The Penny Ferry da-2

by Rick Boyer

  "I want to thank you, Sam, for all you've done."

  "Hmmmph! Should be me who's thankin' you, Doc. We almost got that guy today. Next time, I promise you: I won't miss."

  "Call it a hunch, Sam, but if I were you I'd take that cash out of your safe for a week or so."

  "Huh? Why?"

  I shrugged my shoulders and repeated that it was just a hunch.

  Sam went in and reappeared with a shopping bag full of bills. He asked us to drive him to Somerville. We did. Following his directions, we soon found ourselves winding our way through tiny labyrinthine alleyways that were lined with small businesses dealing with the automotive aftermarket. Muffler shops, radiator repair, engine rebuilding, front ends, rear ends, bumpers, windshields, tires, shocks- the Cambridge-Somerville line was to cars what Boston's South End was to leather and shoes. We passed a radiator joint and I smelled noxious fumes of zinc galvanizing and acid baths. We stopped at Nissenbaum's Auto Parts on Columbia, right down the street from the Nike running-shoe factory.

  I went inside with Sam; Maurice Nissenbaum put the cash in his big safe, gave Sam a signed slip, and we returned to Dependable where we finally parted. Sam left on that rumbly, popping old Honda with Popeye, goggles and all, right behind him. It seemed as if we could hear him three blocks out of sight. At home I poured large dollops of Laphroaig into brandy snifters and added some room-temperature soda water. We sat outside on the flagged terrace and looked at the two pink dogwood trees that were in full bloom. Joe and I stuck our noses down into the bowl-like glasses and inhaled the warm malty smell of the whisky. Mary sipped on Amaretto liqueur.

  My lawn was bright green and wide. In one cozy corner of it was a cluster of paper-birch trees, and in the midst of this copse was a rough wooden table with benches. Moe and I like to sit there and play chess on a crisp fall day. Moe brings his old samovar and we make Russian caravan tea and play and push our little chess clocks down and he beats me. And we pretend we're Tolstoi and Chekhov. We wear warm sweaters in the afternoon and play balalaika music on a tiny cassette player. The birches are gold and white, and it's very Russian.

  Mary has part of the side yard bounded by a walk-through arbor. The side of the house there is set with some Florentine tiles and a bronze wall fountain. There are Lombardy poplars around the other two sides, and two gas lamps. It's a romantic Latin courtyard, and only about twenty feet square. My favorite spot is still under construction, and borders on the small garage-sized guest cabin far back on the lawn. It is enclosed by birches and wild evergreens and wide bamboo stakes. Inside this tiny court are boulders, a pond, a curved concrete footbridge, a small torii, and two dozen dwarf bonsai in old pots or pots made by Mary, or set into rock crevices, or lining the miniature waterfall. Then in the middle, surrounded by all this miniaturized countryside, is a tiny teak teahouse with ungawa and rice screens. By the time I'm a hundred I may finish it. It's only forty feet square, but inside it one has the feeling of great space, privacy, and timelessness. Not a lot of talking in there. No laughing or loud noise. Cats but not dogs. You go there alone, or with someone you really care about, and sit quietly. Little bronze temple bells chime in the wind, and the squat bronze lantern by the miniature lake glows, and you can sometimes see the dull golden flash of the bug-eyed goldfish who live in the lake. I wanted to be there right now. I wanted to be drinking hot Keemun, not Scotch, and meditate on the past few days. I wanted the dust and events to settle, find their place, and begin to make sense.

  "Charlie! Charlie! My God, how many times do we have to ask you?"

  "Hmmm?"

  "What's it going to be tonight, rack of lamb or bouillabaisse?"

  "Oh, whatever." I got up and paced the flagstones. I looked up at our house. It looked big. I felt insulated and spoiled. Then I thought of what I'd read about Sacco and Vanzetti. Sacco and his family lived in a tiny cottage in Stoughton. He worked eighty-hour weeks and kept a big garden. He gave his spare vegetables to the "needy" families in the area. Vanzetti was a boarder in North Plymouth who, if the testimony of his neighbors in that town could be believed, made pennies at a time, yet gave the kids in the neighborhood dimes. Not only was their testimony as to his good character and generosity not believed by the jury (because the neighbors, too, were Italians and therefore in league with him), but his giving away of dimes was taken as evidence that he had stolen fifteen grand from the Slater and Morrill shoe company in South Braintree. Of course this line of thinking failed to explain why both Sacco and Vanzetti had none of this fortune in their hands, and why they then perversely chose to continue to live in tiny workingmen's dwellings and to work eighty-hour weeks.

  Looking up at our red-brick house on Old Stone Mill Road, which looked very big and splendorous, I thought of Sacco and Vanzetti and all the old ladies on the oil-soaked floors who were deaf from the looms, and felt guilty.

  "I think we should sell this place, Mary," I announced, "and get something a bit smaller. What do you think?"

  "What?"

  "Well, don't you think it's a bit big for us? Jack and Tony are off at school now, and I just thought-"

  "You're losing your mind, Charlie. Okay, sit out here and moon and pout all you want. We're not selling this house; we've got way too much at stake here. And a large part of it's mine, kiddo. You forgot that? See you later; Joe and I are going in to make bouillabaisse. And if you're not a good boy you won't get any."

  But I couldn't have cared less. Oh, they tried to distract me, all right. A few times I almost weakened. First the aroma of the olive oil with onions, shallots, and leeks sauteing in it. I didn't even flinch. Then Joe brought out a glass of cold Soave, and shortly afterward I heard the strains of Mozart's Clarinet Concerto in A major. I sipped and listened and sniffed, but not a quiver. I just kept thinking of the pouch, the empty pouch… the anterior bridge, and those two working-class Italians strapped into the electric chair at Charlestown Prison and coming out in those black boxes.

  I heard the hum of the microwave. Mary was defrosting frozen fillets of striped bass and containers filled with littleneck clams and mussels, shrimp, lobster claws, and maybe even some king-crab legs

  … big, thick, spiky golden sticks full of white meat… I squirmed a bit and stared out over the wide lawn.

  The pouch was empty. Why had they come back for it? Maybe it was somebody else who'd come back. Some other party entirely. That would explain why the guy we'd gotten the drop on had been digging in the wrong section of the old wall. He hadn't been there when the pouch was dropped down into the "How you doing?" asked Joe, who had sneaked up on me. "Mary just added the fumet. Smell it?"

  "Yeah. Hey Joe, how did your old man get to be president of his company, anyway? That's pretty good for an Italian peasant who landed broke at Ellis Island. I know the broad details. But you know Mary doesn't talk about it that much. I know he started out as a carpenter, right? But how'd he-"

  "Pop made it on hard work and luck. And common sense. He was no genius, but he wasn't dumb, and he listened to the right people. I tell ya, Doc, next to common sense, genius isn't worth shit."

  "I agree."

  "Well, Pop went from New York up to Schenectady, where he had some relatives. He learned to be a plasterer, and he earned good money, which he saved. He got married and Mom worked too, as a pastry cook. They saved and saved. just before World War Two, rock lath came in. Most people dismissed it as a fad, but Pop saw the writing on the wall- no pun intended. He knew rock lath was here to stay, and that it would put him out of business. I don't know if you know this, but it took a week to put up a real plaster wall. The wooden lath, sometimes wire lath, then the rough coat. Day or so later the brown or scratch coat. Finally the finish coat. A great wall, but a lot of time and dough. So Pop, using his common sense and some of the saved money, got some young greaseballs off the anchovy boats and trained them to put up rock lath. That was the start of his contracting business."

  "Ah sooo."

  "It was small at first, and Pop worked
with them, doing the fancy cornice work and stuff. Before long he hired more greaseballs to work as carpenters, putting up studding and door frames. About that time Pop ran into a young Polack named Ray Woznicki, who was a plumber. Well, both guys were looking for a shop and some rolling stock, and they thought if they could go together on the capital equipment both would benefit. Ray wasn't Italian, but he was Catholic, which was almost as good. They were in the same parish. So they went in as partners, and each guy moved out of his garage and into their new rented building in the center of town. Result? Central Construction Company. Hah! Original, huh?"

  "And so it just grew and grew."

  "And so it just grew and grew. Right. Pop went overseas in the war and fought at Anzio and all up through his old country, then came home. Ray didn't come home; he got shot to pieces on Iwo. Broke Pop's heart. Old Mrs. Woznicki, Ray's widow, she still owns a lot of the company. Anyway, Central Construction grew like Topsy in the postwar boom, and they went into retail… started a lumberyard and supply house along with the contracting company. Now Pop was hiring greaseball architects, for Chrissake."

  "Amazing!"

  "No, not amazing. You're forgetting it all happened real gradually, Doc, over years and years. And sometimes, growing up, I remember some pretty lean years. But it kept growing mostly, and Pop paid off his notes, and then he did the smartest thing of all."

  "What?"

  "He got out. As Kenny Rogers says in the song, he knew when to fold 'em. Around nineteen sixty Pop saw the dramatic rise in union scale. The greaseballs were now making more than he was. No good. It was the rock-lath story all over again to Pop. You couldn't pay a guy nine bucks an hour to slam nails. Again, common sense. Forget the financial rags and the guys with MBAs… good old common sense, eh?"

  "Right."

  "So in sixty-one Pop sold the contracting business for a bundle, and put the money into three big retail stores specializing in what Pop saw would be the new thing: do-it-yourself home improvement. So there you are."

  We sat in silence for a minute.

  "America is a great country," I said.

  "It sure as hell is. Got some warts, but we're the best around. You bet! So come on in now and have some bouillabaisse."

  When the fish stew was ready Mary served it in big crocks she had made. Each one held over a quart of bouillabaisse, which we ate with huge wooden spoons. There was a long baguette of French garlic bread, and more cold Soave. Okay, they'd done it to me.

  "Well I wish you luck on this bad business, Joe," I said, refilling my glass. "I really hope you catch the guys who did Johnny in. And I hope Sam doesn't get hurt, either. But one thing's for sure: I'm out of it. My mouthpiece is nowhere to be found. So they chucked it into some old trash can somewhere and it's gone for keeps. So that lets me out. Exit Doc." '

  "About time," growled Mary, who was cracking a lobster claw in her teeth. "No more screwing around in old factories and getting shot at."

  But she was wrong, and so was I. Because my mouthpiece was about to surface in a most surprising manner. And like so many things that come back at you- like the late john Robinson's voice- it came with strings attached.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Life's biggest problem is that it's boring. At least it's boring most of the time. When it's not boring it's terrifying. But when the panic subsides the needle does not settle back to mid-range, which consists of stimulating, interesting, exciting. No. Instead it drops right back into boring. There's no middle ground in life, or precious little of it.

  So, in accordance with this zero-to-red line-to-zero pattern of life's tachometer, I was bored and depressed following work the next afternoon. My day's labors had consisted of removing impacted third molars. It's a painful but necessary procedure. It's how I make the bulk of my living. I hate it. None of my patients had been happy to greet me. Afterward, though glad the operation was over, they departed sullenly, with swollen jowls, in anticipation of the pain to come when the local wore off. Bad. I went for a slow run out along the Old Road to Nine-Acre Corners, then back around to Old Stone Mill Road where we live. I took a sauna, assembled and fiddled with my new compound archery bow, and took the mail into the study to go through it. I listened to Wagner. It was the funeral march from Seigfried. Very stirring. Heroic. When the Chicago Symphony plays Wagner, with that great brass section, you can hear the alpenhorns echoing off the purplish far walls of the Jungfrau… The only trouble with Wagner is that if you listen to too much of him, you get to actually believe it. And then it's not too difficult to imagine yourself walking out to the nearest aerodrome, climbing into your Stuka, and roaring off into the wild blue to strafe civilians.

  Got to watch it with old Richard Wagner.

  Halfway through the mail call I came across a government form bearing a U.S. Postal Service inscription. It was from the post office in Lowell, informing me that "an item of personal property" had been found in one of their postal facilities, and that I could claim said item by appearing there in person, bearing the proper identification, within thirty days.

  An item of personal property… found in a postal facility.. . It couldn't be. It was too good to be true. To hell with thirty days;'I hightailed it to the phone and dialed the Lowell P.O. It was after four; I had forty minutes to get there before they closed. After much runaround and holding, I finally got to the young lady who was familiar with the item.

  "Well, we were wondering when you'd call back, Doctor Adams. You see, you gotta have the slip in your hand, as well as the I.D. It's just the rules."

  "I understand. Well, I'll be right up, so stay put. You want me to describe it?"

  "No, not again. I'll be here. 'Bye."

  On the drive up I couldn't help thinking that part of her phone conversation had sounded funny. Did she have the correct item? Was she confusing me with someone else? It wouldn't seem likely in a town the size of Lowell.

  I arrived just before closing, and soon was facing the young woman across the counter. I showed her the proper identification.

  "Should I describe the package?"

  She gave a little giggle, as if I were obviously kidding, then gave me a questioning sidelong glance with furrowed brow.

  "Your voice change?"

  "Hmm?"

  "Your voice. It sounds different. Gotta cold, mistah?"

  I stared around the building. I was beginning to think I was in a Franz Kafka novel. A fat man appeared next to the young lady and glared at me over his droopy glasses. He looked at me, looked at the slip, looked at me, looked at the slip, looked at me. Later on in the year he was going to try something really challenging, like toilet training.

  "Whats a big idea?" he asked me.

  "What big idea? I'm here to claim my personal item. I have furnished the required identification and am prepared to describe the item. It's a small package from Investment Alloy Laboratories in Cambridge, which is a dental lab. And the piece is valuable to me."

  "Must be, the way you been buggin' us about it," he said.

  Back into the Kafka novel again.

  "Excuse me. I only called once."

  "Frank, he don't sound like the other guy," said the girl. "I asked him if his voice changed."

  "What other guy?" I asked.

  "A guy named Charles Adams has been callin' us continual for the past two days, did we find a box, you know? But we ain't found no box, till yesterday. Then we send the note out, right?"

  "Did he call you today?" I asked.

  "Uh-huh. About forty minutes ago."

  "No dear, that was me."'

  She giggled again. Frank looked at me, looked at the slip, looked at me, looked at the slip…

  "That's just what he said each time: it's me." She laughed.

  "But I described the package."

  "Yeah," said Frank, "four times."

  I sighed, and swept my eyes around the place. Somebody else wanted the package. Somebody who knew what it looked like. And also somebody who knew the post office would have it. Wh
o was it? Not the guys chipping at the factory wall, because he thought the package was still in there. Or maybe he was after the newsboy's pouch… the empty pouch…

  They finally let me have the package because they knew I wasn't leaving without it, and it was closing time. The best way to win an argument with a government employee is to do it just before quitting time. I filled out another special form and departed with the box, which was only as big as a pack of cigarettes. It had been opened, and the post-office people had not opened it. The letter carrier had found it, as is, in a letter box near the old factory. It could have been there all weekend. The mouth-piece was there, in perfect condition. They had never seen the other caller at the post office, nor had he left any phone number or address. One thing for sure: he knew where to find me.

  But he didn't even wait until I got home. At the third light I knew the dark-blue Olds behind me wasn't there by coincidence. I did a double cloverleaf on and off of 495 and he was still on my tail. He was following me, as Brian Hannon might say, like stink on a skunk.

  South on Route 3 he sped up, swerved to the left-hand passing lane, and tried to come alongside. But I swerved left too and blocked him. He tried to pass on the right and I blocked him again. Then I pulled out the light switch while I tromped on the gas pedal. He braked hard when he saw the rear lights flash on, and I had the edge for a few seconds, but it didn't work and I wasn't surprised. An International Scout is no match for an Olds sedan on the highway. He tried the passing routine again and this time I let him. But as he passed me he tried to run me off onto the shoulder. And we weren't alone on the road, either. My mystery friend wanted that cardboard box pretty badly. When he tried to head me off I got a little belligerent and swerved right into him. Ka-whunk! Our fenders banged and shrieked, and I even saw sparks. A Scout may not be fast, but it's heavy-duty and good on the body punches… just like Dempsey. I had bloodied Blue Olds's nose a bit and he backed off.