Brighton (4 page)

FIVE BLACK
taxis stood sentry outside the cab office. Massive Detroit machines, with bumpers made of iron and headlights as big as hubcaps, doors heavy enough to knock you over when they swung open and engines that shook the ground under your feet when they turned over. Each of them had
OLD TOWNE TAXI
stenciled on the side. Kevin found the key to the back door of the office under a rock and let himself in. His grandmother’s wooden desk sat silently by the window, looking back at the three-decker sunk down in the yard. On the desk was a stack of papers and an enormous phone with a silver rotary dial. Kevin picked up the handset and stared at the cab company’s number, ST2-6400, stamped in thick red letters on the receiver. Kevin’s grandmother owned the cab company outright. Her five brothers drove. Usually they made it to their destination. Sometimes they found a drink and hit a tree instead. Kevin hung up the phone and wandered out of the main office, headed toward the second floor.

“Who’s that?”

Kevin jumped and looked down at his feet. The voice came from what his grandmother called the mouse hole—a half circle cut into the wall near the floor. The mouse hole was usually
sealed up. This morning, however, it was wide open, a shaft of white light streaming through.

“Hey, Aggie. It’s just me.”

Aggie was Kevin’s great-aunt and his grandmother’s only sister. She lived in a one-room apartment that shared a common wall with the office. Aggie never came out of her apartment and no one ever went in except Kevin’s grandmother. All of Kevin’s conversations with Aggie took place on his hands and knees, staring at a slice of her face through the mouse hole.

“Hi, Kevin. Take this, will you?” An empty plate with some crumbs on it and a teacup came sliding through. Kevin hated it but bent down so his face was nearly flat against the floor. A large blue eye rolled his way.

“You working today?”

“Yeah, Aggie.”

The eye drifted. Now Kevin was looking at a piece of inflamed ear fringed by white hair and a stretch of moving red lip.

“I took my goofballs when I woke up. Four of ’em.”

“Are you supposed to take that many?”

“Doctor says I should, but they make me crazy.” The blue marble rolled back into its wooden socket. Kevin blinked and believed every inch of the power of the goofball.

“Where’s Mary?” Aggie said.

“She’s not in yet.”

Every afternoon, Aggie and her sister sat in Aggie’s apartment, watching
Candlepins for Cash
and eating bowls of ice cream. Something went wrong once and they rushed Aggie to the hospital with tubes up her nose and eyes gone back in her head. For three weeks after that, Kevin’s grandmother ate ice cream alone, just her and the sound of pins falling on the black-and-
white in a small kitchen at the back of the office. Kevin watched once from the dark hallway but left without saying a word.

“Tell Mary I got peach today,” Aggie said.

“Peach?”

“Ice cream. She knows cuz she bought it. Make sure you tell her.”

“You got it.”

“Gotta go. Bye, Kevin.”

The mouse hole snapped shut and Kevin was left on his hands and knees. He got up from the floor and took Aggie’s cup and plate into the kitchen. His great-uncle, Shuks, sat at the table. He had the
Herald
laid out in front of him and a large black coffee beside it.

“Hey, Shuks.”

“Hey, kid. What did Aggie want?”

“Nothing. She just gave me her stuff.” Kevin dumped cup and plate in the sink. “Bobby up?”

“Haven’t seen him.”

“He’s gonna let me drive one of the cabs.”

“Good for you.”

Kevin could have said he was gonna drink a case and a half of beer and piss off down the Mass Pike blindfolded and Shuks would have been all in. Dukie was the youngest and most naturally Irish of the five brothers, with curly hair of iron gray, long, sharp features, and a nose you wouldn’t forget. He was also probably the best-looking, which wasn’t saying a whole lot unless you said it to him. Shuks, on the other hand, wasn’t pretty. His face was lumpy like soft potatoes. His hands were huge, with doorknobs for knuckles and thick, coarse fingers stained with nicotine. Still, he was Kevin’s favorite. Shuks had been a wild man
back in the day—boozing and brawling his way through most of the Irish joints in Boston until he finally decided to let his fists earn him a living. Kevin had seen one of the old boxing posters, so he knew it wasn’t the usual family bullshit. Shuks at twenty-three, crouched in front of the camera, tight blue eyes stitched above a set of black gloves. Underneath, the script read
NEW ENGLAND JUNIOR WELTERWEIGHT CHAMP
, 1937. Most of Shuks’s fights were at places like the Taunton Civic Center or the Allston VFW. Twice Shuks fought in Filene’s window. He told Kevin those were the best-paying bouts. They’d set up a ring in the big window on Washington Street and people would stand on the corner and watch. Shuks wasn’t the type to brag, but Kevin liked to hear about the fights. And he thought Shuks liked to talk about them. Why the hell not? Kevin slapped his glove on the table and pulled out a chair.

“Sox win?”

“Three to two. Lynn hit a home run in the eighth. Goin’ all the way this year, kid.”

“They always blow it.”

“Not this year.”

“You think?”

“I got a feeling.” Shuks reached for a pack of Lucky Strikes on the table, shaking out a cigarette and pointing the business end at Kevin. “Don’t start. Cuts down on your wind.” He always said that before he lit up. And Kevin always nodded.

“You got practice today?”

“Yeah.”

“What time?”

“Eleven. We play Dorchester for the title next week.”

Blue streams of smoke issued from the tunnels his great-
uncle called nostrils. “I’ll be there.” Shuks lived by himself in a cheap studio across from Tar Park and never missed a game. Rarely missed a practice. He didn’t say much. Just sat on one of the benches drinking tallboy cans of Schlitz. Drank and smoked. Smoked and watched.

“It’s down at the Commons,” Kevin said. “Bobby told me they announce your name over a speaker.”

“You gonna be nervous?”

“Probably.”

“You don’t look it out there.”

“No?”

Shuks shook his head and pulled again on the Lucky. Kevin could hear the tobacco crackle and burn.

“When I played baseball, I was a wreck,” Shuks said.

“Come on.”

“Ask your grandmother. I’d shake like a leaf with that bat in my hands, praying to Christ they didn’t hit the ball my way in the field. Course they always did.”

“You were a professional boxer, Shuks.”

“Boxing’s nothing but a fistfight. No time to think about what can go wrong. Baseball’s different.” He tapped his temple with a knobby finger. “Gotta have it up here. Grace under pressure.”

“You think I got that?”

“I know you do. Now, don’t be getting a big head or nothing.”

“I won’t.”

Shuks’s chuckle was full of love and smoke and whiskey. “I know. I’m just giving you a hard time.” He licked the side of ham he called a thumb and turned a page to the racing section. “Now, let me see if I can’t make us a few shekels.”

Kevin watched him mark up the page with a black pen, hesitant
to say anything more because it was quiet and peaceful and safe with Shuks and it wasn’t always that way. He took a final drag on the Lucky, crushing it in a tin ashtray and blowing out twin engines of smoke, then stretching his arms over his head and cracking his jaw in a ferocious yawn. Shuks had black rocks for teeth and precious few of those. Kevin remembered the night he’d seen one pulled. It happened at the same table where they were sitting now. Kevin was eight and had snuck into the back of the low-lit room. His great-uncle was slumped in a chair, rag stuffed in his jaw and a bottle of Paddy’s on the table. Three of his brothers sat in a shiftless row along the wall. Kevin’s gram stood over Shuks, a long, red-handled plumber’s wrench in one hand. Shuks pulled out the rag and took a belt of whiskey. Then he nodded and Kevin’s grandmother didn’t wait. One of the brothers turned away as she worked the pliers. The other two watched and winced. She slipped once, ran her upper teeth over her lower lip, and got a better grip. Shuks’s huge blue eye never left her, big man’s hands twitching by his side, left foot tapping out a beat. Kevin remembered the god-awful crack and belly moan. Then the pliers were back on the table—rotting tooth, horned roots and all, in their gory maw. Shuks spit blood and went hard for the bottle. Kevin’s grandmother sat down in a chair, slightly out of breath, and reached for her cigarettes. That was when she noticed Kevin. His eyes must have been as wide as the world because she hustled him out of the room, swearing he’d go to a dentist when the time came and to forget what he’d seen. Fat chance. Kevin’s first trip to Dr. Foster ended when he gave the dentist a busted lip. Kevin’s mom was mortified. Shuks had been proud as all hell and told him he had a good right hand. Kevin studied the creases in his great-uncle’s face, suddenly desperate to commit them to
memory for some reason he couldn’t quite fathom. Shuks turned another page in his
Herald
and made some more notes.

“Got a nice one today, kid. Three fifteen at Suffolk.”

“Oh, yeah?” Kevin crowded closer.

“Name’s Gun Hill. He’s been out for a couple of months with an injury. Dropping down into the claimers for the first time.”

“Horse belongs in the fucking glue factory.”

Shuks and Kevin looked up as one. Bobby was slouched in the doorway, wearing faded jeans and a Sox sweatshirt, black hair curling and still wet from the shower. He came over to the table and picked up the pack of cigarettes. Bobby shook one out and stuck it behind his ear.

“What do you know about Gun Hill?” Shuks said, grabbing his smokes off the table.

“Stay away from him, Shuks.” Bobby winked at Kevin, turned around one of the chairs, and sat down. “You already owe Fingers a hundred for the piece of shit you bet on last week.” In addition to driving cabs, Bobby hustled part-time for a local bookie named Fingers. “On top of that, you owe another twenty for the nigger pool from last week.”

“Speaking of which . . .” Shuks pulled off an enormous lump of black boot and fished out a slip of paper he’d stuck in the heel. “Here’s the number for this week. Twenty bucks.”

“Forget it.”

“How much was the payout last week?”

“Five fifty.”

“I missed by one number.”

“Everyone misses by one number, Shuks.”

The nigger pool was a neighborhood lottery run by the local bookies. The winning numbers were taken from the last three
digits of Saturday’s take at Suffolk Downs printed in the Sunday paper. Shuks played every week. So did all his brothers and Kevin’s grandmother. She hit the number once, and it was the only time Kevin had ever heard her laugh without any strings attached.

“Just put the bet in. I’ll have Fingers’s money tonight.” Shuks flipped on the TV. A reporter stood in front of Charlestown High, talking about the new school year and the first full week of busing. The news report cut to videotape of a white kid wearing a Barracuda jacket inside out and throwing a bottle at a school bus stopped at a red light. Three more white kids pulled a kid with a yarmulke off the bus and beat him to the pavement. One of the kids started toward the camera with a bat, then everyone ran across the street. Two black faces peered out of a dry cleaners. The kid in the ’Cuda lobbed a brick through the front window and they poured in. A couple of cops on motorcycles rolled up as they cut back to the reporter still in front of the high school and talking a blue streak. Shuks turned down the sound.

“Fucking assholes,” Bobby said.

Shuks twitched a thumb and blinked. “How’d you like to get bused through Dudley Square every morning?”

“Half those kids aren’t even in school. They just want to crack some skulls. And if the skulls are black, so much the better.”

Shuks rolled an eye toward Kevin. “You expecting trouble?”

Kevin went to Boston Latin School. Latin was the oldest public school in the country and offered its own entrance exam for prospective students. If you got in, it was free, at least until you flunked out. Every fall, eight hundred kids of every color and creed enrolled in Latin’s seventh-grade class. Six years later, about a hundred graduated. Kevin didn’t tell anyone when he
applied to Latin. Didn’t tell anyone when he was accepted. A month before school started, his mother found the letter in a drawer. She sat him down in the kitchen and asked what it was all about. When he told her, something stirred in her eyes, something fierce and young and bright and proud. Then his father banged through the front door and the spark was snuffed. She jammed the letter in one of Kevin’s pockets and started hunting around in the cabinets for a box of mac and cheese. Two flights up, his grandmother taped the letter to her fridge and took it off every time anyone visited so they could read it and marvel.

“I go to Latin, Shuks.”

“It’s on the other side of the city and you take a bus.”

“I’m fine.”

Shuks glanced at Bobby, who shrugged and dangled a set of keys. “I’m gonna get him some time behind the wheel.”

“Donnie Campbell needs a pickup at nine.”

“Where’s he headed?”

“Logan. Said he’d be waiting on the porch.”

“Got it.” Bobby turned to Kevin. “You ready?”

There was a sound outside in the lot. Three sets of eyes looked to the door. Kevin’s grandmother wasn’t expected into work for at least another fifteen minutes. But sometimes you never knew.

BRIDGET PEARCE
sat in the kitchen, chin six inches off the table, shoveling Sugar Pops into her mouth as fast as she could. Her father sat across from her, fingers black under the nails from working on carburetors all week. Her mother was in between, clasping and unclasping her hands, a sure sign she was getting ready to speak.
Shut up,
Bridget thought.
Just shut up
.

“It’s only up the hill, Jack.”

“Up the hill. My ass, up the goddamn hill.” Bridget’s father picked up the blue-and-white ceramic shaker and tapped a sprinkle of salt over his eggs. Her mother moved the butter dish closer so he could reach it. They watched while he buttered, then dipped a corner of his toast in the yolk and took a bite, licking at a smear of yellow on his lip and taking a suffering sip of coffee before setting the cup back in its saucer.

“She has friends in Newton, Jack. She plays up there all summer.”

“What’s wrong with her friends down here?” The old man salted his eggs a second time and chewed noisily on a piece of bacon wrapped in a fold of yolky toast. Bridget could see the
remains of breakfast in his teeth as he spoke. “Maybe Brighton’s not good enough for her?”

“No one said that.”

He beckoned without looking. “Come here.”

Colleen was silhouetted in the doorway, shifting her weight from one foot to the other.

“I said come here, goddammit.”

Bridget’s mother gave the slightest of nods, and Colleen edged into the room. He swept her between his legs and pulled her close to his body, turning her around so she was staring at her mother.

“You’d love to go up the hill with her, wouldn’t you, Kate?”

Bridget’s mother’s eyes ran on tracks in her head, from husband to daughter, hunting for an escape where there was none. “It’s got nothing to do with that.”

Lie. It had everything to do with that. And she damn well knew it. Bridget remembered the day last summer when she left, cheap clothes on wire hangers slung over her shoulder, Kevin’s dry whispers in her ear, Colleen’s screams taking the paint off the walls as she scraped at her mother’s skirts, Bridget dead-eyed and blinking, watching her father in the flat heat as his wife went out the front door. She was gone three days, the old man sitting sentry in the living room the whole time. Bridget snuck out of bed on the first night just to see if he was still there. She watched the glow of his cigar pulse in purple clouds of darkness, counting ten pulls before she allowed herself to slip back into bed.

Her mother came home on the afternoon of the third day. Bridget was on the roof of their building as the car slalomed down the hill, a freshly washed Caddy with gleaming chrome bumpers winking in the sunlight as it pulled to the curb. There was a man
behind the wheel. Bridget watched them fall into a clinch by the side of the car, her mother pressing against him, then hanging on even as he tried to pull away. Bridget hated her for that last bit as much as anything. She trudged up Champney, her clothes still on hangers but all wrinkled now and stuffed under an arm. Bridget scrambled off the roof and sat alone in the kitchen, listening as her mother shuffled down the hall and closed the door to the bedroom. The old man cracked the seal on a fresh bottle of whiskey that night and drank most of it, still chain-smoking cigars and never moving from the living room. The next morning Bridget’s mother was back in the kitchen, making breakfast. And he was at the table, eating whatever she put in front of him. No one ever spoke about any of it. What was there to say? Until there was.

“Apple didn’t fall far from the tree, did it?” He twisted a curl of Colleen’s satin locks around one of his fingers.

“Keep them out of it, Jack.”

He grabbed a fistful of his daughter’s hair and buried his nose in it. “She even smells like you.”

Colleen let out a tiny whimper. Bridget rose up from her chair, kicking at the book bag she’d stashed by her feet. “Leave her alone.”

His eyes swept across the table. “Who the Christ was talking to you?”

“Bridget . . .”

“Shut up, Ma. Just leave her alone.”

Colleen suddenly found some spine, struggling in vain to work herself free.

“Relax,” Bridget said. “He’s not gonna hurt you.”

“Hurt her? Why would I hurt her?” He turned Colleen around
and studied her like she was a doll he’d won at a carnival. “Who would hurt something like this?” He traced the fine bones of her face, running a thumb along a cheek until he found the hollow spot beneath her eye, then pressing in until Colleen squealed and her knees buckled.

Bridget leaned forward. Her father narrowed the gap between them with his eyes, pink tongue shooting between his lips.

“You gonna stick me with that, little pup?”

She looked down at the black-handled kitchen knife gripped in her fist, then back up at his face flushed with a complex of emotions. Anger, fear, anticipation? Maybe all three.

“Let her go,” Bridget said, the words even and thick and solid in her mouth. She’d do what it took, even at the breakfast table on a Saturday morning. And so there it was, fully conceived and freshly birthed, ugly in all its wrinkles and all its greed, licking its lips and gnashing its teeth, squalling and looking to feed. And everything else crumbled before it and raised itself up again, except it wasn’t the same in that house and never would be. Her father could see that, plain as day. So he let Colleen go, his face spasming with some private pain as she ran from the room. Then he tucked back into breakfast, salting his eggs a third time and asking his wife if it wasn’t too much trouble for him to get a look at the goddamn, fucking
Globe
. She shuffled off to puzzle together whatever pieces she could find. Bridget slung her bag over her shoulder and followed her baby sister out.

They snuck up the back stairs and climbed a wooden ladder onto the roof. Bridget led the way—scrambling over a loose pile of
bricks and ducking underneath a forked TV antenna. At the front of the building they perched like a couple of skinned birds, staring down at Oak Square and the tangled web of streets spinning off it. The wind had turned raw and raked across the roof in cold, clean sheets. Bridget still had the book bag with her and held it against her chest. Colleen shivered.

“I’m freezing.”

“Come on.”

The back of the roof looked out over their yard and offered shelter in the form of a sooted chimney. Bridget sat cross-legged. Colleen huddled against a wall of rough brick, stick arms wrapped around her ribs, hands tucked under her armpits.

“Thanks.” Her voice rode just under the wind, but Bridget heard it well enough.

“He wasn’t gonna hurt you.”

“He scares me.”

“Everything scares you. That’s why you’re a target.”

“I don’t want to be a target.”

“Then you need to toughen up.”

Colleen wrinkled her nose and blinked. They looked alike, she and Colleen, except Colleen was a more finished product—features sanded and chiseled to finer proportions. Bridget, on the other hand, looked like she’d been taken out of the oven a half hour early. Dull, muddy, a little lopsided, not quite done.

“Why do you come up here so much?” Colleen said.

“It’s called privacy. You wouldn’t know anything about that.”

“I know more than you think.”

Bridget cut her eyes to her sister, who trembled under the weight of her secret.

“You don’t know nothing,” Bridget said.

“I know you’ve got a crush on Bobby.”

“Who?”

“Bobby who lives above the cab office. I saw you watching him.”

“I wasn’t watching him.”

“Yes, you were. Right here from the roof.”

Bridget pulled her bag onto her lap and opened it. “No wonder they hate you.”

“No one hates me.”

“Everyone hates you. Mom, Dad. Everyone.”

“You’re wrong.”

“They hate me, too. Think I care? I can look after myself.”

“Dad used to give me his Communion water.”

Before Colleen made her First Communion, their father would come home from church every Sunday and wordlessly fill a glass with water. He’d take a sip and then let Colleen have some. Their mom said it was his way of giving her the body of Christ.

“Big deal.”

“It is.”

Bridget could read the desperation in her little sister’s voice and brushed at her cheek. The outline of his thumbprint was tattooed there in tiny threads of purple and red.

“You bruise too easy, Col.”

A fat tear trickled down Colleen’s nose and dripped off the curl of her lip. Bridget opened her arms and let her sister snuggle in, burying herself in the sleeve of Bridget’s coat. The sun moved out from behind the clouds and walked shadows across the roof.

“You were a beautiful baby,” Bridget whispered. “Mom said you could be in commercials.”

Colleen’s head popped up. “You’re lying.”

Bridget shooed away the notion.

“Mom really said that?”

“Of course she did.”

Colleen sat up against the wall again, sniffling and wiping her nose, still upset but unavoidably pleased.

“Feeling better?” Bridget said.

Colleen nodded. “I’m glad you’re my sister.”

“Yeah?”

“You’re tough and you take care of me. Are you glad you’re my sister?”

“Do I have a choice? Sure, I’m glad.”

“I’m sorry I teased you about Bobby.”

“Forget it. You wanna see something?”

“What?”

Bridget pulled a big, blue medical dictionary out of her bag.

“Why do you carry that thing around?”

“I like it.” Bridget loved all things flesh and blood. The walls inside her head were covered with maps of arteries and organs, coils of intestinal tract, cross sections of bowels and brains. She was fascinated with the idea of a heart and wondered why it beat at all.

“You won’t start crying?” she said, flipping open the dictionary to a page she’d marked.

“No.”

“You sure?”

Colleen nodded, all bright and eager. Bridget pointed to an entry. “You know what this word means?”

Colleen leaned over the word and squinted. “‘Pre’ something.”

“Preeclampsia. It’s another name for high blood pressure. It happens sometimes when women have babies.”

“Babies?”

Something primal flickered in the deepest black of Bridget’s eyes. “Yes, babies. You know what they are.”

Colleen scooched closer, like they were around a campfire or in the library or something.

“Preeclampsia.” Bridget pointed at the entry again. Colleen repeated the word.

“Good. Now, you know why it’s important?”

Colleen shook her curls, not so much to say no but just because they were rich and full and everyone loved the sound of them. And because Bridget hated every shake.

“It’s important cuz Mom had it.”

A shadow crossed Colleen’s brow. A wrinkle creased her smooth forehead. “Mom?”

“She got it when she had you. Preeclampsia.” Bridget stretched out each syllable. “You didn’t you know any of this?”

“No.”

Bridget flipped the dictionary shut. “It’s what made her go blind. For six months after you were born, Mom couldn’t see a thing.”

“Mom wasn’t blind.”

“That’s why she never held you when you were a baby.”

“She held me.” An eyebrow jerked, followed by another tremor in Colleen’s perfect upper lip.

“You promised you wouldn’t cry.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Come here.” Bridget opened her arms a second time and Colleen fell into them, coiling into the embrace of her older
sister, who kissed the top of her forehead, cooing and fussing, explaining and apologizing until Colleen grew calm again. And then they sat together, huddled against the morning chill, staring out over flat rooftops and empty streets. Colleen had gotten all the looks and loved to play her games, but she didn’t understand pain. Not like she needed to. She’d learn. They’d all have to learn. Even at twelve, Bridget could feel that certainty bleaching her bones and knew there couldn’t be any other way.