She’d heard similar stories from a lot of women. Men, at least in this city, rarely got mugged unless they were looking for it, but women, all the time. Always there was the threat of rape, either implied or intuited, and in all the stories she’d heard, she’d never come across a mugger with clever phrasing. They didn’t have the time. They needed to be as succinct as possible. Get in and get out before someone screamed.
And then there was the issue of the punch thrown while the mugger held a knife in the other hand. If you assumed the knife hand was the favored hand, well, come on, who threw a punch with anything but their writing hand?
Yes, she believed Dave had been thrust into an awful situation where he’d been forced to succumb to a kill-or-be-killed mentality. Yes, she was sure he wasn’t the type of guy to have gone looking for it. But…but, still, his story had flaws, gaps. It was like trying to explain lipstick on the inside of your shirt—you may very well have been faithful, but your explanation, no matter how ridiculous, had better add up.
She imagined the two detectives in their kitchen, asking them questions, and she felt sure Dave would crack. His story would fall apart under impersonal eyes and repeated questions. It would be like when she asked about his childhood. She’d heard the stories, of course; the Flats was nothing but a small town wrapped within a big city, and people whispered. So, she’d asked Dave once if something terrible had happened in his childhood, something he felt he couldn’t share with anyone, letting him know that he could share it with her, his wife, pregnant with his baby at the time.
He’d looked at her as if confused. “Oh, you mean that thing?”
“What thing?”
“I’m playing with Jimmy and this kid, Sean Devine. Yeah, you know him. You cut his hair once or twice, right?”
Celeste remembered. He worked somewhere in law enforcement, but not with the city. He was tall, with curly hair and an amber voice that slid through you. He had that same effortless confidence Jimmy had—the kind that came to men who were either very good-looking or were rarely afflicted by doubt.
She couldn’t picture Dave with these two men, even as boys.
“Okay,” she’d said.
“So this car pulls up, I get in, and not long after, I escaped.”
“Escaped.”
He nodded. “Wasn’t much to it, honey.”
“But, Dave—”
He placed a finger to her lips. “That’s sorta the end of it, okay?”
He was smiling, but Celeste could see a—what was it?—a kind of mild hysteria in his eyes.
“I mean—what?—I remember playing ball and kick-the-can,” Dave said, “and going to the Looey-Dooey, trying to stay awake in class. I remember some birthday parties and shit. But, come on, it’s a pretty boring time. Now, high school…”
She’d let it go, as she would when he lied about why he lost his job at American Messenger Service (Dave saying it was another budgetary cutback, but other guys from the neighborhood were walking in off the street in the weeks that followed and scooping up jobs left and right), or when he told her his mother died of a sudden heart attack when the whole neighborhood had heard the story of Dave coming home from senior year in high school to find her sitting by the oven, kitchen doors closed, towels pressed to the bottoms, gas filling the room. Dave, she’d come to believe, needed his lies, needed to rewrite his history and fashion it in such a way that it became something he could live with and tuck far away. And if it made him a better person—a loving, if occasionally distant, husband and attentive father—who was to judge?
But this lie, Celeste knew as she tossed on some jeans and one of Dave’s shirts, could bury him. Bury them, now that she had joined in the conspiracy to obstruct justice by washing the clothes. If Dave didn’t come clean with her, she couldn’t help him. And when the police came (and they would; this wasn’t TV; the dumbest, drunkest detective was smarter than either of them when it came to crime), they’d break Dave’s story like an egg on the side of a pan.
DAVE’S RIGHT HAND was killing him. The knuckles had ballooned to twice their normal size and the bones closest to the wrist felt like they were ready to punch up through the skin. He could have forgiven himself, then, for floating meatballs to Michael, but he refused to. If the kid couldn’t hit curves and knucklers from a Wiffle ball, he’d never be able to track a hardball coming twice as fast, hit it with a bat about ten times as heavy.
His son was small for seven, and far too trusting for this world. You could see it in the openness of his face, the glow of hope in the set of his blue eyes. Dave loved that in his son, but he hated it, too. He didn’t know if he had the strength to take it away, but he knew that soon he’d have to, or the world would do it for him. That tender, breakable thing in his son was a Boyle curse, the same thing that made Dave, at thirty-five, repeatedly get mistaken for a college student, find himself getting carded at liquor stores outside the neighborhood. His hairline hadn’t changed since he was Michael’s age; no lines had ever creased his face; and his own blue eyes were vivid and innocent.
Dave watched Michael dig in as he’d been taught, adjust his cap, and cock the bat high above his shoulder. He swayed his knees a bit, flexing them, a habit Dave had been gradually working out of him, but one that kept coming back like a tic, and Dave released the ball fast, hoping to exploit the weakness, hiding the knuckler by releasing the ball before his arm was fully extended, the center of his palm screaming with the pinch of the grip.
Michael stopped flexing, though, as soon as Dave began his motion, quick as it was, and as the ball fluttered, then dropped over the plate, Michael swung low and teed off on it like he was holding a three-wood. Dave saw the flash of a hopeful smile on Michael’s face mixed with a bit of amazement at his own prowess, and Dave almost let the ball go, but instead he slapped it back to the earth, felt something crumble in his chest as the smile disintegrated on his son’s face.
“Hey, hey,” Dave said, deciding to let his son feel the goodness of a sweet swing, “that was a great swing, Yaz.”
Michael was still working on a scowl. “How come you could knock it down then?”
Dave picked the ball up off the grass. “I dunno. ’Cause I’m a lot taller than kids in Little League?”
Michael’s smile was tentative, waiting to break again. “Yeah?”
“Lemme ask you—you know any second-graders who go five-ten?”
“No.”
“And I had to jump for it.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah. Keep a trip to a single, all five-ten of me.”
Michael laughed now. It was Celeste’s laugh, rippling. “Okay…”
“You were flexing, though.”
“I know, I know.”
“Once you dig in and set, buddy, you stop moving.”
“But Nomar—”
“I know all about Nomar. And Derek Jeter, too. Your heroes, okay. But when you’re pulling down ten million in the Show, you can fidget. Until then?”
Michael shrugged, kicked at the grass.
“Mike. Until then?”
Michael sighed. “Until then, I concentrate on the basics.”
Dave smiled and tossed the ball above him, caught it without watching it fall. “It was a nice rip, though.”
“Yeah?”
“Dude, that thing was heading for the Point. Heading uptown.”
“Heading uptown,” Michael said, and let ripple another of his mother’s laughs.
“Who’s heading uptown?”
They both turned to see Celeste standing on the back porch, hair tied back and barefoot, one of Dave’s shirts hanging untucked over faded jeans.
“Hey, Ma.”
“Hey, cutie. You going uptown with your father?”
Michael looked at Dave. It was their private joke suddenly, and he snickered. “Nah, Ma.”
“Dave?”
“The ball he just hit, honey. The ball was going uptown.”
“Ah. The ball.”
“Kille
d it, Ma. Dad knocked it down only ’cause he’s so tall.”
Dave could feel her watching him even when her eyes were on Michael. Watching and waiting and wanting to ask him something. He remembered her hoarse voice in his ear last night, as she rose off the kitchen floor to grab his neck and pull her lips to his ear and say, “I am you now. You are me.”
Dave hadn’t known what the hell she was talking about, but he liked the sound of it, and the hoarseness in her vocal cords had pushed him that much closer to climax.
Now, though, he had the feeling it was just one more attempt by Celeste to climb inside his head, poke around, and it pissed him off. Because once they got in there, they didn’t like what they saw and they ran from it.
“So what’s up, honey?”
“Oh, nothing.” She wrapped her arms around herself, even though the day was warming up pretty fast. “Hey, Mike, did you eat?”
“Not yet.”
Celeste frowned at Dave, like it was the crime of the century Michael hit a few balls before he got a sugar high from that crimson cereal he ate.
“Your bowl’s full and milk’s on the table.”
“Good. I’m starving.” Michael dropped the bat, and Dave felt a betrayal in the way he flipped the bat and hurried to the stairs. You were starving? And, what, I taped your mouth up so you couldn’t tell me? Fuck.
Michael trotted past his mother and then hit the stairs leading up to the third floor like they’d disappear if he didn’t reach the top fast enough.
“Skipping breakfast, Dave?”
“Sleeping till noon, Celeste?”
“It’s ten-fifteen,” Celeste said, and Dave could feel all the goodwill they’d pumped back into their marriage with last night’s kitchen lunacy turn to smoke and drift off into the yards beyond theirs.
He forced himself to smile. You made the smile real enough, no one could get past it. “So what’s doing, hon?”
Celeste came down into the yard, her bare feet a light brown on the grass. “What happened to the knife?”
“What?”
“The knife,” she whispered, looking back over her shoulder at McAllister’s bedroom window. “The one the mugger had. Where’d it go, Dave?”
Dave tossed the ball in the air, caught it behind his back. “It’s gone.”
“Gone?” She pursed her lips and looked down at the grass. “I mean, shit, Dave.”
“Shit what, honey?”
“Gone where?”
“Gone.”
“You’re sure.”
Dave was sure. He smiled, looked in her eyes. “Positive.”
“Your blood’s on it, though. Your DNA, Dave. Is it so ‘gone’ that it’ll never be found?”
Dave didn’t have an answer for that one, so he just stared at his wife until she changed the subject.
“You check the paper this morning?”
“Sure,” he said.
“You see anything?”
“About what?”
Celeste hissed: “About what?”
“Oh…oh. Yeah.” Dave shook his head. “No, there was nothing. No mention of it. ’Member, honey, it was late.”
“It was late. Come on. Metro pages? They’re always the last to go in, everyone waiting for the police blotters.”
“You work for a newspaper, do you?”
“This isn’t a joke, Dave.”
“No, honey, it’s not. I’m just saying there’s nothing in the morning paper. That’s all. Why? I don’t know. We’ll watch the noon news, see what’s there.”
Celeste looked back down at the grass, nodded to herself several times. “We going to see anything, Dave?”
Dave stepped back from her.
“I mean about some black guy found beat half to death in a parking lot outside…where was it?”
“The, ah, Last Drop.”
“The—ah—Last Drop?”
“Yeah, Celeste.”
“Oh, okay, Dave,” she said. “Sure.”
And she left him. She gave him her back and walked up the stairs to the porch, walked inside, and Dave listened to the soft footfalls of her bare feet as she climbed the staircase.
That’s what they did. They left you. Maybe not physically all the time. But emotionally, mentally? They were never there when you needed them. It had been the same with his mother. That morning after the police had brought him home, his mother had cooked him breakfast, her back to him, humming “Old MacDonald,” and occasionally turning to look back over her shoulder at him to toss him a nervous smile, as if he were a boarder she wasn’t sure about.
She’d placed the plate of runny eggs and black bacon and undercooked, soggy toast down in front of him and asked him if he wanted orange juice.
“Ma,” he said, “who were those guys? Why did they—?”
“Davey,” she said, “you want orange juice? I didn’t hear.”
“Sure. Look, Ma, I don’t know why they took—”
“There you go.” Placing the juice in front of him. “Eat your breakfast and I’m going to…” She waved her hands at the kitchen, no idea what the fuck she was going to do. “I’m going to…wash your clothes. Okay? And, then, Davey? We’ll go see a movie. How’s that sound?”
Dave looked at his mother, looked for something that was waiting for him to open his mouth and tell her, tell her about that car and the house in the woods, and the smell of the big one’s aftershave. Instead he saw a bright, hard gaiety, the look she got sometimes as she was preparing to go out on Friday nights, trying to find just the right thing to wear, desperate with hope.
Dave put his head down and ate his eggs. He heard his mother leave the kitchen, humming “Old MacDonald” all the way down the hall.
Standing in the yard now, knuckles aching, he could hear it, too. Old MacDonald had a farm. And everything was hunky-dory on it. You farmed and tilled and reaped and sowed and everything was just fucking great. Everyone got along, even the chickens and the cows, and no one needed to talk about anything, because nothing bad ever happened, and nobody had any secrets because secrets were for bad people, people who didn’t eat their eggs, people who climbed in cars that smelled of apples with strange men and disappeared for four days, only to come back home to find everyone they’d known had disappeared, too, been replaced with smiley-faced look-alikes who’d do just about anything but listen to you. Just about anything but that.
9
FROGMEN IN THE PEN
THE FIRST THING Jimmy saw as he neared the Roseclair Street entrance to Pen Park was a K-9 van parked down on Sydney Street, its back doors open, two cops struggling with six German shepherds on long leather leashes. He’d walked up Roseclair from the church, trying hard not to trot, and reached a small crowd of onlookers by the overpass that stretched above Sydney. They stood at the base of the incline where Roseclair began its rise under the expressway and then over the Pen Channel, losing its name on the other side and becoming Valenz Boulevard as it left Buckingham and entered Shawmut.
Back where the crowd had gathered, you could stand at the top of a fifteen-foot retaining wall of poured concrete that served as Sydney’s dead end and look down on the last street running north-south in the East Bucky Flats, a rusting guardrail pressed against your kneecaps. Just a few yards east of the overlook, the guardrail gave way to a purple limestone stairwell. As kids, they’d sometimes bring dates there, and sit in the shadows passing forty-ounce bottles of Miller back and forth and watching the images flicker across the white screen of Hurley’s Drive-in. Sometimes, Dave Boyle would come with them, not because anyone particularly liked Dave, but because he’d seen just about every damn movie ever made, and sometimes, if they were stoned, they’d have Dave rattle off the lines as they watched the silent screen, Dave getting into it so much at times that he even changed his vocal inflections to fit the various characters. Then Dave suddenly got good at baseball, went off to Don Bosco to become a jock superstar, and they couldn’t keep him around just for laughs anymore.
Jimmy ha
d no clue why all this was flooding back to him suddenly, or why he stood frozen by the guardrail, eyes gaping down at Sydney, except that it had something to do with those dogs, the way they pranced nervously in place after they’d hopped from the van and pawed the asphalt. One of their handlers raised a walkie-talkie to his lips as a helicopter appeared in the sky over downtown and headed for them like a fat bee, growing fatter every time Jimmy blinked.
A baby of a cop stood blocking the purple stairwell and a bit farther up Roseclair, two cruisers and a few more boys in blue stood guard in front of the access road leading into the park.
The dogs never barked. Jimmy turned his head back as he realized that’s what had been bugging him since he’d first seen them. Even though their twenty-four paws jittered back and forth on the asphalt, it was a tight, concentric jittering, like soldiers marching in place, and Jimmy felt a terrible efficiency in their black snouts and lean flanks, had an image of their eyes as hot coals.
The rest of Sydney looked like the waiting room to a riot. Cops filled the street and walked methodically through the weeds leading into the park. From up here, Jimmy had a partial view of the park itself, and he could see them in there, too, blue uniforms and earth-tone sport coats moving across the grass, peering off the edge into the Pen, calling out to one another.
Back down on Sydney, they gathered around something just on the far side of the K-9 van and several plainclothes detectives leaned against unmarked cars parked on the other side of the street, sipping coffee, but none of them bullshitting the way cops usually did, cracking each other up with war stories from recent shifts. Jimmy could feel pure tension—in the dogs, in the silent cops leaning against their cars, in the helicopter, no longer a bee now and roaring as it swept above Sydney, riding low, and disappeared in Pen Park on the other side of the imported trees and drive-in screen.