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  “I guess Kyle is back at the bar at this point, but I don’t see him. So anyway, I go for it, not taking into my calculations the lamp hanging just above the pool table. I get a running start, leap, slam my head into the lamp and hit the pool table hard. That’s when the powers that govern Irish Times decided I’d had enough and sent me on my merry way. But Kyle made my exit more ceremonious than it otherwise might have been.”

  “He sounds like a good guy so far.”

  “That’s not even a third of it. So I pull out of the parking lot and stop at the first intersection. Now, this is right in the middle of downtown Worcester. At the red light, I apparently I decide that a nap is in order. Luckily, Kyle comes out of the bar for some unknown reason and finds me there passed out at the wheel. Next thing I know, I’m on my couch, and it’s time to go to work.”

  We laughed and ate the hot dogs. An old guy got up from the counter and put some coins into the jukebox, which began playing Frank Sinatra’s Very Good Year.

  “What’s going on with Smitty?”

  “He’s okay, conscious and all that. His jaw is wired up and they broke his collarbone and a few ribs. He lost a lot of blood. I feel like shit that I didn’t visit. I guess it’s too late tonight. I’ll go by tomorrow.”

  From there, our conversation drifted to Joe’s quote-unquote plan to get Sully back for Smitty, with the help of some people I’d never met, including a guy named Fitzie.

  The names took me back—names systematically mangled through laziness and misplaced enthusiasm. I remember those times more in images—cigarette ends dancing in the darkness of a keg party in the woods, drunk girls, their lips leering and their pants wet from a fall or worse, awkward teenagers high on stolen cigarettes and afternoons AWOL from high school, walking down train tracks to where kids from another part of town waited under a highway bridge for a fight. There were stories galore—drugs taken, punches thrown, insults and jokes traded, arrests made. But it’s the images that stuck.

  “… but Vietnam says that the bouncer said he will definitely call him when Sully comes by,” Joe concluded.

  As he spoke, it became clear that his plan for revenge was pretty vague. It depended on luck more than anything. Worcester is a small city, but not so small as to make a reckoning inevitable. The whole thing would blow over, if not for the anger that defined so many in that town. Gypped by the seasons, trapped by the long memories of neighbors, teased by the productions of television, stuck and cut off by only half-articulable obstacles, the anger animates screaming hardcore bands and sneering cashiers the same. It is as set and jagged as the granite curbstones. It doesn’t have anything better to do. It is just waiting for an excuse. It sits above everything like smog and bends the sunlight. It makes the people in Worcester funnier and more intense than any I had met elsewhere. And it makes them dangerous.

  And Joe, telling me why he wouldn’t leave town, wouldn’t avoid Sully, was just as angry and just as obstinate.

  I wish I could say I talked him out of it—the part-time drug dealing, the vendetta. I wish I could say I talked him into skipping town. I wish I could say I found it all more worrisome than amusing.

  “I’m only saying it in case nobody else is. Just be careful,” I said.

  I remembered that I had Joe’s $300 curled up in my hand. I noticed his eyes drop to it.

  “So what’s the three hundred for?”

  “It’s in case things get really crazy and I do have to get out of town, I want to have some money on hand. The holidays are over, so sales might be slower. But I also won’t be as likely to get drunk and just give it all away.”

  I wish I could say his insistent foolishness wasn’t the only sign of life in my day. I wish I could say I withheld the $300. But I can’t.

  I gave him the money and Kyle showed up. He was a tiny guy, maybe a hundred forty pounds soaking wet, covered with freckles, as though camouflaged. He said hi and went to get a tray of hot dogs. He came back with about eight of them.

  “I’ll never figure out how you eat so much and stay so small,” Joe said.

  “I work a lot, I screw a lot and I shit a lot. I can’t figure out how you two ever got so big,” Kyle said between bites.

  I gave Kyle my recap and he gave his in between bites.

  “Roofing. I have a crew of about twelve guys. We work year-round, though it slows down in the winter. And I own part of the Irish Times, and part of Rehab, the club upstairs.”

  “No shit. I wouldn’t have guessed it”

  “Right? When we all used to hang out, I was wild, robbing gas stations and stuff.”

  “I didn’t know you were up to so much shit back then. You were always so quiet.”

  Kyle shrugged with his mouth full and his eyes down, as if to say ‘how do you think I got away with it?’

  “So what’s up with this party tonight?” Kyle asked.

  “It’s Chris and Rory and them. They’re getting a keg. It should be alright. They don’t want a lot of people. They don’t want their place getting fucked up. But they shouldn’t mind you showing up. And Jim should be fine. He’s upstanding as hell. They said there’ll be a lot of girls. Rory said it would be ‘a stocked pond.’”

  Joe nodded at the prospect of a night of drinking and Kyle made short work of his hot dogs. We drove over to the Burncoat neighborhood, finally finding a house at the foot of the hill, near the Norton plant. The party was in an apartment on the bottom floor of a subdivided house.

  31.

  Things didn’t feel right from the get-go. It took Rory a while, and some audible hassle to get to the door, and too long to open it for us. When he let us in, Rory didn’t look too good, raw around the eyes and nostrils, his skin too pale even for the short winter days. We walked through a small hallway to the living room, where he gestured us toward a couch. In the living room there was a keg, but it wasn’t set up. When I saw that Rory was wearing sweatpants, I turned to Joe to say something.

  “You guys just sit down, get comfortable. I have to get the tap for the keg,” Rory yelled, walking quickly down the hall.

  Only Joe went to sit on the couch. He was comfortable and settled when Kyle looked at him and shook his head, quickly. Joe sat up, but then sat back. I noticed the same Bob Marley poster that Joe owned hanging above the couch. We heard the murmur of voices, then a louder murmur and footsteps. Kyle looked at Joe with alarm, but Joe just shrugged.

  Sully was not much to look at. He was medium height, medium build, with medium-brown hair. He looked more Italian than Irish. But he was more than medium angry. I figured out it was him from the cast on his arm, the lopsidedness of his bruised face and the insuperable rage in his eyes. In his good hand, he carried an old-fashioned billy club, made of pale wood, with a strap at the bottom. Behind him was a three-man Rainbow Coalition of revenge. One was Ki, the pale black guy we’d met outside Denny’s, one was a fat Asian kid with a scraggly goatee and the last one down the hall was a tall redhead with nearly translucent skin. Kyle charged straight at Sully, who raised his billy club just in time to have his nose re-broken by the tiny, flying man.

  That was the highlight of the fight, which was over in a few minutes. We retreated quickly while throwing and taking punches from Sully’s friends. Terror moved my limbs through paces I thought I’d forgotten. I know I landed a good one somewhere on Ki’s face because he fell down and my hand hurt like hell afterwards. My head rattled as the tall Irish guy landed a few on me around the door. The shock of the attack, the sneering faces of our enemies and their clear intent to do us harm were more upsetting than the pain of the punches they landed.

  By the time they stopped chasing us and started calling us names, I had a black eye and Joe a bloodied nose. Our triumph was that we made it back to our cars. I was breathing heavy, and was rattled as hell as I followed Joe’s Buick away from Burncoat Street. The streets were empty. The placidly changing streetlights and the quiet houses behind their darkened yards mocked us.

  Joe’s apartment was
empty when we got there. I took my time rinsing my face and hands and checking the swelling in the bathroom mirror. I could hear Joe and Kyle arguing. I took my time, contemplating my fresh black eye. In the living room, Joe argued with people on the phone, trying and failing to recruit them for his feud.

  “What do you say, Jim? I say we go back to Rory’s and settle this thing once and for all,” Joe said as soon as I walked out of the bathroom. His voice had been rendered utterly ridiculous by the bloody tissues jammed into his nostrils. He was holding a shovel. I started to laugh, but checked myself.

  “Man, you know what I think about all this Hatfields-and-McCoys shit. I am decidedly out.”

  Kyle was in the living room, quietly watching a TV show about the Patriots. He had a ziplock bag of ice against one side of his face.

  “Any ice left?”

  “You could go grab some snow from outside,” he said, shrugging.

  The well-scrubbed men on the TV discussed the game in thick New England accents. The Pats were playing the Colts Sunday at Foxborough. Dad had tickets, but gave them to Gerry.

  “What do you think?” I asked the air.

  “The Pats should kill them. The Colts are all dinged up, and the coach doesn’t have his head in the game. Not only that, but they’re fuckin’ chokers,” Kyle offered, engrossed in the show.

  Joe was in the next room, on the phone, telling his story and trying to cajole someone else into action. I could hear the parrying action of it, the counterarguments, the feigned disappointment, the invocation of Smitty, the challenges to their innate masculinity and their purported loyalty.

  “You’re not going back there, are you?”

  “No fucking way. Joe’s got to let it go. And he has to be more careful. He can’t just go off to parties like he’s used to doing,” Kyle said.

  “What the fuck, right? That was a bona fide ambush.”

  “No shit it was. But man, this isn’t like back in the day. We had a lot of pissed-off, nothing-to-lose type guys. Shit, I guess we were those guys. But they’re gone and we’ve grown the fuck up. You can’t settle most of the scores you’d like to settle. You and me, even Joe, we have too much to lose. You just have to walk away and try to make something better where you go.”

  “He doesn’t want to hear that.”

  “I know. And that’s part of why I love the guy. When he says something, he means it. Even if it isn’t practical, even if it doesn’t even make any sense.”

  Joe came out of the kitchen to where we were sitting on the couch.

  “Are you guys serious that you don’t want to go back there with some baseball bats and tire irons and get some justice?”

  “Very serious,” I said.

  “Me too. You started this bullshit. I have a liquor license in my name. This is the last thing I need.”

  “Fine. Then I’m going to bed, bitches,” Joe said. The bruising from the smack to his nose was starting to spread out to his eyes, like a raccoon’s mask.

  Outside, the cold soothed my bruised eye and swollen hand. I was jumpy from the fight, and had a pit in my stomach like I could cry. Last thing I wanted was go back to the Fountainhead.

  I drove around Worcester, down to Lincoln Street, then past Institute Park and the Armenian church, to the Worcester Historical Society, around the WPI hills back to Main Street, where people were driving back and forth. I passed Irish Times, the nightclubs, Mechanics Hall, City Hall and a mirrored high-rise bank building. I drifted by the shuttered Paris Cinema, which had shown pornography to a furtive generation of New Englanders, down the downtown common, past the library and the oxidized bronze statue of a man having intercourse with a turtle. The common culminated in the old Galleria, a mall that had sucked the life out of the once-bustling downtown stores. It had gone out of business twice and sat empty, waiting to be plowed into condos.

  Beyond that were signs of the future—the Centrum now named after a local credit union, the glass convention center and the sparkling medical complex straddling the train tracks. The last spasms of the Massachusetts Miracle were finally reaching downtown, pushed by the staggering real estate prices of Metro-West, all the way to Wistah. Passing from downtown to the foot of Shrewsbury Street, you could most clearly see the fresh overlay of faux-Colonial elegance and the stunted glamour of Boston onto an industrial city a half-century past its prime.

  Stopped at a red light, I checked my face in the rear view mirror. The redness under my eye was darkening. The skin was hot and taut from the swelling. I tried to laugh at the black eye like I’d laughed at minor misfortunes before. But it didn’t feel right. Helplessness loomed large behind every building, and winked from the mirror.

  Maybe it was the long hours in the hospital, seeing how long it would take to get back from a simple bit of bad luck. But all I could see around me was the 10,000 varieties of death—surgery, fist fights, boredom, a dwindling bank account, depression, social disgrace and spiritual neglect. It wasn’t a joke or some distant entertainment. It was a very slow variety of mortal combat. Squinting and shaking my head, I drove back to the Fountainhead, determined that something must be done. I would help Joe whether he wanted it or not.

  Part Three—The 10,000 Varieties of Death

  Thus on July 3 the Massachusetts Council had instructed Goodkin to order Printer, who had likely expressed an interest in securing amnesty for himself, to demonstrate his fidelity “by bringing som of the enemies heads.” (Here, “heads” may mean “scalps.”) Apparently, Printer succeeded in securing the necessary badges of fidelity and returned to English society; he soon returned to his work at Cambridge Press.

  —Jill Lepore

  The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity

  32.

  Saturday, January 3

  I woke early to the hot throb in my face. A deep anxiety in my gut made the apartment feel like a cage. I numbly hamstered on the elliptical machine in the apartment complex fitness room until sweat washed through the swollen, painful slit next to my eye. The pain spurred me on, into the day. Shaving, the mirror said I was a criminal or, at best, a hockey player. I strained my left eye open to a medium-sized slit.

  The previous night’s determination remained—I would help Joe. But first, I had to save myself. I dug around until I found a legal pad in one of Dad’s boxes. Dad had covered the first ten or so pages on the pad with lists in the squashed loops of his cursive. I turned to a blank page, and in the pale light of the room’s window, I plotted my escape. If I got a job, I would have to go back to New York. The list was a dreary dredging of trivia, a raking over of coals. I filled two pages with fragile plans and slender reeds of hope. I got to work on the computer.

  Serena had sent me an e-mail, saying she’d sensed my frustration over the phone the day before. She offered to come up the next weekend. So the question was no longer if she was falling out of love with me, it was if I deserved her love. I thought of Olive and cringed. But it’s hard to forgive or really condemn yourself for something you’re thinking of doing again. I started to write back, but abandoned it and headed for the door.

  I drove slow. I had dubious depth perception and little peripheral vision on my left side. That day, Route 9’s series of anonymous lakes and inscrutable corporate headquarters were so familiar that they hardly existed. In the hospital, Dad’s breathing tube was gone. His unfocused eyes settled just beyond me. I went up and took his hand, gently. It was dry and limp.

  “Hey Dad, you made it. It’s good to see you awake.”

  He looked at me and struggled to choke out the word ‘hey.’

  “When did you come out of it?”

  After struggling to choke out a word, he just shook his head to indicate he didn’t know or couldn’t say.

  “Well, you didn’t miss too much. The doctor said that the mass isn’t cancer, so you don’t need any more surgery. And your friends Robert and Gerry came by the other day.”

  More with his face than his head, Dad nodd
ed.

  “And look, you’re up and about in time for the playoffs.”

  Dad nodded again, as if resigned, and closed his eyes. I sat in the inflexible wood and polyester chair, book in lap and watched the men on TV argue about how the weather would affect the San Diego offense. Dad woke a half hour before kickoff, surprised to see me there. He blinked a few times. He grunted thinly and looked at me, then blinked again, and after a moment of puzzlement croaked ‘your eye.’

  “Yeah. I was at a party in Worcester and a brawl started. And I got caught up in it. It’s no big deal.”

  “Joe?” he croaked after some effort. Even in his state, Dad sure could ask a loaded question.

  “Joe was there. But there were also some guys I knew from St. Johns,” was my loaded response. “I don’t know who started the fight. I just got caught up in it.”

  Dad made a face of disappointment.

  “It was just a fistfight. I’ll be more careful.”

  With his mouth ajar, Dad surveyed the bruise again and croaked ‘doctor?’

  “Come on. It’s just a black eye.”

  Dad started to shrug, then winced, and settled for pursing his lips.

  “We have Tennessee at San Diego for the early game. Then it’s the Seahawks at the Giants.”

  Football had always been a blessing for us. It meant spending time together without talking, especially with Dad struggling to speak and the left side of my face a purple reminder of so much he disliked. The nurses came in for their sometimes baffling and sometimes awful errands. They made a point of ignoring me. The black eye had changed me from the devoted and dutiful son to the violent and unemployed son. The black eye was one of those things that created a subtle but real exile from the middle class. Dad’s friend Robert showed up a half hour after the game ended. Another friend, Dan Wong, showed up just before the kickoff of the second game, with three big foil bags of chicken wings. Dan was half-Chinese and the other half must have been a bear. He was just over six feet tall and he had arms like legs and legs like torsos.