A Drink Before the War (19 page)

I sat in
the front pew of St. Bart's and watched Angie light a candle for Bubba. She stood over it for a moment, her hand cupped around it until the yellow flame grew fat with oxygen. Then she knelt and bowed her head.

I started to bow mine, then stopped halfway, caught in the middle as always.

I believe in God. Maybe not the Catholic God or even the Christian one because I have a hard time seeing any God as elitist. I also have a hard time believing that anything that created rain forests and oceans and an infinite universe would, in the same process, create something as unnatural as humanity in its own image. I believe in God, but not as a he or a she or an it, but as something that defies my ability to conceptualize within the rather paltry frames of reference I have on hand.

I stopped praying—or bowing, for that matter—a long time ago, around the time my prayers became whispered chants pleading for the Hero's demise and the courage necessary to have a hand in it. I never did get the courage, and the demise happened slowly, witnessed by my impotent stew of leftover emotions. Afterward, the world went on and any contract between God and myself had severed, interred in the hole with my father.

Angie stood up, blessed herself, and walked down off the carpeted altar to the pew. She stood there, looking down at the Gap bag beside me, and waited.

Bubba was dead, dying, or severely wounded because of
this innocuous-looking bag. Jenna was dead too. So were Curtis Moore and two or three guys in the Amtrak station and twelve anonymous street kids who'd probably felt dead for a long time. By the time this was all over, Socia or I would join those statistics too. Maybe both of us. Maybe Angie. Maybe Roland.

A lot of pain in such a simple plastic bag.

“They'll get here soon,” Angie said. “Open it.”

“They” were the police. It wouldn't take Devin and Oscar long to identify the Unidentified White Male and the Unidentified White Female who shot it out at the train station with gang members, aided by a known gunrunner named Bubba Rogowski.

I loosened the string at the top of the bag, reached in, and my hand closed around a file folder, maybe a quarter-inch thick. I pulled it out and opened it. More photographs.

I stood and laid them out on the pew. There were twenty-one in all, their surfaces splintered by the triangles of shadow and light cast by the stained-glass windows. Not one of them contained anything I'd want to look at; all of them contained things I had to.

They were from the same camera and location that produced the photograph Jenna had given me. Paulson was in most of these, Socia in a few. The same scuzzy motel room, the same grainy texture to the film, the same high camera angle, leading me to assume they were stills from a videotape, the camera probably positioned eight or ten feet up, possibly behind a double mirror.

In most of the photos, Paulson had removed his underwear but retained his black socks. He seemed to be enjoying himself on the small twin bed with torn, stained sheets.

The same couldn't be said for the other person on the bed. The object of Paulson's affection—if you could call it that—was a child. A young, extremely skinny black boy who couldn't have been any older than ten or eleven. He wasn't wearing any socks. He wasn't wearing anything at all. He didn't seem to be having as much fun as Paulson.

He did seem to be in a lot of pain.

Sixteen of the twenty-one photographs captured the sex act itself. In some of these, Socia appeared, leaning into the frame to give Paulson what appeared to be directions. In one, Socia's hand gripped the back of the child's head, yanking it back toward Paulson's chest, like a rider reining in a horse. Paulson didn't seem to mind or even notice, his eyes glazed, his lips pursed in pleasure.

The child seemed to mind.

Of the five remaining photographs, four were of Paulson and Socia as they drank dark liquid from bathroom glasses, chatting it up, leaning against the dresser, having a swell old time. In one of those, the boy's slim leg was apparent, just out of focus, tangled in the filthy bedsheets.

Angie said, “Oh, my God,” in a cracked, high-pitched voice that sounded like it came from someone else. The knuckles of her right hand were in her mouth, and her whitening skin rippled. Tears welled in her sockets. The warm, stilted air in the church closed in on me for a moment, a weight against my chest that left me slightly lightheaded. I looked down at the photographs again, and nausea eddied against the walls of my stomach.

I forced myself to look down at the photos, to hold my eyes there, and soon, my eyes were drawn to the twenty-first the way they would drift toward and fasten onto a single flame in the corner of a dark screen. This was the photograph, I knew, that had already burned its way into my dreams and my shadows, into that part of my mind that I have no control over. Its image would reappear in all its wanton cruelty for the rest of my life, particularly when I was least prepared for it. It was not taken during the act, but afterward. The boy sat on the bed, uncovered and oblivious, his eyes taking on the ghostly image of what he'd already ceased being. In those eyes was the shriveled cast of dead hope and a closed door. They were the eyes of a brain and a soul that had collapsed under the weight of
sensory overload. The eyes of the walking dead, their owner oblivious to his loss, his nakedness.

I shuffled the photographs back into a pile and closed the file. Numbness was already settling in, clotting the flow of horror and bewilderment. I looked at Angie, saw the same process taking place in her. The shakes had stopped and she stood very still. It wasn't a sweet feeling, possibly it was harmful in the long run, but at the moment, it was absolutely necessary.

Angie looked up, her eyes red but dry. She pointed at the file. “No matter what, we take them down.”

I nodded. “Going to have to take it to them.”

She shrugged and leaned back against the baptismal font. “Oh well.”

I took one photo from the folder—one that showed the act—the boy, Socia, and Paulson's body but not his head. Socia was Devin's, maybe, but Paulson was mine. I took the rest of the folder to one of the rear confessionals, stepped through the heavy burgundy partition, and bent by the floor. I used my penknife on a square of marble that's been loose since I was an altar boy. I lifted it out and placed the folder down in the two-foot hole. Angie was behind me now, and I held out my hand. She placed her .38 in it and I added the nine millimeter, then closed the hole back up again. The square fit neatly, without any noticeable gaps, and I realized then that I'd co-opted one of the great Catholic traditions: concealment.

I stepped back out of the confessional and we walked down the center aisle. At the door, Angie dipped her fingers into the holy water and blessed herself. I thought about it, figuring I'd need all the help I could get on this one, but there's one thing I hate more than a hypocrite: a pious one. We pushed open the heavy oak doors and stepped into the late afternoon sunlight.

Devin and Oscar were parked out front, leaning over the hood of Devin's Camaro, a spread of McDonald's food in front of them. They didn't so much as look up at us before
Devin said, around a mouthful of Big Mac, “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. Hand me those fries, partner. You have a right to an attorney….”

 

It was well into the next morning before they finished with us.

Devin and Oscar were obviously taking a lot of heat. Gangland shootouts in Roxbury or Mattapan are one thing, but when it rises from the ghettos and rears its ugly head in the heart of the city, when Joe and Suzy Citizen have to stumble over their Louis Vuitton luggage to duck out of the way of gunfire, then there's a problem. We were cuffed. We were booked. Devin took the photo from me without a word before we got to the station, and they took everything else shortly after.

I stood in a lineup with four cops who didn't look remotely like me, and stared into a white light. Beyond it, I heard a cop saying, “Take your time. Look closely,” followed by a woman's voice: “I didn't really get a good look. I only saw the big black guy.”

Lucky me. If there's gunfire, people usually see the black guy.

Angie and I met up again later when they sat us down on a bench beside a mangy wino named Terrance. Terrance smelled like a banana stew, but he didn't seem to mind. He gladly explained to me, while brushing his teeth with his index finger, why the world was so out of control. Uranus. The good green folks who inhabit this planet don't have the technology to build modern cities; Terrance told us they can build farmhouses that would make your mouth water, but skyscrapers are beyond them. “But they want 'em bad, you see?” Now that we'd built all those skyscrapers, the Urani were ready to take over. They pissed through the rain, filling our water supply with a violence-inducing drug. Within ten years, Terrance confided in us, we'd have all
killed each other off and the cities would be theirs. A big green party in the Sears Tower.

I asked Terrance where he'd be then, and Angie elbowed me in the ribs for encouraging him.

Terrance stopped brushing his teeth for a moment and looked at me. “Back on Uranus, of course.” He leaned in close and I almost passed out from the smell. “I'm one of them.”

I said, “Of course you are.”

They came and got Terrance a few minutes later, took him off to his spaceship or a secret meeting with the government. They left us where we were. Devin and Oscar walked by a few times without glancing our way. A lot of other cops did the same, not to mention some hookers, an army of bail bondsmen, a bunch of PDs with awkward briefcases and the lean faces of those who don't have time to eat. As darkness fell, then deepened, a lot of hard-looking guys, built like Devin—powerful and low to the ground—headed toward the elevators, bulky Teflon vests under dark blue windbreakers, M-16s in their hands. The Anti-Gang Task Force. They held the elevators until Devin and Oscar joined them, then they all went down in two cars.

They never offered us a phone call. They'd do that just before or within the first few minutes of our interrogation. Someone would say, “What, nobody told you you could make a phone call? Jeeze. All our lines must have been busy.”

A kid in patrolman's blues brought us some lukewarm coffee from a machine. The old cop who'd taken our prints stood across from us behind a desk. He stamped a stack of papers, answered the phone a lot, and if he remembered us at all, he was doing a good job of hiding it. At one point, when I stood up to stretch, he half-glanced my way and out of the corner of my eye I saw a cop appear in the hallway on my left. I got a drink from the water fountain—not an
easy thing to manage with your hands cuffed—and sat back down.

Angie said, “They won't tell us about Bubba will they?”

I shook my head. “If we ask about him, it puts us at the crime scene. If they tell us before we ask, they lose everything, gain nothing.”

“Pretty much what I figured.”

She slept for a while, her head on my shoulder, her knees close to her chest. The weight of her body probably would have cramped a muscle after a while if there'd been any left to cramp; after nine or ten hours on this bench, a simple stretching exercise would have been orgasmic.

They'd taken my watch, but the darkest blue of night had already begun to give way to the first false light of early morning by the time Devin and Oscar returned. I guessed it was around five. Devin said, “Follow us, Kenzie,” as he passed.

We peeled ourselves off the bench and staggered down the hallway after them. My legs refused to straighten completely and my lower back felt like I'd swallowed a hammer. They led us into the same interrogation room where'd we'd met about twenty hours before, let the door swing back into my face as I approached. I pushed it open with my cuffed hands and we did our Quasimodo imitations through the doorway.

I said, “You ever hear of the ACLU?”

Devin tossed a walkie-talkie down on the table in front of him. He followed with a huge ring of keys, then sat back in a chair and watched us. His eyes were ragged and red, but darkly vibrant, an amphetamine vibrancy. Oscar's looked the same. They'd probably been up forty-eight hours straight. Someday, when all this was over and they were both spending Sundays in their La-Z-Boys watching football games, their hearts would finally play catch up, do what no bullet had ever managed. Knowing them, they'd probably go the same day too.

I held out my hands. “You going to take these things off?”

Devin looked at my wrists, then at my face. He shook his head.

Angie sat down. “You're an asshole.”

“I am,” Devin said.

I took a seat.

Oscar said, “Case you two are interested, they upped the ante in the war tonight. Someone fired a grenade through the window of a Saints' crack house. Took out damn near everyone inside, including two babies, couldn't have been more than nine months, the oldest. We're not positive yet, but we think two of the dead might have been white college kids, there on a buy. Probably the best thing could have happened. Maybe somebody'll care now.”

I said, “What'd you do with that photograph?”

“Filed it,” Devin said. “Socia's already wanted for questioning on seven deaths in the last two nights. If he ever comes to ground, that photo will be one more thing to nail him with. The white guy in the photo, the one on top of the little kid—somebody tells me who he is, maybe we can do something about it.”

“Maybe if I was allowed back out on the street, I could do something in ways you couldn't.”

Devin said, “Like shoot up another train station?”

Oscar said, “You wouldn't last five minutes on the street anymore, Kenzie.”

Angie said, “Why's that?”

“Because Socia knows you have incriminating evidence on him. Hard evidence. Because your main protection, Patrick, ain't in the game anymore and everyone knows it. Because your life ain't worth a nickel bag as long as Socia's still walking around.”