Another Broken Wizard (27 page)

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.

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 court 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.