Todd Robinson: The Hard Bounce

Junior stopped. “I forgot. Started thinking about titties. Oh yeah. PIs. Seems like their standard gig, if books have taught me anything.”

“And they haven’t.”

Junior bowed. “Ahthangyooverramuch.”

“Most of those guys are retired cops. We’ve already established that they don’t want the cops in this.”

“But why us?”

“A different perspective?”

Junior snorted. “That’s for fucking sure. But seriously. Why us?”

“Because we’re so pretty?”

“I am, but you could scare flies off a shit wagon.” Junior winced at his own word choice, hoping Luke didn’t hear. “Maybe ’cause we’re underappreciated geniuses?”

I lined up my shot. “I am, but you’re so dumb, you can’t spell PI.”

“But I might be able to sound it out.”

Junior had a lot of points. All valid. Why us?

Why the fuck us?

I scratched the eight.

Whenever anyone asks, I say Junior and me go way back. If anyone asks how long is way back, I say none of your goddamned business. Nobody asks a third time.

Truth is, we go back to The Home. As ironic a name for a place as any.

It was always The Home.

Never home.

The real name was Saint Gabriel’s Home for Boys. Or Saint Gabe’s. Or Saint Gabe’s Home. It sure as shit wasn’t ours. What it was was half juvenile detention, half state-funded residence.

Most of the kids there were orphans from birth. Me and Junior lived in the minority. We’d had families, once. I got shipped in when I was eight. That’s how old I was when I lost everything.

Think about it. Try to remember back to when you were eight. Try to remember everything that was important to that kid. Now imagine losing it all.

Your home?

Poof.

Your family?

Gone.

Everyone who loves you?

Bye-bye.

Even the kids whose bodies were pockmarked by little round burns the same size as a cigarette cherry. Even those whose backs and legs were crosshatched by vicious belt buckle scars. More than those whose wounds rested deeper than any place on their bodies, we were all united by that little piece we’d lost.

Blood from blood.

No matter how shitty our lives may have been, we’d had something. Anything is better than nothing when you’re that young.

More so than the never-hads, we instinctively arranged ourselves into groups. The neo-progressives who ran the program called us makeshift families. The counselors still linked to reality called us gangs. Whatever kept our backs safe and our asses covered.

Fact was, until you or your crew could inflict enough physical damage on an attacker, you were a potential victim. You never wanted to get caught alone. Ever.

Me and Junior ran our own crew, The Avengers-named after the comic book. Since there was no comic book called the Make Sure You Don’t Get Ass-Raped League, we took what was available. We wanted X-Men, but it was taken already by some older boys. Bigger boys, who would defend their little piece of the world-something so simple as an adopted name-with a violence polite society would find shocking.

So we were The Avengers. It was all just an earlier incarnation of 4DC. Protection and services. At least now we make a little money for it, instead of a couple extra pieces of commissary cake and an unsullied rectum.

We both turned eighteen around the same time and left tracks running out of St. Gabe’s. We worked your typical bullshit eighteen-year-old jobs. Never for very long.

Junior worked at Dunkin Donuts until he slapped a customer after three straight mornings of busting Junior’s balls regarding cruller freshness. He got forty hours of community service and an anger management class.

I bussed tables at Hoolihan’s. That stint ended when the manager grabbed my vest and flapped his jaws at me a little too aggressively. I broke my hand on that same jaw. It flapped a little differently after that. I got a hundred hours of community service and an anger management class.

Clearly the anger management classes didn’t take.

The community service did.

Junior and I both had spent the larger portion of our lives under the State’s rule. We didn’t want to go back to that. Ever.

And the only reason that I wasn’t already in a cage was that I had three witnesses that saw the Hoolihan’s manager grab me first.

That scared the shit out of me.

It was obvious that we needed jobs with as little answering to higher authorities as possible.

We were drinking our sorrows blind at The Cellar when opportunity knocked. Back then, the door staff was too busy scoring, selling, or snorting to care much about carding. One night, the bouncer got the shit kicked out of him by a couple of townie bikers after he screwed them on a coke deal. Junior and I entered the fray and tossed all of them, bouncer included, into Kenmore Square.

4DC was born.

When we left the bar, the streets were empty and silent but for the sounds of traffic coming off of Storrow Drive on one side and the Mass Pike on the other. Junior hopped on his ten-speed bicycle and rode off. Normally, Junior would have given me a ride, but his car was in the shop for the third time in six months. The car was an old wreck, but Junior loved it, even to the point of suffering the indignity of putting himself on a beat-up bicycle for days at a time. Devotion and indignity. That pretty much sums up our lives.

And beat-up.

Beat-up cars, beat-up bicycles. Beat-up lives.

Nice thing about our business though? Sometimes we got to beat back.

While waiting for a cab, I leaned against the front of the bar and looked at Cassandra’s picture.

The picture was taken at a mall somewhere in the suburbs. I could make out a Sunglass Hut and Spencer Gifts in the background. She was a cute kid with a sweet smile: a kid’s smile, without the self-consciousness that develops with adulthood. Her hair was slightly shorter in the shot so it couldn’t have been more than a few months old. I noticed the unusual maturity I’d seen in her eyes earlier that day wasn’t present in the picture.

Whatever put it there happened recently.

I handed the cabbie ten bucks after the short drive up Commonwealth from Kenmore Square to my apartment in Allston. The young neo-hippie who lived upstairs wasn’t at his usual post on the front steps. He’s usually perched there all odd hours during the summer, never on any type of schedule that might coincide with having a job. Might be a student. Never cared enough to ask.

I have the entire first floor of a two-family house on Gordon Street. It’s got three big rooms-more space than I need, but the price is right. The landlord cut me a deal when 4DC shoo-flyed some meth-head squatters from another one of his properties. I converted the front room into a home gym and use the second for a living area. The smallest room, no bigger than a large closet, is my bedroom. Growing up like I did, I tend to find comfort in smaller spaces. Less to defend.

The red light on my answering machine blinked three times. I hit play and walked into the kitchen to open a can of dinner. I dumped the canned pasta into my lucky bowl and tossed it into the microwave. It’s my lucky bowl because it’s my only one. I also own a lucky plate and a lucky glass. It says Welch’s Grape Jelly on it and features Tom & Jerry.

The first message was from Curtis, the manager at The Drop Bar in Cambridge. He needed some extra security on weekends. He said the bar had been attracting a rowdier crowd in the last month and more fights had been flaring.

The machine beeped. Message two. Some woman was overly concerned with my cable TV package. She left a number in case I was as excited about the movie lover’s package as she was.