7
Trees Don’t Hit Back
Except for his parents’ movie marathons, Corey’s break from school was completely lacking in structure except for that provided by the weather: All the days but one were very cold, and it was very warm, to the point of being an anomaly. He didn’t have homework and he wasn’t working. The moratorium on calling Tom was still in effect. He was at loose ends. As much as possible, he went to see Adrian, who was on his break as well, though as always, Adrian was frequently occupied with his studies and couldn’t be disturbed, so Corey only saw him twice.
The first night he went to Cambridge, he found Adrian alone. Mrs. Reinhardt, who had an active schedule despite her cancer, had gone to visit friends. Both boys were happy to be unsupervised. Corey experienced a giddy sense of freedom as he stood in the big dark cold house with his friend looming above him on the stairs and the entire nighttime city awaiting them outside.
He said they ought to go to Harvard Square to look for girls.
Adrian said that, for once, he didn’t feel oppressed by the need for a woman because the first thing he’d done when his mother left the house that night was masturbate.
“Thanks for sharing.”
“Oh, that’s right. You don’t like to talk about that.” Unlike a lot of guys, Adrian admitted that he masturbated. He talked about it openly—incessantly—until it became an uncomfortable form of comedy. “I don’t see how anyone can resist it. Don’t you jack off?”
“I can’t deny it. But I want a real woman. Don’t you?”
“Well, if you could meet those needs another way, wouldn’t it be more efficient?”
“I’m not thinking about efficiency, I’m thinking about a girlfriend.”
“But how can you guarantee you’ll get one?”
“Of course I’ll get one.”
“How? You can’t just snap your fingers and make one appear.”
“I don’t know how. I’m just gonna try. I’m gonna get lucky.”
“I wish that would work for me.”
Corey was reminded that a few weeks ago, Adrian had told him that he knew a girl at Rindge, a big girl with a big rear end. She was five-foot-nine, she had full lips and long hair. In Adrian’s words, she had a “big beefcake” and he wanted to “pop it.” Adrian had heard through the grapevine that she was into him. People were saying she thought he had a hot body and was waiting for him to ask her out. What should he do? Corey had told him to go for it. Adrian had agreed (reluctantly, it had seemed to Corey) that maybe he should. But he didn’t want to mess this up. He knew what he was going to do: He was going to write down everything he was going to say to her beforehand.
“I’ll get three-by-five note cards and plan everything out.”
Corey had said he didn’t think that was a great idea.
Adrian had turned on him and glared. “Why not?”
It was the first time his friend had ever been angry at him and he didn’t know what to say. He wanted to say that scripting your date with a woman sounded like a surefire way to turn something alive and unpredictable into something dead, and above all, why would you even think of doing such a thing? But he held his tongue.
“No,” Adrian repeated firmly, as if Corey wasn’t even there, “that’s exactly what I’ll do. I’ll plan everything out beforehand.”
Shortly thereafter, Adrian had informed Corey that he had asked the girl out and she had accepted. But since then, Adrian hadn’t said a word about their date. Remembering it now, Corey asked him how his date had gone.
“Oh, that. Not well.”
Adrian had picked her up after class and they’d taken a walk to Inman Square. On the way, he worked through his preplanned conversation points. It was going well, he thought, but then she changed things; she wanted to get pizza, so of course he had to say okay. They went into a pizza place. She ordered a slice and they sat down. She crossed her big legs and ate her pizza. He tried to adapt to the situation by talking about the pizza place, but there wasn’t much to say. “I could tell she was losing interest. It got really awkward.” She wiped her fingers and her big mouth with her napkin and said she was ready to go back to school; her friends were waiting. He had to walk her the four long hedgerow-lined blocks back to their high school campus. When they got there, she was just like “Thanks, bye.” Adrian had waved at her as she walked away from him, saying, “Happy trails”—speaking to her thick rear end.
“How do you know that’s bad?” Corey asked. “She might be waiting for you to ask her out again.”
“No, she isn’t. I got shot down.”
“Don’t let it get you down.”
“I don’t. I don’t set high expectations so I don’t get disappointed.”
However, Adrian was not a virgin.
“I am. I’m counting the hours till I do it. It’s gotta be incredible. What’s it like?”
“It’s better than jacking off because you’re kind of like—unh!—on top of her. But it doesn’t feel as good as your hand. There are all these grooves in your hand.”
“Shit, it’s gotta be way better than your hand.”
“No, take my word for it. It’s not.”
Instead of going to Harvard Square, Adrian suggested, Corey could watch him hit the bag. He took his G-Shock watch and led the way downstairs, unlocked the garage, turned on the light. A sledgehammer stood on its solid metal head among shovels and rakes. On the concrete floor rested an Everlast punching bag. It was very hard to move, as if it had absorbed weight from the earth. Corey bear-hugged it and walked it out and dropped it in the driveway.
They hung the bag on a tree growing out of a grass-covered patch on a traffic island between Mount Auburn and an intersecting road. Adrian began preparing, wrapping his hands with long bloodstained strips of elastic cloth that resembled Ace bandages. They reeked with the urine-stink of dried sweat. His knuckles were perpetually scabbed and bleeding. Because he never gave them time to heal, they had developed fleshy wartlike growths.
Corey wandered around on the black grass in the freezing New England night, trying to stay warm.
His eye fell on Adrian’s big red boxing gloves. He tried them on. They were damp and cold inside and full of fungus. He stood sideways and raised the gloves. They felt huge on either side of his head. He closed in on the hanging bag and started hitting. The bag gradually tilted away from the pressure of his punches. When he relented, it swung the other way.
He tired himself out after a minute.
“How’d I do?” he asked.
He took off the gloves and held them for Adrian. Adrian shoved his fists inside. Corey clipped the iPod that played death metal to the headband of Adrian’s black ball cap, took his G-Shock watch, hit the timer, yelled, “Go,” and Adrian exploded.
The eighty-pound bag folded when he hit it where your face would be. The bag jumped as if someone had thrown it and came down on its chains. The report of leather hitting leather cracked across the street and flew above the trees. Adrian’s other fist hit the bag, folding it the other way.
He did three rounds, separated by a minute’s rest, during which he stared at the pitch-black treetops, the music chugging in his ears. Cars went by, no few of them driven by people associated with Harvard University—often lone women with Quaker haircuts. But towards the end of Adrian’s workout, a construction worker’s truck stopped at the light, and the man at the wheel called out to the boys, “Trees don’t hit back!”
The light changed and he drove away.
“Let me see how hard you hit,” Corey shouted.
Adrian took off his iPod. “Did you say something to that guy?”
“He was saying ‘Trees don’t hit back.’ ”
The boys guffawed together.
“Have you been in a lot of street fights down in Quincy?” Adrian asked.
“No.”
Adrian said he loved street fights. He turned his ball cap backwards on his head just to talk about them, but he hadn’t been in any either.
He went back to Quincy, where the movie marathon was still ongoing. Leonard and his mother were sitting on the futon, staring at the laptop. Corey ate his mother’s leftovers, sitting on the floor in the space between them and watched whatever they were watching until he fell asleep.
The next day, the meteorological fluke, he went back to Cambridge and sat with Adrian while he studied physics at his desk. The skylight was filled with blue sky and the room was filled with shining white radiance—and, gradually, as the morning passed, with heat. It was a beautiful warm day outside. Corey told his friend, “We’ve got to get out there.”
Adrian finally agreed they could leave the house. But first he had to solve another physics problem, which took another hour, and then he couldn’t leave until he had gotten dressed a specific way: in kneepads, wrestling shoes, cup and jockstrap, sweatpants and leather jacket. Corey was surprised by everything he had to wear.
By now it was noon and downright hot. They headed towards Belmont, a direction Adrian chose at random—it was difficult to steer him—then turned and cut at random through wooded side streets. Sweating, Corey carried his jacket. Adrian walked with his large head down, armored in his leather as if he didn’t feel the heat, talking about ideas. At the Alewife Brook Parkway, they turned south and hiked down Mass Ave. They walked for hours, circling through the district until after sundown.
They arrived at Harvard Square. The Pit was full of people. Skate kids sat on the ring of granite around the T. The night air was soft and thick with mystery and excitement. The trees thought it was spring—they were budding—and girls and women had come out on the street in skirts and heels.
Corey stopped. Adrian halted next to him like a terminator robot with his muscles flexed.
“What is it?”
Corey had been stricken by the sight of a brunette with a shapely solidity. The fullness of her legs glowed through her stretched black stockings.
“Man, I really want to talk to her.”
“Oh sure, that’s a good idea. All you’re going to do is feed her ego. Then she’s going to tell you to get lost and laugh about it with her friends.”
“I gotta do this. Just look at her.”
“Take my advice: Don’t.”
“Be right back.”
Corey went across The Pit. The woman was polite enough to let him say hello. Her face reminded him of Joan’s, only better cared for. She didn’t think it would be a good idea to give him her number because she had a boyfriend. Corey told her she was beautiful. She saw how young he looked, his blushing and his freckles, the Patriots jacket tied around his waist. She wished him luck. He told her she was beautiful again and walked away.
Adrian had disappeared.
Still smiling, Corey bounded up on the stained granite wall where the skaters were sitting and looked around. He finally made out the black-jacketed figure of his friend standing stock-still, as if mesmerized by something inscrutable, on the outermost edge of the square, facing into traffic.
Corey ran over. “Hey, man.”
Adrian took hold of a traffic sign. “Hmm, let me see. What would the forces be? Is this a rigid body? No, not quite. I can bend it. Now, I can exert a force of about eight hundred foot-pounds. Convert to newton-meters. Measure the length of the lever—” He measured off a length of the signpost with his forearm. “Say, one meter. Torque equals force times l. If the impact comes from this angle, let’s see, mass times velocity, an inelastic collision…”
“You were right. She didn’t want me.”
“What did I tell you?”
“But she was really nice. What are you doing?”
“I’m seeing what would happen if this hit someone in the ribs at one hundred miles an hour.”
“What should we do now?”
Adrian suggested they go down into the T. “So soon?” said Corey; he hadn’t planned on going home yet. But Adrian said they could talk down there; they could watch the trains. They did, and Adrian was happy. The subways gave him such a sense of power. “Ahh! Listen to that!” he said when the Red Line T roared in. He delivered a slow-motion left hook to an invisible target in the air in time with the train’s arrival, a faraway look in his eyes, full of wonder and beatitude.
After Corey had left to see his friend that morning, Gloria found herself alone in Quincy. By nine, the house was growing hot. She opened a window, which was hard with her weak hands. Leonard wasn’t there to help. He had gotten up before everyone and driven away, presumably to work. She thought he was coming back, if for no other reason than to discuss her disease. It engaged him, he assured her.
“Let’s see the power of the rational approach,” he said of her illness. “I’m a great believer in the miracle of science.”
“I want to believe in a miracle. I need one.”
Then he had gone, leaving her brooding about their history:
That cold clear day in the fall of 1993, he had told her she was attractive. She had closed her book and followed him out of the student union, through the lobby, up a stair beneath a skylight, down a hall, a checkerboard of black steel doors, the silence absolute except for purring ventilation. He had thick workingman’s forearms and the keys to all the doors. She swung along next to him in her ragamuffin dress and riot girl boots. They went into an empty laboratory and he showed her an equation.
Afterwards, she straightened her dress and they went for a drive in his economy stick shift. He drove very fast through streets she’d never seen. He took her for an Italian sub soaked in vinegar and oil at a deli called a spa. Peppers squirted out of her sandwich when she bit it. “Are we in Somerville?” she asked. She didn’t know where they were.
Their romance involved a lot of driving. It was a time of blue maritime skies and windy days, hard rock on the car radio, dark nights, streetlights and perpetual motion. He knew all the byways, all the one-ways. He drove bent over the wheel, looking up through the windshield at the signal, hand on the stick, rolling through the stop, checking sideways traffic, going early against the red—complaining how the city was run: in a manner that interfered with common people and catered to elites. She sat in the passenger seat, sunk deep, impressed with him, and smoking.
He gunned them through an endless maze of houses—seemingly undifferentiatable—no commerce except the odd corner store. She didn’t know how he told his way. He took her through East Cambridge up the Fellsway north of the Mystic River along an industrial route from Everett into Chelsea, to an Italian restaurant in East Boston that smelled like frying garlic.
When she was with him, she never quite knew where she was. They’d be speeding over a bridge, then suddenly the familiar city would appear again like magic—the student/tourist part—the Prudential and the Common, Copley Plaza, the Charles River, the CITGO sign in Kenmore Square. He took her home to Mission Hill, where she was staying among poor blacks and white bohemians.
On their excursions, he told her the inside story of the city, the Boston lore—the dirt on the universities, on Mayor Menino, the union contract disputes, the way the city really ran. Stephen “the Rifleman” Flemmi, Raymond Patriarca—there were names you couldn’t say out loud in certain places. The president of the State Senate was the brother of Whitey Bulger, the crime figure who had killed his underage girlfriend with the help of Kevin Weeks.
Leonard killed her with possibility.
One night in 1993, Leonard drove Gloria to a spot behind the Blue Line train tracks in Revere and pointed in the darkness. “See that?”
“What?” she asked. The ocean was crashing on the shore. He said nothing. They sat for quite some time in silence. The train went by on its way to Wonderland.
“This place gets dangerous at night.”
She asked why they were here.
Had she heard about the woman who had gone missing? “Her name was Marie.”
“What happened to her?”
“Do you really want to know?”
When she said yes, he drove her to Malden and stopped outside a house like any other on a street that terminated in a public park.
“The guy who lives in that house killed her. His name is John Nunzio. He’s my neighbor.”
Over the course of their affair, Leonard brought Gloria to Malden and showed her the place where he lived across from the murderer on several occasions. The street was cluttered with houses—turquoise, white and brown like a collection of hen’s eggs—showing signs of disrepair. One had a flat roof, its neighbor a pitched roof. The street itself zigzagged side to side and up and down, giving the vista a jumbled, chaotic appearance. On the outside, Leonard’s house was no different from the others.
He brought Gloria inside. It was empty and large. There was only one room that had anything in it—his bedroom. He slept on a mattress on the floor. He had a desk, chair, dense books full of math. In his closet, there were uniforms. A mimeographed study guide for the police test lay on a Formica table in the kitchen, a room of blistering paint over rotting cabinetry, which smelled like earwigs and termites. He turned out the lights so she could see. She looked out his blinds at his neighbor the murderer’s house across the street.
The woman had been killed that summer. The cops’ efforts to tie John Nunzio to Marie Sacramonti’s disappearance were failing due to lack of evidence. They knew he was guilty but couldn’t prove it. John had an alibi. On the night of the crime, he had been at his job in front of witnesses. But Leonard assured Gloria that Nunzio was far from innocent. You only had to look into his eyes to see he was hiding a terrible secret. There was no question. But he would never serve a day in jail because he had hidden Marie’s body so well the cops would never find it.
Sooner or later, said Leonard, when the heat had blown over, John was going to move away, all the way out to the suburbs, away from all the police and the people of the neighborhood who thought ill of him. He had a place that no one knew about that belonged to his family, out west of the city.
As the nineties elapsed and Gloria’s relationship with him went through changes, eventually settling after Corey’s birth into a pattern of receiving visitations from the father, Leonard continued, from time to time, to raise the subject of the crime.
“We used to socialize,” he once said of Nunzio. “Obviously, there were limits to what we could talk about. If you tried to talk to John about ideas you’d lose him, but within the confines of his intellect, we had a good relationship. It helped that we were both Italian. The shared heritage meant we could both go to the café and order an espress’. We knew what was going on. Things like pizza and cannolis were standard fare to us. Now the rest of the world is just catching up and exploiting them commercially. But we could go to the old neighborhood and enjoy the culture because we were of it.
“His girlfriend, Marie, was a classic Italian beauty from the eighties era—the Stallone era. She had the heavy metal look they had back in the day. It’s too bad she was two-timing him. John was a very dangerous man—very sick and dangerous. I warned her, don’t get in a relationship with him if you aren’t one hundred percent sure of yourself because he’ll be able to tell.”
As years passed, Leonard revealed steadily increasing knowledge of Nunzio’s crime, claiming to see it in its entirety. He said he understood the killer.
“Knowing John, Marie’s death was more agonizing than it had to be. That’s what I lament.”
It seemed to Gloria that Leonard’s insight was so acute that he ought to share what he knew with law enforcement.
“Don’t forget, I am in law enforcement,” Leonard said. He had a statutory obligation to assist the investigation. He had fulfilled it by speaking to his contacts at other agencies, though he couldn’t make them act on his recommendations in an intelligent manner. If they ever did, they would crack the case.
“I’ve given them everything they need to do their job. The rest is up to them.”
The case remained infamous throughout the decade. Leonard was still talking about it at the turn of the millennium when Gloria was living with Joan in Cleveland Circle. By then, it was clear that Nunzio wasn’t going to be convicted for his crime, unless new evidence emerged—DNA perhaps.
In a bizarre coincidence—and proof that Boston is a small city—Joan once met someone in Revere who knew Nunzio and confirmed he was guilty. John’s evil—and the travesty of his having escaped justice—were the only things that Joan and Leonard ever agreed on.