Brenda kicked the guy next. Then George.
“Then you,” Vincent says to Rum Collins.
Rum stares at them for a bit, eventually nods.
When Rum kicked the spook lying on his back, it felt better than anything he could remember feeling since maybe his ninth birthday, when he got that three-speed bike he’d been asking for since he was seven. Rum knew what he was staring down — the rest of life in Southie with every day looking exactly like the last. Maybe he’d move up at the supermarket, make his way from produce to deli, but after that, where would he go? He didn’t have a head for numbers, he wasn’t a leader, he knew that much. That meant any type of management position was off the table. So he’d spend his life in produce or deli or dairy. His life. From now to sixty-five. Find some dishrag hag for a wife and pop out four or five little Rums and watch them lose the only good thing about the life their father had known — at least, when Rum was a kid, you knew your neighbors. You shared your food and your rituals and your music. Nothing changed. It was the one fucking thing they couldn’t take from you.
But they could. They would. They were. Forcing their notions and their ways and their lies on you. Lies because they told you change was going to make you happier, it was going to make you richer, it was going to brighten your world.
It wasn’t bright. It was fucking dark. He kicked and kept kicking until he missed, which caused him to fall on his own ass, and then his “friends” were laughing at him and the black guy was on his feet and running—
Straight into the oncoming train.
“So the train hit him.” Vincent’s pen is poised over his notepad.
“More like he hit the train,” Rum says.
“Explain.”
“He bounced off it. Like, he probably thought he was gonna jump onto the tracks to get away? Well, one second the train wasn’t there. Next second it was. And he ran right into it. Snapped around and bounced off the wall — you know where the sign is with all the train routes? — and then, yeah, he hit the platform.”
“And rolled over and fell under the tracks?” Bobby says helpfully.
“Yup.”
Bobby and Vincent nod at each other. Makes perfect sense.
Bobby smiles at Rum. “You know how much space lies between a subway car and the platform edge?”
Rum shrugs, sensing the boom even before it drops.
“Eight inches. Apparently, there’s an industry standard. Plus, we measured.”
Rum seems to have stopped breathing. He’s that still.
Bobby holds up a hand to Vincent so he’ll stop writing. “Now, Rum,” he says, “judging by your face and the fact you walked in here to tell us the truth, I don’t think now is the time to segue into bullshit. You’re not smart enough to sell it, whatever it is, and if you don’t come clean with us—”
“Like right fucking now,” Vincent says.
“—then we’re going to kick you loose and make sure everyone knows you were uncooperative with us. Which, hey, will buy you some street cred up and down Broadway. But will it endear you to Mary Pat Fennessy?”
Rum goes back to chewing on his lip as if his teeth are clock gears.
“Which nut will she take first?” Vincent asks Bobby.
Bobby says, “Depends on if she’s right- or left-handed.”
Vincent asks Rum, “Is she a righty or a lefty? Did you notice?”
Rum says nothing. It’s like he’s slipping into shock.
“He didn’t notice,” Vincent says.
“If she’s right-handed,” Bobby says, “we gotta assume it’s the left side of his ball sac that’s easiest to, you know, grab and then chop into.”
Vincent winces and crosses his legs.
“If she’s left-handed, she goes for the right nut.”
“What about his dick?”
Bobby says, “Well, that’s where you’d really have to get in her head. I mean, does she want to just grab it and yank it like some taffy and chop it off right at the root?”
“Stop,” Rum whispers.
“Or would she start at the top and slice it right down the middle like a banana?”
Rum makes a gagging noise, and when they look over, his tongue thrusts out of his mouth and his head surges far ahead of his neck. He gags some more.
But he doesn’t puke. Which is a relief. Because the shit and piss are enough. Add one more disgusting bodily fluid to the room, and no amount of cigarette smoke will help.
Now the tears come. They well up under his eyes and de-age him five years. “If she cuts off my dick,” he says, “it’s not like I’ll just be walking around with no dick. I mean, I’ll fucking die, won’t I?”
“Depends how close you are to a hospital,” Vincent says.
“And what you have on hand to stanch the blood flow,” Bobby says.
“Well, that goes without saying,” Vincent says.
“Does it? Kid’s never had his dick chopped off before, so he might not know these things.”
Another series of gags. They wait him out.
“Can you stop her?” The tears fall.
“We can arrest her,” Bobby says. “Sure. You just give us a statement, swear she threatened you. And we’ll pick her up.”
“And then what?”
Bobby pushes a box of tissues across the table to him. “She’ll go to court.”
“Will she go to jail?”
Bobby looks at Vincent for his opinion.
“Doubtful,” Vincent says.
“Why the fuck not?” The kid’s half bawling now. “She said she’d cut off my balls. And my dick. She beat me up.”
“Well, if we’re talking about Mrs. Fennessy, she has no priors.”
“Model citizen,” Vincent says.
Bobby decides to slather it on. “Pillar of the community.”
“So she’ll get a low bail.”
“If she gets bail at all.”
“True. She’s an ROR if ever there was one.”
“What’s an ROR?” The sobs have diminished to sniffles.
“Released on one’s own recognizance.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Means she won’t have to pay bail.”
“And won’t spend a night in jail.”
“But she threatened my balls.”
“Who did? Who is this ‘she’ you’re so scared of, Rum? Give us a name.”
He shakes his head.
“Then finish telling us what happened the night Auggie Williamson died.”
“And don’t shovel a bunch of shit at us about him bouncing off a train and then bouncing off a wall and dropping onto the tracks, because we know that’s bullshit.”
“How?”
“Witnesses. And the medical examiner’s report. And ten years of fucking police work.”
“You can tell us the truth.” Bobby gives Rum another cigarette and lights it for him. “Or you can take your chances back out that door.”
“And if I tell you the truth and it turns out I did something bad?”
“Then we’ll arrest you.”
“And I won’t have to walk back out that door?”
“Not until you make bond.”
“You’ll be safe and sound in a nice comfy jail cell. We’ll even throw in a pillow.”
Rum takes a long drag and a longer exhale, staring up at the ceiling. Then he says, “He did run into the train, he did bounce off the wall. It knocked him out and he, like, laid on the platform all shaking and shit, and then he stopped shaking, so we thought he was dead.”
“But he wasn’t?”
He shakes his head. “I mean, we thought he was, but...”
They wait.
After a while, Bobby says, “Help us out with ‘but.’”
When the black guy banged his face into the train, they all laughed, George Dunbar the loudest. When the guy bounced back into the wall and then dropped to the platform like he’d been dropped from a helicopter, they laughed harder. But then, as the car doors opened, they noticed he was having this weird seizure, as if he’d been electrocuted. His heels hammered the ground, his arms flung out and back to his sides, his head rolled from side to side, and his eyes pinned themselves so far back into his skull they looked like egg whites.