Mystic River (6 page)

Dave rolled through the intersection, suffocating on their sudden stares, their sudden, unreasonable stares.

T
HAT NIGHT
Katie Marcus went out with her two best friends, Diane Cestra and Eve Pigeon, to celebrate Katie’s last night in the Flats, last night, probably, in Buckingham. Celebrate like gypsies had just sprinkled them with gold dust, told them all their dreams would come true. Like they
shared a winning scratch ticket and had all gotten negative pregnancy test results on the same day.

They slapped their packs of menthols down on a table in the back of Spires Pub and threw back kamikaze shots and Mich Lights and shrieked every time a good-looking guy shot one of them The Look. They’d eaten a killer meal at the East Coast Grill an hour before, then drove back into Buckingham and sparked up a joint in the parking lot before walking into the bar. Everything—old stories they’d heard each other tell a hundred times, Diane’s recounting of the latest beating from her asshole boyfriend, Eve’s sudden lipstick smear, two chubby guys waddling around the pool table—was hilarious.

Once the place got so jammed folks were standing three deep at the bar and it started taking twenty minutes to get a drink, they moved on toward Curley’s Folly in the Point, smoking another joint in the car, Katie feeling the jagged shards of paranoia scrape the edges of her skull.

“That car’s following us.”

Eve looked at the lights in the rearview. “It ain’t.”

“It’s been behind us since we left the bar.”

“Friggin’ Katie, man, that was, like, thirty seconds ago.”

“Oh.”

“Oh,” Diane mimicked, then hiccuped a laugh, passed the joint back to Katie.

Eve deepened her voice. “It’s quiet.”

Katie saw where this was going. “Shut up.”

“Too quiet,” Diane agreed, and burst out laughing.

“Bitches,” Katie said, trying for an edge of annoyance but catching the crest of a giggle-fit wave instead. She fell onto the backseat, losing it, the back of her head landing between the armrest and the seat, cheeks getting that pins-and-needles sensation they always got those rare times she smoked pot. The giggles subsided and she felt herself go all dreamy as she fixated on the pale dome light, thinking this was it, this was what you lived for, to giggle like a fool with your giggling-fool best friends on the night before you’d
marry the man you loved. (In Vegas, okay. With a hangover, okay.) Still, this was the point. This was the dream.

F
OUR BARS
, three shots, and a couple of phone numbers on napkins later, Katie and Diane were so trashed they hopped up on the bar at McGills and danced to “Brown Eyed Girl” even though the jukebox was silent. Eve sang, “Slipping and a sliding,” and Katie and Diane slipped and slid all along the waterfall with you, getting their hips into it, shaking their hair until it covered their faces. At McGills, the guys had thought it was a riot, but twenty minutes later at the Brown, they couldn’t even get through the door.

Diane and Katie had Eve propped up between them at this point, and she was still singing (Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” by this time), which was half the problem, and swaying like a metronome, which was the other half.

So they got the boot even before they could enter the Brown, which meant the only option left in terms of serving three legless East Bucky girls was the Last Drop, a clammy dump in the worst section of the Flats, a horror-show three-block stretch where the scaggiest hookers and johns did their mating dance and any car without an alarm lasted about a minute and a half.

Which is where they were when Roman Fallow showed up with his latest guppy of a girlfriend, Roman liking his women small and blond and big-eyed. Roman’s appearance was good news for the bartenders because Roman tipped somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 percent. Bad news for Katie, though, because Roman was friends with Bobby O’Donnell.

Roman said, “You a tad hammered there, Katie?”

Katie smiled because Roman scared her. Roman scared just about everyone. A good-looking guy, and smart, he could be funny as hell when he felt like it, but man there was a hole in Roman, a complete lack of anything resembling real feeling that hung in his eyes like a vacancy sign.

“I’m a bit buzzed,” she admitted.

That amused Roman. He gave her a short laugh, flashed his perfect teeth, and took a sip of Tanqueray. “A bit buzzed, huh? Yeah, okay, Katie. Let me ask you something,” he said gently. “You think Bobby would like hearing you were making a fucking ass of yourself at McGills tonight? You think he’d like hearing that?”

“No.”

“’Cause I didn’t like hearing it, Katie. You see what I’m saying?”

“Right.”

Roman cupped a hand behind his ear. “What’s that?”

“Right.”

Roman left his hand where it was, leaned into her. “I’m sorry. What?”

“I’ll go home right now,” Katie said.

Roman smiled. “You sure? I don’t want to make you do anything you don’t feel like.”

“No, no. I’ve had enough.”

“Sure, sure. Hey, can I settle your tab?”

“No, no. Thanks, Roman, we already paid cash.”

Roman slung his arm around his bimbo. “Call you a cab?”

Katie almost slipped up and said she’d driven here, but she caught herself. “No, no. This time of night? We’ll flag one down no problem.”

“Yeah, you will. All right then, Katie, we’ll be seeing you.”

Eve and Diane were already at the door, had been, in fact, since they’d first seen Roman.

Out on the sidewalk, Diane said, “Jesus. You think he’ll call Bobby?”

Katie shook her head, though she wasn’t positive. “No. Roman doesn’t deliver bad news. He just takes care of it.” She put her hand over her face for a moment and in the darkness, she felt the alcohol turn to an itchy sludge in her blood and the weight of her aloneness. She’d always felt alone, ever since her mother had died, and her mother had died a long, long time ago.

In the parking lot, Eve threw up, some of it splashing against one of the rear tires of Katie’s blue Toyota. When she was finished, Katie fished some mouthwash from her purse, handed the small bottle to Eve. Eve said, “You going to be okay to drive?”

Katie nodded. “What’s it, fourteen blocks from here? I’ll be fine.”

As they pulled out of the parking lot, Katie said, “Just one more reason to leave. One more reason to get the hell out of this whole shitty neighborhood.”

Diane piped up with a halfhearted “Yeah.”

They rolled cautiously through the Flats, Katie keeping the needle at twenty-five, staying in the right lane, concentrating. They stayed on Dunboy for twelve blocks, then cut down Crescent, the streets darker, quieter. At the base of the Flats, they drove along Sydney Street, heading for Eve’s house. During the drive, Diane had decided to crash on Eve’s couch rather than go over to her boyfriend Matt’s house and eat a ration of shit for showing up hammered, so she and Eve got out under the broken streetlight on Sydney Street. It had begun to rain, spitting against Katie’s windshield, but Diane and Eve didn’t seem to notice.

They both bent at the waist and looked back in through the open passenger window at Katie. The bitter drop the evening had taken in its last hour caused their faces to sag, their shoulders to droop, and Katie could feel their sadness on the side of her face as she looked through the windshield at the spitting drops. She could feel the rest of their lives weighing stilted and unhappy on top of them. Her best friends since kindergarten, and she might never see them again.

“You going to be okay?” Diane’s voice had a high, bubbling pitch to it.

Katie turned her face toward them and smiled, giving it all she had even though the effort felt like it would rip her jaw in half. “Yeah. ’Course. I’ll call you from Vegas. You’ll come visit.”

“Flights are cheap,” Eve said.

“Real cheap.”

“Real cheap,” Diane agreed, her voice trailing off as she looked away down the chipped sidewalk.

“Okay,” Katie said, the word popping from her mouth like a bright explosion. “I’m going to go before someone cries.”

Eve and Diane stretched their hands in through the window and Katie took a lingering pull on each of them, and then they stepped back from the car. They waved. Katie waved back, and then she tooted the horn and drove off.

They stayed on the pavement, watching, long after Katie’s taillights had sparked red and then disappeared as she took the sharp curve in the middle of Sydney Street. They felt there were other things to say. They could smell the rain and the tinfoil scent of the Penitentiary Channel rolling dark and silent on the other side of the park.

For the rest of her life, Diane would wish she’d stayed in that car. She would give birth to a son in less than a year and she’d tell him when he was young (before he became his father, before he became mean, before he drove drunk and ran over a woman waiting to cross the street in the Point) that she believed she was meant to stay in that car, and that by deciding to get out, on a whim, she felt she’d altered something, shaved the corner off an edge in time. She would carry that with her along with an overriding sense that her life was spent as a passive observer of other people’s tragic impulses, impulses she never did enough to curb. She would say these things again to her son during visitation days at the prison, and he’d give her a long roll of his shoulders and shift in his seat and say, “Did you bring those smokes, Ma?”

Eve would marry an electrician and move to a ranch house in Braintree. Sometimes, late at night, she’d rest her palm on his big, kind chest and tell him about Katie, about that night, and he’d listen and stroke her hair and back, but he wouldn’t say much because he knew there was nothing to say. Sometimes Eve just needed to say her friend’s name, to hear it, to feel its heft on her tongue. They would have chil
dren. Eve would go to their soccer games, stand on the sidelines, and every now and then her lips would part and she’d say Katie’s name, silently, for herself, on the damp April fields.

But that night they were just two drunken East Bucky girls, and Katie watched them fade in her rearview as she took the curve on Sydney and headed for home.

It was dead down here at night, most of the homes that overlooked the Pen Channel Park having been scorched in a fire four years before that left them gutted and black and boarded up. Katie just wanted to get home, crawl into bed, get up in the morning, and be long gone before Bobby or her father ever thought to look for her. She wanted to shed this place the way you’d shed clothes you’d been wearing during a thundershower. Wad it up in her fist and toss it aside, never look back at it.

And she remembered something she hadn’t thought about in years. She remembered walking to the zoo with her mother when she was five years old. She remembered this for no particular reason except that the hanging tendrils of stale pot and booze in her brain must have bumped against the cell where the memory was stored. Her mother had held her hand as they walked down Columbia Road toward the zoo, and Katie could feel the bones in her mother’s hand as small tremors snapped under the skin by her wrist. She looked up at her mother’s thin face and gaunt eyes, her nose gone hawkish with weight loss, her chin a pinched nub. And Katie, five and curious and sad, said, “How come you’re tired all the time?”

Her mother’s hard, brittle face had crumbled like a dry sponge. She’d crouched down by Katie and placed both palms on her cheeks and stared at her with red eyes. Katie thought she was mad, but then her mother smiled, and the smile immediately curled downward and her chin went all jerky and she said, “Oh, baby,” and pulled Katie to her. She tucked her chin into Katie’s shoulder and said, “Oh, baby,” again, and then Katie felt her tears in her hair.

She could feel them now, the soft drizzle of tears in her hair like the soft drizzle against her windshield, and she was trying to remember the color of her mother’s eyes when she saw the body lying in the middle of the street. It lay like a sack just in front of her tires and she swerved hard to the right, feeling something bump under her rear left tire, thinking, Oh Jesus, oh God, no, tell me I didn’t hit it, please, Jesus God no.

She slammed the Toyota into the curb on the right side of the street, and her foot came off the clutch, and the car lurched forward, sputtering, then died.

Someone called to her. “Hey, you okay?”

Katie saw him coming toward her, and she started to relax because he looked familiar and harmless until she noticed the gun in his hand.

A
T THREE
in the morning, Brendan Harris finally fell asleep.

He did so smiling, Katie floating above him, telling him she loved him, whispering his name, her soft breath like a kiss in his ear.

D
AVE
B
OYLE
had ended up in McGills that night, sitting with Stanley the Giant at the corner of the bar, watching the Sox play an away game. Pedro Martinez reigned on the mound, so the Sox were beating the holy piss out of the Angels, Pedro throwing so much ungodly heat the ball looked like a goddamn Advil by the time it crossed the plate. By the third inning, the Angel hitters looked scared; by the sixth, they looked like they just wanted to go home, start making dinner plans. When Garret Anderson blooped a dying sigh of a single into shallow right and ended Pedro’s bid for a no-hitter, any excitement that had been left in the 8-0 game floated out past the bleachers, and Dave found himself paying more attention to the lights and the fans and Anaheim Stadium itself than to the actual game.

He watched the faces in the bleachers most—the disgust and defeated fatigue, the fans looking like they were taking the loss more personally than the guys in the dugout. And maybe they were. For some of them, Dave figured, this was the only game they’d attend this year. They’d brought the kids, the wife, walked out of their homes into the early California evening with coolers for the tailgate party and five thirty-dollar tickets so they could sit in the cheap seats and put twenty-five-dollar caps on their kids’ heads, eat six-
dollar rat burgers and $4.50 hot dogs, watered-down Pepsi and sticky ice cream bars that melted into the hairs of their wrists. They came to be elated and uplifted, Dave knew, raised up out of their lives by the rare spectacle of victory. That’s why arenas and ballparks felt like cathedrals—buzzing with light and murmured prayers and forty thousand hearts all beating the drum of the same collective hope.

Win for me. Win for my kids. Win for my marriage so I can carry your winning back to the car with me and sit in the glow of it with my family as we drive back toward our otherwise winless lives.

Win for me. Win. Win. Win.

But when the team lost, that collective hope crumbled into shards and any illusion of unity you’d felt with your fellow parishioners went with it. Your team had failed you and served only to remind you that usually when you tried, you lost. When you hoped, hope died. And you sat there in the debris of cellophane wrappers and popcorn and soft, soggy drink cups, dumped back into the numb wreckage of your life, facing a long dark walk back through a long dark parking lot with hordes of drunk, angry strangers, a silent wife tallying up your latest failure, and three cranky kids. All so you could get in your car and drive back to your home, the very place from which this cathedral had promised to transport you.

Dave Boyle, former star shortstop for the glory-years baseball teams of Don Bosco Technical High School, ’78 to ’82, knew few things in this world were more moody than a fan. He knew what it was to need them, to hate them, to go down on your knees for them and beg for one more roar of approval, to hang your head when you’d broken their one shared, angry heart.

“You believe these chicks?” Stanley the Giant said, and Dave looked up to see two girls standing atop the bar all of a sudden, dancing as a third friend sang “Brown Eyed Girl” off-key, the two up on the bar shaking their asses and swaying their hips. The one on the right had fleshy skin and shiny
gray “fuck me” eyes, Dave figuring she was in the peak of a tenuous prime, the kind of girl who’d probably be a great roll on the mattress for maybe another six months. Two years from now, though, she’d be gone hard to seed—you could see it in the chin—fat and flaccid and wearing a housedress, no way you’d be able to so much as imagine she’d been worthy of lust not all that long ago.

The other one, though…

Dave had known her since she was a little girl—Katie Marcus, Jimmy and poor, dead Marita’s daughter, now the stepdaughter of his wife’s cousin Annabeth, but looking all grown up, every inch of her firm and fresh and defying gravity. Watching her dance and thrust and swivel and laugh, her blond hair sweeping over her face like a veil, then flying back off again as she threw back her head and exposed a milky, arched throat, Dave felt a black, pining hope surge through him like a grease fire, and it didn’t come from nowhere. It came from her. It was transmitted from her body to his, from the sudden recognition in her sweaty face when her eyes met his and she smiled and gave him a little finger wave that brushed straight through the bones in his chest and tingled against his heart.

He glanced at the guys in the bar, their faces dazed as they watched the two girls dance as if they were apparitions bestowed by God. Dave could see in their faces the same yearning he’d seen on the Angels’ fans in the early innings, a sad yearning mixed with a pathetic acceptance that they were sure to go home unsatisfied. Left to stroking their own dicks in 3
A.M
. bathrooms, wives and kids snoring upstairs.

Dave watched Katie shimmer above him and remembered what Maura Keaveny had looked like when she was naked beneath him, perspiration beading her brow, eyes loose and floating with booze and lust. Lust for him. Dave Boyle. Baseball star. Pride of the Flats for three short years. No one referring to him as that kid who’d been abducted when he was ten anymore. No, he was a local hero. Maura in his bed. Fate on his side.

Dave Boyle. Unaware, then, how short futures could be. How quick they could disappear, leave you with nothing but a long-ass present that held no surprises, no reason for hope, nothing but days that bled into one another with so little impact that another year was over and the calendar page in the kitchen was still stuck on March.

I will not dream anymore, you said. I will not set myself up for the pain. But then your team made the playoffs, or you saw a movie, or a billboard glowing dusky orange and advertising Aruba, or a girl who bore more than a passing resemblance to a woman you’d dated in high school—a woman you’d loved and lost—danced above you with shimmering eyes, and you said, fuck it, let’s dream just one more time.

O
NCE WHEN
Rosemary Savage Samarco was on her deathbed (the fifth of ten), she’d told her daughter, Celeste Boyle: “Swear to Christ, the only pleasure I ever got in this life was snapping your father’s balls like a wet sheet on a dry day.”

Celeste had given her a distant smile and tried to turn away, but her mother’s arthritic claw clamped over her wrist and squeezed straight through to the bone.

“You listen to me, Celeste. I’m dying, so I’m serious as shit. There’s what you get—if you’re
lucky
—in this life, and it ain’t much in the first place. I’ll be dead tomorrow and I want my daughter to understand: You get one thing. Hear me? One thing in the whole world that gives you pleasure. Mine was busting your bastard father’s balls every chance I got.” Her eyes gleamed and spittle dotted her lips. “Trust me, after a while? He loved it.”

Celeste wiped her mother’s forehead with a towel. She smiled down on her and said, “Momma,” in a soft, cooing voice. She dabbed the spittle from her lips and stroked the inside of her hand, all the time thinking, I’ve got to get out of here. Out of this house, out of this neighborhood, out of this
crazy place where people’s brains rotted straight through from being too poor and too pissed off and too helpless to do anything about it for too fucking long.

Her mother kept living, though. She survived colitis, diabetic seizures, renal failure, two myocardial infarctions, cancerous malignancies in one breast and her colon. Her pancreas stopped working one day, just quit, then suddenly showed back up for work a week later, raring to go, and doctors repeatedly asked Celeste if they could study her mother’s body after she died.

The first few times, Celeste had asked, “Which part?”

“All of it.”

Rosemary Savage Samarco had a brother in the Flats she hated, two sisters living in Florida who wouldn’t talk to her, and she’d busted her husband’s balls so successfully he dove into an early grave to escape her. Celeste was her only child after eight miscarriages. When she was little, Celeste used to imagine all those almost-sisters and almost-brothers floating around Limbo and think, You caught a break.

When Celeste had been a teenager, she’d been sure someone would come along to take her away from all this. She wasn’t bad-looking. She wasn’t bitter, had a good personality, knew how to laugh. She figured, all things considered, it should happen. Problem was, even though she met a few candidates, they weren’t of sweep-her-off-her-feet caliber. The majority were from Buckingham, mostly Point or Flat punks here in East Bucky, a few from Rome Basin, and one guy from uptown she’d met while attending Blaine Hairstyling School, but he was gay, even though he hadn’t figured it out yet.

Her mother’s health insurance was for shit, and pretty soon Celeste found herself working simply to pay the minimum due on monstrous medical bills for monstrous diseases that weren’t quite monstrous enough to put her mother out of her misery. Not that her mother didn’t enjoy her misery. Every bout with disease was a fresh trump card to wield in what Dave called the Rosemary’s Life Sucks Worse Than
Yours Sweepstakes. They’d be watching the news, see some grieving mother weeping and wailing on the sidewalk after her house and two kids had gone up in a fire, and Rosemary would smack her gums and say, “You can always have more kids. Try living with colitis and a collapsed lung all in the same year.”

Dave would smile tightly and go get another beer.

Rosemary, hearing the fridge open in the kitchen, would say to Celeste, “You’re just his mistress, honey. His wife’s name is Budweiser.”

Celeste would say, “Momma, quit it.”

Her mother would say, “What?”

It had been Dave who Celeste had ultimately settled—for?—on. He was good-looking and funny and very few things seemed to ruffle him. When they’d married, he’d had a good job, running the mail room at Raytheon, and even though that job had been lost to cutbacks, he eventually scored another on the loading docks of a downtown hotel (for about half his previous salary) and never complained about it. Dave, in fact, never complained about anything and almost never talked about his childhood before high school, which had only begun to seem odd to her in the year since her mother had died.

It had been a stroke that had finally done the job, Celeste coming home from the supermarket to find her mother dead in the tub, head cocked, lips curled hard up the right side of her face as if she’d bitten into something overly tart.

In the months after the funeral, Celeste would comfort herself with the knowledge that at least things would be easier now without her mother’s constant reproach and cruel asides. But it hadn’t quite worked out that way. Dave’s job paid about the same as Celeste’s and that was about a buck an hour more than McDonald’s, and while the medical bills Rosemary had accrued during her life were thankfully not passed on to her daughter, the funeral and burial bills were. Celeste would look at the financial wreck of their lives—the bills they’d be paying off for years, the lack of money com
ing in, the tonnage going out, the new mountain of bills Michael and the advent of his schooling represented, and the destroyed credit—and feel like the rest of her life would be lived with a held breath. Neither she nor Dave had any college or any prospects for it, and while every time you turned on the news they were crowing about the low unemployment rate and national sense of job security, nobody mentioned that this affected mostly skilled labor and people willing to temp for no medical or dental and few career prospects.

Sometimes, Celeste found herself sitting on the toilet beside the tub where she’d found her mother. She’d sit in the dark. She’d sit there and try not to cry and wonder how her life had gotten here, and that’s what she was doing at three in the morning, early Sunday, as a hard rain battered the windows, when Dave came in with blood all over him.

He seemed shocked to find her there. He jumped back when she stood up.

She said, “Honey, what happened?” and reached for him.

He jumped back again and his foot hit the doorjamb. “I got sliced.”

“What?”

“I got sliced.”

“Dave, Jesus Christ. What
happened
?”

He lifted the shirt and Celeste stared at a long sweeping gash along his rib cage that bubbled red.

“Sweetie, Jesus, you have to go to the hospital.”

“No, no,” he said. “Look, it’s not that deep. It just bled like hell.”

He was right. On a second look, she noticed it wasn’t more than a tenth of an inch deep. But it was long. And it was bloody. Though not enough to account for all the blood on his shirt and neck.

“Who did this?”

“Some crackhead nigger psycho,” he said, and peeled off the shirt, dumped it in the sink. “Honey, I fucked up.”

“You what? How?”

He looked at her, eyes spinning. “The guy tried to mug me, right? So, so I swung on him. That’s when he sliced me.”

“You swung on a guy with a
knife
, Dave?”

He ran the faucet and tipped his head into the sink, gulped some water. “I don’t know why. I freaked. I mean, I freaked seriously, babe. I fucked this guy up.”

“You…?”

“I mangled him, Celeste. I just went apeshit when I felt the knife in my side. You know? I knocked him down, got on top of him, and, baby, I went
off
.”

“So it was self-defense?”

He made a “sorta-kinda” gesture with his hand. “I don’t think the court would see it that way, tell you the truth.”

“I can’t believe this. Honey”—she took his wrists in her hands—“tell me exactly what happened.”

And for a quarter second, looking into his face, she felt nauseous. She felt something leering behind his eyes, something turned on and self-congratulatory.

It was the light, she decided, the cheap fluorescent directly above his head, because when his chin dipped toward his chest and he stroked her hands, the nausea went away and his face returned to normal—scared, but normal.

“I’m walking to my car,” he said, and Celeste sat back on the closed toilet seat as he knelt in front of her, “and this guy comes up to me, asks me for a light. I say I don’t smoke. Guy says neither does he.”