All the Dead Yale Men

by Craig Nova

“Your father?” he said. “Well, shit, Frank, I’m sorry about that. I really am.”

  “I know you are,” I said.

  “I wish this was a better time, Frank. I really do. You know that.”

  “There’s never a better time . . . ,” I said.

  “I’m not talking about your father. I’m talking about a friend of yours.”

  “Someone else wants to call me?” I said.

  “Cal Tolbert is getting ready to jump off the Tobin Bridge and he only wants to talk to you. Didn’t he go to law school with you?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I wish it were some other time,” said Tim.

  “OK,” I said.

  “The negotiator thinks Cal means it. So, when you get here, you’re supposed to keep Cal talking. Tell him a joke. Do you know any jokes?”

  “A couple,” I said.

  “Just get over here,” said Marshall. “And Frank? Don’t say anything about your father, all right? What good is that going to do?”

  Maybe a lot, I thought.

  “Do you know what’s wrong?” I said.

  “Who the fuck knows with a Dutch job? I’m a cop, not a shrink.”

  The cup of coffee went into the trash, and I hesitated at the door, trying to recall the small peace of the church.

  •••

  The Tobin Bridge looks as if it were made with an Erector Set, and that the kid who built it liked V-shaped supports along the side and Xs on top. It is painted a sort of Boston green, the same color as the wall at Fenway Park, as though the city got a deal on some green paint. Mostly, I guess, if they thought they could have gotten away with it, they would have dumped it into the harbor and bought some more, to get another kickback. Boston. Not the cleanest place in the world, but it has a certain honest graft that keeps it on the up and up. Sort of.

  •••

  So, the Vs and Xs were there, and even from a distance, Cal showed in his white shirt and dark pants, his tie flying like a flag of desperation as he sat in the pigeon shit on the rail of the upper level. Just there, like a white bird, a seagull, that had been blown in by a storm.

  I waited back from the cop cars and from Marshall, who shifted his weight from one leg to another and stared in my general direction. Now, it seemed, was the time to cry, if I could, and so I sat at the steering wheel and thought of those times when my father and I had gone to that piece of land he had inherited from my grandfather and how he had made plans there for things he’d never do. How it was now mine. Or would be after probate. Or his advice about the facts of life: You know, Frank, let it soak for a while. Women like that. The steering wheel of my Audi was covered with black leather, and while I waited and hoped it would come (the crying) and that I would be over it, at least that part of it (not knowing it happened more than once and that grief, or tears, could begin when you saw beauty or horror, at a flower show, a museum, or at the scene of a murder), but for now nothing happened. Just that weight.

  Cal was a bald man of medium height with the blue sky now showing in the sheen of his scalp. He owed me ten thousand dollars, and the first thing I wanted to say to him was that he didn’t owe me anything.

  Below the bridge were a row of houses, all made of brick, and in the spring light they seemed to harbor some chill, as though the winter had penetrated so deeply that it took months of heat to pull it out. Or maybe it was built into brick: constant winter.

  The road was empty and in the distance the cops’ lights flashed with a sort of patriotic display: red, white, and blue. Cal sat on the edge of the bridge, hands next to his thighs, head down, the empty air below studied and memorized. Or maybe it was just the fascination of the last thing you ever see. But that just showed how little I knew: at this stage, things like that don’t matter at all.

  “Nice day, huh?” I said.

  “Little windy,” he said.

  “What do you expect, up in the air like this?”

  “It could be a little more still,” he said. “But you can’t have everything.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Thanks for coming,” he said. “Hope you weren’t doing anything important.”

  “No,” I said. “Same old. You know.”

  “Well, when we were in law school, I bet you never planned on meeting me at a place like this, did you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “What does that mean? You expected this?”

  “No,” I said. “I wasn’t thinking about the future too much. Who had time for that?”

  The new buildings in the skyline, all glass and aluminum, just squares and metal with jagged roofs, showed against the blue and smoky sky. Inside one of the windows, a man typed at a computer as though his life depended on it. Presentation, I guessed, an explanation of losses. Always a tough sell.

  “How’s your father?” he said.

  “Fine,” I said. “You can’t kill a guy like that.”

  “You mean he has to do it himself?” said Cal.

  “No,” I said. “No.”

  “You know what’s wrong with this bridge? I’m sitting in a layer of pigeon shit. Or maybe seagulls. Which do you think it is?”

  “Cal,” I said, “I really don’t know. I’m not going to lie to you about that.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Cal. “That’s why I asked them to get you. You never told me any lies. You always knew what to say.”

  You poor son of a bitch, I thought. You’re turning to me?

  “So why are you sitting in the pigeon shit?” I said.

  Down below, Burger King wrappers blew under the bridge, bits of colored paper in a wind tunnel. I guessed if Cal jumped, he’d be swept in the same direction: under the bridge, toward the houses.

  “I’m having marital problems,” said Cal. “At least I was having them. Now I’ve got something else.”

  “So what?” I said. “Everyone has trouble.”

  “Not like mine,” he said.

  “So, tell me about it,” I said.

  He moved his feet back and forth, a kid sitting on a pier.

  He closed his eyes and started to cry, and I thought, no, no. It’s catching. I bit my lip until my eyes watered.

  Cal said, while sniffling, “What’s wrong? Got a toothache?”

  “Yeah, that’s it,” I said.

  But I thought of those bits of memories, like newspaper becoming blank, as my father’s head exploded. Was I one of those things that disappeared? Learning how to ride a bike or how to lick an ice cream cone? Did I exist a little less because he didn’t think of me anymore? That’s the horror of being on your own.

  Cal’s wife was an insurance administrator who had red hair, freckles, and a restrained air about her. You’d expect her to go around with kids on Halloween with a box for UNICEF. Wholesome, moral, distant.

  “So, what’s wrong between you and your wife?” I said.

  “I wanted her to do something with me . . . ,” said Cal.

  “What was that?”

  “Well, I don’t know,” he said.

  The wind made his pants flap as though he were riding a motorcycle.

  “Jesus,” I said. “If you can’t tell me . . . ”

  He nodded.

  “That’s why I wanted you to come over.”

  “OK,” I said.

  The layer of guano was a white-green, and as I put my hand in it, as though to steady myself, I slid through it to get a little closer to him. A little at a time. Like sneaking up on a mosquito that’s sitting on the arm of a chair.

  “I wanted my wife to sit on my face,” said Cal. He still looked down, but he was absolutely still. “She didn’t want to.”

  “So,” I said. “Maybe we can work something out. There’s got to be a woman on the planet who likes that. I bet I could find someone in a half hour. Come on. Let’s go find one.”

  “I’m married. I can’t have a scandal. I’m a prosecutor. Just like you.”

  The word “scandal” hung there, a kite in the breeze. So, wh
at advice did I have about that?

  “If that’s all it is, let’s go home,” I said. “Come on.”

  “It’s not that simple,” he said.

  “I guess not,” I said.

  “I bought this video clip, you know, a woman doing what I asked my wife to do, and I played it in my office. I thought I had disabled the software that keeps an eye on things like that . . . ”

  Cal’s pants flapped in the wind and made a little shudder.

  “But it wasn’t the software. It was Jimmy Blaine. He comes in and sees it.”

  “You should have locked the door,” I said.

  “You’re telling me,” he said.

  “So,” I said. “Why don’t we go over to a bar I know? You can see it from here. See. Over there.”

  “Listen,” said Cal. “Blaine wants my job. You know that.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But he went to Essex and hasn’t got a chance.”

  “That’s not the way it’s playing out. I said, ‘Please, Jimmy, Please, this is just between us. Right? You don’t have to do anything? You can just be quiet. I even have a little money tucked away . . .’ Of course, Frank, I was thinking of borrowing more from you.”

  “I’ll give it to you,” I said. “How much does that asshole want? Ten thousand? Twenty? I can get it. This afternoon.”

  “It’s not that way.”

  “We’ll buy him off. He’s got to have a price, right?”

  “Blaine looks at me, like he’s adding things up, and then he goes down the hall to Martha Bingham and tells her and she gets the IT guy involved and the next thing you know everyone knows, and Martha calls Mary Coffin, you know, the PR type, and she says we should be proactive . . . ”

  “Proactive?” I said.

  “Yeah, cut the DA’s office losses.”

  “And what does that mean? Calling The Boston Globe?” I said.

  “Bingo,” said Cal. “And some other papers. And Martha Bingham wants them to know that she is running a clean ship and that a prosecutor was looking at porn but she is going to take care of it.”

  The constant pressure of the wind had a whiff of oil from the smokestack of a ship, the scent romantic and suggesting Bangkok, Singapore, Saigon. A bird flew over the bridge and the cop cars. Jimmy Blaine emerged from the line of parked cruisers and started walking, his tie blowing, too, in our direction. He came along as if he were just out for a stroll, calm and cool. Above him the helicopters hovered with that beating, whacking noise, as though they stayed aloft by a variety of cruelty.

  “He’s coming,” Cal said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Can you beat that?” he said. “Maybe I can grab him and take him along.”

  I made a sign, with both hands. Back up. Stop. Stop. Blaine waves. Smiles. Keeps walking.

  Cal looked down. The birds streamed by as though they were coming out of a hose, all going to the same place, all in a tight formation, one behind the other.

  “Is he still coming?” said Cal.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  I waved to Tim Marshall, who stared at me and then at Blaine. I pointed at Blaine and then made a quick movement under my chin, as though I was cutting my throat.

  “If I went over there and hit Blaine in the mouth, would it be all right? Can I leave you?”

  “Sure, Frank,” said Cal.

  I slid my hand closer to Cal’s hand with its golden hair and the thin wedding band that probably won’t come off, since he’d gained some weight. Tim Marshall walked out of that line of flashing red and blue lights. Blaine kept coming.

  So, I was left with the choice. Should I stay there in the pigeon shit and paper, or should I stand up and leave Cal alone? To stop Blaine from coming any closer.

  “You know why he’s here?” said Cal.

  “Blaine?” I said. “I don’t know. Who cares? You want to hear a joke about some women who are taking steroids?”

  “He wants to seem sympathetic, see?” said Cal. “Then Blaine can have it both ways. He fucks me and then shows what a sweetheart he is by coming here to stop me from . . . ” He gestured with his chin to the empty space below.

  The birds hovered on the wind, wings out, static: maybe it was their lack of movement, which suggested the serene, but I stood up.

  “I never meant anything like this,” said Blaine.

  “Get back,” I said. “Turn around. Walk away. Don’t say a thing. Not a word.”

  “I just wanted to apologize,” he said.

  “Didn’t Cal beg you to be quiet?” I said.

  “He might have said something about that,” Blaine said. “It was one of those confusing moments, you know?”

  “Get out of here,” I said.

  Cal concentrated on those stationary birds, the squawking they made, so at odds with that scent of oil, of smoke that came from a funnel, from the stink of bilge that ships pumped into the harbor. Then Cal turned, his head moving as though Blaine had a sort of magnetism.

  “So,” said Cal.

  “I didn’t mean anything,” said Blaine. “You know. Office politics. Nothing important.”

  The houses down below seemed brutal in their arrangement, more like teeth than a row of houses. And that coldness from the brick, the glitter in the street from the glassphalt. Like something that would always cut.

  “Have you got the job yet?” said Cal.

  Marshall ran along the side of the bridge, his jacket open, his tie over his shoulder. He took Blaine’s tie and jerked him back, like a dog on a leash.

  “What the fuck are you doing here?” said Marshall.

  “I wanted to apologize,” said Blaine. “It’s all a misunderstanding. Don’t you see? I didn’t do anything . . . ”

  “Come on,” said Marshall.

  My hand sat in that green-and-white guano.

  “You’ve ruined your pants,” said Cal.

  “So what?” I said.

  “That fucking Blaine,” said Cal. “And my wife. She’s just shy, I guess.”

  The slimy guano made it easier to move my hand closer to his fingers, to his wrist. I was going to tell a joke, too, about the two Russian women who were athletes . . . Would that give me enough time, between the punch line and the laughter?

  “And what are my kids going to say? You know my daughter is fourteen. DA watching porn at work, you know, that’s how it’s going to play in the Herald? How about that at school? At Buckingham, Brown, and Nichols. What is she going to say? And my wife? She’s already talking about divorce. I called before coming over here. What chance do I have with the kids? With getting to see them?”

  I put my hand on his.

  “Please,” I said.

  “It’s thirty-two feet per second per second,” said Cal. “Isn’t that the acceleration of gravity?”

  “That’s what they taught us at school . . . ,” I said.

  “Thirty-two feet . . . ,” he said.

  “You remember Coulomb’s law?”

  “I’m hurt pretty bad,” he said.

  “I’ll stick with you,” I said.

  “Sorry.”

  The bird shit was so slick that he slipped through my fingers: it was as familiar as dropping a chicken greased for the oven. His hand went through my fingers with a little sound, a kind of intimate squish. He fell at an angle, like a skydiver, arms out, tie over his shoulder like that flag of condemnation now, flapping in a trembling shudder, and as he fell, it seemed that the layers of smoke, the movement of birds, the bits of trash that blew in the air, were a sediment of trouble, a kind of airy strata, like you see where a road has been cut through a hill. He turned halfway around, arms out, and then hit a white bird that folded its wings and went down, too, like a pilot fish in front of a shark.

  Even from the bridge, a hundred yards in the air, he hit the pavement with the sound of a ham dropped from a loading dock. A slap and a crunch, breaking bones and a fleshy explosion.

  My hands left smears on my pants. Marshall and some of the others stood
around, eyes over the bridge, as though if they just followed the path through the air accurately enough they could bring him back.

  Then Tim said, “Well, there’s a Dutch job for the books. Bird shit, porno, and office politics. Frank, I think I’m going to take an early retirement.” He turned to a cop in uniform and said, “Well, what’s to look at. Get the fucking traffic moving.”

  My handkerchief got off some more of the guano.

  “I should have told you how slippery that stuff is. Like grease.”

  “Worse,” I said. “Grease doesn’t come out of an asshole.”

  “No,” said Tim. “I guess not.”

  The wind was still constant, indifferent, but the birds funneled down on the place below.

  •••

  In Cambridge, I found a place to park in front of the Burger King, and I sat at the same table and same young woman came back, her hair a little sweatier than before, and when she did she brought a coffee.

  “I didn’t think you’d come back.”

  “Well,” I said. I shrugged.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I know what you mean. What’s all that shit on your pants?”

  “A mistake,” I said.

  “Well, sure,” she said. “Sure. Who doesn’t make mistakes?”

  She took an index card out of the pocket of her uniform, where she kept her cell phone and a tube of lipstick. The front had a drawing of a nude woman who rode a spiral galaxy like a horse, and she shot thunder bolts, or maybe they were horse nebulae, from each hand. Hair in a ponytail. The waitress passed the card over.

  “Here,” she said. “The Raver brought that in just yesterday. That’s a twenty-celon note.”

  On the back, the Raver had written in his script: Be content to seem what you really are.

  “You sure you don’t want it?”

  “Oh, I’ve got a shitload at home. One whole wall is covered. The guy leaves tips in celons. Take it.”

  After an hour, the Raver came along, his coat covered with mirrors, each tinted a different color, and the effect was one of being scaled, like a new lizard. His skin was marked with acne scars and he wore his hair in a ponytail and he wore shoes made from tire treads, but he stopped a woman here and there, and said something that made them smile.

  When he came up to the window, he stopped and looked in and said, his voice making the glass vibrate, “Observe constantly that all things take place by change, and accustom thyself to consider that the nature of the universe loves nothing so much as to change the things which are and to make new things like them.” Then he picked out some french fries from the Burger King trash basket and had dinner. He came back and mouthed to me, through the glass, “You should be crying. Why can’t you do that?”