Mystic River

by Dennis Lehane

  I almost got in that car, too, Jimmy wanted to tell someone. He wanted to tell Miss Powell more than anyone. She was beautiful and so clean, and when she laughed you could see that one of her upper teeth was slightly crooked, and that made her even more beautiful to Jimmy. Jimmy wanted to tell her he’d almost gotten in that car and see if her face would fill with the look she was giving Dave now. He wanted to tell her that he thought about her all the time, and in his thoughts he was older and could drive a car and take her to places where she smiled at him a lot and they ate a picnic lunch and everything he said made her laugh and expose that tooth and touch his face with her palm.

  Miss Powell was uncomfortable here, though. Jimmy could tell. After she’d said a few words to Dave and touched his face and kissed his cheek—she kissed him twice—other people moved in, and Miss Powell stepped aside and stood on the cracked sidewalk looking up at the leaning three-deckers and their tar paper curling up to expose the wood underneath, and she seemed younger and yet harder to Jimmy at the same time, as if there was something suddenly nunnish about her, touching her hair to feel for her habit, button nose twitching and ready to judge.

  Jimmy wanted to go to her, but his mother was still holding him tight, ignoring his squirms, and then Miss Powell walked to the corner of Rester and Sydney and Jimmy watched her wave desperately to someone. A hippie-looking guy pulled up in a hippie-looking yellow convertible with faded purple flower petals painted on the sunbaked doors, and Miss Powell climbed in the car and they drove off, Jimmy thinking, No.

  He finally wrenched free of his mother’s hold. He stood in the middle of the street, watching the crowd surround Dave, and he wished he’d gotten in that car, if only so he could feel some of the adoration Dave was feeling, see all those eyes looking at him like he was something special.

  It turned into a big party on Rester Street, everyone running from camera to camera, hoping they’d get on TV or see themselves in the morning papers—Yeah, I know Dave, he’s my best friend, grew up with him, you know, great kid, thank the good Lord he’s okay.

  Someone opened a hydrant and the water jetted out onto Rester like a sigh of relief, and kids tossed their shoes to the gutter and rolled up their pants and danced in the gushing water. The ice cream truck rolled in, and Dave got to pick whatever he wanted, on the house, and even Mr. Pakinaw, a nasty old widower who fired a BB rifle at squirrels (and kids, too, sometimes, if their parents weren’t looking) and screamed all the time for people to just be fucking quiet, will ya—he opened up his windows and put his speakers up against the screens and next thing you know, Dean Martin was singing “Memories Are Made of This” and “Volare” and a lot of other shit Jimmy would normally puke if he heard, but today, it fit. Today the music floated down Rester like bright streams of crepe paper. It mixed with the loud gush of water from the hydrant. Some of the guys who ran the card game in the back of the Pork Chop Brothers’ store brought out a folding table and a small grill, and pretty soon someone else carted out some coolers filled with Schlitz and Narragansett, and the air turned fat with the smell of grilled hot dogs and Italian sausage, the wafting, smoky, charred smell and the whiff of open beer cans making Jimmy think of Fenway Park and summer Sundays and that tight joy you got in your chest when the adults kicked back and acted more like kids, everyone laughing, everyone looking younger and lighter and happy to be around each other.

  This was what Jimmy, even in the pit of his blackest hates after a beating from the old man or the theft of something he’d cared about—this was what he loved about growing up here. It was the way people could suddenly throw off a year of aches and complaints and split lips and job worries and old grudges and just let loose, like nothing bad had ever happened in their lives. On St. Pat’s or Buckingham Day, sometimes on the Fourth of July, or when the Sox were playing well in September, or, like now, when something collectively lost had been found—especially then—this neighborhood could erupt into a kind of furious delirium.

  Not like up in the Point. In the Point they had block parties, sure, but they were always planned, the necessary permits obtained, everyone making sure everyone else was careful around the cars, careful on the lawns—Watch it, I just painted that fence.

  In the Flats, half the people didn’t have lawns, and the fences sagged, so what the fuck. When you wanted to party, you partied, because, shit, you sure as hell deserved it. No bosses here today. No welfare investigators or loan shark muscle. And as for the cops—well, there were the cops now, partying along with everyone else, Officer Kubiaki helping himself to a hot-’n’-spicy sausage spuckie off the grill, and his partner pocketing a beer for later. The reporters had all gone home and the sun was starting to set, giving the street that time-for-dinner glow, but none of the women were cooking, and no one was going inside.

  Except for Dave. Dave was gone, Jimmy realized when he stepped out of the hydrant spray and squeezed out his pant cuffs and put his T-shirt back on as he waited in line for a hot dog. Dave’s party was in full swing, but Dave must have gone back in his house, his mother, too, and when Jimmy looked at their second-story windows, the shades were drawn and lonely.

  Those drawn shades made him think of Miss Powell for some reason, of her climbing in that hippie-looking car, and it made him feel grimy and sad to remember watching her curve her right calf and ankle into the car before she’d closed the door. Where was she going? Was she driving on the highway right now, the wind streaming through her hair like the music streamed down Rester Street? Was the night closing in on them in that hippie car as they drove off to…where? Jimmy wanted to know, but then he didn’t want to know. He’d see her in school tomorrow—unless they gave everyone a day off from school, too, to celebrate Dave’s return—and he’d want to ask her, but he wouldn’t.

  Jimmy took his hot dog and sat down on the curb across from Dave’s house to eat it. When he was about halfway through the dog, one of the shades rolled up and he saw Dave standing in the window, staring down at him. Jimmy held up his half-eaten hot dog in recognition, but Dave didn’t acknowledge him, even when he tried a second time. Dave just stared. He stared at Jimmy, and even though Jimmy couldn’t see his eyes, he could sense blankness in them. Blankness, and blame.

  Jimmy’s mother sat down beside him on the curb, and Dave stepped away from the window. Jimmy’s mother was a small, thin woman with the palest hair. For someone so thin, she moved as if she carried stacks of brick on each shoulder, and she sighed a lot and in such a way that Jimmy wasn’t positive she knew the sound was coming out of her. He would look at pictures of her that had been taken before she’d become pregnant with him, and she looked a lot less thin and so much younger, like a teenage girl (which, when he did the math, was exactly what she’d been). Her face was rounder in the pictures, with no lines by the eyes or on the forehead, and she had this beautiful, full smile that seemed just slightly frightened, or maybe curious, Jimmy could never tell for sure. His father had told him a thousand times that Jimmy had almost killed her coming out, that she’d bled and bled until the doctors were worried she might never stop bleeding. It had wiped her out, his father had said. And, of course, there would be no more babies. No one wanted to go through that again.

  She put her hand on Jimmy’s knee and said, “How you doing, G.I. Joe?” His mother was always calling him by different nicknames, often made up on the spot, Jimmy half the time not knowing who the name referred to.

  He shrugged. “You know.”

  “You didn’t say anything to Dave.”

  “You wouldn’t let me move, Ma.”

  His mother lifted her hand back off his knee and hugged herself in the chill that was deepening with the dark. “I meant after. When he was still outside.”

  “I’ll see him tomorrow in school.”

  Her mother fished in the pocket of her jeans for her Kents and lit one, blew the smoke out in a rush. “I don’t think he’ll be going in tomorrow.”

  Jimmy finished his hot dog. “Well, soon, then. Right?”


  His mother nodded and blew some more smoke out of her mouth. She cupped her elbow in her hand and smoked and looked up at Dave’s windows. “How was school today?” she said, though she didn’t seem real interested in an answer.

  Jimmy shrugged. “Okay.”

  “I met that teacher of yours. She’s cute.”

  Jimmy didn’t say anything.

  “Real cute,” his mother repeated into a gray ribbon of exhaled smoke.

  Jimmy still didn’t say anything. Most of the time he didn’t know what to say to his parents. His mother was worn out so much. She stared off at places Jimmy couldn’t see and smoked her cigarettes, and half the time didn’t hear him until he’d repeated himself a couple times. His father was pissed off usually, and even when he wasn’t and could be kind of fun, Jimmy would know that he could turn into a pissed-off drunk guy any second, give Jimmy a whack for saying something he might have laughed at half an hour before. And he knew that no matter how hard he tried to pretend otherwise, he had both his father and mother inside of him—his mother’s long silences and his father’s sudden fits of rage.

  When Jimmy wasn’t wondering what it would be like to be Miss Powell’s boyfriend, he sometimes wondered what it would be like to be her son.

  His mother was looking at him now, her cigarette held up by her ear, her eyes small and searching.

  “What?” he said, and gave her an embarrassed smile.

  “You got a great smile, Cassius Clay.” She smiled back at him.

  “Yeah?”

  “Oh, yeah. You’re gonna be a heartbreaker.”

  “Uh, okay,” Jimmy said, and they both laughed.

  “You could talk a little more,” his mother said.

  You could, too, Jimmy wanted to say.

  “That’s okay, though. Women like the silent type.”

  Over his mother’s shoulder, Jimmy saw his father stumble out of the house, his clothes wrinkled and his face puffy with sleep or booze or both. His father looked at the party going on in front of him like he couldn’t imagine where it had come from.

  His mother followed Jimmy’s gaze and when she looked back at him, she was worn out again, the smile gone so completely from her face, you’d have been surprised she knew how to make one. “Hey, Jim.”

  He loved it when she called him “Jim.” It made him feel like they were in on something together.

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m real glad you didn’t get in that car, baby.” She kissed his forehead and Jimmy could see her eyes glistening, and then she stood up and walked over to some of the other mothers, kept her back to her husband.

  Jimmy looked up and saw Dave in the window staring down at him again, a soft yellow light on somewhere in the room behind him now. This time, Jimmy didn’t even try to wave back. With the police and reporters all gone now, and the party so deep in swing no one probably remembered what had started it, Jimmy could feel Dave in that apartment, alone except for his crazy mother, surrounded by brown walls and weak yellow lights as the party throbbed on the street below.

  And he was glad, too, once again, that he hadn’t gotten in that car.

  Damaged goods. That’s what Jimmy’s father had said to his mother last night: “Even if they find him alive, the kid’s damaged goods. Never be the same.”

  Dave raised a single hand. He held it up by his shoulder and didn’t move it for a long time, and as Jimmy waved back, he felt a sadness weed its way into him and go deep and then spread out in small waves. He didn’t know whether the sadness had something to do with his father, his mother, Miss Powell, this place, or Dave holding that hand so steady as he stood in the window, but whatever caused it—one of those things or all of them—it would never, he was sure, come back out again. Jimmy, sitting on the curb, was eleven years old, but he didn’t feel it anymore. He felt old. Old as his parents, old as this street.

  Damaged goods, Jimmy thought, and let his hand drop back to his lap. He watched Dave nod at him and then pull down the shade to go back inside that too-quiet apartment with its brown walls and ticking clocks, and Jimmy felt the sadness take root in him, nestle up against his insides as if finding a warm home, and he didn’t even try to wish it back out again, because some part of him understood that there was no point.

  He got up off the curb, not sure for a second what he meant to do. He felt that itchy, antsy need to either hit something or do something new and nutty. But then his stomach growled, and he realized he was still hungry, so he headed back for another hot dog, hoping they still had some left.

  FOR A FEW DAYS, Dave Boyle became a minor celebrity, and not just in the neighborhood, but throughout the state. The headline the next morning in the Record American read LITTLE BOY LOST/LITTLE BOY FOUND. The photograph above the fold showed Dave sitting on his stoop, his mother’s thin arms draped across his chest, a bunch of smiling kids from the Flats mugging for the camera on either side of Dave and his mother, everyone looking just happy as can be, except for Dave’s mother, who looked like she’d just missed her bus on a cold day.

  The same kids who’d been with him on the front page started calling him “freak boy” within a week at school. Dave would look in their faces and see a spite he wasn’t sure they understood any better than he did. Dave’s mother said they probably got it from their parents and don’t you pay them any mind, Davey, they’ll get bored and forget all about it and be your friends next year.

  Dave would nod and wonder if there was something about him—some mark on his face that he couldn’t see—which made everyone want to hurt him. Like those guys in the car. Why had they picked him? How had they known he’d climb in that car, and that Jimmy and Sean wouldn’t? Looking back, that’s how it seemed to Dave. Those men (and he knew their names, or at least the names they’d called each other, but he couldn’t bring himself to use them) had known Sean and Jimmy wouldn’t have gotten into that car without a fight. Sean would have run for his house, screaming, probably, and Jimmy—they’d have had to knock Jimmy cold to get him inside. The Big Wolf had even said it a few hours into their drive: “You see that kid in the white T-shirt? Way he looked at me, no real fear, no nothing? Kid’s gonna fuck someone up someday, not lose a night of sleep over it.”

  His partner, the Greasy Wolf, had smiled. “I like a little fight.”

  Big Wolf shook his head. “He’d bite your thumb off just pulling him into the car. Clean off, the little fucker.”

  It helped to give them dopey names: Big Wolf and Greasy Wolf. It helped Dave to see them as creatures, wolves hidden under costumes of human skin, and Dave himself as a character in a story: the Boy Taken by Wolves. The Boy Who Escaped and made his way through the damp woods to an Esso station. The Boy Who’d Remained Calm and Crafty, always looking for a way out.

  In school, though, he was just the Boy Who Got Stolen, and everyone let their imaginations run as to what had happened during those four lost days. In the bathroom one morning, a seventh-grader named Junior McCaffery sidled up to the urinal beside Dave and said, “Did they make you suck it?” and all his seventh-grader friends had started laughing and making kissing noises.

  Dave zipped his fly with trembling fingers, his face red, and turned to face Junior McCaffery. He tried to put a mean look in his eyes, and Junior frowned and slapped him across the face.

  You could hear the sound of it echo in the bathroom. One seventh-grader gasped like a girl.

  Junior said, “You got something to say, queer? Huh? You want me to hit you again, faggot?”

  “He’s crying,” someone said.

  “He is,” Junior McCaffery shrieked, and Dave’s tears fell harder. He felt the numbness in his face turn into a sting, but it wasn’t the pain that bothered him. Pain had never bothered him all that much, and he’d never cried from it, not even when he’d crashed his bike and sliced his ankle open on the pedal as he fell, and that had taken seven stitches to close. It was the range of emotions he could feel pouring from the boys in the bathroom that cut into him. Hat
e, disgust, anger, contempt. All directed at him. He didn’t understand why. He’d never bothered anyone his whole life. Yet they hated him. And the hate made him feel orphaned. It made him feel putrid and guilty and tiny, and he wept because he didn’t want to feel that way.

  They all laughed at his tears. Junior danced around for a moment, his face twisted up in rubbery contortions as he aped Dave’s blubbering. When Dave finally got it under control, reduced it to a few sniffles, Junior slapped him again, the same place, just as hard.

  “Look at me,” Junior said as Dave felt a fresh burst of tears explode from his eye sockets. “Look at me.”

  Dave looked up at Junior, hoping to see compassion or humanity or even pity—he’d take pity—in his face, but all he saw was an angry, laughing glare.

  “Yeah,” Junior said, “you sucked it.”

  He feinted another slap at Dave and Dave dropped his head and cringed, but Junior was walking away with his friends, all of them laughing as they left the bathroom.

  Dave remembered something Mr. Peters, a friend of his mother’s who slept over occasionally, once said to him: “Two things you never take from a man—his spit or his slap. They’re both worse than a punch, and a man does that to you, you try to kill him if you can.”

  Dave sat down on the bathroom floor and wished he had that in himself—the will to kill someone. He’d start with Junior McCaffery, he supposed, and move on to Big Wolf and Greasy Wolf, if he ever ran into them again. But, truth was, he just didn’t think he could. He didn’t know why people were mean to other people. He didn’t understand. He didn’t understand.

  After the bathroom incident, word seemed to come down from on high or something and spread through the school, so that everyone from the third grade on up had heard about what Junior McCaffery did to Dave and how Dave had responded. A judgment was arrived at, and Dave found that even the few classmates who’d been his sort-of friends after he’d first returned to school started treating him like a leper.