Solitary Dancer Read online

  When he returned home the blood on the floor had hardened and dried. A neighbour stuck her head out the door of her apartment. “The hell goin’ on there?” she asked Martin. “You all right?”

  Martin said he was all right.

  “Your mother all right?”

  Martin said she was dead.

  When the cops left, some social worker took Martin to a children’s shelter and later to a foster family in another neighbourhood. Martin remained there until he was twelve years old, stood five and a half feet tall, and weighed a hundred and sixty-five pounds.

  Martin Luther Griswold became simply Grizzly. And Grizzly, when he was fourteen years old, chased a teacher from the classroom, swinging a brass fire extinguisher in his hand and threatening to bury it in the teacher’s skull.

  Grizzly became a street person, scamming whatever was available, sometimes wondering what happened to the man his mother called her husband, who told Grizzly he should think of him as his father.

  Didn’t make a helluva lot of sense to Grizzly. Man sleeps with a woman, doesn’t make him her husband. Woman’s got a kid, doesn’t make her man the kid’s father.

  They arrested Grizzly for the first time when he was sixteen after he organized a pay-off three-day gang rape of a fifteen-year-old girl who had told Grizzly she loved him, keeping her tied up in a back alley shed and charging local kids five bucks a go. Some adults came around too, fathers of some of the boys who were Grizzly’s customers, grown men who heard about it while he kept the girl there. They slipped Grizzly the money, went inside the shed, came out maybe five minutes later, the young boys laughing and talking, their fathers and their fathers’ friends skulking away in shame. For three days Grizzly fed the girl, slapped her when he had to, and made a pile of money.

  Until somebody squealed.

  Grizzly spent two years in a reformatory where he acquired enough formal education to expand his street smarts.

  Nobody had more street smarts than Grizzly. When Grizzly learned about marketing in prison, when he grasped the concept of keeping both demand and prices high, he rose head and shoulders above everybody else when it came to dealing narcotics.

  “Make it scarce an’ you makes it valuable,” he told Django once. “So you wanta sell, you sell the scarce stuff, hear me?”

  Django nodded but he didn’t understand completely. The more you sell the more you make, he believed. If something’s scarce, there ain’t much of it so how can you sell more? Didn’t make sense. But disagreeing with Grizzly made even less sense.

  “You always gotta be either the first on the street or the last on the street sellin’ your stuff,” Grizzly added. “Guy in the middle don’t make shit.”

  Django nodded again. It’s safer in the middle, Django wanted to say. But he didn’t.

  The first man Grizzly killed was a street tough named Bones, a bully who claimed to have downtown connections and who made the mistake in a bar one night of reaching across Grizzly to stroke the breast of a girl Grizzly was with. It was a year after Grizzly came out of reformatory.

  When Grizzly raised an eyebrow at Bones, the older man slapped Grizzly’s face with one open hand and showed him a knife in the other. “Don’ say a word, pussy,” Bones sneered, and Grizzly nodded and slid off the stool, leaving Bones laughing and groping and the girl crying in fear.

  Ten minutes later Grizzly returned with a .357 Magnum revolver inside his jacket. Bones had his arm around the girl and when Grizzly walked up to him, Grizzly said, “Show me yo’ knife.”

  Bones said, “You got one?”

  Grizzly said, “No.”

  Bones said, “Knew it. Pussies don’ carry steel.”

  Grizzly took the gun out and shot Bones through his left eye. Then he turned the gun on the girl and shot her too. Twice.

  “She shoulda left,” Grizzly said when he told a friend about it the next day. “She shouldn’ta been there so long.”

  No one in the bar could identify Grizzly. None of the investigating police officers felt the incident was worth more than a day’s investigation.

  Only fools challenged Grizzly again. And they only challenged him once.

  Grizzly finished his whispered conversation behind the bar with Dewey and returned to the table where Django and the Gypsy waited.

  Dewey was more than the Flamingo’s bouncer. He was also assistant manager, talent scout and Grizzly’s bouquet man. Bouquet men profited from drug sales but never carried, never used, never sold the product themselves. They functioned as conduits of information and directors of traffic. When sweeps occurred and arrests were made, Dewey and the handful of other bouquet men would be questioned and released for lack of sufficient evidence. “Come out smelling like a bouquet of roses,” one of them had boasted, and he and others were dubbed bouquet men from that day forward.

  Now Grizzly settled his massive black bulk in the chair between Django and the Gypsy. “Heat’s on,” he said, watching the tiny stage set against the far wall of the room. He extended an arm to the Gypsy, his index and middle fingers spread in a V sign. His lidded eyes remained on the small brown girl who was prancing back and forth across the stage, strutting her stuff in a long green satin skirt open on one side all the way up to her tiny waist. The Gypsy quickly pulled a pack of Camel Lights from a pocket of her red and black plaid woollen shirt.

  “Heat?” Even when sitting, Django moved with the music, his shoulders swinging, his head bobbing, like a featherweight boxer watching for a jab, waiting for an opening. “Hell, ain’t no heat,” Django laughed. “World’s colder’n a witch’s tit. No heat at all. Put your peeker out the door, Grizz, it be a chocolate popsicle faster’n Sienna up there can aim her money-maker at you.”

  The Gypsy placed a Camel Light between Grizzly’s waiting fingers and he transferred the cigarette to his mouth. “That her name?” he asked, still watching the stage. “Sienna?” He leaned toward the Gypsy who had the match already lit and was applying it to the end of the cigarette. “Nice name for a little gal like that.”

  Sienna whirled once and dropped the satin skirt to the floor of the stage revealing a gold G-string and slim legs.

  Grizzly drew in a deep breath of cigarette smoke and nodded.

  Beside him the Gypsy studied her glass of beer, her face a mask.

  “Who feelin’ heat?” Django asked. His eyes darted from Grizzly to the stage and back again.

  “People I know.”

  “Same people I know.”

  “Not the same. Special people. People you don’t know ’bout, you don’t wanna know ’bout, hear me?” His voice softened. “You know this little girl, this, what’d you call her?”

  “Sienna. From the islands. One a them itty-bitty places named after them saints down there. Thomas or John or Ralph.”

  “Ralph? There a St. Ralph?” Grizzly looked at Django with interest.

  “Sure. Church gotta name saints just like you and me get named. What, Grizz, you think the pope, he gonna pick a new saint and he say, ‘We callin’ this next sucker number two-five-eight’? They name ’em, the saints.”

  “After who?”

  Django shrugged.

  “Tell you one thing,” Grizzly said, shifting the cigarette to a corner of his wide mouth. “They ain’t never gonna be no St. Django.”

  Django erupted in laughter. “Whoa, darlin’!” He slapped his thighs and bent from the waist. “I’m doin’ my part to make it a fact, I surely am.” The small brown girl was prancing in long strides around the perimeter of the stage. Her hands were busy at one hip, unfastening her G-string. “I surely am.”

  Grizzly held his breath until the stripper removed the last piece of fabric covering her body. Then he exhaled slowly and spoke softly, watching the girl promenade in her nakedness. “Wait out the heat. Gotta wait out the heat, monkey.”

  “Hear you, Grizz,” Django nodded.<
br />
  “We be like that little gal up there, you know. What her name again?”

  “Sienna, darlin’. She Lady Sienna.”

  Grizzly grunted and took his eyes from the woman to inspect the tip of his cigarette. “Not as pretty, understand. Not as pretty as that little thing. But we be as naked, you hear me talkin’?”

  Django nodded, his face clouded.

  “We don’t carry nothin’ for nobody ’til it cool again, understand?” Grizzly swung his massive body to Django and leaned to look directly into the small man’s eyes. “Special not for that cop friend of yours, hear me?” His breath smelled like a musty room and Django sat back in his chair. “Tell me you hear me talkin’ to you.”

  “The Jolt, he all right,” Django said. He avoided Grizzly’s eyes. “Don’t be askin’ me to leave the Jolt dry. . . .”

  “I be talkin’ to you all this time and you ain’t started listenin’ yet,” Grizzly said. “I ain’t axin’ you to dry the man up. I tellin’ you, you hear me?”

  Django watched Sienna doing knee-bends at the edge of the stage where men gripped long-necked bottles of beer and stared back at her with open smiles. “I hear you, Grizz,” he said. “Hear you.” He bit his lip, looked around, tried to stay cool, then he said, “Other guys, Garce ’n’ Drew, them guys, they dry too?”

  “What you wanta know for?” Grizzly shot back. “None a your damn business. I say you dry, you dry.”

  Django sat back in his chair. Garce and Drew, he only met them a couple, maybe three times, they were dealers for Grizzly, Grizz liked to keep everybody separate, nobody get together on a conspiracy against Grizzly, no sir.

  “You do like I tell you?” Grizzly said.

  “No question, Grizz,” Django said. “Never any question ’bout it.”

  Grizzly grunted and sat back in the chair, his eyes on Sienna again. “Little brown girl nice,” he said to no one in particular. “But Billie, she still the best ’cause she like it up there, you know? Don’t she like it up there?”

  “Oh, she do,” Django agreed. “She like to show her jewels all right.” He was no longer moving in his chair and his face was glum. “Can see she like it.”

  The Gypsy played with her fingers, her eyes downcast.

  The sports channel was running a replay of last night’s hockey game and the Bruins were again getting their asses kicked; this time by the hated Rangers, a reprise of organized chaos traced on the screen of the television set above the noisy, smoky bar. The inept play and repeated miscues of the hometown team generated shouts of derision, cries of anguish and peels of sardonic laughter from the patrons, nearly all men, virtually all of them out of work and low on hope.

  McGuire slouched at a table in a rear corner next to the washroom door, a half-finished glass of beer in front of him. The rim of the glass was chipped and the beer was flat. Men in soiled caps passed McGuire on their way to the urinals and many offered him a curt nod, acknowledging him not as a friend but as a regular patron of Chet’s, almost the same thing. Two weeks earlier one of the regulars recognized McGuire and had spread the word that he was an ex-cop, and for a few days the patrons withheld their greetings. But it soon became evident that ex-cops have every bit as much to lose as ex-truck drivers, ex-welders and ex-mechanics, and eventually they accepted the common bond although they still moved past McGuire warily. None chose to sit with him and offer to buy him a beer, or cadge enough money from him for a draft and a hamburger.

  McGuire swallowed another Demerol. He waited for the fresh wave of relaxation and numbness to creep through him. It would displace the tension in his body, dissolve the furrows between his eyes.

  Soon, he lied to himself. Soon he would turn things around, get himself organized, go back to the Bahamas . . .

  He lowered his head to his hand, rested it there.

  They almost killed him.

  They would have left his body rotting among the mangroves or being flayed apart in the surf. He heard them discussing it between the blows of the heavy boots striking his back, his groin, his head, talking about it in the casual tones of shade-tree mechanics pondering a reluctant car engine.

  “Take the son of a bitch out past the reef, throw him in.” That was Charlie, Patty’s husband, the industrial mineral king from Chicago.

  “We can work him over a little more, you give us the word.” The taller of Henshaw’s two employees who had flown down with their boss on a chartered jet that afternoon drew his foot back and drove it into McGuire’s side, and pain like a rapier shot through McGuire’s abdomen.

  “You start her up, Mr. Henshaw, take us out to deep water and we’ll drop-kick the prick over the side.” The smaller man, the more vicious of the two, seized McGuire’s hair and yanked his head up. “See what happens when you fuck around where you shouldn’t, asshole?” he spat in McGuire’s face.

  The yacht was anchored in the middle of the harbour. Music drifted across the water from the bar of the Horizon Club where McGuire had promised to meet Patty Henshaw and where, half an hour earlier, the taller of Charlie Henshaw’s men had found him sitting on a bench at the water’s edge. “You McGuire?” the man asked and when McGuire nodded he said, “The missus wants you to join her on board.” He jerked a thumb behind him. “I got a whaler over near the dive shop to take you across.”

  “Who are you?” McGuire asked.

  “New crew member in from Man O’ War Cay for the week,” the tall man replied. He thrust a calloused hand at McGuire. “Name’s Unsworth. Came down from Chicago last month and lucked out. Got a crew job’ll take me through the summer.”

  McGuire followed Unsworth, stepping aboard the motorized flat-bottomed skiff to join Patty Henshaw, the shattered wife of a domineering and abusive husband. For the past two weeks she and McGuire had been a diversion for each other, McGuire living alone in a cabin overlooking the harbour, Patty spending the winter aboard Savarin, her husband’s eighty-five-foot yacht.

  “This boat and me are the same thing to Charlie,” she once smiled at McGuire. “We both wait down here for him to climb on and enjoy himself.”

  As soon as McGuire stepped aboard, Charlie Henshaw and the other man emerged from a cabin, Henshaw with a brass chain wrapped around one fist, the smaller man beside him and one step behind, his teeth gleaming in a broad smile, and the beating began.

  “Get up!” Henshaw screamed at McGuire when the small man offered to throw McGuire overboard in deep water. “On your feet, you scum-sucking bastard!”

  McGuire pulled himself to his hands and knees, retched once and rolled onto his back.

  “Pull him up,” Henshaw muttered and Unsworth, his back to the low railing, rolled McGuire facedown on the deck and gripped his collar, yanking him to his feet. McGuire held back, waiting for Unsworth to apply more strength and when he did McGuire flew at him. Surprised, Unsworth stepped aside, prepared to deflect a punch, but McGuire continued his forward motion and dove over the railing and down, through the darkness and the soft Bahamian air, into the water.

  A couple from Maryland, sailing with their children for a year through the Caribbean, pulled him aboard their boat and called the police. But beyond transporting McGuire to hospital in Nassau, the police offered him no assistance and asked him no questions. Two officers arrived at his hospital bedside three days later to give McGuire the alternative of being charged with robbery and attempted rape aboard the Savarin or accepting immediate deportation to the U.S. upon his release from hospital.

  “We have witnesses sworn to testify against you,” one of the Bahamian police officers told him. “You will receive a fair trial, of course, but I would caution you against such a choice. Should you be found guilty, as I believe you would be, you would face several years in jail.”

  In hospital while his ribs mended and his bruised kidneys healed, the doctors prescribed meperidine for McGuire’s constant pain; within weeks the drug became
his deliverance from agony and his entry into a world of peace and solace where he could escape not only the pain but himself. Upon his release he was deported to Miami where he sold his possessions and sat for two days at sidewalk cafés in Coconut Grove, squinting against the sunlight and the pain.

  In downtown bars he made enquiries, then a cabbie drove him as far toward Liberty City as the driver dared to go, and a block further along he met two men who offered him ’ludes and codeine and heroin and crack, and he chose the codeine, buying a hundred capsules from them, and returned to Coconut Grove.

  The release from the pain was a freedom he had never experienced, and the agony fell from him like discarded clothing that he stepped out of on an empty beach. For the next few days he smiled and drifted and when he was mugged by three teenagers who took his watch and gold ring he smiled again because they had not found his capsules hidden in a small plastic bag in the crotch of his underwear.

  A week later the pills were gone and he returned to Liberty City. But the men were not to be found. He asked a street vendor where they were and the vendor said, “Dead,” and shrugged and pushed out his bottom lip.

  McGuire called Ollie and Ronnie Schantz who wired him enough money to return to Boston. The pain was back and when the doctors at the Mass General walk-in clinic refused to renew his drug prescription, he sought and found sources as he had in Miami, settling on Django, the compact black man with the withered left hand who dispensed codeine and meperidine and who heard the rhythm of the saints in every phrase spoken to him, responding with smiles and laughter.

  McGuire leaned back in the chair, his hand gripping the glass, his eyes closed. On the television screen the Bruins intercepted a pass and the men in the bar abandoned their sense of loss and defeat and cheered the hometown player who broke through the Ranger defense to glide across the ice and flick the puck into the far corner of the net with a deft wrist shot, the perfect play making those in the bar feel like winners for a precious few moments, lifting them above their own lost lives.

  Boston’s Summer Street boasts no major tourist attractions nor is there evidence that Paul Revere’s horse ever carried the patriot over its cobblestones or that British regulars performed unspeakable acts of violence against innocent colonists. But it remains one of the oldest thoroughfares in the city and the short distance from its beginnings near Filene’s in the heart of the shopping district to the ancient docks on Fort Point Channel is a journey that extends backwards, from the city’s present adversities to its past glories.