But the man who wrote this letter had embraced evil. He enjoyed the pain of others. He didn’t rationalize his hate, he reveled in it.
And reading his letter was, above all else, tiring. In a uniquely sordid way.
“I’m beat,” Angie said.
“Me too.”
She looked at the letter again and touched her palms to her shoulders, closed her eyes.
“I want to say it’s inhuman,” she said. “But it isn’t.”
I looked at the letter. “It’s human all right.”
I’d made myself a bed on her couch and was trying to get comfortable when she called to me from the bedroom.
“What?” I said.
“C’mere a second.”
I walked to the bedroom, leaned against the doorway. She was sitting up in the bed, the down comforter spread over and around her like a rose pink sea.
“You okay on the couch?”
“Fine,” I said.
“Okay.”
“Okay,” I said and headed back for the couch.
“Because—”
I turned back. “Huh?”
“It’s big, you know. Plenty of room.”
“The couch?”
She frowned. “The bed.”
“Oh.” I narrowed my eyes at her. “What’s up?”
“Don’t make me say it.”
“Say what?”
Her lips turned up in an attempt at a grin and it came out looking horrible. “I’m afraid, Patrick. Okay?”
I have no idea what it cost her to say that.
“Me too,” I said and came into the bedroom.
Sometime during our nap, Angie’s body shifted and I opened my eyes to find her leg curled over mine, wrapped tightly between my thighs. Her head was tucked into my shoulder, her left hand draped across my chest. Her breath fluttered against my neck, rhythmic with sleep.
I thought of Grace, but for some reason I couldn’t picture her fully in my head. I could see her hair and her eyes, but when I tried to form an image of her face, whole, it wouldn’t come.
Angie groaned and her leg tightened against mine.
“Don’t,” she mumbled very softly. “Don’t,” she repeated, still asleep.
This is the way the world ends, I thought, and faded back to dreams.
Late in the day, Phil called and I answered on the first ring.
“You awake?” he said.
“I’m awake.”
“Thought I’d drop by.”
“Angie’s asleep.”
“That’s cool. I just…sitting alone, waiting for this guy to try something, it’s driving me nuts.”
“Come on by, Phil.”
While we slept, the temperature had dropped fifteen degrees and the sky turned to granite. Wind roared down from Canada and poured across the neighborhood, rattled windows and bucked the bodies of cars parked along the avenue.
The hail unleashed itself shortly afterward. When I went into Angie’s bathroom for a shower, it spit against the windows like sand carried by sweeps of water off the ocean. By the time I was drying off, it spewed against windows and walls as if the wind were ejecting nails and lug nuts.
Phil brewed coffee while I changed into fresh clothes in the bedroom, then come back into the kitchen.
“She still asleep?” he said.
I nodded.
“Goes out like Spinks fighting Tyson, don’t she? One minute she’s all bright-eyed energy, the next she’s crashed like she ain’t slept in a month.” He poured some coffee into a mug. “Always been that way, that girl.”
I got myself a Coke, sat at the table. “She’ll be okay, Phil. No one’s going to get to her. Or you either.”
“Mmm.” He brought his coffee to the table. “You sleeping with her yet?”
I leaned back in my chair, cocked my head, and raised an eyebrow at him. “You’re way out of line, Phil.”
He shrugged. “She loves you, Patrick.”
“Not that way. You never understood that.”
He smiled. “I understood a lot, Patrick.” He cupped the mug in both hands. “I know she loved me. I’m not arguing that. But she’s always been half in love with you, too.”
I shook my head. “All those years you beat her, Phil, guess what? She never, not once, fooled around on you.”
“I know that.”
“Really?” I leaned forward a bit, lowered my voice. “Didn’t keep you from calling her a whore on a regular basis. Didn’t stop you from pummeling the shit out of her when you felt in the mood. Did it?”
“Patrick,” he said softly, “I know what I was. What I…am.” He frowned and stared into his coffee cup. “I’m a wife beater. And a drunk. And that’s that. There you go.” He smiled bitterly at the cup. “I beat that woman.” He looked over his shoulder toward her bedroom. “I beat her and I earned her hate, and she’ll never trust me again. Ever. We’ll never be…friends. Not on any level near what we used to be.”
“Probably not.”
“Yeah. So, however I became what I became, I did become that thing. And I’ve lost her and I deserved to because she’s better off without me in her life in the long run.”
“I don’t think she’s planning to ever boot you out of her life, Phil.”
He gave me that bitter smile. “That’s classic Ange, though. Let’s face it, Patrick. Angie, for all her fuck-you, I-don’t-need-anyone attitude, can’t say good-bye. To anything. That’s her weakness. Why do you think she still lives in her mother’s house? With most of the furniture that was here when she was a kid?”
I looked around, saw her mother’s ancient black pots in the pantry, her doilies on the couch in the den, realized Phil and I were sitting in chairs her parents had purchased from the Marshall Field’s in Uphams Corner that had burned down sometime in the late sixties. Something can sit in front of you your whole life, waiting to be noticed for what it is, and often you’re sitting too close to really see it.
“You got a point,” I admitted.
“Why do you think she never left Dorchester? A girl as smart and beautiful as her, the only time she’s been out of state was on our honeymoon. Why do you think it took her twelve years to leave me? Anyone else would have been gone in six. But Angie can’t walk away. It’s her flaw. Probably has something to do with her sister being the opposite.”
I’m not sure what kind of look I gave him, but he held up a hand in apology.
“Touchy subject,” he said. “I forgot.”
“What’s your point here, Phil?”
He shrugged. “Angie can’t say good-bye, so she’ll work hard to keep me in her life.”
“And?”
“And I won’t let her. I’m an albatross around her neck. Right now, I need us to—I dunno—heal a bit more. Get some closure. So she knows completely that I was the bad guy. It was all, all, all me. Not her.”
“And when that’s done?”
“I’m gone. A guy like me, I can get work anywhere. Rich people are always remodeling their homes. So soon, I’m hitting the road. I think you two deserve your shot.”
“Phil—”
“Please, Pat. Please,” he said. “This is me. We been friends since forever. I know you. And I know Angela. You might have something real nice with Grace now and I think that’s terrific. I do. But know yourself.” He bumped his elbow into mine and looked hard in my eyes. “Okay? For once in your life, buddy, face yourself. You’ve been in love with Angie since kindergarten. And she’s been in love with you.”
“She married you, Phil.” I bumped his elbow back.
“Because she was pissed at you—”
“That’s not the only reason.”
“I know. She loved me, too. For a while, maybe, she even loved me more. I don’t doubt it. But we can love more than one thing simultaneously. We’re human, so we’re messy.”
I smiled, realized it was the first time I’d smiled naturally in Phil’s presence in a decade. “We are that.”
We looked at each other and I could fe
el the old blood rippling within us—the blood of sacred bonds and shared boyhoods. Neither Phil nor I ever felt accepted in our homes. His father was an alcoholic and an unregenerate womanizer, a guy who slept with every woman in the neighborhood and made sure his wife knew it. By the time Phil was seven or eight, his household was a DMZ of flying plates and accusations. Anytime Carmine and Laura Dimassi were in the same room, it was about as safe as Beirut, and in one of the great perverse misinterpretations of their Catholic faith, they refused to divorce or live apart. They liked the daily skirmishes and nightly makeup sessions of passionate lovemaking that had them thumping against the wall separating their bedroom from their son’s.
I was out of my house as much as possible for different reasons, so Phil and I took refuge together, and the first home we both felt comfortable in was an abandoned pigeon coop we found on the roof of an industrial garage on Sudan Street. We cleaned all the white shit out and reinforced it with boards from old pallets and slid some abandoned furniture in there, and pretty soon we picked up other strays like ourselves—Bubba, Kevin Hurlihy for a while, Nelson Ferrare, Angie. The Little Rascals with class rage and larcenous hearts and complete lack of respect for authority.
As he sat across from me at his ex-wife’s table, I could see the old Phil again, the only brother I ever had. He grinned, as if remembering it all himself, and I could hear the sounds of our childhood laughter as we roamed the streets and ran like wolves over rooftops and tried to stay three steps ahead of our parents. Jesus, we’d laughed a lot for kids who should have been permanently angry.
Outside Angie’s house, the clatter of hail sounded like a thousand sticks beating against the roof.
“What happened to you, Phil?”
His grin disappeared. “Hey, you—”
I held up a hand. “No. I’m not judging. I’m wondering. Like you told Bolton, we were like brothers. We were brothers, for Christ’s sake. And then you went south on me. When’d all the hate take over, Phil?”
He shrugged. “I never forgave you for some things, Pat.”
“Like what?”
“Well…You and Angie, you know…”
“Sleeping together?”
“Her losing her virginity to you. You were my best friends and we were all so Catholic and repressed and sexually skewed. And you two, that summer, you distanced from me.”
“No.”
“Oh, yes.” He chuckled. “Oh, yes. Left me with Bubba and Frankie Shakes and a bunch of other pituitary cases with mush for brains. And then—what was it, in August?”
I knew what “it” was. I nodded. “August fourth.”
“Down at Carson Beach, you two, well, did the deed. And then, genius that you were, you treated her like shit. And she came running to me. And I was second choice. Again.”
“Again?”
“Again.” He leaned back in his chair and spread his arms in an almost apologetic gesture. “Hey,” he said, “I always had charm and I always had my looks, but you had instinct.”
“You kidding me?”
“No,” he said. “Come on, Pat. I was always thinking things through too much, and you were doing them. You were the first guy to realize Angie wasn’t just one of the guys anymore, the first to stop hanging out on the corner, the first to—”
“I was restless. I was—”
“You were instinct,” he said. “You always could size up any situation before the rest of us and act on it.”
“Bullshit.”
“Bullshit?” He chuckled. “Come on, Pat. It’s your gift. ’Member those spooky fucking clowns in Savin Hill?”
I smiled and shivered at the same time. “Oh, yeah.”
He nodded, and I could tell that two decades later he still felt the fear that had gripped us for weeks after our encounter with the clowns.
“If you hadn’t thrown that baseball through their windshield,” he said, “who knows if we’d even be here today.”
“Phil,” I said, “we were kids with overactive imaginations and—”
He shook his head violently. “Sure, sure. We were kids and we were on edge because Cal Morrison had been killed that week and we’d been hearing rumors about those clowns since forever and blah, blah, blah. All that’s true, but we were there, Patrick. Me and you. And you know what would have happened to us if we’d gotten into that van with them. I can still see it. Shit. The grime and grease all over the fenders, that smell coming from the open window—”
The white van with the broken windshield in the Hardiman file.
“Phil,” I said. “Phil. Jesus Christ.”
“What?”
“The clowns,” I said. “You just said it yourself. It was the week Cal was killed. And then, shit, I hummed the baseball through their windshield—”
“Damn straight you did.”
“And told my father.” I’d raised my hand to my mouth, half covering it because it was wide open in shock.
“Wait a second,” he said and I could see that the same knowledge prickling like fire ants against my spinal column had invaded Phil. His eyes lit up like flares.
“I marked the van,” I said. “I fucking marked it, Phil, without even knowing it. And EEPA found it.”
He stared at me and I could see that he knew it too.
“Patrick, you’re saying—”
“Alec Hardiman and Charles Rugglestone were the clowns.”
31
In the days and weeks after Cal Morrison was killed, if you were a kid in my neighborhood, you were afraid.
You were afraid of black guys, because Cal had supposedly been killed by one. You were afraid of mangy, grizzled men who stared too long at you on the subway. You were frightened by cars that paused at intersections for too long after the light had turned green or seemed to slow as they approached you. You were terrified by the homeless and the dank alleys and dark parks in which they slept.
You were afraid of almost everything.
But nothing frightened the kids in my neighborhood as much as clowns.
It seemed so silly, in retrospect. Killer clowns rampaged in pulp fiction and bad drive-in movies. They lived in the realm of vampires and prehistoric monsters stomping Tokyo. Fictions conjured up to scare the only targets gullible enough to be afraid of them—children.
As I reached adulthood, I was no longer afraid of my closet when I woke in the middle of the night. The creaks of the old house I grew up in held no terror either; they were simply creaks—the plaintive whine of aging wood and the relaxed sighs of settling foundations. I grew to fear almost nothing except the barrel of a pistol pointed in my direction or the sudden potential for violence in the eyes of bitter drunks and men realizing their entire lives had passed unnoticed by all but themselves.
But as a child, my fear was embodied by the clowns.
I’m not sure how the rumor started—maybe around a fire at summer camp, maybe after one of our group had seen one of those bad drive-in movies—but by the time I was six or so, every kid knew about the clowns, though no one could actually claim to have seen them.
But the rumors were rampant.
They drove a van and carried bags of candy and bright balloons, and bouquets of flowers exploded out from their oversized sleeves.
They had a machine in the back of that van that knocked kids out in under a second, and once you were unconscious, you never woke back up.
While you were out, but before you died, they took turns on your body.
Then they cut your throat.
And because they were clowns and their mouths were painted that way, they were always smiling.
Phil and I were almost at the age when we would have stopped fearing them, the age when you knew there was no Santa Claus and you probably weren’t the long-lost son of a benevolent billionaire who’d return some day to claim you.
We were on our way back from a Little League game in Savin Hill, and we’d lingered until near dark, playing war games in the woods behind the Motley School, climbing the decre
pit fire escape to the roof of the school itself. By the time we climbed down, the day had grown long and chilly, the shadows lengthening against walls and spreading out hard against bare pavement as if they’d been carved there.
We began the walk down Savin Hill Avenue as the sun disappeared entirely and the sky took on the cast of polished metal, tossed the ball back and forth to keep the gathering cold at bay and ignored the rumbles in our stomachs because they meant we’d have to go home sooner or later, and home, ours, at least, sucked.
The van slid up behind us as we started down the slope of the avenue by the subway station, and I remember very distinctly noticing that the entire avenue was empty. It lay before us in that sudden emptiness that comes to a neighborhood around dinner time. Though it wasn’t yet dark, we could see orange and yellow squares of light in several homes fronting the avenue, and a lone plastic hockey puck curled against the hubcap of a car.
Everyone was in for dinner. Even the bars were quiet.
Phil rifled the ball with his shotgun arm and it rose a bit more than I first expected; I had to jump and twist myself to snag it. When I came down I’d twisted myself to the side and that’s when I saw the white face and blue hair and wide red lips staring out the passenger window at me.
“Nice catch,” the clown said.
There was only one way kids in my neighborhood responded to clowns.
“Fuck you,” I said.
“Nice mouth,” the clown said, and I didn’t like the way he smiled when he said it, his gloved hand resting on the outside of the door panel.
“Real nice,” the driver said. “Real, real nice. Your mother know you talk that way?”
I was no more than two feet from that door, frozen on the pavement, and I couldn’t move my feet. I couldn’t take my eyes off the clown’s red mouth.
Phil, I noticed, was a good ten feet down the hill, frozen too, it seemed.
“You guys need a ride?” the passenger clown said.
I shook my head, my mouth dry.
“He’s not so mouthy all of a sudden, this kid.”
“No.” The driver craned his head around his partner’s neck so that I could see his bright red hair and the bursts of yellow around his eyes. “You two look cold.”