by Chuck Hogan
MALDEN CENTER SMELLED LIKE a village set on the shore of an ocean of hot coffee. With the coffee bean warehouse so close, sitting in Dunkin' Donuts was a little redundant, like chewing nicotine gum in a tobacco field. But that's what they were doing, Frank G. in a soft black sweatshirt, nursing a decaf, and Doug M. looking rumpled in a gray shirt with blue baseball-length sleeves, rolling a bottle of Mountain Dew between his hands.
"So," Frank G. said, "what's up, Sport? Let's have it."
Doug shrugged. "You know how it is."
"I know that I get nervous whenever a guy strings together a bunch of no-shows."
"Yeah," said Doug, admitting it, settling back into his chair. "Work's been a bitch."
"You should take on a wife, studly. And a house to keep up, and two kids who never wanna go to bed. And yet and still, I find the time to make it down here three or four nights a week."
"Right," said Doug, nodding, agreeing.
"It the romance?"
"Nah, no."
"She have a problem with you not drinking?"
"What? No, nothing like that."
Frank nodded. "So it's over already."
"Over?" Doug had blabbed way too much last time. "It's not over over."
"What is it then?"
"Guess it's on hold."
"She's done with it, but you're still into her."
"No." Doug shook his head. "Wrong-o. Other way around."
"Okay. My concern is you trading one addiction for another. Like an even exchange, going up to the counter at Jordan Marsh with your receipt. This booze thing isn't working out for me so well. I want to trade it in for a pretty girl. And they initial your receipt and off you go. Then the new one-- the positive one, right? 'Cause it's love, man. This new one up and dumps you, and what you're left with then is a garage-sized hole in your daily life."
"Christ, Frank-- I skipped a couple of meetings. My bad. I been real busy."
"Busy, bullshit. This is the heart and soul of your week right here. This is the oil that greases the engine. Without this you have nothing, and you should know that by now. Everything else will just go away."
"This is like friggin' high school. You show up on Tuesday, they yell at you for skipping Monday."
"This isn't anything like school." Frank G.'s anger surprised Doug. "I look like your truant officer? You don't go to meetings-- that means I get to bust you up about it. That's how this works."
Doug looked at the table and nodded. He waited.
And waited.
"Fine." Frank G. checked his watch. "Let's cut this short then."
Doug looked up. "What?"
"You come and make time for me at meetings, I'll make time for you. As it is, if I hustle, I can make it home for my kids' bedtime, read them a story for a change."
Doug shrugged, hands high. "Frank, I missed some fucking meetings here and there-- "
"Do the work, then you get the perks."
"Perks? Did you say perks? Sitting in a Dunkin' Donuts in Malden Center at eight thirty at night, this is a perk?"
Which was stupid, stupid. Frank G. stared at Doug, then reached for his yellow windbreaker, starting to stand.
"Frank," said Doug. "Frank, look, man, I was kidding. That didn't come out the way it sounded."
"See you in church." Frank G. was checking his pockets for keys. "Maybe."
Frank was walking past him. Doug had fucked up. "I'm going to see my old man tomorrow," he blurted.
Frank G. weighed his keys in his hand as though they were Doug himself, a fish he might throw back. All Frank knew about Mac was that he was in jail. "How long's it been?"
"Good long time. He asked me to come in, see him about something."
"Uh-huh. And how's it gonna go?"
"Power of positive thinking, right?"
"A lot of it's up to you."
"Then it's gonna go splendid. And he'll go back into his cell, and I'm good for another year or so. That's how it's gonna go."
Frank G. nodded and started for the door. "See you 'round."
* * *
THE NAME MCI CEDAR JUNCTION sounded like one of those corporate-brand stadiums, with naming rights purchased by a long distance phone company or a logging concern. MCI stood for Massachusetts Correctional Institution. When Doug's father started his tour there, the place was called MCI Walpole, after its host town, but at some point during the mid-1980s, Walpole's residents realized that sharing their name with the state's toughest prison-- it was also home to the DDU, the Departmental Disciplinary Unit, known as The Pit-- placed a slight drag on property values and sued successfully to have it renamed after a long-abandoned railroad station.
The complex was originally constructed in the 1950s to replace the old Charlestown Prison. Entering it brought all sorts of associations flooding into Doug's mind, first and foremost his stay at MCI Norfolk, a prison still named after its host town just a couple of miles away. Norfolk was medium security, Level 4, with 80 percent of its inmates serving time for violent crimes. Cedar Junction was Level 6.
He paced in the waiting room ahead of his scheduled meet, the only male in a group of six visitors. The combined smell of their perfumes reminded him of the Haymarket on a hot, late Saturday, produce fallen between the carts, spoiling and trampled underfoot. Three black women sat heavily, depressedly, with blood-threaded eyes and bruised stares. The two white women looked hard, worn down to the core. Blue denim, sweatshirts, and bralessness were on the Prohibited Clothing List. Evidently stretch pants and cleavage-canoeing knit tops were not.
Wall postings warned against physical contact, and a brand-new sign on the door, UNDERPANTS MUST BE WORN, made Doug's arms itch.
Only one person visited Doug while he was in stir, and that had been Krista, every third weekend. How grateful he had been-- though he never admitted it-- for those brief conversations, at least at first. But once he started getting into AA inside and taking the program seriously-- how she had changed in his eyes.
They were called inside and Doug sat alone in his partition, getting his head together. It was almost worth the visit just for the leaving, being able to walk back out of the prison again, getting into his car, driving away. Stopping at a gas station for a soda on the way home: simple freedom, an impossible dream within these walls.
Visiting Mac was like a dentist appointment and license renewal at the RMV all wrapped up in one. A trial. Something to dread, something to endure. Though in truth Doug had a good setup here, and he knew it. He controlled the contact, having Mac brought to him like a damaged library book pulled from general circulation.
Mac's shadow fell over him, and there was always that little kick when Doug saw the old crook again, always a ripple in his fabric of the hero he once knew, the strong man who used to call him Little Partner. Not the selfish me machine who had gone down sixteen years ago and lived mainly as a voice in Doug's head ever since.
Mac sat in his chair with a smart smile, a rooster sucking all his strength into his chest. But things were settling in him, Doug noticed: the middle getting thicker, the neck loosening up, his face sinking deeper into his skull. The casino-dice eyes that dared you to trust them, telling you straight out, Play with me long enough and you'll lose. The smile that was always more for him than for you. And his big Irish gourd, the shiny scalp oranged with freckles, now scored with pink treatment scars.
Mac straddled the chair, his proud, strawberry arm hair lighter now, nearly invisible. He always acted as though they were meeting on equal terms-- as though their relationship had some balance-- and Doug felt as sorry for him as he did for any trapped thing, having been there himself. Seeing Mac once a year was like flipping through a scrapbook, watching hair go, the features fading, blemishes rising. The resemblance between father and son, always remarkable, haunted Doug now more than ever. Looking into that partition was like looking into a mirror twenty years deep. The traces of his mother that Doug used to find in himself-- that he once took great pains to seek out-- were long disa
ppeared.
"Look at you." This was what Mac always said.
"Dad," said Doug, that word he got to use for about twenty minutes each year. "How's it going?"
"How ya been?"
Doug nodded. "Good. You?"
Mac shrugged. "Still here."
"Looks that way. Been getting the money?"
"Money's good. Makes things easier. Though it ain't that bad in here neither. You know how we got things arranged."
The hive of Cedar Junction was home to a colony of Townies who, with the assistance of a few friendly guards, got most of what they needed. There were good and bad assignments in the prison industries program, like laundry or making license plates, whatever they did for their seventy-three cents an hour.
Doug nodded to him, pointed to his own head. "That it?"
Mac touched it like it was hot. "The skin cancer, yeah. They just keep burning off bits of it. Gets me into the infirmary now and then, which is good. Passes the time."
"Where you getting all this sun?"
"This is pre-1980 damage. Shoulda worn my scally cap more, I guess. It's not the bad cancer, now. This is just freckles on a mutiny. I'm still as strong as the stink in Chelsea." He inhaled like he could smell it now. "So, Jem talked to you?"
"Jem told me this, yeah."
"Never get lonely with him around. In here all the time. Funny kid when he gets going. Excitable like his dad. What you gotta do with a Coughlin is, you gotta keep that carrot hanging out in front of his beady eyes. 'Cause the stick in back, it don't register."
"Got it," said Doug.
Mac pretended to work on some food in his teeth, studying Doug, his only child. Whatever he saw, he kept his observations to himself.
"I should have come to see you more," Doug said, having to say something.
"Well, it's a long trip, coming out here to the country."
"Been doing things, you know. This and that. Time goes by."
"Hey. You're talking to a clock here." Still looking at Doug, one year older. "I didn't blow it with you, Duggy. What I hear, you're doing awright."
Doug shrugged. "Day to day."
"Older I get, the more I think about the years I missed. Fuckin' shame."
"Yeah." Doug tugged at the shelf, wondering how much longer.
"I think I know why you're pissed at me all the time."
Doug sat up a little. "Yeah? Am I?"
Mac crossed his arms over his blue scrub shirt, his chest now sagged back into his midsection. "Me losing your mother's house."
Doug rubbed the back of his head. "Nah. I don't care about that no more."
"Those legal bills, Duggy. Fuck. I had a shot at staying out-- some nervous witnesses, a few changed stories-- but you know no court-assigned PD could do it. You claim indigence, you might as well drive yourself to prison the day the trial starts."
"It's just that-- you never had anything solid put away. With all you took. It's like you never imagined a rainy day."
Mac absorbed this criticism along with whatever else he was drawing off Doug. "I heard some knucklehead crew took a hostage in that Kenmore Square thing."
Doug said, "Yeah. I read that too."
"Bonehead play. Hostages bring a lot of heat. Better to take the pinch, should it come. Less of a bill to pay, and you earn your stripes, you come out stronger."
Doug looked at the patches taken out of Mac's head, thinking, Are you coming out stronger? "Well," Doug said, vigilant for guards within listening range, "like I said, I read about it."
"Seemed like a good haul, though."
"I suppose it might have been."
"And how's about old Boozo and his crew?"
"Gone away forever. Boozo's on a shelf in some federal pen in Kentucky or somewheres. Not like here. No connections. No home away from home."
"His kid, what's his name?"
"Jackie."
"There's a fuckup. Not like my boy."
"Jackie's gone too, and he's not missed."
"RICO, huh? That racketeering stuff?"
"RICO was twenty years ago. G's got a bigger stick now, a much heavier stick. Called the Hobbs Act. Anything interstate, interfering with any commerce like that. They don't need to prove conspiracy now."
"Getting tough out there."
"I guess. But when was it easy, right?"
Mac smiled. He was trying to read Doug's face like words might appear. "Jem says he's worried about you."
Doug was beginning to understand the eyeballing. "Is he."
"Says you're doing some things, acting some ways... he's concerned."
"Uh-huh. Was it his idea for us to meet again, or yours?"
"Both."
Doug crossed his arms, unused to getting played by Jem. "So here I am then. Presenting myself for inspection to show you everything's fine, thanks for asking. Next topic?"
"He's worried about you not having your eye on the ball."
"I'm gonna tell you something. Him looking after me? That's like you looking after me, okay? You wanna push it, that's what you're gonna hear. You mentioned something, I think, about a hostage, earlier? Who do you think was solely responsible for that little fiasco?"
"You still keeping dry?"
"Fuckin'... next topic. How was your Christmas?"
Mac scratched the back of his neck, looking lazily at the guards on either end, then leaning closer to the glass. "Sixteen months."
Doug nodded, waiting for more. "And? What? Sixteen months, what?"
"Sixteen more months for me, here. I'm getting out."
"Out? Out of what?" Doug was sitting up now. "What do you mean, out?"
"Out, Little Partner." Mac nodding, smiling. "Gonna be you and me again."
All feeling flushed from Doug's face. "What are you talking about?"
Big, satisfied shrug. "Been in the works for a while. Parole board's under pressure to free up room for all the young shoot-firsts coming up. Either that or build a new prison, you know? Old outta-step bank robber, never even seen an ATM-- what's he gonna do, right?" Big grin. "Hey, I didn't even tell Jem. Didn't want to jinx it. Would of kept you updated, I'd seen you more."
He was getting out. Mac was getting out.
"The neighborhood, Dad-- it's all gone. The Town. There's nothing left."
"You trying to talk me into staying? We'll get it back."
"Get back what? There's nothing... it's all changed, understand? It's gone."
"You've been doing good, I can see that. Some bumps in the road, but okay. Now we're gonna take things to the next level."
Doug's chair was no good for him anymore. He needed to stand, to move, but the room rules kept him low and squirming-- panicking like the old man was walking out right now.
"I'm gonna get back your mother's house, Duggy."
Doug shook his head, hot. "You don't even know, Dad. You couldn't even begin to afford it."
Mac smiled his smile. "I'll get it back."
"What you think, you're gonna walk in, have one of your famous sit-downs? Like you're still the king thief? Nobody's afraid of you there, Dad. Nobody even knows you anymore. A few old guys, sitting outside the Foodmaster-- they might shake your hand. They might doff the cap. It's not like it was. The code is gone. The old ways, all of it. Gone."
"Ain't gonna be just like it was, Duggy," said Mac, the old ka-ching returning to his eyes, popping up like dollar-sign tabs on an old-fashioned cash register. "Gonna be better. Let the G bring their big sticks. You two, you and Jem, working under me...?"
Doug stared. Mac was getting out.
* * *
DOUG DROVE HARD INTO the night, turning out the ZR-1 along the 95-to-93 interstate circuit, doing ninety-mile-an-hour doughnuts around the city. Sometimes he imagined he had taken all the bad energy of his youth and harnessed it in that 405-horse, all-aluminum V-8. He watched the lights in his rearview mirror, thinking about the G following him, or even Jem, when in reality it was the ghost of his father. The old crook had been chasing him all along.
