“Man, I hope you know what you’re doing. Gonna hurt for a couple of days.”
“I always know what I’m doing,” O’Connell answered. He gritted his teeth a little against the pain and leaned back in the tattoo parlor chair. He stared down and watched as the burly man began to work over the design. Michael O’Connell had chosen a scarlet heart with a black arrow driven through it, dripping blood tears. In the center of the pierced heart, the tattoo would have the initials AF. What was unusual about the tattoo was the location. He watched the artist struggle a little. It was more awkward for him to put the heart and initials on the ball of the sole of O’Connell’s right foot than it was for O’Connell to keep his leg lifted and steady. As the needle pierced the skin, O’Connell waited. It is a sensitive location. Where one might tickle a child or caress a lover. Or step on a bug. It was the location best suited for the multiplicity of his feelings, he thought.
Michael O’Connell was a man with few outward connections, but thick ropes, razor wires, and dead-bolt locks constricted him within. He was a half inch under six feet in height and had a thick, curly head of dark hair. He was broad through the shoulders, the result of many hours lifting weights as a high school wrestler, and trim through the waist. He knew that he was good-looking, had a magnetism in the lift of his eyebrows and the way he sauntered into any situation. He affected a kind of carelessness about his clothing that made him seem familiar and friendly; he favored fleece over leather so that he would fit in with the student population better and avoided wearing anything reminiscent of where he had grown up, such as too tight jeans or T-shirts with tightly rolled sleeves. He walked down Boylston Street toward Fenway, letting the midmorning breeze wrap itself around him. It had a suggestion of November in its breath, swirling some fallen leaves and debris off the street into a small whirlwind of trash. He could taste a little of New Hampshire in the air, a crispness that reminded him of his youth.
His foot hurt him, but it was a pleasant pain.
The tattoo artist had given him a couple of Tylenol and placed a sterile pad over the design, but he had warned O’Connell that the pressure of walking on the tattoo might be hard. That was all right, regardless how crippled he might be for a few days.
He wasn’t far from the Boston University campus, and he knew a bar that opened early. He limped along, making his way down a side street, hunched over a little, trying with each step to measure the shafts of electric hurt that radiated upward from his foot. It was a little like playing a game, he thought to himself. This step, I’ll feel pain all the way to my ankle. This step, all the way to my calf. Will I feel it all the way to my knee, or beyond? He pushed open the door to the bar and stood for a moment, letting his eyes adjust to the dark, smoky interior.
A couple of older men were at the bar, seated with bent shoulders as they nursed their liquor. Regulars, he thought. Men with needs defined by a dollar and a shot glass.
O’Connell moved to the bar, slapped a couple of bucks down on the counter, and motioned to the bartender.
“Beer and a shot,” O’Connell said.
The bartender grunted, expertly drew a small glass of beer with a quarter inch of foam at the top, and poured off a shot glass with amber Scotch. O’Connell tossed back the shot, which burned his throat harshly, and followed it with a gulp from the beer. He gestured at the glass.
“Again,” he said.
“Let’s see the money,” the bartender replied.
O’Connell pointed. “Again.”
The bartender didn’t reply. He’d already made his statement.
O’Connell considered a half dozen things he might say, all of which might lead to a fight. He could feel adrenaline starting to pump in his ears. It was one of those moments where it didn’t really matter if he won or if he lost, it was just the relief he would feel in throwing punches. Something in the sensation of his fist and another man’s flesh was far more intoxicating than even the liquor; he knew it would erase the throbbing in his foot and energize him for hours to come. He stared at the bartender. He was significantly older than O’Connell, pale, with a pronounced gut around his waist. It wouldn’t be much of a fight, O’Connell thought, feeling his own taut muscles contracting with energy, begging to be released. The bartender watched him warily; years spent on that side of the bar had given him an understanding of the way a man’s face suggested what he was about to do.
“You don’t think I’ve got the money?” O’Connell asked.
“Need to see it,” the bartender replied. He had stepped back, and O’Connell noticed that the other men at the bar had shrunk away, their eyes lifted up to the dark ceiling. They, too, were veterans of this particular conflict.
He looked at the bartender again. The man was too old and too experienced in the world defined by the gloomy corners of the decrepit bar to be taken unawares. And, in that second, O’Connell realized that the bartender would have some ready source of man-made equality. An aluminum baseball bat, or maybe a short-handled wooden fish billy. Maybe something more substantial, like a chrome-plated nine millimeter or a twelve gauge. No, he thought, not the nine millimeter. Too hard to chamber a round. Something older, more antique, like a.38 police special, safety disengaged, loaded with wadcutters, so to maximize the damage to flesh, minimize the damage to the property. It would be located out of sight, in easy reach. He did not think he could jackknife across the bar fast enough to reach the bartender before the man grabbed the weapon.
So, he shrugged. He spun and stared at the man at the bar a few feet away.
“What’re you looking at, you old fuck?” he asked angrily.
The man refused to make eye contact.
“You want another drink?” the bartender demanded.
O’Connell could no longer see the man’s hands.
He laughed. “Not in a shit hole like this.” He rose and exited the bar, leaving the men behind in silence as he passed through the door. He made a mental note to come back sometime, and felt a surge of satisfaction. There was nothing, he thought, nearly as pleasurable in life as moving to an edge of something, and teetering back and forth. Rage was like a drug; in moderation, it made him high. But every so often it was necessary to truly indulge; to get wasted with it. He looked down at his watch. A little after lunchtime. Sometimes Ashley liked to take a sandwich out onto the Common and eat beneath a tree with some of her art class friends. It was an easy place to keep an eye on her without being seen. He thought he might just wander over and check.
Michael O’Connell first met Ashley Freeman by happenstance, some six months earlier. He was working as a part-time auto mechanic at a gas station just off the Massachusetts Turnpike extension, taking computer technology courses in his free hours, making ends meet by tending bar on weekends in a student hangout near BU. She had been coming back from a weekend ski trip with her roommates when the right rear tire had shredded after hitting one of Boston’s ubiquitous potholes, a common enough winter-season occurrence. The roommate had nursed the car into the station, and O’Connell had replaced the flat. When the roommate’s Visa card, maxed out by the weekend’s excesses, had been rejected, O’Connell had used his own credit card to pay for the tire, an act of generosity and seemingly Good Samaritanism that hadn’t been lost on the four girls in the vehicle. They were unaware that the card he used was stolen and had readily handed over their addresses and phone numbers, promising to collect the cash for him by midweek if he would just swing by and pick it up. The new tire, and the labor to install it, had come to $221. None of the girls in the car had understood for an instant how ironically small a sum that truly was, to allow Michael O’Connell into their lives.