A Drink Before the War Page 12

  “Do what?”

  She turned her head, met my eyes. “The gorgeous stuff. Don’t do that anymore. Not now.”

  I said, “Well gee, Mom…”

  She swiveled the chair all the way around to face me, her legs coming off the windowsill. “And don’t do that shit either. That ‘Well gee, Mom…’ like you’re being innocent. You’re not being innocent.” She looked out the window for a moment, then back at me. “You can be some kind of asshole sometimes, Patrick. You know that?”

  I put my beer down on the corner of the desk. “Where is this coming from?”

  “It’s just coming,” she said. “OK? It’s not easy…It’s not…I come here every day from my fucking…home, and I just want…Jesus. And I, I have to deal with you calling me ‘gorgeous’ and hitting on me like it’s a goddamned reflex action and looking at me the way you do and I…just…want it to stop.” She rubbed her face harshly with her hands and ran them back through her hair, groaning.

  I said, “Ange—”

  “Don’t Ange me, Patrick. Don’t.” She kicked a lower drawer of her desk. “You know, between men like Sterling Mulkern the fat fuck, and Phil, and you, I just don’t know.”

  It felt like there was a poodle lodged in my throat, but I managed to say, “Don’t know what?”

  “Anything!” She dropped her face into her hands, then looked up again. “I just don’t know anymore.” She stood up hard enough to spin her chair a full revolution and walked toward the door. “And I’m sick of being asked the fucking questions.” She walked out.

  The sound of her heels echoed off the steps like bullets, cracking upward and through the doorway. I felt a heavy ache behind my eyes, the steel spikes of a grate that had its back to a dam.

  The sound of her heels stopped. I looked out the window, but she wasn’t outside. The scraped beige paint of her car roof shone dully under the streetlight.

  I took the stairs three at a time in the dark, the steep narrow space curving and dropping in a black rush before me. She was standing a few feet past the bottom step, leaning against a confessional. A lit cigarette stood straight out between her lips and she was placing the lighter back in her purse when I rounded the bend.

  I stopped dead and waited.

  She said, “Well?”

  I said, “Well what?”

  “This conversation sounds like it’s going to be a winner.”

  I said, “Please, Angie, give me a break here. This sort of is coming out of the clear blue sky to me.” I caught my breath as she watched me with opaque eyes, the kind that told me a challenge had been issued and I’d better figure out what it was, quick. I said, “I know what’s wrong—about Mulkern, Phil, me. You got a lot of asshole men in—”

  “Boys,” she said.

  “OK,” I said. “A lot of asshole boys in your life right now. But, Ange, what’s wrong?”

  She shrugged and flicked an ash on the marble floor. “Probably burn in hell for that.”

  I waited.

  “Everything’s wrong, Patrick. Everything. When I thought about you almost dying yesterday, it made me think of a lot of other things too. And, I mean, Jesus Christ—this is my life? Phil? Dorchester?”—she swept her hand around the church—“This? I come to work, I fend you off, you have your fun, I go home, get slapped around once or twice a month, make love to the bastard sometimes the same night, and…that’s all? That’s who I am?”

  “Nobody says it has to be.”

  “Oh, right, Patrick. I’ll become a brain surgeon.”

  “I can—”

  “No.” She dropped her cigarette on the marble, ground it out. “It’s a game to you. It’s—‘I wonder how she is in bed?’ And then, once you know, you move on.” She shook her head. “This is my life. No game.”

  I nodded.

  She smiled, a rueful one, and in the little bit of light that shone through the green stained glass to my right I could see that her eyes were wet. She said, “Remember what it used to be like?”

  I nodded again. She was talking about before. Before, when there weren’t any limits. Before, when this place was a slightly drab, slightly bluesy romantic locale, and not a simple reality.

  She said, “Who would’ve thought, right? Kinda funny, huh?”

  “No,” I said.

  17

  Bubba never made it to my office that night. Typical.

  He came to my apartment the next morning while I was deciding what to wear to Jenna’s funeral. He sat on my bed as I worked on my tie and said, “You look like a fag with that tie.”

  I said, “Didn’t you know?” and blew him a kiss.

  Bubba moved a foot down the bed. “Don’t even fucking kid about that, Kenzie.”

  I considered pushing it, seeing how antsy I could make him. But pushing Bubba is a good way to find out real quick how well you fly, so I went back to working on my tie.

  Bubba is an absolute anachronism in these times—he hates everything and everybody except Angie and myself, but unlike most people of similar inclination, he doesn’t waste any time thinking about it. He doesn’t write letters to the editor or hate mail to the president, he doesn’t form groups or stage marches or consider his hate as anything other than a completely natural aspect of his world, like breathing or the shot glass. Bubba has all the self-awareness of a carburetor and takes even less notice of anyone else—unless they get in his way. He’s six feet four inches, 235 pounds of raw adrenaline and disassociated anger. And he’d shoot anyone who blinked at me the wrong way.

  I prefer not to consider this loyalty too closely, which is fine with Bubba. As for Angie, well, Bubba once promised to sever each of Phil’s limbs and put them back on again—backward—before we talked him out of it. We promised him, swore to God in fact, that we’d take care of it some day and call him before we did. He relented. He called us losers and shitheads and every other expletive you can think of, but at least we didn’t have a Murder One Conspiracy hanging over our heads.

  The world according to Bubba is simple—if it aggravates you, stop it. By whatever means necessary.

  He reached into his denim trench coat and tossed two guns onto my bed. “Sorry I was late.”

  “No problem,” I said.

  He said, “I got some missiles you could use.”

  I considered the knot in my tie, kept my breathing regular. “Missiles?” I said.

  “Sure,” he said. “Got a couple of stingers would fix those homeboys just right.”

  Very slowly I said, “But, Bubba, wouldn’t they take out, like, half a neighborhood while they were at it?”

  He thought about that for a second. “What’s your point?” he said. He stuck his hands behind his head and leaned back on the bed. “So, you interested or what?”

  “Maybe later,” I said.

  He nodded. “Cool.” He reached into his jacket again and I waited for him to pull out an antitank gun or some claymores. He tossed four grenades on my bed. “In case,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said like I understood, “those could probably come in handy.”

  “Fucking A right,” he said. He stood up. “You’re good for the cost of the guns, right?”

  I eyed him in the mirror and nodded. “I can pay you later this afternoon if you really need it.”

  “Nah. I know where you live.” He smiled. Bubba’s smile has been known to induce month-long periods of insomnia. He said, “You call me, day or night, you need anything.” He stopped at the bedroom door. “A beer soon?”

  “Oh,” I said, “absolutely.”

  “Righteous.” He waved and left.

  I felt like I always felt after Bubba left—like something hadn’t exploded.

  I finished with the tie and crossed to the bed. In between the grenades were two guns—a .38 Smith and a nickle-plated Browning Hi-Power nine millimeter. I put on my suit jacket, slipped the Browning into my holster. I put the .38 in the pocket of the jacket and appraised myself in the mirror. The swelling on my face had gone down a
nd my lips were semihealed. The tissue around my eye had yellowed and the scrapes on my face were starting to fade to pink. I was still no dream date, but I wasn’t in the running for the Elephant Man contest, either. I could go out in public without fear of pointed fingers and muffled giggles. And if not, I was packing serious heat; anyone giggled, I’d shoot him.

  I looked at the grenades. Didn’t have a clue what to do with them. I had the feeling that if I left the house, they’d roll off the bed, take out the entire building. I picked them up, gingerly, and put them in the fridge. Anyone broke in to steal my beer, they’d know I meant business.

  Angie was sitting on her steps when I pulled up. She wore a white blouse and a pair of black pants that tapered at her ankles. She was looking like a dream date, but I didn’t mention it.

  She got in the car and we drove for quite a while without a word. I’d purposely put a Screaming Jay Hawkins tape in the player, but she didn’t so much as flinch. Angie likes Screaming Jay about as much as she likes being called a chick. She smoked a cigarette and stared out at the landscape of Dorchester as if she’d just emigrated here.

  The tape ended as we entered Mattapan, and I said, “That Screaming Jay, he’s good enough to play twice. Heck, I might just rip out the eject button, play him for eternity.”

  She chewed a hangnail.

  I ejected Screaming Jay and replaced him with U2. The tape usually rocks Angie in her seat, but today it might as well have been Steve and Edie; she sat there like she’d had lithium with her morning coffee.

  We were on the Jamaica Plain Parkway and the Dublin boys were into “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” when Angie said, “I’m working some things out. Give me time.”

  “I can deal with that.”

  She turned on the seat, tucking her hair behind her ear in the wind. “Just lay off the ‘gorgeous’ stuff for a little while, the invitations to your shower, things like that.”

  “Old habits die hard,” I said.

  “I’m not a habit,” she said.

  I nodded. “Touché. You want to take some time off maybe?”

  “No way.” She tucked her left leg under her right. “I love the job. I just need to work through things and I need your support, Patrick, not your flirtations.”

  I held out my right hand. “You got it.” I almost tacked a “gorgeous” to the end of that, but thankfully, I didn’t. Mama Kenzie may have raised a fool, but she didn’t raise no suicide.

  She took my hand, shook it. “Bubba catch up with you?”

  “Uh-huh. He brought you a present.” I reached into my pocket, handed her the .38.

  She hefted it. “He’s so sentimental sometimes.”

  “He offered us the use of a couple of stingers, in case there’s a country we want to overthrow anytime soon.”

  “I hear the beaches in Costa Rica are nice.”

  “Costa Rica it is then. You speak Spanish?”

  “I thought you did.”

  “I failed it,” I said. “Twice. Not the same thing.”

  “You speak Latin.”

  “OK, we’ll overthrow Ancient Rome.”

  The cemetery was coming up on our left and Angie said, “Jesus Christ.”

  I looked as I made the turn onto the main road. We’d expected the sort of funeral cleaning ladies usually get—one rung higher than a pauper’s—but there were cars everywhere. A bunch of beat-up street sleds, a black BMW, a silver Mercedes, a Maserati, a couple of RX-7s, then a full squadron of police cruisers, the patrolmen standing out of their units watching the grave site.

  Angie said, “You sure this is the right place?”

  I shrugged and pulled over onto the lawn, completely confused. We left the Porsche and crossed the lawn, pausing a couple of times when Angie’s heel caught the soft soil.

  The minister’s baritone was calling upon the Lord our God to welcome his child, Jenna Angeline, into the Kingdom of Heaven with the love of a father for a true daughter of the spirit. His head was down as he spoke, peering at the coffin that sat on brass runners over the deep black rectangle. He was the only one looking at it, though. Everyone else was too busy looking at each other.

  The group on the southern side of the coffin was headed by Marion Socia. He was taller than he’d appeared in the photograph, his hair shorter, tight curls hugging an oversize head. He was thinner, too, the thin of adrenaline burn. His slim hands twitched constantly by his sides, as if grasping for the trigger of a gun. He was wearing a simple black suit with white shirt and black tie, but it was expensive material—silk, I guessed.

  The boys behind him were dressed exactly the same, their suits of varying quality, deteriorating steadily the farther back they stood from Socia and the grave. There were at least forty of them, the whole group in a taut, structured formation behind its leader. A conspicuous air of Spartan devotion. None of them, except Socia, looked much over seventeen, and some didn’t look old enough to have had an erection yet. They all stared beyond the grave in the same direction as Socia, their eyes devoid of youth or movement or emotion, flat and clear and focused.

  The object of their attention was on the other side of the grave, directly across from Socia. A black kid, as tall as Socia, but more solid, his body the healthy hard that a male achieves only before the age of twenty-five. He wore a black trench coat over a midnight blue shirt, buttoned at the top, no tie. His pants were pleated charcoal with light blue specks woven into the fabric. He had a single gold earring hanging from his left ear and his hair was cut in a sloping high-top fade, the sides of his head cropped extremely close, matching stripes cut into what little hair remained there. The back of his head was shorn just as close and something had been carved there too. From my vantage point, I couldn’t be positive, but it looked like the shape of Africa. He held a black umbrella in his hand, pointed at the ground, even though the sky was about as cloudy as freshly blown glass. Behind him was another army: thirty of them, all young, all dressed semiformal, but not a tie among them.

  The first white person we noticed was Devin Amronklin. He was standing a good fifteen yards behind the second group, chatting with three other detectives, all four of them flashing their eyes back and forth between the two gangs and the cops on the road.

  Beyond all of this, facing the foot of the coffin, I noticed a few older women, two men dressed in the clothes of State House sanitary personnel, and Simone. Simone was staring at us when we noticed her and she held the look for a solid minute before looking off at the firm elms that surrounded the cemetery. Nothing about her look suggested she’d come past me on the way out, invite me over for tea and a healing racial debate.

  Angie took my hand and we walked over to Devin. He gave us each a curt nod, but didn’t say anything.

  The minister finished his eulogy and hung his head one last time. No one else followed suit. There was something alien about the stillness, something dangerously false and ponderous. A pigeon, gray and fat, swooped over the silence, small wings flapping fast. Then the crisp morning air cracked open with the mechanical whir of the coffin descending into the black rectangle.

  The two groups moved as one, fading forward ever so slightly like slim trees in the first gust of a storm. Devin put his hand on his hip, a quarter inch from his gun, and the other three cops did the same. The air in the cemetery seemed to suck into itself and disappear in its own vortex. A current of electricity streamed into its place, and my teeth felt like they were gritted into tin foil. A gear ground somewhere in the dark hole, but the coffin continued on down. In those few moments of some of the most severe quiet I’ve ever felt, I think if someone had sneezed they’d have spent the rest of the day shoveling bodies off the lawn.

  Then the kid in the trench coat took one step closer to the grave. Socia was a millisecond behind him, taking two steps to compensate. Trench Coat took the challenge and they reached the edge of the grave simultaneously, their bearings interchangeable, heads straight and immobile.

  Devin said, “Calm. Everyone. Calm,” in a
whisper.

  Trench Coat bent, a stiff squat, and picked up a white lily from a small pile by his feet. Socia did the same. They looked at each other as they extended their arms over the grave. The white lilies never quivered. They held their arms straight out, neither dropping his lily. A test whose limit only they knew. I didn’t see which of them opened his hand first but suddenly the lilies fell toward the grave in nearly weightless surrender.

  Each took two steps back from the grave.

  Now it was the gangs’ turn. They mimicked what Socia or Trench Coat had done, depending on their affiliation. By the time the line had dwindled to the lowest level members of each group, though, they were picking up the lilies and dropping them into the blackness in record time, barely taking a few precious moments to stare into each other’s eyes and show how unafraid they were. I heard the cops behind me begin breathing again.

  Socia had moved to the foot of the grave, hands folded together, staring at nothing. Trench Coat stood near the head, hand on his umbrella, eyes on Socia.

  I said to Devin, “OK to talk now?”

  He shrugged. “Sure.”

  Angie said, “The hell’s going on here, Devin?”

  Devin smiled. His face was only slightly colder to look at than the black hole everyone was dropping lilies into. “What’s going on,” he said, “is the beginning of the biggest bloodfest this city’s ever seen. It’ll make the Coconut Grove fire seem like a trip to EPCOT.”

  A block of ice the size of a baseball nestled against the base of my spine and chilled sweat slid past my ear. I turned my head and my eyes passed over the grave and locked with Socia’s. He was completely still, his eyes looking directly at me as if I weren’t there. I said, “He doesn’t seem too friendly.”

  Devin said, “You amputated the foot of his favorite lieutenant. I’d say he’s downright livid.”

  “Enough to kill me?” It wasn’t easy, but I continued to meet that sullen gaze that told me I’d already ceased to exist.

  “Oh, without a doubt,” Devin said.

  That’s Devin for you. All heart.

  “What’s my move?” I asked.