this’d be a much wider pipe. Fiber optics. Makes World Wide Web surfing like changing channels.”
“Yeah? That the future?”
“Today it is. Tomorrow, who knows? Someday there’ll be no wires, I know that. Someday there’ll be no linemen.”
“Maybe you oughta think about getting something going on the side.”
Dez smiled in the direction of the highway. “I gotta roll.” They rapped fists, Dez taking off down the incline with the bundle of cash under his arm.
Doug turned and went the other way, up Old Rutherford, habitually scanning the parked cars for snoops as he went. He turned right on Devens and followedit around to Packard, a one-way street, one of the few in the tightly packed Town with a back alley. The narrow alley showed bow windows and Juliet balconies over brick walls separating tiny parking spaces. Empty trash cans stood at every cobblestoned parking court except Claire Keesey’s, the plum Saturn still gone. A poker hand of takeout menus was fanned inside her back screen door.
Keep moving,
he told himself, jamming his fists inside the pockets of his warm-up jacket, pretending he was satisfied. All he had done was save her from a beating. He lowered his head like a regular citizen and walked on.
4
PLAYSTATION
T HE BACK OF THE hill was Charlestown without the gas streetlamps. It was wooden row houses with stepped roofs and front doors that opened onto sidewalks sloping at forty-five-degree angles to the sea. During the Blizzard of 1978, on plastic Super Saucers and collapsed cardboard box “project sleds,” neighborhood kids got up over twenty miles an hour bombing down the sheer faces of Mystic, Belmont, and North Mead before bottoming out hard onto Medford Street below.
The gentrification that had made new virgins out of other Town fiefdoms such as Monument Square, City Square, and the Heights, had embraced but not yet transformed the uncapitalized old lady known simply as “the back of the hill.” Its curbs saw a few Audis and Acuras, designer water bottles lay in some recycling bins, and most exteriors had been power-washed and painted smooth. But Irish lace still fluttered in a few windows, a handful of Boston firefighters and city employees still calling it home.
Doug ate two buttered corn muffins out of a wax paper bag at the crest of Sackville Street. His large tea, thick with milk and sugar, steamed out of the tall Lori-Ann’s cardboard cup set on the roof of his rust-pocked 1986 Caprice Classic.
Breakfast there was for him a regular thing. The house he was looking at across the street, with its rich red siding and nurse-white trim—formerly dove gray over flaking charcoal—was the home of his youth. He still considered it his mother’s house even though she had abandoned it, and him, when he was six years old. His father managed to hold on to it for ten more years, meaning, and this seemed impossible, that Doug had lived half his life away from it now. It still ruled his dreams: the monster oil tank in the stone basement; the dark wood parlor with cabinet radiators and custard wallpaper; his corner bedroom on the first floor, swept by passing headlights.
This was the place he went to get his head together. A bungled job—this one had netted them plenty, but he would forever think of the caper as failed—always left him in a sour mood, but never with the mental mono like this one had. He returned to the heist over and over in his head, trying to untangle itsfaults, only to get caught up again in the image of the branch manager blindfolded next to him in the van. This image possessed him, how fragile she had appeared, yet also how composed. How she had wept tearlessly beside him—he had felt her shaking, her hands limp and empty in her lap—like a statue of a blindfolded woman crying. Having followed this stranger around, he now felt himself getting sucked into the mystery of her existence.
He was breaking out of that rut today. It was April and the sidewalks of
“Yeah? That the future?”
“Today it is. Tomorrow, who knows? Someday there’ll be no wires, I know that. Someday there’ll be no linemen.”
“Maybe you oughta think about getting something going on the side.”
Dez smiled in the direction of the highway. “I gotta roll.” They rapped fists, Dez taking off down the incline with the bundle of cash under his arm.
Doug turned and went the other way, up Old Rutherford, habitually scanning the parked cars for snoops as he went. He turned right on Devens and followedit around to Packard, a one-way street, one of the few in the tightly packed Town with a back alley. The narrow alley showed bow windows and Juliet balconies over brick walls separating tiny parking spaces. Empty trash cans stood at every cobblestoned parking court except Claire Keesey’s, the plum Saturn still gone. A poker hand of takeout menus was fanned inside her back screen door.
Keep moving,
he told himself, jamming his fists inside the pockets of his warm-up jacket, pretending he was satisfied. All he had done was save her from a beating. He lowered his head like a regular citizen and walked on.
4
PLAYSTATION
T HE BACK OF THE hill was Charlestown without the gas streetlamps. It was wooden row houses with stepped roofs and front doors that opened onto sidewalks sloping at forty-five-degree angles to the sea. During the Blizzard of 1978, on plastic Super Saucers and collapsed cardboard box “project sleds,” neighborhood kids got up over twenty miles an hour bombing down the sheer faces of Mystic, Belmont, and North Mead before bottoming out hard onto Medford Street below.
The gentrification that had made new virgins out of other Town fiefdoms such as Monument Square, City Square, and the Heights, had embraced but not yet transformed the uncapitalized old lady known simply as “the back of the hill.” Its curbs saw a few Audis and Acuras, designer water bottles lay in some recycling bins, and most exteriors had been power-washed and painted smooth. But Irish lace still fluttered in a few windows, a handful of Boston firefighters and city employees still calling it home.
Doug ate two buttered corn muffins out of a wax paper bag at the crest of Sackville Street. His large tea, thick with milk and sugar, steamed out of the tall Lori-Ann’s cardboard cup set on the roof of his rust-pocked 1986 Caprice Classic.
Breakfast there was for him a regular thing. The house he was looking at across the street, with its rich red siding and nurse-white trim—formerly dove gray over flaking charcoal—was the home of his youth. He still considered it his mother’s house even though she had abandoned it, and him, when he was six years old. His father managed to hold on to it for ten more years, meaning, and this seemed impossible, that Doug had lived half his life away from it now. It still ruled his dreams: the monster oil tank in the stone basement; the dark wood parlor with cabinet radiators and custard wallpaper; his corner bedroom on the first floor, swept by passing headlights.
This was the place he went to get his head together. A bungled job—this one had netted them plenty, but he would forever think of the caper as failed—always left him in a sour mood, but never with the mental mono like this one had. He returned to the heist over and over in his head, trying to untangle itsfaults, only to get caught up again in the image of the branch manager blindfolded next to him in the van. This image possessed him, how fragile she had appeared, yet also how composed. How she had wept tearlessly beside him—he had felt her shaking, her hands limp and empty in her lap—like a statue of a blindfolded woman crying. Having followed this stranger around, he now felt himself getting sucked into the mystery of her existence.
He was breaking out of that rut today. It was April and the sidewalks of
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