A Drink Before the War (20 page)

“So what's the charge?” I asked.

“Charge?”

“What're you charging us with, Devin?”

Oscar said, “Charging?” Couple of parrots, these two.

“Devin.”

“Mr. Kenzie, I have nothing to hold you on. My partner and I
were
under the impression that you might have been involved in some nasty business down at South Station early yesterday afternoon. But, since no witnesses can place you there, what can I say? We fucked up. And we're too sorry about it, believe me.”

Angie said, “Take the cuffs off.”

“Would that we could find the key,” Devin said.

“Take the fucking cuffs off, Devin,” she said again.

“Oscar?”

Oscar pulled out all his pockets.

“Oscar doesn't have them either. We'll have to call around.”

Oscar stood up. “Maybe I take a look around, see if I can scare them up.”

He left and we sat there, Devin watching us. We watched him back. He said, “Think about protective custody.”

I shook my head.

“Patrick,” he said in a tone my mother used to use, “it's a rolling battleground out there. You won't make it until sunrise. Angie, neither will you if you're with him.”

She tilted her chair back, turned her beautiful, weary face toward me. She said, “‘Nobody hands me my guns and says run. Nobody.'” Just like James Coburn in
The Magnificent Seven
. Her full mouth burst wide, the smile that blew into my chest was devastating. At that moment, I think I knew what love was.

We looked at Devin.

He sighed. “I saw the movie too. Coburn died in the end.”

“There's always reruns,” I said.

“Not out there, there isn't.”

Oscar came back through the door. He said, “Well, lookee here,” and held up a small key ring.

“Where'd you find 'em?” Devin asked.

Oscar tossed them onto the table in front of me. “Right
where I left them. Funny how that works sometimes, huh.”

Devin pointed at us. “They think they're cowboys.”

Oscar pulled back his chair and settled heavily into it. “Then we'll bury them with their boots on.”

We couldn't go
home. Devin was right. I had no more cards to play, and Socia had nothing to gain as long as I continued breathing.

We sat around for another two hours while they finished up some paperwork and then they took us out a side door and drove us a few blocks away to the Lenox Hotel.

As we got out of the car, Oscar looked over at Devin. “Have a heart. Tell 'em.”

We stood on the curb, waited.

Devin said, “Rogowski's got a broken collarbone and he lost a shitload of blood, but he's stable.”

Angie sagged against me for a moment.

Devin said, “Been swell knowing you,” and drove off.

The folks at the Lenox didn't seem too pleased we'd chosen their hotel at eight in the morning, sans luggage. Our clothes, appropriately, looked as if we'd sat on a bench all night, and my hair was still speckled with chips of marble from the shoot-out at South Station. I gave them my Visa Gold Card and they asked for more ID. While the concierge copied the numbers of my driver's license onto a pad of paper, the reservations clerk called in my Visa number for authorization. Some people you can never please.

After they ascertained that I was who I said I was and that we probably wouldn't make off with much more than a bath towel and some sheets, they gave us a room key. I signed my name and looked up at the reservations clerk.
“Is the TV in our room bolted to the wall or could it just roll on out of there?”

She gave me a very tight smile but didn't answer.

The room was on the ninth floor, overlooking Boylston Street. Not a bad view. Directly below us wasn't much—a Store 24, a Dunkin' Donuts—but beyond, a nice stretch of brownstones, some with mint-green roof gardens, and beyond them, the dark, rolling Charles striped against a pale, gray sky.

The sun was rising steadily. I was dead tired, but more than sleep, I needed a shower. Too bad Angie's quicker than I am. I sat in a chair and flicked on the TV. Bolted to the wall, of course. The early news was running a commentary about yesterday's gang violence in South Station. The commentator, broad-shouldered with bangs that looked as if they'd been sharpened to points with a razor, was damn near quivering with righteous anger. Gang violence, he said, had finally reached our front doors and something had to be done about it, no matter what.

It's always when it reaches our “front doors” that we finally consider it a problem. When it's confined to our backyards for decades, no one even notices it.

I turned off the TV, switched places with Angie when she came out of the bathroom.

By the time I'd finished, she was asleep, lying on her stomach, one hand still on the phone where she'd hung it up, the other still closed around the top of the towel. Beads of water glistened on her bare back above the towel line, her slim shoulder blades rising and falling with each breath. I dried off and went to the bed. I pulled the covers out from under her and she groaned softly, raising her left leg closer to her chest. I placed the sheet over her and shut off the light.

I lay down on the right side of the bed, a few feet away from her on top of the sheet, and prayed she didn't roll over in her sleep. If her body touched mine, I was afraid I'd dissolve into it. And probably not mind.

That being the major problem, right there, I turned onto my side, facing the wall, and waited for sleep.

 

Some time, shortly before I woke up, I saw the boy in the photos. The Hero was carrying him down a dank hallway, both of them enshrouded in shower steam. Water dripped steadily from the ceiling. I yelled something to the boy, because I knew him. I knew him in that dank hallway as his legs kicked out from under my father's arm. He seemed small in my father's arm, smaller still because he was naked. I called to him and my father turned back toward me; Sterling Mulkern's face was under the dark fireman's helmet. He said, “If you had half the balls your old man had…” in Devin's voice. The boy turned too, the face craning around my father's elbow bored and disinterested, even as his bare legs flailed. His eyes were empty, like a doll's, and I felt my legs buckle when I realized nothing would ever shock or scare him again.

I woke up to Angie kneeling over me, her hands on my shoulders. She said, “It's OK, it's OK,” in a soft whisper.

I was very aware of her bare legs against mine as I said, “What?”

“It's OK,” she said. “Just a dream.”

The room was pitch dark but light exploded behind the heavy curtains. I said, “What time is it?”

She stood up, still wearing the towel, and walked to the window. “Eight o'clock,” she said. “
P.M.
” She opened the curtain. “On the Fourth of July.”

The sky was a canvas of explosive colors. Whites, reds, blues, even some orange and yellow. A clap of thunder rocked the room and a starburst of blue and white ignited the sky. A shooting star of red rocketed through the middle and set off a smaller starburst that bled all over the blue and white. The whole display hit its peak then collapsed at once, the colors arcing downward and sputtering out in a cascade of dying embers. Angie opened the windows and
the Boston Pops boomed Beethoven's Fifth as if they had a wall of speakers wrapped around the Hub.

I said, “We slept fourteen hours?”

She nodded. “Shoot-outs and interrogations will do that to you, I guess.”

“I guess so.”

She came back to the bed, sat on the corner. “Boy, Skid, when you have a nightmare, you have a
nightmare
.”

I rubbed my face. “Sorry I woke you.”

“Had to get up some time. Speaking of which, do we have a plan of any sort?”

“We have to find Paulson and Socia.”

“That's an objective, not a plan.”

“We need our guns.”

“Definitely.”

“Probably not going to be easy getting to them with Socia's people all over the place.”

“We're the inventive type.”

 

We took a cab back to the neighborhood, gave the driver an address about a half-mile past the church. I didn't see anyone lurking in the shadows as we passed, but you're not supposed to: that's why there are shadows; that's why they lurk. Some kids—ten or twelve years old at most—were shooting bottle rockets at the passing cars, tossing packs of firecrackers out into the middle of the avenue. The car directly behind us took a direct hit to its windshield and screeched to a halt. The guy jumped out running, but the kids were gone before he'd even reached the curb, hopping fences like hurdlers, disappearing into their own backyard jungle.

Angie and I paid the cabbie and walked through the backyard of the public grammar school—the “project” school we called it when we were kids, because only the kids from the housing projects went there. In the back of the schoolyard, hanging in a loose pack around the fire escape, twenty or so of the older neighborhood kids
pounded back some beers, a boom box tuned to WBCN, a few passing around a joint. When they saw us, one of them turned the boom box up louder. J. Geils Band's “Whammer Jammer.” Fine with me. They had already decided we weren't cops and now they were deliberating how bad they were going to scare us for being stupid enough to walk through their hangout.

Then a few of them recognized us as we passed under a streetlight and seemed pretty depressed—can't scare people who know your parents. I recognized their leader, Colin, right off. Bobby Shefton's kid; good-looking, even if he was as obviously Irish as a potato famine—tall, well-built, a short-cropped head of dirty blond hair around a chiseled face. He was wearing a white and green BNBL tank top and a pair of pleated walking shorts. He said, “'S up, Mr. Kenzie?”

They nodded to Angie. No one wants to get too well acquainted with a woman whose husband's jealous streak is legend.

I said, “Colin, how'd you guys like to make fifty bucks before the liquor store closes?”

His eyes lit up for a moment before he remembered how cool he was. He said, “You go in and buy the shit for us?”

“Of course.”

They kicked the idea around for a second and a half or so. “You got it. What do you need?”

I said, “It involves screwing with people who might be packing.”

Colin shrugged. “Niggers ain't the only ones with guns anymore, Mr. Kenzie.” He pulled his own from under his tank top. A couple of other kids did too. “Since they tried to take over the Ryan playground a couple months back, we stocked up a bit.” For a moment I thought back to my days on this fire escape—the good old days of tire irons and baseball bats. When a switchblade was rare. But the ante kept getting upped, and obviously, everyone was willing to meet it.

My plan had been to get them to pack around us as we walked back up to the church. With hats, in the darkness, we could probably pass as kids, and by the time Socia's people figured it out, we'd be in the church with our guns. It had never been much of a plan. And I realized now that I'd missed the obvious because of my own racism. If the black kids had guns, only went to figure, the white kids would have them too.

I said, “Tell you what. I changed my mind. I'll give you a hundred bucks
and
the booze for three things.”

Colin said, “Name 'em.”

“Let us rent two of your guns.” I tossed him my car keys. “And go boost my car from in front of my house.”

“That's two things.”

“Three,” I said. “Two guns and one car. What're they teaching you kids these days?”

One of the kids laughed. “Helps if you go to school.”

Colin said, “You just want to rent the guns? You'll definitely bring them back?”

“Probably. If not, we'll kick in enough to buy you two more.”

Colin stood, handed me his gun, butt first. A .357, scratched along the barrel, but well oiled. He slapped a buddy's shoulder and the buddy handed his gun to Angie. A .38. Her favorite. He looked at his buddy. “Let's go get Mr. Kenzie's car.”

While they were gone, we walked across the street to the liquor store and filled their order—five cases of Bud, two liters of vodka, some OJ, some gin. We carried it back across the street and had just given it to the kids when the Vobeast came hurtling down the avenue and smoked rubber the last quarter block to the curb. Colin and his pal were out of it before it stopped rolling. “Get going, Mr. Kenzie. They're coming.”

We scrambled into the car and pulled off the curb as the headlights loomed large and malevolent in back of us. There were two sets of headlights and they were right be
hind us, three silhouettes in each car. They started firing half a block past the school, the bullets ripping into the Vobeast. I cut across the wrong lane of traffic and jumped the divider strip as we entered Edward Everett Square. I banged a right past a tavern, punched the pedal as we lit down the small, densely packed street, the cars fat on both sides. In my rearview, I saw the first car spin around the corner and straighten out cleanly. The second car, though, didn't make the turn. It bounced off a Dodge and the front axle snapped in two. Its fender plowed into asphalt and it flipped up onto its grill.

The first car was still firing away, and Angie and I kept ducking our heads, not sure which explosions came from a gun muzzle and which came from the barrage of fireworks in the sky overhead. Straight out, like this, there was no way we'd last. A Yugo could outrun the Vobeast, and the streets were growing tighter and tighter with less cover and more parked cars.

We crossed over into Roxbury and my back window imploded. I took enough shards of glass in my neck to think I'd been shot for a moment, and Angie had a cut on her forehead that was bleeding a thick river down her left cheekbone. I said, “You OK?”

She nodded, scared but pissed off too. She said, “Goddamn them,” and swiveled on the seat, pointing the .38 at the space where the window used to be. My ear exploded as she squeezed off two shots, her arm steady.

Angie's one hell of a shot. The windshield of the car splattered into two big spiderwebs. The driver spun the wheel and they rammed a white panel truck, bounced back into the street sideways.

I didn't stop to check their condition. The Vobeast careened onto a badly paved stretch of road that rocked our heads off the ceiling. I spun the wheel to the right and turned onto a street that was only marginally better. Someone screamed something at us as we went past, and a bottle shattered against the trunk.

The left side of the street was one big abandoned lot, scorched overgrown weeds pouring up out of piles of gravel, crumbled cinder block and brick. To our right, houses that should have been condemned a half-century ago sagged toward the earth, carrying the weight of poverty and neglect with them until the day they'd spill into one another like dominoes. Then the right side of the street would look identical to the left. The porches were crowded and no one seemed too pleased with the whiteys in the rolling piece of shit tearing down their street. A few more bottles hit the car, a cherry bomb blew up in front of us.

I reached the end of the street, and just as I saw the other car appear a block back, I took a left. The street I turned onto was even worse, a bleak, forgotten path through brown weeds and the skeletal remains of abandoned tenements. A few kids stood by a burning trash can tossing firecrackers inside, and behind them two winos tackled one another for the rights to that last sip of T-bird. Beyond them, the condemned tenements rose in crumbling brick, the black windows empty of glass, singed in places by some forgotten fire.

Angie said, “Oh, Christ, Patrick.”

The street dead-ended, no outlet, twenty yards away. A heavy cement divider and years of weeds and rubble stood in our way. I looked behind me as I began to apply the brakes, and saw the car turning the corner toward us. The kids were walking away from the barrel, smelling the battle and getting out of the line of fire. I stood on the brakes and the Vobeast gave me a belligerent “fuck you” in reply. Metal clacked against metal, and I might as well have been in a Flintstone car. It seemed to almost pick up a last burst of speed just before we hit the divider.