Another Broken Wizard (32 page)

I was halfway to Worcester when I realized I hadn’t turned my headlights on. Downtown, the traffic consisted of police cruisers, and beat-up cars furtively driving home in the late, late Saturday night. The occasional bakery or newspaper trucks shouldered through the cold of their early Sunday morning. Passing the old Showcase Cinema, I realized that I had no clue where I was going. I turned up Chandler Street. The streets were so empty, and I had so few places to go that I wondered if I wasn’t the one who had died.

Here and there, driving down Park Avenue and then down Highland Street, it seemed the tears were finally about to come. It was like trying to puke up a cinderblock. I pulled into the gas station across from Tortilla Sam’s and idled there. I wanted to be with Marissa and Kyle and Joe’s mother. I wanted to be as close as possible to the ground zero of this thing that had so completely disarmed me. I thought of calling Justine, but something about it frightened me. I called Marissa again and she picked up.

54.

“Jim, oh my God, oh my God,” she said, saying what I didn’t dare say in my solitude.

“Yeah. I know. I can’t believe it,” I said.

It was the best we could do. No combination of words could yet carry weight against the unfixable event.

“I’m at the Honey Farms on Highland. I’ve just been driving around. Where are you right now?”

“I’m with Justine. But her brother and her sister are here and her sister has been hinting that I should leave. I don’t want to, but I’ll probably go. You want to meet me back at our apartment in like, twenty minutes?”

“Yeah.”

I went into the Honey Farms. Its fluorescent lights blinded me. In a daze, I nodded to the obese, mustachioed man who controlled access to the cigarettes and dirty magazines behind him. I poured myself a Styrofoam cupful of coffee. He took my money, looking at everything in the store except me. Outside, I took a painfully hot sip, cursed, and threw it in the garbage. In the white noise of the waking city, of the cleanup crew unlocking Tortilla Sam’s, I started to cry.

Leaning on Dad’s forest-green SUV, and bawling into my hand, with my face a leaky mess, I thought, well, this should kill twenty minutes. I laughed at my prevailing instinct for time management, with the same convulsive desperation. I laughed until I almost puked, going down on a knee on the gas station concrete. A cop car rolling down Highland Street slowed, then slowed some more, then decided not to bother with me.

In the car, I wiped my cheeks and laugh-cried at myself some more. Laughing and crying both got at that cinderblock in my guts, one handful of sand at a time. I drove to Marissa and Joe’s apartment. On Highland and Lincoln Streets, the churches were starting to come alive. At the apartment, the lights were on, but nobody answered my knock. I tried the door and it was unlocked. Inside, it looked like someone had robbed the place. But I remembered it was in the same disarray the other day. I sat on the couch and fired up the TV, because that’s what people do. Marissa opened her bedroom door, then jumped back and spilled her purse on the floor.

“Jesus Jim, you scared the shit out of me. How did you get in here?”

“The door was open.”

I got up and we hugged hard, her crying and me just holding on. Then I helped her pick up the contents of her purse.

“What the hell happened?” she asked.

I told her what I saw outside the Lucky Dog.

“So you didn’t see how it started?” she asked.

“No. I got there at the end. Did you hear anything?”

“Stefanie told me what she heard from Kyle.”

“Kyle’s out already?”

“I guess so. I guess that they didn’t charge him with anything. They just took a statement and drove him home. I think like half of those guys work for his roofing business in the summer.”

“Kyle was out there when Joe and the other guy started arguing. But I never heard what happened.”

“I guess that Joe and Kyle were outside smoking, talking to one of Escalita’s friends. Then this crackhead guy grabbed her purse and ran. So Joe, who Kyle says was out-of-his-head fucked up, went after him, along with this other guy. I guess the other guy caught the crackhead first. But Joe showed up and pulled the other guy off the crackhead, head-butted the crackhead, and then yelled at the crackhead not to mess with his people, or something. The crackhead dropped the bag and ran away.”

“Joe and his fucking head butts.”

“I know. So the crackhead ran off and the other guy started yelling at Joe. The yelling turned into shoving, and that’s when the guy pulled out a gun. At some point, the guy may have said he was a cop. But what kind of fucking maniac cop goes out to a bar with a gun? I mean, this guy should go away for a long time ...”

“I can’t believe it. I really can’t.”

“I was hanging out with my boyfriend when I found out. I got like ten calls in a row. Then my fucking moron boyfriend told me to shut off the phone because he wanted to fuck. I started yelling at him and he left. He’s such a friggin’ moron. God, this sucks so much.”

Marissa leaned into me and I put my arm around her and she started sobbing. We sat that way for a long time. She cried and then stopped and then started again. I mostly stared off, trying to look at anything but the hole in the wall with the partially washed away blood stain.

I imagined stepping between Joe and the shooter. I imagined myself never calling Volpe back, and imagined a less desperate Joe Rousseau, who wouldn’t walk into a bullet for largely inchoate reasons. I imagined a dozen ways I could have been a better friend. I wondered if this was my fault, because that’s something people do in these situations.

“I think I want to leave the place this way, as a tribute. What do you think?”

We laughed at the state of the apartment. Instead of cleaning after the police searched the place, Joe and Marissa had each picked what they needed from the disarray, in a long poker game to see who would blink first and clean the apartment. It made me miss him.

“It might be a fitting tribute. But I don’t think it’s what you’d call a great decorating idea.”

“I have to call like a million people,” Marissa said, getting up from the couch.

“It’s barely seven in the morning.”

“I know. But it’s a death. You call people at odd hours when there’s a death.”

“It’s what people do,” I volunteered.

Motion and talking—they helped. Sitting alone with the cinderblock in my gut didn’t. Marissa started calling people, her voice loud on the hello-sorry-to-call-so-early, then dropping as she delivered the news, followed by shared sobs. I heard two or three calls and then went into Joe’s room. It was a worse mess than the living room, with all the dresser drawers pulled out and the bookcase flipped and leaning on its side against a wall. I cleared off the bed and tried to remember why I had gone in there. I decided to lie down and think it over.

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.”