Rogue Island

by Bruce DeSilva

  “Y doan dey spray moah wahduh awn duh ruf?” (Why don’t they spray more water on the roof?)

  “Dey orda.” (They ought to.)

  “Ats wut I bin sayin.” (That’s what I’ve been saying.)

  “Shut up, daboatayuz.” (Shut up, the both of you.)

  “Jeet yet?” (Did you eat yet?)

  “Gnaw.” (No.)

  “We kin take my cah tuh Caserduz if I kin fine my kahkis.” (We can take my car to Casserta’s if I can find my car keys.)

  “Wicked pissa!” (Good idea!)

  I spotted Roselli by the police lines, snapping pictures of his gloved thumb with a digital camera. He saw me and threw me the finger. I flashed him a thumbs-up.

  An old woman, unkempt silver hair a halo around her face, saw my notepad and dug her fingers into my arm. “I banged on all the doors,” she said, her eyes bright with panic. “I think everybody got out. If somebody’s still in there, God help ’em.”

  I pumped her for a few more details, thanked her, and started to turn away.

  “You’re Louisa’s boy, aren’t you?”

  “That I am.”

  “She’d have been so proud, seeing your name in the paper on all them stories.”

  “Thanks. I’d like to think so.”

  I turned and skidded across a patch of ice to the battalion chief’s car.

  “I don’t have time for you right now,” Rosie said, her gray eyes locked on the smoking building as she cinched her air-pack strap tight. Flanked by five firemen hefting axes, she strode toward the blackened front entry. At six foot five, an inch taller than when she was ripping down rebounds for a Final Four team at Rutgers, she towered over all five of them.

  I glanced at a fireman who slumped against the chief’s car as a paramedic cut the insulated gloves from his frostbitten fingers. His cheeks were blistered scarlet, and his breath rasped in short bursts. The perils of firefighting in subzero temperatures: You freeze while you burn.

  “The chief’s going in after DePrisco,” the fireman volunteered. “The poor bastard was inside with a hose when the first floor collapsed into the cellar.”

  “Tony DePrisco?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Aw, shit.” Now the fire had a face. Tony had gone through Hope High School with Rosie and me. Ten years ago, I was an usher at his wedding. He was a family man and I wasn’t, so we hadn’t seen all that much of each other the last few years, but last week at Hopes he’d shown me pictures of his three little kids. The girl was still in diapers. What was her name? Michelle? Mikaila?

  I stood in the cold with the gawkers, pretending a professional detachment I didn’t feel. Together we gulped the acrid, frigid air and waited to see what Rosie would be carrying when she came back out.

  When the chief finally strode from the building into the light, cradling something blackened and broken in her arms, sound seemed to stop again. I squeezed my eyes shut, but that didn’t prevent me from seeing the toothless grin of a baby girl waiting for her daddy to come home.

  * * *

  I dashed off a quick news brief for our online edition, but it was late afternoon by the time I filed the full story for the paper. My computer flashed with a message from Lomax. It didn’t say “Good job.” It said:

  DOG STORY.

  He glared as I shrugged on my jacket and walked to the elevator. As soon as the door slid shut, I tugged off the jacket and punched the button for the second floor, which housed the cafeteria, mailroom, and photo lab.

  “Everything or just what we published?” said Gloria Costa, the photo lab tech.

  “Everything,” I said. “Especially crowd shots.”

  Gloria pecked at her keyboard, and a menu of Mount Hope fire photos filled the screen of her Apple monitor. We stood close, our shoulders touching as we bent toward the screen. Her skin smelled of something spicy and sweet. She was a little pudgy, but subtract twenty pounds, give her a makeup lesson, squeeze her into something by Emilio Pucci, and you’ve got a young Sharon Stone. Add twenty pounds, dump her into a shapeless shift, and you’ve got my almost-ex.

  It took us nearly an hour to examine every frame and pick out about seventy crowd shots—at least a few from each of the fires.

  “You want prints?”

  “Soon as you can, Gloria. There’ll be crowd shots from today’s fire too. This morning I asked the picture desk to make sure we shoot spectators at Mount Hope fires till further notice.”

  “Prints could take a few days, baby. We’re understaffed here.”

  “Have them by Monday and you can drink on my tab at Hopes for a week.”

  7

  “Can’t you turn off that damn police radio?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “You know why not.”

  “Who has a police radio in his bedroom anyway?” Veronica said.

  “I do.”

  She smirked and shook her head, then rolled on top of me. We kissed, all open mouths and heat. But it was a heat with no flame. What I pulled down, she pulled up. What I tried to unsnap, she twisted away. We were consenting adults, but she wouldn’t consent. I had more luck in middle school.

  It was the first time I had brought Veronica to my place, three rooms on the second floor of a crumbling tenement building on America Street in Providence’s Italian neighborhood of Federal Hill. Three rooms was an extravagance because I was living in just one of them, unless you counted the time I spent in the kitchen opening and closing the refrigerator.

  I’d tidied up the place in anticipation of Veronica’s arrival, even dragged a damp paper towel through the dust. I would have tried distracting her from the decor with music, but Dorcas still had my LPs, and my only CD player was in Secretariat’s dash.

  All the floors were covered in the same linoleum made to look like red brick. Real brick wouldn’t have had all those scuffs. The beige walls were bare except for a few plaster cracks and my only piece of art, a shadow box holding a Colt .45. It had been my grandfather’s gun when he wore Providence PD blue. He carried it until the day someone laid a pipe across the back of his skull on Atwells Avenue, jerked it from his holster, shot him dead with it, and dropped it on the body.

  Veronica asked about the gun, so I had to tell the story again. As she listened, she rested her hand on my shoulder.

  “Every once in a while I take it down and clean it,” I said. “Makes me feel close to him.”

  It was late Saturday afternoon, and through the walls we could hear my neighbor, Angela Anselmo, screeching out the window at her little darlings, the eight-year-old budding concert violinist and the thirteen-year-old fledgling smash-and-grab virtuoso. She had already started supper, the garlic aroma from her kitchen slipping easily through the inch-wide crack at the bottom of my front door. We were lying on my tag-sale bed and Salvation Army mattress because there was no place else to sit. I was still pissed about the LPs and the mystery novels, but for the first time, I was glad Dorcas had all the furniture. Veronica’s lips flirted with the side of my face.

  “How mad do you think Lomax will be?” I said.

  “Pretty mad.”

  “Maybe I should do the dog story this weekend.”

  “No working this weekend. Just us. You promised.”

  “Unless there’s a fire in Mount Hope,” I said.

  “Unless there’s a fire,” she said.

  “I hope the fire-scene pictures tell me something.”

  “What are you hoping to find?”

  “The same face in the crowd at several fires.”

  “A firebug?”

  “Maybe. They like to hang around and admire their work.”

  “Mulligan?”

  “Um?”

  “Could we talk about something else?”

  Again with the lips.

  “Sure. Why don’t you tell me how you managed to get that grand-jury testimony?”

  “Forget it, buster.”

  “What, then?”

  “Ask me something
else.”

  “Do you color your hair?”

  “What?”

  “Do you color your hair?”

  “No. Okay, my turn. How’s that divorce coming along?”

  “I had a pleasant conversation about that with Dorcas just this morning.”

  “And?”

  “Unless I agree to lifetime alimony, she’ll tell the judge I beat her.”

  “She’s been saying that for two years, Liam.”

  “I asked you not to call me that.”

  “I like it.”

  “I don’t.”

  “It’s a fine name, baby.”

  But it was my grandfather’s name. Every time I hear it, I see a chalk outline on a bloodstained sidewalk. I didn’t want to go into it, so I just shook my head.

  “L. S. A. Mulligan. Maybe I could call you by one of your middle names.”

  “Seamus or Aloysius?”

  “Oh.… Ever have any nicknames?”

  “My teammates on the Providence College basketball team used to call me ‘Stew.’ ”

  “Why?”

  “Mulligan Stew?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Thank you.”

  “It seems odd calling you Mulligan when your hands are on my butt.”

  “It’s the only name I answer to.”

  “Like Madonna?”

  “Like Seal.”

  “I think I’m going to call you Liam.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t.”

  “Pleeeeeease,” she said, stringing out the syllable and rubbing all that woman against the front of my jeans. The rubbing didn’t work. It just made me forget what she was asking. I rolled her over, pinning her beneath me and nipping at the space between her neck and the swell of her breasts. My hands fumbled with the top button on her blouse.

  “Liam?”

  I ignored her, my fingers working on the second button.

  “Mulligan?”

  “Mmm?”

  “I want you to get an AIDS test first.”

  8

  Efrain and Graciela Rueda had arrived in Providence seven years ago from the little town of La Ceiba in southeastern Mexico. He went to work as a day laborer. She made beds at the Holiday Inn. Two years later, the twins were born. Graciela wanted to name them Carlos, which means “free man,” and Leticia, which means “joy,” but Efrain insisted on Scott and Melissa. He wanted them to be American through and through. Their children were their life. Now they didn’t have enough money to bury them.

  Their fellow parishioners at the Church of the Holy Name of Jesus raised enough for two little wooden coffins. The Providence firefighters’ local donated the headstone. In a paroxysm of generosity, Lugo’s Mortuary supplied the hearse at half price.

  On Monday morning, the crowns of the tallest headstones in the North Burial Ground poked above the crusted snow cover. Rosie and I stood with a little knot of mourners huddled at a pit hacked into the frozen turf. Mike Austin, the firefighter who had brought Scott’s body down the ladder, helped carry him to his grave. Brian Bazinet, who had descended with Melissa, helped carry her.

  I cocked my head to catch the priest’s ancient words of comfort and glory, but they were swallowed by Graciela’s keening and the white noise of hundreds of Bridgestones, Dunlops, and Goodyears swishing by on the interstate thirty yards to the west. Off to the east, the gravedigger watched from his backhoe, its engine muttering.

  After the mourners slogged to their battered Toyotas and Chevrolets, Rosie and I picked up clumps of frozen earth and dropped them into the grave. They landed on the little coffins with hollow thuds. Then we stood aside and watched the gravedigger finish the job. I tried to find calm in the steady rhythm of his work, but in my mind I could still hear Graciela’s anguished wail and the low rumble of her husband as he tried to comfort her.

  Journalism professors preach that you should never get emotionally involved in your stories, that to remain objective you must cultivate a professional detachment. They are so full of shit. If you don’t care, your stories will be so bloodless that readers won’t care either.

  I said a prayer in case He was listening. But where was He when the snowplow was burying the hydrant? Where was He when the twins were screaming for help?

  Rosie and I crunched through the snow to the Bronco, then turned and looked back at the patch of brown earth in a blinding field of white. We didn’t speak. What was there to say?

  Somebody had to pay for this, and Polecki and Roselli weren’t up to the job.

  * * *

  Twenty minutes later, I walked into the newsroom and found a thick manila envelope on my desk. On the front were the words “You owe me—Gloria.” She’d stuffed the envelope with eight-by-tens.

  I thought about logging on, but I didn’t want to deal with the latest Lomax message just yet. I dumped the envelope out on the desk, studied the prints, and found a lot of familiar faces. Old Mrs. Doaks, who had babysat the Mulligan kids when we were little, stood at the police lines and craned her neck. Three of the Tillinghast boys, apprentices in their older brother’s truck-hijacking start-up venture, scowled at the flames and looked like they wanted to hurt somebody. Jack Centofanti, a retired fireman who missed the action so much that he spent his afternoons hanging around the firehouse, lent a hand by directing traffic. That face took me back. When I was a kid, Jack and his tackle box appeared at our front door at 4:00 A.M. every time the fish were biting at Shad Factory Pond across the river in East Providence. He’d been a steady loser at the low-stakes poker-and-beer nights that had filled our parlor with bawdy stories and good fellowship every Saturday night. Jack had been my father’s best friend. When he spoke at Pop’s funeral, he made a Mount Hope milkman sound like a hero for raising a girl who didn’t wind up pregnant and two boys who managed to stay out of jail.

  I kept flipping through the same pictures over and over. Each time I saw a face at more than one fire, I circled it in red grease pencil. Best I could tell, fourteen faces showed up at two or more fires. At first I was surprised there were so many, but when I thought about it, I was surprised there weren’t more. After all, the fires were all in the same neighborhood, all but the last one breaking out at night when most people were home.

  Jack’s face showed up at a record seven fires, and I’d bet a year’s pay that he’d directed traffic or handed out hot coffee at all of them. Another face showed up at six. It belonged to an Asian male, late twenties, wearing a black leather jacket. In two pictures, he was carrying a flashlight, and in one, his eyes were lifted to the roof of a burning building. On his face was a look of rapture.

  I knew exactly how he felt. I was a cub reporter when the old Capron Knitting Mill in Pawtucket burned down, and even though that was a long time ago, sometimes, when I closed my eyes, I could still see it: firemen silhouetted against orange fireballs soaring hundreds of feet against the blackest of skies. It was so horrifyingly beautiful that for several long minutes, I forgot why I was there.

  Suddenly I remembered that two of the Mount Hope fires hadn’t been labeled suspicious origin. I flipped back through the pictures, tossing out those from a fire that had started from careless smoking and another caused by a faulty kerosene heater. When I was done, I still had a dozen faces to check out. I recognized three of them, but I’d need help identifying the others, including Mr. Rapture.

  The name made me think of Veronica, and my loins tingled a little. I picked up the phone and punched in the number for my doctor. Unless it was an emergency, his receptionist said, the first available appointment would be seven weeks from Tuesday.

  “It is an emergency,” I said.

  “What is the nature of the emergency?”

  “It is of a delicate nature.”

  “I’m very discreet,” she said.

  “My girl won’t screw me until I have an AIDS test,” I said, and she hung up.

  I called the Rhode Island Department of Health’s VD clinic and learned they could draw my blood today, but the lab w
as so backed up that it would take five weeks to get the results.

  After I hung up, I logged on to my computer and found the message I expected from Lomax:

  WHERE’S THE GODDAMNED DOG STORY?

  I shot back a reply:

  I’M WORKING ON IT.

  But first I needed to see my bookie.

  9

  Dominic Zerilli had lived for seventy-four years, and every morning for the last forty-two of them, he would get up at 6:00 A.M., put on a blue suit, a white dress shirt, and a silk necktie, and walk four blocks to his little corner market on Doyle Avenue in Mount Hope.

  Once inside, he would wish a cheery good morning to the skanky high school dropout manning the register. Then he would climb four steps to a little elevated room with a window that looked out over the grocery aisles. He would remove his suit jacket, put it on a wooden hanger, and hang it on a clothes rod he had rigged in back. Then he would do the same thing with his pants. He would sit there all day in his shirt, tie, and boxer shorts, chain-smoking unfiltered Luckies and taking sports and numbers bets through the window and over three telephones that were checked for bugs every week. He would write the bets down on slips of flash paper and deposit them in a gray metal washtub next to his chair. Whenever the cops came to bust him, which only happened when the Rhode Island Lottery Commission got worked up about lost revenue, he would remove the cigarette from his lips and toss it into the washtub.

  Whoosh!

  The officially sanctioned gangsters at the lottery commission, who pushed worthless scratch tickets and chump numbers games, resented Zerilli because he gave the suckers a legitimate chance to win. The Mafia always gives better odds than the state.

  Just about everybody in Mount Hope dropped by Zerilli’s store from time to time, either to lay down a bet or to replenish dwindling supplies of malt liquor, soft-porn magazines, and illegal tax-stamp-free cigarettes. They called him “Whoosh,” and it was said he knew them all by name. I bought my first pack of Topps baseball cards from Whoosh when I was seven years old, and he started taking my bets on the Sox and Patriots when I turned sixteen. Now, thanks to the snow-induced parking ban, I found a spot for Secretariat right out front.