Afterburn: A Novel

by Colin Harrison

  Mazy glanced down the hallway, then back at Christina, eyes soft, smiling sweetly.

  Christina shook her head. “I can’t, Mazy.”

  “It’s our last time.”

  “I can’t. My mind is already out of here.” She looked at the ceiling. She knew every crack, every flake of paint waiting to fall. One more night and she’d never see the cell again.

  Mazy stepped near but did not touch her. “You don’t want come be close one last time?”

  I’ll cry about Mazy later, she told herself. “I’m sorry, Mazy. I’ve got so much to think about now.”

  Mazy sighed. “You going go back to men?”

  “That’s not what I’m thinking about right now.”

  “I know, but I was just wondering.”

  “I haven’t been thinking about it, Mazy, I really haven’t.”

  She turned. Mazy’s big calm eyes were fixed on her. “I’m pretty sure you going do that,” Mazy said, her voice affectionate. “That’s who you are, baby.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “No, I’m pretty sure.”

  Maybe it was true. It was definitely true. It was so true that she felt something in her knees just thinking about it.

  “I miss men,” Mazy said. “I miss my Robbie, he my youngest’s daddy, he one of the biggest men I ever seen.”

  “Yeah, I knew a guy who was full of muscles,” Christina replied, if only to talk the remaining time away.

  “Who was he, baby?”

  “He was the asshole who got me into this place.”

  “You never talked about it.”

  “I told you things, Mazy. I told you what I could.”

  “I know that girl Katisha? She went out of here after four years, and then she called up one of the gals and she had something like ten men that first week she was out.”

  Christina nodded, remembering. “That’s truly insane.”

  “You going call your sweet mother down Florida?”

  She wanted to, but it might be a bad idea. “I’m not sure.”

  “She’ll miss you so much.”

  Christina dropped the bag to the floor. “I might let her think I’m still here.”

  Mazy frowned with incomprehension. “That’s hard.”

  She tightened. Yes, it was.

  HER PAROLE had been so far off that she hadn’t allowed herself to think about what it would be like to live in Manhattan again. But now, after only a few hours, all kinds of things crowded her mind. She’d need money, that was certain. She had just over three hundred dollars in her prison account, and if she could somehow live on that for a couple of weeks, she’d be okay. She’d get a job and rent a room downtown, near First or Second Avenue. Start all over. No flashy moves. Be careful what she said to people. You could live on almost nothing if you had to. You spent every dollar carefully, that’s all. She wanted to walk along the streets, look at the store windows. She’d buy a small radio and lie on her bed and listen to WCBS-FM, the oldies station. She’d read magazines in the bookstore. She missed all the magazines, even the trashy ones. She’d go to the movies, just sink into one of those seats with a Coke and some popcorn. She wanted to see a Jack Nicholson movie. Anything he was in. Yes. She would take a bath, her first in four years. Watch the water go down the drain and fill it up again, hot as she could stand it. She’d watch the beautiful little babies in the park and think, Where has the time gone? She would try to find the next version of herself. Woman in the city. Woman being careful. Woman in a long dark coat, one of those third-hand wool ones with deep pockets you could get in the Village for forty bucks. Big enough to hide in. She’d pet dogs. She’d buy a broom! Sweep her floor. Sweep her floor over and over. Maybe she’d get a place where she could paint the floorboards. A rose or light green, perhaps. Then one table. A simple oak table. A small one, with a chair. She’d buy a nice bra when she could afford it. A pretty one. So many things to think about. She’d get a cat, she’d buy good lipstick, she’d disagree with the op-ed pages. She’d marry a millionaire. Ha. She’d light a candle, watch the flame. She would watch her ass, too. Not talk to too many people. Not tell them much. Maybe cut her hair, buy some sunglasses. She had to assume that Tony Verducci’s people would be looking for her. Watching to see what she did. She would find a place and tell the landlord she had to have a good heat. The prison was so cold, the walls started getting icy in December; half the women caught pneumonia each winter, coughing and spitting up gunk in the bathrooms, especially the women with AIDS. What else? Well, there was wine. She’d sit somewhere and just sip it and let it hit her head. Nothing to drink for four years. That first glass, maybe with a piece of lamb or chicken. Could you drink red wine with chicken? She didn’t remember. It didn’t matter. To be drunk, that was the thing. And some good coffee. Not too much, just a couple of cups, to help her think. Cigarettes, too. As many as she wanted. But no more than five a day. She’d go to the Strand bookstore and look at the old titles. Peruse the history section. She used to do that, she used to feel safe doing that. She was going to find the latest biography of Charles Dickens. She was going to get a little shit job and survive on nothing. Lay low, live well. She was going to buy only good stuff and put it in the refrigerator. Vegetables and fruit and skim milk. Good bread. Maybe a little cheese. Fresh carrots. Grapefruit. She had missed onions and decent Mexican food and hummus and garlic and Granny Smith apples and the smell of the dry cleaner’s shop and the feeling of a newspaper that had never been read by anyone else and good shampoo and getting a smoked turkey sandwich at the deli and watching the limousines outside the Plaza Hotel and having her own telephone and real butter and the feeling of a man’s big hand running lightly up and down her neck—yes, that, too. And the moment when he was fully inside of you, when you didn’t have to think about anything. Anything but. And riding in elevators and watching the traffic light turn green and the ticking of a bicycle. So much she’d missed, so much to think about, including the things she didn’t want to think about—the things that worried her, the worst one being why in God’s name the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office had decided to let her go. She was guilty, after all.

  ORIENT POINT, LONG ISLAND, NEW YORK

  SEPTEMBER 7,1999

  HE LIKED TO IMAGINE his own death, oh yes he did—be—cause it would never happen the way you imagined—and that is what he did now. The water was still warm enough to swim in, and he pressed toward the huge rocking red buoy and the three iron chains that held it fast, each hung with clusters of blue-black mussels and veils of seaweed. The sea pulled at his beard and rose against his lips; every few seconds he spat out salt water. Although he was thirty-seven, his torso remained thickly muscular from cutting firewood and working on the boat, so much so that his arms got heavy as he swam. If he were to have trouble, no one would hear his cries—for no one else knew where he was. It would be some time before his bloated, naked corpse was found bumping against the rocks. The gulls would have a time of it, Rick thought, not to mention the crabs. Hey, eat me up, you little fuckers. Eat my eyes out. Eat my balls. Chew off my tattoos. I won’t feel a thing. A lobsterman pulling his pots near shore at high tide might spot him and that would be that. Rick Bocca, dead man.

  On the map, Orient Point lay at the easternmost tip of Long Island’s North Fork, a relatively unknown forty-mile stretch of flat, fertile soil that once supported hundreds of truck farms. Now people were planting vineyards, building vacation homes. But you could still see the green farm tractors rumble along the lanes pulling a load of cabbages or potatoes, you could still buy fish off the boat in the docks of Greenport, and the fork still sheltered forested tracts that hid abandoned and forgotten buildings where a man, if he wanted, could live out of sight of others. The place where Rick swam now was like that, off a rocky spit that tapered to a pebbled cove that rested below the small, wind-battered cottage that he rented for three hundred dollars a month. The red buoy clanged mournfully, and as he neared it, a gull flapped up and away. He avoided the huge dr
ipping chains and grabbed the slimy metal edge. All you fucking sharks and garbage-fish can just leave me alone, he thought, don’t bite my dick. A green skirt of plant growth floated out from the barnacle-encrusted can. The shoreline was lost in fog. His chest heaved, nipples stinging from the salt. It was sixteen minutes out and, carried by the waves, nine back. The buoy creaked against its chains, as if signaling displeasure with his presence. He took a breath deep into his lungs and then pushed off, stroking into the gloom.

  Soon he waded out of the water, toes pressing the sandy bottom, eel-grass against his shins, and retrieved his eyeglasses from a slab of stone, making habitual adjustments to get the fit right, yet no longer really noticing that the lenses were scratched and speckled with paint, the broken frame taped at the bridge. He could see well enough with them, and after he climbed the high scaffold of wooden steps up the sea cliff, he could certainly see the blue-and-white police car parked next to his old shingled cottage, the car’s windshield opaque with dust, a small maple branch caught under the wiper. He hunched in surprise, as if jabbed. A New York City police car, more than one hundred miles out of its jurisdiction. They never leave you alone, he thought, they never do. Everybody should have forgotten me by now.

  He stood in the low bramble, naked and considering. The wind blew, and tiny airborne seeds caught in his beard and the long wet hair on his shoulders. Cornflower and milkweed. A yellow butterfly touched his penis, fluttered away. The cop would be on the other side of the cottage, perhaps peering in a window. Rick hurried along the edge of the cliff toward the deep shade of the woods. When he reached the trees, he looked again across the high grass. The police car, dented from minor collisions in the crowded streets of New York City, was streaked from the muddy ruts of the overgrown lane that led to the cottage and barn well off the main road. The unmarked drive was almost impossible to spot, which was the way Rick preferred it. Now some cop had decided to take a drive out from New York City. They got to fucking leave me alone, he thought, I didn’t do anything lately.

  He cut through the high grass, the sun warm now on his shoulders, his skin almost dry, and hurried toward the barn, a sagging, windowless structure set fifty yards back from the sea cliff that sheltered a sizable vegetable garden on the lee side. The shingled roof, damaged by ice the previous winter, needed work, and a climbing rose, perhaps once a small shrub planted by a farmer’s wife next to the door, reached up over the barn, its main vine as thick as Rick’s calf, roots feeding on an ancient manure pile and producing a geyser of pink blooms now attended by the dull hum of bees. He slipped inside, pulled on a pair of frayed cotton boxer shorts, and closed the barn’s door, quietly locking it with a heavy iron hook.

  Outside, a noise. Grass whisking against long pants. A hand pulled the handle of the door.

  “Rick Bocca?”

  He adjusted his glasses, waiting.

  The hand yanked hard on the door, rattling the frame. “Rick!” the man called fiercely. Then, muttered with disgust: “Fucking bastard.”

  Rick waited. His hair dripped dark coins onto the bleached planks beneath him. A minute, and then a minute more. He discovered a piece of green kelp in his beard and raked it out with his fingers. If they find you, they’ll pull you back. He’d worked too hard to let them do that to him. Maybe something had happened to—well, it could be a lot of people. The dried salt of the ocean was caught in the swirls of black hair on his chest and belly, the creases in his elbows, behind his ears. He told himself to wait longer. Count to one hundred. Finally, the only sound was the wind begging along the shingles outside. Still he waited—nothing. Fuck them all. When he emerged into the bright midday sun, so suddenly hot and dry that the begonias next to the cottage drooped, the police car was gone.

  BUT NOT FOR LONG. Three hours later he was standing in the forward hold of the rust-eaten trawler he worked on, hip boots knee-deep in fish, some still alive, kissing at their death, when the blue-and-white cruiser nosed up, right out onto Greenport’s municipal dock, tires drumming over the boards to a stop not two feet from the bow of the trawler. A trim man of about thirty eased out. He wore a jacket and an unknotted necktie thrown over one shoulder, which meant he was a detective.

  “Hey,” the man called.

  “Yeah?”

  “Rick Bocca?”

  “Yes.”

  “You got a minute?”

  Rick nodded and climbed up out of the fish onto the dock.

  “I’m Detective Peck.”

  “Right.”

  The detective pulled a photo out of his breast pocket, flashed it at Rick—one of the old bodybuilding shots, local contests maybe six, seven years back. Weight two-sixty, body fat five percent. No beard, crew cut, tanned, buffed, shaved, contact lenses, toenails trimmed.

  “Looks like you lost some of that weight.”

  “It got old, man. I got old.”

  “You don’t remember me, do you?”

  “No,” Rick answered.

  “I was the one put Christina Welles away. Undercover.”

  “Okay, yeah. You look different. You got the gold shield, I see.”

  “You should have gone down with her, Rick.”

  He’d spent a long time thinking about that, but he didn’t wish to say so.

  “Just want to make sure you know that somebody else knows,” said Peck.

  “Lot of people should have done a lot of things,” answered Rick.

  “Right, right.” The detective nodded dismissively. “Of course, she never told us her system, which made it more serious for her.”

  Rick listened to the wind saw against the boat’s rusted edges. A fish flopped a tail.

  “I said she never told us her system.”

  Rick looked back at the detective. “It was too complicated for you to understand.”

  The detective shrugged this away. “I heard all those steroids make your balls shrink up.”

  Here we go, Rick thought.

  “You got your balls back now, Rick?” The detective smiled, waiting for a response. “I hope you do, because you’re gonna need them. See, all your old pals in Brooklyn didn’t forget Christina. How could they? She’s a sexy girl, sort of the mysterious type, not with the big hair and all. Tony Verducci remembers her. And he got Mickey Simms to call up the Manhattan D.A. and tell them that he was lying, that everything he said about her on the record was a lie.” The detective lifted his eyebrows in disgust. “Now, they don’t have to believe that, of course, but Tony Verducci says, I can give you somebody else—who exactly, I don’t know, but it could be a lot of people. This is just maybe a week ago. Mickey Simms recants his whole testimony. They make a deal. They actually sit in a room and drink coffee and say, This is a deal. You do this, we do that.” The detective retrieved a small box of raisins from his pocket. “I worked like a motherfucker to pull that testimony out of him, and then they go and tear it up and say it was a mistake and Christina Welles and her boyfriend Rick Bocca and the rest of those assholes had nothing to do with a tractor trailer full of air conditioners. ’Course, the fact that I saw the truck, counted the boxes, that doesn’t matter. You with me so far?”

  “Yeah,” Rick said. “I get it.” Which he didn’t. None of it made any sense to him, in fact. All he had so far was a story. Anybody could make up a story. He sat against the hood of the police car.

  “See, I know that Tony Verducci is behind all of this,” the detective went on, chewing a wad of raisins. “He’s still running his crew. All over the city. I know you don’t talk to these people anymore, Rick, but you remember them. You know all these people, Rick, I know you do. You guys practically had your dicks in each other’s butts. So I hear about this thing and start wondering, What the fuck’s it about? Why does Tony Verducci want Christina Welles out of prison? That’s a good question. But it’s not for a good reason, Rick. It’s not for her health.” Peck stopped to chew; his mouth appeared to be full of bugs. “He wants something off that poor girl and he’s gone to a lot of trouble to get
it. He’s put Mickey Simms on a stick and stuck him in everybody’s face like a marshmallow, and that makes him somebody who I now personally want a piece of, for fucking up all my work, and he’s also delivered some other poor asswipe to the D.A. I told them, Don’t do it, don’t make the deal, you’re hanging that poor girl out to dry, because she doesn’t know who is doing what anymore. I called the prison, she’s putting in her time, okay? No big fights, not much time in the hole, you know? That strikes me as basically unfair. See, this is actually a pretty decent college girl who never should have gotten mixed up with a scumbag mope named Ricky Bocca. She helped him out because she loved him or whatever …” The detective paused, eyes full of hate. “This is a girl who never got a break from fucking nobody, never, and probably all she wants to do is just put her life back together, and now they’re setting her up.”

  Rick put his hands down on the hood of the car, as if about to be arrested. He felt heavy, heavier than in years. His anxieties from the old days had receded, but, like black ants moving regularly up and down the dark trunk of a tree, remained just perceptible; always he’d known they were there, somewhere—the old connections, the unfinished animosities, the gravity of mutual hatreds.

  “See,” continued Peck, “I’m thinking Tony Verducci is getting frustrated with the cell phones. He hates them. He drives around with like fifty phones in his backseat, always driving and talking. Uses one, throws it back, uses another. Very hard for us to keep track of his conversations, but it can be done. If we put enough meat into it, we can do it. He knows that, everyone knows that. Plus, lot of people aren’t as careful as Verducci. He studies the Colombians, admires them. Shit, I admire them, too. But he knows what he got isn’t safe. A lot of these cellular encryption technologies can be beat. He’s worried, he’s getting pretty old to think about doing time. Man’s got grandchildren, one of them with some kind of heart condition. He’s paying for the doctors, we know everything. It’s time to settle up, consolidate. It’s time to put on the slippers. So I think he’s got some kind of one last monster deal coming up and he needs the best system he ever had. He needs Christina. It didn’t go bad because of her, you remember.”