Adrian McKinty - The Dead Yard

“So who’s Ted Williams?” I asked, to resume the conversation.

“Are you joking?”

“No.”

“Only the greatest baseball player ever. The last man to hit over.400, war hero, batting champion again and again.”

“I thought Babe Ruth was the greatest player,” I said innocently.

Kit looked at me as if she were having a fit. Her nose had wrinkled up and she was plucking at the pointy strands of hair over her forehead.

“Are you trying to rile me up?”

“No.”

“This is a Red Sox town,” she said.

“So?”

“You don’t know about the Red Sox and the curse of the Bambino?”

“No.”

“Well, anyway, it’s a long story, No, No, Nanette and all that, suffice to say, we don’t talk about Babe Ruth. We don’t, in Massachusetts, talk about any Yankees players. It’s a rule.”

“Sorry, I don’t know much about baseball, nothing actually. We don’t play it in Ireland. I’ve only heard of Babe Ruth, oh, and Joe DiMaggio of course, because of Simon and Gar-funkel, and yeah, Lou Gehrig because of the disease. Oh aye, and Yogi Berra, you know because of the cartoon.”

“What did I tell you about Yankees players?” Kit snapped, her face turning bright red. She was working herself up into a little bit of a state. More of a state than immediately after a man had tried to bloody kill her da. Odd but a good thing perhaps- you keep your calm for the dangerous things, you lose your cool over the trivial.

“They were all Yankees? Jesus. Sorry. Who are the famous Red Sox?” I asked.

“I don’t walk to talk about it now,” Kit said, still a little ticked off. Petulant and furious, she looked even more fetching.

“I was just asking,” I said.

“Obviously you’re, like, totally ignorant about the whole business,” she said.

“I just said I was,” I protested.

“And you fucking are.”

“But that’s what I said.”

“And you were right.”

She turned away from me, so that I couldn’t see that she was laughing. I wanted to pull the car over, grab her, and kiss her.

It was completely the wrong thing to do, but also…

“Why are you slowing down? The bus station is still a couple of miles, come on,” Kit said.

True enough, we were getting close to civilization. A big town. The trees giving way to houses. Old wooden homes, some with signs saying that they dated back to the 1630s. Traffic started to increase and I could definitely smell the sea. We stopped at a red light. A sign to the right pointed to Rolfe’s Lane, Plum Island, and Plum Island Airfield.

“This is where you’d turn to take me home but Daddy really wouldn’t approve of me bringing you to the house, he just wouldn’t. Sorry,” Kit said.

“It’s ok,” I said. “So what do I do?”

“Go straight through town and then turn right at the bus station. There’s a big parking lot, we can dump the car, you can get a bus back to Boston, I’ll phone Sonia.”

“Who’s Sonia?” I asked.

“My dad’s new wife. I guess my stepmom now. My mom died two years ago. Well, not my real mom, my real mom is out there somewhere, it’s complicated.”

“Is she a wicked stepmom?”

“No, she’s nice. She doesn’t like Jackie very much, though.”

“Jackie-the boyfriend, right?”

“Yeah.”

“I like Sonia, sounds like she has good horse sense. I want to meet her.”

“No way, Dad wouldn’t like it.”

We drove along High Street. Enormous mansions to the left and right built during Newburyport’s boom times in the nineteenth century on profits from the whaling and the China trade.

We turned into the parking lot at the bus station, got out of the car. I started walking away.

“You really are naive, aren’t you?” she said, took off her jacket, and wiped down the steering wheel, the gear stick, the dash.

“Can’t leave prints,” she said.

I nodded, slapped my forehead.

We walked to the bus station.

A lovely night. Warm and the heavens packed with constellations and a waxing moon. We walked in silence across the parking lot and she led me into the station entrance. Not much of a bus station, more of a halt, a desk, a guy, a phone, a Coke machine, half a dozen chairs. She phoned Sonia while I asked the man at the desk about the next bus to Boston.

“Ten minutes, Boston and Logan,” he said, though it was more like tea meen, bosson, logue.

We went outside. Moths bewitched by the big arc lights over the car park, crashing into them and falling stunned to the ground.

“Let’s get away from shere,” I said and led her away from the lights and under an oak tree. We sat on one of the enormous roots. Kit’s hand reached round to mine. Her fingers were cool and delicate. She turned me to look at her.

“I’m like totally dating someone, you know… Jackie, but, but I want to give you this in case I never see you again,” she said.

She pulled me toward her and kissed me on the lips. I opened her mouth with mine and I found her tongue and we kissed there in the night under the moon and the arc lights.

She was young and beautiful. So alive. I kissed her and held her and put my hands on her bum, squeezed her ass, and ran my hand up her back and leaned down and kissed her small pert breasts.

A car honked.

“Sonia,” she said, gasping.

She broke away and stood and then came over and kissed me again.

“I never thanked you,” she said.

“You just did.”

“Yes,” she said, blushing happily.

“Will I see you again?”

“Sean McKenna from Ireland, I’ll remember that.”

Sonia honked the car horn again.

“I have to go. Sonia’s not one to gossip, but Jackie, you know, he can be a bit jealous. And I don’t want him to go after you. I don’t want you to get hurt.”

“Don’t worry, I avoid hurt,” I said.

She kissed me on the cheek.

She signaled Sonia, ran to the car, climbed in. Waved at me as she drove past.

I avoid hurt, I said to myself with a thin smile. Of course.

I’m at the other end of the stick. I’m the hurter. I’m the goddamn nimrod that could destroy all of them. Jackie, Gerry, Sonia, Seamus, and even the famous Touched McGuigan.

And you too, Kit. You too.

Aye.

Stay young, stay beautiful, stay away if you know what’s good for you.

I walked into the bus station, put fifty cents in the pay phone, and called Samantha at the safe house. Jeremy answered and told me to hold on.

“Are you ok?” Samantha asked. “How did it go?”

“Better and worse than we could have hoped,” I said. “I drove Kit home, but the bar was a disaster. For a start there were two assass-”

“Not on the phone,” Samantha snapped. “Where are you?”

“I’m in Newburyport, at the bus station.”

“Newburyport. Ok, let me think. Ok, we want to get to New York. What’s the number there?”

“Let me see, Newburyport 555-9360, the area code’s 978.”

“I’ll call you back in five minutes.”

“There’s a bus going back to Boston right now, do you want me to get on it?”

“I’ll call you back,” she said.

The bus came and went and the man behind the desk gave me a hangdog look.

The phone rang. It was Samantha. I was pissed off.

“Yeah, well, now we’re screwed, I just missed the last bus to Boston,” I said.

“No, no. This is what I want you to do. Get a taxi to the airport at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. There’s an 11:50 flight to New York. I will meet you there. Is that clear?”

“It’s clear,” I said, rubbing the tiredness from my eyes and hanging up.

The cab ride took an hour and cost seventy bucks. Samantha arrived at the airport the same time that I did, landing in a helicopter.