Charlie's Key (13 page)

“Mor’n you,” says Gerald. “I’m doing advanced history.”

“Oh, Jesus,” says Frankie. “You hear that, Cowboy? Advanced history, instead of the stunned-arse history what you and me takes.”

He tips the beer so steep it’s like he’s going to eat the can, then tosses the empty out the window.

“Well, Mister Advanced History,” says Frankie, barking a giant burp between
Advanced
and
History
, “if you’re such a smart guy, how come you’re such a shitty driver?”

Then all of a sudden Frankie grabs the steering wheel and yanks it hard over to his side of the car. Gerald hits the brakes, and the car spins right around, my end swinging in a big circle until—
pow!
—the wheels slam into the curb and we’re stopped, pointing the way we were just coming.

“Jesus Christ, Frankie,” says Gerald. “What the hell’s the matter with you? You coulda killed us.”

“You’re the matter with me, ya snotty arsehole,” says Frankie. Then before Gerald can say anything to that, Frankie hauls back his fist and takes a swing at him. But instead of hitting Gerald, he bashes his hand into the rearview mirror.

“Jesus,” Frankie says, grabbing his hurt hand with the other, which gives Gerald the chance to reach past him and open the passenger door. Frankie’s bending over, some drool hanging from his mouth while he rubs his knuckles. It’s the same hand he busted up on Flarehead, I can see, ’cause it’s bleeding again.

“Get the hell out,” says Gerald, giving him a shove through the door. He gives another push, and Frankie ends up on the sidewalk.

“And don’t be calling me until you sober up, ya dirty pisspot. You’re worse’n your old man.”

This last bit he says when he’s pulling the door shut. I wonder if maybe I should get out with Frankie, seeing as I just met Gerald a little bit ago. But before I get a chance to say anything, Gerald does a U-turn and we’re off headed for the party again. He puts the mirror back in place and sees me looking at him.

“Got something to say?” he asks.

Maybe I do, I think. Maybe I got to say that he should let me out so I can check to make sure Frankie’s okay. That’d probably be the right thing to say, seeing how Frankie’s helped me out twice already. But what could I do? I don’t have any bandages or anything. And it’s not like I could take him to my house and get him cleaned up and call his mom or dad to come get him. And it might be worse for him with me there anyways, ’cause I can just see a cop car go driving by and then pulling over. I get arrested and they take me into some cement room down in a basement somewheres and keep me up all night, making me sit in a hard chair with some light in my face. And I don’t get any breakfast or any lunch or supper and finally I tell them how Frankie helped me break outta the funeral home, and Frankie ends up back in jail, except this time it’s a real jail, ’cause he’s eighteen, and who knows what could happen to him in a place like that? So it’s probably better if I just don’t say anything. Which I do, even though when we’re driving away I get a picture in my head of that garbage we left on the sidewalk back at the fish and chip place.

“Well?” Gerald asks again.

“Is Frankie drunk?” I know he is, because I’ve seen my dad drunk. Most times my dad ends up sad, which is how Frankie looked when we were driving off. Once, with my dad, he started off happy when he got home, talking about how he got a raise and that meant more money, and that meant we could move outta the cat-pee place. Then all of a sudden he got all sad about how he made me live in a place that smelled like cat pee. And how he should do better for me, which—honest—was something I never even thought of thinking. Anyways, it all ended up with him crying and me going over to give him a pat on the shoulder, which he didn’t much like me to do.

“Leave me alone,” he’d say, every time. “Just leave me alone.”

So I already know Frankie is drunk, but I ask anyways.

“Yes, Jesus, he’s drunk,” says Gerald. “First thing he does, every time he gets out—gets pissed. Always starts off good— couple a beer, a drive somewhere. Maybe a draw if he scores something. Then he pulls some crap like this. Every time.”

“Sorry,” I say. I don’t really know why I say it.

“Sorry?” says Gerald. “What do you got to be sorry about?”

“Well,” I say, “I guess if you guys hadn’t a come to get me, this wouldn’t have happened.”

“If we hadn’t come to get you, some other kind of shit would have happened. Frankie woulda got pissed at something. Guaranteed. Something I said, something somebody else said, a car that cut us off, an old guy looking at us wrong— it’d be something. Guaranteed.”

He rolls down the electric window and shoots out a great big spit.

“Anyways,” he says, “he’ll be okay tomorrow, when he sobers up. For now, I wanna go see this girl who’s having this little party. You can come—just don’t cause any shit.”

“Okay.”

We turn off the main street onto a curvy little road where all the houses are jumbled up next to one another. Some are big, some are little, some squished together, other ones sitting off by themselves, up on little hills, with paths running between them. We take a right turn and there’s the ocean again—at least I think it’s the ocean. It looks the same, gray and cold, but it’s almost like a little lake, the banks close to one another.

“Is that the ocean?” I say.

“Quidi Vidi Gut. Ocean comes into the gut through that break in the rocks.”

He stops the car and lowers my window. The moon’s starting to come up now, and right below it there’s an opening in the rocks, with big waves rolling in. It’s cold outside, and wet, too, with a mist that floats into the car.

“Fog coming in,” says Gerald. “We won’t be sitting out tonight.”

A couple a secs later we pull into a driveway, right up beside a house. It’s a big one, painted red and yellow to make it look old-timey, but you can tell it’s new. It’s full of windows, one beside the other, going from the floor to the ceiling, like whoever built it wanted to make sure everybody could look in and see all the stuff they owned. “Take your backpack,” Gerald says when I get out of the car. “I don’t know how long I’m staying, and I don’t want your crap in the car when I take off.”

Gerald goes up the steps and rings the bell while I wait at the bottom. Someone answers: a girl.

“Where’ve you been?” she asks. “You get the stuff?”

“Jesus,” says Gerald. “Nice to see you too.”

“Sorry. It’s just I’ve been waiting.”

“The wait’s gonna be a little longer,” says Gerald. “My guy…we had, ah, a little disagreement on the way over here— before we scored the shit.”

“Jesus, Gerald.”

“Don’t worry—he’ll be around tomorrow. We can set something up for then. Anyways, I got some beer for tonight…”

He holds up another six-pack.

“’Kay,” says the girl. “C’mon in.”

“And I got a guy with me,” he says, waving me up the steps.

I come up and the door opens wide, and it’s Clare, standing right there. As soon as she sees me, her eyes get big and she puts her hand up to her mouth.

“Charlie,” she says. “Jesus, get in here.”

She shuts the door quick behind us.

“You know one another?” Gerald asks.

“We met,” says Clare, “when I was in rehab and Charlie was in The Hollow.” She turns to Gerald. “And you two have been driving around all afternoon?”

“Had a spin out to the Cape, then something to eat up to Leo’s.”

“Jesus, Gerald. The whole freakin’ city’s out looking for Charlie. It’s all over the
TV
—I was just watching it. Anybody see you come here?”

“Don’t think so.”

“Well, bring your stuff in here, Charlie, and stay right there,” she says. “Gerald, help me get these blinds down. Jesus.”

“Relax, girl. It’s not like he’s a murderer or something.”

“He’s not, but his uncle is. Nick Sykes.”

She pulls the last blind down.

“Oh Jesus, Gerald—he’s not your connection, is he? You weren’t buying off Nick Sykes?”

“No, no,” says Gerald. “I mean, I don’t know who we were buying off—my buddy, Frankie, he was getting the stuff. I was just giving him the money and driving him to the guy’s house to make the pickup. I don’t figure this Nick Sykes has even got a house, the way he looked today.”

“You saw him?”

“Yeah. Right when we got Charlie, out by the funeral home.”

“You helped Charlie get away?” says Clare, like she can’t believe it.

“Yeah. Me and Frankie.”

“And who’s Frankie?” Clare asks.

“Guy I got to know last year. Sold me some dope, started hanging out a bit. You never met him.”

“And this Frankie,” she says slow, “he got you involved in this whole thing with Charlie.” Clare turns to me. “This is Frankie from The Hollow? The older guy you were hanging with at the fence—the guy smoking, with the black hair and the T-shirt?”

I nod.

“And he’s the guy who’s supposed to be getting my Oxy?”

Gerald nods.

“And he’s where now?”

“Last I seen he was sat on his arse on the boulevard.”

“And does he know you were coming here?”

“Well,” says Gerald, “he knows we were coming to see somebody in the Gut, but he don’t know you, and he don’t know this house.”

“Good,” says Clare.

“You’re awful snotty about the company you keep, all of a sudden,” says Gerald.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you’d a been happy enough to see Frankie and me if we had a bottle of Oxy with us.”

“Not if it meant the cops were two steps behind the pair of you,” says Clare. “I mean, Jesus, Gerald. I’m just outta rehab a day. I don’t want to get chucked back in again.”

“Then maybe you shouldn’t be asking me to hook you up with that shit.”

“Oh, don’t worry. I won’t make that mistake again.”

Right then I figure Gerald’s going to storm out, but he doesn’t. Fact, they keep yelling about how Gerald’s always getting Clare in trouble and about how Clare always seems happy enough to go along with what Gerald wants to get up to. They keep going on for a long time—long enough for me to take a look round the house. Mostly what I see are books, all about money and banks and economics, that look like they’ve been opened maybe once. There’s some big books about art and museums too. Which makes sense, since they’ve got a couple a big paintings on the wall. One looks like somebody took a fat paint brush and painted whatever they felt like with a bunch of different colors. They’re all squiggled up, angry-like. Another one’s got cranberries dumped in a big blue bowl. It’s pretty good, how much they look like cranberries. I don’t paint, but if I did I wouldn’t paint cranberries. I’d paint cop cars, or trains. Still, I bet painting a cranberry is tougher than you might think. It might
seem
easy—what’s a cranberry except a red circle? But try sitting down and painting one up that doesn’t look like a red circle. I bet that’s hard.

There’s other things up on the walls too: certificates for certified accounting—stuff like that. And right beside that, a little framed box full of spoons or knives or something. I go up close to take a look and I see they’re not spoons— they’re keys, brass ones, silver ones, old rusty ones and—yes, right there—one just like the key I got in my sneaker. They’re all stuck on green felt, and there’s writing underneath:
Honoring a century of shared security between Diebold and The Bank of Nova Scotia, September 27, 2001.

“You into keys?”

It’s Clare, finished her fight with Gerald.

“I never saw keys like this,” I say. “What do they open?”

“Locks,” Clare says.

“Padlocks?”

Clare leans toward the keys. I smell her hair when she gets close.

“Safety deposit boxes,” she says.

“What’re those?”

“Boxes,” she says. She looks at me like I’m about three years old. “In a bank. You’ve been in a bank, right?”

“Not in one. I go the teller machine sometimes with my dad, but I never been inside one.”

“God, I spent half my life in them, waiting for my old man to finish up work.”

“What’s he do?”

“He’s a manager. Central branch, downtown on Water Street.”

“So he’s got keys like this to open up these boxes inside.”

“Anybody can have a safety deposit box. You just pay your rent each year and the bank gives you a box and a key.”

“How big are they? The boxes?”

“Different sizes,” says Clare. “Little ones, for things like a will. Bigger ones for jewelry or old books. People put all kinds of things in them.”

“And nobody else can get into this box without that key?”

Clare nods. “You show up, tell them your key number, they take you to your box and you open it and get whatever you want out.” She gives her head a tilt. “What do you care about that stuff? You’re a kid.”

“Just wondering. Sometimes when I…”

Right then the doorbell rings, with Gerald coming outta the kitchen to open it.

“Leave it shut,” Clare whispers.

Gerald tries to sneak a look out a side window by the door but shrugs his shoulders. “All’s I see is a cab,” he says. “Can’t tell who it is.”

The bell rings again, but we all stay where we are.

“Charlie,” says Clare. “Quick, go out back to the kitchen. There’s a little cupboard by the back door. Get inside and stay quiet.”

I start to say something, but she gives me a shove.

“Go,” she says. “Leave your backpack and stuff and go.”

I’m squeezing into the cupboard when I hear the three barks. Then again, loud and clear, just like this afternoon. Next comes a creak—Gerald opening the front door.

“Frankie,” I hear him say. Then back to Clare, “It’s just Frankie. Get in here, b’y, you must be freezing your arse off. Sobered up, have ya?”

“Enough to spot yer old man’s car,” I hear him say. I open the door a crack to get a look, but I can’t see anybody.

“Where’s Charlie to?” asks Frankie.

“Upstairs,” says Clare. “In the bathroom.”

“Okay,” Frankie says. “You two gotta come out here, just for a sec.”

“Screw that,” says Gerald. “Get your arse in here.”

“Listen,” says Frankie, “I got your stuff—my man’s here with it. But he don’t want to come into no house, so he says for you two to come out and do the deal in the cab. C’mon. He’s getting nervous.”