B009XDDVN8 EBOK (31 page)

That night in Guaymas Tony didn’t get drunk with a whore, he got drunk alone. When Nat came looking for him in the morning to take him to the next fight in the next town, he was already gone.

He didn’t know where he was going, he didn’t care. He went south from Guaymas, and then south again. He kept moving south for weeks, drinking and whoring away whatever money he had. Finally he found a clot of old hippies camped on some beach and he stayed drugged up with them for he didn’t know how long. They slept on the sand, roasted fish on the fire, ate peyote, and fucked in the moonlight. Tony was trying to run from what he had done in that ring, what he had become, even as he was trying to embrace it, too, in some strange way. And the drugs, and the hippies, and the ritual dances around the fire, seemed to let him do both.

Then one night, by the light of a full moon, with a tab of acid under his tongue, Tony stripped naked, dove into the water, floated on his back, felt the press of the night sky on his chest. And he started crying. He cried for the kid he had killed, for the kid he himself had been, for the empty husk of the man he had become. And he found himself sinking, as if his limbs were wrapped in great iron chains. Water poured into his nose and his mouth as the chains pulled him down. Above him, lit by the
moon, he saw a raven circling, his death wings outstretched, his caw like an invocation to the ocean itself.
Put him down. Put him down.
And the chains grew heavier, and the water kept pouring in, and the raven kept circling, and he knew he was going to die that night. And he was glad.

Yet even as he drowned in that ocean, he felt at the same time as if he was circling free in the sky, staring down through raven eyes at his dying body. And from that vantage he could see that the chains weren’t wrapped around his limbs at all, they were held in his hands, and he was clutching them with a death grip. To become free and save himself, all he had to do was let go. Let go of the chains that were dragging him down and float freely back to the surface. He was a slave and he could be free—all he had to do was let go.

And right there beneath the surface of the water, under the bright silver moon, Tony Grubbins made a choice. He chose to open his fists. It was harder than it should have been, because he wasn’t just letting go of the chains, he was letting go of himself, too. What was he without the prison of his past, without his pain or his anger, without his sweet violence? He didn’t know, but he was ready to find out. It was the hardest thing he had ever done, harder than he ever could have imagined, but with all the strength he could muster from his soul he pried open his fists and let go of the chains.

Slowly he rose, out of the depths, back to the surface of the great heaving ocean. And as he gasped like a newborn for air he kept rising, right out of the water, his limbs spread, his chest arched, rising like a dream of freedom into the moon-drenched sky.

I sat there for a moment as we drove through the narrow urban streets of North Philly, a bit dazed, disconcerted by the
juxtaposition of the fantastic elements of Tony’s story and the hard reality we were driving through. Nothing is as rooted in the facts of this world as the streets of Philadelphia.

“Is any of that true?” I said finally.

“The acid,” said Tony, laughing. “I was so wasted I had to piece together the other stuff from snatches of dreams.”

“So it’s all bullshit,” I said, as if trying to comfort myself.

“It feels true,” said Tony. “And I’ll tell you this: when I stepped out of the water, naked in the moonlight, I was different. I was a free man, for the first time in my life.”

“I’m free,” I said, a defensive whine in my voice.

“Why did you pull that gun on Richie? Because he stole your girl when you were seventeen? Why did you point the gun at me? Because I killed your dog when you were eleven? Dude, you got more chains around your neck than King Kong.”

“You’re the one still living in Pitchford.”

“By choice. In California I ran into a guy I used to know. Remember Denise? He told me Denise had a ten-year-old kid. She was married in Pitchford, and doing well by the kid, but ten years and nine months before that she was sleeping with me. My parents left me by dying. That was one of my chains. I was strong enough by then that I could choose to come back and take a chain away from the kid. So I did.”

“How’s he doing?”

“Pretty damn good.”

“Why are you helping me find Derek?”

“Because I didn’t want to. It’s not so easy being free—you’ve got to keep letting go.”

He pulled the truck to the side of the road and parked. We were in a district of worn-out warehouses with their windows boarded, of old factories long shuttered, of dreams murdered in their sleep by some invisible hand. In front of us, between two dead buildings, the only sign of life in the whole decrepit block was a neon sign with a pack of shined Harleys sitting out in
front. The sign flickered and hissed into the night: T
HE
D
EVIL’S
B
REW
.

“That’s the unofficial clubhouse of my brother’s old gang.”

“Is he in there?” I said, a burp of panic rising in my throat.

“No, but his oldest gang mates might be. They could know where he is. I’ve been purposely avoiding that place since I’ve been back. I suppose it’s time to stop the avoiding.”

“What’s the plan?” I said.

“Not to die, how’s that?”

“No, we need a plan. We have to know why you’re looking for your brother, and why now. We’ve got to have a cover story.”

“A cover story.”

“Yeah.”

“You know what your problem has always been, Moretti? You think too much.”

“Why don’t we say that you’re in some AA twelve-step program and you need to ask your brother for forgiveness? They might buy that.”

“That’s my cover story?”

“Your name is Tony and you’re an alcoholic. I could be Jon, your sponsor.”

Tony stared at me for the longest time, stared at me like I was a dog on the flying trapeze.

“It could work,” I said.

“Like pulling a gun on Diffendale worked.”

“It got your interest quick enough.”

“Just keep your mouth shut and let me do the talking. And leave your gun here.”

“I’m not going in there without a gun.”

“You pull a gun in that place, they’ll make sure you need to use it. And you use a gun in a place like that, you’re not getting out alive. Put it in the glove box.”

I thought about it for a moment, thought about how I hadn’t remembered to prime the chamber, how Sid the bartender had
trained that shotgun at my head without my even knowing it. I did the calculation and then did as he said. Not because I was scared of him but because he was right. And then, I don’t know why—maybe it was his story, the image of all those chains being released from Tony’s hands, or maybe it was the truth of what he said about me, about how I was bound like an oversized monkey to my past—but I did something I’d never thought I’d ever do in ten million years.

“I stole the money,” I said to Tony Grubbins. “From your house. You should know that before you go in there. You had been selling us dust and stems at an unfair price, so I broke in looking for weed and I found two paint buckets filled with cash in the crawl space and I took them, both of them. It was me.”

He looked at me for a moment, Tony Grubbins, the very face of my nightmares, something unfathomable working across his features, and then he said in that hushed voice of his, “Try not to tell them that.”

A
S SOON AS
we opened the door, the babble of conversations turned to silence. We were sized up quick and spit out flat, before the babble rose again. There were about twenty bearded motorheads in denim vests scattered about the place with half that number of biker chicks, although to be honest, even with the beards it wasn’t so easy to tell them apart. The fantasy of the slim, leather-clad vixen gripping tightly to your chest as you roared westward on your Harley died an ugly death inside The Devil’s Brew.

The very name still evokes a sensory overload in my memory. The wafting scent of vomit in an atmosphere already poisoned with nicotine, weed, and exhaust. A jukebox so loaded with heavy metal it could have been declared a toxic-waste site. A ratty pool table with a skinny old man in a ragged gang vest sleeping atop it. And tacked on the wall like deer heads, the vests from a whole host of different gangs, their colors slashed, many of them stained maroon. Seeing them there as we stepped inside, I could very well imagine my whole body hanging among the trophies like a stuffed marmoset.

The bartender stared at us both as we brushed through the hostile glares on our way to the bar, his gaze catching especially on my garb. I was wearing my usual: tan pants, brown loafers,
a white dress shirt I had bought at a strip mall on my way up from Virginia. It was a look that wouldn’t have batted an eye in Patriots Landing, but sitting at that bar in that hole, I’d have been less out of place wearing a tutu.

“Are you fellows sure you’re in the right joint?” said the bartender, a broad-shouldered brute whose shaved head led inexorably to a jaw shaped like the head of a ball-peen hammer.

“You mean this isn’t the Elks Club?” said Tony.

“My bet is you’re not,” said the barkeep. “What can I get you?”

Tony looked at me for a moment and cocked an eye before saying, “Two club sodas.”

“Shots to go with it?” said the barkeep.

“No shots,” said Tony. “Just a couple of limes.”

“This is a funny kind of place to drive your wagon,” said the barkeep. “Maybe you fellows should try Woody’s on Thirteenth Street.”

“We’re wearing shoes and shirts,” said Tony. “Make the damn drinks.”

“Fine, pal, but take my advice and drink fast.”

As the bartender spritzed the seltzers I said quietly to Tony, “I guess my plan wasn’t so stupid after all.”

“I couldn’t come up with anything better on the fly.”

“Now that I’m here, I could actually use a beer. In fact, right now I could use a Xanax.”

“Crutches,” said Tony as he took out a cigarette and a lighter and flicked it all to life.

“Two club sodas,” said the bartender bringing over the drinks. “With limes.” He looked at Tony with his lit cigarette. “You see the sign?”

Behind the bar was a small red sign that read B
Y
C
ITY
O
RDINANCE
, S
MOKING
P
ROHIBITED IN
A
LL
P
UBLIC
P
LACES
. Tony looked at the sign and then around at all the cigarettes burning in the place, their tips glowing like a herd of fireflies.

“I see it,” said Tony before inhaling.

“Just checking,” said the barkeep. “Give a holler if you guys think you can handle another round.”

“Is Flynn around?” said Tony.

“Flynn who?”

“Fat Dog Flynn.”

“You knew the Fat Dog?”

“A while ago, yeah.”

“Seen him lately?”

“No.”

“Guess not, since he’s been dead ten years. Died in prison.”

“I’m tearing up,” said Tony.

The barkeep glanced quickly over at one of the tables and then leaned closer. “You did know the son of a bitch, didn’t you?”

“What about Corky? Is he here?”

“Who the hell are you?”

“Someone who used to come around a long time ago.”

“You were a member of the Rams?”

“My brother was.”

“Oh yeah? Who’s your brother?”

“Derek Grubbins.”

The barkeep kept his quiet at the sounding of the name. And in a strange way his silence spread like a ripple in a pond, reaching outward along the bar to the tables. Even the jukebox quieted for a moment between songs as everyone in the place stared at the two of us. Tony hadn’t been talking loudly, but the very name had seemed to cut through the room’s haze of noise like the crystalline ring of a silver bell.

“Now I know you’re in the wrong place,” said the bartender, before heading out from behind the bar.

Tony and I watched as the bartender made his way to one of the tables at the far corner of the room. There was a big-boned moose at the table, his long scraggly hair falling out of a red bandanna tied over his head. Sitting next to him was a huge mound of a woman with stringy hair and tattoos up and down her
billboard-sized arms. A woman so big her shadow had stretch marks, a woman so ugly her pillow cried at night. The bartender leaned over and spoke quietly to the lovely couple. The man nodded and thumbed a signal. One of the other men at the table stood, grabbed a pool cue, and poked at the old man sleeping on the pool table.