by Chuck Hogan
At one point, Jem turned to Doug, eyes bleary with game glee. "Like old times, kid! Can you tell me why we don't do this every fucking day?"
Eventually Doug had to step out past the tower speakers to take a piss. The worn checkerboard bathroom tile, the rotten shower curtain, the foam-coated pipes running up through the ceiling into his own third-floor bathroom: it all seemed virtual to him, flickering, pixilated. At that moment the computerized rink with its frictionless ice was more real to him than Jem's mother's house.
He stepped back into the narrow hallway with its undulating walls and twitching corners, a world with seams, the framed photograph of Cardinal Cushing hanging over the long-dry holy-water bowl looking poor-graphics fuzzy.
The sound of the glass rattling on the downstairs door sent a dead feeling through Doug, the caffeine and carbonation draining from his alter world, his game buzz gone flat.
"Krista's home," he said, returning to Jem.
"It's cool, man, she won't bug us."
"Let me get my take, get it squared away."
Jem smiled icily. "You're gonna breeze."
"No. Just get my shit squared away, then come right back down."
Jem stood, unconvinced, going to the frame of the doorway between the parlor and the neglected second-floor kitchen. He yanked on the molding and brought it loose in one long piece, revealing plywood shelves nailed in between the old walls like a row of mail slots. Jem withdrew Doug's bundle, leaving many smaller newspaper-wrapped parcels behind, many ripped open and spilling cash.
"You stash here?" said Doug.
"Why not?"
Doug nodded at Jem's room full of toys. "You take a search warrant and they see all this hardware against your tax return, then the electricity you steal, the cable you pirate-- you don't think they're gonna tap on the walls?"
Jem shrugged and fit the molding back over the wall edge, hammering it in tight with the heel of his hand. "Always so fucking panicked. What, where you keep yours? You don't spend it, I know that."
"Not upstairs." Doug weighed the bundle in his hand. "Speaking of, how you fixed for clean linen?"
"Could always wash some."
Doug nodded, feeling residual good humor from the game. "We could go native tonight."
"Native it is. But only if we eat down there. Make a night of it this time, Duggy, do it right, not just up and back like going to the cash machine."
Doug nodded, cool with that. "I'll run this upstairs. You call the two homos."
* * *
DOUG RETURNED DOWNSTAIRS CARRYING a suede Timberland jacket with eight thousand dollars in twenties and fifties tucked inside the quilted lining.
Jem's mother's house was a classic Charlestown triple-decker of stacked, identical apartments. Diabetes had claimed Jem's mother's body in pieces, toes and feet first, then fingers, knees, kidney, and finally her heart. The disease had since spread to her house, rotting it room by room.
Doug's rent for the entire third floor was a couple of grand a year in real estate taxes. Jem, on the second floor, took care of all stolen utilities. The first floor was Krista's.
Kristina Coughlin was Jem's Irish twin, exactly eleven months and eleven days his junior. They bickered like husband and wife, she doing his laundry and occasionally cooking a meal-- her mother's gooey chicken a la king her specialty-- while he handed her money and generally laid around watching TV.
Krista shared her brother's wild streak. She had smoked her twenties down to the filter, the wear and tear just now starting to show, though she had snapped back from her pregnancy like a fresh rubber band. Merit Longs kept her in fighting trim. She had the Coughlin white-blue eyes, not so bad as her brother's, but when she drank, which was often, they glowed like demon jewels. Something she did to her hair with a razor kept the layers jagged and sharp. Like her partying soul, her dirty-blond hair lay flat and useless during the day, only to be teased into action every night. Her chest was criminally small, her long legs usually done out in stonewashed denim and heels in order to show off her proud, heart-shaped ass.
The three of them had grown up together, Doug spending so much time at the Coughlins' house as a kid that, when Doug's father went away, Jem's mother's taking him in presented little change. Krista and Doug had been a longtime, on-and-off couple, bad for each other in every way except carousing and sex. But now she couldn't let go. She had even tried to get clean with Doug after his release from prison, just weeks after her mother's death, but after a few months of sobriety fell out rather dramatically. For Doug, this had been a source of secret relief. She had been the heaviest of many stones roped around his neck. A couple of months later she was a couple of months pregnant and going around Town telling everybody that Doug was the father.
Now Krista sat at the table, watching Jem down half a High Life at a gulp. "And you wonder why he don't come down no more?" she said with smoke in her voice.
"Fuckin' Duggy doesn't mind-- do you, kid? His will is strong." Douche-bag grin as he killed the bottle. "Maybe too strong." The dinged-up cordless phone trilled and he snapped it off the table, answering, "Gloansy, you fatherless prick," rising and wandering away down the narrow hall.
Almost nothing had changed on the first two floors in the three years since Jem's mother's passing. They were sitting now in the first-floor back parlor, directly below Jem's game room. A maple chair-rail border ran between velvety milk-white parchment wallpaper stained nicotine yellow and scuffed white wood. The only new addition was an empty walker sticky with old juice, and the padded plastic high chair with the nineteen-month-old girl strapped into it.
Shyne gripped a gnawed graham cracker in one hand, the pink ribbon of a sagging Mylar heart balloon in the other. Despite the name and its inventive spelling, Shyne was a white child, an alabaster doll with fine, threadlike copper hair and sad, small, Coughlin-white eyes. She looked nothing at all like Doug, eliminating any sliver of doubt remaining in anyone's mind-- even his own-- as to Krista's paternity claim.
Shyne chewed on her cookie and stared across the table at him. The little girl was like a clock running slow. At a glance, you might not notice that anything was off, but spend any amount of time with her and you'd see she wasn't ticking with the rest of the world. The few times Doug had brought this up with Jem, Jem always countered with some pap he had heard on television, about children developing at different paces. And he could never bring it up with Krista, who was always reading him for signs that he was ready again to care.
Alone with him now, Krista shook out her ash-blond hair and sat back from the table, looking small and tired in the old armless chair. "I don't ask him to do that."
Doug watched the perfectly still, half-inflated red balloon, wanting the year-and-a-half-old to bounce it, something. "Do what?"
"Leave us alone together like this. It's fucked-up, his pushing. Sometimes I swear he wants it more than I do. Like it's you and his friendship he wants to save."
"Where are you getting all this?"
She shrugged as though it were obvious. "You don't come around. I mean, he's an asshole, but you guys are like brothers." She combed up her hair with her fingers, lifting it high off her ears, then letting it fall. "Or maybe it's me. Like I'm so radioactive now you can't come around."
Doug sat back and sighed.
"It's you who's radioactive," she said. "Your X-rays got inside me young, altered me permanently." She picked at a waffled, clover-shaped place mat, the old food dried into it. "You came home late from your meeting last night."
"Jesus," he said. "That fucking glass rattling in the door."
Jem blew back into the room. "Gloaner's in," he said, dropping down in front of Shyne and plucking at her balloon string, trying to grab her attention. She gazed up at the sagging, slow-drifting heart. "Talking about your meetings again?" Jem said. "Like fucking church with you."
Doug said, "It's in a church."
Jem gave up on his niece and turned to the gored table, rolling an Irish-flag Zippo lighter
over and over in his hand. "Hey, I go dry. Days at a time. Good to step back now and then, reset the clock. Healthy. But this is, what, you're on like a year or more? That's fucking hitting pause, kid."
"Two years next month."
"Key-reist almighty. Real comfortable up there in the front seat of that wagon. I'm remembering one time you fell off-- Dearden's wedding."
Krista smiled at the memory. Doug wondered why this always came up. "That was a mistake."
"A mistake where you rocked the house, buddy. That was a night."
"I had almost a year in, until that slip."
"Slip? Yo, a slip? That was a high-dive, Rodney Dangerfield. A Back to School Triple Lindy belly flop. My point is, Duggy-- you went right back. Look at you. Unshakable. Better, stronger, faster. So what's the fucking harm now and then, breaking down and getting a little wet with your poor, misguided, dry-throated friends?"
The phone rang and Jem snapped it up, answering, "Monsignor Kid-Toucher, what's the word?" again jumping to his feet and wandering away.
Krista sat there with her arms crossed, watching her daughter, lost in thought. "You're no priest," she said.
Doug turned to stare at her. "The hell are you talking about?"
"Even the Monsignor, Desmond the Nearsighted-- the Pope of the Forgotten Village-- even he lowers himself to drink with the boys."
"Because he can handle it. I can't."
"'Cause you're an alcoholic."
"Right. 'Cause I'm an alcoholic."
"So proud, though. Proud of your disease."
"Jesus, Kris," said Doug. "You were asking why I don't come down anymore?"
"So what's your high now? Just banks? Being the prince of these thieves?"
Doug frowned, done. He never talked about this with her, and she knew he didn't like her talking about it at all. "Any more shots you want to take before I go?"
Krista wiped some cracker mush from her daughter's mouth before turning on him. "Yeah. What's it gonna take to wake you up from whatever dream it is you're dreaming?"
When he didn't answer, she stood and carried her crossed arms into the kitchen, leaving him alone with Shyne's staring eyes.
* * *
THEY DROVE SOUTH THROUGH Rhode Island into Connecticut in Gloansy's tricked-out '84 Monte SS, black with orange trim. With three convicted felons on board and riding with a lot of cash, Gloansy couldn't be trusted to keep his Halloween-mobile under the speed limit, so Dez had the wheel. Doug sat up front with him, working the radio and using his side mirror now and then, idly checking for tails, while Jem and Gloansy split a six in back.
Two hours to Foxwoods, door to door. Careful as they were on the job, even a circulated bill could be marked, and washing the money was one of Doug's rituals. Insisting on it had the added benefit of slowing Jem's and Gloansy's spending.
Jem liked the roulette wheel and usually ended up dropping half of what he came to wash, drinking Seven and Sevens on the house and overtipping like a fifteen-year-old out on a date.
Gloansy bought a $12 cigar and set out to lose at high-min poker.
Dez floated back and forth between rooms, paranoid about pit bosses and floor managers with their cop eyes.
Doug worked steadily at the blackjack tables. He started by laying out sixty twenties on the felt of a $50 table and watched the dirty bills get dunked, forty-eight $25 chips pushed over to him. He drank Cokes without ice and played not to win but to not lose, which is different. Not losing means staying in every hand as long as possible, sitting on fifteens and sixteens and letting the dealer do all the busting. When he cashed in thirty minutes later, he was down only six chips. He folded the clean $1,050 into his zippered pocket and moved on to a $100 table, washing another quick $1,300 there before cashing out and rotating again.
It took him less than three hours to roll over the entire eight grand, ending hot, dropping a total of $320 in play and tips, a minuscule 4 percent commission to what the papers said was the most profitable casino in the country.
He met up with Dez again by a revolving red Infiniti. They made two complete circuits of the floor before an Indian war cry brought them to Jem, finding him doing a rain dance around the $50 roulette table, having finally scored on double zero. They cashed him in and steered him away.
Jem wanted to stop for a quarter-hour massage at one of the jack shacks near the casino, but Gloansy refused. "The red man just jerked me off for nineteen hundred dollars, I'm not going to pay some greasy geisha half a yard to do the same."
Instead, Doug drove them a few exits north to a steak house, where they filled a booth by the window in sight of the back-finned Monte. Soon the table was cluttered with steaks, High Lifes, and Doug's large no-ice Mountain Dew.
"So what's next, Duggy?" asked Gloansy.
"Strip club," chewed Jem.
"I mean, for us. For the team."
"I don't know," said Doug. "Think we need to mix it up a bit. I'm looking at a few things."
Jem said, "You talked about hitting a can."
"Maybe. Might be looking at something softer first."
Jem waved that off. "Fuck softer."
"Hitting a can means daylight. Armed guards, crowds, traffic. Going in strong like that, I don't know. We need a win."
Jem pointed his steak knife. "You're losing your edge, DigDug. Startin' to worry about you. Used to be you were the first one to throw down gloves and go."
"Used to be I got a hard-on every morning, homeroom. But now it's 1996 and I'm thirty-two, and I got that shit together."
Gloansy said, "Whatever it is, I'm ready. Anytime you say, Duggy."
Jem speared one of Gloansy's pinkest morsels and pushed it into his own mouth. "Anytime I say, corn hole."
Gloansy watched his steak get swallowed, poured ketchup on more. "I'm sure that's what I meant."
They ate and drank and got loud and stupid as usual. Doug tried to hustle them along like children, like he was running a fucking field trip outside the Town.
Gloansy said, "If I had to go one hundred percent legit? One of those batting cages things. Indoor/outdoor. Snacks and shit. Town needs something like that. What about you, Jem?"
"Liquor store, man. Also sell smokes, lottery, and porn. That's one-stop vice shopping."
Gloansy said, "That was Duggy's brainchild once upon a time."
"Duggy don't drink anymore. So that million-dollar idea goes to me."
Dez said to Jem, "Maybe put in a photo-developing booth too?"
Jem stared at him, Dez holding the look for another few seconds before cracking, Doug too, both of them falling into snorts of laughter.
"What is that?" said Jem. "The fuck is that, 'photo-developing booth'? It's not funny. He's not funny. It makes no fuckin' sense."
Jem's fury only made them laugh harder, the nearby tables starting to get annoyed. Doug went to use the head, and on his way back he saw what the other diners saw sitting there at the side booth: Gloansy and Dez playing goal-posts with a packet of butter, Jem draining another longneck and staring out the window, bobbing his head to some interior tune. The glamorous life of the outlaw; the majesty of being the prince of these thieves.
The waitress delivered the check as he returned. "Let's split," Doug said.
"Got a stop to make on the way back," said Gloansy, grinning. "In Providence."
Doug was tired, he wanted to get back to Dodge. "Losers."
"No," Gloansy corrected him. "Horny losers."
The munching sound next to Doug was Jem eating the food bill.
* * *
DOUG RECEIVED A BEAUTIFUL lap dance from a long-haired Portuguese girl with teardrop-shaped breasts. He succumbed to the hypnotizing power of cleavage, the pendulousness of femininity, as she ran her small hands over the muscles of his shoulders and leaned boldly into his face. When she turned and ground herself into his lap, waist and hips undulating, the swelling in Doug's jeans reminded him that he was already four months in to going 0-for-1996.
Afterward, as she d
ressed in the seat next to him, Doug felt shitty and alone. Even a guy without a girlfriend had to admit that patronizing a strip club was like cheating on womankind in general, and with this vague sense of guilt came a philandering husband's determination to repair and repent. She relieved him of his $20 wad with a wink and a smile, then paused, giving his face a pursed-lipped look of concern. She reached out and explored, gently, the sliver of skin where Doug's left eyebrow was split, planting a soft kiss on the old scar there before walking off in search of her next dance.
The free kiss threw him. Twenty doughnuts for tits and friction, and then a gratis moment of actual intimacy? She could have saved the dance and charged him twenty just for the compassion.
