How can I possibly explain my life to Mary-Kate? Tell her about the sleepless nights and why I roam the dark apartment until I’m tired enough to fall asleep. She’d never understand. A faithful servant to the Church and every Monday night at the rosary club. She takes a certain amount of pride in having turned my life around. She pulled me from the barstool, from the racetrack, from late-night fights and too many nights sleeping on a cot in jail. Mary-Kate inspired me to find a job and help contribute to our lives as a married couple.
“Mickey,” she’d say, “better to push a broom at DeMoulas than break legs for money.”
Breaking Wallace Goldberg’s nose for being constantly late on the juice. Or the time I took a sledgehammer to Dennis Quinn’s legs and left him in an open grave in St. Anthony’s Cemetery. That’s as much as she knows.
“Poor Dennis,” she’d say, “that man is forever in a wheelchair because of you, Mickey.” Mary-Kate is relentless with dragging me off to confession every week. Like the first time wasn’t good enough. “The Lord and Father Murray, need to know you truly are sorry for the crimes you’ve committed. One confession will never be enough, Mickey.”
What she doesn’t know will certainly kill her. I decided best to keep pushing the broom for minimum wage at DeMoulas. It’s not all cleaning, somedays they need me to help break down pallets. Shit’s a bastard on my back, but it’s good exercise, at least I tell myself that. It keeps me from straying and going back to the life. Straight and narrow from here on out, The Lord and Father Murray next Tuesday.
She saved me from an early death no doubt, but the money was a hell of a lot better, that’s for sure, but I love to put my body up next to Mary-Kate’s every night. She has curves for days, and that’s how I like’em, top-heavy and thick in the hips. I will admit, I mostly like her kisses and the way she says a little prayer for me before going to sleep. She thinks I don’t hear her, but I do. Makes a working man feel good about his shit stain of a life. I didn’t have anything like her after breaking a nose, a leg, no sir, I ended up on a stool spending a little bit of what Chuckie O’Brien had stuffed into an envelope for me. Boy, I miss those thick envelopes. I couldn’t put them in my pants pockets, too thick. I needed to stuff them into the inside pocket of my coat. Classy.
She’s what goes through my head every night when I wake up and start walking around in my boxer shorts. The dog isn’t worth a damn. I got that mutt at the shelter because the woman insisted, he was “the guard dog supreme.” I haven’t seen him run towards the door after a knock. Not once. He eats and sleeps, does nothing else. The smelly bastard lies on the couch all day with his legs in the air farting fantastically into the night like a hell-bound symphony, stinky asshole.
Most nights, like tonight, I sit here and drink warm milk hoping it puts me back to sleep. It never works. They always say to drink it in the older television shows like ‘Leave It to Beaver.” If I had Beaver in front of me, I’d break his pudgy fingers one by one for telling lies about warm milk. Nothing works when I see her face in my head. Nothing works when she begs and cries. I hear her all the time. What am I supposed to do? I can’t open myself to Mary-Kate. She’d certainly leave me, even if the Church forbids divorce. I can tell the stars at least, and this useless, farting, dog. I haven’t built up the courage to tell The Lord and Father Murray, not yet. There are things you do in this world you can’t return from once you’ve done them. All I can do is look in the mirror and hopefully see a man worth redemption. I never do. I see a man I no longer recognize. I see a human being worth the ridicule and hateful stabs. I see a man whose aged, thicker around the gut, more hair on the shoulders, and a plethora of well-earned scars.
There’s not much to do in the dark, waiting on the clock to either put me back to sleep or in the shower for another day pushing broom. Next to the clock on the mantle there’s a photo of me as a younger man from 1960 in a boxing pose. I used to work out at Larry McCluskey’s Gym over on D Street. They tore it down and put up the Demoulas right where I push broom now. It’s fitting. Back in my early twenties I was an up-and-coming boxer, trained by Larry himself. I hit opponents in the face like a hand grenade. Mean left hook. The old timers still talk about the time I knocked Roxbury Russell on his ass in the first ten seconds of round one. Snapped his jaw like a branch. People walking outside heard his jaw shatter. No one ever heard from Roxbury Russell again.
The dog isn’t impressed with the size of my fist. I’ll move it closer to his chops. Useless mutt doesn’t care. Fitting it’s a Demoulas now. I was too slow to move up from the amateur ranks into the pros. It didn’t matter if I could crack a face by looking at it, I moved like a drunk cement mixer. Chuckie liked me enough to put me on the payroll. He thinks I’m chicken now, and he’s not wrong, but I love Mary-Kate. I have nothing, honestly, never did. I’m the kind of guy you talk about with strangers, and say, “He had a lot of promise.” And the people reply, “what a shame, just flushed it. How does he look at himself?”
Mary-Kate says I carry too much weight, and she’s right, but I have nothing. Everything in the apartment, besides the damn dog, is hers. I brought violence and depression into this house. I brought an uneven past. I put all my ghosts in the cabinets next to the coffee mugs and artfully arranged my self-defeatist personality next to the forks and spoons. The clothes on my back and clothes in the closet from the motel I lived in are all I brought into the marriage. She says she loves me because of my rugged looks. I remind her of the heavies in the old TV westerns. Names of actors you cannot remember but they are familiar because their faces look sanded and chipped. Distorted faces, flawed, and burnt, fish-hooked and grit torn, yet somehow, they hold love, masculinity, and hope in their eyes.
I suppose I need to try and sleep, these kinds of thoughts are not good for anyone, but sometimes I hear her, especially her, in my head. Donna McIntyre, she was only twenty years old when I opened the window of her boyfriend’s apartment in Old Colony, Jerry Lindsey. He snitched on Chuckie’s brother, Howard, he’s still up in Walpole doing a thirty-year stretch for running guns. Fuck rats. They lack character and integrity, but I didn’t know Donna was going to be there. I put two in Jerry’s chest, and one in the forehead. He never woke up, easy-peasy. Donna walked out of the bathroom. A beauty, I may add. Not in the way you want to ball a woman, but she reminded me of a young woman who was going to be successful in life. She makes mom and dad proud of her achievements in college. She never wasted a day. I bet she had never carried an ounce of stress in her life, until she saw me.
I’ll never forget the way fear etched into her skin for the rest of my life, but I knew what needed to be done or it would’ve been my ass. Nowadays, I wish it were me, but we can’t all be the receivers of prayers, most times we need to give them. The way her bare feet kicked and glided across the hardwood floors after I put the belt around her throat. I had to turn around and hold her over my back and shoulder, her back up on my back. Her feet up in the air kicked like a bicycle. I couldn’t look her in the face. Fucking chickenshit. It took all I had until I heard her neck snap, and felt her body go heavy, but I’ll never forget her face when she saw me. It never leaves me.
One time I watched Mary-Kate put together a puzzle of Liz Taylor, but pieces were missing. She left it on the coffee table incomplete for a week, and I kept looking at it. A human missing the eye pulse. The electric field none of us can see that brings the soul beyond humanity. Makes the glow crank forward into the living, it wasn’t there, and I saw her puzzle every day after work. Terrifying. That’s the face Donna McIntyre made when she saw me standing over Jerry Lindsey’s corpse. In the moment, her pieces gone. Her right to a life, forgotten by a nameless worker, too lazy to put all the pieces inside of the box.
I try and seek comfort by looking outside at the postage-stamp-sized backyard at night. How the grass looks neon when summer takes her final breath before fall. The last of the lightning bugs come out to glow, then die off until the next spring when new ones return. It’s about the prettiest thing we have in Southie. They’ve saved me more times than not, more times than prayers in church. The frogs too, I’m not sure where they hide in the city, but I like to listen to them. It’s peaceful. Damn, mutt, I’m not sure where you got an asshole like that, foul beast. They were sick of your asshole lighting up the atmosphere at the shelter, then they saw my frumpy ass walk into the joint with my Ray-Bans at the end of my nose. “Now there’s a sucker.” I can’t even scratch his belly out of fear he’ll shit all over the couch.
I need to get up in a few hours and break down pallets of celery for days. You know, if you do it long enough crates of celery will rip the tendons in your shoulders? Yeah, it hurts like a bastard. Four, five, six hours of picking up celery have killed more men than atomic bombs. At first you think you got it good, light, and easy, by the fifth hour my shoulders burn. Mary-Kate hates massaging me, so she puts this stinky ointment on my back, then makes me sit with the dog, our scents colliding, until it absorbs into me and I can return to the bed. I’ve seen more men sent to an early grave or put in the hospital for weeks because of crates of celery. No joke. Yet, I get up every morning out of a sense of duty to Mary-Kate and rotten bum over here. What’s with the legs in the air?
She has a better job than me. Works as a bookkeeper in Downtown Crossing. She does the books for Uri Goldbuck. He owns a few jewelry stores over there, but names them different things to keep the competition in his favor. He can up the prices whenever he wants, wicked smart. There’s ‘Uri’s Watches and Gold,’ and ‘Ronnie D’s Platinum,’ Mary-Kate is treated like a queen with the way she does numbers, I tell ya, kid, smart baby. She makes three times more than me, I don’t care, it is what it is, but I get up and break my neck just for the comfort of her knowing I am contributing. I don’t mind, but I’ll admit, I’d like to call Chuckie and get a paying gig. Not what I keep from my wife but breaking a nose here and there. It’s what I was put on the earth to do. I can’t go back to the other thing, or perhaps I put myself in purgatory already, and I can keep doing it. The idea of being forever trapped in limbo with no one to light a candle for me on the other side is a scary thought.
I like to think I matter to somebody besides my wife. I used to matter to the O’Briens, always the first one they called when they needed something done. I mattered to the neighborhood. The church didn’t get in my way, they feared me. People knew my name all the way up to Nashua. Now I push a broom, I’m forgotten. You know, it’s all absurd anyhow, none of it matters. When I’m dead, I’m dead. Plant the roses, move on to the Jameson, and pretend to remember me for an afternoon. I like to think I mean something to the universe. Like driving and listening to a talk radio for an hour, bunch of idiots complaining about the state of country and their rights. It’s exhausting, so I change the channel, and a great song comes on. It hits me that I am the song, a melody trapped inside moving steel, rubber, and glass. I am the small victory, or at least I tell myself those things to trick the brain into thinking that none of it is really that bad, but I know better.
Mary-Kate feels great to push up against. Half naked, silky panties under a T-shirt, slightly grinding myself into the perfect position with her body. The dog farting in the other room, right before I throw my arm over her body and put my hand up her shirt to see if I can get her interested in a little middle of the night sex.
This feeling right now is not absurd, wrong, or painful. It’s why I keep going. Want to know why? Because of how she’s looking down at me when she’s riding me. Her long hair falling over her enormous tits. Her hand on my chest to keep the rhythm. The way she bites her lip. It’s like living in a bowl of whipped topping, how she rolls off me, says “good night, Mickey,” and I kiss her, and try to go to sleep. It’s the real reason I keep on the narrow path at Demoulas.
If not for Mary-Kate, I fear there will be more Donna McIntyres. Before my wife, I killed twenty-one people for money. How can I ever tell her that? She wouldn’t understand that every single one of them deserved what they had coming. Perverts, sell-outs, people who snitch on friends for a bigger piece of the pie, people who lacked a code, were not born with moral fiber. They needed to go. Donna didn’t deserve what I did, and it doesn’t leave me. It never will. It’s God’s great punishment. A moment in time that lasted thirty seconds that will haunt me for my entire life. A face and a light scream that keeps me up at night when the nightmares are no longer fully loaded within the six chambers.
I need to talk to the Lord and Father Murray about Donna. He can’t call the cops. He knows better anyhow, his hands have more blood on them than all the cow knockers in the United States combined. I should tell him and relieve a little of the pain. From there, I can go be a free man at Demoulas. I can tell the boss to suck my ass, better yet stop going altogether. I can feel right about contributing and still have a little leftover to take Mary-Kate on a trip somewhere to a fancy motel. She likes to brag and make her friends jealous. Free to sleep six straight hours. Free to call Chuckie so the right people will fear me again. Free to live and die within the dance of the lightning bugs.
