Pulse Page 3

  “Check it out.” Tommy pointed at a blue police bus packed with staties stitched up in their best riot gear. A second and third bus rolled right behind the first as kids began to pour into the streets, congregating in angry knots of muscle and moving in packs.

  “What do you think?” Barkley said.

  “Gotta be the high school.”

  “You wanna take a look?”

  “Like I don’t have enough fucking heartache? Let’s go see my book.”

  Barkley shrugged and wheeled the car onto West Broadway. A mile later, they shot under the expressway and into the South End.

  * * *

  They found a spot on Albany Street, across from a Chinese restaurant called Hom’s. A dirty rain slanted across the windshield and was gone as quick as it had arrived. Barkley nodded at a thick silver watch that hung loose on his partner’s wrist.

  “New?”

  Tommy smiled and adjusted the bauble. “Nice, right? Check it out. The band is inlaid with turquoise.”

  “Katie give it to you?”

  “Pawnshop. She likes it, though.”

  “How long you gonna be?”

  “Ten minutes. Fifteen, tops.”

  “Don’t forget your dinner.” Barkley grinned and held out the paper plate of scrambled eggs, still covered in tinfoil. Tommy gave him the finger, grabbed the plate, and jogged across the street, disappearing into a fenced-off salvage yard jammed up next to a garage with a sign overhead that read STEVENS AUTO SUPPLY. Barkley switched on the radio and turned up the volume.

  WRKO. DJ Mike Addams talking a mile a minute about the lowdown on the hoedown tonight at who the fuck knew where. Fifty-cent drink specials, except for the ladies. They drank free. Barkley switched off the noise and gazed out the window. The South End was a study in urban rot, gently putrefying from the inside out. Halfway down the block a flophouse advertised rooms for seven bucks a week. Next to it was a bar with a ’Gansett sign in the window and no name on the front. On the other side of the bar, a soup kitchen where the boozers could refuel for their next bender.

  The door to Hom’s swung open and an Asian woman popped out. She was carrying a bag of food in one hand and dragging a young girl with the other. The woman wore a cloth coat and black galoshes with metal buckles. The kid shuffled along in green boots with yellow heels.

  Barkley watched as the pair picked their way around a string of trash cans and on down the block. He wasn’t the only one. A whisper of a man hung in a doorway, smoking a cigarette and shivering in a jean jacket. He let the woman and child go past, then tossed his cigarette and followed. The woman ducked into a three-decker that looked like it was about to topple into the street. The man went right in after her. Barkley cursed his luck and got out of the car.

  Someone had propped open the front door to the building with a chunk of cement. Barkley brushed his hand across his gun. Domestics, loud parties, dogs barking, cat up a fucking tree. It was always the most mundane, penny-ante, bullshit things that got cops shot. He shouldered open the door. To his left, a skylight striped a narrow staircase in prison bars of gray. Straight ahead, the girl with the green-and-yellow boots sat on a small bench, tongue curled between her teeth, working hard with crayons on a coloring book. Barkley squatted down so he was eye level and put a finger to his lips.

  “Where’s your mom?”

  The girl widened her eyes and chewed on the end of a Crayola.

  “She in there?” Barkley pointed at a door behind the girl, who nodded.

  “That man take her in?”

  Her face clouded. Barkley told the girl to stay put and sidled up to the door. He could hear a low bubble of sound that resolved into voices growing louder, more urgent. A man screamed something in what sounded like Chinese. Barkley glanced at the girl, pulled his gun, and pushed inside.

  The room looked like it might have once been a garage. Cement floor, high roof with large overhead lights fixed to a double set of steel girders. On one side of the room six dingy Asian men were crowded around a table covered in pai gow tiles and cash, mostly fifties and hundreds. Five of the men were seated. The sixth, the one who had screamed, was standing up, still screaming in Chinese and shaking a golden metal cup over his head. With a final oath, he slammed the cup on the table just as Barkley came through the door. Tiles and money went flying and some dice tumbled out of the cup. No one, however, was watching where they landed. Why bother with that shit when there was a massive black man sticking a gun in your face?

  “Hey, what you want?”

  The woman with the buckle boots was smoking a pink cigarette and chewing on an egg roll. The man in the jean jacket sat next to her at an angle. He had a fork full of what looked like chow mein raised to his mouth and a healthy length of noodle hanging from his lower lip. In front of them was a table packed with more cash and a pile of papers. The money was wrapped in rubber bands and organized into neat stacks. Barkley flashed his badge at the woman and lowered his piece.

  “Is this your little girl?” Barkley nodded at the girl, who was standing wide-eyed on the threshold. The woman barked something and the girl scurried in, disappearing behind the woman so all Barkley could see were the child’s eyes, peeking out from the crook of the woman’s arm.

  “Bark, what the fuck?” Tommy popped out of a back room, wiping his fingers with a paper towel. “That’s Tian Chen.” Tommy pointed to the man eating the chow mein. “And his wife.”

  “Yolanda.” The woman offered a limp hand. Her smile looked like an empty pocket.

  “Tell them not to leave the kid outside.”

  “Don’t leave the kid outside. They don’t speak much English, B.”

  Barkley holstered his gun and left. Tommy followed.

  “Bark.”

  “Chen’s your bookie?”

  “I told you my book had a stroke. He’s holed up in the back. Yolanda and Chen run the dice and card games. Actually, Yolanda runs them. Real fucking ball-breaker, too.”

  “So you go in through the salvage yard?”

  “Cut down the alley and came in the back.”

  Barkley paused at the front door to the building. “Lot of cloak-and-dagger for a hundred-dollar bet, Tommy.”

  “I told you they run the pai gow games in here. Piles of cash lying around and these fuckers are paranoid as shit.”

  Barkley started to leave. Tommy grabbed him by the shoulder. “It’s nothing, B. A hondo. Go back and check with Yolanda.”

  Barkley walked off. He was pissed at his partner and felt stupid about pulling the piece. More the latter than the former, but Tommy didn’t need to know that. A pickup struggled down the street, grinding its gears and belching flourishes of black smoke. Barkley squinted at the machine smell of oil and turned his head just as a woman came out of the Chinese restaurant, her arms full of packages. Barkley veered to avoid her, but she dipped right into his path and the two bumped shoulders. He reached for the woman’s elbow as she started to topple into the gutter. She was weightless, hollowed out in the way incredibly old people get even though she was no more than thirty. Barkley noted her hands, marbled in blue, and her fingers, one decorated with a silver ring enameled in red and encrusted with diamonds in the shape of a rose.

  The woman slid her hand along Barkley’s wrist and gripped it, sending a hot wire up his arm and pulling him in. Her face was Western, smooth and unlined, cheeks touched with powder that smelled like the notes spinning off an old jazz record on a phonograph in a picture hanging on a wall. Then she unhooded her eyes. And Barkley’s world exploded.

  The concussion was silent, short-circuiting the sparks of conscious thought that arced in his brain while snatching him clean off his feet. He fell through hanging mists of pink and white, bouncing off the plateglass window of the restaurant before landing face-first on the pavement. Except it wasn’t pavement anymore. It was wood, old and buckled, rotting and warped, smelling of the sea and salt and hobbled with hard round nails that bit into his cheek. Barkley opened his eyes and recogni
zed the long wobbly run of a pier on Boston’s waterfront. Below he could see the harbor, slicked with circles of oil and mottled in lumps of gray and green. The water began to bubble and then something popped to the surface. Bloated, spread-eagled, and floating on its belly, the body sagged like a half-deflated balloon. A wave swept under the pier, banging the naked corpse off a piling and rolling it over and over. In the churn Barkley spotted bits and pieces of what had once been a person—elbow, earlobe, a flash of bleached thigh leading to an ankle rubbed raw where it had slipped its tether of chains and anchor of cinder blocks. A seagull blew in sideways, circling the corpse before perching on the meat part of the shoulder. The gull stared at Barkley with a fierce black eye as its claws worked the slack flesh in small, worried circles. The bird took flight again, pushing the corpse so it rolled once more in the wash and settled faceup, lolling and bobbing merrily in the lumpy water. Barkley watched as the corpse’s blue lips curled into a perfect bow and its eyelids shot open.

  “Hey, Bark, what the fuck you looking at?” Tommy Dillon winked as his arm stretched out of the harbor like a bleached rubber band, snaking up a piling and across the pier. Five mossy fingers wrapped around Barkley’s wrist and pulled him over the side, headfirst toward the broken sea where his partner lay in wait, jaws agape, tongue curled, eager to feed, eager to swallow him whole.

  Barkley recoiled, head popping off the brick facade of the restaurant. He was back on the pavement in front of Hom’s, sitting up while Tommy looked at him all kinds of funny.

  “B, you all right?”

  Barkley felt for a lump on the back of his head and let Tommy help him to his feet.

  “Where’s the woman?” Barkley scanned up and down the block.

  “What woman?”

  “There was a woman coming out of the restaurant.” Barkley pointed toward a CLOSED sign in the window.

  “They closed up twenty minutes ago, B. I seen you fall.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Looked like you tripped or something. Hit your head pretty good off the side of the building.”

  “There was a woman.”

  Tommy shrugged. “What say we go grab a coffee or something?”

  They made their way across the street to the car. Tommy wanted to drive. Barkley told him to go fuck himself and took a hard look at the street as he sat behind the wheel.

  “We going?” Tommy said.

  “You think I’m crazy.”

  “We’re all crazy, B. It’s just your day today. Come on. There’s a place with good pie two blocks over.”

  Dispatch popped on the radio. Tommy took down the details as Barkley listened, a dead finger prickling the skin of his soul. Sure as fuck, someone had just pulled a body out of Boston Harbor. He started up the car and spun the wheel into traffic. But it was Fate who was driving. And they were all just along for the ride.

  4

  SHE WAS standing in the ROCK aisle. Albums from artists beginning A–M ran down one side, N–Z down the other. As he got closer Daniel could smell the soap on her skin, see the moisture on her cheek and lashes.

  “You’re wet,” he said.

  “Got caught in the rain.” Grace Nguyen swung her long mane of hair, catching it with both hands and piling it atop her head. “I’ve got to get this mop cut.”

  “I like it.”

  “Short or long?”

  “Just leave it the way it is.”

  “Easy for you to say. You don’t have to brush it and wash it and deal with it.” She let the hair drop past her shoulders and clasped his arm, pulling him over to the “S” section, where she found the new Stevie Wonder, Songs in the Key of Life.

  “They should have him in the ‘W’s,” Daniel said. “Anyway, you like him more than I do.”

  “Seriously? Stevie Wonder?” Grace widened her eyes in mock horror.

  “He’s awesome, but I like Bruce. Born to Run. And the Stones.”

  “The Stones. Always the Stones.”

  “There’s nothing purer in rock and roll than the first twenty seconds of ‘Jumping Jack Flash.’”

  “Oh my God. Let me guess, you saw Sticky Fingers in the window?”

  “What else you gonna put in the window? We don’t have the money to buy anything anyway.”

  “Yeah, but if we did . . . it’d be Stevie every time.” Grace slid the album back in its slot and Daniel swore the minute he got the money scraped together he was gonna buy a bunch of Stevie Wonder albums, wrap them up, and watch her open them. Then they’d listen to the whole stack and he’d tell her Stevie was great but not the best and listen to her explain how he knew nothing about music and she hardly knew why she wasted her time.

  “Did you stay for seventh period?” he said.

  “Zzzzz.” Grace closed her eyes and rested her cheek on folded hands. “Total snore. We’re supposed to finish ‘Book 1’ by the end of next week.”

  Like Daniel, Grace was a sophomore at Latin School. They had a lot of classes together, including Latin, where they were in the middle of translating Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

  “Did anyone notice I wasn’t there?” Daniel said.

  “No, but Hamilton said there’s gonna be a test. You wanna get something to eat?”

  “Can’t. Gotta go for a run.”

  They spent most days together after school bumming around Kenmore Square. For Daniel, it didn’t matter where they went or what they did. He was with her and whatever came next was more than enough. So they’d hit the record store, grab a cheeseburger at Charlie’s, rummage through the bins at Supersocks, or just sit on the curb and people-watch. Kenmore Square was great for that—a lot of drifters and panhandlers, hippies and Hare Krishnas mixed in with students, wannabe musicians, and artists living in cheap apartments up and down Beacon Street.

  In the summer the show moved to the other side of the Pike and Fenway Park. They’d walk down Lansdowne and sit against the wall outside Gate C. Sully was always there. The scalper from Charlestown wore jeans and a white T-shirt with a pack of cigarettes rolled up old-school in his sleeve. He’d hold his tickets low by his side, making no attempt to get the attention of fans as they floated past. Cool worked better than fine in Boston and the regulars went out of their way to find him, whisper in his ear, and shove money in his hands as if Sully’s reserved grandstand were somehow better than the guy selling on the next corner. Daniel and Grace were never looking for tickets, but that didn’t stop people from dropping extras in their laps. Sometimes they went in if it was a good game. Usually they just gave them to Sully.

  One afternoon they met a kid from Somerville named Dapper. He worked on the grounds crew and asked if they wanted to get into a Yankees game the next night. Grace was on it in a blink. Two hours before game time, they met him outside a service gate Daniel had never noticed before. Dapper shoved a couple of dark green slickers at them and said to put them on, tugging the hood up over Grace’s head and tightening the string under her chin. They followed him into the belly of the park, dipping beneath the grandstand, staying quiet and small as Dapper nodded and bullshitted with ushers and concession guys who were stocking up on peanuts and rolling in kegs. He led them down a set of stairs and along a cramped corridor, then up another set. They surfaced in a gangway that opened to a rectangle of light and the baseball cathedral that was a half-empty Fenway Park at twilight. Dapper stashed them in a corner behind some buckets and rakes while he and the rest of the grounds crew got the field ready. The crew knew who they were with and were fine with it. Dapper told them everyone got a turn sneaking in someone during the season and this was his night. Daniel wondered why Dapper would use his free pass on a couple of kids he barely knew, but then Sherm Feller came over the loudspeaker.

  Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome to Fenway Park . . .

  After Sherm, everything spun into another dimension. Daniel felt the weight, the buzz, the Friday night jazz of thirty-thousand plus—first dates, last dates, fathers with sons, guys flashing eyes at girls, loners w
ith their transistors and scorecards, kids like Daniel and Grace, except with tickets and parents and all the rest. They gathered like supplicants, row after row rising up into the night—field box, grandstand, bleachers, kids hanging off the Canadian Club sign in the outfield—welling until they filled the precious and finely cut chalice that was Fenway to overflow, their ferocity and their angst pouring out of the stands, bent toward the destruction and ruin of the hated and hateful Yankees.

  Daniel turned his eyes toward the jeweled perfection of the diamond and found himself lost in it—the green of the outfield, bases blindingly white, the soft red skin of the infield. Daniel was sure he could curl up in the hollow of shortstop and never wake up. And then Tiant strolled out of the dugout. Luis grabbed the rosin off the slope of the mound, bouncing the bag across the back of his knuckles before pounding it back to the ground. He started in on his warm-ups, chewing on a cud of tobacco as he threw, kicking at the dirt in front of the mound like a Cuban toro. Yastrzemski lobbed grounders across the infield. Closest to Daniel, Rico Petrocelli stood by third, chatting casually with the ump as everything swirled in colors around them. A warm breeze pumped up the gangway, recirculating all the Fenway smells—cigar smoke soaked in draft beer, roasted peanuts in the shell, Fenway franks and Gulden’s mustard. A wrapper floated on the slipstream, dancing past Daniel, brushing the edge of the tarp and tumbling toward the infield. The ump talking to Petrocelli saw it out of the corner of his eye and snagged it with his right hand, jamming it into his back pocket without ever breaking stride in the confab with Rico.