BRENDAN HARRIS LOVED Katie Marcus like crazy, loved her like movie love, with an orchestra booming through his blood and flooding his ears. He loved her waking up, going to bed, loved her all day and every second in between. Brendan Harris would love Katie Marcus fat and ugly. He’d love her with bad skin and no breasts and thick fuzz on her upper lip. He’d love her toothless. He’d love her bald.
Katie. The trill of her name sliding through his brain was enough to make Brendan feel like his limbs were filled with nitrous oxide, like he could walk on water and bench-press an eighteen-wheeler, toss it across the street when he was finished with it.
Brendan Harris loved everyone now because he loved Katie and Katie loved him. Brendan loved traffic and smog and the sound of jackhammers. He loved his worthless old man who hadn’t sent him a single birthday or Christmas card since he’d walked out on Brendan and his mother when Brendan was six. He loved Monday mornings, sitcoms that couldn’t make a retard laugh, and standing in line at the RMV. He even loved his job, though he wouldn’t be going in ever again.
Brendan was leaving this house tomorrow morning, leaving his mother, walking out that shabby door and down those cracked steps, up the great wide street with cars double-parked all over the place and everyone sitting on the stoops, walking out like he was in a goddamned Springsteen song, and not the Nebraska-Ghost-of-Tom-Joad Springsteen, but the Born-to-Run-Two-Hearts-Are-Better-Than-One-Rosalita-(Won’t-You-Come-Out-Tonight) Bruce, the anthem Bruce. Yeah, an anthem; that’s what he’d be as he walked right down the middle of the asphalt whether bumpers rode the backs of his legs and horns honked, going right up that street and into the heart of Buckingham to take his Katie’s hand, and then they were leaving it all behind for good, hopping on that plane and going to Vegas and tying the knot, fingers entwined, Elvis reading from the Bible, asking if he took this woman, and Katie saying she took this man and then—then, forget about it, they were married and they were gone and they were never coming back, no way, just him and Katie and the rest of their lives lying open and clean before them like a lifeline scrubbed of the past, scrubbed of the world.
He looked around his bedroom. Clothes packed. American Express traveler’s checks packed. High-tops packed. Pictures of him and Katie packed. Portable CD player, CDs, toiletries packed.
He looked at what he was leaving behind. Poster of Bird and Parrish. Poster of Fisk waving that home run fair in ’75. Poster of Sharon Stone, sheathed in white (rolled up and under his bed since the first night he’d snuck Katie in here, but still…). Half his CDs. Fuck it; he hadn’t listened to most of them but twice. MC Hammer for Christ’s sake. Billy Ray Cyrus. My Gawd. A pair of kick-ass Sony speakers to supplement a Jensen desktop system, two hundred watts total, paid for last summer when he’d done some roofing for Bobby O’Donnell’s crew.
Which is how he’d first come close enough to Katie to strike up a conversation. Jesus. Just a year ago. Sometimes it felt like a decade, in a good way, and other times it felt like a minute. Katie Marcus. He’d known of her, of course; everyone in the neighborhood knew of Katie. She was that beautiful. But few people really knew her. Beauty could do that; it scared you off, made you keep your distance. It wasn’t like in the movies where the camera made beauty seem like something that invited you in. In the real world, beauty was like a fence to keep you out, back you off.
But Katie, man, from that first day she’d come by with Bobby O’Donnell, and then he’d left her at the site while he and a few of his boys tore off across town to conduct some pressing business, left Katie behind like they’d forgot they ever had her—from that very first day, she was so basic and normal; she hung with Brendan as he applied flashing to the roof as if she was just another dude. She knew his name, and she said, “How come a guy as nice as you, Brendan, is working for Bobby O’Donnell?” Brendan. The word coming out of her mouth like she said it every day, Brendan up there with his knees on the edge of the roof feeling like he was going to swoon right off it. Swoon. No shit. That’s what she did to him.
And tomorrow, soon as she called, they were gone. Gone together. Gone forever.
Brendan lay back on his bed and pictured the moon of her face floating above him. He knew he’d never sleep. He was too keyed up. But he didn’t mind. He lay there, Katie floating and smiling, her eyes shining in the darkness behind his eyes.
AFTER WORK THAT NIGHT Jimmy Marcus had a beer with his brother-in-law, Kevin Savage, at the Warren Tap, the two of them sitting at the window and watching some kids play street hockey. There were six kids, and they were fighting the dark, their faces gone featureless with it. The Warren Tap was tucked away on a side street in the old stockyard district, and this made it great for hockey because there wasn’t much traffic but shit for night games because none of the streetlights had worked in a decade.
Kevin was good company because he didn’t talk much in general and neither did Jimmy, so they sat and sipped their beers and listened to the scuffle and scrape of rubber soles and wooden stick blades, the sudden metallic clang of the hard rubber ball banging off a hubcap.
At thirty-six, Jimmy Marcus had come to love the quiet of his Saturday nights. He had no use for loud, packed bars and drunken confessions. Thirteen years since he’d walked out of prison, and he owned a corner store, had a wife and three daughters at home, and believed he’d traded the wired-up boy he’d been for a man who appreciated an even pace to his life—a slowly sipped beer, a morning stroll, the sound of a baseball game on the radio.
He looked out onto the street. Four of the kids had given up and gone home, but two remained in the street, shrouded by the dark, scrabbling over that ball. Jimmy could barely make them out, but he could feel the fury of their energy in the slap of their sticks, the mad scramble of their feet.
It had to go somewhere, all that youthful uncoiling. When Jimmy was a kid—hell, until he was almost twenty-three—that energy had dictated his every action. And then…then you just learned how to stow it someplace, he guessed. You tucked it away.
His eldest daughter, Katie, was in the midst of that process now. Nineteen years old and so, so beautiful, all her hormones on red alert, surging. But lately he’d noticed an air of grace settling in his daughter. He wasn’t sure where it had come from—some girls grew into womanhood gracefully, others remained girls their whole lives—but it was there in Katie all of a sudden, a peacefulness, a serenity even.
At the store this afternoon, as she was leaving, she’d kissed Jimmy’s cheek and said, “Later, Daddy,” and five minutes afterward Jimmy realized he could still feel her voice in his chest. It was her mother’s voice, he realized, slightly lower and more confident than the voice he remembered his daughter having, and Jimmy found himself wondering when it had made its home in his daughter’s vocal cords and why he hadn’t noticed it until now.
Her mother’s voice. Her mother, almost fourteen years dead now, and coming back to Jimmy through their daughter. Saying: She’s a woman now, Jim. She’s all grown up.
A woman. Wow. How’d that happen?
DAVE BOYLE hadn’t even planned on going out that night.
Saturday night, sure, after a long week of work, but he’d reached an age where Saturday didn’t feel much different than Tuesday, and drinking at a bar didn’t seem all that much more enjoyable than drinking at home. Home, at least, you controlled the remote.
So he’d tell himself later, after it was all over and done, that Fate had played a hand. Fate had played a hand in Dave Boyle’s life before—or at least luck, most of it bad—but it had never felt like a guiding hand before, more like a pissy, moody one. Fate sitting up in the clouds somewhere, someone saying to him, Bored today, Fate? Fate going, A bit. Kinda think I’ll fuck with Dave Boyle, though, cheer myself right up. What’re you gonna do?
So Dave knew Fate when he saw it.
Maybe that Saturday night, Fate was having a birthday or something, decided to finally give ol’ Dave a break, let him release some steam without suffering the consequences, Fate saying, Take a swing at the world, Davey. I promise it won’t swing back this time. As if Lucy, holding the football for Charlie Brown and just this once not being a bitch about it, allowed him to kick it clean. Because it hadn’t been planned. It hadn’t. Dave, alone late at night in the days afterward, would hold out his hands as if speaking to a jury and say that softly to the empty kitchen: You have to understand. It wasn’t planned.
That night, he’d just come down the stairs after kissing his son, Michael, good night and was heading to the fridge for a beer when his wife, Celeste, reminded him that it was Girls’ Night.
“Again?” Dave opened the fridge.
“It’s been four weeks,” Celeste said in that playful singsong of hers that gnawed at the ridges of Dave Boyle’s spine sometimes.
“No kidding.” Dave leaned against the dishwasher and cracked his beer. “What’s tonight’s selection?”
“Stepmom,” Celeste said, eyes bright, hands clasped together.
Once a month, Celeste and three of her coworkers at Ozma’s Hair Design got together at Dave and Celeste Boyle’s apartment to read one another’s tarot cards, drink a lot of wine, and cook something they’d never tried before. They capped off the evening by watching some chick movie that was usually about some driven but lonely career woman who found true love and big dick with some baggy-balled old cowhand, or else it was about two chicks who discovered the meaning of womanhood and the true depths of their friendship just before one of them caught some long-ass illness in the third act, died all beautiful and perfectly coifed on a bed the size of Peru.
Dave had three options on Girls’ Night: he could sit in Michael’s room and watch his son sleep, hide out in the back bedroom he shared with Celeste and thumb through the cable choices, or tip the hell on out the door and find someplace where he wouldn’t have to listen to four women getting all sniffly because Baggy Balls decided he couldn’t be tied down and rode back into the hills in pursuit of the simple life.
Dave usually chose Door #3.
And tonight was no different. He finished his beer and kissed Celeste, a small, milky curdle rippling through his stomach as she grabbed his ass and kissed him back hard, and then he walked out the door and down the stairs past Mr. McAllister’s apartment and out through the front door into Saturday night in the Flats. He thought about walking down to Bucky’s or over to the Tap, stood in front of the house for a few minutes debating, but then decided to drive instead. Maybe go up to the Point, take a gander at the college girls and yuppies who’d been flocking there in droves lately—so many elbowing into the Point, in fact, that a few had even begun to trickle down into the Flats.
They snapped up the brick three-deckers that suddenly weren’t three-deckers anymore but Queen Annes. They encased them in scaffolding and gutted them, workers going in day and night until three months later, the L.L. Beans parked their Volvos out front, carried their Pottery Barn boxes inside. Jazz would creep out softly through their window screens, and they’d buy shit like port from Eagle Liquors, walk their little rat-dogs around the block, and have their tiny lawns sculpted. It was only those brick three-deckers so far, the ones up by Galvin and Twoomey Avenue, but if the Point was any kind of indicator, soon you’d see Saabs and gourmet grocery store bags by the dozen as far down as the Pen Channel at the base of the Flats.
Just last week, Mr. McAllister, Dave’s landlord, had told Dave (idly, casually), “Housing values are going up. I mean, way, way up.”
“So you sit on it,” Dave said, looking back at the house where he’d had his apartment going on ten years, “and somewhere down the road you—”
“Somewhere down the road?” McAllister looked at him. “Dave, I could drown on the property taxes. I’m fixed income, for Christ’s sake. I don’t sell soon? Two, maybe three years, fucking IRS’ll take it from me.”
“Where would you go?” Dave thinking, Where would I go?
McAllister shrugged. “I dunno. Weymouth maybe. Got some friends in Leominster.”
Saying it like he’d already made some calls, dropped in on a few open houses.
As Dave’s Accord rolled into the Point, he tried to remember if he knew anyone his age or younger who lived up here anymore. He idled at a red light, saw two yups in matching cranberry crewnecks and khaki cargo shorts sitting on the pavement outside what used to be Primo’s Pizza. It was called Café Society now, and the two yups, sexless and strong, spooned ice cream or frozen yogurt into their mouths, tanned legs stretched across the sidewalk and crossed at the ankles, gleaming mountain bikes leaning against the storefront window under a shiny wash of white neon.
Dave wondered where the hell he was going to live if the frontier mentality rolled the frontier right over him. On what he and Celeste made together, if the bars and pizza shops kept turning into cafés, they’d be lucky to qualify for a two-bedroom in the Parker Hill Projects. Get put on an eighteen-month waiting list so they could move into a place where stairwells smelled like piss, and rat corpses rotted their stench straight through moldy walls, and junkies and switchblade artists roamed the halls, waiting for your white ass to fall asleep.
Ever since a Parker Hill homey had tried to jack his car while he was in it with Michael, Dave kept a .22 under the seat. He’d never fired it, not even at a range, but he held it a lot, sighted down the barrel. He allowed himself the indulgence of wondering what those two matching yups would look like at the other end of the barrel, and he smiled.
But the light had turned green, and he was still stopped, and the horns erupted behind him, and the yuppies looked up and stared at his dented car to see what all the commotion was about in their new neighborhood.
Dave rolled through the intersection, suffocating on their sudden stares, their sudden, unreasonable stares.
THAT NIGHT Katie Marcus went out with her two best friends, Diane Cestra and Eve Pigeon, to celebrate Katie’s last night in the Flats, last night, probably, in Buckingham. Celebrate like gypsies had just sprinkled them with gold dust, told them all their dreams would come true. Like they shared a winning scratch ticket and had all gotten negative pregnancy test results on the same day.
They slapped their packs of menthols down on a table in the back of Spires Pub and threw back kamikaze shots and Mich Lights and shrieked every time a good-looking guy shot one of them The Look. They’d eaten a killer meal at the East Coast Grill an hour before, then drove back into Buckingham and sparked up a joint in the parking lot before walking into the bar. Everything—old stories they’d heard each other tell a hundred times, Diane’s recounting of the latest beating from her asshole boyfriend, Eve’s sudden lipstick smear, two chubby guys waddling around the pool table—was hilarious.
Once the place got so jammed folks were standing three deep at the bar and it started taking twenty minutes to get a drink, they moved on toward Curley’s Folly in the Point, smoking another joint in the car, Katie feeling the jagged shards of paranoia scrape the edges of her skull.
“That car’s following us.”
Eve looked at the lights in the rearview. “It ain’t.”
“It’s been behind us since we left the bar.”
“Friggin’ Katie, man, that was, like, thirty seconds ago.”
“Oh.”
“Oh,” Diane mimicked, then hiccuped a laugh, passed the joint back to Katie.
Eve deepened her voice. “It’s quiet.”
Katie saw where this was going. “Shut up.”
“Too quiet,” Diane agreed, and burst out laughing.
“Bitches,” Katie said, trying for an edge of annoyance but catching the crest of a giggle-fit wave instead. She fell onto the backseat, losing it, the back of her head landing between the armrest and the seat, cheeks getting that pins-and-needles sensation they always got those rare times she smoked pot. The giggles subsided and she felt herself go all dreamy as she fixated on the pale dome light, thinking this was it, this was what you lived for, to giggle like a fool with your giggling-fool best friends on the night before you’d marry the man you loved. (In Vegas, okay. With a hangover, okay.) Still, this was the point. This was the dream.
FOUR BARS, three shots, and a couple of phone numbers on napkins later, Katie and Diane were so trashed they hopped up on the bar at McGills and danced to “Brown Eyed Girl” even though the jukebox was silent. Eve sang, “Slipping and a sliding,” and Katie and Diane slipped and slid all along the waterfall with you, getting their hips into it, shaking their hair until it covered their faces. At McGills, the guys had thought it was a riot, but twenty minutes later at the Brown, they couldn’t even get through the door.
Diane and Katie had Eve propped up between them at this point, and she was still singing (Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” by this time), which was half the problem, and swaying like a metronome, which was the other half.
So they got the boot even before they could enter the Brown, which meant the only option left in terms of serving three legless East Bucky girls was the Last Drop, a clammy dump in the worst section of the Flats, a horror-show three-block stretch where the scaggiest hookers and johns did their mating dance and any car without an alarm lasted about a minute and a half.
Which is where they were when Roman Fallow showed up with his latest guppy of a girlfriend, Roman liking his women small and blond and big-eyed. Roman’s appearance was good news for the bartenders because Roman tipped somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 percent. Bad news for Katie, though, because Roman was friends with Bobby O’Donnell.
Roman said, “You a tad hammered there, Katie?”
Katie smiled because Roman scared her. Roman scared just about everyone. A good-looking guy, and smart, he could be funny as hell when he felt like it, but man there was a hole in Roman, a complete lack of anything resembling real feeling that hung in his eyes like a vacancy sign.
“I’m a bit buzzed,” she admitted.
That amused Roman. He gave her a short laugh, flashed his perfect teeth, and took a sip of Tanqueray. “A bit buzzed, huh? Yeah, okay, Katie. Let me ask you something,” he said gently. “You think Bobby would like hearing you were making a fucking ass of yourself at McGills tonight? You think he’d like hearing that?”
“No.”
“’Cause I didn’t like hearing it, Katie. You see what I’m saying?”
“Right.”
Roman cupped a hand behind his ear. “What’s that?”
“Right.”
Roman left his hand where it was, leaned into her. “I’m sorry. What?”
“I’ll go home right now,” Katie said.
Roman smiled. “You sure? I don’t want to make you do anything you don’t feel like.”
“No, no. I’ve had enough.”
“Sure, sure. Hey, can I settle your tab?”
“No, no. Thanks, Roman, we already paid cash.”
Roman slung his arm around his bimbo. “Call you a cab?”
Katie almost slipped up and said she’d driven here, but she caught herself. “No, no. This time of night? We’ll flag one down no problem.”
“Yeah, you will. All right then, Katie, we’ll be seeing you.”
Eve and Diane were already at the door, had been, in fact, since they’d first seen Roman.
Out on the sidewalk, Diane said, “Jesus. You think he’ll call Bobby?”
Katie shook her head, though she wasn’t positive. “No. Roman doesn’t deliver bad news. He just takes care of it.” She put her hand over her face for a moment and in the darkness, she felt the alcohol turn to an itchy sludge in her blood and the weight of her aloneness. She’d always felt alone, ever since her mother had died, and her mother had died a long, long time ago.
In the parking lot, Eve threw up, some of it splashing against one of the rear tires of Katie’s blue Toyota. When she was finished, Katie fished some mouthwash from her purse, handed the small bottle to Eve. Eve said, “You going to be okay to drive?”
Katie nodded. “What’s it, fourteen blocks from here? I’ll be fine.”
As they pulled out of the parking lot, Katie said, “Just one more reason to leave. One more reason to get the hell out of this whole shitty neighborhood.”
Diane piped up with a halfhearted “Yeah.”
They rolled cautiously through the Flats, Katie keeping the needle at twenty-five, staying in the right lane, concentrating. They stayed on Dunboy for twelve blocks, then cut down Crescent, the streets darker, quieter. At the base of the Flats, they drove along Sydney Street, heading for Eve’s house. During the drive, Diane had decided to crash on Eve’s couch rather than go over to her boyfriend Matt’s house and eat a ration of shit for showing up hammered, so she and Eve got out under the broken streetlight on Sydney Street. It had begun to rain, spitting against Katie’s windshield, but Diane and Eve didn’t seem to notice.
They both bent at the waist and looked back in through the open passenger window at Katie. The bitter drop the evening had taken in its last hour caused their faces to sag, their shoulders to droop, and Katie could feel their sadness on the side of her face as she looked through the windshield at the spitting drops. She could feel the rest of their lives weighing stilted and unhappy on top of them. Her best friends since kindergarten, and she might never see them again.
“You going to be okay?” Diane’s voice had a high, bubbling pitch to it.
Katie turned her face toward them and smiled, giving it all she had even though the effort felt like it would rip her jaw in half. “Yeah. ’Course. I’ll call you from Vegas. You’ll come visit.”
“Flights are cheap,” Eve said.
“Real cheap.”
“Real cheap,” Diane agreed, her voice trailing off as she looked away down the chipped sidewalk.
“Okay,” Katie said, the word popping from her mouth like a bright explosion. “I’m going to go before someone cries.”
Eve and Diane stretched their hands in through the window and Katie took a lingering pull on each of them, and then they stepped back from the car. They waved. Katie waved back, and then she tooted the horn and drove off.
They stayed on the pavement, watching, long after Katie’s taillights had sparked red and then disappeared as she took the sharp curve in the middle of Sydney Street. They felt there were other things to say. They could smell the rain and the tinfoil scent of the Penitentiary Channel rolling dark and silent on the other side of the park.
For the rest of her life, Diane would wish she’d stayed in that car. She would give birth to a son in less than a year and she’d tell him when he was young (before he became his father, before he became mean, before he drove drunk and ran over a woman waiting to cross the street in the Point) that she believed she was meant to stay in that car, and that by deciding to get out, on a whim, she felt she’d altered something, shaved the corner off an edge in time. She would carry that with her along with an overriding sense that her life was spent as a passive observer of other people’s tragic impulses, impulses she never did enough to curb. She would say these things again to her son during visitation days at the prison, and he’d give her a long roll of his shoulders and shift in his seat and say, “Did you bring those smokes, Ma?”
Eve would marry an electrician and move to a ranch house in Braintree. Sometimes, late at night, she’d rest her palm on his big, kind chest and tell him about Katie, about that night, and he’d listen and stroke her hair and back, but he wouldn’t say much because he knew there was nothing to say. Sometimes Eve just needed to say her friend’s name, to hear it, to feel its heft on her tongue. They would have children. Eve would go to their soccer games, stand on the sidelines, and every now and then her lips would part and she’d say Katie’s name, silently, for herself, on the damp April fields.
But that night they were just two drunken East Bucky girls, and Katie watched them fade in her rearview as she took the curve on Sydney and headed for home.
It was dead down here at night, most of the homes that overlooked the Pen Channel Park having been scorched in a fire four years before that left them gutted and black and boarded up. Katie just wanted to get home, crawl into bed, get up in the morning, and be long gone before Bobby or her father ever thought to look for her. She wanted to shed this place the way you’d shed clothes you’d been wearing during a thundershower. Wad it up in her fist and toss it aside, never look back at it.
And she remembered something she hadn’t thought about in years. She remembered walking to the zoo with her mother when she was five years old. She remembered this for no particular reason except that the hanging tendrils of stale pot and booze in her brain must have bumped against the cell where the memory was stored. Her mother had held her hand as they walked down Columbia Road toward the zoo, and Katie could feel the bones in her mother’s hand as small tremors snapped under the skin by her wrist. She looked up at her mother’s thin face and gaunt eyes, her nose gone hawkish with weight loss, her chin a pinched nub. And Katie, five and curious and sad, said, “How come you’re tired all the time?”
Her mother’s hard, brittle face had crumbled like a dry sponge. She’d crouched down by Katie and placed both palms on her cheeks and stared at her with red eyes. Katie thought she was mad, but then her mother smiled, and the smile immediately curled downward and her chin went all jerky and she said, “Oh, baby,” and pulled Katie to her. She tucked her chin into Katie’s shoulder and said, “Oh, baby,” again, and then Katie felt her tears in her hair.
She could feel them now, the soft drizzle of tears in her hair like the soft drizzle against her windshield, and she was trying to remember the color of her mother’s eyes when she saw the body lying in the middle of the street. It lay like a sack just in front of her tires and she swerved hard to the right, feeling something bump under her rear left tire, thinking, Oh Jesus, oh God, no, tell me I didn’t hit it, please, Jesus God no.
She slammed the Toyota into the curb on the right side of the street, and her foot came off the clutch, and the car lurched forward, sputtering, then died.
Someone called to her. “Hey, you okay?”
Katie saw him coming toward her, and she started to relax because he looked familiar and harmless until she noticed the gun in his hand.
AT THREE in the morning, Brendan Harris finally fell asleep.
He did so smiling, Katie floating above him, telling him she loved him, whispering his name, her soft breath like a kiss in his ear.