Prince of Thieves

by Chuck Hogan

  Maybe you always new about her or gessed or never wanted to ask. If you do'nt want to talk about this again I would not mind.

  This is the longest letter Ive ever ritten.

  By the way. Old Uncle G came to see me. But I did'nt see him.

  Do'nt no how to end this Duggy. Do'nt even no if Ill mail it.

  Mac.

  PS. Your mother never came back, Duggy. I am.

  41

  Birthday

  DOUG ROLLED DOWN A lane of tidy homes, checking addresses, coming up on a line of parked cars and an inflatable castle in a driveway. The bladder castle jerked and jiggled like a stomach full of screaming, indigestible kids. Doug slowed at the silver mailbox festooned with birthday balloons. The house number matched.

  He pulled over at the end of the row of cars and stood out of the Caprice. The house was a gray Cape, kids chasing each other around the front yard with squirt guns, parents chatting in the driveway. Doug was about to get back in his car when he saw Frank G. step away from a small group near the castle's generator and wave him up. Frank wore a collared, short-sleeved shirt, long shorts, and Converse flats, walking down the driveway to meet him. "You found it."

  Doug pulled off his shades, looking at the party. "Frank, man-- you should have told me."

  "You said you needed a few minutes, right? C'mon."

  Frank walked him past the screaming castle toward an open garage full of chairs and folding tables of food. Twin girls in matching pink eyeglasses sat hip to hip on the front lawn, eating melting blocks of ice cream cake, and three plastic paratroopers came swaying down to earth out of a bedroom window, followed by a balsa wood airplane in a tailspin. Then a kid with his arm in a blue cast came racing past, nailing them each in the gut with water out of a tiny green pistol, taunting, "Ha-ha, Uncle Frank!"

  Frank pulled a pastel pink Saturday night special out of his pocket and turned on the kid, blasting him, the kid running off squealing in a war-movie zigzag as Frank's piece ran dry. "Inside," he said. "Gotta reload."

  He did so at the sink, the kitchen bustling with women wrapping to-go plates of ziti and lasagna and cold cuts. Frank led Doug past two dads talking business in the hallway, past a cooing woman changing a sleepy baby on the dining room floor, past the Sox game in the family room. A ruckus up on the second floor made Frank reverse direction, taking Doug to a side door, down wooden steps into a cool basement.

  Half of it was finished, the paneled walls papered with Michael Jordan, Ray Bourque, and Mo Vaughn posters. There were Koosh balls everywhere, old U-Haul boxes overflowing with sporting equipment, and an elaborate Matchbox racetrack setup in the back. In the center of the room stood an air hockey table under a billiards lamp.

  "So what's doing?" said Frank.

  Doug shrugged. The birthday party had thrown him, he didn't know where to start. "How you doing?"

  "Me?" Frank walked around to the other end of the table rink. "Much better. You caught me at a bad moment last time. I let that little old guy get to me, I don't know why. He doesn't stand for everybody. I know he doesn't stand for me."

  "Good. Good to hear." Doug prowled back and forth, uncomfortable, as though asking for money.

  Frank switched on the game table, the jets pushing air through the perforated playing surface. "I'm back at meetings, been to a few." The puck stirred, a red plastic disk drifting to the side as though by an invisible hand. Frank flicked it back to the opposite boards-- just diddling, not an invitation to play. "What about you?"

  Doug ran his hand briskly through his chopped hair. "Meetings? Nah. Not since before we talked."

  A herd of elephants went trampling overhead. "Big mistake," said Frank. "You got crisis written all over your face, I can see it. Beeping me was the right thing to do. Listen to me now. She's not worth it."

  "Who? Not worth what?"

  "That drink you haven't taken yet. Your girl isn't worth it."

  "Nah, Frank-- "

  " 'I think I met someone...' You remember that?" Frank pushed the wafer puck harder now, sending it clicking off the boards, coasting on the low-friction surface. "The way you first told me about her-- I knew. This girl is your disease, Doug."

  Doug held out his hands. "Frank-- and I never said this to you before-- but you're dead wrong here. This girl... if anything, she's my sobriety."

  "And she's gone now."

  Doug admitted, "Yeah."

  "And you're thirsty. It's right there on your face. But if you can somehow get her back-- that'll cure everything, right?"

  "Frank, look. This other girl, my old girlfriend-- she's my alcoholism. Fucking haunting me every good step I try to take. But this girl-- no. She's too good for me. She's-- "

  "Everything you want but can't have. You've poured all your hopes into this person who can't be with you-- am I right? She's too good. Can you hear it? You set up this unattainable thing."

  "You're reading me wrong."

  "Set it all up maybe even since the beginning. A long, slow slide into you giving yourself the okay to drink again, with her as your excuse. With all I'm going through, who wouldn't slip just a little?" The disk click-clanked into one of the slot goals like a coin dropping into a bank. "That's the bullshit you have to fight here. That's the demon."

  Doug paced with his hands folded behind his head. "How did it get so complicated?" he said. "It's a beer. You drink it, or you don't."

  "It used to be a beer," said Frank, switching off the table, coming out from behind it. "Face that, Doug. You got to eat what's eating you. You can't drown it. You tried that already. Didn't work."

  Doug wondered what it would taste like, this thing that was eating him.

  The door opened on the party above them, a woman's voice: "Frank?"

  "Yeah, down here, hon."

  Toeless summer sandals stopped two steps down. "Steve and Pauline just left, they couldn't find you."

  "I'm sniffing glue with a friend. Hold on."

  Frank trotted up the steps for a whispered conversation. Then the sandals flapped down ahead of Frank.

  "I'm Nancy Geary," she said, offering her small hand for a quick, purposeful shake; not unfriendly, but not sweetly fake either. He was a guest in her house and she was presenting herself to greet him.

  "You have a beautiful home here," said Doug, because he was supposed to, and because it was true.

  She was small, a tough city girl. "You get anything to eat yet?"

  "I'm a gate-crasher. Frank didn't tell me you were..." He waved at the thumping upstairs.

  "Take some sandwiches home with you, okay?"

  "I will. Thank you."

  She was already starting back up the stairs. Probably never beautiful, but steady, no more attractive with makeup than without. A constant. Not trying to impress anybody, she had a house and a family and a birthday party to run.

  The door closed, and Doug looked at Frank. "You wanted me here for this," he said. "Wanted me to see the house, the wife, the kids."

  "It's not unattainable. All you gotta do is get lucky. This girl, Doug-- people come and go. There're reasons. That's what life is. It doesn't mean anything about you yourself."

  Doug shook his head at how wrong Frank was. "'Course it does."

  Frank studied him. "What's this do to you moving on from your friends?"

  Doug felt the suffocation again. "No, that's still on."

  "You've been saying that."

  "Frank, look, I'm committed. There's nothing left here for me now. I'm setting it up so that there's no turning back. But I gotta... I gotta take care of things first."

  "That I don't like the sound of. You trying to save people who don't want to be saved."

  "It's not that. Truly. It's knowing what will happen to them after I'm gone, and trying to give them, at least, one good last chance."

  "Chance at what?"

  Doug shrugged. "I guess, life."

  "You really think that? Think you're the only thing kept them safe all these years? The designated driver for
everyone?"

  Doug considered this. "Yeah. I have to say-- it's exactly that."

  They went back up the stairs together. In the hallway a kid went racing past waving a plastic sword, and Frank stopped him with a shoulder squeeze. "Mikey, where's Kev?"

  "Right here, Dad," said a shorter, tow-haired boy in the kitchen doorway, holding a hockey stick with a big blue bow on it.

  "C'mere, Roscoe," said Frank, steering the two boys across into the dining room, past a supermarket tray of cookie crumbs. Frank stood with one hand on the swordsman's shoulder and the other on the shorter boy's blond head. "Michael, Kevin, this is the guy I was telling you about. This is Doug MacRay."

  Doug looked at Frank, surprised but getting it now. Frank G. had had his number the whole time.

  Frank said, "This guy was the fastest backward skater I ever saw, including pro."

  Doug stood before the boys, feeling like he was the kid and they were the adults.

  "Kev turned seven today," said Frank, roughing up his boy's hair, pride and love coming off him like heat.

  "Yesterday," corrected Kevin.

  "Right. Sorry. Birthday yesterday, party today."

  Brown-haired Michael looked up at Doug with his mother's no-nonsense eyes. "You were drafted by the Bruins?"

  Doug said, "I was."

  They looked him over closely, this stranger in their dining room, this former hockey star, mysteriously a friend of their father's.

  The birthday boy, Kevin, shrugged. "So what happened?"

  Doug nodded, unable to meet their young eyes, almost unable to say the words. "I blew it."

  42

  The Last Breakfast

  BREAKFAST AT HIS MOTHER'S house, without the breakfast. He hadn't eaten anything in a couple of days, and thought he might never eat again.

  My mother is a house.

  Why come here now? To mourn her? Hadn't he always come here to mourn her?

  My mother is dead.

  No. He had always come here to mourn himself. His motherless self.

  Gone now was his fantasy of her brave midnight flight from the Town, winning her freedom from his father and living reinvented and happy somewhere in the outside world, yet with a tender spot in her heart for the son she hated to leave behind.

  All the baths he had taken in that porcelain tub, emerging barefoot and shivering and dripping tears of bathwater onto the tile floor where she last lay.

  He wanted to believe in her sickness, her suffering. Her passionate, epic torment. Anything but the banality of a junkie fixing to self-destruct.

  That night he had dreamed that the one-way streets of the Town were lined not with houses but with heads, the giant, weathered faces of old mothers talking at him as he hurried past them toward the empty lot on Sackville Street, the mouths on either side of it going tsk-tsk.

  The Town kept its secrets close, raising them like its children. Thinking this brought on an absurd surge of panic for Krista and for Shyne, one he fought down.

  Doug hadn't seen the guy exit the house. He was so lost in thought, he didn't notice the owner of the bottom-floor condo walking to his red Saab, keys in hand. Dark-haired, compact in an unbuttoned suit jacket, long tie, tasseled shoes. The guy saw Doug and slowed, and Doug couldn't even work up the energy to pretend to be doing anything other than what he was doing: sitting against this low brick hedge wall, watching the guy's house.

  The guy tossed his underarm portfolio into the backseat of the car, then shut the door, considering heading over and saying something to Doug.

  "Hi," the guy said, doing just that, slowly crossing the one-way street. "I notice you sit out here some mornings. Most mornings."

  "Yeah?" Doug said, low-energy, off his guard. "I'm just waiting for a ride."

  The guy nodded, stopping at the front bumper of the Caprice. "We-- I see you out here a lot." He glanced back at the house. "You seem to be watching our house, or something. Unless I'm..."

  "I used to live here a long time ago," said Doug, surprised by his tired candor. "That's all."

  "Ah." The guy was still confused.

  "It's cool, don't worry," said Doug. "After today I won't be coming around anymore."

  The guy nodded, trying to think of something else to say, then turned and started back. Then he stopped, something nagging at him.

  "Say-- you want to step inside? I don't know, see it again, one last time?"

  Doug never expected the guy to be decent. Doug could see the lady of the house now, peeking out at them from behind the parlor-window curtain. He pictured them all inside together, a pair of wary yuppies watching 210 pounds of Grade-A Townie getting misty in their bathroom.

  The offer was tantalizing, but the house was his mother, and his mother was long dead.

  Doug said, "You got a little girl there, huh?"

  "Yes," the guy said, at first brightening, then suspicious.

  "Sleeps in that corner room?"

  The guy looked at the window where the faded ghost of a TOT ALERT! fire-safety sticker remained-- not knowing how or whether to answer.

  "Those dolphin curtains there," said Doug, pointing them out. "You want to draw those every night. Headlights come by on the street, they reflect off the ceiling and look like ghosts flying past. Scary for a kid lying there alone."

  The guy nodded, mouth hanging open. "I will certainly do that."

  Doug slid into the Caprice and pulled away down the steep decline.

  * * *

  THE KNOCK ON KRISTA'S door brought her answering it in a tank shirt, nylon workout pants, and Tweety slippers. She straightened with surprise, looking past Doug as though he might not be alone. "What's up?"

  Doug shrugged, uncertain himself. "Nothing really."

  She moved aside, and he entered. Shyne was trapped in her sticky high chair in the dying parlor, shredding a cord of string cheese into white threads. A crushed butt in the table ashtray was still smoking.

  "I think I'm hungry," said Doug.

  Krista disappeared into the kitchen and Doug dropped into a chair at the table, exhausted at 9 A.M. He watched Shyne's wormy fingers working at the cheese, the dull concentration in her close-set eyes, her lips lax along the flat line of her mouth. He heard the microwave hum for about a minute, then beep and stop.

  He said, toward the kitchen, "I'm going away."

  Silence, then Krista's padding slipper-steps resumed, the microwave door opened and shut. "You in some kind of trouble?"

  Doug shook his head, though she couldn't see him. "No more than usual."

  A drawer opened, silverware rustling. "Is it the heat in Town?"

  Her insider status grated on him as she reentered the room. Jem told her too much. "What do you know about it?"

  She set down a steaming plate of chicken a la king in front of him with a fork and knife. Thick cream sauce studded with chunks of white meat. Anything would have looked good to him then.

  Krista lifted a strand of cheese off Shyne's tray and dangled it before her daughter's mouth like a mother bird with a white worm. When Shyne didn't bite, Krista pressed the cheese in between the girl's lips, only to have it fall back onto the tray. She gave up and sat across from him on a folded knee. "When are you coming back?"

  Steam from his plate rose between them. Doug shook his head.

  She studied him, doubtful. "This have to do with you and Jem?"

  Behind her, Shyne almost made a word then, a sound like Shemmm.

  Doug said, "In a way."

  "Does he know?"

  "Probably." Doug picked up the fork, checking that it was clean. "I'm gonna do this one last thing he wants. You can tell him that for me."

  She nodded. "And afterward?"

  The thin wood handle of the knife was cracked, the blade rusted and wobbly. "You know I've always looked out for him."

  "You were the only one who could."

  "Well, this is it for me. He wants a chance at one big score, I'm gonna give it to him. It's up to him whether he makes it his last
or not."

  Her eyes tightened, seeing that he was serious now. "Where are you gonna go?"

  "I don't know yet."

  "Is she going with you?"

  Doug had a forkful almost to his mouth. He set the fork back down and absorbed her blunt stare. As Shyne dropped the threads of cheese to the dusty floor, one by one, Krista's glare became full of violence, a scorned lover's inward scream.