William Landay - Mission Flats

It is March 20, 1977, 4:06 A.M.

‘I can’t do it!’ Fasulo screams but the crosswind up here is so strong he figures maybe nobody can hear so he shouts again, ‘I can’t fuckin’ do it!’

‘Your choice, Frankie,’ comes the voice behind him, all strutty and cool cuz it’s not his fuckin’ ass standing up here on the guardrail a mile-or-whatever above the Mystic fuckin’ River.

Jesus, Fasulo’s legs are shaking so bad, they’re gonna shake him right the fuck off the little rail he’s standing on. He’ll shake all the way down to that black water. But it’s so goddamn cold he can’t hold his muscles still. Or maybe they’re afraid. Maybe his muscles are scared shitless just like the rest of him.

‘I’m getting down!’

‘Your call, Frankie.’

‘What happens if I get down!’

No answer.

‘I said, what happens if I get down?’

‘Just like I said, Frankie, you get a little of what you gave. Only I tell you what, Frankie, I’ll make you a deal. Just to show I’m not a bad guy. I won’t make you suck my dick, how’s that? I won’t give you back everything you did to that cop, Frankie, see?’

‘I didn’t-’

‘You didn’t what, Frankie? Come on, what didn’t you do?’

‘I didn’t!’

‘Now don’t you fuckin’ lie, Frankie! Don’t you fuckin’ do that!’

‘Alrightalrightalright, I did! I did! He wasn’t supposed to be there! We just wanted the money! He shouldn’t have come in like that! What were we supposed to do?’

‘I can’t listen to this shit anymore, Frankie. You can get off either side of that thing, I don’t give a shit which. Just don’t talk anymore, alright? I’m giving you a choice, Frankie. That’s more than you gave that cop. That cop was my friend, Frankie, did you know that? You don’t even know his name, do you? Did you know he was my friend?’

‘I didn’t know.’

‘Well you should have known before you stuck your dick in his mouth, Frankie.’

‘I didn’t! know!’

Fasulo looks down again. Maybe it won’t be so bad. Not so fuckin’ bad. Lot of guys died making the Tobin Bridge, that’s what everybody says. They fell off, maybe, and that’s all there was to it. Some of them even fell into the wet concrete and they got built right into the bridge, isn’t that what people say about this bridge? Isn’t that right? Or do they say that about every fuckin’ bridge? So how bad can it be just falling? Who is this fuckin’ pig? How did he fuckin’find me? Somebody fuckin’ ratted me out, some fuckin’ cocksucker, and I’ll fuckin’ kill that cocksucker, whoever it was, only I won’t kill that cocksucker cuz I’m never gonna get off this FUCKIN’ BRIDGE -

‘Come on, Frankie, we don’t have all night. What’s it gonna be?’

‘I can’t!’

‘You can. Don’t tell me you can’t.’

‘I can’t!’

‘Then don’t. Climb down off of there.’

‘What? You mean it’s off?’

‘Yeah, come on, Frankie. Just climb down.’

But the cop punctuates his offer by racking his gun and that sound — metallic, precise, machined — carries right into Frank Fasulo’s eardrum like the gun is right next to him.

‘Come on, Frankie. Your choice. You want me to do it, or you want to do it yourself?’

‘It’s not right!’

‘Don’t tell me about right, Frankie. This is right, believe me.’

A deep breath — the smell of cold, the taste of it on the tongue like mercury — and Fasulo leans forward slightly, just enough that he begins to lose his balance, begins to spin forward around the pole in his left elbow — begins to turn around the pole like it’s a streetlamp and he’s just going to spin around it — and a step forward and there is nothing under him and the wind is holding him up, he is floating, hanging for just a moment- flying — and then he is not flying but he is falling- and falling and falling- and it’s not so bad after all, not unpleasant at all — he has time to think, to feel the sensation — the wind is loud and it sticks his ears and his cheeks like needles — and it’s blowing his pant legs up over his shins and he can feel the cold on his calves — and his hair whipping in his eyes — and his body begins to cartwheel — and the wind begins to — pull off his coat and on top of the bridge Martin Gittens — in plain clothes — his face unworried and handsome — carefully clips on the safety and puts his Beretta back in its holster because it’s all over now and it had to end this way — nobody needed to tell him what to do only his partner, the big redhead with the full-moon face — a face like a big ball of dough, Gittens likes to say — a face they could use for the first-base bag at Fenway, he likes to say — only Artie Trudell is staring with that big face at the spot where Frank Fasulo the cop-raper and cop-killer went over the edge — staring as if some miraculous wind were going to catch Frank Fasulo and sweep him back up onto the bridge.

‘Kurth, you gettin’ all this?’

Kurth nodded. He was scratching furiously at a legal pad, trying to catch up to Franny I assume he was not trying to copy it all down verbatim. Even so…

‘You need me to go back and tell it again, you just say so.’

‘Don’t worry about me, Franny,’ Kurth said. ‘You just keep talking.’

‘I don’t want you to miss anything. Everybody who hears this story, they tend not to be around when that grand-jury day comes.’ He gave us all a little leer to be sure we got the point: The price for watching this danse macabre was that sooner or later any of us could be pulled from the audience and made to join in.

Ten years. That’s how long it has taken before Artie Trudell can no longer bear the thought of Frank Fasulo going over the side of the Tobin Bridge. Ten years of returning to that bridge over and over in his thoughts. Ten years of seeing Fasulo up on the parapet, hugging that beam and screaming to make himself heard above the wind, ‘I can’t!’ — then stepping — no, he did not step, not at first — he leaned, Artie Trudell distinctly remembers that — he leaned the way a diver does at the beginning of a dive when he tips his chest forward ever so slightly, listing, tipping, extending the moment of counterbalance, feeling the accelerating pull of gravity as the diver surrenders — Artie Trudell can feel that fatal instant of imbalance, when the body’s weight begins to move not forward but downward — he can feel it, the irreversible loss of balance. Then Fasulo spun — oh, that awful rotation of his body, that half-turn to his left caused by his hand still gripping the I-beam — the twirl, again so like a diver’s, that suggested Fasulo could not let go, that he had not decided to jump but was falling or being pushed — pushed by Gittens — not Artie, Gittens — and then the hand slipping off the beam and Fasulo disappearing over the edge. Artie Trudell had not been able to move, of course. He could not even pull his eyes away from the spot on the guardrail where Fasulo went over. So Trudell did not actually see the man in free-fall, but that has not spared him the visions of it. No, it has only unleashed his imagination to conjure up endless vertiginous falls — tumbling and spinning in the black emptiness of cold and stars — speed and terror of such purity — and impact… Trudell never quite reaches the moment of impact. He wakes up or he simply stops replaying the scene before Frank Fasulo slams into the water.

Ten years of this.

It was not so bad at the beginning. At first, there was a — period of shock when the whole thing seemed unreal. The memory was too sharp, too big, like a movie. Trudell stuffed it down into the same dark hole where he kept the other ghoulies. He ‘repressed’ it, as observers would later say.