Serpents in the Cold (6 page)

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Wholesale Food Terminal, Boston

THE WAREHOUSE TERMINAL
at the fraying edges of Dorchester, Roxbury, and South Boston spread out on the west bank of the Fort Point Channel like a vast industrial wasteland with trucks rumbling in and out of warehouse bays. Cal had often passed it coming from Uphams Corner without giving it a second thought, but as they came in through the Southampton Street entrance, the size of the place momentarily overwhelmed him.

“Jesus, how many warehouses are there here?”

“I dunno, maybe fifty? Sixty?

“And how many of them are cold storage?”

“Most of 'em.”

“Christ.”

“Keep the faith. You might get lucky straight off.”

A quarter of a mile in Jimmy waited for a truck to pull out and then turned the rig wide before a row of empty bays beneath the sign
BOSTON MEATS
and slowly backed it to the dock. Inside the warehouse Cal followed Jimmy to the dispatcher's office, where a woodstove burned by the desk and drivers were drinking coffee and waiting for their loads. A blackboard covered the far wall listing the truck numbers and times in and out and their scheduled pickups and drops in glaring white chalk, pressed hard to the board. Jimmy led him over to a desk by the loading dock where a large ledger showed the drivers' assignments, their rigs, and their times, signed in and out with each return to the hub. The door to the office was propped open by a cinder block, and from the warehouse beyond came the sound of blaring forklifts and shouting loading-dock workers.

Cal looked at the log. He didn't know what he was looking for other than a sign that something was off. If someone was using a reefer to pick up, kill, transport, and then dump bodies, it would take time, time that had to show up somewhere. Forty trucks, and every truck accounted for in the last twenty-four hours, including Jimmy Gleason's, his neat script logging his most recent run. And every truck on the page within twenty minutes of its scheduled pickup and drop-off.

Jimmy waited. “Any luck?”

“No. This isn't the place. I'd better get my walking shoes on.”

“Jesus, that's a shame. Listen, I've got to drop my load and get to Fall River, but a quick tip. Most of the warehouses here do retail food sales to locals, so they usually don't mind people coming by the docks. But stay out of the way of the loading—that's the fastest way to piss people off. Just tell the dispatcher your story, lie where you need to, and perhaps you'll get what you're looking for.”

Cal extended his hand. “Thanks, Jimmy. It was a pleasure meeting you.”

Jimmy's grip was like a vise. “Same here,” he said. “You remember to look after that wife of yours, okay? She sounds like a peach if she's stuck by you,” and he laughed.

“Sure thing, Jimmy.”

CAL HAD SPENT
the better part of the day searching the terminal, and now, nearing dusk, his thigh was throbbing. The place was the size of an airport field. He'd watched refrigerated semis coming in, loading, and leaving from one warehouse after the other, their rumblings jolting the tarmac beneath his feet and trains on the B&A line—the Boston-to-Albany Twilight Express—churning back and forth out of South Station in the distance. He passed the cold storage fish warehouses with their dumpsters reeking of rotting fish and upon which big harbor seagulls fought and screeched. Whatever reefer carried her body to Tenean, he doubted it was carrying fish. The pallet loading aboard the trucks wouldn't allow it, never mind the smell.

The need for a drink to ebb the pain pressed at the forefront of his thoughts, but he pushed it back down, unwilling to give in to it until he had something that he and Dante could work on. He climbed the ladder to the loading dock of another warehouse—his twenty-third, if he was counting. A sign for Fat Fong Choy—
鴻鈞老祖
—hung over the dock, looking like the type of business sign that might be replaced in a month by another.

The dock workers were a mix of white and Asian. An Asian kid was smoking a cigarette by the trucking log and signing his initials. When he was done, he looked up. “I was hoping you might be taking that load sitting out there to New Bedford, but you ain't a driver.”

His accent was townie all the way. “No, I'm looking for a friend who drives a rig out of here.”

“What's his name?”

“I figure if I look at the log it'll jog my memory.”

The driver raised his eyebrows, clearly suspicious but waiting him out.

Cal scanned down the log. Twenty trucks and every truck accounted for in the last twenty-four hours but one: number 36, Scarletti.

“What happened to thirty-six, Scarletti?” he asked.

“That your friend?”

“Might be.”

“How much is it worth to you?”

Cal considered this. He had limited funds and wasn't about to give anyone a handout, but he still had an additional ticket for the hockey game tonight. It was the Bruins, after all, and it was still Boston.

“A ticket to the Bruins and the Canadiens,” he said. The driver looked at him and shrugged.

“Guess it's not worth that much to you. The Bruins fucking stink.”

“That's what everyone tells me.” He pulled a five from his wallet.

The driver turned and called out to a stump of a man as wide as a rain barrel who had his back to them and was gesturing at one of the forklift drivers. “Hey, Peter! Have you seen Mike Scarletti come in? His friend here is looking for him.”

Peter half turned, an unlit stogie mashed in his mouth, and Cal could see the face of the Asian forklift driver, tight-lipped and angry as hell. Peter held up his index finger, telling them one minute, and then went back to screaming at the driver. The kid was looking at him, grinning. “You're full of shit, gwai lo,” he said and put out his hand.

THE DISPATCHER PLODDED
into the office as if the weight of the world rested upon his shoulders. He was even more barrel-like close up. A heavy red-and-black-plaid flannel shirt rode up from his waistband.

“I swear most of these morons don't know their ass from their elbows,” he said, pulling the wet cigar from his mouth and laying it tenderly across a rusted tin ashtray. “What the fuck you want?”

“Scarletti, the driver of number thirty-six.” Cal gestured to the log. “Have you seen him?”

“Who are you?”

“I'm looking for a friend who drives one of those rigs, maybe out of here.”

“Yeah? Your friend got my truck, red and green Peterbilt?”

“Maybe. Who's this driver?”

“Fucking Scarletti, he's a big stupid punk from Providence.” He looked at Cal. “I thought you was friends?”

“From way back when. Long time ago. Didn't know he moonlighted as a working stiff, but then it's been a long time since I've seen him.”

“Working stiff? Well, that's not Scarletti, and when I see him he's fucking through. I got a guy down in Buzzards Bay pissing and screaming his customers never got their meat, a half ton of fucking cow that never gets to where it's going because my driver decides to take a fucking powder.”

“When did he miss his load?”

“Two days ago. He's been AWOL since.”

“This Scarletti, if it's the same guy, how would I know him?”

“You couldn't miss him. Built like a brick shithouse, big as a fucking moose. Just as dumb, too. Curly orange hair.” He pointed a stubby finger to his upper lip. “And one of those ugly deformed lips, you know, a harelip.”

Cal kept his expression measured. “Yeah, that sounds like him.”

In the warehouse someone was shouting for the dispatcher. He cursed, jammed the stogie back in his mouth, and left the office. Cal followed. Forklifts hummed past, forks rattling in their braces. Before the open truck bays, workers hollered at trucks reversing into their spots, signaling the drivers to cut their wheels or waving them off and telling them to start again. Someone swung open a truck's rear doors and cried, “Fuckin' load's crushed! Some asshole double-stacked the pallets!”

“What's that over there?” Cal said, gesturing out beyond an open truck bay toward the Fort Point Channel and the South Station rail yards. In the distance, beside stacks of crushed cars were rows of identical-looking trailers.

“What's what?”

“Over there at the end of the lot, those trailers. Are they waiting to be loaded?”

“Nah.” The dispatcher waved them away. “They're useless. The refrigeration units are done on some; on others the floors are rotted away, or the brake lines are shot, or a hundred other frigging things. They're waiting to be towed away.”

“Out to the city dump?”

“That's right.”

The dispatcher chewed on his cigar so that bits of it flew about the room as he turned his head, frowning. “Listen, guy, not to be a rude son of a bitch, but I really don't give a shit about your friend. I don't know where the fuck he is. If you want to waste your time, go check out those trailers, go the fuck over to the city dump. Be my fucking guest, but I got a warehouse to run.”

He followed as Cal limped to the loading dock, wrapped a beefy hand around the chains that raised and lowered the dock doors, and lowered the door to just above Cal's head so that Cal had to duck beneath. Cal jumped down off the dock, and the shock of the impact shot through his legs. His hat fell to the ground, and he stumbled awkwardly as he went to pick it up. With his hands in his pockets, he walked gingerly toward the rail yard, pulling his coat tight about him. He heard the rollers against the chains as the dispatcher hollered, “And if you find Scarletti, you tell him I want my fucking truck!” and then the dock door slammed down behind him.

A short distance across the abandoned lot, toward the trains at South Station and the subway home, the wind came at him, pushing him back, and his feet and hands felt frozen. His thigh had stiffened with all the walking, and the rail yard was farther away than it seemed, so that when he looked back, he was surprised to see how little distance he'd come, the lights of the terminal and its trucks glowing feebly no more than two hundred yards away.

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Ball Square, Somerville

DANTE SAT IN
the car as it grew cold, watching the boardinghouse where Margo and Sheila had once lived together. One seventy-four Russell Street looked like it could have been a small nursing home, or a place where addicts like himself, or broken war heroes like Cal, came to forget the messes they'd left behind. The large boardinghouse was built in the Greek Revival style, and it sat upon a small hill, peeling white paint against the white of the snow. The bare arthritic maple trees gave the house a haunting perspective from the sidewalk. None of the steps had been cleared, and the smooth, untouched snow gave the place an aura of seclusion despite being in a relatively crowded neighborhood.

He kept the car's engine running. The driver's-side window fogged over, and he wiped at the moisture and watched the building for any signs of life. A gust of wind pulled pieces of newspaper across the front lawn. Two squirrels jumped from the long porch, one chasing the other, and then climbed the dark silhouette of a tree, scurrying one moment and, the next, seeming to disappear. The house was over a hundred years old, and it looked the worse for wear. The three columns on the front porch appeared slanted, perhaps one rough winter away from collapse. And the shutterless windows on the three floors had no curtains, giving the feeling that the place was vacant. He turned off the engine, leaned back in the seat. How awful Margo and Sheila had had it as foster children during the depression, a time when parents struggled to put food on the table for their own children, let alone ones they felt charitable enough to take in and give shelter to.

More bad things had happened to Sheila and Margo than good, and during his and Margo's marriage, he regretted that she had kept all those things to herself. But sometimes in a rare moment of sharing, she had given him enough of a story to put the pieces together and form a sort of crude map of their lives. Their mother had left them at Saint Mark's when Margo was seven and Sheila was three. And they'd gone from foster home to shelter to a new city to another town—from Quincy Center to Roslindale, Mattapan, Weymouth, a stint in Fields Corner and then Jamaica Plain. They'd once had their heads shaved for fear of their bringing lice into a new home; a man at an orphanage had broken Margo's arm and it never set properly and got infected; when Sheila was six, she fell ill with pneumonia and missed a year of school. And the house before him was the first place Margo, and then Sheila, could call home—thanks to an old Brahmin couple, the Baxters, who, in return for their helping with cleaning and cooking, offered them the small room in the attic.

The windshield was now glazed with ice. The quiet in the car ate at him and filled him with anxiety. He felt like he was falling off the world again. A fix was waiting in his pocket, whispering a remedy. Just return the car to Cal, admit that your hunch went nowhere, and then go away for a while, see you tomorrow. But there was the thought that needed absolution, and it helped carry Dante out of the car and up onto the sidewalk that hadn't been shoveled in weeks. For a moment he stood looking up at the lone window on the uppermost attic floor, a small black square that, against the white paint of the house, seemed impenetrable from the outside.

Dante pulled up his collar and moved through the snow along the sloping front lawn. Most of it was frozen solid, and every few steps the crust of ice caved in, leaving him in up to his knees. Eventually he made it up the hill and to the stairs slanted with snowdrift, up onto the long, wide front porch. He rang the doorbell and heard the chimes ring out a brief and stately melody, part of a Protestant hymn long forgotten. He waited and then opened the screen and knocked on the wooden door.

He peered in through one of the windows. A slight tapping on the pane startled him. It was a fly seeking escape. He left the columned porch and passed around the side of the house. Empty trash barrels without their lids tilted crookedly, half submerged and frozen in the snow. Using the wooden railing, he climbed the short porch that led to the kitchen. He knocked on the door, waited a moment, and then turned the doorknob. It opened. In the kitchen, the rotting stink of garbage, only slightly disturbed by the gust of cold air that poured in behind him.

A plate of untouched food sat on the kitchen table, what might have been mashed potatoes and carrots turned gray and black with mold. A lump of shriveled meat seemed to convulse as maggots squirmed upon it. Another fly crept over the fetid mass, and then paused and remained motionless, as if it were looking at him. Dante scanned the room. Pots and pans hung on their hooks beside the stove. The sink and countertops, though now covered in a fine layer of dust, had recently been clean. He turned back toward the plate of food, watched the fly exit the kitchen into the hallway.

He closed the door behind him. Beneath the silence, he could hear the house shifting, moaning as the wind pressed against it. There was a back staircase that led from the kitchen up the three floors to the attic. He remembered this, somehow, and entered the narrow, musty staircase, and in the darkness felt for a light switch. He found one and flipped it. The bulb was out.

His lighter provided enough light, a flickering glare that traveled a foot in front of him. The wood of the stairs groaned under his weight. He paused, feeling as if something or somebody was in the house listening to him, and he thought of the crippled woman who had once been a tenant here. She'd had a stroke at a young age, no more than thirty, and it had paralyzed half her body and left her with a shuffling limp. The woman's hair had fallen out, and she had refused to eat, and had slowly wasted away, her body becoming emaciated and sexless. She hid in her locked bedroom all day, but at night she would roam the house barefoot, wearing nothing but her robe. Margo and the other women had complained of her frightening them: sitting in the bathroom with the lights off, just staring into the tiles on the floor, hiding in the basement where the washing tubs were, or in this very same dark staircase, waiting hours and hours until somebody came and found her.

He made it up to the third floor, paused for a moment at the door he knew led out to a long hallway past five of the bedrooms, and then continued up the narrow staircase to the fourth and uppermost floor, the attic. In the hallway he found a lightbulb and pulled on the cord with fingers still numb from the cold. The light chased away the darkness, as well as the memory of the woman. He opened the door and took one step into the room where Margo and Sheila had lived. A single window allowed in the weakening light of late afternoon. Except for a small bed where a sheet and a blanket lay strewn at one end, the room appeared stripped of everything else, as if it had always been this bare and empty, as if nobody had ever lived here.

Dante walked farther into the room. To his left, a small dresser stood against the wall. The drawers had been pulled out, forced from their runners. Whatever had been inside them was scattered about the floor: a pair of white panties, a small purse with floral design stitching, a silk slip, a roll of lace, several tins of rouge and powder, and crimson stockings. Someone had been through the room, and they'd done a thorough job, but had they found what they were looking for? He crouched to his knees, reached down, and grabbed the purse. Its lining had been torn out and nothing was left inside. He tossed it back into the mess of scattered clothes. A gust of wind pressed against the old wooden window frame, set the loose screen on the other side of the glass clacking loudly. Dante stood back up and, in fear of dirtying the clothes with his wet shoes, stepped carefully over them, only realizing after a moment that Sheila would never be wearing them again.

On the other side of the dresser, a small mirror had been smashed on the floor. In the pieces he saw fragments of himself, a shadow in reflection. Seven years' bad luck for you, he thought, and reached over to the closet, the same closet that Margo used to store her meager belongings in. It was empty except for a few wire hangers. Deeper inside he saw a human shape, a pale torso. Startled for a moment, he realized it was just a dressmaker's dummy, a headless, armless body on a pole. A sudden weight came down on him and he had to sit on the mattress.

This was the room where he and Margo had spent their first night together. And this had been their bed. The thin mattress bowed beneath him. For a moment it seemed he could smell her here, the cool touch of her arms on the back of his neck.

He looked down and spotted the board that didn't quite match the rest of the floor, a slightly different grain against the dark-stained maple—the place where Margo used to keep her fixings. He tapped on the board with the heel of his shoe, and the echo of it ran hollow. He got on his knees, cigarette resting at the edge of his lip, and pushed at the floorboard. It was loose and without any nails holding it in. There was a groove beside it, not big enough for a finger to fit into. From the closet he grabbed a metal coat hanger and straightened the hook out. Forcing the metal into the hole, he raised the slat high enough to pull it free with his fingers. The space was empty. He sat back on his haunches, took a long pull on the cigarette. He didn't know why he thought there would be something still here after all this time. He leaned facedown to the floor and peered first left and then right along the line of the joist.

A small box sat deeper in the hole in the shadow beneath the joists. He reached in, fingers scrabbling for a hold, and pulled it out, returned to the bed with the box on his lap. He wiped the dust and the cobwebs from the top and then slowly opened it. A nude photograph of Sheila propped up on an elbow and reclining amid the cushions on an ornate couch glared up at him. Through slitted eyes, thick with eyeliner and mascara, she stared at him, smeared lips puckered, blowing a kiss to whoever held the camera.

Another one of her standing naked in what looked to be a hotel room, posing like Betty Grable, with a leg bent upward behind her and her head thrust back as if in the midst of laughter. One was taken from the foot of a bed and centered on her spread legs, her glistening vagina thrust toward the camera lens. Her head was propped awkwardly upon the pillow, and the smile plastered to her face seemed unsure and anxious. There were others of her also, but in these the face was purposely blurred or the photos were cropped from the neck up. From the body alone he knew they were Sheila.

Repulsion turned in Dante's stomach. He stared at the pictures even though he felt dirty, guilty, a Peeping Tom. This was all his fault. He inhaled, exhaled slowly, trying to stave off the sudden shame and guilt pressing in on him.

Beneath the stack of smut there were more photos, unlike the others. They were of Sheila at the dog track, smoking in the dim light of a club, on the Swan Boats in the Public Garden. And then there were older ones, blistered and cracked, taken from when she was a child. One showed a young Sheila holding the hand of Margo, probably nine years old at the time, each of them wearing dresses far too big and both staring blankly at the camera with coal-dark eyes. Another showed them standing out in front of Saint Mark's church, the same church where their mother had abandoned them, the same church he and Cal had attended as children. Both of them stood beside a sturdy older woman who may have been the senile woman they called Auntie, the one they briefly lived with in South Boston. Also in the stack was a picture from Dante and Margo's wedding, the bride and groom beaming in the bright flash, Cal standing next to him, squinting, and Sheila next to her sister, her eyes looking not at the camera but somewhere off in the distance.

He placed the photographs on the floor and began to search the rest of the box. To his side, the picture of Sheila's spread legs and shockingly bared vagina stared up at him, and he found it hard not to glance at it. In the box there was a charm ring, a rabbit's foot, a first report card, jewelry, trinkets, a dance card from a cocktail banquet at the Emporium Hotel, junk. It was like looking through the secret belongings of a young girl. But at the very bottom of the box was an envelope. Inside were ten one-hundred-dollar bills, perfectly pressed, without line or crease, all sticking to one another as if they had never been counted. He put the bills to his nose. Fresh off the press, steeped in that sharp tang of new money. He looked at his hands as if he expected to see green ink there, as if it might bleed from the notes and stain his skin.

He stood and folded the bills before sliding them into his pants pocket. He reached back down and picked up the photos, looking at the girl in them again. He flipped them over, searched for a photo shop imprint, a date, a name, but every one of them was blank except for the one pose that mimicked Grable, and on it was written
My Only Pin-Up, Love, Your Man, Mario.
He collected the trinkets and photos, placed them into his coat pocket, returned the box to its space in the floor, and left the room.

HE WALKED THE
hallway floors, bare, water-damaged, and warped plywood, passing before open doors of empty bedrooms. All of them were gone; the middle-aged widows, or the wife waiting and praying for her husband to return home from Europe unharmed, the single girls who ached for a romance that wouldn't materialize until the war was over, and the spinster who had told the younger girls that hearts could be broken only once. The sad, horrifying, deformed stroke victim in her early thirties, forever limping alone through the dark.

Downstairs he suddenly had the feeling of somebody's presence in the next room and, feeling foolish, he called out, “Hello. Anybody there?”

There was only the distant buzzing of flies. He had seen two flies earlier, and now as he walked closer to the front room, he could hear, and smell, where the rest of them gathered. He pulled out a handkerchief from his pocket, covering his nose and mouth before entering the dining room.

The body lay on the floor. Its head was like a large decomposing vegetable that had fallen from its vine. The face was stretched and splitting. A blackened gouge ran along the side of the forehead and led down to a puddle of dried blood covering the edge of the carpet. The hair on the scalp was a sandy pale white, the hands liver spotted and bloated, one upturned on the floor, the other resting on his chest.