The Town: A Novel (44 page)

He walked in without knocking, down the dark-wood hall, finding Shyne in her high chair as usual, abandoned in front of the tube. Her hands, face, and hair were smeared with bloodlike ravioli sauce while she zoned out on the goddamn purple dinosaur hopping around on a pogo stick. Sauce in her ears too.

“Hey, kid,” he said. She did not turn. He touched the back of her neck, a clean spot there, but he might just as well have been touching a Shyne doll. “Uh-oh!” sang the purple dinosaur, and she stared like she was receiving some coded message, unable to look away.

The toilet flushed and Krista came out of the bathroom wearing a Daisy Duck T-shirt and saggy-ass bikini underwear.

“You didn’t cook nothing, did you?” He didn’t even want dinner, only to point out one more thing at which she had failed.

“The fuck do I know when you’re gonna be home anymore?” she said.

But he had neither the time for nor the interest in fighting—and this, she noticed. A weird little moment of mind reading between the calendar twins,
and suddenly she knew exactly where he had come from, whom he had met, what he had in his pocket. Almost like she could see inside his shorts to the little tea bag nestled there. A look crossed her face—hunger, want—and Jem saw it. She knew he saw it.

“What?” he said, more taunting than angry—another chance to punch home his authority.

She used to say, after every slow, smoky exhale,
Don’t tell him, Jem.
Every single hit. Stronger than her taste for dust was her fear that she would be found out by Duggy. Everybody needed a parent or a spouse to run around behind. Come to think of it, Jem spent a lot of his time running around behind Duggy’s back too.

He stared at his sister, the failure. To be a slut was one thing, but a failed slut? That took something almost like talent.

Now he is as disgusted by you as I am
.

Jem almost said this. Yet even he held out hope for a turnaround from Duggy. It had happened before. The kernel of a plan was already forming in Jem’s head.

Maybe, Kris, I can save even you.

Anything was within his power. But now he was furious again, staring her down, hating the thing that he loved. He bent down and kissed the top of Shyne’s stained head and tasted sauce. The kiss said,
She will not be a fuckup like you,
and at the same time,
I alone can save us all.

“I’ll be upstairs,” he said—knowing that she knew what that meant, knowing that she would sit down here in her saggy-ass panties and stare up at the water-stained ceiling knowing he was up there getting high without her.
Because you couldn’t hold up your end of the deal. Because you couldn’t hold on to Duggy, and now it falls to me.

Upstairs in the cramped air of his hi-fi room, he dialed up the Sox on his stolen cable, his big-ass TV, and drew the tea bag from his pocket. He got his stuff from the cabinet over the kitchen sink and set it all out on the coffee table, slicing open the tea bag with the tip of his X-Acto knife. In a shot glass nicked from Tully’s years before, he mixed the milligrams of magic with an equal pinch of dry Kool-Aid powder. Then he worked up a little saliva, drooled it into the glass, and watched the dust take to the spit and fade, becoming one.

He thought of that dude at the halfway house those years ago, the four-eyed former CVS pharmacist who in his spare time made lung-busting bongs out of bicycle pumps, and who was eventually bounced back into lockup for cooking speed in his room. He had told Jem that dust was medically not a hallucinogen but in fact classified as a “deliriant.” Jem had never forgotten that. A
deliriant.
That was the fucking balls.

He swirled the glass, the mix turning cherry red. Then he tapped out a Camel unfiltered and dipped the tip into the scooped bottom of the shot glass, soaking up paste. His thumb came down on his Irish-flag Zippo, the bloody tip flaring as he inhaled.

He took it all in, so deep he thought he might never send it back out again, his chest expanding like the universe.

The atmosphere in the room depressurized as his head sank back and sighed. Things changed. Sounds—the TV, his heartbeat—separated from their sources, jettisoned like escape pods from the mother ship, tumbling free. Time stopped for him and he drifted out of it, watching it slide greasily by. The play-by-play man called a home run, and minutes later Jem watched the ball sail into the bleachers.

Wind back the clock.
His words, speaking about the Town.
Wind back the clock.

A Texas voice talked to him out of the TV, Roger Clemens yelling at him from the mound between pitches. “She’s the G, you stupid fucking dicksuck!”

Jem said,
Fuck, Rocket
—
you think I don’t know that?

“The hell is Duggy? Where
is
he?”

What do I look like, his goddamn keeper?

“Fuckin’ A, man, you do. Don’t shake me off here. I will plunk you in the ass.”

You couldn’t plunk fucking Mo Vaughn’s fat ass, you washed-up has-been.

“Don’t Buckner this, bitch!”

Well, fuck you, you fat fucking… oh, shit…

Clemens was now a big, soft purple dinosaur in a Red Sox cap, singing, “Uh-oh!”

Jem’s jellyfish brain glowed in the room. The transformation had already begun, his blood turning into mercury. Jem stripped to boxers and flip-flops and flapped down to the basement.

He hit it hard, chest presses and forty-pound curls, heart thumping like a body falling down an endless flight of stairs. The dank basement smelled of the sea, the iron weights clanking like anchor chains.

The camo kids. His foot soldiers. It would start with them, this rebel army he was putting together. Roving bands of Townie kids taking back their streets. Patriots planning for the second Battle of Bunker Hill, winding back the clock. The red, white, and blue of their bloodshot eyes.

He finished with power squats and climbed back up the stairs, his legs and arms aching the way bent steel aches. He shut his door on the world and stood there as the hallway wavered at either end. Jem the deliriant.

He flipped on the hanging lamp over the mirror, his body so pumped that
there was no longer any distinction between flexing and not flexing. Jem was flexed. Every part of him blood-tanned and tumescent.

Every part.

The shorts came off. Facing himself in the mirror under the swinging lamp, he gripped his ass with his other hand, and his third hand—had to be—pulled back on the bank manager’s hair, making her want it, making her work for it. The purple dinosaur pounding at the door threw him off, the bank manager momentarily becoming Krista, but he concentrated hard, and by the time he corrected himself he was too close for Kleenex.

His acid spew scorched the vanity in the shape of a question mark, Jem finishing and stepping back, decreeing, “That shit is fucked-up.”

In the hot shower, his pig’s dick hung swollen and pink between his legs. He gave the nozzle his back, shutting his eyes—the water jet turning to fire on his shoulders, the nozzle like a welder’s torch spewing flame. Sparks danced off his body like spray, the blue flame fashioning something of him, forging a new being, a man of iron transformed in a baptism of fire.

He knew now what he had to do. What the Man of Iron—formerly the Man of Glue—must do.

He dressed in black and returned to the basement, to his grandfather’s old steamer trunk under the stairs. He worked the combination on the lock, and the hinges—arthritic from the dankness—groaned as the trunk opened its mouth. He lifted his gramps’s uniform off the weapons and trophies the old man had brought back from the Pacific—his rifle, the swords, the half-dozen grenades cling-wrapped in an oversized egg carton—along with some other small arms he had tucked away, and some cash, that was the seed out of which the great rebellion would soon grow. From the bottom of this trunk, he pulled out the Foodmaster bag, then closed and relocked his treasure chest.

This was what brothers did. They watched each other’s back.

In darkness he set out on his mission, soldiering through the night Town with the bag tucked under his arm. Crows and keening pterodactyls swooped down from the Heights, screaming over Bunker Hill Street. Voices spoke at him from doorways, alleys, corners. An impossibly ancient woman, older than the sidewalk, whispered to him,
Take care of her for us,
to which Jem replied telepathically,
Ma’am, I will
.

Through Monument Square under the granite spike. Night creatures sailed around it on robe wings—the spirits of altar boys loosed from church attics—drawn to the heaven finger that was a radio tower broadcasting WTOWN, all day and all night, the reception strong and clear inside Jem’s head.

Doug was getting ready to fly. Jem picked up his pace, the ocean roaring in his ears.

Packard Street was the heart of the disease. The G was a cancer in the Town, Jem the fucking deliriant chemo. Jem, the sin eater, the avenging archangel.

In the alley behind Packard he saw her glazed bathroom window, pushed open a few inches for him, just enough. Jem pulled on gloves, and with a glance up and down the alley, tucked the bag into his belt.

He asked for invisibility. It was granted.

Up onto her purple car without a sound, from its roof to the top of the dividing brick wall. He found a hand grip on the brick face of the sleeping building, the window within his reach now. It was old, like those in his mother’s house, hanging on clothesline pulleys, needing only a shove to rise.

He asked for, and received, stealth, night vision, and cloaking silence. For a moment he hung two-handedly from the wooden sill—then he raised himself over it, crawling inside headfirst, being born into the room, coming to rest on the cold tile floor.

The bathroom—the crotch in the body of the home. The kitchen was the heart; the bedroom the brain; the dining room the stomach; the living room the lungs. The front door its face; the garage its ass.

The crotch was dark and cool. A steady dripping inside the porcelain bowl at his shoulder. The flower smells of night creams.

His vision was good, and he untucked the paper bag from his waist, controlling the wrinkling noise. He pulled out the mask by its oval eye sockets, standing, fitting the black strap over the back of his head.

So long as you ditched the masks, she’s got nothing.

Course I ditched the masks.

Well, you seemed pretty fond of your artwork, I want to be sure.

Fuck you, Duggy. So fucking clever.

In the sink mirror, the white Cheevers mask floated against the blackness of its eyes and graffiti scars.

He emerged from the crotch into the lungs. Green digits of a stereo clock pulsing against the wall. A nightlight showing him the way.

The door to the sleeping brain was closed. He gripped the knob with his gloved hand and entered.

Streetlights gave him the room. Red clock digits quivering near the bed where she awaited him.

His knee touched the side of the mattress as he stood over her, listening to her breathe.

She sensed his presence. Her legs moved beneath the sheets. Her head turned under spilled hair, first finding the opened door. She brushed the hair back off her eyes. Then she saw.

The face of the deliriant. She opened her mouth to scream.

D
OUG SHOWED UP ON
her doorstep with a plastic Foodmaster bag of groceries, feeling pretty good. There was a peculiar morning-after pleasure in having refused immediate gratification, in resisting his craving with an eye toward a greater design. This was the bedrock of Alcoholics Anonymous, and it occurred to him that this was also how religions were born.

He found her door open a crack and felt a moment of concern, quickly mastered by rationalization. Lots of people in Town left their doors half-shut while running out for a quick errand. There would be a note on the table telling him that she had gone for more eggs, and to make himself at home.

“Hey?” he said with a knock on the open door, moving inside. “It’s me.”

Nothing. He moved down the hallway, telling himself it wasn’t danger he was sensing.

“Claire?”

She was standing in the living room, on the other side of the sofa between the coffee table and the stereo, wearing faded blue jeans and an untucked yellow T-shirt, a cordless telephone in her hand at her side.

“Hey,” Doug said, stopping, feeling something in the air. “You know your door was open?”

The way she was staring told him that she knew.

“Why?” she said.

Doug went numb. He set the grocery bag on the floor. “Why what?”

“Is this a thing you do?”

Something in him believed he could bluff his way out of this, even as it was all slipping away. “You talking about breakfast, or… ?”

“Tearing women down and building them back up again?”

The side of the sofa was as near to her as he dared move. His talk was pointless, but he wanted to keep on believing. “I brought bacon, I…”

“Or was I some sort of bet? A contest maybe?”