’ve even fantasized about my wife, no matter how pathetic that might sound. But number one on the pop charts had always been Madeline Worshack.
Not anymore.
“I shouldn’t have been surprised to see you on my doorstep, J.J.,” said Madeline when we were sitting across from each other in her living room. She had brought out beers from the kitchen, had downed hers in three quick snatches before I had even taken a sip. “What with everybody and his sister showing up asking about you.”
“About me? Who?”
“The police, for one,” she said. “They wondered if I knew how to find you. Something about a suspicious death in Las Vegas. They said it was Augie. Is that true?”
“Yes, sadly. But why would they be looking for me?”
“They said you were a person of interest in the Vegas investigation.”
“What did you tell them?”
“The truth. That I thought you were dead.”
“Good answer,” I said.
Her house was dark. And it wasn’t just that the curtains of the big picture window were closed or that the lamplight was dim. There was a gloom hovering within that house, spreading its tattered wings over Madeline, my Madeline.
“And even before the police came,” she said, “there was someone on that same doorstep asking about J.J. Moretti. A man.”
“Did he give you a name?”
“Something. I don’t remember. But he had a tattoo on his neck. And he was trouble, I could tell. One thing I can spot a mile off now is trouble.”
“What did you tell him?”
“The same. And when he laughed and said he doubted it, I just told him that I didn’t really know and I didn’t really care.”
“Did he buy it?”
“The truth usually goes over. You want another beer?”
“No, thank you, I’m fine.”
“So what happened to Augie?”
I waited a beat before I said, “Drugs.”
“He was always headed there, wasn’t he? Augie should have been pictured in the yearbook under Most Likely to Die Beneath a Highway Overpass.”
Something about that grated. “He died in his bed,” I said.
“You want another beer? Oh yeah, you said no already. But I’ll have one. To celebrate our reunion.” She rose from her chair and turned her back on me as she made her way into the kitchen. “Have you been home since graduation?” she said as she pulled open the fridge.
“This is my first time back in Pitchford. After high school I just wanted to disappear.”
“I know you hated this place,” she said, now standing the kitchen doorway, twisting open her beer, “but it was like you dropped off the edge of the earth.”
I lifted my bottle in salutation. “Mission accomplished.”
“You look the same, J.J. Just a little fatter in the face. And your nose grew. And someone beat the hell out of you. But other than that…”
“You look the same, too,” I lied. “So Madeline, how’s life? Really.”
“You’ve been away for twenty-five years. You don’t get to show up on my door one day like a magician’s trick and ask that question. How’s your stinking life?”
“I’ve had my ups and downs. And downs.”
“You’re not just saying that to cheer me up, are you?”
“My wife wants a divorce, my kids hate me, and I owe too much money to the wrong people.”
“Thank you,” she said. “God, whatever happened to us, anyway?”
“You broke up with me.”
“I thought it was you who broke up with me.”
“Do you want me to go over it word for word? Because I still remember each and every one.”
“That’s the nicest thing I’ve heard in years,” she said. “And you’re right, it was me. I broke your little heart, didn’t I?”
“I got over it,” I said, suddenly surprised at how pissed off I was. “But why’d you do it? I was never quite sure.”
“Richie had a better car,” she said.
“I only had my mom’s old beater.”
“Exactly. And…”
“Go ahead.”
“Forget it.”
“No, go ahead. Why?”
“I was young, and I was pretty. Wasn’t I pretty?”
“You were pretty.”
“And now?”
I peered at her through the murk of time. She was still slim enough, but not a sexy slim anymore, more like the slim of an old battered plank. The prettiness that had captured my breath was roughed down into plainness, the breezy manner was gone, the sexy laugh had turned bitter. I could just make out the curve of her face, more lumpish now than sharp and angular, and there was something slightly misshapen to her features. Her cheekbones had been razor-sharp when she was young, but they had somehow disappeared, beaten down by time or…yeah, that’s what I thought, too.
“You don’t have to answer,” she said. “I can barely look at myself in the mirror. Life’s rougher than I ever imagined. But in high school I needed to be the center of everyone’s attention. And my boyfriend’s attention most of all.”
“You were.”
“Not when I was with you.”
“Then what was?”
“I never knew. I needed you to adore me, but your eyes were always on something else.”
“And Richie Diffendale adored you?”
She let that hang there for a moment. “Sophomore year of college I actually went to find you up in Massachusetts. It was in the middle of…let’s say a difficult time. And I was thinking about you, and how nice we were together, and so I screwed up my courage and hopped a train to Boston. I don’t know what I thought would happen, maybe everything, maybe nothing, at least that we’d fuck again. I figured everyone would know your name, but the surprise was no one did. You weren’t even a ghost. I went to the administration office, but there was no record of you ever even showing up.”
“Boston College didn’t quite work out. I ended up at Wisconsin. It was a better fit.”
“And you never called to let me know.”
“I’m surprised Richie let you go up looking for me. He always seemed the jealous type.”
“I wasn’t with him then. We broke up at the end of the summer after graduation.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“You had driven that truck off to Florida already. But I broke up with Richie before I went to Maryland. I wanted to be totally free when I started my new life.”
“How’d that work out?”
“Not so well,” she said. “I wasn’t ready for college academically. I had played around too much in high school. And then I got involved with a lacrosse player.”
“Lacrosse players,” I said, shaking my head.
“I crashed and I burned. I was flunking out, I was feeling scared, I was totally lost. I needed to be rescued. And the thing is, J.J., I hoped it was you who would swoop down and do the rescuing.”
“Me?”
“Funny, huh?”
“I didn’t know.”
“How coul
d you?”
“Why me?”
“Because of all the boys I had known, you were the nice one. And that’s what I needed then, someone nice. It’s an underrated quality.”
“By the hot girls, yeah. So what happened?”
“I was sitting on the green in front of the library, wearing long sleeves on a hot day—I’ve gone through bad times since, but nothing is as bad as teenaged bad—needing desperately to be rescued, and I looked up and there he was, like a gift.”
“Richie Diffendale.”
She took a long swallow of her beer. “And the gift keeps giving.”
“I never liked him.”
She scraped at the label on her bottle with a thumbnail. “Richie always thought you guys, you and Ben and Augie, took the Grubbins money.”
“Is that what Richie thought?”
“Over the years I’ve told him he was crazy, but when that guy with the tattoo on his neck showed up a few weeks ago asking his questions, Richie just mashed my face in it. It proved he was right all along, he said.”
“There’s a reason I never liked him.”
“Is it true?”
“You’re asking if I took the money?”
“Yes. Did you take it, J.J.?”
“I live in a suburb in Virginia. If had the money I’d be living on a beach instead, don’t you think?”
“Well, you wouldn’t be living here, that’s for sure.”
I looked at my bottle, took a quick swig, kept looking at it as I said, “I always thought Tony took it.”
“Tony?”
“Well, it was his house. He was the only one who might have known something was there. And he was selling drugs all through high school. Maybe he decided to go for the big score.”
“It wasn’t Tony.”
“How do you know for sure?”
“Because Tony actually does live here.”
My neck tightened in raw adolescent fear. “Tony Grubbins is in Pitchford?”
“He has a drywall business. I see his truck go by now and then.”
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