B009XDDVN8 EBOK (15 page)

“Johnny, my boy,” said Harry Conahan, “it’s good to see you. What brings you to this hell hole?”

“You,” I said.

“What I do?”

“Nothing, Harry. But we agreed to meet, remember?”

“To play a game or something, was it?”

“To talk.”

“Is that all?”

“Yeah.”

“Then, hell, buy me a drink and I’ll let you talk my ear off, so long as I don’t really need to listen.”

“What say I get us a pitcher?”

“Beer? What do you take me for?”

“A drunken sailor,” I said.

“And right you are.”

“Grab a booth. I’ll get the beer.”

“And a couple shots to go with it.”

“Are you sure?”

“Sure I’m sure. A couple for each of us. Just to lubricate the ears.”

I had never much liked fishing, never much liked boats, actually—too much water all about. But even as I negotiated with the developer for my newly built George Washington in Patriots Landing, I already had one eye looking for a route along which to flee if it became necessary. And the river, wide and calm, like a superhighway leading to some tropical refuge, simply was there. A small airport sat nearby, too, I must admit, but the only thing I knew about little planes was that sometimes they went down, fast, so the hell with that. At the very moment I signed the closing papers, I determined to develop a maritime hobby.

I bought a small sailboat to learn on, an eighteen-foot Cape Dory Typhoon, with an outboard just in case the wind handled
me instead of the other way around, and I docked it at a marina away from the prying eyes at my development. I had dreams of picking up something more substantial once I mastered the sailing arts, something twice the size, on which, in the event of an emergency, we could sail down the river, through Norfolk, into the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway south, and farther south, past the Keys, all the way to the Caribbean, where, with my money and my boat, Caitlin and I could live the dolce vita until the heat died down. But I took to sailing like a cat takes to water polo. I couldn’t read the wind, I couldn’t keep the boat on course, and I was bored to tears by the whole affair. Stuck in my little boat in a failing wind one afternoon, I watched while muscular powerboats roared by, leaving me shivering in their wakes, and decided I had played it wrong. I didn’t want to sail, I wanted to cruise.

But when I looked into the prices for the bigger powerboats, a boat large enough to live on in comfort for the years of my expected exile, and the amounts I would have to pay to keep one of those monsters fueled and docked and ready to roll, I realized no matter how much money I had stolen from the Grubbins house, it wouldn’t be enough. And by then, in any event, things had changed a bit. It wasn’t just my wife anymore, I had a child, and another on the way. I couldn’t expect them to go on the lam with me, but I also couldn’t just run away on my boat and leave my family at the mercy of Tony Grubbins and the Devil Rams. I would have to take another path. It wouldn’t require a huge power yacht, it wouldn’t require gobs of money; all it would require would be a little help. And so, even as I floundered trying to tack against the wind in my daysailer, I kept my eye open. I was looking for someone who could guide me and come through in the clutch, someone shady enough to be willing to assist for a price and dependable enough to bet my life on.

What I found was Fighting Harry Conahan, a bowlegged drunk with a high-pitched raspy voice, a beat old wooden fishing boat dubbed the
Left Hook
, and who, in the distant past, was one
Sugar Ray Robinson straight right to the jaw from the middleweight boxing championship of the world.

“So what’s got your cat all in a twist there, Johnny? What are you running from?”

“Someone from my past. It’s not important.”

“Important enough to the guy chasing you. What’d you do?”

“Only what anyone else would have done.”

“Then why is he after you?”

“Because I did it to him.”

Harry lifted up one of his clear shots of tequila and tossed it down his throat with a clatter of coughs. “God that feels bad, God that feels just awful. I’m getting too old to drink like this, and too old to stop. You sure you two just can’t work it out?”

“It’s too late for that.”

“And you can’t stand up to him?”

“It wouldn’t be much of a fight. All I want to make certain is that you and I are set.”

“You and me, we been planning about this for years, haven’t we? Sure we’re set. And tomorrow, is it?”

“The sooner I get away, the better.”

“Tomorrow, then.”

“Two-ish.”

“What does religion have to do with it?”

“Harry?”

“Some of the toughest lugs I ever fought was Jewish. Herbie Kronowitz, with a left as hard as a hammer. And LaMotta’s mother was Jewish, though not everyone knows that.”

I stared at the old man for a bit. Sometimes I thought he was certifiable, and sometimes I was sure he was just playing with me, and then sometimes I…

“Two, Harry. Two. I’ll be at the spot we worked out at two. We’ll capsize my boat, spill some blood, and then you’ll take me to that fishing shack you have up the Chickahominy. I’ll stay there until the story dies down. Does your friend still have
that sailboat we talked about, the one that we planned on taking down?”

“Sure he does, if he’s still around.”

“Harry?”

“I mean, who the hell knows? My friend with the boat, he might not be alive no more.”

“Might not be alive?”

“He might have got hit by a van out in Suffolk, a white van coming out of nowhere when he was just crossing the street to an AA meeting.”

“Harry.”

“I always knowed them meetings were trouble. I don’t know why we just can’t take mine.”

“It’s too small and it’s too old. And I was sort of counting on a sailboat for going island to island. In any event, if you and your boat disappear right after I disappear, people will get ideas. That’s why you’re putting your boat in storage and telling everyone you’re visiting family in Michigan.”

“All right, don’t be fretting like an old hen, now. You still got the cash we talked about, right?”

“I still have the cash.”

“One thing you can always get around here is a boat. The only thing they got more of in this world than people buying boats is people selling boats. You sure you want to do this, Johnny?”

“I don’t want to do this; I have to do this. One man is dead already, and they just missed their shot at me. I stay, my family’s in danger. I run, same thing, the message will be relayed somehow: come back or your family’s dead. But if I die, Harry, if a terrible accident befalls me when I’m out fishing, then the danger ends. My family will mourn for a bit, sure, but the life insurance will see them through. It’s not like I’m doing them much good anyway.”

“You’d be surprised.”

“I’ve been out of work for over a year.”

“I been out longer than that and damn proud of it.”

“And, to be truthful, I haven’t been getting along too well with any of them.”

“All the more reason to stay and work it out. Don’t want to be leaving on bad terms.”

“That’s the only kind of terms we have anymore. You’re not getting cold feet, are you, Harry?”

“Me? I don’t get cold feet, except for them circulation issues I been having. I’ll be there, just like I promised. After all, you’ve been paying me all these years. What did you call it?”

“A retainer.”

“That’s it. So I’ll step up like we talked about.” He looked around. “But I’ll miss it here.”

“Schooners? It’s a dump.”

“But it’s my dump.”

“We’ll find you someplace better with an island beat. When the coast clears and everything’s set we’ll head on down. To someplace in the Caribbean maybe, or Central America. Or Brazil. I hear the girls are hot in Brazil, Harry.”

“I bet they are.” He nodded gleefully for a moment and then thought better of it. “And they sure would be hot for me if I was fifty years younger.”

“Didn’t you tell me that everyone loves an old man on a boat?”

“I told you that, sure, but that don’t make it true.”

“Just bring your passport, Harry, and we’ll have a time together.”

“No disputing that,” said Harry, as he picked up his second shot and stared through it like it was a crystal ball. “And you never know, maybe even a good time, too.”

A
FTER MEETING WITH
Harry and plotting my escape, I drove slowly back to Patriots Landing, thinking about my sun-drenched future, my blighted present, the disappointments of my past. The failure at the heart of my relationship with my wife was too familiar not to have been solely mine. What had happened between Caitlin and me, twice now actually, was the same thing that had happened with all the girls in between our two stints together, and the girl before ever I laid eyes on Caitlin with whom the pattern had started. As I drove ever closer to my new life, my thoughts inevitably drifted back to her. There is always one lurking in some hidden crevice of a man’s heart, the avatar of perfect, youthful love, the one that got away and forever after remains the standard by which other lovers are judged, and for me that one was Madeline Worshack.

Madeline Worshack was the prettiest girl in Pitchford. She didn’t have the insistent good looks of the cheerleaders, with their aggressive curves, their bright blonde hair, their lips like glossy cherries ready to be plucked with your teeth. But Madeline’s eyes were green and her hair was red and her cheekbones were high and lightly freckled and sometimes when I looked at her my breath caught in my throat. I had been in crush with Madeline since junior high, but had pined at a distance as she went out with a series of boys both older and better looking than I was. As
a sophomore in high school she dated the captain of the football team. Compared with the captain of the football team, what the hell was I?

Shit out of luck.

But somehow something changed in me after that night at the Grubbins house. Whereas before, Madeline knew me as just another of the boys who was tongue-tied in her presence, late in the spring of my junior year she looked at me anew and, even though she had a boyfriend at Penn State and a rash of admirers that spanned the spectrum of high-school achievement, when she looked at me she suddenly liked what she saw.

“Hey, J.J. How’s it going?”

“Who? Me?”

“Yes, you, silly.”

“I’m okay, I guess.”

“Have you been working out? You look…different.”

“I guess so, yeah. Pumping that iron. Doing those reps.”

“Are you going to Francine’s party tonight?”

“I wasn’t really planning on it.”

“Did she invite you?”

“It must have slipped her mind.”

“I’ll talk to her.”

“No, it’s okay. I’ve got something going on anyway.”

“I’ve been thinking about you.”

“About me?” I said, my palms beginning to itch.

“What have you been up to?”

“Nothing.”

“I bet not. You look like you’ve been up to all kinds of things. We’ll talk at the party, okay?”

I hadn’t developed a six-pack overnight, or biceps, or a fastball to blow away the opposition, or even a shining intellect that made the debaters step back in awe, but there was something surely different about me. Nothing is more alluring, I suppose, than a secret. If I could take a stack of cash and bury it in every
high-school kid’s basement, there’s no telling what the youth of America could achieve.

What I achieved—fist pump—was Madeline Worshack.

I’d had other crushes in my life, and by then I’d had sex with a girl I didn’t much care for, but you could say Madeline, as the first girl whom I both dated and loved, was my first real girlfriend. Inevitably, having no idea what I was supposed to do as a boyfriend and overcome with that potent combination of desire, cockiness, and fearful jealousy, I ended up spending as much time as possible with her, primarily at the expense of my time with Augie and Ben. It would be easy enough to cast Madeline Worshack as the Yoko Ono of our little gang, she sure had the cheekbones for it, but it wouldn’t quite be accurate. Even before Madeline, things had changed between the three of us, and not for the better.

You know how when you’re in high school and you have sex with someone one night, the next day you end up avoiding your partner in the hallways? It’s not a purposeful snub, it’s just that after such raw intimacy, you’re not sure how to act in less intimate surroundings, so you punt. That’s sort of the way we felt, Augie and Ben and I, the first couple of days after getting away with the money. The three of us had crossed a line together and we weren’t sure how to behave with each other thereafter. Maybe it was simple awkwardness, or maybe we were trying to cover our tracks, make ourselves less believable as a criminal crew, but it felt to me like some deeper chasm had opened. It was as if each of us was a mirror for the other’s soul and we suddenly didn’t like what we saw.

So we were finding fewer reasons to hang out together as the saga of the Grubbins house played out for all of Pitchford to follow. The day after the police swarmed along Henrietta Road, the DA announced a drug seizure of epic proportions and flashed pictures of the haul on all the television stations. Tony Grubbins was sent to juvie in a different part of the state. Derek Grubbins
was arrested at his jamboree, extradited to Pennsylvania, and sent to jail, directly to jail, without ever passing home. The Grubbins house was seized by the state and the whole aftermath looked to be as clean as we could have hoped, until the weirdness began.