The Year We Disappeared Read online

  It’s 1961. I’m eighteen.

  I’ve just been punched in the face by the station chief. We’d been brought in for questioning, but he came in swinging. It was my good fortune to be the closest to the door, and the first one hit. He smacked a couple of the other guys, too, but by now they were ready and blocking. He couldn’t punch for shit, it was just a surprise to get whacked in the face by this big cop.

  I rub the side of my face, my jaw aches. Why does it hurt so bad?

  The chief starts yelling, “How many points do I get? How many?” This is not good—it means he knows all about the points system.

  At my high school, we had a loosely associated gang, with a core of maybe twenty members. No name, no dues, no colors, just East Dedham guys—the neighborhood just south of Boston where I grew up. Dedham was then—and still is—a slum. I didn’t know it until years later, after I’d already moved away, when I read a Boston Globe article about the East Dedham Square slums being torn down. Slums in the ghetto of Boston. News to me.

  East Dedhams were white, Irish Catholic, and dirt poor. And we thought we were bad. Sharpened Garrison belt buckles and chain dog collars—you could swing these or wrap them around your fist for punching, also snap the chain quick on an opponent’s head. We’d fight with just about anybody who wasn’t from Dedham, and had set to with guys from Natick, Norwood (our archenemies), and Malden. The Malden fight happened during a hockey game and that was where I acquired the nickname “Strangler” for choking some loser. He passed out and we took off before he came to. I read the paper the next day, fearing I’d killed him, but there wasn’t anything about it—a great relief to me. We’d also invaded a house party in an upper-class section of town—we left the birthday cake spinning around on the phono and a couple of pretty college boys with lumps and abrasions.

  Every time you got into a fight, you got a “point” for each guy you punched. It was strictly honor system because you were too busy defending yourself to observe anything else. Word of our point system got around. Maybe it made other guys more afraid, or maybe it just made them hate us more. One night I was riding around with my car full of friends when we saw another friend, Mike, with his car full of guys and decided to trail them. Turns out they’re going to Sunnyside, a section of Hyde Park. The Sunnyside boys and the group from East Dedham didn’t get along. We’d ride through their turf yelling insults at them, and they’d return the favor.

  Mike’s car stops and his guys pile out, grabbing three Sunnysider locals and laying some lumps on them. Before my crew can get into action, Mike’s running back to the car and we all leave the scene. We’re hanging out at Dave’s Sub Shop about an hour later when the Boston Police arrive in force, backed up by our local fuzz, and they grab us all. They search my car and find a huge butcher knife in the trunk that I’ve never seen before (it took me years to realize they’d dropped it on me). Possession of a deadly weapon. So we’re off to Hyde Park district station for questioning. It’s not my first time there.

  After the chief gives us all a few knocks, he rants at us about the “point” system, assault and battery charges, the deadly weapon they found in my car. Turns out they don’t really care about the Sunnyside fight, they want to shake us for names of some guys in West Roxbury who may or may not have been involved in a more serious crime. We don’t even know the guys, and besides, we won’t talk. So it’s off to court we go.

  We show up in suits and ties, the Sunnyside victims in engineer boots, jeans, and muscle shirts showing off their tattoos. The prosecutor takes a look at his little lambs and gets a continuance—moving the court date to another day so that he can get his clients in order. Next date, everybody shows up in their Sunday Mass duds and the tragic facts are presented by their side. Mike and his guys hire an attorney who will later become the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts. I hire a guy who’s done some real estate law for my parents. Cost fifty dollars—my life savings at the time. He puts me on the stand to defend myself. I’m sweating bullets but somehow get through it. Swear the knife isn’t mine, and I mean it.

  The judge finds Mike and his friends guilty, me and my crew not guilty. But the judge has seen me in here twice before and has something to say to me personally before we’re led out of the courtroom. “Join the service, boy,” he says. “Your next appearance before me, you’re headed to Village Avenue”—the address of the local jail. I go home that night and think about what he said. It wasn’t really a choice. I went down to enlist in the Air Force the next day.

  When I woke up, I didn’t know what day it was. I knew I was in a hospital. Polly was there. Then I remembered being shot. I looked at all the tubes, IVs, hoses, and machines attached to me. There were tubes going in and out of my stomach and chest for some reason too. Was I shot there? I couldn’t remember, couldn’t figure it out. Polly started talking to me.

  “You’re okay. You were in surgery for twelve hours, now you’re in the ICU.” I remembered seeing parts of my face and my teeth in the passenger seat of the car. I remembered the doctors talking about me at Falmouth. I motioned for paper and wrote Polly a note: “Don’t let me live like this.”

  Polly just gave me this look and didn’t say a word. I knew she couldn’t pull the plug. Later I learned that when Rick Smith got to the house the previous evening to bring her to the Falmouth ER, he’d told her I’d been shot but not badly. He was trying to ease her into it. When she arrived at the hospital, she thought I would be wearing an eye patch or something. She couldn’t believe that my chin was hanging down onto my chest. The bones on both sides of the lower jaw had been discontinued—not broken or fractured; they were gone. Most of my teeth were gone, or broken off at the root. My tongue was nearly severed. I had metal fragments from the lead and from the car and glass fragments from the side and front windows in my face and eyes.

  I’d been lucky to be hit where I was. Had the bullets passed an inch higher or an inch farther back, I would have bled to death or died from brain damage. It seemed the idiots who tried to kill me were pretty amateurish. First of all, it’s almost impossible to aim accurately from a moving vehicle, and this becomes a lot harder when you’re shooting at another moving vehicle. Second, they got too close. They used a shotgun loaded with double-O buckshot. Inside the casing for each shot are nine 32-caliber copper-plated lead pellets. The object of double-O buckshot is that, once fired, the nine pellets will spread out into an ever-widening pattern. If they’d been six feet away, the bullets would have spread sufficiently enough to literally blow my head apart. Instead, they pushed the gun almost to the window of my car and the nine bullets followed a two-inch-wide path through my face.

  Had those rounds been an inch lower, I would have suffered from little more than a singed beard and a busted-up car. But then I guess the second blast that came through the top of the door and the roof might have hit me since I wouldn’t have been knocked over into the passenger seat. I could have gone around and around with these kinds of thoughts, but it wouldn’t have gotten me anywhere. I was still faced with the simple facts: Someone shot me. They wanted to kill me. And here I was, still alive.

  chapter 5

  CYLIN

  FROM our hiding spot in the attic, we couldn’t hear anything going on downstairs, but we waited like Kelly had told us to do. The insulation pricked my skin, and I was careful to balance my bare feet on a wooden rafter so it wouldn’t touch me. After a few minutes I was tired of hiding and wanted to know what was going on. My feet were numb and tingly from crouching down and not moving too much. But I knew Eric and Shawn would kill me if I made a sound, so I stayed quiet.

  Finally Kelly called up to us. “You can come down, it’s okay,” she said. We climbed down the ladder and stood in the kitchen, watching her face. “He’s a cop,” she explained. “He’s going to wait outside the house all night, so you don’t have to be afraid.”

  Something wasn’t right. Who was this guy who had come to our house in the middle of the night? And if he was really a cop
, like Dad, where was his uniform? How come we’d never seen him before? And why was he going to be outside all night?

  “Okay, you guys have to go to bed now,” Kelly said. She seemed scared, and it was making me nervous. Eric and Shawn looked at each other, then back at Kelly. She couldn’t tell us what to do, not unless Mom said it was okay. “Tomorrow morning, we’re going to the beach early. Your mom wants us to be in public so nobody can mess with us.”

  I didn’t understand what she was talking about. “When’s Dad coming home?” Shawn asked.

  “I don’t know,” Kelly told him. She sat at the kitchen table and put her hands down on the wooden top. She moved her palms over the table, as if cleaning off imaginary crumbs. “Your uncle Joe will meet us at the beach tomorrow, and then we’ll go see your mom and dad, okay?” She looked like she was going to cry. “You all need to go back to bed, this guy is going to be here all night, and we’ll leave for the beach early.” It sounded more like she was talking to herself.

  “What if Mom comes home and he accidentally shoots her?” Eric asked. “Does he know that Mom is coming home?”

  “He’s not going to shoot her!” Kelly snapped. “She’s not coming home tonight, so don’t worry about it.”

  Eric and Shawn went back up to their bedroom and I went into mine without asking any more questions. During her stay with us, Kelly had been sleeping in my room on the bottom bunk of my bunk bed. I climbed up the little wooden ladder and lay down on the top bunk, pulling the covers up tight under my chin. I listened to Kelly in the living room, walking around, and watched as car lights came and went down the street. How did she know Mom wasn’t coming home? I hadn’t heard the phone ring.

  It was after one in the morning. I was never allowed to be up this late unless I was really sick. Something about that was thrilling, but I also felt bad. I knew it was important to try to go to sleep quickly. If my mom came home now, I would have to pretend to be asleep or Kelly would get in trouble. As I drifted off, I thought about what Kelly had said about going to the beach early the next day. So no one could mess with us.

  The next morning, I heard people talking. It was early. As I climbed down from the top bunk, I noticed that Kelly’s bed was still made. I could smell cigarette smoke. In the kitchen, my uncle Joe was sitting at the table. He was a big guy, with sandy auburn hair and eyes so light blue, it seemed there was no way that he and my dark-eyed, dark-haired mom could possibly be brother and sister.

  “Hey, kiddo,” he said, exhaling smoke from his cigarette. Eric and Shawn were already sitting there, eating cereal, and Kelly was there too, still wearing the clothes she had on the night before. I looked out the window and saw the hot rod car was still there, and one police car, too.

  “Is that Dad?” I asked.

  “What?” Kelly said, looking out the window. “No, that’s someone else.”

  “Whose car is that?” I pointed to a new light brown two-door car parked in our driveway.

  “That’s mine,” Uncle Joe said. He was drinking coffee and looked tired.

  Kelly poured me a bowl of cereal and put in too much milk. I didn’t like it that way, and milk made my stomach hurt, but I sat down anyhow. “Where are Lauren and Cassie?” Shawn asked about our two cousins.

  “They couldn’t come,” Uncle Joe explained. It was very strange for him to be here without Aunt Kate and without Lauren and Cassie. Why was he here anyhow?

  “Are we still going to the beach?” I asked, trying to eat the soggy cereal.

  “You guys are coming to Boston with me, and we’ll go see your dad,” Uncle Joe said. He was tapping his pack of cigarettes on the table, then took out another one and lit it.

  “Is he going to be at your house?” Eric asked, confused.

  “I think they’ll still be at the hospital,” Uncle Joe said.

  “You’re coming too?” I asked Kelly.

  “I’ll be there later. Lucky’s coming to pick me up,” she explained. Lucky was her older brother, one of our favorite cousins, who lived up in Maine. I wondered why he would drive all the way down here to pick her up when she could just go with us in Uncle Joe’s car.

  “When you’re done eating, you need to go pack,” she added, looking at my brothers. “You need to take your sleeping bags.”

  “We’re staying over?” I asked. I loved having a sleepover at my cousins’ house. Lauren, who was a year and a half older than me, was really pretty and always had expensive clothes that she gave me as hand-me-downs. Cassie was three years younger than I was, so she was the baby of the family but still fun to hang out with.

  “You’re going to stay over.” Uncle Joe took another sip of his coffee.

  “When are we going?” Eric asked, putting his cereal bowl into the sink.

  “As soon as you can get dressed and packed,” Uncle Joe said. He gave me a weak smile, but his eyes didn’t get all crinkled up like they did when he was really happy or laughing. I put my cereal bowl into the sink and ran some water into it like mom always made us do. I wondered when she would wash the dishes, when we would come back home. When I broke my arm the summer before, it took forever to get the cast put on at the emergency room—X-rays and doctors and waiting. We were there all day and into the night before we could go home. I wondered if Dad was getting a cast put on, how long it might take. Then I went into my room and started to pack.

  I took out the new dark red corduroys that Mom had bought me for school; they still had the tags on them. Kelly came into the room and sat on the bottom bunk. “Should I take these?” I asked her, holding up the pants. I had never worn them, but I wanted to show them to my cousin with the new sweater my mom had also picked out. Lauren would think they were so cool.

  “I don’t know,” Kelly said. I laid the pants on the bed and Kelly touched the price tag gently with her fingers. “You still wear a size slim?” she asked, looking me up and down. “Jesus.” She shook her head. I didn’t know what to say.

  I opened my drawers and took out a bathing suit. Uncle Joe and Aunt Kate had a pool. They were rich. I put in some shorts, a couple of halter tops, then I looked at my suitcase. It looked really empty, so I put in my other bathing suit, too. “When are we coming back?” I asked Kelly.

  “I’m not sure.” She folded the cords up carefully and laid them in the suitcase on top of everything else. “Maybe you should take these,” she said quietly.

  I loved staying at my aunt and uncle’s house, except for the food. Aunt Kate liked to cook “gourmet,” which Mom thought was so amazing. She had all kinds of beautiful pots and pans and an expensive Cuisinart that Mom was sort of jealous of. Whenever we went to visit, Aunt Kate would try out new recipes and spend hours in the kitchen cooking things like chicken breast stuffed with blue cheese or a huge roast with some weird orange sauce. It was disgusting, and I usually ended up eating nothing for dinner when we were there. I know it used to make my aunt unhappy that I wouldn’t try some of her dishes, especially since she worked so hard on them and everyone else loved her cooking, but most of it was just too gross for me.

  “Let’s go, gang,” Uncle Joe said. I picked up my suitcase and took it outside.

  “I’m starving. What do you guys say we go to McDonald’s?” he asked as he loaded our sleeping bags into the car. We had just eaten cereal, but we weren’t about to turn down a trip to McDonald’s.

  Shawn nodded and I realized that I hadn’t heard him speak all morning. His brown eyes were big; he looked really scared. I got into the front seat before my brothers could call it. But they just climbed in the backseat without a word.

  “I like your new car,” I told Uncle Joe as he got into the driver’s seat. “It’s really nice.” The seats were soft and clean, and the radio was pretty fancy.

  “It’s not that new,” Uncle Joe said, like he was embarrassed. Still, it was the nicest car I’d ever been in. I felt small and dirty in the shorts I’d worn the day before. I probably should have dressed better to be sitting in this car, to be going to hi
s house.

  After we all had pancakes at McDonald’s, we started the drive to Boston, about an hour and a half from the Cape. Uncle Joe was quiet on the way there, and Eric and Shawn didn’t talk either. I played with the radio until I found some of our favorite songs. “Don’t Bring Me Down,” by ELO. And “Sad Eyes” by Robert John. The music sounded great on the radio in Uncle Joe’s car.

  “I wish Dad would get the radio in his car fixed,” I said, but no one said anything. “Don’t you guys?” I said to my brothers in the backseat. Shawn was looking out the window, and Eric just gave me a blank stare, so I gave him one back for a second, but he didn’t flinch.

  When Uncle Joe was ready for another cigarette, he let me push in the special button in his car that heated the lighter. When the lighter popped back out, the end of it was fiery hot and glowing red, like coals in the barbecue. After he lit his cigarette, he cleared his throat. “Here’s the thing,” he finally said, turning down the volume on the radio. “Your dad is alive, and he’s going to make it. He’s a strong man.”

  Uncle Joe was acting weird, so serious, so tired. I was used to him always joking around, so I didn’t like him like this. Maybe, I thought, I just don’t like him when Lauren and Cassie aren’t around.

  We were quiet. No one wanted to ask any questions; we didn’t really want to know what he was talking about. “My dad died when I was a kid, when your mom was only nine years old,” Uncle Joe reminded us. “And we turned out okay. Just remember that.” He kept his eyes on the road. I kind of had to pee, but I didn’t want to tell my uncle. It seemed like he was in a bad mood. Besides, we would be there soon.

  chapter 6

  JOHN

  THE second time I regained consciousness, I was looking at an aluminum ceiling with thousands of tiny holes in it. I knew I’d been shot and I’d had surgery. I didn’t know what day it was. I couldn’t figure out why my stomach hurt so badly. Slowly I began tracing where the lines went from all the bottles and bags hanging around the bed. A few of them were smaller tubes—IVs with blood, water, meds. I found a big tube, about a half-inch in diameter, that went under the sheet. It looked like it had milk in it.