“Just a wee spot to warm me stumuch on a lonely night,” the guy said in a horrendously fake brogue.
Gerry came off the cooler and walked around the bar. “You even know where you are, son?”
Underneath my hand, Patton’s muscles tightened and he raised his head, stared at the kid.
The kid took a step forward. “Just a wee spot of whiskey.” He giggled into his hand, blinked into the light and his face was swollen with booze and God knows what else.
“Kenmore Square is that way,” Gerry said and pointed back out the door.
“Don’t want Kenmore Square,” the guy said. He swayed slightly from side to side as he fumbled in his waistband for his cigarettes.
“Son,” Gerry said, “it’s time for you to be moving on.”
Gerry put his arm on the guy’s shoulder and for a moment the guy looked ready to shrug it off, but then he looked at me and then Patton and then down at Gerry. Gerry’s demeanor was kind and warm, and he was four inches shorter, but even this guy, drunk as he was, sensed how quickly that kindness could disappear if he pushed it.
“Just wanted a drink,” he mumbled.
“I know,” Gerry said. “But I can’t give you one. You got cab fare? Where you live?”
“I just wanted a drink,” the guy repeated. He looked up at me and tears leaked down his cheeks and the damp cigarette hung flaccid between his lips. “I just…”
“Where you live?” Gerry asked again.
“Huh? Lower Mills.” The guy sniffled.
“You can walk around Lower Mills dressed like that
without getting your ass kicked?” Gerry smiled. “Place must have changed a lot in ten years.”
“Lower Mills,” the guy sobbed.
“Son,” Gerry said, “ssshh. It’s okay. It’s all right. You go out this door, you take a right, there’s a cab half a block up. Cabbie’s name is Achal and he’s there till three on the dot. You tell him to take you to Lower Mills.”
“I don’t got no money.”
Gerry patted the kid’s hip and when he pulled his hand away there was a ten-dollar bill in the kid’s waistband. “Looks like you got a sawbuck you forgot about.”
The kid looked down at his waistband. “Mine?”
“It ain’t mine. Now go get in that cab. Okay?”
“Okay.” The kid sniffled as Gerry led him back out the door, and then suddenly he spun and hugged as much of Gerry as he could get his arms around.
Gerry chuckled. “Okay. Okay.”
“I love you, man,” the kid said. “I love you!”
A cab pulled to the curb outside and Gerry nodded at the driver as he disentangled himself. “Go on now. Go on.”
Patton lowered his head and rolled into a fetal position on the bar, closed his eyes. I scratched his nose and he nipped my hand gently, seemed to smile sleepily at me.
“I love you!” the kid bellowed as he stumbled out.
“I’m moved,” Gerry said. He shut the door to the bar and we heard the taxi’s axles clack as it pulled a U-turn on the avenue to head down to Lower Mills. “Deeply moved.” Gerry locked the door and raised his eyebrows at me, ran a hand through the rusty stubble on his head.
“Still Officer Friendly,” I said.
He shrugged, then frowned. “Did I do that at your school—the Officer Friendly lecture?”
I nodded. “Second grade at St. Bart’s.”
He took his bottle and shot glass over to a table by the jukebox and I joined him, left my shot glass on the bar, seven feet away from me, where it belonged. Patton remained on the bar, eyes closed, dreaming of large cats.
He leaned back in his chair and arched his back, stretched his arms behind his head and yawned loudly.
“You know something? I remember that now.”
“Oh, please,” I said. “That was over twenty years ago.”
“Mmm.” He brought the chair legs back to the floor, poured himself another drink. By my count he’d had six shots and there was absolutely no noticeable effect. “That class was something, though,” he said, tilting the glass toward me in toast. “There was you and Angela and that shitbird she married, what was his name.”
“Phil Dimassi.”
“Phil, yeah.” He shook his head. “Then there was that head case Kevin Hurlihy and that other nut job, Rogowski.”
“Bubba’s okay.”
“I know you guys are friends, Patrick, but give me a break. He’s a suspect in maybe seven unsolved homicides.”
“Real nice guys, I’m sure, the victims.”
He shrugged. “Killing is killing. You take a life without cause, you should be punished. All there is to it.”
I sipped my beer, glanced at the jukebox.
“You don’t agree?” he said.
I held out my hands, leaned back in my chair. “I used to. Sometimes, though, I mean come on, Gerry—Kara Rider’s life was worth more than the life of the guy who killed her.”
“Beautiful,” he said and gave me a dark smile. “Utilitarian logic at its best, and the cornerstone of most fascist ideologies, if you don’t mind me mentioning.” He downed another shot, watching me with clear, steady eyes. “If you presuppose that a victim’s life is worth more than a murderer’s, and then you yourself go and kill that murderer, doesn’t that then make your own life less worthy than the murderer you killed?”
“What,” I said, “you’re a Jesuit now, Gerry? Going to wrap me up in syllogisms?”
“Answer the question, Patrick. Don’t be glib.”
Even when I’d been a kid, there’d always been something oddly ethereal about Gerry. He didn’t exist on the same plane as the rest of us. You sensed that some part of him swam in the spiritual murk that the priests told us existed just above the realm of our everyday consciousness. The place from which dreams and art and faith and divine inspiration were sprung.
I went behind the bar for another beer, and he watched me with those calm, kind eyes. I dug around the cooler, found another Harpoon, and came back to the table.
“We could sit here and debate it all night, Gerry, and maybe in an ideal world, it wouldn’t be true, but in this one, yeah, some lives are worth a lot more than others.” I shrugged at his cocked eyebrow. “Might make me a fascist but I’d say Mother Teresa’s life is worth more than Michael Millken’s. I’d say Martin Luther King’s was worth a lot more than Hitler’s.”