The ball swung back and forth, back and forth, gathering its lazy momentum.
A small crowd stood on the sidewalk behind BPD sawhorses, heads tipped upward, slack-faced with fascination. A woman said, “Here it comes.” The shopkeeper Moe Wasserman was in the crowd, at the front, watching his building come down. Joe Daley, too.
The ball entered the building easily, through the brick curtain, and nestled in a second-floor bedroom. Plaster dust filled the room and drifted out of the front of the building like smoke. The room was not quite empty of furniture. A bed remained, its mattress stripped, and a small bureau. There were other holes in the building, other three-walled rooms exposed to view. The crane operator tugged the ball, which snagged the bed as it dragged across the room.
The building came down. Thirty-five minutes. The cloud of plaster dust took longer to dissipate. It left ashy powder on the windshields of parked cars.
After, the crowd looked past the rubble pile, across the newly opened air space to St. Joseph’s Church a quarter mile away. The church sat like a fortress on the bare plain of the old West End site. Joe tried to remember exactly what Moe Wasserman’s building had looked like, but already it was hard to summon up a complete picture. There had been a pattern along the roofline, like steps. Hadn’t there?
A few hours later-it was after sunset, beyond that it was hard to know; could have been six o’clock, could have been ten-Joe was at the Pompeii, a favorite joint near Haymarket Square. The owner had a special relationship with the Department, and the Pompeii stayed open till all hours. That was a handy thing. There were nights he didn’t feel like going home after working last half, with his engine still revving and the house all dark and quiet, the kid asleep, wife asleep.
Joe lived on the hill in Brighton, in a little split-level ranch on a woodsy new street behind St. Sebastian’s. The fancy house never suited him. This was not his neighborhood. He did not belong out here, pretending to live in the suburbs. When he thought of the house, he tended to picture Kat and Little Joe there, without him. Sometimes when company came, Joe felt like one of the guests. And at night-Christ. The street went black and the only noises were the bugs cricking and shrilling in the woods and the squawks of the city in the far distance.
So, late at night Joe took it someplace else to work it off a little. That wasn’t always easy. Some nights he never did run out of gas. The energy just seemed to feed on itself and Joe felt a tireless capacity for working, drinking, laughing, fucking, whatever came along. He could go all night. Tonight would not be one of those nights, though. An uncharacteristic weariness had settled over him since Amy’s death. It felt like rot. His strong body was being pulped from the inside, like some massive blighted tree. Maybe this was what it felt like to get old. Your body rotted away with you in it. Age was a disease, a fatal one. The sight of that building under the wrecking ball seemed to fit the same pattern, though Joe could not quite articulate how.
Across the bar were rows of bottles like soldiers in formation, and behind them a mirrored wall in which Joe saw his own blockish face. At least his appearance gave nothing away, he thought. He still looked like the old Joe.
Also reflected in the mirror was the woman beside him at the bar, a big blowsy redhead with a lot of miles on the odometer but not a bad-looking broad once you looked past the wear and tear. The Pompeii-themed interior of the restaurant heightened the red in her hair. It was a brazenly false color for a gal her age, but rather than being put off by it, Joe understood. He saw the sassy natural redhead she’d once been and wanted to be still. With her right hand the woman held a cigarette wedged between her index and middle fingers while she made minute adjustments to the neck of her dress with the remaining three fingers.
Joe turned to his left to peek at her directly, and they exchanged faint, well-meaning smiles, signals of good intentions. Up close, she was even more ruddy and windblown than she had looked in the mirror. Too old for Joe, but there was something there. He liked the way she plumped on her stool like a hen brooding an egg underneath her.
“Hey,” the woman offered.
“Hey,” Joe said, and he faced forward and for the first time in weeks he felt happy. Diffuse, childish joy.
Jesus Lord, did Joe Daley love women! Not just fucking them, though fucking was certainly part of it. He enjoyed their company, he was happy in their presence. Their tricks, the smells and makeup and clothes. The power of their clothed bodies! The happy squeeze of cleavage, the rise of the hips under their dresses, the suggestion of nudity up an open skirt. He exulted in it. Joe was dumbfounded when people, especially men-baby brother Michael could be particularly preachy here-suggested there was anything low-down or girl-hating about Joe’s womanizing. Joe couldn’t imagine anyone loving women more or better than he did. How on earth could anyone take seriously the pretense of monogamy in marriage? Joe lumped it in with all the other crazy old relics of Catholicism, like Church Latin and celibate priests and Swiss Guards. What did Joe’s appreciation of other broads have to do with his sincere love for Kat? It just didn’t figure. One had nothing to do with the other. Maybe a smarter guy could understand it. Then again, if some smart-ass ever did figure it out, Joe hoped he would keep it to himself. He did not want any part of a world without women.
Joe raised his empty glass and shook the ice cubes. The bartender ignored him. Joe called him by name, but the bartender pretended not to hear as he hefted a rack of dirty glasses back into the kitchen.
“Wax in his ears.” The redhead shrugged.
“I guess so.”
When the bartender returned, Joe asked loudly for another bourbon rocks.
“Tab’s getting pretty high, Joe.”
“I haven’t been here that long.”
“Not just tonight.”
“Just give me a drink. You’re a bartender not a, a…accountant. Whattaya? What are you shaking your head? Just give me a drink.”
“If it was up to me…It’s not coming from me, Joe.”
Joe gave him a vexed look, a first stirring of trouble.
“Hey, Joe, if it was up to me. I mean, what do I give a shit?”
“You’re shitting me.”
“Just throw in a few bucks, Joe. Make it look good.”
“I don’t have any cash, the banks are closed. What do you want me to do?”
The bartender shook his head. “Can’t do it.”
“Can’t do it? The fuck is that, ‘can’t do it’? How long’ve I been coming here?”
“Long time.”
“Long time is right. Is this how you treat a customer?”
“No offense, Joe, but if you were a regular customer, I’d have cut you off a long time ago. You’re going to drink us out of business.”
“You don’t think I’m good for it?”
The bartender cleared away Joe’s glass and slung the ice into a dump sink. Joe took the act as a provocation and he started to stand, and things might have got worse had the redhead not piped up with “I’ll buy him a drink.”
The bartender, though he was probably relieved to avoid a confrontation with Joe, gave her a look. “He’s a cop, you know.”
“So? I got nothing against cops.”
After he had his drink, Joe lifted the glass toward her. “Thanks.”
She said, “Never a cop when you need one.”
“You need one?”
“Sure.”
A few hours later Joe lay in this woman’s bed. The pillow under his nose stank of her perfume. She was beside him, under a thin blanket, the cool skin of her bottom against his. She snored, fluttery tubercular snores.
The room was dimly lit with reflected street light.
Joe stared at the wallpaper by the bed, a faded flower print. The paper was peeling at the seams. There must have been a room just like this one in Moe Wasserman’s demolished building. Maybe it had flowery wallpaper, too. Probably there’d been lots and lots of rooms like this in the West End. People had lived in those rooms, those boxes, stood in them, slept in them, got born and died in them. Now they were all gone. The rooms didn’t exist anymore except as boxes in the air. Pieces of sky. This room where Joe was lying-it had been a box in the air, too, thirty feet aboveground, until someone had come along and wrapped it in these four walls and floor and ceiling. He was lying in a bed thirty feet off the ground, in a box in the air. A city is a pile of such boxes.
And Amy’s room was a box, splashed with her blood. By now the blood had been scrubbed off, probably. The walls had been repainted. They would re-rent the room as soon as everyone forgot what happened there. It wouldn’t take people long to forget. Amy’s death had meant nothing. The world still turned, people went about their business. Joe should not have been surprised. How many men had he killed in the war? Germans, Italians. Fifty, a hundred, who knew? Why bother to count? He did not give a shit about them. Not then, not now. He would happily have killed more if he’d had the chance. A person was nothing. A bag of bones. Joe Daley included.