He answered, and I told him who was calling.
“Never heard of you,” he said.
I repeated my name and reminded him of the pumpkins from last year. “That’s right,” he said. “They were a big hit. Everybody loved it. Thought you should know. It’s the way the world works, right? You pay an artist for work in your home and manage to steal all the credit.”
“I don’t need the credit,” I said. “I’m glad they went off well.”
I told him about my ideas for his pumpkins this year, that I could do a Sistine Chapel that would blow his mind, or a crowd of horrormovie villains. Sales weren’t in my blood, but I thought I was coming on smooth. I was aiming for bigger spreads, more pumpkins, more cash in my pocket.
“I haven’t thought much about what I’m doing this year, but when I do I’ll have my secretary get in touch. Look, I’m getting on the bridge. I’ve got to go.” He hung up before I could renew my pitch. From that point on, I knew the score. I knew there would be no call from any secretary. I even knew Durant no longer graced his foyer, now that Guy Bonner was the soup du jour. I took my painting and got on the train.
In Allston, though, I had to get off because the train became too crowded. At each stop, at the usually empty stops after the line turned left off Commonwealth, new people poured on. What had been a ghost train in Brighton was now full of elbows that did not bode well for my canvas. At Packard’s Corner I made the decision to walk the rest of the way. It would take a lot longer to bring home all the paintings this way, but it was a walk I enjoyed, down Commonwealth right in front of Boston University, with the river peeking from behind in the gaps between buildings.
At first I’d been unable to figure out what drew the crowd that day. It was too early in the morning for a Red Sox game, too early in the week for the Patriots. Even in the “Athens of America,” as a few old-fashioned folks still called Boston, plays and museum openings didn’t draw like this. The traffic was backed up as well, at a complete standstill in the eastbound lanes and not much better westbound, and even the sidewalks were overwhelmed with a mix of the young and old.
When I got closer to the center of campus I saw pavilion tents and young women in scarlet polos ushering about young people in backpacks. It was Boston University’s move-in day, and four thousand new students were swarming east Allston with their parents in tow. There was music playing; there were games, festivities, booths, all signaling the commencement of a new age and new possibilities for the arriving students. Along the street, buskers and artists had come to take their tithe, selling Citgo signs and Fenway Parks and paintings of the Common. I even saw the street artist—the one who’d sold me the panorama for Deckinger’s pumpkins that day in Back Bay—hauling in hundreds with his infinitely replaceable work.
I leaned my painting against a garbage can and walked on without it. It could decorate a dorm room or migrate to the dump, but that was no longer my concern. As I trekked farther up Commonwealth, I saw what was stopping traffic. A clumsy U-Haul driver had driven his truck through an underpass without enough clearance, shearing off half of the overhead storage compartment and wedging the vehicle in so tightly that two parallel tow trucks were trying to pull it out together. A piece of wooden furniture too mangled to identify lay along the line between lanes, surrounded by a smashed TV and scattered boots and dresses. A girl in a tube top berated her father on the sidewalk. The foot traffic swarmed around it all and walked on unaffected, and the subway cars rattled by, and the river flowed on as always.
At home I poured myself a small glass of Paul Giraud and drank it slowly. I had a few inches left in the bottom of the bottle, and when I was done I hid it away in the back of a cabinet and never touched it again, because I know that when it’s gone, it’s gone.
THE LAW OF THREES
They roll out at 10 p.m. with the radio crackling. Whit tries to keep his mind on the LSAT study books hidden in the book bag at his feet. The messages coming through the speaker urge everyone to be careful, to exercise caution, but the whole night-shift fleet is swirling around the parking lot like a cloud of energized bees. In the hallways of the station, the mood had been somber, almost silent. It was amazing to see grown, armed men feel so vulnerable in the guarded hallways of their own station. But now that each pair is wrapped in a cruiser, some doing donuts or fishtailing out of figure eights, the lot is a rave of red and blue lights. The men roll past Whit and Vargas flashing three fingers in the air, expecting to see them flashed back. Whit does not lift his hand. Though he’s always had the tendency to be carved by the expectations of others, he won’t celebrate this. He remembers this mood. High school. Homecoming. The radio says stay safe out there, but the body politic says be aggressive, B-E aggressive.
Vargas rolls out plenty slow, the caboose of the train, steering with his elbows while he eats his nightly cup of chocolate pudding. He regards himself as some kind of sage or oracle, and Whit supposes anyone who’s been patrolling so long without being promoted out of it has to. He waxes his mustache, not with a hipster twirl but into a fat black slug that overfills the entire upper lip. Somehow he never gets his pudding in it, which does indeed feel like a mystical power. Vargas also thinks there’s power in moving slowly. Whit is not sure there’s power in anything the force does. But other times he thinks every one of his actions is a wasted act of power: resting a hand on a holster, speeding down an empty night street, or even stopping on a busy sidewalk to double-knot a loosened shoelace.
When the cars come out of the lot, they split left and right into two trails, and from there into smaller and smaller groups until finally he and Vargas are alone headed southwest on International. You can smell the canal and the marshy coastline a few blocks away. The smell travels farther at night, a stink of plant matter ripening in still water. A few blocks more and they’re in what Vargas calls Zombieland: weak, irregular streetlamps illuminating now and then the dead souls pushing shopping carts full of obsolete VCRs, or walking that slow junkie waltz with the whole body rocking. Then there are the groups, the gangs, three or four or five teens walking abreast in the street, enlarged by their oversize athletic apparel. If there’s a pipe being passed or a gun tucked in the back of a belt, or anything else citable, Vargas likes to startle them with the lights and siren and watch them scurry, he says, like bugs.
Whit’s foot nudges his satchel, heavy with two fat books of practice questions.
“You know what the people who live here call it?” he asks Vargas. This would have been a good retort if he’d said it months ago, when Vargas had first claimed the naming rights. He’s thought of the word often since, but not until tonight has it seemed important to point out. Vargas raises his eyebrows, waiting to be amused.
“Home,” he says.
“Not as catchy.”
They pass a bum toting an out-of-season Christmas tree over his shoulder, nearly dragging a soggy-hipped basset hound behind him; a ten-year-old weaving down the street on a bicycle with a basket full of groceries; a donut shop they both choose not to mention tonight, the only lit storefront on an avenue composed of security-gated laundries, vacuum repair shops, ethnic groceries, and massage brothels.