Grayson's Knife

by Russell H Aborn

  “An accident? No, I’m afraid not,” Stan says. He points at Grayson. “I have it on good authority that this man deliberately pushed him out the window.” Stan flashes a two second smile. “Many of my brother Lords are howling for his death.” He smiles for one second. “Some want to cut his heart out and feed it to the dogs.” Again, with the incongruous smile. “Many others want to kill the whole lot of you. You, your family, friends, pets, maybe even your high school mascot.” Another smile flashes, almost subliminally. “In any case, Amy, sweetheart that she is, suggested we put our heads together and find a way for you all to redeem yourselves, if you’re interested. I kind of hope you’re not. I love a blood bath.”

  Grayson says, “All this trouble is because Bird shot a guy. Why?”

  Amy says, “Let me take this one, Stan.” She gets up and begins to pace back and forth, rubbing her hands together as if washing them, deep in thought. It is a nice bit of theater, but her physical assets, which are many and distracting, have Donny nearly hyperventilating. “Of course, no one could have known there was a pig undercover in there. The shooting was... unfortunate. Our theory is that Bird, who had been busted numerous times, recognized the undercover pig, and, it’s quite likely, the pig recognized Bird. Bird was, in fact, out on bail waiting for a court date. But, that’s conjecture, we will never know, since he’s--”

  “Kaput,” Stan says.

  They are silent and rueful for a few moments. When that moment had its due, Hugh says, “How would we redeem ourselves?”

  Stan says, “By hijacking a trailer load of those M-16s your company is picking up at Colt.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Back in Hugh’s apartment Grayson is on the couch in front of the droning TV trying to fathom how these things have come to pass. Hugh has gone out to “Get something from work.”

  Donny went into the bathroom for a while, and when he comes back, he finds an apple in the refrigerator and is rubbing it with both hands, like it is a new baseball.

  “That Amy is hot,” Donny says. “Hugh said you weren’t interested. Because I damn sure am.” He takes a big bite out of the apple, which sounds like the moment a large tree cracks and falls in a blizzard.

  “Be my guest,” Grayson says. “Good luck.”

  A few minutes later there’s a rap on the door. Donny reaches behind his back and produces a pistol.

  “Who’s that?” he says, looking at Grayson.

  “How the hell do I know,” Grayson says. He gets up to answer it while Donny backs up to the wall and holds the gun out, pointed at the doorway.

  “Hello, hello,” Amy says, sing song. She comes in and Grayson closes the door, as Donny hurries to put his gun back in his pants.

  “How are you guys, after that meeting?” She comes over to kiss Grayson, but he turns away from her.

  She acts like it didn’t happen. “Stan is intense, no?

  “You can almost hear the bees buzzing around in his head,” Grayson says.

  “We need to talk. Where’s Hugh?” she says.

  “He’ll be back in a jiffy,” Donny says.

  “You and Stan are pretty cozy,” Grayson says. “You rubbing his smelly feet, him asking if you want to make a Donny sandwich with him.”

  “There’s something about him,” she says. “You just want to do what he asks. He’s charismatic, don’t you think? And very sexy.”

  “Oh, yes, he’s sooo dreamy,” Grayson says.

  “Jealousy is sooo bourgeois,” she says.

  “He’s a switch hitter?” Donny says. “That seems strange for a biker. And, an elected official, no less.”

  Amy says, “I think he was trying to topple your worldview. Challenge you to keep an open mind, see things differently. He’s a type of revolutionary, too. Aligned with my cadre, but different. We share the same goal, to smash the system, by any means necessary. He’s gone by the way.”

  “Oh? Off to play some tennis?” Grayson says. “We’re not hijacking a load of guns, is that clear?”

  She says, “Think long and hard about that. You don’t want The Dark Lords as an adversary.”

  “How did he know that my company was going to be trucking the guns?”

  “I was searching for a way to keep you guys alive,” she says, “and up popped this idea. It’s elegant. It takes care of all our needs. You should thank me.”

  “What are our needs?” Donny says.

  “To go on living?” she says. “Let’s show him some initiative, draw up a plan and take it to him. Think about it, please. We rip off the guns, and The Lords forgive and forget.”

  “What ‘we’ are you talking about?” Grayson says.

  “I’m in this right along with you. I brought you guys to him, and you killed his top lieutenant. He’s upset with me, too.”

  Grayson says, “He didn’t look it. Smiling like a cat on your couch.”

  “That will always be our couch to me.” She giggles, which is, for her, unbecoming.

  Donny intuits immediately what she is referring to, and deflates promptly. As always, when thwarted, he lashes out.

  Donny says, pointing outside, to the world at large, “And make sure he knows we keep the drugs and money we got from the apartment.”

  She says, “I agree. That’s eminently fair. If he gets the rifles.”

  “I’m not doing it,” Grayson says. “That’s final.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Grayson goes up to the corner to get an afternoon newspaper, but since the South Shore paper hasn’t come out yet, he grabs a mid-day tabloid. At his apartment he sits on the front stairs in the cold with a copy of the Record American. He opens the newspaper and braces himself. The reporters at the Record could make a trip to the store for skim milk sound lurid.

  “Hawthorne’s widow Amanda told reporters her husband was motivated to become a crime fighter because of a deep, personal tragedy… He hailed from the tony suburb of Cohasset and a family of extraordinary wealth and prestige.”

  “I never even heard of them,” Grayson says.

  “.....the family manse on the ocean…. He could have done anything, or nothing, but he chose public service…a senior at Harvard when his sister Sophia, who was a freshman in college, died from a drug overdose... He left Harvard without graduating, and within days was enrolled at the State Police academy.”

  He reads each story and every sidebar in the paper. There are pictures of William James Hawthorne, as a trooper, as a boy, with his sister and his parents, pictures of his two brothers, grimly facing a mob of reporters, the house in Cohasset, the apartment building on Peterborough St., and cops milling around outside the apartment building on the day of the shooting. The “Jimmy” that Bird shot had long hair and a scruffy beard, but it was easy to recognize “Jimmy” in the picture of the clean-cut young man in the State Police graduation photo. The wake is being held tomorrow and the next day, visiting hours two to four, and seven to nine.

  He closes the paper, not wanting to read anymore. He has to move, to get away. He folds the paper and tucks it in between the step and the bottom of the railing. He digs his car keys out of his pocket and jumps in the car and drives away.

  If he could just sit still, he’d be okay, but he has to keep moving because each time he stops his mind catches up with him.

  He has to keep moving, and not stop, not at a bar or a liquor store. He wheels out of Quincy, and down Rte. 3A, towards Hull and Paragon Park, an old amusement park where he’d often taken Catherine to ride the rollercoaster and drive the bumper cars. When he got to the traffic circle, he realizes he wants to find the house in Cohasset that William James Hawthorne had lived in. He continues on 3A until he sees a sign for Cohasset Center. From there he kept going east, toward the ocean, and soon finds himself on a coast road.

  On both sides of the road are big houses on big lots that cost big money. The Atlantic Ocean here looks different than the Atlantic Ocean in cramped Quincy Bay. Quincy Bay has boundaries, and you could only see so far.
Here there appears to be no boundaries, although there has to be. Maybe the boundary out there is the west coast of the Iberian Peninsula, but there are boundaries to everything in this world.

  As he pilots the GTO along, the road unwinds in front of him and could well have been the model for the roller coaster over at Paragon Park. Jerusalem Rd. fell away, reappears, turns ninety degrees, rose up, disappeared, turns this way and turned that way and turned the other way, but always there is the ocean. There are sections of the road that are without houses and serve only to connect one collection of rock outcrop to another, but after a sharp swerve more monuments to mammon would rise up to overwhelm the eye. These shingle-style 8,000 square foot ‘cottages’ were often erected during the so-called Progressive Era, sometime between the 1890’s and the Depression.

  At one point, Jerusalem Road crawls through an S-turn under a low canopy of old growth oak trees, and at the end, the road emerges onto a bridge. On the right side of the bridge is what appears to be another pond, but this is actually salt water and is called Little Harbor. It is fed and drained by the ocean tides through a boulder walled channel that runs under the bridge. An incoming tide pushes a strong current from the ocean into Little Harbor and is made visible by its course over rocks, some of which can be seen and others which are just below the surface. Grayson stops on the bridge and looks. He saw that the tide is rising and the great rocks that had come to rest here some ten thousand years ago during the latest, but certainly not the last, Ice Age, are all marked at the same height by smeared algae and barnacles. He sees by the same sort of signs that the water would expand into a much wider basin before it rose. When the tide goes out, the level of the salt pond would drop and the flow would be out to the ocean on his left.

  He continues over the bridge and sees a Massachusetts State Police car at the top of a long half circle driveway filled with cars. The huge driveway curved in front of a spectacular old house set way back from the street. On the porch in the distance he could see a number of people, mostly men, standing around smoking and talking. There is a State cop sitting in a State cop car reading the newspaper. He folds the top of the newspaper down and glances at Grayson as he drives by in the GTO. The cop goes back to reading the paper before Grayson has fully passed.

  Here, just beyond the house, a slew of TV news vans, both local and network, clog the roadsides, each with their splashed logos in cartoon colors painted on the sides, all representing the rearguard of the Bad News Carnival. Near the Channel Four van veteran newsman Walt Sanders is standing on the grass at the side of the street with a microphone in his hand, talking into a camera that is perched on the shoulder of a guy in droopy dungarees and an untucked white shirt.

  Grayson lifts his foot off the gas pedal, not wanting to make any noise on the news. He pretends to be gawking at the newshawks, but he is actually checking out the house behind Walt Sanders.

  The house is like something you’d see in the movies. It stands alone on a bank of rocks with a great expanse of grass in the back that runs down to the water’s edge. It is big, very big, but also just right. There is even a wraparound porch. It is a great house, and unlike many homes of the very rich, this one doesn’t invite a sneer. It is beautiful, and he feels a brief pang of lust in the pit of his stomach. But, he can only imagine what a grand old house like this would cost. His parents paid $5,700 for their house in 1954, and today it was said to be worth $25,000. So, this ocean front mansion, with a huge yard, backed up to the ocean would probably go for some insane price, like three hundred thousand, or more, a price not easy to wrap your mind around.

  Grayson wheels a U-turn and goes by the big house again, looking but not staring at the house and the cop, the news crews and the neighbors shooing them away. He drives away, anxious and depressed.

  Driving, he tries to think. People are always telling him to think, but the truth is he is fairly certain he really doesn’t know how. Impulses, images, ideas, the odd curse word, rehashed arguments, imaginary arguments, a funny line from a TV show, song lyrics, all popped into his head unbidden. Sometimes he reacted to these “thoughts” and other times he’d shoo them away, shaking them off like a willful pitcher in baseball. Is that thinking? In high school, when an exasperated teacher would come to his seat and yell at him to ‘Think!’ he’d knit his brow as he’d seen other people do, but when he did that, the only thing on his mind was, ‘I can keep my brow knitted longer than you can stand there.’ He knew eventually the teacher would tire of looking at his knitted brow and move on so he could go back to reading whatever paperback book he had hidden under his text book. If it wasn’t for smuggled paperbacks, like Catch-22, The Godfather, On the Road, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Moviegoer, Slaughterhouse 5, he’d have never been able to sit through high school. Why aren’t there books on the process of thinking? Thinking can’t be just having shit pop up in your head, could it?

  Thinking, perhaps, causes him to remember the family is gathering at the house to eat dinner.

  When he gets there the rest of the tribe are all sitting down to eat a smoked shoulder dinner, with all the fixings. There are about twenty of them, including the grandkids, who cry, laugh, and argue, slightly more than the adults. The kids refuse to eat any smoked shoulder at all. The kids are big into spaghetti, which they shoveled down while sitting on metal folding chairs at a long folding table in the living room. Grayson’s three brothers-in-law sat in there with them, quelling skirmishes and eating when they could.

  “I didn’t know the little ones didn’t like smoked shoulder,” Aunt Betty says. “My boys did. They only thing they didn’t eat was something that could still run away from them.”

  They drank coffee and tea while waiting for the doctor to call.

  “I’m still not used to cooking meat on Friday,” Betty says.

  “Is Benny on the way up from Florida?” Daniel asks. “I didn’t know he fell down the stairs.”

  “When did Uncle Ben fall down the stairs?” Susan asks. She bounces baby Doris on her knee.

  Betty nods, purses her lips, and raises her eyebrows, pleased to be the carrier of a bit of news.

  “He fell face first down a long, long set of marble stairs and broke his glasses, his nose and his clavicle,” Betty says.

  “Ma, I didn’t know Uncle Ben played the clavicle,” Donny says. They all laugh, grateful for the opportunity.

  After dinner the kids go outside to play in the street, and the others broke up into usual groups, along gender lines. Grayson goes in the front room with his brothers-in-law and his father. Hugh went upstairs and Donny went out to the garage to check on his stored motorcycle and make sure it was ready to go.

  His mind drifts in and out, as he listens to them talk about the advent of cable television.

  “That’s what they’re saying,” Matt says. “It sounds pretty good.”

  “That would be pretty good,” The Old Man says. “A hundred channels, no more commercials, for five bucks a month. I’ll believe it when I see it.”

  Grayson goes outside to the porch and watches the kids play tag on the street. He sits on the glider and looks at the world through the slatted glass windows.

  The Patriot Ledger delivery boy, a tall fourteen-year old, walks heavily up to the top step and opens the porch door.

  “How you doing, Mike?” the pale, plump paperboy asks.

  Grayson goes over to get the paper from the kid.

  “Good, Arthur. How’re you?” He looks at the headline as he goes back to his seat. To his surprise, he hears Arthur answer his question.

  “Not good. I’m late delivering because I just buried my dog Bruno. It’s really hard when they die.”

  Grayson is tempted to say something like, ‘It’s harder to bury them when they’re still alive, the fuckers keep jumping out,’ but the young doofus lives on this street and is known to be emotionally fragile and subject to tantrums.

  “Yeah,” Grayson says, but what he wants to say is ‘Fuck you and your dog
.’ “Bruno was old, right?”

  “Fifteen,” the kid says. “Older than me.”

  “Well,” Grayson says. He has nothing to offer someone moaning about an old fucking dog; not today. He has a dead baby, a dying mother, and a murdered cop on his hands. Not to mention fucking Bird. To hell with Arthur and his dog.

  As the kid stands there, though, Grayson can almost see the waves of pain pulsating from him, as if Arthur is the sketch in a medical pamphlet, a line drawing of a suffering boy. But Arthur is not the illustration of a boy with a toothache, Arthur is a real kid, a kid innocent of the truth. The truth is that the crust of the earth is crammed with the dead, and if you love one of them, you mourn them, and soon enough join them. It is the way of this world; sooner or later Mother Earth eats her young. All Grayson knows about pain is to run from it, like it is a killer. The ache that young Arthur is brave enough to suffer today would be surpassed in the future, but that didn’t diminish what the kid is feeling right now. Grayson admires Arthur’s courage, standing there and feeling it. This, too, is pain from Mad Mark’s knife, the knife that opens you up.

  Grayson stands again and offers his hand.

  “Hey, man, I’m sorry about Bruno. He was a great dog. He came around a lot, and my mother would give him cheese. We were always happy to see him, looking in from the top step.”

  “Bruno loved cheese,” Arthur says. He chuckles as he shakes Grayson’s hand. “That’s for sure.” He looks serious for a moment. “But he would’ve come here anyway, he really liked your mother, and the rest of the family, too. Besides the cheese, I mean.” After protecting Bruno’s reputation, he smiles again. “He also loved squirrels. They were always surprised by how fast he was when he caught ‘em.”