Another Broken Wizard Page 15

  “That how you got the shiner?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Anyone else hurt?”

  “Just bruises. We got out fast.”

  “Sully was there?”

  “Yeah, him and some of his friends. Sully had a billy club. It was set up by this guy Rory, who was supposed to be Joe’s friend. He looked pretty strung out.”

  “Now where does this Rory guy live?”

  “In the Burncoat neighborhood, off West Boylston Street.”

  Ira continued with the cop questions—do you know his last name, were you drinking, had you met these people previously, how do you spell Ki, where exactly on West Boylston Street? He wrote parts of it down, but not the parts I would have written down. By the time he’d exhausted his questions, I’d finished a coffee and most of the eggs and sausage.

  “So what can you do with all that?” I asked as he paused to write the last of it down.

  “Not much. It’s thin—maybe assault, if you wanted to press charges. But it’s a stretch even then. With the billy club, maybe we could try for aggravated assault, but I’d need Joe and this other guy to give statements.

  “I don’t think they would go for that,” I said. “Is there any way you can get Sully to back off Joe? I think Sully is involved in some shady dealings—drugs and whatnot.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Joe.”

  “How does he know?”

  I was going to say something vague, something about how people talk. But I hesitated for a second or so, and that was all Ira needed.

  “Exactly,” he said, before I could say anything.

  I suppose he saved me the trouble of lying. I put a yolk-covered piece of sausage in my mouth and tried to act unruffled.

  “I don’t even know why you’re trying to go to bat for this guy. I mean, you’re college educated, you live in New York City, and you look like you’re doing pretty well. So why get your face messed up for this guy who obviously can’t be bothered to look out for himself?” he asked.

  “Ira, I’ve known the guy since I was ten. In high school, we went our own ways. But he’s a real friend. You don’t get too many of those. So, to lay it out there, I guess I’m asking for a favor. I’ll keep trying to get Joe to drop this stupid feud of his. But I need you do something to squash this on Sully’s end, lay pressure on him and his friends. It’ll be one less thing to investigate.”

  “I’ll look into it. But I don’t know how much I can do. Other than that, there’s only one other way I can think of to put a stop to this thing, if you are really worried about your friend getting hurt.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “You can tell us what Joe is into. Get him off the streets for a little while. Give the dickheads who are after him some time to screw themselves up. It’ll happen sooner than later.”

  My face may have gone pale, but I was careful not to hesitate again. You can’t see nausea.

  “The guy may be a rowdy drunk. And okay, he may get high now and then, but that’s all I have on him. And that’s a lot thinner than the freaking set-up we walked into the other night. If he was alone, he could have been killed.”

  “So you’re telling me that he’s not selling coke, not buying guns?” Ira said, seriously.

  It took a second for me to realize that to Ira, these things were what they sounded like. It struck me that by knowing Joe and the guys around him so long, one gun or a few eight balls of cocaine just didn’t add up to the kind of seriousness that they did to the law. They seemed like the instruments of great underground revolt against a depression the size of the world. But here they were, laid bare by my new ally, as the felonies that they were.

  “I never heard of any of that. That’s not what this is about. It’s just a nasty brawl.”

  “Maybe you should talk to your friend Joe about that other stuff before you defend him.”

  “I really don’t know what you’re talking about, or what you might have heard. I just want to help my friend.”

  “And I just told you how you can.”

  “Okay,” I said, nodding.

  “Are you really getting this?” Ira asked, gesturing down to his empty cup of coffee, looking at me coldly.

  “Yeah.”

  Ira shook my hand and left. I felt like a fool, and even more helpless than before. I gestured to the old Italian guy behind the counter for the check and he gestured me to the register. Ira’s coffee cost $1.05. Breathing heavy, I walked through the snow to Dad’s SUV. I watched the snow in the pale orange street light. The flakes fell like notes in some perfect, infinite piece of music. But they’d become dirty, icy piles that lingered into mid-March. It was all fucked, but fucked in a pretty sort of way.

  Going down Belmont Street, with the whole valley of Lake Quinsigamond and all the parking and shopping of Shrewsbury opening up before me like a drunk ex-wife. At White City, I pulled off the road to think.

  In its first life, White City was an amusement park on the edge of the lake. They turned it into a shopping plaza before I was born. Since high school, it had shed its record store, its improbably gorgeous neon sign, and its movie theater. I parked by what had been a toy store so vast that I once peed my pants at its overwhelming promise. I turned off the car, and watched the windshield fill with snow, blotting out the back-lit, cursive sign of a dried-flower superstore for the thousands of households kept just so by the dour repression of their children. In the silence, I cursed the future, and cursed the caution of expensive lives. I was halfway into reconsidering the curse when my cell phone rang. It was Joe. We talked a few minutes before he got to the point.

  “Jim, I hate to even ask. I mean, I’m sorry, but I need to borrow another three hundred. I’m really sorry. But I need it.”

  “What for?”

  “Well, can we meet up to talk about it?”

  “Joe, I’m still unemployed. I didn’t get a new job over the weekend, you know? I’m not sure if I can swing it. Let me call you back tomorrow about it.”

  “Okay, because I need it soon. Where are you?”

  “I’m in Westborough. I’m in for the night,” I lied.

  We agreed to talk the next day. I turned the car on and drove back to the Fountainhead. Out of respect for its power over me, I left the TV off and went to bed, thinking about Joe and Volpe, back and forth.

  Finally, a long fantasy of Olive in the land of forgetfulness put me to sleep.

  36.

  Monday, January 5

  Something urgent and persistent woke me. I fumbled around the apartment until I found the source—a speaker with buttons in the living room. The voice on the other end said the medical supply company was downstairs in the cold and the fresh foot and half of snow. Pulling on pants and rinsing out my mouth, I looked in the mirror. I had slept on my left side, so the eye was almost swollen shut, its purple turning brown. A fresh wound looks menacing, but a stale wound looks squalid.

  I welcomed the two West Indian men with a hand truck full of aluminum railings and a toolbox into the apartment. The living room and the hall were a mess. I had a bad habit of leaving my pants where I took them off. I cleared the debris from their path and got out of their way. I looked over my list of things to do and sat down at the computer. The two men measured the hallway and the bathrooms for railings and the like. I was tweaking a cover letter for a job that I didn’t want when they knocked on the door and gave me a form to fill out for the insurance company. Then they left.

  Yellow sunlight streamed off the still-white snow outside, through the big glass door in the living room. Quiet and alone, the world could be anything. I could be the narrator and the interpreter of my own story. These moments of solitude are the closest I’ve found to freedom or to being awake. I did a little dance in the living room to underline this point to myself, removing my pants and swinging them over my head like a lasso. Then I went into the kitchen to make coffee.

  On a roll, I e-mailed some friends in New York, e-mailed Emily
in Worcester, wrote Serena back, writing the things I ought to say. It was a workday and I was working, typing and checking things off my list. I watched the financial news for a few hours. The news had gone from troubling to bad to ominous in the last few months. Red arrows tracked the Dow Jones, as the investing public lost its illusions about what our prized enterprises were worth. The yelling white men on the TV almost had me believing that the world we’d built would soon resort to barbarism or mysticism.

  But what did I know? Despite my close attention to the trembling of the global financial markets on the TV, I was just a guy in his underwear on the couch, waiting for the cable guy.

  The cable guy showed and I made up some work to do to get out of his way, hunting through more job descriptions. The adjectives—“passionate,” entrepreneurial,” “committed,” “dazzling”—didn’t seem like me. I couldn’t fight the sensation that I was digging my own cavernous grave with each cover letter and resume.

  It took the cable guy a little less than an hour to get the TV and cable all set up, after which he gave me the special moron’s tour of the remote control until I gave him a tenner and said thanks a lot. The nurse called to say she would be by the day after tomorrow to look at the apartment to make sure everything was in place. She sure didn’t sound like a Spanish broad with big cans. She sounded cold; I don’t want to say clinical, but I suppose I just did. With that done, I looked at the computer, and recited the eight percent unemployment rate and assured myself that I was better qualified than at least nine percent of the population. I looked out the glass patio doors at the landfill flattened and rehabilitated for family dining establishments. The daylight was failing, but hadn’t failed yet.

  I called Olive. She was getting off her lunch shift at Ruby Tuesday’s and said she was surprised I called. We made plans to meet at a place she picked, a sushi place on Route 9. She said it was all yupped out, but she knew the bartender. Then I called Joe.

  “Jim, I can’t talk now, I’m at work.”

  “Just calling to see what’s up.”

  “Nothing, just tired as hell. Listen, can I call you back tonight? Do you think you’ll be able to help me out with that thing we talked about?”

  “I don’t think so. It’s not life and death, is it?”

  “I don’t think so, but I’m not sure. Listen, I just got spoken to about too many personal calls. I have to go. But I’ll call you back later.”

  I raced outside to get some daylight. By the time I made it to the cold parking lot, the sun was just an orange glow on the hill behind the Target megastore. I raced to the hospital. In the room, a nurse tended to Dad’s roommate. The roommate’s wife watched, leaning forward like she was just about to say something. I nodded and smiled and hurried to Dad. Dad napped before the TV, a bowl of broth and saucer of Jell-o. After a minute, he woke up with an infant’s look of disoriented curiosity.

  “Hey Dad.”

  He nodded, and tried to shake himself more awake. The shake didn’t wake him, but the pain it brought on did. He looked at me a minute, drawing breath through his mouth.

  “Hey. How are you doing?” I asked.

  “Okay. I had a dream about cars, cars crashing, cars driving along, parked cars, a lot of parked cars. Then tow trucks in the night,” he said, his rasp no longer the obstacle it had been.

  “Was it a good dream or a bad dream?”

  He took a minute to answer. He looked around, calm except for his eyes, which still seemed desperate for orientation.

  “It was both.”

  Then he was quiet. I filled the silence telling him about the railings in the bathroom and the cable TV by his bed.

  “It’s a lot of TVs for one apartment, for just one guy. When I’m better, you can have the old one,” he croaked.

  “Thanks. I’m sorry I couldn’t make it until now.”

  “And you probably have to go soon.”

  “No, uh, not exactly.”

  “You’re not all cleaned up and dressed up for me. Do you have a girl in Worcester?”

  “Something like that. But it’s no big deal. I can stick around as long as you want.”

  “Jim, I’m on so many drugs right now. I mostly sleep. And when I wake up, I can hardly tell. I have the pain in my dreams too, except it’s a big leach on my chest, or a face trying to break through the skin, or a mine cave-in.”

  “Jesus. It sounds like they’re giving you the strong stuff.”

  “It’s not strong enough,” Dad said, then closed his eyes and drifted off into something that looked like sleep, but worse.

  I forgot my books in the car so I watched the news channel. I couldn’t focus—it was all images, people loitering in malls, vast parking lots, ships loading or unloading, men in suits talking or sitting and watching the one who talked, the floor of a stock exchange, bar graphs and missiles. The TV was adamant about all of it. I reached for the remote in its spot between Dad’s forearm and belly. He flinched, grabbed the remote and woke up.

  “What are you doing?” he demanded.

  “Just changing the channel.”

  “I’m watching that.”

  “You looked like you were sleeping.”

  “I wasn’t. I was watching that,” he said, pissed off.

  It was good to have him back.

  “Okay, okay. Take it easy. You want some food, or a magazine or anything?”

  “I’m fine. I still haven’t read the magazine you left here the other day. I can’t hold it up for very long.”

  “Oh, well, I guess I could read it to you if you want.”

  Dad made a face like I’d recommended that we slow dance. I shrugged. A few minutes later, he fell back asleep, or what passed for sleep. I got up to leave.

  “See you tomorrow, Dad,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t hear me and wake. He didn’t at first.

  But he opened his eyes, startled, when I took my coat from the chair. I cringed at having to stay much longer, but reminded myself of the hundred reasons I came to Massachusetts in the first place.

  “You’re still here?”

  “Yeah. I was just about to head out.”

  “Just you and me, huh?”

  “Yeah. I’ll stick around longer if you want.”

  “No, no go ahead.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay. Have a good night, Dad.”

  “Okay,” he said, closing his mouth as if there was a bad taste in it.

  Whiskeynose seemed to sneer when he saw how little of my day I’d spent with Dad and how little money I owed his booth. But I think he was just the sneering type. I hit the road and made it to the restaurant, Sushi Samba, early.

  37.

  The place was just too big. From passing cars, I’d seen it fail as a Bistro, Steakhouse, Barbecue and Italian seafood restaurant before its current incarnation. The place had tableside grills and a sushi bar on the sprawling floor below, anchored by a huge golden Buddha. I wondered if the Italian place had a huge golden Crucifix in that spot, imagined Christ in Golden agony watching over the waiter as he pushed the veal special. I ordered a beer in a bottle and waited. The bartendress smiled through her suspicion. A man with a black eye, no matter how preppy his polo shirt, would always be suspect in an upscale place.

  The TVs behind the bar, above the bar and behind me showed all that could be shown about the Patriots, Celtics and Bruins. Olive came through the door looking good. She wore black, like she mostly did. Her skirt was short and her top made her even more inviting. She kissed me hello, then said hello to the blonde.

  “I go to school with Jemma,” she explained as Jemma brought her a tall glass filled with a bright red liquid. “So what’s going on, brawler?”

  “Oh right, the eye. I had the cable guy and the nursing people over at the house today, setting things up. They probably thought I was one of those criminals who kills old people and cashes their Social Security checks.”

  “House? I thought you said he was in an apartment?�
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  “He is. I guess old habits die hard. I’m used to him being in a house. It’s going to be close quarters once he moves back in.”

  “Don’t tell me about close quarters. I never thought being at work would be such a relief. Between my mother and my dweeb brothers and the fucking hospital, this holiday is pure hell. The nurses in that place—if you aren’t dressed in Ann Taylor yuppie wear, no offense, then they look at you like you have some disease.”

  “At least with the black eye, they back off.”

  She finished her drink quickly. Jemma brought us another round without saying anything. We talked about Framingham, Natick and Sherborn, and the Metro-West suburban cloud. We finished our drinks and Jemma delivered more, her smile intensifying to the point where it almost wasn’t a smile anymore.

  “I’m surprised they didn’t stop you at the door to this place.”

  “Well, they have a lot of seats to fill,” I said, making eyes at the quarter-full restaurant.

  “Still, these places are all uptight. It’s all yuppies out here in the Metro-West, except for the old men. I have this one old man who comes into Ruby Tuesdays and drinks his coffee at the bar. He lives across Route 9 in one of those little apartment buildings and walks over. He mostly just talks about the Red Sox and about back when Framingham was orchards and factories. But sometimes he’ll talk about World War Two.”

  “He sounds interesting.”

  “You would think that. But he’s really not. I like him just because he’ll come out and say he doesn’t like what’s going on. He calls them the ‘get-rich-quick crowd.’ But mostly he’s mad because he doesn’t understand what’s going on. He doesn’t understand why he’s the only old man sitting in a chain restaurant at noon, when it opens, talking to people. I guess I don’t understand it either.”

  “I can relate. The whole thing drives me nuts. You drive someplace, unbuckle your seatbelt, turn off the car, get out of your car, lock it, buy whatever you need, unlock your car, get in, buckle your seatbelt, start the engine, drive home, open the door, get what you bought, close the door, make sure the lights are off if it’s night time, lock the car, go inside and so on. It’s just grating. In New York, in any city where you can live without a car, it’s like you can hide from the twenty-first century for just a little while longer. It’s more of a holdout than a triumph. But I’ll take it.”