Mercy Street

“It’s late,” she said. “I should go.”

“Not yet.” Timmy jangled his keys in his pocket. “Let’s go for a ride.”

IN RETROSPECT—CLAUDIA KNOWS THIS—HER BEHAVIOR RAISES certain questions. What was she thinking, getting into a car in the middle of the night with a known drug criminal? Was she aware that she was engaging in high-risk behavior?

She was aware.

And yet, in her gelatinous state, it didn’t feel risky. She felt safer than she had in weeks or months or possibly ever; safer, certainly, than she felt showing up for work each morning. Timmy’s hugeness was comforting, a powerful visual deterrent to any Dateline-type predator. Walking down a dark alley with Timmy, she would not be messed with.

With Timmy she would be perfectly safe, unless he decided to kill her himself.

Washington Street was deserted, the traffic lights flashing. As they crossed the street, Claudia noticed the lightness in her pocket.

“Shit. I left my phone in your apartment.”

She could picture exactly where she’d left it, beside her on Timmy’s couch.

“Get it later. You won’t need it,” Timmy said.

More high-risk behavior: without her cell phone, her GPS coordinates could not be traced. A stern male voice—the voice of Dateline—whispered this in her ear.

They walked several blocks to somebody’s garage. Inside it, the Barracuda was draped with a canvas cover, like a giant toaster. Timmy rolled back the cover and unlocked the passenger door. “Madam,” he said, opening it with a flourish.

She got into the car. They were both beaming like idiots, flush with excellent weed, the magnificence of the car, the sheer unlikeliness of the moment.

“It’s beautiful,” Claudia said.

It wasn’t the right word. It wasn’t the wrong word either. The dashboard was set with round dials that looked vaguely nautical. The bucket seats, dark green leather, felt smooth and cold. The sleek cockpit was a psychic time capsule, a sacred artifact of a lost tribe. Encoded in the design were all its secrets: the collective unconscious of an extinct people, its unspoken, unspeakable beliefs.

The interior was spanking clean. The chrome ashtray shone like a mirror. Claudia found herself babbling about Street Rodz, her early career cleaning cars for Uncle Ricky.

“I always do my own detailing,” said Timmy. “There’s no one else I can trust.” He glanced at her sideways. “You, maybe. Because you were a professional. I could maybe trust you.”

They sat in silence, their breath fogging the windshield.

“I can’t believe you’re selling it,” she said.

“It’s already sold. Sight unseen. The guy is coming tomorrow.” Timmy stroked the steering wheel with unabashed tenderness, as though petting a cat. “This is the final ride.”

“But why?” Claudia was filled with an inexplicable anguish. “I don’t get it.”

“I need the cash. I have obligations; it’s a long story. Anyway,” he said, “I bought another car.”

Claudia could make no sense of this explanation.

“There is no other car,” she said, with emphasis. “What could you possibly?”

Timmy grinned broadly. “A Honda Civic.”

It was the funniest thing anyone had ever said. Claudia and Timmy laughed until suffocation was a real danger. They laughed to the point of physical pain.

Timmy turned the key in the ignition. A thrill in her stomach as the engine roared to life. Claudia felt the vibration all through her, as if she’d been dancing near the speakers at a loud concert, her body a blind antenna picking frequencies from space.

The heater came on with a huff.

“Where to?” said Timmy.

“Anywhere,” Claudia said.

They rolled east, in the vague direction of the expressway. Dorchester slipped past like a film they weren’t watching. The streets were strangely deserted. Claudia remembered that it was two in the morning.

They stopped at a red light just to watch it blink.

The car’s heater smelled like a lawn mower, it smelled of petroleum and burning dust, it smelled like it might cause mesothelioma. They skated along the empty streets, the blinking red lights like leftover Christmas. Timmy drove with great concentration, in some enraptured state. Claudia turned a little to watch him, his hands large and square and strangely young looking, the hands of an overgrown boy.

AS THEY PULLED INTO THE GARAGE, A LIGHT SNOW WAS FALLING. Deliberately, almost reverently, Timmy engaged the parking brake, closed the door and locked it. They stood a long moment looking at the car.

On the sidewalk in front of Timmy’s they said good night. Snow dusted their shoulders, their hair and eyelashes. The snow was an afterthought, light and powdery, a snow of no consequence. It would be gone in the morning, leaving no trace.

Timmy said, “What about your phone?”

Claudia followed him inside. The radiators were hissing. Her head was swimming from the joint, the sheer exhilaration of riding. The overheated air burned her cheeks.

Her phone wasn’t on the couch where she’d left it. Her phone was nowhere to be seen.

“Don’t worry, we’ll find it. Happens all the time. Jesus Christ, it’s like a sauna in here.” Timmy peeled off his wool sweater and tossed it onto a chair.

He dropped to his knees and dug around in the recesses of the couch. Claudia knelt beside him to help.

“Hang on, I feel something.” He reached in elbow-deep, like a fearless midwife, and pulled out Claudia’s iPhone, still in its orange plastic case.

The relief was intoxicating. To a veteran phone-loser like Claudia, the feeling was familiar. The upside of losing things was the joy of finding them eventually—which may have been (she reflected) the entire reason she lost them in the first place. In her fractured state she saw a perverse logic to this, like wearing uncomfortable shoes for the sheer pleasure of taking them off.

They got to their feet. She noticed, then, a dime-sized spot on the back of Timmy’s T-shirt—one in a larger constellation of rust-colored stains, as though someone had shaken a wet paintbrush in his direction.

“You’re bleeding,” she said.

Timmy turned his head to look. “Eh, that’s nothing. The new ones always bleed a little.” Then, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, he peeled off his shirt.

“Whoa,” said Claudia. “That’s a lot of ink.”

What had been done to his back was extraordinary. You couldn’t look at it quickly. There was simply too much to take in: a giant cross, a complicated tapestry of roses and chain mail, an actual wolf howling at the moon. The style was psychedelic, like album cover art from the sixties, Santana or Steppenwolf or King Crimson. In that moment it seemed perfectly reasonable to stand in Timmy’s living room, studying his large naked back—his secret hieroglyphics, an obscure language of his own invention, evidence of some deeply strange inner life.

She would wonder, later, how long they stood there. Time had gotten slippery, expanding and contracting like an accordion.

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