The Town: A Novel (20 page)

“Good luck,” he said, backing off. “With tomorrow.”

“Thanks.” She held up the glass as though it were a gift. “Good night, Doug.”

“Wow. Hey, could you say that for me again?”

“Good night, Doug.”

“Good night, Claire.” He said it, and there was no lightning striking him dead in the street.

D
EZ LIVED IN THE NECK
.

As Charlestown was the orphan of Boston, so was the Neck the orphan of Charlestown. Getting there meant heading out past the Schrafft’s tower at the western gate of the Town, banging a one-eighty by the MBTA rail shop in the Flat, ducking under two crumbling highway elevations, then turning past the all-cement salute to urban blight that was the Sullivan Square Station. Tucked behind there was the six-street patch of old railroad houses also known as the Forgotten Village, an outpost teetering on the edge of Charlestown and of Boston itself, the last settlement before the Brazilian food markets of Somerville’s Cobble Hill.

The Neck embodied the Town’s siege mentality. Dez’s mother still hissed about the traitors who’d accepted the city’s relo money, making way for planners and engineers to carve up the Neck. Whole streets had been bulldozed—Haverhill, Perkins Place, Sever—chopped off like arms and legs, and yet, proud old veteran that it was, the Neck survived.

Dez’s mother’s aluminum-sided two-story on Brighton Street was shouldered between two taller houses, its square front yard fenced with child’s-height chain-link. Growing up beneath a major highway had made Desmond Elden feel isolated and marginalized—and proud. Looking up at the rusting struts—the corroding Central Artery and its crumbling chunks of concrete—Dez often thought of the view fish had, looking up at a pier.

Dez earned enough—legitimately, from his other mother, dear old Ma Bell—to move them both out of there, though he knew better than to even bring up the subject. Ma would never give up the land she had been bitching about for years. Certainly there was no leaving the parish. Dez’s mother didn’t drive, and her daily walks to mass were a hike: a dreary quarter mile over hot asphalt in summer, battered by whipping river winds in winter, always taking her life into her hands crossing the highway rotary. And this was just to reach the Schrafft’s tower—from there she had to march all the way up Bunker Hill to the steeple at the crest of the Heights. But you’d just as soon ask her to trade in
Dez for another son as leave St. Frank’s. This daily odyssey was part of her experience of mass, as it was part of the experience of living in the Neck, of being Catholic, of being Irish, of being an aging widow. It was suffering made proud. There were only two ways she would leave the Neck, Ma always said, and one of them was by being bulldozed.

Dez understood her view of the world, though he no longer embraced it. Wire work had taken him high above much of Greater Boston, in a cherry picker over leafy towns like Belmont, Brookline, Arlington, neighborhoods with grass and parks and unobstructed sky, even some elbow room between houses. But the Neck was all she knew. It was like smoking to her now—gone beyond habit and addiction, a way of life.

The smoking, pursued vigorously over four decades, was finally and forever drying Ma out. Her hair—the wavy red mane she had been known for—was thinning into wisps of brown. Her skin was stiff and going gray like an old sink sponge, her eyes marbling, her lips shriveling along with her beauty, all that was supple and yielding about her evaporating away. Her wrinkled hands trembled without a butt or a soft pack or a lighter to busy them, and more and more nights she spent alone at the kitchen table under the fruit-glass lamp, listening to talk radio and filling the house with exhaust.

She put the smokes away long enough to sit down and eat the meal she had prepared. Doug’s visit had brought her to life, which was nice to see. At least she could still snap-to for company: fussing about the old kitchen with a dishrag on her shoulder, humming the way she used to. Both she and Dez had needed this lift.

“Meat loaf’s better than ever, Mrs. Elden,” said Doug, bent over his plate, scooping it in.

Her secret was to bake a small loaf of spice bread first, then shred that and work it into the meat. Her cooking was getting spicier and spicier, the cigarettes snuffing out her taste buds one by one.

“Potatoes, too, Ma,” said Dez. She whipped them with a mixer, melting in four sticks of butter.

“Yeah,” said Doug. “This is a meal.”

“Such manners on you two,” she said, pleased. “My Desmond, of course, I expect it. Raised him that way. But, Douglas, the way you were brought up? The bad luck you seen?”

He helped himself to a little more ketchup. “Just so as I get asked back.”

“Don’t give me that now. You know you’re welcome here, any day of the week.”

Dez ate happily with his father’s photograph at his elbow. It had been moved there from its customary position across the table in order to make room for their dinner guest. The picture showed two blurry nuns and most of the
word
Hospital
behind a happy, surprised-looking man in shirtsleeves and thickrimmed, black eyeglasses, holding a thin-banded summer hat. The picture had been taken on July 4, 1967, the day of Dez’s birth, and the resemblance between father and son was made extraordinary by their shared pair of eyeglasses. The specs in the picture were the same ones Dez wore now. In the sixteen years since Desmond senior’s murder, neither Dez nor Ma had taken a home-cooked meal without his portrait joining them at the table.

The linoleum floor was warped, and when Doug rested his arms on the table, all three glasses of Pepsi jumped. Dez said, “I gotta get that shimmed.”

“How’s your father doing?” Ma asked Doug. “See him much?”

“Not that often,” said Doug.

“Jem says he’s doing good, Ma,” said Dez. “Jimmy Coughlin goes up and sees him more than Doug does.”

Doug wiped his mouth, nodded. “His old man and mine ran around together, and Jem, I think he likes to hear the tales. Stories about his old man, because that’s all he’s got.”

“Those Coughlin kids,” said Ma, shaking her head—Dez tensing. “How you became who you are today, Douglas, living in that household, I’ll never know. Any trouble you ever got into, I blamed that family.”

“No,” said Doug, aiming his fork at his own chest. “You can place all that blame right here.”

“That woman and her tirades.
Mother of God
. Get herself loaded and start calling around town, ranting at her enemies. I know she took you in, Douglas, and God bless her for that. Her one and only ticket upstairs. I do wish we coulda taken you at the time, given you a proper home.”

“That’s beautiful of you to say, Mrs. Elden. But Jimmy’s ma, you know, she did her best. Truthfully, I think she liked me better than her own kids. I know she treated me that way.”

“And that daughter of hers…”

“Ma,” said Dez.

“Desmond don’t like me talking about it, but”—she put out a hand to keep Dez from cutting her off—“I am just over the moon that you two are no more.”

“
Jesus,
Ma,” said Dez, “I didn’t tell you that so you could—”

“No, no, no,” said Doug, putting out his own hand. “It’s fine, really. Krista’s all right, Mrs. E. S he’ll land on her feet. She’s doing good.”

His respectful lie hung in the air as the three of them chewed.

“I know the four a you were all friends in school, but that’s not the kind of boy I let Desmond hang around at night.” She looked over at her Dez. “But he’s a man now, and he can pick his own friends. He knows right from wrong. Knows enough to stay out of trouble.”

Dez kept his head down, chewing over his plate.

Doug said, “Everybody we meet, Mrs. Elden, I tell them Dez is the best of us.”

Dez frowned, looking up, pleased. “Come on.”

“College-educated,” said Ma, needing no encouragement, “good phone company job. Clean boy. Manners. Such a help to me all these years. And look how handsome. So why isn’t he married then? The both of you’s.”

Dez pointed at Doug. “You walked right into that one.”

“Your pal there, what’s his name.” She snapped her fingers dryly. “The Mead Street Magloans. Freckled kids, like a litter of toads.”

“Gloansy,” said Dez, sharing a grin with Doug.

“Alfred Magloan,” she said, nodding. “Desmond tells me he has a boy with this girlfriend of his now. I don’t know her.”

“Joanie Lawler. From the houses.”

“Okay, the houses, that explains some of it. But ask me and she is damn lucky to be getting
anything
out of him now, after already giving away the store. My day, we wouldn’t have let a pair like you get past twenty-three. We’d’ve grabbed hold and held on. Those days, girls knew how to.” She sat back, done with her meal though she had hardly touched it, lighting up. “I used to think the problem was you very modern men. Now, the more I see, the more I realize it’s the women of the species. Too soft.”

T
HE ODOR OF SMOKE
clung to everything in the house, including Dez’s bedroom upstairs. The comforter on the twin bed, the dumbbells on the floor, his work gear. All his U2 imports, rarities, and bootlegs stacked on top of the bureau. Dez put on The Alarm’s
Strength,
just loud enough to give them some privacy. The Alarm had been on the same socially conscious, Catholic, protestpunk track as U2 and Simple Minds in the eighties, and Dez was doing his part to keep the music alive.

A bus moaned into Sully Square. All day and night they arrived, the subway cars and the squealing wheels of the commuter rail—never mind the trucks pounding the highway overhead. But to Dez it was all lullabies. God forbid it should ever stop some night, how would he ever get to sleep without it?

Doug sat big in the small chair at Dez’s computer, his hand clumsy over the mouse, reminding Dez of old men at the library trying to work the microfilm. Dez was showing Doug the speed of his ISDN line, and how to use a search engine called Alta Vista.

Doug had entered
Corvette
and was surfing the Web pages it gave him. “All right, now what?”

“Any of those words that are a different color interest you, click on them.”

The screen jumped to a site named Borla, something about exhaust systems. “Your Ma really likes Jem, huh?”

“Loves him,” said Dez. “You want to know what that’s about? Specifically?”

“I bet I don’t.”

“All these years, Jem’s been inside my house exactly once, okay? Maybe a year ago now. Not ten minutes total, he’s here—and he takes the biggest fucking smash of his life.”

Doug cracked up laughing. “He did not.”

“Doesn’t even flush, just leaves it there. Kid has no respect.”

Doug swiped his face with his hand, trying to control his laughter.

“Scented candles, my mother lit,” said Dez. “They burned for three days straight, trying to exorcise the spirit of that kid. And this is a one-bathroom house!”

“Hey, don’t tell me, I live above him.”

“He should of just lit the bathroom on fire when he was done with it, saved us the trouble.”

“Remind me to flush, if and when.”

“Hey—you could piss on the curtains and dry-hump the sofa, Ma’d find some redeeming aspect in it.”

“Well, the kid’s a maniac. Always has been.”

“Yeah. But getting worse. Every time he hands me a piece before a job, he says, ‘I know you won’t use this.’”

Doug nodded. “He says that about you. ‘He’ll never shoot.’”

“But if you have to shoot a gun on a job, it’s because you’ve blown it. Right? You screwed it up. The gun is your emergency backup plan.”

“You don’t open up your parachute while you’re still standing inside the plane.”

“But to Jem—you
don’t
shoot a gun on the job, you’ve blown it.”

Doug was onto another page. “Kid’s warped.”

“So what are you doing about this wedding?”

“Don’t know. I fucking hate weddings.”

It was to be a double ceremony, Gloansy and Joanie’s nuptials as well as the christening of their little freckle, Nicky. Jem was Gloansy’s best man, Doug the boy’s godfather. Dez was just a groomsman. He was never the type to be first or second in any group—but Gloansy rating third out of the four of them irked him. Dumb-guy Gloansy, the car booster—whereas, without Dez, they’d be pulling low-percentage strong-arm heists, risky in-through-the-front-door jobs. Dez wondered if other people spent as much time as he did worrying about his place in the hearts and minds of his friends.

They had all come up through school together, Jem joining them after being kept back a grade. Good friends right up through middle school, when Dez started drifting away. Or they drifted away from him: part of it was his collegetrack classes, and part of it was Ma keeping him in nights to study. Doug never became a stranger, but he wasn’t exactly a buddy either. Dez followed his career the same as everyone else in Town: hockey star, destined for glory, drafted by the Bruins out of high school—then bounced out of the AHL under murky circumstances, returning to the Town, and after a few months getting pinched for armed robbery. “High School Hockey Star Arrested,” sang the papers. Then back to the Town after his release, drinking and brawling, a wrong-way hood maturing into full-time criminal. Then a second short prison sentence, and back out on the streets again.