Mystic River

"So?"

"So, I remember you coming into my room maybe a year after Dave came home and saying, 'It's over. They got the guys.'"

His father shrugged. "They got one of them."

"So, why didn't? ?"

"In Albany," his father said. "I saw the picture in the paper. The guy had confessed to a couple molestations in New York and claimed he'd done a few more in Massachusetts and Vermont. The guy hung himself in his cell before he could get to the particulars. But I recognized the guy's face from the sketch the cop drew in our kitchen."

"You're sure?"

He nodded. "Hundred percent. The investigating detective? his name was, ah? "

"Flynn," Sean said.

His father nodded. "Mike Flynn. Right. I'd kept in contact with him, you know, a bit. So I called him after I saw the picture in the paper, and he said, yeah, it was the same guy. Dave had confirmed it."

"Which one?"

"Huh?"

"Which guy?"

"Oh. The, ah, how'd you describe him? 'The greasy one who looked sleepy.'"

Sean's child's words seemed strange coming out of his father's mouth and across the table at him. "The passenger."

"Yeah."

"And his partner?" Sean said.

His father shook his head. "Died in a car crash. Or so the other one said. That's as far as I know, but I wouldn't put too much stock in what I know. Hell, you had to tell me Tim Marcus was dead."

Sean drained what remained in his mug, pointed at his father's empty glass. "Another?"

His father considered the glass for a bit. "What the hell. Sure."

When Sean came back from the bar with fresh beers, his father was watching Jeopardy! run silently on one of the TV screens above the bar. As Sean sat down, his father said, "Who is Robert Oppenheimer?" to the TV.

"Without the volume," Sean said, "how do you know if you got it right?"

"Because I do," his father said, and poured his beer into his mug, frowning at the stupidity of Sean's question. "You guys do that a lot. I'll never understand it."

"Do what? What guys?"

His father gestured at him with the beer mug. "Guys your age. You ask a lot of questions without thinking the answer might be obvious if you just gave it some friggin' thought."

"Oh," Sean said. "Okay."

"Like this Dave Boyle stuff," his father said. "What does it matter what happened twenty-five years ago to Dave? You know what happened. He disappeared for four days with two child molesters. What happened was exactly what you'd think would happen. But here you come dredging it back up again because?" His father took a drink. "Hell, I don't know why."

His father gave him a befuddled smile and Sean matched it with his own.

"Hey, Dad."

"Yeah."

"You telling me that nothing ever happened in your past that you don't think about, turn over in your head a lot?"

His father sighed. "That's not the point."

"Sure, it is."

"No, it isn't. Bad shit happens to everyone, Sean. Everyone. You ain't special. But your whole generation, you're scab pickers. You just can't leave well enough alone. You have evidence linking Dave to Katherine Marcus's death?"

Sean laughed. The old man had come around his flank, pushing Sean's buttons with the "your generation" slurs while all the time what he wanted to know was if Dave was involved in Katie's death.

"Let's say there are a couple of circumstantial things which make Dave look like someone we'd like to keep an eye on."

"You call that an answer?"

"You call that a question?"

His father's terrific smile broke across his face then and erased a good fifteen years from his face, Sean remembering how that smile could spread through the whole house when he was young, lighting everything up.

"So you were bugging me about Dave because you're wondering if what those guys did to him could turn him into a guy who'd kill a young girl."

Sean shrugged. "Something like that."

His father gave that some thought as he stirred the peanuts in the bowl between them and sipped some more beer. "I don't think so."

Sean chuckled. "You know him that well, do you?"

"No. I just remember him as a kid. He didn't have that kind of thing in him."

"Lot of nice kids grow up to be adults who do shit you wouldn't believe."

His father cocked an eyebrow at him. "You trying to tell me about human nature?"

Sean shook his head. "Just police work."

His father leaned back in his chair, considered Sean with the tug of a smile playing at the corners of his mouth. "Come on. Enlighten me."

Sean felt his face redden a bit. "Hey, no, I'm just? "

"Please."

Sean felt foolish. It was amazing how fast his father could do that, make him feel as if what would pass as a normal set of observations with most of the people Sean knew was, in his father's eyes, the boy Sean trying to act grown up and merely succeeding at sounding pompous instead.

"Give me a little credit. I think I know a bit about people and crime. It's, you know, my job."

"So you think Dave could have butchered a nineteen-year-old girl, Sean? Dave, who you used to play with in the backyard. That kid?"

"I think anyone's capable of anything."

"So, I could have done it." His father put a hand to his chest. "Or your mother."

"No."

"Better check our alibis."

"I didn't say that. Jesus."

"Sure you did. You said anyone was capable of anything."

"Within reason."

"Oh," his father said loudly. "Well, I didn't hear that part."

He was doing it again? wrapping Sean up in knots, playing him like Sean played suspects in the box. No wonder Sean was so good at interrogation. He'd learned from a master.

They sat in silence for a bit, and eventually his father said, "Hey, maybe you're right."

Sean looked at him, waited for the punch line.

"Maybe Dave could have done what you think. I dunno. I'm just remembering the kid. I don't know the man."

Sean tried to see himself through his father's eyes then. He wondered if that's what his father saw? the kid, not the man? when he looked at his son. Probably hard to do otherwise.

He remembered the way his uncles used to talk about his father, the youngest brother in a family of twelve who'd emigrated from Ireland when his father was five. The "old Bill," they'd say, referring to the Bill Devine who'd existed before Sean was born. The "scrapper." Only now could Sean hear their voices and feel the hint of patronization an older generation feels for a younger, most of Sean's uncles having a good twelve or fifteen years on their baby brother.