The City Below (38 page)

Terry gunned down the length of Memorial Drive, along Cambridge Parkway, and up onto a new sleek bridge that took them from Cambridge into the Town, above the rail yards and the Flat. Terry repeatedly slapped the wooden knob of the gearshift, clutching, revving the engine, going home. The new bridge meant that Charlestown wasn't Charlestown anymore, but that was all right. Terry Doyle wasn't Terry Doyle either.

At the grubby projects, the three-square-block, whites-only housing complex that served as the Town's west wall, Terry slowed the car. His eyes went by chance to a particular window in the nearest building, and he saw the pale face of a child staring out at them. As the child dropped from sight, Terry glanced at Joan. She had seen it too, and he felt her pang for the tyke, whose misery was quickly conveyed by the sagging chain-link fences and yellowed undershirts flapping on a clothesline. Terry said, "You should have seen the tenements those projects replaced. Toilets in the back yard, right behind the prison where Sacco and Vanzetti died."

"Really?" Joan said, but with a flat, noncommittal voice.

"There used to be a Flying Horse gas station on the corner."

Vacant lots separated lone storefronts, several of which were bars: Pat's, O'Grady's. Their doors were open, offering glimpses of permanently shadowed interiors. He sensed her registering the sudden stink of stale beer, and he said, "The true Celtic Twilight."

He turned onto Main Street, squealing rubber. Marked by stanchions of the el, the street jogged right a few blocks along, into City Square. A large, pillared bank building anchored one corner; on another were the courthouse and the police station.

Joan pointed at the courthouse and Terry said, "The site of the original settlement of Boston, John Winthrop's—"

"Look, Terry. What's that?"

On the top floor of the courthouse, letters blanked out each of the row of windows, spelling out the word
NEVER!

"Well,
I
never," Joan said.

Terry felt a bolt of anger, but channeled it into his driving, taking the next corner too fast. On Warren Street he continued to accelerate most of the way to St Mary's, where he swung right again. He could have climbed this hill blind.

He turned onto Monument Square, their first view of the great obelisk. "Bunker Hill," he said, slowing. "The hallowed American shrine, 'degraded now,' as the
Globe
so eloquently put it this morning, 'by misguided and self-appointed defenders of the notorious high school.'
Le voilà.
"

The high school rose ahead, dominating the northwest corner of the square, the same old granite hulk A single glimpse called the place fully to mind, because what his eyes went to were the seven false columns embedded in the façade above the otherwise undistinguished entrance. Eventually those columns—like the stucco-and-beam Tudor façades on Sullivan Square taverns and the marbleized Con-Tact paper on kitchen counters and the wire-propped shamrocks that his grandfather fashioned—symbolized all that he'd wanted to leave behind. No matter that, much later, he had taken the Gothic turrets of Boston College, the reforms of Vatican H, and the high-mindedness of the Kennedys as absolutely authentic.

The bone-white flagpole flew nothing but its ropes. The multiple windows had always been filthy, but the view they offered had nevertheless drawn his constant gaze. He remembered being yanked back from the rooftops of the city by the clang of the period bell. He remembered crowds surging in the corridors, locker doors slamming, the pungent stale air pouring off the bodies of kids who should have been his friends.

FUCK THE TPF
, read one sign that the wind had plastered against a fence,
POWDER KEG FOREVER
! read another. Terry slowed almost to a stop. "Imagine going to war over that sad place."

"What year were you?"

"Nineteen sixty." He pointed to a row of dreary brick houses down the block. "When I was a kid, we thought those places were mansions, but Jesus." What dumps they seemed now, with flaking shutters, sagging bay windows, decked with hand-lettered signs.
Never! Resist! Go Townies!

Terry stopped the car without pulling over. His memory supplied a set of tastes and aromas: cabbage, talc, stale tea, egg salad, the smell of Borkham Riff tobacco. Once he'd loved everything about life inside those houses. Now the houses themselves seemed utterly grief stricken.

"Look at those signs," Joan said.

But Telly's eyes were drawn by boys coming out of the variety store where he too had gone, though in his day for Pez and finger-size wax bottles of red, green, or orange sugar water. Three kids, no four, moved onto the sidewalk like heavy machines. They wore caps and sneakers and trousers about to be outgrown and identical school jackets, the white leather sleeves, red bodies, football emblems on their breasts. Linemen. The sports car had drawn their attention.

Terry put the car in gear and turned the corner, past the high school, away from the boys. They took the next turn easily, onto the fourth side of the square, the front of the park "I want to show you something." He pulled over, shut the engine off, opened his door, and, before Joan could react, went around to her door. He held his hand out "Close your eyes."

"What?"

"Close your eyes. I want to surprise you."

"No way."

"Come on, Joan. Really." He took her hand and pulled gently. She swung her legs out and stood. "Close them," he said.

She was wearing a trim tweed jacket over her jeans and sweater. "You're asking me to trust you, is that it"

"Exactly."

She slipped her arm inside his and closed her eyes. She allowed him to lead her across the street and onto the stairs that led up into the park "Watch it here," he said.

"How can I watch it if my eyes are closed?" She laughed and leaned into him.

"There are maybe twenty stairs going up. Twenty-five. Careful here, it curves. And a railing is on your right now, if you want."

She squeezed against him. "Who needs a railing? But you better get me there. Three minutes of trusting and I start to feel dizzy."

"I've noticed."

"What is this, Outward Bound?"

"Just a bit further ... across here ... just a little further."

"Terry, really ... this is ..."

"We're almost there." He had taken her to the base of the stone monument, and now he turned her so that she stood with her back to it, at the bench to which he had always gone. "Now," he said. "Now open."

She did, and her mind reeled at what she saw. Muscular clouds of the passing rain marched across the sky, but her eyes went right to the spine of the strange city, Oz, at her feet "Oh, it's close!"

"Ain't it beautiful?"

"But it's ... it's ..." She hesitated, then saw what made the view strange. "It's reversed!" The familiar Custom House and State Street Bank were in the foreground, a switch with the gleaming Hancock tower. "The skyline is backwards from here."

"Maybe it's backwards from Cambridge," he said, but he was moved by her readiness to lose her breath to a view he loved. "This is where I used to come as a kid. Boston seemed so close from here. Everything seemed possible."

"Everything
was
possible, sugar." She leaned against him once more.

"I love this city."

"But you moved away. You love it as something you can't have."

Terry laughed. "Which is
why
I love it. I only love what I can't have."

"But you have me."

"The exception that proves the rule?"

"And since that's what I am, I give this to you." She tossed her free arm at the skyline. "I let you have it, finally."

"'All of this I lay before you.'"

"What?"

"The Devil, to Jesus, when he took him up the mountain and showed him the world. A temptation."

"Well, when you get to be Jesus, you can start worrying about it. Meanwhile, the city's yours."

His gaze went back to the side wall of the high school,
NEVER!
he read. The Irish Nazis. For a moment that wall seemed to be falling toward him, but that was an effect of the clouds soaring by behind.

"If I want it."

"Yes, if you want it."

Joan set off down the steps toward the car. He lit a cigarette, cupping the match against the harbor breeze, inhaling deeply but tasting nothing. Then he followed.

What he saw, over the lip of the hill, stopped him. The four boys from the variety store were in, and on, the Healey, one in each seat, the others lounging on the fenders. Joan had stopped dead where she had registered the sight, and now she turned toward Terry. He skipped down the stairs. "Wait here," he said, passing her.

But she didn't. She followed closely behind, as far as the curb. As he crossed the street toward the car, she cried after him, "Call the police!"

What, the TPF?

He put his weed between his lips, grinning at the boys as if glad to see them. Do this like a coach, he told himself. "What say, guys? Pretty nice wheels, huh?"

"Brit piece of shit," the boy in the driver's seat said, and he sent a wad of spit shooting past Terry's feet. A trail of saliva fell across the side of the car. The others laughed.

"Brit? Don't you know what this is? Austin-Healey, see there?" When the punks turned to look at the medallion on the steering wheel, Doyle sensed his power. They are children, he told himself. "Healey is as Irish as we are. Healey owns the company. The Irish are very proud of this car. That's why most of the models you see are green."

The two on the fenders exchanged a wary glance, but the boy at the wheel, with a malevolent eye, said, "We was going to go for a ride." Earlier Terry had made them for linemen, but this kid had the confidence of a ball carrier. There was something familiar about the way his close-cropped head rode on his shoulders, like a pumpkin on a board.

"I'd love to let you go for a ride, but I'm not insured for it."

"You're insured for theft, aren't you?" The boy on the rear fender grinned at the others.

Terry held out his cigarette pack. "Have a smoke, fellows. Let it go at that."

"Give us the key, mister. This car don't belong in Charlestown. We'll take it out for you."

"You going to loop it?"

"You know about looping?"

"Yeah, I know about it." Terry leaned toward the driver and read the name on his jacket "'Boss.' What are you boss of? The Town bullshit factory?"

The boy on the rear fender pulled his hand from his pocket, producing a switchblade. He flicked it open. "Hey, O'Keefe, the bullshit factory. How did this jerkoff know?" The boy buried the blade in the folds of the automobile top, teasing it, but not puncturing the canvas yet.

Terry ignored the knife. O'Keefe? The name was what, without knowing it, he'd been hoping for. He opened the driver's door. "Get out of the car, kids, before you have a problem you don't want."

"Fuck you, mister." The boy with the knife jerked forward. "This fucking car belongs to a friend of ours. He asked us to watch it for him."

"That so? Was he going to pay you to make sure nobody cut a hole in the top?"

"Yeah, I guess he was."

"Twenty bucks?" Doyle read the kid's name. "Twenty bucks, Jimbo?"

"Thirty. I think he said thirty." Jimbo pulled the knife free of the canvas, and he Angered the blade.

Terry looked at the driver, O'Keefe. That stump of a neck, and now with that name, what Doyle saw was not a pumpkin but a helmet banging against the knees of an enemy tackle. Keefe O'Keefe, All-City fullback, '58 and '59. Terry shook his head. "Does Keefe O'Keefe know that his son hangs out with a two-bit, penny-ante extortionist? Not to mention your mother. The Lindy O'Keefe I know would have you by that cauliflower ear and out of here by now."

Boss O'Keefe seemed to shrink into the leather. The years dropped away until he was ten, maybe five. Terry made one last offer of a cigarette, which now the kid took Terry lit it for him. The boy winced at the rough French smoke and stared at it.

Terry turned to the others. "Put the knife away, Jimbo, before you cut yourself."

"Where's my twenty bucks?"

"Is that what I tell
your
mother?"

"You don't know my mother."

"I don't?"

"Anyways, you said twenty bucks."

"Me? That was your
friend.
What
I'm
saying, Jimbo, and I'm saying it to you, Boss, and to you"—he read their names—"Chuck and Chris, is that if you beat it now, I won't tell your mothers what you tried to do here."

"Hey." Boss swung his legs out of the car. "If you would of said before you was a Townie. We just never saw the fucking car before."

Hie others followed O'Keefe in backing away. One waved at Joan, to let her know they'd been aware of her throughout "Hiya, doll!"

They curled into a knot and sauntered up the sidewalk. Joan joined Terry, watching them. "Well. Good old boys, even here."

"They're just kids. They don't know if they're coming or going."

"Meanwhile, they've got knives."

Terry shrugged sadly. She crossed to the for side of the car. He got in, started the engine, pulled into the street and away from the monument. Joan looked up at it, but saw instead the oddly slanted telephone poles just there, the tangle of wires—the sort of machine mess that was rarely seen anymore elsewhere in the city.

T
ERRY WENT RIGHT
on Winthrop Street, onto a downhill slope. Ahead was the tidy Common with its Civil War statue. Terry stopped on Adams Street to say something about the Town as an abolitionist stronghold. Before he could begin, the car was suddenly bumped from behind.

Joan yelped, a breach of her composure which, as much as the jolt, brought her anger up. She whipped around. A battered tank of a car—a Buick, an Oldsmobile, something—had slammed into them.

Two men sat grinning. Joan's eyes went to the tiny figure on their dashboard, one of those creepy religious statues. On the snout of the hood, a red and blue metal plate had been wired to the grill, a Confederate flag.

Terry got out of the car, then she did. He was more rigidly in control than ever, but she was ready to explode. Like a pair of adjusters they checked for damage, bending over the sleek rear of the car. In the four years Joan had owned it, the Healey had never been so much as dented, and to her horror now, she felt pressure building behind her eyes. But despite the disparity in the bulk of the two cars, and because the Healey's bumper had been mounted high to meet import specs, the force of the collision had gone harmlessly into the steel designed to take it. Neither vehicle showed damage.