The gig couldn’t have been simpler: babysitting a Q-tip a breath away from being worm food. Chucky Bresler had practically grown up in the business, starting off doing security for his dad’s bar in Southie before moving off to the major clubs on Lansdowne Street. Breaking up fights between drunks didn’t bother him. All it took was a firm hand and a little muscle and you were good to go.
Usually.
The problem was the posers. Sure, they were easy to spot—guys wearing muscle shirts and gold chains or gang gear and flashing a lot of green and sauntering their pretty little selves around the club, acting like they owned the place and itching for trouble. Back in the day, before clubs made it mandatory for you to pass through a metal detector or get worked over head-to-toe with one of those handheld devices, these posers would think nothing of pulling a knife or worse, a gun. Chucky never had a gun pulled on him, but one time, this group of Mattapan punks decided to get into it at the club, and by the time Chuck broke it up, he had all three of them down for the count. He also had a switchblade stuck in his lower back.
The doctor had to cut him open to repair the punctured kidney. Thank the sweet Lord for painkillers. While Chucky lay in the hospital recouping, doped up on Percodan, this humongous black dude dressed in some seriously expensive threads waltzed in and said how impressed he was by the way Chucky handled himself the other night at the club. Dude’s name was Booker and he owned a private security company in downtown Boston. You interested in a full-time salary with health bennies, paid vacations and gym memberships? Hell yeah.
That was almost a decade ago, and during that time, Chucky, now forty-three, had carved out a nice life for himself, the only steady woman in his life a white pit bull named Snowball. Once in a while, when movie stars came to Boston to promote their latest piece of crap, Chucky would sometimes be called in for body detail for one of these cushy crowd-control jobs. Most of the time, though, he was called in to provide protection services for Mark Thompson’s clients, guys out on bail who basically needed a babysitter—like this dude Francis Jonah.
Since six P. M., Jonah had been sitting in the rocking chair with an afghan draped over his lap, staring out the window overlooking his backyard. It was now one in the morning and he was still up, still rocking and staring out the window. What was the point of sleeping when you knew you were dying, right? One look and you could tell the guy was on his way out:air tubes in the nostrils, portable oxygen tank on the floor, veins bulging from beneath his egg-white skin, that vacancy sign already hanging in his eyes. Chucky had seen that look so many times throughout his professional life he instantly recognized it.
“Get you something to eat or drink, Mr. Jonah?” Phil Debrussio asked. He was Chucky’s partner. When it came to these gigs, you always worked in pairs.
Jonah mumbled something under his breath.
“What’s that, Mr. Jonah?”
No answer. Not surprising either. Jonah liked to speak silently to himself, not hearing you or ignoring you, Chucky wasn’t sure which. The guy was probably praying. If you knew you were on your way out, you probably tended to pray your ass off, talk to the guy upstairs and make sure everything was in order.
Only this guy could pray twenty-four seven and it wasn’t going to make a lick of difference. After what he did to those three girls, this guy was destined for hotter climates.
“I’m going to make myself a sandwich,” Phil said to Chucky. “You want anything?”
Chucky shook his head and Phil stood up, walked down the hallway and disappeared into the kitchen. Chucky turned back to an article about the pros and cons of breast implants. The article was written from a medical perspective, interesting as hell, sure, but there was no mention about which kind men preferred.
“Your sister’s Sheila Bresler,” Jonah croaked in a wet voice.
Chucky shut his Newsweek and made sure his face was blank before he looked up. Jonah had stopped rocking; his head rested on the back of the rocker, his face turned to the side, Chucky sure those dreamy, faraway eyes were staring straight into his soul.
“That Globe article,” Jonah wheezed. “That was your sister. She died of a heroin overdose.”
The interview had run in the Globe about a month ago. The reporter was a buddy from the neighborhood who wanted to talk about the heroin epidemic in Southie, and Chucky had jumped on it, wanting everyone to know that his sister was more than a junkie who had died in a motel room.
“I understand. Sometimes the hurt can be too much for us to bear. The Lord understands that. The Lord doesn’t condemn, He embraces . Don’t hold onto the hurt. If you let it go, the Lord will free you. The Lord will heal you. Trust me.”
Chucky tossed the Newsweek on the end table and stood up, his knees cracking, and without a word walked out of the living room and into the kitchen.
Phil put down his sandwich. “What’s up?”
“Just stepping outside for a smoke.” Chucky picked his black Navy peacoat from the coat rack and shoved his arm in the sleeve, found it too small.
Not his coat; it was Jonah’s.
Right. Jonah had a similar coat to the one Chucky wore.
Phil said, “You’re as white as a sheet.”
“Can you take him up the stairs yourself?”
Phil looked insulted. “Chucky, the guy barely weighs a buck.”
“Grab some shuteye if you want to. I’ll take the first shift.”
Chucky picked up his coat, put it on and stepped out onto the back porch. Later, while he was in the hospital and after the doctors had stabilized the pain, he would think about how life could take a series of small and absolutely meaningless events and turn them into one big torpedo that seriously fucked up your life.
Morphine-induced psychosis. Jonah had trouble remembering where he left things like his glasses and keys, but his mind could, at any time, cough up memories from his childhood and month-old newspaper articles. Weird. Chucky had seen it happen before, to Trudy, his saint of a stepmother. When the breast cancer had finally taken hold of her organs, she’d sometimes have trouble remembering Chucky’s face. Then, out of nowhere, she’d start listing off the ingredients of a recipe she read in Good Housekeeping. The morphine just spit up these random bits, mixed them together, somehow made it a memory.
Good Lord the air felt good, so cool and sweet and clean. Spend an hour in that house, the windows shut and that baseboard heating percolating all of Jonah’s sneezes and coughs, and you started to appreciate fresh air. Right now, it was nice and quiet, no reporters parked on the street—at least none that he could see. For the moment, the stream of reporters had pretty much petered off. Last night, around this time, Jonah had decided to go out for a walk. Again he refused to use his walker. It sat where it always did, in the corner near the top of the stairs.
Chucky leaned forward, grabbed it and stretched out his back. First time Sheila overdosed, she was so weak she had to use a walker to get to the bathroom. She had undergone every kind of detox and gimmick under the sun; but in the end, she always went for the needle, loved the needle, and Chucky knew that. Deep down he knew it was only a matter of time before he had to say goodbye, so he prepared himself, thinking that early grieving, if there was such a thing, would somehow spare him from whatever horror was waiting for him down the road. Wrong. In the end, you still needed to grieve. You still had to make room for your losses and find a way to carry your love for that person without drowning in it. Chucky Bresler didn’t hear the dry flick of a lighter or see the jumping flame, but he did hear the solid crunch of footsteps running across snow. By the time he looked up, the glass bottle had shattered against the railing, splashing gasoline on his clothes and face, engulfing him in flames.