The Town: A Novel (43 page)

“Doing what?”

He took a breath before launching into it. “I was at this bar once. Five years ago now. Bully’s, a Townie tavern. Doing my thing, bunch of us, drinking pitchers, carousing. I don’t remember much of this firsthand. I know a guy came in, older than us, getting his drink on. He’s looking at me, and I’m getting annoyed. Some point he comes over, asks am I Mac MacRay’s son. Tells me he knew my dad years ago, worked with him close, and I’m like, whatever. Until he tells me how he recognized me. Smiles and says I look exactly the way my dad looked when he got drunk.”

The wave came around, everyone jumping to their feet and throwing their hands in the air except Doug and Claire.

“And I guess I attacked the guy. I have almost no memory of this. But if they hadn’t pulled me off him, it would have been bad. Hospital he went to got the law involved, and the guy fingered me. And I’m grateful now. I am.”

She watched him closely. Almost like she knew this already or suspected something like it.

“I did some prison time for that. Hated it, and I will never go back. Only thing to come of it was, I started on the program while I was in there. Changed my life. Cleared probation a year ago, now I’m free and clear. And I
feel
free and clear.” All of this was the truth. He’d only left out his earlier stint inside.

“Wow,” she said.

“Yeah, I know. It’s like a knife in my eye, every time I have to tell you these things.” He ticked them off on his fingers. “Alcoholic. Broken family. Ex-con. Not much to take home to your parents, huh?”

She absorbed all this, turning back to the field. “I told my parents I quit,” she said. “They want me to go see a psychiatrist. Which I actually had been considering on my own—but now, forget it.”

“You don’t need one.”

“No?” she said, shooting him a quick, angry look she seemed to regret.

Doug felt the chill. “You’re full of questions tonight.”

“Am I?”

“Something on your mind?”

She shook her head, hesitant, as though easing her way into this. “Agent Frawley came to see me again and I guess it shook me up a little.”

Doug stared at the mound to control his reaction. “Yeah? How so?”

She was looking at him now. Fucking
looking
at him, and Doug made a study of the Milwaukee pitcher checking the runner on first. He would not look back at her.

“He said they were sure now that the bank robbers are from Charlestown.”

Doug nodded. “Yeah?”

“He said they’re watching some people. Getting close.”

Did she know? Would she be telling him this if she knew anything? Was she testing him? Feeling him out? Trying to
help
him?

“I guess I’m worried,” she said.

Maybe she did know. Maybe she knew and she accepted it and she was only waiting for him to come clean to her. Clear the air. Put all this behind them.

A fantasy. He turned slowly, giving her plenty of time to break off her scrutiny of him. “What are you worried about?”

She shrugged inside the dugout jacket. “Testifying, I guess. Living in the same town as these people. Things like that.”

She looked back at him on
Things like that,
searching him—was she?—and
Doug held his expression, nearly impossible, looking into her eyes, wondering suddenly who was lying to whom.

Had Frawley put her up to questioning him? This was Jem’s voice inside his head, he knew that, and it twisted his stomach.

Would she wear a wire for Frawley?

“He told me there were some developments in the case,” she said.

Don’t ask.

Doug nodded, checking the game, keeping his eye on the ball.
Developments?

Don’t. Let it go.

“Must be a long process,” he said, “an investigation like that.” He had hardly felt the words leaving his throat. “Probably still a long ways off.”

Why was she nodding? Was she waiting for more from him? Baiting him here?

Don’t.

Going crazy. “Maybe if you just don’t think about it,” he said. Were they communicating in code now?
Don’t think about me that way—think about me the way I am now.
“Put it out of your mind. Don’t deal with it unless you have to.”

Her eyes were on him again, and he tried to guess her emotion. Relief? Surprise? Was she hearing this other thing in his words?

Do not ask.

Developments.

He had to know. Maybe she wanted to tell him—maybe she was trying to warn him here.

Or maybe she didn’t know anything. His head was pounding like his heart had traded places with his brain.

Don’t.

His words caught her just as she was looking away in relief. “Why?” He shrugged it, like he didn’t have a care in the world. “What are these developments?”

And she came back to look at him—they were searching each other—and he could tell by her eyes that he had made a disastrous mistake.

She turned away first, looking down at the ballcap of the boy sleeping against his father’s shoulder in the seat before her. Doug had been found out.

“Fingerprints,” she told him.

Doug nodded, frantic to unmake his mistake, trying to swamp her doubts with forced enthusiasm. “Fingerprints, wow.”
Whose?
“I didn’t even know they still solved crimes that way.”

She shrugged.

“Anyway,” he went on, headlong, “you definitely shouldn’t worry. Not about your role in it. There’s really nothing to worry about, that I can see.”

The silence that came over them was charged, the game going on before their eyes and not mattering. Nothing mattered suddenly. The wave swept past and again failed to lift them. Then another sort of commotion—someone slapped Doug hard on the shoulder, and he turned fast, expecting Adam Frawley and federal badges and guns.

It was Wally the Green Monster, Fenway Park’s furry green mascot, demanding a high five.

People around them pointed to the electronic scoreboard over the centerfield bleachers, the seat numbers flashing there. Claire was one of four lucky winners of a free pancake breakfast at Bickford’s.

The guy inside Wally said, “Jesus, man, lighten up,” and Doug stuck out his hand, accepting the Green Monster’s salute and watching him dance away.

Claire looked bewildered.

“Free pancakes,” Doug said, riding the interruption. “Not bad.”

“Sure,” she said.

If he had any chance of salvaging things with her, it would have to be away from the ballpark crowd, alone. “You okay here right now, or… ?”

She turned and looked straight into his eyes. “Let’s go back to my place.”

Doug blinked. “Your place?”

Her hand came out of its sleeve and took his. “On one condition.”

“Okay, sure.”

“You can’t stay over.”

“Okay,” he agreed. He would have agreed to almost anything.

Only after driving back to the Town in near silence—his hand leaving hers only to shift gears—as he neared Packard Street, did he ask:

“Why can’t I stay over?”

She turned toward him. “‘Mornings after’ are so excruciating, and I don’t want that with you. Morning only raises questions. I’m tired of questions.”

He eased down her block, pulling up outside her door, shifting into neutral. He idled there, not turning off the engine.

“You’re not parking?” she said.

Doug looked over at the light shining above her front door. “Oh, man.”

“What?”

He couldn’t go in there. Not this way. There was no future in sleeping with her without telling her everything first.

Her hand went slack in his but he would not release it. All the cars parked up and down the block—the sleuth could have been watching from any one of them. “How about I come back first thing in the morning instead? We’ll make breakfast, we’ll do the whole ‘morning after’ thing first, get that out of the way. All those questions. What do you say?”

Disbelief in her eyes, but also concern. The dash vent fans floated the edges of her hair.

The urge was powerful, and for a moment he relented. “Oh, fuck it, no. Christ, what am I…”

But then he remembered the ballpark and how it had felt sitting there, thinking he had lost her. He still had a chance here.
Don’t blow this too.

“No,” he made himself say. “I can’t.”

She yielded a little. “If it’s about leaving…”

He saw it in her eyes then: she was afraid it was ending. All she was doing here was trying to hold on to him a little while longer.

“Look,” he said, “there’s plenty of time, right? Tell me there is. Because I have a long night of second-guessing ahead of me.”

“What about work tomorrow morning?”

What was she asking him? Was she asking him something?

“I quit that,” he said. “I told you, I’m ready for a life change. I’m committed to it. What about you?”

“Me?”

“Your if-only place. Us blowing this town. Together.”

She searched his face, reaching for his eyebrow, touching the smooth scar. “I don’t know.”

Yet her indecision lifted Doug’s heart. Whatever she knew or had figured out about him—she did not tell him no.

“Pancakes, maybe,” said Doug. “You like bacon? Sausage or bacon?”

She looked at their intertwined fingers, then pulled her hand free. She opened her door, swinging one leg out, looking back for him.

“If I walk you up there,” he said, “if I get anywhere near your door …”

With the interior light on now, he felt anxious, exposed. She read more into it than that. “Is this good night or good-bye?”

He reached for her, pulling her back inside. The kiss was deep and allencompassing, and she surrendered to it, gripping him tight. She didn’t want to let him go. Maybe never, and maybe no matter what.

“Good night,” he told her, stroking her hair. “Definitely good night.”

J
EM, IN MOTION
.

On foot patrol in the Town, feeling the air currents curl around him as he walked. If it had been foggy, moisture giving character to the air, then others would have witnessed the slipstream in his wake, would have stared in awe at this native son trailing a flowing cloak of smoke. Then they would have understood.

Some knew already, a respect he felt but never deigned to acknowledge. Their hesitant glances, the quick look-aways. It hurt their eyes to stare. But their esteem for him was evident in their silence, the hush that fell over people and children as he passed.

He was carrying this Town on his back. All his concentration, all his brainpower was focused on remembering the Town as it had once been, and returning it to glory.

Fucking Duggy.

Jem fingered the tea bag in his pocket, the smooth plastic packet. As he walked, he envisioned the Town in flames. Cleansing flames, flames that built, destroying the unworthy, flames that cauterized and forged. The row houses and triple-deckers burning clean and new.

At the corner of Trenton and Bunker Hill, another new dry cleaner’s. Yuppies passing him unaware. In a purging fire the dry cleaners with their chemicals would be the first to go up. Then back across the bridge would go the yuppies, ants fleeing a burning log. On paper, they owned the properties, but Jem still owned the streets. In the way that animals own the forest, he owned the Town.

He felt the itchy flecks of Colonial brick flowing in his blood.

Fergie. Jem could listen to him talk about the old Town for hours, having just left the wise man sitting in his flower shop walk-in cooler. The Florist knew about tenacity, about pride. The ex-wrestler and ex-boxer wore it on his face, the defiance of a window all cracked up but unbroken. Fergie knew how to win and win ugly.

Fucking Duggy. Treason and betrayal all around Jem. Everyone weakening and succumbing to change, to
progress,
and Jem, the glue, single-handedly holding everything together. Patching up the cracks. After Fergie it would all be up to him.

On the fucked-up clock face of the Town—as off-kilter as Fergie’s—Pearl Street ticked up toward midnight. The witching hour was where Jem was born, lived, and would die. He was proud of the house’s disrepair, the way it taunted the refurbished triples up and down the street, houses that had gone condo like whores transformed into virgins. All the sellouts who bailed: the Kenneys, Hayeses, Phalons, O’Briens. If it had been firstborns the yuppies were paying top dollar for, these traitorous fucks would have placed their kids’ school portraits in the classifieds section of
The Charlestown Patriot
. Moving out ain’t moving up—it’s giving up, it’s pussy.

Where the sidewalk plummeted like the first drop on the old Nantasket Beach roller coaster, Jem walked in the door. He had duct-taped an old cardboard box where Duggy had busted out the glass—solved that window rattle anyway. At the bottom step, he stopped and looked at Krista’s door. Thinking about the next generation produced in him a powerful urge to see Shyne. His eye fell upon the old pictures standing on the hall table: the house as it had been in the sixties; an old jalopy parked on the slant with his dad unloading something—swag, most likely—from the trunk; his parents’ wedding-party photo, Kennedy/Johnson campaign buttons under each groomsman’s rose boutonniere; him and Krista in rompers, sitting on a blanket out on the back lot when it was grass.