Live Free or Die
by Louis Scenti
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Table of Contents parts 1, 2, 3 |
conclusion
“You coming?”
I closed the door and walked around and got in, and we rode in silence. Not the good kind. On the highway, I watched the mile markers whip by. I rarely drove when I was in Manhattan. The sameness of the interstate unspooling ahead of us put me on edge. Trapezoids of light kept slanting through the cabin. I waited for each pulse to illuminate Mary’s face, hoping for a glimpse of the person I’d known before tonight.
“Uhm, it’s none of my business, I know,” I said, with a timid laugh, “but if you want to tell me about this... I mean, you did ask me to do this. Maybe you kind of owe me an explanation of what this was all about, at least?”
“Mike, I don’t owe you anything. I’m grateful you did this for me, but that’s all.”
Okay. If she had anything to say to me, she would. I turned and stared out the window, zoning out on the dark connected shapes of freeway trees. After a few minutes Mary spoke.
“Look... my family is... I guess we’re like any family, unhappy in our own way, you know?” I smiled at the Tolstoy reference. I didn’t know Mary was literary. Under other circumstances, it would have only added to my growing attraction to her.
“But... I just wanted my grandfather to see that I’m okay. He tried his best when my father left. After Grandma Rose died, he really seemed to change. It got weird.”
“Weird?”
“He was lonely. Sad. I didn’t know what to do.”
After a long pause, Mary looked straight at me. She stared for so long I should have shouted for her to keep her eyes on the road, but being drunk and all, I guess I didn’t care.
“My mother thinks she knows things, but she doesn’t.”
“What things?”
Mary’s face flashed dark then light in the oncoming headlights.
“Grandpa would come after school to watch me. He’d just sit there. Sometimes he would cry. What do you do when you see your grandfather crying? So I held his hand. A couple of times he asked me to hug him and I did.”
I felt faint. An awareness of being surrounded and smothered overtook me. My limbs felt detached from my torso. Jet engines fired in my ears.
“Mary, did Cosimo... I mean... are you saying...? Mary, quick, pull over!”
Deftly, she swung the car into the breakdown lane. Before it came to a stop, I pushed the door open and vomited. I waited a while, then wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. I turned to her. “I was molested by a guy at summer camp when I was nine.”
“What? Oh, my God, Mike. Oh, my God.”
“I’ve never told anyone. You’re the first person. Not even my parents. When you started telling me about your grandfather... I just...”
“Oh, Mike, I am so sorry. That’s terrible.” Mary sat back in her seat, her hands still on the steering wheel, a look of confusion, then dawning, crossed her features.
“Mike, I don’t think you do. I think you think... Mike, nothing ever happened. What you’re thinking. That didn’t happen.”
As she spoke, she grew calmer, her narration methodical, precise. “I must have been eleven or twelve. It was late when my mother came home. Grandpa was sitting on my bed rubbing my back, trying to help me sleep. She flipped out. Started screaming. Told him to get out. Called him a filthy pervert. I swear, Mike, nothing ever happened. Cory’s a psycho. Now that he’s dying, she’s his devoted daughter, but she’s the sick one.”
“I’m sorry for you, Mary. Sorry this happened to you.” But I wasn’t sorry. I was more alone than ever. I’d thought I’d found someone who would know what it was like to be yoked to an unspeakable burden. Someone I could trust.
* * *
Junior and Kath were in their room when I got in; Donny, still at large. The windows were open and the woods were alive, peepers and crickets incanting a serenity I couldn’t claim. I thought about Mary. I wanted her. I wanted someone to know me, to understand. I tried to bring her into my thinking, but my mind wouldn’t have it, returning to the awful truth, more real now, by some cruel trick of memory, than it ever had been.
The acne-scarred monster Tommy Branson had lurked behind the flapping curtain of my memories for so long. His I-don’t-give-a-shit grin, greasy shag haircut, callused hands and smelly feet. He’d bring Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill wine, and we’d drink it down by the lake. He told me you didn’t have to be a homo to give a blow job. In my allotted once-a-week phone calls, I begged my parents to let me come home. They said I was homesick. I’d be fine.
The self-loathing and terror that Tommy Branson would kill my family — something he’d said calmly, demonically — transformed me. I lost any identity beyond degradation and shame.
I grabbed the quart of Jack Daniels off the chest of drawers and went to the window. Lightning bugs flickered randomly at the edge of the woods. They reminded me of camp. Everything was suddenly reminding me of camp. Black woods, night noises, all of the trappings of an idyllic summer gone rancid.
I woke to a sticky gray dawn, naked, on the couch, wrapped in a scratchy woolen throw. I went up to my loft and half-slept until I heard Junior downstairs. He was always the first one up. He’d be dressed, ready for work, drinking coffee.
“Hey,” I said, emerging on the landing above the great room.
Junior looked up. “How was your night, Romeo? Or should I say Juliet?”
I forced a laugh, but it felt false. I stood mute.
He took the hint. “So? What happened?”
“Uh, it was surreal. Her mother cornered me and said she knew I wasn’t a real boyfriend. Said I should scram. I’m not sure. I guess I blew the role.”
“Holy shit,” said Junior with a laugh.
I wanted to tell him it wasn’t funny. I wanted to tell him what really happened so he’d know how unfunny it was. But I knew I never would.
“Yeah, holy shit is right.”
“You know, you could do a lot worse than Mary,” he said.
* * *
That evening I went through the motions of pre-set with the interns. Junior set the call for strike and broke us for dinner. I checked in with him to see if he needed me. When he said no, I headed over to Austin’s, my breathing quickening.
Walking in, I didn’t see Mary. Jackie was tending bar. I thought about walking out, but she waved me over.
“Mike, how you doing?”
“Hey, Jackie. I’m good. A little hungover.”
She laughed. “You look it. But it sounds like you guys had a good time.”
“Yeah, we did, I guess.”
“It’s sad about her grandpa.” She looked past me, wiping a spot on the bar that looked dry to me. “Mary really appreciated it. She said you even asked her to dance.”
“Yeah. Be glad you missed that part,” I said with a wan smile. “Is she here?”
Jackie shrugged. “I guess she’s in the dining room.” She put a drink down in front of me.
“This one’s on me,” she said with a wink.
I’d genuinely planned on not drinking, but the amber liquid refracted through ice was like an old friend beckoning: Let’s make up. Forgive and forget. And anyway: hair of the dog, right?
“Can you make it a double?”
“Pushy, pushy,” she said, lifting the bottle again and topping me off.
She leaned over the bar and lowered her voice. With a mix of lust and unease, I saw she wasn’t wearing a bra.
“Hey, come by later on. We can do a little blow. My guy was here last night.”
“Okay, yeah. As soon as I get done with strike.”
“Good. See you later.”
“Yeah, okay. I’ll try to get away—”
“Hey, here she is. Hi, honey,” she said as Mary appeared from behind me.
“Hey, hi!” I said, with a little too much enthusiasm. I reached to touch her arm playfully, but she drew back.
“Mike, let’s talk for a minute? We can grab a table in the lounge. Jacks, can you watch my section for a minute?”
“Sure sweetie. Mike, see you later, huh?” Jackie said, winking.
We took a seat in the half-full lounge area. A server I didn’t know — new blood, I suspected — was going table-to-table and lighting those pear-shaped candles wrapped in plastic webbing. She was struggling to get the wicks to ignite before the flame caught up to her. She snapped her hand back, and I saw her mouth silently cussing.
Mary had pushed her chair pretty far back from the table, affording me a glimpse of the carpet fraying away from the metal strip anchoring it to the floor. I flashed on a few days ago — a lifetime — when we brushed knees at the bar.
“I can’t talk long. It’s getting busy.”
“Right, no, I know. I just wanted to see if—”
“Mike, I think you had too much to drink last night. I’m feeling bad I put you in that spot.”
“No, it’s okay, really. In fact, I was thinking we should have a real date. See, last night... Well, I really like you, Mary. I’m going back to New York at the end of the week and maybe we can...”
She was looking past me. I trailed off. The protracted silence eclipsed the answer I’d hoped for.
“But if you don’t want to, I understand. It’s cool. No problem.”
“Mike, I think it’s better if we just keep it like it was before last night.”
“Mary, I hardly slept last night thinking about... you know. I never told anyone.”
“Look, I have to get back.”
* * *
All week I went around on the razor’s edge and, in a fit of botched self-regulation, I had a volcanic run-in with Nicky the intern. I ripped him profanely and publicly after he discharged a fire extinguisher during a performance. He claimed it was an accident. He said I’d pushed him against the wall and “manhandled” him. I don’t recall handling of any kind. His big-shot lawyer father threatened the producer, compelling Junior to come down on me.
And because too much is never enough, ahead of Sunday’s final performance, the producer asked Junior back for the 1981 season. In a casual postscript, she informed him she would never hire me again.
After the show came down Sunday night, I said good-bye to the few people I thought cared. I was driving to my parent’s house in Providence. I’d leave my car there and hop the Greyhound to Manhattan the next morning.
* * *
Back in New York I drifted sideways, ignoring and alienating friends, raining hostility down on random strangers, while doing stupid things, drunken things. One morning I woke on a couch that was not mine. Stokes, one of the other bartenders from the restaurant where I was working, explained he’d intervened after he saw me picking a fight with some Columbia jocks in a dive on Amsterdam Avenue.
Stokes and I weren’t really tight but, in a coincidence that probably kept me out of a precinct lock-up, he intervened and dragged me to his apartment, depositing me on his couch. Looking back, it was around that time a small kernel of rage had germinated inside me. Exorcising it would prove beyond my power.
* * *
Junior and Kath divorced within a year of our last summer at Alton. This was a few years before the incident. The last time I saw them together, I’d asked Kath if she’d ever heard from Mary.
Apparently, Mary had done okay. She’d gotten a master’s degree in Education Administration and was a big deal in the Melrose school system. She married a guy who got in on the ground floor of computers with the Digital Equipment Company. They’d had a kid, maybe more. I asked about the grandfather. Kath said she wasn’t sure, but she thought he’d died in the fall of ’80. And that was that.
Junior came to visit me once, early on. He was tense, his glances truncated, fearful. I didn’t blame him. Prison — even the lenient version in which I’d landed — was not the milieu of my old crowd. We faded away.
Tommy Branson’s bona fides as a “diaper sniper” were well known by then, and other than his toothless, trailer-trash aunt, no one seemed troubled by his passing. I did a short bid. Two years. My Public Defender was ecstatic, relatively speaking. I was out after fourteen months. Model prisoner, good behavior, blah, blah, blah.
I earned a stool in my neighborhood bar. I’d have a couple of beers — no more hard stuff — and mind my own business. For quite a while I had a dog, a mutt I found on the street. After putting him down, I swore never again.
I have debilitating arthritis in my hands. From my third floor apartment in an old triple-decker at the top of the hill, a sliver of the bay unpretentiously revealed its influence on the seasons. Occasionally, I drive out to the Cape to look at the sunset and eat a lobster roll. It’s not so bad. I keep busy. I know what to expect, and I know my limits.
* * *
After the birth of the World Wide Web in the mid-nineties, I caught up with the stories of the Tommy Branson murder. There was plenty of time in between fielding phone calls and organizing files in my job as a clerk/receptionist for a plumbing supply house in Fall River. My Probie knew the family. She vouched for me. I wanted to make her look good.
Today I found an article published around the thirty-fifth anniversary of Tommy Branson’s murder. Some connection to National Victims of Childhood Abuse Day. His killer, the article stated, was one of his former victims, a New York actor turned reclusive loner. The article said Tommy Branson was walking in the parking lot of a Family Dollar Store when he had his brains bashed in from behind by an aluminum baseball bat. A journalistic error. I made sure he recognized me before I rearranged his features.
Do I wish I’d never done it? Yeah, for sure. But who can say what it takes to exorcise the demons that devour a childhood? But what did it matter now? Time had nibbled away at the edges of what might have been until it was like my life before had never happened. He got his and I got mine.
Copyright © 2026 by Louis Scenti
