We were kings, p.17
We Were Kings, page 17
“C’mon, get in.”
Maria was leaning on the wall under the mailboxes, and, with her arms crossed over her chest, she shook her head no.
“I know you’re a big girl, but because of your foot you can’t be walking.”
“Horsey ride,” she said.
“No horsey ride. My back can’t take it, and you’re too big for it anyway.” He reached out his hand. “C’mon, don’t be a brat now.”
Stinking of aftershave and pomade, a man leaving for work opened the inner door, said, “Excuse me,” and eyed Dante standing beside the wreck of a stroller. Dante’s patience was stretched thin already, and he stared back until the man left, letting the front door slam shut behind him.
“We don’t have all day,” Dante said, and she finally relented. He helped her into the seat. When she leaned back, her shoulders were pinched by the two metal bars that led up to the curved handles. The canvas material bowed under her weight.
“Where we going?” she asked, even though he’d told her twice already.
“To see Auntie at work and get you some pancakes.”
They crossed out of the North End toward Causeway Street. It was still early in the morning, yet the sunlight was as harsh and bright as if it were high noon. The lack of food in his stomach and the lack of sleep made all the edges of the city bleach and blur in the glare. Everything looked like it did on a television set with the tint turned all the way up.
Pedestrians drifted by them on the sidewalk, turning toward them with apparent amusement. Perhaps it was the loud clacking from the carriage wheels. Or how Maria was too large for the seat. Or maybe it was Dante’s downtrodden appearance as he pushed her along, a cigarette hanging loosely from his lips and his wardrobe not much finer than a bum’s down at the Pine Street Inn.
“Don’t let your feet hit the ground,” he said to Maria, who kicked her legs up and then lowered them dangerously close to the concrete. Again, she was testing him.
They passed under the elevated tracks that led from North Station to the Lechmere stop. Shafts of dirty sunlight came through the tracks and girders and lit the street in strips, giving Dante the sensation that they were descending underground and witnessing the last of the outside world before darkness completely took them. The windows of the stores and shops were opaque, and trying to see inside as he passed, Dante witnessed his own greasy silhouette in reflection. A man with a horribly thin face and yellow, syphilitic eyes stood inside a doorway. He whistled through his teeth, raised a hand, and waved for Dante to stop. “Hey, buddy, come here. I need to ask you a question.”
Above, a train pulled into the station with a thunderous roar, and the conductor announced the stop but the speaker on the platform was so damaged that the words were lost in feedback. As the train moved out, metal tearing against metal, Maria put her hands over her ears and pressed to quell the noise. Cars honked at one another, the sounds of their horns echoing in the air heavy with exhaust.
There was a hump of a homeless man curled up on the sidewalk on a piece of cardboard, his face black with beard and a foul smell coming off of him. Maria turned her head and stared at the bum as Dante maneuvered the carriage closer to the curb. A small flock of pigeons shot up from the gutter, their plumage the same color of the soiled concrete, and flew up to the shit-caked rafters under the rail. Maria watched their ascent, and then she started to clap, her applause muted by all the noise around them.
Back out in the sunlight, Dante winced. A block down, he spotted the sign of the diner Claudia worked at, the Hopscotch.
An older woman held the door open for them, and as he moved forward, the wheels locked up. He lifted the stroller with Maria inside it and settled it down in the alcove next to a gumball machine filmed over with dust. The air was thick with cigarette smoke, and the smell of burned bacon dimmed his appetite.
There were two waitresses weaving among the booths along the wall and the ten tables that were squared up on the linoleum floor. They were seated right away, but they waited for five minutes before someone came to take their order.
“So what’ll it be for the young lady? Apple or orange?”
“Orange, please. And coffee for me.”
The waitress’s hair was blue-black and it was tightly knotted in the back. She listed the specials and Dante couldn’t help but notice a cold sore, the size of a raspberry, on the side of her mouth, poorly veiled by the lipstick she wore heavily. He lost his appetite completely but he ordered scrambled eggs and rye toast for himself and blueberry pancakes for Maria. He watched her walk away, the blue skirt wrinkled and her panty hose loose behind the knee, as if they were two sizes too large. Glancing up, he expected to see Claudia coming out of the kitchen.
And maybe this is her now, he thought as a waitress came through the doors, but when she raised her head, he saw a pale-skinned girl barely eighteen tying a checkered apron around her waist.
Where the fuck is Claudia?
In the wooden kid’s chair, Maria was restless, taking her fork and stabbing at the place mat. He told her to simmer down but she paid no attention. Funny how the stroller was too small for her but the chair she was sitting in was too big. No wonder she was in such an awful mood; nothing seemed to fit her right.
“What do you want to do today?” he asked.
“Nothing.” She shook her head and he could tell that boredom was going to lead to one of her tantrums. He reached into his pocket and found the worn nub of a pencil. He handed it to her, and, still frowning, she started doodling on the paper place mat. He lit a cigarette, tugged at it with deep breaths. Ash flaked down to the table and he wiped at it with the side of his hand.
“I’ll be right back,” he said. “You stay put, hear me? Don’t get out of the chair.”
He followed the waitress with the blue-black hair and tapped her on the shoulder before she went through the swinging door into the kitchen. “Excuse me, miss.”
“Yeah?”
“Claudia Cooper works here, right?”
“Yeah, she does. Or did, I should say.”
“Did?”
“Claudia hasn’t been in all week. Didn’t even give notice or nothing. Just walked out and didn’t come back.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, really. Why you looking for her? She in trouble?”
“No, she’s not in any trouble. But you see her, let her know her brother was looking for her.”
When he returned to the table, he saw that Maria had knocked over her glass. The orange juice pooled on the tablecloth and dripped onto the floor. He pulled out napkins from the dispenser and tried mopping up the juice, but it only seemed to make the mess worse.
Dante looked toward the kitchen, and through the ticket window he saw one of the cooks staring at him. When the cook noticed him looking back, he quickly returned his attention to putting the finishing touches on a plate for pickup. In that moment, Dante knew that the waitress had told everybody that he was looking for Claudia.
Five minutes later, the food arrived. Dante got out of his seat and cut up Maria’s pancakes, took the syrup and poured it on until she cried, “Too much!” He kissed her on the top of her head, returned to his seat, lit another cigarette, and ignored the rubbery-looking eggs and the burned toast on his plate. The coffee was weak, as if they had used yesterday’s grounds, but he drank it anyway. The waitress came and put down the bill. He did his best not to look at the cold sore on her lip.
“Not hungry?” she asked. “Our food ain’t that bad.”
Dante shook his head and smiled. “I lost my appetite.”
Back on the sidewalk, Dante tried to fold out the carriage but it wouldn’t budge. He got down on his knees, laid it on its side, and pulled at the handle.
“Piece of shit!”
As soon as he said it, the handle snapped off at the point where the rust was thickest. Standing straight, he picked the carriage up and tried to right it, but it leaned at an angle. It was useless now, junk.
Standing a few feet away, Maria was laughing, but he found nothing funny about it. There was a line of trash cans against the building. He grabbed the stroller, swung it high, and tossed it. It spun in the air and crashed against the barrels, knocking over one of them, its lid popping off and clattering like the cymbal from a drum kit. A flurry of flies shot up from the stinking trash. A rat scurried out toward the shadows under the elevated tracks.
“Time to get on the horse,” he said. He knelt down so Maria could crawl onto his back, and when he stood up, he felt a knuckle of pain knock at the base of his spine. Her little hands, sticky from the syrup, pulled at his neck.
And they were off, back under the elevated tracks, dodging the bum laid out on the sidewalk, going past the pigeons flapping their filthy wings, past the junkie swaying in the doorway like some destitute marionette, and then out into the sunlight on the other side, that much closer to home.
He jostled her up higher and told her to hold on to his shoulders and not let go.
“The Apache are right on our tail and they’re shooting arrows by the hundreds. They want their scalps back and they’ll string us up for the vultures if they catch us.” He neighed like a horse and she kicked at his hip to propel him forward. Both of them were laughing, and it lasted all the way back to their neighborhood.
When they got back to the apartment, he was drenched in sweat, lungs gasping for air. She needed a bath, so he ran the water in the tub, sat Maria down on the toilet seat and checked the wrappings on her foot. Dried blood appeared on the gauze like a blot of red ink. He’d have to clean it up again. “I’ll be right back,” he said.
Claudia’s bedroom door was partially open and he tried to remember if it had been opened or closed before they’d left for breakfast. Her dresser had two of its drawers halfway pulled out. Some clothes were scattered about her unmade bed. It was obvious she had been in a hurry.
In the kitchen, he fired up the burner, filled the kettle, and poured coffee grounds into the press. A pack of smokes was on the kitchen table and he recognized they weren’t his. Reaching for them, he saw the note that had been left there.
Dante, I’m sorry about this but I had to get away for a while. Vinny and I are heading to the Cape for a few days, maybe a week. There are lots of things to talk about when I get back. I spoke to Mrs. Berardi just now. She says she’ll help watch Maria when you’re gone at work. Sorry again. Love you. —Claudia
On the side of the note, somebody had sloppily drawn a sad face, two Xs for eyes and a downturned frown. And next to that was a crooked heart with an arrow stabbed through it and the words Love you too.
Dante knew that it wasn’t Claudia who had drawn the face and the heart and written Love you too. It had to be Vinny who had doodled on the note while Claudia was in her bedroom packing up her suitcase. Dante crumpled up the piece of paper and dropped it back on the table. In his head, he could see the two of them in a car right now traveling down Route 6 over the Sagamore Bridge to the Cape, not a care in the world. As he lit a cigarette, he heard Maria cry out for him, suddenly and with an urgency that could only mean she was in pain.
In the bathroom, she stood beside the claw-foot tub and pointed to the water and all the steam coming off it. He turned the brass knob the other way, and the tap stopped running, and he reached inside to pull out the plug but reared back quickly and shook his hand. The water was scalding. He hurried over to the sink and held his hand under the faucet, letting the cold numb the pain.
“I’ll fix it,” Maria said. And on her dirty face, dried syrup glistening along her cheeks, a look of worry took hold. “Let me fix it.”
“It’s okay, love. It’s fine.”
His heart was breaking again, just like it had when he was with her in the emergency room, but as he kept on talking, he felt a desperation tear into him and open the hole so wide that he was afraid something would get inside that he wouldn’t be able to get rid of.
“I got an idea. Just me and you, just the two of us, we’ll get dressed nice and go see the matinee. There’s one movie that just came out about giant monster ants, called Them. How about that? Then, later, a sundae at Brigham’s. We’ll get jimmies, caramel, hot fudge, the works—”
“Vinny says ice cream is bad for me. Vinny says my teeth will fall out.”
“What does Vinny know about anything?” Dante took a deep breath and sighed, grabbed a towel and dried his hands, then picked Maria up, embraced her, and brought her out to the kitchen, where the kettle whistled with a horrible, foreboding pitch.
26
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Cedar Grove Cemetery, Dorchester
CAL HADN’T TENDED his father’s grave in over a dozen years, but someone—perhaps a family member of someone in a nearby grave who’d been embarrassed or ashamed by the state of the plot—had taken it upon himself to cut the grass, pull the weeds, occasionally place a potted flower before the stone, and, on St. Patrick’s Day, lay a wreath of shamrock there. Cal knew these things because, though he’d convinced himself that he didn’t care, he often stopped by to look at the stone, consider his father’s life, and wonder about the man. He didn’t talk and he didn’t pray the way he often saw others do at the graves; he merely looked and thought and wondered, as if somehow, one day, he might be granted the answers to his questions, as if his father might rear up out of the grave and say, All right, now it’s time, a mhac, come with me and I’ll tell you what you want to know, what it is you’re looking for.
He didn’t talk and he didn’t pray, not as he did at Lynne’s grave, and he was thankful that they were in separate parts of the cemetery—his father on the bank beyond the cedars that sloped to the broad, almost regal width of the Neponset before it became a trickle and leaked defeated into the harbor and the sea; Lynne on the other side of the train tracks that bisected the grounds and along one of the paths that wound through small undulating knolls filled with flowers and copses of hardwoods, closer to the chapel.
He stood at his father’s grave—his funeral, the plot, and the stone of Connemara marble had been paid for by his mother with most of the funds from his father’s pension and donations from various unions about the city. The grass had been cut and was brown, scorched from the sun. Blackened and withered flowers stood in front of the headstone; Cal couldn’t even tell what they were. Hornets buzzed the air, savagely going after the apples that had fallen from the trees and were rotting sweetly on the ground. Crickets and cicadas and other flying things thrummed and pulsed electrically in the denser foliage.
“What secrets did you keep? You bastard,” Cal said aloud. He sighed and stared about him.
The Old Colony Railroad trolley from Ashmont rumbled through the cemetery, just out of sight beyond the rolling knolls of the grounds. Cal watched an old man in a decrepit rowboat pulling up traps on the far bank of the river. Tree branches, granting Cal welcome shade from the sun, stirred above, making a sloughing sound as they rubbed together gently.
Father Nolan strode up the path between the greenhouse and the stables coming from the riverside, having, Cal guessed, walked along the Neponset from St. Gregory’s and Lower Mills Falls. He looked as strong and lean as ever, his stride that of an ex-soldier, quick and purposeful, and his white hair slicked back, but to Cal, he seemed older somehow, a barely perceptible weariness to his face and as if he were pulling his shoulders in against some deep, internal cold. Sweat trickled down Cal’s spine. He wiped at his brow and waved and then stepped back into the shade beneath the cedars, and Father Nolan met him there.
“I spoke to your man and he’s agreed to a meeting at St. Anthony’s shrine on Tuesday evening at seven, after confession and vespers.”
“Why the church?”
“He didn’t tell me why and I didn’t ask—neutral ground, I suppose. He’s a churchgoing man, a God-fearing man. He’ll respect the sanctity of the church.”
“How will I recognize him?”
“He’ll be downstairs by the votives. He’s a tall, thin fellow. He’ll be wearing a Pioneer pin on his lapel. You’ll know his look from your own history, from the war. You can’t mistake it.”
The priest lit a cigarette and Cal was surprised to see the shakiness in his hands as he brought it to his lips and deeply inhaled.
“It’s like a black stain upon all of us, Cal,” Father Nolan said, smoke streaming from his nostrils. “It’s as if something dark touched your soul and not even the light of God can bring it back. Do you believe that? Sadly, God forgive my soul, at times I do. It’s my own weakness, my own lack of faith, perhaps. My own soul is tarnished the same way. There’s a place there that even God has no access to, no ability to mend. I have to live with that—we all have our own secret burdens—just as you have to live with those things from your past.”
He glanced at the grave and then toward the river where the sun struck the water in dappled lances, making it seem as if it had more movement than it did. “Hopefully you’ll get the information you need and then you can put it to rest.”
“You make it sound simple, Father. I only wish it were that way.”
“God help us, Cal, go easy. This is all I could do, and dear God, I wish I hadn’t done it at all. I don’t know what is the right thing anymore. You don’t have to meet with him, you know. It can end right here”—and he glanced to the headstones that stretched down to the river—“before your father’s grave.”
“You know I can’t do that, Father.”
“Then God be with you, Cal.” The priest put out his hand and Cal shook it.
“And you, Father. Thank you.” For a moment they regarded each other and Cal thought Father Nolan might say something more, but then the man nodded serenely, an acceptance, perhaps of things no longer in his control. He turned away and then paused. The light through the swaying branches dappled his black shirt, blazed in his white hair. He looked at Cal and forced a smile. “I’d better see you in Mass after this,” he said, and he strode off.
