The Town: A Novel (62 page)

“Let me buy you a drink, soldier” meant
If you wig out and decide to start shooting up the room, spare me, I’m one of the good guys.

“You know, I came close to enlisting myself” meant
Yeah, September eleventh made me piss my pants, but I somehow pulled myself together and haven’t missed an episode of
American Idol
since
.

“I supported you boys one hundred percent” meant
Just because I have a rib-bon magnet on my car doesn’t mean you can look at my daughter.

“Great to have you back” meant
Now please go away again.

He finally did drop by the VA for some career guidance, and a short-armed woman with a shrub of salt-and-pepper hair and everyday compassion sat down and banged out that magical résumé, omitting any reference to combat experience. What he considered to be his proudest accomplishment in life, aside from not getting maimed or killed in action—namely, passing the six-phase Qualification Course at Fort Bragg, earning his Special Forces tab in the run-up to the Iraq invasion—was shrunken to a bullet point on the “Skill Sets” section of his résumé. “Proficient at team-building and leadership skills.” Not “Mud-hungry, man-killing son of a bitch.” So much of his life since coming back had been about writing off what had happened.

The resulting document was a skimpy little thing that whimpered, “Please hire me.” He had fifty of them printed on twenty-four-pound paper at Kinko’s and seeded another seventy-five around the city via e-mail, to a great and profound silence.

The parking-lot-guard job—6 p.m. to 2 a.m., three nights a week—came via a posting on craigslist. The owner of the parking lot was a builder looking to jab another diamond pin in the cushion of downtown Boston. The property manager who hired Maven, a square-shouldered navy vet of two Vietnam tours, clapped him on the back fraternally and then explained that he would break Maven’s thumbs if he stole so much as a penny.

After a week or two of long hours stamping his feet out in the bitterly cold night, warding street people away from soft-top Benzes and Lexus SUVs, this threat took the form of a challenge. Every shift now, Maven showed up thinking he wouldn’t steal, only to soften after long hours soaking in the lonesome marinade of night. $36.75
FLAT FEE, ENTER AFTER
6
P.M., NO BLOCKING, EASY-IN/EASY-OUT
. He kept it to one or two cars a shift, nothing serious. Latecomers always, inebriates pulling in after midnight, addressing Maven as “my man” or “dude,” and never requesting a receipt, never even noticing him lifting the gate by hand. All they cared about was tucking their silver Saab in near the downtown action, wanting nothing to disrupt the momentum of their weekend night.

It was funny money, the $73.50 he skimmed. He wasted it accordingly, opening the gate at quarter to two and walking a few blocks south to Centerfold’s in the old Combat Zone, dropping his dollars on a couple of quick beers and a table dance before lights-up at two. He was in a bad way. Any money he had left over, he would take two blocks over to Chinatown, ordering a pot of “cold tea” along with the club zombies and the Leather District poseurs and the college seniors too cool for Boston’s puritanical 2 a.m. closing time. Maven sat alone at a cloth-covered table, the piped-in Asian music trickling into his beer
buzz like sweet rain as he drank the teapot of draft Bud, throwing back pork dumplings like soft, greasy aspirins. Then he overtipped the rest, tightened up his boot laces, and strapped on his shoulder pack for the long run home.

Home was Quincy, 8.2 miles away.

Running was a purge and a meditation. His thick boots clumped over the cracked streets of rough neighborhoods, along dormant Conrail tracks, and under expressway bridges. Past dark playgrounds and suspicious cars idling at corners, traffic lights blinking yellow overhead, people calling out from porches and stoops, “Who’s chasin’ you, man?”

Quincy is home to beautiful ocean-view properties, seven-?figure marina condos, and is the original homestead of this country’s first father-son presidents, the Adamses.

Maven’s converted attic apartment was nowhere near any of these. It had sloped ceilings in every room, a stand-up shower with almost zero water pressure, and stood directly under the approach path into Logan.

This was where he lived now. This was who he was.

Sometimes, during his run, he remembered the dancers and the way they eyed themselves in the strip club’s mirrored walls as they worked the stage: so unashamed and even bored by their public nudity, as though they considered themselves just part of the spectacle, and not in fact its focus.

This was Maven’s attitude toward himself and his own life now. He felt as though he were watching a man slowly slipping over the edge of a deep chasm, not at all concerned that this man was him.

S
IX NIGHTS BEFORE, HE
had nearly killed a man.

The rain had been coming down hard that shift, hard enough to wash away the usual symphony of the downtown weekend: no laughter from passing couples; no Emerson students gloating in packs; no snatches of discussion from scarf-wearing theatergoers; no club-hoppers tripping over sidewalk cracks and laughing off their ass.

The gate had a small booth, but with the rain banging on the tin roof like gunshots, it was easier just to stand outside, letting the rain rap his poncho hood and shoulders, blowing down in sheets from the high security lamps like the rippling sails of a storm-?battered ship. He imagined himself a rock beneath a waterfall, and the sensation, as such, was not unpleasant; this was the kind of mind game he had taught himself in the Arabian desert.

People think it never rains over there, but it does: rarely and suddenly, as out of place as applause inside a church. Desert rain tastes silty and runs in dirty black tears down your face. Boston rain, on the other hand, thanks to recycled industrial emissions, tastes and smells as sweet as a soft drink.

Since returning to the States, Maven had battled reimmersion issues common among discharged Iraq veterans. A heightened startle reflex; avoidance of crowded places; sudden, overwhelming anxiety attacks. Discarded food containers, dead animals on the roadside, a man walking alone into traffic: in Iraq, the appearance of these things portended death. Any of them had the potential to detonate fatally without notice. His time over there had been one of unremitting suspense, which he had met with unrelenting vigilance, one of many habits he was still having trouble unlearning.

Two things conspired to distract him from his usual psychotic vigilance that night. The insulating rain was one of them. The other was a gleaming black Cadillac Escalade that pulled in around ten.

The Escalade was a big SUV, the driver sitting at about Maven’s eye level. Nothing about him jumped out at Maven: black hair, a no-nonsense face, perfectly shaped shirt collar, jutting chin. The dash was loaded with electronics, more sophisticated than anything in Maven’s entire apartment.

As the driver went poking into the sun visor for cash, a woman leaned forward in the passenger seat. She threw a brief glance Maven’s way—nothing more than a peek around a blind corner—just curious to put a face to the dark figure working in the rain. The liquid crystal display of the navigation screen lit her green and blue like some beautiful android. Maven glimpsed a flawless neck, a delicately pointed chin, and a tantalizingly thick line of cleavage.

All in an instant. She eased back again—no spark in her eyes, no recognition, nothing.

“Messy night, huh?”

The guy was talking to him, a neatly creased fifty clipped be?-tween his fingers. The windshield wipers flicked rain into Maven’s face.

“Yeah,” said Maven, slow to recover, his hands disappearing inside his pants pockets within the poncho, making change.

The guy accepted the damp bills and coins and spilled them into his cupholder. “Stay dry, man.”

He pulled in and parked, exiting with a wide black umbrella, and Maven watched them walk away arm in arm, focusing on the woman’s bare shins beneath the cut of her dress, her heels picking at the sidewalk, the sound fading into the rain.

Maven knew her. Knew
of
her, anyway. A girl from his high school. Older than him by three years, a senior when he was a freshman, but as clear and as fixed in his memory as the bikini model who used to smile down at him from the poster on his bedroom wall. Smiled knowingly, with one crooked thumb hooked in the side string of her pink bikini bottom, drawing it an inch away from her cocked hip. That kind of memory.

Her name came back to him with the slap and sting of a snowball to the face: Danielle Vetti.

He said it aloud a few times in the rain. “Danielle Vetti, Dan?ielle Vetti, Danielle Vetti.” Watching it steam and disappear. He was amazed to have seen her again, marveling at the gyrations the paths of their lives had to have taken in order to intersect once again, momentarily, that rainy night. The mere memory of her, and this one-second encounter—even the
taste
of her name in his mouth, after all those years—all put a charge into him the likes of which he hadn’t felt in a long, long time.

Danielle Vetti had been
the
girl in high school. Passing her in the hall was the highlight of your day, something you’d brag about to your seatmate in the next class. Guys at their lockers—guys in the bathroom you didn’t even know—would spread the word:
Check out Danielle Vetti today
. They just didn’t make people like that in Gridley, Massachusetts.

Danielle Vetti.

“Hey, man, you see a little, wet dog come through here?”

A guy coming off the street. The Latino accent didn’t jibe with what Maven glimpsed of his face beneath the hood of an oily anorak. But this detail didn’t jump out at Maven—not until the second guy did.

The blow came from behind, Maven going down and rolling in a puddle. They pulled him up, his head throbbing, and a thick strap was fitted around his chest like the kind used to cinch down loads in a flatbed truck. It was ratcheted fast from behind, pinning Maven’s arms against him inside the poncho.

The first guy showed a knife, low and silver, turning it so that it caught the overhead light. A fat, three-inch blade. Maven’s focus went in and out.

The guy behind him tugged Maven back between two cars, out of sight from the street.

“The money, man,” said the first one, the one holding the knife. “I might just cut you anyway, so give it up fast.”

Steam from the mouth of the guy behind Maven smelled sour and chemical. Maven couldn’t clear his mind, couldn’t get any thoughts started. A cold automobile engine that wouldn’t turn over.

They pulled him toward the booth. The knife guy backed inside, Maven getting a better look at his face, his smile sharp and hungry, breath squeezing through widely spaced teeth like fog through a broken fence. He pecked at the register keys, hitting the big button, the drawer shooting open.

Empty.

The knife guy’s smile faded. He came back outside, the knife low at his waist. He was set on using it; Maven could see that much. This guy wasn’t going away until his blade was bloodied.

“Search him.”

Maven set his teeth hard, his tongue pressing against his gums—feeling the notch in the right front quadrant. This recognition relaxed him. A kind of deadness crept in, which was the prelude to combat readiness, a feeling he had once known so well.

E
VERYONE WHO COMES BACK
has his one story.

Even if you come back with a lot of stories, there’s still always that one.

Maven’s was about a girl. Young, maybe fourteen, her head wrapped in a kaffiyeh of caramel-gold cotton. Maven was working a sneak-and-peek at a house in Samarra with his fire team. Young Iraqi girls often detoured past American soldiers, looking to draw a reaction they could ignore. The concept of America and the freedoms it represented frightened and attracted them, and so to be fancied by a Westerner was like having your forbidden dream beckon to you.

Maven, posted outside the house, didn’t see her until she was maybe twenty meters away. She wore a smile, but even at that distance Maven could tell that something was behind it. Her breathing was quick and shallow, and she walked with her arms raised from her sides.

His first thought was that she was in trouble, looking for help, and Maven actually took a step or two toward her, moving into her kill range. She reached inside the loose sleeve of her robe and yanked down, shivering, expecting to die.

Her hand came out holding a broken wire.

She looked at Maven with sweaty panic, then reached back inside her sleeve fast.

Maven brought up his M16. He could have cut her down right there, a chest-pattern, three-round burst.
Brr-rrr-rrp.

She bent over, working hard, reaching up into her armpit. Maven spun behind a parked Humvee just as she exploded. Shattering car windows sprayed his armor-plated vest, and he was thrown through a thin wooden fence. His fire team found him on all fours, spitting blood, and thought he’d been hit. A warmth spread over his gums, pooling in the right pocket of his cheek. He choked on something wedged in his throat, swallowing it down.

He had bitten off a chunk of his own tongue.

He saw many things during his tours there—many worse things—but it was always this girl who appeared in his dreams. Ended them usually, waking him up. Why she came at him, why she chose him, was a question for which there was no answer. Insurrectionists had been hiring head cases to do pay-and-sprays on American troops, even locking IEDs to noncoms against their will.
He wondered if the near-death experience of the first misfire had made her change her mind. Maybe, in those last frantic moments, she was actually trying to get the device off her.

But in the end, what did it matter? The brutality of war, the random nature of man’s existence: she represented none of those things to him. All Maven got out of it was a few weeks of speech therapy, and a reminder of something he already knew: trouble had a way of finding him. Always had, always would.

A
S THE STRAP CREAKED
tighter behind him, the now smooth tongue notch pushed against the inside of Maven’s bite. The second guy’s free hand came around to pat Maven’s chest and gut through the wet poncho. He felt each side of Maven’s waist, pausing at his pants pockets, gripping a mobile phone, then continuing, the guy stooping now, his hand at the cargo pocket along the lower left thigh of Maven’s camo fatigues.