Another Broken Wizard (31 page)

“Do you want another drink?”

“Yeah, totally. But, what was I saying? I was saying something. You asked me something.”

“A drink?”

“No. But yes. But before that.”

“Uh, I asked if you were feeling good.”

“Oh yeah. Well, that’s exactly the question. I guess that in my own spoiled, white-guy-on-drugs way, I feel like that Narragansett. The bastards may get to me, but they’ll never know it. And I may be fucked, even the lawyer my mom is paying will concede that point. But I’m still singing.”

“Yeah, about that …”

“Let’s do two more shots. Rum this time?”

“Whiskey. I’ll get this one.”

Then the band began. They introduced themselves in a nervous, self-effacing sort of way, making bad jokes. Then the guitars emitted a loud, menacing thrum and impenetrable high-pitched thrashing. The once-nervous lead singer—a tall and obese white guy with a shaved head, baggy t-shirt and a braided, dyed goatee—let out a shrill and throaty roar. Conversation again vanished from the room. After a couple songs, Joe went to the other end of the bar and started talk-yelling with a group of girls down there. Kyle was over by the stage, nodding his head enthusiastically to the roar and screech of the music. I stayed where I was, trying to enjoy my light beer, thinking of Worcester in the 1600s, left abandoned over long decades, freelance and French-sponsored Indians marauding its hills. I thought of Worcester since World War Two, losing jobs and people, grasping at straws, building a mall downtown. I thought of the screamer on stage and the Narragansett, defiant, fucked and singing.

The next few songs passed wordlessly because of the deafening noise. I saw Joe coming out of the bathroom, looking like he was being carried on the shoulders of a grateful nation, his mouth wide and his eyes roaming. He bumped into Kyle and they started toward the door. He yelled into my ear that they were going outside for a smoke. I yelled I’d go out to meet them as soon as I got the drink I’d ordered. The bartender was a thin, pale girl who looked enough like Olive that her coldness surprised me. She took her time getting my drink and then even longer giving me change.

I was sorting my change from her tip when Kyle poked his head through the door looking alarmed, mouthing words I couldn’t hear. I followed him outside and around the corner, toward the yelling and a small crowd.

“What the fuck is your problem, buddy?” I heard someone yell as we rounded the corner. The sidewalk on the side street was dark. A small crowd stood back and watched the scene. No one spoke. The orange streetlights cast shadows on their faces.

A short, clean-cut white guy in a new, brown leather jacket pointed a gun at Joe. And Joe, in a black t-shirt, walked toward him, his arms outstretched and a wild, open-mouthed smile on his face.

“What are you going to do now?” the guy yelled at Joe.

“What are you going to do? Shoot me?”

The guy fired into the narrow, cracked sidewalk, and most of the crowd took off. The TV show had become real, and they wanted no part of it. Kyle and I started yelling at Joe—something about chilling out, letting it go, going home, shutting the fuck up, forgetting about it. Something like that. But Joe was transfixed on the guy with the gun and he didn’t acknowledge anything else. His eyes and smile were wide, taunting. We yelled, but something kept us from stepping between them. Maybe we should have been, but neither of us was ready for this situation.

“Go ahead. Shoot me, then. You don’t have the balls,” Joe said.

The guy shot twice. The second shot hit him in the stomach. Joe dropped his arms and deflated. He staggered to the sidewalk to lean against the building. The sound of the gun and Joe’s sodden loss of levity made the situation real in a way nothing had ever been real before.

Kyle and I ran to Joe, who leaned against the brick wall, and sank, doubled over to the sidewalk. I looked up at the guy who had shot him, who just stood there, awkwardly. The shooter’s face numb and slack, as disarmed as us by what he’d done. He looked around, took a few steps back and a few steps forward, his eyes big with shock, lost in the question of whether or not to flee.
It was enough to tell me he was done shooting for the night.

Kyle took off his white windbreaker and put it over Joe. The white windbreaker was drenched in blood in seconds. Joe trembled more with each breath. His face was pulled tight and serious with the effort of it. We crouched over him, adjusting Kyle’s windbreaker over the wound, not sure what else to do. The shooter started to shrug his shoulders. He looked familiar, with buggy eyes I had seen before.

“Ambulance!” I shouted at the shooter. “Call an ambulance now! Ambulance! Now!”

The shooter dialed his cell phone with his gun hand. Joe wasn’t speaking, just taking small shuddering breaths in the shadow created by Kyle and me. His blood had soaked through the white windbreaker and started to pool on the sidewalk.

“Officer needs assistance … ambulance …” I heard coming from behind us.

Joe’s face was losing its taut seriousness. His eyes wandered, only occasionally pausing on our faces. He shivered. The shooter paced behind us. He stopped now and then to try and fail to light a cigarette with his gun hand. He kept muttering ohmygod or okayokayokay or don’tdiedon’tdiedon’tdie, while keeping his distance. Kyle and I repeated to Joe to stay with us, and that he was going to be fine, and all the other crap we’d seen on cop shows and in action movies over the years. But we registered less and less with him as the minutes passed. Joe’s eyes wheeled around the world above him, but did not focus. He shivered and coughed up a little blood. I have no clear idea of how long it was before the ambulance and cops showed up, shouldered us out of the way, and took Joe.

Once Joe was tied to a stretcher and loaded into the ambulance, Kyle pointed at the shooter. The police took the shooter aside, but not like a murderer, more like a neighbor who’d borrowed a lawnmower. One cop took his weapon, another took him over by a cruiser. But no handcuffs. The whole scene was bathed in siren lights. I followed the shooter to where a pair of cops put their hands on my shoulders and told me to stand back.

A big crowd had gathered from all the bars on Green Street, and Kyle was yelling with tears in his eyes that the cop in the leather jacket was the one who shot Joe. From the crowd, someone threw a shard of ice at the cruiser where the shooter stood. Kyle stood at the front of the crowd, pointing and yelling in a polo shirt.

“It was him that shot Joe,” someone yelled.

“That’s that fucking Dowd,” someone else yelled.

The cops saw a mob, and put Dowd the shooter in the back of a car, which drove off. I wandered back and forth through the crowd, between the cops and the Lucky Dog. I was in some kind of shock. I was looking for someone. But I couldn’t figure out whom.

The mob focused on the cops who remained, throwing insults, ice and bottles. Before long, a whole phalanx of cop cars came rolling to the defense of the officers on Green Street. They waded into the disorganized crowd, which was torn between an inchoate thirst for revenge, and a desire to get out of the cold. They arrested Kyle and this Spanish guy who was just looking for any fight he could find. Then the mob scaled back its ambitions from revolution to just making snide remarks about pigs, and started filtering back into the bars.

I noticed that my hands and arms were getting cold. That made sense, as I had no coat on. Looking at them, I saw that they were covered in Joe’s blood. And the blood was getting cold. I realized I had to go. Grabbing my coat off the bar stool in the Lucky Dog, I noticed the blood on most of Dad’s Patriots t-shirt.

My whole physical and mental existence seemed as precarious as a spinning top. I focused on the task at hand, repeating to myself to put on my coat and go get my car. Outside, the cops were dealing with the stragglers and the curious, but the mob had vanished. I shoved my hands into my coat pockets and asked one cop where they had taken Joe Rousseau. He said he didn’t know and told me to move away from the front of the building. I started walking back to Highland Street, repeating a mantra of things I had to do. I carried my body under the railroad bridge, past the Galleria, across the Common, down Main Street. There were few cars and no people out on foot.

On the long walk, I entertained myself with daydreams of getting to the hospital and seeing Joe, sitting up in bed with his wild grin and another crazy story to tell. I thought of us as old men, taking LSD with our grandchildren, and Joe breaking out his bullet-wound scar for them to marvel at. It made me laugh out loud, a lone madman in downtown Worcester on a frigid night. My cell phone rang.

“Jim, did you hear? Joe was shot. Kyle’s in jail,” Marissa said by way of hello.
Shewat
.

“Yeah, I was there. I’m going to get my car now.”

“What happened?”

“I’ll tell you when I see you. I need you to call the police and the hospitals and whoever else and find out what hospital they took Joe to, then call me. I’ll tell you when I get there.”

“Okay. But just tell me this. Did Joe really get shot? Was he okay?”

“He got shot. I don’t know if he’s okay. Find out the hospital and call me back as soon as you can.”

Cell phone still in my hand, I trudged up Highland Street, past the monumental WPA Auditorium. I wanted to call someone, to tell someone. But the thought of talking made me dizzy and sick on the inside. I couldn’t think of who to call or what to say. I focused on moving my legs. I passed Tortilla Sam’s, a few closed stores, then took a narrow side street and found Dad’s SUV. I sat inside and focused on waiting for my phone to ring. To think of anything made me nauseous. I sat like that for about ten minutes.

“They took him to UMass. I’m already on my way,” Marissa said, and hung up.

The ride between Highland Street and UMass didn’t exist. It was a meaningless and unnecessary aggravation. Everything—driving, parking, walking the labyrinth to the Emergency Room—didn’t register. Nothing would register until I found out what happened.

I focused on making my mouth form the words of the questions I needed to ask. Otherwise, I would slip into the image of Joe grinning from a hospital bed, or the image of Joe’s eyes growing less responsive in the sidewalk shadows. And each made me feel like I was flying apart.

I saw Marissa a moment before she saw me. She was already crying. She ran up to me and threw her arms around my neck and squeezed. She squeezed too hard for it to be relief. I knew then and my whole body froze. Numbness all but removed me from my body, blotting out sight and sound for a moment.

“Oh God, Joe is dead.”

“Already?” was all I could say.

Part Five: What a Good Time Would Cost

Those noble traits that marked the wild man’s course lie buried in the shades of night.

—William Apess

Eulogy on King Philip (1836)

53.

Sunday, January 18

The rest of the night came in fast waves of crushing reality alternated with numbness. The flickering fluorescent hospital lights went from being unbearable to nonexistent and back to unbearable again. The police, seeing the blood on my hands, took a statement. They asked innumerable questions, hammering away about whether or not the shooter identified himself as a police officer. I answered in yeses, nos and don’t knows—nods, head shakes and shrugs.

When the cops were done, I saw Marissa sitting with Joe’s mother, Justine. They were crumpled onto each other. I took a few steps toward them. But, self-conscious of all the blood on me, I walked away, and focused on getting out of the hospital.

The hospital signs, the parking lot lights, the letter-number codes denoting different parking levels, the lock-unlock buttons on the keychain were the only respite I had from the growing certainty that everything from my eyes to my guts was about to topple irretrievably. I had no answers, no solid idea of what had happened, only a whispered memory of how to start the car, obey traffic laws and get back to the Fountainhead. Passing out of Shrewsbury, I started to cry. I wondered if I should pull over and really have at it. But even that small bit of thinking frustrated the urge to sob. I focused on driving, then parking, focusing on the tangible otherness of the world. It was the only safety.

Inside the apartment, I fell on the inflatable bed. To ask what I wanted at that moment was a thought that travelled straight into a nauseous chaos that I could not bear. But my body needed to collapse as badly as the rest of me. I slept a few hours, waking to piss. And before I reached the bathroom, the night’s events hit me with physical shudder, and kept me up.

The sun was rising on the other side of the apartment building, lighting the distant hills. Rawboned and out of control, I called Marissa, but got her voicemail. Looking around the apartment for clues about what to do with myself, I showered and shaved. That was something people did, after all. The blood had faded and was starting to crack on my skin. It took a lot of scrubbing to get it out of the hair on my forearms. In Dad’s bathrobe, I walked into the dark and silent living room. I should cry, I thought. And though something was moving in my stomach, I didn’t. I got up to pour myself a drink, because that’s something people do. But I forgot what I was doing on my way to Dad’s scotch bottle, with the paper tax stamp over its top. I reached for the bottle, then changed my mind, then wondered if I should have changed my mind. It wasn’t too different from having a concussion. The only clean shirt immediately evident was Dad’s Patriots t-shirt, the one with the Flying Elvis. I put it on.

All the automata, all the habits and preferences that once swooped me through my days had now taken on an awful echo of uncertainty. On the couch, I moved my mouth around the words
car keys
until I could muster the will to gather my car keys, wallet and phone and leave the apartment. The sky above the Fountainhead parking lot was muffled by pale clouds. Out past Boston, dawn was establishing itself by half-measures. I looked at the sky and contemplated the afterlife, because that is something people do at times like these. But the image of Joe slumping to the pavement put all my thinking to halt.