Catriona looked away, toward her house, back. She held up a small white handkerchief, rubber-banded around a few coins. ‘Mom gave me enough, she did.’

  Two summers ago they had watched Catriona stop on the way to the corner store to jump rope with some of the neighborhood girls.

  They had all seen her drop her hankie purse while she was jumping, and saw, as it opened, coins spilling onto the sidewalk. With one hard look from the then eleven-year-old Jimmy Doyle, no one dared move. When Catriona was done with the Double Dutch, she collected the coins – fully unaware that she had dropped her own money – and ran up to Jimmy bursting with excitement and pride.

  ‘They threw money at me, Jimmy Doyle! Money!’

  ‘Yes they did,’ Jimmy said. ‘You were great.’

  Had the two of them been older, they might have hugged at that moment. Instead, they both backed away.

  On this day, as Jimmy put away his roll, Kevin sensed someone exiting the grocery store, crossing the sidewalk. It was Catriona Daugherty’s mother.

  ‘Hello, men,’ she said.

  They all greeted her. Catriona’s mother was younger than most of the mothers of school-age children in the Pocket, her fashion sense a little closer to the teenage girls with whom the boys were obsessed, a little more in tune with the times. She was always good for a laugh.

  ‘You boys staying out of trouble?’ she asked.

  ‘Now where’s the fun in that?’ Jimmy replied.

  ‘Don’t make me call your ma, Mr Doyle. You know I’ll do it.’

  Jimmy held up both hands, palms out, in mock surrender. ‘I’ll be good. I promise.’

  ‘And I’ll be Miss America next year.’ She smiled, wagged a finger at them, then reached out a hand to her daughter. Catriona took it.

  ‘Enjoy your water ice, Catie,’ Jimmy said.

  ‘I will, Jimmy.’

  Catriona continued down the street, hand in hand with her mother, floating a few feet above the sidewalk.

  Ronan tapped Jimmy on the shoulder, pointed at the shopping bag at Jimmy’s feet, the one he’d been carrying around all morning.

  ‘So you got them,’ Ronan said.

  ‘As if this were in any doubt,’ Jimmy replied.

  He reached into the shopping bag, took out four beautiful new walkie-talkies he had artfully boosted from a Radio Shack in Center City a few days earlier.

  Yet as much as they wanted to use them, there was one small hurdle. Batteries.

  Batteries cost money.

  F&B Variety was an old-school store on Christian Street. It had been there longer than anyone could remember, and that included the three old men who sat on lawn chairs out front, by turns dumping on the Eagles, the Phillies and the Sixers. The Flyers, having won the Stanley Cup the two previous seasons, were currently exempt.

  Inside, F&B wasn’t any more modern than the day it opened. The store sold the staples – lunch meats, shelf breads, condiments, laundry and dish detergents – as well as a selection of gift and tourist items, such as plastic Liberty Bells and bobble-head dolls that bore only a passing resemblance to Mike Schmidt and Greg Luzinski.

  Toward the back of the store were a few racks of paperback books and comic books, with an aisle dedicated to knockoff toys.

  On the end cap, facing away from the register, and the watchful eye of the owner, the perpetually sour-faced Old Man Flagg, were the batteries. It was summer, and that meant portable radios came off the shelves, so F&B always had a good stock.

  The plan, as always:

  Ronan would stand in line at the counter. When he got to the register, he would ask for change for a dollar. Kevin would stand at the rack of comic books, looking as suspicious as possible, which was not all that hard. He was the biggest of the four boys, and therefore the most menacing.

  While Dave observed through the front window, Kevin would knock a few comic books from the rack, drawing Old Man Flagg’s attention for just a few seconds. But a few seconds was all Jimmy needed. He was a natural.

  Contraband acquired, they coolly emerged from the store, met up on the corner and walked to Catharine Street. Once there, Dave sat down on the steps of a row house and began taking the battery covers off the walkie-talkies.

  They would be on the air in minutes.

  Before Jimmy could get the batteries out of his pockets, a shadow appeared on the sidewalk beneath their feet.

  It was Old Man Flagg. He’d seen the whole thing.

  Charles Flagg was in his sixties, a prude of the first order. He made everybody’s business his business, even going so far as to form a neighborhood watch group so he could stick his nose even further into the lives of people in the Pocket. Rumor had it that Old Man Flagg got manicures at a Center City salon.

  ‘Empty your pockets,’ Flagg said to Jimmy.

  Jimmy took a step back. For a split second it looked as if he might make a run for it. But they had all seen the PPD sector car parked a block away. No doubt Flagg had seen it too. Jimmy had no choice. He slowly reached into his pockets, front and back, and pulled out eight nine-volt batteries, still on the card. Each of the cards clearly displayed the small orange F&B price sticker. Flagg took them from him.

  ‘I know you,’ he said. ‘You’re a Doyle. I know your father.’

  Jimmy balled his fists. Nothing got his blood up faster than this. ‘He’s not my father.’

  Old Man Flagg looked slapped. ‘’Scuse you?’

  ‘I said, he’s not my father. He adopted me.’

  Flagg shrugged, looked over Dave’s shoulder. He pointed down the street, in the direction of the Well, a shot and beer tavern. This was all you had to say about the geography of Tommy Doyle’s life these days. Work. Bar. Sleep. Repeat.

  ‘I know where he is right now,’ Flagg said. ‘Stay put.’

  The next three minutes were spent in silence. Each of the boys dedicated the time to trying to concoct the most plausible story for how this had happened. The only one who had a shot was Dave – being the smartest – but even he was stumped.

  Jimmy was fucked.

  A minute later they saw Jimmy’s stepfather emerge from the shadowed doorway of the Well.

  Tommy Doyle was over six feet tall, broad-shouldered, hands like Tim McCarver’s mitts. As he crossed the street, they all saw him weave slightly. He had an unfiltered Lucky in his right hand, burned almost to the nub.

  When he reached the corner, they could smell the booze from five feet away.

  Tommy Doyle pointed at Jimmy. ‘You don’t fucking move,’ he said. He swept the finger across them. ‘None of you.’

  There had been a time when Tommy Doyle – if you caught him only one or two beers into the day – could be the nicest guy you would ever meet. Once, when Kevin’s mother got her Dodge Dart stuck in a snowdrift, Tommy Doyle spent the better part of an hour digging her out with nothing more than a bent license plate he’d found in the gutter.

  Then there was the time he broke his own wife’s jaw with a left hook, supposedly because there was some dried mustard left on a plate he had taken out of the cupboard.

  Kevin, Ronan and Dave all looked anywhere but at Tommy Doyle, or Old Man Flagg. Jimmy stared straight into his stepfather’s eyes.

  ‘What do you have to say?’ Tommy asked him.

  Jimmy remained silent, the words solid and immovable inside.

  Tommy Doyle raised a hand. Jimmy didn’t flinch. ‘I asked you a fuckin’ question.’

  Jimmy glared straight through him, said softly: ‘I’m sorry.’

  Tommy Doyle’s hand came down hard. It caught Jimmy on the right side of his jaw. They all saw Jimmy’s eyes roll back in his head for a moment as he stumbled into the brick wall. Somehow he found his footing. He did not go down.

  ‘Get the fuckin’ marbles out of your mouth,’ Tommy Doyle yelled. ‘You babble again and I swear to Christ on the cross I will take you apart right here and now.’

  Jimmy’s eyes welled with tears, but not one dropped. He looked at Old Man Flagg, took a deep breath, and on the exhale said, loud enough for everyone in the Pocket to hear:

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  Tommy Doyle turned to Flagg, reached into his back pocket, pulled out a wallet on a chain.

  ‘How much are they?’ he asked.

  Flagg looked confused. He held up the batteries. ‘What, these?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said. ‘I got them back.’

  ‘How much are they?’

  Flagg shrugged, glanced at the batteries. ‘Four bucks for the lot.’

  Tommy Doyle extracted a five, handed it to the man. ‘That cover the tax?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Tommy grabbed the batteries, tore open the packages, walked over to the curb and one by one threw the batteries into the sewer.

  Red-faced, his chin flecked with spittle, he walked back to where the boys stood, flicked the empty cardboard cards into his stepson’s chest.

  ‘You’re coming to work with me in the morning,’ he said. ‘All of you.’

  Tommy Doyle worked for a company that demolished houses, but took extra work as a landscaper on summer evenings and weekends.

  It was clear that Dave Carmody wanted to break rank, perhaps interjecting that he had voiced opposition to the plan to begin with, but one look from Jimmy fixed the words on his lips.

  Tommy pointed at Kevin, Dave and Ronan. ‘Seven o’clock sharp. Corner of Twenty-sixth and Christian. You don’t show, I’m coming to your fucking houses.’

  Ronan and Kevin got to the corner of 26th and Christian at 6.45, stuffed with breakfast, sugar-rushed. Ronan’s father – who was a cousin to Byrne’s father, Paddy – worked for the company that made Tastykake, and the boys had eaten as many powdered mini-donuts as they could. There was a pretty good chance that they were not going to get lunch.

  When they turned the corner, Dave was already there, his jeans laundered and pressed. This was his mom’s work, of course. Dave was going to labor on a landscaping site all day, probably kneeling in dirt, and his pants were ironed.

  ‘Come here,’ Dave said in a low voice, as if he were passing along state secrets. ‘You gotta see this.’

  They walked down 26th Street, across from the power plant to a vacant lot on the corner of 26th and Montrose. Dave stepped onto the lot, jumped up on an old rusted Dumpster which had been pushed up against one of the crumbling single-car garages, pulled out a pair of bricks, reached inside. A few seconds later he drew out a paper lunch bag and jumped down.

  He slowly opened the bag, showed the other two boys the contents.

  It was a nickel-plated .38 revolver.

  ‘Jesus and his parents,’ Ronan said.

  ‘And all the fucking saints,’ Dave replied.

  ‘Is that yours?’ Kevin asked.

  Dave shook his head. ‘It’s Jimmy’s. He showed it to me. It used to be Donny’s.’

  Donal Doyle, Jimmy’s older stepbrother, was killed in Vietnam. Some said it was all Tommy Doyle needed to let go of the rail and fall head first into the bottle for good.

  ‘Is it loaded?’ Ronan asked.

  Dave pushed the release, rolled the cylinder. Five rounds. He cautiously snapped it back in place, careful to leave the chamber opposite the firing pin empty.

  ‘Wow,’ Ronan said.

  Kevin said nothing.

  At that moment they heard the throaty sound of the Doyle landscaping truck’s wired-together muffler coming up the street. Dave put the gun back in the bag, jumped on the Dumpster and replaced the bag in the wall.

  A few seconds later, they joined a very morose-looking Jimmy Doyle in the back of his stepfather’s rusting Ford F-150.

  Jimmy had a bandage on his swollen left cheek.

  No one asked him about it.

  The day was hot, humid, dense with dark gray clouds. Mosquitoes by the millions. The landscaping job was in Lafayette Hill, at one of the big homes off Germantown Pike.

  Around ten o’clock, the lady of the house, a heavyset woman with an easy laugh and Ace bandages on both knees, brought them frosty tumblers of ice-cold lemonade. None of them had ever tasted anything better.

  Twice Jimmy – wielding the big mower around the side yard – came perilously close to flattening the perfectly sculpted spirea on that side of the house. Both times it looked as if his stepfather might run him over.

  If the lemonade had been a godsend, it paled in comparison to the words they heard around 2.30 from Bobby Anselmo, who was Tommy Doyle’s partner.

  ‘Let’s pack it up, guys,’ he said. ‘We’re done for the day.’

  They jumped out of the back of the truck at just after three, near the corner of Naudain and South Taney Street.

  Jimmy was inconsolable. Not because he had been caught stealing and had to apologize for it, or because he had dragged his friends into the matter. That was what friends were for. It was that he had been berated and belittled by his stepfather all day, right in front of those same friends. Jimmy was getting bigger, filling out, and his friends secretly wondered when the day would come when he would brace the old man.

  That day had not yet come.

  But by these same measures they all knew this mood of Jimmy’s, and it always preceded some challenge, some death-defying attempt at something, some larceny far greater than the one that had put him in his stepfather’s sights to begin with. It was as if there was something slowly winding inside him, ready to spring at a moment’s notice.

  Without saying much, the four boys made their way up South Taney Street, heading to the park. Just after crossing Lombard, Ronan stopped, pointed.

  ‘Who the fuck is that?’

  They all turned to see what he was pointing at. There was someone standing at the edge of the park, behind a tree.

  It soon registered. The wrinkled white suit. The twitchy movements. It was Desmond Farren. Every few seconds he would lean to his right, looking around the tree, then snap his head back like a crazed turtle. For some reason he seemed to be in motion even though he was just standing there.

  Without a word of discussion, the four boys headed to the field. It went without saying that they were all suddenly very interested in whatever had drawn Des Farren there.

  It was Dave who noticed first. ‘Tell me I’m not looking at what I know I’m looking at,’ he said.

  ‘Holy shit,’ Kevin said.

  It soon became clear why Des Farren seemed to be in motion. He was in motion.

  ‘He’s whacking off?’ Jimmy asked.

  ‘Out here?’ Ronan replied.

  They all moved a few feet closer and saw what Des Farren was looking at.

  There, sitting in the middle of the field, not thirty feet away, was Catriona Daugherty. She wore a lemon-yellow dress, short white socks, white shoes, the patent leather kind, probably from her First Communion. She sat cross-legged on the grass, oblivious to any impropriety, to any and all onlookers.

  ‘You sick fuck,’ Ronan said.

  At this, Des Farren turned around, spotted the boys. He turned and ran, in the direction of the copse of trees next to the ball diamond.

  Jimmy reached the man first, on a dead run, and sent him sprawling.

  All four boys jumped on Farren and dragged him into the bushes. Jimmy was the first to speak.

  ‘Kevin, get his glasses,’ he said.

  Kevin reached down, removed Des Farren’s dark glasses.

  Without advance warning, Jimmy dropped to his knees and hit the man, twice, square on the nose. Fast, well-leveraged punches. Farren’s nose burst in a gummy spray of bright blood. The sound of bone on cartilage seemed to echo across the park.

  Dazed, Farren tried to roll to his side. Each of the boys grabbed a leg or an arm, pinning him down.

  Jimmy searched the man, emptied his pockets onto the ground. Des Farren was carrying just over a dollar in change, mostly dimes and nickels. In his back pocket he had a SEPTA bus pass, and a handkerchief the color of army fatigues. There was also an Ace comb with a half-dozen teeth missing.

  ‘What were you doing back there?’ Jimmy asked.

  Des Farren’s lips trembled, but he remained silent.

  ‘Gonna ask again, you warped piece of shit,’ Jimmy said. ‘One last time.’ He straddled the man, bent at the waist. His fists were tightly clenched. ‘What the fuck were you doing back there?’

  ‘I wasn’t doin’ nothing.’

  ‘You were watching Catriona,’ Jimmy said.

  ‘Who?’

  Jimmy raised a fist, stopped short. ‘Don’t fuck with me. You know who I’m talking about. The little girl. You were watching her.’

  ‘I wasn’t.’

  ‘You were watching her and you were playing with your puny little dick, you sick motherfucker.’

  ‘I never.’

  ‘Admit it and I might let you live today. All you have to do is admit it. Admit what I saw you doing. Deny it and I swear to Christ on the cross I will take you apart right here and now.’

  ‘I didn’t do nothing.’

  ‘Do you know where you are?’ Jimmy asked.

  The man just stared.

  ‘You’re in our park,’ Jimmy said. ‘We want you out of here. We want you out of here, and to never come back.’

  ‘I’m gonna tell my brothers.’

  And there it was.

  Jimmy cocked his fist again. He held off, then reached into his pocket, took out his small pearl-handled switchblade, flicked it open.

  ‘Jimmy,’ Kevin said. ‘Come on, man.’

  Des Farren began to sob. ‘Tell… my brothers.’

  Jimmy stuck the tip of the knife into the man’s right thigh. Not deep, but deep enough. Des Farren screeched. Blood darkened the front of his dirty white suit pants.

  ‘That’s enough, Jimmy,’ Kevin shouted. ‘Let him up.’

  Jimmy hesitated for a few moments.

  ‘Thought so,’ he said. ‘If you ever come back to this park, if you ever even look at Catriona again, I will gut you with this knife and feed you to my dog. Then I will throw what’s left into the fucking river. Hear me?’

  Silence.

  ‘Do you hear me?’

  Nothing.

  ‘Take his pants down,’ Jimmy said to Dave Carmody.

  ‘I hear you I hear you I hear you,’ Des Farren screamed.

 

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