by Dodds, Colin
At the rehab place, Dad and I passed the hours until his physical therapy. I didn’t want to be there for it and I didn’t think he particularly wanted me to watch. It was a short visit.
The snow had made the landscape as bright and hopeful as Christmas. Caught at a red light, I watched children sled from a hilltop apartment complex down into the parking lot of a bowling alley in Shrewsbury. The fresh snow made Route 9 into something more than just its petty cadging for a buck. It rose and fell, over foothills for a mountain that never came.
In Worcester, I found the streets that would take me up the hill to Bancroft Tower. The tower was an eighth of a medieval castle, built from the large rough stones that made Massachusetts such a foul place to be a farmer. One of Worcester’s old time aristocrats, a Salisbury, built it for another, a Bancroft. The low tower was square and the high one narrow and round, both ridged with toothed battlements at their tops. I parked by it and looked out. The hills of Worcester concealed the city from itself, obscuring a full view of downtown from most angles. I pushed my hands into my jacket pockets and walked over to the towers that were not useful or beautiful. The cold insisted I move at a half-jog to inspect it.
Beneath its jagged arch, I looked in the locked gates at the low mat of old leaves, a solid padlock kept from the public. The tower was one of those anomalous parts of Worcester like the statue of a boy screwing a turtle in downtown, the Coney Island Hot Dogs sign, the huge Polar Cola polar bear overlooking the highway, Spider Gates cemetery by the airport, the six-way free-for-all intersection at Kelley Square, the Gothic clock tower of the abandoned mental hospital on top of Belmont hill, the Blackstone canal buried beneath downtown, the old neon ‘White City’ sign, the Hebert Candy Mansion, the street signs proclaiming Gold Star Boulevard by the armpit of two Interstate highways, East Park with its granite winged lions in front and the huge cliff rising behind it. They made the city, usually so prosaic, seem like a dream on the verge of revealing an impossible meaning.
The cold made me jog back to the car, stopping only to read the inscription again. “This memorial was built by his friend and admirer Stephen Salisbury, III.” Back in the car I wondered at friendship. I wondered how it could matter, how anyone could matter to anyone else in a world ruled by the blind forces of power, money, fear, hunger, horniness and boredom. I turned up the heat in the car and looked at the city, all white below the unruly branches of trees and the plowed-brown roads. The life below fought through the frost with snow plows and mail trucks. I considered my day and my reasons for driving back to Worcester. And it seemed that friendship was one of the only things that did indeed matter. I called Joe, but got the same recording. I sat in the SUV and wondered what to do with myself. I called Marissa.
“Jimbo Monaghan, did you hear about Joe?”
“Hear what?”
“My God, it was crazy. Like ten cops came busting in the other night and tore our apartment apart. It was nuts. I guess someone told the cops what Joe was doing and they got a search warrant. It’s totally crazy. They said they were going to come back and arrest me. But then Joe turned himself in.”
“Has he gotten out?”
“I think he’s getting out later today. I talked with his mom. She says she shouldn’t bail him out. But she totally will.”
“How much trouble is Joe in?”
“I don’t know. The cops seemed pretty serious. But I don’t think they found that much stuff. I’m hanging out at the apartment if you want to meet up.”
Marissa opened the door for me at the apartment and cleared some papers, clothes and pieces of broken furniture off the couch so I could sit. She said she had rum and tap water if I was thirsty and I opted for the water. The place was every bit the wreck Marissa said it was. She had cleared a path through the debris between her room and the bathroom, but not much else. I said silent little thank you to Volpe for making it look like he didn’t know exactly where to search.
“The place is such a friggin’ wreck that I’ve been staying at my mom’s place the last few days. I am going to clean. But anything that’s not mine or that I don’t use, I’m just going to throw in Joe’s room. I mean, this is totally his fault,” she said, turning a chair upright.
I shrugged my assent and she picked through the mess. I tried the remote, but the TV wouldn’t turn on. Marissa made little piles from the clutter and cursed to herself. She returned a bookcase so it was flush against the wall and started replacing the books, pausing to take out a photo book. She sat next to me with it. It beat cleaning.
“This totally sucks. He was hardly even doing anything. Why the hell did someone drop a dime? It’s such a shit thing to do,” she said.
I nodded. Above the clutter, next to the TV was the old bloody hole in the wall from the struggle with Sully. You could just see the outlines of the blood stain and a pink cloud from some half-assed scrubbing. From where I sat, the stain looked as old as the Constitution. In her picture book, Marissa came to one of Joe shirtless, standing gut out in a big grass field full of cars and people dressed in bright-colored clothes. Joe was smiling with his eyes half-lidded and his mouth agape.
“That’s from Reggaefest, a few years back. If we ever should have gotten arrested, it was then. Me, Joe and Rich Papadopolis went in on two hundred ecstasy tabs that we were going to sell there. We hid them in a hollowed-out loaf of bread. We thought we were slick. But our ride, this guy Keith, totally flaked and left without us. And I forget why, but all we could rent was a U-Haul. So we drive the U-Haul up to Vermont. I think we were about a hundred miles away from Reggaefest when the U-Haul broke down, and it like, really broke down. There was smoke coming out of the hood and everything. We ended up getting a ride to a service station from a state cop. We must’ve driven like fifty miles in that cop car with just this loaf of bread. The cop probably thought we were crazy.”
“Jesus. You brought the loaf with you? How did it work out?”
“We made it to the festival, sold all the pills and got high as balls. Then when we got back, Rich complained and got his money back from U-Haul. He’s good at that stuff.”
Marissa jumped up from the couch and went back to cleaning and cursing. I thought of leaving, but couldn’t come up with a good reason or a decent place to go. I leaned my head back and willed the time to pass. Finally, Joe and his mother came in the door. Justine’s shoulders were coiled, as if ready to punch someone—likely Joe. The left side of Joe’s mouth was bruised badly and his lip cut. His hair was wild, barely restrained by a rubber band.
“Jim, what’s up?” he said, smiling.
“Nothing. Just thought I’d swing by. What happened to your face?”
“I’ll tell you in a minute. I have to shit like you wouldn’t believe.”
“Well, that’s a great way to greet your guest, Joseph,” his mother said, while Joe walked off.
Justine shook her head and picked up a chair to sit on. She wore blue jeans and a thick wool sweater, knowing the futility of dressing up for a bail hearing. She said it was good to see me and then went full-bore into the drawn-out debacle that the day had been. Her eyes bulged with exasperation as she talked about the cruel indifference of the criminal justice system and what she did to bend its ear. She squinted as she laid bare the specifics of Joe’s bail.
“So finally, they give Joe his belt and his wallet. And we can go. But I want to talk to someone to file a complaint. I mean, you saw his face. I think we have legal grounds, even if another prisoner did it. They have to monitor those cells.”
“So did you?” Marissa asked.
“Well, Joe starts telling me to just forget it, that he has to go home and shit. He’s practically yelling it. I tell him to just shit in the police station, but you know how he is. I tell him to wait anyway, but he goes around me and asks the desk sergeant to call him a cab, then he asks me for cab fare. The whole thing was just squalid.”
“So what’s the story? Is Joe going to jail?”
“We have another cour
t date in two weeks. They gave Joe a lawyer. But he doesn’t seem that sharp. I know some lawyers and I’ll start calling around to see if I can get some kind of deal. I’d really like it if Joe could stay out of jail without bankrupting me.”
Then Justine and Marissa, two of the people who loved Joe most in the world, started in, verse for verse and chapter for chapter, about his selfish, disrespectful and pig-headed ways. With some practice and a great deal of effort, I might have been able to get in a word edgewise.
After a half hour of, we all paused at the sound of the toilet flushing down the hall, then they resumed. The toilet flushed again a few minutes later. Then the shower started. Joe walked out another half-hour later in a towel. His mother, then Marissa, yelled at him to put on some clothes. He retreated to his room, and took his sweet time before returning dressed in a pair of slacks, a red t-shirt and a pair of boots.
“Joe, you’re going to help me clean up, right?” Marissa said, her voice more bombastic than plaintive.
“Really Joe, Marissa shouldn’t have to clean up any of it. It’s not her fault that this place was torn apart,” Justine added with all the momentum of the last hour’s bitch session.
“I’m going to take care of it. I just got out of jail, so just give me a minute. Just leave it, really,” Joe said and smiled, just to make sure they were riled.
“No. This mess is your fault and you should clean it up now,” Marissa said.
“She’s right.”
Maybe they were right. But I had the gnawing sense that I’d wind up cleaning too, unless Joe stuck to his guns. I raised my eyebrows in solidarity with him. Joe looked around, nodded and went into his room, returning with his car keys and coat.
49.
“What are you doing?” Joe’s mother asked.
“Jim and I have to go out for a minute. We’ll be right back.”
“Where are you going?” Marissa asked.
“Just out, for a second. We’ll be right back.”
Joe nodded at me and I nodded back. I had no idea what he had in mind.
“Joseph, where are you going?” Justine asked.
“Just out. Jesus. Take it easy. I’ll be back in a minute.”
“Two cars?” I asked as we crossed the deeply dug pathway across the shallow front yard.
“No, I’ll drive,” Joe said.
We hopped into his Buick Skylark and started driving. Down Main Street, past the nightclub where Joe’s old nemesis had killed three people just about a week ago, past City Hall, and into Main South. Joe stopped at a light, switched on his turn signal, paused, and then decided to keep going straight.
“Where are we heading?” I asked.
“Lincoln County Road or Armageddon,” Joe said, but didn’t laugh. He just stared through the windshield at the sparse city traffic as we neared Webster Square.
“I don’t care. You just gave me a scare with that blinker in Main South.”
“I guess I gave myself a scare too. I know where Sully lives now. I found out the other night. I keep thinking it was him who called the cops.”
“Sully?”
“Yeah. But it doesn’t seem right. It just doesn’t add up.”
After Webster Square, we hung a right onto Route 9 and went west, toward Amherst and New York State. I didn’t think we were making a run for it. If we were, we would have gotten on the Mass Pike. And anyway, we weren’t in a road movie. We weren’t in California. No matter how much we raged or how what we might try, we were in Massachusetts and Massachusetts was in us. And Massachusetts is not wide open. Trees and hills tightly circumscribe its sky. Massachusetts doesn’t say you can be new again. It’s historic like a haunted house. Even the Pilgrims just kept on with their old willful miseries, in a glacier-scraped land where farming was hard and the winters worse than home. The snow banks turn brown and the cold shuts down five out of six things you’d like to do on a given night. In Leicester, the high snow banks crowded its two westbound lanes into one.
“Up ahead is the dead man’s curve. It’s famous,” Joe said.
“Well, then be sure to speed up. I’d hate for us to be the guys famous for making it crippled man’s curve.”
And there it was—Joe’s magnificent, inappropriate, unstoppable, and for the moment, life-threatening, laugh. It took him over like a fit of glossolalia. The laugh always came with an invitation to join him in its weird ecstasy. I joined, but watched the road, for fear that he didn’t.
“If you have to do that, pull over, or at least slow down.”
That just made it worse. He could barely keep his forehead off the steering wheel, he was laughing so hard. But he did slow down. The rest of that night, we saw a hundred dead man’s curves and crippled man’s curves, and laughed at every one.
“So I have to ask. What happened to your face? Was that the cops?”
“No. The cops were pretty nice, for the most part. They were mostly just annoyed I took so long to turn myself in. This,” Joe said, gesturing to his face “was all in jail. Jail was a nightmare.”
“What happened?”
“It wasn’t anything like you’ve heard.”
“Not all rapey?”
Joe wanted to laugh at that one, but didn’t.
“Actually, it almost was a little rapey. After the judge cancelled court for the day, they shipped me and a bunch of other guys out to the county jail in West Boylston. I was in a four-man cell with two other guys. One was an older guy who kept combing his hair with his fingers, then patting it down. I saw him rub a loogie into his hair to keep it in place. He said he was in for his political beliefs. But that obviously wasn’t the case, which I’ll get to. The other guy was this black kid, who I got along with at first.”
“At least you had one friend.”
“Well, that’s what I thought. So me and this black kid, whose name is Kane, we get to talking. We’re getting along really well, talking about the places we hung out and stuff like that. But then we start talking about people we both know and I figure out that he’s Ki’s older brother and he figures out that I’m that Joe, Joe Rousseau. For a minute, I thought we were going to get in a fight. But we agreed to leave our differences outside the cell for the night. Jail was bad enough. They gave us baloney sandwiches for dinner and I tried to get some sleep.”
“So far so good.”
“Yeah, good, right until I wake up with the hair-comber guy’s hands rubbing on my package.”
“Oh shit.”
“That’s right, it got rapey. And this was just jail. They say that jail is nothing compared to prison.”
“It’s not a great introduction to penalized life.”
“Well, I hope it’s the entirety of my penalized life, except for those other times. Anyway, I feel his hands, so I wake up in a flash and punch the hair-comber on the side of the head. He runs off to his bunk and starts howling like a monkey. Then Kane is awake and he’s pissed and asks why I beat up the hair-comber. I try to tell him what happened and he’s not buying it. Now, Kane isn’t a big guy, but he surprises me by punching me in the stomach, so I’m already sucking wind. I grab his neck and he starts hitting me in the face. Then I get him on the ground and I’m banging his head into the concrete floor and the hair-comber is going absolutely berserk. He’s making sounds that aren’t even human. So there I am, throttling Kane to death and looking over my shoulder like ‘what is that sound?’ Then the guards come and ask me nicely to stop attempting to murder Kane, and I do. He didn’t have to go to the hospital, so they didn’t have to fill out any forms, so I just got put in a cell by myself.”
“Sounds like a posh arrangement.”
“Compared to being locked in with a weird pervy dude and my worst enemy’s friend’s older brother, it was the fucking Holiday Inn. But even in the new cell, there were guys across from me, snoring and talking and moving around, so I couldn’t take a shit there. You hungry?”
“Yeah, let’s stop at the next place.”
There were a lot of trees,
stone walls, town squares, cemeteries and a lot of silent, snow-crammed lanes branching off into the darkness, but not a lot of places to eat. Occasionally the road would open up straight for a moment and we’d be surprised by a windshield full of stars. The shadow and the orange glow of the streetlights played off Joe’s face. I think it was in the middle of Spencer, some town that’s ninety-nine percent darkness and snow, that we passed a big, granite World War One memorial obelisk by a stop sign.
“Look at that,” I said.
“What?”
“The World War One memorial there—just imagine all those goobers from Spencer who signed up, who left the trees and wood-frame houses of their safe irrelevancy to be slaughtered in Flanders.”
“I can relate. I’d risk a lot to get the fuck out of Spencer,” Joe said.
“I think about war sometimes, how it makes sense for the kids who fight it. It’s just being pissed off and wanting a place in the world. The army gives you something to tide over both of those impulses.”
“After nine-eleven, my friend Paul Girardi joined up. He was a pissed-off guy before that. He also said that it was like he wanted to either exist or not exist. But he didn’t want it to be up to him. I guess he thought that war would decide it for him in a way that regular life couldn’t.”
“Never heard that one before. So war lets you know whether or not you’re supposed to exist.”
“Like I said, Paul was an intense kid,” Joe said, watching the road. “But the last laugh was on him. The army has him counting boxes down in Mississippi, last I heard.”
In one of the Brookfields, we stopped at a pub by a graveyard. The old regulars at the bar seemed at odds with the management’s efforts to give it a Berkshires-rustic feel. As a result, the place wavered between being twig-and-wreath illusion and video-keno reality. The grizzled locals eyed us with suspicion. We ignored them and ordered dinner and beers.
“So where are we going?” I asked after the beers arrived.
