Pawtucket 11 p.m.
by John Kilkelly
illustrations by Mark Reusch
Hot summer night, sticky and treacherous. Red night. Night of sirens and fear. We were sitting on the balcony of my apartment in Pawtucket, three of us, drinking beers and poking at pieces of steak on the grille. In the background, the muted roar of traffic on the interstate, the distant howl of police cruisers dredging the Friday streets.
Brad was sitting nearest the grill. He had assumed the controlling role as usual and insisted that he, and only he, was the grillmaster, that only he had the instincts for such a task. He was still in his work clothes: badly-ironed shirt, wool slacks on this hot night, Florsheims in need of a polish, tie infested by long-congealed substances.
I was on my fourth Swillbeer, back in those beat Pawtucket days I couldn’t drink any better than that. I was freshly-divorced and this pit was almost a step up from the crumbling pisshole mill town I had just left.
Richard was sitting furthest from the fire, taking slow hits on a rum bottle, his brown eyes surveying us almost sadly. He worked in a jewelry factory, we kept at him to organize a heist with us, but he was content with minimum wage, or maybe he didn’t think we would be competent criminals.
Dana, my neighbor, had departed this happy gathering some hours earlier with almost all of Brad’s paycheck in his sweaty fist, on an errand to procure some discount weed. Alleged discount weed. He had said he’d be right back, maybe half an hour or so…
“Where is the fuggin’ dude?” Brad swore, spearing a chunk of meat and ripping it asunder with his fine, dentally-coherent chops.
“He’s coming, don’t worry,” I told him.
“Been gone a long time, man,” Richard said.
“Yeah, yeah… you know how it is, you have to socialize when you’re doing these deals, go through the niceties, make pleasant fuggin’ conversation…”
“Man, I bet he’s sitting there smoking the weed that I paid for, two-hundred and fifty bucks in his pocket, laughing,” Brad mumbled.
I spat out over the balcony and heard that lunger thud onto the driveway. Across the street my neighbor was watching his big-ass TV set, biggest TV set I’d ever seen, glaring in Technicolor nastiness all along the street. All I’d ever seen of this neighbor was his fat ass draped over a Harley and his hairy arm outstretched along the sofa in front of that mother television.
Brad was getting antsy by then. It had been a long time since Dana had left, after all. I didn’t quite doubt that he would return with our shit but I also knew him well enough to know it was highly probable he’d decided to swing by a few neighborhood bars on his way back. Dana did not exist for our convenience or anyone else’s. He was omnipotent unto himself.
When I had first moved into this swillpit apartment, he had come across the hallway and introduced himself. He was hairy and oafish and clad in greasy biker duds. He had a tattoo on each meaty fist: L.O.V.E. on one, H.A.T.E. on the other. Imagine my white-collar Ford Taurus-driving delight when he informed me that he was fresh outta jail, ten years for Murder One.
Then he’d picked up my books, unpacked as yet, and leafed through a wad of titles approvingly.
“You got the Kerouac,” he’d grunted, “an’ I love this Tolstoy, you ever read Chekov? Guy like you, I bet you read fuggin’ Chekov…”
“You’ve read Chekov?” I remember asking as I tried to remember where my wallet was.
“Oh shit, yes. I like Joyce, too, when I was in Solitary once, I finally figured out what Ulysses was about. I got through Homer’s Iliad an’ Plato and Machiavelli… oh, man.”
“So Dana, er… What did you do, if y’don’t mind me askin’…?”
He growled from deep down in the tarnished hell that was his throat.
“Whaddya fuggin’ mean wha’did I fuggin’ do? I popped a guy, they call that Murder, y’know… fuggin’ maggot…”
“Yeah, yeah, but I mean, why didya pop him?” I had to know, even if it meant getting dragged down the street behind a Harley.
“He raped my daughter…”
There wasn’t much to say after that. But I asked him anyway: “What judge in the world would send you down after that, I mean, s’justifiable ain’t it?” He was silent for a while. Then, “Premeditated,” he said. “It was a week after the bastard did it. I had time to think about it…”
“Oh,” I said. That shut me up.
Richard and Brad were trying to have a conversation but it wasn’t going to happen. They were as far apart from each other as bread vans in Ethiopia. Brad was your archetypal educated prick and Richard the stoic serf tending the garden of his head. I went for a piss and left them to each other.
Brad had pissed me off, something he did with amazing regularity. We had all tried to be nice to Brad, to welcome him into the cozy nook of our social grouping, to assimilate him into the ranks of ordinary humanity. But he insisted on pissing people off, it happened all the time. Anytime, no matter where he was, he would piss someone off.
Personally, I attributed this to his parents and their overzealous toilet-training techniques. I don’t even know why we were so tolerant, maybe it was a Catholic thing, I don’t know.
That night I was broke. I would be getting paid the next day but at that point, at that moment, I was skint. Dana had come out onto the deck and announced that a friend of his was clearing out his pot dealership and we could get ounces for a hundred bucks. That was like double coupon day at Circle K. I said to Brad, “If’n you front me a hundred bucks, I’ll pay you tomorrow.”
Brad had two hundred bucks. At first he agreed, then, in a typical maneuver, after Dana had taken all his cash, he retracted his offer to finance my weed purchase. He decided he would buy the whole wad himself, two ounces, and maybe give me a small bit, a few buds for my trouble in getting him hooked up with Dana.
“Bastard,” I told him, “low down yellow dog, mangy scum-laden son of a cesspool cleaner…”
“Hey,” he said, “hey, I gotta get buds, I gotta take advantage of whatever situation presents itself.”
“Your parentage always was dubious,” I told him.
Richard had observed this and snorted. He stared at Brad as he stood on my balcony and practiced his golf swing. “You gotta come out on the links, Limey,” he said, “get you some nice clubs, some lessons… I gotta great coach right now.”
“Isn’t your car about to get repo’d?” I asked him. He scowled, putted an imaginary hole in one and sat down.
I gave him the benefit of my upraised middle finger and went inside. I’d been trying to reach this chick I’d met a few nights ago but she never seemed to be around to answer her phone. It was a beat time, like I said, and the only women coming my way were those for whom darkness was a friend. After another failed attempt at calling this girl, I hung up the phone and wondered where Dana’s woman was. I forgot her name, she never seemed to leave the couch unless she was working, I think she supported them both. She seemed like a woman who’d had a nice sedentary life, money in the bank, and a daughter who’d run off to New Jersey at sixteen. Then she’d met Dana, this biker ex-convict from hell, and proceeded to let him completely fuck up her life. She seemed indifferent to it all, merely smoked joints and drank cheap beer and peered at you through vacuous and world-weary eyes from the musty depths of that sofa.
She wasn’t around tonight. Our apartments shared the same balcony and normally their door was open, the windows up. But tonight the place was dark and silent. Dana, of course, was off on our – Brad’s – weed mission, but Dana’s woman was not home. That was not normal.
Dana’s story, the alleged justifiable homicide, interested me. I asked him how old he was and he told me thirty-two. That meant he’d gone to jail at the age of twenty-two. Now, before that he’d been a New York City cop, he said. He told me all manner of hair-raising tales of his days on the force. Before that he’d been a Sgt. in the 82nd Airborne. So, I calculated, he must have joined the cops at eighteen, and joined the army at thirteen. Right. After a while, I didn’t believe any of his stories, except that he’d been to jail. That I could see.
Tonight he’d taken his motorcycle. It was a friend’s bike, actually. He’d just adopted it. 900cc’s of hammered Yokohama steel with exhaust pipes circumcised to the goddess of speed. I’d also noticed in the last few days that there had been a vintage Mustang in the driveway that he’d “borrowed” from another friend. Strange that it had begun bearing the same license plates as the charred wreck of a Chevy buried way back in the bushes, and that this Mustang was also now absent from the scene.
“Hey! We need more beer!” Brad yelled from the balcony. I looked in the fridge, there was a six-pack left. I took three bottles out and hid the others.
“This is the last of it,” I said, handing them each one.
Richard looked at me oddly and I winked back at him. He smiled. Brad was bummed out that this was it. He looked at his watch. The liquor stores had just closed.
“Fugg,” he said. “Where’s my fuggin’ ganja?”
Richard went to take a piss.
“Hey,” Brad said, “did he give that guy money, too?”
“Who, Brad?” I asked. “You mean Richard? No… we were gonna split what I wanted to get before you cheesed me out of it.”
“Aw, c’mon, I’ll give you a few joints and it won’t have cost you anything.”
I nodded. I was interested in why Dana’s woman was not home. She didn’t even have her own car and the only times she stayed out late were when he’d abandoned her in some bar. Earlier that week, she tried to interest me in buying their sofa, a huge black leather affair, overstuffed and as classy as a Vegas wedding chapel. I didn’t want the damn thing. It was only two hundred bucks and it was a brand new sofa, probably worth a grand at least. But I didn’t want it.
Then Dana had tried to borrow a hundred bucks off me. I overheard him saying to his woman that he was gonna ask me and I quickly dashed over to their apartment to ask him if I could borrow twenty bucks. Pre-emptive move. I learned fast.
Richard came back from the bathroom. Brad was practicing his golf swing again. Rich gave me a look and I went inside with him.
“I think he split,” Richard said.
“Why?” I asked.
“I just think he douched us, took the money and split.”
“For a couple of hundred bucks?” I said.
“You think we’re the only ones who got ripped off? I bet he did this to a whole buncha people. C’mon, let’s check his place out.”
“We can’t go in there,” I said, following him to Dana’s door. Richard grasped the doorknob and pushed. The door swung open. We looked inside.
“Holy shit,” I whistled.
“He’s gone, man,” Richard said. “He’s gone.”
The apartment looked as if a small but efficient tornado had swept through it, taking all the usable furniture and what assorted knick-knacks they’d had, leaving all the detritus behind. Everything worth anything was gone.
“Wow,” I said.
For days after that, various people kept showing up at the house, banging on Dana’s door, looking for money or weed or their cars, a steady stream of pissed-off creditors and, of course, the cops. Apparently, all the furniture, including the Vegas couch, had been rented. Dana had sold it all.
Brad, snake that he was, tried to insist that I now owed him half of his lost money. I laughed in his face. This is what greed gets you, boy, I told him. Keep working on that golf swing.
I’d gotten off easy. Good thing I’d been broke that night or I would have lost a weeks pay. Dana called me a few days later from a pay phone in Arizona, at least that’s where he said he was. I felt fairly safe calling him a cocksucker, but then I remembered how Brad’s face had looked when he saw the empty apartment, and I retracted my statement. I didn’t want to lay awake at night wondering if Dana was gonna come back and get me either. Not long after that, I left Pawtucket, that blasphemous hinterland of frame-houses and liquor stores. Forever.
