A Drink Before the War

  I doubted that part about the feelings. They’d come back. They always did, usually when you were least prepared for them. I knew she’d probably never love him again, but the emotion would never leave, the reds, the blues, the blacks of all the different things she had felt during that marriage, they’d reverberate time and again. You could leave a bedroom, but the bed stayed with you. I didn’t tell her this, though; she’d learn it soon enough on her own.

  I said, “Judging by what I saw, you went a lot hoopy.”

  She smiled slightly, let her hair fall back in front of her eyes. “Yeah. I suppose so. Long time coming though.”

  “No argument,” I said.

  “Pat?” She’s the only person who can call me that without setting my teeth on edge. On those rare times she does, it sounds OK, it feels kinda warm.

  “Yeah?”

  “When I was looking down at him, afterward, I kept thinking about the two of us in that alley with the car heading around the block toward us. And I was terrified then, don’t get me wrong, but I wasn’t half as terrified as I could have been, because I was with you. And we always seem to make it through things if we’re together. I don’t doubt things as much when I’m with you. You know?”

  “I know exactly,” I said.

  She smiled. Her bangs covered her eyes and she kept her head down for a moment. She started to say something.

  Then the phone rang. I damn near shot it.

  I got up, grabbed it. “Hello.”

  “Kenzie, it’s Socia.”

  “Congratulations,” I said.

  “Kenzie, you have to meet me.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Jesus, Kenzie, I’m a dead man you don’t help me.”

  “Listen to what you just said, Marion, and think.”

  Angie looked up and I nodded. The softness in her face receded like surf from a reef.

  “All right, Kenzie, I know what you’re thinking, sitting there all safe, saying, ‘Socia done now.’ But I ain’t done. Not yet. And I have to, I’ll come looking for you and make sure I take you with me on the way to the grave. You got what I need to stay alive and you gone give it to me.”

  I thought about it. “Try and take me out, Socia.”

  “I’m a half mile from your house.”

  That stopped me, but I said, “Come on over. We’ll have a beer together before I shoot you.”

  “Kenzie,” he said, suddenly sounding weary, “I can get to you and I can get to your partner, that one you look at like she hold all the mysteries to life. You ain’t got that psycho with the hardware to protect you no more. Don’t make me come for you.”

  Anyone can get to anyone. If Socia made it his sole objective to make sure my funeral preceded his by a few days or a few hours, he could do it. I said, “What do you want?”

  “The fucking pictures, man. Save both our lives. I’ll tell Roland if he kill me or you, those pictures definitely see the light. That’s exactly what he don’t want, people saying Roland take it up the bunghole.”

  What a prince. Father of the Year.

  I said, “Where and when?”

  “Know the expressway on-ramp, beside Columbia Station?”

  It was two blocks away. “Yeah.”

  “Half an hour. Underneath.”

  “And this’ll get you both off my back?”

  “Fucking right. Keep me and you breathing for some time.”

  “Half an hour.”

  We got the photographs and guns from the confessional. We Xeroxed the photos on the machine Pastor Drummond uses for his Bingo sheets in the basement, put the originals back in their place, and went back to my apartment.

  Angie drank a tall cup of black coffee and I checked our weapons supply. We had the .357 with two bullets left, the .38 Colin had given us and the .38 Bubba had acquired for us, the nine millimeter, and the .45 I’d taken off Lollipop, silencer attached. We also had four grenades in the fridge, and the Ithaca twelve-gauge.

  I put on my trench coat and Angie put on her leather jacket and we took everything but the grenades. Can’t be too safe with people like Socia. I said, “Hell of a Fourth,” and we left the apartment.

  Part of I-93 stretches over the neighborhood. Underneath it, the city leaves three deposits—sand, salt, and gravel—for emergencies. These three cones rise up twenty feet, the bases about fifteen feet wide. It was summer, so they weren’t in all that much use. In Boston though, you have to be prepared. Sometimes Mother Nature plays a joke or two on us, drops a snowstorm on us in early October just to show what a card she is.

  You can enter the area from the avenue or from the back entrance of the Columbia/JFK subway station or from Mosley Street if you don’t mind climbing over some shrubs and walking down an incline.

  We climbed some shrubs and walked down the incline, kicking clouds of brown dirt in front of us until we reached bottom. We stepped around a green support beam and came out between the three cones.

  Socia was standing in the middle, where the bottoms converged into a ragged triangle. A small kid stood beside him. Unformed cheekbones and baby fat betrayed his age, even if he thought the wraparounds and the hat on his head made him look old enough to buy a pint of scotch. If he was any older than fourteen, he aged well.

  Socia’s hands hung empty by his sides, but the kid’s were dug into the pockets of a team jacket, and he flapped them back and forth against knobby hips. I said, “Take your hands out of your pockets.”

  The kid looked at Socia, and I pointed the .45 at him. “Which word didn’t you understand?”

  Socia nodded. “Take ’em out, Eugene.”

  Eugene’s hands came out of the jacket slowly, the left empty, the right holding a .38 that looked twice as big as his hand. He tossed it into the salt pile without my asking, then started to place his hands back in his pockets. He changed his mind and held them out in front of him as if he’d never noticed them before. He folded them across his chest eventually and shifted his feet. He didn’t seem to know exactly what to do with his head either. In quick, rodent’s motions, he looked at me, then at Angie, over at Socia, back at the place where he’d tossed the gun, then up at the dark green underside of the expressway.

  All the salt and exhaust fumes and cheap wine aromas down here, and the stench of the kid’s fear hung in the air like a fat cloud.

  Angie looked at me and I nodded. She disappeared around the cone on our left while I watched Socia and Eugene. We knew no one was hanging around on the expressway above, because we’d checked as we came down Mosley. No one was on the roof of the subway station; we’d scoped it out coming down the hill.

  Socia said, “Just me and Eugene. No one else.”

  I didn’t see much reason to doubt him. Three days had aged Socia faster than four years in the White House had aged Carter. His hair was mangy. His clothes hung on him like they’d hang on a wire hanger, and there were beige food stains on the fine linen. His eyes were pink, a crack head’s eyes, all burning adrenaline and shadow seeking. His thin wrists trembled and his skin had the pallor of a mortician’s handiwork. He was on borrowed time, and even he knew he was way past due.

  Looking at him, for a twentieth of a second or so, I felt something akin to pity. Then I remembered the photos in my jacket, the skinny boy he’d killed, a hardened robot rising up from the ashes who looked like the boy, talked like the boy, but had left his soul back in a motel room with stained sheets. I heard the tape of him popping Anton’s eye from the socket. I saw his wife going down in a hail of bullets on a soft summer morning, eyes glazed with eternal resignation. I thought of his army of Eugenes, who closed their glass eyes and hurtled forward to die for him, inhaled his “product,” and exhaled their souls. I looked at Marion Socia and it wasn’t a “black thing” or a “white thing,” it was a human thing. Just knowing he existed made me hate the nature of the world.

  He nodded toward Eugene. “Like my bodyguard, Kenzie? Am I scraping the bottom of the barrel, or what?”

  I lo
oked at the boy, could only imagine what those words did to the eyes behind those glasses.

  I said, “Socia, you’re a fucking pig.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” He reached into his pocket and I placed the .45 against his throat.

  He looked down at the silencer nestled against his Adam’s apple. “Think I’m foolish?” He pulled a small pipe from his pocket. “Just grabbing some lightning.” I took a step back as he extracted a thick rock from his other pocket and placed it in the pipe. He lit it and sucked back hard, closing his eyes. In a frog’s voice he said, “You bring what I need?” He opened the lids again and the whites of his eyes fluttered like a bad TV.

  Angie came up beside me, and we stared at him.

  He chucked the smoke from his lungs in a blast and smiled. He handed the pipe to Eugene. “Aaah. What you two looking at? Little repressed white children appalled by the big black demon?” He chuckled.

  “Don’t flatter yourself, Socia,” Angie said. “You’re no demon. You’re a garden snake. Hell, you aren’t even black.”

  “Then what am I, missy thing?”

  “An aberration,” she said and flicked her cigarette off his chest.

  He shrugged, brushed at the ash on his jacket.

  Eugene was sucking the small pipe as if it were a reed poking above a waterline. He handed it back to Socia and tilted his head back.

  Socia reached out and slapped my shoulder. “Hey, boy, give me what I come for. Save us both from that crazy dog.”

  “‘That crazy dog’? Socia, you created him. You stripped him bare and left him with nothing but hate by the time he was ten.”

  Eugene shifted on his feet, looked at Socia.

  Socia snorted, toked from the pipe. The smoke flowed slowly out of the corners of his mouth. “What do you know about anything, white boy? Huh? Seven years back, that bitch took my boy away from me, tried to teach him all about Jesus and how to behave for the white man, like he had a chance in the first place. Little nigger boy from the ghetto. She try and slap a restraining order on me. On me. Keep me away from my own child so she could fill his head with a lot a shit about the American Dream. Shit. American Dream to a nigger is like a centerfold hanging in a prison cell. Black man in this world ain’t nothing unless he can sing or dance, throw a football, make you whiteys happy.” He took another hit off the pipe. “Only time you like looking at a nigger is when you in the audience. And Jenna, bitch tries to pass all that Tom bullshit onto my boy, tell him God will provide. Fuck that. Man does what he does in this world and that’s it. Ain’t no accountant up above taking notes, no matter what the preachers say.” He tapped the pipe hard against his leg, dumping the ash and resin, his face flushed. “Come on now, Kenzie, give me that shit and Roland leave you alone. Me too.”

  I doubted that. Socia would leave me alone until he was secure again, if that ever happened. Then he’d start worrying about all the people who had something on him, who’d seen him beg. And he’d wipe us all out to preserve his illusion of himself.

  I looked at him, still scrambling to decide if I had any options other than the one he offered. He stared back. Eugene took a step away from him, a small one, and his right hand scratched his back.

  “Come on. Give it here.”

  I didn’t have much choice. Roland would definitely get to me if I didn’t. I reached into my pocket with my free hand and extracted the manila envelope.

  Socia leaned forward slightly. Eugene’s right hand was still scratching at his back and his left foot tapped up and down on the cement. I handed the envelope to Socia, and Eugene’s foot picked up speed.

  Socia opened the clasp and stepped back under the streetlight to survey his handiwork. “Copies,” he said.

  “Very good. I keep the originals.”

  He looked at me, saw it wasn’t negotiable, and shrugged. He looked at them one by one, taking his time, as if they were old postcards. A couple of times, he chuckled softly.

  I said, “Socia, there’s something I don’t get.”

  He smiled, a ghostly one. “Lot you don’t get, white boy.”

  “Well, at this particular moment in time, then.”

  “What is it?”

  “Did you transfer the original photos from videocassette?”

  He shook his head. “Eight millimeter home movie camera.”

  “So, if you have the original film, why are all these people dying?”

  He smiled. “Don’t have the original.” He shrugged. “First house Roland’s boys hit was a place I keep on Warren. Firebombed it, hoping I was in it. I wasn’t.”

  “But the film is?”

  He nodded, then looked back down at the Xeroxed photos.

  Eugene was leaning forward, craning his head to get a look over Socia’s shoulder. His right hand was buried behind his back now and his left scratched furiously along his hip. His small body rippled, and I could hear a hum coming from his mouth, a low buzzing sound I doubt he knew he was making. Whatever it was that he was getting ready to do, it was coming soon.

  I took a step forward, my breathing shallow.

  Socia said, “Well, how about all this? Boy could have been a movie star. Eh, Eugene?”

  Eugene made his move. He bounced forward, a stumble almost, and his hand cleared his back with a pistol in it. He jerked his arm up but it glanced off Socia’s elbow. Socia was turning away as I stepped forward, pivoting as I grasped Eugene’s wrist, turning my back in toward his chest. Socia’s ankle turned against the pavement. He tipped toward the ground and the gun boomed twice in the still humid air. I snapped my elbow back into Eugene’s face and heard bone crack.

  Socia bounced off the pavement and rolled into the salt cone, the photocopies exploding in a flurry. Eugene dropped the gun. I let go of his slick wrist and he fell straight back to the pavement, a soft pop as his head hit cement.

  I picked up the gun and looked at Angie. She stood in a target shooter’s stance, her arm steady as it swung the .38 back and forth between Socia and Eugene.

  Eugene sat up, hands on his legs, blood flowing from a broken nose.

  Socia lay against the salt pile, his body slack in the dark shadow of the expressway. I waited, but he didn’t move.

  Angie stepped over to him and looked down. She reached out for his wrist and he rolled over on his back. He looked at us and laughed, a rich, explosive bellow. We watched as he tried to get control of it, but it was beyond him. He tried to sit up straight against the cone, but the movement loosened the salt above him and it cascaded down inside his shirt. This made him laugh even harder. He slid back down into the salt like a drunk on a waterbed, slapping it with his hand, the laughter rippling into the atmosphere and momentarily overpowering the din of cars passing overhead.

  Eventually he sat forward, holding his stomach. “Hoo boy. Ain’t there no one to trust in this world no more?” He giggled and looked at the boy. “Hey, Eugene, how much Roland pay you to Judas me?”

  Eugene didn’t seem to hear him. The color of his skin had taken on the unhealthy hue of someone fighting back nausea. He took deep breaths and held a hand to his heart. He seemed oblivious to the broken nose, but his eyes were wide with the enormity of what he’d just attempted and what it had gotten him. Unfathomable terror swam in his irises, and I could tell his brain was scrambling to get past it, searching his soul for the courage necessary to achieve resignation.

  Socia stood and brushed some salt from his suit. He shook his head slowly, then bent to pick up the scattered photocopies. “My, my. Ain’t going to be a hole deep enough or a country wide enough to hide your ass in, child. Roland or no Roland, you dead.”

  Eugene looked at his shattered sunglasses lying on the ground beside him and threw up on his lap.

  Socia said, “Do that all you want. Won’t help you none.”

  The back of my neck and the lower half of my ears felt sickly warm, the blood boiling in a whirlpool just below the skin. Above us, the metal expressway extension rattled as a convoy of semis roared over
in a screaming cacophony.

  I looked down at the boy and I felt tired—horrendously tired—of all the death and petty hate and ignorance and complete and utter carelessness that had assaulted me in a maelstrom this last week. I was tired of all the brick-wall debating—the black versus white, the rich versus poor, the mean versus innocent. Tired of spite and senselessness and Marion Socia and his offhand cruelty. Too tired to care about moral implications or politics or anything except the glass eyes of this boy on the ground who didn’t seem to know how to cry anymore. I was exhausted by the Socias and the Paulsons, the Rolands and the Mulkerns of this world, the ghosts of all their victims whispering a growling wind of pleas into my ear to make someone accountable. To end it.

  Socia was searching the shadows between the cones. “Kenzie, how many of these pictures were there?”

  I pulled back the hammer on the .45 as the truck tires overhead slapped the heavy metal with relentless fury, roaring onward to a destination that could have been a thousand miles away or right next door.

  I looked at the nose I’d broken. When did he forget how to cry?

  “Kenzie. How many fucking pictures you give me?”

  Angie was staring at me, and I knew the sounds that howled from above raged in her head too.

  Socia scooped up another photocopy. “Fuck, man, this better be all of it.”

  The last of the trucks rattled past, but the wail continued, pounding at a fever pitch against my eardrums.

  Eugene groaned and touched his nose.

  Angie looked over at Socia as he searched the ground in a crablike walk. She looked back at me and nodded.

  Socia straightened and stepped under the light, holding the photocopies in his hand.

  I said, “How many more will it take, Socia?”

  He said, “What?” shuffling the edges of the photocopies into a neat stack.

  “How many more people are you going to chew up before it’s finally enough? Before even you get sick of it?”