The Town: A Novel

by Chuck Hogan

  Doug waited, shrugged. “That’s all I get? No trumpets, no angels singing?”

  Frank G. squirmed in his seat. “So—we get this call at the station last week.”

  Doug was startled. Mr. Anonymous made a point of never talking about himself or his work. “The station,” said Doug, alerting Frank G. to his slip.

  “Guy’s hit by a truck on the Fellsway. Okay, no big deal, we suit up and head out to assist EMS, it’s routine. Then, big commotion as we arrive on the scene. Something’s up. Middle of the road is this huge dump truck with a haul full of sand, engine still running. They tell us there’s an elderly man pinned underneath it. Truck’s got four twin sets of wheels, big mothers, and I’m thinking, mashed foot, some poor jaywalker’s looking at a wheelchair for the rest of his days. So my guys are getting out the equipment, and I go round this truck, find the driver sitting on the curb median, bawling into his hands. A big guy, and he’s falling apart, sobbing, asking for a priest. So I know it’s gonna be bad.

  “I go round to look, and my eyes, it takes a second to process this. The tire, the outside one, is right on top of this guy’s pelvis. Flattening it. Inside tire has his legs crushed at the knees. EMTs and a young lady cop are crouching by this guy, attending to him, and my mind’s telling me it’s fake, it’s a movie, guy lying in a hole in the road, dummy legs set on the other side of the tires.

  “And then the old guy’s head turns. I can’t even believe he’s still moving. His head turns and his eyes find me, his mouth open like a baby’s. And now I really can’t believe it. Because I fucking know this guy. It’s Billy T.”

  Doug said, “Whoa, whoa. Billy T.? Sad-sack Billy T.?”

  “From the meetings. The scally cap he always wore, that moth-bitten thing, it’s lying next to the EMT’s medical case. And then I see in his eyes, his wet, little wooden eyes—he recognizes me. He’s trying to place me—I’m in uniform, red helmet, jacket, reflective stripes—but he knows the face. Probably thought I was an angel or something, you know? The body like that, the brain releasing those, whatever they’re called, hormones, opiates, whatever. Least I hope that’s what it does, when you wake up under a dump truck.”

  Frank G. watched steam escape from the triangle torn out of his cup cover.

  “‘Billy,’ I says to him. The people attending to him, they look up at me like he’s my dad or something, I know this guy’s name. One EMT jumps up, takes my arm, handles me like I’m next of kin, tells me Billy was crossing the street against the traffic, truck knocked him down, rolled over him, stopped. Billy T. should be dead, he tells me. Any other way this had happened, he would be gone already. But the truck was like a giant tourniquet, cutting off the bleeding, keeping him alive.

  “Meantime, my crew is scrambling to slide a twenty-five-ton hydraulic jack under the dumper, setting up these two big seventy-ton air bags. They see me huddled with the EMT and think Billy’s my wife’s uncle or something, so they’re working double-time for me, and I’m like, Whoa, whoa, whoa! We raise this thing off him and Billy dies. We leave it where it is, Billy dies too—only more slowly.

  “So now I’ve got the EMT in my face, he’s flipping out on me, talking about surgeons and field amputations and such, and I’m no doctor, but I can see there’s nothing to amputate here. A magician, maybe, could saw Billy T. in two, pull him out, then wave his hand and put him back together again. So I become the point guy on this. I want to go off, sit down with the truck driver, wait for the priest—but I’m the guy now. I have to make the call.

  “So I kneel in the road next to Billy. They’d cut his shirt off and I can see his little heart beating through his old dishrag of a chest, but real slow. He moves his arm—guy’s moving still—reaching for me, so I take his hand. His little fingers are hot, he’s burning up. And the look on his face. But I see his lips are working, so I get down low. Both feet in the grave and he’s still able to whisper to me. ‘Frank,’ he’s says. I yell back to someone to turn off the truck so I can hear, and then the engine goes silent, the whole world goes silent.

  “‘Billy,’ I says to him. ‘My friend.’ All of a sudden this weepy old man’s my friend, like we’re soldiers on a battlefield somewhere, the same unit. I take off my helmet. ‘We gotta lift this truck, Billy. We gotta get it off you. Anything you want to say?’ I don’t know if he’s got kids, what. ‘Any message for anybody, something I can do for you, my friend?’ I keep calling him my friend, over and over. ‘Anything you want to tell me, Billy, anything to say?’

  “And his hand, there’s like this little squeeze of pressure, and I get in tight. I’m right there, him breathing on me, this half-ghost, looking me square in the eye. ‘Frank,’ he whispers. ‘Frank.’

  “I say, ‘What is it, Billy, anything at all.’

  “‘A drink, Frank. Get me a drink.’

  “The EMT next to me, he jumps up again, calling for bottled water, a dying man’s last request. Me, I’m kneeling there as cold as a fish on ice. Because I know Billy T. I know this weepy old, bandy-legged Irish punter with bologna on his breath. He didn’t want any water to drink just then. He didn’t want fucking water.”

  Doug shared Frank G.’s chill, but not his anger. Frank left it hanging there, until Doug finally had to ask, “So what happened?”

  Frank G. looked at him like Doug hadn’t heard a word he’d said. “That’s what happened. That’s the story.”

  “No, what happened to Billy T.?”

  Frank shrugged, pissed. “My guys did the best they could for him. We shimmed some timber cribbing around the wheels to cut down on the vibration, we raised the truck. What happened to Billy T.? They put a sheet over his face and took him away. We hosed off the road and went back to the station.”

  A gust of laughter from the clerk and an Indian customer at the counter—Doug and Frank G. sitting there like two guys who had just donated blood.

  “Okay,” Doug said.

  Frank G. looked up from the study he was making of his coffee cup. “Okay, what?”

  “Okay, so I’m waiting for you to drop some wisdom on me.”

  “Wisdom? I got nothing for you, buddy. I’m fresh out here. Billy T., he was a royal pain in the ass at meeting—but the guy did good work. He was dry some twelve fucking years. I can’t get my mind around this thing.”

  “What, that he—”

  “That with all the work he did, twelve long years—every single day of it he was just marking time until he could take a drink again. Waiting for that day. Like someday he’d hit all nines on the odometer and it would roll over to zero again and he’d get to start fresh. A life with no restrictions on it. And what I want to know is—is that all of us? Just marking time here, waiting? Thinking someday, some miracle’s gonna happen, and we’re going to be free again?”

  Doug nodded. “Maybe, yeah.”

  “Christ, don’t agree with me, Doug. I’m fighting for my life here. What was he thinking, what? That heaven is an open bar? Jesus wiping out pint glasses, setting out a coaster, What’ll you have? That’s what we’re being good for here?”

  “The guy was dying, Frank.”

  “Fuck him.” Frank sat back. “Fuck Billy T.”

  “All right, Frank. Hey.”

  “Fuck you, hey. You weren’t there. How would you like it if I was going down, you holding my hand, and I asked you for a quick pop? Huh? I begged you?”

  “I wouldn’t like it at all.”

  “You’d be sick. Fucking repulsed. All my words here? You’d tell me I was full of shit, and you’d be right.” He dropped his hands on the table. “I am, anyway.”

  “Frank, man,” said Doug, looking around for something to say to him. “I don’t wanna see you like this.”

  “Listen, Doug, you’re still my obligation, you got my number. But I can’t do this anymore. Least not right now.”

  “Whoa, hold up. What are you—”

  “I’m saying maybe you ought to be in the market for another sponsor.”

  “Frank—no
fucking way, Frank. No way. You can’t.”

  “Can. Am.”

  Doug stared. “Frank—you would never let me.”

  “No? How would I stop you? Huh? How you gonna stop me?”

  Doug rubbed his face hard in a panic. Up popped a memory from a longago meeting, one Jem had appeared at—uninvited, twenty minutes late, and stinking drunk. He had dropped into a folding chair two rows behind Doug and, in the middle of Billy T.’s lament, started humming “The Star-Spangled Banner.” When someone finally asked him to leave, Jem burst out crying and started talking about his father and how he never really knew the guy, and all he ever wanted was his love. Two people slid down the row to comfort him, at which point Jem jumped up and cackled, Suckaz!—knocking over chairs and lurching toward the door. Duggy, he had said, c’mon, man, lezz go! And it was Frank who came over to Doug later, telling him, Your friends are afraid of you getting healthy. They want to keep you sick.

  “Frank,” said Doug, still searching for some angle to play, some lever to pull—but all he could summon was unreasonable anger. “Don’t walk out on me now. I need this.”

  “Hey. Sorry if my little crisis of faith is inconvenient for you. Sorry if I’m the one maybe needs a little counseling now.”

  “I—I can’t fucking counsel you. I wouldn’t know the first—”

  “Then respect my decision and leave it at that, for Christ’s sake.” Frank picked up his keys and started to stand, then sat back down again. Something else was tugging at him. “I wasn’t going to tell you this. But this guy came to see me about you.”

  Doug froze. “What guy?”

  “Other day, over at the station house. Showed me an FBI badge, asked if I knew someone named Doug MacRay. We went back and forth on that one a little while, me trying to go the priest-doctor-lawyer route, confidentiality. He wouldn’t have it. Kind of a prick. So I basically told him what I knew. That this Doug M. reminded me of myself some fifteen years ago, and that I was trying to be a sort of priest to him, the way I wish someone’d been a priest to me. I asked this guy, I said to him, ‘You got a priest?’ And he says, ‘Yeah. Me.’ So I tell him, ‘No, then you’re lost. Gotta answer to someone.’ He says, ‘I do answer to someone. The archdiocese of the FBI.’”

  Frawley. What had he told Frank G.? Frank, who had always praised him. Frank, who thought Doug was something.

  “You probably… maybe you heard some things,” Doug said. “About me—did you hear some things?”

  Frank ignored that like he hadn’t heard Doug. “So then this guy, he says to me, ‘Priests don’t hit their wives.’”

  Doug got lost on that one.

  “Yeah,” said Frank, nodding his way through this. “I hope you’re hearing this first from me. I am a shitbag wife-beater. That was my drunk, getting pissed off and slapping around my first wife. Great guy, huh? Good sponsor. Finally she had me arrested one night, but jail time would have meant no fire-fighting job, no salary, and as she was now fixing to divorce me, no alimony. So she dropped the charges. I have her greed to thank for my life now.” Frank smiled bitterly, blowing out a long breath. “So much pride I had. That I’d turned everything around since then. That I’d put down this asshole living inside me.” He shook his head. “Fucking Billy T.,” he mumbled, pulling himself to his feet. “You got my pager if you need it.”

  Doug stood with him, in shock. “Frank…”

  Frank shook his head, unable to look Doug in the face. “Careful crossing that street,” he said, and then he was out the door.

  34

  DEFINITELY GOOD NIGHT

  DOUG TURNED IN HIS seat again, scanning the faces behind him, fans carrying beer caddies up the aisles behind home plate, leaning on the back rail with their scorecards and their ballpark food. The wires in their ears were just radio earphones, and Doug told himself to relax.

  “What are you looking for?” asked Claire, next to him.

  “Nothing,” he said, turning back. He had bought her an official Red Sox dugout jacket after the weather turned chilly in the fifth inning. The cuffs were empty, her hands tucked inside the leather sleeves. Her necklace hung below her throat. “Just taking in the crowd. The Fenway experience. Getting my money’s worth.”

  He looked out past the plate umpire’s broad back to Roger Clemens on the mound, the ace, ten years off his rookie season. Clemens hid his grip behind his glove and stared in, shaking off a sign. He went into his motion, delivered, and the pitch sliced flat off the bat, fouled straight back against the screen—the first ten rows jumping like heads on springs.

  “Are we hiding?” she said.

  Doug turned to her. “What?”

  She shrugged under the bulky jacket, curious. “I don’t know.”

  She had picked up on his sleuth paranoia. A yellow-shirted hawker appeared in the aisle and Doug waved him up, as though a box of Cracker Jack was what he had been looking for all along. “Here we go.”

  “I guess I thought the secretive stuff would go away after a while,” she said, softening her words with a smile. “You being so hard to get hold of. I mean—it’s romantic and all, you leaving me a Red Sox ticket on my garden seat. Just not normal.”

  “It bothers you, yeah? I can give you my phone number, no problem. Just that I’m never home, and I don’t have an answering machine.”

  She shook her head, denying making any demands on him. The kid with the $2.25 price button on his cap came with a rack of oversized Cracker Jack boxes, and Doug busied himself paying for one. The kid was slow making change, his leafy roll of cash drawing Doug’s roving criminal eye. Maybe someday that would go away, he thought. Maybe he could train himself not to watch for these things, not to compulsively puzzle out ways to relieve cash businesses of their profits.

  For the first time in a long time, certainly since he got sober, Doug had nothing lined up. Nothing else he was working on, no jobs, nothing in prep. Frank G.’s defection weighed on him as one more reason to move on. All he had to do now was devise some sort of graceful exit strategy from the Town, some way to tell the others good-bye.

  Claire eyed him as he rose half out of his seat to stuff his cash roll back into his jeans. He remembered how she had fallen silent when he’d pulled it out to pay for her jacket.

  He ripped open the box of caramel popcorn and offered her some, which she declined. “Do you ever see your father much?” she asked.

  Doug looked out to the left-field wall, which was where this question seemed to come from. “I see him once in a while. Why?”

  “What sort of things do you two talk about?”

  “I don’t know. Not much.” He dug down to the bottom of the box for the prize. “Hey, flag tattoo,” he said, making to hand it to her, but with her hands pulled into her cuffs, he tucked it into her jacket pocket.

  “I guess I’m just imagining my father in prison.…”

  Why was she pawing him with questions? “I’m not my father,” he told her. “Maybe that’s what you’re asking. It took a while, because as a kid I idolized him—it was just him and me, after all. Took a while for me to get a good look at him and start working hard at being everything he’s not.”

  She nodded, liking what she heard. Still, something in her eyes wanted more.

  Doug looked down. This seemed as good a time as any. He prefaced his story with “Seems like I’m always doing this with you.”

  “Doing what?”

  He took a breath before launching into it. “I was at this bar once. Five years ago now. Bully’s, a Townie tavern. Doing my thing, bunch of us, drinking pitchers, carousing. I don’t remember much of this firsthand. I know a guy came in, older than us, getting his drink on. He’s looking at me, and I’m getting annoyed. Some point he comes over, asks am I Mac MacRay’s son. Tells me he knew my dad years ago, worked with him close, and I’m like, whatever. Until he tells me how he recognized me. Smiles and says I look exactly the way my dad looked when he got drunk.”

  The wave came around, everyone jumping t
o their feet and throwing their hands in the air except Doug and Claire.

  “And I guess I attacked the guy. I have almost no memory of this. But if they hadn’t pulled me off him, it would have been bad. Hospital he went to got the law involved, and the guy fingered me. And I’m grateful now. I am.”

  She watched him closely. Almost like she knew this already or suspected something like it.

  “I did some prison time for that. Hated it, and I will never go back. Only thing to come of it was, I started on the program while I was in there. Changed my life. Cleared probation a year ago, now I’m free and clear. And I feel free and clear.” All of this was the truth. He’d only left out his earlier stint inside.

  “Wow,” she said.

  “Yeah, I know. It’s like a knife in my eye, every time I have to tell you these things.” He ticked them off on his fingers. “Alcoholic. Broken family. Ex-con. Not much to take home to your parents, huh?”

  She absorbed all this, turning back to the field. “I told my parents I quit,” she said. “They want me to go see a psychiatrist. Which I actually had been considering on my own—but now, forget it.”

  “You don’t need one.”

  “No?” she said, shooting him a quick, angry look she seemed to regret.

  Doug felt the chill. “You’re full of questions tonight.”

  “Am I?”

  “Something on your mind?”

  She shook her head, hesitant, as though easing her way into this. “Agent Frawley came to see me again and I guess it shook me up a little.”

  Doug stared at the mound to control his reaction. “Yeah? How so?”

  She was looking at him now. Fucking looking at him, and Doug made a study of the Milwaukee pitcher checking the runner on first. He would not look back at her.

  “He said they were sure now that the bank robbers are from Charlestown.”

  Doug nodded. “Yeah?”

  “He said they’re watching some people. Getting close.”

  Did she know? Would she be telling him this if she knew anything? Was she testing him? Feeling him out? Trying to help him?