Doug looked at Frank, surprised but getting it now. Frank G. had had his number the whole time.
Frank said, "This guy was the fastest backward skater I ever saw, including pro."
Doug stood before the boys, feeling like he was the kid and they were the adults.
"Kev turned seven today," said Frank, roughing up his boy's hair, pride and love coming off him like heat.
"Yesterday,"
corrected Kevin.
"Right. Sorry. Birthday yesterday, party today."
Brown-haired Michael looked up at Doug with his mother's no-nonsense eyes. "You were drafted by the Bruins?"
Doug said, "I was."
They looked him over closely, this stranger in their dining room, this former hockey star, mysteriously a friend of their father's.
The birthday boy, Kevin, shrugged. "So what happened?"
Doug nodded, unable to meet their young eyes, almost unable to say the words. "I blew it."
42
The Last Breakfast
B
REAKFAST AT HIS MOTHER'S house, without the breakfast. He hadn't eaten anything in a couple of days, and thought he might never eat again.
My mother is a house.
Why come here now? To mourn her? Hadn't he always come here to mourn her?
My mother is dead.
No. He had always come here to mourn himself. His motherless self.
Gone now was his fantasy of her brave midnight flight from the Town, winning her freedom from his father and living reinvented and happy somewhere in the outside world, yet with a tender spot in her heart for the son she hated to leave behind.
All the baths he had taken in that porcelain tub, emerging barefoot and shivering and dripping tears of bathwater onto the tile floor where she last lay.
He wanted to believe in her sickness, her suffering. Her passionate, epic torment. Anything but the banality of a junkie fixing to self-destruct.
That night he had dreamed that the one-way streets of the Town were lined not with houses but with heads, the giant, weathered faces of old mothers talking at him as he hurried past them toward the empty lot on Sackville Street, the mouths on either side of it going
tsk-tsk
.
The Town kept its secrets close, raising them like its children. Thinking this brought on an absurd surge of panic for Krista and for Shyne, one he fought down.
Doug hadn't seen the guy exit the house. He was so lost in thought, he didn't notice the owner of the bottom-floor condo walking to his red Saab, keys in hand. Dark-haired, compact in an unbuttoned suit jacket, long tie, tasseled shoes. The guy saw Doug and slowed, and Doug couldn't even work up the energy to pretend to be doing anything other than what he was doing: sitting against this low brick hedge wall, watching the guy's house.
The guy tossed his underarm portfolio into the backseat of the car, then shut the door, considering heading over and saying something to Doug.
"Hi," the guy said, doing just that, slowly crossing the one-way street. "I notice you sit out here some mornings. Most mornings."
"Yeah?" Doug said, low-energy, off his guard. "I'm just waiting for a ride."
The guy nodded, stopping at the front bumper of the Caprice. "We-- I see you out here a lot." He glanced back at the house. "You seem to be watching our house, or something. Unless I'm..."
"I used to live here a long time ago," said Doug, surprised by his tired candor. "That's all."
"Ah." The guy was still confused.
"It's cool, don't worry," said Doug. "After today I won't be coming around anymore."
The guy nodded, trying to think of something else to say, then turned and started back. Then he stopped, something nagging at him.
"Say-- you want to step inside? I don't know, see it again, one last time?"
Doug never expected the guy to be decent. Doug could see the lady of the house now, peeking out at them from behind the parlor-window curtain. He pictured them all inside together, a pair of wary yuppies watching 210 pounds of Grade-A Townie getting misty in their bathroom.
The offer was tantalizing, but the house was his mother, and his mother was long dead.
Doug said, "You got a little girl there, huh?"
"Yes," the guy said, at first brightening, then suspicious.
"Sleeps in that corner room?"
The guy looked at the window where the faded ghost of a TOT ALERT! fire-safety sticker remained-- not knowing how or whether to answer.
"Those dolphin curtains there," said Doug, pointing them out. "You want to draw those every night. Headlights come by on the street, they reflect off the ceiling and look like ghosts flying past. Scary for a kid lying there alone."
The guy nodded, mouth hanging open. "I will certainly do that."
Doug slid into the Caprice and pulled away down the steep decline.
* * *
THE KNOCK ON KRISTA'S door brought her answering it in a tank shirt, nylon workout pants, and Tweety slippers. She straightened with surprise, looking past Doug as though he might not be alone. "What's up?"
Doug shrugged, uncertain himself. "Nothing really."
She moved aside, and he entered. Shyne was trapped in her sticky high chair in the dying parlor, shredding a cord of string cheese into white threads. A crushed butt in the table ashtray was still smoking.
"I think I'm hungry," said Doug.
Krista disappeared into the kitchen and Doug dropped into a chair at the table, exhausted at 9 A.M. He watched Shyne's wormy fingers working at the cheese, the dull concentration in her close-set eyes, her lips lax along the flat line of her mouth. He heard the microwave hum for about a minute, then beep and stop.
He said, toward the kitchen, "I'm going away."
Silence, then Krista's padding slipper-steps resumed, the microwave door opened and shut. "You in some kind of trouble?"
Doug shook his head, though she couldn't see him. "No more than usual."
A drawer opened, silverware rustling. "Is it the heat in Town?"
Her insider status grated on him as she reentered the room. Jem told her too much. "What do you know about it?"
She set down a steaming plate of chicken a la king in front of him with a fork and knife. Thick cream sauce studded with chunks of white meat. Anything would have looked good to him then.
Krista lifted a strand of cheese off Shyne's tray and dangled it before her daughter's mouth like a mother bird with a white worm. When Shyne didn't bite, Krista pressed the cheese in between the girl's lips, only to have it fall back onto the tray. She gave up and sat across from him on a folded knee. "When are you coming back?"
Steam from his plate rose between them. Doug shook his head.
She studied him, doubtful. "This have to do with you and Jem?"
Behind her, Shyne almost made a word then, a sound like
Shemmm
.
Doug said, "In a way."
"Does he know?"
"Probably." Doug picked up the fork, checking that it was clean. "I'm gonna do this one last thing he wants. You can tell him that for me."
She nodded. "And afterward?"
The thin wood handle of the knife was cracked, the blade rusted and wobbly. "You know I've always looked out for him."
"You were the only one who could."
"Well, this is it for me. He wants a chance at one big score, I'm gonna give it to him. It's up to him whether he makes it his last or not."
Her eyes tightened, seeing that he was serious now. "Where are you gonna go?"
"I don't know yet."
"Is she going with you?"
Doug had a forkful almost to his mouth. He set the fork back down and absorbed her blunt stare. As Shyne dropped the threads of cheese to the dusty floor, one by one, Krista's glare became full of violence, a scorned lover's inward scream.
43
The Florist
G
LOANSY REALIZED WHAT THE Florist's walk-in cooler reminded him of: a vault. The small-room-within-a-room thing, and the thick butcher door with the locking clasp, and the quiet inside. But with flowers in bunches on the shelves instead of stacks of bundled cash.
Why a flower shop? Gloansy wondered that now for the first time. Why not a smoke shop or a deli or something? The Main Street shop had always been there, with Fergie always running it. Probably he had taken the store from someone as part of a long-ago debt, and then-- maybe with just the touch of his hand-- transformed it into the ugliest flower shop ever. Petals had to be brown and wrinkled like bottom-of-the-bag potato chips before he would yank a $2 rose from a display pot. The vase water was never freshened, scummy and black-green like the harbor, and it was the only flower shop anywhere with plastic vines and silk plants in the display window.
Fergie did good parade business around Bunker Hill Day. He did some winner's circles on featured horse races over at Suffolk Downs, the wreaths they used for big-purse runs. It was bragged around that sometimes Fergie mailed the bill to the winning horse's owner the day before the race. Funerals, he did a lot of. Death, Fergie had a knack for. It followed him around in place of his lost conscience, his two sons gone, one of them a casualty of the dust he peddled, and his daughter gunned down in an ambush meant for the other. And always Fergie survived, coming back here to his workroom and wiring up his wreaths. Spools of ribbon hung in tongues of black and gold off his workbench: DAUGHTER; MOTHER; WIFE; SON.
They sat on small folding chairs with padded seats like mourners at a graveside burial, the four of them facing Fergie. Rare to get within spitting distance of Fergus Coln. He was mostly a recluse now, either bona fide paranoid or maybe just letting the legend that was The Florist feed on itself. The Code of Silence trials had all but wiped out every one of his contemporaries, but still he soldiered on. He lived somewhere near the old armory, but supposedly kept crash pads all over Town, constantly moving, like a fugitive king.
He was also known as Fucked-Up Fergie, because that's what his face was, totally fucked-up, thanks to early careers as both a wrestler-- some of his bouts were televised in the late 1950s-- and as a prizefighter on the Revere and Brockton circuits. His nose was wrong, his eyes doggy and tired, his skin waxy like fake fruit. His lips were so thin they were nonexistent, and his tiny cauliflower ears were things a child would draw in crayon. As they used to say about him, in his days as a mob enforcer: some hearts he stopped with just his reputation and his face. His hands were messed up too, crooked fingers looking like each row of knuckles had been separately slammed in a drawer, his nails flat and silver like coins.
Always there was this guy with him, keg-chested Rusty, supposedly an IRA or ex-IRA gunner who couldn't go back home. Rusty had fading white hair, pale Irish skin, and liked to wear dark running suits like he was on vacation. In other words, there was nothing red about Rusty, nothing to support the name. Unless he was "rusty" because he was a little slow. Guy never talked. A zombie following Fergie everywhere-- except inside the cooler on that warm afternoon, a big nod of respect to the crew. Paranoid Fergie never met with anybody alone.
He sat before them in his little chair like a fighter in the corner between late-round bells. His legs were fanned wide, as though daring somebody to kick him in the balls. He wore a grease-stained white tank, black uniform-type pants, and a scally cap turned backward over his rearranged face.
Usually if you did see Fergie around Town, you recognized him first by the tight sweatshirts he always wore, the hood string drawn around his head, shadowing his face. It was no coincidence that Jem had cribbed Fergie's look that day. Jem also flattered Fergie in the fucked-up-face department, his nose and cheek still pasted in gauze, his left eye full of blood, lips cut and swollen.
Duggy sat on the other side of Gloansy, silent. He had been so sullen since their fight, you would have thought he had been the one who took the beating.
It was Doug's pride getting pummeled here. Gloansy knew how Doug was about the Florist. Fergie had some young muscle in the store when they came in, project kids in camo pants, and Doug had almost gotten into it with them too.
But being all together again, that was what counted. Doug and Jem had reached a sort of unspoken cease-fire. In fact, the one to watch here was Dez: sitting on the other side of Duggy, staring full-out at warlord Fergie, the guy who maybe-- "maybe" in the Town sense-- offed his father. Gloansy had to hand it to him. He couldn't believe that Dez had come at all.
"He looks like me now," said Fergie, nodding at Jem. His voice was clipped and raspy. "A little rumpus, eh?" He looked back and forth between Jem and Duggy, aging muscle hanging off his arms like rope. "Coupla stitches between brothers, it's good. Healthy. Clears the air."
