CELESTE SAT by the window of Nate & Nancy’s Coffee Shop on Buckingham Avenue across from Jimmy Marcus’s house as Jimmy and Val Savage parked Val’s car half a block up and started walking back down toward the house.
If she were going to do this, actually do it, she had to get out of her chair now and approach them. She stood, her legs trembling, and her hand hit the underside of the table. She looked down at it. Trembling, too, and the skin scraped along the lower half of the thumb bone. She raised it to her lips and then turned toward the door. She still wasn’t sure she could do this, say the words that she’d prepared in the motel room this morning. She’d decided to tell Jimmy only what she knew—the physical details of Dave’s behavior since early Sunday morning without any conclusions as to what they meant—and allow him to make his own judgments. Without the clothes Dave had worn home that night, it didn’t make much sense to go to the police. She told herself this. She told herself this because she wasn’t sure the police could protect her. She had to live in this neighborhood, after all, and the only thing that could protect you from something dangerous in the neighborhood was the neighborhood itself. And if she told Jimmy, then not only he, but the Savages as well, could form a kind of moat around her that Dave would never dare cross.
She went through the door as Jimmy and Val neared their front steps. She raised her sore hand. She called Jimmy’s name as she stepped into the avenue, looking like a crazy woman, she was sure—hair wild, eyes puffy and black with fear.
“Hey, Jimmy! Val!”
They turned as they reached the bottom step and looked over at her. Jimmy gave her a small, bewildered smile, and she noticed again what an open, lovely thing his smile was. It was unforced and strong and genuine. It said, I’m your friend, Celeste. How can I help?
She reached the curb and Val kissed her cheek. “Hey, cuz.”
“Hey, Val.”
Jimmy gave her a light peck, too, and it seemed to enter her flesh and tremble at the base of her throat.
He said, “Annabeth was trying you this morning. Couldn’t get you at home or work.”
Celeste nodded. “I’ve been, ah…” She looked away from Val’s stunted, curious face as it peered into her own. “Jimmy, could I talk to you a sec?”
Jimmy said, “Sure,” the bewildered smile returning. He turned to Val. “We’ll talk about those things later, right?”
“You bet. See you soon, cuz.”
“Thanks, Val.”
Val went inside and Jimmy sat down on the third step, made a space for Celeste beside him. She sat and cradled her bruised hand in her lap and tried to find the words. Jimmy watched her for a bit, waiting, and then he seemed to sense that she was all bottled up, incapable of speaking her mind.
In a light voice, he said, “You know what I was remembering the other day?”
Celeste shook her head.
“I was standing up by those old stairs above Sydney. ’Member the ones where we’d all go and watch the drive-in movies, smoke some bones?”
Celeste smiled. “You were dating—”
“Oh, don’t say it.”
“—Jessica Lutzen and her bodacious bod, and I was seeing Duckie Cooper.”
“The Duckster,” Jimmy said. “Hell ever happened to him?”
“I heard he joined the marines, caught some weird skin disease overseas, lives in California.”
“Huh.” Jimmy tilted his chin up, his gaze gone back half his lifetime, and Celeste could suddenly see him doing the exact same thing eighteen years earlier when his hair was a little blonder and he was a whole lot crazier, Jimmy the kind of guy who’d climb telephone poles in thunderstorms, all the girls watching, praying he didn’t fall. And yet even at the craziest times, there was this stillness, these sudden pauses of self-reflection, this sense one got from him, even when he was a boy, that he carefully considered everything with the exception of his own skin.
He turned and lightly slapped her knee with the back of his hand. “So what’s up, dude? You look, uh…”
“You can say it.”
“What? No, you look, well, a little tired is all.” He leaned back on the step and sighed. “Hell, I guess we all do, right?”
“I spent last night at a motel. With Michael.”
Jimmy stared straight ahead. “Okay.”
“I dunno, Jim. I may have left Dave for good.”
She noticed a change in his face, a setting of the jawbone, and she suddenly had the feeling Jimmy knew what she was going to say.
“You left Dave.” His voice was a monotone now, his gaze on the avenue.
“Yeah. He’s been acting, well…He’s been acting nuts lately. He’s not himself. He’s starting to frighten me.”
Jimmy turned to her then and the smile on his face was so icy she almost slapped it with her hand. In his eyes, she could see the boy who’d climbed those telephone poles in the rain.
“Why don’t you start from the beginning?” he said. “When Dave started acting different.”
She said, “What do you know, Jimmy?”
“Know?”
“You know something. You’re not surprised.”
The ugly smile faded and Jimmy leaned forward, his hands entwined in his lap. “I know he was taken in by the police this morning. I know he’s got a foreign car with a dent in the front passenger quarter. I know he told me one story about how he fucked up his hand and he told the police another. And I know he saw Katie the night she died, but he didn’t tell me that until after the police had questioned him about it.” He unlocked his hands and spread them. “I don’t know what all this means exactly, but it’s beginning to bug me, yeah.”
Celeste felt a momentary wash of pity for her husband as she pictured him in some police interrogation room, perhaps handcuffed to a table, a harsh light in his pale face. Then she saw the Dave who’d craned his head around the door last night and looked at her, tilted and crazed, and fear overrode pity.
She took a deep breath, let it out. “At three in the morning on Sunday, Dave came back to our apartment covered in someone else’s blood.”
It was out there now. The words had left her mouth and entered the atmosphere. They formed a wall in front of her and Jimmy and then that wall sprouted a ceiling and another wall behind them and they were suddenly cloistered within a tiny cell created by a single sentence. The noises along the avenue died and the breeze vanished, and all Celeste could smell was Jimmy’s cologne and the bright May sun baked into the steps at their feet.
When he spoke, Jimmy sounded like someone’s hand clenched his throat. “What did he say happened?”
She told him. She told him everything, up to and including last night’s vampire madness. She told him, and she saw that every word out of her mouth became just one more word he wanted to hide from. They burned him. They entered his skin like darts. His mouth and eyes curled back from them, and the skin tightened on his face until she could see the skeleton underneath, and her body temperature dropped at an image of him lying in a coffin with long, pointed fingernails and a crumbling jaw, flowing moss for hair.
And when the tears began to fall silently down his cheeks, she resisted the urge to press his face to her neck, to feel those tears leak into her blouse and down her back.
She kept talking because she knew if she stopped, she’d stop for good, and she couldn’t stop because she had to tell someone why she’d left, why she’d run from a man she’d sworn to stand by in good times and bad, a man who’d fathered her child, and told her jokes, and caressed her hand, and provided his chest for her to fall asleep on. A man who’d never complained and who’d never hit her, and who’d been a wonderful father and a good husband. She needed to tell someone how confused she was when that man seemed to vanish as if the mask that had been his face fell to the floor and a leering monstrosity peeked back at her.
She finished up by saying. “I still don’t know what he did, Jimmy. I still don’t know whose blood that was. I don’t. Not conclusively. I just don’t. But I’m so, so scared.”
Jimmy turned on the step so that his upper half was propped against the wrought-iron banister. The tears had dried into his skin, and his mouth formed a small oval of shock. He stared back at Celeste with a gaze that seemed to go through her and down the avenue and fixate on something blocks away that no one else could see.
Celeste said, “Jimmy,” but he waved her away and closed his eyes tight. He lowered his head and sucked oxygen into his mouth.
The cell around them evaporated, and Celeste nodded at Joan Hamilton as she walked by and gave them both a sympathetic and yet vaguely suspicious glance before clicking her shoes up the sidewalk. The sounds of the avenue returned with its beeps and door creakings, its distant calling of names.
When Celeste looked back at Jimmy, she was fixed in his gaze. His eyes were clear, his mouth closed, and he’d pulled his knees up by his chest. He rested his arms on them and she could feel a fierce and belligerent intelligence coming from him, his mind beginning to work far faster and with more originality than most people would muster in a lifetime.
“The clothes he wore are gone,” he said.
She nodded. “I checked. Yeah.”
He placed his chin on his knees. “How scared are you? Honestly.”
Celeste cleared her throat. “Last night, Jimmy, I thought he was going to bite me. And then just keep biting.”
Jimmy tilted his face so that his left cheek rested on his knees now, and he closed his eyes. “Celeste,” he whispered.
“Yes?”
“Do you think Dave killed Katie?”
Celeste felt the answer rumble up through her body like last night’s vomit. She felt its hot feet pound across her heart.
“Yes,” she said.
Jimmy’s eyes snapped open.
Celeste said, “Jimmy? God help me.”
SEAN LOOKED ACROSS his desk at Brendan Harris. The kid looked confused and tired and scared, just the way Sean wanted him. He’d sent two troopers over to pick him up at his house and bring him back down here, and then he’d let Brendan sit on the other side of his desk while he scrolled down his computer screen and studied all the data he’d amassed on the kid’s father, taking his time about it, ignoring Brendan, letting him sit there and fidget.
He looked back at the screen now, tapped the scroll-down key with his pencil simply for effect, and said, “Tell me about your father, Brendan.”
“What?”
“Your father. Raymond senior. You remember him?”
“Barely. I was, like, six when he bailed on us.”
“So you don’t remember the guy.”
Brendan shrugged. “I remember little things. He used to come in the house singing when he was drunk. He took me to Canobie Lake Park once and bought me cotton candy and I ate half of it and puked all over the teacup ride. He wasn’t around a lot, I remember that. Why?”
Sean’s eyes were back on the screen. “What else you remember?”
“I dunno. He smelled like Schlitz and Dentyne. He…”
Sean could hear a smile in Brendan’s voice and he looked up, caught it sliding softly across his face. “He what, Brendan?”
Brendan shifted in his chair, his gaze fixed on something that wasn’t in the squad room, wasn’t even in the current time zone. “He used to carry all this change, you know? It weighed down his pockets, and he made noise when he walked. When I was a kid, I’d sit in the living room at the front of the house. It was a different place than where we live now. It was nice. And I’d sit there around five o’clock and keep my eyes closed until I heard him and his coins coming up the street. Then I’d bolt out of the house to see him, and if I could guess how much he had in one pocket—if I was even close, you know?—he’d give it to me.” Brendan’s smile widened and he shook his head. “The man had a lot of change.”
“What about a gun?” Sean said. “Your father have a gun?”
The smile froze and Brendan’s eyes narrowed at Sean like he didn’t understand the language. “What?”
“Did your father have a gun?”
“No.”
Sean nodded and said. “You seem pretty sure for someone who was only six when he left.”
Connolly entered the squad room carrying a cardboard box. He walked over to Sean and placed the box on Whitey’s desk.
“What is it?” Sean said.
“A bunch of stuff,” Connolly said, peering inside. “CSS reports, ballistics, fingerprint analysis, the 911 tape, a bunch of stuff.”
“You already said that. What’s up on the fingerprints?”
“No matches to anyone in the computer.”
“You ran it through the national database?”
Connolly said, “And Interpol. Zip. There’s one real flawless latent we pulled off the door. It’s a thumb. If it’s the doer, he’s short.”
“Short,” Sean said.
“Yup. Short. Could be anyone’s, though. We pulled six clean ones, not a match on any of ’em.”
“You listen to the 911?”
“No. Should I?”
“Connolly, you should familiarize yourself with everything and anything that has to do with the case, man.”
Connolly nodded. “You gonna listen to it?”
Sean said, “That’s what we got you for.” He turned back to Brendan Harris. “About your father’s gun.”
Brendan said, “My father didn’t have a gun.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh,” Sean said, “then I guess we were misinformed. By the way, Brendan, you talk to your father much?”
Brendan shook his head. “Never. He said he was going out for a drink, and he took off, left my mother and me behind, and her pregnant, too.”
Sean nodded as if he could feel his pain. “But your mother never filed a missing persons report.”
“That’s ’cause he wasn’t missing,” Brendan said, some fight coming into his eyes. “He told my mother he didn’t love her. He told her she was always harping on him. Two days later, he leaves.”
“She never tried to find him? Nothing like that?”
“No. He sends money, so fuck it.”
Sean took his pencil away from the keyboard and laid it flat on his desk. He looked at Brendan Harris, trying to read the kid, getting nothing back but a whiff of depression and residual anger.
“He sends money?”
Brendan nodded. “Once a month like clockwork.”
“From where?”
“Huh?”
“The envelopes the money comes in. Where are they sent from?”
“New York.”
“Always?”
“Yeah.”
“Is it cash?”
“Yeah. Five hundred a month mostly. More at Christmas.”
Sean said, “Does he ever write a note?”
“No.”
“So how do you know it’s him?”
“Who else would send us money every month? He’s guilty. My ma says he was always that way—he’d do shitty things, think that just because he felt bad about them it absolved him. You know?”
Sean said, “I want to see one of the envelopes the money came in.”
“My mother throws ’em away.”
Sean said, “Shit,” and swiveled the computer screen out of his line of vision. Everything about the case was bugging him—Dave Boyle as a suspect, Jimmy Marcus’s being the father of the victim, the victim herself having been killed with her boyfriend’s father’s gun. And then he thought of something else that bugged him, though not in any way pertinent to the case.
“Brendan,” he said, “if your father abandoned the family while your mother was pregnant, why’d she name the baby after him?”
Brendan’s gaze drifted off into the squad room. “My mom ain’t entirely there. You know? She tries and all, but…”
“Okay…”
“She says she named him Ray to remind herself.”
“Of what?”
“Men.” He shrugged. “How if you give ’em half a chance, they’ll fuck you over just to prove they can.”
“But when your brother turned out mute, how’d that make her feel?”
“Pissed,” Brendan said, and a tiny smile played on his lips. “Kinda proved her point, though. Least in her mind.” He touched the paperclip tray on the edge of Sean’s desk, and the tiny smile vanished.
“Why you asking me if my father had a gun?”
Sean was suddenly tired of games and being polite and cautious. “You know why, kid.”
“No,” Brendan said. “I don’t.”
Sean leaned across the desk, barely resisting an inexplicable desire to keep going, to lunge at Brendan Harris and squeeze his throat in his hand. “The gun that killed your girlfriend, Brendan, was the same gun your father used in a robbery eighteen years ago. You want to tell me about that?”
“My father didn’t have a gun,” he said, but Sean could see something beginning to go to work in the kid’s brain.
“No? Bullshit.” He slapped the desk hard enough to jerk the kid in his chair. “You say you loved Katie Marcus? Let me tell you what I love, Brendan. I love my clearance rate. I love my ability to put down cases in seventy-two hours. Now you are fucking lying to me.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Yes, you are, kid. You know your father was a thief?”
“He was a subway—”
“He was a fucking thief. He worked with Jimmy Marcus. Who was also a fucking thief. And now Jimmy’s daughter is killed with your father’s gun?”
“My father didn’t have a gun.”
“Fuck you!” Sean bellowed, and Connolly shot up in his chair, looked over at them. “You want to bullshit someone, kid? Bullshit your cell.”
Sean took his keys from his belt and tossed them over his head at Connolly.
“Lock this maggot up.”
Brendan stood. “I didn’t do anything.”
Sean watched Connolly step up behind the kid, tensing on the balls of his feet.
“You got no alibi, Brendan, and you had a prior relationship with the victim, and she was shot with your father’s gun. Until I got better, I’ll take you. Have a rest, think about the statements you just made to me.”
“You can’t lock me up.” Brendan looked behind him at Connolly. “You can’t.”
Connolly looked back at Sean, wide-eyed, because the kid was right. Technically, they couldn’t lock him up unless they charged him. And they had nothing to charge him with, really. It was against the law in this state to charge anyone with suspicion.
But Brendan didn’t know any of that, and Sean gave Connolly a look that said: Welcome to Homicide, new boy.
Sean said, “You don’t tell me something right now, kid, I’m doing it.”
Brendan opened his mouth, and Sean saw a dark knowledge pass through him like an electric eel. Then his mouth closed, and he shook his head.
“Suspicion of capital murder,” Sean said to Connolly. “Jail his ass.”
DAVE GOT BACK to his empty apartment in the midafternoon and went straight to the fridge for a beer. He hadn’t eaten anything and his stomach felt hollow and bubbling with air. Not the best conditions under which to throw back a beer, but Dave needed one. He needed to soften the edge in his head and take the crimps out of his neck, ease the wild-rat banging of his heart.
The first one went down easy as he walked around the empty apartment. Celeste could have come home while he was gone and then went off to work, and he thought of calling Ozma’s to see if she was in there now, cutting heads and chatting with the ladies, flirting with Paolo, the gay guy who worked the same shifts as she did and flirted in that loose but not entirely harmless way gay men did. Or maybe he’d go down to Michael’s school, give him a big wave and a hug, then walk him back toward home, stop for chocolate milk on the way.
But Michael wasn’t in school and Celeste wasn’t at work. Dave somehow knew that they were hiding from him, so he finished his second beer sitting at the kitchen table, feeling it work its way into his body, calming everything, turning the air in front of him a tad silver and a tad swirly.
He should have told her. Right from the start, he should have told his wife what had really happened. He should have had faith in her. Not many wives stood by has-been high school ballplayers who’d been molested as children and couldn’t hold down a decent job. But Celeste had. Just the thought of her over the sink the other night, washing those clothes, saying she was taking care of the evidence, babe—Jesus, she was something. How could Dave have lost sight of that? How did you get to the point where you’d been around someone for so long that you couldn’t even see them?
Dave got the third and last beer out of the fridge and walked around the apartment some more, his body filling with love for his wife and love for his son. He wanted to curl up against his wife’s naked body as she stroked his hair and tell her how much he’d missed her in that interrogation room with its cracked chair and its cold. Earlier, he’d thought he’d wanted human warmth, but the truth was he’d just wanted Celeste’s warmth. He wanted to wrap her body around his and make her smile and kiss her eyelids and caress her back and smother himself with her.
It’s not too late, he’d tell her when she came home. My brain’s just been miswired recently, all jumbled up. This beer in my hand ain’t helping matters, I suppose, but I need it until I have you again. And then I’ll quit. I’ll quit drinking and I’ll take computer classes or something, get a good white-collar job. The National Guard offers tuition reimbursement, and I can do that. I can do one weekend a month and a few weeks in the summer for my family. For my family, I can do that standing on my head. It’ll help me get back into shape, lose the beer weight, clear my mind. And when I get that white-collar job, I’ll move us out of here, out of this whole neighborhood with its steadily rising rents and stadium deals and gentrification. Why fight it? They’ll push us out sooner or later. Push us out and make a Crate & Barrel world for themselves, discuss their summer homes at the cafés and in the aisles of the whole-food markets.
We’ll go someplace good, though, he’d tell Celeste. We’ll go someplace clean where we can raise our son. We’ll start fresh. And I’ll tell you what happened, Celeste. It’s not pretty, but it’s not as bad as you think. I’ll tell you that I have some scary, perverse things in my head and maybe I need to see someone about them. I have wants that disgust me, but I’m trying, honey. I’m trying to be a good man. I’m trying to bury the Boy. Or at the very least, teach him something about compassion.
Maybe that’s what the guy in the Cadillac had been looking for—a little compassion. But the Boy Who’d Escaped from Wolves wasn’t about any fucking compassion Saturday night. He’d had that gun in his hand and he’d hit the guy in the Cadillac through his open window, Dave hearing bone crack as the red-haired kid scrambled up and out through the passenger door, stood there with his mouth agape as Dave hit the guy again and again. He’d reached in and pulled him out through the door by his hair, and the guy hadn’t been as helpless as he’d pretended. He’d been playing possum, and Dave only saw the knife as it sliced through his shirt and into his flesh. It was a switchblade, feebly swung, but sharp enough to cut Dave before he rammed his knee into the guy’s wrist, pinned his arm against the car door. When the knife fell to the pavement, Dave kicked it under the car.
The red-haired kid looked scared, but excited too, and Dave, enraged beyond reason now, brought the butt of the gun down on top of the guy’s head so hard, he cracked the handle. The guy rolled onto his stomach, and Dave hopped on his back, feeling the wolf, hating this man, this freak, this fucking degenerate child molester, getting a good grip on the bastard’s hair and pulling his head up and then ramming it down into the pavement. Just ramming it, over and over again, pulverizing this guy, this Henry, this George, this, oh Jesus, this Dave, this Dave.
Die, you motherfucker. Die, die, die.
The red-haired kid ran off then, Dave turning his head and realizing the words were coming out of his mouth. “Die, die, die, die, die.” Dave watched the kid run off through the parking lot and he scrambled after him, his hands dripping with the guy’s blood. He wanted to tell the red-haired kid that he’d done this for him. He’d saved him. And he would protect him forever if that’s what he wanted.
He stood in the alley behind the bar, out of breath, knowing the kid was long gone. He looked up at the night sky. He said, “Why?”
Why put me here? Why give me this life? Why give me this disease, a disease that I despise, in particular, more than any other? Why scramble my brain with moments of beauty and tenderness and intermittent love for my child and my wife—glimpses, really, of a life that could have been mine if that car hadn’t rolled down Gannon Street and taken me to that basement? Why?
Answer me, please. Oh, please, please, answer me.
But, of course, there was nothing. Nothing but silence and the drip of gutters and the light rain turning stronger.
He walked back out of the alley a few minutes later and found the man lying beside his car.
Wow, Dave thought. I killed him.
But then the guy rolled over onto his side, gasping like a fish. He had blond hair and a pillow for a belly on an otherwise slim frame. Dave tried to remember what his face had looked like before he’d plunged his hand through the open window and hit him with the gun. He remembered only that his lips had seemed too red and too wide.
The guy’s face was gone now, though. It looked like it had been pressed against a jet engine, and Dave felt a wave of nausea as he watched this bloody thing suck at the air, heaving.
The guy didn’t seem to be aware of Dave standing over him. He rolled onto his knees and started crawling. He crawled toward the trees behind the car. He crawled up the small embankment and put his hands on the chain-link fence that separated the parking lot from the scrap metal company on the other side. Dave took off the flannel shirt he was wearing over his T-shirt. He wrapped it around the gun as he walked toward the faceless creature.
The faceless creature reached up another rung in the fence, and then his energy left him. He fell back down and tilted to his right, ended up sitting against the fence, his legs splayed, his faceless face watching Dave come.
“No,” he whispered. “No.”
But Dave could tell he didn’t mean it. He was as exhausted with who he’d become as Dave was.
The Boy knelt in front of the guy and placed the wrapped-up ball of flannel shirt against his torso, just above the abdomen, Dave floating above them now, watching.
“Please,” the guy croaked.
“Sssh,” Dave said, and the Boy pulled the trigger.
The faceless creature’s body jerked hard enough to kick Dave in the armpit, and then the air left it with the whistle of a kettle.
And the Boy said, Good.
It was only once he’d manhandled the guy into the Honda’s trunk that Dave realized he should have used the guy’s Cadillac. He’d already rolled up its windows and shut off the engine and then wiped down the front seat and everything he’d touched with the flannel shirt. But what was the point of riding around in his Honda with the guy in the trunk, trying to find a place to dump him, when the answer was right in front of him?
So Dave backed his car in beside the Caddy, his eyes on the side door of the bar, no one having come out for a while. He popped his trunk, then popped the Caddy’s trunk, and pulled the body from one car to the other. He shut the two trunks and wrapped the switchblade and his gun in the flannel shirt, tossed it on the Honda’s front seat, and got the hell out of there.
He threw the shirt and knife and the gun off the Roseclair Street Bridge and into the Penitentiary Channel, realizing only later that as he’d been doing that, Katie Marcus was probably in the process of dying herself in the park below. And then he’d driven home, certain that any minute someone would find the car and the body in the trunk.
He’d driven by the Last Drop late Sunday, and there was a car parked beside the Caddy, the lot otherwise empty. But he recognized the other car as belonging to Reggie Damone, one of the bartenders. The Caddy looked innocent, forgotten. Later that same day, he’d gone back, and felt like he was having a heart attack when he saw an empty slot where the Caddy used to be. He realized he couldn’t ask about it, even casually, like, “Hey, Reggie, you guys tow if a car’s in your lot too long?” and then he realized whatever had happened to it, there was nothing to connect it to him anymore.
Nothing but the red-haired kid.
But as time had passed, it occurred to him that even though the kid had been scared, he’d been pleased, too, excited. He was on Dave’s side. He wasn’t anything to worry about.
And now the cops had nothing. They didn’t have a witness. They didn’t have the evidence from Dave’s car, not the kind they could use in court anyway. So Dave could relax. He could talk to Celeste and come clean and let the chips fall where they may, offer himself up to his wife and hope she’d accept him as flawed but trying to change. As a good man who’d done a bad thing for a good reason. As a man who was trying his damnedest to slay the vampire in his soul.
I will quit driving by parks and public swimming pools, Dave told himself as he drained his third beer. He held up the empty can. I will quit this, too.
But not today. Today he was already three beers in and, what the hell, Celeste didn’t look like she’d be coming home soon. Maybe tomorrow. That’d be good. Give them both some space, time to heal and repair. She’d come home to a new man, an improved Dave with no more secrets.
“Because secrets are poison,” he said aloud in the kitchen where he’d last made love to his wife. “Secrets are walls.” And then with a smile: “And I’m all out of beer.”
He felt good, jaunty almost, as he left the house to walk up to Eagle Liquors. It was a gorgeous day, the sun flooding the street. When they’d been kids, the el tracks used to run down here, splitting Crescent in the center and piling it with soot and blotting out the sky. It only added to the sense one got of the Flats as a place cloaked from the rest of the world, tucked under it like a banished tribe, free to live any way it chose as long as it did so in exile.
Once they’d removed the tracks, the Flats had risen into the light, and for a while they’d thought that was a good thing. So much less soot, so much more sun, skin looked healthier. But without the cloak, everyone could look in on them, appreciate their brick row houses and view of the Penitentiary Channel and proximity to downtown. Suddenly they weren’t an underground tribe. They were prime real estate.
Dave would have to think about how that had happened when he got back home, formulate a theory with his twelve-pack. Or he could find a cool bar, sit in the dark on a bright day and order a burger, chat with the bartender, see if the two of them together could figure out when the Flats had started slipping away, when the whole world had started revolving past them.
Maybe that’s what he’d do. Sure! Take a leather seat at a mahogany bar and while away the afternoon. He’d plan his future. He’d plan his family’s future. He’d figure out each and every way in which he could atone. It was amazing how friendly three beers could be after a long, hard day. They were taking Dave by the hand as he walked up the hill toward Buckingham Avenue. They were saying, Hey, ain’t it great to be us? Ain’t it just the flat-out balls to be turning a new leaf, shedding yourself of soiled secrets, ready to renew your vows to your loved ones and become the man you always knew you could be? Why, it’s just terrific.
And look who we have ahead of us, idling at the corner in his shiny sports car. He’s smiling at us. That’s Val Savage, smiling away, waving us over! Come on. Let’s go say hi.
“Dandy Dave Boyle,” Val said as Dave approached the car. “How they hanging, brother?”
“Always to the left,” Dave said, and squatted down by the car. He rested his elbows on the slot where the window had descended into the door and peered in at Val. “What’re you up to?”
Val shrugged. “Not much, man. Was looking for someone to grab a beer with, maybe a bite to eat.”
Dave couldn’t believe this. Here he’d been thinking the same thing. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. You could go for a few pops, maybe a game of pool, right, Dave?”
“Sure.”
Dave was a bit surprised, actually. He got along with Jimmy and Val’s brother Kevin, even sometimes with Chuck, but he never remembered Val showing anything but complete apathy in his presence. It must be Katie, he figured. In death, she was bringing them all together. They were united in their loss, forging bonds through the sharing of tragedy.
“Hop in,” Val said. “We’ll hit a place I know across town. Good bar. A buddy of mine owns it.”
“Across town?” Dave looked back up the empty street he’d just come down. “Well, I’ll have to get home at some point.”
“Sure, sure,” Val said. “I’ll take you back whenever you want. Come on. Hop in. We’ll have ourselves a boys’ night in the middle of the day.”
Dave smiled and took the smile with him as he walked around the front of Val’s car toward the passenger door. Boys’ night in the middle of the day. Exactly what was called for. Him and Val, hanging like old pals. And that was one of the great things about a place like the Flats, the thing he feared would be lost—the way old feelings and entire pasts could be laid to rest with time, as you aged, once you realized that everything was changing and the only things that remained the same were the people you’d grown up with and the place you’d come from. The neighborhood. May it live forever, Dave thought as he opened the door, if only in our minds.