Haggerty tried to imagine the girl's life—the little girl visiting her father in prison, the police cars in the driveway after school, urgent phone calls in the middle of the night, her mother dragging her from bed to hide with a neighbor. And in high school, the boys watching her from a distance, leaning against the fence at the convent school as she walked past, their eyes following her to the car, where Tommy Russo chewed his cigar.
Haggerty smiled. She knew these boys, had met them at the fence when the afternoon bell rang. The nuns watched from the windows, taking notes on which girls tugged their skirts up at the afternoon bell, accepted drags on a boy's cigarettes, or, shielded by a crowd of boys, slipped into a car for the ride home. But Kate Haggerty, a lawyer's daughter, had gotten grades and gotten out. If she smiled at the memory of the boys at the fence, it was because distance is kind to such boys, smoothing their rough edges, giving their crude jokes, their dangling cigarettes, their battered cars the innocence of a life that holds no claim anymore. And if you can't get out? Haggerty wondered. If you're marked by the rumor of violence, the need for silence? If the boys at the fence watch you with wary eyes, what then?
"You marry one," she murmured. "The first one who has the courage to ask you."
She turned back to the news clipping, the photograph of Defeo pushing his way through the crowd, his eyes empty. A small guy, but wiry. His face was pale, the dark hair combed back. He had a weak mouth, curled up at one edge in a sarcastic grin.
A boy who wants that life, who watches with envy as the car drives you away.
* * *
"This wedding thing, it's gonna kill me."
Russo could see him in the rearview, flicking the ash from his cigar through a crack in the window.
"Angela, she's got this list. The fucking florist, the photographer, the band. It's three feet long, Tommy."
He leaned forward, peering through the windshield. A block away, a car pulled into the parking lot of the International House of Pancakes, stopping in the pale light of the streetlamp. A Chevy, blue. He settled back in his seat.
"You think I'm kidding? She calls 'em all at least twice a week. The colors are wrong. The song list is too short, some fucking thing."
"Keeps her busy."
"Am I complaining?"
"Yeah, Johnny."
"All right. Give me a break here, Tommy. It's making me crazy, that's all I'm saying. Like we're launching a ship here, or something."
His cigar glowed in the darkness.
"She's busy, she's happy," Russo said. "Got no time to think, you know?"
"Maria came to me; I figured, you know, it's too soon. I told her, 'Your mother, she's not ready for this. She's still thinking about Vinnie, right?' I mean, Tommy, I'd wake up in the middle of the night, and she's crying. Every night this happened. I get up in the morning, she's got the covers up over her head. I come back a couple hours later, she's still there. How's she gonna make a wedding?"
The cigar glowed. Like it was his fault, Russo thought. Angie screaming at him. What's he gonna do about it? Doesn't he care? And him just sitting there, listening to it. Asks me one day, can we get a guy inside the prison? I told him, we got a dozen guys in there. They can't get at this guy. Sleeps with the guards, for Christ's sake. Just wait, I told him. He's gonna get out of there one day.
Tell her, he says, shaking his head. Tell her.
"Maria, she wants to go right in there, give her the news. What am I gonna say, no? So next thing I know, Angie's outta bed, she's in the kitchen on the phone to Mr. Charles, making an appointment to get her hair done. Telling me she's gotta start looking for a dress, for Christ's sake."
He flicked at his lip with one finger.
"I'll tell you, though, I gotta get outta there, she starts with that list."
"Here he comes," Russo said.
A second car turned into the restaurant lot—a Lincoln, the leather roof shining under the lights.
"Look at him in that car."
"He's got an account down at the Soft-Wipe. You can see him over there every morning."
Johnny grunted. He pressed a button, and the window rolled down. He leaned forward.
The Lincoln parked in front of the entrance. As the headlights died, the Chevy pulled out, tires squealing. It swung past the Lincoln, came to a sudden stop. A man leaped out of the passenger side, approached the car. Even from their distance, they could see the driver look up, surprised, raising one fat arm as the man yanked the door open, lifted the gun . . .
* * *
Jackie Mullen felt the door jerked from his grasp. He looked up, saw the gun reflected in the window, raised one hand. The gun swatted his hand aside, nestled in the hollow of his ear.
"Wait," he whispered.
* * *
Three faint pops, echoing along the wet street. Jackie slumped across the front seat. The gunman trotted back to the Chevy. It pulled out with a screech, bumped over a curb in a shower of sparks. Headlights flaring, it rounded the corner and pulled to a stop beside them.
Johnny nodded to the driver, looked past him at the gunman.
"All right, Frankie," he said. "Angie said to remind you 'bout the fitting tomorrow. Mr. Tux, on Washington."
The passenger nodded, a flash of teeth, and the Chevy roared off. Johnny settled back in his seat, the cigar glowing.
"Okay, Tommy. Let's go."
PART III
VOYEURS AND OUTSIDERS
TOWNIES
BY ANDRE DUBUS
Merrimack River
(Originally published in 1980)
The campus security guard found her. She wore a parka and she lay on the footbridge over the pond. Her left cheek lay on the frozen snow. The college was a small one, he was the only guard on duty, and in winter he made his rounds in the car. But partly because he was sleepy in the heated car, and mostly because he wanted to get out of the car and walk in the cold dry air, wanted a pleasurable solitude within the imposed solitude of his job, he had gone to the bridge.
He was sixty-one years old, a tall broad man, his shoulders slumped, and he was wide in the hips and he walked with his toes pointed outward, with a long stride which appeared slow. His body, whether at rest or in motion, seemed the result of sixty-one years of erosion, as though all his life he had been acted upon and, with just enough struggle to keep going, he had conceded; fifty years earlier he would have sat quietly at the rear of a classroom, scraped dirt with his shoe on the periphery of a playground. In a way, he was the best man to find her. He was not excitable, he was not given to anger, he was not a man of action: when he realized the girl was dead he did not think immediately of what he ought to do, of what acts and words his uniform and wages required of him. He did not think of phoning the police. He knelt on the snow, so close to her that his knee touched her shoulder, and he stroked her cold cheek, her cold blonde hair.
He did not know her name. He had seen her about the campus. He believed she had died of an overdose of drugs or a mixture of drugs and liquor. This deepened his sorrow. Often when he thought of what young people were doing to themselves, he felt confused and sad, as though in the country he loved there was a civil war whose causes baffled him, whose victims seemed wounded and dead without reason. Especially the girls, and especially these girls. He had lived all his life in this town, a small city in northeastern Massachusetts; once there had been a shoe industry. Now that was over, only three factories were open, and the others sat empty along the bank of the Merrimack. Their closed windows and the dark empty rooms beyond them stared at the street, like the faces of the old and poor who on summer Sundays sat on the stoops of the old houses farther upriver and stared at the street, the river, the air before their eyes. He had worked in a factory, as a stitcher. When the factory closed he got a job driving a truck, delivering fresh loaves of bread to families in time for their breakfast. Then people stopped having their bread delivered. It was a change he did not understand. He had loved the smell of bread in the morning and its warmth in his
hands. He did not know why the people he had delivered to would choose to buy bread in a supermarket. He did not believe that the pennies and nickels saved on one expense ever showed up in your pocket.
When they stopped eating fresh bread in the morning he was out of work for a while, but his children were grown and his wife did not worry, and then he got his last and strangest job. He was not an authorized constable, he carried no weapons, and he needed only one qualification other than the usual ones of punctuality and subservience: a willingness to work for very little money. He was so accustomed to all three that none of them required an act of will, not even a moment's pause while he made the decision to take and do the job. When he worked a daylight shift he spent some time ordering possible vandals off the campus: they were usually children on bicycles; sometimes they made him chase them away, and he did this in his long stride, watching the distance lengthen between him and the children, the bicycles. Mostly during the day he chatted with the maintenance men and students and some of the teachers; and he walked the campus, which was contained by an iron fence and four streets, and he looked at the trees. There were trees he recognized, and more that he did not. One of the maintenance men had told him that every kind of New England tree grew here. There was one with thick, low, spreading branches and, in the fall, dark red leaves; sometimes students sat on the branches.
The time he saw three girls in the tree he was fooled: they were pretty and they wore sweaters in the warm autumn afternoon. They looked like the girls he had grown up knowing about: the rich girls who came from all parts of the country to the school, and who were rarely seen in town. From time to time some of them walked the three blocks from the campus to the first row of stores where the commercial part of the town began. But most of them only walked the one block, to the corner where they waited for the bus to Boston. He had smelled them once, as a young man. It was a winter day. When he saw them waiting for the bus he crossed the street so he could walk near them. There were perhaps six of them. As he approached, he looked at their faces, their hair. They did not look at him. He walked by them. He could smell them and he could feel their eyes seeing him and not seeing him. Their smells were of perfume, cold fur, leather gloves, leather suitcases. Their voices had no accents he could recognize. They seemed the voices of mansions, resorts, travel. He was too conscious of himself to hear what they were saying. He knew it was idle talk; but its tone seemed peremptory; he would not have been surprised if one of them had suddenly given him a command. Then he was away from them. He smelled only the cold air now; he longed for their smells again: erotic, unattainable, a world that would never be open to him. But he did not think about its availability, any more than he would wish for an African safari. He knew people who hated them because they were rich. But he did not. In the late sixties more of them began appearing in town and they wore blue jeans and smoked on the street. In the early seventies, when the drinking age was lowered, he heard they were going to the bars at night, and some of them got into trouble with the local boys. Also, the college started accepting boys, and they lived in the dormitories with the girls. He wished all this were not so; but by then he wished much that was happening was not so.
When he saw the three girls in the tree with low spreading branches and red leaves, he stopped and looked across the lawn at them, stood for a moment that was redolent of his past, of the way he had always seen the college girls, and still tried to see them: lovely and nubile, existing in an ambience of benign royalty. Their sweaters and hair seemed bright as the autumn sky. He walked toward them, his hands in his back pockets. They watched him. Then he stood under the tree, his eyes level with their legs. They were all biting silenced giggles. He said it was a pretty day. Then the giggles came, shrill and relentless; they could have been monkeys in the tree. There was an impunity about the giggling that was different from the other graceful impunity they carried with them as they carried the checkbooks that were its source. He was accustomed to that. He looked at their faces, at their vacant eyes and flushed cheeks; then his own cheeks flushed with shame. It was marijuana. He lifted a hand in goodbye.
He was not angry. He walked with lowered eyes away from the giggling tree, walked impuissant and slow across the lawn and around the snack bar, toward the library; then he shifted direction and with raised eyes went toward the ginkgo tree near the chapel. There was no one around. He stood looking at the yellow leaves, then he moved around the tree and stopped to read again the bronze plaque he had first read and marveled at his second day on the job. It said the tree was a gift of the class of 1941. He stood now as he had stood on that first day, in a reverie which refreshed his bruised heart, then healed it. He imagined the girls of 1941 standing in a circle as one of the maintenance men dug a hole and planted the small tree. The girls were pretty and hopeful and had sweethearts. He thought of them later in that year, in winter; perhaps skiing while the Arizona took the bombs. He was certain that some of them lost sweethearts in that war, which at first he had followed in the newspapers as he now followed the Red Sox and Patriots and Celtics and Bruins. Then he was drafted. They made him a truck driver and he saw England while the war was still on, and France when it was over. He was glad that he missed combat and when he returned he did not pretend to his wife and family and friends that he wished he had been shot at. Going over, he had worried about submarines; other than that, he had enjoyed his friends and England and France, and he had saved money. He still remembered it as a pleasurable interlude in his life. Looking at the ginkgo tree and the plaque he happily felt their presence like remembered music: the girls then, standing in a circle around the small tree on that spring day in 1941; those who were in love and would grieve; and he stood in the warmth of the afternoon staring at the yellow leaves strewn on the ground like deciduous sunshine.
So this last one was his strangest job: he was finally among them, not quite their servant like the cleaning women and not their protector either: an unarmed watchman and patrolman whose job consisted mostly of being present, of strolling and chatting in daylight and, when he drew the night shift, of driving or walking, depending on the weather, and of daydreaming and remembering and talking to himself. He enjoyed the job. He would not call it work, but that did not bother him. He had long ago ceased believing in work: the word and its connotation of fulfillment as a man. Life was cluttered with these ideas which he neither believed nor disputed. He merely ignored them. He liked wandering about in this job, as he had liked delivering bread and had liked the army; only the stitching had been tedious. He liked coming home and drinking coffee in the kitchen with his wife: the daily chatting which seemed eternal. He liked his children and his grandchildren. He accepted the rest of his life as a different man might accept commuting: a tolerable inconvenience. He knew he was not lazy. That was another word he did not believe in.
He kneeled on the snow and with his ungloved hand he touched her cold blonde hair. In sorrow his flesh mingled like death-ash with the pierced serenity of the night air and the trees on the banks of the pond and the stars. He felt her spirit everywhere, fog-like across the pond and the bridge, spreading and rising in silent weeping above him into the black visible night and the invisible space beyond his ken and the cold silver truth of the stars.
* * *
On the bridge Mike slipped and cursed, catching himself on the wooden guardrail, but still she did not look back. He was about to speak her name but he did not: he knew if his voice was angry she would not stop and if his voice was pleading she might stop and even turn to wait for him but he could not bear to plead. He walked faster. He had the singular focus that came from being drunk and sad at the same time: he saw nothing but her parka and blonde hair. All evening, as they drank, he had been waiting to lie with her in her bright clean room. Now there would be no room. He caught up with her and grabbed her arm and spun her around; both her feet slipped but he held her up.
"You asshole," she said, and he struck her with his fist, saw the surprise and pain in her eyes
, and she started to speak but he struck her before she could; and when now she only moaned he swung again and again, holding her up with his left hand, her parka bunched and twisted in his grip; when he released her she fell forward. He kicked her side. He knew he should stop but he could not. Kicking, he saw her naked in the bed in her room. She was slender. She moaned and gasped while they made love; sometimes she came so hard she cried. He stopped kicking. He knew she had died while he was kicking her. Something about the silence of the night, and the way her body yielded to his boot.
He looked around him: the frozen pond, the tall trees, the darkened library. He squatted down and looked at her red-splotched cheek. He lifted her head and turned it and lowered it to the snow. Her right cheek was untouched; now she looked asleep. In the mornings he usually woke first, hung over and hard, listening to students passing in the halls. Now on the snow she looked like that: in bed, on her pillow. Under the blanket he took her hand and put it around him and he woke and they smoked a joint; then she kneeled between his legs and he watched her hair going up and down.
He stood and walked off the bridge and around the library. His body was weak and sober and it weaved; he did not feel part of it, and he felt no need to hurry away from the campus and the bridge and Robin. What waited for him was home, and a two-mile walk to get there: the room he hated though he tried to believe he did not. For he lived there, his clothes hung there, most of all he slept there, the old vulnerable breathing of night and dreams; and if he allowed himself to hate it then he would have to hate his life too, and himself.
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