He says, “Why would she call you?”
I say, “I’m also guessing she didn’t really tell you about our date at Amrheins either. Did she tell you I showed her the pictures? No? Fancy that. Tell me, are you stressed now, Billy?”
He yells, “What did you tell her?”
Cigarette number two is a bullet between my teeth, and I’m chomping the hell out of it. I say, “I told her everything. I told her that once upon a time there were three musketeers, you, my father, and Brendan Sullivan, the lords of Southie—or lords of their project at least—and they decided to try their hand at an amateur porno. Tim was the director, Brendan an actor, and everyone’s local hero, Billy, was costar and producer. They found and bribed some young barely-there junkie, and a star was born. Only she OD’d, or was just so drunk she choked on her own vomit, and died on camera as you guys just sat and watched with your thumbs up your asses.
“Some bad luck there, I guess, but you three of Southie’s finest never reported the death. No. You see, Billy Times used to go around bragging about mob and Whitey Bulger contacts to whoever would listen. Yeah, you had a big mouth and it was always running, but maybe it wasn’t all talk, maybe you weren’t just full of shit. So the junkie died in your bedroom, you called in a favor, and the body magically disappeared. But what you weren’t expecting was that two of your musketeers, your pals, Tim especially, didn’t trust you. Not one goddamn bit. He didn’t destroy the pictures or the film. He split them up with Brendan, a two-man tontine of your former musketeers. That’s gotta hurt a little, eh, DA?”
While I’m talking, the DA drops my cell phone and it disappears into the rubble. He jams the gun in his waistband, by his left hip, and slumps over to the projector. He plucks the take-up reel and film from the rear arm.
I say, “Fast forward to last week. Brendan saw Jennifer performing on American Star, and she looked so much like the junkie, like the dead girl, and your name was being bandied about on fluff news pieces all over the state, Brendan had a belated attack of conscience. He brought me the photos and hired me to find the film. Of course I was, shall we say, indisposed when he was in my office and I thought it was Jennifer who gave me the pics. This is where you come in again. Yeah, this Monday morning quarterback knows taking the pictures to you was a full ten on the Richter scale of mistakes, which resulted in my apartment and office being torn apart and your goons putting the lean on me and making sure Brendan Sullivan was out of the picture, so to speak, or dead if you prefer I speak plainly. But I found the film.
“Oh—and this last bit is pure conjecture, but Jennifer thought it sounded plausible—the narcoleptic me had taken some notes when Brendan was here. The only piece of automatic writing that wasn’t gibberish was South Shore Plaza, and that notepad was stolen from my office. Haven’t had a chance to check dates yet, but I’ll bet more than two bits there was some heavy construction going on at that mall back in your day, and Dead Girl has herself a cement plot, maybe parking-garage Level Three?
“That’s what I told Jennifer. All of it. She found it to be riveting stuff. Begged me to show her the film and told me she’d help me if I needed it. So, Billy boy, what do you think? How’d I do? Did I get it right?”
He says, “Not perfect. But you’re more right than wrong.”
He doesn’t accuse me of bluffing, doesn’t deny the goons, either. I nailed it. Perfect dismount. I broke him down. I’m the one with all the hand. In the midst of the mental back pat, cigarette number two falls out of my mouth and onto my chest. My arms are tree trunks, but I slowly manage to brush the glowing stub off onto the couch—but still too close to me. Wasn’t thinking right. Should’ve flicked it across the room with my fingers.
I still smell smoke, and now I see it. It’s coming up from the floor, from between my legs. Unless my floor has taken up smoking, there’s a fire down below. I try to move my legs; still no go. I don’t have much time.
The DA has gone all quiet. He’s the secret that everyone knows. He passes the film from hand to hand. He says, “Jennifer wouldn’t believe you.”
I try to move, but all I manage is some feeble twisting of my torso and some hip movement. It’s not the Twist and I’m no Chubby Checker. The dummy film inside the couch cushion digs into my ass as I move. It’s not helping. I say, “Why wouldn’t she believe me? Especially after I wind up quote accidentally dead unquote.”
The DA looks at me, his wheels turning, but they aren’t taking him anywhere. He says, “She’ll believe me over you. Time will pass, and she’ll believe me.” He says it, but I don’t think he buys it, not even at discount. He stands in the dark of my ruined apartment.
Need to keep those wheels a-spinnin’. I say, “Who was Dead Girl? Tell me.”
He says, “I don’t know, Mark. I really don’t.”
The couch on my too-close left is smoking now. Maybe it’s my imagination but the apartment is getting brighter. The heat down by my feet is no longer a phantom heat. It’s real.
I say, “Come on. It’s over, Times. Just cross the Ts for me.”
The DA pulls his gun out. I might’ve pushed him too far into desperation mode. “I can’t tell you what I don’t know. We found her in Dorchester. Tim had seen her wandering the streets for days, bumming smokes and offering five-dollar blowjobs. We didn’t even know her name, and after—after, no one missed her. No one asked about her.”
I say, “That’s not good enough—” and then a searing pain wraps around my left ankle, worse then anything I’ve ever felt, worse than anything I’ve ever imagined. I scream and it’s enough of a jolt to bend me in half, send my arms down to the emergency scene. My left pant leg is engulfed in flame; so is most of the floor beneath my feet. I beat frantically at my pant leg, each swipe of my paw like mashing a nest full of yellow jackets into my ankle. I quickly and without thinking or planning try to stand, and manage a somewhat upright position but fall immediately to the left, crash-landing on shards of broken coffee table. That hurts too. The high-intense pain of my actively burning flesh is gone, replaced by a slow, throbbing, and building ache. I belly-crawl away from the flames, but things are getting hotter and brighter in the apartment.
I look up. Times is still there, looking down, watching me, gun in one hand, film in the other. I say, “Burning me up isn’t gonna solve anything. You’ll still have questions to answer.” The flames are speaking now, the greedy crackle of its expanding mouth.
He says, “I’m sorry it has to be this way. I’m not a good guy.” He bends down, knocks my hat off, grabs a handful of my hair, and yanks my head up. Can’t say I’m thrilled with this by-the-scruff treatment. He says, “Your father wasn’t a good guy either, Mark. But I liked him anyway.”
The pain in my leg starts to subside and this isn’t a good sign, because it likely means I’m going out again, and this time the sleep won’t be a little one. I yell, and scream, and bang my forehead on the floor, anything to keep myself awake.
The fire races up the blankets over the windows, throwing an orange spotlight on the room and waves of powerful heat. The DA stands up, coughs, and takes a step toward the front door.
I reach out with my right hand and clamp down on his ankle. I’m a leech, a barnacle, and I’m not letting go. I yell, “Go ahead, shoot me!” He won’t. If he’s careful, he won’t even step on my hand to break it, or mark me up with bruises. He can’t chance ruining his quaint narcoleptic-burned-himself-up-smoking setup.
The DA halfheartedly tries to pull his leg out of my hand, and it gives me time and an opening to pull my torso close and wrap myself around his leg. Now I’m an anchor, a tree root, and he isn’t going anywhere.
Apparently my apartment isn’t very flame retardant, because a full-on blaze is roaring now. I curl up into a tighter ball, trying to keep my assorted parts out of the fire. The DA is yelling, getting more violent and desperate.
I turn my head and pin my face to his leg, trying to protect it. I close my eyes, waiting for a bullet that doesn’t come.
Instead, he kicks me in the back of the head and kicks me in the ribs, but I’m not letting go. No way.
The DA drags me and his leg behind him, toward the front door. He gives me a few more kicks, then pulls us out into the hallway. My legs are weak, but they have something in them, they have to.
He sticks the gun barrel in my ear, jams it inside, trying to poke at my brain. The pain is like that pressure-point pain where your whole body involuntary gives up. He yells, “Fucking let go! Right now!”
I twist and load my legs under my weight, like I did in preparation for my ill-fated shed leap. Then I lift his leg off the ground and I’m in a crouch. The gun hand goes away with the sudden shift and he stands and waves his arms like a kid on a balance beam. I throw his leg left, which spins the DA around, away from me and facing the stairs.
I jump up, my burned leg erupting into new pain, but I get into a standing position right behind the DA. I grab handfuls of his turtleneck first, fixing to twist his gun arm and pin it behind his back, disarm him, and be the hero, but my legs go out like they were never there. My momentum takes me forward into the DA’s back and my legs tangle and twine in his, knocking out his knees. He can’t hold us and we pitch down the wooden stairs.
The DA lands almost halfway down the flight, face first, with me on his back, clinging, hands still full of turtleneck, and I’m driving, forcing all my weight down, not that I have a choice. We land hard. There’s a crack and I bounce up and manage to stay on his back, riding him like a sled, until we hit the first-floor landing. I involuntarily roll off him, crashing back first into the outside door. The glass window rattles hard in the frame but holds together.
The DA comes to a stop at my feet, sprawled and boneless, his head bent back, too far back, a broken doll. The gun is still in one gloved hand. The take-up reel of film sits on the bottom step, between the DA’s feet.
I think about sitting here and just closing my eyes, letting that orange warmth above rock me to sleep. I think about crawling into my office, maybe that bottle of whiskey is still in the bottom drawer of my file cabinet. Those scenarios have a nice captain-going-down-with-the-ship appeal to them, but that’s not me.
I grab the film, open the front door, and crawl out onto the sidewalk, the gritty and cold sidewalk, and the door shuts behind me. Everything goes quiet, but below the quiet, if my ears dig hard enough, is the not-so-subtle rumble of flames doing their thing inside the building.
I crawl the first fifty feet down the street, then struggle onto unsteady feet. I use the facades of apartment buildings and pizza joints and convenience stores to rappel down West Broadway and to my rental car.
Inside. I start the car. The dash lights up and I have plenty of gas, enough for another road trip. Beneath my seat, the manila envelope is still there, the pictures still inside, the girl still dead and anonymous. The film goes inside the envelope. It fits.
The sound of flames has disappeared but there are sirens now. One fire truck roars up Broadway past me. I watch it go by; its sound and fury stops at the corner, my corner. Maybe they’re in time to save the building and some of my stuff, like the projector. I know better. They won’t be able to save anything or anyone.
It’s the wee hours of someone’s morning. I’m all out of cigarettes, but my leg feels like a used one. Hands on the wheel at two and ten. I check my mirrors. No one is double-parked. My U-turn is legal and easy, and I drive away.
THIRTY-EIGHT
I’m back at the bungalow. Ellen isn’t home and she didn’t leave the lights on for me. I’m used to it. I limp inside the back door and into the kitchen. First I grab that dusty bottle of whiskey from the cabinets above the refrigerator, take a couple of pulls, and then head to the bathroom to check out my leg. Priorities, man, priorities.
I took the back roads to the Cape, made a pit stop or two, pulled over and napped a couple of times. The sun was coming up as I white-knuckled it over the Sagamore Bridge again, but I made it here. And I made it here without another car accident, although I think I ran over a squirrel when I found myself two-wheeling it up a sidewalk. Sorry, fella.
Bathroom. I roll my pants up and the burned parts stick to my leg. I clean it up best as I can in the tub, but the water hurts. The whiskey doesn’t help as much as it should. The skin on my ankle and about halfway up my calf is burned pretty good. I have no idea of the degree scale, but the skin is red and has oozing blisters. I squeeze some Vaseline onto gauze pads and wrap things up tight, but not too tight. It’s a bad wrap job, gauze coming undone and sticking out, Christmas presents wrapped in old tissue paper. But it’ll have to do.
Me and the bottle of whiskey, we hobble into the living room and I sit on the couch like a dropped piano. I take out the manila envelope and one of the pictures, the picture of Dead Girl wearing the white T-shirt and skirt. The photo is black-and-white but I’ll remember her in color, like in the film. She seems a little more alive in this picture, as if the second picture, taken moments later, wears that spent time instead of clothes. The girl in the second photo is that much closer to death, and you can see it.
The living room is getting brighter and my eyes are getting heavier, but I can’t go to sleep just yet. I walk to the front windowsill and grab the picture of the old fisherman holding whatever it is next to his head, and I still think it looks like a gun. I also take the picture of the three musketeers: Tim, Billy, and Brendan, those clean-looking carefree preteens sitting on the stairs. I escort the pictures back to the couch and put them on the coffee table, whiskey bottle between them.
I pick up the old fisherman, flip it around to the back, undo the golden clasp, and remove the photo from the frame. I put the picture facedown on the table. Don’t mean any disrespect to the guy.
I stick the first picture of the girl into the frame. Don’t need to trim the edges or margins. It’s a perfect fit. I spit-polish the glass. Looks good as new. I put her down next to the boys. LIT in the lower left of both pictures.
The boys. Those goddamn buzz cuts and soda-pop smiles. That picture might as well be of anyone. I don’t know them, any of them, never did, never will, and don’t really want to, but I know their lies.
I think about taking down all the photos off the walls, making a pile, mixing these two in, then reshuffling the deck and hanging everything back up. Maybe I could forget that way and no one would ever find them again.
I think about Jennifer, Ellen, Janice, and me and of how, because of them, our lives will always be about lies and lost time, just like my little sleeps. I think about the dead girl, the stubborn memory that everyone has forgotten. Maybe tomorrow someone will remember.
I gather up my cargo and walk into the hallway. Framed black-and-white pictures hang on the walls on both sides of my bedroom doorway. Faux-lantern lamps hang on either side of the doorway and beneath the lamps are two pictures. I take those two frames down and stack them on the floor.
I double-check that the manila envelope with the other photo and the film is still inside my jacket. It is. I’m holding on to that sucker like a mama bird with a wing around her egg.
The other photos, those I hang on the wall. The girl and the boys fit the nails and fill those glowing empty spots on the walls, one picture on each side of my door for all the world to see.
I open the bedroom door. Unlike the hallway, it’s dark inside. I won’t open the curtains or pull the shade. I won’t turn on the light. I know where I am and I know where I’m going.
Tomorrow, if there is one, will be for remembering. Now? I’m going to sleep, even if it’s just a little one.
THIRTY-NINE
The sun shines bright and hot, too hot. It’s a remorseless desert sun, a sun completely indifferent to the effect of its heat and radiation. It’s the real sun, not a cartoon. Can’t even be bothered to say fuck you.
It’s the weekend. Tim and I are in our backyard. I’m five years old. Not everything is green. Debris and old equipment cover the yard. Someone’s life has exploded. The shed has been
destroyed and is nothing but a pile of sharp and splintered pieces. All the king’s men can’t put it back together again. The shed is dead.
Tim and I stand in front of the fallen shed, hand in hand. His big hand sweats around my little one and I want to let go. I really want to let go, but I can’t.
He pats me on the head, hands me the brown paper bag, and says, “Come on. Let’s clean up all this shit.”
I follow Tim around the yard. He picks up his old lawn mower along with the sharp and toothy tools that used to wink and gleam at me from inside the shed. They go inside my little brown paper bag. Next into the bag are the bottles of cleaners and bags of fertilizer. There’s no game today and Tim doesn’t name dogs after the stuff we pick up.
He says, “You can still sing your song, buddy.”
I don’t. And I won’t.
Some of the stuff we find lying on the grass is charred and smoking. He picks up a projector, a screen, and a film can, all empty secrets, and they go into the bag. There are other bits and pieces burned beyond recognition, and I get the sense that this is a good thing. Everything goes into the bag. The bag is getting heavy.
We still have much more to pick up, haven’t made a dent with our cleanup effort, but Tim leads me behind the fallen shed, takes the brown bag, and tips it upside down behind the fence. Nothing comes out. Tim says, “Goodbye,” as he shakes out the empty bag.
We walk around to where the front of the shed used to be. He kicks at the fallen cinder blocks, gray as tombstones, and paces in the rectangular dirt spot left by the shed. I stay where the shed’s front doors used to be, like a good boy.
Tim stops walking and stands in the middle of the dirt spot. He says, “So, kid, whaddaya think?”
The five-year-old me is tired, tired of the cleanup and the questions, tired of everything. I say, “I think you’re a coward.” It has no ring of authenticity to it, not one bit, because I think I’m a coward too. Like father, like son.
The Little Sleep Page 20
