Another Broken Wizard (19 page)

“Sorry to hear that.”

“Do you want to just, like, run off to San Francisco with me? Maybe we can change our names.”

She said it like a joke that required only that I not laugh for it to come true. In that moment, she wasn’t my regret.

“It’s the best idea I’ve heard today. But I can’t,” I said, gesturing all around me to explain it.

“Yeah, that’s right. I forgot. You can’t even call me.”

“I’m sorry about that. I have Dad, then Mom, then my friends back in Worcester. And things are crazy there. I want to tell you about what happened to my face, about all of it. I really do. And I do think of you. You’re the bright spot for me here. There. I said it.”

“Said what?”

“What you wanted me to say when you came on all sour a few minutes ago.”

“I just wanted to know why you didn’t call.”

“What are you doing tomorrow night?”

“I’m not just coming over. That was just that time.”

“Okay, we’ll go someplace. You know your way around. You pick.”

“I’ll think about it,” she said.

He dark lips pressed against each other to stifle a smile. I touched her hand and it opened to the touch.

“I’ll call this time.”

Exhilarated and wondering what the hell I was doing, I made it back to Dad’s room.

“Jesus, you go to Atlanta for the sodas? You missed the kickoff. Dallas is about to score,” Dad rasped, his impatience trumping the pain.

“Sorry, I got turned around in the other wing. Then I got a phone call.”

“It’s okay. I had the nurse help me to the bathroom when you were gone.”

“Oh shit, and I missed all the excitement.”

I opened Dad a soda and we settled down to watch the game. There was a lot of scoring for a playoff game. Between the first and second quarter was a plug for the late night news. Below the eager weather man, the time flashed—after five thirty. I took a breath and excused myself. I went outside to make the call. It was warming up, almost to the freezing point. Snow was on the way.

“Ira Volpe,” he answered, and the background noise filled in behind him.

“Ira, it’s Jim, Jim Monaghan. We talked the other day.”

“Yeah, Jim, what’s up?”

“Well, it’s just that this situation—the one from the other night—it has me a little worried. I wanted to sit down and talk to you about it, get your take, see what I can do. Do you have time?”

“I could do later tonight. I’m on until one tonight, unless someone gets shot. But uh, it’s cold out and the Pats won, so I should be free.”

“How’s nine sound?”

“Sure, you know where headquarters is, right?”

Worcester police headquarters was an impregnable cement block with no windows until the fifth story. In the middle of downtown, it stood as a monument of hostility towards the city’s residents.

“Can we meet somewhere else?”

“Where?”

“How about the Boulevard Diner, on Shrewsbury Street?”

“The old dining car?”

“Yeah. Eggs and coffee are on me.”

“See you at nine.”

Back in Dad’s room, the elderly roommate slept. His wife watched. Dad stared at his dinner—a covered plastic bowl of broth with a big spoon.

“What took you so long? I even farted while you were gone.”

“Farting, hospital food—why do I always miss the good parts?”

Dad started to laugh, but that invited a near cataclysm of pain. He smiled instead.

“I guess you just have shit luck.”

Halftime was ending. The game carried on, one heroic sack, one heroic long bomb at a time until heroism lost all meaning. It was 42–38 by the time Dad fell asleep with five minutes left. I pulled up his blanket as a way of saying good-bye. It was snowing when I gave Whiskeynose my ticket and my money.

35.

The snow fell through the streetlights, renewing the landscape. I drove slowly after Dad’s SUV lost its grip on the road by a half-built, Tyvek-skinned car dealership. I got to the diner early, and ordered sausage, eggs and a coffee. The place was a onetime dining car parked for good on Shrewsbury Street, down the hill from the tracks of the Worcester-Boston railroad. The place was so small that everyone had to make a solid effort to ignore each other. A woman and her daughter bickering in and out of whispers, assassinating each others’ characters between the clatter of plates, were the main event that we ignored. Ira was also early, showing up before the food. He pointed to his left eye and shook his head as he made his way over to the booth I was in.

“I told you to stay out of it,” he said, seeming disappointed. Somehow he seemed a lot older than me.

“It’s just a black eye.”

“I know. But it could have been worse. There’s one thing I learned it’s that there’s really no limit to how bad these things can get.”

“What things?”

“The fights that break out over nothing. They usually end worse than the ones we can make sense of. Really Jim, you should know better. You’re not one of them. And you’re what? Thirty almost? I mean, you’re too old for this nonsense.”

In high school, Ira had been a big kid, big because fat and then big after years in the weight room. He’d slimmed down and gotten old in the intervening years. Lines radiated from the corners of his eyes and creases connected his broad nose and the sides of his mouth. He had an old man’s slow-moving eyes.

“You’re right. I didn’t know what I was dealing with. I went with Joe to a party. He said it was a friend of his invited him. But it was a set up. They were waiting for him. Things could have gone very badly.”

“That how you got the shiner?”

“Yeah.”

“Anyone else hurt?”

“Just bruises. We got out fast.”

“Sully was there?”

“Yeah, him and some of his friends. Sully had a billy club. It was set up by this guy Rory, who was supposed to be Joe’s friend. He looked pretty strung out.”

“Now where does this Rory guy live?”

“In the Burncoat neighborhood, off West Boylston Street.”

Ira continued with the cop questions—do you know his last name, were you drinking, had you met these people previously, how do you spell Ki, where exactly on West Boylston Street? He wrote parts of it down, but not the parts I would have written down. By the time he’d exhausted his questions, I’d finished a coffee and most of the eggs and sausage.

“So what can you do with all that?” I asked as he paused to write the last of it down.

“Not much. It’s thin—maybe assault, if you wanted to press charges. But it’s a stretch even then. With the billy club, maybe we could try for aggravated assault, but I’d need Joe and this other guy to give statements.

“I don’t think they would go for that,” I said. “Is there any way you can get Sully to back off Joe? I think Sully is involved in some shady dealings—drugs and whatnot.”

“Who told you that?”

“Joe.”

“How does he know?”

I was going to say something vague, something about how people talk. But I hesitated for a second or so, and that was all Ira needed.

“Exactly,” he said, before I could say anything.

I suppose he saved me the trouble of lying. I put a yolk-covered piece of sausage in my mouth and tried to act unruffled.

“I don’t even know why you’re trying to go to bat for this guy. I mean, you’re college educated, you live in New York City, and you look like you’re doing pretty well. So why get your face messed up for this guy who obviously can’t be bothered to look out for himself?” he asked.

“Ira, I’ve known the guy since I was ten. In high school, we went our own ways. But he’s a real friend. You don’t get too many of those. So, to lay it out there, I guess I’m asking for a favor. I’ll keep trying to get Joe to drop this stupid feud of his. But I need you do something to squash this on Sully’s end, lay pressure on him and his friends. It’ll be one less thing to investigate.”

“I’ll look into it. But I don’t know how much I can do. Other than that, there’s only one other way I can think of to put a stop to this thing, if you are really worried about your friend getting hurt.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“You can tell us what Joe is into. Get him off the streets for a little while. Give the dickheads who are after him some time to screw themselves up. It’ll happen sooner than later.”

My face may have gone pale, but I was careful not to hesitate again. You can’t see nausea.

“The guy may be a rowdy drunk. And okay, he may get high now and then, but that’s all I have on him. And that’s a lot thinner than the freaking set-up we walked into the other night. If he was alone, he could have been killed.”

“So you’re telling me that he’s not selling coke, not buying guns?” Ira said, seriously.

It took a second for me to realize that to Ira, these things were what they sounded like. It struck me that by knowing Joe and the guys around him so long, one gun or a few eight balls of cocaine just didn’t add up to the kind of seriousness that they did to the law. They seemed like the instruments of great underground revolt against a depression the size of the world. But here they were, laid bare by my new ally, as the felonies that they were.

“I never heard of any of that. That’s not what this is about. It’s just a nasty brawl.”

“Maybe you should talk to your friend Joe about that other stuff before you defend him.”

“I really don’t know what you’re talking about, or what you might have heard. I just want to help my friend.”

“And I just told you how you can.”

“Okay,” I said, nodding.

“Are you really getting this?” Ira asked, gesturing down to his empty cup of coffee, looking at me coldly.

“Yeah.”

Ira shook my hand and left. I felt like a fool, and even more helpless than before. I gestured to the old Italian guy behind the counter for the check and he gestured me to the register. Ira’s coffee cost $1.05. Breathing heavy, I walked through the snow to Dad’s SUV. I watched the snow in the pale orange street light. The flakes fell like notes in some perfect, infinite piece of music. But they’d become dirty, icy piles that lingered into mid-March. It was all fucked, but fucked in a pretty sort of way.

Going down Belmont Street, with the whole valley of Lake Quinsigamond and all the parking and shopping of Shrewsbury opening up before me like a drunk ex-wife. At White City, I pulled off the road to think.

In its first life, White City was an amusement park on the edge of the lake. They turned it into a shopping plaza before I was born. Since high school, it had shed its record store, its improbably gorgeous neon sign, and its movie theater. I parked by what had been a toy store so vast that I once peed my pants at its overwhelming promise. I turned off the car, and watched the windshield fill with snow, blotting out the back-lit, cursive sign of a dried-flower superstore for the thousands of households kept just so by the dour repression of their children. In the silence, I cursed the future, and cursed the caution of expensive lives. I was halfway into reconsidering the curse when my cell phone rang. It was Joe. We talked a few minutes before he got to the point.

“Jim, I hate to even ask. I mean, I’m sorry, but I need to borrow another three hundred. I’m really sorry. But I need it.”

“What for?”

“Well, can we meet up to talk about it?”

“Joe, I’m still unemployed. I didn’t get a new job over the weekend, you know? I’m not sure if I can swing it. Let me call you back tomorrow about it.”

“Okay, because I need it soon. Where are you?”

“I’m in Westborough. I’m in for the night,” I lied.

We agreed to talk the next day. I turned the car on and drove back to the Fountainhead. Out of respect for its power over me, I left the TV off and went to bed, thinking about Joe and Volpe, back and forth.

Finally, a long fantasy of Olive in the land of forgetfulness put me to sleep.

36.

Monday, January 5

Something urgent and persistent woke me. I fumbled around the apartment until I found the source—a speaker with buttons in the living room. The voice on the other end said the medical supply company was downstairs in the cold and the fresh foot and half of snow. Pulling on pants and rinsing out my mouth, I looked in the mirror. I had slept on my left side, so the eye was almost swollen shut, its purple turning brown. A fresh wound looks menacing, but a stale wound looks squalid.

I welcomed the two West Indian men with a hand truck full of aluminum railings and a toolbox into the apartment. The living room and the hall were a mess. I had a bad habit of leaving my pants where I took them off. I cleared the debris from their path and got out of their way. I looked over my list of things to do and sat down at the computer. The two men measured the hallway and the bathrooms for railings and the like. I was tweaking a cover letter for a job that I didn’t want when they knocked on the door and gave me a form to fill out for the insurance company. Then they left.

Yellow sunlight streamed off the still-white snow outside, through the big glass door in the living room. Quiet and alone, the world could be anything. I could be the narrator and the interpreter of my own story. These moments of solitude are the closest I’ve found to freedom or to being awake. I did a little dance in the living room to underline this point to myself, removing my pants and swinging them over my head like a lasso. Then I went into the kitchen to make coffee.