up, matching each other one for one, all night.
In the wee hours of the morning, after the nightclub closed, I wanted to go to an after-hours party with Doyle but Mac pulled me away and drove me back to the house. Bobby the wanted murderer was nowhere to be seen. I was sitting on the faded, wilted couch, when Mac leaned in awkwardly to kiss me. I tried to push him away with both palms. His eyes slipped out of focus, became glazed with rage; I recognized the look and felt a tremor of fear before defiance kicked in.
“Don’t you know how you make me feel?” he muttered between clenched teeth. “You know, don’t you? You know.”
“To hell with you, Mac,” I said, and in a flash he was on top of me. I struggled to free myself; I felt like I was lying under a refrigerator. He got his hands around my neck and started to choke me. Doyle came through the front door just as I was losing consciousness and he lifted the cheap trunk that they used as a coffee table and whacked Mac with it on the back of the head.
Doyle pulled me up to sitting, Mac out cold on the floor beneath us. “You all right? He could’ve killed you.”
I rubbed my neck, trying to catch my breath. “It’s weird,” I said, “at the time, I didn’t really care. I guess I’m drunker than I thought.”
While Mac slept it off, Doyle and I walked around the neighborhood of one-story houses. We sat down on someone’s lawn, which was slightly pitched. It was very dark. “Sometimes Mac gets violent when he drinks too much,” Doyle explained, as if he were talking about his aging uncle’s blood pressure. “It’s like a switch goes off in his head. You can see it in his eyes. Tomorrow he won’t remember.”
“I know,” I said. “Everyone always protected him at school. What’ll happen to him now that he’s back in the real world?”
“Everyone will keep on protecting him.”
We talked for a long time. There were no stars in the sky; the clouds had rolled in as they often do near the beach at night. I told him about my mother and her awful boyfriend, gambling and partying in the south of France. I told him about how my dad died alone, drunk and broken, in a flophouse in upstate New York. Even I had walked away from him, and he’d been the only person I ever loved. I explained to Doyle that sometimes being on the move seemed best. Four years of college was the longest I’d ever stayed in one place. But I knew the only chance I had was to finish, and to keep on learning. Reading and reading until I knew so much no one could hurt me. I didn’t know who I was or where I was going but I knew I had to keep on learning. I told Doyle these things I had never told a soul, feeling his warmth and his breath beside me but not able to see him. He told me he had a girlfriend who was in a Charlestown gang called the Stingers, all girls. He said if she ever found out he’d fallen in love with someone in ten minutes flat, she’d cut us both up, but good.
“Is Doyle your first or last name?”
“Last. My name is Bill—but no one calls me Bill except my parents.”
The darkness gradually began to fade around us. I saw the house’s mailbox take shape, a set of lines forming a silvery rectangle in the darkness. Then I noticed the watery rose-colored sunlight on the wet grass; dew had soaked through our clothes. The pale green color of the grass was the same as his eyes.
“You have the most beautiful eyes,” I told him. And kissed him again for a long time.
“We better get back,” Doyle finally said. By now the sun was shining brightly and I felt dizzy and exposed. The birds had started chirping, making a racket. We walked back through the deserted neighborhood, all the houses one-story summer rentals set out in orderly crescents, with little square lawns.
When we walked into the house, Bobby was packing up his stuff. He said he was driving back to Boston to turn himself in.
He didn’t have much, an old backpack filled with dirty clothes. He was shoving socks in a side pocket. He said hiding out was too much for his nerves. Waiting all night for