Grayson's Knife

by Russell H Aborn

  John M. thinks that is pretty funny, despite his own breathing issues.

  Grayson says nothing more since it seems like anything he says leads to a trap where someone finds an excuse to talk about AA. Do any of these people have other interests? Plus, all this frivolity seems forced, like they are trying too hard. If you have to push it so much, it must be a shitty deal, after all.

  By and by some goober gets up to the microphone and drones on, everyone went quiet for some reason and then the guy reads some more bullshit. It is all staticky and broken, like late night radio coming in from St. Louis.

  Grayson looks around and wonders how he’d ended up in this crowd of old drunks. These people are the real article, while he’s just a young guy who drinks too much from time to time, which is what happens to young guys, and that doesn’t make him an alcoholic. Is he the only young guy here? He looks at Igor, who probably has a swelled head now with all these people going around calling him Bob. Grayson and Bob are the only young guys. There are a shitload of skinny, yellow haired old men hanging around the coffee urn. They all seem to be wearing white shirts and ancient, baggy suit pants which they’d probably swiped out of a Goodwill box. The sort of old guys who smoke Chesterfields, and live with their divorced, middle-aged daughters. Here and there are a few older women, always together in twos or threes, some of them avid knitters. But young men are badly underrepresented. But then he sees three young guys, sitting together and laughing. One of the guys is Buff Mulligan, Buck’s twenty-year old brother, the last of the ten Mulligans boys fielded by their never-say-die parents. Buff isn’t wearing his hooded black sweatshirt, the one that puts the finishing touch on his medieval zombie-leper look. If this gimmick straightened out Buff, turned him back into a human, then maybe Grayson should listen?

  Grayson hears clapping and stops looking around and looks up to the front of the room where a trim man in early middle age starts speaking from the podium. The man’s face is tanned and lined, as if from outdoor work, and his hair is a full white that matches his open necked shirt. The white hair is the sort that seems to happen to some guys early and overnight.

  “Do you recognize him?” Bob whispers.

  Grayson shakes his head.

  “That’s Mad Mike Ryan.”

  “The B.C. guy?”

  Bob nods.

  Mike Ryan is from East Milton and had been a great fullback for Boston College in the 50’s, and knocked around the AFL in the early 60’s. He was not the most talented player B. C. ever fielded, but it is widely held that he was the toughest.

  Grayson listens.

  “Finally,” Mike Ryan says, “after years and years of me coming home drunk, the odd time when I could find my way home at all, my wife gave me the broom. Guess what? I was surprised.”

  Laughter.

  “You cannot be serious, I said to her. What about these kids, growing up without their father? Never mind that if I saw a bunch of kids playing on the street, I probably couldn’t pick mine out. But I was offended she’d do such a thing. To me? I was a good provider, wasn’t I? So, I came into the program hoping that my wife would reconsider.”

  Of course. Why the hell else would anyone be here? Grayson looks around and sees bobbing heads and smiling faces.

  Grayson’s gaze sweeps the room again, looking, with fading hope, to catch sight of someone whose very presence would free Grayson. He wants to find someone he could point to, mentally, and say, ‘If that guy, who is a Dover St. wino, is here, and this other guy who beats his wife and kids, or even this pathetic fool who is known to shit his drawers and sit in it, then certainly I definitely do not belong here with them.’ He looks all around, but sees no sad sack savior. When he looks up at the casement windows again, he sees Bob’s profile reflected in the dark glass, and beside Bob’s reflection, he sees a sneakered foot attached to a jeaned leg that led to a knee that was pumping up and down fast enough to mix a gallon of paint. He recognizes the sneaker as his own.

  “She’s a good woman,” Mad Mike Ryan is saying, “and I figured if she saw I was trying to quit she’d show me mercy. I wanted mercy. But my version of mercy didn’t happen.”

  Then what, Grayson asks himself, is the fucking point?

  Mad Mike says, “What’s funny is, that about two years after I got in AA, I realized a few things. Things that don’t add up when I think of them at the same time. One, if my wife had not divorced me, I would never have gotten sober. I only came here to take the heat off. My plan was to stay until she cooled off. Which was weird, because she wasn’t mad, not anymore, now she pitied me, which was way worse. But she kept the divorce proceedings in motion so I kept coming to meetings, thinking she’d come around. She didn’t come around, but I got sober. I would not have come here and gotten sober, if she’d taken me back. Two, getting sober is far and away the best thing that ever happened to me. Because it made me realize how blessed I had been, with my family, how much I love my kids, and my wife. Now, my kids, the oldest is twelve, the youngest, seven, we live in different houses, but I’m more conscious of them than I ever was. They are always on my mind, and in my heart. That’s only because I don’t have to go around thinking about booze all the time. When I do see my kids, they’re happy to see me. They give their old man a hug and a kiss. I know they love me. Before, I just figured they didn’t. Why would they?”

  So, this is AA? Sitting around listening to depressing stories? This makes no sense.

  Mike Ryan says, “My wife, my ex-wife, has moved on. She has a boyfriend. I wish I hated him because it would be easier, but I don’t. I still love her so I’m happy for her, because she deserves a good guy and he is. Three, I wish my wife had not divorced me, even though I would not have gotten sober, and getting sober is the best thing that ever happened to me. Plus, if I was still drinking, I wouldn’t have all this pain, like the pain of losing my family. I would be numb. Today I feel real love for my kids and my family, friends, you people and even a little for myself now and then, and it’s something, really something. It’s amazing. Being sober is the best thing that ever happened to me, but boy, sometimes it hurts so much I don’t know how I can take it anymore. That’s when my sponsor tells me, keep it in the day, don’t worry about tomorrow. And then I say, but I’m not thinking about tomorrow, I’m torn up right now. He says, have faith. ‘You’re feeling love, and it will hurt for a while. Sometimes love is a knife that opens you up so the poison can get out, and when it does you start to heal and healing is painful.’“

  Grayson almost frees a dry sob, even before he’d understood what Ryan said.

  Ryan says, “And then I say to my sponsor, great! Wonderful! That’s really swell. A lot of times, I don’t know what the hell he’s talking about but I don’t drink anyway, just so I can keep coming to these meetings and maybe someday I’ll know. Maybe. But for now, I have hope, mostly hope that he’s not altogether full of shit.”

  The AA crowd responds with laughter and applause.

  This is the good news?

  “Hey, Bob,” Grayson says. “Is there a men’s room down here?”

  Bob points to the back. “Take a right after the door.”

  Grayson goes through the door, and straight up the stone steps, two at a time, and runs down Beach St. like he is being chased, across Hancock to Beale St., up the hill, dodging the sadistic traffic as he crosses Newport, and jumps in the GTO parked at the top of the hill. He snaps the emergency brake off, points it down Arlington St, puts the clutch in and rolls out. He turns the key on, pops the clutch and jump starts the car as he hits the bottom of the hill. He is sick of reading signs, so he ignores the red Stop, blows across Brook St. without even looking, hoping to Christ that nothing is coming for him.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Grayson wants to occupy himself to avoid picking up something to drink, so he goes to Charlie’s apartment and parks. Upstairs, he knocks and knocks but there is no answer. He’s pulling away from the curb when Charlie hustles around the corner from Billings
Rd., waves to someone in the pizza place and then cuts across Hancock, walking between two cars stopped for the light. He jogs across to the sidewalk and starts down the slight hill.

  Grayson taps the horn and Charlie jumps, and whirls toward the noise. He sees Grayson and puts his hand over his heart and shakes his head.

  He gets in the car saying, “You trying to give me a heart attack?”

  “Sorry, bud. That’s kind of why I’m here. You want to get out of town, right? What can I do to help?”

  “Yes, I have decided to hit the road for parts unknown. Don’t try to talk me out of it. I’m not set up to handle cops or people trying to kill me.”

  “That’s what I figured and I want to help you.”

  “What about Hugh? Will he be okay with it?”

  “No problem. To be honest they are a little concerned about you.” Grayson speaks the last word and realizes his utterance is ill advised. In fact, really fucking stupid.

  Charlie’s face turns ashen. “Why? They worried about me talking? I would never talk. Never.”

  “Why would you say that?” Grayson says. “No one thinks that.”

  “Plus, there’s something, I don’t know, not right, about the way he pulled this together.”

  “Water under the bridge,” Grayson says. “What do you need to split?”

  “Money.”

  “I can give you money.”

  “Thanks anyway. I’ve got some upstairs. Maybe you could drive me in to Oliver’s. It’s pay day. Live park while I run in.”

  The area all around Fenway Park and Kenmore Square is always hopping at night, year-round, baseball or no. The Red Sox spring training season is well under way in Florida, and the regular season starts soon and the slightly warmer nights seem an encouragement to begin another soul crushing Boston baseball season. Students on break from the area’s prestigious universities mix loudly with their peers from the humbler academies, most of them shouting and drinking in equal measure. The bars around Kenmore played live music by up and coming bands. The music bars served students, baseball fans, rockers, drunken louts and hooligans. On the streets, the louts mixed democratically with college kids. Now that the legal drinking age is eighteen, the area around the Square is a swarm of teenaged fun seekers. The guiding principle of many of these undergrads is that every night in Boston had the potential to regenerate into another Woodstock, minus the mud.

  Grayson drives the pentagon formed by the city streets that surround Fenway Park, keeping his eyes peeled for cops and a parking spot.

  “Park on the bridge,” Charlie says. “They won’t bother you if you’re waiting in the car.”

  Grayson makes the loop around Kenmore station and is heading back toward Oliver’s and the ball park when he spots an opening almost right on the bridge.

  Charlie says, “That works. I’ll be right back.” He hops out and jaywalks across the bridge to the other side, heading toward the bar.

  Grayson has never been in Oliver’s, but he had been in the blue-collar barroom that preceded it. It had been a scrum before Sox games, and they’d serve anyone who could reach the bar and put money on it. The front door opens right onto the wide corner of Brookline and Lansdowne. The buildings on this section of Brookline Ave. had been torn down in the early 60’s and an east-west corridor of land excavated here so that the brick backside of the bar building looms sharply above and beside the railroad tracks which run parallel to the Mass Pike. Where Oliver’s ends, the Brookline Ave Bridge begins, and the Pike and railroad tracks run underneath the bridge. On both sides of the bridge an eight-foot high chain link fence has been erected to prevent playful kids from dropping boulders and such onto the speedy turnpike traffic or the passenger trains passing thirty feet below.

  On the Oliver’s side of the street Grayson can see clots of people milling around in front of the bar, watched over by the bouncers.

  Grayson looks down at the car ashtray while grinding out his cigarette. In those two seconds a screech of tires startles him. He sees a dirty white Chevy panel van with a blown muffler almost topple over as it rips off a crazy-fast U-turn in the wide intersection of Lansdowne and Brookline, and heads back to the bridge. The van slams to an abrupt stop on the up slope of the bridge, bobs when the passenger door flies open and a guy every bit as big as Donny jumps out onto the sidewalk. For a second, Charlie keeps walking toward the guy but finally he sees what’s in front of him and he throws his hands into the air as if to surrender. The man spins Charlie halfway round and grabs him by the scruff of the neck and the ass of his pants.

  Grayson is still, like prey, assuming it’s the cops. But, as the big guy turns, Grayson can see he’s wearing a ski mask. Grayson gets out of the car, held up by street traffic, gets ready to run across the bridge. The next thing Grayson sees, over the top of the van, is Charlie; he is being held aloft, prone, his puffy hair-do at one end and the soles of his little sneakers at the other. The big guy from the van is holding him overhead, facing him up to the night sky, like some kind of sacrifice. The horizontal Charlie disappears below the roof line of the van. Grayson sprints toward them, and sees Charlie again, as he is launched off the bridge and is arcing over the top of the eight-foot-high chain link fence that was supposed to prevent just such a thing. Grayson freezes in the roadway, trying to process what he’s just seen. And now horns behind him begin sounding and the closest driver shouts out his window.

  “Get out of the fucking street, you stupid bastard.”

  Grayson snaps to and runs around the stopped cars, intent on grabbing whoever it is that threw Charlie over, but before he gets there, the van bobs again, the door slams and it rips away from the curb and snaps a fast right on the barren section of Newbury St. that runs from Kenmore Square. It’s gone from sight in under three seconds.

  Around the bridge, what seems like a million girls start screaming; they sound like the train whistles in the old movies. Most of the crowd rushes away from the sidewalk and toward the center of the street, as if afraid they’d be tossed off next. Grayson gets to the fence and grabs the chain link, standing between two guys who have their faces pressed against the fence looking down at the Mass Pike and the railroad tracks. Grayson strains to see where Charlie landed.

  He presses his face up to the fence beside an older guy, maybe thirty, with an enormous Fu Manchu. Like most hippies past their prime hippie years, he looks both very old and ageless.

  “Far out. Too much, man. Too much.”

  Grayson grabs the hippie’s arm and yells. “Where is he?”

  “Too much, man.” The man’s eyes were all black pupil, from either shock or chemicals.

  Grayson shakes him. “Did you see where he landed?”

  “Not really. Somebody came out of the van and knocked me down. I got up just as the little guy got chucked over. That grabbed my eye, and blew my mind. Man, what do we do? Call the cops?”

  The hippie starts gulping air, almost panting as if to ward off a fainting spell.

  “Where is he?” Grayson says.

  “Do you think he’s dead?” the hippie says.

  “Fuck no,” the second guy says.

  He seems rattled, but nowhere near as much as the hippie. He is younger, maybe late teens, with short, wiry blonde hair and Elvis sideburns. The kid’s jaded face is colored by a sea of freckles; the face, combined with the hard-edged haircut, the shiny black pointy shoes, known locally as fence climbers, sharkskin pants and shiny black trench coat tells Grayson this kid is from Charlestown, or maybe Dorchester on the Roxbury line. He’s standing a few feet further down the bridge, more toward Oliver’s.

  “I saw the whole fucking thing,” the city kid says. “The little guy hit that bob wire on the fence.”

  The kid points toward five strings of barbed wire atop the rusty chain link fence that ran between the railroad tracks and the Mass Pike. The wire juts in toward the track at a 45-degree angle from the fence.

  “His jacket got caught on the bob wire, and he was just hang
ing there a second, then he raised his arms over his head and slid, real slow like, right outta his jacket, and on to all them junk tires beside the fence. He hit them fucking tires and bounced up and landed on his feet, already running. He ran like a bastard that way.” He pointed west, to the other side of the bridge. “It was like Tom and Jerry, man.”

  “What did the guy who threw him look like?” Grayson asks.

  The kid’s face registers shock and disgust. “I look like a rat to you? I saw nobody and nothing, pal.” He looks both ways, put his hands in his trench coat pockets and hustles off toward Kenmore Square.

  Grayson drains through the runny crowd and across the street to the western side of the bridge, grabs the fence and looks up along the tracks. No Charlie. On this part of the tracks, there is fencing on both sides until the tracks disappear under the Beacon Street overpass. Charlie might have squirted through a hole in the fence and gone up to the side streets off of Brookline Ave. Or maybe he’d find a place where he could hide, while he reaches the conclusion that his best bet now is to go straight to the cops and tell them everything he knew, which is not optimum at this time. Grayson stares some more, then takes off back to his car.

  Now, out of nowhere there are cop cars rolling up on the bridge from both directions, sirens shrieking, and roof lights aboil. Grayson looks back at the chattering children, and the new people streaming from the other bars toward the sirens; the armed cops look big and surreal in the gaudy police lights, and more sirens close in as the Bad News Carnival continues to shriek its arrival.

  Grayson fires up the engine and moves down Brookline Ave, makes a quick turn down Maitland Street, which ran off Brookline down toward the tracks. He navigates through a parking lot and comes out onto Beacon St., takes a right and a quick left, parking beside another section of tall fence that ran along the railroad tracks. He cuts the lights, shuts down the engine and gets out. He runs over to where a section of the high fence is attached to the fence pole, that being a sturdier place to climb over, but when he puts his foot in the fence it separates from the pole. He squeezes through the gash like it was a doggy door and crouches down beside a weedy bush. He closes his eyes for half a minute, adjusting to the darkness. Who could have done this? Someone trying to quiet Charlie, someone very strong. Donny? He is prone to rash acts and paranoia.