City on Fire (Danny Ryan, #1)(58)

“It’s not important.”

“What?”

“That he wished it had been him instead of Pat,” Danny says.

“Don’t we all.”

Time doesn’t pass slowly for Danny; it doesn’t pass at all.

He’s awash in memories.

Pat and him eating sugar sandwiches, Pat and him and Jimmy looking at Superman comics, Batman comics, building model cars. One time they were playing in a construction site and they found a rock they thought had gold in it and they thought they were going to be rich and talked for hours about the stuff they were going to buy—cars, new houses for their parents, a private jet—until they had to admit they knew it wasn’t really gold, but they felt sad anyway, and slunk home brokenhearted. Or when an aunt gave Pat a butterfly net and kit for his birthday and they went hunting butterflies and Pat caught a monarch in the net but then didn’t have the heart to kill it, or, a little older, sneaking upstairs to Jimmy’s father’s room, finding Playboys under the bed. Pat behind an old screen door in the upstairs closet pretending he was a priest, hearing their confessions, making sure they made everything up or it would be sacrilege. First confession, first communion, confirmation, Pat taking it all so serious, talked about maybe becoming a priest until he started dating Sheila in high school and then that was that, Danny asked him what happened to the seminary and Pat just said, “Tits.” Pat and Sheila and Jimmy and Angie and him and Terri going out together, out to Rocky Point, down to the shore, over to Newport, one time they went to jai alai and Angie won three hundred dollars and they tried to get her to blow it all at the Black Pearl but she wouldn’t and put it all in the bank or the time they was playing street hockey on a hot July night on a basketball court and this guy had a stick so curved he couldn’t shoot anywhere but up and he took a shot and hit Liam smack in the mouth and Pat dropped his gloves and beat everybody up and they all fought until the cops came and threw them out and then they went and got someone to buy them beer and they sat outside sipping beer and put ice on their bruised hands and laughed and talked about the fight but Pat he was still pissed about the guy’s curved stick until Danny said he heard Peter Moretti had a curved stick too and Pat finally laughed or that time him and Jimmy and Pat got so drunk in high school and squeezed into a phone booth to make prank calls but then got stuck and couldn’t get the door open so they called Sheila to come get them and they were laughing so hard when she came and shook her head and said she should just leave them there it’s what they deserved but she opened the door and they spilled out like tin cans and lay there in the parking lot still laughing and laughing or the first time Pat took Sheila parking down at the beach and the idiot got his car stuck in the sand and had to call Danny and Jimmy to come help push it out before Sheila’s dad found out, Danny remembers these things and tries not to remember Pat’s flayed body in the dirt.

He dreams about it, though, the night before the funeral, the waking hours before they put Pat in the dirt again. In his dream Pat reaches up like Help me pull me up out of here pull me up out of death and Danny, he grabs for him but Pat’s hand falls off in his hand and Danny trudges brokenhearted home and lays the hand on the kitchen counter and tells Terri that’s your brother and there’s no gold.

The funeral is so sad.

Danny can barely make himself get out of bed in the morning, he so much don’t want to face it.

But he goes down to the shore and picks up Marty and Ned, then back to the house for Terri, and they drive out to the cemetery.

And there’s Liam standing there stiff with rage and guilt, Pam beside him knowing people are blaming her, maybe she’s blaming herself, too. And Cassie, sober—surprising, given the situation—and she makes it through the eulogy without crying and says, “He was the best of us and the last.”

Leave it to her to make poetry of it.

Leave it to her to be right.

Danny takes Marty by the elbow and starts to walk him back to the car, to the wake that’s going to be as brutal as the burial. Where they’ll all get drunk and tell maudlin stories about Pat, and Marty will sing old songs. As he’s walking away, Danny notices that Pam is beside him. She looks at him and says, “Pat never said an unkind word to me.”

Danny feels the weight come onto his shoulders, feels autumn turn to winter right there.

Because now they’re without a leader.

Oh, John will still be the boss in name, or Liam might try to pick up the mantle, but that’s never going to happen.

Which leaves me, Danny thinks.

Because there is nobody else.

It started with a sunny day on the beach, he thinks, and ended up with you throwing cold dirt on your best friend’s coffin.

He yearns for summer and sun and dreams of a warm sea.





Part Three

The Last Days of Dogtown


Providence, Rhode Island

March 1987



. . . oblivious, blind, insane, we stationed the monster

fraught with doom on the hallowed heights of Troy.

Virgil

The Aeneid

Book II





Twenty-Four


Providence is a gray city.

Gray skies, gray buildings, gray streets. Gray granite as hard as the New England pilgrims who hacked it out of the quarries to build their City on the Hill. Gray as the pessimism that hangs in the air like the fog.