Charles Mulcahy folded the pieces of paper into a neat square and inserted it in his lapel pocket. At the coat closet, he spent more than a moment with his car keys, holding the biggest one between his knuckles and brandishing it like a street-weapon, a blade that could be hidden in a fist aimed straight for the eye. Then he headed out of his elaborately woodworked doorway into the clean morning sun, but this time Cass took note of him. She even left her bead-strings and ornaments, zipped up a winter vest and saw him to the garage, where she took his arm and held onto it until he pulled away.
“So where are you going?”
“So why do you ask?” His finger hit the button and the garage moaned and gaped. Charles and his wife stepped into the dark opening together, the first of four yawning bays, each containing a different style of chariot, all of them European and subject to quite the luxury tax. He went to the silver one, the one whose long, strong hood reminded him of the nose of an airplane. She stood close as he climbed in.
“It’s the weekend, it’s the season, your grandchild will be here. You have that faraway look.”
“Well I’m not going to Timbuktu,” he said to her. “I don’t have the fuel.”
“If it’s Boston you can pick up something. We could use a really strong cheese.”
“I’m not going in for a cheese,” he said. “I’m going to the old neighborhood.” His voice dropped into shameless self-pity. “Since no one else around here wants to.”
“You could still pick up a cheese.” It was the last thing he heard her say as he swept up the driveway past the now nearly yachtless cove, and it was either the words or the tone of her voice or something else in the air that put him in a zombie zone, the shadow-land of delirium just before exhaustion or fever or intravenous anesthesia takes you under. He came alive again at Logan Airport, vaguely recalling the dopplerized drone of Cass’s call for cheese but nothing else at all, not one instant of the fifty minute trip in through the crawling, bleating traffic, even though he had been at the wheel the whole time and the car was unscathed. He parked in one of the lots and boarded with a straggle of other passengers. But what he entered and took a window seat on was not a plane headed away from Boston; it was a subway car headed into its depths. The old train squealed and clattered like an old man with false teeth. It tilted its nose downward and bore into a hole black as a mineshaft, tunneling under the harbor and the wharves, burrowing beneath the decades.
Charles could have gone in by car, and if Cass or any of his now-grown children had shown interest he would have. But they were happiest out with the Saturday Home Depots and Sunday Frostbite Regattas. And since he was doing a solo he would do it the way that seemed the original way, by train, trolley and foot. He eventually came out of the ground squinting, not a half mile from where he had walked to school in the days when they taught him the right way to spell a word. The instant his foot hit the top step of the stairs at sidewalk level he became part of the noisy, fast-moving crowd that stretched from one end of the square to the other.
But his was the only white face in it, and he felt for the pointed end of the key in his pants pocket, making sure it was ready if needed, although the only assault that came his way was a slap of wind announcing the season’s first shower of snow. As he ventured forth from the subway entrance he turned his head this way and that, seeking landmarks. The Cathedral stood gray as ever, but now it was shuttered by a Vatican cost-cutting purge. Over sporadic storefronts there were still signs in unreadable foreign letters, as there had been decades before, but instead of the heathen but familiar Jewish the characters had become either inscrutable Asian or menacing Arabic. Lurking and shirking in doorways or alleys were clusters of the kinds of young men Charles could easily picture shooting hoops in a jailyard or each other in a schoolyard, perhaps the same schoolyard he had looked out on while some spinster teacher droned on about their continent, their dark continent. His right hand stayed on alert in his right pocket, clutching the key with greater or lesser pressure depending on how close these gang-boys got to him. After he had walked a couple of blocks and not a hulking one of them had paid him much more than a shrug, he felt a wave of something come over his deeper self. The feeling couldn’t be called relief, nor was it disappointment either. It was worse, a kind of mourning for a lost whatever – now that he was evidently too old to be worth even a fusillade of verbal race rage, if not a real true mugging.
Charles pulled his overcoat tight against the thin drilling of snow and wiped his eyes on his sleeve. He crossed a side street and moved onto a new block where the bars and liquor stores and steel-grated pawn shops were more abundant. So were the loiterers, but they were older and shakier. The mouths showed more gum than teeth; the eyes more yellow and spidery red than white. The men, and some women too, seemed to have glue or molasses in their legs. They struggled with the sidewalk like flies who have just landed on a strip of flypaper.
He crossed to yet another block and came to a neon sign, The Shamrock, which dated from the days he used a fake driver’s license to quaff at the bar. But the fluorescent letters flickered and trembled, as though hungry for electricity. Passing close to the steamed-up front door he took a good whiff, expecting the ancient tang of spilled ale and overcooked corned beef. Instead he got a nose full of muscatel and piss and a mule-kick of nausea from his offended guts, and Charles Mulcahy jumped to avoid tripping over two feet in torn sneakers. The legs they were attached to were bare from the ankles to the calves, and one of them was swollen blue-purple. What remained of the man’s pants was ripped and sodden and unapproachable. What cloth there was on his chest could have once been a green team jacket; could have been on him for decades too, old as the grates imbedded in the sidewalk. The body itself, the skin - where it wasn’t bruised or pestilent - was the color of dark walnut furniture. But the stranger was alive. The lips and nose labored under thickets of dried blood, sucking and gulping air and water from the steady white drizzle.
Repelled as he was, Charles took heart at having found what he came for, and he wasted no time unbuttoning the collar of his overcoat. He thrust his hand into his lapel pocket and took out the neat square of folded bills, a thousand dollars in all. He fell to one knee and there, from the length of a well-stretched arm, he studied the man’s stained rag of an athletic jacket, planning his move on the one exposed pocket. Then he reached forward and inserted the bills swiftly and cleanly, all without actually touching the fabric.
Charles stayed a little longer with his knee on the cold sidewalk, watching and listening for any sign– an eye flutter, a deeper gasp – anything to acknowledge what had just taken place, but there was only the same sleep, the same dried blood, the same misting snow. He stood up abruptly and crossed himself. After re-buttoning the top of his overcoat he marched double-time back to the dark, welcoming hole of the subway, wondering for a moment what might happen to him in this cab-forsaken territory if the hole suddenly sealed up, or just disappeared. The thought returned to pester him as he rode the old train under the storm-whipped harbor and its sunken world of moorings and anchors and pilings. He stared at the blackness outside the window and thought of the groaning buoys high above and the weight of so much water pressing against the barnacled skin of the tunnel. At one point the train came to a sudden halt and he looked around, a little too wildly, alarmed that there were no other passengers he could see, not even a conductor. For an eerie instant everything inside and outside the train went black, except his racing mind, and in the first flash of returning light Charles saw the forward door between cars slap shut behind something shiny and green that flitted away, leaving the hint of satin or a disappearing arm.
At last there was a snap, a clank and the slow, shuddering climb that returned him to Logan, where Charles wasted no time finding his car and at last using the key, the key he had kept at the ready like a miniature bayonet, from the moment he entered the old neighborhood to the moment the subway turnstile swung shut behind him. By now the threads of snow had begun to gather on sheet metal, and he was glad – brimming with prowess - to feel the spasm of the ignition and hear the big engine rumble at his command.
The feeling only got better as he negotiated the ramps of the airport exit system and made his way onto the highway going back up north - his north, his side of the train tunnel. The very air pooling out of the climate system of the car gave him a sense of welcome and comfort, like a familiar coat slipping around his shoulders, and he grew excited and restless – impatient to return to his Cass and his holiday and a sip of rarest malt, such a malt that could never, ever be found on the shelves of The Shamrock.
His visibility was fine despite the snow. The road ahead seemed exceptionally clear – nothing in sight to slow him down. It was the holiday, of course. Its onset had swept the highway clean of the usual commuting traffic, and the last of the afternoon light was rapidly going home too. To his left were the Park ‘n Fly lots, silent as cemeteries; to his right, a sooty hill capped by a tall Madonna statue and shrine, standing exactly as they had when he was a schoolboy. As the billboard lamps and neon signs came on, the snow glistened like tinsel, and the traffic signal turning from green to red struck Charles as almost playful, because there were no other cars surging behind or beside him. No police either, he reckoned, and he saw it would be a cakewalk to simply keep on going and run the light. For an instant he leaned on the pedal but in the next instant he came to a resolute stop, applying his brakes in a voluntary act of gratitude and civic decency, even reverence. He found himself giving prayerful thanks to the law - to the heavens as well - for bringing him to where he now sat, both hands on the wheel, both eyes enjoying the merry red circle of light and the silvery ice-threads pelting and melting on the windshield.
Charles bit his lip, readying himself for the blink of an eye when the red would turn green and the car would burst forward like a race horse. But the thrust that came and shocked his body was different and opposite in every possible way – a crumpling slam from the rear, not caused by the action of his own engine and gears but some large foreign object ramming against his trunk. It flung him towards the windshield like a crash dummy and instantly stiffened the seat belt, which slapped him back into his place. Before he could think to unbuckle, before he could get used to the fact that the previously empty rearview mirror was now filled with blaring light and a hideous metallic mass, a hand shot towards the left side of his head and knuckles rapped against the driver’s window.
Next came a voice, loud and pleading. “Are you okay?” The fist pushed its index finger at him. “You, you…okay?”
Charles fingered the button on the door, dropping the window half-way. He caught a blast of breath as rank as a brewery. Now the voice was even louder, an urgent bellow, repeating its plea – okay? And behind the jabbing finger was a brawling, boozy face, thirty or forty years his junior – a white face, Irish as his own - head shaved clean as the snow. It was the anonymous lout’s head Charles saw all over his warehouse, attached to scores of neckless beef-bodies running his forklifts, pumping his crates, shimmying up and down ladders like a colony of young apes.
If Charles Mulcahy knew anything, he knew how to be the CEO of men in the trenches. “What the hell happened, son?” He made the front part sound threatening and the last word fatherly. It left no doubt as to who was in command.
“I hit an ice patch, man. Jesus, I’m sorry, I wrecked your beautiful car. Are you okay?”
The images ran through his head like a river of poison. He would be late for the home crowd, his triumphant mood gone sour, his car ugly and maimed. Everything had turned upside down, all because of some gorilla in a shitbox and his gorilla friends. In the rearview mirror he could now make out the shapes of two other neo-Neanderthals. He imagined the reek of the interior and its occupants, every inch of skin, clothing and upholstery steeped in pot fumes and cheap beer, their adolescent ideal of holiday ambrosia. He knew it because he had lived it himself, back in the days when he was a warehouse monkey too. Chugging longnecks up on the hill behind the outstretched arms of the towering bronze Madonna.
“Do you have insurance, son?” Charles contained himself. There was no point in making it worse.
“Hey, I’ll call 911 if you want me to. Shit, I can’t believe this. My fault, definitely mine. Hey. But the ice, I’m telling you…”
“I don’t need any 911. I’m not that far gone. Let’s pull over to the shoulder. Do you have your papers?”
“Thanks, man. I’m sorry. Damn, I wasn’t tailgating you, I swear it. What a holiday, what a freaking holiday. ”
Charles watched him turn and jog back, like a private who’d been caught on a bender by the MP or drill sergeant. As they crossed the road to the shoulder, Charles in the lead, he noticed what a true crap-heap the assaulting car was. An ancient Lumina, dented, rusted, sagging and groaning. It was his luck, tough luck. But it could have been anything. A falling meteorite, a piece of shrapnel crashing down from a million miles away.
He could still smell the driver’s beer breath as he inched the car into position, as far off the road as he could get it. The stench was in his lungs and head and worse, it was circulating in the cabin. He saw it as causing yet more damage – not the kind a body shop could fix - oozing into the hand-tooled leather of the seats and dash; infecting the shiny burl of the wooden driver’s wheel. With a flick he sent the window down all the way, and the passenger window too, to create a cross-draft. He kept the motor running and turned the fan dial to its highest position – the idea was to be quick about it, perform his due diligence with the paperwork and just get the hell out of there; no dressing the boys down, no threatening to press charges – he would keep his mouth shut and decide all that later.
From the glove compartment Charles extracted the black calfskin folio that contained his ownership papers. Glancing at the mirror he saw the driver and one of the two companions, milling oafishly between the two cars, pointing to their bumper and to his trunk, shaking their heads. He climbed out and joined them, very relieved at what damage he found. Incredible, his rear bumper was intact, more scraped than mangled or bruised. The Lumina was less lucky. You get what you pay for, Charles said to himself.
“Do you have a pen?”
The driver shuffled and shrugged. He looked haplessly at his friend.
“It’s okay. I’ve got an extra one – take it. Let me see your license and registration.” The way Charles said this made him feel like a policeman, a feeling he didn’t at all mind. He slid his own papers out of a pocket in the calfskin. And then the meteorite did fall from outer space, fell and struck – but in two pieces – slamming him from more than one direction.
The first slam he saw. It was the same fist that had rapped on his window – only this time it smashed into his mouth and teeth. The next blow was from behind, the crunch of stone or hard steel cracking the back of his skull. The pain cut all the way through to his eyeballs and filled them with fiery colors and hellish shapes. He thought he had been thrown from a building when a third wallop came. It seemed to be from the earth itself, as the cold rubble of the roadside rose and drove the full force of the planet into his face.
Through the swirl of agony and visual chaos a tiny part of Charles stayed alive and battling. It was a beam of something no wider than a single cell, but it kept sending him information. The calfskin being snatched from his hands. His haughty silver car throwing back a roar and a screech as it pulled away and took off without him. The ragged Lumina screaming and racing to join it. The two vehicles barrel-assing down the highway, exhaust pipes firing like guns in celebration.
Hot as the pain was, it grew even more searing as he lay there, begging his hands to find the cell phone he had left on the seat. He tasted the gossamer snow as it danced onto his lips and melted away, erased by the stronger substance, the bubbling blood.