The Drop (7 page)

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, several 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.

Except the old man hadn’t accepted his money back then. The old man was fucking annoying that way, asking Marv in his broken Polack (Stipler was an Americanization, and not a very good one, of Stepanski) why he couldn’t work an honest job like his father, mother, and sister.

Marvin Sr. had been a cobbler, his wife worked in a Laundromat for thirty years, and Dottie pushed paper for Allstate. Marv would sooner sell his dick to science than work a coolie career for coolie wages the rest of his life. Wake up at the end of it all and ask, What the fuck happened?

Yet for all their conflict, he loved the old man and, he liked to hope, vice versa. They caught a lot of Sox games together and held their own in the 50 Tenpin Bowling League once a week, the old man a deadeye for picking up the 7–10 split. Then came the stroke, followed a year later by the heart attack, followed three months after that by the second stroke. Now Marvin Stipler Senior sat in a dim room that smelled of mold, and not the kind of mold you found in wet walls but the kind you found in people as they neared the end. Still, Marv held out hope that the old man was in there somewhere and he was coming back. And not just coming back but coming back with a glint in his eyes. Lots of stranger things had happened in this world. Trick was to not give up hope. Not give up hope and go get some money, put him in a place where they believed in miracles, not warehousing.

In the house, he grabbed a beer, a shot of Stoli, and his ashtray and joined Dottie in the small den where they had the TV and the Barcaloungers set up. Dottie was working her way through a bowl of Rocky Road. She claimed it was her second, so Marv knew it was her third, but who was he to begrudge the things that gave a person pleasure? He lit a cigarette and stared at a commercial for motorized floor sweepers, the little fuckers buzzing around some toothy housewife’s floors like things that turned against you in sci-fi movies. Marv figured pretty soon that toothy housewife would open a closet, find a couple of the little robot saucers whispering their conspiracy to each other. And then she’d be the first to go, each of the little fuckers taking an end and just sucking her to pieces.

Marv had a lot of ideas like this. One of these days, he kept telling himself, he needed to write them down.

When
American Idol
returned, Dottie turned in her recliner and said, “We should join that show.”

“You can’t sing,” he reminded her.

She waved her spoon. “No, the other one—people going around the world looking for the clues and stuff.”

“
The Amazing Race
?”

She nodded.

Marv patted her arm. “Dottie, you’re my sister and I love you, but between my smokes and your ice cream, they’re, what, gonna run beside us with defibrillators and those fucking shock paddles? Every ten steps we take—
Bzzt! Bzzt!
”

Dottie’s spoon scraped the bottom of her bowl. “It’d be fun. We’d see things.”

“What things?”

“Other countries, other ways.”

It hit Marv—when they did jack the drop bar, he’d
have to
leave the country. No way out of that one. Jesus. Say good-bye to Dottie? Not even say good-bye. Just go. Man, oh man, the world asked a lot of ambitious men.

“You see Dad today?”

“I was by.”

“They want their money, Marv.”

Marv looked around the room. “Who?”

“The home,” Dottie said.

“They’ll get it.” Marv stubbed out his cigarette, exhausted suddenly. “They’ll get it.”

Dottie put her bowl on the TV dinner table between them. “It’s collection agencies calling now, not the home. You know? Medicare cuts, me retiring . . . They’ll ship him off.”

“To where?”

“A lesser place.”

“There is one?”

She looked at him carefully. “Maybe it’s time.”

Marv lit a cigarette, even though his throat was still raw meat from the last one. “Just kill him, you’re saying. Our father. He’s inconvenient.”

“He’s dead, Marv.”

“Yeah? What’re those beeps coming out of the machines? Those waves on the screen of the thing? That’s life.”

“That’s electricity.”

Marv closed his eyes. The darkness was warm, inviting. “I put his hand to my face today?” He opened his eyes, looked at his sister. “I could hear his blood.”

Neither of them spoke for so long that
American Idol
had moved on to a new set of commercials by the time Dottie cleared her throat and opened her mouth.

“I’ll get to Europe in another life,” she said.

Marv met her eyes and nodded his thanks.

After a minute, he patted her leg. “You want some more Rocky Road?”

She handed the bowl to him.

W
HEN EVANDRO TORRES WAS
five years old, he got stuck on the Ferris wheel at Paragon Park in Nantasket Beach. His parents had let him go on the ride alone. To this day he couldn’t understand the fuck they’d been thinking or fully comprehend that the park personnel had let a five-year-old sit alone in a seat that went a hundred feet in the air. But back then, shit, child safety wasn’t a big concern to most people; you asked your old man for a seat belt while he was barreling along 95 with a Schlitz tall between his legs, he handed you his tie, told you to figure it out.

So there was little Evandro, sitting at the meridian of the wheel’s rotation when it jammed, sitting under a white sun that beat on his face and head like a bee swarm, and if he looked to his left he could see the park and then the rest of Hull and Weymouth beyond. He could even make out parts of Quincy. To his right though was ocean—ocean and more ocean and then the Harbor Islands followed by the Boston skyline. And he realized he was seeing things as God saw things.

It chilled him to realize how small and breakable everything was—every building, every person.

When they finally got the wheel going again and got him down, they thought he was crying because the height had scared him. And truth was he’d never be a real fan of heights ever again, but that wasn’t why he wept. He wept—and did so for so long that while they were riding home, his father, Hector, threatened to throw him out of the car without coming off the gas—because he understood that life was finite. Yeah, yeah, he’d tell the one shrink he went to after his second demotion, I get it—we all understand life ends. But actually, we don’t. Somewhere in the back of our heads, we think we’re going to beat it. We think something’s going to happen to change the deal—a new scientific discovery, the Second Coming, ETs,
something
—and we’ll live forever. But at five—at fucking
five
—he’d known with crystalline clarity that he, Evandro Manolo Torres, was going to die. Maybe not today. But, then again, maybe so.

This knowledge placed a ticking clock in the center of his head and a bell in his heart that tolled on the hour, every hour.

And so Evandro prayed. And he went to mass. And he read his Bible. And he tried to commune every day with the Lord Our Savior and Heavenly Father.

And he drank too much.

And, for a while there, he also smoked too much and chipped cocaine, both nasty habits, but both now more than five years in his rearview.

And he loved his wife and his kids and he tried to make sure they knew it and felt it every day.

But it wasn’t enough. The gap—the fucking chasm, the hole, the abscess at the center of him—would not close. Whatever else the world saw when they looked at him, when Evandro looked at himself, he saw a man running toward a point on the horizon he could never reach. And one day in the middle of the running the lights would simply go out. Never to be turned on again. Not in this world.