Gone, Baby, Gone by Dennis Lehane Read Free Book Online

she placed a fist to her lips and stared at Angie as tears filled her eyes but refused to fall.

4
    The section of Dorchester Avenue that runs through my neighborhood used to have more Irish bars on it than any other street outside Dublin. When I was younger, my father used to participate in a marathon pub crawl to raise money for local charities. Two beers and one shot per bar, and the men would move onto the next one. They’d begin in Fields Corner, the next neighborhood over, and move north up the avenue. The idea was to see which man could remain standing long enough to cross the border into South Boston, less than two miles north.
    My father was a hell of a drinker, as were most of the men who signed up for the pub crawl, but in all the years of its existence, not one man ever made it to Southie.
    Most of those bars are gone now, replaced by Vietnamese restaurants and corner stores. Now known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail, this four-block section of the avenue is actually a lot more charming than many of my white neighbors seem to find it. You drive it early in the morning, and you often find old men leading fellow senior citizens in tai chi exercises along the sidewalks, see people wearing their native dress of dark silk pajamas and wide straw hats. I’ve heard about the alleged gangs, or tongs, working down here, but I’ve never encountered them; mostly I’ve seen young Vietnamese kids with spiked, gel-saturated hair and Gargoyle sunglasses, standing around trying to look cool, trying to look hard, and I find them no different than I was at their age.
    Of the old bars that have survived the latest flux of immigration into our neighborhood, the three that front the avenue itself are very good bars. The owners and their clientele have a laissez-faire attitude toward the Vietnamese, and the Vietnamese treat them in kind. Neither culture seems particularly curious about the other, and that suits both just fine.
    The only other bar near the Ho Chi Minh Trail was off the avenue, at the end of a dirt road that was stunted when the town ran out of funds to complete it in the mid-forties. The alley that remained never saw the sunlight. A trucking company’s hangar-sized depot loomed over it from the south. A dense thicket of three-deckers blocked it from the north. At the end of this alley sat the Filmore Tap, as dusty and seemingly forgotten as the aborted road it sat on.
    Back in the days of the Dot Ave pub crawl, even men of my father’s ilk—brawlers and boozers all—didn’t go in the Filmore. It was stricken from the pub crawl map as if it didn’t exist, and in my entire life I never knew anyone who frequented the place on a regular basis.
    There’s a difference between a tough working-class bar and a sleazy white-trash bar, and the Filmore epitomized the latter. Fights in working-class bars break out frequently enough but usually involve fists, maybe a beer bottle over someone’s head at worst. Fights broke out in the Filmore about every second beer and usually involved switchblades. Something about the place attracted men who’d lost anything worth caring about a long, long time ago. They came in here to nurse their drug habits and their alcoholism and their hate. And while you wouldn’t think there were a lot of people clamoring to get in their club, they didn’t look kindly upon potential applicants.
    The bartender glanced at us as we came in from the sunlight Thursday afternoon and adjusted our eyes to the sallow dark green ambience of the place. Four guys huddled around the corner of the bar closest to the door, and they turned slowly, one by one, and looked at us.
    “Where’s Lee Marvin when you need him?” I said to Angie.
    “Or Eastwood,” Angie said. “I’d take Clint about now.”
    Two guys shot pool in the back. Well, they were shooting pool. And then we came in and somehow messed up their game, and one of them looked up from the table and frowned.
    The bartender turned his back to us. He stared