Mission Flats (13 page)

Kelly and I reached the eastern edge of the Flats shortly before noon. ‘You want to look around a little?’ he offered, and as I drove, he directed me down a broad avenue called Franklin Street. Here the sidewalk was lined with the same red-brick row houses that fill the Back Bay and the South End. Proceeding north, though, the street wall began to falter. Burned-out and abandoned buildings cropped up between the occupied ones. Here and there a tenement would simply have vanished, leaving a gap between the rough interior walls of the adjacent buildings. These vacant lots were strewn with stones and bricks. Eventually the row houses gave way to larger apartment buildings, then the desolate Grove Park housing project, then a commercial strip: auto-body shops, check-cashing services, convenience stores, tow lots.

‘The tour buses don’t get out here much,’ Kelly remarked dryly.

We turned off Franklin Street into a maze of side streets with tranquil names, Orchard Street, Amherst Street, Willow Street. The apartment buildings fell away and one-, two-, and three-family homes lined the sidewalks. Cracked driveways, sagging porches, peeled paint, even a few broken windows. The well-kept houses served only to highlight the decay of the surrounding ones. Yet for all that decay, on a sunny autumn day the neighborhood did not look especially threatening. Everywhere I looked, there seemed to be cheery details: a milk crate nailed to a phone pole as a makeshift basketball hoop, flower boxes, little girls skipping rope. This was no underworld, just poor. I had seen poverty before. There is no shortage of dirt-poor swamp Yankees and Québécois in Acadia County. I imagined people here felt the same sense of diffident yearning. Poor is poor.

We emerged from the winding side streets and Kelly announced, ‘This is Mission Ave.’

(Bostonians reflexively shorten the word avenue to ave. A New Yorker sees the abbreviation
5th Ave.
and says ‘Fifth Avenue’; a Bostonian sees
Massachusetts Avenue
and says ‘Mass Ave.’ I don’t know why. In any event, in Boston the road is generally referred to as Mission Ave.)

The main artery through the Flats was a wasteland. Looking north, Mission Avenue was a corridor of empty lots strewn with rubble and garbage. Tenements stood here and there, listing like punch-drunk boxers. The pediments above each door had been stripped away along with any brass or metal trim, drainpipes, mail slots, street numbers – anything that could plausibly be carried off and sold. Someone had erected a chainlink fence around one of these buildings to define a sort of yard; scumbles of garbage were caught in it like fish in a drift net.

‘These row houses used to stretch for miles,’ Kelly said. ‘Used to be a nice place. Italians lived here, Irish, Jews. They all got out.’

We passed the Winthrop Village housing project, a cluster of concrete bunkers set in a landscaped park. A Boston Housing Authority Police cruiser sat idling near the entrance, and the cop, an enormous black guy with a badass goatee and wraparound shades, watched us drive past.

Kelly pointed to graffiti, the same insignia recurring over and over: two interlocking letters, MP, artlessly spray-painted in childish lettering. ‘Braxton’s crew,’ Kelly said. ‘Mission Posse.’ The Posse had tagged everything: MP on telephone poles, MP on sidewalks, they’d even painted over street signs with it.

‘Pull in here, Ben Truman.’ Kelly was pointing at a little market called Mal’s. ‘I want to use the phone.’

Kelly disappeared into the store, and after flipping through the radio stations for a minute, I decided to get out of the car, take in the sunshine and the view. There was not much to look at. The oatmeal shade of the sidewalk nearly matched Mal’s storefront. Even the signs in the window had been bleached by the sun. I stood on the sidewalk, crossing and uncrossing my arms, leaning and unleaning against a parking meter.

People stared. A kid hanging in a doorway, sagging against the doorjamb like an empty set of clothes. An overweight woman in Adidas shower sandals. Were they staring? What were they staring at? Mine was the only white face on the street – was that enough to draw attention?

The kid draped in the doorway roused himself to approach me. His face was the color of caramel, almost as fair as my own. He wore new-out-of-the-box white sneakers and a loose hockey-style shirt that hung off his bony shoulders.

A second kid joined him. A huge, plump kid I had not noticed before.

There was a cretinous quality about him. He had narrow eyes incised into a bloated, doughy face.

‘What are you waiting for?’ the first kid said.

‘Just waiting on a friend. He’s inside.’

The kid studied me, as if my answer were suspicious.

‘This is a nice car,’ the slit-eyed guy said.

The first kid was still staring at me. ‘You got any money?’

‘No.’

‘We need some money to go to the store.’

‘Sorry’

‘You lost?’

‘No. I told you, my friend is in the store.’

‘All we need is like a dollar,’ said Slit Eyes.

‘I told you—’

‘Come on, a
dollar
?’

I gave them a one-dollar bill.

‘Thought you didn’t have any money’

‘I didn’t say that. I said I wasn’t giving you any’

‘Only now you did. You gave us some.’

‘So?’

‘So, a dollar? That’s like, why don’t you just give us a fuckin’ penny?’ The skinny kid watched me for a reaction. ‘Come on, you got a whole walletful. I just seen it. We need it to go to the store.’

‘No. Sorry’

‘We need to get something to eat.’

‘Yeah,’ agreed Slit Eyes, ‘something to eat.’

‘I’m not giving you any more.’

‘Why not? I told you, we need it.’

I shook my head. Maybe it was time to announce that I was a cop. But these were just kids, it was under control. Besides, I was not a cop here. I was outside my jurisdiction, I had no police powers. Just another tourist. ‘I gave you a buck, fellas. That’s all you’re gonna get.’

Slit Eyes edged beside me. ‘But I just seen your wallet.’ He was taller and heavier than me. His eyelids squeezed tight as clams.

‘Come on,’ the first kid wheedled, ‘just help us out.’

He stepped toward me, not aggressively – or maybe it was aggressively, I’m still not sure. I raised my hand to hold him away. My five fingertips pressed lightly on his breastbone.

‘Hey, don’t touch me!’ the skinny kid said softly. ‘You don’t want to get physical.’

‘I’m not getting phys—’

Slit Eyes cut me off: ‘Hey, yo, don’t go getting physical. There’s no need.’

‘Look, you asked for a buck, I gave it to you.’

‘Yeah,’ the skinny kid said, ‘but now you went and started getting physical. What’s up with that?’

‘I didn’t get physical.’

‘Have I disrespected you?’

‘No.’

‘No, we’re just talking here. I just asked you for some help. How come you’re all mad?’

‘I’m not mad.’ I pulled my hand back down. ‘I’m asking you nicely now, respectfully: Step back.’

‘It’s a public sidewalk. You think you can tell me where to go just ’cause I asked you for help? It’s like that? I got to step back because you gave me a
whole dollar
?’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘You thought it. I can see.’

‘I didn’t think anything.’

‘Yes, you did.’ The skinny kid reached out and tapped my front pants pocket with his knuckles, apparently to feel my wallet.

I brushed his hand away, gently. ‘Don’t touch me.’

‘Hey! I told you, you don’t have to push. I’m just talking to you.’

Kelly emerged from the little market. He glanced at the three of us, then said, in a peremptory way, ‘Come on, Ben, we don’t have time to fool around. I want to see my daughter.’ He brushed between us and climbed into the passenger seat. ‘Well? Let’s go.’

I stepped around the two kids without a word, and they offered not a word to me.

‘It’s like another country,’ I said in the car, but Kelly did not respond, and saying it did not dispel my uneasiness.

12

Mission Flats District Court, First Session.

By 12:45, Judge Hilton Bell was no longer sitting at the judge’s bench but pacing behind it, his black robe unzipped to the navel. The judge had been processing arraignments since nine o’clock sharp, and still his courtroom was packed. There were occasional shouts of protest from the holding cells in the basement; they, too, were still crowded.

I sat on a front bench, wedged between an armrest and a young woman who smelled, not unpleasantly, of Dune perfume and armpit. For reasons I can’t begin to explain, this woman clutched a plastic baggie containing dark curls of what appeared to be human hair.

(John Kelly had the good sense to avoid the courtroom. He waited outside on the street, where it was cooler.)

Judge Bell looked out over the audience, apparently considering his plight. The judge was quite literally overheating. Somewhere in the intestines of the courthouse, an ancient furnace was huffing hot air into the first-session courtroom, where the temperature was already near eighty oxygenless degrees, and the goddamn Boston police had placed the entire population of the city under arrest, and here they all were, these huddled masses, turning Judge Bell’s courtroom into a great sweating steerage compartment, exhaling more and more of their steamy vapor toward the judge’s bench, a sirocco of unminty breath. The judge fiddled with his bow tie. He looked up at the ceiling for heavenly assistance. The audience looked up along with him, but all we saw were water stains.

Then the pensive moment was over and it was back to work.

‘Next case!’ Judge Bell bellowed.

‘Number ninety-seven dash seven-seven-eight-eight,’ the clerk read out. ‘Commonwealth v. Gerald McNeese the Third, also known as G also known as G-Mac also known as G-Money also known as Trey McNeese.’

‘Custody!’ the clerk sang.

‘Custody!’ echoed one of the court officers.

By now the audience had learned the drill, so like spectators at a tennis match we right-faced in unison toward a rectangular cutout in the wall. On the other side of this glassless window were the arrests from the previous weekend who had not posted bail. They crowded together, visible from the waist up like puppets in a shadow box. The men shuffled about until one was able to squeeze to the front and wordlessly identify himself as Gerald McNeese.

‘Commonwealth!’ the judge said.

A young assistant DA riffled through his files. The kid’s face was sweat-shiny from the heat. Two round coins of red flushed his cheeks. At length, he pulled out an empty file folder and held it open for the judge to see. ‘Your Honor, I don’t have anything on this one. It’s Ms Kelly’s case.’

The clerk rolled his eyes.

Judge Bell shook his head. It was hopeless. ‘So where is she?’

The kid made a face.
Beats me.

‘Well?’

‘I don’t know, Your Honor.’

‘Why don’t you know?’

‘Um, I don’t know . . . why . . . I don’t know.’

The kid could not have been more than a year or two out of law school. Now here he was, reddening in the heat of Mission Flats District Court, buried in files, no doubt counting the days till his tour of duty was up and he would be transferred somewhere – anywhere – else.

‘You don’t know why you don’t know?’

‘I don’t – I don’t know. Your Honor.’

‘Next case!’

There followed a few desultory arraignments on charges that, even to me, seemed petty: possession of marijuana, disorderly, simple A&B. With each arraignment, the audience gave a little respiratory heave of relief as the defendant and his supporters were exhaled from the courtroom. Each time, though, the void was filled by others. They pushed in from the hallway, and the benches were squeezed tight, the room repressurized.

‘Call the McNeese case again.’ The judge was smoldering.

‘Your Honor, I still have not heard from Ms Kelly.’

‘Then turn around and tell
them
.’

‘Tell who?’

‘Turn around and explain to all these people why you’re unprepared, why you’re wasting everyone’s time.’

‘Your Honor?’

‘Turn around, Mr Prosecutor.’ The judge swept his arm toward us, the groundlings in our damp shirts. ‘Tell it to them, not me.’

The kid turned slowly, penitently. The red stains on his cheeks seeped over his ears and down his neck. He stood with a self-effacing turtle-backed slouch, scanning the crowd. But when his eyes reached the doorway, he managed a wan smile. He’d found an ally.

A woman entered the courtroom and pushed and excuse-me’d her way forward. She was dressed in a sleek black skirt suit. The jacket had a band collar with an open tab at the hollow of her neck. It looked a little like a priest’s collar.

‘Ms Kelly!’ the clerk blurted, and the entire court staff repeated ‘Ms Kelly!’ as if they’d all been trying to think of a forgotten name and it had just come back to them.

Caroline Kelly stood at the prosecutor’s table next to the young ADA. Unseen by the judge, she put her hand on the kid’s shoulder blade. The point was not so much to reassure him, I think, but to get him to stand up straight. She stretched her thumb to touch his spine just as a stern mother would press on the backbone of a slouching child. And it worked; the kid did stand a little straighter. Kelly left her thumb on his weakest vertebra for good measure, to prevent a relapse. She leaned over and whispered in the kid’s ear, but loud enough for us in the front row to hear quite clearly, ‘Fuck him.’

Those were the first words I ever heard Caroline Kelly say,
fuck him,
and she loaded a little extra sauce on the
fuck
to show she meant it.

From my seat in the front row, I studied the details of her posterior side. Her hair was dark brown, clipped loosely at the back of her neck with a gold clasp. The twill fabric of her skirt was slightly but discernibly taut around her hips, which were not thin. She stood with her anklebones nearly touching, so that a flame-shaped gap was formed between the inner curves of her calves. A soft leather briefcase slumped against her ankle when she set it down.