JIMMY WOKE UP Sunday morning to the distant sound of drums.
Not the rat-a-tat and cymbal clash of some nose-ring band in a sweaty club, but the deep, steady, tom-tom thump of a war party encamped just on the outskirts of the neighborhood. Then he heard the bleat of brass horns, sudden and off-key. Once again, it was a distant sound, riding the morning air from a distance of ten or twelve blocks away, and it died almost as soon as it had started. In the silence that followed, he lay there listening to the crisp quiet of a late Sunday morning—a bright one, too, judging by the hard yellow glow on the other side of the closed shades. He heard the cluck and coo of pigeons on his ledge and the dry bark of a dog down the street. A car door snapped open and shut, and he waited for the gun of its engine, but it never came, and then he heard that deep tom-tom thumping again, steadier, more confident.
He looked over at the clock on the nightstand: 11 A.M. The last time he’d slept this late, he’d been…He couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept this late, actually. Years. A decade, maybe. He remembered the last few days’ exhaustion, the sensation he’d had that Katie’s coffin rose and fell like an elevator car through his body. And then Just Ray Harris and Dave Boyle had come to visit as he’d sat drunk on the living room couch last night, a gun in his hand, watching them wave to him from the backseat of the car that had smelled of apples. And the back of Katie’s head stretched up between them as they drove off down Gannon Street, Katie never looking back, and Just Ray and Dave waving like mad, grinning like fools, as Jimmy felt the gun itch against his palm. He’d smelled the oil and thought of putting the barrel in his mouth.
The wake had been a nightmare, Celeste showing up when it was packed at eight in the evening and attacking Jimmy, hitting him with her fists, calling him a murderer. “You have her body!” she’d screamed. “What do I have? Where is he, Jimmy? Where?” Bruce Reed and his sons pulled her off him and carted her out of there, but Celeste still screamed full throttle: “Murderer! He’s a murderer! He killed my husband! Murderer!”
Murderer.
Then there’d been the funeral, and the service at the grave site, Jimmy standing there as they lowered his baby into the hole and hit the coffin with piles of dirt and loose rock and Katie faded away from him under all that soil as if she’d never lived.
The weight of all that had found his bones last night and sunk in deep, Katie’s coffin rising and falling, rising and falling, so that by the time he’d put the gun back in the drawer and flopped into bed, he’d felt immobilized, as if his bone marrow had filled with his dead, and the blood was clotting.
Oh, God, he’d thought, I have never been so tired. So tired, so sad, so useless and alone. I’m exhausted from my mistakes and my rage and my bitter, bitter sadness. Wiped out from my sins. Oh, God, leave me alone and let me die so I won’t do wrong and I won’t be tired and I won’t carry the burdens of my nature and my loves anymore. Loose me of all that, because I’m too tired to do it on my own.
Annabeth had tried to understand this guilt, this horror at himself, but she couldn’t. Because she hadn’t pulled the trigger.
And now, he’d slept until eleven. Twelve hours straight, and a dead sleep, too, because he’d never heard Annabeth wake.
He’d read somewhere that a hallmark of deep depression was a consistent weariness, a compulsive need to sleep, but as he sat up in bed and listened to the thump of drums, joined now by the blasts of those brass horns, almost in tune, too, he felt refreshed. He felt twenty. He felt wide, wide awake, as if he’d never need sleep again.
The parade, he realized. The drums and horns came from the band prepping to march down Buckingham Avenue at noon. He got up and went to the window and pulled up the shade. The reason that car hadn’t started out front was because they’d blocked off Buckingham Avenue from the Flats straight up to Rome Basin. Thirty-six blocks. He looked through the window and down onto the avenue. It was a clean stripe of blue-gray asphalt under the bright sun, as clean as Jimmy could remember seeing it. Blue sawhorses blocked access at every cross street and stretched end-to-end along the curbs as far as Jimmy could see in either direction.
Folks had just begun to come out of their homes and stake out their places on the sidewalk. Jimmy watched them set down their coolers and radios and picnic baskets, and he waved to Dan and Maureen Guden as they unfolded their lawn chairs in front of Hennessey’s Laundromat. When they waved back, he felt touched by the concern he saw in their faces. Maureen cupped her hands around her mouth and called to him. Jimmy opened the window and leaned into the screen, got a whiff of the morning sun, bright air, and what remained of the spring’s dust clinging to the screen.
“What’s that, Maureen?”
“I said, ‘How you doing, hon?’” Maureen called. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” Jimmy said, and it surprised him to realize that, in fact, he did feel okay. He still carried Katie in him like a second stricken and angry heart that would never, he was certain, stop beating its mad beat. He had no illusions about that. The grief was a constant now, more a part of him than a limb. But somehow during his long sleep, he’d gained an elemental acceptance of it. There it was, part of him, and he could deal with it on those terms. And so, under the circumstances, he felt far better than he would have expected. “I’m…all right,” he called to Maureen and Dan. “Considering. You know?”
Maureen nodded, and Dan asked, “You need anything, Jim?”
“We mean anything,” Maureen said.
And Jimmy felt a proud and everlasting surge of love for them and this whole place as he said, “No, I’m good. But thanks. Very much. It means a lot.”
“You coming down?” Maureen called.
“I think so, yeah,” Jimmy said, not knowing for sure until the words left his mouth. “We’ll see you down there in a bit?”
“We’ll save you a place,” Dan said.
They waved and Jimmy waved back and then left the window, chest still filled with that overwhelming mixture of pride and love. These were his people. And this was his neighborhood. His home. They’d save a place for him. They would. Jimmy from the Flats.
That’s what the big boys had called him in the old days, before he’d shipped out to Deer Island. They’d take him to the social clubs on Prince Street in the North End and say, “Hey, Carlo, this is that friend of mine I was telling you about. Jimmy. Jimmy from the Flats.”
And Carlo or Gino or one of the O’s would widen his eyes and go, “No shit? Jimmy Flats. Nice to meet you, Jimmy. I admired your work a long time now.”
The jokes about his age would follow—“What, you crack your first safe with your diaper pin?”—but Jimmy could feel the respect, if not a kind of minor awe, these hard guys felt in his presence.
He was Jimmy Flats. Ran his first crew at seventeen. Seventeen—you believe that shit? A serious guy. Not to be fucked with. A man who kept his mouth shut and knew how the game was played and knew how to show respect. A man who made money for his friends.
He was Jimmy Flats back then, and he was Jimmy Flats right now, and those people beginning to gather along the parade route—they loved him. They worried about him and shouldered a modicum of his grief as best as they could. And for their love, what did he give them in return? He had to wonder. What, really, did he give them?
The closest thing this neighborhood had to a governing presence in the years since the Feds and RICO had busted up Louie Jello’s gang had been—what?—Bobby O’Donnell? Bobby O’Donnell and Roman Fallow. Pair of bantamweight drug dealers who’d moved into the protection and shylock rackets. Jimmy had heard the rumors—how they’d forged some kind of deal with the Vietnamese gangs up in Rome Basin to keep the gooks from muscling in, carved up the territory and then celebrated the alliance by burning Connie’s Flower Shop to the ground as a warning to anyone who refused to pay their insurance premiums.
That’s not how you did it. You kept your business out of your neighborhood; you didn’t make the neighborhood your business. You kept your people clean and safe and they, in gratitude, watched your back and became your ears to whispers of trouble. And if occasionally their gratitude came in the form of an envelope here, a cake or a car there, then that was their choice and your reward for keeping them safe.
That’s how you ran a neighborhood. Benevolently. With one eye on their interests and one on your own. You didn’t let the Bobby O’Donnells and the slant-eyed tong wannabes think they could just stroll the fuck in here and take whatever they desired. Not if they wanted to stroll back out on their God-given limbs.
Jimmy left the bedroom and found the apartment empty. The door at the end of the hall was open, and he could hear Annabeth’s voice from the apartment upstairs, could hear his daughters’ small feet scampering across the floorboards as they chased Val’s cat. He let himself into the bathroom and turned on the shower, stepped in when it got warm, and raised his face to the spray.
The only reason O’Donnell and Farrow had never bothered Jimmy’s store was because they knew he was tight with the Savages. And like anyone with a brain, O’Donnell was afraid of them. And if he and Roman feared the Savages, then that meant that, by association, they feared Jimmy.
They feared him. Jimmy from the Flats. Because, on his own, Lord knows, he certainly had the brains. And with the Savages watching his back, he could have all the muscle and balls-to-the-wall, batshit fearlessness he’d ever need. Put Jimmy Marcus and the Savage brothers together for real, and they could…
What?
Make the neighborhood as safe as it deserved to be.
Run the whole damn city.
Own it.
“Please don’t, Jimmy. Jesus. I want to see my wife. I want to live my life. Jimmy? Please, don’t take that away from me. Look at me!”
Jimmy closed his eyes and let the hard, hot water drill his skull.
“Look at me!”
I’m looking at you, Dave. I’m looking at you.
Jimmy saw Dave’s pleading face, the spittle on his lips not much different than the spittle on Just Ray Harris’s lower lip and chin had been thirteen years ago.
“Look at me!”
I’m looking, Dave. I’m looking. You never should have gotten back out of that car. You know that? You should have stayed gone. You came back here, to our home, and there were crucial pieces of you missing. You never fit back in, Dave, because they’d poisoned you and that poison was just waiting to spill back out.
“I didn’t kill your daughter, Jimmy. I didn’t kill Katie. I didn’t, I didn’t.”
Maybe you didn’t, Dave. I know that now. It’s starting to look like you actually had nothing to do with it. Still a small chance the cops got the wrong kids, but I’ll admit, all in all, it looks like you may have been guilt-free on the Katie account.
“So?”
So you killed someone, Dave. You killed someone. Celeste was right about that. Besides, you know how it is with kids who get molested.
“No, Jim. Why don’t you tell me?”
They turn into molesters themselves. Sooner or later. The poison’s in you and it has to come out. I was just protecting some poor future victim from your poison, Dave. Maybe your son.
“Leave my son out of this.”
Fine. Maybe one of his friends then. But, Dave, sooner or later, you would have shown your true colors.
“That’s how you live with it?”
Once you got in that car, Dave, you should never have come back. That’s how I live with it. You didn’t belong. Don’t you get it? That’s all a neighborhood is—a place where people who belong together live. All others need not fucking apply.
Dave’s voice fell through the water and drummed into Jimmy’s skull: “I live in you now, Jimmy. You can’t shut me off.”
Yes, Dave, I can.
And Jimmy turned the shower off and stepped out of the tub. He dried off and sucked the soft steam up his nostrils. If anything, it left him feeling even more clearheaded. He wiped steam off the small window in the corner and looked down into the alley that ran behind his house. The day was so clear and bright that even the alley looked clean. Christ, what a beautiful day. What a perfect Sunday. What a perfect day for a parade. He would take his daughters and his wife down to the street and they would hold hands and watch the marchers and the bands and the floats and politicians stream by in the bright sunlight. And they’d eat hot dogs and cotton candy and he’d buy the girls Buckingham Pride flags and T-shirts. And a healing process would begin amid the cymbals and drumbeats and horns and cheers. It would take hold of them, he was sure, as they stood on the sidewalk and celebrated the founding of their neighborhood. And when Katie’s death pressed in on them again during the evening hours, and their bodies sagged a bit with the weight of her, they would at least have the afternoon’s entertainment to balance their grief a little bit. It would be the start of healing. They would all realize that, at least for a few hours this afternoon, they’d known pleasure, if not joy.
He left the window and splashed warm water on his face, then covered his cheeks and throat with shaving cream, and it occurred to him as he began to shave that he was evil. No big thing, really, no earth-shattering clang of bells erupting in his heart. Just that—an occurrence, a momentary realization that fell like gently grasping fingers through his chest.
So I am then.
He looked in the mirror and felt very little of anything at all. He loved his daughters and he loved his wife. And they loved him. He found certainty in them, complete certainty. Few men—few people—had that.
He’d killed a man for a crime the man had probably not committed. If that weren’t bad enough, he felt very little regret. And in the long-ago, he’d killed another man. And he’d weighted both bodies down so that they’d descended to the depths of the Mystic. And he’d genuinely liked both men—Ray a bit more than Dave, but he’d liked them both. Still, he’d killed them. On principle. Stood on a stone ledge above the river and watched Ray’s face turn white and sagging as it sank beneath the waterline, eyes open and lifeless. And in all these years, he hadn’t felt much guilt over that, although he’d told himself he did. But what he called guilt was actually a fear of bad karma, of what he’d done being done to him or someone he loved. And Katie’s death, he supposed, may have been the fulfillment of that bad karma. The ultimate fulfillment if you really looked at it—Ray coming back through his wife’s womb and killing Katie for no good reason except karma.
And Dave? They’d wrapped the chain through the holes in the cinder block, tied it tight around his body, and locked the two ends together. And then they’d struggled to lift his body the nine inches it needed to clear the boat, and they’d tossed him over, Jimmy having a distinct image of the child Dave, not the adult, sinking to the river floor. Who knew exactly where he’d landed? But he was down there, at the bottom of the Mystic, looking up. Stay there, Dave. Stay there.
The truth was, Jimmy had never felt much guilt for anything he’d done. Sure, he’d arranged with a buddy in New York to have the Harrises sent five hundred a month over the last thirteen years, but that wasn’t guilt so much as good business sense—as long as they thought Just Ray was alive, they’d never send anyone looking for him. In fact, now that Ray’s son was in jail, fuck it, he could stop sending the money. Use it for something good.
The neighborhood, he decided. He’d use it to protect his neighborhood. And looking in the mirror, he decided that that’s exactly what it was: his. From now on, he owned it. He’d been living a lie for thirteen years, pretending to think like a straight citizen, when all around him he saw the waste of blown opportunities. They were going to build a stadium down here? Fine. Let’s talk about the workers we represent. No? Oh, okay. Better keep a close eye on your machinery, boys. Hate to have a fire on something like this.
He’d have to sit down with Val and Kevin and discuss their future. This town was waiting to be opened up. And Bobby O’Donnell? His future, Jimmy decided, wasn’t looking all that bright if he planned on sticking around East Bucky.
He finished shaving, looked one more time at his reflection. He was evil? So be it. He could live with it because he had love in his heart and he had certainty. As trade-offs went, it wasn’t half bad.
He got dressed. He walked through the kitchen feeling like the man he’d been pretending to be all these years had just gone down the drain in the bathroom. He could hear his daughters shrieking and laughing, probably getting licked to death by Val’s cat, and he thought, Man, that’s a beautiful sound.
OUT ON THE STREET, Sean and Lauren found a space in front of Nate & Nancy’s coffee shop. Nora slept in her carriage and they placed it in the shade under the awning. They leaned against the wall and ate their ice cream cones and Sean looked at his wife and wondered if they’d make it, or if the yearlong rift had done too much damage, squandered their love and all the good years they’d had in their marriage before the mess of the final two. Lauren took his hand, though, squeezed it, and he looked down at his daughter and thought she did look a little bit like something to be adored, a small goddess, perhaps, filling him up.
Through the parade streaming in front of them Sean could see Jimmy and Annabeth Marcus, their two pretty girls sitting atop the shoulders of Val and Kevin Savage, the girls waving at every float and open convertible that passed by.
Two hundred and sixteen years ago, Sean knew, they’d built the first prison in the region along the banks of the channel that ultimately bore its name. The first settlers in Buckingham had been the jailers and their families and the wives and children of the men housed in the prison. It had never been an easy truce. When the prisoners were released, they were often too tired or too old to move very far, and Buckingham soon became known as a dumping ground for the dregs. Saloons sprouted up along this avenue and its dirt streets, and the jailers took to the hills, literally, building their homes up in the Point so they could once again look down on the people they’d corralled. The 1800s brought a cattle boom, the stockyards springing up where the expressway was now, a freight track running along the edges of Sydney Street and unloading the steers for the long walk up to the center of what was now the parade route. And generations of prisoners and slaughterhouse hands and their offspring pushed the Flats all the way down to the freight tracks. The prison closed in the wake of some forgotten re-form movement, and the cattle boom ended, and the saloons kept sprouting. The Irish immigrant wave followed the Italian wave in twice the numbers, and the el tracks were built, and they streamed into the city for jobs, but always back here when the day closed. You came back here because you’d built this village, you knew its dangers and its pleasures, and most important, nothing that happened here surprised you. There was a logic to the corruption and the bloodbaths and the bar fights and the stickball games and the Saturday-morning lovemaking. No one else saw the logic, and that was the point. No one else was welcome here.
Lauren leaned back into him, her head beneath his chin, and Sean could feel her doubt, but also her resolve, her need to rebuild her faith in him. She said, “How scared were you when that kid pointed the gun in your face?”
“The truth?”
“Please.”
“Close to losing bladder control.”
She craned her head out from underneath his chin and looked at him. “Seriously.”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Did you think of me?”
“I did,” he said. “I thought of both of you.”
“What’d you think?”
“I thought of this,” he said. “I thought of now.”
“The parade, everything?”
He nodded.
She kissed his neck. “You’re full of shit, honey, but it’s sweet of you to say.”
“I’m not lying,” he said. “I’m not.”
She looked down at Nora. “She’s got your eyes.”
“And your nose.”
She was staring at their baby when she said, “I hope this works.”
“Me, too.” He kissed her.
They leaned back against the wall together, a steady stream of people passing by along the sidewalk in front of them, and then Celeste suddenly stood before them. Her skin was pale and her hair was speckled with dandruff and she kept pulling on her fingers as if trying to pop them from the sockets.
She blinked at Sean. She said, “Hey, Trooper Devine.”
Sean held out his hand because she looked like she needed contact or she’d float away. “Hi, Celeste. Call me Sean. It’s okay.”
She shook his hand. Her palm was clammy, her fingers hot, and she let go almost as soon as they’d touched.
Sean said, “This is Lauren, my wife.”
“Hello,” Lauren said.
“Hi.”
For a moment, no one knew what to say. They stood there, stilted and untethered, and then Celeste looked across the street and Sean followed her gaze to Jimmy, standing there with his arm around Annabeth, the two of them shining as bright as the day, surrounded by friends and family. They looked like they’d never lose anything again.
Jimmy’s eyes swept past Celeste and met Sean’s. He nodded in recognition and Sean nodded back.
Celeste said, “He killed my husband.”
Sean felt Lauren freeze up against him.
“I know,” he said. “I can’t prove it yet, but I know.”
“Will you?”
“What?”
“Prove it?” she said.
“I’ll try, Celeste. I swear to God.”
Celeste looked out on the avenue and scratched her head with a lazy ferocity, as if digging for lice. “I can’t seem to put a finger on my mind lately.” She laughed. “That didn’t sound right. But I can’t. I just can’t.”
Sean reached out and touched her wrist. She looked at him, her brown eyes wild and aged. She seemed sure he was going to slap her.
He said, “I can give you the name of a doctor, Celeste, someone who specializes in those who’ve lost loved ones to violent crime.”
She nodded, though his words didn’t seem to provide any consolation. Her wrist fell away from his hand, and she tugged at her fingers again. She noticed Lauren watching her, and she looked down at her fingers. She dropped her hands, then raised them again and crossed her arms over her chest and tucked her hands under her elbows as if trying to keep them from flying away. Sean noticed Lauren giving her a small, hesitant smile, one of abject empathy, and he was surprised to see Celeste respond with a tiny smile of her own and an acknowledgment of gratitude in the blink of her eyes.
He loved his wife then as deeply as he ever had, and he felt humbled by her ability to convey instant kinship with lost souls. He was sure then that it was he who had wronged their marriage with the emergence of his cop’s ego, his gradual contempt for the flaws and frailty of people.
He reached out and touched Lauren’s cheek, and the gesture caused Celeste to look away.
She looked out onto the avenue as a float in the shape of a baseball glove drifted by, ringed on all sides with Little Leaguers and T-ball teams, the kids beaming and waving and going crazy with the adoration.
Something about the float chilled Sean, the way the baseball glove, maybe, seemed less to be cradling the kids and more on the verge of enveloping them, the kids oblivious, smiling like mad.
Except for one. He was subdued and he looked at his cleats, and Sean recognized him immediately. Dave’s son.
“Michael!” Celeste waved to him, but the kid didn’t look back. He kept his eyes down even though she called his name again. “Michael, honey! Sweetie, look! Michael!”
The float kept drifting along, and Celeste kept calling, and her son refused to look her way. Sean could see a young Dave in the kid’s shoulders and the droop of his chin, his almost delicate good looks.
“Michael!” Celeste called. She pulled her fingers again and stepped off the curb.
The float passed them, but Celeste kept following it, moving through the crowds, waving, calling her son’s name.
Sean felt Lauren idly caress his arm, and he looked across the street at Jimmy. If it took him the rest of his life, he was going to bring him down. You see me, Jimmy? Come on. Look over again.
And Jimmy’s head swiveled. He smiled at Sean.
Sean raised his hand, the index finger pointing out, the thumb cocked like the hammer of a gun, and then he dropped the thumb and fired.
Jimmy’s smile broadened.
“Who was that woman?” Lauren said.
Sean watched Celeste as she trotted along the line of parade watchers, growing smaller as the float continued up the avenue, her coat flapping behind her.
“Somebody who lost her husband,” Sean said.
And he thought of Dave Boyle, and he wished he’d bought him that beer like he’d promised on the second day of the investigation. He wished he’d been nicer to him when they were kids, and that Dave’s father hadn’t left him, and his mother hadn’t been nuts, and that so many bad things hadn’t happened to him. Standing along the parade route with his wife and child, he wished a lot of things for Dave Boyle. But peace mostly. More than anything, he hoped Dave, wherever he was, got a little of that.