"Not yet."
Celeste frowned at Dave, like it was the crime of the century Michael hit a few balls before he got a sugar high from that crimson cereal he ate.
"Your bowl's full and milk's on the table."
"Good. I'm starving." Michael dropped the bat, and Dave felt a betrayal in the way he flipped the bat and hurried to the stairs. You were starving? And, what, I taped your mouth up so you couldn't tell me? Fuck.
Michael trotted past his mother and then hit the stairs leading up to the third floor like they'd disappear if he didn't reach the top fast enough.
"Skipping breakfast, Dave?"
"Sleeping till noon, Celeste?"
"It's ten-fifteen," Celeste said, and Dave could feel all the goodwill they'd pumped back into their marriage with last night's kitchen lunacy turn to smoke and drift off into the yards beyond theirs.
He forced himself to smile. You made the smile real enough, no one could get past it. "So what's doing, hon?"
Celeste came down into the yard, her bare feet a light brown on the grass. "What happened to the knife?"
"What?"
"The knife," she whispered, looking back over her shoulder at McAllister's bedroom window. "The one the mugger had. Where'd it go, Dave?"
Dave tossed the ball in the air, caught it behind his back. "It's gone."
"Gone?" She pursed her lips and looked down at the grass. "I mean, shit, Dave."
"Shit what, honey?"
"Gone where?"
"Gone."
"You're sure."
Dave was sure. He smiled, looked in her eyes. "Positive."
"Your blood's on it, though. Your DNA, Dave. Is it so 'gone' that it'll never be found?"
Dave didn't have an answer for that one, so he just stared at his wife until she changed the subject.
"You check the paper this morning?"
"Sure," he said.
"You see anything?"
"About what?"
Celeste hissed: "About what?"
"Oh?oh. Yeah." Dave shook his head. "No, there was nothing. No mention of it. 'Member, honey, it was late."
"It was late. Come on. Metro pages? They're always the last to go in, everyone waiting for the police blotters."
"You work for a newspaper, do you?"
"This isn't a joke, Dave."
"No, honey, it's not. I'm just saying there's nothing in the morning paper. That's all. Why? I don't know. We'll watch the noon news, see what's there."
Celeste looked back down at the grass, nodded to herself several times. "We going to see anything, Dave?"
Dave stepped back from her.
"I mean about some black guy found beat half to death in a parking lot outside?where was it?"
"The, ah, Last Drop."
"The? ah? Last Drop?"
"Yeah, Celeste."
"Oh, okay, Dave," she said. "Sure."
And she left him. She gave him her back and walked up the stairs to the porch, walked inside, and Dave listened to the soft footfalls of her bare feet as she climbed the staircase.
That's what they did. They left you. Maybe not physically all the time. But emotionally, mentally? They were never there when you needed them. It had been the same with his mother. That morning after the police had brought him home, his mother had cooked him breakfast, her back to him, humming "Old MacDonald," and occasionally turning to look back over her shoulder at him to toss him a nervous smile, as if he were a boarder she wasn't sure about.
She'd placed the plate of runny eggs and black bacon and undercooked, soggy toast down in front of him and asked him if he wanted orange juice.
"Ma," he said, "who were those guys? Why did they? ?"
"Davey," she said, "you want orange juice? I didn't hear."
"Sure. Look, Ma, I don't know why they took? "
"There you go." Placing the juice in front of him. "Eat your breakfast and I'm going to?" She waved her hands at the kitchen, no idea what the fuck she was going to do. "I'm going to?wash your clothes. Okay? And, then, Davey? We'll go see a movie. How's that sound?"
Dave looked at his mother, looked for something that was waiting for him to open his mouth and tell her, tell her about that car and the house in the woods, and the smell of the big one's aftershave. Instead he saw a bright, hard gaiety, the look she got sometimes as she was preparing to go out on Friday nights, trying to find just the right thing to wear, desperate with hope.
Dave put his head down and ate his eggs. He heard his mother leave the kitchen, humming "Old MacDonald" all the way down the hall.
Standing in the yard now, knuckles aching, he could hear it, too. Old MacDonald had a farm. And everything was hunky-dory on it. You farmed and tilled and reaped and sowed and everything was just fucking great. Everyone got along, even the chickens and the cows, and no one needed to talk about anything, because nothing bad ever happened, and nobody had any secrets because secrets were for bad people, people who didn't eat their eggs, people who climbed in cars that smelled of apples with strange men and disappeared for four days, only to come back home to find everyone they'd known had disappeared, too, been replaced with smiley-faced look-alikes who'd do just about anything but listen to you. Just about anything but that.
9
FROGMEN IN THE PEN
THE FIRST THING Jimmy saw as he neared the Roseclair Street entrance to Pen Park was a K-9 van parked down on Sydney Street, its back doors open, two cops struggling with six German shepherds on long leather leashes. He'd walked up Roseclair from the church, trying hard not to trot, and reached a small crowd of onlookers by the overpass that stretched above Sydney. They stood at the base of the incline where Roseclair began its rise under the expressway and then over the Pen Channel, losing its name on the other side and becoming Valenz Boulevard as it left Buckingham and entered Shawmut.
Back where the crowd had gathered, you could stand at the top of a fifteen-foot retaining wall of poured concrete that served as Sydney's dead end and look down on the last street running north-south in the East Bucky Flats, a rusting guardrail pressed against your kneecaps. Just a few yards east of the overlook, the guardrail gave way to a purple limestone stairwell. As kids, they'd sometimes bring dates there, and sit in the shadows passing forty-ounce bottles of Miller back and forth and watching the images flicker across the white screen of Hurley's Drive-in. Sometimes, Dave Boyle would come with them, not because anyone particularly liked Dave, but because he'd seen just about every damn movie ever made, and sometimes, if they were stoned, they'd have Dave rattle off the lines as they watched the silent screen, Dave getting into it so much at times that he even changed his vocal inflections to fit the various characters. Then Dave suddenly got good at baseball, went off to Don Bosco to become a jock superstar, and they couldn't keep him around just for laughs anymore.