He heard his name, walking out of his bank, head down, fingers skittering through receipts in his palm.
The voice was Jimmy McBride, and he was the voice — the same as when they were kids: abrupt, unbalanced, a weapon by itself.
“Sweaty Eddie, what’s happening?”
“Jimmy McBride,” Eddie said. He felt his bowels click.
“Fuckin’ A-right. I just saw one of the trucks. Your name’s everywhere, huh? Business is good?”
Eddie smiled, kept his glances furtive, hiding his mental inventory: the morning sun, the grates in the storefront, Jimmy’s grocery cart of bottles and cans, his black, cloaklike sweatshirt, and pushed-up sleeves, the raised scabs on the insides of his arms. He refreshed his smile at Jimmy, who had never looked away. Absent of depth, Eddie retreated to the familiar.
“How’s your mother? And Donna, and your brothers?” Eddie asked.
Eddie shifted his weight from one foot to the other.
“Return some of these ...” Jimmy thumbed towards the cart. “... and get a morning pop, you know ...”
Jimmy cackled, put a gray fist in Eddie’s shoulder. To look directly at Jimmy McBride was like looking at the black windows of a vacant house: you knew there was nothing inside but you always imagined movement in the darkness. Most people who were invited into Jimmy’s gaze generally swallowed and walked in another direction.
“Yuh, I hate to bolt, but I’m late for an estimate out in Chelsea. You know how ...”
Eddie’s fingers squeezed into his pants pocket, pulled out a thin stack of bills, clumsily extracted a five dollar bill, handed it to Jimmy. Some ones floated to the sidewalk. Eddie huffed as he scooped them off the pavement.
“You’re the man,” said Jimmy with a grin full of rat’s teeth. His hair was shaved by a dull kitchen knife, maybe a week ago.
“It’s nothing. Listen, I got to run ...”
Eddie backed toward the corner of the intersection, exhaled when out of view. He thought he might need a bathroom.
He found himself pausing, slowing towards his pick up, parked several cars down, then standing erect, shuffling the toes of his boots across the pavement, as if to nudge debris off the sidewalk, along with his hot flash of disgrace. With hands on his waist he fixed his eyes on the sky, let his nostrils flare in the breeze.
Eddie began to walk and, contrary to the chorus of screams in his head, he backtracked around the corner. Jimmy was still there, waiting inches behind a clerk, who was unlocking the grate that covered the storefront. Jimmy’s eyes burned in the back of the clerk’s neck. Had not his hands been dragging the rickety cart behind him, Jimmy might as well been readying to envelop the clerk in cloaked wings with a perversity that nearly made Eddie faint.
Eddie’s words neither startled nor impressed Jimmy when spoken.
“You did what?” his wife Julie said, fork poised at her mouth, a long piece of asparagus flopping in front of her.
She stared a moment, then placed her fork on her plate, pinching the bridge of her nose. Shaun and Kevin, their two young sons, who sat on the same side of the dinner table, stopped flicking their food at each other, then shifted in their seats to brace for the ensuing argument, as if they had become accustomed to a routine.
“You offered Jimmy McBride a job. What — to be a mover?”
“Jules, what part don’t get through?”
Julie gazed open mouthed at her husband. She flipped her hair over one ear, twisted her body and put her whole arm on the other side of her plate, leaning towards the center of the table as if to completely veil his peripheral vision. Eddie tilted away, continued to chew his food, staring at a point on the wall across from him.
“Please, though. Indulge me this. You saw him where this morning?”
“Oh good. In front of the liquor store. Waiting for his breakfast.
Kevin began shoveling peas on to his fork. But Shaun, the older of the two, remained fastened to the conversation.
“You know he’s still shooting heroin.”
“Kelly Morrison says he sleeps in Robinson Park most nights. On the benches.”
After a few moments, Julie turned back to her plate.
“Well,” she began again, “As long as he stays on the trucks.”
“Don’t let him in the office.”
Eddie finally looked at his wife.
Julie’s eyes centered on a spot in front of her, her jaw tightening. Then she picked up her plate, her fork clattering to the floor, stomped into the kitchen where Eddie and his boys heard her crash her dishes into the sink. Eddie glanced at his sons, who sat frozen. Shaun searched his father’s face for relief, a sign of mirth, something to squash the anxiety in his belly. He found nothing but clouds.
“By the way,” Julie said, as the top half of her body swung around the corner from the kitchen, “the roof’s leaking again. Third floor bedroom.”
“Why can’t you ... never mind.”
She sighed, swung back into the kitchen.
To understand Jimmy, you had to understand Whiskey Point — the old neighborhood. There wasn’t much to say, but there was much to know. All you had to do was mention you lived in the Point, and you were immediately linked with fading brogues and Boston accents, Catholics and claddaghs, bricks and mortar, townie boors who swung on you for thrills, teenaged girls who would give you the finger with one hand while crossing themselves with the other, bad cops, drunken brawls, gas pumps, poverty, addiction, and disease that was shared only in whispers. Jimmy, and Eddie for that matter, was part of the last gasp of breath of this neighborhood.
As a kid, Jimmy challenged all boys to fight, lifted up the dresses of the girls, broke bottles against houses, wrote his name on mailboxes, pushed kids off bikes — still only a petty thug of the Point, it came with the territory. But there was a troublesome joy that Jimmy took from his actions, even the other Point kids felt, and most watched him with a pensive admiration, even the older kids.
As Jimmy grew, so did his antics. He stoned neighborhood cats, punched walls until his knuckles bled, still challenged the boys to fight. When some of the local boys tried to burn out a Korean family that moved into a three family house near Clark Park, they let Jimmy carry a can of gasoline.
Still, most never blamed the neighborhood for the evolution of Jimmy. His mother used to tell her friends on her porch: My other kids is all right. But Jimmy ... poor Jimmy ... he’s touched. Pure evil, that one.
As far as Jimmy knew, his involvement in Eddie’s life was minuscule. But to Eddie, Jimmy defined his existence as much as the neighborhood.
It was a tough quarter — and Eddie, he barely qualified. He was painfully average and unremarkable: pasty, thin, not the slowest runner, certainly not the fastest. When the local boys geared for hockey every winter, Eddie showed little promise as a youngster, and his skates eventually grew rust and never left the bottom of his closet. As the division of children grew in school — between the ones who would evolve and the ones who would not — Eddie managed to pass subjects with a Gentleman’s C. At Sunday school, he whispered jokes to his friends when the nuns turned their backs, but they always fell flat. Jimmy McBride would have probably focused more of his terror on Eddie during his childhood if Eddie had not been so boring to harass.
But Jimmy’s despotism in the Point would be abbreviated. By the time he dropped out of high school, the surrounding boroughs, swathed in colonial mansions and productive public schools, paired with white flight, gradually gnawed away at the Point, allowing most families to sell high — including the McBrides.
Jimmy had not been invited to make the move. He whirled in the streets like wind blown trash.
Three days later, in the early morning, as Eddie and Julie looked over a work order on a desk in the office, the men of the moving crews lingered by the trucks near the warehouse, smoking and drinking coffee, Jimmy wandered into the alley of Dooley’s Moving company, grin in tact, his black sweatshirt unzipped and dangling around his frame. He had discoloring around his right eye, a red sore on his lip.
“Eddie!” he called randomly toward the office, around the hunched shoulders of the men in front of him. “Yo Eddie!”
There was a frenetic wiring to his voice that made the men pause with their cigarettes perched at their mouths. Eddie and Julie looked through the office window out in the alley.
Eddie walked out of the office door into the alley. Jimmy lurched through the group of men and invaded Eddie’s space.
“I’m here, man. Let’s rock n’ roll.”
“All right, Jimmy. Whoa, hold on for a sec. The trucks don’t even get to the sites until nine. You need a shirt, too.”
Eddie walked into the office, began rummaging through some boxes. Jimmy swaggered through the office door, his cigarette poking straight from the center of his mouth. Julie looked up from the desk, inhaled a long, audible breath through her nose, and held it.
Eddie closed his eyes for a moment before continuing his search amongst the boxes.
“Hi-ya, Jules,” Jimmy said behind his erect cigarette.
“Jimmy. How you doing?” said Julie, as she released her breath
Within seconds, Eddie found a work T-shirt, pulled it out without checking the size, stumbled over to Jimmy.
“Here. Come on outside, let me introduce you around.”
Jimmy exited first, detached as he had entered, without saying goodbye to Julie. As Eddie followed, he looked back hopefully at his wife, only to witness a glare in her brown eyes that severed him in half.
It was it was Jimmy’s attention for Eddie’s sister that would ultimately carve out Eddie’s anxiety.
Pamela Dooley was born with a wild tangle of red hair that the women of the Point thought gorgeous, the men amusing. But there was no doubt about it — she was a beauty. In the beginning, at the school yard, though, she felt the sting of abuse for her uniqueness, in particular from Jimmy and his boys.
Eddie tried to be brave — he really did. One time, in fifth grade, after Jimmy told the boys in school that Pammy stroked his package in the boys’ bathroom, Eddie’s ire flared irregularly. At the end of the school day, he walked along a chain link fence, he on one side, Jimmy and his friends on the other, told Jimmy just what he’d do if the fence weren’t there.
“You’re a dickhead.” It was the best he could create.
Jimmy listened for a moment with a grin, curled his fingers of both hands around the mesh like a caged creature, said he’d meet Eddie at Robinson field later. Then he shook the fence with gale force for a full minute, the entire time staring into the back of Eddie’s head as he walked back towards the school.
Finally Eddie approached his father. He wanted to wait for a time when the two of them might have actually been alone, out of the house. But since it rarely happened, he settled for the one place he could find his father – in his usual chair near the window, facing the television. Regardless of the season, Frank Dooley wore a Dooley’s Mover’s T-Shirt. He watched black and white TV, bleary, inanimated, his corded fingers curled around glasses of whiskey and cigarettes every night until he died. The evening Eddie told his father of his troubles, All In The Family blared through his voice. When Eddie mumbled through Jimmy’s taunts of Pammy and him, Frank Dooley slowly turned his head, his Irish blue eyes devoid of any real understanding.
“Why don’t you just fight him and be done with it?”
“Watch yer tongue.” Eddie heard his mother say from the kitchen.
Frank watched the screen for a moment, then looked back at his son. For a moment he revealed a small concession in his eyes, perhaps a reconciliation, that his son was a weakling, a dependent, in need of guidance. It was the only time Eddie could ever remember his father being sympathetic towards anything.
His father placed a calloused hand on his head.
“Them McBrides is a shameful bunch. Don’t waste a moment on ’em. You’ll end up in jail or in the morgue.”
He smirked quickly, rubbed Eddie’s head once, turned back to the television.
It was six-thirty in the evening. Julie and the kids were probably eating by now. So would have Eddie — except he was still in the office, with Rico, who sat in a chair across from his boss, looking spent. Eddie’s eyes glazed over as he stared into the expanse of the office.
“He stayed in the shitter for forty-five minutes,” said Rico
“Round nine-forty-five. We barely started. Man, can’t have this.”
“Christ. What’d the wife say?”
“Nothing. ’Cept she use a whole can of Lysol when he come out.”
“He move, like a total of maybe five boxes. At lunch time, he left to go buy lunch down the block. He come back, maybe round four. Me and Gus do everything. The couches, that dining room set, them marble shelves ... can’t have this, man.”
“All right,” said Eddie. “All right.”
The next morning, as the men folded furniture blankets and straps in the backs of the trucks, Jimmy stumbled up the alley towards the office. He wore the same clothes as the previous day, including his work shirt which hung slack across Jimmy’s taut frame. His face had barely healed, the welt on his mouth now maroon. Eddie motioned through the window towards the door. Julie stood up from the desk, walked into the bathroom.
“Jimmy,” Eddie said from behind the desk. “How was yesterday?”
“Outstanding.”
“Good. Listen, this type of job, a good thing, is to, you know, make sure you ... kick in the same amount.”
“I’m just saying, everyone’s gotta pull in their own weight? You know how that is.”
“You saying I didn’t do nothing yesterday?”
“Christ, no Jimmy. I’m just saying, do like everyone else.”
“’Cause that’s bullshit. I carry my weight.”
“Besides, you put me with two guys who don’t know the friggin’ language. How’m I know what I’m supposed to do?”
“Jimmy, here we gotta work with all kinds of people. That’s something that we all deal with.”
“’Cause those guys spoke Spanish all day, like I don’t exist. I know they talked shit too. About me. You know me, Eddie, I won’t take that.”
“I know, Jimmy, I know. Why don’t you go out with Chuck and Dave today. They’re on truck two.”
Eddie watched through the window as Jimmy weaved slowly through the trucks until he found two guys humping dollies into the back hatch of truck two, then leaned against the alley wall and smoked a cigarette. Eddie went to knock softly on the bathroom door, but it wanged open into his raised fist. Julie whisked by him without looking, grabbed her pocket book off the office chair.
“Going for coffee,” she said, as she went to exit past the freshly brewed pot on the table near the door.
Of course, Julie’s role in their history had been bewildering to all, including Eddie, who could only assume the worst. Julie never even spoke to him in high school, but when she realized her choices were corralled by men who drove the town dump trucks, custodians, midnight shift cops, she sought out the anomaly, the man whose legacy shone through the gloom. But what she never pictured herself doing was manning the phones, filing estimates in a small office in the warehouse of a relatively successful moving company.
It was no surprise to anyone when she retained her last name Shea, most people agreeing that she spared herself the indignity of “Julie Dooley.” But Eddie always knew it was more than that. Rico, in front of the men on the trucks, used to say with impunity, “Hey, man. If she don’t take your last name, it mean you ain’t eating enough pussy.” The other movers would whoop and slap the sides of the truck. Eddie always pretended not to hear.
The rest of the week brought the same reports at the end of the day: Jimmy was lazy at his best, disruptive at his worst. Tuesday morning, with Chuck and Dave, he refused to take bottom end of any two man carries — then he left the job site at three, before the truck was unloaded. On Wednesday, on Mal’s truck, Willie Lee swore up and down he heard Jimmy say the words “dumb jig” — Jimmy denied it all at the end of the day and left spitting on the brick of the alley. Friday, Jimmy showed at noon, waited in the office with Julie until Eddie came back from an estimate and had to drive him to the unloading site where Rico and Gus exchanged long glances in the back of the truck as Eddie drove off.
Friday evening, as some of the boys drank beer back at the warehouse in the alley, Jimmy hung in the front door of the office with Eddie, as if to block it from exit. Eddie could see the boys sitting on upended crates, spitting in the dirt, laughing over mumbled conversation, every now and then studying the office.
“Yuh, Jimmy. Let me cut you a check.”
“You said you had forty hours a week for me, right? At ten an hour?
“Yuh, actually Jimmy, I was thinking, just how many hours you think you worked?”
“Cause, you know, you took off a couple of times, showed late today. You know what I mean?”
“No biggie. We’ll let it slide this week. Let me get my checkbook.”
“Take the check to the Corrib. I’ll call Richie. They usually do it for me.”
“Naw. I got kicked out of there last month. Richie won’t let me through the front door.”
“Christ, Jimmy. I don’t know what to do then.”
Eddie glanced up at the doorway. Jimmy’s hands gripped the sides of the door jamb, his black eyes converging, the cartilage in his jaw like a stone.
“I need to get paid,” said Jimmy.
Eddie wiped his hands on his pants, walked to the desk. He keyed into the bottom drawer, pulled out a metal box, laid it on the desktop. From the box he pulled out a small stack of bills, counted them out them out behind the lid. Jimmy swung out of the doorway and into the office for a better look.
“I got a hundred and forty three cash here,” said Eddie. “That’s it. I can give you the rest on Monday.” He swallowed after he finished his sentence.
“That’ll work,” said Jimmy, and he swiped the money out of Eddie’s hand.
It wasn’t until Sunday dinner that Julie and Eddie spoke of it again. Julie sat mashing her meatballs over and over into her spaghetti. Kevin and Shaun sat quietly and slumped in their seats, their mouths orange with sauce.
“I don’t believe this,” she began. “You want to make him a driver.”
“Not the big trucks. Just the twelve footer.”
“You must be lost. You think he has a class three license?”
“You don’t need a class three for the twelve.”
“I’m sorry. Do you think he has a library card, much less any license at all?”
“I’ve let high school kids drive that truck before.”
“Yuh, your cousins. You don’t even let Gus or Willie drive the twelve.”
“Oh my God, are you ...” Julie stood up with her half full plate and stormed into the kitchen and slammed the plate in the sink. Eddie stared mutely at the wall across the table. Shaun watched his father as usual, then gave up, moved some peas around his plate with his fork. After a moment, Julie swung her frame around the wall.
“Two more things,” she said, “The roof guy you got sucks. There’s fresh water stains on the third floor ...”
“I’ll call Fitzy. His cousin in Waltham does roofs.”
Julie put her tongue in her cheek, looked away.
“... and when I went to the office yesterday the box was empty. What happened to the money in petty cash?”
On Monday, after the big trucks went out, Eddie gave Jimmy a course in the twelve-footer on the back roads for an hour. Jimmy smiled as he spun the large steering wheel.
“You’re doing good,” said Eddie from the passenger seat of the cab.
“This is nothing. My old man drove the sweepers for the town before he split. He used to let me drive with him back in the day.”
“Good. Take me back to the office.”
Outside the alley, Eddie jumped out of the door, swung it shut, and hung his arms back inside the cab through the window.
“All right, go meet Rico and Gus out in Dedham at this address here,” Eddie said as he put a work order on the seat. “Have Rico call me on my cell when you get there. I need to tell him something about owners of the house.”
Jimmy swerved back into the road and turned the corner, the back end of the truck swinging like a fish’s tail.
Eddie’s cell phone buzzed on his waist around lunch time.
“Truck’s not here, man,” said Rico.
“Not there?” said Eddie. “You mean, the truck’s not there yet?”
“Nope. We need that truck too. The guy here says he wants to take the shit in the garage now.”
“Yep. You ever think maybe your friend ain’t right for this line of work?”
“You say so. How hard it is to find an address, man?”
Jimmy swayed up the alley with the sunlight behind him around three-thirty. The collar of his work shirt was stretched twice as wide as it had been when he left, as if someone had yanked it over his head. From the office, Eddie could see there was a fresh knot on his stubbly scalp, and in the front pocket of his unzipped sweatshirt, the top of an open aluminum can cradled by a paper bag.
“It’s at the top of Larz Anderson. It don’t run right.”
“The park? How did you end up there?”
“I stopped to read the map. I tried to start it again. It won’t go.”
“Damn, Jimmy. You think of calling?”
“You give me a bum truck and now I’m the bad guy? I just walked three hours.”
“No. Not like that, Jimmy. My fault. Listen, you got the keys?”
“You want to take a ride, help me out?”
“Naw, you need a tow. I gotta go anyhow.”
Driving in his own pick up to Larz Anderson park, Eddie called for a tow, then sped to the top of the park where the parking lot lay. On inspection of the truck, the front fender was bent and had fresh scabs of white paint on the silver that had not been there before. He sat in the driver’s seat of the truck, his hand drumming the steering wheel and called back the tow.
“Sorry Pat, false alarm,” Eddie said into the voice mail. When he hung up, he inserted the key into the ignition, and the engine grumbled to life in the barren lot.
Jimmy’s assault on Pammy was what solidified Eddie’s disgrace.
There wasn’t much to the story — for some godforsaken reason, Pam, after weeks of Jimmy needling her, agreed to date him. She was a sophomore in High School — he might have been a senior — at least his age would indicate where he should have been. At some point he set his sights on Pam, and somehow elicited enough bad boy charm that she agreed to take a drive with him and eat a slice at Pino’s.
By the end of the night, he had consumed, in full view of Pam, a pint of Four Roses, stole all the jars of pepper flakes from Pino’s, refused to stop at any red light in his Caddy. Finally, after pleading to be taken home, Jimmy sealed the night with slap so stinging and cold, it left red fingerprints across her cheek like a cattle brand that could still be seen the next week. He left Pam crying on the front stoop of her house, the tires of his car squealing around the corner, her red hair a tangle of snakes.
Certainly, every teenager from the Point knew what happened by Monday at school. But not one of them doubted how it would play out. Not only did Eddie do nothing, he avoided the front of the school for weeks, as if he had been absent altogether. Hiding out in bathrooms, and going home via the back exit, his humiliation reached new heights. Never once did he confront Jimmy — even when Pam vowed never to speak to him again.
He just didn’t have it in him.
Later on that week, Eddie sat in the living room with Shaun in his lap shining from a bath, the two of them reading from the same children’s book. They were halfway through, when Shaun tilted his face towards his father.
“Dad, why don’t you just fix the roof like Mom wants you to?”
“I just don’t.”
Shaun looked at the book. Eddie continued reading aloud, but he was cut short again.
“Do you know Dylan Slavin in my class? Jimmy McBride’s his uncle. He says Jimmy beats up people.”
“No, he doesn’t. Those are just rumors.”
“Dylan says one time, Jimmy chased a black guy around the Point with a shovel, and then hit him with it.”
“Dylan kicks people a lot. What should I do if he kicks me? Am I allowed to hit him back?”
“Christ already. Time for bed.”
The following Monday morning, Jimmy assaulted Mal for confronting him on his two hour trip to buy smokes. Jimmy caught him right above the eye and caused a half inch gash on the eyebrow. In the office, after the job, Mal’s eye shone like a hard boiled egg as he leaned his arm over the back of a chair. His cigarette in his mouth bobbed up and down as he spoke.
“It either him or me,” he said.
“I’ll talk to him,” said Eddie.
“He suckered me, called me ‘nigger,’ and spit on the truck on his way out, and you sayin’ you’ll talk to him? In my neighborhood, he woulda caught a bullet in his pale ass. Hole be shaped like a fuckin’ clover too. Shit.”
“Okay, yuh. I’ll do something.”
“I know for a fact Viking is hiring. An’ I’ll take Willie and Gus with me. Those dudes be madder’n me.”
“Your shit will shut down. Down to the ground.”
Eddie wouldn’t have to solve his problem – Jimmy would do it for him.
When Julie came home on a Saturday night from her mother’s, Eddie heard her toss the keys on the front table, shuffle off her shoes, move faster than usual into the living room. When she appeared her jacket was still on, her purse still hung in the crook of her arm. There was a sheen on her face, and a tight lipped grin.
“Well,” she said towards Eddie, who sat facing the ball game on television, “looks like you’ll be a man short come Monday morning.”
Shaun and Kevin, who raced matchbox cars on the rug only looked up now. Eddie clicked the mute button on the TV.
“Jules, what are you talking about?”
“My mother gets a call from Dottie an hour ago? Dottie got a call from Joanie’s aunt who said Jimmy got locked up last night.”
Julie could barely catch her breath as she spoke.
“How about armed robbery, assault with a shod foot, resisting arrest?”
“Get this. He tried to rob Reggie’s. During rush hour. Reggie wouldn’t sell him booze, so he decided to rob the place instead. He held a hypodermic needle up to Reggie’s throat.”
Julie couldn’t stop her smile from breaking though. Eddie put the remote control down on the arm of the chair.
“For what? It’s over. This will be like his hundredth offense. His goose is cooked, my dear.”
“Yuh, but I should see him. You know. Guy’s in jail.”
Julie stared for a second, then ripped off her jacket and slammed it into the crook of the couch.
“You know what Eddie? Fuck you. Shaun and Kevin, Mommy’s sorry.” She stomped to the stairwell, didn’t look back as she climbed towards the bedroom.
The next morning, Eddie signed a log book at the courthouse, entered a series of gated checkpoints, walked past several empty cells to the last in the row. He had been led by a uniformed guard, who blocked out the lights on the concrete ceiling above. If Eddie’s rumbling belly had been as audible as he thought it was, the guard didn’t let on.
“No problem. Call out when you’re done. Hey Jimmy! Wake the fuck up! You got a visitor! Tell Jules I said hello.”
Billy lumbered back and closed the hall gate with a clank. Jimmy had been lying on a suspended bench covered in graffiti with no blanket or pillow. He rose slowly, walked to the front of his cell, put his face in between the bars and bared his rat’s teeth. He rested his hands out on the steel crossbar as if he had just stepped up to a bartender. He wore a tank top that was as thin and gray as cheese cloth. Eddie swayed but caught his weight in time as not to make it obvious.
“Sweaty Eddie. You’re my first visit.”
“Christ, Jimmy.”
“No I ain’t Jesus.” He cackled, then hacked up some phlegm and spat it outside the cell, about a foot to the right of Eddie. “Smoke?”
“Yuh.” Eddie reached into his pocket. “So what are you looking at?”
“Who gives a fuck? False arrest is what those guy’s are looking at.”
Jimmy put the cigarette in his mouth — Eddie lit it with a lighter.
“Can you go my bail?” said Jimmy.
Eddie stepped back for a moment, pushed some grit around on the cement floor. Jimmy’s mucus stared back at him like a watery eyeball. Eddie felt air rush into his lungs — then he clenched his bowels and spoke.
“Why not? Eddie, you gotta get me out of here.”
“Naw. You’re in the right place.”
“What. What you say? Don’t say that shit to me.”
Eddie took a step back from the cell.
“Jimmy, you’re a fuck up. You’re a degenerate fuck up and you deserve what you got coming.”
Jimmy’s breath was audible and rife with funk.
“And I hope your cell mate is gorilla with a ten foot dick who fucks you in the ass until it comes out your mouth. Billy!”
Eddie began falling towards the exit. Billy had not yet appeared.
“Wait till I get out of here, Eddie,” called Jimmy, his face in between the bars. “I’ll put you in the morgue. I’ll come to your house.”
“And don’t you think about coming to my house! I’ll put a shotgun in between your teeth and pull the trigger.”
Eddie could no longer understand the epithets echoing out of Jimmy’s mouth, but as he stood at the locked exit, out of breath, he looked back and saw Jimmy’s hands trying to shake the steel out of his cell door with every ounce of muscle in his corded wrists. Finally, like some kind of massive angel shrouded in light, Billy appeared, twirling a ring full of keys around his finger.
Jimmy got six years in prison. During the trial, his court appointed lawyer admitted as much to the judge that he could not get any character witnesses to justify why the sentence should be suspended. On his way out of the courtroom, his hands shackled behind him, Jimmy called out to the judge, telling him the next time he sees him he’ll shove his gavel up his ass.
The night of Jimmy’s sentencing, Eddie and his wife continued eating dinner while their sons washed themselves, laughing in the bathroom. Julie’s empty plate remained in front of her, as she smiled to herself, fingering the petals of a flower in the vase in the middle of the table. Eddie leaned back in his chair, his plate also clean.
“Say it again,” Julie said. “Try and remember your exact words.”
“Something like, ‘And I hope you get fucked by a ... forget it. I don’t even want to think about it.”
“Was it awesome? To like, bitch him out.”
Julie stopped touching the petals after a moment, put her hands under her chin, and then stopped smiling.
“So what, you feel like you got some kind of revenge or something?”
Eddie pursed his lips and did not answer.
“Because you didn’t, you know. Get revenge.”
Eddie stared at a familiar spot across the way, then glared back at his wife.
Three months later, during the summer, Eddie pulled a cobweb covered forty foot ladder out of his basement by himself, propped it up against the side of the house, and climbed to the rooftop, tool belt banging his hips, breathing as calmly as if in a hammock. Not only did he repair the shingles that allowed water into the third floor, he resealed the flashing on his chimney and removed a vacant bird’s nest from a gutter. Even though he had sold the moving company last month and remained unemployed, and even though his wife had packed a suitcase one night and moved to her mother’s, he was still able to kick his feet over the side of the roof and wave to his sons in the driveway, who craned their necks up and smiled in awe at their father in a place they had never seen him before.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Nick Rothstein lives in Jamaica Plain (a borough of Boston) with his wife of four years, Jen, and his two daughters, Faith and Scarlett. He teaches High School English and instructs boxing. He writes short fiction and poetry, while currently working on a novel. After his Bacholor’s from American University in Washington, Nick received a Master’s from Simmons College.
0 comments:
Post a Comment