by Peter Orner
The shadow of that little bridge over our heads. Us in the dark water, my brother and me, the gummy sand, July 1976.
THE MAYOR’S DREAM
No man is an Ireland.
—RICHARD J. DALEY,
48TH MAYOR OF CHICAGO
His Honor’s dreams tended to be practical and concerned matters such as tax policy or the loosening of onerous zoning restrictions or who to slate for state’s attorney. This was different. He found himself pounding on the door of a house, an ordinary bungalow. For some reason, he wasn’t able to use his fists. He’d lost the ability to close his hands. And so with open palms he pounded. Of course, it was his own house at Thirty-sixth and Lowe. Except at first he didn’t seem to know this. He tried to pound harder, his hands hopelessly platting against the door. Sis isn’t home, nor are any of the the children. He has no keys, apparently no pockets, either, though he’s wearing a suit. He goes around the house. Same thing. Back door’s locked. He’s starting to worry that the neighbors will think he is a prowler. He has influence? He knows President Johnson? He knows the Queen of England? Bring the kids next time, Lizzie. Right now he is only a man, Dick Daley, and he’s locked out of his house. Try throwing your weight around in a dream and see where it gets you. He goes around to the front again and sits on the stoop. Night comes without any slowness. It’s day. It’s dark. He sits on the stoop. The lights pop on in the house across the street, and he watches the shadows beyond the curtains. He watches those shadows—the Cowleys’ shadows—for what feels like hours. Now he wants to know something. Why do shadows dance when if you look directly at the people themselves—not their shadows—they aren’t dancing?
FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLDS, INDIANA DUNES, LATE AFTERNOON
Her name is Allie and she sits outside a ring of boys at the bottom of this hill of sand, along the southern edge of Lake Michigan. Chicago rises like a kingdom in the distance. Closer, maybe a quarter of a mile away, lurk the boxy towers of a defunct steel mill. Out in the water is a platform with a rusty crane, floating with no apparent purpose. She wonders how long it has been since the crane has been useful and whether it will ever be useful again. Allie hugs her shoulders and inhales the clean, mineral waft. The lake, for some reason, has always smelled like rice to her.
She used to love one of the boys—Marcus—but it’s become clear to her that it isn’t Marcus but all the boys together that she loves, wants. Their motley collection of skinny bodies. Alone, she could take or leave any one of them, but together there is something so skittery about them. They all want her, too, or at least they claim to, with their sagging mouths. But would they even know what to do with her body if she tried to give it to them? She’s long known what to do with theirs, and she lets them know, and this makes them nervous and need to grip each other harder. It is each other they need. Later, maybe, her. Later one or the other of them will fumble for her in the dark. Now it is only this unfinished day, the sun like a fiery headlight through the trees on the top of the bluff, and the sand, the waves riding slowly up the beach. Wave after wave breaks and flattens, but the noise of them never pauses for even a single breath. That low, constant roar that she will hear long after they all leave this beach. It is each other they need, and it is their needing each other that she wants. She sits on the sand and watches. They wrestle and chase; they smash their bodies into each other. She cups some sand and drains it on her feet. She scratches her long legs. She digs a groove in the sand with her heel and waits to be noticed. Marcus locks arms with Anthony, lifts him up, Anthony’s big feet waving. It will go away, this time. Just like the nicknames her father used to call her. Now that she has breasts, he calls her Allison. She stands up and runs down to the edge of the water. She dives, leaving her eyes open. The cold stings. She swims through the blur. The boys have a new thing they say: Butter my bread. Butter it, butter it. She’d do it, faster than they could even imagine. They’d run up the dunes screaming for their mothers. Butter nothing, wimps. For now, let them lie about it. For now, let them stay skinny cowards flinging into each other. She rises and stands in the shallow water and faces the beach as the waves break upon the shore, only to fall back toward her.
DENNY COUGHLIN: IN MEMORY
Things were good for a while. A team made up of guys from Southie would play a team made up of guys from Charlestown—with a couple first-degree lifers from Chelsea or Malden thrown in to make things even. Every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon. Can’t you see Pinkhands Salerno? Nursing his eye with a frozen sausage and shouting from the sidelines, “Fuckers, this show’s gotta go on!” Like we were putting on Guys and Dolls, opening night, on Broadway.
This place used to be called just Walpole, but the people of Walpole got tired of being known only as the town with the prison, so the state of Massachusetts changed the gulag’s name to Cedar Junction, a mythical place, an intersection of horrors just off Route 47 North. Turn right at the Dairy Delight and keep going a mile and a half. Paint scabbed, looks like an abandoned factory but for the layers of razor wire loop-dilooped, glistening silver in the sun, and the warning signs and the guard towers and the machine gunners.
Denny Coughlin made the rules, and Salerno, his most faithful lieutenant, carried them out with the zeal of a convert. Denny Coughlin. Good old Boston Irish from an old Southie family. Some of the sons went into the racket, others into politics. When his brother Len got hitched, Mike Dukakis gave the bride away. Denny, though, was in the crime branch, and back then—he’d be the first to admit it—he was a few clowns short of a circus. He got lugged on a murder two for busting a former associate in the head with a tire iron behind the Shell station on Columbus Boulevard. Denny pled to manslaughter and landed twelve to fourteen at Walpole, where he rose to his true calling, undisputed king of prison floor hockey.
Time. We don’t measure it in years. We measure it in lunch, in soup, in the ache for those we’ll never touch again, but out there on the gym floor, twenty-eight minutes, three times a week, it did, it did move faster.
The game had two basic rules:
Rule 1: No injuries. If you got hurt enough so that you couldn’t play, you dragged yourself off to the sidelines, stuffed your elbow back in the socket or got a towel to stanch whatever was bleeding. But you were forbidden to go to the choke. The rule came about because Sergeant Whosafuck said the game was getting too expensive after Rent Meelhan got blunked by Fabain and Joey Norris and had to be carried off, blood gushing from his eyeballs, on a stretcher. Spent a week in the choke with five broken ribs and a knob on his head big as Uranus. Finally they had to send him to a real hospital. So Whosafuck said, “Next time somebody goes down like that, that’ll be it, and you useless hogs will suck each other’s dicks while the blacks get double gym time for basketball.”
“Sergeant Whosafuck, must you be so vulgar?” Salerno asked. “Think of the tender ears. We’ve got juveniles here tried as adults.”
“Hustoff, Salerno. Hustoff. It’s Slovenian.”
And so Coughlin decreed it: “The days of wine and pain are over.” Nobody would get hurt again—ever. Salerno was a trustee. He’d steal the frozen meat from the kitchen that we’d use for icepacks.
Rule 2, which was around before we needed Rule 1, was straightforward also: The puck is always live. No time-outs. Constant action. The game never stopped unless the puck went under the equipment cage on the far side of the gym. When this happened, one of the screws would have to get up off his lolling ass and open the metal gate to retrieve the puck. Now, the important thing to understand here was that the puck remained live even when it went under the wooden bench the officers sat on during games. The drill was that the screws covering the gym—usually Morton and Salazar—would leap up whenever the puck went under the bench so that the guys could fight over the puck until somebody dug it out. The screws—at least Morton and Salazar—knew the deal. They got a kick out of seeing us beat the living crap out of each other up close. But when the puck went under the bench (about three times a game), they ran fo
r the hills.
(The only other rule, so minor it didn’t need a number, was that blacks didn’t play floor hockey. But this was less a rule than the simple fact that the blacks, according to Coughlin, were scared pissless to play us barbarians. Same reason they don’t come to Southie. We’re big and white and hairy, baby!)
Nobody ever got hurt, nobody went to the choke. So maybe it was surprising that it was Rule 2 that caused Whosafuck to finally ban hockey, after all the trouble we went through to enforce Rule 1.
It was a tight game, only four minutes left before count call. Charlestown up by one. Coughlin was having an off day; he hadn’t scored. For a big man he had a strange grace as he went after the puck. He moved with this real fluid motion, as if he really was on ice skates. I played for Southie, defense. I’m not that aggressive a guy. I’m in here on a murder one, crime of passion, my lawyer called it. And it was love, that much is true, but I’m not making excuses—anyway, too long a story. In the gym, I rarely moved much. I’m decently sized myself, and mostly I just stood there in front of our goal like those cement pots they use to block off a street. Sometimes my head wouldn’t even be that much in the game because I’d be too busy watching Coughlin. There isn’t any other way to say it. Out there on the floor he wasn’t inside, he was somewhere else. And he’d thread through a bunch of guys, twirl like a ballerina, and come out with the puck like it was glued to his stick. It was a beautiful thing to watch. Losing brought out the artist in him. He never wanted to crush Charlestown; he always wanted them to believe they could beat us. Coughlin always said you had to give Charlestown some reason to believe. Otherwise, why would they ever play?
That day I think Coughlin may have pulled something, because he was favoring his left side a bit, but as soon as he heard the first warning bell, five minutes to count, his body seemed to forget about it and he got the old hunger back. But Charlestown had some strong players and they were hanging in there; most of them dropped back to defend. They kept deflecting Coughlin’s shots—with not only their sticks but their shoes, their elbows, their necks, their teeth. It was getting bloody down there on their side of the gym. Charlestown was smelling it. And Coughlin, with only about two minutes to go, had decided enough was enough—
Another shot ricocheted off the goal, and this time the puck went under the officers’ bench. And, see, that day a brand-new screw was down in the gym and he didn’t know the rules. Morton, the lazy fuck, didn’t bother to tell him. Salazar would have told him. Salazar would have showed him the ropes. But Morton, never. It would have taken too much energy to open his mouth and say, Hey, listen, rook, when the puck goes under the bench, they’ll kill you if you don’t get out of the way, okay? What would it have taken? And so of course, when it happened, the twenty-year-old puny rookie screw didn’t have any sense. Even though Morton was practically in New Hampshire when that puck slid under the bench that day. But the kid didn’t move. I’m a guard, the kid thinking, I’m wearing a uniform. I have to move for these Neanderthals? Two hundred fifty-five pounds of Denny Coughlin barreling his way, and the kid sits there on a picnic. Coughlin couldn’t stop, and he popped the kid so hard his head mulched against the concrete wall like a kicked-in pumpkin. It was bad. Morton, who knew damn well Coughlin was only going for the puck, fucked him anyway. That’s your Rule 3: They will always fuck us anyway. He got on his radio and called in an emergency B single assault on an officer. It didn’t take more than ninety seconds for Whosafuck to burst in with six helmeted Nazi lunatics from the Special Operations Response Team, plastic shields in one hand, wombats in the other. And the SORTs went right for Coughlin. But hear this, Coughlin, even on the floor, even getting his teeth kicked in by the toes of the SORT screws’ boots—the man still spoke up for the game, for us:
“Puck’s always live. Puck’s only dead when it goes in the cage!”
And when they dragged him away by his pits and he was nearly unconscious, his blood across the gym floor, he kept sputtering that he didn’t need to go to the choke, that he was fine, absolutely fucking fine.
Salerno told us what happened after. He had contacts in the choke. They couldn’t save him, so they had him medivaced to Mass General. But that was only covering their asses. Denny Coughlin was brain dead before he rose up from Cedar Junction.
THE DIVORCE
Gary died before the divorce was finalized, before he’d even moved out. Francine tried to be philosophical about it. Gary, had he been here to laugh, would have laughed. To him matters of life and death were laughable. He’d only fall apart when he couldn’t find his keys. And she did try to be—what?—light about the whole thing. An odd word, light, especially as it applied to her. Francine wasn’t light; she had no lightness about her. If you asked people, they might have said, Oh, no, not light, whatever you mean by this. Franny’s, you know, serious, lovely but serious. And yet today she feels oddly buoyant. Even the casket itself seems as if it’s bobbing in water. She loved him. Some people you come across in this world you end up loving. So many we don’t. So many we don’t even give a second thought. Why Gary? Nothing in particular doomed their marriage, and maybe this is why they decided to end it formally in the eyes of the State of Michigan before they had a true reason they could quantify in their heart of hearts. Heart of hearts. Her mother used to say that. What did it mean, the heart of a heart? What about the heart of a heart of a heart? Where does it stop? She stands before the casket and tries to weep. She’s finding it hard to stay focused. Affairs on both sides, but these were years ago, and, if anything, they’d strengthened their bond. For a while they were more interesting to each other. Once she’d run into him on the street downtown and he wasn’t wearing his wedding ring and she’d punched him in the face. Gary laughed, she laughed. To the end, he’d made her laugh. Francine wasn’t light, but Gary could make her laugh. This is more baffling than sad. I said I wanted to be alone, not alone alone. Gary? Just this past weekend he was packing boxes and asking politely if he should take or leave the ashtray they’d stolen from the hotel in Florence. Neither smoked anymore. What happened to smoking? She keeps trying to weep. She’s in the seat of honor, the seat closest to the body of the deceased. Deceased? What kind of word? Isn’t it redundant? Why not simply ceased? The casket is just far enough away so that she can’t reach out and touch it. She wishes she came from the sort of people who fling themselves on caskets. She saw that once, at the funeral of a Filipino coworker. Relatives clinging all over the casket like people on a raft. The lack of restraint was inspiring. But her own position now is somewhat awkward. Most of their friends know what’s been going on. Their kids too, of course. They’d taken it in stride. All in their twenties and thirties now, they’d been trained well by their parents never to pass judgment. Mom, Dad, do what you have to do. We totally get it. Anyway, who’s not divorced? People were groping for her now, tugging at her clothes, as if she were a talisman. “Oh, Franny, I’m so, so, so—” “Gary and I were supposed to play golf on Tuesday, a thing like this you can’t—” “The soul of kindness, you remember when he came over in his pajamas and talked Arthur off the roof?” “Anything at all, Fran, day or night, call me, will you? You won’t. Will you?”
And when it’s over she goes home, takes off her dress, and stands before the mirror. He’d been sleeping in one of the kid’s old rooms while he apartment hunted, a phrase he took literally. Gary was hunting down a house, a place to land. He said it was actually interesting, hilarious almost, how even familiar rooms, even architecture you know in the bones of your fingers, can one day simply deny you. Now I’m a guest, now I take up space. Oh, Gary, I just want to be alone, a little alone. Is this such a crime? I’m not blaming you, I’m merely remarking on the situation as a general matter, Fran. It’s not about you and me even, it’s simply bizarre to be looking for an apartment in a city I thought I knew but don’t really. I mean, going inside these buildings, walking up stairs, going through strange doors into rooms where other people I will never meet no longer live�
� She will have to get dressed again to go to his sister’s. Judy had been generous to host the after-funeral, given that it might be uncomfortable for the mourners to see his stuff already packed up like this. She puts on a dress. Hates it, tears it off. She remains in front of the mirror. Now she weeps, out-loud sobs that embarrass her even though it’s only her and the cat. Baldo. Baldo purring on the bed like nothing’s different. And Gary the only one who truly loves—loved—you. He was trying to find an apartment that accepted pets, which he said wasn’t so easy. When did everybody turn on pets? Renters don’t get companions? Only owners? How much damage can one old cat possibly do? A lot, she’d said. Don’t you remember what Baldo did to the suede couch? It was like Charles Manson came over. She looks at herself in the mirror. Not so terrible. Her arms need work, but not so bad. She will be wanted again. She begins to quake before the mirror. Will be wanted. Naked, Gary was always nervous. He’d always been self-conscious of what he considered his small penis. How did he know it was small? Did he go around comparing at the gym? He never went to the gym. She has to remember to cancel his membership. Charlene Gooch moved to New Hampshire to be closer to her grandkids, and they charged her credit card for three years before she noticed. Sex? Not unloving, hasty, and they liked it that way. They’d turn on the light again, begin reading where they’d left off, their bare arms touching. Okay for you? Mmmmmm. You? Mmmmm. My god, she thinks, horny? Now? This is ridiculous. All you were doing was moving out of the house.