Yesterday's News

head toward the gate. “What does that sign say?”
    I waved the mailer at him. “I’ve got something here for Mr. Dykestra.” 1
    “Packages go to the office.”
    “Not this one.” I sat down on a fairly flat piece of rubble and crossed my arms.
    “I’m coming down.” He didn’t sound pleased with me.
    I lost track of him as he wended his way back into the intact part of the building. He came out a first-floor door along the wharf, with a short, pudgy man in a large-patterned plaid three-piece suit clumping after him. Pudge’s vest didn’t reach his belt, and his pants didn’t reach his shoes.
    As they drew even with me, the foreman pushed up his sleeves while Pudge said, “What kind of package you got for Dykestra?”
    “Confidential package.”
    “Give it here.”
    “You Dykestra?”
    The foreman said, “Give the man the package, asshole.”
    I tried to sound hurt. “I was given explicit instructions to give this only to Mr. Dykestra personally. In hand.”
    Pudge’s jaw set. “In hand, huh? A process server? Al, this guy don’t have a hard hat. Throw him off the job before the feds cite me for a safety violation.”
    “With pleasure.”
    I figured Al had watched me limp before he yelled at me, and he started for my bad left side. I pivoted on the weak leg, throwing my right hip into his left thigh. Reaching my right arm up and past his left armpit, I threw him over my hip. He landed on his back, the air whoofing from his lungs. My leg hurt as badly as he sounded.
    I said, “Mr. Dykestra, someplace we can talk this over?”
    Pudge watched me as he said, “Al, you gonna be okay?”
    Al, wallowing on the ground, nodded erratically. Dykestra said, “Let’s sit down by the water.”

    “I gotta say, I figured you’d be around to see me.”
    “Bruce Fetch give you a call?”
    Dykestra laughed. “Bruce is a good guy. He’s had more than his share of problems lately, that’s all.”
    “Seems like the kind of town, everybody’s got problems.”
    A man was maneuvering a beamy sea skiff with a small outboard across the choppy bay. He was hunkered down in the stem, spray dousing him every time the prow smacked a wave.
    Dykestra said, “You see that boat?”
    “Yes.”
    “What do you see?”
    “An old one barely making it.”
    “That’s pretty close to right. The guy in that skiff used to have a big fishing boat. Bank took it from him because the insurance company said the premium’s tripled and the bank won’t let him go out without insurance to cover their loan. So he loses his boat and now the poor bastard tries to feed his family the only way he knows how, by fishing handlines.”
    “There a moral to this story?”
    “Yeah. Yeah, there’s a moral awright. The moral is you gotta change, otherwise you lose what you got and get left with something worse.”
    “And that’s what you’re doing here, changing things?”
    “Bet your sweet ass. This fuckin town’s like a fat broad, you know? Has enough to eat, don’t have no reason to look good, it just sits and eats. That’s fine, till all of a sudden the food runs out, and nobody thinks the town looks good enough to treat to a dinner.”
    I looked over my shoulder, partly to view the condo site and partly to watch for Al. “You’re a long way from making this look good enough.”
    “You gotta start somewhere, right? I grew up in Nasharbor. Wrong side of the tracks, wrong side of the sheets. I can’t help that. But I got smart the hard way, and I got lucky, too. And now I can do something for the place, give it a hand, help pull itself out of the shit it’s in before it gets any deeper.”
    “And you figure Harborside is just what the doctor ordered?”
    “You gotta have some vision. You remember the Faneuil Hall area in the old days?”
    “I remember.”
    “Mud flats, open sewers, wharf buildings so cruddy the rats were looking to move up. Now, what do they get for those waterfront condos? Three, four hundred thousand.”
    “That’s Boston . The city draws young professionals like a magnet. Down here, I don’t see people wanting to move into an area that looks like a Soviet missile landed last week. I see them going for single-family homes, bigger, with more property than they could buy in the city.”
    “Like I said, you gotta have vision. When Harborside hits its stride, other developers’ll move on the other parcels around here. Snowball effect, you know?”
    “Or Harborside gets built, even though it’s a