Brighton (5 page)

THEY TOOK
cab number four, Bobby behind the wheel, adjusting the radio, lighting a cigarette, and downshifting as they bumped down a long, potholed driveway. They turned onto Hunnewell Avenue, climbed up Burton Street, then coasted back down Washington, past Sammy’s corner store and the cobbler, a Greek pizza joint, Patty’s Donuts, and the Catholic grammar school Kevin’s sisters attended. After that came the march of bars: the Irish Village, the Last Drop, Castlebar, Jimmy’s Nineteenth Hole, and the Oak Square Grill. They drove around the Circle, three locals on full display, rolled up in the grass and sleeping off Friday night. A fourth lay across one of the benches, vomit on his clothes, more puddled at his feet.

The bell inside Saint Andrew’s Church had just struck seven when Bobby goosed the car up a broken runt of a street called Nonantum. About halfway up sat the Thomas Jefferson Middle School. The “Jeff” was a public school and offered the usual city education, which was to say crap. It did, however, have a large back lot. When Kevin was in grammar school, he and his buddies would spray-paint a strike zone on one of the brick walls and play baseball all day in the flat, summer heat. Kevin would
pretend he was Sonny Siebert or Luis Tiant. It didn’t matter what anyone else pretended, because in Kevin’s head he was playing the entire game before a packed house at Fenway. When they hit thirteen or so, the neighborhood found other uses for the back of the Jeff—nighttime uses, like drinking beer and smoking dope. Kevin did enough of both so as not to be an outcast, but never enough that he forgot the best thing about the Jeff—throwing a Ray Culp screwball and watching someone swing and miss. Sure there were no seams to grip on a sponge ball, but who gave a shit? He swung and missed, didn’t he?

Bobby hit the turn signal with a flick of his finger, navigating a narrow path that emptied into the Jeff’s back lot. Kevin felt the wheels bump and watched the flag on the cab’s meter bounce with every lurch in the road. Bobby pushed on the brakes as the cab creaked to a stop and settled into a rough idle. Kevin rolled down the window. A couple of kids were sitting on a low wall. One was wearing a long, black leather coat, the other a satin green Celtics jacket. They were drinking tall cans of early morning Bud and passing around what was left of a joint pinched in a roach clip.

“Coreys,” Kevin said.

“Go on out.”

“Where you going?”

“Gotta gas up. I’ll be right back.”

Kevin climbed out and watched Bobby head back down the alley, tailpipe hanging a few inches off the ground and trailing gray smoke. Kevin scuffed his sneakers as he made his way across the lot. “DIE NIGGA DIE” was spray-painted in black letters on one of the school’s brick walls—three words reflecting the crudest understanding of a conflict that feasted on fear and swept like
a plague through the narrow neighborhoods of Boston. Kevin barely registered the message as he walked past.

“Kevin boy, what’s up?” David Corey was a year older than Kevin. He’d dropped out of Brighton High after his freshman year and got hired as an apprentice electrician, making sixteen bucks an hour, six days a week, on one of the high-rises going up downtown. He was too young to be an apprentice, but David looked old for his age and paid off some guy at the union hall to get the gig. He took a sip of beer and banged his boots against the wall in pointless, nervous energy.

Sitting beside him was his older brother, Paul. His specialty had always been huffing airplane glue and stealing cars. One night when he was thirteen, he boosted a half dozen and lined them up behind the Jeff with their headlights on and engines running. Then he and his pals burned rubber around the lot until dawn. Just for the fuck of it. These days he made a living selling drugs out of the basement of his uncle’s building. Dope, speed, blotter acid, angel dust—you name it and Paulie C. could hook you up. He pried what was left of the joint out of the roach clip and brought it to his lips, one eye stuck on Kevin the whole time.

“What’s up, shithead?” Paulie spoke with the smoke still down in his lungs so the words came out in gasps of air.

“Fuck you.”

Paulie reared up from his perch and cuffed Kevin across the side of the head. Kevin countered with a sneaky fast right that surprised the older boy almost as much as Kevin when it grazed his chin.

“Motherfucker.” Paulie tossed the roach and came at Kevin with both hands, bouncing him off a brick wall and doubling him over with a knee to the stomach. He got Kevin in a headlock
and flipped him to the ground. Kevin could smell weed and beer and the leather of Paulie’s coat in his nose and reached up to claw at whatever he could find. Paulie snickered and squeezed down with his biceps, the muscle flexing and crushing Kevin’s windpipe. He could hear himself gurgling, hungry for a sip of air. Threads of darkness crowded the edges of his vision. His hand slipped, scratching feebly at the older boy’s shoulder. Then the hold was broken. Kevin fell forward, retching and coughing. Bobby stood over him, holding Paulie by a twist of his jacket.

“You all right?”

Kevin spit on the hardtop and rubbed his throat. “I’m good.”

Paul Corey wasn’t the kind of guy you could really take a lot of shit from. Some guys you could. Let them mess around because they didn’t really mean anything by it. Not Paulie. He was always jabbing with the needle, testing to see who might be a bit of a pussy. If he found one, then he’d just keep pushing. Better to push back and be done with it. Or be like Bobby. He threw Paulie onto the wall beside his brother. “Take a fucking seat.”

“Kid needs to learn some manners,” Paulie said, eyes already scouting the ground for the scrap of dope he’d dropped. His brother pulled a tallboy off a plastic ring and offered it to Bobby, who shook his head.

“I’m driving.”

“You still wasting your time with that? Look at the cake I’m making.” Paulie gestured to his ride, a Camaro, shiny and blue and looking pretty nice sitting beside Old Towne Taxi’s beat-to-hell-and-back cab number four.

“It’s a fucking car,” Bobby said. “Besides, I’m not interested in dealing.”

Paulie crushed an empty beer can and tossed it toward a
crooked tangle of weeds that grew out of a seam where the wall met the blacktop.

“You hear about the break-in over on Brackett?” David said.

“When?”

“Couple days ago. Some smoke broke in and cleaned out an old lady’s house while she was shopping.”

“How do you know it was a black kid?” Kevin said.

“Brendan Higgins lives next door.” Paulie popped another tallboy and took a sip. “His sister saw the bonehead leaving. Said he was from Fidelis.”

“She tell the police?” Bobby said.

“Cops don’t give a fuck. We gotta take care of this shit ourselves.” Paulie glanced at his younger brother, who nodded his support.

“You just gonna grab any black kid you see, then?”

Paulie furrowed his brow and dropped his voice a notch. “You some kind of nigger lover, Bobby?”

“Piss off.”

Paulie eyed Bobby, but thought better of it. Bobby stayed with both brothers until he was sure they understood how things were. Then he turned to Kevin.

“Come on. We gotta go.”

They were halfway to the cab when David hopped off the wall and pointed. Thirty yards away, outlined in quick charcoal strokes, was a skinny black kid, twelve, thirteen years old, perched atop a fence that separated the Jeff from the houses behind it. The Coreys took off at a silent run. The kid on the fence slipped down the other side, and was gone.

“No chance,” Kevin said as one of the Coreys shinnied up and over the fence.

“No shit,” Bobby said and they started to walk again.

“What would they do if they caught him?” Kevin said.

“Fuck him up, big time. Paulie’s a mean prick. You don’t want to be messing with him.”

“I can take care of myself.”

Bobby gave him a look. “You talking about the kid from Rosie?”

Bobby had taught Kevin how to hit last summer in his room above the cab office. They’d wrapped towels around their fists and boxed, Bobby popping Kevin in the face every time he tried to throw a punch. Kevin bled all over himself, stuffed his nose with toilet paper, and kept coming. After a couple of weeks, he got better. Bobby even let him land a few, just to feel what it was like. Then Kevin kicked the shit out of a kid from Roslindale who’d called one of his classmates a “Latin fag.” The kid from Rosie walked into two straight rights, went down, and didn’t move. The whole thing happened in a handful of seconds outside Rourke’s, a hamburger joint a couple blocks from school. Kevin stood over the kid, blood pounding in his ears, terrified at what he’d done and hoping against hope the kid would get up so he could hit him again. That night he stared at his clenched fist in the bathroom mirror and wondered what he had there. According to Bobby, not very much.

“That kid weighed even less than you.”

“I weigh a hundred and three.”

“Jesus Christ, do they feed you in that house?”

Kevin pulled a napkin full of crumbs from his pocket. “I like corn muffins.”

“Listen, the kid didn’t weigh much more than you. Besides, I know his older brother and he’s a pussy. Paul Corey isn’t. You know he busted some kid’s jaw from Smith Park last weekend?”

Kevin shook his head.

“Said he didn’t like the way he looked at him. Busted his jaw, then went at him with a baseball bat. Took three cops from Fourteen to pull him off.”

“I didn’t hear about that.”

“Yeah, well, you’re hearing it now.”

They stopped near the front of the cab. Bobby put a foot up on the fender. Kevin sat on the hood, then leaned back across the windshield so he was looking at the bruised and broken sky when he spoke.

“You don’t like Paulie, do you?”

“He’s a loser.”

“How about what he said about you?”

“You mean when he called me a nigger lover?” Bobby picked up a rock and fired it at a
NO LOITERING
sign fixed to the side of the building. He missed. “I don’t hate people cuz of their color if that’s what you’re asking. And I don’t really give a fuck who knows it. The truth is half these jag-offs don’t care what color you are. They just want to mess someone up.”

“I guess.”

“You guess?” Bobby threw another rock. This time he hit the sign. The metal ping rippled across the lot. “This place likes to eat its own. And it’s always looking to be fed. Remember that.”

Kevin sat up again. “I’m not like you, Bobby. I can’t just look at someone and they walk away.”

“Then you walk away.”

“You mean be a pussy.”

“I mean stay alive long enough to fucking stay alive. You wanna go to college or what?”

The great dream. Getting out of Brighton. Getting anywhere
but where you were. Some people hated Kevin cuz he had a clean shot. Others lived for it, pushing in all their chips on the teenager, knitting his future out of the cloth of their own fears and failures. Kevin could feel it, too. Something out there, alive and electric. All he needed to do was plug in. But first, he had to get out.

“Sure, I wanna go.”

“All right, then,” Bobby said. “Keep your nose clean. And don’t mess with guys like Corey.”

“And if I can’t?”

“If you got no choice . . . I mean no choice at all . . . then you go hard-core. Kill-or-be-killed sort of shit. But you walk away first. Or you find me. Got it?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. You ever drive a stick?”

“I was born for the stick.”

Bobby chuckled. “Come on.”

Kevin climbed in the driver’s side of the cab, hands running over the steering wheel and sliding down to touch the round knobs and thick buttons. Bobby slipped into the passenger’s seat and pointed to the floor. “That pedal there is the clutch. You put the car in first, let the clutch out slow, and feed it some gas at the same time.”

“Piece of cake.”

“Yeah, right. Clutch is loose as hell on this tank so that’ll make it easier. All right, Mario, give it a go.”

Kevin stomped on the clutch with his left foot, touched the gas with his right, and jammed the shift lever into first. The car never moved. Bobby swung a set of keys off his finger. “Be nice if
you turned the thing on.” He thought that was funny as all hell and stuck a key in the ignition.

The first three times the car bucked and died. The fourth time it went five feet. After six tries, Kevin got the sense of it. Pretty soon, he was rolling across the lot, shifting from first to second to third, then back to second.

“Good. You can downshift instead of using your brakes. Watch the fucking wall.”

Kevin hit the brakes five feet from the redbrick side of the school. The car sputtered and stalled. “I saw it.”

“Sure you did. That’s enough for today.”

“Let me drive home.”

“Next time. Now, get out.” Bobby slid behind the wheel as Kevin ran around to the passenger’s side. Bobby reached forward to turn over the engine, then stopped. They both heard the hard thump of rubber on brick.

“Finn,” Bobby said.

“You think?”

“Who else?”

They walked around the corner to a smaller lot on the far side of the school. Finn McDermott tossed a tennis ball high in the air, arched his back, and rocketed a serve against the brick wall fifty feet away.

“What’s up, boys?” Finn had a wiffle cut and a hard, square chin. He wore blue sweats, a long-sleeved gray shirt, and white Adidas tennis shoes. At his feet was a half-empty wire bucket of green tennis balls and maybe fifteen more rolling around on the blacktop. Pushed up against the wall was a shopping cart, filled with three more buckets of balls, another racket, a jacket, an ex
tra pair of suede Cons, and a full tennis net with the hard wire needed to hook it up to the posts down at the park.

Finn bounced a palm off the face of his racket and nodded toward the back lot. “Having a liquid breakfast with the Coreys?”

“They back there every day?” Bobby said.

“Sure.” Finn picked up a ball that had rolled to his feet. “They’ll be there until they head to AA, or the graveyard.” Finn held the ball tight to the strings of his racket, stared down an imaginary opponent, coiled his body, and unleashed another serve. “What’s up, Kevin?”