When Sean Devine and Jimmy Marcus were kids, their fathers worked together at a candy plant and brought the smell of warm chocolate back home with them. It stayed on their clothes, their car seats, the beds they slept in. By the age of eleven, Sean and Jimmy had already developed a hatred of sweets. For the rest of their lives they drank only black coffee and never ate dessert.
On Saturdays, Jimmy's father often visited the Devines to have a beer with Sean's father. He brought Jimmy with him so that he and Sean could play in the backyard. Sometimes there was also Dave Boyle, a kid with thin arms and weak eyes, who was always telling jokes he'd learned from his uncles.
Sean's father, a foreman, had the better job. He was tall and fair, with an easy smile that calmed his mother's anger. Jimmy's father loaded the trucks. He was small, his hair was dark, and he moved too quickly. Dave Boyle didn't have a father, just a lot of uncles, and the only reason he was usually there on those Saturdays was because he was clinging to Jimmy like lint. When he saw Jimmy leaving his house with his father, he showed up beside their car, asking “What's up, Jimmy?” with a sad hopefulness.
They all lived in East Buckingham, west of downtown, in a neighborhood of small corner stores and small playgrounds. The bars had Irish names. Women wore scarves around their heads and carried cigarettes in their purses. Until a couple of years ago, older boys had been taken from the streets and sent to war. They came back a year or so later, or they didn't come back at all. Days, the mothers looked for coupons in the newspapers. Nights, the fathers went to the bars. You knew everyone; nobody except those older boys ever left the place.
Jimmy and Dave came from the Flats, by the Penitentiary Channel, south of Buckingham Avenue. It was not so far from Sean's street, but the Devines lived in the Point, north of the Avenue, and the Point and the Flats didn't mix much.
People in the Point owned their places. People in the Flats rented. Point families went to church and stayed together. The Flats people were living like animals sometimes, ten in one apartment, trash in their streets, sending their kids to public schools, divorcing.
So while Sean went to his school in black pants, a black tie, and a blue shirt, Jimmy and Dave went to their school wearing street clothes, which was cool, but they usually wore the same ones three out of five days, which wasn't cool at all. They had greasy hair, greasy skin, greasy clothes.
So they probably would've never been friends if it wasn't for their fathers[1]. During the week, they never hung out, but they had those Saturdays, and there was something to those days, whether they hung out in the backyard, or wandered through the dumps, or rode the subway downtown, that felt exciting to Sean. Anything could happen, especially when you were with Jimmy.
Once they were at South Station, kicking an orange ball on the platform, and Jimmy missed, and the ball fell down onto the tracks. Quickly, Jimmy jumped off the platform, down there where the rats and the third rail were.
People on the platform went crazy, screaming at Jimmy. They waved their arms, looking for the subway police. Sean heard a rumble that could have been a train in the tunnel or just trucks in the street above, and the people on the platform heard it, too.
But Jimmy ignored the people. He was looking for the ball in the darkness under the platform, and he found it. As he was walking back, along the center of the tracks toward the stairs at the far end of the platform where the tunnel opened, a heavier rumble shook the station, and people almost jumped. Jimmy was taking his time now[2], walking slowly, then he looked back over his shoulder at Sean and Dave, and grinned.
“He's smiling. He's just nuts. You know?” Dave whispered.
When Jimmy reached the first step of the stairs, several hands grabbed him and pulled him up. People got Jimmy onto the platform and held him, looking around for someone to tell them what to do next. The train went through the tunnel, and someone screamed, but then someone laughed because the train went on the other side of the station, moving north, and Jimmy looked up into the faces of the people holding him as if to say, See?
* * *
That night Sean's father sat him down in the basement tool room. Sean's father, who often worked as a handyman around the neighborhood, came down there to build his birdhouses that were piled in a corner and the window boxes for his wife's flowers. He came down there when he wanted peace and quiet, and sometimes when he was angry, angry at Sean or Sean's mother or his job.
Sean sat quietly on an old red chair until his father said, “Sean, I know you like Jimmy Marcus, but if you two want to play together, from now on[3], you'll have to do it in view of the house. Yours, not his.”
Sean nodded. Arguing with his father was useless when he spoke as quietly and slowly as he was doing it now.
