Crowe Street is quiet at night. Murphy likes it this way, though most
nights he has trouble sleeping. For weeks he hasn’t gotten a good
night’s rest, averaging four or five hours each night, sometimes less.
He attributes his restlessness to his worries about his job at Granaby
Youth Corrections. At thirty-six, he’s the youngest administrator
since the facility was built in the early nineties, but in truth he hates
it. He wants to believe in the kindness of strangers, the fierce pos-
sibilities of hope, the beauty of color. Some nights after work he sits
on the back porch and watches fireflies and moths while his son Ste-
phen plays with their dog, Rufus. Lately he has to supervise Stephen
outside. Stephen is six, and for several weeks he’s been trying to hurt
the dog—poking him with a stick, pulling his tail, throwing rocks
at him. Last month Murphy talked to his wife Kate about counsel-
ing, but neither of them got around to calling anyone. Murphy’s so
beaten down by work lately he can’t concentrate on anything.
Much of what he describes about his work to Kate is corroborated
by the younger guys from his neighborhood who’ve been through
the system and talk openly about being locked up when they were
minors. Outside the Portuguese market down the street, Murphy
listens to their stories and pretends to be interested. In the apartment
building next door, one of the upstairs tenants, Jack, has Monday
Night Football parties that Murphy’s never been invited to. Jack, who’s slightly dyspneic and overweight, talks about his life as a delin-
quent, all the times he smoked hydroponic pot with his friends in a
dim basement while listening to Jane’s Addiction and eating Nutter
Butters. When Jack was seventeen he got drunk and stole a car from
the neighborhood, put it through the window of a Repo Records,
and then got out and asked if they had anything by the Del Fuegos.
“But that’s all history,” he tells Murphy. Another tenant, a thirty-
four-year-old construction worker named Lyle, says he was caught
trying to steal a rosewood-handled boot knife from an estate sale.
Ever since, his father refers to him as slightly worse than useless.
About once a week Kate sends Murphy to the Portuguese market
even though she knows Murphy can’t stand the food. Codfish, pick-
led onions, red peppers, chourico, pork pudding, cacoula, and so on.
Murphy can’t stand any of it. On nights she cooks that stuff he pur-
posefully works late, then stops by Anchor Tom’s on his way home
for a slice of pizza or a bowl of chowder to go. But the truth is that
Murphy never minds going to the market because he has a small crush
on the woman who works there. Her name is Mina; she’s divorced
and dark and in her thirties. Murphy can tell she has a good bullshit
antenna, so he hasn’t even attempted to flirt with her. She shrugs off
the guys who try, or else tells them straight, “Sorry, not interested.”
Murphy has never once seen her smile. The way her mouth droops
on one side is basically the way she looks all the time, but somehow
he finds this sexy. He imagines sleeping with her and searching her
face. Her expression, her mouth, the whole time looking like she’s
just been handed a used sock.
Tonight, yet again, he is thinking about her as he lies in bed next
to Kate. “Do we need anything from the market?” he asks quietly in
the dark. “I was just thinking.”
“What? It’s midnight.”
“I meant for tomorrow. I could dash over there real quick.”
“Stop talking.”
“Just trying to help out.”
“No.”
He loves Kate absurdly. He loves that she’s neurotic, afraid of spi-
ders and planes, worried about catching colds or a sore throat. Before
her arms while they watched Letterman at her apartment in West
Haven. She grew up with three older brothers, so she didn’t mind
playing rough. In the beginning they were spontaneous; he often
took her against the wall in a sort of arabesque position, but that was
several years ago. They married just out of college. He was working
as a program coordinator in a small juvenile detention center. Now
all he thinks about is quitting his job or fucking some stranger, like
Mina from the market.
Although, more and more frequently, he is aware of how incredibly
lucky he is. He reminds himself of this. Stephen is a joy regardless of
his recent behavior with Rufus. Sometimes at night they gather in
the living room and play board games or draw pictures. On Sundays,
Murphy helps Kate with yard work. When the weather is nice they
take walks through the neighborhood, Stephen riding his bike in
front of them. “We’re blessed,” Kate said one Christmas Eve when
Stephen was a baby. “We have to remember how blessed we are.”
Murphy sits up in bed and turns on the TV, mutes the sound, finds
a nature program on cable. A magnified butterfly sits on a leaf. The
butterfly materializes, pulsing, then flutters away.
Murphy’s boss, Hank Drucker, says the city doesn’t like runaways
or delinquents. Hank, who’s been a detention director for twenty-
five years, is overweight and asthmatic and drinks heavily. He spends
most of the day in his office, sucking on his inhaler and leaving
Murphy to supervise the staff and handle the residents. For as long
as Murphy’s known him, Hank’s been a man who speaks his mind.
“I need someone to put out fires,” he told Murphy when he hired
him several years ago. He pumped his inhaler in his mouth and sat
back in his swivel chair. “The juveniles at Granaby are runaways and
criminals. Some get kicked out of youth shelters for getting high or
stealing from staff. Others get picked up by the police and brought
in. I’ll worry about the court documents and paperwork. I need you
out there on the floor, putting out fires.”
For the past fifteen years, Murphy has seen these kids come in and
out of juvenile detention. Sometimes the court places them in the tody of social services and they sit in detention and wait to be placed
in group homes. Then they run away from the group homes and
return to the streets, and the whole cycle starts over again. Murphy
is the assistant director and serves as a sort of in-house counselor.
The juveniles he talks to during intakes, after they’ve changed out of
their street clothes and showered and put all their money and jewelry
in baggies, after they’ve carried their bed sheets and pillows down
the hall past the medical supply room to their rooms, they tell him
what happens when they return to the streets. They always want to
talk their first night. Especially the newcomers. Part of Murphy’s job
is just listening to them. He thinks they see enough in six months
to provide a lifetime of nightmares. Some of the Hispanics tell him
they stand in the alley behind MG’s Liquor on Albany Street and see
skinheads in leather jackets and camouflage pants walk by and stare at
them. The skinheads smoke cigarettes and throw bottles. The skin-
heads lean against the fence and piss in the street and yell at them.
“We’re not scared of them,” Paolo says. “I’ve seen these guys and
they don’t do anything.” Paolo is sixteen and from the north side of
Hartford. He’s lived in six different foster homes since he was twelve.
His father is part of a large Latin gang and is doing time for posses-
sion of firearms and drug trafficking after what the FBI called one of
the largest raids since the prohibition era. Paolo tells Murphy about
pickpocketing tourists in Boston on the subway T train from Govern-
ment Center to Harvard Square. For two months he stole toilet paper
every day from Captain Jack’s Fish House’s bathroom until the place
closed down due to failing health inspections. For a while, before he
was picked up and sent to the shelter, he slept wherever he could—in
the homes of strange men, under a pavilion in a park on Albany, on
the wood floors of abandoned houses. As he talks to Murphy, he
looks at the dried blood in his fingernails from scratching the scabs
on his scalp. He has lice. Impetigo of the scalp. Tonight the staff will
treat his hair with olive oil and a lice comb. They’ve been through
this before
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