First thing that hit them was the smell. Dante moved about the center of the room with the flame from his butane lighter leading the way. After several minutes he found a lone string hanging from the ceiling. He pulled down on it and a bare bulb illuminated a room with concrete floors and walls constructed of cheap plywood. A couple of worktables stood against the wall off to their right, boxes of bootleg liquor stacked beneath them.
A cot covered in bedsheets and blankets rested in the far-left corner of the room. Above it, photos of women with powdered faces exposing their pointed breasts were tacked on the wall, and besides them, a gas station calendar two years old, pinned open to October 1949.
“Jesus Christ,” Dante said as he pulled back the sheets, revealing a large blackish-brown stain in the area where a head would have rested.
Cal moved to the boxes under the table. They were full of water-damaged papers and files, now dry to the touch. He poured gasoline on them first, and then, taking small steps sideways, his arms moving in a careful pendulum motion, poured gasoline in splashing arcs on the walls.
When the can was empty, he walked back to the center of the room and lit the cigarette in his mouth, inhaled slowly, seeming to savor it. He flicked the cigarette and it landed under the table, and the vacuum sucking noise of conflagration was followed by a rolling, bellowing hiss as everything caught fire. He walked over to the bulb and pulled down on the string so the only light was from the flames that carried up the walls in a brilliant blue, orange, and white wave.
Outside, it took a third attempt with the solenoid clicking before the engine roared and then settled into a steady grumble. Cal hit a switch, and headlights rose up from the sides of the hood. Two beams of light fluttered, washed trembling light across the snowbank before them. The engine grated and made a straining noise as he put the car in gear and slowly moved out onto the empty street.
He kept the whiskey bottle between his legs as he drove, took a small pull before taking a much larger one, then passed it to Dante. He flexed his hands, rolled his shoulders, pressed back into the car seat, and watched the snow falling slow and thick before the wavering beam of the headlights.
THEY FINISHED THE bottle of whiskey outside the second building, a small warehouse on the Milton–Hyde Park line. It was as if it was all meant to be. The door to the small warehouse wasn’t even locked, and inside a large pile of dried splitting firewood sat in the corner, as though the Fates bore matchstick fingers and had placed it there just for them. But farther in amid boxes of cigarettes, imported canned goods, clothes, kitchen appliances, was a row of male and female department store mannequins standing there as if guarding the stolen goods. Grinning, Cal began moving about the room like the boxer of old, jabbing the air before the mannequins’ faces. He shuffled down the row and then paused at a dummy with a pencil-thin mustache. “Ahh, you fuck!” Cal shouted. “Thought you’d sneak by me, didn’t you, you dirty bastard!” and he struck it a left uppercut and then a right and the dummy toppled to the floor. Dante shook his head, helped drag one of the wooden men into the center of the large room, poured gasoline over its bald head just like dousing a wick, and then, branching out trails of gasoline in all directions, made sure the inferno would catch to every corner.
LEARY’S SAT AGAINST the tracks behind a steel-wire fence crested with tight coils of barbed wire: a one-story building that looked as if it had once been a canteen for the local mill workers. It was well past one o’clock, and all the lights were out. Cal and Dante moved around the perimeter of the building until they found a cellar window. “It’s Saturday night, they got better places to be,” Dante said as he kicked the glass in, tapped at the sharp fragments with the tip of his boot until it was clear enough for them to climb through. They made it up the staircase, listened at the door, and when only silence came to their ears, they moved quickly inside. Dante found a light switch, which illuminated the small barroom.
Dante moved behind the bar, swiped a bottle, broke its seal, and drank from it. Cal poured gasoline along the oak bar and the stools whose cushions were tattered and torn, wide strips of electrical tape keeping them from falling apart. When he lit the cigarette and flicked it over the bar, Dante stood farther away, unzipped, and let loose a streaming arc of piss onto the jukebox by the entrance, watching the fire reflect off and dance on Cal’s profile. “Now we can celebrate!” he shouted.
BLACK JACK’S HAD its back to the Fort Point Channel, beside an arch-covered alleyway that veered crookedly out onto Old Colony Way. Plaster crumbling in places revealed the horsehair between the framing joists. Empty beer glasses and overflowing ashtrays lay on the windowsills from the night before. Dante glanced at the shattered glass, the places that showed bullet holes and blood, and the floor near the door where a pool of blood had soaked into the wood, turning it black, and then he and Cal went to work, dousing the tables and booths and bar.
As Cal and Dante set the fire, there was a sudden swell in the channel as a barge passed slowly in the night; waves pushed up against the stone embankment, and the building seemed to shift, a wavering tremor beneath Dante’s and Cal’s feet as if they were at sea, and as if the place were built on pylons instead of stone, and then they rushed out to the car, which they’d left idling.
They crossed the channel and drove into the city. The windows of the lone tavern on the far side of the South Street Bridge blazed with light like a distant flame, and then something inside ignited, perhaps the gas mains from the stove or the heater, or more secret things stored in the bar’s cellars, for an explosion sounded across the water, and they could feel the vibration of it through the chassis of the car, and a pillar of bright flame shot through the bar’s roof, sending shingles and splintered joist beams and black tar paper hurtling into a sky lightening with more snow.
They moved through the dark, deserted city, blankets of white snow in drifts between buildings starkly white, and the firelight caught like candle flames in black, empty windows. Dante tugged at a cigarette while Cal wove the car lazily through the darkness, fishtailing back and forth on the deserted streets of downtown. The lights of Jimmy’s Lighthouse blazed in blue and amber. Atop the John Hancock building the weather beacon flashed red. And the snow fell thick and soft before their headlights, swirling before the windshield and the wipers, and then swept back along the car’s sides and into the blackness.
61
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City Dump, the Calf Pasture, Dorchester
THEY DROVE THE DeSoto to the city dump, where they’d left Cal’s car parked beyond the mountains of refuse, hidden among the crushed cars from the wrecker’s yard stacked eight high. Thick, churning smoke billowed up from the tire plant; the smell of burning rubber swept across the frozen marshland. Here and there, plainly visible in the darkness, feeble white smoke twined sluggishly upward from the roofs of hobo shacks scattered across the point. Tonight it seemed too cold even for the rats, and nothing moved. The crushed chassis shuddered and groaned about them as wind off the water came rushing over the peninsula, and Cal turned his head slightly against the wind, convinced for a moment that he’d heard a fragment of an old dancehall tune come drifting across the bay.
They splashed the remainder of the gasoline on the stolen car, smashed the windows, and doused the interior. Dante lit a matchbook, stood for a moment watching the matches curl, blackened, into a small blaze, and then he pitched it through the shattered windows and onto the front seat, where it at once ignited the gasoline. Blue-tinged flames raced through the interior and then on rapidly flickering tendrils about the roof of the car, across glass and metal. In a moment the upholstery of the seats had caught and the interior became a revolving fireball. The front and rear windows blackened, torqued, and then shattered. Flames shot upward, illuminating the towers of crushed cars.
They stepped back, twenty feet or so, and watched. Even from such a distance the glow of the burning car shone upon their faces. “I was starting to like that car,” Dante sa
id. The adrenaline of the night was all but gone, and a sickly metallic taste remained in his mouth. His limbs ached dully, and he was suddenly extremely tired. Blood had seeped through his bandage, and he felt the wound throb with a sharp, bullying pain. Cal looked pale and washed out, his eyelids opening and closing heavily as they watched the car burn. He lifted the whiskey bottle to his mouth, but it was empty, and he let it drop to the snow.
He trudged to his Fleetline, climbed in, and started the engine—it turned over grudgingly and caught on the third attempt—and fixed Dante in the headlights as he pulled slowly out from between the rows of crushed cars.
Cal rolled down the window, gunned the engine as the idle faltered, and motioned with his head for Dante to get in the car. “I’ve seen enough fires for one night,” he muttered.
They drove back along the Mile Road from the dump, past the tire factory and treatment station, and the lights of the city blinked into view before them, and it was as if they’d suddenly emerged from some strange, hidden country, a place that existed outside the world they were returning to; and with this came a sensory realization, the overpowering smell of gasoline, sulfur, and ash, burnt hair and charred clothing, of sweat and alcohol. Cal’s head slumped forward as he drove, his eyes mere slits as he peered through the glass. His shoulders shook and his hands gripped the wheel so tightly the big, scarred knuckles shone white. It took Dante a moment before he realized that Cal was crying. He said nothing, and Cal’s eyes tracked the road before them and they drove on blindly through the dark.
62
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Scollay Square, Downtown
CAL WASHED AND then slept through the afternoon on the office’s foldout couch in his underwear, a blanket wrapped about his lower legs, sweating although the room was freezing. When he woke, he looked in on Dante. He was sleeping fitfully but seemed stronger than he had the day before; some color had come back to his face. He boiled water for coffee, breath steaming the cold air, and couldn’t help but smell from their overcoats the acrid scent of ash and gasoline. He lowered his nose to his skin and sniffed; even after bathing, he could still smell the gasoline and fire on his skin.
Too agitated and stir-crazy to bide his time sitting in the office any longer, Cal wandered the streets again, his senses alert to every holler or shout or passing car. A reluctant winter dusk came down upon the city and the lights came on. In the distant bell tower of the Old North Church in the North End, a lamp glowed golden-hued, and seemed to guide him. He walked the old West End, passing small tenement houses, working-class shuls, Italian butcher shops and bakeries, grimy storefronts seeming to lean in on the narrow streets, and alleyways entrenched in snow and through which no cars could now pass, and then along the river back into the North End, along Copp’s Hill, where Cotton Mather lay in his grave, and down the backside of Hanover Street. He passed Clough House and the Paul Revere House, the Standard Saloon, infamous political club of the old ward bosses.
“What do we do now?” Cal said aloud, and a group of passing pedestrians stared at him.
He passed the Langone Funeral Home on Hanover, where over ten thousand mourners had paid their respects to Sacco and Vanzetti back in ’27. And the tenement where ward boss John F. Fitzgerald had been born, worked his way up from ward heeler to city council to state senator to congressman for the Ninth District, and, finally, mayor of Boston. The Ladies’ Auxiliary were standing on the steps of the shul on Salem Street, and despite a strake of snow and wind rushing at his face, Cal looked up and tipped his hat as he passed.
A regiment of streetlights came on above his head with a slight buzzing hum. Along the street thick clouds of steam spiraled slowly upward from manhole covers. On Thacher Street he found himself before the restaurant that just the week before he’d waited outside as Foley, McAllister, and Renza’s uncle had their meeting. The red and green neon sign glowed in the frozen air, its windows lit brightly from within, and he stepped inside into the heated air thick with the scent of garlic and fresh dough.
Cooks shouted in Italian at one another, flattened and oiled the dough, dressed it with various toppings, pulled pizzas steaming from the ovens. On the wall behind the counter, under grease-spotted frames, numerous pictures of smiling Italian crooners, pop stars from years past, all autographed to the pizzeria.
He ordered a pizza and took a beer to a stool before the window. On the opposite wall more framed pictures crowded the wallpaper, peeling in the steam of the room: local figures, sports heroes, politicians—a picture of Mayor Hynes, Pope Pius XII; Italian boxers staring at the camera lens and frozen in permanent flat-footed rigor, their fists raised against invisible opponents just beyond the photographer.
From a radio came the standards from a decade before, crackling and hissing over the noise from the kitchen, and between songs the deejay, bright and exuberant, describing the year of the song, the various singers and band members, and national events occurring at the time of the record’s release. Cal drank the beer slowly, reluctant to head back to the office, and then his pizza came and he ate.
Sam Shaw’s “Wish You Were Mine” followed Dinny Cochrane’s “A Splendid Thing” from 1942, the year they completed the Alaskan Highway, How Green Was My Valley won Best Picture at the Academy Awards, and a fire at the Cocoanut Grove supper club on Piedmont Street burned it to the ground, the year Cal shipped out for Europe. He and Lynne had taken a final trip to the Cape the month before, and Dante and Margo had joined them. He hadn’t known then that it would be the last time he’d visit the Cape. It was near the end of the summer, and even with the new food rationing program, the local stores were out of vegetables and fruit, even bread and milk were in short supply, and they combined their money and their ration coupons to buy what they could: a small amount of coffee, eggs, and chocolate. From a local fisherman they purchased a crate of beer and a bushel of oysters. It seemed like it was all they ate for three days.
At night they lit a bonfire on Long Nook Beach, and each couple huddled against the wind coming in off the sea, surf booming on the sand, he imagined, like the distant guns in Europe waiting for him, and Dante made up stories about the acts of heroism Cal O’Brien would perform during the war, the medals he’d be wearing on his shirtfront when he came back, stories so absurd that they all laughed. It had been a good time, a happy time, but when he returned, the world had changed, gone slightly off-kilter, and so had he. In the time that he’d been away, Dante had lost himself to his addiction, Margo was slowly killing herself, and he wondered if Dante would ever be the same. But at least now, after Dante’s withdrawal, if they could get him cleaned up, off the junk, and healthy again, it would be a start.
One of the cooks was singing in broken English along with Sam Shaw, and Cal smiled as he ate, looked absently at the pictures of Celtics and Bruins teams, the horses at full gallop at Suffolk Downs, and then of greyhounds at Wonderland curling about their track, of a grinning man holding a winning betting ticket aloft, of greyhounds curled up, asleep in their cramped kennels, and another of a gaunt-faced man, eyes bright with humor, walking four greyhounds on a leash, his slick black pompadour seeming to defy gravity.
Cal paused with the pizza in his mouth, began chewing again until he could swallow. He took a swig from his beer, almost draining it, and looked back at the photos again, at their stark black clarity, the sharply defined foreground. He looked about the room and to the signed photos of pop stars and crooners over the counter where a group of old men now sat.
“Hey!” he said aloud to himself. “Hey!”
He squinted and stared at the row of three pictures of Wonderland: the greyhounds racing, the greyhounds asleep, and the man with the black pompadour holding the dogs’ leash. They were all done in the same style as the ones they’d found in Sheila’s box.
The amber glow of the streetlights pushed through the three windows at his back, like the flames of a dimming furnace, lighting the long, narrow room. He looked at the picture on the wa
ll, and then stood to look at the autographed picture of the crooner above the register. “It’s fucking him,” he whispered. “Bobby Renza, Mario fucking Rizzo.”
“Hey,” he said to one of the men working the ovens, face shimmering with sweat from the heat. “You know this guy?” He pointed to the photograph of the crooner on the wall.
“Of course,” he said. “Everyone know that guy.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he said, “but what about this guy,” and he gestured to the photos on the back wall so that the man had to come out from behind the ovens to look. He shook his head. “I no know this guy, I no know who he is.”
Some locals seated at stools at the counter turned his way. “You know this guy?” he asked. “This guy in the picture with the dogs, you know this guy?” But either because they spoke only Italian or because they distrusted him, they refused to answer and only shook their heads.
He turned to a stocky man who sat at a small booth studying a betting slip, the thumb-end of a cigar clenched between his teeth, its thick smoke swirling above his head.
“This guy,” he said, “in this picture, it’s Mario Rizzo, right?” The man had arms that seemed carved of granite, each tightly layered with cords of muscle and coiling black hair, and each crossed over the other and leaning atop his generous stomach. He gave off the appearance of some golem, a morose statue perched still on the toilet, contemplating nothing but the well-earned stones he was about to purge from his bowels.
Cal ground his teeth in frustration. He might as well have been talking to a man taking a shit, and was about to turn away when the man nodded once slowly, and then looked back down at the betting slip on the table before him.
Serpents in the Cold Page 32