Mystic River

  Sean did. Mr. Griffin left them under the seat, and Dottie Fiore left them in her glove compartment, and Old Man Makowski, the drunk who listened to Sinatra records too loud all hours of the day and night, left them in the ignition most times.

  But as he followed Jimmy’s gaze and picked out the cars that he knew held keys, Sean felt a dull ache grow behind his eyes, and in the hard sunlight bouncing off the trunks and hoods, he could feel the weight of the street, its homes, the entire Point and its expectations for him. He was not a kid who stole cars. He was a kid who’d go to college someday, make something of himself that was bigger and better than a foreman or a truck loader. That was the plan, and Sean believed that plans worked out if you were careful, if you were cautious. It was like sitting through a movie, no matter how boring or confusing, until the end. Because at the end, sometimes things were explained or the ending itself was cool enough that you felt like sitting through all the boring stuff had been worth it.

  He almost said this to Jimmy, but Jimmy was already moving up the street, looking in car windows, Dave running alongside him.

  “How about this one?” Jimmy put his hand on Mr. Carlton’s Bel Air, and his voice was loud in the dry breeze.

  “Hey, Jimmy?” Sean walked toward him. “Maybe some other time. Right?”

  Jimmy’s face went all saggy and narrow. “What do you mean? We’ll do it. It’ll be fun. Fucking cool. Remember?”

  “Fucking cool,” Dave said.

  “We can’t even see over the dashboard.”

  “Phone books.” Jimmy smiled in the sunlight. “We’ll get ’em from your house.”

  “Phone books,” Dave said. “Yeah!”

  Sean held out his arms. “No. Come on.”

  Jimmy’s smile died. He looked at Sean’s arms as if he wanted to cut them off at the elbows. “Why won’t you just do something for fun. Huh?” He tugged on the handle of the Bel Air, but it was locked. For a second, Jimmy’s cheeks jiggled and his lower lip trembled, and then he looked in Sean’s face with a wild loneliness that Sean pitied.

  Dave looked at Jimmy and then at Sean. His arm shot out awkwardly and hit Sean’s shoulder. “Yeah, how come you don’t want to do fun things?”

  Sean couldn’t believe Dave had just hit him. Dave.

  He punched Dave in the chest, and Dave sat down.

  Jimmy pushed Sean. “What the hell you doing?”

  “He hit me,” Sean said.

  “He didn’t hit you,” Jimmy said.

  Sean’s eyes widened in disbelief and Jimmy’s mimicked them.

  “He hit me.”

  “He hit me,” Jimmy said in a girl’s voice, and pushed Sean again. “He’s my fucking friend.”

  “So am I,” Sean said.

  “So am I,” Jimmy said. “So am I, so am I, so am I.”

  Dave Boyle stood up and laughed.

  Sean said, “Cut it out.”

  “Cut it out, cut it out, cut it out.” Jimmy pushed Sean again, the heels of his hands digging into Sean’s ribs. “Make me. You wanna make me?”

  “You wanna make him?” And now Dave shoved Sean.

  Sean had no idea how this had happened. He couldn’t even remember what had made Jimmy mad anymore or why Dave had been stupid enough to hit him in the first place. One second they were standing by the car. Now they were in the middle of the street and Jimmy was pushing him, his face screwed up and stunted, his eyes black and small, Dave starting to join in.

  “Come on. Make me.”

  “I don’t—”

  Another shove. “Come on, little girl.”

  “Jimmy, can we just—?”

  “No, we can’t. You a little pussy, Sean? Huh?”

  He went to shove him again but stopped, and that wild (and tired, Sean could see that, too, suddenly) aloneness pummeled his features as he looked past Sean at something coming up the street.

  It was a dark brown car, square and long like the kind police detectives drove, a Plymouth or something, and its bumper stopped by their legs and the two cops looked out through the windshield at them, their faces watery in the reflected trees that swam across the glass.

  Sean felt a sudden lurch in the morning, a shifting in the softness of it.

  The driver got out. He looked like a cop—blond crew cut, red face, white shirt, black-and-gold nylon tie, the heft of his gut dropping over his belt buckle like a stack of pancakes. The other one looked sick. He was skinny and tired-looking and stayed in his seat, one hand gripping his skull through greasy black hair, staring into the side-view mirror as the three boys came around near the driver’s door.

  The beefy one crooked a finger at them, then wiggled it toward his chest until they stood in front of him. “Let me ask you something, okay?” He bent at his big belly and his huge head filled Sean’s vision. “You guys think it’s okay to fight in the middle of the street?”

  Sean noticed a gold badge clipped to the belt buckle beside the big man’s right hip.

  “What’s that?” The cop cupped a hand behind his ear.

  “No, sir.”

  “No, sir.”

  “No, sir.”

  “A pack of punks, huh? That what you are?” He jerked his big thumb back at the man in the passenger seat. “Me and my partner, we’ve had our fill of you East Bucky punks scaring decent people off the street. You know?”

  Sean and Jimmy didn’t say anything.

  “We’re sorry,” Dave Boyle said, and looked like he was about to cry.

  “You kids from this street?” the big cop asked. His eyes scanned the homes on the left side of the street like he knew every occupant, would bag them if they lied.

  “Yup,” Jimmy said, and looked back over his shoulder at Sean’s house.

  “Yes, sir,” Sean said.

  Dave didn’t say anything.

  The cop looked down at him. “Huh? You say something, kid?”

  “What?” Dave looked at Jimmy.

  “Don’t look at him. Look at me.” The big cop breathed loudly through his nostrils. “You live here, kid?”

  “Huh? No.”

  “No?” The cop bent over Dave. “Where you live, son?”

  “Rester Street.” Still looking at Jimmy.

  “Flats trash in the Point?” The cop’s cherry-red lips swiveled as if he were sucking a lollipop. “That can’t be good for business, can it?”

  “Sir?”

  “Your mother home?”

  “Yes, sir.” A tear fell down Dave’s cheek and Sean and Jimmy looked away.

  “Well, we’re going to have a talk with her, tell her what her punk kid’s been up to.”

  “I don’t…I don’t…” Dave blubbered.

  “Get in.” The cop opened up the back door and Sean caught a whiff of apples, a sharp, October scent.

  Dave looked at Jimmy.

  “Get in,” the cop said. “Or you want I should throw the cuffs on you?”

  “I—”

  “What?” The cop sounded pissed now. He slapped the top of the open door. “Get the fuck inside.”

  Dave climbed into the backseat, bawling.

  The cop pointed a stubby finger at Jimmy and Sean. “Go tell your mothers what you been up to. And don’t let me catch you shits fighting on my streets again.”

  Jimmy and Sean stepped back, and the cop hopped in his car and drove off. They watched it reach the corner and then turn right, Dave’s head, darkened by distance and shadows, looking back at them. And then the street was empty again, seemed to have gone mute with the slam of the car door. Jimmy and Sean stood where the car had been, looked at their feet, up and down the street, anywhere but at each other.

  Sean got that lurching sensation again, this time accompanied by the taste of dirty pennies in his mouth. His stomach felt as if a spoon had hollowed it out.

  Then Jimmy said it:

  “You started it.”

  “He started it.”

  “You did. Now he’s screwed. His mother’s soft in the head. No telling what she?
??ll do two cops bring him home.”

  “I didn’t start it.”

  Jimmy pushed him, and Sean pushed back this time, and then they were on the ground, rolling around, punching each other.

  “Hey!”

  Sean rolled off Jimmy and they both stood up, expecting to see the two cops again but seeing Mr. Devine instead, coming down the front steps toward them.

  “The hell you two doing?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing.” Sean’s father frowned as he reached the sidewalk. “Get out of the middle of the street.”

  They reached the sidewalk beside him.

  “Weren’t there three of you?” Mr. Devine looked up the street. “Where’s Dave?”

  “What?”

  “Dave.” Sean’s father looked at Sean and Jimmy. “Wasn’t Dave with you?”

  “We were fighting in the street.”

  “What?”

  “We were fighting in the street and the cops came.”

  “When was this?”

  “Like five minutes ago.”

  “Okay. So, the cops came.”

  “And they picked Dave up.”

  Sean’s father looked up and down the street again. “They what? They picked him up?”

  “To take him home. I lied. I said I lived here. Dave said he lived in the Flats, and they—”

  “What are you talking about? Sean, what’d the cops look like?”

  “Huh?”

  “Were they wearing uniforms?”

  “No. No, they—”

  “Then how’d you know they were cops?”

  “I didn’t. They…”

  “They what?”

  “He had a badge,” Jimmy said. “On his belt.”

  “What kind of badge?”

  “Gold?”

  “Okay. But what’d it say on it?”

  “Say?”

  “The words. Were there words you could read?”

  “No. I don’t know.”

  “Billy?”

  They all looked up at Sean’s mother standing on the porch, her face tight and curious.

  “Hey, honey? Call the police station, all right? See if any detectives would have picked up a kid for fighting on this street.”

  “A kid.”

  “Dave Boyle.”

  “Oh, Jesus. His mother.”

  “Let’s hold off on that. Okay? Let’s just see what the police say. Right?”

  Sean’s mother went back inside. Sean looked at his father. He didn’t seem to know where to put his hands. He put them in his pockets, then he pulled them out, wiped them on his pants. He said, “I’ll be damned,” very softly, and he looked down to the end of the street as if Dave hovered at the corner, a dancing mirage just beyond Sean’s field of vision.

  “It was brown,” Jimmy said.

  “What?”

  “The car. It was dark brown. Like a Plymouth, I think.”

  “Anything else?”

  Sean tried to picture it, but he couldn’t. He could see it only as something that had blocked his vision, not entered it. It had obscured Mrs. Ryan’s orange Pinto and the lower half of her hedges, but Sean couldn’t see the car itself.

  “It smelled like apples,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Like apples. The car smelled like apples.”

  “It smelled like apples,” his father said.

  AN HOUR LATER, in Sean’s kitchen, two other cops asked Sean and Jimmy a bunch of questions, and then a third guy showed up and drew sketches of the men in the brown car based on what Jimmy and Sean told them. The big blond cop looked meaner on the sketch pad, his face even bigger, but otherwise it was him. The second guy, the one who’d kept his eyes on the side-view, didn’t look much like anything at all, a blur with black hair really, because Sean and Jimmy couldn’t remember him too well.

  Jimmy’s father showed up and stood in the corner of the kitchen looking mad and distracted, his eyes watery, weaving a bit as if the wall kept moving behind him. He didn’t speak to Sean’s father, and no one spoke to him. With his usual capacity for sudden movement muted, he seemed smaller to Sean, less real somehow, like if Sean looked away he’d look back to find him dissolved into the wallpaper.

  After they’d gone over it four or five times, everyone left—the cops, the guy who’d drawn on the pad, Jimmy and his father. Sean’s mother went into her bedroom and shut the door, and Sean could hear muffled crying a few minutes later.

  He sat out on the porch and his father told him he hadn’t done anything wrong, that he and Jimmy were smart not to have gotten in that car. His father patted his knee and said things would turn out fine. Dave will be home tonight. You’ll see.

  His father shut up then. He sipped his beer and sat with Sean, but Sean could feel he’d drifted away on him, was maybe in the back bedroom with Sean’s mother, or down in the cellar building his birdhouses.

  Sean looked up the street at the rows of cars, the shiny glint of them. He told himself that this—all of this—was part of some plan that made sense. He just couldn’t see it yet. He would someday, though. The adrenaline that had been rushing through his body since Dave had been driven away and he and Jimmy had rolled on the street fighting finally flushed out through his pores like waste.

  He saw the place where he, Jimmy, and Dave Boyle had fought by the Bel Air and he waited for the new hollow spaces formed as the adrenaline had left his body to fill back in. He waited for the plan to re-form and make sense. He waited and watched the street and felt its hum and waited some more until his father stood up and they went back inside.

  JIMMY WALKED BACK to the Flats behind the old man. The old man weaved slightly and smoked his cigarettes down to pinched ends and talked to himself under his breath. When they got home, his father might give him a beating, might not, it was too close to tell. After he’d lost his job, he’d told Jimmy never to go to the Devines’ house again, and Jimmy figured he’d have to pay up for breaking that rule. But maybe not today. His father had that sleepy drunkenness about him, the kind that usually meant he would sit at the kitchen table when they got home and drink until he fell asleep with his head on his arms.

  Jimmy kept a few steps behind him, just in case, though, and tossed the ball up into the air, caught it in the baseball glove he’d stolen from Sean’s house while the cops had been saying their good-byes to the Devines and nobody had even said a word to Jimmy and his father as they’d headed down the hallway toward the front door. Sean’s bedroom door had been open, and Jimmy’d seen the glove lying on the floor, ball wrapped inside, and he’d reached in and picked it up, and then he and his father were through the front door. He had no idea why he’d stolen the glove. It wasn’t for the wink of surprised pride he’d seen in the old man’s eyes when he’d picked it up. Fuck that. Fuck him.

  It had something to do with Sean hitting Dave Boyle and pussying out on stealing the car and some other things over the year they’d been friends, that feeling Jimmy got that whatever Sean gave him—baseball cards, half a candy bar, whatever—came in the form of a handout.

  When Jimmy had first picked up the glove and walked away with it, he’d felt elated. He’d felt great. A little later, as they were crossing Buckingham Avenue, he’d felt that familiar shame and embarrassment that came whenever he stole something, an anger at whatever or whoever made him do these things. Then a little later, as they walked down Crescent and into the Flats, he felt a stab of pride as he looked at the shitty three-deckers and then the glove in his hand.

  Jimmy took the glove and he felt bad about it. Sean would miss it. Jimmy took the glove and he felt good about it. Sean would miss it.

  Jimmy watched his father stumble ahead of him, the old fuck looking like he’d crumple and turn into a puddle of himself any second, and he hated Sean.

  He hated Sean and he’d been dumb to think they could have been friends, and he knew he’d hold on to this glove for the rest of his life, take care of it, never show it to anyone, and he’d never, no
t once, use the goddamn thing. He’d die before that happened.

  Jimmy looked at the Flats spread out before him as he and the old man walked under the deep shade of the el tracks and neared the place where Crescent bottomed out and the freight trains rumbled past the old, ratty drive-in and the Penitentiary Channel beyond, and he knew—deep, deep in his chest—that they’d never see Dave Boyle again. Where Jimmy lived, on Rester, they stole things all the time. Jimmy had had his Big Wheel stolen when he was four, his bike when he was eight. The old man had lost a car. And his mother had started hanging clothes inside to dry after so many had been ripped off the line in the backyard. You felt different when something was stolen as opposed to simply misplaced. You felt it in your chest that it was never coming back. That’s how he felt about Dave. Maybe Sean, right now, was feeling that way about his baseball glove, standing over the empty space on the floor where it had been, knowing, beyond logic, that it was never, ever, coming back.

  Too bad, too, because Jimmy had liked Dave, although he couldn’t put his finger on why most times. Just something about the kid, maybe the way he’d always been there, even if half the time you didn’t notice him.

  2

  FOUR DAYS

  AS IT TURNED OUT, Jimmy was wrong.

  Dave Boyle returned to the neighborhood four days after he’d disappeared. He came back riding in the front seat of a police car. The two cops who brought him home let him play with the siren and touch the butt of the shotgun locked down beneath the dash. They gave him an honorary badge, and when they delivered him to his mother’s house on Rester Street, reporters from the papers and TV were there to capture the moment. One of the cops, an Officer Eugene Kubiaki, lifted Dave out of the cruiser and swung Dave’s legs high over the pavement before placing him down in front of his weeping, giggling, shaking mother.

  There was a crowd out on Rester Street that day—parents, kids, a mailman, the two roly-poly Pork Chop Brothers who owned the sub shop on the corner of Rester and Sydney, and even Miss Powell, Dave and Jimmy’s fifth-grade teacher at the Looey & Dooey. Jimmy stood with his mother. His mother held the back of his head to her midsection and kept a damp palm clamped to his forehead, as if she were checking to make sure he hadn’t caught whatever Dave had, and Jimmy felt a twinge of jealousy as Officer Kubiaki swung Dave above the sidewalk, the two of them laughing like old friends as pretty Miss Powell clapped her hands.