by Dodds, Colin
“Well, it’s just civilization. It may not be much, but it seems to have beaten out the competition for now.”
“True, true. I guess that makes us its discontents.”
“Pretty much. They didn’t mention that one at career day.”
“The discontent bit is more like a hobby than a career. I’m too tired after work to do it more than an hour a night, unless I’m drinking.”
This was the Joe I loved—sober, focused and funny. It was one who I had seen less and less of since high school.
Escalita showed up. She had a way of passing through a room, a grace I hadn’t noticed before. She radiated a strange sense that everything, even the things she had no way of knowing about, were as natural as the rain. I rose and she kissed my cheek hello, leaving a wake of sweet perfume behind her. Joe gave her a plate of pasta and poured his own portion on a plate as well. I said I should go, that I needed some sleep. I walked out into the cold and over to my car, feeling terrible, and relieved at the same time.
41.
Parked outside Joe’s house, I called Volpe. He sounded busy and irritated and said he could meet me either in three hours, just after midnight, or on Saturday. I said midnight at the same diner and he agreed.
I drove to Vincent’s and drank at the end of the bar. The whiskey made my face unclench and my mind wander. I followed that impulse until I was more than a little drunk. The patrons were a mix and there was no single answer as to what was going on in that place. In the car, I practiced my sober voice, and then drove to the Boulevard Diner. I ordered some eggs and coffee to mask the whiskey on my breath. Ira Volpe showed up just after the eggs. He looked bone tired and pale, almost yellow. He hung up his coat on the hook over the booth and gestured for a coffee.
“What’s up?” he said.
“Listen, I’ve been thinking about what you said. And I’ve heard some things that I don’t like. If I were to tell you something about Joe, maybe enough to get a search warrant, could you try to keep the charges down to a misdemeanor?”
“You been drinking?”
“A little. Is that a problem?”
“No. If I wasn’t on duty, I’d have one with you. This week fuckin’ sucks. You hear about that psycho killed three innocent people at the Palladium?”
“I did. Three?”
“Well, it’s three now, another one just died. My boss is on all of our asses to do something, but he doesn’t seem to know what.”
“I heard about that. It’s a shame. Joe knew that guy, the killer, he used to prank call him.”
“That sounds about right. Your buddy sure knows how to choose his enemies. So tell me, is Joe in enough trouble that it’s worth him getting a record and maybe going to jail for a few months to get him out of harm’s way?”
“It might be. But is there any way he could just get like, a house arrest? Maybe just for a few months. Can you rig that if you were … Well, before I say anything, can we talk off the record?”
“What does that mean, like we say things and then pretend that we didn’t say them?”
“Yeah.”
“It depends on what you say.”
I drank my coffee and decided that being in this far, I might as well continue.
“So say there’s a guy who had about three hundred dollars worth of cocaine. If you knew where it was enough to get a search warrant, could you still look all over the apartment for it before you found it, so he wouldn’t know who told you?”
“I guess so. But if the person who told us was just fucking around and warned his friend, that person and his friend would lose all of my good will. Is that off the record enough?” Ira asked, more tired than angry.
“Okay. Now, do you know a judge you could talk to who could recommend house arrest?”
“It’s not unthinkable, if the guy didn’t have a record, or if he wanted to give some people up. After this O’Brien nightmare, we all just need to make some arrests out there.”
We negotiated from there. Ira acted more confident about his promise of house arrest with every detail I gave him. So I kept on telling him details, including the locked desk drawer in Joe’s apartment. Ira went out to his car to get some forms for me to sign. I hadn’t occurred to me that I’d have to sign anything. I picked at my eggs for what seemed like a long time before he came back into the dining car. He had the carbon-paper forms mostly filled out. I started reading the carbon paper pages, but almost got sick about three quarters of the way down the first page I was supposed to initial. I knew the phrase “Confidential Informant” from cop shows, so that wasn’t what hit me. I flinched when I saw that Volpe had checked a box pertaining to my payment. It said “$30.” After that, I stopped reading and just initialed, initialed, initialed, signed and signed. After that, he gave me a voucher for my payment. Then he got up and put out his hand and we shook.
“You’re doing the right thing here.”
“I hope so. Just hold up your end, please.”
Volpe said he’d try and left. I pushed my plate away and wondered why you can’t ever take back anything you do in this life. I wished I was drunker. I paid and drove through downtown, up Highland Street, then down Park Avenue to an Irish bar. I went in and knocked back a few drinks among the solitary men watching Cheers reruns on TV. I watched the bottles until they cleared the place at quarter to two. From there, I drove down the road to Emily’s apartment. When you have problems, make yourself someone else’s problem—it’s an old trick.
I buzzed until her roommate, Aileen, came downstairs. I told her through the door to tell Emily that Jim was there and needed to talk to her. Emily came down, dressed in pajamas and a bathrobe and let me in. On the ground floor, I started to apologize and explain myself, but she disarmed me with a sideways cock of her head and told me to come upstairs. In her apartment, she sat me down on the couch, then went into Aileen’s room to explain things to her. Emily finally sat down next to me on the couch.
“So Jim, what’s wrong?”
I told her everything, starting with my meeting with Volpe, then about Sully, the ambush, Leominster, Willie Brown. I was drunk and full of doubt and rambled on about Olive, about the terrible sense of waste and helplessness that I couldn’t shake. I told her about Serena cancelling, and about all the sounds in the background of her phone calls. She listened patiently.
“I know that waste feeling,” she said. “It’s like there’s something or someone in front of you that you can’t touch. And the more you look at them, the farther you get. I don’t really know what it means.”
For a moment, I felt understood. My nerves, which had been flapping in the breeze all week, grew still. I leaned in and kissed Emily. It felt right. She waited a second or two before laying one of her small hands on my collarbone and gently pushing me away.
“Listen Jim, I’m glad you’re here. And I’m glad you told me all that. But you know us. You know that this isn’t that.”
I nodded and sat back on the couch, by turns befuddled, embarrassed and relieved. Emily left the room for a minute and came back with blankets and pillows and made up the couch for me. She gave me a long hug and said good night.
On the couch, I looked at the window-shaped patches of light on the ceiling and wondered if the world wasn’t a makeshift hospital where the doctors and patients kept changing places.
Part Four—War Town and Worm Town
But a small part of the dominion of my ancestors remains. I am determined not to live until I have no country.
—Metacomet, also known as King Philip
42.
Thursday, January 8
I fought waking until a square of light fell directly on my face. Emily was reading a thick book about Alexander Hamilton at the kitchen table when I sat up from the couch. My whole body vibrated with the ache of hangover. Pretty, in jeans and a big sweatshirt, she looked up from her book without moving. Her roommate wasn’t around and the apartment was very still around her. The dust danced in the sunlight. I got up slow.
“
I thought I should let you sleep. You seemed pretty wasted last night.”
“Yeah. Sorry about that, and sorry about the other thing,” I said and hoped I wouldn’t have to say more.
“It’s okay. After all these years, you get a pass.”
“And tell your roommate I’m sorry I woke her up. Am I covered for apologies?”
“For now,” she said and smiled.
“What time is it?”
“Ten,” she said, which by her inflection was late, but by my reckoning too early. I burped up a little whiskey and grimaced.
“So what do you have planned for today?”
“I promised my advisor I’d read all these books over break and I am way behind. So I have devoted my day to Alexander Hamilton’s early plans for industrializing America. You want some breakfast?”
“I don’t know. Yes?”
“I have eggs and oatmeal.”
“Maybe some oatmeal. My stomach is a little jumpy.”
She started making the oatmeal at the stove. I blinked, at home for the first time since I had come to Massachusetts. I opened the book on Hamilton for a look, saw the word tariff three times in a paragraph and closed it. The wood grain of the old kitchen table was more my speed.
“So I was thinking about what you told me about Joe. Did you really talk to that cop, Ira, last night?” she said, stirring the pot and then turning around.
“Yeah, I even filled out some forms, so he could get a warrant. I did all of that.”
“I think it’s a good thing you did.”
“If it works out. Otherwise, it might be the worst thing I could have done.”
“Regardless, you did something. You’re looking out for the guy.”
Pulling up the sleeves of her sweatshirt, she poured the oatmeal into a bowl, then retrieved a box of brown sugar from a cupboard she could barely reach and sprinkled it over the oatmeal. The dust in the sunlight swirled when she walked over with the bowl.
“This is a situation where good intentions may not matter. I just hope I’m not being misled here.”
“Obviously. But still, it’s a good thing. I think it had to be done, and done by one of his friends.”
“Well, the only thing I can do now is warn Joe. But I can’t even do that. Fuck.”
“Back when I was at Smith, a group of my friends hung out with this kid from town. His real name was Jaime, but he called himself Brando. He was a few years older than us and always knew where to find drugs and parties. We met him when we were freshmen and he was a funny, self-deprecating guy. He might have been gay, but he wasn’t out. He’d get us coke and X and we’d have a lot fun. But by the end of my sophomore year, he started getting bitter, even violent sometimes, and we just stopped returning his calls. Sometime in my senior year, he hung himself. I only heard about it a few weeks later. But I always wonder what I, or anyone, could have done, if someone, anyone, had been looking out for him. I mean, where were the people who cared, who could have stopped him from getting to that point, from doing what he did?”
“It’s the million-dollar question: How do you get between someone and their self-destruction?” I asked, eating again.
“It’s one of those things. I don’t think you can. But I think you have to try. Do you ever go to church anymore?”
“Hardly at all, maybe once every few years. Catholic school cured me of it. Why, do you think I should get the diocese involved?”
“No, it’s just the idea of trying to help people, to change people. It reminds me of church, of all that steadfast effort for impossible things, like turning the other cheek, or just having faith. I started going to Sunday Mass again last year, almost every week. I don’t think it gives me much peace, but it gives me a proper place to be honestly uneasy about all the impossible things, all the things that are out of my control.”
I finished my oatmeal. We looked at each other and both knew it was time for me to go. Outside, the sky was a clear merciless shade of pale blue over the dirty snow and sandy streets. Back on Route 9, I considered going to a Mass, then thought of the pale wood and bad art of the modern churches. It made the whiskey churn in my belly. Passing a shuttered mini-golf course, I smelled myself and decided not to stop into the Fountainhead for a change of clothes. Coffee and gas later, I was in Dad’s room. There seemed to be fewer tubes and wires going into his gown. He was napping in front of the repeating stream of cable news. He woke suddenly when I went for the TV remote cradled in his forearm. It took him a minute to get his bearings. We talked in sputters and spurts.
“I like that shirt,” Dad said.
It was a polo shirt with brown and blue stripes.
“Thanks.”
“Did you have that on yesterday?”
“Yeah. I guess I did. I had a late night.”
“You’ve been having a lot of them lately. That’s a good thing. You should have some fun. I didn’t mean to sound like I was giving you a hard time the other day. This place probably makes you want to blow off some steam. So who’s this girl?”
“Who?”
“The one you’ve been going out with?”
“Oh, I don’t know what’s going on there. I just met her a week or so ago. It’s funny. I met her here.”
“In the hospital?”
“Yeah, you can store that one away for when you start dating again. The food sucks, but the ICU is full of vulnerable chicks.”
“When I was your age, I could go out any night of the week and take a girl home. They weren’t always gorgeous. But any night of the week.”
“When was that, 1970? Everyone tells me that was a good year.”
The little hospital TV filled up with a computer-animated mushroom cloud full of bullet-pointed factoids over the Manhattan skyline.
“You really need to get a job,” Dad said when the commercial came.
“Really? I had no clue. I was just sitting around, twiddling my thumbs and waiting on the salary fairy. Thanks, really. Thanks for the fucking tip.”
“Hey, hey. Take it easy.”
“Me? I am taking it easy. But why don’t you tell me to eat? Why don’t you tell me to breathe? That’s not exactly advice.”
“Fine. Forget it,” Dad said, lowering the corners of his mouth so his eyes widened, the implication being that I overreacted.
In my experience, overreacting is sometimes the correct thing to do. I looked across the room and noticed that Dad’s roommate was gone. The curtain was pushed round to the wall, and the bed awaited a new customer.
“What happened to the old guy in the next bed?” I asked.
“His cancer spread. They moved him to a hospice.”
“That’s one of those places they put you to die?”
“Pretty much. I’m stuck here until Tuesday, the doctor said. I don’t want another depressing roommate.”
“He wasn’t so bad, except for the dying. He didn’t talk anyway.”
“Yeah, he was fine. But his wife, Jim, you didn’t hear it—she would start saying the rosary when you left. I mean, not even whispering. And I’m here, trying to sleep, so I clear my throat, but she keeps at it. So I ask her to stop it. She ignores me again. So finally, after twenty minutes, I buzz the nurse and I tell her. The nurse tells her to pray more quietly.”
“I guess she was distraught.”
“Oh, that’s not the half of it. When the nurse leaves, the woman starts praying out loud again, so I yell at her to shut up and buzz for the nurse. So the wife comes over and pulls the curtain away and points at her eye and her neck and then at me and makes a hissing noise. It was the strangest damn thing. Here I am and I can’t even wipe my own ass, and now I have this crazy woman putting a goddamn gypsy curse on me.”
“I thought she was a Catholic.”
“Catholicism is different for women, it’s all about hexes and candles and bribing the saints.”
“Fucking witchery,” I said. We both started laughing at the perverse tableau of Dad harassing the soon-to-be widow, and me accusi
ng her of witchcraft.
“I’m just saying, why can’t I catch a break? I know it’s a hospital, but can’t I get a less-depressing roommate? Why can’t I get some nineteen-year-old sorority girl after her boob job?”
“I don’t think they give those to guys who just had open-heart surgery. Insurance and whatnot.”
“I’m just saying.”
“How’s the pain?”
“It’s okay. It’s just in one section in my chest, well, the upper half of my torso, well, most of my torso, shoulders and arms, and neck. The point is that if I just don’t think about it, it’s pretty manageable. But it wears me out. I think I sleep about fifteen hours a day.”
Dad shook his head. He looked old, but somehow identical to how I remembered him from when I was a kid. His hair wasn’t gray and he had a mustache then. His cheeks were less baggy back then, and not so full of red capillaries. His eyes weren’t as crowded by folds of skin and his eyebrows weren’t as wild and overgrown. But I had to work to recognize the differences. Something was so much the same that it mooted everything else.
“Hey, if you’re going to the cafeteria, I could go for a Diet Coke,” Dad said, smiling at his failed attempt at subtlety.
I said okay and got up. The hyperbolic voices of the news anchors exploded into life before I was two steps away. I ran into Dad’s friend Robert in the hallway, waved and said I’d be back in a few minutes. The cafeteria was crowded, so I wandered like a kid in a new high school looking for a place to eat lunch, with my tray of chicken nuggets, soft pretzel and Diet Cokes. I spotted Olive at a table by the cash register.
“Oh, hey,” Olive said, looking at me flatly.
She was wearing jeans along with a black top that had too many straps to make sense at first glance.
“Nice to see you too, sunshine.”
“I guess that was supposed to be you being charming.”
“I’m sorry, did I shoot Morrissey while I was sleeping?”
“Hardy har,” she said, and smiled despite herself. But she flattened her mouth and deadened her eyes almost immediately.
