“Anyway, I’m sorry,” said Peyton. “It wasn’t…kind.”
“Apology accepted,” said Artie. “Buy me a drink next time we’re in Dean’s.”
He put his hand out, and the two men shook. Peyton patted Artie on the back. He felt his eyes water slightly, and blamed it on his exertions.
“How about I buy you a beer when we’re done here? I could do with something to toast the end of a long day.”
“Agreed. Let’s water your dog and get the-”
He stopped. They were within sight of the sheltered pond. It had been a popular trysting spot, once upon a time, when both Artie and Peyton were much younger men, until the land changed hands and the new owner, the God-fearing man whose estate was now being fought over by his godless relatives, had let it be known that he didn’t want any adolescent voyages of sexual discovery being embarked upon in the vicinity of his pond. A large beech tree over-hung the water, its branches almost touching the surface. Molly was standing a small distance from it. She had not drunk the water. She had, in fact, stopped several feet from the bank. Now she was waiting, one paw raised, her tail wagging uncertainly. Through the rushes, something blue was visible to the approaching men.
Bobby Faraday was kneeling by the water’s edge, his upper body at a slight angle, as though he were trying to glimpse his reflection in the pool. There was a rope around his neck, attached to the trunk of the tree. He was swollen with gas, his face a reddish-purple, his features almost unrecognizable.
“Ah, hell,” said Peyton.
He wavered slightly, and Artie reached up and put his arm around his companion’s shoulder as the sun set behind them, and the wind blew, and the host bowed low in mour hi qlow in mning.
CHAPTER TWO
I TOOK THE TRAIN to Pearl River from Penn Station. I hadn’t driven down to New York from Maine, and I hadn’t bothered to rent a car while I was in the city. There was no need. Whatever I needed to do here, I could do more easily without an automobile. As the little single-car train pulled into the station, still barely altered from its origins as a branch of the Erie Railroad, I saw that any other changes to the heart of the town were also purely cosmetic. I climbed down and walked slowly across Memorial Park where a sign close to the unmanned Town of Orangetown police booth announced that Pearl River was still the town of friendly people. The park had been created by Julius E. Braunsdorf, the father of Pearl River, who had also laid out the town itself after purchasing the land, as well as building the railroad station, manufacturing the Aetna sewing machine and the America & Liberty printing press, developing an incandescent lightbulb, and inventing the electric arc light that illuminated, not just this park, but the Capitol area in Washington, D.C. Braunsdorf was one of those guys who made most people look kind of sluggish by comparison. Along with Dan Fortmann of the Chicago Bears, he was Pearl River ’s proudest boast.
The Stars and Stripes still flew over the memorial at the center of the park, commemorating the young men of the town who had died in combat. Curiously, these included James B. Moore and Siegfried W. Butz, who had died, not in combat, but in the course of a bank raid in 1929, when Henry J. Fernekes, a notorious bandit of the time, tried to hold up the First National Bank of Pearl River while masquerading as an electrician. Still, at least they were remembered. Murdered bank clerks don’t often qualify for a mention on public memorials anymore.
Pearl River hadn’t shaken off any of its Irish roots since I’d left. The Muddy Brook Café at North Main, on the far side of the park, still offered a Celtic breakfast, and nearby were Gallagher’s Irish butcher, the Irish Cottage gift store, and Healy-O’Sullivan Travel. Across East Central Avenue, next door to Handeler’s hardware store, was the Ha’penny Irish Shop, which sold Irish tea, candy, potato chips, and replica Gaelic football jerseys, and around the corner from the old Pearl Street Hotel was G. F. Noonan’s Irish bar. As my father often remarked, they should just have painted the whole town green and been done with it. The Pearl River movie theater was now closed, though, and there were chichi stores selling crafts and expensive gifts alongside the more functional auto shops and furniture stores.
It seems to me now that I spent all of my childhood in Pearl River, but that was not the case. We moved there when I was nearly eight, once my father had begun to tire of the long commute into the city from farther upstate, where he and my mother lived cheaply thanks to a house left to my father when his own mother died. It was particularly hard for him when he worked his week of 8:00 to 4:00 tours, which were, in reality, 7:00 to 3:30 tours. He would rise at five in the morning, sometimes even earlier, to make his trek in to the Ninth, a violent precinct that occupied less than one square mile on the Lower East Side but accounted for up to seventy-five homicides every year. On those weeks, my mother and I barely saw him. Not that the other tours on each six-week cycle were much better. He was required to do one week of 8:00 to 4:00, one week of 4:00 to 12:00, anotheren k of 4:† week of 8:00 to 4:00, two weeks of 4:00 to 12:00 (on those weeks, I saw him only at weekends, for he was sleeping when I left for school in the morning, and gone to work by the time I returned), and one mandatory 12:00 midnight to 8:00 tour, which screwed up his body clock so badly he would sometimes be almost delirious with tiredness by the end of it.
The Ninth worked what was called a “nine-squad chart,” nine squads of nine men, each with a sergeant, a system that dated back to the fifties and was eventually eliminated in the eighties, taking with it much of the camaraderie that it engendered. My father’s sergeant in the First Squad was a man named Larry Costello, and it was he who suggested that my father should consider moving down to Pearl River. It was where all the Irish cops lived, a town that claimed the second largest St. Patrick’s Day parade in the state after Manhattan. It was comparatively wealthy too, with an average income that was almost twice the national average, and an air of comfortable prosperity. So it had enough off-duty cops to form a police state; it had money; and it had its own identity defined by common bonds of nationality. Even though my father was not himself Irish, he was Catholic, knew many of the men who lived in Pearl River, and was comfortable with them. My mother raised no objections to the move. If it gave her more time with her husband, and relieved him of some of the stress and strain that was, by then, so clearly etched on his face, she would have moved to a hole in the ground covered by a sheet of tarp and made the best of it.
So we went south, and because all that subsequently went wrong in our lives was, for me, tied in with Pearl River, the town came to dominate the memories of my childhood. We bought a house on Franklin Avenue, close to the corner of John Street where the United Methodist Church still stands. It was a “fixer-upper,” in the peculiar language of Realtors: the old lady who had lived in it for most of her life had recently died, and there was nothing to suggest that she had done much with the house, other than occasionally move a broom across the floors, since 1950. But it was a bigger house than we could otherwise have afforded, and something about the lack of fences, the open yards between properties on the street, appealed to my father. It gave him a sense of space, of community. The notion of good fences making good neighbors was not one that held much currency in Pearl River. Instead, there were those in the town who found the concept of a fence mildly troubling: a sign of disengagement, perhaps, of otherness.