to himself. The rebound stage would progress relatively quickly. Still, still. Another hour or two.
In Michael’s head was a film: His father, Joe Senior, not idealized but as he’d been in life, fifty-eight years old, thin and sinewy like Ricky, with a pair of reading glasses in his shirt pocket, in the same black windbreaker he always wore on the job. He was running. Fast. He could surprise you with his athleticism, even at fifty-eight. It was easy to forget Joe Senior had not always been old. The brothers always thought of their dad as an old man, decrepit from the booze and the long hours. When he ran, it was like a revelation-this, this, was the real Joe Senior, the young man inside the old one. The scene was a road, not a proper road but an access road along the water, bounded by redbrick buildings on the left and a molded-concrete seawall on the right. Ahead of Joe Senior a kid was scampering away. Probably just a reflex. See a cop-run. There were swarms of tough kids like this one scurrying around the East Boston wharfs. Wharf rats.
(In his confession at Bridgewater, as Michael listened, Albert DeSalvo had claimed he’d hung around the East Boston waterfront for a while as a kid. The waterfront had been his only escape from an abusive father, he had said. The wharfs had toughened him up. This was where DeSalvo learned he could take care of himself, that he had good fists. He did not hate cops-DeSalvo had hastened to point this out, always ingratiating-but the other wharf rats did. One of the beat cops here liked to blow the homeless boys who lived at the wharfs. He liked it when the boys ejaculated on his blue brass-buttoned tunic. The rats all hated that cop, but DeSalvo did not hate him, or any other cop. It was just a story, DeSalvo had said, a memory.
But Michael was conflating memories. When Joe Senior sprinted down that alley in 1962, no one had heard of Albert DeSalvo, or the Strangler, or Lee Harvey Oswald or any of the rest of it. This was Before. Michael depressed his head into the pillow again, tried to refocus. He had to slow his brain down to keep the movie running, to let the reel play out.)
The kid skittered around a corner with a neat pivot. He disappeared. He was there and then he was not. Black sneakers, blue jeans, white T-shirt, blue jacket-Joe Senior made his mental notes as he ran, he started writing his report. His feet tick-tick-ticked light on the gritty ground. Behind him were the heavier chunking footfalls of Brendan Conroy, his partner. Conroy chuffed loudly, struggled to keep up. “That’s the kid!” Conroy shouted. “That’s the kid!” Conroy and Daley had a tip on a homicide. They wanted to talk to this kid. When the kid vanished around that corner, Joe Senior seemed to accelerate. Something in him opened up and he found himself rushing ahead faster than he’d thought possible, lifted, flying. (Michael saw from his dad’s point of view now, through the old man’s eyes, heard the old man’s breath in his own ears. He heard his dad say through Michael’s own mouth, “Hold it! Police!”) Joe Senior fixed on that corner, an alley between two buildings. He had to slow down to come around the corner. A good cop does not rush around a corner. But it was a kid. He was thirteen or fourteen years old, he was not a suspect, just a witness, a “person of interest.” Joe Senior came around the corner a little off balance, turning left as his upper body pulled him right, momentum like an invisible string tugging his torso; he leaned right, put out his left hand to steady himself on the brick wall of the building. And here was the kid a moment’s confusion no here was the kid with a snub-nose four-shot derringer, a punky toy thing wavering in the kid’s hand and in the last moment the temptation was to stare at the gun but Dad looked up at the kid, caught his eye Joe Senior was going to say No! – the tip of his tongue flattened against the roof of his mouth to sound the N.
And now beside Michael’s bed, his mother was repeating and repeating those whispery rosaries imploring Jesus Christ and Saint fucking Anthony and God Himself to come down and heal the mis-calibration in Michael’s central nervous system, “grant him rest and relief”-this from the same Jesus who had not bestirred Himself to intervene on Amy Ryan’s behalf as her blood soaked the bedsheets, nor to stop the bullet from a child’s gun that drilled Joe Senior’s chest-for that matter the same Jesus who coded the flaw into Michael’s brainstem in the first place. Stupid woman. Stupid fucking woman.
“Get out!”
He spoke the words into his pillow and felt the muffled humidity of his own breath.
Margaret was silent.
He snapped his head around recklessly and the fluid swirled in his skull and phosphenes floated across his vision and he was dizzy and furious. He saw her face, wide-eyed, shocked, and knew how he must have looked to her. He did not care. His voice was low and raw. “Get! Out!”
28
The ball swung back and forth, back and forth, gathering its lazy momentum.
A small crowd stood on the sidewalk behind BPD sawhorses, heads tipped upward, slack-faced with fascination. A woman said, “Here it comes.” The shopkeeper Moe Wasserman was in the crowd, at the front, watching his building come down. Joe Daley, too.
The ball entered the building easily, through the brick curtain, and nestled in a second-floor bedroom. Plaster dust filled the room and drifted out of the front of the building like smoke. The room was not quite empty of furniture. A bed remained, its mattress stripped, and a small bureau. There were other holes in the building, other three-walled rooms exposed to view. The crane operator tugged the ball, which snagged the bed as it dragged across the room.
The building came down. Thirty-five minutes. The cloud of plaster dust took longer to dissipate. It left ashy powder on the windshields of parked cars.
After, the crowd looked past the rubble pile, across the newly opened air space to St. Joseph’s Church a quarter mile away. The church sat like a fortress on the bare plain of the old West End site. Joe tried to remember exactly what Moe Wasserman’s building had looked like, but already it was hard to summon up a complete picture. There had been a pattern along the roofline, like steps. Hadn’t there?
A few hours later-it was after sunset, beyond that it was hard to know; could have been six o’clock, could have been ten-Joe was at the Pompeii, a favorite joint near Haymarket Square. The owner had a special relationship with the Department, and the Pompeii stayed open till all hours. That was a handy thing. There were nights he didn’t feel like going home after working last half, with his engine still revving and the house all dark and quiet, the kid asleep, wife asleep.
Joe lived on the hill in Brighton, in a little split-level ranch on a woodsy new street behind St. Sebastian’s. The fancy house never suited him. This was not his neighborhood. He did not belong out here, pretending to live in the suburbs. When he thought of the house, he tended to picture Kat and Little Joe there, without him. Sometimes when company came, Joe felt like one of the guests. And at night-Christ. The street went black and the only noises were the bugs cricking and shrilling in the woods and the squawks of the city in the far distance.
So, late at night Joe took it someplace else to work it off a little. That wasn’t always easy. Some nights he never did run out of gas. The energy just seemed to feed on itself and Joe felt a tireless capacity for working, drinking, laughing, fucking, whatever came along. He could go all night. Tonight would not be one of those nights, though. An uncharacteristic weariness had settled over him since Amy’s death. It felt like rot. His strong body was being pulped from the inside, like some massive blighted tree. Maybe this was what it felt like to get old. Your body rotted away with you in it. Age was a disease, a fatal one. The sight of that building under the wrecking ball seemed to fit the same pattern, though Joe could not quite articulate how.
Across the bar were rows of bottles like soldiers in formation, and behind them a mirrored wall in which Joe saw his own blockish face. At least his appearance gave nothing away, he thought. He still looked like the old Joe.
Also reflected in the mirror was the woman beside him at the bar, a big blowsy redhead with a lot of miles on the odometer but not a bad-looking broad once you looked past the wear and tear. The Pompeii-themed interior of the restaurant heightened the red in her hair. It was a brazenly false color for a gal her age, but rather than being put off by it, Joe understood. He saw the sassy natural redhead she’d once been and wanted to be still. With her right hand the woman held a cigarette wedged between her index and middle fingers while she made minute adjustments to the neck of her dress with the remaining three fingers.
Joe turned to his left to peek at her directly, and they exchanged faint, well-meaning smiles, signals of good intentions. Up close, she was even more ruddy and windblown than she had looked in the mirror. Too old for Joe, but there was something there. He liked the way she plumped on her stool like a hen brooding an egg underneath her.
