The Town: A Novel

by Chuck Hogan

  “And you’re still here. So what I’m asking for now is, please—let me work on trying to impress you for a change. Please.”

  She nodded, unconvinced.

  Doug made a pretend move for his wallet. “I have a license and a Blockbuster card.”

  “Just tell me, Doug.” She reached out and gripped his wrists. “Tell me if I’m making a mistake. I will still make the mistake. That’s no problem. I just want to know now.”

  “I’m saying there is no—”

  “Aaah!” Her tiny scream startled a nearby family of ducks. She pulled on his arms, staring into his eyes. “Yes or no. Am I making a mistake here, or not?”

  Doug looked down at her hands manacling his wrists. He knew what he wanted to say, and he knew what she was waiting for him to say. All he had to do was say it.

  “No.”

  She stared hard, then let go of him, pointing a finger at his chest. “You promised.”

  Doug nodded. “Okay.”

  A bird fluttering to a nearby trellis caught her eye, and she watched it peck at some vines, softening her mood a bit. “So much agitation around me these days,” she said. “Stuff swirling. But with you, when I’m alone with you—there’s a silence, there’s peace. You make all that other stuff go away.” The bird disappeared to a high branch. “But again—whether any of this is real or not, I have no idea.”

  “Maybe if we just stop talking about it. Maybe if we just let it be.”

  “I’m not looking for a guarantee. Just good faith.”

  Doug nodded, feeling better about it now himself. “And that’s what I gave you.”

  She relented then, turning to start back, one hand finding its way to the pocket of her jeans, the other into his hand. “Do you think that was our first fight?”

  “Was it?”

  “Maybe just my first freak-out.”

  Relief filled him like breath. “Our first discussion, maybe.”

  “That’s it, a discussion.” She swung their joined hands a little. “I don’t even think true fights are possible between a couple until sex enters the equation.”

  “Yeah,” said Doug at first. “Wait. Is that a vote for fighting, or… ?”

  “A relationship filled only with firsts. Wouldn’t that be the best? No past, no history to worry about, things moving too fast. You and me up on the rooftop, over and over again. Everything light and new.”

  “We could do that.”

  “Could we? Every date our first?”

  “Why not?” He let go of her hand. “Hey, I’m Doug.”

  She smiled. “Claire. Nice to meet you.”

  They shook hands, then Doug looked at his empty palm, shrugging. “Nah. No chemistry.”

  She pushed him away, laughing, then grabbed his hand again, hooking her arm around his, pulling him close.

  CANESTARO’S WAS A PIZZERIA and bistro with café seating on the park end of Peterborough Street. Nice without the Chart House finery, no table linen, butter with the bread instead of oil. He was comfortable here. With the sun still peeking over the high wall of apartment buildings lining the other side of the street, they claimed one of the sidewalk tables and split a pizza, half ’roni, half chicken and broccoli. Echoes of Fenway Park reached them from two streets away, the announcer droning, “Vaughn. First base, Vaughn.”

  Claire was better by the time the food came, and the meal passed as the best ones do, offering few great revelations but constant little connections, two people dining on each other’s character, curious and gentle as nibbling fish. Then she said something about his mother that threw him. “Just that, how, whenever you talk about your mother leaving, it’s like she escaped from you and your father. As opposed to, well—deserting you.”

  “Yeah,” he said, surprised both by the change in topic and the observation itself, never having thought of it that way. “Guess you’re right.”

  “Why?”

  “I guess,” he said, “because it’s true.”

  “But you were six years old. How can you blame yourself?”

  “No, I hear you.”

  “No one ever told you what she was going through? There must have been some signs.…”

  “No one told me anything about my mother. Not my father, that’s for sure. But that’s also because, pretty much, he was the problem.”

  “How so?”

  Cars rolled past while he deliberated. “Well,” he said, “you’re not gonna like it.”

  “What do you mean, I’m not gonna like it?”

  The strangest thing was, he wanted to tell her this. It amazed him how honest he wanted to be, how dry he felt under the broad umbrella of the lie. “You know how you asked me one time about Charlestown, bank robbers?”

  She just looked at him, waiting for him to say something other than what she was thinking.

  “Yeah,” said Doug, unable to spare her. “I didn’t say anything because… well, because.”

  “My God. I never thought… I’m so sorry—”

  “No, no.” Doug grunted a harsh laugh. “You’re not the sorry one. Doesn’t matter to me, I’m used to it. I didn’t say anything because of you.”

  She looked off down the street, grappling with this.

  “Two years after my mother left us, he drew a twenty-one-month prison sentence, meaning I drew twenty-one months in a foster home. I was eight. I’ll never forget when he got out, how he made out like he was the hero, rescuing me. I was sixteen when he went up again, and that time the bank took our house. I moved in with a friend’s mother who was basically raising me anyway.” He shrugged and took a deep breath, looking at his pizza. “That’s my tale of woe. No one ever tells me about my mother. But between my father, being who he was, living like an outlaw, and me there, a little hydrant-sized version of him—I think it was probably too much for her. Probably her or us, you know? In her mind, I think she had no choice. I always assume she went off and started up another family somewhere, and she’s happier there. I don’t blame her. But—I wouldn’t mind talking about something else either.”

  It was dizzying to speak of such things. Dizzying and freeing at the same time.

  “So many of my friends,” said Claire, after a respectful silence. “They pick the wrong guy, again and again.” A cheer from the ballpark crowd reached them like a cry of attack from a distant battlefield. “I wonder why so many girls seem dead set on picking out a guy who’s bound to make them unhappy.”

  “I don’t know,” said Doug, careful here. “Is it that, or are they picking out someone they think they can help? Maybe someone they can save?”

  She poked around her side salad, considering a tomato wedge. “But how often does that happen, right? What’s the success rate there?” She declined the tomato, laying it back on her dish. “And why aren’t there more guys out there looking for women to save?”

  Doug shrugged. “Maybe there are.”

  Claire looked him over, his face, and she smiled. “You are helping me, you know. It’s so bizarre, the random way we met. Almost like you were sent here to help me.”

  Doug nodded, sincere. “I want to help you.” Then he opened his hands to indicate the pizza, the restaurant, the fading day. “I’m having a good time. A really good time.”

  She pulled her napkin from her lap and dropped it on the table, pushing back her chair. “Good. Then you’ll miss me while I’m gone.”

  After some confusion at the door with an exiting waitress, Claire disappeared inside to the bathroom and Doug sat back. The sun was just slipping behind the apartment row, a wall of shadow reaching across the street. Organ music played from the ballpark, distorted and warbling with echo. He tipped his chair back until it hit the pointy tips of the wrought-iron fencing and looked up at the sky, the smoky contrail of a jet plane. He ruffled his hair with his hand and his mind unwound, following one of those hopscotching strings of reason, wondering what they would do next, anticipating the bill, thinking about how much clean cash he had left, remembering Foxwoods and how l
ong he had to drive every time he needed to wash currency. If only there were an Indian casino someplace where he could go and wash his soul.

  He set the front two feet of his chair back down on the sidewalk terrace and pulled his money roll from his jeans pocket. As he was counting it, something jabbed into the back of his neck, and at first he grinned, thinking it was Claire. Then he remembered the short fence and realized it had to be someone off the street.

  “Gimme all ya money,” said a low voice.

  Doug tensed, his adrenaline response delayed by the friendly street setting, the other diners eating calmly, the cars rolling past.

  The stickup man appeared next to him in a white nylon Red Sox jersey untucked over jeans, and small, stupid, syrup-lens sunglasses: Jem with a whitelipped smirk.

  “I froze you, fothermucker.”

  Doug sat up with a hard glance at the pizzeria door. The adrenaline arrived and he started to stand out of his chair before stopping himself.

  “What’re you doing here?” said Jem, pulling off his shades to scan up and down Peterborough, then hanging them on the top button of his shirt and stepping over the fence, dropping into Claire’s seat across from Doug.

  “What?” said Doug, lost, another cheat at the door.

  “Chicken and broccoli?” Jem scooped up the slice Claire had been eating, bit into it. “Fuck is this? Who you here with?” Smiling, having fun.

  “No one,” said Doug—the strangest, most feeble lie.

  “No one, huh?” said Jem, reaching for her lemonade glass. He put his lips on her straw and sucked, and Doug’s insides went icy. “’s’up with you?”

  Jem looked straight enough, his eyes lacking their doomsday blur, maybe only three or four beers in. The door was still closed. Doug peeled off two twenties and spilled them on the table, making to stand. He’d explain it to her later. “Wanna get outta here?”

  But Jem stayed hunkered over his slice, waving him back down. “I’m cool, take your time.” He gobbled the slice up to the crust. “But who puts fuckin’ broccoli on a pizza?”

  The door opened and Claire stepped back outside, and Doug went deaf.

  Claire slowing, strange. Smiling at Doug, but odd, walking up to the man sitting in her chair.

  Jem gnawing on crust, oblivious. Looking up. Standing, not shocked.

  Hi, Claire’s lips say.

  Hey, say Jem’s, still chewing. Not much taller than her, but broad, all shoulders and arms and neck. Guess I’m in your seat.

  Surrendering the chair with his jerk-gentleman flourish. Standing behind her now, grinning at Doug. The jaw of his small head, chewing.

  This was no chance meeting. Suddenly Doug was no longer intimidated, only angry. The same adrenaline surge, a different state of mind.

  Claire also looking at Doug, awkward. She gave up waiting for him and turned to Jem to introduce herself, offering her hand, sound roaring back into Doug’s head.

  “I’m Claire. Claire Keesey.”

  “Jem.” He took her hand, a perfunctory up-and-down shake.

  “Jim?”

  “Jem,” he said. “Just Jem.”

  She nodded, turning again to Doug for help.

  “I’m a friend of this loser right here,” Jem told her. “He lives with me. Not with me, domestic partners, but above me, my house.”

  “Oh?” she said.

  A snake’s grin as Jem held her chair for her. Claire sat as offered, staring across the wire table at mute Doug.

  Jem retreated to a chair at the end of the table. “Yeah, I came down here to catch the ball game, and what do I see but the Shamrock parked around the corner. Thought I’d walk the block, you know, check up on this guy.” Grin. “Gotta keep tabs, always.”

  Claire said, “The Shamrock?”

  “His machine. Scoundrel, this guy is. Never breathed a word. The secrets he can keep.”

  Claire took them in together. “You two have been friends a long time?”

  “No, only since second grade,” said Jem. “Like brothers, everyone says. Huh, Duggy?”

  Worlds colliding. Doug sat still, there and not there at the same time.

  “I’m sorry,” said Claire, “did you say your name was Jim, or Gem?”

  “Ah, both actually. A combination. You might think it’s because of the family jewels. These ones up here.” He pointed out the grinning blue-white marbles of his eyes. “But the truth is—Duggy knows this—truth is, that’s what the teachers would say when they passed me off to each other, shuttling me around by the scruff of my neck. ‘Here’s this one, he’s a real gem.’ And Jimmy, Gem, it kinda sticked.”

  She wore that distant smile people get when they’re evaluating someone. “A troublemaker, huh?”

  “Oh, the worst. What do you do for yourself there, Claire?”

  It was like watching a movie—Claire taking a slow-mo sip of lemonade through the straw Jem had just sucked on.

  “I work in a bank,” she told him. “Just around the corner from here, one street over. Kenmore Square.”

  “Hey, wait. The BayBanks?” Jem pointed at Doug, then back at Claire. He even snapped his fingers. “Wasn’t that the one… ?”

  “Yes,” she said. “The robbery.”

  “Ha. I don’t know what made me remember that.” He glanced at Doug. “So how’d you two kids meet?”

  Claire looked to Doug to tell the tale—to say something, anything—but he could not. “A Laundromat,” she said, concerned.

  “Laundromat, huh? This guy stealing bras again? Seriously, your socks get mixed up? Love among the bleach, huh?”

  Doug dead-staring at Jem now. Not a crack anywhere in Jem’s grinning facade.

  “Like I said, I was gonna go pick up some cheap seats off a scalper, root-root-root for the home team. Guys interested? Duggy? What do you say?”

  Claire looked at Doug, but Doug’s eyes stayed on Jem.

  “No?” said Jem. “That’s awright anyway. Hate being the third wheel, you know?” He smiled at them both, then formed a gun with his fingers, shooting it at Doug. “Don’t trust a word he says, Claire. What kinda lies he been telling you?”

  Claire watching Doug now. “Wait,” she said. “Do you mean he’s not really an astronaut?”

  Jem pointed her out to Doug. “Hey, that’s quick, that’s spunk. Very good. No, but, yeah, we are both in the space program, so if you got any friends interested in that stuff, who also happen to be redheads and a little bit on the easy side…”

  “I will let them know.”

  “You do that, cool. She’s awright, Duggy. Oh, hey.” He patted the table before he stood. “Don’t get too used to this here, your leisure, loverboy. We got some more work coming our way.”

  Claire said, “You two work together, too?”

  “Told you, we’re tighter than tight. Used to tell each other everything.”

  “You’re a sky-maker too?”

  “That’s us. Another takedown job. My Duggy here, he loves to watch ’em fall.”

  The smile vanished a moment under his dead eyes, and then just as fleetly reemerged. He stepped over the fence onto the sidewalk. “You watch out for this one now, Claire. Remember what I said—pure trouble.”

  Jem slapped Doug hard on the shoulder and took off down the street in a bobbing saunter, replacing the shades on his face. Claire watched him go, her eyes falling to Doug, who was still staring at the empty chair.

  “He seems nice,” she said flatly.

  “That’s being polite.”

  “What is wrong, Doug? You were scaring me.”

  “I wasn’t ready for you to meet him yet.”

  “Is that what you were talking about—the old you?”

  “Yeah.” Doug still staring at the empty chair. “That was some of it.”

  “What’s up with his eyes?”

  Doug could think of no way to answer that question.

  “Are you okay?” she said. “Going to be?”

  “Sure,” he said, surfacing, looking arou
nd, seeing his twenties still on the table. Claire reached for her lemonade again, but this time Doug took the glass from her hand. She stiffened, watching him.

  “You want to be alone?” she said.

  He was alone. Jem had just seen to that.

  20

  WORKOUT

  THE MORNING WAS WET, the rising sun burning off shadows and dampness, raising street steam. Through the cat’s cradle of power and phone wires, falling to eye level as Sackville Street plunged headlong into the Mystic, a barge was being unloaded by tall, pecking cranes. Gulls coasted overhead, dipping and swirling around Doug’s mother’s house, threatening to shit.

  When his father had first lost the house, Doug was so pissed he didn’t come around for years, avoiding Sackville Street altogether. The life he was leading then, that of a drinking man, offered little solace, his mind stewing in boyhood memories and associations, rather than drawing on their strength. But during his stay at MCI Norfolk, all thoughts of home, of the Town, centered around his mother’s house. Not the Monument, not Pearl Street, not the rink. Her house was the first place he visited after his release. The Town was his mother. The Town had raised him. This house was her face, watching over him. These streets were her arms, holding him close.

  Acting impulsively had been the hallmark of Doug’s drinking years, and never had it come to any good. He always wound up hurting people. How had he thought this was going to end any differently?

  It was the lottery mentality. Something he had been working so hard to suppress these past three years: the all-or-nothing play, going after that “marquee score.” It was something else he had inherited from the Town, like his eyes and his face: a gambler’s dream of that one sweet score that would change everything forever.

  He preached this to the others about banks: Don’t be greedy. Don’t overstep, don’t overreach. Get in, get the money, get out. Now he had to take his own advice.

  The thought of Jem standing behind her at the pizzeria—like a flickering image-echo of the two of them at the Kenmore Square vault, a couple waiting for the elevator—gripped his heart like a fist. It crystallized the danger Doug had invited into her life, as well as his own. Staying away meant keeping Jem away from her and the G away from him. No more daydreams about healing Claire Keesey, or magically absolving himself. The best thing he could do for her now, the only thing, as well as for himself, was to let her go.