It was a beautiful morning, the sun was shining, and I was smiling. Egg yolks quivered and stared up at me. Bacon sizzled in another skillet, and I worked the space like a conductor, waiting for the ding of the toaster and the pop of toasted bread. As the tom-tom of the strong coffee worked its way through my veins, the scent of Bonnie’s L’Air du Temps lingered in the hallway behind me, my foot stomped to the beat of Shirley & Lee singing ‘Let the Good Times Roll.’
I slid the eggs onto the dish with the help of a spatula. I used tongs to transport the bacon to a bed of Bounty paper towels and patted them dry. I visited the fridge for a tub of soft butter, so I didn’t make a doughnut out of each slice of bread with the knife. I could hear Bill’s editorial about my breakfast as all the cholesterol a hard-working boy needed for a heart attack.
The pager went off. Dot and Mercury Answering Service as messengers of the gods.
Minutes later, it beeped again. I ignored it and ate my breakfast. Delilah had hopped onto the chair. I refused to let my coffee run cold for a phone message, but I shared some of my bacon with her.
I finished my breakfast. I did the dishes. I degreased the stovetop with a touch of Easy-Off and brewed myself another small pot of coffee. I’d switched to Maxwell House after Tony’s comment about Bustelo. He’d made it sound as if Joe DiMaggio would’ve stepped out of the TV, a baseball bat in hand, to work over my kneecaps. I reminded myself that I need to buy the Bialetti he recommended. I worked my last cup of coffee down to the last drop. I pulled a pad of paper out of a drawer for the pencil on the table.
Delilah batted the pencil around. Other than hunting for toes under the bedsheets and covers, this was the closest she came to exercising her primitive instincts. After I lifted the receiver from the handset and stretched the cord out, I stole the pencil back from her.
Bonnie’s choice of phone in the room was a Touch Tone. We were a mixed house. We had two phones, one rotary and one push-button, and two television sets. We lived better than most people, and I didn’t take it for granted. We talked about subscribing to HBO, but I told her cable-tv had been around since I was born, and I wasn’t about to cough up six bucks a month and rent a box and have some stranger install wiring for reception. I heard HBO used microwave to send out the signal, and I read somewhere that microwaves caused cancer and triggered malfunctions in pacemakers. When I told Bonnie HBO received three-fifty of those six dollars, I reminded her they were earning a better return than most of Mr. B’s shylocks on the street. I also didn’t want to watch the same damn movie on rotation. I like Paul Newman, but I wasn’t about to watch him and Henry Fonda in Sometimes a Great Notion and reach the point where I could recite all their lines from memory. If I’d wanted repetition, I’d watch the Million Dollar Movie of the Week. She said I was retro, the only person she knew who called a sofa a davenport.
Dot answered. She was alert and oriented to my voice.
“This is another first for you, Mr. Cleary. A woman caller.”
“Did she leave a message?”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself, Mr. Cleary. I want to enjoy this.”
“By all means,” I said.
“She called herself Maverick.”
“A name then. Anything cryptic for a message? You enjoy cryptic, Dot.”
“You’ve had your morning coffee, haven’t you?”
“What did she say?”
Dot provided me with the date and time first. “I’m curious,” she said to extend her gratification. “Does the name Maverick mean anything to you?”
“It does. The message, please.”
“She says she’s made contact but would like for you to call her pronto. Pen and paper ready?”
“Let’s have it.”
Dot recited the number and said, “Made contact sounds like something out of a Graham Greene novel. I recently reread The Quiet American.”
“If people had read it, I think we might’ve avoided Vietnam.”
“True. Some days I like End of An Affair, and other days, The Power and the Glory.”
“Interesting contrast,” I said. “I pegged you for comedy, for his Our Man in Havana. I didn’t think someone from Ohio would be so dark.”
“You haven’t been to Cleveland, have you, Mr. Cleary? Anything else?”
“Yeah, there is.” I put the pencil down. “You’re a good judge of voices and character. What was your read of Maverick over the phone?”
“Jimmy Hoffa would’ve been scared of her. Will that be all?”
I thanked Dot and hung up. I looked down at the paper, at my notes and handwriting. I was a long way from the Palmer Method of handwriting. I’d abandoned cursive for print so I could read my own writing later.
Maverick did say I was listed in the phonebook, and she did let her fingers do the walking. I pressed the numbers, one by one, with a sense of dread and a thought from the Bard’s Love’s Labour’s Lost: ‘A hope for a low heaven.’
She answered. Not even eight am, and I could hear last night’s smoke and whiskey in her voice. I said my hello, and she said, “Morning, Mr. Cleary. Remember me?”
“To forget you is impossible. I received your message.”
“Thought you’d like to know, I have something for your lady friend.”
“You have her card,” I said. “It’s best for our mutual friend to speak with her. It makes life less complicated for both of us. Legal reasons.”
“Oh, I understand, Mr. Cleary, but you’ve heard of nothing for nothing.”
“The Billy Preston song?”
“Cute, Mr. Cleary. Now, I need you to do something for me. Quid pro quo.”
Maverick yammered on about a young man and how she’d appreciate it if I were to use my street charms on him. I clenched my eyes, as I didn’t need or want Excedrin this early in the day. The kid, she said, was a good kid. Weren’t they all? She provided context, like a social worker in Family Court. I responded with questions of my own. “This kid you’re talking about attends Boston Latin?”
“Correct.”
“And he has a scholarship at the school, and he’s fast-tracked to a good college?”
She said, come hell and the proverbial high water, this wild child would not become some street urchin in a Dickens novel. It was doctor or lawyer, house in the burbs, picket fence, dog, and the two-point-two kids.
“Let me guess, someone has mapped out his life for him.”
“You say that as if it were a horrible thing, Mr. Cleary.”
“It’s what every immigrant has done to his kids for the last two generations. The story is as old as the Prodigal Son. Perhaps the family pressure explains why the young man is acting out.”
“I don’t care, Mr. Cleary. He can thank us later.”
“Us?”
“He’s my sister’s kid. I want you to scare him straight, okay.”
“Not for anything, I’d think you could do that job yourself.”
“I’ve got a soft spot, and I can’t, plus it’s not my place.”
“Imagine that, you and a soft spot. Why isn’t it your place?”
“My sister would get in the way.”
“She’s that protective?”
“Put it this way, I’m the more pleasant of the two options.”
All I was thinking was that the world was too much with nephews.
“And may I ask, where’s this kid’s father?”
“Out of the picture. They’re divorced, like everybody else these days. He’ll listen to persuasion and authority. What do you say, Mr. Cleary?”
“Give me some leads where I can find this nephew of yours, and I’ll have a talk with him if I find him.”
She gave me two locations, and times she’d thought I’d find him there. Maverick had done most of the grunt work, which saved me some aggravation. She gave me a description.
“You give me a call either way.”
I told her, “I’m no Father Flanagan, and I don’t run a Boys Town.”
“Cute again, but you’re no Spencer Tracy, Mr. Cleary, and one more thing.”
I waited without saying a word.
She said, “Young men don’t always understand words.”
“Be glad you didn’t have nieces.”
“Thank God,” she said and promised to uphold her end of the bargain.
Tammy Costa would contact Bonnie today.
I didn’t mind playing the heavy. What I did mind, however, was her use of quid pro quo. I wish to hell people realized that, while the Latin translation was legit, ‘This for That’ never existed in classical literature. The closest the ancients came to the contractual expression was Do ut des, and that was between Man and deity. And don’t get me started on God, because He doesn’t exist in the Old Testament. It was either Yahweh, or the untranslatable Adonai, or Elohim.
The kid in question was Italian and addled with hormones. He didn’t have the fever for girls, she said, and I believed her. I understood the problem.
Boston Latin went coed in ’72, which coincided with the court mandate to desegregate schools throughout the city. On paper, it was an ideal, but on the streets, violence. Neither the school’s founding Puritans, nor Bostonians after them, had ever expected to see black and white kids share the same classroom. Boston was the last city in the country to end racial segregation.
Boston Latin had other troubles. While the graduates of the hallowed halls of BLS boasted of legacies and Old Money, nobody had opened the coffers in centuries to update the place. Most of the physical plant was in a state of disrepair. Paint peeled from the pipes, and the commissary was one chair short of a prison cafeteria. All of this was conducive to an insurrection, on par with the one seen at Attica in ’71.
This young man was the only child of a single mom and weighed down like he was a member of the Chicago Outfit sitting on the dock of the bay, his feet inside a bucket of cement. The kid was drowning in family expectations heaped on him. He was the trophy for their deferred dreams.
To me, he was a typical male teenager, a peacock in the yard. Two notable exceptions, though. One, he was playing hooky and roamed black neighborhoods and attacked black kids with a ‘friend.’ Two, male students from Boston Latin, whether they came from money or not, had a reputation for being able to carry themselves. Whether it was in town proper or at shindig on the Cape or the Vineyard, they owned the room when they walked in. They were tough, and they could back it up.
I found him in Roxbury. He was a long way from Avenue Louis Pasteur and the hallways of the oldest school in America, an institution one year older than Harvard University.
He was doing his best imitation of James Dean, acting cool in front of his friend, the guy who owned the car behind him and who came from money. The choice of car made that plain.
Jimmy Dean saw me coming and put his back against the door, his hands inside his jacket. Another cold winter day in Boston, and this idiot had chosen to wear a black leather jacket. I assumed he and Sal Mineo next to him had tossed their school blazer and tie onto the backseat of the Trans Am. I shook my head. The perils of testosterone.
Dean stepped up to the mark. “Whataya want?”
“A civil conversation. Alone.”
I glanced at the black car behind him, and not in admiration. His buddy said. “You’ve seen the wheels, now bug off.”
“Your car?” I asked, and he didn’t answer. I asked, “A question for you then.”
“What?”
He was abrupt, and I was trying to establish a rapport. It was interrogatives with the question marks on my end, the chewing gum, and attitude, on his. I was about to make the conversation turn the corner.
“Couldn’t you have picked a car that didn’t scream stupid so loud?”
James Dean took a step forward. “What’s your problem, old man?”
“My problem? You two are my problem. You two are morons, though you think you’re tough. You cruise through Rox and dip into Dot for victims, and think nobody is onto you? I’m here to tell you two you’re not as bright as you think you are. Masterminds, you are not.”
“Says you,” Dean replied.
His friend laughed like the cartoon dog Muttley. “You laughing at me?” I said.
“What, you doing De Niro from Taxi Driver now? Yeah, I’m laughing at you.”
I pointed to the buildings, all the public housing. I took two steps toward my Jimmy Dean, my rebel without a cause, close enough but not within reach of a swing. No matter the age, you never trusted someone with their hands inside their pockets.
“Take a look around, genius. Someone in any one of these buildings will be waiting for you here one morning, and your friend’s car behind you will be on the news, found abandoned and stripped, and there will be no sign of you. If they find you, it’ll be you rolled up inside a rug, left out in the yard here for the rats at night.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Think about what’s on the line here, kid.”
The friend mouthed off. “You the Neighborhood Watch, or what?”
“I’m nobody to you, so fuck off,” I answered, my eyes intent on the kid I came for.
Sal Mineo had played John ‘Plato’ Crawford in the movie. Likewise, this kid started philosophizing on all the damage he’d do to me and how Medicare and Medicaid would be paying all the medical bills for decades. He ended the tirade with, “You’re nothing but white trash.”
I turned my head and looked at the kid. “I’m white trash? Is that the best you’ve got? You don’t even know your own history.”
“What history are you talking about, man?”
I pointed to the buildings and windows again. Mentioned the red bricks.
“Your people used to live here, in Roxbury, and in your other hunting ground, Dorchester. That’s right, that’s where all the wealthy white people used to live. Your people tore everything down, so there would be nothing for nobody. The people who live here now have never forgotten that. They may be poor and black, but they know history, most of it not written down. The one thing you have in common with your ancestors is you’re a spider, like them. You drain all the blood out of the living.”
I pointed at Maverick’s nephew. “Stay inside his web, and you’ll have no life. No opportunities, nothing.”
Mineo lunged at me. I stepped back, turned sideways, grabbed the hair on the back of his head, and kicked his feet out from under him. I rested my heel on his throat after he’d hit the asphalt.
I heard the click of a switchblade open. James Dean in front of me had taken his hand out from inside his jacket, so I returned the courtesy. I caught the wrist, twisted it, then drove the forearm of my other arm into the back of his elbow. He heard the first crunch and then the second one when I yanked down on the captured wrist. The knife fell, he screamed, and I kicked the blade away.
I stood over both of them and told them to get their asses back to school the next day.
I backpedaled and left the scene to the sounds of persons unknown clapping from their windows. I’d taken the strut out of the peacocks in the yard.