Past Tense by William G. Tapply Read Free Book Online

the harbor. Across the water lie East Boston and Logan Airport. Way off to the left sits the old Charlestown Navy Yard, and beyond it looms the Mystic River Bridge. The nighttime view from my balcony features traffic lights and city lights and airplane lights and the lights of the ferries and barges and tankers and fishing boats and pleasure craft that chug around the harbor at all hours. I can spit over the railing and hit the ocean six stories down.
On a damp night, I can hear a friendly bell buoy clanging in slow, comforting rhythm. The harbor smells are strongest on a foggy night—salt air and seaweed, dead fish and diesel fumes.
    I know my neighbors in the building only well enough to nod to in the elevator that runs up from the parking garage in the basement.
    I furnished my place with discarded stuff from the house Gloria and I used to share in Wellesley, and in eleven years I haven’t replaced any of it.
    I can walk to my office in Copley Square, and I usually do. Even in the winter, coming home is a pleasant stroll up Newbury Street, across the Public Garden and the Boston Common, and through the financial district and Quincy Market. I can walk to Chinatown and the North End and the Fleet Center and Fenway Park and the New England Aquarium from my place. Skeeter’s Infield, which serves a hundred varieties of beer and the best burgers in the city, lies halfway between my office and Lewis Wharf.
    I moved there in a hurry when Gloria and I agreed we couldn’t live together for another day, and at the time I figured it was a stopgap until I found something that suited me, or until Gloria and I decided we needed to be together after all.
    After eleven years, it still felt temporary. Eleven years, and I was still waiting to see where my life was headed.
    â€œSimplify, simplify,” Thoreau said. He moved to a one-room cabin in the woods on Walden Pond to get away from people and figure things out, and I guess I was doing the same thing.
    It had taken Thoreau only a couple of years. For me, it had been over a decade and I hadn’t made much progress.
    I got home around five-thirty. I dropped my duffel bag on the bed, got a Coke from the refrigerator, and went out onto
the balcony. I lit a cigarette, leaned my forearms on the railing, and gazed at the water.
    I wondered what Evie was doing.
    She believed that I thought she had killed Larry Scott. I had to fight the urge to call her and try to convince her that I knew her better than that.
    Actually, she was half-right. I wasn’t sure what I thought.
    Evie had powerful intuition. She always seemed to know what I was thinking—sometimes even better than I did.
    When she was ready to talk, she’d call me.
    I finished my cigarette, flipped it over the railing, and went back inside. I turned on my old black-and-white television for company, found a ball game, then went into the bedroom. I unzipped my duffel bag, turned it upside down on the bed, and started putting my weekend stuff away.
    On the bottom of the pile I found the little carved quail I’d bought in Provincetown for Evie. When I’d collected our things from the cottage under the watchful eye of the Brewster police officer, in my haste I must have stuck the little bird into my bag instead of hers.
    I held it in my hand and looked at it. The artist had not painted it. Instead, he’d used the grain of the wood to suggest the texture of the feathers. It looked so real that I wanted to stroke those feathers with my fingertip.
    I suspected that I’d slipped the little wooden bird into my bag with some subconscious intent. A hostage, maybe, against the easily imagined possibility that Evie would go into one of her withdrawals—as, in fact, she had done. An excuse to call her. I’ve got your quail, honey. Why don’t I just bring it over, and while I’m there, we can have a drink.
    Nope. She’d call me when she was ready, and she’d be ready quicker if I