by Peter Colt
“Is it a nice place with brick streets and bookstores?”
“No, that is Back Bay. Southie . . . is one of the places that is made up of three-family tenements—generations live in them, assigned floors by age. You had reached the pinnacle of your earning potential and age by the time you moved into the first floor. You also couldn’t walk up to the third floor anymore, which you had moved into when you got married.
“Our part of the neighborhood was a little poorer, a little meaner, and a little more run-down. At some point, someone had gone around selling siding in our neighborhood. It was tar paper on one side and on the other, it looked like brick. Fake brick. Where we grew up, brick houses were for people who had good jobs, education. Every other house ended up with the tar-paper brick. Have you ever seen a three-family with a porch on every floor made of brick? Of course not. It looked good for about a year, and the brick-looking part started to peel. Then it just looked like shit with fake brick stuck to it.
“In our neighborhood, you worked in the mills back when there was work, or the shipyards. Lucky people got jobs with the post office or became teachers, priests, or nurses. The few doctors and lawyers the neighborhood makes move out to the suburbs. The gangsters stay, like some sort of run-down royalty in nylon Celtics team jackets. Most of the men die young, and most of the women live long after they’re gone.
“There is a bar on every corner and a package store, a packie, selling liquor, smokes, and Lotto tickets every few blocks. Most days after work, the men would stop in their favorite bar for a boilermaker or two. Friday and Saturdays, they drink away most of their pay, go home and fight with their wives, and Sunday is the Lord’s Day. Family dinner after church and watching football on the TV. Most of us went to Catholic school, and the kids from big families wore hand-me-downs that were still considered new when the third kid got them. It was poor, and it was depressing. It was mostly shanty Irish.”
“Shanty Irish, as opposed to?”
“Lace curtain Irish . . . those are the ones who make it up the ladder. The ones who become lawyers or doctors. They leave and move to the suburbs and join the country club. Lace curtain Irish are the ones who end up in brick houses or at least single-family ones. They live in nice neighborhoods, and their kids don’t have to wear hand-me-downs. They buy new cars and vote Republican, because they stopped giving a fuck about the most Irish saint of all . . . JFK.
“Danny and I were shanty Irish. My dad worked as a bookkeeper for the sugar company. He was a sweet man who loved poetry and whiskey. Mom was his German war bride. She split when I was six. My dad wrote and drank more. For all of his disappointment and drinking, I don’t think he ever hit me. A rarity in a place where slapping a child was considered liberal parenting.
“Growing up half-Kraut meant I was always the Indian in Cowboys and Indians. I got in a lot of fights. I lost a lot of them. Veteran’s Day was like running the gauntlet. My dad’s drinking and perpetually broken heart meant we were poor. But he had books. He loved books, and I was always reading. The library was the safest, nicest place I had ever been in.
“Danny grew up next door. He was skinny and bad at sports. My dad was a sad drunk. Danny’s dad was a mean one. My dad never hit me; Danny’s was an artist with the belt. One summer at the local swimming pool, Danny had so many bruises on his pale Irish skin that he looked like a bag of Wonder Bread.
“The same kids who liked using me as a punching bag because I was half-Kraut loved doing the same to Danny because he was smart and skinny. Danny got it at home from his dad and then again in school. One day I took a swing at one of the Murphy brothers who was picking on Danny. We have been friends ever since.
“We were in a race to leave Southie. Danny was being suffocated by it. He wasn’t going to work in the shipyards or the mills. He wasn’t going into the church, and that would have just left the mob. Not Danny. We both got into colleges. Danny stayed and became a lawyer and left the neighborhood.”
“What made you want to leave?”
“I knew the world was bigger than our few blocks of the neighborhood. I never fit in, never felt at home. I felt like I spoke the language, but that I wasn’t fluent. I was missing out on nuances and was always out of step with everyone else.
“Then Vietnam came. I wasn’t doing well in college and, like lots of other young men going back centuries, I heard the drumbeat and bugle call. Flunking out of college would have meant moving back to Southie. A job in a factory if I was lucky. Going to the same bar for boilermakers every night after work. Nope, not for me. I would have blown my brains out.
“Me, Vietnam saved me. The army let me travel, exposed me to different people and ideas. In Vietnam, I found work that I was good at and loved. Then the cops and now this. In the end, we both got out. Me, I am still trying to figure out what the hell I am doing. Danny is trying to put as much distance between him and the skinny kid in Southie as he can.”
I didn’t tell her that Danny’s ticket out involved some very scary mob people. That they paid well, but that Danny was always on call. Danny had excused himself from more than one family dinner in order to go bail out a guy who another guy called Danny about. Danny spent much of his work life fixing problems and bringing stacks of cash from one guy to another. Danny was the keeper of their secrets and arranged everything that they did that was legal or near legal. He had set up corporations and businesses that washed money. He had found places to put money, on and offshore. Danny had gotten murderers, pimps, drug dealers, and rapists out of prison. Danny kept their soldiers safe and the bosses safer. There was no denying he was valuable to them, and that meant he wasn’t free. I could see why he was hoping Deborah Swift would be his next big client. She might be another step farther from Southie.
The waiter brought us our menus, and we ordered. We split an order of scallops wrapped in bacon. She ordered roast chicken with rosemary and new potatoes. I ordered paella. I am nuts about paella. We split a bottle of California chardonnay that was not as special as its price would lead you to believe. The meal was good and, as usual, the waiters and waitresses all seemed to know her.
“So, you are really a private investigator?”
“Yep.”
“Just like Magnum P.I.?”
“No, I am not that tall. More like Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade. Don’t let my hippie hair fool you.”
“Do you carry a gun?” She leaned forward and used a stage whisper. There was a little more than a hint of cleavage, and I could smell lilacs.
“Yes, I do.”
“All the time?”
“Not in the shower or at the beach.” I hadn’t been to the beach since some in-country R&R in Da Nang . . . we brought our guns to the beach. I didn’t like Wollaston Beach, and I couldn’t afford the Cape and islands in the summer. Plus, my pale Irish flesh burns fast in the summer sun and my scars show. I don’t mind the sunburn.
“Do you have one now?” She had lost the stage whisper, and I squirmed uncomfortably in my chair.
“Yes.” I was uncomfortable with such honesty.
“Why? Do you think that Nantucket is so dangerous?”
“No, I don’t think Nantucket is that dangerous.” On the other hand, I did get pushed off of a bluff this afternoon.
“Okay, why?”
“I grew up in Southie, which was tough, but most things could be settled with our fists. If things were really bad, a bike chain, stick, or knife. When I went to Vietnam, the little brown men were trying to kill me. I respected their prowess. They had spent centuries trying to kill the Chinese, then the Japanese, then the French, and then the Americans. When I showed up, they had been fighting for centuries before there was an America, and they were pretty good at killing foreigners.
“I worked in a dangerous part of a dangerous, stupid war. In our corner of it, they threw their best men at us; they put bounties on our heads. They were not to be taken lightly. A very, very skilled enemy was trying very hard to kill me. I respected their professionalis
m.
“When I came home, I was more scared just trying to be a normal person, going to college and trying to fit in, than I ever was in Vietnam. Home was chaos. In the war, there had been an order to it. Things made sense. Everything we did, everything they did was done for a reason.
“Then I joined the cops. That was true chaos. People weren’t trying to kill like the NVA—they didn’t have the skill—but death was so common and random and casual. There were so many ways to get killed in the cops . . . so many of them random. Car accidents, family disputes, convicts who don’t want to go back, drug dealers, murderers, rapists, crazies, knives, guns, straight razors, baseball bats, and all sorts of other random shit.
“Now I am a private license, off on my own. No artillery and air support. No backup. No boys in blue with nightsticks. Out in the world where people still want to hurt me; it is just me, so I carry a gun.”
She leaned back and looked at me for a long minute. She then picked up her wine and had a sip; every move was slow and deliberate and made me ache a little in the very center of myself. I watched her throat work as she swallowed and thought about the night before, kissing the hollow of her neck right where it met her jawbone. She put the glass down, and her eyes seemed to sparkle and dance in the candlelight.
“Ohh, Tomcat, you are soooo serious. I don’t like guns, but I do like you.” Her smile was what I was growing accustomed to, slightly mocking, with little, pearl-like teeth.
We finished our dinner and decided that dessert would be best in the bar, the old club car itself, in the form of cocktails. I slid a bunch of Mrs. Swift’s twenty-dollar bills in the leather case with the check. We got up and went to the old club car. She walked ahead of me, and I followed. Her ponytail swayed as she walked, and when she walked, it was all hips and shapely bottom. I probably would have followed her anywhere. If I was less of a gentleman, I would have goosed her, and if I were more of one, I wouldn’t have stared so much.
The actual club car itself was narrow and tight. One half of it, the half abutting the restaurant, was made of the bar, with a small cutout for an upright piano, which was being played by a thin, ginger-haired man in his early sixties. He was singing, not the usual jazz piano standards, but songs from my father’s war. We ordered drinks and sat at one of the small tables opposite the bar, next to the windows of the old club car, which looked out at the building next door.
The man playing piano was wearing a pearl-gray suit that spoke of English tailoring, good breeding, good schools, and money. It also spoke of a style that hadn’t been popular since a time when men wore hats outside. He had a neatly trimmed beard that hugged his jaw. A slow parade of scotch and sodas made their way to the piano and back again, but he never seemed to get drunk. He was American but spoke the Queen’s English. The type who said “boot” and “bonnet” instead of “trunk” and “hood,” and believed that serving tea in a mug was a form of sacrilege.
He was a good piano player, but more the talented amateur with good lessons than the classically trained, concert pianist type. He should have been in Rick’s Café Américain or in some bar in London during the Blitz instead of a bar on Nantucket. He certainly played better than I ever would.
“That’s Scotty. He has been here for years.” She said it over the rim of her Manhattan.
“I like what he plays. He isn’t local?” This was said over the rim of my own scotch and soda.
“No, he is from New York but has been playing out here forever. When the tourist season ends, he goes back to Manhattan. He comes back for closing weekend.”
“Everyone knows everything about everyone here?”
“Yes, that is why we don’t have any private eyes of our own out here. No money in it.”
“I can see that. I didn’t get too far out here.”
“Maybe not, but you did get to me, Tomcat. Isn’t that worth the trip?” She was teasing me again.
“Of course, and then some. I just don’t like being wrong or not finding the guy I am supposed to. It is some sort of professional pride.”
“Or male ego, tough guys don’t like striking out?”
“Or not so tough guy, in my case. I can’t deny the male ego thing, but mostly I just like to get results for my clients. I don’t want to be the private investigator who can’t find people.”
“No, I can see where that would be bad for business. On the other hand, could anyone else have found him?” Her eyes were big and earnest, and I felt old.
“Others tried and didn’t get too far, either. I thought that I had been cleverer than them. I thought that an obscure lead led me to him out here. Instead, I just bent the facts into something that fit my theory.”
“Everyone does that. If people didn’t, then no one would ever discover anything new. No one would try to climb mountains or go to the moon.” She put her little, unblemished hand over my rougher, scarred one. “The Earth was flat until someone looked at the facts and bent them to their theory, and the Earth became a sphere. I assume you followed the facts and your hunch, your theory, as far as they could be taken. That is what your client was paying you for.”
“Okay, okay. You are right. Let’s not talk about this anymore.” Failure is still failure, and I hate to fail. I find it hard to be philosophical about it. I went to the bar and ordered us two more cocktails. Scotty was singing a dirty song about Hitler’s underwear and Göring’s boots and Churchill’s cigar. Most of the crowd was too young to get most of the references, but Scotty sang the dirty parts with gusto, and the crowd played along. The drinks came, and I put more of Mrs. Swift’s money on the bar. I wanted to hear The Doors or The Rolling Stones or something other than my father’s music. I carried our cocktails to our little table and sat down.
“Tomcat, you brought me another drink. You are trying to get me drunk and have your way with me.” Her nose was wrinkled, and her smile was as crooked as ever.
“You are right about that.” I smiled, and it was pretty crooked, too.
“Silly, Tomcat, you don’t even have to get me drunk to do that.” She said it and somehow, without leaving her chair or moving too much, she shimmied in her seat. It was a shimmy that spoke of hips and breasts and of all things good and true.
“Well, I don’t mind buying you a drink.” We drank in companionable silence for a while. When we did talk, it was about nothing in particular. Not small talk, just not the type of conversation that would last in either of our memories.
“So, what now, you go back to the mainland and go on looking for this guy?”
“No, I have pretty much hit a dead end.”
“Now what? Another case like this one—travel, sex, adventure, and glamour?”
I laughed a little. “No, most of my cases aren’t like this at all.”
She arched an eyebrow. “What are they like?”
“Most of the time I work divorce cases; you know, waiting to catch someone’s husband or wife cheating, and taking pictures. They are in my office paying me good money. They already know, they just want me to confirm it. Or I work insurance fraud cases.”
“Insurance fraud?”
“Yeah, someone claims to be injured on the job. Makes a workers’ comp claim, and I get sent to take pictures of them running a marathon or skydiving, or catch them doing things that they couldn’t do if they were really hurt. Once in a blue moon, the fraud is about something that someone is claiming to be lost, destroyed, or stolen, so they can collect the insurance payout. Usually it is workers’ comp. Once in a while I get a missing persons case, but, for the most part, it is a lot of long, boring hours.”
“It sounds seedy.” She wrinkled her nose a little.
“It is seedy, but I have to eat.” The truth is, I liked the freedom, being my own boss and making my own hours. I didn’t mind cold, stiff hours sitting in a car, watching and waiting. I loved the occasional interesting case that came my way, and I loved just being in the game.
Then it was time to go, which in this case involved her havin
g to stop and say goodbye to a fair amount of people. Saying good-bye involved her hugging a lot and my standing awkwardly off to one side. We got near the door, and I helped her on with her coat and shrugged into my own. Outside, the wind was still blowing, and it was still cold. We managed to stop in a few doorways to steal kisses on the way back to her apartment. It was nice, nice in a way that I had forgotten about. We made our way up the stairs to her apartment, and inside we ended up on the couch in a brief, urgent, passionate struggle.
Afterward, I lit the fire, and she lit a joint. We shared the joint, bourbon, and each other’s warmth. Somewhere, somehow our clothes ended up in heaps and piles around her living room. Outside, the wind shrieked and howled, and inside it was warm. I could smell sex and pot and felt mellow by the fire. She was sitting behind me, tracing lazy circles on my back.
“Tomcat, this is nice.”
“Yes, it is. When I was in Nam, this is exactly what I thought about when I thought about coming home.”
“Tomcat, you know how to make a girl feel good about herself.” She pulled my face to hers, and we kissed. Her fingers started to probe my new, darkening bruises.
“These are new. What were you doing this afternoon?”
“Um, someone pushed me off of the bluff by the lighthouse.”
“Sankaty Light? Who would do that?”
“I have no idea. Do you have a jealous boyfriend?”
“Um, I do have an ex . . . but I can’t picture him doing anything like that.”
“Don’t worry about it. There must be better things for us to talk about.”
She showed me that I was right. We ended up spending the night on the couch, making love and sleeping and waking up to make love again.
I woke up with a headache that reminded me that I couldn’t drink like I could ten years ago. The bright, painful shaft of sunlight in my eye didn’t help, either. I was stiff and sore and felt as though I had been worked over with a lead pipe. I heard someone groan and realized it was me. I managed to ease myself into a sitting position and would have shot myself except I was pretty sure that a gunshot would only make my head hurt worse. I lit my first cigarette and coughed as it burned my lungs. Shelly padded in from the kitchen wearing my shirt and handed me a glass of tomato juice.
