He arched his eyebrows and shook his head. “I dunno,” he said, “that could be, I guess. It could be that she is right. But that’s not what I mean, that I know it is. Where she’s concerned, I dunno anythin’. I’ve been married to that woman now, comin’ up on thirty years, and to this day two things have not happened, like I always hoped that they would: I have not gotten so I know her better, and she hasn’t become better-lookin’. I have to say I never really understood her. Still don’t know what she’ll do, when she gets it in her head, that she is gonna do somethin’, somethin’ that she’s gotta do. Or any of them actually, any women that I know. Every one of them is Greek to me, like the VCR there: ‘Hey, is there a button on this thing, button I can push here makes it do what I want? Or is the only thing it does what it wants to do, huh? And if there is, will someone tell me, which one do I push? And how many times? Little Vaseline help, there, you think?’ I admit it: I really don’t know. I still don’t really know.
“She told me yesterday, she said: ‘Bob, all right? I’m goin’ out. Is there anythin’ you want?’ And I was doin’ somethin’, wasn’t payin’ that much attention, and there was nothin’ that I needed, anyway. So I just said: ‘No, no that’s okay, Margaret, I’ll see you when you get back.’ Little later, couple hours, she comes back, all right? I am downstairs, in my workshop. I said I’d make a cobbler’s bench for my son Freddie’s wife, Melissa, wants it for her family-room. And so I am doin’ that, and Margaret comes back and she hollers down the stairs, she can hear the lathe up there, I know; good hard maple’s noisy on that, ‘I’m home, Bob, I’m back.’ And so everything is fine.
“And that night we’re havin’ dinner and I said to her: ‘Hey, I meant to ask you: you went out this after, when you went out, there? Anythin’ particular, or just to get some air?’ And she looks at me and she says: ‘No, the funeral home. I went down to Quillici’s and picked my casket out.’
“I just sit there. I am stunned, a thing which very seldom happens so I don’t know what to do. I sit there and I look at her, got a mouthful, baked-sliced ham, we are havin’ with pineapple, and I just stop chewin’ it. Then I start because I gotta, gotta get it chewed, so that I can swallow it so I can talk to her. And so I do that. And then I say to her: ‘For Christ sake, what’s the matter with you? Are you sick or somethin’, didn’t bother tellin’ me? What the Christ is wrong with you, I didn’t know about?’
“And she says: ‘Hey, calm down, I’m fine, I am perfectly all right. Nothin’s wrong with me. I just wanted, get it done, have it out the way. It’s somethin’ we all know there, there isn’t any question, that we’re all gonna hafta do, and if we haven’t done it, by the time comes that it’s time, that isn’t gonna cancel it, postpone it for a while—like someone’s gonna say to us: “Well, darn it, you ain’t ready. We’ll give you another week, walk around and so forth, see if you can get it done—we’ll be back next Friday.” No, if the time comes when the time comes, like we know it will, it won’t make no difference that we didn’t do it there. All it’ll mean is that we’ll still be just as dead and so forth, and someone else’ll have to do for us, the stuff we didn’t do.
“ ‘And I just decided, well, if everythin’ is goin’ up, cars ’n houses, food ’n water, you name it: it’s gone up, then that must mean that caskets are up too. Because they don’t just exist, there—people have to make them, and they need more money too. So what I should do now, like those TV ads all say that sell the cemetery lots—course we already got our lot so we are all set there, and no worry about that—but we don’t have our boxes yet, to put us in, in the lot, I should do like they’re always sayin’: I should plan before the need, seems to be the key to it. Because if somethin’ happens so I go ahead of you, well, this’s a big expense that you’d have on your hands here, and you know how I feel about you and things that cost big money that you got to have, no choice—you just shouldn’t, by yourself, do those kind of things. You’re no good at them. And so that is what I did, what I was out doin’ today.’
“I couldn’t fuckin’ believe it,” Brennan said. “I can’t believe my own ears. Here is this woman, my own wife, Margaret, sittin’ there right across from me. There is my plate, in front of me, my beer and my knife and my fork, everything looks perfectly normal, just like it always looks, and unless I have been gettin’ some kind of science-fiction story playin’ to me through my fuckin’ teeth, she’s just finished tellin’ me, calm as can be, she was out plannin’ her funeral. Almost thirty years, I’ve been married to her, and she might as well be from Mars. ‘Jesus H. Christ,’ I said to her, ‘you’re fifty-two and you feel good, and you’ve got your funeral all planned? Don’t you think that’s a little bit early? Have you picked out a dress for yourself yet?’
“She nods her head, she’s chewing her food, that’s another thing I didn’t tell you. All the time this’s goin’ on, she is still eatin’, tuckin’ the food right away. ‘Yeah,’ she says, when she swallowed, ‘and all cleaned and pressed. It’s the dark-green shawl-collar you like so much, and that also takes care of the jewelry. I think that that’s tacky, corpse wearin’ jewelry: “You make sure she’s got cab-fare home? What if some man-corpse gets fresh with her? She gonna hafta walk home then?” If the jewelry’s any good, you’re not gonna bury it, because you’re a fool if you do. And if it isn’t any good, she shouldn’t’ve been wearin’ it when she alive, why the hell then put it on the old fool when she’s dead and can’t defend herself? What the hell’s that say about her, huh? “She was so great inna sack that people gave her cheap jewelry? Where’d her boyfriend work anyway, K mart?”
“ ‘And I told Tommy Quillici—his son, Rick, was with us; I insisted, because after all, Tommy is my age, and he’s a man, and there’s more hair on the hood of my car than there is on the top of his head. So that means he will die before I do, and so I want somebody who’s younger than me, knowing how I want things done, he’ll still be around when I’m dead. So anyway, I said: ‘And none of that goddamned blue hair-rinse, all right? So with the green dress and then with the hair, I look like a grape-’n-lime Popsicle? Because I do not want that to happen.” And they both promised me that it won’t.
“ ‘And we also took care of the visiting hours: one day, that is all, first day after I’m dead, just the evening, seven-to-nine and that’s all—that is it. Tommy said to me: “Geez, Peg, just the two hours? You’re pretty well-known in this town, you know, Peg. Lotta people’re gonna wanna come around when you’re dead, pay their respects to your family. That isn’t gonna give ’em enough time there, to do it, you know? You don’t wanna have two-to-four too?” This’s after he tells me that visiting hours are one-dollar-fifty per minute, him and his kid and three freeloading pals-ah theirs takin’ money for wearing dark suits, openin’ doors and then closin’ them. “Not a chance, Tom,” I say to him. “If they really liked me, they came around, and they saw me when I was alive. And if they didn’t like me enough to do something as simple as that, well then, I’m not lying still at those kinds of prices, so they can apologize when I’m dead.’
“So I says to her,” Brennan said, “I says: ‘Jesus, ’m I really hearin’ you sayin’ this? The next thing you’ll be tellin’ me, you will be tellin’ me, you’ve got mine all planned out for me too. You picked out my casket for me.’
“And she looks at me and she says to me, my own wife, I’m not makin’ this up: ‘Yeah, I did,’ she says. ‘I got that done today too. You want the truth, which you probably don’t, that was the real reason I went—to get all of your stuff all picked out. I just did my own stuff while I was there, save makin’ an extra trip.’
“I didn’t say one fuckin’ thing, I tell you,” Brennan said. “I did not say one fuckin’ thing. I just stared at this woman that I’m married to, I been married to a long time, and I can’t believe what I’m hearin’. And I said to her: ‘Well, Jesus H. Christ, and tell me the fuckin’ truth now: should I eat any more of this dinner here now, or anythin’ else that you
feed me? Or are you poisonin’ me?’
“And do you know, you know, what she said to me when I said that? She said: ‘Heck, got no reason, waste poison on you, I wanted you outta the way—an’ I don’t want you outta the way, by the way. I just think what you’re doin’ is lettin’ your old pals, all them loyal brothers of yours, I think you’re lettin’ them, put you outta the way, here. I think you’re lettin’ them do you in, Bob. I think you’re lettin’ ’em kill you. And I think it’s just a matter of time here, and not very much time at that, before they finish what they’re doin’ to you, what you are lettin’ them do. And they will, you know that, that they will. They will kill you and use you for bait. And after they do that, after you let them, well, we’ll need a box to put you in. Dispose of the remains properly. We have to that; that’s the law. You know that we can’t, just keep you here, when that happens and you are dead—we’ll have to put you someplace. But you gotta go packed inna box, that’s the rule—they won’t take you if you’re not boxed.’ And that’s what she said about that.
“So now you ask me, have I got this death wish? Well, I dunno; maybe I have. Margaret’s right? I guess I have.”
Dennison and Dell’Appa both nodded. “Okay,” Dennison said, “show-time, Robert.” Dell’Appa opened his tweed sport jacket and put his hand on his gun-butt. “Revolver and badge on the desk, if you would, please.” Dennison patted the desktop. “Put ’em right here, Bob, right here now, okay?”
Brennan sighed. He leaned forward in the chair and unsnapped the keeper-strap on the holster, grasping the .38 at the end of the butt with his thumb and forefinger clenched on it. He held it up vertically as though consecrating it and then lowered it slowly onto the surface of the desk, the barrel pointing toward him. Dennison leaned forward, picked it up by the butt and released the cylinder, swinging it open and tilting the muzzle toward the ceiling. He had to use the extractor to eject the five grimy cartridges onto his blotter. He glanced up at Brennan. “Yeah, I know, boss,” Brennan said. “I’ve been meanin’ to clean it, any day now. Looks like I won’t have to, now. Badge’s in my jacket. Drop it off on the way out.”
Dennison nodded. “Bob,” he said, “I hate doin’ this to you. I really hate doing this. But my God, you’ve gotten yourself into one smelly peckah-shit here, and I can’t do anything else. Hadda dog once, liked rollin’ in stink, just a regular, long-haired, old dog, and if there was one thing she loved in the world, loved even better’n me—and Princie there, really loved me, more’n my own mother did; but of course, then, my mother was smarter—it was a carcass, perfectly rotted, right at the peak of decay, ’nother dog, or a cat, or maybe a squirrel—squirrel’d do, that was nothin’ else—that got run over or something, so all of the skin an’ the flesh ’n the muscles’d all gone all soft in the sun? And she would find it, usin’ her nose, and my Lord, she would go to town on it. She would go totally nuts. She’d jump on it, smash it up, just tear it open, get it spread out in the grass, and what she would do, she’d go right to work on it there: jump on it, kick it, throw it around, toss it up in the air, spread it out on the ground again, roll in it, roll in it, do it all to beat the band. Get her front shoulders right down in those rotten guts there, roll around, roll around, roll around. It was like that dog, when she was doin’ that, it was like we would be, gettin’ laid. And’d waited a long time to get, too.
“And then she’d come home, and my God, she would stink. We couldn’t let her in the house. And we’d say ‘No, Princie, you can’t come in. You’ll have to sleep in the yard.’ And then she would look so mournful at us that one of us would volunteer. Go outside with her, turn on the hose, hard-spray her down to clean skin. So we could let her come into the house. And even then, she still stunk a little.
“But Jesus, Bob, you stink to high Hell here, and I haven’t got any hard-spray hose to wash you, hard-spray to use on you, here. I’m not sure they even make one. When Harry and the boys served those warrants that we got, they left those machines on and watched them. faxes comin’ in from all over the place, and damn, what variety there. Did you know Dougie had that kiddie-porno-scumbag Buddy Royal wired into the network he built for that woman?”
Brennan had his head down. He shook it, once. “He had orders coming in on it, for Christ sake, Bob,” Dennison said. “People who cater to perverts, ordering crates of dirty pictures of little kids getting abused. Kiddie-porn, Jesus H. Christ. Is there anythin’, lower’n that? Did you know that your brother, and therefore you, too, did you know you were both in that rotten garbage? Makin’ money off pictures of kids? Kids with men’s hands in their asses? We knew Reno, and Chico, and Franco, them of course, and Short Joe, too; all them nice fellas like that, they were involved in it there. But my sweet Lord, at least they’re all self-respecting gangsters. Buddy Royal’s an embarrassment. Buddy Royal’s pond-scum. Did you know Doug was tied up with him, too?”
Brennan nodded again. He did not raise his eyes.
“And this was because, at least this’s what we’ve got, because Dougie got Rollins to get you a job?” Dennison said. “In exchange for the job with Track Security—and not much of a job, I must say, thirty-two-lousy-grand a year—Bob Brennan went into the tank? What the hell did you do to your little kid-brother? Grab his dick when he was eleven, and he’s got a Polaroid of it? What the hell’s this hold he’s got over you? You tanked it on Mossi, you tanked it on all of them, and these’re all very bad guys. None of this makes any sense.”
Brennan raised his head. His eyes were dead, and to Dell’Appa it appeared that all the fluid that had inflated him had vaporized and left him sagging floppy in the chair, like a discarded balloon. “It doesn’t now, I guess,” he said. “It seemed like it did, at the time. When you got the job I’d been told would be mine, and then I was getting retired, and Harry came in, raising hell. Dougie’s my brother for Christ sake. When I found out, when I first found out, what kind of shitheels were his customers, I went and I tried to talk to him. Didn’t know about Buddy then; didn’t find out about him ’til later. All I knew about when I first talked to Dougie was the drug-guys, Franco’s guys washin’ the money. But I said to him: ‘Jesus H. Christ, you can’t do this stuff, Doug—you just can’t do this stuff, you’re my brother.’ And he told me to wise up or else arrest him, but his choice would be wising-up. ‘Get some dough for yourself for a change.’ What can I say? He’s brother. He’s sure getting heavy though, padre, now.” He sighed. “I dunno, Brian,” he said, “I haven’t got no excuse. This just isn’t fun any more. Is it okay if I go along now?”
Dennison looked at Dell’Appa. He nodded. “Yeah, Bob, you can go now,” Dennison said. “I wish I knew what to tell you. I don’t know what we’ll give the grand jury. I won’t know ’til we see what we’ve got.”
Brennan, standing back to them, goatshoulder-slumped, flopped his left hand at his side, the right hanging limply at the empty holster with the snap-strap loose. “Doesn’t matter,” he said, “doesn’t matter at all. Do the best you can for me, guys. That’s all I guess I can ask.” He shuffled the rest of his way to the door, the empty holster bobbing on his right hip, turned the knob and went out, closing the door carefully and quietly behind him.”
“Happy, Harry?” Dennison said.
“No,” Dell’Appa said, “Bob was right about that one, too. It just isn’t fun when you win what I won. Even when you wanted to win it.”
“You know how the Bomber got his name?” Dennison said.
“No,” Dell’Appa said. “I assumed: from the Air Force. He was in B-Fifty-twos, I know? ‘Rolling Thunder’ or something.”
“Nope,” Dennison said. “Bomber grew up on K Street in Southie, and he was not a big kid. What he was was a fat little fucker the nuns loved, because he was also so bright, and Jesus, did that ever plague him. So when he’s about seven, he’s got this blond crewcut that his old man’d slapped on him there, most likely savin’ money on haircuts, or like that, hot weather, I know it was summer, and for some r
eason or other, suddenly that was his year. That was his summer to shine. People pickin’ on him, wouldn’t give him no peace, and they’re all of course bigger ’n he was. They’re all ’way bigger ’n he was. And well, he tells me, ‘I just said: “Aw right, fuck it then. So I’ll die. All right then, at least I’ll die proud.”
“ ‘It’s a wonder I didn’t have to have surgery six times, ’fore Labor Day finally come that year. I had more fights ’n Tunney an’ Dempsey did, and I don’t mean: just with each other. Both of all of their fights, them and everyone else, all of their fights put together.
“ ‘I lost almost every one of those fights. I was too small, and too short and too hot, and I didn’t know howtah fight. But I was the kid that grows into the man that they tell you about in flight-school: “The man to look out for’s the man who found out, that he really does not give a shit. Because he will hit you with everything he’s got, and when he runs out of that, then he’ll hit you with his own head. He will ram you with his own fuckin’ head, and if that kills him, killing you with his head, well, that’s all right, he don’t care. Because that is the thing he found out, and at least to everyone else that he comes up against, it is a terrible thing: he doesn’t care if he dies. There’s nothing you can do to him.
“ ‘And that was the way that I was, that year, that summer when I was seven. Somebody jumped me? Hey, okay by me. I didn’t mind a good fistfight, even though I knew I would lose. Losin’d gotten me noplace—the other kids still beat me up, so I might as well do some damage to them. At least I went home, shit all kicked outta me, I knew the other guy hurt too. You can’t stop the customers from comin’ in, but by Jesus, you can make ’em pay, ’fore you let the bastards get out. And if you can set the price high enough, maybe not quite so many will come.
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