At End of Day

“D
ERELICT
,” N
AUGHTON
’
S
KID
HAD
SAID
to Rascob on the evening of the third Tuesday in March at the Getty station, collecting $31.50 for an oil change and two new filters he said the old grey Lincoln Town Car badly needed. “Air and oil both,” he said. “Took a chance and did it. Old ones’re both shot. Air filter looked like a gorilla wiped his arse with it. Oil filter—rollah toilet paper, brand new. Saved ’em, case you wanna see them—show you both of them, you like.”

“Take your word,” Rascob said. “Damn thing’s gotta run.”

“Didn’t think you’d mind,” Naughton’s kid said. He’d finished in the top fifteen percent on the police exam and was waiting out the next list of appointments to the academy.

“
Oh
-kay,” Rascob said. “Gonna hafta get a new one. But the Uncle likes it. Know how he is.”

“Long’s ah radio works,” the Naughton kid said, laughing. “ ‘Don’t care ah fuckin’ thing looks like—runs anna radio works.’ ”

“Right,” Rascob said. “Radio. So—I’m covered. The radio works—it runs. Work McKeach, drive his kindah of car.”

“Inconspicuous,” McKeach had said. “Only way to travel. Al Castle says, way things’re goin’, Supreme Court, everything,
pretty soon a bad
excuse
to stop you’ll be enough. Then if they find somethin’, courts’re gonna let ’em have it. Know your car, guys aren’t with us—know what we’re doin’, too. So, they know what you got in it. Give ’em half a chance, drag you down and search, knowin’ what they’re gonna find? And then when they find it, put your ass in jail? Not if you got half a brain. All you gotta do is tell ’em, ‘Hey, I didn’t put it in there. Didn’t know I had it—don’t belong to me.’ Won’t lay a glove on you.

“What they’ll do’s keep the money. ‘Unclaimed propty.’ No one claims it for a year? Forfeit to the state. I go in and say ‘It’s mine,’
I
go to the jug.”

“
Best
thing can happen, we lose a lotta dough. Worst thing—they figure out some way to tie it to me. Don’t like either thing. Make sure everything works. Turn signals. Brake lights—bulb above the license plate. And
whatever
you do, don’t go over the speed limit.
Nothin
’—give ’em nothin’—that way you should be all right.”

Rascob tried his best to be on time for his weekly meetings with Dominic Frolio. Dominic was his last appointment of the morning, but meeting him took patience—and at least twenty-five minutes. Dominic joined him no less than eight minutes after he arrived and he would not hurry business. “Rushin’ does no good,” McKeach said. It still made Rascob nervous; one January morning the trunk of the Town Car had held more than $817,000 in cash. The New England Pats had had a bad Sunday, losing the AFC Championship to the Denver Broncos; the Boston books’d done well.

When Rascob had started meeting Dominic, in the early eighties, the house on the corner of Apthorp Street had been a neat and modest white five-room bungalow with green trim, a screened sun porch added on the front. Genevieve had been making noises about moving to a larger place, a better neighborhood.

Dominic said he wouldn’t. He and Genevieve had lived there since he went to work as a spot welder at the shipyard. “Endah World War Two—forty years ago. Yard’s really busy then. Anyone who wanted, wasn’t dead, could make a buck. Everybody building boats. Naturally—most the merchant fleet got sunk.”

Then the shipyard went under. His job went away. “Anyway, my back was shot, killin’ me by then, workin’ onna stagin’.” But he had the Beachside, at the traffic lights. “So it was okay. Made it good. Took up my time, you know? Kept me occupied.”

In the Beachside he ran the action that Brian G. had watched over years before for a fee and McKeach now kept provisioned and protected, as he protected the old grey Town Car full of currency on its way into Boston and the back room at Flynn’s Spa, Beer & Wine, Superette, at Old Colony and B.

“Once they knew who you were with: that was all they hadda know. No one bothered you. Safe’s you’d ah been in your dear mother’s arms.”

Things stayed the same after Brian G. went down and McKeach took over. So Frolio could say now, as he did: “Nothing bad’s ever happened, me and Jenny, we bought that fuckin’ house. It’s a lucky house, I think. Didn’t know it when I bought it but I think that’s what it is.”

Jenny did not share his contented trust. After every hurricane season and severe winter she had to replace the azaleas killed by the salt water, muttering forebodings that some day the roaring storms would wash them and the house away. He did not listen. He never left the protection of it until he had made as sure as possible that it was safe to go outside.

“Always try to take a piss, ’fore I go out. That way I don’t hafta look around, find a place to take a leak, ten minutes after I been out. An’ naturally I never leave it—any morning, whatsoever—’til I’ve had a good shit for myself.” Then he put on his cap and jacket, regardless of the season. On very hot days in August he
didn’t zip the jacket. On very humid mornings, he sometimes wore the Bermuda shorts he put on before he went to sit outside on his green-and-yellow aluminum folding lawn chair in the early afternoons.

“Take a little sun, you know? Don’t believe that cancer stuff, sun is bad for you. Father always liked the sun—he died, he’s ninety-two. What happened, all a sudden? Now it’s bad for us? Everybody’s trynah scare us. I figure it can’t hurt.”

Leaving the house on the mornings Rascob came, Dominic would pick up the same small, dark-blue canvas gym bag with black plastic handles Rascob had noticed the first day McKeach had introduced them. One day, several years later, Rascob mentioned to Dominic that the bag had lasted well, and Dominic had said, “All my things do. They should. I’m not hard on stuff.” The last minute-plus was for walking out to meet Rascob.

Fourteen years had passed since Nino Giunta went to what was then MCI Walpole with twenty-to-life in front of him, and Rascob succeeded him as Dominic’s contact. Thirteen and a half had passed since the first and last time Rascob had suggested that Dominic forget the eight-minute delay.

“Yeah,” Dominic said. “Never did like Nino. Most guys I’ve done business with, I have got along with good. Four of them so far, you’ve lasted the longest—and that’s not even counting you. The three before Nino, and then him. And then you.

“When something’s happened to them—they got careless, trusted someone they shouldn’t’ve; did something they’re not sure of? Then they hadda go away? Or they just disappeared, during all the trouble here? I been, you know, sorry for them. Hoped whatever happened to them, not … too bad. They didn’t have much pain. Nothing I could do—’cept wish they’d been more careful. But still, I did feel sorry. Bad they hadda go away.

“Nino I did not. Very careless man. Loud about it, too. ‘Look at me, everyone, oh ho, I’m the big cheese inna thing. Everybody kiss my ass. I’m a great big city man.’ Full of the big talk. Now Nino’s in Walpole—I’m right? Will be a long time. Don’t wanna be there with him. Always figured him for trouble. Never liked the guy.”

In the rearview mirror this March day Rascob saw the grey aluminum storm door open at the front of the first-floor front room with the picture windows that had been the screened-in porch before Jenny’s compromise conversion. Dominic emerged and shut the door securely with both hands, the right one on the knob and the left, holding the gym bag, pushing on the wood above it. Those who live in the wind respect it.

Dominic disappeared from the mirror when he reached the right rear quarter panel of the Lincoln. Rascob sighed and slouched, reaching forward with his right hand to shut off the ignition and remove his keys from the lock, then unlatching his seatbelt. Dominic appeared at the right front window, bending only slightly to peer in, raising his bushy grey-black eyebrows under the visor of his black leather cap, rapping with the knuckles of his right hand. Rascob nodded and slipped the seatbelt over his shoulder, in the same movement opening his door and getting out. By the time he had the door closed, Dominic had sidled around to the driver’s side through the narrow space Rascob had left between the seawall and the front bumper, shifting the bag to his right hand and steadying himself with his left on the warm hood. He left three hand prints that would remain visible in the obliquely angled afternoon light of late winter until the next downpour.

Rascob went to the back of the car and used the key to open the trunk. Inside there was a black ballistic nylon duffel bag. Rascob reached in with both hands and unzipped it. It contained
several brown paper bags with hand-written figures in green or black Magic Marker. Dominic put the gym bag into the trunk and unzipped it. He removed four brown paper bags with numerals hand written on them in blue Magic Marker and put them in the suitcase. He stepped back with the gym bag and Rascob closed the duffel. Increasing to $147,800 the running total for that day he kept in his head, for the amusement of learning later from his actual count how accurate his quick mental tallies had been, Rascob stepped back and slammed the trunk shut. He returned to the driver’s door, ready to use the ignition key. “You want to leave the bag?” he said.

“I think so, Max,” Frolio said. “Cold today. Forgot my gloves again.” He opened the left rear door and put the bag inside on the seat. He closed the door and put his hands into his pockets. Rascob locked the car. “Nice tah see you. Should take a little walk. Clears the lungs out. And—things to talk about.”

“Dom,” Rascob said, nodding once, “by all means. Always look forward to it.”

They went north along the seawall until they came to a flight of four cement steps with green iron railings leading up to the platform at the top. To the right a flight of five more cement steps led down to the beach. Dominic went first, clenching the railings with his liver-spotted hands, assisting his leg muscles with his forearms.

Rascob had once asked McKeach how old Frolio was. McKeach shrugged.

“Dunno,” he said. “Brian G.’s his original rabbi—unless it was Moses. He’s where he is when Brian got whacked, same place he is today. Doin’ the exact same thing, same way he does today. Knows from nothin’, anything that’s going on. Ask him something and he’ll tell you, he just owns ah liquor store. All that’s on his mind. Already’d been doing it for years back when
I first run up against him. How many? Dunno. How old he’s then? When he got started? Who brought him in? Dunno that either. Didn’t ask him. See, by then I’m over thirty and I knew a couple things. Things you didn’t fuck with; you just hadda deal with—unless you liked a lotta grief. And so that was what you did. He was one of them, so you dealt with him.