CHAPTER 5
Cousin Marv
IN LATE 1967, WHEN the good people of Boston elected Kevin White mayor, Cousin Marv’s voice was deemed so beautiful he was plucked out of third grade to sing at the inauguration. Each morning, he attended Saint Dom’s. But every afternoon, after lunch, he was bused across the city to train with a boys’ choir at the Old South Church in Back Bay. The Old South Church sat at 645 Boylston Street—the rest of his life, Marv never forgot that address—and had been built in 1875. It sat diagonally across a plaza from Trinity Church, another architectural masterpiece, and within spitting distance of the Boston Public Library Main Branch and the Copley Plaza Hotel, four buildings so majestic that when little Marv was in them, even in their basements, he felt closer to the sky. Closer to Heaven, closer to God or any of the angels or other spirits that floated along the fringes of old paintings. Marv remembered having his first adult suspicion as a choirboy—that feeling closer to God had something to do with feeling closer to knowledge.
And then they kicked him out of the choir.
Another boy, Chad Benson—Marv would never forget that fucking name, either—claimed he saw Marv steal a Baby Ruth from Donald Samuel’s schoolbag in the coat closet. Claimed it in front of the rest of the choir while the choirmaster and the instructors were all taking a piss break downstairs. Chad said they all knew Marv was poor but next time he wanted to eat just ask them and they’d give him charity. Marv told Chad Benson he was full of shit. Chad mocked Marv for sputtering and turning red. Then Chad called Marv a welfare case, asked if he’d got his clothes at the Bargain Basement in Quincy, and whether his whole family shopped there or just Marv and his mother. Marv punched Chad Benson in the face so hard the crack of it echoed through the sanctuary. When Chad hit the floor, Marv climbed on top of him, grabbed a hunk of his hair, and punched him twice more. It was the third punch that detached Chad’s retina. Not that the injury, serious as it was, mattered in the grand scheme of things—Marv was done the moment he took his first swing at the prick. The Chad Bensons of the world, he learned that day, were never to be hit. They weren’t even to be questioned. Not by the Marvin Stiplers of this life anyway.
In the process of kicking him out, Ted Bing, the choirmaster, delivered a further blow when he told Marv that according to his expert ear, Marv’s voice would peak at the age of nine.
Marv was eight.
They didn’t even let him take the bus home with the rest of the choir. Just gave him carfare, and he hopped the Red Line down under the city and back to East Buckingham. He waited until he was walking from the station back to his house before he ate Donald Samuel’s Baby Ruth bar. It was the best meal, before or since, he’d ever tasted. It wasn’t just the chocolate, slightly melted, but the rich buttery tang of self-pity that engaged every one of his taste buds and caressed his heart. To feel righteously enraged and tragically victimized at the same time was, Marv would very rarely admit to himself, better than any orgasm in the history of fucking.
Happiness made Marv anxious because he knew it didn’t last. But happiness destroyed was worth wrapping your arms around because it always hugged you back.
His voice cracked at nine just as Ted Fucking Bing had said it would. No more singing in choirs for Marv. For the rest of his life Marv avoided downtown whenever possible. Those old buildings, once his gods, became heartless mirrors. He could see, reflected in them, all the versions of himself he’d never become.
After Chovka visited with his Gitmo-on-Wheels and his prick eyes and prick attitude, Marv had shoveled up the rest of the walk, bad knee and all, Bob just fucking watching the whole time, probably daydreaming about that dog he’d become so obsessed with you could barely talk to him anymore. They’d gone inside and, sure enough, Bob had started babbling about the dog again. Marv hadn’t let on how boring it was because, truth be told, it was good to see Bob get excited about anything.
Bob’s short stick in life wasn’t just that he was raised by two old, homely parents with few friends and no connections. His true short stick was that those parents had babied him, smothered him so completely in a desperate love (connected, Marv suspected, to their own imminent passage from the land of the living), that Bob never learned how to fully survive in a man’s world. Bob, it would surprise many who knew him now, could be pretty fearsome if you tripped the wrong switch in that slow brain of his, but there was another part of him that was so in need of a petting that it completely undercut the part of him that could fuck a person up if he were pushed hard enough against a wall.
Now he had the Chechen mob looking at them because he’d been stupid enough to give free information to a cop. And not just any cop, it turned out. A cop he knew. From church.
The Chechen mob. Looking at them. Because Bob was weak.
Marv got home early that night. Not much going on at the bar, no reason to stick around when he was paying Bob to do, you know, his fucking job. He paused in his mudroom to take off his coat and gloves and hat and scarf, winter being just one big fucking excuse to wear more shit than someone in Hawaii knew existed.
Dottie called from the kitchen. “That you?”
“Who’s it gonna be?” he called back even though he’d promised himself he’d be kinder to his sister in the new year.
“Could be one of them kids claims to sell magazine subscriptions because he’s working his way out of the ghetto.”
He searched for a hook for his hat. “Wouldn’t that kid ring the front doorbell?”
“They could slice your throat.”
“Who?”
“Those kids.”
“With magazines. What, they grab one of those, what do they call ’em, inserts, and bleed you out with a paper cut?”
“Your Steak-umm’s on.”
He could hear it sizzle. “On my way.”
He kicked off his right boot with his left but then had to remove the left by hand. At the tip, it was dark. At first he thought it was the snow.
But no, it was blood.
Same blood had leaked out of that guy’s foot, through the hole in the floor of the van, and onto the street.
Found Marv’s boot.
Those Chechens, man. Those fucking Chechens.
Give a dumb man pause. Give a smart man ambition.
When he came into the kitchen, Dottie, in her housedress and fuzzy moose slippers, eyes on the pan, said, “You look tired.”
“You didn’t even look.”
“I looked yesterday.” She gave him a weary smile. “Now I’m looking.”
Marv grabbed a beer from the fridge, trying to shake the image of that guy’s foot from his head, of that sick fucking Chechen beside him tightening the drill with his chuck key.
“And?” he asked Dottie.
“You look tired,” she said brightly.
AFTER DINNER, DOTTIE WENT into the den to catch up on her shows and Marv went to the gym on Dunboy. He’d already had a beer too many to work out but he could always catch a steam.
This time of night, there was no one in the steam room—there was barely anyone in the gym—and when Marv came out he felt so much better. It was almost like he had worked out, which, come to think of it, was usually what happened when he went to the gym.
He showered, part of him wishing he’d smuggled a beer in with him because there was nothing quite like a cold beer in a hot shower after a workout. When he came out, he dressed by his locker. Ed Fitzgerald stood at the next locker over and idly fiddled with the lock.
“I hear they’re pissed,” Fitz said.
Marv stepped into his cords. “They’re not supposed to like it. They got robbed.”
“Scary-fucking-Chechen pissed.” Fitz sniffled and Marv was pretty sure it wasn’t from the cold.
“No, they’re fine. You’re fine. Just keep your head down. Your brother too.” He looked at Fitz as he laced up his shoes. “What’s up with his watch?”
“Why?”
“I noticed it doesn’t work.”
F
itz looked embarrassed. “It never did. Our old man gave it to him for his tenth birthday. It stopped, like, the next day. Old man couldn’t return it because he’d stole it in the first place. He’d tell Bri, ‘Don’t bitch—it’s right twice a day.’ Bri don’t go anywhere without it.”
Marv buttoned his shirt up over his wife-beater. “Well, he should get a new one.”
“When we going to hit a place that’s holding the actual drop? I don’t like risking my life, my fucking freedom, my, ya know, everything for five fucking grand.”
Marv closed his locker, his coat over his arm. “Let’s just assume I’m not an asshole without a plan. When an airplane crashes, what’s the safest airline to fly the next day?”
“The one that had the crash.”
Marv gave him a big shit-eating grin. “There you go.”
Fitz followed him out of the locker room. “I don’t understand a word you’re saying. It’s like you’re speaking Brazilian.”
“Brazilians speak Portuguese.”
“Yeah?” Fitz said. “Well, fuck them.”
CHAPTER 6
Via Crucis
AFTER EVERYONE HAD FILED out of the seven o’clock mass, including Detective Torres, who shot Bob a look of flat contempt as he passed, and Father Regan had retired to the sacristy to change out of his vestments and wash the chalices (a job once left to the altar boys, but you couldn’t find altar boys to do the seven anymore), Bob remained in his pew. He didn’t pray exactly, but he did sit in the embrace of a silent hush rarely found outside of a church to reflect on an eventful week. Bob could remember whole years in which nothing had happened to him. Years when he’d look up expecting the calendar to read March and see November instead. But in the past seven days, he’d found the dog (as yet unnamed), met Nadia, been robbed at gunpoint, adopted the dog, and been visited by a gangster who tortured men in the back of a van.
He looked up at the vaulted ceiling. He looked out at the marble altar. He looked over at the stations of the cross, each placed evenly between the stained glass saints. The Way of Sorrows, each station a sculpture depicting Christ’s final journey in the temporal world, from condemnation through crucifixion to entombment. There were fourteen stations spaced throughout the church. Bob could have drawn them from memory if he’d been any good at drawing. Same could be said of the stained glass saints, starting with Saint Dominic, of course, patron saint of hopeful mothers, but not to be confused with the other Saint Dominic, patron saint of the falsely accused and founder of the Dominican Order. Most members of Saint Dominic’s parish didn’t know there were two Saint Dominics and, if they did, had no idea which of them their church was named after. But Bob did. His father, head usher for this church for many years and the most devout man Bob had ever met, had known, of course, and had passed down the knowledge to his son.
You didn’t tell me, Dad, that the world contained men who beat dogs and left them to die in frigid trash cans or men who drilled bolts through the feet of other men.
I didn’t have to tell you. Cruelty is older than the Bible. Savagery beat its chest in the first human summer and has kept beating it every day since. The worst in men is commonplace. The best is a far rarer thing.
Bob walked the stations. Via Crucis. He paused at the fourth, where Jesus met His mother as He carried the cross up the hill, the crown of thorns on His head, two centurions standing behind Him with their whips, ready to use them, to drive Him from His mother, to force Him up the hill, where they would nail Him to the very cross they forced Him to drag. Had those centurions repented later in life? Could there be repentance?
Or were some sins simply too big?
The Church said no. As long as there was meaningful penance, the Church said God would forgive. But the Church was an interpretive vessel, at times an imperfect one. So what if, in this case, the Church was wrong? What if some souls could never be reclaimed from the black pits of their sin?
If Heaven was to be considered a valued destination, then Hell must hold twice as many souls.
Bob hadn’t even realized he’d lowered his head until he raised it.
To the left of the fourth station of the cross was Saint Agatha, patron saint of nurses and bakers, among other things, and to the right was Saint Rocco, patron saint of bachelors, pilgrims, and . . .
Bob stepped back in the aisle to get a better look at a stained glass window he’d passed so many times he’d long since lost his ability to see it. And there in the lower right-hand corner of the window, looking up at his saint and master, was a dog.
Rocco, patron saint of bachelors, pilgrims, and . . .
Dogs.
“ROCCO,” NADIA SAID WHEN he told her. “I . . . like it. That’s a good name.”
“You think? I almost named him Cassius.”
“Why?”
“Because I thought he was a boxer.”
“And?”
“Cassius Clay,” he explained.
“Was he a boxer?”
“Yeah. Changed his name to Muhammad Ali.”
“Him, I heard of,” she said and Bob suddenly didn’t feel so old. But then she said, “Doesn’t he have a grill named after him?”
“No, that’s the other guy.”
Bob, Nadia, and the newly minted Rocco walked along a path by the river in Pen’ Park. Nadia came around after work sometimes, and she and Bob took Rocco out. Bob knew something was a little off about Nadia—the dog being found so close to her house and her lack of surprise or interest in that fact was not lost on Bob—but was there anyone, anywhere on this planet, who wasn’t a little off? More than a little most times. Nadia came by to help with the dog, and Bob, who hadn’t known much friendship in his life, took what he could get.
They taught Rocco to sit and lie down and paw and roll over. Bob read the entire monk book and followed its instructions. The puppy was dewormed and cured of kennel cough by the vet before it really got a chance to start. He had his rabies shot, his parvo booster, and had been cleared of any serious damage to his head. Just deep bruises, the vet said, just deep bruises. He was registered. He grew fast.
Now Nadia was teaching them both how to “heel.”
“Okay, Bob, now stop hard and say it.”
Bob stopped and pulled up on the leash to get Rocco to sit by his left foot. Rocco half-swung with the leash. Then he twirled. Then he lay on his back.
“Heel. No, Rocco. Heel.”
Rocco sat up. He stared at Bob.
“Okay,” Nadia said. “Not bad, not bad. Walk ten steps, do it again.”
Bob and Rocco walked down the path. Bob stopped. “Heel.”
Rocco sat.
“Good boy.” Bob gave him a treat.
They walked another ten steps, tried it again. This time Rocco jumped as high as Bob’s hip, landed on his side, and rolled over several times.
“Heel,” Bob said. “Heel.”
They walked another ten steps and it worked.
Tried it again. And failed.
Bob looked at Nadia. “It takes time, right?”
Nadia nodded. “Some more than others. You two? I think it’ll take a while.”
A bit later, Bob let Rocco off leash, and the puppy bolted off the path into the trees, raced back and forth among the trunks closest to the path.
“He won’t go far from you,” Nadia said. “You notice? He keeps his eye on you.”
Bob flushed with pride. “He sleeps on my leg when I watch TV.”
“Yeah?” Nadia smiled. “He still having accidents in the house?”
Bob sighed. “Oh, yeah.”
About a hundred yards deeper in the park, they stopped by the restrooms and Nadia went in the ladies’ while Bob put Rocco back on leash and gave him another treat.
“Nice-looking dog.”
Bob turned, saw a young guy passing them. Lanky hair, lanky build, pale eyes, small silver hoop in his left earlobe.
Bob gave the guy a nod and a smile of thanks.
The guy stood on the path, severa
l feet away and said, “That’s a nice-looking dog.”
Bob said, “Thanks.”
“A handsome dog.”
Bob looked over at the guy, but he’d already turned and was walking away. He flipped a hood off his shoulders and over his head and walked with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders hunched against the raw weather.
Nadia exited the ladies’ room and saw something in Bob’s face.
“What’s up?”
Bob chin-gestured up the path. “That guy kept saying Rocco was a nice-looking dog.”
Nadia said, “Rocco is a nice-looking dog.”
“Yeah, but . . .”
“But what?”
Bob shrugged and let it pass, even though he knew there was more to it. He could feel it—something in the fabric of the world had just torn.
THESE DAYS, MARV HAD to pay for it.
After his half hour with Fantasia Ibanez, he left and headed home. He met Fantasia once a week in the room at the back of the whorehouse Betsy Cannon ran out of one of the old wardens’ mansions on the top of the crest in The Heights. The houses up there were all Second Empire Victorians and had been built back in the 1800s when the prison had been the main source of work in East Buckingham. The prison was long gone; all that remained of it were the names—Pen’ Park, Justice Lane, Probation Avenue, and the oldest bar in the neighborhood, The Gallows.
Marv walked down the hill into the Flats, surprised at how warm it had gotten today, up in the forties and holding into the evening, the gutters all gurgling with streams of melted snow, the drainpipes voiding gray liquid onto the sidewalks, the wood frame homes sporting pimples of moisture, like they’d spent the afternoon sweating.
Nearing the house, he wondered how he’d become a guy who lived with his sister and paid for sex. This afternoon, he’d gone to visit the old man, Marv Sr., and he’d told him a bunch of lies even though the old man had no idea he was even in the room. He told his father he’d taken advantage of the hot market in commercial real estate and the limited supply of liquor licenses in this city and he’d cashed in, sold Cousin Marv’s Bar for a mint. Enough to get his father in a real good home, that German one over in West Roxbury, maybe, if he greased the right palms. And now he could. Once all the paperwork was signed and the money released by the bank—“You know banks, Pop, they’ll hold on to it until you resort to begging for your own money”—Marv could take care of the family again, just like he had in his heyday.