Third Rail

by Rory Flynn

  They catch up with their mother, staring at the houses more intensely. Somewhere deep in her misfiring brain, she has to remember this road that she drove up and down for years, taking them to school, into town, to the train. The order of the houses—a rambling white clapboard that was once the Jamisons’, a brick pile that was Mr. Stephen’s place—sends a message that she’s home.

  They stand in front of what looks like a brand-new prep school, an enormous white house with two wings jutting out, more windows than they can count, and a circular gravel drive that looks like a sports car parking lot.

  Their mother stares at the McMansion. “Where is . . .”

  “Our house? It’s in there somewhere,” Nora says. “All gobbled up.” A hedge fund manager bought their house from the IRS and supersized it.

  “Where is . . .”

  “Dad? He’s gone . . . on a business trip.”

  Mom turns to Nora and shakes her head. “No, dear, he’s dead. He’s dead.”

  They stare. Their mother used to surface in rare moments of clarity, but there hasn’t been one in months.

  “Is he?” Nora asks.

  “Yes. He died because he did bad things. Bad things.” She’s shaking her head now, holding her right hand in front of her and waving the bad things away like flies.

  “Some people . . . ,” she says. “Some people are too smart for their own damn good.”

  12

  FROM THALIA’S LOFT they walk past condemned brownstones marked with spray-painted red Xs, an abandoned Syrian restaurant, and a burnt-out Citgo station. When they cross Albany Street and Harrison Avenue, Harkness remembers sweaty all-ages shows in cavernous warehouses before artists and gallery owners replaced squatters and punks, before the vintage flea markets and artisanal food trucks appeared like mushrooms that grew on money.

  “They call this neighborhood SoWa now,” he says.

  “What?”

  “South of Washington Street—SoWa. Like SoHo. Supposed to sound all hip and happening.”

  “Sounds like ‘So what?’,” Thalia says. “I like the old names. Kenmore Square. Winter Hill. The Combat Zone.”

  “You really want to bring back the Combat Zone?”

  “Sure,” she says. “It didn’t try to be something that it wasn’t already.”

  They walk down the stairs into Ruggles station to wait for a downtown trolley. The platform is nearly empty except for a few tired women slumped on the wooden benches, one with her arm wrapped around a bright red upright vacuum cleaner. When the hair on the back of his neck tingles for a moment, Harkness glances over his shoulder just in time to see two guys in thin leather jackets running toward them. They look like hipsters pretending to be thugs. The bigger of the two shoves Harkness to the ground while the other latches on to Thalia’s arm.

  Harkness jumps up to pull the skinnier one from Thalia, spin him around, and wrap his hands around his neck. When Harkness presses his thumbs into the soft hollow at the base of his neck, his face reddens and his eyes pop open wide like a stress doll’s.

  “Want to rob us?” Harkness says. “I don’t have any money. I’m carrying a CharlieCard and a Visa that’s about two hours from maxing out.” He tosses the choking guy down at the feet of his friend, who pulls out a serrated survival knife. If Harkness still had his gun, his right hand would be moving toward reassuring, deadly force. But on this clear fall night, he’s just another citizen.

  The bigger one’s eyes rake over them and he seems to be at a loss for what to say next, like he’s lost his place in a script. “Uh, give me those boots.” He waves his knife at Thalia. “Those fucking boots.”

  “Really?” Thalia says. “That’s what it’s come to now, guys stealing boots?”

  “Frye boots, aren’t they?”

  “So what?”

  “Expensive. Take ’em off. Now.”

  “Just take them off, Thalia,” Harkness says quietly.

  “Are you kidding, Eddy?”

  “Take them off.”

  She pulls off her favorite boots and hands them to Harkness, who holds them up like a prize. “Okay, come get them.”

  The guy Harkness choked hangs back. But the bigger hipster has been drinking or thinks he might have a chance just because he has a knife. When he steps forward, Harkness swings the boots and hits him in the temple with the heavy heels. The knife clatters down into the gravel next to the tracks. He goes down hard and stays sprawled on the platform. His friend runs across the empty platform and up the stairs to the street.

  Harkness hands Thalia a boot. He sits on the edge of the cement platform and starts to slide down to get the other one from where it’s fallen between the tracks.

  “Don’t do that, Eddy.”

  “There’s not a train coming.”

  “Just don’t. It’s dangerous.”

  Harkness jumps down into the gravel. “Some guy just tried to knife us. I think I’ll be okay.”

  He steps over one rail and picks up the boot from the beer cans and trash. Harkness stares at the third rail, taller than the other two and strapped down to the ground with thick metal bands spiked into the railroad ties. It’s rust-sided and silver-topped like the other rails. But it sends out a powerful signal, as if temptation runs through the steel instead of electricity. Though it would be foolish as well as fatal, Harkness imagines touching the rail just to find out if it’s deadly.

  “Get back up here,” Thalia says.

  He climbs back up onto the platform.

  Thalia pulls her boots on. “Let’s go,” she says.

  They climb the stairs.

  “Hey!”

  They turn to see the failed boot thief swaying on the cement platform as a train pulls into the station.

  “Where’s your gun, Harkness?” He shouts over the train’s squealing brakes. “Where’s your fucking gun?”

  The train doors open and he staggers inside.

  ***

  “So how would this guy know your name?” George leans forward over what’s left of his steak. “Or that you lost your gun?”

  “I have no idea.” Harkness looks at Thalia for any hint that she knows something, but her gaze stays steady.

  “Eddy,” George says. “I got to tell you, maybe this is a sign.”

  Harkness shakes his head. “Don’t start that up. It’s like listening to Dad all over again.”

  “Maybe he was right, Eddy. Just come work with me. I could use help from a smart guy like you.”

  “I already have a job and I—”

  Thalia cuts in. “So you’re like what, a banker?”

  “I’m the Harkness family janitor.” A couple of years past thirty and looking older, George still carries the culpable sadness of a spoiled boy who just sat on his favorite toy and crushed it.

  “Don’t play the victim, George,” Suzanne says. “Tell her what you mean.”

  “Okay, I’m an investment advisor,” he says. “But mostly what I do is clean up the mess our dad left us.”

  “What’d he do?” Thalia asks.

  “Screwed over his clients,” George says. “Unions, corporate retirement funds . . .”

  “Anyone he could talk money out of,” Harkness says.

  “Anyone he ever met,” George says. “Say what you will, Dad was a charmer. Told everyone the returns were better than they were, and siphoned off a chunk of their money, figuring they wouldn’t ever ask for it.”

  “What happened?”

  “They asked for it.” George pours wine in Thalia’s glass, then Suzanne’s. “Shot himself in the head when the regulators started sniffing around.”

  “Shit,” Thalia says. “Why didn’t you tell me about this, Eddy?”

  “Guess I didn’t feel like talking about it,” Harkness says.

  “That’s too bad, Eddy,” Suzanne says. “Talking about tragedy is one way we process it.” A life coach, Suzanne exudes a professional-grade concern.

  “Well, I’m at the end of the process,” George says. “The de
al we worked out is that we have to pay the aggrieved parties thirty cents for every dollar they lost. Couple of months and it’s over. Done. Ancient history.”

  “We ought to be paying them everything we owe them,” Harkness says.

  “Do NOT start with that again.” George slams his glass down on the table. “We’d have to liquidate. You might even have to quit playing cop.”

  Harkness stares at the lights across the Public Garden, wishing he and Thalia were walking back to her loft. “I’m not playing cop, George. I am a cop. I like it. And I’m good at it.”

  “So what?” George empties his glass. “I like drinking. And I’m really good at it. But I don’t pretend it’s a career.”

  Suzanne cuts in. “What do you like about your job, Eddy?” While she waits for his answer, Suzanne tilts her head like a talk show host.

  “Every now and then I get to stop someone from doing something stupid.”

  “Eddy’s on an investigation,” Thalia says.

  George perks up. “Investigating what?”

  “Guy who plowed into that monument thing in Nagog . . . ,” Thalia says.

  Harkness nudges her under the table.

  “So you’re investigating a traffic accident? Congrats, bro.”

  Harkness feels his face turning hot. “There’s more to it than that.”

  “You know what Dad would tell you, don’t you?”

  “No, I don’t. And you don’t either.”

  “He’d tell you to cut your losses, Eddy. Write it off. Move on.”

  Harkness stares at his brother for a moment. “I’m coming back to Boston,” he says. “I’m not done.”

  “Maybe you are but you just don’t know it. Because the world’s telling you something loud and clear.”

  “Well, I’m not listening.”

  “Then listen to me. Come work with me. You owe it to the family. After all, we wouldn’t be in this mess without you.” George turns to Thalia. “Junior G-man here led the cops right to the evidence.”

  Harkness shakes his head. “You can’t really still be mad about that.”

  “Grudge is our middle name, bro.”

  ***

  Eddy was wearing his clunky Sony headphones, so he only heard a soft thud from his father’s office. He walked downstairs in a trance to find his father sprawled forward on his desk, face to the wood, arms splayed above, blood filling the oval they made.

  His father’s eyes were open but unmoving. Harkness waited for him to turn his head and reveal the cruel joke. The blood came from a joke shop. The vintage silver revolver on the rug was a toy. Harkness looked behind the door, expecting to find George trying to keep from laughing.

  He slid his earphones down around his neck and put his hand on the cool indigo wool shoulder of his father’s summer-weight Brooks Brothers suit. He shook it and saw nothing but the recoil of his own actions. No breath rippled the blood. No murmur broke the silence. His father slumped lower.

  No one else was home to make sense of the still life of his father’s body and the bloody desk, to close the gaping red pocket above his pale ear. Like a sleepwalker, Harkness called the police and reported what had happened.

  He waited for the ambulance, standing next to the desk like a faithful dog, unable to do anything but wait for someone to come help his master.

  His father had left one of the lower drawers of his desk open, the one he always locked so carefully. Harkness inched closer and saw the silver latch at the bottom. He pushed away the papers and turned it. Underneath waited a hidden drawer with ledgers, notepads, and stack after stack of cash.

  A few weeks later, when the lawyers and regulators came, Harkness showed them the little silver handle. It opened up a new world, one that led to audits then lawsuits, to making excuses then making amends. It all started with the glowing silver latch that called out for a hand to turn it.

  ***

  “George, you’re getting angry,” Suzanne says. “You need to O-E-E.”

  “What’s O-E-E?” Harkness asks.

  “Suzanne runs a workshop called Emotional Composting,” George says. “That’s where we met. Couple of friends suggested that I needed to do a little work to get rid of some, you know, anger issues.”

  Suzanne leans forward. “George needed to move from self-destructive to self-constructive.”

  Thalia turns to Suzanne. “So what’s O-E-E?”

  “It stands for Own It, Eat It, Excrete It,” she says. “It’s a proven process for getting rid of anger. First you own the anger, recognizing that it’s there and where it comes from. Then you take in the anger, challenge it, and devour it.”

  “Side order of anger, hold the fries,” Thalia mutters.

  “You can make fun of O-E-E all you want,” George sputters. “But it helped me with my anger. It really fucking helped.”

  “Apparently,” Harkness says.

  “In the final phase, you excrete the anger,” Suzanne says, “the way the body naturally rids itself of all toxins. The anger you shed can serve as fertile soil for growth and renewal. That’s why we call it emotional composting.”

  “Good name,” Harkness says.

  George gives him the dismissive stare that no one but a big brother can. “No one asked for your opinion, Eddy.”

  Thalia and Suzanne drift off—Thalia to the bar, Suzanne to the ladies’ room—to escape a dinner that drags on like a drive to the Cape on Memorial Day weekend.

  When they’re both gone, Harkness leans toward his brother. “Hey, did you check on Allison Nevis?”

  “She’s definitely on the list—aggrieved party from the Nagog Teachers’ Union.”

  “How much is she in for?”

  “Three-quarters of a mil, maybe more. She’s retired now. Lives somewhere on the South Shore. Why do you care?”

  “Ran into her son the other day. I think he may know something about my gun.”

  “Probably wants to get back at us,” George says. “I get threats all the time—on the phone, e-mails, even old-style anonymous letters. Hey, maybe that’s who was fucking with you tonight.”

  “Maybe.” The inept attackers at the station seemed too normal to be Dex’s friends.

  “Better just keep emptying the parking meters, bro,” George says. “They can’t fight back. How much is time going for now?”

  “In Nagog, fifteen minutes for a quarter,” Harkness says.

  George reaches into his pocket for his wallet, takes out a dollar bill, and sets it on the white tablecloth, crumb pocked and splotched with sauce. “I’ll take an hour.”

  Harkness picks up the dollar and tucks it in his pocket, then tosses some coins on the table between them. “Here’s your thirty cents.”

  George’s face reddens as he picks up his steak knife, deftly palms it point down, and drives it into the table next to Harkness’s forearm. A wineglass rolls off the table and shatters on the floor. Waiters scramble. Businessmen turn and stare.

  Harkness raises his arm but the blue shirtsleeve stays pinned to the table. “Hey, that’s my best shirt.”

  “Not anymore.” George is still laughing when the bartender hustles them out of the restaurant.

  The brothers walk down Park Street with their girlfriends hovering close behind them.

  Sudden happiness sweeps over Harkness for a moment, brought on by the saxophone echoing in the distance from Park Street station, the click of Thalia’s favorite boots on the brick sidewalk, the glowing statehouse dome late at night, even the familiar presence of his annoying brother.

  George takes a swing at the side of Harkness’s head and misses.

  Harkness shoves George away. “Cut it out.”

  Suzanne flutters toward them to intervene. She trips and falls on the street, legs splayed, purse dumping out into the gutter. Thalia rushes over to help her but Suzanne pushes her away.

  “You people are like animals,” she shouts.

  George lurches toward Harkness again, hunched down like a pinstriped prizefighter. T
he extra pounds he’s carrying tighten his white shirt, collar overrun by his razor-burnt neck. He’s drunk but still pretty fast. He tries to punch Harkness in the stomach but Harkness grabs his wrist and spins his arm behind him in a classic come-along. George yelps in pain.

  “Stop it!” Suzanne scrambles up from the ground and rushes at them.

  Thalia sticks out a long leg and Suzanne’s down again, triggering applause and whistles from bums sprawled on the edge of the Common.

  Harkness marches George toward his black Audi. “Your girlfriend’s right. Get a handle on your temper.”

  “Can’t help it.” George’s huffing like a marathoner. “You know that.”

  “You’re just giving in to it like a big baby.”

  George struggles to get free.

  Harkness reaches into his brother’s suit coat pocket to find his keys. The car beeps and the trunk pops. He moves a tennis racket to one side and pushes his brother inside. George’s kicking but Harkness grabs his legs and shoves them in, slamming the trunk.

  “Nice move!” George’s muffled voice comes from the trunk.

  Harkness tosses the keys to Suzanne. “Drive him around a little to quiet him down, then let him out. He’ll be fine.”

  George’s thumping around inside the trunk like a pair of high tops in a dryer.

  Suzanne stares at them for a moment. Her face is smudged with street grime and there’s a crescent of dog shit clinging to the knee of her pants suit. She opens her mouth to deliver a final assessment but just shakes her head and climbs into the Audi.

  George shouts inside the trunk. Then Suzanne roars off and runs the red light at the intersection with Boylston Street.

  Thalia and Harkness watch in silence until the taillights disappear into traffic.

  “Another night of Harkness family togetherness,” he says.

  “You guys are kinda tough on each other.”

  “Dad liked us that way.”

  ***

  Harkness lifts Thalia gently from the futon at the end of each thrust to push even further inside her. The only light in the quiet loft comes from a bodega candle guttering on the kitchen table next to an empty wine bottle.