Todd Robinson - Dirty Words

The second candle was for Jesus. The wrong man at the wrong place at the wrong time, even though he was a bad man and a worse bodyguard. I prayed some more.

The voice came back. I'd saved the kid from an eternity in jail, it said. It said what life remained in him, the State would have ripped out by the time he breathed free air again, if ever.

It was better this way.

For him.

For his family.

It said.

It said.

The third candle was for Carlos. In my prayer, I apologized to him as a lump of guilt filled my throat. I prayed for his forgiveness. The voice told me that I didn't kill him for my own sake.

Because they'd catch him.

Because he'd seen my face.

Because he could then point his remaining fingers at me.

The voice said the words over and over as though trying to convince me that they were true. It said that my act, in the end, was a merciful act.

I lit the last candle for myself.

And prayed as hard as I could.

"4DC Security," Junior answered the phone in a falsetto about as feminine as Hulk Hogan. Junior had been answering our office phone like that for a good three years running and the joke never seemed to wear on him. He called the voice "Wendy".

Wendy was our imaginary receptionist, which was fine since our imaginary office was a desk stuck in the liquor room above The Cellar, Boston's shittiest rock & roll bar.

I try not to let Junior answer the phone all that much.

I hit the button to turn on the speakerphone just as a weary sigh replied to Wendy's greeting. I recognized the sigh as belonging to Barry Hardon, Boston's lowest of the low-end parole officers. "I don't know why I even call you turkeys."

"Because we work cheap?" I replied.

"Boo, that you?"

"It's me," I answered. Because it was.

"Don't forget me, sexy," Junior said, as Wendy again.

"You're about as sexy as ten-foot catheter."

"Thanks, Hard-On" Junior said in his natural voice, which was somewhere closer to a Rottweiler chewing on gravel.

Barry sighed at the dig, which he'd probably heard at least three times a day during the fifty years he'd been on the planet.

"What've you got for us, Barry?"

Barry sighed again. Seventy to eighty percent of conversation with Barry Hardon consisted of him sighing in various tones and pitches. "I need you guys to go get Ralphie O'Malley again."

"What now?"

"He had a hearing two days ago. Dummy fell asleep drunk on the train. He got picked up for vagrancy.

"Vagrancy? Seriously?"

"Seriously."

"That still a law? The fuck is this, the Great Depression?"

Barry went on. "Kinda. Probably would have gotten it dismissed, if the fuckwit had actually shown up for court."

I swear, only Ralphie O'Malley could get arrested for vagrancy. "We'll have him in by this afternoon. Fee?"

"Two hundred."

"Deal." I hung up the phone.

"How much?" Junior asked.

"Two bills."

"Dammit," he said as he pulled on his coat. "It's fuckin' freezing out. Shoulda got another fifty." Junior pulled knit mittens over his hands. He saw me smirking. "What?"

"Nice mittens, Mary." If you can't see why mittens covering the knuckles of a man with H-A-R-D and C-O-R-E tattooed across them is funny, then I can't explain it to you.

"Hardy-har. You're gonna have a good time explaining to the E.M.T's how these mittens got inside of you."

Ralphie O'Malley always said that his luck permanently switched for the worst on October 2nd, 1978. Ralphie claimed that he was sitting on the lap of the elder Mr. O'Malley the moment Bucky Dent hit his home run out of Fenway. As the ball arced over The Green Monster, Mr. O'Malley leapt up in disbelief, sending Ralphie airborne off the couch and headfirst into the TV screen, effectively busting both the Zenith and his only son's head.

Since that point, society, the fates, and even Ralphie himself considered him something of a jinxed soul-I didn't know of a bar in Boston that didn't eighty-six Ralphie during important baseball games.

Or hockey games.

Or basketball games.

Yeah, Ralphie wasn't much welcome during football season either.

But it was deeper than that. I'd seen some of the old timers actually cross themselves when Ralphie entered the bar, heard people half-kiddingly talk about the invisible cloud of doom that followed him wherever he went.

Remember the Sox in 2004? Everybody thought it was funny to chip in and buy him a weeklong trip to New York during the ALCS.

That jinx ain't so funny any more, is it?

Then there was the night of "the girl".

One evening about two years ago, the heavens parted, the stars aligned and the cloud looked like it lost its way for the night. Lo and behold, Ralphie was talking to a girl. An honest to goodness, living and breathing girl. And a cute little blonde, at that.

Silently, we all rooted him on. We'd never seen him talking to a girl before. All seemed to be going well. I even thought I might have even seen a twirl of the hair.

Then the cloud found its way back to Ralphie's coordinates.

Out of nowhere, somebody dropped a full pitcher of beer from the balcony. It wasn't heavy, just angled right. The pitcher landed right on the crown of Ralphie's head, knocking him silly. The cheap beer erupted in a mushroom cloud, directly into the blonde's face. Ralphie was lights-out for less than a minute, but of course by that time the girl had skedaddled in beer-soaked humiliation.

Now, for most people, embarrassing as that incident might have been, the story would have made for a great bar tale of ill-fate and circumstance, told over and over to great guffaws and shots of whiskey lifted in good humor. For Ralphie, it was just another bitch-slap from the heavens. Hell, even Junior and me couldn't find the funny in his tragi-comic existence anymore, and we're the masters of the form. Most of the time, it was just sad.

"Warming up" Junior's car was just a figure of speech, since the heater didn't work. It was also three below zero that afternoon. Wind chill my ass. Cold is cold. We sat there, shivering and cupping our hands over our cigarette cherries for warmth while Junior's '79 Buick, (which for some sweet fuck-all reason he'd named Ms. Kitty), slowly stopped coughing like a habitual three-packer.

"You gotta get this heater fixed, Junior." My demand might have had more weight if Ms. Kitty's heater had ever worked.

Junior glared at me, then tenderly rubbed the dashboard, as if I might have injured the car's feelings.

We drove onto Storrow Dive heading out to Quincy, where Ralphie lived in a house with his mother.

Miss Kitty had warmed up to a temperature just above welldigger's arse by the time we got to the O'Malley residence. If houses were representative of the people who lived in them, then Ralphie's was dead-on. The paint might have been light blue at one point, but had faded into a peeling gray, hanging off of the weather-beaten shingles for dear life. The porch, half-built, had never been painted at all-a project undertaken long ago and never finished. It too, looked like it was clinging to the house simply because it had no better place to be.

Junior clucked his tongue as he killed the ignition. "This is gonna break Mrs. O'Malley's heart again." Miss Kitty wheezed once in seeming agreement, then fell silent.

"You'd think she'd be used to it by now."

"Wonder what she cooked last night?"

It wasn't the first time we'd had to pick up Ralphie. Almost a year ago, Ralphie got busted for public drunkenness after he peed, blind drunk, between two parked cars. One of the parked cars just happened to be an idling black-and-white.

When we showed up at the O'Malley house the last time Ralphie forgot he had a court date, Mrs. O'Malley cooked us leftovers while Ralphie showered and got dressed. She cried the whole time. That alone might have been enough to kill the appetite of lesser men, but Mrs. O'Malley made one hell of a chicken pot pie. Besides, it seemed to make her feel better to be doing something just then, to feel appreciated. As far as I could tell, Ralphie never disrespected his mother, just took her for granted like a lot of people do with their parents.