My Brother's Keeper (25 page)

‘Well, here's your chance to do a good deed. Buy this guy a drink and then we can get out of here.'

Though the man's face was a rich, dark black beneath the stubble, there were washed-out splotches of faded pigment. And on the back of his chapped hands, where he held the glass of beer, the same patches of cracked, light skin came through as if it was some kind of a rash which, if it kept growing unchecked, might turn his whole body white. The man leaned against the bar for balance. He seemed to be losing his coordination one ounce at a time.

Lou was still on the stool, a few dollars left on the bar in front of him and the half-empty glass of beer going flat. He didn't want to look the man in the face, knowing now what he wanted. He wanted to skip the formalities. He wanted to spare them both the unnecessary small-talk. He wanted to spare this man the humiliation of telling his sad story one more time, of begging another glass of beer and admitting that he had no money and that when he got paid he'd come back to the Golden Rose and repay the favor, buy a round for everyone in the place.

Lou finally turned and looked at the man and was surprised to see that he was younger than Lou first thought. He'd looked like an older man from a distance, the grizzled face and staggered gait. But up close his age wasn't so well hidden and Lou thought now that maybe humiliation wasn't what the man was feeling, that humiliation was felt by the very old and the very young because they couldn't take care of themselves, because they'd lost their independence or had yet to find it. But this guy felt nothing, not while he had a drink in his hand, not anytime.

The bartender returned with a glass in her hand and she set it down a little harder this time, taking two dollars from Joey's pile without asking. She'd come out wearing a white tuxedo jacket over her black spandex like she was ready to close for the night. Joey watched in dismay as she plucked the bills off the bar. Before she walked away, she tossed a matchpack on the bar. It had an address written on it and a telephone number.

‘The address is Gracie's. The phone number is mine. If you find Gracie, tell her to give Shar a call.'

‘If?'

‘I mean, when you find her. And you can use that number yourself, if you feel like it.'

‘Thanks, Shar.'

Joey smirked and reached over Lou's shoulder and snatched the rest of his money. He folded the crumpled dollars in half and slid them into his pants pocket.

‘Can we go now? Or do we both have to buy him one?'

‘I guess that depends on how thirsty he is.'

Lou raised his glass; they all tapped glasses and some of the foamy beer spilled from the man's glass and dripped onto the floor. They drank in silence and Lou and Joey got up to go. The man was obviously in no hurry and proceeded back to the other end of the bar, where he started the process all over again.

‘Looks like he's pretty thirsty.'

‘Do you blame him?'

‘For being thirsty?'

‘For accepting free drinks from these kind-hearted souls.'

These were mostly working men at the Golden Rose and while they didn't mind spotting someone a drink now and then, they wouldn't be willing to carry him all night. And there was no better person to give a voice to their collective will than Denis McNulty.

‘That's enough!'

A hush fell suddenly over the bar. Everyone knew who Denis McNulty was addressing except for this poor black guy who only knew that his glass was empty and no one seemed in a hurry to fill it.

‘Did you hear me? I said you've had enough.'

McNulty was standing by the table where he'd been sitting all the while, his thumbs hooked into his pants and his flannel shirt pulled back, exposing the black crew underneath. He was a hard man and there was enough of him showing to know he could make a lot of noise if he wanted to. The bartender turned up the lights and pulled the plug on the juke box. Lou could see what Shar was thinking. She didn't like the idea of telling her boss how his bar was wrecked when Denis McNulty beat the shit out of some drunken rooster and threw him out into the street and chased his ass all the way back to Point Breeze.

McNulty wasn't moving but the other guy seemed to have gotten the message and started for the door. He was taking his good old time, though, his feet threatening to get crossed with each step. With the lights on the place looked empty. Not much of an audience, Lou thought, for the show McNulty was putting on for his home-town fans. Even the Leprechauns in green-framed pictures on the wall looked bored by the charade, sitting on their glowing rainbows and their shining pots of gold. They'd turned up their pug noses and rolled up their sleeves and raised their fists but Lou could tell they didn't really mean it. Their heart wasn't in it. He could see it in their eyes, those emerald green eyes that might buy you a drink and then take a swing at you. And by the end of the evening, it would all be forgotten.

The man paused in the doorway and spun around as if he was determined to have the last word before he left. He'd pulled a gun from under the tattered winter coat and started waving it around. Shar froze behind the bar. But McNulty wasn't having it, not in his bar, not where he and his court had always convened, ruling with the sort of street-corner benevolence known only in Grays Ferry.

McNulty reached behind the bar and came up with a sawed-off shotgun. It was a relatively small piece of machinery, about twenty inches long, with a double barrel and duct tape on the handle and a serial number that had been filed off ages ago. McNulty racked one into the chamber and pointed it at the man, who took one look at it and ran, his limp suddenly gone.

McNulty chased him out the door and into the street. Nobody got up to follow them out. After about a minute, a few short blasts from the shotgun rang out. They were like explosions in the street as if someone had pulled the pins on a couple of hand grenades and dropped them out of the window of a moving car. A few of the old-timers still at the bar let out a laugh as if the sound jogged their memories of old days in Dublin. McNulty could be heard outside, punctuating each pull of the trigger with a tirade of epithets in which he summarized the nature of race relations in Grays Ferry for now and all time. Nobody dared to dispute it.

By the time the cops got there, everything was back to normal. The shotgun was back behind the bar. McNulty was back at his table with a full pint of dark beer in front of him. The lights were dimmed again and the juke box was back on, playing Black Thorn's latest rendition of ‘Irish Eyes,' which even seemed to elicit a tear from one of the cops. Lou and Joey had made a hasty exit between the time McNulty had replaced the shotgun and the first few chords of that sad score issued from the jukebox.

They sat in their car and smoked, watching the patrol car double park and the cops listening to the heavy silence on the street. They watched them go inside the Golden Rose as if the cops needed one more drink before quitting time, just like everyone else. They watched a group of punks, not more than sixteen, behind the chain link of Battery Park. They were like ghosts in the night and they took turns hurling broken chunks of gravel at the last intact street light hanging over the western end of the playground. Lou and Joey heard the crash of the rock against the light and a second later the sound of broken glass hitting the ground. But they were moving already, on their way to Catherine Street to see Mary Grace Flannery.

TWENTY-THREE

J
oey parked in an empty 7/11 lot on 25th. He locked it up and set the alarm and they started walking toward Catherine, the cold night air seeping into their bones and compounding the fatigue that was beginning to tie a knot at the base of their spines. Lou snapped the top button of his jacket and thrust his hands into his pockets. A couple of black girls stood on the corner chattering into their cell phones. They were both skinny and young and wore short fur coats. The fur was dyed white and Lou pictured the hundred dead rabbits it might have taken to make them. But they were most likely fake, Lou thought, only the girls didn't know that.

They were out of their turf and Lou knew the score there. They'd met a couple of white boys, did some business, which usually amounted to a couple hits of coke followed by a quick blow-job. Then they got dumped and were probably calling one of their brothers for a ride, still tasting the coke in their nose and the cum in their mouth.

Their hair was braided with iridescent beads that sparkled as their heads flitted around. They noticed Joey and Lou coming toward them and started walking quickly away. They made them for cops immediately.

The front door to Mary Grace Flannery's building was open. The lock seemed as if it hadn't worked for a long time. She lived in a two-story walk-up made of worn brown brick. The street-level windows had thick black bars over them. The vestibule was dark and cold. The overhead light didn't work any better than the lock. They stepped into the dark hallway and started up the steep flight of stairs. Gracie lived on the second floor. They didn't have an apartment number. There were three doors on the second floor, one on each side of the hallway and one at the far end that had a capital
B
and a
4
drawn in ornate calligraphy onto a piece of gray cardboard and held up with a thumbtack.

Lou had smelled it as soon as he'd entered the building. Joey had smelled it, too. It was sharp and bitter in their nostrils. They knew that smell and they looked at each other, wondering aloud how anyone could live there and not notice it, not knock on Mary Grace Flannery's door and ask her what the hell she was cooking in there. They both were on edge. Call it instinct or intuition, it was an early-warning system and most cops had it. Hopefully they had it before they ever became cops. If not they learned it soon after they hit the street. It could be triggered because something doesn't look right or, as in this case, something doesn't smell right. Some guys were just born with it. Some guys had it and some guys didn't and the ones that didn't usually weren't around very long.

Lou knocked on the door at the end of the hall and waited. He knocked again, the smell that much stronger with his nose against the door. He tried the knob, knowing it wouldn't turn but going through the motions while he contemplated just how much force he was willing to use to get in. Joey leaned against the wall watching him, the slight gleam in his eyes revealing the humor he saw in the situation, two ex-cops breaking and entering, knowing what they'd find and knowing that it didn't matter, that an enthusiastic DA would think nothing of charging them with criminal trespass regardless of what they found. The right thing would have been to call it in and let the cops do their job.

Lou had gone back down the steps and through the front door and around to the back of the house and up a set of wooden steps leading to a second-floor landing. There was no light at all in the back. Joey was right behind him, their combined weight causing the bare, unpainted wood to creak under them. At the top of the stairs there were two doors with windows side by side. Lou put his face against the glass of the one on the left. He cupped his hands around his eyes. The darkness was thick inside. He lit a match. On the other side of the glass was a buzzing swarm of black flies.

There must have been thousands of them, a living black mass that seemed to move as if it had a single consciousness. He'd felt the vibration of their wings through the glass as they were drawn to the light and he'd seen their round, bulging, metallic eyes, the blindly staring eyes of an insect that fed on death.

Lou dropped the match and turned his back to the door. He could still hear their buzzing behind him and he shuddered as if one of them had crawled under his shirt and up his spine and was biting the skin on his back. He stood there for another minute with his eyes closed, visualizing what it might look like in there, what might attract that amount of flies, just how much human flesh they could consume in a day, a week, a month. He'd seen how maggots can live and grow in a carcass that was once a human being, laying eggs, eggs hatching into flies and those flies laying more eggs until they'd grown into a dark, moving shadow.

‘You see anything?'

‘Flies. A lot of them.'

‘Oh, shit.'

‘You ready to go in?'

‘Not really.'

‘Light a cigarette.'

‘Aw, c'mon Lou. This isn't our job. We know what we're gonna find in there. What else do you need to know? Let's just call it in. Call it a night.'

‘I want to get a look around.'

‘Of course you do.'

‘OK, stand back.'

Lou pulled his balled fist into the cuff of his leather jacket and punched it through the glass. He felt it shatter and heard the falling glass hit the floor. He jumped back and watched the swarm of flies streaming from the window like thick black smoke. They hit the cold night air and sped away while Lou kept his hand over his mouth and nose and Joey waved the cigarette at them and blew out a heavy cloud of blue-gray smoke. The vibration of all those diaphanous wings pulsating at once seemed to crackle with electricity. The swarm flew from the house, the humming dissipated into the night and it grew suddenly silent as if someone had pulled the plug.

He reached through the broken window, turned the latch and pushed open the door. They stepped into a dark kitchen and Lou reached along the wall for a light switch. Something moved beside him and he pulled his hand back reflexively. A cat hissed at him and jumped from the counter and raced across the floor, a dull yellow glow emanating from its crusted eyes. Lou found the switch again and the animal seemed to cringe from the light. He could see it licking its dark greenish-gray fur, cleaning itself with a rough, pink tongue that looked as coarse as sandpaper. There was another cat moving behind it. Lou noticed a line of dishes on the floor, all of them empty.

The moment they'd come through the door, the caustic stench that seemed tolerable in the hallway was now a tangible, fetid odor, thick in the moldering air. Lou pulled the neck of his sweater up over his nose and mouth. Joey, who had thrown his cigarette off the back porch, was now lighting another one. The kitchen was small with a row of small cabinets against one wall. Against the other wall were two stools and a cut-out counter top that opened into an equally small dining room. The living room was beyond that. A dim light from a small table lamp glowed at the other end of the apartment. Lou moved toward it and Joey followed, careful not to step in the scattered mounds of cat feces littering the floor.