AS MAUREEN SAT AT THE BAR OF THE BLACK SWAN, she thought that maybe she wouldn’t finish her second double whisky. Maybe she’d go back to the apartment and have a look around. Of course, the cops had probably gone over every bit of the apartment by now with a fine-tooth comb and would have it all roped off, too. But maybe she’d be able to spot something that they couldn’t. Yea, right. Because you’re so smart . . .
“Okay, okay, shut up!” Maureen said to her mind. Even if she was an idiot, she still wanted to go back to the apartment and have a poke. The cops must have Bo’s bank book and would have noticed the big deposits he’d made over the last couple of months. Why hadn’t the cops already known about DAFT? Were the boys paying them off? Oh Christ, paying off the cops. That probably only happened in the movies. She finished off the double whisky.
THE APARTMENT WASN’T ROPED OFF AND THE KEY STILL worked. Maureen crept in. It was pitch-black. The curtains were closed. She’d tie-dyed some cotton for the curtains and Bo’s mother had run them up on her machine when they’d first moved in together. Bo had made a rough table that folded back out of the way in the tiny kitchen, as well as a number of other improvements, and he pointed out that she’d done nothing. He seemed hurt by that, by her lack of involvement. So she made the curtains and he was pleased, and then he had his mother line them so they would block out all the light. With the curtains closed, the apartment was like a cave. There were no windows in the bedroom or the kitchen, and there was just one small frosted window in the bathroom. She could see now with hindsight that she did nothing with the apartment because she didn’t want to be in that apartment, but at the time, she didn’t know it. She couldn’t remember one good time they had there. Most of the time, she’d been angry—angry when she was drunk, depressed when she wasn’t.
Even at the very beginning, Maureen was already living like a person in a dream. Events moved on, and without thought, Maureen moved on with them. Sometimes when she didn’t get out of bed for days on end, time would disappear on her. Right in the middle of whatever she was doing, just putting on her boots say, she’d be staring down at her feet when she’d realize that she’d been staring at them for a long time, because every tiny detail of the boots was so familiar to her: the green laces, the gold stitching, the slewed toe.
Maureen took a chance and turned on the desk lamp, figuring that if she couldn’t see the street light, then the street probably couldn’t see her. She poked through the desk Bo had built, a little rough secretary made out of plywood, but found nothing new since the last time she’d gone searching. She tried not to look at the big brown bottle of chlordane in the corner of the living room or the Flit gun right next to it. She snapped on the light in the bedroom. It was covered in green and gold wallpaper—not just the walls, but also the ceiling. It looked like wrapping paper. The bedroom was like a big awful present that she and Bo had been trapped inside all that time. Gathering her courage, she stepped into the room and started searching through the wardrobe. There was Bo’s grey suit on a hanger, still shredded. The tiny manicure scissors she’d used wouldn’t cut through the shoulders, so the suit still hung. It frightened her to remember herself standing there at the closet, blankly cutting away at whatever piece of grey fabric would give in to the scissors. She remembered now how she’d stood there in that awful bedroom for hours destroying that suit. When she had done as much damage as she could, she had closed the wardrobe door, walked over to the bed and gotten quietly under the covers. It was after that, she supposed, that Bo had scrawled “Tiny Tits” across her two best bras.
Jesus, being back in the apartment was getting her nowhere and just making her feel even worse. The jockey club and the two double whiskies were giving her that too-much-but-not-enough-alcohol feeling: the headache, dry mouth. Maybe she’d go back to George’s and see if he had anything to drink, or maybe she’d just lie down right here. It was still half her apartment; she’d paid half the rent till the end of December. No, she wouldn’t get in that bed, the bed that Bo built. Maybe Bo had made her bed, but she didn’t have to keep lying in it. She’d just lie down on the floor—she was used to that anyway. Whenever he was mad at her, he wouldn’t let her lie in the bed. She would just put her head down here on the floor and rest her eyes.
SHE WOKE TO A NOISE AT THE APARTMENT DOOR. SHE COULD hear the door open very slowly. Fuck, I forgot to lock the door, Maureen thought. She heard footsteps. She held her breath. Maybe she could get in under the bed—no, it was a platform bed. She crept around to the other side, away from the bedroom door. She heard a big thump and a voice that sounded like Jack Dunne’s.
“Ow! Fuck!” the voice that sounded like Jack’s said.
“Shut up, Jacky,” said a voice she’d recognize anywhere: Fox Albert. “What are we looking for here?”
“I don’t know, b’y. Something, anything—receipts, invoices—anything that could compromise the business.”
“Jesus, Jacky. The cops got all of that by now, and please tell me that you are not stupid enough to have given out invoices and receipts pertaining to our other businesses, are you?”
“No, b’y. I just thought that prick mighta had something, or . . . Just shine the flashlight around the floor. Jesus, what a state of dirt. What—do Maureen never clean up?”
“Something tells me that Maureen is not exactly a star in the whole housekeeping department,” said Fox.
“Well, what department do she star in?” said Jacky, snickering.
“I wouldn’t say Maureen would shine in any department.”
You prick. Maureen thought back to the night in Montreal. You weren’t exactly a star yourself. She felt like sticking her fingers in her ears; she wasn’t sure she could bear hearing any more bad shit about herself right now.
“Except the Useless, Loaded Drunk, Falling Down and Startin’ Rackets Department,” Jack said. “Or the Sookin’ and Bawlin’ All Night Department,” he added.
“Nice legs, though. And tits.”
“Tiny, though.”
“Yea, nice though for all that,” said Fox.
“Jesus,” said Jacky. “Look at that! There it is: my chip. That’s where I lost it.”
“What?”
“My twenty-four-hour chip.”
“What are you talking about?”
“My Desire Chip, b’y, from AA. You get it for twenty-four hours of sobriety—the hardest twenty-four hours I ever fuckin’ put in.”
“What are you doin’?” Fox asked.
“I’m picking it up. I’m takin’ it. I must’ve dropped it on Tuesday.”
“You were here on Tuesday? The day Bo disappeared?”
“Yea. Just for a minute, though.”
“What were you doing?”
“I just needed to talk to him, after what happened with Deuce. I wanted to put the frightners on him. But just talk. But you know Bo . . . We had a few shoves at each other—he started it—and that’s when I lost my chip, I guess.”
“Jack?”
“Cool it, Fox. He was fine when I left him, b’y; hungover like a bastard but definitely breathing.”
“Jack, if you’re lying—are you crazy? Put that back right where you got it. The cops probably know exactly where that is, and if it’s gone, they’ll go lookin’ for it.”
“Jesus, my twenty-four-hour chip. It’s my lucky chip. I’ve been going cracked looking for it since Wednesday. I don’t even know if I can stay sober without it.”
“Don’t be stupid, Jacky. I didn’t even know that you were an alchy.”
“Oh, yea. Sober alchy. Sober almost four and a half years.”
“And you never told the rest of the boys?”
“Why should I?” said Jack.
“No secrets in the DAFT brotherhood—that whole thing. Remember that, Jack?”
“Bullshit. It’s an anonymous program, Fox.”
“Yea, and what other secrets are you keepin’, Jacky?”
“Me to know and you to find out.” Jack laughed.
“Yes,” said Fox. “And make no mistake about it, I will find out. You made me come back here for that? All the receipts and stuff, that was just bullshit?”
“I had to find it, b’y.”
“Well, now you’re going to have to put it back on the floor where you found it, and we’re gonna have to get the fuck out of here. Who knows you’re in AA?”
Maureen heard their footsteps heading back toward the door.
“Nobody.”
“Nobody?”
“No-body. Nobody but the crowd in AA.”
“Oh, well then. We’re fucked.”
“Anonymity is the whole fucking foundation of the entire fucking organization, Fox.”
“Yea, right. Does Deucey know?”
“Yea, Deuce knows,” Jack said as he closed the door quietly after himself. Then he said something about Deucey not drinking because of the meds or something, but his voice was muffled. Maureen wasn’t sure.
She didn’t move for another few minutes. So that’s what they thought of her: that she was useless and a troublemaker to boot. Thinking about it made her feel sick to her stomach. She got up from behind the bed and dusted herself off. It was true: the floor was rotten with mildew and dust bunnies and general dirt and stuff.
What had Jacky been doing here on Tuesday, the day the cops figured Bo had disappeared—the last time, as far as Maureen knew, anybody had talked to Bo? Fluff said there had been a knock at the door and Bo had hung up, and now Maureen figured that must’ve been Jack coming to see Bo. But then what happened?
The whole thing was starting to seem like math to Maureen, and her mind was doing the exact same thing it did whenever it was presented with a math problem: A man gets on a train at Philadelphia. The train is travelling at 60 miles per hour. On a parallel track, another man gets on a train . . . Where that train was coming from, Maureen didn’t even know, because every time she got to that part, her brain would check out. It would just fill up with white noise and start screaming at Maureen, You’re an idiot! You’re a fucking idiot! Maybe if she just lay down for a few minutes more, she could figure it all out. Or maybe the answers would come to her in a dream like they came to Carlos Castaneda or Don Juan. She had never read those books, but Bo and them talked about the books all the time, so she had pretended she’d read them too—so much so that sometimes now she forgot and thought she had read them.
Of course, nothing had ever come to Maureen in a dream, except the Old Hag. Sometimes when she was sleeping, Maureen couldn’t get her breath because an old and terrifying woman was lying on top of her, crushing her chest, and no matter how hard Maureen tried, she couldn’t get the old woman off because Maureen’s arms would suddenly have no strength, and if she struck the old woman, her blows had no impact. Maureen would get weaker and weaker, but just before she died from not being able to breathe, she’d wake up screaming.
The Sarge said that back when she was young, the Old Hag was so common, and people were so crucified with her riding them every night, that they actually made Hag boards—pieces of lumber with the pointy bits of nails sticking up out of them, which you’d strap onto your chest every night before you lay down to go to sleep, to keep the Old Hag off. By the time Maureen got to thinking about Hag boards, her head was back down on the floor and she was drifting off.