The Cold Hard Light by Christopher Amenta

Author:Christopher Amenta
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Published: 2022-05-23T22:45:29+00:00

TEN

Mist dampened the pavement of his city. H sat in a wheelchair he’d found collapsed near the ticket booth for a harbor cruise. Jo slept in her stroller beside him. An overhang sheltered them from the weather. The pistol was in his pocket.

H sipped coffee from a Styrofoam cup, and with a foot, he rocked the carriage to keep Jo still and asleep. She’d been up on the hour, every hour, last night, giving him all hell, crying aloud everything she felt about him and his parenting.

Beyond the yacht, which bobbed in its berth behind him, and from over the airport, dawn lifted and caromed through the bay, setting water adazzle with light and shadow. Above, gulls circled and cawed. Higher still, rumbled the engines of planes rising from or descending into Logan. H counted three construction sites on this block: to his left a new hotel, then a tower of condominiums, and then ahead, spanning a stretch of Congress Street, the new Goldman building. A dive bar he’d been to before he met Christine had been reduced to rubble and mud. Rat traps punctuated the sidewalk. Construction had chopped up the roads and left potholes. Everything would be new, would have private balconies and luxury finishes and concierge services, but everything, now, was in flux, designed but not delivered, payoffs yet unrealized.

Ahead, the site for a new tower was a hole that gaped four stories down. According to Billy, the crew, which hadn’t yet arrived, included a bunch of union guys and Benjamin Williams.

A street man worked his way up the sidewalk, stooping now and then to pluck cigarette butts from cracks in the cement. A city bus, empty and yellow, rolled past with a hiss. Across the street, a girl inside a Dunkin’ Donuts was unfurling rubber mats, laying them over tile to make a path from the door to the counter. Her hijab was the same pink as the D in the store sign. In the window of a boutique gym, which spanned the second floor of a new condominium, a woman bobbed on a treadmill and appeared as a silhouette, dark against yellow light. H smelled bagels baking. A cyclist in black spandex—face covered in some sort of space-age balaclava—thudded over snow and broken cement in the direction of the brewery. A Coca-Cola truck pulled over at a deli, and a man in coveralls and work gloves and a ball cap came out, chattering into an earpiece as he unloaded cases of soda onto a handcart.

After five thirty, traffic on the roads quickened. By six, workers began to arrive. Pickups with empty payloads came on-site and parked, and men in sweatshirts and safety vests and hard hats emerged, smoking, sipping coffee from paper cups.

They rubbed their eyes with gloved hands. They left their trucks for other vehicles, which rattled into action: a Cat, a forklift, a pile driver, a food truck. An American flag the size of a jumbo jet flapped from the neck of a crane.

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