Boston Noir

  She pushed the treat toward him and he rolled and took it and got to his feet, chomping. She waited till he was finished to pet him. His tag said his name was Edgar and he belonged to the Friedmans. The phone number was a Brookline exchange, a point in her favor.

  He was still panting, so she took the bowl from the trunk and gave him some water. As he lapped, she inspected his haunch, pouring the rest of the bottle over it. She rinsed most of the blood off but there wasn't enough light to see where it was coming from.

  "I know it hurts, Edgar," she said, drying him with an old towel, but he didn't seem to mind. He stood still for her as if he was getting a bath. Maybe he was senile, or maybe he was just good-natured.

  He looked good enough. She laid a trash bag and another towel across the backseat for him and drove straight home. It took only five minutes this time of night, but in the lot, when she opened the back door, his rear was matted again and the towel was bloody.

  Later she realized this was where she should have cut him loose, but she'd already made her decision, and the possibility never crossed her mind. She thought she'd saved him. He had the tag, the tag had the number. That was the game. The only thing she was worried about was her father.

  She couldn't lie to him. The dog didn't want to go in the cage, and there was blood on her shirt, blood on her arms. She gave him his cigarettes first.

  "I don't believe you," he said. "What do I tell you, and you do this."

  "I'm going to call them," she said, but when she did, there was no answer.

  Edgar was bleeding in the cage, and she had to make dinner.

  "Get it out of here," her father said. "What are you waiting for?"

  She called the Friedmans again while he was eating. She thought it was wrong. She should at least be getting a machine.

  She coaxed Edgar out of the cage and lifted him into the bathtub the way she did her father, using the flexible hose to wash his haunch. As she scrubbed him, something sharp cut her palm.

  She looked at the hole in her rubber glove as if it couldn't have happened, but the blood was already welling up.

  "Shit."

  "What is it?" her father called.

  "Nothing."

  She held Edgar still and gingerly parted his fur. Poking from a lipped gash in his gray skin was the broken blade of a steak knife.

  She needed the pliers to ease it out. He didn't growl as she cleaned and dressed the wound. She used extra butterflies and checked on him every few minutes to make sure he wasn't digging at it. He didn't like the cage, so she'd put down a blanket in a corner and given him a few toys. He lay with a stuffed Tigger between his crossed paws, licking the head as if it were a pup.

  "I don't know why anyone would do that to you," she said, stroking him. "You're a good boy."

  "Call them again," her father said.

  She had the number right, they just weren't home. She had their address. Tomorrow she'd swing by and see if they'd put up posters. She wondered how long it had been.

  In the middle of the night she woke to her father calling for her and the dog barking. Edgar must have nosed the door open, because he was in the middle of her father's room, his front legs braced, his fangs bared. It was like the two of them were arguing.

  "Go!" Boupha shouted, clapping, and Edgar slunk away.

  "Keep him away from me!" her father screamed, wild-eyed. "He tried to bite me!"

  "I'll close your door. That way you'll be safe."

  "Don't leave me alone!"

  "I'm right here, Pa," she said, patting his arm. "I'm not going anywhere."

  In the morning he was calmer, but he wanted the dog gone. Now, today.

  Edgar's bleeding had stopped, the blood crusted darkly around the butterflies. The way the game worked, the longer you held on to them, the greater your reward, but her father made that impossible. She called the Friedmans, and when no one answered, she clipped Edgar to his leash and took him to Brookline.

  The address on his tag belonged to a leafy side street. It was the kind of neighborhood she could never afford, with neat lawns and hedges and gardens. As she slowed, searching for the number, Edgar sat up in the backseat as if he knew where they were going.

  The Friedmans' was a white frame house with baskets of geraniums hanging from the porch. Behind her, Edgar huffed and scratched at the window.

  "Let me stop the car first."

  When she opened the door, he shot across the yard and up the steps, trailing his leash, a burst of energy that made her think he was feeling better. He waited, facing the doorknob, as if she had the key.

  She took the leash in hand and rang the bell, then stepped back, standing straight, her chin held high. Americans liked you to look them in the eye so they knew you were telling the truth. In this case Boupha was, but out of habit she prepared the details of her story, like an actor about to take the stage. As proof, she would show the Friedmans the Band-Aid on her palm. She wouldn't ask for a reward, would turn it down at first. Only when they insisted would she accept it, thanking them in turn for their generosity, and everyone would be happy.

  After standing there a minute, Boupha pressed the doorbell again and heard it chime inside--bing-bong.

  "They're probably all out looking for you," she said, scratching Edgar's head.

  She was about to knock when a voice called, "Can I help you?"

  It came from the porch next door, from an older lady with puffy white hair and red lipstick. She wore a flowered apron over a powder-blue sweat suit. In one gloved hand, drawn like a weapon, she held a spade.

  "I'm looking for the Friedmans," Boupha said.

  "I'm sorry, the Friedmans aren't here. They're both gone."

  "I think I found their dog."

  "Is that Edgar?" the woman said, craning as if she couldn't see him. "I thought the police took him."

  Just the mention of them made Boupha want to excuse herself.

  "Wait right there." The woman tottered down the stairs and across the yard. "Oh God, it is Edgar."

  Boupha went right into her story. When she described finding the blade, the woman covered her mouth with both hands.

  "Oh dear, you don't know, do you? You didn't hear what happened to them?"

  "No."

  "I thought everyone knew. It was all over the TV. There were reporters tromping all over my yard. I refused to talk to them. I told them they could go dig up their dirt somewhere else. It was a tragedy, that's all. God forgives everything, I have to believe that. The people I feel sorry for are the children."

  "What happened?"

  She really didn't want to talk about it. The woman would just give Boupha the basics--she could get them from the paper anyway.

  Last Wednesday, in the middle of the night, Mr. Friedman, who was having serious health problems, took a kitchen knife and stabbed Mrs. Friedman--who was having even more serious health problems--many times. Then Mr. Friedman stabbed himself, once, in the neck (the woman gestured with the spade). He survived, she died, which the woman guessed was better than the other way around, but it was still horrible. They were both such nice people. Mrs. Friedman had been president of the Hadassah.

  "I'm sorry," Boupha said.

  "It's no mystery. He couldn't take care of her anymore, that was all. He was afraid."

  "You said there are children." She petted Edgar as if to show how good he was.

  "They're long gone. They wanted to get as far away as possible from this mess, and I don't blame them. I don't have the slightest idea how to get ahold of them. You might try the police. It's a shame. He always had such a sweet disposition for a shepherd. I'd take him in a second if I wasn't allergic."

  "Is there anyone around here who could?"

  The woman shrugged and shook her head as if there was nothing anyone could do.

  Boupha knew what her father would do. He'd leave the dog sitting on the porch and drive away. Boupha thought she could have done that too, if the woman wasn't standing there. Maybe later she could come back
and tie him to a tree in the backyard--but how long would he be there, and who would find him? She might as well drive over to Brighton and drop him off at animal control.

  She thanked the woman and--finally resorting to treats again--convinced Edgar to get back in the cab. In the rearview mirror, he watched his old home go, and she wondered if, that night, he'd tried to protect Mrs. Friedman, or whether it had already been too late and he was just lucky to escape. The way he acted on the porch, she wasn't sure he understood what had happened. Had he expected them to be there waiting for him?

  He was old, and hurt, and maybe he couldn't imagine that great of a change.

  When she let him out in their parking lot, she noticed bloody pawprints on the seat. He'd probably opened the cut running across the yard.

  "I tell you!" her father shouted. "You get rid of him! Boupha!"

  She closed the bathroom door to tend to Edgar, but the butterflies were fine. In the other room, her father raged.

  "Stop!" she finally shouted. "I can hear you. Everyone can hear you. I'll get rid of him when he's better. Right now he's sick."

  "That's why you need to get rid of him! You're not a doctor!"

  She wasn't, and she really needed to be. That night, as she was falling asleep, Edgar got up from his corner, padded to a spot in front of her closet, and squatted. The puddling noise woke her.

  "No!" she yelled. "Bad!"

  Fearing diarrhea, she turned on the light and saw he was unleashing a bloody stream. He looked over at her guiltily as it gushed out of him onto the carpet.

  She jumped up in just her T-shirt and dragged him into the kitchen so he would go on the linoleum, because he wasn't done, but that only made a bigger mess.

  "What's happening?" her father shouted.

  "He's sick."

  "I tell you that already."

  Someone upstairs stomped on the floor.

  "Shut up!" Boupha yelled at the ceiling.

  Bomp, bomp, bomp!

  "Boupha! Listen to me! Get rid of it!"

  In the whole city, the only animal hospital that was open was in Brookline. She laid down towels, knowing they wouldn't do any good. He couldn't stop. She couldn't stop it. Her father was right, she wasn't a doctor, and when she parked by the sliding doors and carried the dog inside, her sopping T-shirt sticking to her skin, there was nothing the doctor could do either.

  She paid them to take care of him, a week's worth of tips.

  "What I tell you?" her father said. "You don't listen. Stupid."

  The next morning she cleaned the carpet, going over the spot with Resolve and a scrub brush. She threw out the toys and blankets and folded the cage away. She took the car to the self-wash, using the rubber gloves and Oust one last time.

  She worked. She drove. She bought her father cigarettes and listened to him cough. In the night he summoned her. "Boupha!" he called. "Boupha!" And sometimes, as she made her way through the darkened kitchen, she imagined the knives piled in the silverware drawer, and wondered how strong or how weak you would have to be to use them. Not very, she thought.

  THE CROSS-EYED BEAR

  BY JOHN DUFRESNE

  Southie

  Father Tom Mulcahy can't seem to get warm. He's wearing his bulky cardigan sweater over his flannel pajamas over his V-neck T-shirt. He's got fleece-lined cordovan slippers on over his woolen socks and an afghan folded over his lap. The radiator is clanging and hissing in the corner, and he's still shivering. He tugs his watch cap over his ears, wipes his runny nose with a tissue. He stares at the bed against the wall and longs for the sleep of the dead. The window rattles. The weather people expect eighteen to twenty inches from the storm. He sips his Irish whiskey, swallows the other half of the Ativan, opens Meister Eckhart, and reads how all of our suffering comes from love and affection. He slips the venomous letter into the book to mark his page. The red numerals on the alarm clock seem to float in their black box. He sees his galoshes tucked under the radiator, the shaft of the right one bent to the floor. He's so tired he wonders if the droopy galosh might be a sign from God. Then he smiles and takes another sip of whiskey.

  He lifts a corner of the curtain, peeks out on the driveway below, and sees fresh footprints leading to the elementary school. Probably Mr. O'Toole, the parish custodian, up early to clear the walk, an exercise in futility, it seems to Father Tom. The snow swirls, and the huge flakes look like black moths in the spotlight over the rectory porch. How new the world seems like this, all the clutter and debris mantled in white. He looks at the school and remembers the childhood exhilaration of snow days. Up early, radio on, listening to 'BZ, waiting for Carl De Suze to read the cancellation notices: "No school in Arlington, Belmont, and Beverly. No school, all schools, Boston..." In the years before his brother died, Tom would wake Gerard with the wicked good news, and the pair of them would pester their mom for cocoa and then snuggle under blankets on the couch and watch TV while she trudged off to work at Filene's. They'd eat lunch watching Big Brother Bob Emery, and they'd toast President Eisenhower with their glasses of milk while Big Brother's phonograph played "Hail to the Chief." Maybe if Gerard had lived, if they'd taken him to the hospital before it was too late, maybe then their dad would not have lost heart and found the highway.

  Father Tom woke up this morning--well, yesterday morning now--woke up at 5:45 to get ready to celebrate the 6:30 Mass. He opened his eyes and saw the intruder sitting in the rocking chair. Father Tom said, "Who are you?"

  "I'm with the Globe."

  "Mrs. Walsh let you in?"

  "I let myself in."

  "What's going on?"

  The man from the Globe tapped his cigarette ash into the cuff of his slacks.

  "No smoking in the room, Mr....?"

  "Hanratty."

  "I'm allergic."

  "Does the name Lionel Ferry mean anything to you?"

  Father Tom found himself accused of sexual abuse by a man who claimed to have been molested and raped while he was an altar boy here at St. Cormac's. Thirty-some years ago. A reticent boy whom Father Tom barely thinks about anymore, not really, now a troubled adult looking for publicity and an easy payday from the archdiocese, needing an excuse to explain his own shabby and contemptible life, no doubt. Out for a little revenge against the Church for some fancied transgression. Father Tom had no comment for this Mr. Hanratty. And he has no plans to read the morning papers. But he does know they'll come for him, the press, the police, the cardinal's emissaries. His life as he knew it is over. Already the monsignor has asked him not to say Mass this morning--no use giving the disaffected an easy target.

  He never did a harmful thing to any child, but he will not be believed. He prays to Jesus, our crucified Lord, to St. Jude, and to the Blessed Virgin. Father Tom trusts that God would not give him a burden he could not bear. He puts out the reading lamp. He stuffs earplugs in his ears, shuts his eyes, and covers them with a sleep mask. He feels crushed with fatigue, but his humming brain won't shut down. He keeps hearing that Paul Simon song about a dying constellation in a corner of the sky. The boy in the bubble and all that. "These are the days of..." And then unfamiliar faces shape themselves out of the caliginous murk in front of his closed eyes and morph into other faces, and soon he is drifting in space and shimmering like numerals on a digital clock, and then he's asleep. In his dream he's a boy again, and he's sitting with Jesus on a desolate hill overlooking Jerusalem. It's very late, and the air, every square inch of it, is purple. Jesus weeps. Tom knows what Jesus knows, that soon Jesus will be betrayed. Jesus wipes His eyes with the sleeve of His robe and says, "You always cheer me up, Thomas," and He tickles Tom in the ribs. Tom laughs, tucks his elbows against his sides, and rolls away. "Do you like that, Thomas? Do you?" Tom likes it, but he tells Jesus to stop so he can breathe. "Stop, please, or I'll wet my pants!" But Jesus won't stop.

  Father Tom wakes up when the book drops to the floor. He takes off the sleep mask, picks up the letter, unfolds it, and reads in the window light. I'll slice of
f your junk and stuff it down your throat, you worthless piece of shit. I'll drench you with gasoline and strike the match that sends you to hell.

  While he's waiting for the monsignor to finish up in the bathroom, Father Tom considers the painting he's been staring at all his life. It hung in the front hall of the family's first-floor apartment on L Street when he was a boy, and he was sure it must have been called Sadness or Gloom. His parents had no idea what it was called. The painting was a gift from an Irish cousin on his mother's side was all they knew. One of the O'Sullivans from Kerry. Now it hangs on the wall above Father Tom's prie-dieu. As a boy he saw this ragged, barefoot woman sitting on a rock in the middle of an ocean with her eyes blindfolded and her head bandaged and chained to a wooden frame that he assumed to be an instrument of torture, but turned out to be a lyre, of all things, and the rock was really the world itself, and the title was actually and inexplicably Hope. He's been trying to understand the aspiration, the anticipation in this somber and forlorn study in hazy blues and pale greens all his life. Hope is blind? Does that even make sense? The lyre has only one string. So the music is broken. The dark sky is starless. All he's ever felt looking at the picture is melancholy and desolation. Hopelessness. Is that it? If you are without desire, you are free?

  He hears the bathroom door open and Monsignor McDermott descend the creaky staircase. The bathroom reeks of Listerine and bay rum aftershave. He folds the monsignor's pearl-handled straight razor and puts it by the shaving brush and mug. He starts the shower and lets the room steam and warm while he shaves. He stares in the mirror and wonders what people see when they look at him. He cuts himself in the little crease beside his lip and applies a tear of toilet paper to the bubble of blood. He looks at his face and sees his father's blue eyes and his mother's weak chin. He removes the toilet paper and dabs the cut with a styptic pencil. Gerard was the handsome one.