A Drink Before the War (14 page)

I raised my eyebrows at Angie and she smiled softly, both of us remembering her voice in the chapel the night before. “This is my life?” Lot of people taking stock of their lives these days. Judging by Devin and Angie, I wasn't sure how bright that was.

Somebody down the end of the bar said, “Look at that fucking nigger run, though.”

Roy said, “Of course he can run, moron. Been hightailing it from the po-lice since he was two. Probably thinks that's a stolen radio under his arm, 'stead of a football.”

Lots of laughter from the group. Wits, one and all.

Devin was watching them now, hollow eyes staring from behind the stream of smoke that flowed from his cigarette. He took a drag from it, the fat forgotten ash tipping forward and dropping to the bar. He didn't seem to notice, even though half of it hit his arm. He downed the rest of his pint and stared at the group and I had the feeling there was going to be some property damage.

He stubbed out his cigarette halfway and stood up. I reached out my hand, stopping three inches from his chest. “Devin.”

He pushed it away like it was a subway turnstile and walked down the bar.

Angie turned on her seat, followed him with her eyes. “Eventful morning.”

Devin had reached the other end of the bar. One by one,
the men sensed him and turned around. He stood with his legs spread slightly, planted on the rubber tile, his arms hanging loosely by his sides. His hands made small circular motions.

Tommy said, “C'mon, Sarge. Not my place.”

Devin said, “C'mere, Roy,” very quietly.

Roy climbed off the bar. “Me?”

Devin nodded.

Roy stepped through his friends, pulling the shirt down over his belly. The second he let go of it, it rolled back up like a disobedient shade. Roy said, “Yeah?”

Devin's hand was back down by his side before most of us realized he'd used it. Roy's head snapped back and his legs buckled and he was quite suddenly on the floor with a shattered nose and blood jetting above his face in a small fountain.

Devin looked down at him, kicked his foot lightly. “Roy,” he said. He kicked the foot again, a little harder. “Roy, I'm talking to you.”

Roy moaned something and tried to raise his head, his hands filling with blood.

Devin said, “A nigger friend of mine asked me to give you that. He said you'd understand.”

He walked back down the bar and took his seat again. He made another pint disappear and lit another cigarette. “So, whatta you think?” he said. “Is Roy concerned now?”

We left the
bar about an hour later. Roy's friends had already taken him out, presumably to the emergency room at City. They gave Angie and me their hard-guy stares as they dragged Roy past, but they avoided Devin's flat gaze as if he were the Antichrist.

Devin tossed an extra twenty on the bar for Tommy's lost business. Tommy said, “You're a real pisser, Sarge. You gonna come in, put money down for every other fucking day they don't come back?”

Devin grumbled, “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” and did a drunken shuffle toward the door.

Angie and I caught up with him on the street. I said, “Let me give you a ride home, Dev.”

Devin shuffled his way into the Dunkin' Donuts parking lot. He said, “Thanks anyway, Kenzie, but I got to stay in practice.”

I said, “For what?”

“Case I ever drink and drive again. I'll want to remember how I managed this time.” He turned, walking backward, and I waited for him to tip.

He reached his rusted Camaro, got his keys out of his pocket.

I said, “Devin,” and stepped toward him, reaching for the keys.

His hand closed around my shirt, the knuckles pressing into my Adam's apple, and he walked me back a few feet, his eyes swimming with ghosts. He said, “Kenzie, Ken
zie,” and pushed me back against a car. He tapped my cheek lightly with his other hand. He's got big hands, Devin. Like steaks with fingers. “Kenzie,” he said again and his eyes grew hard. He shook his head from side to side slowly. “I'll drive. OK?” He let go of my collar and brushed at the wrinkles he'd left behind in my shirt. He gave me a smile that had no soul. “You're all right,” he said. He turned back to his car and nodded at Angie. “Take care of yourself, Stone Fox.” He opened the door and climbed in the car. It took two turns of the ignition for the engine to turn over, then the exhaust pipe banged off the small exit ramp and the car dropped into the street. He weaved into traffic, cut off a Volvo, and turned a corner.

I raised my eyebrows and whistled softly. Angie shrugged.

We drove downtown and got the Vobeast out of the parking lot for a little less than it would have cost me to put a kid through med school. Angie drove it, following me to the garage where I returned the Porsche to its happy home and climbed in with her. She slid across the seat and I chugged the rolling scrap metal onto Cambridge.

We drove through downtown, past where Cambridge becomes Tremont, past the place where Jenna went down like a rag doll in the morning sunlight, past the remains of the old Combat Zone, dying a slow but sure death at the hands of development and the X-rated video boom. Why jack off in a scuzzy movie theater when you can jack off in the comfort of your own scuzzy home?

We drove through South Boston—Southie to everyone who isn't a tourist or a newscaster—past strings of drab three-deckers, packed like a line of Port-o'-Potties at a rock concert. Southie amazes me. A good percentage of it is poor, overcrowded, relentlessly unkempt. The D Street housing projects are as bad as anything you'll find in the Bronx—dirty, poorly lit, teeming with angry, crew-cut punks who roam its streets with bloodlust and baseball bats. During a St. Patrick's Day parade a few years ago, a very
Irish kid with a shamrock on his T-shirt wandered in there. He ran into a pack of other Irish kids who also had shamrocks on their T-shirts. Only difference between his T-shirt and theirs was that his said “Dorchester” in green over the shamrock and theirs said “Southie.” The D Street kids solved the difference by tossing the kid off a roof.

We were driving up Broadway, past the babies in curlers pushing babies in carriages, past the double- and triple-parked cars and the “Niggers Stay Out” spray-painted on a store grate. Broken glass glittered from the darkness of filthy curbs and trash blew from under cars into the street. I thought of how I could step from this car and poll twenty people here, ask them why they hated “the niggers” so bad, and maybe half would probably tell me, “'Cause they got no fucking pride in their communities, man.” So what if Broadway in Southie was identical to Dudley in Roxbury, if slightly lighter?

We crossed into Dorchester, rode up around Columbia Park and down into the neighborhood. I pulled in front of the church and we could hear the phone ringing as we climbed the stairs. Busy day. I caught it on the tenth ring. “Kenzie-Gennaro,” I said.

Angie dropped into her seat as the voice on the other end said, “Hold on. Someone here want to talk with you.”

I took the receiver with me as I went around the desk and sat down. Angie gave me a “Who is it?” look and I shrugged.

A voice came on the line. “Mr. Kenzie?”

“Last time I checked.”

“This Patrick Kenzie?” The voice had an edge to it, someone not used to dealing with smart-asses.

“Depends,” I said. “Who's this?”

“You're Kenzie,” the voice said. “How's the breathing?”

I inhaled audibly, sucking it way back and expelling it in a long rush. I said, “Much better since I quit smoking, thanks.”

“Uh-huh,” the voice said, slow like freshly sapped maple. “Well, don't get too used to it. Might be all that more depressing when you can't do it no more.” The maple voice was thick but light, a hint of lazy Southern afternoons hidden behind years of Northern living.

I said, “You always talk this way, Socia, or you just in a particularly elliptical mood today?”

Angie sat up and leaned forward.

Socia said, “Only reason you're still walking, Kenzie, is because we got things to talk about. Hell, I might just send someone over anyway, have them take a hammer to your spine. All I need's your mouth as it is.”

I sat up and scratched an itch near the small of my back. I said, “Send them by, Socia. I'll do some more amputations. Pretty soon you'll have an army of cripples. The Raven Gimps.”

“Easy to talk that way, sitting nice and safe in your office.”

“Yeah, well look,
Marion
, I got a business to run.”

“You sitting down?” he said.

“Sure am.”

“In that chair by the boom box?”

Everything went cold inside of me, a flush of chipped ice spilling through my arteries.

Socia said, “You sitting in that chair, I wouldn't get up anytime soon, less you want to see your ass blow past your head on its way out the window.” He chuckled. “Was nice knowing you, Kenzie.”

He hung up and I looked at Angie and said, “Don't move,” even though her moving wasn't the problem.

“What?” She stood up.

The room didn't explode, but I damn near fainted. At least we knew he didn't put a bomb under her chair too, just for fun. I said, “Socia said there's a bomb under my chair.”

She froze, a wax statue in mid-stride. The word “bomb”
will do that to people. She took a deep breath. “Call the bomb squad?”

I tried not to breathe. The possibility existed, I told myself, that the weight of the oxygen going into my lungs could put pressure on my lower extremities and detonate the bomb. It also occurred to me how ludicrous that was since the bomb was obviously triggered by a release of pressure, not a gain. So now, I couldn't exhale. Either way I wasn't breathing.

I said, “Yeah, call the bomb squad.” It sounded funny, talking while I held my breath, like Donald Duck with a cold. Then I closed my eyes and said, “Wait. Look under the chair first.”

It was an old wooden chair, a teacher's chair.

Angie put the phone down. She knelt by the chair. It took a few moments for her to do that. No one wants their eyes an inch from an explosive. She bent her head under the chair and I heard her exhale loudly. She said, “I don't see anything.”

I started to breathe again, then stopped. Possibly it was in the wood itself. I said, “Look like someone might have tampered with the wood?”

She said, “What? I can't understand you.”

I took a chance and let out my breath and repeated the question.

She was down there for six or seven hours, or so it seemed, before she said, “No.” She slid back out from under the chair and sat back on the floor. “There's no bomb under the chair, Patrick.”

“Great.” I smiled.

“So?”

“So, what?”

“Are you going to stand up?”

I thought of my ass flying over my head. “There's a rush?”

“No rush,” she said. “Why don't you stand up?”

“Maybe I like it here.”

“Stand up,” she said and stood herself. She held her arms out to me.

“I'm working up to it.”

“Stand,” she said. “Come to me, baby.”

I did. I put my arms on the chair and did it. Except, somehow, I was still sitting. My brain had moved, but my body was of another opinion. How professional were Socia's people? Could they fit a bomb seamlessly into a wooden chair? Of course not. I've heard of people dying in a lot of ways, but getting blown up by a completely undetectable bomb in a thin wooden chair isn't one of them. Course, maybe I was being honored by being the first.

“Skid?”

“Yeah?”

“Anytime you're ready.”

“OK. Well, see I—”

Her hands grabbed mine and she yanked me up out of the chair. I fell against her and we banged into the desk and didn't blow up. She laughed, an explosion in itself, and I realized she hadn't been entirely sure herself. But she'd pulled me out anyway. She said, “Oh, Jesus!”

I started to laugh too, the laugh of someone who hasn't slept in a week, a laugh along a razor blade. I held on to her, my hands tight around her waist, her breasts rising and falling against my chest. We were both drenched in sweat, but her eyes were pulsing, the dark pupils large and drunk with the taste of a moment that wasn't our last on earth.

I kissed her then and she returned it. For a moment, everything was heightened—the sound of a car horn four stories below, the smell of fresh summer air mingling with spring's dust in the window screen, the salty whiff of fresh perspiration at our hairlines, the slight pain from my still swollen lips, the taste of her lips and tongue still slightly cool from the pale ale we'd drunk an hour before.

Then the phone rang.

She pulled back, her hands on my chest, and slid away from me along the desk. She was smiling, but it was one
of disbelief and her eyes were already taking on a spectre of regret and fear. God only knows what mine looked like.

I answered the phone with a hoarse, “Hello.”

“You still sitting down?”

“No,” I said. “I'm looking out the window for my ass.”

“Uh-huh. Well, just remember, Kenzie—anyone can get to anyone, and
anyone
can get to you.”

“What can I do for you, Marion?”

“You gone come see me, have a chat with me.”

“I am, am I?”

“Bet your ass.” He chuckled softly.

“Well, Marion, I'll tell you, I'm booked solid till October. Why don't you try back around Halloween?”

All he said was, “Two-oh-five Howe Street.” It was all he had to say. It was Angie's address.

I said, “Where and when?”

He gave it another soft chuckle. He'd read me perfectly and he knew it and knew I knew it too. “We'll meet someplace crowded so you have the illusion of safety.”

“Damn white of you.”

“Downtown Crossing,” he said. “Two hours. In front of Barnes and Noble. And you come alone, or I might just have to pay a visit to that address I mentioned.”

“Downtown Crossing,” I repeated.

“In two hours.”

“So I'll feel safe.”

He chuckled again. I figured it was a habit of his. “Yeah,” he said, “so you'll feel safe.” He hung up.

I did the same and looked at Angie. The room was still overcrowded with the memory of our lips touching, of my hand in her hair and her breasts swelling against my chest.

She was in her seat, looking out the window. She didn't turn her head. She said, “I won't say it wasn't nice, because it was. And I won't try and blame it on you, because I was just as guilty. But I will say, it won't happen again.”

Hard to find a loophole in that.