Dennis Lehane - Prayers For Rain

I said, “So she lost her job, and the money started to run out.”

She tilted her head back and opened her mouth, poured some water in without her lips ever touching the bottle. She swallowed a few times, then lowered her chin, dabbed her lips with a corner of the towel.

“She was out of money before that. There was something screwy with David’s medical insurance.”

“What kind of screwy?”

She shrugged. “Karen was trying to pay some of his medical bills. They were huge. It wiped her out. And I said, you know, a couple of months not paying rent is all right. I don’t like it, but I understand. But the third month, I said, you know, she had to go if she couldn’t come up with it. I mean, we were friends and all-good friends-but this is life.”

“Life,” I said. “Sure.”

Her eyes widened to coasters as she nodded at me. “The thing is, life, right? I mean, it’s a train. It just keeps moving, and you have to run ahead of it, okay. You stop to catch your breath too long? It runs you over. So, sooner or later, you have to stop being so other-centered and Look Out for Number One.”

“Good tenet,” I said.

She smiled. She walked over to the ugly chair and lowered her hand toward me. “Need help getting up?”

“No, I’m fine. Chair’s not that bad.”

She laughed and her tongue fell over her lower lip again, like Jordan ’s when he’d drive for a layup.

“I wasn’t talking about the chair.”

I stood and she stepped back. “I know you weren’t, Dara.”

She put a hand at the small of her back, leaned into it as she took another sip of water. “And the problem,” she said in a singsong, “lies, ah, where, exactly?”

“I got standards,” I said as I walked to the door.

“About strangers?”

“About humans,” I said, and let myself out.

The inside of Pickup on South Street, David Wetterau’s fledgling film equipment supply company, was a warehouse littered with 16-millimeter cameras, 35-millimeter cameras, lenses, lights, light filters, tripods, dollies, and dolly tracks. Small tables were bolted to the floor and spaced out twenty feet apart along the east wall, where young guys worked on checking in equipment, while along the west wall, a young guy and a young woman rolled a mammoth, crane-shaped dolly along tracks, the woman sitting up top, working a wheel that rose from the center like one you’d find in a truck driver’s cab.

The employees or student interns, both male and female, were a collection of baggy shorts, wrinkled T-shirts, canvas sneakers or battered Doc Martens with no socks, and at least one earring each glinting from heads that were either submerged under mountains of hair or had none at all. I liked them right off, probably because they reminded me of the kids I’d hung out with in college. Low-key dudes and dudettes with the fever of artistic ambition in their pupils, motor mouths when they got drunk, and an encyclopedic knowledge of the city’s best used-record stores, used-book stores, used-clothing stores-just about any purveyor of secondhand goods.

Pickup on South Street had been founded by David Wetterau and Ray Dupuis. Ray Dupuis was one of the guys with shaved heads, and the only thing that separated him from the others was that he seemed a few years older and his wrinkled T-shirt was silk. He propped his Chuck Taylors up on a scarred desk that had been hastily placed in the middle of all the chaos, leaned back in a ratty leather office chair, and spread his arms at the lunacy around him.

“My kingdom.” He gave me a wry smile.

“Lotta work?”

He fingered the fleshy, dark pockets under his eyes. “Uh, yeah.”

Two guys came bounding through the warehouse. They ran side by side, pacing themselves, even though they seemed to be running at top speed. The one on the left had what looked like a combination of a camera and metal detector strapped to his chest and a heavy belt around his waist with bulging pockets that reminded me of a soldier’s ammo and supply belt.

“Get a little ahead of me, a little ahead of me,” the cameraman said.

The kid on the outside did.

“Now! Stop and turn! Stop and turn!”

The other kid put the brakes on, then spun and started running back the other way, and the cameraman whipped in place and tracked him.

Then he stopped. He threw up his hands and screamed, “Aaron! You call that racking?”

A collection of rags with a spillage of dark hair and a dripping Fu Manchu looked up from a boxy remote in his hands. “I’m racking, Eric. I’m racking. It’s the lights, dude.”

“Bullshit!” Eric screamed. “The lights are fine.”

Ray Dupuis smiled and turned his head away from Eric, who looked like his head was about to explode with rage.

“Steadicam guys,” Dupuis said. “They’re like kickers in the NFL. Very specialized talent, very sensitive personalities.”

“That thing strapped to his chest is a Steadicam?” I said.

He nodded.

“I always thought it was on wheels.”

“Nope.”

“So the opening shot of Full Metal Jacket,” I said, “that’s one guy moving around those barracks with a camera strapped to his chest?”

“Sure. Same with that shot in GoodFellas. You think they could have rolled a machine down those steps?”

“I never thought of it that way.”

He nodded at the kid holding the boxy remote. “And that’s the focus puller over there. He’s trying to rack focus by remote.”

I looked back at the young guys as they prepped to try the shot again, fine-tune whatever needed fine-tuning.

I couldn’t think of anything else to say but, “Cool.”

“So you’re a cinephile, Mr. Kenzie?”

I nodded. “Mostly the older ones, to be honest.”

He raised his eyebrows. “So you know where our name comes from?”

“Of course,” I said. “Sam Fuller, 1953. Awful movie, great title.”

He smiled. “That’s just what David said.” He pointed at Eric as Eric rushed by again. “That’s what David was supposed to pick up the day he was hurt.”

“The Steadicam?”

He nodded. “That’s why I don’t get it.”

“Get what?”

“The accident. He wasn’t supposed to be there.”

“On the corner of Congress and Purchase?”

“Yeah.”

“Where was he supposed to be?”

“ Natick.”

“ Natick,” I said. “Birthplace of Doug Flutie and girls with big hair?”

He nodded. “And the Natick Mall, of course.”

“Of course. But Natick ’s about twenty miles away.”

“Yup. And that’s where the Steadicam was.” He gestured with his head at it. “That piece of equipment makes most of the stuff we have here-all of which costs a goddamn fortune-look cheap. The guy in Natick was fire-saling it. Rock bottom. David raced out of here. But he never arrived. Next thing, he’s back downtown on that corner.” He pointed out the window in the direction of the financial district a few blocks north.

“You tell the police this?”

He nodded. “They got back to me a few days later, said they had absolutely no doubt it was an accident. I spoke at length to a detective, and I came away pretty convinced they were right. David tripped in broad daylight in front of something like forty witnesses. So I guess I don’t question that what happened to him was an accident, I’d just like to know what the hell made him turn back from Natick before he arrived and come back into the city. I told the detective this, and he said his job was to determine whether it was an accident, and on that score, he was satisfied. Everything else was ‘irrelevant.’ His word.”

“You?”

He rubbed his smooth head. “David wasn’t irrelevant. David was just a terrific guy. I’m not saying he was perfect. He had flaws, okay, but-”