Gone, Baby, Gone

by Dennis Lehane

  I closed my eyes, leaned my head against the fridge. Of all the appliances in the kitchen, the fridge was the most apt to touch my flesh to in the current situation. It was roughly the size, shape, and weight of Oscar.

  “See you on the field.” Oscar hooted loudly several times and hung up.

  I walked back through the living room on my way toward the bedroom.

  “Where you going?” Angie said.

  “To bed.”

  “Why?”

  “Got a big game this afternoon.”

  “What sort of game?” Bubba said.

  “Football.”

  “What?” Angie said loudly.

  “You heard me right,” I said. I went into the bedroom, closed the door behind me.

  They were still laughing when I fell asleep.

  29

  It seemed like every other guy on the Narcotics, Vice, and Crimes Against Children squads was named John. There was John Ives, John Vreeman, and John Pasquale. The quarterback was John Lawn and one of the wide receivers was John Coltraine, but everyone called him The Jazz. A tall, thin, baby-faced narcotics cop named Johnny Davis played tight end on offense and free safety on D. John Corkery, night watch commander at the 16th precinct and the only guy with the team besides me who wasn’t attached to Narco, Vice, or CAC, was the coach. A third of the Johns had brothers in the same squad, so John Pasquale played tight end and his brother Vic was a wide receiver. John Vreeman set up at left guard while his brother Mel crouched at right. John Lawn was supposedly a pretty good quarterback but took a lot of razzing for favoring passes to his brother Mike.

  All in all, I gave up trying to put names to faces after ten minutes and decided to call everyone John until I was corrected.

  The rest of the players on the DoRights, as they called themselves, had other names, but they all shared a similar look, no matter what their size or color. It was the cop look, the way they had of carrying themselves that was loose and wary at the same time, the hard caution in their eyes even when they were laughing, the sense you got from all of them that you could go from being their friend to their enemy in a split second. It didn’t matter which way to them, it was your choice, but once the decision was made they would act accordingly and immediately.

  I’ve known a lot of cops, hung out with them, drank with them, considered a few to be my friends. But even when one was your friend, it was a different kind of friendship than you had with civilians. I never felt completely at ease with a cop, completely sure I knew what one was thinking. Cops always hold something back, except occasionally, I assume, around other cops.

  Broussard clapped his hand on my shoulder and introduced me around to the team. I got several handshakes, some smiles and curt nods, one “Nice fucking job on Corwin Earle, Mr. Kenzie,” and then we all huddled around John Corkery as he gave us the game plan.

  It wasn’t much of a plan. Basically it had to do with what a pack of prima-donna pussies the guys in Homicide and Robbery were, and how we had to play this game for Poole, whose only chance to make it out of ICU alive, apparently, was if we stomped the shit out of the other team. Lose, and Poole’s death would be on our conscience.

  While Corkery talked, I looked across the field at the other team. Oscar caught my eye and waved happily, a shit-eating grin on his face the size of the Merrimack Valley. Devin saw me looking and smiled, too, nudged a rabid-looking monster with the scrunched features of a Pekinese, and pointed across the field at me. The monster nodded. The rest of the Homicide and Robbery guys didn’t look quite as big as our team, but they looked smarter, and quick, and had a leanness to them that spoke more of gristle than delicacy.

  “Hundred bucks to the first guy knocks one of them out of the game,” Corkery said, and clapped his hands together. “Kill the motherfuckers.”

  That must have been it for the Rockne-like inspiration, because the team came off its haunches and banged fists and clapped hands.

  “Where are the helmets?” I said to Broussard.

  One of the Johns was passing as I said it, and he clapped Broussard’s back and said, “Fucking guy’s hilarious, Broussard. Where’d you find him?”

  “No helmets,” I said.

  Broussard nodded. “It’s a touch game,” he said. “No hard contact.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. “Sure.”

  Homicide-Robbery, or the HurtYous as they called themselves, won the coin toss and elected to receive. Our kicker drove them back to their eleven, and as we lined up, Broussard pointed to a slim black guy on the HurtYous and said, “Jimmy Paxton. He’s your guy. Stick to him like a tumor.”

  The HurtYous’ center snapped the ball and the quarterback dropped back three steps, fired the ball over my head, and hit Jimmy Paxton on the twenty-five. I had no idea how Paxton got past me, never mind to the twenty-five, but I made an awkward lunge that tapped his ankles at the twenty-nine, and the teams moved upfield to the line of scrimmage.

  “I said like a tumor,” Broussard said. “Did you get that part?”

  I looked across at him and saw a hard fury in his eyes. Then he smiled, and I realized how far he’d probably gotten on that smile his whole life. It was that good, that boyish and American and pure.

  “I’ll see if I can adjust,” I said.

  The HurtYous broke their huddle, and I saw Devin on the sideline exchange a nod with Jimmy Paxton.

  “They’re going to come right back at me again,” I said to Broussard.

  John Pasquale, the cornerback, said, “Might want to improve then, huh?”

  The HurtYous snapped the ball and Jimmy Paxton streaked down the sideline and I streaked with him. His eyes flickered and he extended his back and said, “’Bye, white boy,” and I went up with him, spun my body around and extended my right arm, whacked at the air, hit pigskin instead, and swatted the ball out of bounds.

  Jimmy Paxton and I came down together in a heap, banged off the ground, and I knew it was the first of many impacts that would probably keep me in bed all through tomorrow.

  I got up first and reached down for Paxton. “I thought you were going somewhere.”

  He smiled and took the hand. “Keep talking, white boy. You’re getting winded already.”

  We walked back down the sidelines toward the line of scrimmage and I said, “Just so you don’t have to keep calling me white boy, and I don’t have to start calling you black boy, start a race riot at Harvard, I’m Patrick.”

  He slapped my hand. “Jimmy Paxton.”

  “Nice to meet you, Jimmy.”

  Devin ran the next play at me again, and once again I swatted the ball out of Jimmy Paxton’s waiting hands.

  “Fucking mean bunch you’re with, Patrick,” Jimmy Paxton said, as we started the long walk back to scrimmage.

  I nodded. “They think you guys are pussies.”

  Jimmy nodded. “We might not be pussies, but we ain’t cowboys like those crazy fuckers. Narco, Vice, and CAC.” He whistled. “First ones through the door because they love the jizz.”

  “The jizz?”

  “The action, the orgasm. Forget the foreplay with those boys. They go right to the fucking. Know what I mean?”

  The next play, Oscar lined up at fullback and leveled three guys at the snap, and the running back ran through a hole the size of my backyard. But one of the Johns—Pasquale or Vreeman, I had lost track—grabbed the ball carrier’s arm on the thirty-six, and the HurtYous decided to punt.

  The rain came five minutes later and the rest of the first half was a sloppy grind-it-out Marty Schottenheimer-Bill Parcells kind of game. Slogging and slipping and tripping through the mud, neither team made much progress. As running back, I gained about twelve yards on four carries, and as a safety I got burned twice by Jimmy Paxton, but I broke up another potential bomb and otherwise stuck to him so tight the quarterback chose other receivers.

  Near the end of the half, the score was tied at zero but we were threatening. Down in the HurtYous’ red zone, on a second and two with twenty sec
onds left, the DoRights ran an option and John Lawn tossed the ball to me and I saw a gaping hole and nothing but green beyond, did a little spin around a linebacker, stepped into the hole, tucked the ball under my arm, put my head down, and then Oscar loomed out of nowhere, his breath steaming through the cold rain, and hit me so hard I felt like I’d stepped into the path of a 747.

  By the time I got off my back, the clock had run out and the hard rain splattered mud up off the field into my cheek. Oscar reached down with one of those porterhouses he calls hands and lifted me to my feet, chuckling softly under his breath.

  “You gonna puke?”

  “Thinking about it,” I said.

  He whacked me on the back in what I guess was a friendly show of camaraderie that almost sent me into a face plant in the mud.

  “Nice bid,” he said, and walked off toward his bench.

  “What happened to touch football?” I said to Remy on the sidelines, as the DoRights opened a cooler full of beer and soda.

  “Soon as someone does what Sergeant Lee just did, the gloves come off.”

  “So we get helmets for the second half?”

  He shook his head, pulled a beer from the cooler. “No helmets. We just get meaner.”

  “Anyone ever died at one of these games?”

  He smiled. “Not yet. Could happen, though. Beer?”

  I shook my head, waiting for the ringing to stop in there. “Take a water.”

  He passed me a bottle of Poland Spring, put a hand on my shoulder, and led me up the sideline a few yards, away from the rest. In the stands, a small group of people had gathered—runners, mostly, who’d stumbled on the game as they prepared to jog the steps, one tall guy sitting off to himself, long legs propped up on the rail, baseball hat pulled low over his eyes.

  “Last night,” Broussard said, and let the two words hang in the rain.

  I sipped some water.

  “I said a thing or two I shouldn’t have. Too much rum, my head gets a little fucked up.”

  I looked out at the collection of wide Greek columns that rose beyond the stands. “Such as?”

  He stepped in front of me, his eyes dancing and bright. “Don’t try and play with me here, Kenzie.”

  “Patrick,” I said, and took a step to my right.

  He followed, his nose an inch from mine, that weird, dancing brightness filling his eyes. “We both know I let slip something I shouldn’t have. Let’s leave it at that and forget about it.”

  I gave him a friendly, confused smile. “I don’t know where this is coming from, Remy.”

  He shook his head slowly. “You don’t want to play it this way, Kenzie. You understand?”

  “No, I—”

  I never saw his hand move, but I felt a sharp sting on my knuckles and suddenly my water bottle was lying at my feet, chugging its contents into the mud.

  “Forget last night, and we’ll be friends.” The lights in his eyes had stopped dancing but burned hard, as if embers were locked in the pupils.

  I looked down at the water bottle, the mud encasing the sides of the clear plastic. “And if I don’t?”

  “That’s not an ‘if’ you want to bring into your life.” He tilted his head, peered into my eyes as if he saw something there that might require extraction, might not; he wasn’t sure yet. “Are we clear on this?”

  “Yeah, Remy,” I said. “We’re clear. Sure.”

  He held my eyes for a long minute, breathing steadily through his nostrils. Eventually, he raised his beer to his lips, took a long pull on the can, lowered it.

  “That’s Officer Broussard,” he said, and walked back upfield.

  The second half of the game was war.

  The rain and the mud and the smell of blood brought out something horrible in both teams, and in the carnage that ensued, three HurtYous and two DoRights left the game permanently. One of them—Mike Lawn—had to be carried off the field, after Oscar and a Robbery dick named Zeke Monfriez collided on either side of his body and damn near snapped him in half.

  I sustained two heavily bruised ribs and one shot to the lower back that would probably have me pissing blood the next morning, but in view of all the bloody faces, noses flattened to pulps, and one guy spitting two teeth into the first-down hash mark, I felt comparatively fortunate.

  Broussard switched to tailback and stayed away from me the rest of the game. He got a torn lower lip on one play, but two plays later clotheslined the guy who’d given it to him so viciously the guy lay on the field coughing and puking for a full minute before he could stand on legs so wobbly it looked like he was on the keel of a schooner in high seas. After he’d clotheslined the poor bastard, Broussard had kicked him while he was down for good measure, and the HurtYous went apeshit. Broussard stood behind a wall of his own men as Oscar and Zeke tried to get at him, called him a cheap-shot motherfucker, and he caught my eyes and smiled like a gleeful three-year-old.

  He raised a finger caked with dark blood, and wagged it at me.

  We won by a field goal.

  As a guy who grew up as desperate to be a jock as any other guy in America, and one who still cancels most engagements on autumn Sunday afternoons, I suppose I should have been ecstatic at what would probably be my last taste of team sports, the thrill of conquest and the sexual intensity of battle. I should have felt like whooping, should have had tears in my eyes as I stood at midfield in the first football stadium ever built in this country, looked at the Greek columns and the rain boiling off the long planks of seating in the stands, smelled the last hint of winter dying in the April rain, the metallic odor of the rain itself, the lonely advance of evening in the cold purple sky.

  But I didn’t feel any of that.

  I felt like we were a bunch of foolish, pathetic men unwilling to accept our own aging and willing to break bones and tear the flesh of other men just so we could move a brown ball a couple of yards or feet or inches down a field.

  And, also, looking along the sidelines at Remy Broussard as he poured a beer over his bloody finger, doused his torn lip with it, and accepted high-fives from his pals, I felt afraid.

  “Tell me about him,” I said to Devin and Oscar, as we leaned against the bar.

  “Broussard?”

  “Yeah.”

  Both teams had chosen to convene the postgame party at a bar on Western Avenue in Allston, about a half mile from the stadium. The bar was called the Boyne, after a river in Ireland that had snaked through the village where my mother grew up, lost her fisherman father and two brothers to the lethal liquid combination of whiskey and the sea.

  It was excessively well-lit for an Irish bar, and the brightness was heightened by blond wood tables and light beige booths, a shiny blond bar. Most Irish bars are dark, steeped in mahogany and oak and black floors; in the darkness, I’ve always thought, lies the sense of intimacy my race feels is necessary to drink as heavily as we often do.

  In the brightness of the Boyne, it was clear to see how the battle we’d just fought on the field had spilled over into the bar. The Homicide and Robbery guys stuck to the bar and the small high tables across from it. The Narco-Vice-CAC cops took over the rear of the place, draped themselves over the backs of booths, and stood in packs near the tiny stage by the fire exit, talking so loudly that the three-piece Irish band quit playing after four songs.

  I have no idea how the management felt about the fifty bloody men who’d piled into the sparsely populated bar, if they had a team of extra bouncers waiting in the kitchen and a Def-Con alert called into the Brighton P.D., but they were definitely pulling down a profit, pouring beers and shots nonstop, trying to keep abreast of the calls for more coming from the rear of the bar, sending barbacks to wade through the men and sweep up the broken bottles and overturned ashtrays.

  Broussard and John Corkery held court in the back, their voices rising loudly in toasts to the prowess of the DoRights, Broussard alternating a napkin and a cold beer bottle against his damaged lip.

  “Thought you guys
were buddies,” Oscar said. “What, your moms won’t let you play together anymore, or’d you have a spat?”

  “The moms thing,” I said.

  “Great cop,” Devin said. “Bit of a showboat, but all those Narco-Vice guys are.”

  “But Broussard’s CAC. Hell, he’s not even that anymore. He’s Motor Pool.”

  “CAC was recent,” Devin said. “Last two years or so. Before that he did like a nickel in Vice, a nickel in Narco.”

  “More than that.” Oscar belched. “We came out of Housing together, did a year in uniform each, and he went into Vice, I went into Violent Crimes. That was ’eighty-three.”

  Remy’s head turned away from two of his men as they each chatted in his ear, and he looked across the bar at Oscar and Devin and me. He raised his beer bottle, tilted his head.

  We raised ours.

  He smiled, kept his eyes on us for a minute, then turned back to his men.

  “Once Vice, always Vice,” Devin said. “Those fucking guys.”

  “We’ll get ’em next year,” Oscar said.

  “Won’t be the same guys,” Devin said bitterly. “Broussard’s packing it in, so’s Vreeman. Corkery hits his thirty in January, heard he’s already bought the place in Arizona.”

  I nudged his elbow. “What about you? You gotta be close to thirty in.”

  He snorted. “I’m going to retire? To what?” He shook his head, threw back a shot of Wild Turkey.

  “Only way we’re leaving the job is on stretchers,” Oscar said, and he and Devin clinked their pint glasses.

  “Why the interest in Broussard?” Devin said. “Thought you two were bonded in blood after Trett’s house.” He turned his head, slapped my shoulder with the back of his hand. “Which, by the way, was a righteous piece of work.”

  I ignored the compliment. “Broussard just interests me.”

  Oscar said, “That why he slapped a water bottle out of your hand?”

  I looked at Oscar. I’d been pretty sure Broussard had blocked the move with his body.

  “You saw that?”

  Oscar nodded his huge head. “Saw the look he gave you after he clotheslined Rog Doleman, too.”