Black Cat Weekly #71

Chapter 7-2

“I was asking,” he said, “because if you like it, I have some extra paint, probably enough to do your own porch. I don’t need it, so you can have it. Rather give it away than bring it to the hazardous waste dump.”

“You could just hide it in the middle of the garbage can. That’s what I do.” He stayed there a minute. I was afraid I was going to have to offer him a beer, but he finally clued in to the fact that I didn’t want his paint, and he went inside, probably to make himself some thirty-dollar coffee.

After that, Billy Myers set out to be the JP cheerleader for our street. I think he heard that we’re Boston’s capital of liberal activism, a kind of People’s Republic of Cambridge. But that’s only the newcomers. Families that have been here from the start, back when no one but the poor, honest, God-fearing people could be found dodging the trolleys that ran through JP Center, never bothered with that peace-love-and-understanding crap. We go to work, raise the kids, and have trouble enough with our own lives, instead of looking for causes to scream about.

But there he was, passing out plastic police whistles to protect our women against r**e, posting reminders not to litter, and even setting up a can full of bags for picking up after your dog. He wrote up a letter telling us to call 911 for every little suspicious thing, because even if the police were too busy to come to a small emergency (like setting off patriotic fireworks, I suppose), they logged the calls, would see we’re a “hot spot” and increase patrols.

He tried to organize a neighborhood field day at the park where we play basketball. No one showed, except a couple of teenagers trying to score free hamburgers. They told me Billy was more than happy to cook up about a dozen for them, which they ate in the woods while they smoked a few blunts.

I guess Billy wasn’t such a bad guy. But there are lines, and sometimes, there’s no excusing when someone crosses them. Like I said, the Patriots played in Arizona, while we got socked in by a blizzard. The next day, we were all out there, shoveling our steps, the sidewalks, our parking spaces. Not Billy, though. I saw footprints leading out of his house to an empty parking spot that already had three inches of snow. You could barely see the tire tracks pulling out into the street, where they disappeared in the wind.

Suddenly his doctoring duties were more important than taking care of the neighborhood.

See, three or four hours of physical labor in our neck of the woods earns you a parking space until the snow melts. Not that people are going to recognize your work. You gotta claim it. In some places they use buckets, tires, or trash cans. Around here, we like chairs. They’re big enough to see over even the drifts, and they’re easy enough to move. Some favor the folding summer ones you get at the supermarket, but I think they’re too light for windy days. That’s why I go for the old kitchen chairs. There always seems to be one in the corner of the basement.

By the time Billy crawled home that night, it was long past dark. Mounds had already been plowed up on the corners of the sidewalk, which would remain impassable for months. Cars were snug in their shoveled slots, except for one. Tricia Markham, who as a kid used to hang out with me at Bob’s Spa—that’s like a convenience store with a soda fountain—was doing a four-to-midnight shift up at the nursing home. Everyone on the block knew her schedule, but she put her trash can out just in case. Around ten I heard it being dragged through the snow. So I looked out, and there was Billy’s Subaru flashing its hazards while he moved the damn thing.

I stepped into my boots, which were still wet, and without putting on my coat I went outside.

“What the hell are you doing?” I said. Billy had already moved the can to the top of the snowbank and was getting into his car.

“Hi, there,” he said. “Someone put their trash out early, but I needed to park. I was at the hospital all day.”

“That’s Tricia’s space saver. You can’t move it.”

“It’s a public street. You can’t save a spot. I have a parking sticker just like her.”

“But you didn’t work for it. Even the city recognizes that. They won’t move the space savers until the snow emergency is over.”

“That’s stupid. People go crazy selfish when the snow falls. What’s going to happen if I park there?”

“Well, in some neighborhoods, they’ll s***h your tires. Around here, they’ll probably bury your car in snow. What gives you the right to park there, when Tricia was out by herself shoveling for four hours?”

Billy pointed to the front of his house, where we’d put all our snow. A hill the size and shape of a car promised that no one would park there for a very long time. “I was saving lives all day, and this is the thanks I get?”

“You didn’t save any of our lives. Go find another spot, or dig out your own. And don’t forget to shovel your sidewalk too. People can’t get by.”

He tried to stare me down, but by now there were faces in the windows on both sides of the street. He looked around, got the message, and drove off. It was over an hour before I heard him trudging up to his door.

It snowed again Wednesday, the day after the parade for the Pats, and again we were all doing our duty while Billy was who knows where. Tricia gave me a dozen cookies. Someone must’ve told her what I’d done, but we’d all do it for each other. I ate them for lunch, but then I had to go to work, and the trains weren’t running. So I cleared off my car, put my chair in place, and headed off. It was hell driving those roads. In some places, it was like driving through a canyon only wide enough for a sled. They were already trying to haul away the piles to “snow farms” and were talking about getting giant melters, but no one could keep up. It took me two hours to get to work, when it usually took fifteen minutes by bus, then another three hours to get home after the boss called it a day halfway through my shift.

There were times I was going less than five miles an hour, and I was alone on the roads. Even the plows were busy somewhere else. But as I inched my way closer to my block, I saw that another set of tires had left fresh tracks. And I knew, just knew, what I was about to find.

Sure enough, there was that damned Subaru, backing into my spot, the kitchen chair on top of a six-foot pile that separated my spot from Frank Miller’s. Billy was climbing out, beeping the alarm, when I pulled up next to him.

“What’s this?” I said, getting out of my car.

Billy sighed, like he was talking to a little boy. “I told you, it’s illegal and unfair to save spaces. It’s a public street, and I need to park.”

“I’ve spent eight hours on that spot so far, Billy. You need to move your car.”

The snow whipped between us. Four more inches had fallen since I left my house, and there was another storm in the forecast.

“I did that the other day, but I’m not going to this time. You left, and I found. Now you get to park somewhere else.”

“That’s not how it works in this neighborhood.” I took a step towards him. The snow crunched under my boot.

“Were supposed to be civilized,” he said. “Not savages staking out claims with crap from the basement. The neighborhood looks like a dump.” He turned to go, but I grabbed him.

“Move your car. This is my spot.”

“No. You don’t own it. Dig out that one if you want to park there.” He pointed to the mound in front of his house.

It was the last thing he ever said. I punched him, hard, and he dropped like an empty coat to the ground. His head hit a chunk of ice that a plow had pushed off the road, and he started to bleed. He never made a sound. I looked around. No one at the windows. I didn’t know what to do. Watching out for the blood, which was already slowing to a stop from the cold, I took off my glove and felt his neck.

Couldn’t find a pulse. The snow was coming down hard, and a fine white layer collected on his blue coat, first mixing with the blood, then hiding it altogether. I had to do something. My car was still in the middle of the street.

I needed to make Billy disappear. I thought about putting him in his car, but he had no trunk. He’d be spotted right away. The pile at the corner loomed over me. It would have to do until I could think of something better. I took the keys out of his hand, then dragged him to the pile and put him on top. I went up to my porch to get a shovel, and after a minute or two, if anyone saw me, they’d see I was just putting snow up there, same as anyone else.

With Billy taken care of for the moment, I switched my car for his in the spot, then drove off in the Subaru, searching for a place to dump it. Of course, there was nothing in the immediate area, but then again, that was the last thing I wanted. The main roads were clogged with snow banks, and a parking ban was in place. Anything that got in the way of the plows would be towed off. Perfect.

It took an hour, but eventually, I found what had been a space after the first storm, but with the parking ban it was now a tow zone. I pulled in, letting the tires climb the bank a bit, the front end jutting out into the street. They’d tow this real fast, and no one would ever claim it.

Walking home, I dropped the keys in a trash can someone had put out as a space saver.

The next day, I was still trying to figure out how I was going to find a permanent home for Billy. At this point, he was on ice under about three more feet of shoveled and fallen snow.

The blood stain where he hit his head was lost in the dirt and salt and muck from the plows. I was safe for a while. Or so I thought.

By this point, more than five feet of snow had fallen on the city. The streets were clogged, and the city decided something had to be done. I woke in the middle of the night to the beep-beep-beep of a reversing truck. I looked outside and saw the bright lights of a front loader and a dump truck, working the corner where I’d hid Billy. While I watched, the loader rammed into the pile, scooped off the top, and turned to drop it into the truck. It reversed, then made another pass. This time I saw the dark blue of Billy’s coat. But the driver’s view must have been blocked by the bucket. He lifted the bucket high in the air, spun the loader, and deposited the load. He went back for another and then another. A few minutes later, the dump truck left with snow high above the sides. A new truck took its place, and soon enough the corner was cleared.

I scoured the papers and the news for the next few days, but nothing was said about finding a body in the snow. There are snow farms all over the city, mountains that reach up so high, they build roads on them to put more piles on top of the piles. I would’ve heard if Billy went to a melter, so he’s in one of those, somewhere.

The police did come looking for him. They ID’d his car, and the hospital reported that he never showed up for work. A detective knocked on doors, mine and everyone else’s, but we had nothing to say. No one knew him, he wasn’t really part of the neighborhood, just another transient. “I did see him one night, and he said he was having a rough time at work,” I told the detective.

“What night was that?” he asked, writing it in his notebook.

“Who can tell?” I said. “It seemed we were out shoveling morning, noon, and night.”

He laughed. “You’re telling me. Okay, thanks for your help.”

But spring is coming. The snow banks are black with car exhaust, rotting away. As they retreat like glaciers, you can see the bands of one of the snowfalls on top of the other. Even if it takes until July, eventually, they’ll give up their secrets, including mine.

J. M. Taylor has appeared in magazines including Thuglit, Crime Factory, Crime Syndicate, Tough Crime, and Black Cat Mystery Magazine. His first novel, Night of the Furies, was published by New Pulp Press, and Genretarium released his second, Dark Heat. He lives in Boston with his wife and son, and when he’s not writing or reading, he teaches under an assumed name. Learn more at jmtaylorcrimewriter.com.

ThuglitCrimeFactoryCrimeSyndicateToughCrimeBlack Cat Mystery MagazineNight of the FuriesDark Heat