Grayson sees dark figures far down on the tracks casting flashlight beams in the area underneath the bridge. Some of the beams ran up concrete shoulders girding the bridge as if the man they looked for may have clung to the side like a moth.
There are golf ball sized rocks on the ground all around the tracks, and Grayson hears them wheeze and clack as someone lurches toward him out of the dark. He sees the white tee shirt of now jacketless Charlie.
Charlie is looking backward, toward the bridge, but still moving forward, fast, coming closer to Grayson who holds his position behind the bush. How can he get Charlie’s attention without scaring the bejesus out of him?
When Charlie gets closer, Grayson steps out and calls in a shouted whisper.
“Charlie!”
Without turning to look forward, Charlie bolts and runs straight into Grayson. The little guy bounces off him like a Superball. Grayson reaches down and pulls him up. In the faint light Grayson sees Charlie’s face flash a rictus of panic, and he warms up with a small noise generally issued just prior to shrieking. Grayson realizes without thinking that he didn’t have time to soothe Charlie into silence so he clips him under the chin with a sharp uppercut, and Charlie falls against the chain link fence and it rattles as he bounces forward before falling like a sack of sand. Charlie is now quiet, and quite portable.
Grayson carries Charlie over to the hole in the fence and sets him down. Then Grayson eases himself through the hole, reaches one arm back and drags Charlie through by the neck of his tee shirt. Beside the tee shirt, Charlie wore tracksuit pants and his Nike Flyte shoes. Grayson wriggles Charlie through the gash.
“Ow, ow, ow,” Grayson says, voicing pain on Charlie’s behalf.
He tosses him over his shoulder and runs to the car. Wrestling an unconscious guy into the back seat of a two door GTO would be an arduous process, so he keys the trunk open and carefully lays Charlie in it, slams it shut, and scrambles into the front seat of the car and rips away.
Charlie was ready to scream when he saw Grayson. He keeps in mind that Charlie’s emotions are likely quite raw after being tossed off the bridge. That would do a number on anyone’s poise. But, if it is Donny who threw him off the bridge, it would explain why Charlie tried to scream when he saw Grayson.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Grayson pulls the GTO into the dark, truck filled market area that comprises the Boston meat district, which is located about two quick miles from the Fenway area.
The meat companies park their local delivery trucks and trailers in a weed choked, open, common lot in the center of the market. They leave space for the long-haul truckers to park. The truckers arrive at all hours of the day and night, coming in from the Midwest and Western states carrying loads of semi-butchered swinging beef or dead hogs hanging from hooks in refrigerated trailers. The drivers usually sleep until it’s their turn to unload. They’d leave both the truck and reefer engines running, as they waited to drop dead animals into the maw of New England. Meanwhile the drivers dreamt in locked sleeper cabs, lulled by the white noise grumble and soothing vibration of their mobile wombs. When it’s time to deliver, they’d open the trailer doors and the rank, refrigerated smell of blood, raw flesh and animal fat would drift out toward Mass Avenue and the back of the Old Mr. Boston distillery, where the stink of raw whiskey would meld with the smell of blood to form a memorable reek.
Grayson pulls in beside a section of long unused railroad track that sits between two dropped trailers, drives about thirty feet in and jumps out and opens the trunk. He wants to wake Charlie and put him in the front passenger seat. The poor guy has to be pretty rattled.
Charlie is still out cold. He slaps Charlie lightly on the cheek.
“Charlie? Charlie? You’re okay now, Charlie. Everything’s all right.”
Grayson peers down into the dark trunk, trying to see if Charlie’s light is back on. Charlie moans, then retches and Grayson flips him over quickly onto his stomach, so if he did vomit, he wouldn’t choke to death.
Grayson reaches in and lifts him out, closes the trunk and leans Charlie against the back of the car. Charlie begins to slide to the ground and Grayson catches him under the arms, lifts him and lays him down across the trunk. Grayson looks down into Charlie’s face for a sign of consciousness, now with the sense that Charlie is faking being out.
“Wake up, Charlie. Come on, man, you’re not afraid of me, are you? That’s crazy.”
Then Grayson hears shoes scraping behind him, and turns to see two big shadows, both wearing very large cowboy hats.
“Hey fellers,” one hat drawls, “go somewheres else to perform your unnatural acts, now. You got decent folks trying to sleep—”
“Why, that’s just a little feller he’s got there laying on the trunk,” the other hat says.
“Wrong. You got it wrong,” Grayson says. “Go back to your trucks.”
“Why? So you can mess around with that little boy in peace?”
“No. Of course not,” Grayson says. “No. Shit! Hey, get the fuck outta here.”
“Not gonna do it, buddy. Bert, git on the CB. Summon the ‘thorities’ out here.”
“Beat it!” Grayson yells. “You shitkickin’ fools.”
He advances on the two cowboys and now sees they were a lot older than he’d first realized.
“Oh, yeah?” the other one says. “Come on, Sodomy Sam. Come on, an git it.”
He pulls what looks like a sap from his back pocket and slaps the palm of his other hand with it. His sidekick backs up a little, and hung his hands close by his hips, like he’s ready to draw a couple of six-shooters.
Grayson steps over to the old railroad bed and onto the multitude of stones lodged between the track ties. He picks up a rock about the size of a deck of cards, and throws it in between the two large shadows.
“You’re going to have to leave sometime, bub,” one of the cowboys says. “We can wait.”
Grayson picks up two rocks and scales one and then the other. Judging from the howls, they’d both landed.
“Why you….” one cowboy hollers. Grayson always wondered what came after the ‘Why you’ in these situations, but before he could find out he pitches another rock, and from the thump, this one hit a big belly.
“The next ones are going for your heads,” Grayson shouts.
Then he follows through and advances on the cowboys throwing one rock after another. The older men duck and throw their arms up to protect their heads, or maybe their hats, and then they turn and lurch away in two examples of gimpy running; foot speed and agility are unusual, if not unknown, among sedentary, middle-aged fat men. But the attempt to outrun rocks, at night, on frost heaved asphalt, broken up by areas of exposed cobblestone, urban trash, and railroad tracks while shod in cowboy boots, could be the final scene in a Three Stooges short.
Grayson recognizes that their cowboy hearts were in the right place, thinking they were saving a kid from harm, even if they had acted on a misapprehension of the facts.
“God love you,” Grayson says.
He turns back to Charlie, but Charlie isn’t there. Charlie is gone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Grayson spends about two minutes looking around for Charlie. The cowboys, by now, have caught their breath and maybe used the CB radio to call the cops. Grayson holds the conviction that talking to the cops, which is always a bad idea, is especially bad right now. How would he explain why he had driven in between the trucks?
He zips away from the market and up Shetland St. into Roxbury. He makes his way up Norfolk Ave. to Humphrey St., to Dudley and through Uphams Corner, along residential streets he knew but couldn’t name, then to Freeport and out to Morrissey Blvd, over the Neponset River and into North Quincy.
He drove by the bank, saw the time and turned on the radio to catch the news, delivered on the hour by WBZ.
“As we reported earlier this evening, Undercover State Police officer William James Hawthorne died late this afternoon as a result of b
eing shot during an armed home invasion and robbery.”
Grayson has a flash of panic, real panic, and imagines himself speeding up to ninety and ramming his car into the side of the Boston Gear building.
The young cop is dead, a guy who tried to do the right thing with his life. He died because of the chaos that entered his life in the form of Bird, Grayson and the rest.
He goes to a Chinese restaurant with a 2AM liquor license. He sits at the bar at The Joy King and drinks without a thought of what he is doing. It takes three drinks to remember he quit, and why he had quit. Rather than bringing relief, the drink is making him sick. There’s no more relief to be had, but he kept turning back to it. It is nuts. He goes into the gents and sticks his fingers down his throat.
He washes up, leaves and drives around, wrestling with anger and fear. He heads over to Donny’s place. Where has he been and what has he been up to? He drives up West Squantum St., stewing in fear, doubt and insecurity and is waiting to make the turn onto Harvard, now wallowing in depression when, at the last moment, he sees a white van making a right turn, coming from the opposite direction. It is already through the turn and all Grayson can see now is the back end. Is it the same van? Just a coincidence? Or, has the van just dropped Donny at home? Or, maybe they tried to kill him, too. Grayson shoots down Harvard Street to Donny’s street, took a left and on the down slope of the hill, killed his engine and the headlights and rolls silently by Donny’s second floor apartment. His station wagon is at the curb. He lives alone in his apartment, and in the living room window a blue-gray light shifts and changes.
Grayson parks down the street and walks back. He cuts through the neighbor’s yard and hops over the fence into Donny’s backyard, and almost falls over a swing set, which was not there at the time of his last visit. Donny’s landlord lived on the first floor. Carl Winslow is a Boston fireman in his thirties married to a pretty woman named Millie. They have two kids under five, and a third child on the way.
He looks for lights in the first-floor windows and sees none. Carl’s pickup truck isn’t in the driveway, but he works shifts at a firehouse on Columbus Ave., so it is most likely he is at the station and Millie’s in bed.
Grayson creeps up the wooden back steps, opens the hallway door quietly and goes up the carpeted hall stairs the same way. He listens at the back door to the kitchen and can hear television noise. He tries the knob and the door is unlocked. He slips in silently, shuts the door and advances down to the living room. He peers around the doorway and sees a shirtless Donny sitting on the couch with his back to Grayson. He is moaning softly and his arm is moving up and down in the area of his lap. On the loud console TV, Lee Marvin is snarling at Angie Dickinson in some old movie from the 60’s.
Grayson ducks back to the kitchen, opens the oven door. Inside, on two separate racks are pistols. He takes Donny’s .22 out from on top of the rack and moving one small step at a time he makes it to Donny and sticks the gun in the hollow between tendons where his head and neck met.
“Sandra?” Donny says with a tremor. “Is that you, baby?”
Millie Winslow pops up from Donny’s lap, with Donny’s hand still on the back of her head, and she looks up, aghast, at Grayson.
“Oh, honestly,” Millie says. “It’s your cousin.” Grayson has dropped the gun hand to his side, hiding the .22, but Donny knows there is a pistol somewhere close and acts accordingly.
Millie stands up, and brushes her hair out of her face and poses, fully pregnant, with one hand on her hip, as if she were modeling the floor length yellow terry cloth robe she wore: Just the thing in loungewear a woman needs to stay comfortable while feeding on the man upstairs.
She ignores Grayson and looks down and around.
“Don, reach under the couch for my thong, will you?” she says, and holds up a single pink flip-flop. “I only see the one.”
Donny reaches to the floor and picks up the other flip-flop and hands it to her. She’s about as embarrassed as she’d be if she was discovered watering the geraniums.
“You better keep your mouth shut, Grayson,” Millie says, without looking at him.
“Right back at you, Mrs. Winslow,” Grayson says.
“Unless you want to be a home wrecker,” she says.
“I’ll do my part,” Grayson says.
“Goodnight, Millie,” Donny says.
She walks out to the hall and then pokes her head back in.
“Who is Sandra?” she asks.
“Go home, Millie,” Donny says.
Now Grayson has the gun pointed at the side of his cousin’s head.
“Eliminating witnesses, are you?” Grayson says.
“Me?” Donny says. “You’re the one with the gun at my head. Put it away, will you?”
“You, too,” Grayson says. “Before I puke.”
“I don’t have—Oh, yeah.” He reaches down to the floor, then lifts his butt off the couch and pulls up his boxers.
“You saw the news?” Grayson says. “And decided to team up with bikers to winnow down the people who could turn you in.”
“What? What news?”
“The state cop, Hawthorne, the cop that fucking Bird shot, he died this afternoon.” Grayson says.
“Jesus, no. Oh, no.” He jumps up. “I was up at the Highlife. But I didn’t see the news. I was talking to Scotty outside. Nobody said anything when I went in, they were talking Red Sox, so I figured there was nothing new. He’s dead? Hell, no.”
Grayson grimaces. “You had to made things worse.”
“What? How? What did I make worse?” Donny asks.
“Chucking him off the bridge,” Grayson says.
“Are you drunk?” Donny says. “What are you talking about?”
“You knew the cop died, you made peace with bikers and went to war against us. How could you do it? Do you know how many other people could have gotten killed? What the fuck is wrong with you?”
Grayson grabs an ashtray off an end table and scales it at Donny, who blocks it with his forearm.
“Ouch! What are you doing?”
“Who was driving the van?”
Donny furrows his brow. “I don’t know. What van?”
“You know what van. The van that just dropped you off.”
Donny grows visibly angry. “You’re cracking up.”
“I suppose you and someone else didn’t go to Oliver’s in a van tonight?”
“What? When?”
“Don’t give me that shit. You know when.”
“When!”
“You weren’t there about eleven thirty or so?”
“That’s correct,” Donny says. “I wasn’t. I told you I was up at the Highlife with about forty witnesses, including Scotty Walsh, who I was with most of the time.”
Scotty Walsh was an old friend of Grayson’s from ten years of catechism classes.
“Will Scotty say you were there around eleven thirty?”
“Yes. Because we got into a Watergate argument outside. He thinks Nixon should resign.”
“Yeah? So? You do, too.”
Donny shook his head. “Yeah, but I don’t like Scotty. I wanted to piss him off.”
Grayson knows that’s true and it makes the rest of the story credible.
Donny says “What’s going on? What happened with this van?”
Grayson says, “We went to Oliver’s to get Charlie’s check. He needs money to leave town. Listen, I’m sorry about the ashtray. Can I get you some ice?”
“No, that’s okay. Just hand me my .22 so I can put a pill right between your eyes, you son of a bitch. I’d bounce you around but good, if it didn’t wake up Millie’s kids.”
Donny stands and puts a tee shirt on and tucks it into the elastic waist band of his baggy boxers with the lions on them.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Grayson says. “Don’t you want to know what happened?”
“What?” He gets his pants and puts them on.
“Somebody who is very big and strong got out of an o
ld white van and threw Charlie off the Brookline Avenue Bridge tonight.”
Donny stops zipping his fly and looks up.
“What?” he says. “Wow. Oh, man. Oh, God. Poor Charlie.” He sits down on the couch and covers his face with his big mitts. “He was a good friend.”
“I thought it was you,” Grayson says.
“No way. I wish I was that cold.” Donny shakes his head. “He get hit by a bunch of cars?”
“No. He landed on the side with the railroad tracks. He’s not dead. He ran away.”
Donny makes a shocked face. “Fucking Charlie, man. That’s impressive. He’s quite a guy.”
“Plus,” Grayson says, “I think someone is following you in a van.”
“An older chick with short, gray hair?”
Grayson shakes his head. “What? No. The bikers. They may be following all of us, off and on.”
“Tomorrow,” Donny says. “We go after the bastards who threw him over.”
“What?” Grayson says. “Who?”
“Stan and his gang. Who else could it be?”
Grayson expels a relieved breath. It wasn’t Donny, and Donny didn’t think it was Hugh. Grayson is happy it was the rampaging bikers off on a killing spree, rather than his family members.
“Charlie wouldn’t have shown up there if he had any brains,” Grayson says.
“That’s right,” Donny says. “So, why did you both go?”
“I figured he’d be safe with me,” Grayson says.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Grayson wakes up the next morning with his heart in full gallop. He sits on the side of the bed, takes some deep cleansing breaths and then smokes a cigarette. He’d dreamt that a sparrow in flight had crashed into his chest and knocked itself out. As he looked down at the bird on the ground, it revived, hopped to its feet and cheeped at him. He bent down to it and held his open hand out, and the bird hopped on. He lifted the bird to his face, and could see the bird was hurt and it began cheeping insistently. He put it down and walked away but it followed him. In the dream Grayson shouted, ‘I’m sick of this,’ and, as hard as he could, threw the bird at the ground, where it squawked horribly and then died.
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