by Dodds, Colin
“Did our boy call?” he asked.
“He did, but he didn’t leave a message.”
Volpe just hung up. I had a sense there was something I wasn’t seeing, wasn’t considering. The feeling lingered like an uncleaned room. Other state highways merged with Route 9 and vanished, each listing towns with English and Indian names, every name a tale of age-old misapprehension.
In the hospital, Dad had a new roommate, an obese guy not much older than me. His thick legs were wrapped tight with gauze and elevated. He watched everyone who passed the room with bulging eyes, uncomfortably aware. I pulled the curtain behind me and sat down by Dad.
“The new guy makes me nervous,” Dad whispered.
“Me too. And I talked to the plastic surgeons. They said they couldn’t get you a fresh bimbo until tomorrow. The weekend is slow for boob jobs.”
“As long as you checked,” Dad chuckled.
Then the new roommate got a visitor. She was just a little bigger than him. They started whispering about something, probably us. There was no other news in the hospital. Dad thought one of the night nurses had a crush on him, and that the TV networks totally misunderstood the reasons for the latest crash in the markets.
“Is everything okay with you?”
“Yeah. I’m just getting over this flu. Why?”
“Because one of the nurses said a detective called and asked if I was staying here.”
The walls tightened, making me again a child trying to hide his misdeeds from his father. I reminded myself to keep my face slack until my mouth could find words.
“Oh. I think I know who it is. Joe said a detective was trying to get in touch with me because the cops wanted to talk to one of the guys from the night we got into that fight. It’s nothing. I’ll ask the nurse for his name and call him back.”
I stopped myself, knowing how a lie tends to ramble.
“I just want you to know that if you’re in trouble, and you need help, just ask. You aren’t alone. Divorced or not, there’s nothing your mother and I wouldn’t do to help you.”
Shame is the word for it. I felt like I was breathing a rainstorm.
“I’m not in trouble. I’m just, just doing the best I can here,” I said, unable to mask myself.
From there, we talked about the Patriots, about his transfer to the rehab facility, about his friends, before finally letting the TV say our nothing for us. I only stayed a couple hours with him that day. I said I needed some rest, and left. Back at the Fountainhead, the apartment was a mess. I put a bag of take-out Chinese food by the inflatable bed in the living room. Joe was in his boxers by the computer.
“Hey, what’s up?”
“Just looking up state sentencing guidelines. You know there’s not a single source for finding out online. Someone should put up a website,” Joe said.
“A website with criminal state statutes probably doesn’t cater to the most lucrative market in the world.”
“True, true.”
I told him about the take-out and went into Dad’s room. Without bothering to shut the door, I flopped face down, half on the mattress. I opened my eyes and saw a brown stain the shape of an hourglass. Smelling the stain, I figured it was Olive’s. I imagined the cost of new sheets and cursed the indefinable thing that made things happen like they did, then drifted off to sleep. When I woke an hour later, Joe was yelling into his cell phone. I couldn’t make out what he was saying, only that he was talking to his mother.
“I know … But listen … I don’t think they can fire me unless I’m convicted … Whatever, I’ll get another job … After that, I mean … Okay, you don’t know what you’re saying … there’s a huge difference between two years and a suspended sentence.”
I grabbed a cold egg roll and waited for him to get off the phone. I watched some muted TV, while Joe debated around the edges of the only choice he seemed to have. He promised his mother he’d call her back and hung up.
“Shit. Shitty shit chunks on shit bread with shit sauce and a side order of shit-fried shits. Shit,” Joe said, sitting down next to me, somehow smiling at his predicament.
“Good news?”
“I have to turn myself in.”
“Tonight?”
“Nah. It’s late. I’ll do it tomorrow. That way I can get in, get processed, get bail and be out that night. I just have to look at it that way. It’s like going to the DMV.”
“Except that instead of renewing your drivers’ license, they’re plotting to take away your freedom,” I said.
“That’s the kind of difference I’m trying not to think about. I’m focusing more on the DMV-like aspects,” Joe said and laughed.
“So tomorrow?”
“Yeah. I have to. The cops keep calling my mom.”
The fried rice was open on the TV table. I took it and leaned back, kicking my feet up on the inflatable bed. It was still early, but dark and cold and devoid of any promise outside. For the next few hours, we traded fantasy escape scenarios and speculated about what ignoble snitch had told the cops about Joe’s very recent, very small, and mostly unprofitable side business, and wondered why they would do such a foul thing to such a decent and beloved guy as him. Maybe I could have been honest with him that night. Maybe.
“Man, I keep thinking about when I got suspended, back at Venerini. I still remember Sister Maria telling me to stay behind after she gave you your detentions. She said it all businesslike, like it had nothing to with her—that I was just no damn good,” Joe said.
“She was the worst. I think it was a setup. Why did they let us sit next to each other at Mass? It reeks of entrapment by that calculating, ice-in-her-linty-cunt Sister Maria,” I said.
“True. I remember Sister Maria telling my mom about all the stuff I had done, and suddenly I just relaxed. It was like, well, I am a bad kid and my punishment has arrived and there’s no use fighting it anymore. I could just sort of go with it after that. I feel a little like that now, like it’s just out of my hands.”
We talked until it was late, then turned the lights out and talked like in old sleepover days, him back on the couch, me on the inflated bed. It was mostly old-timey stuff, about girls in junior high, about St. John’s, and then finally about jail.
“There was Mike Marsh, he went away for carjacking, remember him?”
“Yeah. I almost got roped into a gang fight with him and some other guys once.”
“He got out and he was never the same. The first week he was out, me, Mike and Kyle were at a party and he starts saying how we all thought we could beat him up. We were all telling him to chill, that we were just hanging out. Then he punched me behind the ear and kicked Kyle in the stomach and ran out.”
“Didn’t he try to kill someone after that?”
“Two people, a guy and his fiancé. He stabbed them each forty times. Just fucking nuts. But the knife was too small and I guess they both lived. They picked him up for having an open container at Hampton Beach a week later. He’s gone for a long time.”
The apartment had thick concrete walls and nothing broke the long silence that followed. I thought of the dead ends so many of those kids had run into, and thought of the bluster and enthusiasm with which they’d run into those dead ends. We can all spot a dead end—a rat in a maze can do it. But we do not all agree on which ends are dead. I thought of Joe, of my exit interview at Bigelow.
“Well, get a lawyer and play ball,” I said. “Stay out of jail. If they offer you a deal, take it. I don’t care what bridges you burn. You can skip town, stay with me in New York, go to the D.R., whatever. It doesn’t matter as long as it’s not jail.”
“Man, I can’t snitch. The guy is a friend. You remember Walshie?”
“The guy who had his hand shot off?”
“Yeah, he’s an old friend. He gave me the coke at cost because we go back so long. He’s only dealing in the first place to get the money together to go back to school.”
“You know, it’s great that he’s your friend and i
t’s great that he wants to go back to school. But in the final equation, I don’t care about him. Your mother doesn’t care about him. Your future cell mate and your future employer doesn’t care about him.”
“I don’t know. Loyalty has to count for something. And I always felt bad that I got so wasted that night and had leave when he got his hand shot off. I always thought I could have done something if I’d been there,” Joe said, trailing off at the vague and impossible idea of doing something, which sounded, at that point, like something between a fantasy and a flat-out lie.
“You shouldn’t have gotten involved with this stuff. They make things like loyalty and decency impossible. Look at Rory. He traded you in, maybe even to be killed, for a few nosefuls of that shit. And look at the guy who turned you in, he was probably facing the same trouble you’re looking at. This isn’t The Godfather, and the only reason people talk about honor among thieves is that there isn’t any such thing. You can disagree, but look at the fix you’re in.”
Joe said nothing. And I had no more to say. Sleep found a foothold, took over and plumbed the depths. I had a dream about a long conversation with the devil. But I can’t remember what we said. There was pale girl sitting next to me who became paler and paler the more we spoke, and there were souls flying over the houses of Worcester to somewhere in Africa, looking down at us.
47.
Tuesday, January 13
Joe was gone when I woke. He had folded the sheet and blanket and rearranged the pillows on the couch. In the apartment and the hospital parking lots, the air smelled like smoke, like it always does before a snowstorm. The sky was heavy and gray with a dull shine, like a wall made of pearl.
In Dad’s hospital room, the fat guy with elevated legs was there, but Dad was gone. Imagining death, escape, or emergency surgery, I rushed over to a nurse. She reminded my father’s half-negligent son with the still-visible black eye that Dad had been moved to the rehab center. I asked where the rehab center was and she rifled through a file, then a drawer and came up with a Xeroxed page of directions from the hospital to the rehab center.
The rehab center was off a quiet street in Marlborough that I passed twice before spotting the street sign. It was a brand new building that looked like a massive suburban home. The old woman at the front desk had me sign in and then told me that Dad had gotten in four hours ago and I was the first visitor.
“Just please take me to his room,” I said.
After making a show of just how long it could take her to straighten the papers on her desk, the old lady and I walked a series of hallways to Dad’s room. Whoever ran the place had laid the décor on thick. Paintings of duck ponds and old white churches, of sailboats and Cape Cod sand dunes covered the wallpapered walls. Every few feet, the hallways had alcoves with telephones to call for help and little baskets of dried flowers. The homey touches ended at Dad’s room, which differed from his hospital room only slightly. It had the same rolling TV-trays, the uncomfortable, uninviting chairs and the little TV suspended by an adjustable arm from the ceiling. Dad seemed upset when I got in. After a distracted hello, I realized that it wasn’t me he was mad at.
“Fucking TV.”
“What’s the matter with it?”
“It’s like a hotel TV. They only give you like twenty channels and then they charge you like twelve bucks to see a movie on pay-per-view.”
“Doesn’t insurance cover it?”
“Maybe in your dreams or in Sweden. It’s just a fucking rip-off.”
“Well, the room is nice. There are some woods outside the window. You can watch the snow fall.”
“I’m going to complain to the management.”
“You okay today?”
“Yeah, it’s just that they changed my medication the other day. I’m constipated and I’m having trouble sleeping.”
“Sorry I was late. I got turned around on my way here. Then I couldn’t find the street this place was on.”
“That’s fine. They made me do the physical therapy for an hour today. It was embarrassing. I couldn’t hold my hands above my shoulders without help. It hurt like hell.”
I repeated all the things the doctors had said about patience, about healing, all the things you say when it isn’t your body that has broken down in ways you can’t believe or accept. Out the window, the first flakes of the coming storm scouted out the backyard and the gray trees beyond it.
“Maybe I can get you a DVD player, they’re only like twenty bucks. Or maybe some paperbacks and magazines. Maybe you can focus better with the new medication.”
“Yeah, maybe. Pick up some magazines tomorrow,” Dad said, flipping through the stations faster and faster. “I don’t even think I get ESPN on this fucking thing.”
I watched the network news with Dad. Countries signed agreements, fighter jets destroyed a series of buildings, billions of dollars sloshed here and there. The news anchors sang their songs for people who had just gotten in from work, to help them understand the small part they had played, and where the next knock might come from. It smoothed over the chaos and uncertainty that lay ahead in Joe’s bail hearing, my unsent resumes and Dad’s convalescence. Sometime after the news, Dad’s dinner came. It didn’t look much different than the hospital food, except that the portions were bigger.
Dad faded and I said good night. I drove through the dream that the snow made of the roads. The flakes fell like notes in a fugue under the streetlights, and slapped the windshield with the irregular and too-fast rhythm of misfortune itself.
I opened one of Joe’s alligator beers left in the fridge. The pale light of the kitchen made the chaos of the living room sadder. Kicking the inflatable bed out of my way, I sat on the couch and called Joe. My call went straight to a recording that said his voicemail was full. Squinting, I recalled the number and dialed his mother, Justine. I always liked her, but hadn’t seen her in a few years. We exchanged pleasantries and recaps, then I asked about Joe.
“Well, I drove him to the police station early this morning. Never mind the shame of it, I had to take a day off work for his bullshit. So I have my book to read, and I’m waiting around and waiting around and finally, I see that everyone is leaving the courtroom where they’re holding Joe’s bail hearing. So I find a bailiff and I ask him ‘what’s going on?’ and he says that the judge has cancelled the rest of the hearings for the day because of the storm. And I say it’s not even snowing outside yet and I point to the window. And I know this judge, he’s an old man who lives out in Barre and always shuts down early so he can drive home before the roads get bad. So Joe is going to have to stay overnight.”
“Jesus, that sucks.”
“Well, he should have turned himself in right away. Not only would he be out by now, but his bail would be lower. He already owes me five hundred bucks for car repairs.”
“You must be able to talk to someone in the court to get his bail lowered, you must know someone.”
“Sure, I know everyone. But after twenty years as a parole officer, I don’t want to go around and advertise the fact that my son was arrested for selling cocaine. I’m actually glad he’s doing a night in jail. He won’t listen to sense. Don’t get me wrong, Jim, I’m going to do everything in the world to keep him out of prison. But he deserves a night in jail,” Justine said.
On her end, I could hear her pour out a bowl of kibble for her dog. She was a tough lady, free-spirited and bombastic, a break from the constant caution and concern that defined so many of my friends’ mothers growing up.
“I don’t know. You’re probably right.”
“Jim, I know you’re his friend. But I see this every day. I know how it works. The innocent don’t wind up behind bars too often or for very long. Usually by the time someone is arrested, it’s the tenth or the twentieth time they’ve done the thing they were arrested for. I just hope this will get Joe to grow up. I used to tell him all the time—that it looks like fun, just hanging out and getting high, but he’ll leave himself without any options
. Of the people I deal with at work—the ones who aren’t morons or sociopaths or totally screwed up by the people who passed for their parents—most just woke up one morning after years of hanging out and didn’t think they had any choice but to do the dumb thing that got them locked up.”
“I guess so. But what do you do after you get locked up?”
“Some people can turn it around. I don’t know why some do and some don’t. I see some of the dumb ones make smart changes and some of the smart ones just get dumber,” she said and paused. I couldn’t figure out what to say. “Oh, God, how did this happen?”
I couldn’t answer. I tried a mixture of repeating what she had said and something I didn’t believe.
The snow filled up the edge of the balcony outside. On the TV, the network stations scrolled weather warnings across the bottoms of their shows. I put a can of soup in a pot and turned on the stove. I called Volpe, but he didn’t answer. I passed the rest of the snowy night eating soup and watching TV. I slept on the inflatable bed, which lay where I’d kicked it.
48.
Wednesday. January 14
Too lazy to shovel, I spent five minutes getting the SUV into four-wheel-drive to drive over the low snow bank that had trapped it in its spot. I drove to Tatnuck Bookseller.
The old Tatnuck in Worcester had been a mainstay of my teenage years. It occupied a massive former factory. Its bookshelves shared the old rough-hewn wood floor with saurian industrial machines too big to be worth removing. But it had closed down a few years ago, and then moved into a shopping plaza in Westborough. It’s always a little painful when someplace you’ve grown attached to closes down. But it’s almost a personal insult when people try to pretend that it’s part of a larger improvement. I jumped the snow bank and went inside the new Tatnuck. I winced under the fluorescent lights and walked past the section full of wind chimes, candles and doodads, grabbed five or six sports magazines, along with a couple news magazines and went straight to the cash register.
