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Across the bay at the branch of the turbulent Hudson, the Statue of Liberty regarded the harbor. Drenched top to toe in a green-tinted bronze, she held no longer a torch in one hand, but a bird whose talons dug deep into her arms, wings spread in mid-flight and beak tilted towards the sky. Her Greek robes, longer, flowed from her limbs and pooled around her feet, and seemingly bellowed from behind her in the wind, not unlike a pair of wings. Her crown of spiking glory was now instead a wreath of laurel, buds and sprawling leaves carved with the same intricacies of sculpted diamonds. Around her feet there were not ruined chains and handcuffs, but a single discarded whip, broken into crumbled ashes. Her fingertips caressed nothingness in her outstretched hand. This was a world where the architect Bartholdi never met the torch-wielding girl on the streets of France’s revolution in 1851. The statue’s lips were parted as if seeing something on the horizon. Something bright.
Two hundred miles north from the jade-colored silhouette, the night was thick, pitch-black and bleak. The silence held, broken apart occasionally by distant shrieks and drunken hollers from late nighters where Dale Barbara was standing in the corner of the street, suffused in shadowy, half-glistening late-night gloom.
A streetlamp flickered, wavered, spluttered into life, the weak, yellow pools turning the pavement gold and half-shimmering. Down the apartment blocks there were longs back-alleys of clubs and hotel lodgings behind the closed-down shops; the bars and the 7-11s radiated light, spilling out in bright squares onto the dark streets.
It was cold enough for his breath to mist before him, in thin, pale puffs of fine haze.
Barbie was ready to give up and turn when he saw the figure, illuminated in light all the way down the street.
The shadow was flanked by two larger, bulkier silhouettes, in the shop’s light. As he got closer towards them, their voices rising above a murmur, and the familiarity made a prickle run down his spine.
“Breaking… table and bill?”
Barbie stopped. He was too faraway for them to spot him, but he saw them clear as day: Junior Rennie, with his back turned, and the two silhouettes facing him, one large, one smaller. The voice carried down the street, like the faintest, ebbing ripple of a pebble skimmed across water.
Junior’s silhouette tilted his head, and spat. “Fuck off.”
“Now that’s one hell of a pretty story to have told, Vins, don’t you think?”
“You’ve got your mouth to watch, old man.” Junior laughed. “Might wanna quit stuffing those doughnuts last thing at night, ’cause nowhere except hospices likes an old fatty-fatty-two-by-four with a bad ticker.” And then, almost to himself, his voice pinging down the street even in its abrupt quietness: “My dad had that problem. Back in the day.”
The taller man of the pair turned sharply, tipping his head into the light, and Barbie caught a glimpse of curling tufts of red-brown hair, a beak-like nose sitting on a large stout face. Ginger-Head said something too low for him to hear, and the smaller guy beside him sniggered.
Then Junior’s voice again: “You wanna know something before you strut around here trying to make those fuckin’ threats? You don’t want to know.” He sucked in a gulp of breath, and turned his cheek. It gave Barbie the chance to see him, just he pulled his lips a tipsy half-contorted grin. “Last time I broke a kid’s arm I was thirteen. But I bet I could still manage.”
Barbie doubted it. It was until now that he’d registered, in comparison with the two men in front of him, how thin – raggedly thin – Junior was. Junior was roughened around the edges, pushing six foot one, but out of shape. Barbie thought he was even thinner than the Dome-universe’s Junior had been.
If there was a fight coming up, it wasn’t going to be pretty.
He began to make his way down the street.
Barbie stopped two feet behind him and cleared his throat.
Junior cast a look over his shoulder, and froze. He blinked. The kid was dressed in a mangled-looking sweater over a T-shirt, and his hair was a bird-nest mess, his eyes glassy and angry, and the tip of his nose touched with red in the weak light.
“You’ve gotta be fuckin’ kidding me.”
There was a beat of silence. The smaller man– the rattier of the pair – looked up and noticed him. Ratty’s brows furrowed and the top of his lip curled into a leer. “Evening, chum.”
“What the fuck are you doing?” Junior snapped.
“Good one, sonny,” Ginger-Head said. There was a slow, deep flush rising in his large, pasty-colored face. “Lil’ motherfucker. Talk the talk and walk the walk, gonna stand out here all night?”
“Mind explaining to me what the hell’s going on over here?” Barbie asked, quietly.
“Hey, hey,” said the ratty young man beside the large one. He was older than Barbie had thought, at first glance. Perhaps past thirty. “Now where’s this guy come from?”
“Friend of yours?” Ginger-Head asked, jerking his chin in Junior’s direction, and a sudden memory flashed through Barbie’s mind: the pills, pink and blue and glistening, rattling in bottles like dice in a cup.
He reached out and grabbed Junior’s arm. The kid was swaying, and staring at the man opposite in a way that reminded Barbie of Junior in a trance: a full trembling glare, a look of black, unadulterated loathing. It was a child whose favorite toy you just broke.
“No.”
Junior shoved him back, with one shoulder, yanking himself free of his grip.
“You shouldn’t have gotten in my way, big guy,” he said. “Your loss, I’m guessin’.”
“This is one bad goddamn place for a brawl, Rennie.”
“Like fuck it is,” Junior muttered. Slurring it. “Guy needs his clock cleaned. Needs it cleaned good and proper like a chick’s panties after prom night.”
Ginger-Head laughed – bellowed, with the gravel of phlegm in his throat, and there was something in that hoarse laugh Barbie did not like.
“Look, Vinny,” he said over his shoulder. “Told you the fuckin’ kid’s got cheek.” A flicker of brief, brimming anger in the large man’s bloodshot eye. “Kid talks like some saucy-mouthed whore on a bad night.”
Junior bared his teeth. “Talk about your mom right after you fucked her in the shower, more like.”
“Whoa,” Barbie said. He whirled around and put himself between them, both arms raised before Junior could leap for the guy, before the ratty sonofabitch could come at them from the side – so quickly that Junior stumbled backwards, and the older ginger-haired man looked so stunned his fist nearly shot right forward and planted itself against Dale Barbara’s nose.
“Stop it,” Barbie said. A hint of steel creeping into his voice. “Right now. Sort the shit out if there’s anything to sort out, or we’re going.”
“Ain’t gon’ stop you there, mister,” said the ratty younger guy, with a queer, unhappy smile. He bent down to pull at the heel of his unravelling sneakers. Those untied shoelaces looked gray with filth, not unlike his matted hair.
A slow moment passed. The other, bigger man raised his hands.
“Not wrong,” Ginger-Head said. His eyes flickered again, but only for a second.
Junior raised a hand again, a muscle-tight arm to slap or to punch, but Barbie’s reflex was faster.
“Junior.” Grabbed his wrist again. The kid’s skin was freezing cold – unsurprising, considering what he was wearing. “Stop it.”
Junior tried to say something, then closed his eyes. His face was lit up, pale and strange, in the shop window’s light. “Bitch.”
He half-swayed another step forwards, right into Barbie’s chest, and a short gasp of air jerked out of him. “Fuck you.”
Footsteps clanged down the pavement. The moment passed, silhouettes chiming away with low mutters – the ratty Vinny’s tentative snigger – and left them alone. They were standing in a position akin to somewhat like a clumsy dance-step, Junior’s chin digging into his shoulder, with Barbie attempting to brace his weight with one arm.
Junior opened his eyes and looked at him. A weak, half-choked wheeze of laughter in his face, reeking of gin. “How the fuck did you even-–”
Barbie grabbed him. “Come on.”
Junior tried to turn away from him, but didn’t quite manage. Barbie only offered his arm just as Junior stumbled again, and though the young man by no means took it willingly, he did not make it impossible.
*
He sat Junior down on the far side of the pavement, half-pushed, half-steered into the bench. Five minutes later he stepped out of the 7-11 down the street with a bundle wedged under his arm, and saw that Junior still sitting on the bench up the street, waiting, a still silhouette beneath the yellow streetlamp. The world was silent and the evening black as pitch, gentle as a fog.
“There,” Barbie said.
He threw the half-threadbare blanket in Junior Rennie’s direction, and it landed in his lap.
“To make sure you don’t freeze to death.”
The lack of wind turned the roaring darkness quiet. He stopped and listened, for a moment, for slurred cries and laughs in the distance, and heard nothing. Nothing except maybe the ocean in the distance, a little, as the long seconds passed by.
Standing two feet away Barbie twisted open the cap of the bottle, releasing a hiss of vigorous fizz, and handed it to him.
Junior took it. Brought up to his mouth and tilted his head back. A beat later he rolled his eyes. “This shit’s fuckin’ soda.”
“I’m not a great believer in the hair of the dog,” Barbie said. Junior looked at him, glaring, then relented and took another gulp anyway.
“You need something else?”
“No.”
Eventually Junior stopped staring at the ground and tugged the woolen thing around his shoulders. He was shivering slightly. Barbie rested his backside against the back of the bench and kept a relatively acceptable length of distance between them. He tilted his head back.
He asked, slowly: “What were you thinking back there?”
Junior Rennie looked up at him, slowly, from where he sat, tilting up his face with tired, half-petulant resentment. “They wouldn’t leave me alone when I knocked over a few fuckin’ bottles. Wasn’t even any part of their fuckin’ business. Like hell was I going to pay for it.”
“Where were you all day?”
He hadn’t expected Junior to reply, but then it came, gruffly, half-shakily: “Checking up on my loan payments for the last time. Just to make sure I got all of them. They gave me over a year to pay it up.”
“How’d you do it?”
“My dad put away a bunch for my college fund.”
“Enough?”
“Some of it I scraped. Washing cars. Doing dishes, for fuck’s sake. Making bets at sports games, once or twice-–” Barbie was glad, however briefly, that dealing prescription opiates wasn’t listed among them, “-–stupid as shit, but it worked.”
A long second passed.
“When did you drop out?”
“September last year,” Junior said. “Around.”
“Why?”
A few days ago a question like this would have Junior biting his head off. But the darkness seemed different. He felt tired, it’d been a long day, and out here in the half-awkward emptiness of a night-lit street, something about it seemed different.
Junior sighed. In the glow of the streetlamp, his breathing was a thin, sparse puff of smoking vapor, misting in the half-light.
“Whole story? I nearly got through a year of just being there without anyone fucking with me, but there was this guy who kinda – found out ’bout my dad. Recognized my face or whatever, m’not sure how. Sonofawhore was going on about it – stupid pimple-faced little cocksucker from freshman year. It was… somewhere with a bunch of other kids. Right in a goddamn hall.”
Barbie could sense where this was going.
“He called me out and tried to pick a fight, can’t remember exactly how it went, and I just fuckin’ lost it, ’kay? Kid set his fuckin’ chum on me. Think I might’ve knocked out some of his teeth and… the school freaked. But the real reason was that I couldn’t deal with it anymore.” His voice wobbled. He looked momentarily amazed at how he was saying this, in fact – the alcohol still in his system, maybe. He wasn’t looking at Barbie any longer. “Don’t even know why I went in the first place.”
This probably wasn’t the time to mention that Barbie had always been surprised at how Junior was accepted to begin with. And definitely not the time to mention that, however little the possibility, he had always presumed Big Jim Rennie pulled a few strings for it.
“You shouldn’t have dropped out, Rennie,” he said, instead. “You don’t get into Bowdoin for nothing.”
The kid said nothing. He pulled his knee up onto the bench and leaning the soda-bottle against it. In order to turn away from him.
Junior sighed. “Once…”
He faltered, but curled his fist against the bench’s edge. Then he said: “Once Frankie came to find me.”
Barbie glanced at him, startled in the low, soft dark.
“It was Saturday night. Four years ago, near the end of September. I don’t know if someone told him. I sat up there right next to the kitchen window – you could see the whole street from there – and I sat there the whole time watching him walk all the way up the street. He stopped right in front of the door and just stood there. For ages – it felt like goddamn ages. And then he walked away again. He didn’t look up once.”
Junior shook his head.
“He didn’t come up and knock,” he continued half-nonsensically.
“Why didn’t you go down?”
Junior took a swig from the soda bottle. He swallowed, and winced, his expression crumpling, whether it was from the drink or the memory.
“I didn’t have anything to say,” he said, with sudden vehemence. The intensity went as soon as came, though, like a light. “Like I fuckin’ cared.”
In the light of the streetlamp, Junior looked like a little old man. A bewildered, hungover little old man.
“He got a different car to come down here – Frankie. In high school he had this vintage Nova, and sophomore year he stuck this huge bumper sticker on it – ass, gas, or grass, it said, and nobody rides for free. He was so damn proud of that stupid sign.”
“Let me guess,” Barbie said. “There must’ve been one glorious history of speeding tickets recorded beneath your good buddy’s Chevrolet.”
Junior actually laughed, low as it was. “Yeah, and no. We used to get away with things like fuckin’ nuts – especially it was we got stopped by Freddy Denton. Freddy used to be our football coach. Varsity. Dude could scream his head off on the field, and those looks he used to give during matches when one of us would make the bench, that used to crack us up. Freddy’s a hardass like that.”
Barbie heard himself ask: “What else was he like?”
“Fred Denton? I dunno. Chill guy with us, kinda stuck-up with everyone else. We loved him, letting us off the hook for driving ’round drunk and being an asshole when we don’t win a B-team match.”
Junior looked up, suddenly. “Why do you want to know?” His eyes were dark. He said it quietly, like an accusation, or a challenge. “You know them.”
“Yeah,” Barbie shrugged. “But I like it better when you talk about them.” You make them sound like real people.
A feeble scowl. “Why?”
“Because you’re sounding more sober by the minute.”
“What, I’m a fuckin’ human jukebox?”
Barbie let out a little laugh, which surprised both of them.
The night was very quiet, and both of them let the silence come and go. Down the street the shutters of a shop darkened and began to come down, where shadows listened in silent, eavesdropping curiosity and the lights from the few still-open shops twinkled in the corner of his eye.
“Do you miss The Mill?” Barbie asked.
Junior had dropped his gaze onto the ground again, and now glanced up at him as if the question was either bullshit or a trap.
“I do,” Barbie continued. “Rosie Twitchell was always sweet. Employed me, of course, and treated me like a real angel.”
There was a moment where Junior Rennie blinked, as if recalling some strangely distant childhood memory.
“Sweetbriar?”
“I worked there. Five months.”
“What was the town like?”
“Like any other sleepy New England urban picture. Between Memorial and Labor Day the town filled up like a public swimming pool. Batshit tourists, you townies called them – don’t think I’ve ever heard more derision carried by a single word.”
Half a smile surfaced on his lips, as he remembered: hot summers, sweating beneath the Red Sox cap Rose insisted they all wore, blending milkshakes while the air sizzled and red ice-lollies melted beneath a blue sky.
“There’s the two highways – 117 and 119 – leading out from town, and most of the time they’re all free. There’s one through the woods that everyone has a nickname for – ’cause that road’s one little bitch in the mud season.”
Junior made a small cough at the back of his throat, and it took Barbie a second or two realize the young man had almost come close to laughing.
“You got that too?” he asked, a beat later. Softly.
Barbie gave him a look of what was almost amusement.
“You bet,” he said.
There was a pause before Junior said: “I learned how to drive on that road.”
“Hmm.”
“Well – some of it on my street, but the neighbors started raging about it so we took it there. Cut down half the trees near those goddamn woods. I was fifteen and Frankie sat shotgun trying stop me from trashing the Nova. Half the time we were drunk and smoking God knows what.” Laughed, a short brisk bark, something between embarrassment and longing. “Rev Coggins could’a called the cops on us, but guess he had his mind on other stuff except trespassing.”
He put the empty bottle down on the pavement by his foot, with a little clink against the ground, then looked up with a fresh – and oddly sober – glower in those hard blue eyes.
“Wasn’t my idea, ’kay,” Junior said. “Fuckin’ dumb how whenever anything happens around everyone automatically assumes that it’s my idea.” Then he laughed, a brief sound. “DeLesseps had it coming, though. Tore his Chevy hood ornament right off on the first go.”
Barbie thought of those few months he’d spent at The Mill back home. He thought of Junior riding shotgun in the vintage Nova, always sweeping in and out as part of their little foursome as easily as splashing through a puddle: muttering something between them and exploding into roaring hyena laughter, Frankie DeLesseps leaning on the horn and winking out of the window, expensive leather and bare knuckles and a constantly raised middle finger. Catching Junior without his chums was akin to cornering a wolf that had strayed too far from its pack, less belligerent but no less dangerous. Never mind that perhaps, only perhaps, the young man in front of him wasn’t the alpha of their little gang, or even the beta. Never mind that the reason his reputation emerged so pointedly – it was Junior Rennie and his chums, Junior Rennie and the rest of those goons – had more to do with his father’s political position than those pranks and escapades he’d indulged in back in high school. People had the strange way of thinking like that. Small towns enjoyed associations.
“There was a kid back in 2006,” Barbie said. “Jason Carstairs. Kid from Kentucky. He used to carry around this hood ornament in the shape of a star – not an emblem or a company’s logo, just something tinkered bit of metal he liked to keep in his pocket all the time. He never went around without it. Said that it was good luck, because it sat twenty years on the hood of his old man’s Mustang Ford and not once did the guy get pulled over, even though half of the time the fella was drunk off his face.”
Above them the New-Yorkverse sky was vast and pitch-black, and he thought about how it was strange, perhaps absurd, to refer the sky that way: there must be a world out there in this universe, for never did New York grow big enough and swallow Earth entirely like some ravenous drooling creature, did it? Did the man-appointed geography of Europe differ, he wondered? Was the United Kingdom divided? Were the borders of the Baltic states drawn differently? If so, what of Asia and the Middle East? Did the rough-sketched borders of the Sykes-Picot agreement still define the years of conflict that followed? If the cities of the now non-existent New England could be renamed, reformed, and forever changed, what of Mosul and Baghdad and Kirkuk and all those nameless dusty roads and sloping mountains rising and falling beneath a powder-blue sky and snipers’ bullets that spilled blood across the dry-grass fields? Could they, too, somehow be wiped away from existence by alternating circumstance and the sheer force of interchanging reality? Did the ever-churning Wheel ever stop before it shuffled the deck of fundamental truths laid bare across the desk, over and over?
Yep, there he was, Jays Carstairs. Jays Carstairs with his lucky gold-tarnished star, his big good-natured grin, and the sniper’s bullet he caught in the neck near the interrogation site at Fallujah. Who could blame him? Carstairs had been only twenty-one. And Fallujah had been a carnival.
Junior looked up at him.
“What went wrong with The Mill? For you?”
In the silence of the world, Barbie looked down at him. He was smiling slightly, as he shook his head.
“Tell me about it,” Junior said. And, when Barbie looked away: “I’m not mad.”
He said it quietly. Lightly. Raising his eyes from the ground. The light from the streetlamp caught in his hair, rendering an unkempt, half-damp corona of dark gold, and when he lifted his face from the shadow, Barbie thought that Junior wasn’t lying. His eyes weren’t mad, either.
“Guess I just didn’t fit in,” Barbie said. Shrugged. It didn’t hurt to admit it out here. Perhaps he’d gotten used to it. Or perhaps it was how the streetlights softened the emptiness of the tarmac pavement. He thought that could hear the ocean from here, just barely, a faraway rush, a crooning, ponderous crash of water grazing the rocks.
“Rennie?”
“Huh?”
“About what I said last night…”
Somewhere far away, ocean waves crashed against the buoys and lapped against the shore.
“What?” Junior said. An edge in his voice. “Not like it’s your fault. And not like you need to make any excuses.”
Barbie shook his head. “That’s not what I’m doing.”
Junior snorted. “Yeah right. Bullshit.” Then, in a hoarse, near-wobbly rush: “I don’t fuckin’ get migraines anyways. Not like the ones you said. So I’m good, ’kay? Won’t get up someday and want to murder you like some – some wackhead.”
“I know,” Barbie said.
He was smiling, now. He stood up and reached out a hand. “I’ll get you something to eat once we get home.”
Junior gave him a look fit to shoot daggers and stood up, ignoring the offer. He wavered for a second, on his feet, before regaining his balance. For a moment or two Barbie stayed close to him anyway, a steadying hand hovering by the small of his back.
“I’m good,” Junior said. The glower was back.
Barbie stepped back with both hands raised, elevating his eyebrows. “Okay, okay. You’re the boss.”
Junior looked at him again, once, a bleary-eyed look of pure annoyed indignation, then marched forward. Soft, dim light from the streetlamp fell over them. Somewhere far away, a horn whined, but apart from this it was so quiet out there, the night still and smooth and unrippling as ink.
Barbie stayed behind a second, shaking his head slightly at the catch of golden light in Junior Rennie’s hair, like a dirty misshapen halo, wanting to say something but not knowing what.
“Rennie?”
“What?”
“I’m glad I got here.”
A beat.
“Sure you are, fucko,” Junior said. He turned around, shadow revolving, slowly, like the spin of a moon across the ground. “And I’m starving.”
Barbie couldn’t tell for sure if the kid was smiling. He thought he was.
He hoped so.