by Dodds, Colin
I was still tired when I woke. Again, the memory of the previous night hit like an electric shock. Morning sunlight oozed through the window. I checked the clock and congratulated myself on having picked up two more hours of sleep. Marissa was asleep with her open cell phone still in hand in the next room. I brushed my teeth with my finger and left.
Driving out to Dad’s rehab facility, I had my wits about me a bit more. I stopped for coffee and food at a Dunkin’ Donuts in Westborough.
“Go Pats,” the little Irish girl behind the counter said to me as she gave me my change.
“What?”
“Go Pats.”
“Who?”
“The Patriots. Your shirt. The game today.”
“Oh, right. Yeah. Thanks. Go Pats.”
Taking my orange tray of food from that nearly shattering experience, I ate an egg sandwich and stared out the window, past the parking lot, at the traffic. I considered the playoff game that day. It would decide whether or not the Patriots went to the Super Bowl. It seemed like the sort of science fiction that strains credulity. But I would watch it, because that’s what people do.
55.
I parked at the far corner of the rehab center parking lot, left my coat in the car, and walked to the wrong entrance. Little things kept escaping me. It was early, barely in range of the lengthiest pregame shows. But Dad was awake and alert, watching people talk football on TV, when I got to his room.
“Whoa! You’re here early. You must be excited. And you got your shirt on. Don’t worry, they’re going to put the game on the big screen in the rec room. I was thinking we’d get a pizza and some wings. Are you okay?”
“Joe was killed last night. He was shot to death.”
Dad’s face dropped. His cheeks hollowed, his eyes widened and his jaw went slack. It was a face I realized I’d been making all day. He asked what happened and I told him. He said I could go back to Worcester or do whatever I wanted—I didn’t have to stick around the rehab center if I didn’t want to.
“No, I mean, what can I do? He’s dead. I can’t go do something to make it better. I’ll watch the game with you and then maybe head over to see his mother.”
“Okay. I’d like to watch the game with you. But do whatever you have to. Is there anything you need?”
I said no and we talked a little. But conversation didn’t come easily. Dad rarely talked about death. It wasn’t until the surgery that he’d made arrangements for his own funeral, and he wasn’t comfortable talking about it.
“I know I was never the biggest Joe Rousseau fan. But he was always a good friend to you. I mean, when you started at Venerini, he already knew a lot of people and still, he made room for you.”
“Yeah,” I said, biting my lip, wanting to cry, but not wanting to cry in front of Dad.
“It’s funny. I had a feeling that something was going to happen, not like I could tell exactly. I used to get the feeling in Vietnam, before we’d run into some shit, just this feeling.”
“Really, that doesn’t sound like you.”
“I know, I’m the last guy to buy into all of that. But it was a feeling I had all last week. I thought it had to do with the surgery.”
Watching the ex-athletes on TV laugh at each others’ jokes, I searched my memory of the last few weeks for some inkling, intuition, dream or psychic clue I’d had of what was coming. But the cupboard was bare.
Dad maneuvered his walker down the serene and clean hallways to the rec room, where an old woman waited. She was watching an old man tell an old woman what her old teapot was worth on the big TV.
“I have this reserved in ten minutes for the game,” Dad told her. The woman was old and frail and her eyes darted around in a wholly unsettling way.
“I didn’t see your name on the list.”
“It’s there. Go check.”
The woman, with great effort, got out of her armchair and onto her own walker and shuffled to check the TV reservation sheet, which was on a clipboard with its own little table, next to yet another small basket of dried twigs and flowers. The trip required an absurd amount of effort and discomfort on her part. But the woman’s age-old instinct for spite demanded she do it nonetheless.
“You blocked out the whole day,” she said.
“There are two games. So I filled in seven hours.”
“You can only reserve two hours maximum. It says so on the sheet.”
“Well, I’ll get someone else to reserve the next two hours.”
The woman grumbled and murmured and Dad ignored her as she thumped back with her walker. She retrieved some wadded up tissues from her armchair and left the room with a grumbling sigh.
“I can’t wait to go home,” Dad said.
I ordered a pizza and some chicken wings, after a lengthy hassle from the massive woman at the front desk that resulted in me promising that Dad wouldn’t eat any of the food I ordered.
The game started and it was more intense than I expected. Dad was emotional, at once serious and not—like he was watching a movie that he only intermittently knew was not real. I tried to play along, but my habits continued to fail me. The players were serious, yelling, gesturing and sucking wind. To them as well, the AFC Championship Game seemed like a movie that they only intermittently knew was not real.
Five minutes into the game, the room was full of patients and staff. I gave up my seat to a guy on crutches. Nurses and orderlies, and even the massive, surly cow from the front desk came over to watch the game and cheer on the Pats with honest fervor. She ate some of our chicken wings. The Pats won handily enough to be slapping each other on the back for the game’s last five minutes. Dad’s arms and shoulders weren’t strong enough to give him a high five. I hugged him and left.
56.
Driving back to Worcester, the people on the road were wild with victory. Passengers leaned out of windows to wave their fingers and yell about the Pats. Cars honked and flashed their lights in exultation. I kept my windows closed and the radio off and honked only when drivers spent too much time congratulating each other at traffic lights. For the first time since I’d quit the team at St. John’s, I hated the game of football.
The sinking in my stomach wasn’t just from so many people cheering on the day that Joe died. I’d also forgotten to eat. I stopped into a D’Angelo’s for a grinder. The fluorescent lights in the restaurant blasted my pegged-open my eyes. It tinted the tan skin of lithe Spanish girl behind the register a pale green.
“Anything else?” she asked. “A drink?”
“Yeah. Sure.”
“What kind?”
“Diet Coke.”
“What size?”
“My best friend from childhood was just shot to death.”
“Oh. Uh …”
“Medium.”
Stopped in her tracks, she murmured something like sorry as she took my money. I took the sandwich to a booth and watched the honking traffic pass through the darkness. The sun was almost completely down. I called Justine from the Formica booth. Her sister Claire, who I’d met a few times, picked up the phone.
“Hi, it’s Jim. Uh, I’d like to stop by sometime today or tonight to talk to Justine. I just thought I’d call first.”
“Jim, first off, thank you for calling. Justine’s really in no condition for visitors to just drop by. Please pass that around. Let people know. She’s sleeping right now. But if you want to come by for ten or fifteen minutes around eight o’clock, that would be okay. But it should just be you, do we understand each other?”
Claire was always the toughest member of the Rousseau clan. She was famous for beating Joe with a frozen pork chop. It was right after Joe’s grandmother died, and he stumbled drunk into his grandparents’ house demanding food. Claire, then as now, took matters into her own hands.
I got into Dad’s SUV, called Mom and told her about Joe. It was all I could think to do. I had a hard time listening to what she was saying. It was too much to hear, too many questions, too many words. Then
Marissa called and I said good-bye to Mom.
“Jim, what’s up? You should have woken me up when you left,” Marissa said.
“You probably needed the sleep. I know I did. Anyway, I had to go see my dad out in Marlborough. I’m going over to see Justine in a little bit. Do you want to hang out until then?”
“Sure. Come on over. I’ll go over there with you.”
“Well, I just talked to Claire and she asked, well, she told me to go over just by myself.”
“That’s so fucked up. My mom went by with a whole Tupperware of ziti earlier, and Joe’s uncle Mark just took it from her at the door, and didn’t even let her in. I don’t understand why you’d want to keep someone’s friends away from them at a time like this.”
“I’m not going to get into a fight about it. You know how you feel—imagine what it’s like for Justine. They’re just trying to take care of her.”
Marissa argued that they were handling the whole thing wrong. I argued less and less as she went on. I was in Shrewsbury and Marissa’s diatribe had drifted to the many legal, professional, personal and physical indignities she hoped would visit the cop who killed Joe. She conjured a future of protest marches, stern judges, and general horrors she imagined would face a former cop in a maximum-security prison. Her rant was a shelter from my own thoughts. It’s something people do. She said we should avenge Joe’s death.
“Yeah, I guess. But you can’t shoot someone back to life,” I said.
No rage, no complaint, no wise saying would bring him back. This was a beating that neither of us had much choice but to sit still for. But Marissa kept on, listing friends who knew judges or local political figures, and what they would do, imagining the terrible, mobilizing outrage that would race through Joe’s hundreds of friends. I also wanted Joe’s death to mean something, but right then I couldn’t fathom how it would. We were still on the phone when I pulled up to the granite curbstone jutting like a new tooth from the snow bank’s icy gums. Marissa told me that someone was knocking on her door.
She answered the door with a cigarette in her drinking hand and started laughing like crazy when she saw me, the phone still to my ear. From the look on her face, I could tell that, like me, she’d been walking into walls all day. We hugged for a minute. Then her phone rang. I wandered over to the window to see that I had left my headlights on. Going back to the car to turn them off, I saw I’d left the keys in the ignition.
Marissa’s efforts to clean the living room had degenerated to just putting everything in a pile against the wall. She was drinking rum and Cokes and smoking.
“You think leaving your keys in the ignition is bad. I almost got put in jail. I’ve been driving on an expired license. I keep meaning to get a new one, but I also keep getting away with it. So I ran a red light on Park Ave this afternoon, and a cop pulls me over. He asks for my license and registration and I just start bawling and telling him ‘My best friend was shot by a cop,’ and all that. So he gives me a warning and tells me to drive straight home.”
“No ticket?”
“Nope. Even the warning was just a verbal warning. Hey, did you get a call from the guy at the Telegram?”
“No, what’s he writing about all this?”
“I hope so. He called me and Kyle and a few other people. I told him that the cops were fascist thugs who were bound to kill someone sooner or later and that the Dowd family was the most retarded of the bunch. Then I said that everyone loved Joe and no one would ever want to hurt him. I gave the reporter your number.”
The Worcester Telegram & Gazette was the daily paper in Worcester. Like most news outlets, it liked to find mourners at their disheveled best. Marissa started in again about her grand plans for justice, or at least vengeance. But I couldn’t help thinking that most of the plans would fall apart the moment any real effort was required. She said that a bunch of people would be at Ralph’s later that night, and I should meet them there.
I left Marissa early and stopped at a gas station for coffee. In Dad’s SUV, I watched traffic negotiate the six-way intersection at Kelley Square without the guidance of a traffic light. The many roads originally met at the banks of the Blackstone Canal, which ran under the intersection, and on to Providence from there. The canal had made Worcester a city and the city made the canal a sewer, and then buried it. It was one more ghost in my haunted afternoon.
I finished my coffee and drove to Joe’s childhood home. For the second-largest city in New England, Worcester has a surprising number of unpaved roads. They weren’t all in ramshackle neighborhoods, either. The streets were just never paved. Joe had grown up on such a street, and Justine still lived there, in a little house which she’d made cozy. It was crowded that day. His aunt Claire was there with her two adopted Vietnamese girls, who were silently playing in what had once been Joe’s bedroom. Claire, Mark and a blonde woman who must have been Mark’s wife sat in the kitchen, flanked around Justine. I gave Justine a hug and said I was so sorry. I pulled the last chair up to the table and the kitchen seemed crowded. We exchanged condolences and numb attempts to understand what had happened.
“What did Faye say, Claire?” Justine said.
“When?”
“When you told her about Joe.”
“The heaven thing?” Claire asked, and Justine nodded. “My little girl, Gloria, when she heard what happened to Joe, she said ‘Justine shouldn’t be sad. Joe gets to go to heaven and not have to wait a whole year for Christmas.’”
Justine nodded sweetly, her face contorted into a difficult smile. I didn’t know what to say about that. It made me want to weep. I made the face—the eyes bulging and the lips pressed together too hard. It kept the tears at bay.
“And the awful part is that Joe still owes me five hundred dollars,” Justine said after a long silence, rising to take a piece of notebook paper off the fridge. Joe had signed it at the bottom. “It was for car repairs.”
Justine zigged and zagged between tortured inconsolability and glib impertinence that night.
“Jim, can I talk to you in the next room for a minute?” Claire asked.
We went into the living room, its floor crammed with bags and its surfaces jammed with dishes of food. Claire sat across from me. She had short hair, rectangular glasses and a demeanor that held the world before her to very strict standards. She told me the wake would be Tuesday and the funeral Wednesday and then eyed me carefully.
“So Jim, how are you holding up with all of this?” she asked me.
“I’m okay. I mean, it’s taking some effort, but I’m putting one foot in front of the other. I don’t know.”
“Well, we’ve gotten some calls from the T&G and the Globe about Joe. I just want you to know that the family doesn’t want to make a statement just now. And we’d rather that Joe’s friends not speak to the press, either. There may come a time to make a statement, and we may take legal action. But until we get more facts, we’d just rather just keep this a family matter. So, as Joe’s reasonable, grown-up friend, we’d like you to try to pass that on. Nobody’s expecting miracles, but do pass it on, capiche?”
“Okay.”
“Me and Mark and his wife Cynthia were talking about Joe. Cynthia’s first husband, Jerry, died of an overdose in an apartment off Vernon Street when he was Joe’s age. So we tend to see what happened to Joe in those terms—alcoholism, drug abuse and so forth. Do you think Joe was an alcoholic?”
I stumbled and equivocated. I felt a cold dread that this would be the story—the unfortunate alcoholic—told about the man who I’d loved like a brother, who had been essential to many of the good things I had experienced and become. After verbalizing my confusion for too long to be convincing, I found an opinion.
“No. I don’t think Joe was an alcoholic,” I said.
As I’d find out, nothing belongs to you anymore when you die, especially not your own death. Your death becomes a way for people to explain or justify themselves. It becomes a cautionary tale or a legend, depending on the t
eller’s agenda. And the living will always have their agendas. It’s a curse that comes with having everything else.
Claire and I went back into the kitchen. Justine stared at each of us with soft, searching eyes and we stared at her more or less the same way. She looked away and I looked out the kitchen window, into the darkness. Words continued to fail all of us. But being together made that failure, and all the other failures of the day, easier to bear.
“Well, I’m sure you have somewhere to be,” Claire said to me, bulging her eyes to make it clear that this was her version of being polite.
I embraced Justine and Claire and shook Mark and Cynthia’s hands. I looked back at the house before I opened the SUV door. The tears started coming as I recalled the street in the summer time.
When Joe and I were about twelve, Joe had learned how bats use echolocation to catch bugs. So he’d gotten out his fishing pole to catch bats. In the dirt street, he’d cast straight up into the sky, and then run away from the weighted hook that fell back down. He must have tried for an hour, casting and fleeing. Another time, around that same age, we’d gotten into an argument and thrown each other’s shoes onto the roof of the house. It took all of Joe’s arguing, cajoling and pleading to talk his mom out of driving me home early.
I climbed into the car to cry in private. My gut buckled with the sobs that finally seized it. Gasping for breath, it didn’t feel good. But it felt necessary.
57.
Ralph’s blinking sign broke the darkness. I parked around back and wandered the crumbled lot to the door. The bouncer and the first five people I saw inside, seeing my Patriots’ t-shirt, offered high fives, and I played along. At the back bar, by the pool table, I spotted Fin, an old friend from a long time ago. His full name was Shawn Finley, but everyone called him Fin. He had the same slack-jawed, hollow-cheeked look I did. He spotted me. I waved and ordered a pair of bourbons. Fin sat alone at the glossy wood table, drinking a beer. After a confused handshake-hug, I sat down and passed him one of the bourbons. Through the jukebox, the nearby chatter and the ceiling, a hardcore band thudded.
