A Drink Before the War (21 page)

My head popped off the dashboard and a rush of metal taste fragmented within my mouth as the impact shook me. Angie had been a little more prepared. She snapped forward, but her seatbelt held her in place.

We barely looked at one another before we jumped out
of the car. I scrambled across the hood as the brakes behind us squealed on the torn cement. Angie was sprinting like an Olympian across the lot of weeds and cinder block and broken glass, her chest out, her head thrown back. She was a good ten yards ahead of me by the time I got going. They fired from the car, the bullets chunking into the ground beside me, what remained of natural soil spitting up between the garbage.

Angie had reached the first tenement. She was looking at me, waving me to go faster, her gun pointed in my general direction, craning her head for a clear shot. I didn't like the look in her eyes at all. Then I noticed the shafts of light jerking up and down in front of me, shining off the tenement, jagged where my body blocked them. They'd driven in after us. Exactly what I'd been afraid of. Somewhere in all these weeds and gravel, roads had existed before this area was condemned. And they'd found one.

A burst of gunfire stitched a pile of torn brick as I jumped over it and reached the first tenement. Angie turned as I came through the doorway and we ran inside, ran without thinking, without looking, because we were running into a building that had no back wall. It had crumbled some time ago, and we were just as out in the open as we'd been before.

The car came across the middle of the building, rocketing over an old metal door ahead of us. I took aim because there was nothing to hide behind. The front passenger and the guy in the backseat were sticking black weapons out the windows. I got off two shots that punched the front door before they let loose, tongues of fire bursting from their muzzles. Angie dove to her left, landing behind an overturned bathtub. I went up in the air, nothing to cover me, and I was halfway down when a bullet burned across my left bicep and snapped me around in midair. I hit the ground and fired again, but the car had gone out the other side and was circling for another pass.

Angie said, “Come on.”

I got up and saw what she was running for. Twenty yards ahead of us were two more tenement towers, intact it seemed, and packed close together. Between them was a dark blue alley. A hazy yellow streetlight shone at the end of it, and it was much too thin for a car to work its way into. Silhouettes of misshapen hulks of metal stood out in dark shadows between the two towers.

I ran across the open lot, hearing the engine coming off to my left, blood pouring down my arm like warm soup. I'd been shot. Shot. I saw their faces again as they fired, and I heard a voice that I soon realized was mine saying the same thing, over and over again: “Fucking niggers, fucking niggers.”

We reached the alley. I looked behind me. The car was stalled by something in the gravel, but the way they were rocking it from the inside, I didn't think they'd stay that way long. I said, “Keep going.”

Angie said, “Why? We can pick them off as they come in.”

“How many bullets you got left?”

“I don't know.”

“Exactly,” I said. “We could run out trying to pick them off.” I worked my way over an upturned dumpster. “Trust me.”

Once we made it to the end of the alley, I looked back and saw the headlights arcing to the left, moving again, coming around to meet us. The road at the end of the alley was a faded yellow cobblestone. We stepped out onto it, hearing the big engine roaring closer. The yellow streetlight we'd seen was the only one for two blocks. Angie checked her gun. “I have four bullets.”

I had three. She was the better shot. I said, “The streetlight.”

She fired once and stepped back as the glass fell in a small shower to the street. I jogged across the street into a mass of brown weeds. Angie climbed down behind a torched car directly across from me. Her eyes peered over
the blackened hood, looking at me, both of our heads nodding forward, the adrenaline rippling through us like fission.

The car fishtailed around the corner, hurtling over the torn cobblestone toward us, the driver craning his head out the window, looking for us. The car began to slow as it got closer, trying to figure out where we could have gone. The shotgun passenger turned his head to his right, looked at the scorched car, didn't see anything. He turned back, and started to say something to the driver.

Angie stood up, took aim over the blackened hood, and fired two shots into his face. His head snapped to the side, bounced off his shoulder, and the driver looked at him for one moment. When he looked back, I was running up to the window, gun extended. He said, “Wait!” through the open window and his eyes loomed large and white just before I pulled the trigger and blew them out through the back of his head.

The car went left, hit an old shopping cart on its way to the curb, bouncing up and over it before ramming a wooden telephone pole and cracking the wood at a point about six feet off the ground. The guy in the backseat shattered the window with his head. The telephone pole wavered in the fragrant summer breeze for a moment, then dropped forward and crushed the driver's side of the car.

We approached slowly, guns pointed at the hole in the back window. We were about three feet away, side by side, when the door creaked open, the lower corner hitting the sidewalk. I took a deep breath and waited for a head to show. It did, followed by a body that dropped to the pavement, covered in glass and blood.

He was alive. His left arm was twisted out behind him at an impossible angle and a large flap of skin was missing from his forehead, but he was trying to crawl anyway. He got two or three feet before he collapsed, rolling over onto his back, breathing hard.

Roland.

He spit some blood onto the sidewalk and opened one eye to look at me. The other eye was already beginning to swell under the mask of blood. He said, “I'll kill you.”

I shook my head.

He managed to sit up a bit, resting on his good arm. He said, “I'll kill you. The bitch too.”

Angie kicked him in the ribs.

All the pain he was in and he rolled his head at her and smiled. “'Scuse me.”

I said, “Roland, you got this all backward. We're not your problem. Socia's your problem.”

“Socia dead,” he said, and I could tell a few of his teeth were broken. “He just don't know it yet. Most of the Saints coming over with me. I get Socia any day now. He lost the war. Just a matter of picking his coffin.”

He managed to open both eyes then, for just a moment, and I knew why he wanted me dead.

He was the kid in the photographs.

“You're the—”

He howled at me, a stream of blood jetting from his mouth, trying to lunge for me when he couldn't even get off the ground. He kicked at me and banged his fist off the ground, probably driving shards of glass all that much farther into the skin and bone. His howl grew louder. “I fucking kill you,” he screamed. “I fucking kill you.”

Angie looked at me. “We let him live, we're both dead.”

I considered it. One shot is all it would take. Out here on the cusp of the urban wasteland with no one around to question. One shot and no more Roland to worry about. Once we settled with Socia, back to our regular life. I looked down at Roland as he arched his back and jerked up, trying to stand, like a bloody fish on newspaper. His sheer effort scared the shit out of me. Roland didn't seem to know pain or fear any longer, just
drive
. I looked at him steadily, considering it, and somewhere in that raging, hulking mass of hatred, I saw the naked child with the dying eyes. I said, “He's already dead.”

Angie stood over him, gun pointed down, hammer pulled back. Roland watched her and she stared back at him flatly. But she couldn't do it either, and she knew no amount of standing there would change that. She shrugged and said, “Have a nice day,” and we walked toward the Melnea Cass Boulevard, four blocks west, shining like civilization itself.

We flagged down
a bus and climbed on. Everyone on it was black and when they saw us—bloody, torn clothes—most of them found some sort of excuse to move to the back. The bus driver closed the door with a soft
whoosh
and pulled off down the highway.

We took seats near the front, and I looked at the people on the bus. Most of them were older; two looked like students, one young couple held a small child between them. They were looking at us with fear and disgust and some hatred. I had an idea what it must be like to be a couple of young black guys in street clothes boarding a subway car in Southie or White Dorchester. Not a nice feeling.

I sat back and looked out the window at the fireworks in the black sky. They were smaller now, less colorful. I heard an echo of my voice as a carload of murderers chased me across an open lot firing bullets at my body, and my hatred and fear distilled into color. “Fucking niggers,” I'd said, over and over. I closed my eyes, and in the darkness, they still took note of the light bursting above me in the sky.

Independence Day.

 

The bus dropped us at the corner of Mass. Ave. and Columbia. I walked Angie back to her house and when we reached it, she touched my shoulder. “You going to get that looked at?”

For all the pain, when I looked at it on the bus, I realized it had only grazed me, cutting the skin like the slash of a
good knife—hardly lethal. It needed cleaning and it hurt like hell, but it wasn't worth a cosmetic job in an overcrowded emergency room at the moment. “Tomorrow,” I said.

Her living-room curtain parted slightly: Phil, thinking he was the detective. I said, “You better go in.”

The prospect didn't seem to appeal to her all that much. She said, “Yeah, I guess I better.”

I looked at the blood on her face, the cut on her forehead. “Better clean that up too,” I said. “You're looking like an extra in
Dawn of the Dead
.”

“You always know the right thing to say,” she said and started toward the house. She saw the parted curtain and turned back toward me, a frown on her face. She looked at me for almost a full minute, her eyes large and a little sad. “He used to be a nice guy. Remember?”

I nodded, because I did. Phil had been a great guy once. Before bills came and jobs went and the future became a vicious joke of a word, something to describe what he'd never have. Phil hadn't always been the Asshole. He'd grown into it.

“Good night,” I said.

She crossed the porch and went inside.

I walked up onto the avenue, headed toward the church. I stopped in the liquor store and bought myself a six-pack. The guy behind the counter looked at me like he figured I'd die soon; a little over an hour ago—one that seemed like a lifetime now—I'd bought enough liquor to start my own company, and now I was back for more. “You know how it is,” I said. “Fourth of July.”

The guy looked at me, at my bloody arm and dirty face. “Yeah,” he said, “tell that to your liver.”

I drank a beer as I walked up the avenue, thinking about Roland and Socia, Angie and Phil, the Hero and me. Dances of pain. Relationships from hell. I'd been a punching bag for my father for eighteen years, and I'd never hit back. I kept believing, kept telling myself, It'll change; he'll
get better. It's hard to close the door on optimistic expectations when you love someone.

Angie and Phil were the same way. She'd known him when he was the best-looking guy in the neighborhood, a charmer and natural leader who told the funniest jokes, the warmest stories. He was everyone's idol. A great guy. She still saw that, prayed for it, hoped against hope—no matter how cynically she viewed the rest of the world—that people change for the better sometimes. Phil had to be one of those people, or what gave anything purpose?

And then there was Roland—taking all that hate and ugliness and depravity that had been shoved into him since childhood at every turn, and spinning around and spewing it back at the world. Waging war against his father and telling himself that once it was done, he'd be at peace. But he wouldn't. It never works that way. Once that ugliness has been forced into you, it becomes part of your blood, dilutes it, races through your heart and back out again, staining everything as it goes. The ugliness never goes away, never comes out, no matter what you do. Anyone who thinks otherwise is naive. All you can hope to do is control it, to force it all into one tight ball in one tight place and keep it there, a constant weight.

I reached the belfry—still less risky than my apartment—and went inside. I sat at my desk, drank my beer. The sky was empty now, the celebration ended. The Fourth would be the fifth soon and the migration back from the Cape and the Vineyard had probably already begun. The day after a holiday is like the day after your birthday—everything seems old, like tarnished copper.

I placed my feet up on the desk and leaned back in the chair. My arm still burned and I straightened it out in front of me and poured half a beer on it. Homemade anesthesia. The cut was wide but shallow. In a few months the scar tissue would pale from a dull red to a duller white. It would barely be noticeable.

I raised my shirt, looked at the jellyfish on my abdomen,
the scar that would never fade, never be mistaken for anything innocuous, for anything but what it was: a mark of violence and depraved indifference, a cattle brand. The Hero's legacy, his stamp on this world, his attempt at immortality. As long as I was alive, carrying this jellyfish on my stomach, then so was he.

When I was growing up, my father's fear of flame burgeoned in direct proportion to his success in fighting it. By the time he reached the rank of lieutenant, he'd turned our apartment into a battle zone against fire. Our refrigerator contained not one, but three boxes of baking soda. Two more in the cupboard below the sink, one above the oven. There were no electric blankets in my father's home, no faulty appliances. The toaster was serviced twice a year. Every clock was mechanical. Electrical cords were checked twice a month for cracks in the rubber; sockets were investigated every six weeks. By the time I was ten, my father pulled all plugs from the sockets nightly to minimize any stray currents of malevolent electricity.

When I was eleven, I found my father sitting at the kitchen table late one night, staring at a candle he'd placed before him. He was holding his hand over the flame, patting it occasionally, his dark eyes fixed on the ropes of blue and yellow as if they could tell him something. When he saw me, his eyes widened, his face flushed, and he said, “It can be contained. It can,” and I was stunned to hear the thinnest chords of uncertainty in the deep timbre of his voice.

Because my father's shift began at three in the afternoon and my mother worked nights as a cashier at Stop and Shop, my sister, Erin, and I were latchkey kids long before the term became fashionable. One night, we tried to cook blackened redfish, something we'd had during a trip to Cape Cod the previous summer.

We poured every spice we could find into the skillet, and within minutes, the kitchen had filled with smoke. I opened the windows while my sister unlatched the front and back
doors. By the time we remembered what caused the smoke in the first place, the pan had caught fire.

I reached the oven just as the first fat parachute of blue flame floated into a white curtain. I remembered the fear in my father's voice. “It can be contained.” Erin picked the pan up off the burner and brown grease splattered her arm. She dropped the pan, and the contents spread across the top of the oven like napalm.

I thought of my father's reaction when he discovered we'd allowed
it
into his home, the embarrassment he'd feel, the rage that his embarrassment would turn into, thickening the blood in his hands until they turned to fists and came looking for me.

I panicked.

With six cartons of baking soda in reach, I grabbed the first liquid I saw off the top of the fridge and poured a half-pint of eighty proof vodka into the middle of a grease fire.

A tenth of a second after, I realized what was going to happen and I tackled my sister just before the top half of the room exploded. We lay on the floor and watched in awe as the wallpaper above the oven stripped away from the wall, as a cloud of blue, yellow, black, and red mushroomed across the ceiling, as a hundred fireflies erupted into the side of the fridge.

My sister rolled away and grabbed the fire extinguisher from the hall. I got one from the pantry, and as if the last five minutes hadn't happened, as if we were truly the children of an illustrious firefighter, we stood in the center of the kitchen and doused the oven, the wall, the ceiling, the fridge, and the curtain. Within a minute, black-and-white foam covered our bodies like birdshit.

Once our adrenal glands had closed their floodgates and our shakes had stopped, we sat down in the center of our ruined kitchen, and stared at the front door where my father entered every night at eleven-thirty. We stared at it until we both wept, kept staring long after we'd run out of tears.

By the time my mother returned from work, we'd fanned
all the smoke out of the apartment, wiped all scorch marks off the fridge and oven, and thrown away the charred strips of wallpaper and what remained of the curtain. My mother looked at the black cloud burned into her ceiling, at the scorched wall, and sat down at the kitchen table and stared blankly at something in the pantry for a full five minutes.

Erin said, “Mum?”

My mother blinked. She looked at my sister, then at me, then at the vodka bottle on the counter. She tilted her head toward it and looked at us. “Which of you…?”

I couldn't speak, pointed a finger at my chest.

My mother walked into the pantry. For a small, thin woman, she moved as if she were overweight, with slow lumbering steps. She returned with the iron and ironing board, placed them in the center of the kitchen. In times of crisis, my mother always clung to routine, and it was time to iron my father's uniforms. She opened the window and began pulling them from the clothesline. With her back to us, she said, “Go to your rooms. I'll see if I can talk to your father.”

I sat on the corner of my bed, hands in my lap, facing the door. I left the lights off, closed my eyes in the darkness, my hands clasped tight.

When my father came home, his usual thumping about the kitchen—tossing his lunch box on the table, rattling ice cubes in a glass, falling heavily into a chair before pouring his drink—was mute. The silence in the apartment that night was longer and thicker and more pregnant with dread than I have ever experienced since.

My mother said, “A mistake, that's all.”

“A mistake,” my father said.

“Edgar,” my mother said.

“A mistake,” my father said again.

“He's eleven. He panicked.”

“Uh-huh,” my father said.

Everything else that happened seemed to unfold in that weird compression of time that people experience just be
fore they get in a car wreck or fall down a flight of stairs—everything speeds up and everything slows down. A lifetime passes, in all its minute detail, in the space of a second.

My mother screamed, “No!” and I heard the ironing board topple to the kitchen linoleum, and my father's footsteps hammered the floorboards toward my room. I tried to keep my eyes closed, but when he kicked the door in, a splinter grazed my cheekbone, and the first thing I saw was the iron in my father's hand, the electrical cord and plug missing. His knee hit my shoulder and knocked me back on the bed and he said, “You're so desperate to find out what it feels like, boy?”

I looked in his eyes because I didn't want to look at the iron, and what I saw in those dark pupils was an unnerving mixture of anger and fear and hatred and savagery and yes, love, some bastardized version of that too.

And that's what I fixated on, clung to, prayed to, as my father ripped my shirt up to my sternum and pressed the iron against my stomach.

 

Angie once said, “Maybe that's what love is—counting the bandages until someone says, ‘Enough.'”

Maybe so.

Sitting at my desk, I closed my eyes, knowing I'd never sleep with the adrenaline doing its stock-car derby in my blood, and when I woke up an hour later, my phone was ringing.

I managed to say, “Patr—” before Angie's voice tumbled over the line. “Patrick, come over here. Please.”

I reached for my gun. “What's the matter?”

“I think I just got divorced.”