“You feel no sympathy for these kids, do you,” she said.
Hawk looked friendly but puzzled.
“Got nothing to do with sympathy,” Hawk said. “Got to do with work. Work I do you kill people sometimes. Major seems as good a person to kill as anybody.”
“When you were twenty,” Erin said, “you probably weren’t so different from Major.”
“Am now,” Hawk said. He drank another swallow of whiskey.
Erin was holding her whiskey glass in both hands. She stared into it quietly for a moment.
“You got out,” she said. “You were no better off than Major, probably, and you got out.”
Hawk looked at her pleasantly.
“Now you are a free man,” Erin said. “Autonomous, sure of yourself, unashamed, unafraid. Nobody’s nigger.”
Hawk listened politely. He seemed interested. “And you’ve paid a terrible price,” she said.
“Worth the cost,” Hawk said.
“I know what you’re like,” she said. “I see young men who, were they stronger, or braver, or smarter, would grow up to be like you. Young men who have put away feelings. Who make a kind of Thoreauvian virtue out of stripping their emotional lives to the necessities.”
“Probably seem a good idea at the time,” Hawk said.
“Of course it does,” Erin said. “It is probably what they must do to live. But what a tragedy, to put aside, in order to live, the things that make it worth anything to live.”
“Worse,” Hawk said, “if you do that and don’t live anyway.”
“Yes,” Erin said.
We all sat for a while nursing the whiskey, listening to the damp traffic sounds from Berkeley Street, where it crosses Boylston. Erin was still staring down into her glass. When she raised her head, I could see that her eyes were moist.
“It’s not just Major that you mourn for,” I said.
She shook her head silently.
“If Hawk talked about things like this, which he doesn’t, he might say that you misread him. That what you see as the absence of emotion is something rather more like calm.”
“Calm?” I nodded.
“I worse than Major,” Hawk said quietly. “And I got better, and I got out, and I got out by myself.”
“And that makes you calm?”
“I know I can trust me,” Hawk said.
“And you’d kill Major?”
“Don’t know if I will, know I could.”
“And you wouldn’t mind,” Erin said. “I can’t understand that.”
Erin’s glance rested on Hawk. She wasn’t staring at her whiskey now.
“I can’t understand that.”
“I know,” Hawk said.
“I don’t want to understand that,” Erin said.
“I know that too,” Hawk said.
CHAPTER 34
The rain had paused, but it was still overcast, and cold for spring, when Hawk pulled his Jaguar into the quadrangle in front of Double Deuce. He stopped. In front of us, on the wet blacktop where we normally parked, was a body. Hawk let the car idle while we got out and looked. It was Tallboy, lying on his back, his mouth ajar, his eyes staring up at the rainclouds, one leg doubled under the other. No need to feel for a pulse, he was stiff with death. Hawk and I both knew it.
“Know him?” Hawk said.
“Name was Tallboy,” I said. “He was Devona Jefferson’s boyfriend and maybe the baby’s father.”
“You just talked to him.”
“Yeah.”
“So he here for us.”
“Yeah.”
Hawk nodded. He looked slowly around the project. Nothing moved. He looked back down at Tallboy.
“Don’t seem too tall,” he said.
“He liked the big beer cans,” I said.
