William Brown - The Undertaker

The woman looked us both over, up and down. “Yeah. Maybe. Why?”

I pulled out the money I had taken from the goon's wallet and peeled off three crisp, new one-hundred dollar bills. “How about you sell us some of your kid's stuff — we'll pay double what you paid for them — and you can have our dirty clothes. It's all new. Deal?”

The woman plucked the three hundred from my fingers, and tucked it into her bra. “Lena's Clothes Emporium is now open for business, Mister. Show me what you want.”

It took less than a minute to pick out some jeans and a maroon pullover shirt for me and some faded blue jeans and a dark-blue MIT sweatshirt for Sandy. None of it was exactly our size, but it was close and that would be good enough to get us out of town. I even got her to trade her kid's nylon windbreaker for my gray herringbone sports coat plus ten dollars to have it dry cleaned.

We slipped into the restrooms to wash up and change. When I came out, Lena was standing by the washing machine pushing our stuff in, adding the soap. I waited by the restroom door for Sandy. When she came out, I noticed there was a pay phone on the back wall. “I'm going to call Billingham.”

“At this hour? You don't think he's still there, do you?”

“No, but I can leave him a message and that might start him thinking.” I dialed Area 212 Information and asked for the phone number of Steiner, Ernst, and Billingham. Before they shunted me off to the computer, I even got the NYNEX operator to give me the firm's address, not a small task when you are dealing with trained, phone company, customer service representative. Through years of illegal lab experiments, secret in-breeding, drugs, chemicals, and electro-shock therapy, call centers had elevated rude and dumb to near-Darwinian perfection.

When they connected me to the law firm's phone number, I found myself trapped in one of those multi-layered answering machines that let me dial the first four letters of the last name of whomever it was I was foolish enough to be calling. I punched B-I–L-L and after the Beep, I said, “Charlie? This is Peter Talbott. A mutual friend, Gino Parini, told me you had Jimmy's ear. To be perfectly frank, I need some help. I'm in the City and I'll call you tomorrow. Maybe we can get together and talk things over. Ciao. Who loves ya, Baby?”

“You had to say that, didn't you?” I smiled, embarrassed. “But what did calling him accomplish?” Sandy asked.

“Well, now we know he's real and that he hangs his hat there. And now he knows I'm real too.”

We turned and walked out the front door. “Thanks, Lena,” I waved.

“Hey, Mister, she's a cute little thing. Next time you get her dirty, you come back here and see old Lena.” She waved.

We walked back to Hanover along the dark, twisting neighborhood streets of the North End. Many of the city's long-time produce distributors were located here, and the smells of fresh fish, bakery goods, flowers, and vegetables from their warehouses filled the damp, night air. In the evening, after the city's normally brutal traffic faded away, the streets and parking areas around the warehouses were packed with delivery trucks loading for their late-night runs into a three-state area around Boston.

I looked over at Sandy in her new clothes. “MIT? That's a new look for you.”

“I'm studying to be a rocket scientist.”

“We already have one in the family, we don't need another one.”

“Whoa!” She stopped walking and turned me around where she could see my face. “What was with that “family” thing? Don't tease me about something like that, Talbott.”

“I wasn't teasing, but you're right. This isn't a real good time to be making long-range plans.”

“Don't worry, I'm not going to trap you into something you aren't ready for.” She threw her arms around my neck. “But you're damned lucky you didn't say anything like that to me back in the laundromat. I'd have dragged your butt into the restroom and given Lena a real story to take home to the kids.”

We crossed over to Hanover Street and ducked into a dark doorway near a flower distributor. She snuggled underneath my new windbreaker. “Is there some reason we're hiding here watching trucks?” she whispered.

“Maybe we can scarf a ride. If we can get to Providence or New Haven or somewhere, we can sneak on a morning train to New York.”

Two buildings over was the warehouse of a large vegetable distributor. The overhead door was up and the bright light inside cascaded out into the street. Three men with handcarts carried out stacks of small wooden crates filled with vegetables and loaded them into a large, white panel truck with “DeFanucci Brothers, Green Grocers, Providence” stenciled on the side. The truck appeared to be loaded. The driver was a middle-aged man in a long grocer's apron, with a thick head of curly black hair. He checked the paper on his clipboard and then rolled down the rear door and walked back into the warehouse.

“Come on,” I said as I pulled Sandy to the side of the truck.

A few minutes later, the driver came out and walked around the front of the cab, where he saw us standing next to his door. He stopped short. “Can I help you?” he asked suspiciously, eyeing us both up and down.

“Are you with DeFanucci's in Providence, by any chance?” I asked.

The driver nodded, still not sure. “Yeah, I'm Dominick. Why?”

“I'm Steve Bowen. This is my friend Wendy. She goes to Brown, in Providence…”

“In an MIT sweatshirt?”

“Oh, that's mine,” I said sheepishly. “Anyway, we were up here at a concert and my car got stolen. I've got to get her back to campus, and I saw your truck. Well, I wondered if we could talk you into a ride. I mean, I'll pay you some money if you'll take us, but we're like, really in a bind.”

He looked us both over again, but we must not have looked too threatening. “How much?” he asked.

“I don't know,” I tried to look as helpless as I could. “Fifty?”

“Make it a hundred,” Dominick answered.

“Seventy-five!” Sandy shot back. “And we get to ride in the back.”

“Deal,” he snorted as he looked at her. “But no squashing the veggies. I know these Brown girls. She gets too excited back there, you pay for anything you crush.”

“Deal,” she said with a big grin.

He rolled up the back door and let us climb inside. “There's a couple of tarps and a stack of mover's blankets over there on the side so you can get comfortable. You sure you're up for this, Steve? It's going to be an hour and a half before I let you out of there, you know. That can be a lifetime with a Brown girl.” he winked at her. “But I'll honk when we get near Providence.”

He waited for us to throw the moving pads on the floor, then rolled the door down and latched it from the outside. It was pitch black inside as I joined her on the floor. She put her hands under my shirt and put her head on my chest, then lay there quietly.

This was a mood I had not seen, I thought, as I stroked her hair.

“Here I have you alone in the dark again, and all I want to do is crawl under your shirt and hide. I'm sorry,” she whispered. “But I'm terrified that something's going to happen to you. Can you understand that?’

We lay there quietly like that all the way to Providence, her head lying on my chest while I stroked her hair. After what we found in Doug's kitchen and all the rest of what they had been throwing at us the past few days, we needed some quiet time to reaffirm life and get comfortable with what was going on between us, but that was good.

As we crossed into Rhode Island, she pulled my shirt up and slowly ran a line of kisses across my chest. “When we get to Providence, let's get a room. There's no sense getting to New York in the middle of the night and I'm really, really tired.”