Serpents in the Cold Page 5

  The shakes were coming stronger now and he licked at his lips. Wouldn’t it be nice to have it all laid out for him, a clean fix and some clean works, a quick taste in the darkness before he made it back out to Cal. Just a taste, something to help him carry on the rest of the day. He bit his lip and erased the thought. If there was any good time to fold, it wasn’t now.

  Just a bunch of coins, a pouch of dry tobacco and rolling papers, a pencil, what looked to be a tooth, and a silver lighter. He raised it to the open window, and the morning light reflected off the silver. He flicked it open and the spark caught and flamed. He pocketed it, stood back in the doorway, and looked out over the beach, the distant view of Moon Island beneath a darkening sky, and then the open Atlantic with its waves ragged and threatening. He lowered his hat and headed back to the beach.

  CAL PAUSED AND looked back the way he’d come, his footsteps small, dark divots in the blanket of white. He tracked them to the parking lot, where, even after the recent snowfall, he could make out the deep frozen rills left by the big trucks and tractor-trailers. He turned back and watched the waves crash and foam under the wooden pylons and against the sheet of rippling ice that last night would have been thicker, blacker, reaching farther out into the bay. He trudged across the frozen grass to the marine salvage and boatyard and stood looking at the beach.

  Dante was standing there, staring at him. He called out to Cal, his voice fighting against the wind. “I found nothing.”

  Two planes passed overhead in quick succession. Dante lowered his head and lit another cigarette.

  “It’s like nothing ever happened here,” Cal said. “Beginning to think Fierro was right. She wasn’t killed here.”

  Cal gestured for Dante’s cigarette, took a drag, and handed it back. “It’s too cold to stand around and bullshit. Let’s get going.”

  In the car they sat in silence, the engine of the Chevy running. Cal watched Dante roll the lighter about in his hands and he resisted the impulse to tell him to stop. “We’ll hit some of these streets next.”

  “I need to go Somerville,” Dante said, but wouldn’t look at him. The lighter seemed to move more frenetically from hand to hand.

  “What the fuck’s in Somerville?”

  “It’s more of a hunch than anything. It’s where Sheila used to live.”

  “I thought she was living in Dorchester.”

  “I have no idea where she was last living. I’m talking about where she used to live with Margo, a boardinghouse.”

  Cal cupped his hands and blew into them, spread them open before the heating vents. “And you have to go now, right this fucking minute?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How long has it been since she was there?”

  “I don’t know, a year and a half maybe. It used to be a safe place for Margo. I’m thinking maybe it was a safe place for Sheila, too.” Dante stared out the window. “Jesus, I just said it was a hunch.”

  He was becoming morose, and Cal didn’t want him to steep in it, to start thinking of the past again, the mistakes that he’d made and that Cal knew he always reminded himself of.

  “Okay,” he said, and shrugged. “I’ll hump around here, pop in on some of the neighbors. You take the car. I know how you are behind the wheel, so just take it slow, okay?”

  They opened the doors and the wind tore at them. At the driver’s side, Cal paused. Dante slid in behind the wheel, clutched it tightly. “I hate to make you walk home,” he said.

  “The walk will do me good. Just be careful. Look both ways, and go slow. You look like a fucking accident waiting to happen.”

  Cal watched as Dante pulled the Fleetline out of the lot and rumbled off down the secondary road. He rubbed at his temple and cursed. It wasn’t Dante’s driving that worried him.

  11

  _________________________

  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 se
e 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 c
onnected in some way to everything else. Everyone, 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.

  12

  _________________________

  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.