Дэвид Гейтс - The Blue Mirror

“Yeah, I understood you the first time. Somebody with a bone to pick is likely to put the guy in the ground. Trouble is that I don’t have six months to wait.”

“Do what you gotta do,” Dugan said.

“What about habits and habitat?” I asked him.

“He holds court at a joint called the Blue Mirror, by the Navy Yard. You know it?”

I was afraid I did.

“Most every afternoon between four and six. Happy hour.”

“That’s pretty deep in Indian Country,” I said.

“I’ve been trying to tell you,” Dugan said cheerfully and hung up.

~ * ~

Boston is a town known for its tough, parochial neighborhoods, Southie, Charlestown, the North End, Fields Corner and Savin Hill in Dorchester, and the neighborhood bars that cater to the locals are often like ethnic social clubs, friendly and familiar to initiates but suspicious of outsiders.

The Blue Mirror was in Charlestown, right outside the main gates of the Navy Yard, where the USS Constitution is berthed.

The yard’s fallen on hard times since the seventies, deactivated with defense cutbacks, new keels being laid at Bath Iron Works in Maine and down at Norfolk and out on the West Coast in Puget Sound. Developers have had their eye on it over the years and now it’s a National Historic Site, but as a shipbuilding facility and a port of call for bluewater sailors, it’s been mothballed. Even when the yard was an active military installation, though, the Blue Mirror was off-limits to enlisted personnel.

There were rougher places, I’m sure, but you probably had to go to Belfast or Kingston, Jamaica, to find them. All the same, at four-thirty in the afternoon it looked pretty tame. A couple dozen vehicles were parked outside, vans, pickups, muscle cars, along with some choppers, low-slung panhead Harleys sporting ape-hangers and chromed valve covers. I went on in.

It took a minute for my eyes to adjust to the gloom. The room was long and low, opening up like a keyhole at the far end, where there was a small hardwood dance floor and a band was doing a sound check, testing levels. The bar itself ran along the near wall, probably thirty-five or forty feet, with two guys working behind the stick. The only lighting was a set of pinpoint spots down the back bar, the narrow focus putting the bottles on the shelves in high relief and making the liquor seem lit from within, like coals. Having the light behind them, the bartenders were in silhouette, so their faces were unreadable. The effect was a little sinister, but I guessed it might even be intentional, giving them the edge on a rowdy crowd when the clock edged last call.

They had Sam Adams on tap. I ordered a draft. Glancing down at the bar, I saw there seemed to be loose change scattered all over it, but when I tried to nudge a dime with my finger, I realized the coins were polyurethaned into the surface. It made me feel like a dope for falling for it, and it marked me as a stranger in a place where I wanted to be taken for furniture. I nursed my beer and looked around.

Given that it was a little shy of quitting time for a day job, the Mirror was pretty busy, and most of the people in there were guys. Not many of them were dressed like they’d come from work, either. Nobody in coveralls wearing a hammer holster or spattered with paint, anyway. Everyone seemed to be wearing aggressive casual, doubleknits or Dockers depending on the age bracket.

I picked up my beer and wandered down the bar toward the bandstand. Tucked around the corner was a pool table, a quarter a game. The guy leaning over the table to break was wearing colors, biker leathers with an elaborate design on the back like an old Grateful Dead album. He broke open the rack but didn’t make any balls, and when he straightened up, I could make out the gang insignia better. It looked like a representation of Leonardo’s Last Supper but with Satan at the head of the table. Hitler, Idi Amin, and the Ayatollah were among his guests. Underneath, in Gothic script, was a legend that read the disciples. I turned back to the bar, ordered a second beer, and asked for my change in quarters.

The girl the biker was playing pool with looked underage, strung-out sixteen, no more than a hundred pounds wringing wet, tie-dyed tank top and jeans she kept tugging up because she didn’t have any hips for them to hang on to. But she had tattoos across her shoulder blades and enough piercings to set off a metal detector — ear clips and a stud in her lower lip and one at the outer edge of each eyelid, the extreme outer edge where it wouldn’t scratch the sclera of her eyes if she looked sideways. She made five solids without breaking a sweat and then scratched with a cross-corner shot on the seven.

I stepped over and put my quarter up for the next game.

Neither one of them seemed to pay any attention to me. The biker was studying the way the table lay. He was shooting stripes, and he had two pockets safed, his balls hanging on the lip, duck shots, but in the way of her making a ball. He took a harder shot, banking one up and back, and made it. She thumped her cue on the floor, acknowledging a good call. He kept moving around the table, sinking his other six balls, and then blew the eight, slamming it too hard so it popped back out of the side pocket. The girl dropped the rest of the solids and sank the eight in a corner. She glanced over at me.

It was probably then that I made my first mistake. I’d assumed they were a couple, although the biker had a good twenty years on her. He had red hair pulled back in a shaggy ponytail, and you could see the streaks of gray in it. And he had kind of a Zapata mustache, drooping past the corners of his mouth. It showed white next to his chin. The mistake was that I spent more time on him than her. Young girl, but skinny as she was, I still should have been looking down the front of her shirt after I put my money in, the balls dropped and I racked, and she bent over the table to break. Anybody else would have.

Like a dummy I went for the target too quickly. The girl was running the table on me, and I stood back a little, just outside the edge of the light that picked out the balls on the green felt, making the colors pop. She made six balls before I got a shot, and then she left me safed behind one of her own high balls. I called a bank, made it by some miracle, and then blew a much easier shot on the four in the side. I stepped away from the table again, shrugging philosophically, and went to stand next to the redheaded biker. “Need to get my chops up, I guess,” I remarked.

“Girl plays a mean stick,” he said.

She took the eight on a long bank, back up in the corner, and he went over to the table to rack. I put another quarter up to play the winner.

The thing was, their concentration on the game wasn’t fierce at all. The girl played deliberately but not as if anything were at stake. Her pride wasn’t involved, She simply took each shot as it came and seemed to be playing more against herself than the biker. For his part, it didn’t bother him if she had the better eye and control of the cue ball with English that would have made Minnesota Fats and Fast Eddie Felton give her a second look. He wasn’t indifferent, or just humoring her, but he wasn’t threatened by it.

I was watching him bridge to make a shot when I saw the jail-house tattoo on the web of skin between his thumb and forefinger: 1 %. It took me a minute to get it. One percent.

Back when Marion Brando made The Wild One and biker gangs were exotic, some square made the remark that motorcycles were ridden by family men and it was only that one percent that gave bikes a bad name. Now, anybody who’s hung out with bikers knows they can be family men, for openers, but that’s not the point.

Bikes have never lived down that outlaw image, and of course it’s part of their appeal, especially riding a big Harley instead of a rice-burner, but Red was flaunting it. The colors, the attitude. Maybe he was for real, or maybe it was all show and no go. I had a funny feeling he was profiling, trying it on for size, and trying just a little too hard.