S Rozan - Absent Friends

“I said if we could sell the self-defense story, maybe we could get a plea deal, no charges in the death, only the gun. There was no way out of the gun. I said with no priors, upstanding citizen, wife and child, probably I could play the violin a little and get the minimum, sixteen months. A possibility of probation, no jail time, if he gave up the gun dealer.”

“But he didn't.”

“Because he didn't know who it was. Because he hadn't bought the gun.”

“He told you that?”

“No, dammit, Kevin, he didn't tell me that! He swore to me he'd bought it from some guy in some bar in Tottenville. He didn't remember the name of the guy, or the bar, or the street the bar was on, or how to get to the street the bar was on. I took the train out to Tottenville one Saturday and spent the whole goddamn day wandering around. You been to Tottenville?” Tottenville, twenty years ago a mini-Appalachia holding down the southern end of Staten Island, where rusting cars were lawn ornaments and chickens shared the yards with scruffy dogs.

“We don't go down there much.”

“From Pleasant Hills. You think in 'seventy-nine anyone did? After everyone Markie knew threw their cash together so he could make bail, I made him drive me back there. To look for the bar. A complete bust. I asked him why he'd been down there. He said, No real reason. He said he had no real reason for buying the gun or for carrying it that night. He said he didn't know why Jack was so pissed, he'd just been trying to help, to set Jack straight. He swore to me he and Jack were alone. He told me he wasn't protecting anybody. He told me bullshit, Kev. And it was all he'd tell me.”

Kevin said nothing, sat so still it was almost possible for Phil to believe he hadn't heard him.

“I could see what was going to happen,” Phil said quietly. “He was going to prison. He was going to do someone else's time-a lot of time, Kev-and there wasn't a goddamn thing I could do.” Phil remembered it, that airless feeling in his chest. No countermove. No fake, no palmed ace, no magic flowers bursting from an empty hand. “And then out of the blue I got a call from an ADA, offering a plea on the gun. Pretty much the deal I'd outlined to Jimmy, almost exactly that. We had nothing, and they were offering a plea. Do you understand what that means?”

Kevin shook his head.

Shit, thought Phil, of course he understands, no one could miss it.

But maybe not. Phil remembered a Panthers game, ten-year-old Kevin leaning on his coach, limping off from second, his ankle bloody (Phil gripping Sally's hand, shaking his head to keep her from the dugout). Kevin's face was white with pain, but he was dry-eyed. No tears, until he saw his coach and the other team's coach screaming at each other nose to nose, until he saw the fury in his teammates' eyes, until he understood he'd been spiked on purpose by the sliding runner. When he cried, it wasn't because of the hurt and the blood. It was bewilderment and surprise that someone would be so deliberately cruel.

So maybe he really didn't get it.

Or maybe he just wanted to make Phil say it.

“It meant a fix, Kev.”

Phil drained his Guinness. “Kev, look where I was. What I had. I didn't know this town, I didn't know where the fix was coming from. My client was a guy I liked, young, with a family. The plea deal was good. Especially if you believed he'd pulled the trigger. And I seemed to be the only one who didn't.

“Maybe I could've found the truth, if I'd kept digging. But I couldn't be sure that was the best thing for Markie. Whatever the truth was, Markie was my client, and he didn't want it out. Maybe he was right, in terms of whatever the hell was going on in Pleasant Hills, things I didn't understand.”

That was it. What else was he going to say? And where was the mistake? What should he have done differently? What had brought him to this dead room with Kevin silent across a scarred table? What had he done wrong?

Kevin looked at him and answered Phil's unasked question: “And you were in love with my mom.”

October 31, 2001

Such strange things, words, Marian thought. They create poetry, and death sentences, and lies. They describe how it feels to make love, or to freeze to death. Without words people would remain as unconnected as rooted trees, unable to approach each other, yearning, but forever alone, on a vast plain.

“Tom?”

Marian stared at Tom in the unfamiliar room, noisier, she was sure, than when they'd arrived. Words were being chattered, shouted, whispered, and flung everywhere all around them, masking and disguising one another, and Marian understood none of them, least of all the ones Tom had just spoken.

Tom slumped in his chair, as though trying to move away from Marian, away from his own past and the memories his words were summoning the way a magician's spell summons evil spirits. She was suddenly terrified he'd get up and leave, leave her, leave her alone here where nothing looked right and all the words had different meanings. In the comics Jimmy used to read-Bizarro World, that was where these things happened. Bizarro World, from Superman.

“We were all there that night,” Tom said. “All four of us. It wasn't Markie and Jack having a few beers on the building site. It was Markie, Jimmy, Jack, and me.”

“I don't understand.”

“I know. Just listen.” A breath. “Jack was drunk. I-I guess we all were. Jack pulled out a gun and started waving it around. He was pissed as hell.”

This needed to be clearer, it really did. “Why?”

“Something Markie said. Jack and Markie'd been talking, a day or two back. That's what it seemed like, anyway. I don't really know, my brother wasn't making a lot of sense. He was pissed, and he kept saying Markie was full of shit and he was going to kill him.”

“That's what Markie said happened.” Marian's voice sounded very faint to her.

“We tried to talk Jack down,” Tom said. “Jimmy and me both. He was-he should have calmed down. You know. He usually did, or he went away steaming and came back when it was okay. But he was so drunk, Marian. And the gun. He fired off a shot, blew a hole in that fucking two-by-four.”

Suddenly every word was sharp, each meaning unmistakable. Was it better this way?

“I thought he'd stop then,” Tom said. “See how stupid it was, and stop. But he aimed at Markie and shot again.”

Tom raised his beer and gazed at her, and this time Marian knew he was not seeing her, he was seeing a skeleton house, his brother, his friends.

“Markie froze. He froze like he always did. What the hell did he think he was doing, Marian?”

Marian didn't know whether Tom meant Jack, or Markie, and in any case she had no idea, none.

“After the second shot Jimmy tackled Markie. Knocked him out of the way.” Tom gulped more beer. “Everything Jack was-everything we all were, Marian, everything, it was all there, you could see it all. Like this bright light was shining. Like we were naked. No, no, not naked. Like you could, like you could see right through us.”

Tired to the bone from waiting, waiting so many years, Marian said it for him. “It was Jimmy, wasn't it?”

Tom raised his eyes to her. “It…” He looked down again, shook his head. “I can't, Marian. And it doesn't matter.”

“It was-”

“Don't you see? What each of us was. What we always were. It was right there.”

“Tom-”

“Marian?” He was pleading for something. How could that be? Tom always had the answers, the smart ideas. Tom never needed anything. Tom was the one other people asked for things from. It was she who'd asked the question, the only question that had ever mattered, ever, the one question, because of that, she'd never asked.