Mystic River Read online

  Not all of them muttered “Homo” when he passed in the hall or used their tongues to push against the insides of their cheeks. In fact, a good number of Dave’s fellow students just ignored him. But in a way, that was worse. He felt marooned by the silence.

  If they ran into each other as they left their houses, Jimmy Marcus would sometimes walk silently alongside him to school because it would have been awkward not to, and he’d say, “Hey,” when he passed him in the hall or bumped into him on the line heading into class. Dave could see some odd mix of pity and embarrassment in Jimmy’s face those times their eyes met, as if Jimmy wanted to say something but couldn’t put it into words—Jimmy, at the best of times, never having been much of a talker unless he was suddenly itching with some insane idea to jump down on train tracks or steal a car. But it felt to Dave as if their friendship (and Dave wasn’t sure, in truth, that they’d ever really been friends; he remembered with a small shame all those times he’d had to press his companionship on Jimmy) had died when Dave climbed in that car and Jimmy had stayed planted on the street.

  Jimmy, as it turned out, wouldn’t be in school with Dave much longer, so even those walks together could eventually be avoided. At school, Jimmy had always hung out with Val Savage, a small, chimp-brained psycho who’d been kept back twice and could turn into this spinning, whirling dust storm of violence that scared the shit out of just about everyone, teachers and students alike. The joke about Val (though never spoken if he was around) was that his parents didn’t save for his college fund, they saved for his bail fund. Even before Dave had gotten in that car, Jimmy had always hung with Val once they reached school. Sometimes he’d allow Dave to tag along with them as they raided the cafeteria kitchen for snacks or found a new roof to climb, but after the car Dave was even shut out of that. When he wasn’t hating him for his sudden exile, Dave noticed that the dark cloud that sometimes seemed to hover over Jimmy had become a permanent thing, like a reverse halo. Jimmy just seemed older lately, sadder.

  He’d finally steal a car, though. It was almost a year after their first attempt on Sean’s street, and it got Jimmy expelled from the Looey & Dooey and bused halfway across the city to the Carver School so he could find out what life was like for a white kid from East Bucky in a mostly black school. Val would get bused along with him, though, and Dave heard that the two of them soon became the terror of the Carver, two white kids so crazy they didn’t know how to be scared.

  The car was a convertible. Dave heard rumors that it belonged to a friend of one of the teachers, though he never found out which one. Jimmy and Val stole it off the school lot while the teachers and their spouses and friends were having a year-end party in the faculty lounge after school. Jimmy was driving, and he and Val took it for a hell of a spin around Buckingham, beeping the horn and waving to girls, and gunning the engine until a police cruiser spotted them and they ended up totaling the car against a Dumpster behind the Zayres in Rome Basin. Val twisted an ankle getting out of the car, and Jimmy, already halfway up a fence that led to a vacant lot, came back to help him, Dave always seeing it in his mind as part war movie—the valiant soldier going back to rescue his fallen buddy, bullets flying all around them (though Dave doubted the cops had been shooting, it made it seem cooler). The cops got both of them right there, and they spent a night in Juvie. They were allowed to finish sixth grade, since there were only a few days left in the year, and then their families were told they had to look elsewhere for the boys’ schooling.

  Dave hardly saw Jimmy after that, maybe once or twice a year until they reached their teens. Dave’s mother wouldn’t let him leave the house anymore, except to go back and forth from school. She was convinced those men were still out there, waiting, driving that car that smelled of apples, and homing in on Dave like heat-seeking missiles.

  Dave knew they weren’t. They were wolves, after all, and wolves sniffed the night for the nearest, lamest prey, and then they hunted it down. They visited his mind more often now, though, the Big Wolf and the Greasy Wolf, along with visions of what they’d done to him. The visions rarely attacked Dave’s dreams, but they slipped up on him in the terrible quiet of his mother’s apartment, in the long stretches of silence during which he’d try to read comic books or watch TV or stare out the window at Rester Street. They came, and Dave would try to shut them out by closing his eyes, and trying not to remember that Big Wolf’s name had been Henry and Greasy Wolf’s name had been George.

  Henry and George, a voice would scream along with the rushing of visions in Dave’s head. Henry and George, Henry and George, Henry and George, you little shit.

  And Dave would tell the voice in his head that he was not a little shit. He was the Boy Who’d Escaped the Wolves. And sometimes to keep the visions at bay, he’d replay his escape in his head, detail by detail—the crack he’d noticed by the hinge in the bulkhead door, the sound of their car pulling away as they went out for a round of drinks, the screw with the missing head he’d used to pry the crack open wider and wider until the rusty hinge snapped and a chunk of wood in the shape of a knife blade cracked away with it. He’d come out of the bulkhead, this Boy Who Was Smart, and he’d scrambled straight off into the woods and followed the late afternoon sun to the Esso station a mile away. It was a shock to see it—that round blue-and-white sign already lit for the night, even though there was still some daylight left. It stabbed something in Dave, the neon white. It made him drop to his knees at the place where the woods ended and the ancient gray tarmac began. That’s how Ron Pierrot, the owner of the station, found him: on his knees and staring up at the sign. Ron Pierrot was a thin man with hands that looked like they could snap a lead pipe, and Dave often wondered what would have happened if the Boy Who Escaped the Wolves had actually been a character in a movie. Why, he and Ron would have bonded and Ron would have taught him all the things fathers teach their sons, and they would have saddled up their horses and loaded up their rifles and gone off on endless adventures. They would have had a great old time, Ron and the Boy. They would have been heroes, out in the wild, conquering all those wolves.

  IN SEAN’S DREAM, the street moved. He looked into the open doorway of the car that smelled like apples, and the street gripped his feet and slid him toward it. Dave was inside, scrunched up on the far side of the seat against the door, his mouth open in a silent howl, as the street carried Sean toward the car. All he could see in the dream was that open door and the backseat. He couldn’t see the guy who’d looked like a cop. He couldn’t see his companion who’d sat in the front passenger seat. He couldn’t see Jimmy, though Jimmy had been right beside him the whole time. He could just see that seat and Dave and the door and the trash on the floor. That, he realized, had been the alarm bell he hadn’t even realized he’d heard—there had been trash on the floor. Fast-food wrappers and crinkled-up bags of chips and beer and soda cans, Styrofoam coffee cups and a dirty green T-shirt. Only after he’d woken up and considered the dream did he realize that the floor of the backseat in his dream had been identical to the floor of the car in real life, and that he hadn’t remembered the trash until now. Even when the cops had been in his house and asked him to think—really think—about any detail he might have forgotten to tell them, it hadn’t occurred to him that the back of the car had been dirty, because he hadn’t remembered it. But in his dream, it had come back to him, and that—more than anything—had been why he’d realized, without realizing it, somehow, that something was wrong about the “cop,” his “partner,” and their car. Sean had never seen the backseat of a cop car in real life, not up close, but a part of him knew that it wouldn’t be filled with trash. Maybe underneath all the trash had lain half-eaten apple cores, and that’s why the car smelled as it had.

  His father would come into his bedroom a year after Dave’s abduction to tell him two things.

  The first was that Sean had been accepted to Latin School, and would begin seventh grade there in September. His father said he and Sean’s mother were real p
roud. Latin was where you went if you wanted to make something out of yourself.

  The second thing he said to Sean, almost as an afterthought, when he was halfway out the door:

  “They caught one of them, Sean.”

  “What?”

  “One of the guys who took Dave. They caught him. He’s dead. Suicide in his cell.”

  “Yeah?”

  His father looked back at him. “Yeah. You can stop having nightmares now.”

  But Sean said, “What about the other one?”

  “The guy who got caught,” his father said, “he told the police the other one was dead, too. Died in a car accident last year. Okay?” His father looked at him in such a way that Sean knew this was the last discussion they’d have on the subject. “So wash up for dinner, pal.”

  His father left and Sean sat on his bed, the mattress lumpy where he’d placed his new baseball glove, a ball wrapped inside, thick red rubber bands wrapped tightly around the leather.

  The other one had died, too. In a car wreck. Sean hoped he’d been driving the car that had smelled of apples, and that he’d driven it off a cliff, took that car straight down to hell with him.

  II

  SAD-EYED SINATRAS

  (2000)

  3

  TEARS IN HER HAIR

  BRENDAN HARRIS LOVED Katie Marcus like crazy, loved her like movie love, with an orchestra booming through his blood and flooding his ears. He loved her waking up, going to bed, loved her all day and every second in between. Brendan Harris would love Katie Marcus fat and ugly. He’d love her with bad skin and no breasts and thick fuzz on her upper lip. He’d love her toothless. He’d love her bald.

  Katie. The trill of her name sliding through his brain was enough to make Brendan feel like his limbs were filled with nitrous oxide, like he could walk on water and bench-press an eighteen-wheeler, toss it across the street when he was finished with it.

  Brendan Harris loved everyone now because he loved Katie and Katie loved him. Brendan loved traffic and smog and the sound of jackhammers. He loved his worthless old man who hadn’t sent him a single birthday or Christmas card since he’d walked out on Brendan and his mother when Brendan was six. He loved Monday mornings, sitcoms that couldn’t make a retard laugh, and standing in line at the RMV. He even loved his job, though he wouldn’t be going in ever again.

  Brendan was leaving this house tomorrow morning, leaving his mother, walking out that shabby door and down those cracked steps, up the great wide street with cars double-parked all over the place and everyone sitting on the stoops, walking out like he was in a goddamned Springsteen song, and not the Nebraska-Ghost-of-Tom-Joad Springsteen, but the Born-to-Run-Two-Hearts-Are-Better-Than-One-Rosalita-(Won’t-You-Come-Out-Tonight) Bruce, the anthem Bruce. Yeah, an anthem; that’s what he’d be as he walked right down the middle of the asphalt whether bumpers rode the backs of his legs and horns honked, going right up that street and into the heart of Buckingham to take his Katie’s hand, and then they were leaving it all behind for good, hopping on that plane and going to Vegas and tying the knot, fingers entwined, Elvis reading from the Bible, asking if he took this woman, and Katie saying she took this man and then—then, forget about it, they were married and they were gone and they were never coming back, no way, just him and Katie and the rest of their lives lying open and clean before them like a lifeline scrubbed of the past, scrubbed of the world.

  He looked around his bedroom. Clothes packed. American Express traveler’s checks packed. High-tops packed. Pictures of him and Katie packed. Portable CD player, CDs, toiletries packed.

  He looked at what he was leaving behind. Poster of Bird and Parrish. Poster of Fisk waving that home run fair in ’75. Poster of Sharon Stone, sheathed in white (rolled up and under his bed since the first night he’d snuck Katie in here, but still…). Half his CDs. Fuck it; he hadn’t listened to most of them but twice. MC Hammer for Christ’s sake. Billy Ray Cyrus. My Gawd. A pair of kick-ass Sony speakers to supplement a Jensen desktop system, two hundred watts total, paid for last summer when he’d done some roofing for Bobby O’Donnell’s crew.

  Which is how he’d first come close enough to Katie to strike up a conversation. Jesus. Just a year ago. Sometimes it felt like a decade, in a good way, and other times it felt like a minute. Katie Marcus. He’d known of her, of course; everyone in the neighborhood knew of Katie. She was that beautiful. But few people really knew her. Beauty could do that; it scared you off, made you keep your distance. It wasn’t like in the movies where the camera made beauty seem like something that invited you in. In the real world, beauty was like a fence to keep you out, back you off.

  But Katie, man, from that first day she’d come by with Bobby O’Donnell, and then he’d left her at the site while he and a few of his boys tore off across town to conduct some pressing business, left Katie behind like they’d forgot they ever had her—from that very first day, she was so basic and normal; she hung with Brendan as he applied flashing to the roof as if she was just another dude. She knew his name, and she said, “How come a guy as nice as you, Brendan, is working for Bobby O’Donnell?” Brendan. The word coming out of her mouth like she said it every day, Brendan up there with his knees on the edge of the roof feeling like he was going to swoon right off it. Swoon. No shit. That’s what she did to him.

  And tomorrow, soon as she called, they were gone. Gone together. Gone forever.

  Brendan lay back on his bed and pictured the moon of her face floating above him. He knew he’d never sleep. He was too keyed up. But he didn’t mind. He lay there, Katie floating and smiling, her eyes shining in the darkness behind his eyes.

  AFTER WORK THAT NIGHT Jimmy Marcus had a beer with his brother-in-law, Kevin Savage, at the Warren Tap, the two of them sitting at the window and watching some kids play street hockey. There were six kids, and they were fighting the dark, their faces gone featureless with it. The Warren Tap was tucked away on a side street in the old stockyard district, and this made it great for hockey because there wasn’t much traffic but shit for night games because none of the streetlights had worked in a decade.

  Kevin was good company because he didn’t talk much in general and neither did Jimmy, so they sat and sipped their beers and listened to the scuffle and scrape of rubber soles and wooden stick blades, the sudden metallic clang of the hard rubber ball banging off a hubcap.

  At thirty-six, Jimmy Marcus had come to love the quiet of his Saturday nights. He had no use for loud, packed bars and drunken confessions. Thirteen years since he’d walked out of prison, and he owned a corner store, had a wife and three daughters at home, and believed he’d traded the wired-up boy he’d been for a man who appreciated an even pace to his life—a slowly sipped beer, a morning stroll, the sound of a baseball game on the radio.

  He looked out onto the street. Four of the kids had given up and gone home, but two remained in the street, shrouded by the dark, scrabbling over that ball. Jimmy could barely make them out, but he could feel the fury of their energy in the slap of their sticks, the mad scramble of their feet.

  It had to go somewhere, all that youthful uncoiling. When Jimmy was a kid—hell, until he was almost twenty-three—that energy had dictated his every action. And then…then you just learned how to stow it someplace, he guessed. You tucked it away.

  His eldest daughter, Katie, was in the midst of that process now. Nineteen years old and so, so beautiful, all her hormones on red alert, surging. But lately he’d noticed an air of grace settling in his daughter. He wasn’t sure where it had come from—some girls grew into womanhood gracefully, others remained girls their whole lives—but it was there in Katie all of a sudden, a peacefulness, a serenity even.

  At the store this afternoon, as she was leaving, she’d kissed Jimmy’s cheek and said, “Later, Daddy,” and five minutes afterward Jimmy realized he could still feel her voice in his chest. It was her mother’s voice, he realized, slightly lower and more confident than the voice he remembered his daughter having,
and Jimmy found himself wondering when it had made its home in his daughter’s vocal cords and why he hadn’t noticed it until now.

  Her mother’s voice. Her mother, almost fourteen years dead now, and coming back to Jimmy through their daughter. Saying: She’s a woman now, Jim. She’s all grown up.

  A woman. Wow. How’d that happen?

  DAVE BOYLE hadn’t even planned on going out that night.

  Saturday night, sure, after a long week of work, but he’d reached an age where Saturday didn’t feel much different than Tuesday, and drinking at a bar didn’t seem all that much more enjoyable than drinking at home. Home, at least, you controlled the remote.

  So he’d tell himself later, after it was all over and done, that Fate had played a hand. Fate had played a hand in Dave Boyle’s life before—or at least luck, most of it bad—but it had never felt like a guiding hand before, more like a pissy, moody one. Fate sitting up in the clouds somewhere, someone saying to him, Bored today, Fate? Fate going, A bit. Kinda think I’ll fuck with Dave Boyle, though, cheer myself right up. What’re you gonna do?

  So Dave knew Fate when he saw it.

  Maybe that Saturday night, Fate was having a birthday or something, decided to finally give ol’ Dave a break, let him release some steam without suffering the consequences, Fate saying, Take a swing at the world, Davey. I promise it won’t swing back this time. As if Lucy, holding the football for Charlie Brown and just this once not being a bitch about it, allowed him to kick it clean. Because it hadn’t been planned. It hadn’t. Dave, alone late at night in the days afterward, would hold out his hands as if speaking to a jury and say that softly to the empty kitchen: You have to understand. It wasn’t planned.