Serpents in the Cold (5 page)

_________________________

WITH DANTE GONE,
Cal spent the next two hours canvassing the neighborhood above Tenean, knocking on doors that never opened. Inner doors slammed and rattled in distant hallways and above shadowy staircases. Curtains parted slightly and then fell back against the window. He heard the volume of a radio being raised, a mother scolding her child. He'd managed to speak to only a dozen or so people, and everyone he'd showed Sheila's picture to had shaken their heads, including an old woman who'd let him in and served him bitter tea, and he'd sat with her and her cats in a room that stank of urine as she proudly showed him her sons' class pictures from Saint Mark's of twenty years before, and he'd recognized them, too—Mark, Pat, and Conor Fitzgerald, all doing time at either Charlestown or Plymouth.

At the end of the street he turned and, looking back over Dorchester Bay with its long sliver of shore stretching toward the city, he thought of Sheila. The last time he'd seen her she'd been nothing more than a girl, a teenager who had taken his hand and asked him to dance at Dante and Margo's wedding at the Polish American Social Club in the Polish Triangle.

Sheila was wearing a pink silk dress that seemed to float around her waist, with a black bodice sheath and matching black shoes with three-inch heels. She was trying to act grown-up, but the dress only made her look younger. Lynne had looked on with amusement, her eyes like a cat's below her slightly arched eyebrows, her teeth bared in a smile and lightly pinching her bottom lip. When she strode to the bar, hips trembling beneath the dress, and ordered a glass of wine, he'd watched her greedily. She'd looked over then with that look of hers and he'd smiled fiercely, alcohol flushing his face and coursing through his body, so that the young girl in his arms had perhaps taken it for something meant for her.

The air had been heavy and sultry and smelled of sweating bodies and spilled beer and electric lights blazing above them, dust burning on the bare bulbs. There were skylights, and a rain had begun to fall sometime during the night and the glass was stippled with it. It hammered and drummed on the tin and pelted the asphalt roof as the band played faster and the crowd hollered and cheered in Polish.

Afterward Sheila had whispered something in his ear and then eyed him as she blew cigarette smoke with practiced precision, pouting her lips and exhaling slowly toward the ceiling elaborate hazy blue rings, trying to affect an elegance and sexual maturity she must have taken from the movies.

At the end of the night she had lifted her glass to him as he placed a stole about Lynne's shoulders. Her lipstick was smeared and her mascara had begun to run with sweat. He could hear, even now, the jangle of the bracelets on her thin wrist as she raised her glass. He'd realized only much later how she'd been drinking steadily all night, and finishing her drinks in the same manner, mock-toasting Margo and Dante. Strange how that sound should come to him now in her death, and the sudden, forgotten knowledge that Sheila had been drunk and so very young and alone at her only sister's wedding.

He stood atop the hill above Port Norfolk and watched the cars and trucks moving north and south over the highway. Below, at Tenean Beach, various trucks, long trailers and short-beds, idled on the street as drivers read papers, smoked, ate their lunch, or waited for their scheduled deliveries. One truck pulled in, killed its engine, and another started up and moved slowly down the street, and disappeared beneath the highway overpass toward Gallivan Boulevard. They moved with the consistency of the planes breaking the clouds over the peninsula and thrumming overhead on their way to Logan.

Steeling his leg for the journey, he strode down the hill. As triple-deckers gave way to beachfront, the wind howled through the crumbling spars and pylons and ripped against him, frozen particles of sand stinging his face. His feet and hands were numb. Needle-sharp pinpricks stabbed his eyes. He stared at the ice-covered snow beyond the crime scene and searched for fading telltale signs—small collapses in the snow that might show him where and how a man carrying a body had moved in the late hours of the night—and then in toward the parking lot, for engine oil frozen in a black pool just beneath the recent snow, or a car's tire track captured in a perfect sparkling mold. But he could only see the gray, thick-ridged icy grooves that had been cut and shaped over the long winter by the big rigs. He poked at them with his foot, those created weeks before and hardened like permafrost, and the more recent, crumbling against his shoe.

A white Peterbilt with
BOSTON MEATS
written across its side panels was one of the last trucks left on the street. In the distance Saint Mark's tolled two o'clock. Cal blew into his hands and knocked on the door, and the driver rolled down his fogged window. A brown-and-green-tweed scally cap was pushed aslant his head; a cigarette dangled from his mouth. He had pale blue eyes that reminded Cal of a child's.

“Jesus, Mac, it's fuckin' cold. What you doing out there?”

“A buddy of mine has a route out of Boston, supposed to pick me up here on his lunch break today. Here I am freezing my ass off and he's a no-show. Maybe you know him?”

“Maybe, if he's out of the wholesale terminal. I make my first pickups there and then my last at the end of the day. What's his name?”

“Murphy, Paul Murphy.”

“Nah, don't know him. But there's a lot of trucks coming out of there.”

“Might that be the only place he drives for? He's got a big reefer unit just like this one.”

“He might be outta someplace else, but if he's driving the city and he's got a reefer, maybe Chelsea, but he'll probably end up at the terminal one way or the other.

“Look, I'll be done with my lunch in a few minutes and I'm heading back in that way if you want a ride.”

“I'd appreciate that.” Cal reached up his hand to the cab's window. “Cal O'Brien.”

The driver took his hand and grimaced with the cold shock of it. “Jesus, the name's Jimmy Gleason, but will you get in here for Christ's sake so I can shut the fuckin' window.”

The cab smelled of grease and cigarette smoke, of old sweat and coffee. But Jimmy Gleason was an immaculate man: Cal noticed his fingernails, spotless and neatly trimmed, and the manner in which, after he ate, he grabbed a rag from a bench box between their seats and wiped down the instrument panel and then the dash and steering wheel. And yet there was a pervasive smell of rot in the cab, as if mildewed and soiled clothing had been piled there and with that, old food. Cal wondered if the odor was coming from the refrigeration unit behind the cab or from within the cab itself. Jimmy seemed oblivious to the smell. He caught Cal looking at him and offered him a cigarette, which he'd been in the process of removing from a pack and placing in his own mouth.

As Jimmy smoked, he pointed to his open lunch pail on the bench box between them. “The wife packs me way too much. It's baloney and cheese and it'll fill a hole if you're hungry.”

“Thanks, but I'm good,” he said.

Wind howled in the hollows of the wheel wells and around the cab's doorframes as the rig climbed the ramp to the highway and they headed north, back into the city. The fan's engine cut in from behind them, on the nose of the trailer, loud and thundering so that the cab shuddered with the vibrations. After a moment Cal became used to the sound, and Jimmy, seeming to sense this, spoke. “At least I don't have to put as much ice in the bunker with days like this.”

“Surprised you need any ice at all.”

“You can't have it too cold, else you'll ruin the meat. All depends what you're haulin'. The temperature has to be regulated just so. Fresh-cut meat: high thirties; apples, peaches, grapes, lettuce: mid-thirties; potatoes: forty-five to fifty; dairy: just above freezing.”

“So, if my friend drives a reefer like this one, you think he'd be out of South Street?”

Jimmy nodded. “Yeah, most of 'em come out of South Street. Flowers, fruit, hanging meats, fish.”

“Hanging meats?”

“Yeah, y'know, cuts of cow put up on hooks, suspended from the ceiling of the trailer—‘hanging.' Sends the rig all over the place. I wouldn't do it long haul if you paid me.”

“Where do you go, then?”

“North and South Shore. Sometimes down to New Bedford and Fall River into Rhode Island.” He grinned. “I also get up to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Maine, Canada sometimes too.”

Jimmy wiped at the gear knob with his cloth and gazed at it appreciatively when he was done, as if he were admiring the luster of freshly polished silver. “She's powered by a Cummins two-hundred-and-sixty-two-horsepower engine with a five-speed main and three-speed auxiliary transmissions. They don't make them like this anymore.”

They passed the Dorchester gas tanks and Jimmy pointed out toward the point, where black smoke from the tire factory and the city dumps twined in the air. “Out there, on the Calf Pasture, that's the graveyard where all the dead trucks go. Like elephants, they all end up there.” He touched the console tenderly. “She'll end up there too.”

“As salvage?”

Jimmy nodded. “She's got go in her yet, though.” He picked at his teeth with a free hand and seemed to be lost in thought for a moment. “When I was a young man I used to haul produce from Nogales, Arizona, into Los Angeles during the summer months. Now that's when we needed ice. Load up the front of the trailer with as much ice as the bunker would hold, twenty one-hundred-pound blocks I'd swing in with my own hands. Had to stop and cool down the load with ice every two hundred miles. I was in some shape then.”

He nodded and smiled, a pleasant memory shifting the wintry highway before him into a sweltering West Coast vista, and he suddenly seemed much younger. “This very same rig. Worked hard to buy it, took ten years to pay it off. No more leasing for me—drain your life, those fuckers will. Fifty-one years old and I got a truck and a house. Ain't bad in these times.”

“You don't look so old, Jimmy.”

“I got a good wife. That helps.”

“Yeah. I guess it does.”

“How old are you, son?”

“Thirty-two.”

“Hate to say it, but you don't look so hot.”

Cal laughed. “I've been told that.”

“Since the end of the war I've seen lots of guys look like you. You were over there, I'd guess. Could tell the way you limped over to the truck. Where were you?”

Cal was quiet for a moment as he looked out the window, feeling the gray and the cold seep into his bones. He gestured to the city around them, to the tenements, warehouses, triple-deckers, the sea always off to their right. “All over,” he said. “I was all over.”

“You've got a wife,” Jimmy said matter-of-factly, and Cal glanced down to check for his wedding ring; he often forgot whether he was wearing it or not.

“Sure.”

“I bet she's a good one.”

“What's that?”

“Your wife. I bet she's a good one.”

Cal looked at him.

“She's stuck by you, hasn't she?”

“She tries to.”

“Sure she does. Through thick and thin. Sickness and sorrow. Till death do us part. All that bullshit.”

Jimmy nodded, chuckled to himself. “Don't get company much. I live in my own world so much, I tend to forget some of the more social graces. I ain't making apologies or nothing.” He shrugged. “But I shouldn't be butting into no one else's business. You'll have to excuse that. I didn't mean any offense.”

The truck's right-front tire hit a pothole, the crashing thud jolting the front end. The sharp reverberation penetrated up through Cal's legs into his scarred hip and thigh, stirring up a sudden pain that made him briefly wince. He gritted his teeth as the truck, downshifting, its engine a roaring backwash, bellowed down through the empty canyons of Dorchester Ave. They turned into Andrew Square, and Cal glimpsed through the fogged window the Polish American Social Club, and then they turned onto Albany and rumbled toward the South Street warehouses, adjoined on the east by the city's central train tracks. In the distance he could make out the square tower and strange medieval turrets of Boston City Hospital. A fucking web, he thought, everything in Boston connected in some way to everything else. Every
one,
too, for that matter. It reminded him that he needed to give Fierro and Owen a call after this next stop, and hope Dante, wherever the hell he was, could get both himself and the car home in one piece.

_________________________

Cambridgeport, Cambridge

THE TRAFFIC ON
Massachusetts Avenue was sluggish. Behind him and in front of him, impatient drivers laid on their horns as if the shrill noise would make everything move. The BPW plows hadn't done a good job clearing the roads; chunks of icy snow lay scattered on the street, and patches of ice grew where the trucks hadn't sanded. A white Buick in front of him slowed and then came to a complete stop.

As he crossed the bridge, the Charles River reflected the high sun that momentarily forced its way through the clouds, stretching its glare across the marbled ice. Below it, he imagined a vast cold current of nothing, and Sheila trapped inside the dark waters, her eyes sealed shut, her throat a frozen gash.

“I'm a fucking mess,” he said aloud, wiping his knuckles across his wet cheek, tears he hadn't been aware of. A weight continued to press on his chest. That he hadn't seen Sheila in so long got to him. It had been late July, a month after he'd been released from the hospital, and he'd gone to the Pacific Club to hear Sonny Stitt and his trio. From his usual spot standing with his back to the bar, he'd glimpsed her sitting at a small ringside table with a guy wearing a broad-shouldered suit that matched the color of his black pompadour. He'd watched her from across the red-lit room, noticing how she leaned into the guy every time he spoke, the gentle touches she placed upon his arm, the smile and the sly nod she gave him when he lit her cigarette. When the band took a short break to refill their glasses, he found her walking to the bathroom, watched the motion of the dress sliding across her hips, the thin material clinging to the cleft of her bottom and the backs of her thighs, and he reached out to her as she passed.

“How about a drink with your brother-in-law?” he said, realizing too late how much it sounded like a pickup line. And even though she smiled, her eyes betrayed her. He gently grabbed her arm and pulled her in closer to a space at the bar and, slurring his words, told her that he'd missed her. He waved to the bartender, Bowie, and asked for another whiskey and a whiskey sour.

When their drinks came, she turned to her table, where her stylish escort sat, gesturing with his hands, beckoning her back. She raised an index finger and mouthed the words “One minute, just one more minute.”

“Who's the sharp dresser?” Dante asked, and she laughed and her eyes drifted back to the table.

“Just a friend,” she said. Sheila was never a good liar, not to him at least.

“Well, I hope he's treating you well.” He looked her over for a moment. She had lost some weight and it showed in her face. Gone was the dreamy curiosity she'd often exhibited. It was now replaced with a self-assured elegance. She wore white gloves that ran all the way up to her elbows and made the pink satin dress even more chic, perhaps too much so for an after-hours club like the Pacific. He stared at her gold necklace and the swell of her cleavage. He was about to ask how she could afford such jewelry, but she was already preparing to leave. “Good to see you, Dante,” she said, and he stumbled and pulled her into him and said he loved her. Her body went tight and he loosened his embrace and stepped back.

“It's been hard for us all,” he said, trying to sound normal despite the anxiety building in his chest and throat. He wanted to say how much he truly cared for her, that they were family, that he loved her and desired her, yes, but before he could utter the words, she extinguished her cigarette, kissed him on the cheek, and said good-bye. That was it. And then she was gone.

PARKING THE CAR
off River Street just outside Central Square, Dante walked two streets over to the corner of Winston. The faint odors of chocolate and burnt fudge carried half a mile from the Necco candy factory. He lit another cigarette, exhaled smoke from his nostrils.

He paused before the green house, a square, flat-roofed two-family without a back or front porch. He pushed the doorbell once and then repeated, hearing the sharp buzzing echo in the hallway inside. All the houses in this neighborhood were built in a rush during the first war, and they were squared up tightly on narrow streets and sidewalks barely wide enough to hold a hydrant. He watched two little boys skip on the sidewalk toward him. Each was wearing a tattered sweater that was a size too big. They looked up, chins raised, and stared at him, a look that an adult might give somebody who wasn't from the neighborhood, and even though they were just children, the look got under his skin.

The door opened, and a voice like a breaking dish made him turn around. “Jesus Christ, look who crossed the bridge! If it ain't Dante Cooper, it must be whatever is left of his ghost.”

Dante hadn't seen Karl in over two months. He was wearing a thin robe and a pair of blemished chinos. A beard hid his lopsided chin and thinned over his stick neck, where his Adam's apple protruded like something infected. His heavy eyes were bloodshot. He wasn't a large man, didn't look like he'd be much in a fight, but the diseased look usually kept those who wanted to brawl in check; he had the look of a man who found many uses for razor blades besides shaving.

“I was in the neighborhood. Just thought I'd say hello.”

“Is that right? Came all the way here just to see me?”

One never knew what to expect with Karl. Either he was pissed off or ecstatic, and he could switch back and forth with the ease of a well-kept switchblade. Right at this moment, Dante couldn't get a good read on him.

Once up the bare wooden stairs to the second floor, Dante could smell the marijuana. It wasn't a good sign. Things must have been dry, and without any of the heavy stuff, Karl was resorting to the green leaf to help pass the time.

Dante didn't want to waste any more effort on him than he had to. “I just thought I'd pop by.”

“You make it sound like we're friends, Dante. You're here for the same reason everybody comes here. You think I'm stupid?”

The second-floor hallway was crammed with nearly a dozen cardboard boxes.

“No, I don't think you're stupid, Karl. I've seen you do some stupid things before, but no.”

Karl's thin lips curled up around his gums, an attempt at a grin. “God's on my side, you know. See these boxes here?” He pulled back one of the flaps. Inside were miniature statues of Christ on the cross, resting on beds of shredded newspaper. “With this many Jesuses, I'd say the big guy's got my back. Yesterday I wasn't holy; today I might as well be the fucking pope.”

“You got enough of these to fill every windowsill in the North End.”

Karl reached out and put his hand on Dante's arm. “C'mon, there's someone I want you to meet.” Karl gave him a wink, and pushed open the door. “Dante, this here is my friend Cassie. She'll take care of you while you're waiting.”

The small living room stank of cheap incense and marijuana. On the couch sat a thin black girl no more than eighteen. She was wearing an off-white silk shirt halfway unbuttoned. The bottom of a billowing skirt spread up around her skinny thighs. She looked at him, her eyes moving in and out of focus, and Dante could tell that she was flying high from junk.

“Have some fuckin' manners, Cassie,” Karl snapped. “Say hello. An old friend like him deserves it.”

She managed a raspy “Hello,” and her head lolled suddenly as though some cosmic puppeteer had sneezed, tweaking the wrong string. A slight impression of fog escaped from her mouth as she tried to smile, and Dante felt how cold it was in the room.

“Take a seat, Dante. Please, make yourself at home.”

“I can't stay long.” It all felt wrong to him.

Karl crossed the room and flipped a record on the player. The stirring of a blues ballad came on, barely audible with all the skips and pops on the vinyl and dust clogging the needle. He turned back to Dante. “C'mon, at least stay for a side. To be honest, I'm having a great day and I'd like you to share it with me.”

“I don't have much time.”

The girl on the couch broke out in raspy laughter. “He doesn't sound like a true friend, does he? He really ain't here to see you.”

Dante gave her a look-over and made sure she felt it. “Karl, if you don't want to part with any, I understand. I just need something to take the edge off. I've been clean for a while. It won't take much.”

“Don't like our company, do you?”

“It's not that. I'm just busy with something.”

“Saving the world, are you?”

“No, just helping somebody out.”

“But you'll only end up making it worse like always, no?” Karl laughed.

Dante didn't respond, so Karl continued, slightly apologetic. “Okay, I understand. How much you got on you?”

“Ten.”

“I'll fix you up something. You can join all of us, if you want. I think we're ready, aren't we, Cass?”

The girl laughed again. “This pale boy looks like he could use some of that love. A face that bruised-up means he a little lonely.” She spread her legs apart and Dante saw the wiry mass of pubic hair.

Karl said, “Don't mind her, she gives too much lip and not enough head is what it comes down to. I'll be right back.” He opened a door off the living room and went inside. Dante could hear him talking to somebody.

A man's wool peacoat hung on the back of the chair. He sat down and looked at the Oriental rug. Two Christ figurines were lying there, each snapped in two at the waist. He reached down and picked one up. It was hollow inside. His thumb pressed into the abdomen, and the plaster crumbled in his hand. So this was where Karl stored it. Dante shook his head, let what was left of Christ drop to the floor, and wiped his chalky fingers on his pant leg.

“Hey you, look.” The girl had lifted her skirt higher, spread her legs farther apart. She rubbed the inside of her spotty thighs for a bit before parting the hair and exposing the pink folds, which she spread with skinny fingers. She leered and then leaned forward, inspected her sex as if it had been removed from her body and placed on a dinner plate.

“Close your damn legs,” he said.

She cackled in response and probed deeper with her thumb and index finger. Dante stood and made his way to the bedroom. Karl was already on his way out. The door was open and Dante could see inside.

A white teenage girl was wiping down her breasts with a tissue. She couldn't have been more than thirteen years old. Her lipstick was smeared over her lips and chin, and her legs were wide open and bent at the knees as if she were giving birth. Before her a man of about fifty was pulling up his boxer shorts. His half-erect penis looked as though it had been bloodied. He wore oval gold-rimmed glasses and looked like a minister, his pale face shaved so clean it shone like polished ivory. Sick bastards like him were the ruin of this world, Dante thought. He looked back at the girl on the bed. Unflinching, she balled up the tissue and threw it on the floor near Dante. “What the fuck you lookin' at?”

Karl put his hand on Dante's arm and pulled him back into the living room, closed the door behind him. “Jesus, Dante. What the fuck is wrong with you?” He handed him six fixes tied in a balloon.

Dante gave him the ten. His jaws clenched and he chewed on the insides of his mouth; he wanted to crack the skull of the sick bastard.

In the hallway Karl said, “I'll see you again, soon.”

“No you won't. I'm giving up after this, I'm going clean.”

“Sure, Dante, sure. I've heard that one a million times. Sorry, brother.”

“No, I mean it. I'm done.”

“I'll see you in two days, tops, maybe even sooner. And you know it's only me you can come to. The whole city is dried up and it has been for months. Canto and Boris ain't carrying, and Gordon is up in Concord. Unless some of your nigger friends can feed you some overpriced shit, probably cut with fuckin' pancake mix, I'm the only one.”

“Karl, you're nothing but a lowlife.”

“But this lowlife always gives people like you what they need.”

“Like selling underage girls to get fucked? Karl, they should put you on a pedestal. Then light a fucking match.”

Karl bared his teeth. He didn't like sarcasm. “You've been lonely since she's gone, don't say you aren't. I could see it in your eyes when you saw those little tits and that tight li'l cunt staring right up at you. You're no different from the rest of us animals, so don't be a fuckin' hypocrite.”

“You don't know me for shit, Karl. I won't be seeing you again.”

“That's a good one, Dante. Morning after next you'll be back. You'll always come back to Brother Karl.”

On the street, Dante inhaled deeply to cleanse the clinging odors of incense, bitter reefer, cum, and pussy that had permeated the apartment and had made their way into his clothes. He lit a cigarette and found it tough to drag on. He shuddered with a disgust and loathing he hadn't felt in some time.

Hate was the only thing that could make one stronger, and he hated not just himself but every low-down bookie, thug, and peddler of junk and underage girls. Someday the fires of hell would take them all away, and he wished that he'd be able to sit on the precipice, taking in his last fix, and watch them all burn and suffer, knowing that soon enough the flames would come his way and pull him down to join them.