\nThe first time they killed Jim Steele, they fed him a cocktail, light on the gin, heavy on the bleach. Now, I\u2019m not sentimental, don\u2019t misunderstand. Jim had it coming. I wouldn\u2019t go so far as to call him a friend, but I knew who he was well enough. Big sonofabitch. Mean. Still, it\u2019s a lousy way to go. What I heard, he got on the wrong side of one too many people. That\u2019s never good if you\u2019re trying to stay on the upside of the grass. Me? I wasn\u2019t there. I was what you would say, otherwise indisposed. But my brother, he was there. He told me later how it all went down:\n<\/p>\n
\n\u201cIt- it was aw-w-wful. Real aw-awful.\u201d Jackie smiled; his grin full of half-chewed hamburger. He always stuttered. If I think back, I don\u2019t think I have a memory of him where he didn\u2019t. Wasn\u2019t his fault. Some cats are cool. Others are born with their tail caught in a doorjamb. Jackie just happened to be one of those. He caught a world of grief for it. When we lived in Southie, our pops would pop him in the mouth every time he did it, which was a lot. \u201cDo it again, Jack. How many times I gotta tell you? You never learn does you? If your mother was still alive, she\u2019d\u2019ve reconsidered having you. Dumb bastahd.\u201d<\/em> They did that sort of thing for years. Both of them. Until the day my pops swung for him one more time, only instead of him connecting with my brother, I reached out and caught my father\u2019s fist in mine.\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cWhaddaya gonna do Bobby? Hha? Ya gonna hurt me?\u201d <\/em>\n<\/p>\n \nI love my brother. He\u2019s all I have.\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cYou should have seen it. Bobby, you should have. N-n-ever seen nothin\u2019 like it. His lips were like,\u201d Jackie squeezed his face with his hands, contorted his mouth into a caricature of a fish, \u201cyou know? Like this. I didn\u2019t- I didn\u2019 think he needed a full gallon, but he did. I swear. A full gallon. Put up one H-h-ell of a fight too. I held him d-d-d-d-own, you know?\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cYou what?\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cWasn\u2019t no big deal. J-ust his han\u2014\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cJust his hands? Jackie. How many times I gotta tell you?\u201d\n<\/p>\n \nMy brother shoved a handful of fries into his mouth. How he didn\u2019t choke was beyond me.\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cThey asked, okay? I\u2019m n-n-no kid. What was I su-p-p- to do? Stand around?\u201d\n<\/p>\n \nThe Hell he wasn\u2019t a kid. What was he? Twenty-one? He may as well have been twelve. It was bad enough that he was even there. A thousand times I told him: You tell them to talk to Bobby, you understand? Talk to Bobby. I\u2019ll take care of it. Talk to Bobby. <\/em>\n<\/p>\n \nI tossed him a napkin. \u201cWipe.\u201d I watched as he did so.\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cSo, what happened to him?\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cTo who?\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cWhat do you mean, to who? To Steele, Jackie. What, you forget already?\u201d\n<\/p>\n \nJackie smiled at me, the way he used to when it was Halloween and he had somehow ended up with the biggest haul of candy. \u201cHe foamed. Foamed like a kitchen s-sp-sp-sp\u2014\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cLike a sponge?\u201d I asked.\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cYeah. Like one of those. It was awful.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \nIt wasn\u2019t but two days after my little brother spent an hour vacuuming up lunch on my dime that he called me at home.\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cB-b-b-b-bbby?\u201d\n<\/p>\n \nLast time I heard him this upset, our father had died.\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cI-t-tt-ts m-mee-J-J\u2014\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cWhat\u2019s wrong?\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cH-he\u2019s a-a-a-a-a-a-a\u2014.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cWhat?\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cH-he\u2019s al-al-al-a\u2014ive.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cWho\u2019s alive?\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cStee-e-e-ele.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cSay that again?\u201d\n<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \nI guess some bartenders are better than others. Whoever was mixing drinks the night Jim Steele got cornered in an alley blended his cocktail too weak. You wouldn\u2019t think a guy could handle a jug of Clorox going down his windpipe, but apparently Steele was a big enough brute to need seconds. He must have still been among the living when he ended up at Three Pines for \u2018recycling.\u2019 Probably walked right out the front doors. Me, I can\u2019t imagine a guy doing that, not after getting his lungs filled to the brim with bleach, but then again, what do I know? I\u2019m no doctor.\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cYou sure it\u2019s him?\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cOne hu-n-nd-hund.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cListen to me. Jackie. You\u2019re certain? You gotta be certain. You\u2019re sure it\u2019s not some joker who just looks like him? Lotta guys look alike.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \nThere was silence for a moment as if Jackie were figuring out what to say. \u201cB-bobby,\u201d Jackie\u2019s voice sounded scared, \u201cwhat d-do I do?\u201d I understood why he was scared. He had every reason to be scared. Killing a guy was one thing. Having him wandering around after you helped try to euthanize him was something else entirely, none of it good. \u201cBob-b-by?\u201d\n<\/p>\n \nThe second time they killed Jim Steele, the job got done right. I know, because I\u2019m the one who got it over with. Thirty-eight caliber to the back of the head. If they\u2019d been smart, they would have sent me the first time. I wouldn\u2019t have used bleach. I would have used Drano.\n<\/p>\n \nAs it was, I watched the back of Steele\u2019s head come apart like a cantaloupe. One second Steele was stumbling around, the next he\u2019s crumpled on the floor, legs all a-jumble, with the insides of his head decorating the wall like some unfinished Jackson Pollock. He never felt a thing. I love my brother, but unlike him, what I do is a job. Professional all the way, start to finish. A little bit of soap, a little bit of water, and come midnight, there was no trace left of Jim Steele. Not even on his wall.\n<\/p>\n \nIt was three in the morning when my phone rang again that night.\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cYou better be telling me you\u2019re coming over with a bottle of whiskey, an apple pie or something.\u201d I still wasn\u2019t dry from my shower. It felt good to be clean.\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cHe\u2019s n-n-n-not d-dead.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cExcuse me?\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cH-he\u2019s lookin\u2019 f-for you.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cWho\u2019s looking for me?\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cI sw-swear Bobby.\u201d If he was frightened before, now, my brother\u2019s voice was petrified.\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cI spent two hours, two goddamned hours on my hands and knees picking up his brains Jackie. And you\u2019re telling me\u2026 How? You wanna explain that? How could he be looking for me?\u201d\n<\/p>\n \nSonofabitch.\n<\/p>\n \nIt wasn\u2019t ten minutes later that I got on the T. The train\u2019s robotic announcement sang out to an almost empty car.\n<\/p>\n \nThis train is departing. <\/em>\n<\/p>\n \nI swear to God; I blew that oversized giraffe\u2019s brains out.\n<\/p>\n \nDoors are closing. <\/em>\n<\/p>\n \nHow could he be looking for me? How was that even possible?\n<\/p>\n \nDoors are closing. Please hold on. <\/em>\n<\/p>\n \nJackie was wrong. That\u2019s what it was. It wasn\u2019t hard to imagine my brother freaking out over someone else who looked like Steele, some other character who stood six three and had a face like an anvil. At this hour of the night, God only knew what Jackie had seen. It could have been anyone. It probably was. Hell, Jackie was probably drunk anyway. Steele was a lot of things, but he wasn\u2019t some boogeyman. Two hours from now I\u2019d be calling my brother, waking his ass up out of bed for once. And I\u2019d be letting him know the next time we went to lunch, he\u2019d be the one picking up the bill.\n<\/p>\n \nNext stop, Kendall. <\/em>\n<\/p>\n \nSteele. Damn that guy. Bastard just didn\u2019t know how to stay dead.\n<\/p>\n \nBy the time the train shuddered its way past Fenway, out from the warren of underground tubes and into the open air, past the endless red brick of buildings which in the dark looked near black, past strings of glittering lights, I had lost track of time. When I was a kid, I loved how the subway popped out from underneath the earth; the view changing all at once from darkened concrete to trees rushing past. Now, in the dark of night, those trees lurked about like ghosts. The streets, the buildings themselves seemed to come alive. Their lights moved between tree branches in my field of vision like some stop animation film flickering past. It wasn\u2019t long before I got to the end of the line.\n<\/p>\n \nJackie said Steele was at Riverside. This far out, he may as well have said he wasn\u2019t even in Boston anymore. Out here, there was more green than brick, more dirt than asphalt. The way I figured it, I\u2019d have better luck finding a Pilgrim in these sticks than I would Steele. But Jackie said Riverside, so that meant that I was here.\n<\/p>\n \nA minute\u2019s walk past Riverside Station, where the trains of the Green Line turn around and head back into the city proper, lies I-95. It doesn\u2019t take much street sense to know you aren\u2019t just going to up and cross the freeway. Not if you want to live, anyway. But if you were born here, like I was, if you spent God knows how many heat-struck summers roaming the sticks, trying to keep yourself entertained, you know something else: Behind the depot, past the tracks where they store derelict trains too busted up to run the rails any longer, is an overpass. Calling it that is giving it too much credit. It\u2019s more like a rundown death trap, something you might see spanning some mountainous chasm in Venezuela. That slab of flaking concrete is how when we were kids, we used to sneak our way into Lower Falls when we crashed a party the rich kids threw from time to time. We used to call them the bourgeoise, only we pronounced it bor-gee.<\/em> The overpass wasn\u2019t much back then. It\u2019s worse now. In some places you have to watch your step for fear it might give way beneath your shoes. It\u2019s about as wide across as I am at the shoulders, maybe a bit more. And on that overpass, wouldn\u2019t you know it, stood Jim Steele.\n<\/p>\n \nIn the rolling half-light coming up from the interstate, he looked a proper mess. Black eye. Bruises. His face was puffy. There was no way around it, the man in front of me was no apparition. It was him. It was Steele. He wore a crumpled cigarette on his lips, loose tie \u2018round his neck. Jim Steele looked me straight in the eye.\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cBobby,\u201d he nodded.\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cJimmy,\u201d I said. I should have said something witty, a tough line that could have masked the weird crawling sensation that settled in my stomach. What can I say? In my business, I don\u2019t spend too much of my time talking to the dead. There\u2019s the living, and then there\u2019s those who used to be living. This was a first for me. Steele should have been where I left him. He should have been in a garbage bag.\n<\/p>\n \nSteele popped a match. He lit his cigarette. \u201cWell? We gonna dance? Or what?\u201d\n<\/p>\n \nI murdered this bastard not two hours ago. Two hours! And now he was standing on the Lower Falls overpass, mangled Marlboro dangling from his kisser. Me, I don\u2019t go to Church. I don\u2019t meditate, and I drink black coffee not green tea. That shit\u2019s for hippies. All I know of the afterlife is that I\u2019ve sent many people into it. I don\u2019t believe in ghosts. But this? This was the same man I dealt with earlier. In the flesh, blood. Only now, he wasn\u2019t dead, wasn\u2019t rolled up in a bedsheet, stuffed into the Hefty bag I left him in. Two hours ago, Steele was worm food, decaying beneath a field in Westborough. Now, he was here. It wasn\u2019t possible. Things like this don\u2019t happen.\n<\/p>\n \nThe slow rain hardened, washed across the interstate in sheets of water that before morning would turn to waves of sleet.\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cCat got your tongue?\u201d Steele seemed to find this amusing. He laughed and then spit something out of his mouth onto the ground. It looked like a clod of dirt. Cold rain ran off his hair, trickled over a depression in his forehead, the same place where two hours ago the round from my pistol had exited his cranium.\n<\/p>\n \nNow I can hold my own in a contest of wits, but I\u2019m smart enough to know my limits. You want to learn what they teach in college? Go talk to someone else. I\u2019m not your man. But what I know is this: dead people don\u2019t smoke Marlboro\u2019s, and they don\u2019t just suddenly appear asking if you want to tango. Steele, the man in front of me, wasn\u2019t dead, though the last time I had seen him, dead was how I had left him. Jackie wasn\u2019t kidding, he hadn\u2019t seen a ghost. He had seen Steele, just like I was seeing him. Bold as brass.\n<\/p>\n \nThe rain swept between us like a curtain. \u201cIn your condo, it was\u2014 It was you.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cDamn right it was.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \nIt was my fault. I was stupid, doubting my eyes, reviewing the mental tape in my mind. Instead of watching him, I was watching what I had done to him. For that, I paid a price.\n<\/p>\n \nSteele sucker punched me. His fist connected with my jaw. I saw stars. Hell, I saw galaxies. <\/em>At his size, Steele didn\u2019t have hands, he had cinderblocks at the ends of his arms.\n<\/p>\n \nHis blow spun me around. I ended up with my face flat on the filthy concrete.\n<\/p>\n \nI reached out, still in a daze from his blow, tried grabbing his ankle. Call it instinct. Call it muscle memory from years of doing a job.\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cNot tonight, Bobby.\u201d Steele stepped on my fingers, ground them into the flaking overpass cement.\n<\/p>\n \nI heard my fingers snapping. When he stepped off, my hand was so much hamburger. His cigarette fell. It landed next to his shoe; sizzled in the pooling rain.\n<\/p>\n \nSteele knelt down. His knees made sharp crackling noises as he did so. \u201cNow, you and I,\u201d he said, \u201cwe\u2019re even.\u201d He spit what looked like dirt on the ground a second time. \u201cI\u2019ll tell Jackie you said hello. Matter of fact, I\u2019ll make sure he enjoys it. Nice and slow, so he has something to remember me by. It\u2019s the least I c-c-c-can d-d-o.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cYou, BASTAR\u2014\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cSee you around, princess.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \nI heard the click of a handgun\u2019s hammer, and then an awful sound, like the popping of a balloon.\n<\/p>\n \nEverything exploded into dazzling, ferocious white.\n<\/p>\n \nWhen my eyes settled, when the white was gone and the blinding aftershocks of purple vanished from my vision, I found myself alone.\n<\/p>\n \nSteele was gone.\n<\/p>\n \nThere was blood on the ground. I could see it, taste it. The pool of red before me was steadily being washed away by the cold, persistent drizzle. It dripped down onto the passing cars going by on freeway below, got whisked away by the sweep of wiper blades. My ears were filled with some odd, supernatural hum. It was disgusting. It swayed in volume, made me nauseous.\n<\/p>\n \nI stirred. When I got halfway to my knees, my arms collapsed. I fell back down to the bloodied concrete. A cloud of flies arose off of me. Black. Dense. They landed on me again. I felt them crawling about my skin, lapping at me with their tongues. There were thousands. They moved in my throat, wiggled around. I gagged, coughed until it felt as though the ribs of my chest would break from the effort. I began to vomit. Only, instead of retch, I vomited blood. It came out of me in lumps, congealed in globs like red gelatin.\n<\/p>\n \nWhat had he done to me?\n<\/p>\n \nBeneath me, the interstate rolled past, a never-ending river of light. Beyond it, the glitter of the city.\n<\/p>\n \nI found him again. Steele. Not in Riverside, but in the Commons. When I saw him, I shot him in plain sight. He crumpled backwards into a mass of bougainvillea, collapsed into the riot of spiky red and green. I stabbed him in Alewife, where the trains reach the end of the Red Line. I listened to his voice go from a scream beneath the Minuteman Parkway to a gentle gurgle of bubbles beneath the blade of a kitchen knife.\n<\/p>\n \nAnd still he wouldn\u2019t die.\n<\/p>\n \nI ran him through a woodchipper. Held his head beneath the murk of the Charles until his legs stopped kicking and his lungs filled with dirty water. Burned him alive. I kept him chained to a pipe in the basement of my apartment until he was nothing but skin and bones, until he crumbled when I touched him, like so much dust.\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cHow long are we gonna do this,\u201d Steele asked, \u201cyou and I?\u201d\n<\/p>\n \nThe sound of rolling steel on rails screeched its way out from the tunnels of the Boston underground. The approaching train pushed in front of it a smell of damp, of decay. Steele was bloodied from my beat down.\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cU-until it\u2019s done,\u201d I said, my voice wavering. How long had we done it already? How long had he run from me, through the alleys, the narrows of Boston, while I followed? A month? Years?\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cWhen will that be?\u201d He stared at me with eyes that looked electric blue beneath the fluorescent lights. I couldn\u2019t tell if what I saw was fear. It must have been. It\u2019s what was in mine.\n<\/p>\n \nI let him fall. He reached out and tried grabbing my hands. For a second, I tried grabbing his. The wheels of the blue line train turned him into mincemeat.\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cB-B-obbby?\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cYah, Jackie?\u201d\n<\/p>\n \nMy little brother held my hand, his small, warm fist in mine. We walked the curb of Western Ave. His face was bruised. I didn\u2019t have to look at him to know there were tears falling from his eyes leaving trails of wet on his cheeks.\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cDo you th-think you\u2019ll always-s-ss be there?\u201d\n<\/p>\n \nHe stared at his feet. We trod on shattered glass that lay scattered on the sidewalk. In the glow of a sunset filtering its way through barren sycamores, those shards of glass looked like so many glittering embers. They did not warm. Could not warm, no matter how they burned. Instead, the cold of October made my brother curl deeper into his jacket.\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cI do,\u201d I said.\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cYou promise?\u201d\n<\/p>\n \nMy father\u2019s door wore a fluttering paper that read: CONDEMNED. It crossed my mind that it had been so, long before that paper ever got there, stapled to the wood.\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cP-promise. Bob-bb-by, prom-mise.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \nI looked up three stories at my father\u2019s window.\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cWacha gonna do Bobby? Ya gonna hurt me? That it coward?\u201d <\/em>\n<\/p>\n \nDown again to the shards of a shattered windowpane beneath my feet. Across the doorway shivered yellow tape that crisscrossed the flaking blue paint. POLICE LINE\u2014DO NOT CROSS.\n<\/p>\n \nI have walked until I could carry myself no further. I have waited until no more waiting could be done. I have shivered in darkness. Cried in the solitude of a city that will not let me go. And still the sun will not rise, to warm my bones, to end a night that has no end.\n<\/p>\n \nPerhaps someday I will see my brother again. I\u2019d like that, though I\u2019ve come to believe where he is and where he has gone, I cannot follow. Here, there is no peace.\n<\/p>\n \nI saw him running, Steele. Whatever price he had to pay for having lived; he was paying it still. He disappeared down Court Street, towards the Wharf.\n<\/p>\n \nI tried to head my way to Beacon Hill, away from him.\n<\/p>\n \nI\u2019ve paid so much\u2026\n<\/p>\n \nI felt myself turn, heard the crunch of the sidewalk as I began to follow him.\n<\/p>\n \n\u2026and I\u2019ve grown so tired.\n<\/p>\n F. Francis Amanti holds a B.A. in English from Williams College. His stories have previously appeared in \u201cUnder the Bed\u201d, \u201cStoryteller,\u201d and \u201cFive on the Fifth.\u201d He lives with his wife and children in Palm Harbor, Florida and is currently working on his first novel. He is online at ffamanti.com<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The first time they killed Jim Steele, they fed him a cocktail, light on the gin, heavy on the bleach. Now, I\u2019m not sentimental, don\u2019t misunderstand. Jim had it coming. I wouldn\u2019t go so far as to call him a friend, but I knew who he was well enough. Big sonofabitch. Mean. Still, it\u2019s a …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107487,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,20085],"tags":[20086],"class_list":["post-138250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction","category-tcl-39-spring-2021","tag-the-colored-lens-39-spring-2021","entry entry-center"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecoloredlens.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecoloredlens.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecoloredlens.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecoloredlens.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/107487"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecoloredlens.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=138250"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thecoloredlens.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138250\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":138251,"href":"https:\/\/thecoloredlens.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138250\/revisions\/138251"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecoloredlens.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=138250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecoloredlens.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=138250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecoloredlens.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=138250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}