The Drop (11 page)

Then the kid clamped his mouth shut and ran away down the hall.

Moira unwrapped a stick of gum and put it in her mouth.

She offered the pack to Bob and he thanked her as he took one and they sat there in silence and chewed gum.

Moira jerked her thumb at the doorway where her son had stood. “Rardy would tell ya that’s why he drinks. They told us Patrick has HDHD? And/or ADD. And/or cognitive disso-something-something. My mother says he’s just an asshole. I dunno. He’s my kid.”

“Sure,” Bob said.

“You okay?”

“Me?” Bob sat back a bit. “Yeah, why?”

“You’re different.”

“How?”

Moira shrugged as she stood. “I dunno. You’re taller or something. You see Rardy? Tell him we need 409 and Tide.”

She went to see her son. Bob let himself out.

NADIA AND BOB SAT
on the swings in the empty playground in Pen’ Park. Rocco lay at their feet in the sand, a tennis ball in his mouth. Bob glanced at the scar on Nadia’s neck, and she caught him as he looked away.

“You never ask about it. Only person I ever met didn’t ask about it in like the first five minutes.”

Bob said, “Not my business. It’s yours.”

Nadia said, “Where are you from?”

Bob looked around. “I’m from here.”

“No, I mean, what planet?”

Bob smiled and shook his head. He finally understood what people were talking about when they said “tickled pink.” That’s about how she made him feel—from a distance, in his mind, or, like now, sitting close enough to touch (though they never had)—tickled pink.

He said, “People used to use the telephone in public? They went into a booth, they closed the door. Or they talked as softly as they could. Now? People talk about their, ya know, their bowel movements while they’re having them in a public restroom. I don’t understand.”

Nadia laughed.

“What?”

“Nothing. No.” She raised a hand in apology. “I’ve just never seen you get worked up. I’m not even sure I follow. What’s a pay phone have to do with my scar?”

“No one,” Bob said, “respects privacy anymore. Everyone wants to tell you every fucking thing about themselves. Excuse me. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that word. You’re a lady.”

She smiled an even broader smile. “Keep going.”

He raised a hand by his ear and didn’t notice until he had. He lowered it. “Everyone wants to tell you something—anything, everything—about themselves and they just go on and on and on. But when it comes time to
show
you who they are? Their shit is weak, Nadia. Their shit is lacking. And they just cover it up by talking more, by explaining away what can’t be explained away. And then they go on talking more shit about someone else. That make sense?”

Her big smile had turned into a small one, curious and unreadable at the same time. “I’m not sure.”

He caught himself licking his upper lip, an old nervous habit. He wanted her to understand. He needed her to understand. He’d never wanted anything so much that he could remember.

“Your scar?” he said. “That’s yours. You’ll tell me about it when you’ll tell me. Or you won’t. Either way.”

He looked out at the channel for a bit. Nadia patted his hand once and looked out at the channel too and they stayed that way for some time.

BEFORE WORK
,
BOB DROPPED
by Saint Dom’s and sat in an empty pew in the empty church and took it all in.

Father Regan entered the altar off the sacristy, mostly in street clothes, though his trousers were black. He watched Bob sit there for a bit.

Bob asked, “Is it true?”

Father Regan walked down the center aisle. He took the pew ahead of Bob’s. Turned and slung his arm over the back. “The diocese feels we could better meet our pastoral commitments if we merged with Saint Cecilia’s, yeah.”

Bob said, “But they’re selling
this
church,” and pointed down at his own pew.

Father Regan said, “This building and the school will be sold, yeah.”

Bob looked up at the soaring ceilings. He’d been looking up at them since he was three years old. He’d never known the ceilings in any other church. That’s how it was supposed to be until the day he died. How it had been for his father, how it had been for his father’s father. Some things—a few rare things—were supposed to stay what they’d always been.

Bob said, “You?”

Father Regan said, “I haven’t been reassigned yet.”

Bob said, “They protect the kid-diddlers and the douche bags who covered up for them but they haven’t figured out what to do with you? That’s fucking wise.”

Father Regan gave Bob a look like he wasn’t sure he’d met
this
Bob before. And maybe he hadn’t.

Father Regan said, “Is everything else okay?”

“Sure.” Bob looked at the transepts. Not for the first time he wondered how they’d had the wherewithal back in 1878—or 1078, for that matter—to build them. “Sure, sure, sure.”

Father Regan said, “I understand you’ve become friends with Nadia Dunn.”

Bob looked at him.

“She’s had some trouble in the past.” Father Regan patted the top of the pew lightly. The pat turned into an absent caress. “Some would say,
she
is troubled.”

The silent church towered over them, beating like a third heart.

Bob said, “Do you have friends?”

Father Regan’s eyebrows arched. “Sure.”

Bob said, “I don’t mean just, like, other priests. I mean, like, buddies. People you can, I dunno, be around.”

Father Regan nodded. “Yeah, Bob. I do.”

“I don’t,” Bob said. “I mean, I didn’t.”

Bob looked around the church some more. He gave Father Regan a smile. He said, “God bless,” and left the pew.

Father Regan said, “God bless.”

Bob stopped at the baptismal font on his way out the door. He blessed himself. He stood there with his head down. Then he blessed himself a second time and left through the center doors.

C
OUSIN MARV STOOD IN
the doorway to the alley, smoking, while Bob gathered up the empty trash barrels from the night before. As usual, the barrels had been tossed all over the alley by the garbage truck guys and Bob had to range a bit to get them.

Cousin Marv said, “It’s too much for them to just put them back down where they found them. That would require courtesy.”

Bob stacked two plastic barrels together, brought them over to the back wall. He noticed, propped against the wall between the barrels and a rat trap, a black plastic trash bag, the kind used on construction sites, extra heavy duty. He hadn’t left it there. He was familiar enough with the businesses on either side of them—Nails Saigon and Doctor Sanjeev K Seth—to know what their trash usually looked like, and this wasn’t it. He left the bag there a moment and went into the alley for the last barrel.

Bob said, “If you’d just pay for a Dumpster—”

Cousin Marv said, “Why should I pay for a Dumpster? I don’t own the bar anymore, remember? ‘Pay for a Dumpster.’ Ain’t your bar Chovka took.”

Bob said, “That was ten years ago.”

Cousin Marv said, “Eight and a half.”

Bob brought the last barrel to the wall. He walked over to the black plastic bag. It was a forty-five-gallon bag, but far from full. Whatever was inside wasn’t big, but the bag jutted at the sides, so whatever was inside was a foot to eighteen inches long. A length of pipe, perhaps, or the kind of cardboard tubing posters came in.

Cousin Marv said, “Dottie thinks we should visit Europe. That’s what I’ve become, kinda guy goes to Europe with his sister, hops on fucking tour buses with a camera around my neck.”

Bob stood over the bag. It had been knotted at the top, but knotted so loosely it would take nothing but a light tug for the bag to open like a rose.

“Back in the day,” Cousin Marv said, “I wanted to go on a trip, I went with Brenda Mulligan or Cheryl Hodge or, or, remember Jillian?”

Bob took another step closer to the bag. Now he stood so close that the only way to get closer would have been to climb in. “Jillian Waingrove. She was pretty.”

“She was fucking smoking. We went together that whole summer? Used to go to that outdoor bar in Marina Bay. What was that called?”

Bob heard himself say, “The Tent,” as he opened the bag and looked in. His lungs filled with lead and his head filled with helium. He turned away from the bag for a moment and the alley canted to the right.

“The Tent,” Marv was saying. “Right, right. That still there?”

“Yeah,” Bob heard himself say, his voice reaching his ears like something from a tunnel, “but they call it something else now.”

He looked over his shoulder at Marv, let Marv see it in his eyes.

Cousin Marv flicked his cigarette into the alley. “What?”

Bob stood where he was, the flaps of the bag in his hand. An odor of decomposition floated out of the bag, a smell similar to raw chicken parts left in the sun.

Cousin Marv looked toward the bag then back at Bob. He remained in the doorway.

Bob said, “You need to—”

Cousin Marv said, “No, I don’t.”

Bob said, “What?”

Cousin Marv said, “I don’t need to do anything. Okay? I’m standing right fucking here. I’m standing here because—”

Bob said, “You need to see—”

“I don’t need to see anything! You hear me?” Cousin Marv said, “I don’t need to see Europe or fucking Thailand or fucking whatever’s in that bag. I’m standing right here.”

“Marv.”

Marv shook his head violently, the way a child would.

Bob waited.

Cousin Marv wiped at his eyes, suddenly embarrassed. “We were a crew once. ’Member that? People were afraid of us.”

Bob said, “Yeah.”

Marv lit another cigarette. He walked toward the bag the way you’d approach a stunned raccoon in the corner of your basement.

He reached Bob. He looked in the bag.

An arm, hacked off just below the elbow, lay in a small pile of bloody money. The arm sported a wristwatch that was stopped at six-fifteen.

Cousin Marv exhaled slowly and kept at it until there was no breath left in his lungs.

Cousin Marv said, “Well, that’s just . . . I mean . . .”

“I know.”

“It’s . . .”

“I know,” Bob said.

“It’s obscene.”

Bob nodded. “We gotta do something with it.”

Cousin Marv said, “The money? Or the . . . ?”

Bob said, “I’m betting the money adds up to whatever we lost that night.”

Cousin Marv said, “So, okay . . .”

Bob said, “So we give the money back to them. It’s what they expect.”

“And that?” Marv pointed at the arm. “
That?
”

“We can’t just leave it here,” Bob said. “It’ll bring that cop right down on us.”

“But we didn’t do anything.”

“Not this time,” Bob said. “But how do you think Chovka or Papa Umarov are going to feel about us if the cops take a special interest?”

“Yeah,” Marv said. “Sure, sure.”

“Need you to focus, Marv.”

Marv blinked at that. “You need
me
to focus?”

“Yeah, I do,” Bob said and carried the bag inside.

IN THE TINY KITCHEN
, next to the four-burner grill and the deep fryer, was a prep station where they made the sandwiches. Bob laid some wax paper on the counter. He pulled shrink-wrap from a dispenser above the counter. He lifted the arm out of the sink where he’d rinsed it and rolled it in the shrink wrap. When it was tightly wrapped, he placed it in the wax paper.

Marv watched from the doorway, a look of repulsion on his stricken face.

Cousin Marv said, “Like you’ve done this a thousand times.”

Bob shot him a look. Cousin Marv blinked and looked at the floor.

Cousin Marv said, “You wonder if you hadn’t mentioned the watch, maybe—”

“No,” Bob said, a little sharper than he meant to. “I don’t.”

Cousin Marv said, “Well, I do.”

Bob taped the edges of the wax paper, and the arm was now somewhat disguised as maybe an expensive pool cue or a foot-long sub. Bob put it in a gym bag.

He and Marv exited the kitchen into the bar and found Eric Deeds sitting there, hands folded on the bar top, just a guy waiting for a drink.

Marv and Bob both kept moving forward.

Cousin Marv said, “We’re closed.”

Eric said, “You got any Zima?”

“Who would we serve it to?” Marv asked. “Moesha?”

Bob and Cousin Marv came around the back of the bar, stared at Deeds.

Eric stood. “Your door was unlocked, so I thought . . .”

Marv and Bob looked at each other.

“No offense,” Cousin Marv said to Eric Deeds, “but get the fuck out of here.”

“Definitely no Zima?” Eric walked to the door. “Good seeing you, Bob.” He waved. “You give Nadia my best, brutha.”

Eric walked out. Marv ran to the door and threw the lock.

Cousin Marv said, “We’re tossing the missing piece of the One-Armed Man back and forth like a fucking Hacky Sack, and the fucking door’s unlocked.”

Bob said, “Well, nothing happened.”

“But it could have.” He took a breath. “You know that kid?”

Bob said, “That’s the guy I told you about.”

“One claims the dog was his?”

“Yeah.”

“He’s fucked in the squash, that one.”

Bob said, “You know him?”

Cousin Marv nodded. “He’s from Mayhew Street. Saint Cecilia’s Parish. You’re old school—somebody ain’t from your parish, they might as well be fucking Flemish. Kid’s a piece of shit. Been to the joint a couple times, did a thirty-day in the cuckoo house, if I recall. The whole fucking Deeds family shoulda been Baker Acted a generation ago.” Cousin Marv said, “Word around a few campfires is he’s the one killed Glory Days.”

Bob said, “I heard that, yeah.”

Cousin Marv said, “Dispersed him from the planet Earth. That’s what they say.”

“Well . . .” Bob said, and then, with nothing left to say, he took the gym bag and walked out the back door.

After he left, Marv filled the bar sink with the bloody money. He engaged the tonic water button on the soda dispensing gun and sprayed the money.

He stopped. He stared at all that runny blood.