The Summer Job Read online

  The girl didn’t acknowledge his request to leave, just kept dancing and smiling her half-childish, half-suggestive smile. Hugh glanced behind her to check on Hannah, craning his neck to see past the rest of the partygoers.

  The bearded boy swung an elbow out at another young man, a motion that served both as a dance move and to keep the smaller boy from trying to cut in between him and Hannah. He was territorial. He’d taken a stranger’s wife in hand and he wasn’t letting her go.

  Hugh shook his thumbs free of the girl’s grip, her fingernails scrapping his skin raw.

  “Hey,” she said, pouting like a favorite toy had been taken away.

  With the bearded boy occupied with Hannah, no one had been feeding the flames, but still the bonfire raged higher. Tendrils of fire licked the low-hanging branches, threatening to ignite the whole dry forest.

  Hugh jostled his way to Hannah, taking the outside track, trying to keep on the far side of the bonfire, not wanting to feel the heat any more than he already could. He still wore his jacket, but he didn’t need it. His lower back was drenched in sweat.

  “Excuse me,” Hugh said, physically parting two youths that didn’t want to let him pass. With every step the mood became more antagonistic and Hannah seemed to be swept farther out of reach, still in the pantomime of dance with the bearded boy, but Hugh could see that her feet were no longer touching the ground.

  The boy had his hand on her ass, was picking her up by the pelvis, his large hand like a bicycle seat.

  “Put her down now,” Hugh shouted. That changed everything.

  Every eye was on him, every shit-eating smile turned towards him. He was painfully aware of the sweat dribbling down his chin, the noxious lemon-booze stink oozing out of his mouth.

  Like magic, the bearded boy began to lower Hannah. When her feet were just a few inches from the ground he released his grip on her ass, letting her slip down to the ground.

  At first Hugh though she’d passed out, the drinks and the exhaustion of the day conspiring to black her out.

  But then he saw the bearded boy’s other hand. His arm was slick up to the elbow, oily black in the firelight. He held a small knife, blood dripping down the handle.

  “What have you done?” Hugh screamed, trying to close the distance between them, trying to run to where Hannah lay, but finding himself glued in place by the rest of the boys and girls.

  Hugh bucked against them, throwing wild, helpless punches. He caught the mousey girl in the mouth with the back of his left hand, feeling her teeth mash against her plump lips. Their young muscles held him firm, giving up a bit of elasticity but redoubling their hold as he struck out.

  The music was switched off now. The only sound was the crack of the firelight and the shuffle of shoes against dirt as Hugh’s captors repositioned themselves. Twigs snapped as the ones that weren’t holding him pressed in, forming a circle that stopped at Hannah’s body.

  The bearded boy’s eyes gleamed in the firelight as he held his bloody hand out in front of Hugh’s face. He didn’t smile, even when everyone around him did. For the bearded boy this was a serious matter.

  “Christ, Jesus Christ!” Hugh said. He was not a religious man, but it was the only exclamation that fit. The words did nothing to abate the bearded boy’s approach.

  Raising the knife, the boy placed one fat thumb against the flat of the blade and scrapped away the blood. Hugh could see the metallic gleam of the knife, see the semi-coagulated accretion on the boy’s thumb.

  Sheathing the knife in his jeans pocket, the bearded boy raised the bloody thumb and kissed it lightly. The kiss left a small dot of red in the middle of the boy’s mouth. He made a mark in the air with the thumb and made some sounds deep in his throat.

  All around them the boys and girls made a similar sound, a primal amen to echo the boy.

  The boy was going to paint the blood on Hugh. “Fuck you,” he shouted and wriggled against them. Fingers crawled out of the darkness, callused palms covered over his ears, pinning his head in place.

  The boy pressed Hannah’s warm blood to one cheek and then the other. Hugh tried his best to scream but they held his jaw shut. The boy finished up by pressing his thumb to Hugh’s forehead, leaving a fat, warm droplet like it was Ash Wednesday in hell.

  Taking a step back, the boy lowered his hands to his sides and waited.

  “Toss him to the flames,” Hugh heard Davey’s voice boom. Whether Davey’s long, lanky body was lost somewhere behind him or beyond the crowd that held him down, Hugh couldn’t tell.

  The hands hoisted him up onto his back and into the air. In the instant before facing treetops, Hugh grabbed one last look at Hannah. She lay with her back against the brambles and dead leaves that coated the forest floor, her eyes half open, legs splayed in the firelight. She looked like a child’s abandoned toy.

  Beneath him, his pallbearers laughed and joked and flirted. They swung him sideways, pointing his head forward, a compass for the flames. Behind him fingers stretched forward to support his head. They all wanted to lay hands on the crowd-surfing rock star.

  Upside down, the flames of the bonfire didn’t look like they were stretching to heaven, but instead like they were pressing up against the sky, their propulsive force trying to send all of the woods down deeper into the earth.

  “Don’t do this,” Hugh said. It was too late, though. The kids at his feet were heaving him up and over, flipping him end over end onto the flames.

  Hugh Mayland’s head bounced off a knot on one of the larger logs, dulling his mind as he inhaled the smoke of his own flesh but not dulling the pain.

  Part One

  Reason to Believe

  Chapter One

  Her name was Silverfish.

  At least that was her name in high school, back when she’d bleached her hair platinum blonde, shaped it into a Mohawk and dated a guy who liked to be called Rott.

  He spelled it with two T’s.

  She had cooled down on that stuff in college, cut down on the video games and eased off the punk rock act a little. Not too much—she’d still spit in your drink if you said anything untoward about The Misfits. Only the Danzig-era Misfits, though.

  Her name was Claire and she waited tables. She did it professionally, now that she was out of school.

  At least she did when there were patrons, which was rare on a Wednesday afternoon shift.

  The Mohawk was gone and nowadays her hair was more red than it was anything else. She was a natural redhead, kinda. That was what most people call the color, but it was really more of a chestnut brown with a hint of red.

  Guys that like redheads took to her, but that wasn’t anything to be proud of.

  Claire kept a stripe of platinum shooting out of her crown, where she could brush over it if need-be. She bleached the roots weekly, preserving the last vestige of Silverfish in a sea of Claire.

  The more we try to change about our lives, the harder some things cling. Usually the most embarrassing aspects.

  Just as she began to finish this thought, the service bell dinged from the kitchen.

  The bell usually signaled that an order was up. But there couldn’t have been an order because there was not a single patron interested in eating.

  There was Tommy and Dale at the bar, but neither of them had been able to keep down solid food since before the Sox won it all in ’04.

  “The bell is a privilege, not a right. Don’t make me take it away,” she said, bellying up to the service window. Window boxed there, his tattooed arms resting under the heat lamps, was Mickey.

  Mickey was not the kind of guy you wanted touching your food. Claire knew this because they’d been dating for the last four years. Move your amps? Sure. Score you weed with the bouncer he went to high school with? Definitely. Rearrange the crispy chicken on your Crispy Chicken Caesar Salad? No, thank you.

  “Want to hit the Middle East tonight?” Mickey asked, the sweat from his forearms fogging up the stainless steel countertops.

>   “I thought it was that place in Allston tonight. For your own show?”

  “That manager is a prick. Plus I think he’s a fucking Nazi. We’re not playing there again. Not gonna send the foot traffic their way.” This was a circuitous, indignant way of saying that Mickey’s band had been fired.

  Mickey was not only the jewel of the kitchen staff at the non-franchise Applebee’s-level joint Sunrise Cantina, but he was also the bass player for The Nun Puppets.

  For close to a decade The Nun Puppets had been kicking around Boston, Cambridge and Allston. Occasionally they’d catch a club gig where they could play their own stuff, but they made most of their money playing covers at the bars in the South End.

  They weren’t terrible on the nights they actually played, but most nights ended with Mickey and his drunken bandmates arguing with management because they wouldn’t play the set list they agreed to. For the Nun Puppets, covering “Jack and Diane” was an unlivable sin, but plagiarizing Black Flag was a God-given right.

  Mickey hit the bell again. “Well, Middle East or not?” he asked.

  She looked at him, the way she got to see him sometimes when she had an abnormally clear head. Or when he was being a particularly abrasive asshole.

  His black pompadour had sagged in the heat of the kitchen, and the droplets of sweat on his brow were getting caught in the crags of his face. He was older than her, five years older. He had acne scars and bad tattoos. He owned a motorcycle cut, but no bike.

  Mickey seemed like a good idea during her junior year, but so did a liberal arts degree.

  “I think I’m going to stay in tonight. You have fun,” she said, leaning into the window and giving him a peck on the cheek. She felt the muscles of his face stiffening into a frown under her lips. His sweat tasted like pot smoke and fryer oil.

  Mickey gave a nearly inaudible sigh and dragged his forearms off the countertops. This was the start of a pout session that would probably last into next week.

  The rest of her shift was two orders of nachos, a plate of jalapeño poppers, six dirty pitchers of beer and too many hurt, furrowed glances from Mickey to count.

  *

  Claire stripped her Sunrise Cantina T-shirt off and pulled her own blouse from the backpack. She stood behind the service door, only mildly aware that anyone who walked past the alleyway was getting a free show. After she’d slipped civilian clothes over her black bra and pale skin, she tossed her bag into the back room of the restaurant and hit the streets.

  It was the last week of May: that magic tipping point when traveling in Boston once again became enjoyable. In the last week of May the streets were cleared of students and it was possible to move all the way into a T car.

  The sun was struggling to find a foothold in the clouds, but it was warm enough to indicate that the seasons were changing. Instead of catching a train, Claire decided to walk.

  She cut across the Commons diagonally, moving away from downtown and towards Back Bay. If nothing else, the park offered fantastic people watching. College kids played various intramural sports; the adults went about their business, trying not to make eye contact with the musicians playing for change; and the drunks peeled off their clothes and lay out in the sun, basking themselves like chemically dependent lizards.

  The park was so enjoyable that she was one block beyond it before her thoughts circled back to what she needed to do about Mickey. She turned down Newbury, hoping that the window shopping and deluge of irredeemable assholes would keep her mind off the subject.

  It didn’t.

  Before she hit Copley, she’d realized that the end of Mickey and Silverfish had been a long time coming.

  He acted like a child. He had always been like that, but when their relationship was beginning these qualities were somehow endearing.

  For the first two years Mickey’s exuberance for his music (and for Silverfish) was unstoppable, maybe a bit doe eyed, but still infectious. He was an artist, an artist who surprised her with cheap presents and talked about their sunglass-bright future.

  But the bulb had dimmed. Maybe that wasn’t it. Not so much dimmed, but maybe it had been pointed in the wrong direction the whole time and Claire was just now realizing it.

  The Nun Puppets weren’t excruciating, but they would never be famous. The members were never quitting their nine-to-fives. Eleven-to-six in Mickey’s case, with three unsanctioned smoke breaks.

  “Do you have a moment for women’s rights?” A voice asked, pulling her out of her thoughts.

  Shit. She’d run into one of those college kids with a vest and a clipboard who looked to shake down passersby for charitable donations. Usually she was better at avoiding them, but she’d drifted too close to this one while deep in internal strife.

  “Sorry, another time,” Claire said, keeping her eyes down. Don’t look at them, don’t engage them, she told herself.

  “Wait a second,” the voice called back, but Claire kept ahead. This one was really desperate, Claire had time to think before a hand clamped down on her shoulder and tugged her around.

  “What the fuck is your prob—” Claire screamed and stopped herself. “Allison?”

  “Ta-da!” Allison said, seemingly oblivious to the fact they had now created quite a scene out in front of Marc Jacobs.

  “What are you doing?” Claire almost added “outside of the apartment” but thought better of it at the last moment. Anything that kept her roommate from sitting around all day and creating more dirty dishes was a gift that ought to be cherished.

  “I got my old job back!” Allison waved a hand from the top of her dirty blonde ringlets to the soles of her Kate Spades, showing off her Planned Parenthood vest and accompanying clipboard.

  “Job” was probably an overgenerous term to use, but Claire couldn’t talk from inside her glass house that reeked of curly fries.

  Allison kept her hand outstretched, waiting a moment for Claire to acknowledge this clearly earth-shattering moment.

  “Congratulations!” Claire contorted her face into something like joy, at least enough in the ballpark to get Allison to buy it. Allison bought most things.

  Allison had been Claire’s roommate and best girlfriend since freshman year. She’d worked for various organizations in college as a way to boost her resume. She didn’t need the money.

  The most precise way of describing Allison would be that she was, and still is, a bright, beautiful, perky, lovable fucking asshole.

  If the computer in the housing office had not placed Claire and Allison together freshman year, they never would have been friends. They probably never would have spoken to each other. But the computer had, thus fusing the pair into something that CBS would turn into an edgy version of The Odd Couple, but in real life more closely resembled a whirling ball of love and hate.

  “What are you doing on the Newb?” Allison asked, turning Newbury Street into “the Newb”. This was one of her trademark maneuvers: abbreviating words that didn’t have or need abbreviations.

  “Just walking home from work. I needed the fresh air.”

  “Is everything okay? What’s wrong, babykins?” Allison had her hand on Claire’s shoulder, already trying to tangle her up in some kind of calming BFF embrace.

  “Nothing’s wrong. I’m fine. You should get back to work,” Claire said. As insensitive as Allison could be as a roommate, she was hypersensitive to drama. Despite being a leggy, gorgeous blonde, she was an absolute pig, rooting for truffles when it came to gossip.

  “I’m not going anywhere until you tell me,” Allison took a step closer to the curb and put her clipboard facedown on the hood of someone’s Beamer. She stood with her arms crossed and stared at Claire.

  Allison was going to find out sooner or later. “Mickey and I are breaking up.”

  “Omigod! Excellent!”

  “Jesus, at least feel conflicted about it,” Claire said, looking down at her shoes, comparing her Converse high-tops to Allison’s tasteful heels.

  “Why should
I? The guy’s a loser. How did it happen? Did it happen just now? Tell me everything. Did he cry?”

  “Not now,” Claire said.

  “Oh honey, did you cry?” Allison was wrapped around her now, trying her damnedest to push out a sympathetic tear of her own. People were starting to stare, Allison’s blue-vested coworkers included.

  “Cut it out, will you.” Claire squirmed out of Allison’s grip, the taller girl’s breasts smooshing into her face as she struggled.

  “Not until you tell me, tell me!” Allison laughed and held on to Claire tighter. Allie was a girl of contradictions. Her dialect was the lowest of vapid daddy’s-credit-card slang, but she was still willing to engage in a tickle fight in the middle of a busy sidewalk, free of embarrassment.

  “I will, I will,” she said. The blonde loosened her grip and Claire slipped out, taking a defensive step back.

  “So,” Allison said, expectantly.

  “You’ve got work to do.” Claire pointed back to the other girl with the donations clipboard. These charities and organizations all used the same trick: have the volunteers work in pairs so they were harder to ignore.

  “Hey, Kim,” Allison yelled at the other girl, beckoning her over. She was young, maybe eighteen or nineteen, a freshman at BU or Northeastern. As she came closer Claire could see that her clothes under the vest had that distinct white suburban Rastafarian look to them: Berklee. She’d bet her life on it.

  “Kim, I’m going to cut out early today. You can go back home now.”

  “But we’ve still got another hour of canvassing and everyone’s just getting out of work. It’s the most traffic we’ve had all day,” Kim said. Her earnestness was deafening.

  Allison leaned in close to the girl and lowered her voice.

  “Look, I’ve been at this longer than you. Nobody donates. They’ll talk awhile because they think you’re cute, they’ll make excuses about being hard up for cash or not having their checkbook on them, but I’ve only ever had, like, five people give me actual money. A girl like you, you’ll get a lot of business cards, but no money. Go home, Kim.”