Dez said, "Ma's been after me to get you over for dinner again."
"Yeah, we'll do that soon." The high sun summoned up in him a tremendous, satisfying sneeze.
"God bless," said Monsignor Dez.
Doug squinted. "You going up to drop half that in the collection box right now?"
"No time. Later."
"St. Frank's gonna put a hot tub in the confessional before you're done."
Dez looked at Doug without a smile. "The split's light," he said. "Isn't it."
Doug rubbed his eyes. "Ah, fuck it."
"Why? Why let him be in charge? You know you run things. And that whole dock thing, that was a charade."
Doug shrugged, truly uninterested. "Hey, what's a IDSN line?"
"ISDN," Dez corrected. "Data streaming, high-speed Internet. Like if I was a plumber bringing you your water, this'd be a much wider pipe. Fiber optics. Makes World Wide Web surfing like changing channels."
"Yeah? That the future?"
"Today it is. Tomorrow, who knows? Someday there'll be no wires, I know that. Someday there'll be no linemen."
"Maybe you oughta think about getting something going on the side."
Dez smiled in the direction of the highway. "I gotta roll." They rapped fists, Dez taking off down the incline with the bundle of cash under his arm.
Doug turned and went the other way, up Old Rutherford, habitually scanning the parked cars for snoops as he went. He turned right on Devens and followed it around to Packard, a one-way street, one of the few in the tightly packed Town with a back alley. The narrow alley showed bow windows and Juliet balconies over brick walls separating tiny parking spaces. Empty trash cans stood at every cobblestoned parking court except Claire Keesey's, the plum Saturn still gone. A poker hand of takeout menus was fanned inside her back screen door.
Keep moving,
he told himself, jamming his fists inside the pockets of his warm-up jacket, pretending he was satisfied. All he had done was save her from a beating. He lowered his head like a regular citizen and walked on.
4
PlayStation
T
HE BACK OF THE hill was Charlestown without the gas streetlamps. It was wooden row houses with stepped roofs and front doors that opened onto sidewalks sloping at forty-five-degree angles to the sea. During the Blizzard of 1978, on plastic Super Saucers and collapsed cardboard box "project sleds," neighborhood kids got up over twenty miles an hour bombing down the sheer faces of Mystic, Belmont, and North Mead before bottoming out hard onto Medford Street below.
The gentrification that had made new virgins out of other Town fiefdoms such as Monument Square, City Square, and the Heights, had embraced but not yet transformed the uncapitalized old lady known simply as "the back of the hill." Its curbs saw a few Audis and Acuras, designer water bottles lay in some recycling bins, and most exteriors had been power-washed and painted smooth. But Irish lace still fluttered in a few windows, a handful of Boston firefighters and city employees still calling it home.
Doug ate two buttered corn muffins out of a wax paper bag at the crest of Sackville Street. His large tea, thick with milk and sugar, steamed out of the tall Lori-Ann's cardboard cup set on the roof of his rust-pocked 1986 Caprice Classic.
Breakfast there was for him a regular thing. The house he was looking at across the street, with its rich red siding and nurse-white trim-- formerly dove gray over flaking charcoal-- was the home of his youth. He still considered it his mother's house even though she had abandoned it, and him, when he was six years old. His father managed to hold on to it for ten more years, meaning, and this seemed impossible, that Doug had lived half his life away from it now. It still ruled his dreams: the monster oil tank in the stone basement; the dark wood parlor with cabinet radiators and custard wallpaper; his corner bedroom on the first floor, swept by passing headlights.
This was the place he went to get his head together. A bungled job-- this one had netted them plenty, but he would forever think of the caper as failed-- always left him in a sour mood, but never with the mental mono like this one had. He returned to the heist over and over in his head, trying to untangle its faults, only to get caught up again in the image of the branch manager blindfolded next to him in the van. This image possessed him, how fragile she had appeared, yet also how composed. How she had wept tearlessly beside him-- he had felt her shaking, her hands limp and empty in her lap-- like a statue of a blindfolded woman crying. Having followed this stranger around, he now felt himself getting sucked into the mystery of her existence.
He was breaking out of that rut today. It was April and the sidewalks of the Town were teeming with Claire Keeseys, drawn to the neighborhood by its cheap rents and safe streets, baring their shoulders and legs after a long winter's hibernation. The Town was a stocked lake and fishing was back in season. This fog, whatever it was that had descended on him at the beginning of the bank job and lingered in the days that followed-- it was finally lifting.
He shook his head and crumpled up the muffin bag. His not telling the others about her triggering the alarm: that was not going to haunt him anymore. It was over with. In the past. Time to move on.
* * *
"CHECK THIS OUT," said Jem.
Doug set down his liter slam of Mountain Dew and accepted the wrinkled Victoria's Secret spring catalog. On page after page, Jem had applied a drop of water to each of the lingerie models' breasts, puckering the thin paper and raising persuasive nipples.
Doug nodded, turning the pages. "And you say this project only took you half the morning?"
"Some days, you know? You just wake up horny. I have all this fucking energy, I already worked out twice today, shoulders and calves. What do you do, days when you can't focus on anything because your mind keeps running back to your dick?"
"Some call it 'applying the pine tar.' "
"No, no," said Jem, shaking his head. "No, I don't do that anymore."
"Excuse me, what?" Doug smiled. "You don't do that anymore?"
"They say weed saps your ambition? I say, yanking it does. Saps your drive. Makes you soft, more ways than one. Always leaves me tired, dopey. I'm serious."
"You'll be down in the basement
three
times a day, working out, and all that's gonna happen is, spume's gonna back up into your system, turn you gay. I seen it happen, man. It's tragic."
"Voice of experience here."
"Radical idea just came to me out of the blue. How about going easy on yourself, getting a regular girlfriend?"
"I think I do awright. And I'm gonna start doing even better. Abstinence makes the dick grow fonder. Hey, you're the last person should be giving shit. Mister fucking life change already."
Doug dragged the remote off the glass-topped coffee table and opened up the cable menu over the soft-core pool-table scene playing on Jem's black box Spice Channel. He found a kung fu movie on pirated pay-per-view, put it on the huge TV. "Your eyesight improves, maybe you can get a smaller screen."
"Hey, how about this. Tonight, right? They say yanking it also gives you hairy palms, right? Okay, we get that spirit gum like we used for the Watertown job, the stuff that gave us fake chins and cheeks? Slop it on our hands instead, then shred up a wig, stick fur on there. Walk in the door at the Tap with all the yuppies, give the place a big wave. High-five the bartender with our furry mitts."
Doug grinned. "You walk in reading your catalog?"
"I will spill water on my
crotch
before I walk in, a nice round little cum stain." He mimed walking into the bar for Doug, open hand raised, hips thrust forward, big Irish smile. "Evening, friends!"
Doug said, "This, right here, is why we don't have regular girlfriends."
"
For Christ,
then it's working." Jem hopped down Fonzie-style onto his green leather couch and grabbed a PlayStation controller. "Bruins," he called.
They played NHL '96 on Jem's Trinitron, first a couple of straight games with the crowd noise roaring in stereo, then they ignored the puck and skated their players around the ice looking for trouble, doling out hard checks until helmets popped off and the view zoomed in and the computer men threw down their gloves, the announcer bellowing in sim surround,
FIGHT!
At one point, Jem turned to Doug, eyes bleary with game glee. "Like old times, kid! Can you tell me why we don't do this every fucking day?"
Eventually Doug had to step out past the tower speakers to take a piss. The worn checkerboard bathroom tile, the rotten shower curtain, the foam-coated pipes running up through the ceiling into his own third-floor bathroom: it all seemed virtual to him, flickering, pixilated. At that moment the computerized rink with its frictionless ice was more real to him than Jem's mother's house.
He stepped back into the narrow hallway with its undulating walls and twitching corners, a world with seams, the framed photograph of Cardinal Cushing hanging over the long-dry holy-water bowl looking poor-graphics fuzzy.
The sound of the glass rattling on the downstairs door sent a dead feeling through Doug, the caffeine and carbonation draining from his alter world, his game buzz gone flat.
"Krista's home," he said, returning to Jem.
"It's cool, man, she won't bug us."
"Let me get my take, get it squared away."
Jem smiled icily. "You're gonna breeze."
"No. Just get my shit squared away, then come right back down."
Jem stood, unconvinced, going to the frame of the doorway between the parlor and the neglected second-floor kitchen. He yanked on the molding and brought it loose in one long piece, revealing plywood shelves nailed in between the old walls like a row of mail slots. Jem withdrew Doug's bundle, leaving many smaller newspaper-wrapped parcels behind, many ripped open and spilling cash.
"You stash here?" said Doug.
"Why not?"
Doug nodded at Jem's room full of toys. "You take a search warrant and they see all this hardware against your tax return, then the electricity you steal, the cable you pirate-- you don't think they're gonna tap on the walls?"
Jem shrugged and fit the molding back over the wall edge, hammering it in tight with the heel of his hand. "Always so fucking panicked. What, where you keep yours? You don't spend it, I know that."
"Not upstairs." Doug weighed the bundle in his hand. "Speaking of, how you fixed for clean linen?"
"Could always wash some."
Doug nodded, feeling residual good humor from the game. "We could go native tonight."
"Native it is. But only if we eat down there. Make a night of it this time, Duggy, do it right, not just up and back like going to the cash machine."
Doug nodded, cool with that. "I'll run this upstairs. You call the two homos."
* * *
DOUG RETURNED DOWNSTAIRS CARRYING a suede Timberland jacket with eight thousand dollars in twenties and fifties tucked inside the quilted lining.
Jem's mother's house was a classic Charlestown triple-decker of stacked, identical apartments. Diabetes had claimed Jem's mother's body in pieces, toes and feet first, then fingers, knees, kidney, and finally her heart. The disease had since spread to her house, rotting it room by room.
Doug's rent for the entire third floor was a couple of grand a year in real estate taxes. Jem, on the second floor, took care of all stolen utilities. The first floor was Krista's.
Kristina Coughlin was Jem's Irish twin, exactly eleven months and eleven days his junior. They bickered like husband and wife, she doing his laundry and occasionally cooking a meal-- her mother's gooey chicken a la king her specialty-- while he handed her money and generally laid around watching TV.
Krista shared her brother's wild streak. She had smoked her twenties down to the filter, the wear and tear just now starting to show, though she had snapped back from her pregnancy like a fresh rubber band. Merit Longs kept her in fighting trim. She had the Coughlin white-blue eyes, not so bad as her brother's, but when she drank, which was often, they glowed like demon jewels. Something she did to her hair with a razor kept the layers jagged and sharp. Like her partying soul, her dirty-blond hair lay flat and useless during the day, only to be teased into action every night. Her chest was criminally small, her long legs usually done out in stonewashed denim and heels in order to show off her proud, heart-shaped ass.
The three of them had grown up together, Doug spending so much time at the Coughlins' house as a kid that, when Doug's father went away, Jem's mother's taking him in presented little change. Krista and Doug had been a longtime, on-and-off couple, bad for each other in every way except carousing and sex. But now she couldn't let go. She had even tried to get clean with Doug after his release from prison, just weeks after her mother's death, but after a few months of sobriety fell out rather dramatically. For Doug, this had been a source of secret relief. She had been the heaviest of many stones roped around his neck. A couple of months later she was a couple of months pregnant and going around Town telling everybody that Doug was the father.
