We Were Kings (31 page)

_________________________

Uphams Corner, Dorchester

THE CAR WAS
raised on the hydraulic lift and beneath it Dante worked to remove the exhaust, cursing as he broke off a piece of the tailpipe with his gloved hands, the section so rusted it crumbled and flaked down onto his face. He had to weld the axle and the struts, but he needed to remove the exhaust first. He'd already cut through four sections that were rusted to their hanging brackets, and still he couldn't get the thing down. Rust and oil streaked his face. He was sweating like a pig, his overalls were stuck to him, and the bastards he worked with had changed the station on the transistor radio from jazz to the Sox game, like anyone gave a shit. He could hear the other two mechanics, Joe Garibaldi and a new part-timer, Hernandez, jabbering at the other lift instead of working. Four empty sixteen-ounce Schlitz cans lay on the workbench and they were still drinking; he was going to go over there in a minute and pull one from the icebox whether they invited him to or not.

“Built like fucking tanks. Jake couldn't believe it. He tried to persuade him not to spend the money, that it was a waste.” Bits of their conversation came to Dante through his grunting and the rattling of the metal as he hauled the remains of the pipe from the mountings and let it fall with a clatter to the concrete.

“You could drive a wagon of Clydesdales to the cemetery in this now, he says. You'll never have that type of weight, but O'Flaherty wasn't hearing any of it. He said he was paying him well to do what he wanted and if he didn't want the business, he'd go elsewhere. So what he'd do? What do you think he did? He welded the fucking chassis.”

Dante kicked the piping aside, wiped at his brow, and came out from beneath the car, squinting at the two men, black shadows that turned at the sound of him. His eyes were used to the glare of the hanging work lamps beneath the lift and it took a moment for them to adjust. “You mean O'Flaherty the funeral-home director?”

“Yeah, that's him.”

“He had tanks built?”

“No, no,” one of the men said, shaking his head. “Not tanks, funeral cars, hearses…Coen's on Columbus Avenue got the order to refit the whole fleet of O'Flaherty hearses.”

Dante walked to them so that he could see better, and hot as it was in the garage, he felt a certain relief at being out from beneath the car. A warm breeze came in from the garage doors and Garibaldi and Hernandez were lounging against the bench, sipping beer. He could tell by their eyes that they were well on the way to getting smashed; they looked at him blearily and smiled. Hernandez reached beneath the bench, opened the icebox, took out a can, and tossed it to Dante. Dante cracked it open, brought it to his lips, drank deeply, and let the cold beer settle in his gut. Hernandez was talking again.

“I was just telling Lou how crazy it was, and Coen, the lucky son of a bitch, gets the contract—you know how many cars that is? How much a job like that costs?”

“So he refitted all the original hearses?”

“Yep.” Garibaldi swigged from his can and licked his lips. “Six heavy-duty chassis bulked up and point-welded to shit so they could transport ten times the weight they'll ever have to carry. Jake said he thinks O'Flaherty's going crazy, paranoid that the government is after him for back taxes, but there was no way he was going to turn down a payday like that.”

“When did he get the contract?”

“Two months back. He had to deliver them by June fifteenth or the contract would be null and void.”

“Jesus, that's a crazy demand—how the hell could he bang them out that fast?”

“For the type of money he told me O'Flaherty paid, he fucking did it.”

Dante shook his head. “You think O'Flaherty would at least have let others bid on the job.”

“Fucking straight you'd think he would, the mick bastard.”

Hernandez and Garibaldi took wooden-backed chairs from along the wall and dragged them to the bay of the garage and sat, half in and half out, in shadow and in light. Dante did the same. The passing traffic created a sense of movement, of stirring air, that fooled the mind and the eye into believing it was cooler than it was. Down the avenue there were other men sitting in the shade of their porches or on their front stoops. At McGuire Park, water spouted and pulsed from a fountain at the center of the kiddie pool but it was too hot for any kids to be about and in the moments of quiet, after traffic had passed, they could hear it spattering onto the aquamarine-colored concrete. The sun blazed down and cast everything in stark relief, the elongated shadows so dark they appeared solid and so sharp it seemed they could cut and draw blood.

“That lucky Jew bastard,” Garibaldi said after a while.

“Why's he lucky?”

“To get a contract like that? That's not luck?”

“Maybe O'Flaherty knows he'll get the job done. You think you two could turn around six hearses done out like that in six weeks? No fucking way. They know Jake will do what needs to be done.”

The beer had soured in Dante's stomach. He stood, put the empty can on the ground.

“Where you going?” Hernandez asked.

“I'm going on my break.”

“What about the car you're working on?”

“What about it? We're still waiting on the differential, which won't be in until the end of the week. Whether I finish today or tomorrow doesn't fucking matter. Not to you two, anyway.”

Coen's Auto Wreckage and Salvage was on the Dorchester-Roxbury border, on Columbus Avenue south of Blue Hill Avenue, a DMZ of sorts where the once-regal Victorians and brownstones owned by the Jewish families who had migrated from the North and West Ends a hundred years before had fallen into disrepair and dishevelment, and now many of those same families were leaving for suburbs like Brookline and Sharon. Coen's had been on the same corner for decades and no one knew if the original owner had been Irish or Jewish; both communities had given business to Coen's over the years based on the assumption that it belonged to one of their own, but for as long as anyone who lived around there now could remember, it had belonged to Jacob Anielewicz.

His family had come to Boston from Eastern Europe and had been part of forming the Blue Hill Avenue Shul. Jacob was mild-mannered and hardworking and tried to stay away from alcohol because he was a bad drunk. Dante had seen that once when they were younger, when another Jewish kid had been condescending to him. That kid came from a German family and was studying at the Boston Conservatory and he'd made fun of Jacob's family and their roots in a logging town outside of Krotoszyn, Poland. Jacob, who'd been drinking, had struck him, knocked him to the ground, and then stomped on his hand with his work boots until the bones in his fingers shattered. The kid's family had wanted Jacob to go away for that, but the local rabbis had persuaded them to deal with it out of the Boston courts and within the Jewish community. In the end the kid's relatives had sued Jacob's family, taking almost everything they had and reducing them to living at the fringe of the neighborhood, an area that most of the Jewish families had left and where no one in the black community there trusted them enough to do business with them. Yet his family had persevered and so had Jacob, and gradually he'd won people over. Dante knew that his getting the O'Flaherty's Funeral Homes contract was a big deal.

Jacob was sitting on a metal pail outside eating his lunch, two slices of bread and roast beef and mustard, which Dante knew his wife had made for him. On the ground next to him was a thermos that smelled of thick, heady coffee with some manner of spice. From the bays of the building came the sound of pneumatic tools, the
thunk-thunk
of ratchet winches lifting engines. In a fenced-in lot behind the garage, there were a couple hundred cars, some crushed, some piled atop one another, as well as fenders, metal panels, grilles, and windshields.

“Dante!” Jacob said through a mouthful of food, and he raised his cup in greeting. “Sit, sit!” he said, and drew up another pail for Dante. “Are you hungry?”

“No, no, I ate an hour ago.”

“What brings you around? I haven't seen you in a long time. Do you need work?”

“No, I don't need work. Was passing by and thought I'd say hello.”

“You can always come to me if you need work—if I have it to spare, I promise I'll give it to you. You're a good welder and a hard worker—always, until that stuff got in the way—” Jacob looked at him apologetically, pursed his lips, and said again, “Always a hard worker.”

Dante smiled and gestured with his head toward the sound coming from the garage bays. “You're doing all right?”

“I'm doing very good. I just finished a big contract—it's unbelievable. Look, I never think of it before I see you, but why don't you come work for me?”

“I'm down at Uphams Corner.”

“With Sheehy, Gus?”

Dante grinned and shook his head resignedly. “With Sheehy and Gus,” he said.

“Oh, that's no good. Listen, they are good guys but they are lazy and that is why no one goes to them. People know the work won't get done. God is good. If you work hard, He provides. Look at me, a minor miracle, some might say. I'm still here. After everything, I am still here, and look, a contract that pays my men and keeps me in work. One of the biggest contracts we've ever gotten. I might even be able to take Lily and the kids on a vacation this year. Perhaps we go back to Europe to visit old family. The kids have never been.”

“Well, barely anybody I know is making it above the red. Everybody's struggling still.”

“Wait.” Jacob put up his hand. “You don't believe. I'll show you, then you'll believe.”

Jacob rose from his pail and proudly strode toward the building. He stepped into one of the dark bays and Dante squinted up at the towers of crushed cars, sunlight glancing sharply off their mangled metal and chrome. A rust-colored dog hobbled through the yard, half dragging its hindquarters. It stopped at a bowl by a stack of pallets and for a long while lapped up water.

Jacob was coming back across the dirt yard, grinning and waving something. It was the work order with a check stapled to it. He dropped the paper in Dante's lap and picked up the rest of his sandwich. Between mouthfuls he said: “Look at that amount. It usually takes more than a year for me to make that much. I haven't even cashed it yet. I want to be sure they're happy with the work, then I'll cash it and put some in the bank.”

Dante looked at the document. The order was for work to be done on six hearses for O'Flaherty's Funeral Homes, with the address of a particular funeral home on Dot Avenue, but the name and signature on the check wasn't O'Flaherty's, it was de Burgh's. He handed it back to Jacob, who took it and waved it once more, emphatically.

“See, Dante. I'm not bullshitting you. If you need work, come to me. I think things might be changing; good things are coming. You come here and I'll make sure you have the work to do. Never mind that garage. They're good guys—I've already said this—but blech!” He pretended to spit something bad-tasting out of his mouth, and Dante laughed.

Dante looked at Jacob, at his sweaty, earnest, kind face, and then at the dog swaying drunkenly out of the yard, and he knew suddenly that Jacob had left the bowl of water there, that he refilled it three times a day during this summer heat, and that in the morning and evening he also left food for the dog. Dante knew that Jacob's kindness to him was more than he deserved and that he shouldn't take advantage of it no matter what Jacob said. He squinted up at the glare of the sun, and bright orange and red orbs bloomed and burst before him. He had to close his eyes for a moment.

“Thank you, Jacob,” he said, and he reached out to shake Jacob's hand. “I'll remember that.”

_________________________

Dorchester Avenue, Dorchester

NEAR DUSK ON
Hallet Street, Cal drove past Florian Hall, pulled the car over, and sat with the engine running. Outside they still had the posters announcing the Liam McDonagh / Joseph Scarpelli bout, their edges lifting slightly in a humid breeze. Cal looked at the picture of the two men standing in typical boxing stances, gloves held at the ready before them.
Liam McDonagh
. So now the kid had a name, and Cal would never forget it. In the poster he looked even younger than Cal remembered, with close-cropped ginger hair and a long, boyish face. He appeared determined, casting a steely gaze at the viewer, but the expression seemed affected, put on and unnatural. Cal saw him instead farming his father's fields, perhaps a tract of bog land, sinew and lean muscle developed by hard work that was never considered hard but essential and necessary. Cal had seen that in Liam's body type, muscles created not in a gym but, like many of the other immigrant fighters he'd met, by all manner of hard labor. In the boy lay the hopes of his entire family; in him lay their pride and their faith and their culture.

If Cal hadn't done what he'd done—if he hadn't gotten drunk and badgered the boy's father, or if he'd boxed instead of brawled—the kid would have been on the card fighting a ten-round ranked bout. Cal suspected that within the rules of the ring and with accredited judges, the boy would have taken it and taken it easily and then he'd be moving up, with a chance at the real big time. Cal had taken plenty of punches in his life but he had felt the kid's full left only once, and that had been enough. A second shot would have done him in.

The red-pink neon lights spelling out
Florian Hall
glowed brighter for a moment during a sudden surge and then, like the rest of the area darkening around him, went black. From the surrounding streets he heard car horns and then a fire engine coming from the Ashmont firehouse blaring down the Avenue. His body tensed and he stopped sweating; he could feel the sickness of adrenaline coiling in his belly. He held his hand aloft and found it was shaking. He closed his eyes and waited for the sensation to pass, then lit a cigarette to relieve the gummy taste in his mouth. He ran his tongue across his teeth and spit out the car window.
Time, Lynne,
he said silently,
it all takes time. And I thought we had all the time in the world.
He nodded and exhaled.
But that's all right,
he told himself,
it's all right now.

He watched kids running screaming through the gushing water from an illegally opened street hydrant; dozens of them had been opened in the neighborhood, and through the mist of spray Cal could see miniature rainbows cast by refracted sunlight—thousands of gallons of water a minute arcing into the air and thundering onto the tarmac. When he and Dante had been kids they'd done the same thing. Lynne too; he saw her in the face of one young girl, in blue and white swimming togs, laughing as she held her hands over the spout and redirected the spray onto a boy who fled, running for cover behind other kids. He listened to their shouts and their laughter and their bare feet slapping the wet road.

If the water continued to flow from all the opened hydrants throughout the city, there wouldn't be a damn thing left for when a fire broke out; there wouldn't be enough pressure for the firemen to get water through the hoses, and then they could all just watch it burn.