DAVE BOYLE had ended up in McGills that night, sitting with Stanley the Giant at the corner of the bar, watching the Sox play an away game. Pedro Martinez reigned on the mound, so the Sox were beating the holy piss out of the Angels, Pedro throwing so much ungodly heat the ball looked like a goddamn Advil by the time it crossed the plate. By the third inning, the Angel hitters looked scared; by the sixth, they looked like they just wanted to go home, start making dinner plans. When Garret Anderson blooped a dying sigh of a single into shallow right and ended Pedro’s bid for a no-hitter, any excitement that had been left in the 8-0 game floated out past the bleachers, and Dave found himself paying more attention to the lights and the fans and Anaheim Stadium itself than to the actual game.
He watched the faces in the bleachers most—the disgust and defeated fatigue, the fans looking like they were taking the loss more personally than the guys in the dugout. And maybe they were. For some of them, Dave figured, this was the only game they’d attend this year. They’d brought the kids, the wife, walked out of their homes into the early California evening with coolers for the tailgate party and five thirty-dollar tickets so they could sit in the cheap seats and put twenty-five-dollar caps on their kids’ heads, eat six-dollar rat burgers and $4.50 hot dogs, watered-down Pepsi and sticky ice cream bars that melted into the hairs of their wrists. They came to be elated and uplifted, Dave knew, raised up out of their lives by the rare spectacle of victory. That’s why arenas and ballparks felt like cathedrals—buzzing with light and murmured prayers and forty thousand hearts all beating the drum of the same collective hope.
Win for me. Win for my kids. Win for my marriage so I can carry your winning back to the car with me and sit in the glow of it with my family as we drive back toward our otherwise winless lives.
Win for me. Win. Win. Win.
But when the team lost, that collective hope crumbled into shards and any illusion of unity you’d felt with your fellow parishioners went with it. Your team had failed you and served only to remind you that usually when you tried, you lost. When you hoped, hope died. And you sat there in the debris of cellophane wrappers and popcorn and soft, soggy drink cups, dumped back into the numb wreckage of your life, facing a long dark walk back through a long dark parking lot with hordes of drunk, angry strangers, a silent wife tallying up your latest failure, and three cranky kids. All so you could get in your car and drive back to your home, the very place from which this cathedral had promised to transport you.
Dave Boyle, former star shortstop for the glory-years baseball teams of Don Bosco Technical High School, ’78 to ’82, knew few things in this world were more moody than a fan. He knew what it was to need them, to hate them, to go down on your knees for them and beg for one more roar of approval, to hang your head when you’d broken their one shared, angry heart.
“You believe these chicks?” Stanley the Giant said, and Dave looked up to see two girls standing atop the bar all of a sudden, dancing as a third friend sang “Brown Eyed Girl” off-key, the two up on the bar shaking their asses and swaying their hips. The one on the right had fleshy skin and shiny gray “fuck me” eyes, Dave figuring she was in the peak of a tenuous prime, the kind of girl who’d probably be a great roll on the mattress for maybe another six months. Two years from now, though, she’d be gone hard to seed—you could see it in the chin—fat and flaccid and wearing a housedress, no way you’d be able to so much as imagine she’d been worthy of lust not all that long ago.
The other one, though…
Dave had known her since she was a little girl—Katie Marcus, Jimmy and poor, dead Marita’s daughter, now the stepdaughter of his wife’s cousin Annabeth, but looking all grown up, every inch of her firm and fresh and defying gravity. Watching her dance and thrust and swivel and laugh, her blond hair sweeping over her face like a veil, then flying back off again as she threw back her head and exposed a milky, arched throat, Dave felt a black, pining hope surge through him like a grease fire, and it didn’t come from nowhere. It came from her. It was transmitted from her body to his, from the sudden recognition in her sweaty face when her eyes met his and she smiled and gave him a little finger wave that brushed straight through the bones in his chest and tingled against his heart.
He glanced at the guys in the bar, their faces dazed as they watched the two girls dance as if they were apparitions bestowed by God. Dave could see in their faces the same yearning he’d seen on the Angels’ fans in the early innings, a sad yearning mixed with a pathetic acceptance that they were sure to go home unsatisfied. Left to stroking their own dicks in 3 A.M. bathrooms, wives and kids snoring upstairs.
Dave watched Katie shimmer above him and remembered what Maura Keaveny had looked like when she was naked beneath him, perspiration beading her brow, eyes loose and floating with booze and lust. Lust for him. Dave Boyle. Baseball star. Pride of the Flats for three short years. No one referring to him as that kid who’d been abducted when he was ten anymore. No, he was a local hero. Maura in his bed. Fate on his side.
Dave Boyle. Unaware, then, how short futures could be. How quick they could disappear, leave you with nothing but a long-ass present that held no surprises, no reason for hope, nothing but days that bled into one another with so little impact that another year was over and the calendar page in the kitchen was still stuck on March.
I will not dream anymore, you said. I will not set myself up for the pain. But then your team made the playoffs, or you saw a movie, or a billboard glowing dusky orange and advertising Aruba, or a girl who bore more than a passing resemblance to a woman you’d dated in high school—a woman you’d loved and lost—danced above you with shimmering eyes, and you said, fuck it, let’s dream just one more time.
ONCE WHEN Rosemary Savage Samarco was on her deathbed (the fifth of ten), she’d told her daughter, Celeste Boyle: “Swear to Christ, the only pleasure I ever got in this life was snapping your father’s balls like a wet sheet on a dry day.”
Celeste had given her a distant smile and tried to turn away, but her mother’s arthritic claw clamped over her wrist and squeezed straight through to the bone.
“You listen to me, Celeste. I’m dying, so I’m serious as shit. There’s what you get—if you’re lucky—in this life, and it ain’t much in the first place. I’ll be dead tomorrow and I want my daughter to understand: You get one thing. Hear me? One thing in the whole world that gives you pleasure. Mine was busting your bastard father’s balls every chance I got.” Her eyes gleamed and spittle dotted her lips. “Trust me, after a while? He loved it.”
Celeste wiped her mother’s forehead with a towel. She smiled down on her and said, “Momma,” in a soft, cooing voice. She dabbed the spittle from her lips and stroked the inside of her hand, all the time thinking, I’ve got to get out of here. Out of this house, out of this neighborhood, out of this crazy place where people’s brains rotted straight through from being too poor and too pissed off and too helpless to do anything about it for too fucking long.
Her mother kept living, though. She survived colitis, diabetic seizures, renal failure, two myocardial infarctions, cancerous malignancies in one breast and her colon. Her pancreas stopped working one day, just quit, then suddenly showed back up for work a week later, raring to go, and doctors repeatedly asked Celeste if they could study her mother’s body after she died.
The first few times, Celeste had asked, “Which part?”
“All of it.”
Rosemary Savage Samarco had a brother in the Flats she hated, two sisters living in Florida who wouldn’t talk to her, and she’d busted her husband’s balls so successfully he dove into an early grave to escape her. Celeste was her only child after eight miscarriages. When she was little, Celeste used to imagine all those almost-sisters and almost-brothers floating around Limbo and think, You caught a break.
When Celeste had been a teenager, she’d been sure someone would come along to take her away from all this. She wasn’t bad-looking. She wasn’t bitter, had a good personality, knew how to laugh. She figured, all things considered, it should happen. Problem was, even though she met a few candidates, they weren’t of sweep-her-off-her-feet caliber. The majority were from Buckingham, mostly Point or Flat punks here in East Bucky, a few from Rome Basin, and one guy from uptown she’d met while attending Blaine Hairstyling School, but he was gay, even though he hadn’t figured it out yet.
Her mother’s health insurance was for shit, and pretty soon Celeste found herself working simply to pay the minimum due on monstrous medical bills for monstrous diseases that weren’t quite monstrous enough to put her mother out of her misery. Not that her mother didn’t enjoy her misery. Every bout with disease was a fresh trump card to wield in what Dave called the Rosemary’s Life Sucks Worse Than Yours Sweepstakes. They’d be watching the news, see some grieving mother weeping and wailing on the sidewalk after her house and two kids had gone up in a fire, and Rosemary would smack her gums and say, “You can always have more kids. Try living with colitis and a collapsed lung all in the same year.”
Dave would smile tightly and go get another beer.
Rosemary, hearing the fridge open in the kitchen, would say to Celeste, “You’re just his mistress, honey. His wife’s name is Budweiser.”
Celeste would say, “Momma, quit it.”
Her mother would say, “What?”
It had been Dave who Celeste had ultimately settled—for?—on. He was good-looking and funny and very few things seemed to ruffle him. When they’d married, he’d had a good job, running the mail room at Raytheon, and even though that job had been lost to cutbacks, he eventually scored another on the loading docks of a downtown hotel (for about half his previous salary) and never complained about it. Dave, in fact, never complained about anything and almost never talked about his childhood before high school, which had only begun to seem odd to her in the year since her mother had died.
It had been a stroke that had finally done the job, Celeste coming home from the supermarket to find her mother dead in the tub, head cocked, lips curled hard up the right side of her face as if she’d bitten into something overly tart.
In the months after the funeral, Celeste would comfort herself with the knowledge that at least things would be easier now without her mother’s constant reproach and cruel asides. But it hadn’t quite worked out that way. Dave’s job paid about the same as Celeste’s and that was about a buck an hour more than McDonald’s, and while the medical bills Rosemary had accrued during her life were thankfully not passed on to her daughter, the funeral and burial bills were. Celeste would look at the financial wreck of their lives—the bills they’d be paying off for years, the lack of money coming in, the tonnage going out, the new mountain of bills Michael and the advent of his schooling represented, and the destroyed credit—and feel like the rest of her life would be lived with a held breath. Neither she nor Dave had any college or any prospects for it, and while every time you turned on the news they were crowing about the low unemployment rate and national sense of job security, nobody mentioned that this affected mostly skilled labor and people willing to temp for no medical or dental and few career prospects.
Sometimes, Celeste found herself sitting on the toilet beside the tub where she’d found her mother. She’d sit in the dark. She’d sit there and try not to cry and wonder how her life had gotten here, and that’s what she was doing at three in the morning, early Sunday, as a hard rain battered the windows, when Dave came in with blood all over him.
He seemed shocked to find her there. He jumped back when she stood up.
She said, “Honey, what happened?” and reached for him.
He jumped back again and his foot hit the doorjamb. “I got sliced.”
“What?”
“I got sliced.”
“Dave, Jesus Christ. What happened?”
He lifted the shirt and Celeste stared at a long sweeping gash along his rib cage that bubbled red.
“Sweetie, Jesus, you have to go to the hospital.”
“No, no,” he said. “Look, it’s not that deep. It just bled like hell.”
He was right. On a second look, she noticed it wasn’t more than a tenth of an inch deep. But it was long. And it was bloody. Though not enough to account for all the blood on his shirt and neck.
“Who did this?”
“Some crackhead nigger psycho,” he said, and peeled off the shirt, dumped it in the sink. “Honey, I fucked up.”
“You what? How?”
He looked at her, eyes spinning. “The guy tried to mug me, right? So, so I swung on him. That’s when he sliced me.”
“You swung on a guy with a knife, Dave?”
He ran the faucet and tipped his head into the sink, gulped some water. “I don’t know why. I freaked. I mean, I freaked seriously, babe. I fucked this guy up.”
“You…?”
“I mangled him, Celeste. I just went apeshit when I felt the knife in my side. You know? I knocked him down, got on top of him, and, baby, I went off.”
“So it was self-defense?”
He made a “sorta-kinda” gesture with his hand. “I don’t think the court would see it that way, tell you the truth.”
“I can’t believe this. Honey”—she took his wrists in her hands—“tell me exactly what happened.”
And for a quarter second, looking into his face, she felt nauseous. She felt something leering behind his eyes, something turned on and self-congratulatory.
It was the light, she decided, the cheap fluorescent directly above his head, because when his chin dipped toward his chest and he stroked her hands, the nausea went away and his face returned to normal—scared, but normal.
“I’m walking to my car,” he said, and Celeste sat back on the closed toilet seat as he knelt in front of her, “and this guy comes up to me, asks me for a light. I say I don’t smoke. Guy says neither does he.”
“Neither does he.”
Dave nodded. “So, my heart starts clocking a buck-fifty right then. ’Cause there’s no one around but me and him. And that’s when I see the knife and he says. ‘Your wallet or your life, bitch. I’m leaving with one of ’em.’”
“That’s what he said?”
Dave leaned back, cocked his head. “Why?”
“Nothing.” Celeste thinking it just sounded funny for some reason, too clever maybe, like in the movies. But then everyone saw movies these days, more so now with cable, so maybe the mugger had learned his lines from a movie mugger, stayed up late at night saying them into a mirror until he thought he sounded like Wesley or Denzel.
“So…so then,” Dave said, “I’m like, ‘Come on, man. Just let me get in my car and go home,’ which was dumb because now he wants my car keys, too. And I just, I dunno, honey, I get mad instead of scared. Whiskey-brave, maybe, I’m not sure, and I try to brush past him and that’s when he slices me.”
“I thought you said he swung on you.”
“Celeste, can I tell the fucking story?”
She touched his cheek. “I’m sorry, baby.”
He kissed her palm. “So, yeah, he sorta pushes me back against the car and takes a swing at me and I, like, just duck the punch and that’s when Homeboy slices me, and I feel the knife cutting through my skin and I, I just flip. I crack him in the side of the head with my fist, and he ain’t expecting it. He’s like, ‘Whoa, motherfucker,’ and I swing again and hit like the side of his neck? And he drops. And the knife goes bouncing away, and I jump on him, and, and, and…”
Dave looked into the tub, his mouth still open, lips half puckered.
“What?” Celeste said, still trying to see the mugger swinging at Dave with one hand cocked into a fist, the other holding a knife at the ready. “What did you do?”
Dave turned back, looked at her knees. “I went fucking nuts on him, babe. I mighta killed him for all I know. I bashed his head off the parking lot and punched the shit out of his face, shattered his nose, you name it. I was so mad and so scared and all I could think about was you and Michael and how I might not have made the car alive, like I coulda died in some shitty parking lot just because some crackhead was too lazy to fucking work for a living.” He looked in her eyes and said it again: “I mighta killed him, honey.”
He looked so young. Eyes wide, face pale and sweaty, hair plastered to his head by perspiration and terror and—was that blood?—yes, blood.
AIDS, she thought for a moment. What if the guy had AIDS?
She thought: No. Deal with the right now. Deal with it.
Dave needed her. That was not the custom. And at that moment she realized why his never complaining had begun to bother her. When you complained to someone, you were, in a way, asking for help, asking for that person to fix what troubled you. But Dave had never needed her before, so he’d never complained, not after lost jobs, not while Rosemary had been alive. But now, kneeling before her, saying, desperately, that he may have killed a man, he was asking her to tell him it was all right.
And it was. Wasn’t it? You tried to mug an honest citizen, tough shit if it didn’t go the way you planned. Too bad you might have died. Celeste was thinking, I mean, sorry, but oops. You play, you pay.
She kissed her husband’s forehead. “Baby,” she whispered, “you hop in the shower. I’ll take care of your clothes.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“What are you going to do with them?”
She didn’t have a clue. Burn them? Sure, but where? Not in the apartment. So that left the backyard. But it occurred to her pretty quickly that someone would notice her burning clothes in the backyard at 3 A.M. Or at any time, really.
“I’ll wash them.” She said it as the idea came to her. “I’ll wash them good and then I’ll put them in a trash bag and we’ll bury that.”
“Bury it?”
“Take it to the dump, then. Or, no, wait”—her thoughts going faster than her mouth now—“we’ll hide the bag till Tuesday morning. Trash day, right?”
“Right…” He turned on the shower, looking at her, waiting, that gash along his side darkening, making her worry about AIDS again, or possibly hepatitis, the many ways another’s blood can kill or poison.
“I know when they come. Seven-fifteen, on the dot, every week, except the first week in June when all the college kids take off, leave all that extra trash and then they’re usually late, but…”
“Celeste. Honey. The point?”
“Oh, so when I hear the truck, I’ll just run downstairs after them, like I forgot a bag, and toss it right in the back of the compactor thing. Right?” She smiled, though she didn’t feel like it.
He put one hand under the shower spray, the rest of him still turned back toward her. “Okay. Look…”
“What?”
“You all right with this?”
“Yeah.”
Hepatitis A, B, and C, she thought. Ebola. Hot zones.
His eyes went wide again. “I might have killed someone, honey. Jesus.”
She wanted to go to him and touch him. She wanted to get out of the room. She wanted to caress his neck, tell him it would be okay. She wanted to run away until she could think this through.
She stayed where she was. “I’ll wash the clothes.”
“Okay,” he said. “Yeah.”
She found some plastic gloves under the sink, ones she used when cleaning the toilet, and she put them on and checked for any tears in the rubber. When she was satisfied there were none, she took his shirt from the sink and his jeans off the floor. The jeans were dark with blood, too, and left a smear on the white tile.
“How’d you get it on your jeans?”
“What?”
“The blood.”
He looked at them hanging from her hand. He looked at the floor. “I was kneeling over him.” He shrugged. “I dunno. I guess it splashed up, like on the shirt.”
“Oh.”
He met her eyes. “Yeah. Oh.”
“So,” she said.
“So.”
“So, I’ll wash these in the kitchen sink.”
“Okay.”
“Okay,” she said, and backed out of the bathroom, left him standing there, one hand fluttering under the water, waiting for it to get hot.
In the kitchen, she dumped the clothes in the sink and ran the water, watched the blood and filmy chips of flesh and, oh Christ, pieces of brain, she was pretty sure, wash down the drain. It amazed her how much the human body could bleed. They said you had six pints in you, but to Celeste it always seemed like so much more. When she was in the fourth grade, she’d been running through a park with friends and she’d tripped. As she was trying to break her fall, she drove the center of her palm through a broken bottle that was pointing straight up out of the grass. She’d severed every major artery and vein in her hand, and it was only because she was so young that over the next decade they gradually repaired. But, still, she was twenty before sensation returned to all four fingertips. What she remembered most, however, was the blood. When she’d raised her hand from the grass, her elbow tingling as if she’d hit her funny bone, the blood had jetted straight up and out from her torn palm, and two of her friends had screamed. At home, she’d filled a sink with it while her mother called an ambulance. In the ambulance, they’d wrapped the hand in an Ace bandage as thick as her thigh, and the layers of fabric turned dark red in less than two minutes. At the hospital, she’d lain on a white gurney and watched as the wrinkles in the sheet formed small canyons that filled with red. And when the gurney had filled, her blood dripped onto the floor and eventually formed puddles until her mother screamed long enough and loud enough that one of the City ER residents decided Celeste should be bumped to the head of the line. All that blood from one hand.
And now, all this blood from one head. From Dave punching another human being’s face, banging the skull off pavement. Hysterical, she was sure, from fear. She held her gloved hands under the water and checked them again for holes. None. She poured dishwashing liquid all over the T-shirt and scoured it with steel wool, then squeezed it out and went through the whole process again until the water that dripped from the shirt when she squeezed was no longer pink but clear. She did the same with the jeans, and by that time Dave was out of the shower and sitting at the kitchen table with a towel wrapped around his waist, smoking one of the long white cigarettes her mother had left behind in the cupboard and drinking a beer, watching her.
“Fucked up,” he said softly.
She nodded.
“I mean, you know?” he whispered. “You go out, expecting one thing, a Saturday night, nice weather, and then…” He stood and came over by her, leaned against the oven, and watched her wring out the left leg of his jeans. “Why aren’t you using the washing machine in the pantry?”
She looked over at him and noticed the cut along his side already going a puckered white after the shower. She felt a nervous need to giggle. She swallowed against it and said, “Evidence, sweetie.”
“Evidence?”
“Well, I dunno for sure, but I figure blood and…other stuff have a better chance of sticking to the insides of a washing machine than to a sink drain.”
He let out a low whistle. “Evidence.”
“Evidence,” she said, giving in to a grin now, feeling conspiratorial, dangerous, part of something big and worthwhile.
“Damn, babe,” he said. “You’re a genius.”
She finished wringing out the jeans and shut off the water, took a small bow.
Four in the morning, and she was more awake than she’d been in years. She was Christmas-morning-when-you’re-eight kind of awake. Her blood was caffeine.
Your whole life, you wished for something like this. You told yourself you didn’t, but you did. To be involved in a drama. And not the drama of unpaid bills and minor, shrieking marital squabbles. No. This was real life, but bigger than real life. This was hyper-real. Her husband may have killed a bad man. And if that bad man really was dead, the police would want to find out who did it. And if the trail actually led here, to Dave, they’d need evidence.
She could see them sitting at the kitchen table, notebooks open, smelling of coffee and the previous night’s taverns, asking her and Dave questions. They’d be polite, but scary. And she and Dave would be polite back and unruffled.
Because it all came down to evidence. And she’d just washed the evidence down the kitchen sink drain and out into the dark sewers. In the morning, she’d remove the drainpipe from under the sink and wash that, too, douse the insides with bleach and put it back in place. She’d put the shirt and jeans into a plastic trash bag and hide it until Tuesday morning and then toss it into the back of the garbage truck where it would be mashed and chewed and compacted with rotten eggs and spoiled chickens and stale bread. She’d do this and feel large, better, than herself.
“It makes you feel alone,” Dave said.
“What’s that?”
“Hurting someone,” he said softly.
“But you had to.”
He nodded. His flesh was gray in the semidark of the kitchen. He looked younger still, as if fresh from his mother’s belly and gasping. “I know. I do. But still, it makes you feel alone. It makes you feel…”
She touched his face and his Adam’s apple bulged as he swallowed.
“Alien,” he said.