Part 8 (1/2)

I'm growing more desperate. I'm actually contemplating telling Ellen everything. I'll tell her to avoid the DA and large men with cell phones in their ears. Maybe she could inspect my photos. She's the expert. She'd be able to tease and wiggle something out of the pictures, something I'm not seeing, or at least tell me when the photos were shot, how old they are.

She gets up from the kitchen table. Her chair's legs argue with the hardwood floors. ”There's a picture I want to show you.”

”Anyone who had the under on five-minutes-before-the-picture-tour is a winner,” I say.

”Don't be a jerk. Come on. It's in the living room.”

We walk through the dining room, past the collection of little bits of history, someone else's lost moments. All those forgotten eyes are staring at me, a houseful of Mona Lisas giving me the eye. Christ, I'm a mess. I need some sleep. Some real sleep.

Living room. We walk to one of the front windows. She plucks a photo from the windowsill. She says, ”It's the only one I could find with both of them in it,” and hands it to me.

Three preteen kids sit on the front stoop of an apartment building, presumably from the Harbor Point projects. It's summer in Southie. The boys have buzz cuts and gaps in their smiles and skinned knees. They all wear white socks and dark-colored sneakers, shoelaces with floppy loops.

The kid in the middle is the biggest, and he has his arms wrapped roughly around the necks of the other two boys. The kid on the right has his head craned away, trying to break out of the hug turned headlock. The kid on the left has his rabbit ears out but didn't get his hand up over his friend quick enough. The one trying to break away is my father, Tim.

I say, ”I've probably seen this a hundred times but never really looked at it. That's Tim there, right?”

”That's him. He was a cutie.” Ellen is talking about Tim. A Halley's Comet rare occurrence. ”You looked just like him when you were a kid.”

That's not true. I looked more like Ellen. Now I look like n.o.body.

Tim has dark brown hair, almost black. The other two kids have much lighter whiffle stubble and skin. I say, ”So that's DA Times in the middle, right?”

”Yup.”

Smack in the middle. The ringleader. The hierarchy of neighborhood authority is clear. The other two boys might as well have deputy badges on their T-s.h.i.+rts. Even back then he had his two goons.

The Tim in the picture, the kid so obviously owned by Times, does not jibe with the Tim of my dreams. Tim is a large, confident man in my dreams who can take care of himself and everyone else, especially the kid me, maybe even the narcoleptic me.

I'm embarra.s.sed for this Tim. This is like seeing him with his pants down. This is like finding him sitting and crying in a room by himself. I don't want any part of this Tim, the Tim that DA Times obviously still remembers, given his strong-arm tactics with me.

I say, ”Who's the third kid?”

Ellen says, ”Brendan Sullivan. For a while there, those boys were never apart. They were practically brothers.”

My stomach fills with mutant-sized b.u.t.terflies. Their wings cut and slash my stomach. Neurons and synapses sputter and fire, and I can actually feel the electricity my body generates amping too high, pumping out too much wattage too soon, and the circuit breaker flips, shutting me off and down. Not a blackout, though. This is worse. I'll be awake and I'll know what's going on. This is cataplexy.

I crumble toward the floor, my head pitching forward and into Ellen's legs. She falls back into the window and sits on the sill, knocking pictures to the floor. I'm going to join them. Nothing works except my thoughts. I can't move or speak. My bulk slides down her legs and I land facedown, my nose pinned against the frame of a picture.

Ellen isn't panicking; she's seen this before. She says, ”Are you all right, Mark?” repeatedly, a mantra, something to help her through my attack.

I'm not all right. I'm paralyzed. Maybe this time I won't recover. I'll be stuck like this forever, lying in Ellen's bungalow, facedown, on a photo.

She lifts my head and shoulders off the ground. One of the pictures below my face is of an old guy in a bait-and-tackle shop. I have no idea who it is or if I'm supposed to know. He's likely someone she picked up antiquing. He's been collected by Ellen. He wears a dark-colored winter hat, a turtleneck stretched tight across his chest, suspenders, and hip waders. Maybe he's going clamming, or he already went. He's looking at the camera, looking at me, and holding up something, some bit of unidentifiable fis.h.i.+ng gear. It's pointed toward his temple, and from my p.r.o.ne vantage point it looks like a gun. The other picture is the one of my father, DA Times, and Brendan Sullivan, and I can't look at it without new, cresting waves of panic cras.h.i.+ng. I'm in big trouble.

Ellen kicks the pictures away and rolls me onto my back. She feels my cheeks and snaps her fingers in front of my eyes. I see them and hear them, but I can't do anything about them.

All I can do is lie here until the circuits cool and I reboot. Thinking about Tackle Man might help. Why not? He's a ghost, and he can't hurt me or Ellen.

Tim Genevich or Billy Times or Brendan Sullivan, on the other hand? They can hurt us, and they are here now, in the bungalow and in my case.

TWENTY-ONE.

Recovery. I'm sitting in the rocking chair, holding the same cup of tea I left in the kitchen. It's warm. Maybe Ellen stirred mine counterclockwise. I hope she used a spoon.

I say, ”Can I see that picture of Tim again?” My voice is a cicada's first call after its seventeen-year slumber. After cicadas wake up, they live for only a day or two and then are usually eaten by something.

Ellen sits on the wicker couch with the picture pressed into her lap, protecting it from disaster. She can't protect them. She nods and hands it to me.

I get another good look at the three friends. Tim is part of the case. He has to be. He's why Sullivan sent me the pictures. Times is why Sullivan didn't want me to show the pictures to anyone without finding the it first, and yeah, I screwed up that part, just a wee bit. I owe it to Sullivan to see this thing through to the bitter end, probably my own bitter end. I'm going to keep swinging, keep fighting those windmills.

I say, ”When did you meet Tim?” I wiggle my toes as a rea.s.surance. For the moment, I'm back behind the controls.

Ellen and I are going to chat about Tim and the boys tonight. We never talk about Tim. He's never been the elephant in our room. He's always been bigger.

Ellen smiles. The smile is lost and far away, lips unsure of their positions. She says, ”When he was twelve. Tim and his friends hung around Kelleys on Castle Island, bugging me for free ice cream. I only gave it to Tim. He wasn't as obnoxious as the other two, which wasn't saying much. The three of them were such pains in the a.s.s back then. Hard to believe Billy became a DA.”

”Can't disagree with you there.” I look at the picture and focus on the Brendan Sullivan kid. Never mind Tackle Man, here's the real ghost-or, at least, the latest model. ”These guys all lived in Harbor Point together, right?”

”That's right.” Ellen isn't looking at me. Her arms are wound tightly around her chest, a life jacket of arms. I'm interviewing a hostile witness.

I say, ”That was a rough neighborhood, right?”

”Roughest in Southie. It's where Whitey Bulger and his boys got their start.”

Whitey Bulger. Not crazy about hearing Boston's most notorious-and still on the lam-gangster name getting dropped. I'm not crazy about any of this. Especially since the early-to-mid-seventies time line for Bulger's rise coincides with Tim's teen days. I say, ”Did Tim know Whitey at all?”

”Everyone knew of Whitey back then, but no, Tim never talked or bragged about knowing him. Billy, though, he would talk big to all us neighborhood kids, stuff about him helping out and doing little jobs for Bulger. Tim always told me he just liked to talk. He probably hasn't changed a bit,” Ellen says, and laughs, but the laugh is sad. It has pity for everyone in it, including herself. She sits on the edge of the couch. She might fall off. She wants the picture back. She's afraid of what I might do to it.

I say, ”Was Times really all talk? He wasn't connected at all to Bulger? You know that for sure?”

To her credit, Ellen thinks about it. She doesn't give me the quick, pat answer. ”Yes, I'm sure,” she says. ”There's no way he messed around with Bulger. Tim would've told me. What, you think Billy Times is dirty?” Ellen scowls at me, the idea apparently less believable to her than the shooter on the gra.s.sy knoll.

”No. I don't think anything like that.”

Whitey Bulger took over the Winter Hill Gang in the mid-to-late seventies. He was smart. He didn't sell the drugs or make the loans or bankroll the bookies. He charged the local urban entrepreneurial types a Bulger fee to stay in business. He later took advantage of FBI protection and contacts to get away with everything, including murder, for decades. The Whitey Bulger name still echoes in South Boston. He's our bogeyman, which means we all know his stories.

This isn't going where I wanted it to. This isn't about Bulger. Ellen still isn't giving me any real information about Tim and his friends.

Then this question bubbles up out of nowhere. I don't like it. The answer might hurt. I say, ”Wait a minute. Was this picture taken before you met Tim?”