At Risk

3

Win looks up and down the street, watching people moving with purpose along sidewalks, watching cars drive by, water spitting out from the tires, watching Lamont drive off.

He walks toward the Square, where the cafés and coffee shops are crowded despite the weather, and he ducks into Peet’s and squeezes between people, mostly students, the privileged and self-consumed. When he orders a latte, the girl behind the counter gawks so openly at him, her face turns red. He’s used to it, usually is somewhat flattered, amused, but not tonight. He can’t stop thinking about Lamont and the way she makes him feel about himself.

He carries his latte through Harvard Square, where the Red Line train comes in and most people traveling on it aren’t enrolled at Harvard, maybe don’t even know that Harvard isn’t just the local college. He loiters on the sidewalk along John F. Kennedy Street, squinting at oncoming headlights, and the rain slashing the bright lights reminds him of pencil marks, of childish drawings of falling rain, like the ones he used to draw when he was a boy, when he drew something besides crime scenes and ugly conclusions about people.

“Tremont and Broadway,” he says as he climbs into a cab, carefully setting the gym bag on the vinyl bench seat.

The driver is the shape of a head talking without turning around, a Middle Eastern accent.

“Tray-mond? Where?”

“Tre-mont and Broad-way, you can drop me off on the corn-er. You don’t know the way, you can stop and I’m getting out.”

“Tray-mont. Is close to where?”

“In-man Square,” he says loudly. “Head that way. You can’t find it, I’ll walk and you don’t get paid.”

The driver stomps on the brake. He turns around, his dark face and dark eyes glowering at him.

“You don’t pay, you get out!”

“You see this?” Win snatches out his wallet, shoves his Massachusetts State Police shield closer to the driver’s face. “You want tickets the rest of your life? Your inspection sticker’s expired. You realize that? One of your taillights is burned out. You aware of that? Just take me to Broadway. Think you can find the damn City Hall Annex? I’ll direct you from there.”

They ride in silence. Win sits in back, his hands clenched in his lap because he just had dinner with Monique Lamont, who’s running for governor and oddly expects him to make Governor Crawley, who’s running for reelection, look good so she’ll look good, the two of them looking good when they run against each other. Politics. Christ. As if either one of them really cares about some murdered old lady down in the boonies of Tennessee. He gets more resentful by the moment as he sits in the dark and the taxi driver drives, having no idea where he’s going unless Win tells him.

“That’s Tremont there, take a right,” Win finally says, pointing. “Just up there on the left. Okay, you can let me out here.”

The house pains him every time he sees it, two-story, paint-peeled wood siding that is overgrown with ivy. Like the woman who lives inside, Win’s family home has seen nothing but bad times for the last fifty years. He climbs out of the cab and hears the chiming of wind chimes in the dark backyard. He sets his latte on the taxi’s roof, digs in a pocket, and throws a crumpled ten-dollar bill through the driver’s window.

“Hey! It’s twelve dollars!”

“Hey! Get a GPS,” he says as the wind chimes play their magical, airy music, as the taxi speeds off and the latte slides off the roof and pops open on the road, and milky coffee streams over the black pavement, and the chimes sweetly chime as if excited to see him.

The thick, moist air stirs and sweet, light chimes sound from the shadows and the trees, from doors and windows he can’t see, chimes sound from everywhere because his grandmother believes chimes should chime all the time to ward off bad spirits, and he’s never said, Well if it really works, then how do you explain our lives? He digs a key out of his pocket and unlocks the front door, pushes it open.

“Nana? It’s me,” he calls out.

Inside the foyer are the same family photographs and paintings of Jesus and crucifixes crowded over the horsehair plaster, all dusty. He shuts the door, locks it, sets his keys on an old oak table that he’s looked at most of his life.

“Nana?”

The TV is on in the living room, turned up high, sirens screaming, Nana and her cop shows. The volume seems higher since he was here last, maybe because he’s gotten used to quiet. Anxiety touches him as he follows the sound to the living room where nothing has changed since he was a boy except that Nana continues to accumulate crystals and stones and statues of cats and dragons and Saint Michael the Archangel and magical wreaths and bundles of herbs and incense, hundreds of all of it everywhere.

“Oh!” she exclaims when the sound of him finally jettisons her out of some Hill Street Blues rerun.

“Didn’t mean to startle you.” He smiles, goes to the couch, and kisses her cheek.

“My darling,” she says, clasping his hands.

He picks up the remote control from a table covered with more crystals and magical trinkets and stones and her deck of tarot cards. He turns off the TV and makes his usual assessment. Nana looks all right, her dark eyes alert and bright in her sharp-featured face, a face very smooth for her age, beautiful once, her long, white hair piled on top of her head. She’s wearing her usual silver jewelry, bracelets practically up to her elbows, and rings and necklaces, and the blaze-orange UT football sweatshirt he sent her a few weeks ago. She never fails to put on something he gave her when she knows she’ll see him. She always seems to know. He doesn’t have to tell her.

“You didn’t have your alarm on,” he says, opening his gym bag, setting jars of sourwood honey, barbecue sauce, and bread-and-butter pickles on the coffee table.

“I have my wind chimes, darling.”

It occurs to him that he left the bottle of bourbon in the faculty club cloakroom. He didn’t remember, and Lamont didn’t notice that he didn’t have it when they left. That figures.

“What did you bring me?” Nana is asking.

“I don’t pay the alarm company all that money for wind chimes. Some local stuff, made right there in Tennessee. If you’d rather have moonshine, I’ll bring that next time,” he teases, settling in a worn-out chair she keeps covered in a purple afghan one of her clients crocheted for her a few years back.

She picks up her cards and says, “What’s this about money?”

“Money?” He frowns. “Now don’t go doing your juju on me, Nana.”

“Something about money. You were just doing something that had to do with money.”

He thinks of “Money” Monique Lamont.

“That boss lady of yours, I suppose.” She slowly shuffles through her cards, her way of having a conversation, and she places a moon card next to her on the couch. “You watch out for that one. Illusions and madness or poetry and visions. You get to choose.”

“How are you feeling? You eating something besides whatever people bring you?”

People give her food for readings, give her all sorts of things, whatever they can afford.

She places another card faceup on the sofa, this one a robed man carrying a lantern, and the rain has picked up again, sounds like a drumroll, tree branches scraping against window glass, wind chimes a distant, frantic clanging.

“What did she want with you?” his grandmother says. “That’s who you were with tonight.”

“Nothing for you to worry about. The good thing is, I get to see you.”

“She keeps things hidden behind a curtain, very troublesome things, this high priestess in your life.” She turns another card faceup, this one the colorful image of a man hanging by one foot from a tree, coins falling out of his pockets.

“Nana.” He sighs. “She’s the DA, a politician. She’s not a high priestess and I don’t consider her in my life.”

“Oh, she’s in it, all right,” his grandmother says, looking keenly at him. “There’s someone else. I’m seeing a man in scarlet. Ha! That one goes in the freezer right away!”

His grandmother’s way of taking care of destructive people is to write their names or descriptions on scraps of paper and tuck them in the freezer. Clients pay good money to have her consign their enemies to her old Frigidaire, and the last time he checked, her freezer looked like the inside of a paper-shredder basket. Win’s phone vibrates and he removes it from his jacket pocket, looks at the display, the number blocked.

“Excuse me,” he says, getting up, moving closer to a window, rain flailing the glass.

“Is this Winston Garano?” a man asks in a voice that is obviously disguised, a really bad fake accent that almost sounds British.

“Who wants to know?”

“I think you might want to have a coffee with me, Davis Square, the Diesel Café, where all the freaks and fags hang out. It’s open late.”

“Let’s start with you telling me who you are.”

He watches his grandmother shuffle through more tarot cards, placing them faceup on the table, thoughtful and at ease with them as if they are old friends.

“Not over the phone,” the man says.

The murdered old woman suddenly enters Win’s mind. He imagines her purplish-blue swollen face, the huge, dark clots on the underside of her scalp, and the holes punched into her skull, bits of bone driven into her brain. He imagines her pitiful, brutalized body on a cold steel autopsy table, doesn’t know why he’s suddenly thinking about her, tries to push her away.

“I don’t meet strangers for coffee when they don’t tell me who they are or what they want,” he says into the phone.

“Vivian Finlay ring a bell? I’m pretty sure you want to talk to me.”

“I’m not seeing any reason at all why I should talk to you,” Win says as his grandmother sits calmly on the sofa, going through cards, placing another one faceup, this one red and white with a pentacle and a sword.

“Midnight. Be there.” The man ends the call.

“Nana, I’ve got to go out for a while,” Win says, pocketing his phone, hesitating by the rain-splattered window, getting one of his feelings, the wind chimes a discordant banging.

“Watch out for that one,” she says, picking another card.

“Your car running?”

Sometimes she forgets to put gas in it, and not even divine intervention keeps the engine from quitting.

“Was last time I drove it. Who’s the man in scarlet? You find that out, you tell me. You pay attention to the numbers.”

“What numbers?”

“The ones coming up. Pay attention.”

“Keep your doors locked, Nana,” he says. “I’m setting the alarm.”

Her 1989 Buick with its peeling vinyl top and rainbow bumper stickers and beaded dream catcher hanging from the rearview mirror is parked behind the house beneath the basketball hoop that’s been rusting on its pole since he was a boy. The engine resists, finally gives itself up, and he backs all the way out to the street because there is no room to turn around. His headlights flash in the eyes of a dog wandering along the roadside.

“Oh for God’s sake,” Win says loudly as he stops the car and gets out.

“Miss Dog, what’cha doing out here, girl?” he says to the poor, wet dog. “Come here. It’s me, come on, come on, that’s a good girl.”

Miss Dog, part beagle, part shepherd, part deaf, part blind, a name as stupid as her owner, creeps forward, sniffs Win’s hand, remembers him, wags her tail. He strokes her wet, dirty fur, picks her up, and puts her in the front seat, massaging her neck as he drives her to a run-down house two blocks away. He carries her to the front door, bangs on it for a long time.

Finally, the woman inside yells, “Who is it?”

“I’ve got Miss Dog again!” Win yells back to her.

The door opens, the ugly, fat woman on the other side wearing a shapeless pink robe, has no bottom teeth, stinks like cigarettes. She turns on the porch light, blinks in the glare, looks past him to Nana’s Buick parked on the street, never seems to remember the car or him. Win gently puts down Miss Dog and she darts inside the house, gets away from the ungrateful sloth as fast as she can.

“I told you, she’s going to get hit by a car,” Win warns. “What’s the matter with you? This is how many times I’ve had to bring her home because she’s wandering the damn street?”

“What am I supposed to do. I let her out to potty, she doesn’t come back. Then he came over tonight, left the door open, not that he’s supposed to be here. You can blame him. Kicks at her, mean as a snake, leaves the door open on purpose so she’ll get out because that stupid dog gets killed it will break Suzy’s heart.”

“Who’s he?”

“My damn son-in-law the police keep arresting.”

Win thinks he might know who she’s talking about, has seen him in the area, drives a white pickup.

“And you let him on the property?” Win says severely to her.

“Just try to stop him. He ain’t afraid of no one, nohow. It’s not me who’s got the restraining order.”

“You call the cops when he showed up earlier?”

“No point in it.”

Through the open door, Win can see Miss Dog flat on the floor, cowering under a chair.

“How about I buy her from you,” Win says.

“There’s no amount of money,” she retorts. “I love that dog.”

“I’ll give you fifty dollars.”

“Can’t put a price on love,” she wavers.

“Sixty,” he says, and that’s all the cash he’s got, his checkbook in Knoxville.

“No sir”—she’s thinking hard about it—“my love for her’s worth a whole lot more than that.”