Mercy Street(82)

“Have a good one,” the clerk said as she handed back his change.

Back in the truck, he studied his gums in the rearview mirror, the monstrous crater where his tooth had been. The crater was painful to look at, never mind touch.

He thought of the clerk’s plump, white hands. He could go back into the store and ask her to apply it for him. Common sense stopped him. He was still sane enough to understand that it would end badly, that she would probably call the cops.

DRIVING SOOTHED HIM. AS HE CROSSED THE BORDER INTO Massachusetts, the road climbed higher and higher, which surprised him. The northeast quadrant of the country was unfamiliar territory. For thirty years he’d avoided the eastern runs, the unending traffic this side of the Mississippi, a trucker’s prejudice. He had pictured a different landscape entirely—flat and congested, an endless expanse of strip malls and big-box stores, the bleak, unending American sprawl.

Western Massachusetts looked nothing like that. Western Massachusetts, to his astonishment, was beautiful country. On a weekday afternoon there was no traffic to speak of. He passed a slow truck in the right lane, a snowplow with its yellow lights flashing.

Good Christ, it’s April, Victor thought.

At that very moment, the snow started. Grit on the windshield, fine as sugar. The sky and the horizon were the same color, grainy and particulated. The road itself looked whitewashed, coated with a scrim of salt.

The road climbed and climbed. MT. GREYLOCK, HIGHEST POINT IN MASS. A stiff gust of wind took a swipe at his truck.

He passed signs for ski areas, for scenic overlooks. Snow swirled along the icy pavement, hovered mysteriously like steam or spirits. He thought wistfully of the tire chains he hadn’t thought to bring, still hanging from sturdy hooks in Randy’s barn.

The pain was making him perspire. A lick of sweat ran down his back. He wished he’d gotten himself an ice pack, something cold to hold to his jaw.

A skinny deer raced across the highway. Victor hit the brakes and regretted it immediately. His tires skidded crazily.

The road was glazed with invisible ice.

The truck slipped and slid; it could not get purchase. On April first, he’d swapped out his snow tires, as any sane person would do.

Pumping the brakes, he righted himself. The ache had spread to his left ear. Its fingers tightened around his throat. Mercy, he thought. When he reached the destination, Columbia would help him. The thought was nearly too much for him: her hands on his face, her fingers in his mouth.

His jaw pulsed like a second heart.

He thought again of the Orajel package. The baby’s smile was sweet and trusting, as though all his pain had been relieved.

He wished the collapse would come already. He was tired of waiting. If shit was going to hit the fan, he wished it would hit soon. For fifteen years he’d planned and plotted. He hadn’t counted on being old when it happened. An old man alone in the world—wifeless, childless, toothless, and possibly blind.

Mercy.

He gunned the engine up a steep grade that went on forever. As he crested the hill he saw—too late and too close—red taillights in front of him.

The world went white.





Spring





23


Long past the point when such a thing seemed inevitable, the thaw came.

In the last week of April, the final storm of the season gathered moisture over the Caribbean. Here we go again, said the NECN weatherman, looking tired. But this time the predictions were wrong. A high-pressure system pushed the frigid air northward—regifted, like an unwanted Christmas present, from New England to Canada, the land of moose and Tim Hortons and mild good manners. The final monster nor’easter of that godforsaken winter hit Greater Boston as driving rain.

A furious rain, fine as needles. The snow towers cringed and shrank; they softened into hillocks. The hillocks were pounded into oblivion, death by a thousand punctures. The accumulated grit of a wretched season washed into storm drains: road salt, motor oil, antifreeze, the tears of a hundred MBTA drivers. In Kenmore Square the roar was audible, a rushing underground river. Which direction it flowed, where or whether it emptied, no one cared to know.

On the North Shore, the South Shore, the storm surge was epic. Fish-smelling streets ran with salt water. A leveling wind whittled the dunes.

For three days and three nights, the rain kept coming. MBTA trains arrived on time. Parking spaces reappeared as if by magic. Boston returned to its regularly scheduled programming: fierce traffic and workaday surliness. The chip on the shoulder, F-bombs exploding. The crooked grimace, the harangue and complaint.

A hundred and ten inches of snowfall. After plowing 295,000 miles of city streets—twelve times the circumference of the earth—Boston road crews called it a wrap.

The thaw was good news for everyone. Good news for the new governor, sworn into office just before the first nor’easter; good news for mayors and city councilors and selectmen, who’d spent their entire snow removal budgets, and part of next year’s, before the second one hit. Good news for bus drivers, for all drivers. For harried parents who’d burned an entire year’s worth of vacation sitting home with restless kids, who had, in some half-forgotten past life, spent their days in school.

In late May, on the same weekend, the Globe and the Herald ran a photo of the very same snow pile, located at the back corner of a Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot in Billerica—a pile so encrusted with soot and garbage, so many times melted and refrozen, that it had been rendered indestructible.