Mystic River (5 page)

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.

(2000)

B
RENDAN
H
ARRIS 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, leav
ing 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.

A
FTER 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 won
dering 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?

D
AVE
B
OYLE
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.

That night, he’d just come down the stairs after kissing his son, Michael, good night and was heading to the fridge for a
beer when his wife, Celeste, reminded him that it was Girls’ Night.

“Again?” Dave opened the fridge.

“It’s been four weeks,” Celeste said in that playful singsong of hers that gnawed at the ridges of Dave Boyle’s spine sometimes.

“No kidding.” Dave leaned against the dishwasher and cracked his beer. “What’s tonight’s selection?”

“
Stepmom
,” Celeste said, eyes bright, hands clasped together.

Once a month, Celeste and three of her coworkers at Ozma’s Hair Design got together at Dave and Celeste Boyle’s apartment to read one another’s tarot cards, drink a lot of wine, and cook something they’d never tried before. They capped off the evening by watching some chick movie that was usually about some driven but lonely career woman who found true love and big dick with some baggy-balled old cowhand, or else it was about two chicks who discovered the meaning of womanhood and the true depths of their friendship just before one of them caught some long-ass illness in the third act, died all beautiful and perfectly coifed on a bed the size of Peru.

Dave had three options on Girls’ Night: he could sit in Michael’s room and watch his son sleep, hide out in the back bedroom he shared with Celeste and thumb through the cable choices, or tip the hell on out the door and find someplace where he wouldn’t have to listen to four women getting all sniffly because Baggy Balls decided he couldn’t be tied down and rode back into the hills in pursuit of the simple life.

Dave usually chose Door #3.

And tonight was no different. He finished his beer and kissed Celeste, a small, milky curdle rippling through his stomach as she grabbed his ass and kissed him back hard, and then he walked out the door and down the stairs past Mr. McAllister’s apartment and out through the front door into Saturday night in the Flats. He thought about walking down
to Bucky’s or over to the Tap, stood in front of the house for a few minutes debating, but then decided to drive instead. Maybe go up to the Point, take a gander at the college girls and yuppies who’d been flocking there in droves lately—so many elbowing into the Point, in fact, that a few had even begun to trickle down into the Flats.

They snapped up the brick three-deckers that suddenly weren’t three-deckers anymore but Queen Annes. They encased them in scaffolding and gutted them, workers going in day and night until three months later, the L.L. Beans parked their Volvos out front, carried their Pottery Barn boxes inside. Jazz would creep out softly through their window screens, and they’d buy shit like port from Eagle Liquors, walk their little rat-dogs around the block, and have their tiny lawns sculpted. It was only those brick three-deckers so far, the ones up by Galvin and Twoomey Avenue, but if the Point was any kind of indicator, soon you’d see Saabs and gourmet grocery store bags by the dozen as far down as the Pen Channel at the base of the Flats.

Just last week, Mr. McAllister, Dave’s landlord, had told Dave (idly, casually), “Housing values are going up. I mean, way, way up.”

“So you sit on it,” Dave said, looking back at the house where he’d had his apartment going on ten years, “and somewhere down the road you—”

“Somewhere down the road?” McAllister looked at him. “Dave, I could drown on the property taxes. I’m fixed income, for Christ’s sake. I don’t sell soon? Two, maybe three years, fucking IRS’ll take it from me.”

“Where would you go?” Dave thinking, Where would I go?

McAllister shrugged. “I dunno. Weymouth maybe. Got some friends in Leominster.”

Saying it like he’d already made some calls, dropped in on a few open houses.

As Dave’s Accord rolled into the Point, he tried to remember if he knew anyone his age or younger who lived up here anymore. He idled at a red light, saw two yups in
matching cranberry crewnecks and khaki cargo shorts sitting on the pavement outside what used to be Primo’s Pizza. It was called Café Society now, and the two yups, sexless and strong, spooned ice cream or frozen yogurt into their mouths, tanned legs stretched across the sidewalk and crossed at the ankles, gleaming mountain bikes leaning against the storefront window under a shiny wash of white neon.

Dave wondered where the hell he was going to live if the frontier mentality rolled the frontier right over him. On what he and Celeste made together, if the bars and pizza shops kept turning into cafés, they’d be lucky to qualify for a two-bedroom in the Parker Hill Projects. Get put on an eighteen-month waiting list so they could move into a place where stairwells smelled like piss, and rat corpses rotted their stench straight through moldy walls, and junkies and switchblade artists roamed the halls, waiting for your white ass to fall asleep.

Ever since a Parker Hill homey had tried to jack his car while he was in it with Michael, Dave kept a .22 under the seat. He’d never fired it, not even at a range, but he held it a lot, sighted down the barrel. He allowed himself the indulgence of wondering what those two matching yups would look like at the other end of the barrel, and he smiled.

But the light had turned green, and he was still stopped, and the horns erupted behind him, and the yuppies looked up and stared at his dented car to see what all the commotion was about in their new neighborhood.