December Boys (12 page)

“Jay?” Charlie said. “You all right?”

“Never mind. Forget it.” I turned off the cab light, flicked the nubbed butt into the sub-zero scrub, and rolled the window back up. “Let’s get out of here.”

The headlights descended on us from out of nowhere.

T
WO ALL-TERRAIN VEHICLES
came at us from opposite directions, jamming my Chevy kitty-corner, high beams catching us in the crossfire.

A beefy security guard, who looked like he’d flopped out of Boston College, pushing three hundred if he was a pound, smacked the butt of a flashlight against the glass until I cracked the window.

“What are you doing here?” he said. “This is private property.”

“Me and my buddy took a wrong turn,” I said. “No street names. Can’t get a signal.” I held up my phone, offering its blank screen as evidence of my ignorance. “Do you know the way to the highway?”

“Let’s see some ID.”

“You’re not a cop,” Charlie said. “We don’t have to show you jack.”

The security guard flashed a secret hand signal, some gangland command, and another guard materialized from the shadows, standing outside Charlie’s window. Light glinted off a grip of a handgun. I knew then these two would love nothing more than to split my skull open. And neither would be opposed to a two-for-one deal. After getting my ass handed to me the other night, I didn’t have the stomach for another beat down. Three days later, I still couldn’t piss right.

I slammed the truck in reverse and floored the pedal. The passenger door flung open, hand darting around inside, fumbling for the traction of Charlie’s coat.

“Hold on,” I screamed.

The guard had a firm grip on Charlie, who two-fisted the Jesus bar, squealing as I punched the transmission in drive. I cranked the steering column, burning donuts in double time until the guy let go.

I jerked, re-righted the front end, speeding to freedom. In the rearview mirror, I saw the big man roll across the frozen dirt. I waited for the echo of gunshots over my shoulder. But they never came.

“Christ, Jay! What the hell?”

“I don’t know, man. I don’t know what their deal was.”

“Not them! You!”

“Me?” Where was the gratitude for saving his ass?

“They were rent-a-cops, dude.”

“I don’t know what they were. But they looked like they wanted to use us for target practice.”

“Target practice? With what? Their flashlights?”

“He had a gun.”

“It was a flashlight. A couple of fat guys on golf carts. What did you think they were going to do? Lock us inside with the rest of the junkies?”

“We were on private property. And he had a gun. I saw it.”

“Dude. It was a flashlight! Relax.”

I checked my rearview to be sure we were clear of any hot pursuit. No one was on our heels. Golf carts? A flashlight? I was certain it was a gun. Was I going crazy?

“Jay, you don’t look so good.”

“Listen, man, I’m not supposed to be touching this case. DeSouza finds out I’m poking my nose around, I’m out of a job.”

“Then what were we doing up here in the first place?”

I could feel him watching me, waiting for a better explanation, but all the ones I had tumbling around inside my brain sounded stupid. I didn’t know what we were doing up there. I didn’t know what I was doing, period.

I felt my chest tighten. I was having a tough time catching my breath. I steadied on the road and focused on my breathing.

“Shit,” Charlie said, rotating his arm and ball joint. “I think Fatty dislocated my shoulder.”

My lungs seized up. They stopped accepting oxygen.

“Jay, you okay?”

I tried to nod but it didn’t come across right. More like my head swiveled in seven different directions at once.

“Pull over,” Charlie said.

“I don’t . . . If they’re . . . behind us.”

Charlie covered his hands over mine, taking control of the wheel. “No one is following us, Porter. Pull over. Let me drive. You look like you swallowed a case of mini-thins. You’re going to wrap around an oak tree and kill us both.”

I steered to the shoulder.

Charlie and I traded places.

I rested my head against the cool glass, and gazed out into the night. I focused on my breathing, like Dr. Shapiro-Weiss had told me to do. Count. One. Two. Twenty-three. Charlie didn’t say anything more as he drove us back to his place.

Like a den mother, he led me to the couch, covering me with a quilt that reeked of mothballs and liniment. Charlie Finn playing caretaker. Hell had truly frozen over.

He thumbed toward his kitchen. “You want a beer or something? Whiskey? You could use a shot to calm down. I think I still have a bottle of Maker’s somewhere . . .”

Charlie returned with a pair of glasses. He broke the seal and measured out two fingers, like he was administering cough syrup to a sick kid.

“Okay, Jay.” He passed the glass. “Drink up.”

I pounded the shot. He poured another. I pounded that too.

“Better?”

I nodded.

“Tell me what’s going on. I’m your friend. Let me help.”

“That folder I showed you.”

“The court documents?”

“Yeah. It relates to the Brian Olisky case. According to the cops, they also found a joint.”

“Is that true?”

“I don’t know.”

Charlie scratched his thinning curls. “How much time did he get?”

I explained the open-ended sentences, North River being a diversion program, parents waiving rights because the children in question were minors.

“So Dad signed off?”

“There’s no dad in the picture.”

“I thought you said Mom called you because she was worried? Why would she agree to send her son there?”

“She didn’t know about the pot. At least that’s what she said when I called her tonight. I think they got to her.”

“They? Who’s they?”

I couldn’t answer that. I didn’t know. The malicious they? The conspiratorial they? The they really in charge.

Charlie tried to wrap his brain around logistics, my investment, my helter-skelter reasoning.

“Sucks about the kid,” Charlie finally said, “but, like, it’s not your problem.”

“It’s more complicated than that.”

I tried to explain about Nicki and what she’d uncovered, Judge Roberts’ harsh sentencing practices, the recent spike in enrollment at North River. Maybe those cops
had
been sent to deliver a message, stop me from kicking over stones. Maybe they were all in on it. Everyone buying into the antidrug propaganda, quick to point the finger, solve problems with absolutes. Black. White. I was bouncing all over the place, talking points that made sense in my head lost in translation. Words failed me. I couldn’t stay on task or follow a single thread to its proper conclusion. I knew how unhinged I sounded. Dredging up the past, fretting about the future. I circled back to Craig Olisky, Brian’s dead brother. At some point in my rambling, I began bitching about Adam Lombardi.

“Adam Lombardi?” Charlie said. “What about him? You know he doesn’t even live in Ashton anymore, right? Relocated his entire family down to Concord after his father died. In fact, I’m pretty sure he got out of the construction business altogether.”

“Bullshit. Where’d you hear that?”

“I don’t know. The news? Sold the company. I think he’s working full time on his brother’s campaign.”

That would explain the abandoned site I’d run across last week.

“I hate to say it, Jay. Don’t take this the wrong way. You sound like your brother. Everything isn’t some conspiracy involving the Lombardis.” He dropped his head, muttering, “I swear between you and Fisher . . .”

“Why do you keep saying that? Fisher. What about Fisher? I haven’t spoken to Fisher since he got me in at NEI—”

“Gerry Lombardi is dead. His sons live far away. It’s over, man. Your brother died because of drugs.”

“You don’t think I know that?”

“No, I think you do. Up here.” Charlie pointed at his head. “But not here.” He pointed at his heart. “You want to hold someone responsible. The Lombardis are convenient.”

“How can you say that? You were with me last year. You were with me when I chased down Roger Paul in those mountains, with my brother a prisoner in the backseat—”

“Roger who?”

“The guy who grabbed Chris and stuffed him in back of his car! The guy who planned to cut a hole in the ice. The guy I chased down and ran off the road. The guy who died! Who do you think sent him?”

“You mean Chris’ drug dealer who’d been trying to collect his money? The one who died in that car accident on Lamentation Mountain?”

“You never believed that, man. That was a bullshit cover story sold to the newspapers. You saw my fucking truck, busted to shit. I was the other vehicle involved in the accident! Come on, Charlie. You know that!”

“All I know is what Turley said. I know what I read in the
Herald
. I know that you ended up with a concussion in the hospital, talking crazy. And truth is, man, you must’ve hit your head pretty fucking hard. Because you haven’t been the same since.”

Charlie sat beside me on the couch, put his arm around my shoulder. “Maybe you should talk to that doctor you were seeing. The shrink.”

I shook my head. “You sound like my wife.”

“Get some sleep, buddy. Everything looks better in the morning.”

I nodded, even though I didn’t believe that. When nothing is right in your world, the sun coming around again to shine a light on your failure is the last thing you want to see.

* * *

Whether from the whiskey or lingering internal trauma from the beating, I couldn’t fully fall asleep, at least not peacefully, enduring an endless, tormented night. Straddling the line between consciousness and slumber, I felt both asleep and awake, very aware of the fact that I was dreaming. I’d read somewhere that your dreams only last a few seconds. Just feels like they go on forever. Not this night. My dreams were never-ending. And it felt like a reckoning, the past coming back to haunt. I saw them all again. High school bullies. Distant relatives. Ex-girlfriends whose hearts I’d broken because I’d only been in love with one woman my whole life. I saw Erik Bowman, Adam Lombardi’s head of security, with the Star of David tattooed on his goddamn neck. Bowman, who’d done time in a motorcycle gang with Jenny’s ex, Brody, whose scumbag ass my scrawny, drug-addled brother had thoroughly kicked the same day he died, tapping into a secret strength from his wrestling days I didn’t know he possessed anymore. I saw the entire town of Ashton, longtime residents who’d come out to pay their final respects to my dead junkie brother, collective expressions on their faces like the expressions I invited wherever I went these days, one that seemed to say, “You poor sick sorry sonofabitch.” Which is what happens when you become a scourge, a pariah, a lunatic.

I lay there immobilized, paralyzed like
Johnny Got His Gun
, forced to relieve my mistakes, watching actors dramatize what could’ve been. No one else could tell me what was real and what wasn’t. Because anyone who had been there was now dead. Like my brother. Like the killer sent to silence him. Like my parents who perished in a fatal car crash twenty years earlier under mysterious circumstances. Like a very real part of me. Every secret, every promise broken, every word left unsaid—my memory and my burden to carry alone. I tossed, turned, and ground my jaw
until I dreamt I was chewing sawdust, mouth parched, calcium phosphate powder, narrative dissolving into nonsensical, overheated bubbling celluloid.

* * *

I split with the daybreak, leaving Charlie snoring blissfully unaware in his bedroom. Stepping outside, I embraced the overcast. I don’t think I could’ve faced a clear blue sky right then.

I filled up my truck, grabbed a paper, a carton of cigarettes, coffee, and drove out to see her, waiting on the front steps for her to arrive.

“J
AY?
” D
R
. S
HAPIRO-
W
EISS
said as she walked up the narrow stone pathway to her office. “What are you doing here?”

“I needed to see you.”

“Okay. But it doesn’t work like that. You can’t show up at my office. You have to call and make an appointment. I have other patients scheduled. These are boundaries I need you to respect.”

“It’s an emergency.” I could feel my chest tightening, breaths short and shallow, pulse irregular. I clamped the cigarette in my teeth and grabbed hold of the railing.

I waited for her to tell me to go to the emergency room, at which point I’d get in my truck and drive off. Fuck it. I didn’t believe in asking for help in the first place. You dig yourself in a hole, you dig yourself out. Only the weak need help. But shame was the least of my concerns. I was falling down and needed a hand up. If the doctor sent me packing to be someone else’s problem, I’d take it as a sign. I wasn’t asking twice.

Maybe Dr. Shapiro-Weiss recognized the crossroads too, because she said to come inside and have a seat in the waiting room.

“Let me see if I can juggle some appointments. Might take a few minutes. Don’t go anywhere. Breathe.”

I nodded and watched her disappear into a back room. The soothing sounds of the rainforest dribbled out the sound system, the calming pitter-patter of water pooling and plopping off lush,
tropical leaves, splashing into giant puddles, the delicate sound of thunder crackling in the distance. I closed my eyes and concentrated on the air filling my lungs. Inhale into my mouth, expel through my nose. Rinse, lather, repeat. Concentrate on solid blocks of color. Don’t think. Blue. Black. Dark forest green. Gray is good too. I passed out.

I doubt more than five minutes ticked by, but I got a better night’s sleep in that short time than I had in the entire six hours at Charlie’s.

Dr. Shapiro-Weiss stood over me, calling my name, pulling me back from the brink.

Inside her office, the doctor sat in her cushioned, wicker chair, waiting while I got comfortable on the couch, rearranging throw pillows and trying to figure out where to begin. The diplomas and accomplishments on her wall distracted, overwhelmed me. Degrees, awards, commendations. From all over the country. Prestigious institutions, framed and centered, fancy gold-leaf lettering. What was I doing with my life? To attain this level of success, she had to start studying at an early age. Right out of high school, straight to college, then to university and grad school, post-grad and doctoral work. No time for parties or fucking around, no time for dragging heels, protesting growing up. Not if you want to be somebody in the world. That’s how Stephen had become a financial advisor, or whatever the fuck he did. Unless Daddy got him the gig. The only skills I possessed: digging ditches and loading a truck. Grunt labor a trained monkey could do. I didn’t belong here.