Aloft (19 page)

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"What talk do you want, there, Jer?"

"Hey, Sally."

It's Salvatore Mondello, just arriving to work. He's dressed as usual in his low-rent white-collar style: short-sleeve dress shirt, too-short stubby tie, trim-fit gabardine slacks, worn cordovan wing tips. He's one of those handsome lanky Northern Italian types who age magnificently. His skin has a clean-scrubbed light olive glow, his hair still thick and full and streaked with enough dark strands that it appears spun straight from silver, If he had been a slightly different man he could have enjoyed a long career as one of those duty-free international playboys jetting from the Cote d'Azur to Palm Beach with a wealthy mis-tress waiting desperately in each hotel suite for him to blindfold her with his silk ascot, fragrant of musk and Dunhill 100s, and do things to her with his tongue and lubed pinky finger that her inattentive jerk husband long gave up doing.

But fortunately or unfortunately Sal is not a slightly different man, and while he is plenty smart and has let his dick lead him through life like a lot of the rest of us, I would say he did so without a companion ambition for fame or money, and so is who he is, which is basically an old local stud who worked just hard enough to pay the rent and take out fresh pussy every Friday and Saturday night. This until maybe eight or ten years ago, when I think the high mileage on his purportedly horse-sized rig (this from one of the mechanics, who early on in Battle Brothers history caught him jerking off in the john and described Sal's action "like he was buffin' a toy baseball bat") finally caught up to him and broke down, relegating him to a retirement of titty bars and dirty Web chats and twice-a-year Caribbean cruises on a popular line on which he travels free for serving as a nightly dance partner for singles and widows, A L O F T

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though with this new hard-on wonder drug they've invented, Sal might soon fly the flag high once again.

"What, Jer, they fire you over there at the agency?"

"Not yet. I'm just saying hello today."

"Hey there, Maya."

"Morning, Sal," she answers him, without a hint of umbrage. Though not with great warmth, either. "I gotta get to work."

"You do that, honey," Sal says. When she's back out front he says, "If I could just be sixty again."

"Yeah? What would you do?" I say, remembering as I do almost daily now that I'll be that very age in a matter of nothing, just when the world tips on its axis and our propitiously temperate part of it starts to die out again, wreathe itself in the dusty colors of mortality.

"Are you kidding? Me and that amazing piece of ass would be balling all day like those horny monkeys on the nature program. What do they call them, bonobos? Those monkeys just screw each other all day, and they'll even get into some dyke and fag action when nobody's looking."

"No kidding?"

"Saw it just last night. The girl monkeys, you know, with the bright red catcher's mitt twats, will squat back to back, rubbing themselves on each other. The boys will hang upside down and play swords with their skinny units. These monkeys are different than other ones who would rather fight viciously than fuck. I guess we're supposed to be more like the fighting monkeys."

"I guess you're a bonobo, huh, Sally?"

"You got that right. What about you?"

"Probably neither," I say, thinking that there must be a third kind of monkey, only slightly more advanced, who sits high up
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in the trees and collects his fruit pits, indolently rioting how much he's eaten.

"How's Rita treating you?"

"You don't know?"

"Oh, Christ, Jer, don't tell me something's happened to her."

"No, no, nothing like that. She just left me. Almost a year ago, I guess."

"Oh. That's even worse. It means she's with someone else."

"Yeah."

"Do I know the guy?"

"Richie Coniglio. From the neighborhood. Hairy little guy."

"That pipsqueak? What's he do now?"

"He's a fancy-pants lawyer. Richer than God. He lives over in Muttontown."

"I guess we all knew that little wiseass was headed for loads of dough. But he has to end up with your girl, too?"

"I know. It's not good."

"And when that girl is somebody like Rita. Christ. I've always liked Puerto Rican chicks because they're like black chicks who aren't black, if you know what I mean. But when you started up with Rita I was especially jealous. She's a sweet lady and a great cook and then she's got those big chocolate eyes and the nice skin and that gorgeous shapely round . . ."

"Hey, hey, Sally. It's still pretty fresh, okay?"

"Sorry, Jer. I'm just telling you how good you had it with her.

Did you fuck things up or did she just get sick of you?"

"Both, I think."

"Probably you weren't giving her enough head. These days women expect it."

"You're probably right," I tell him, reminded now why over all these years Sal and I never got to be closer, despite the fact that A L O F T

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I've always liked him well enough and even looked up to him like the older brother I sometimes wished I'd had. Sal has a way of making you agree with him not because he's a bully but because you don't really want to get into the full squalid array of details necessary to complete a typical conversation with him. I'd like to add here, too, that Rita didn't expect anything in the labial way, and while she clearly liked it plenty whenever I did do my oral duties, she was generally of the mind that men shouldn't get so right up close to a woman's petaled delicates, if they were to remain in the least secret and alluring and mysterious.

Or so she told me.

Sal adds, too: "Seems like these young ones like Maya up there don't even care for old-fashioned penetration anymore.

They'd all just rather be lesbians, if they had it their way. If you don't believe me it's on the Internet."

"Whatever. But if you can do me a favor, Sally, just keep it in your pants here at the office."

"What," he says, looking up front. "Has there been a complaint?"

"No, no, nobody's said nothing. But you hear about what's going on these days with sexual harassment. Jack doesn't need anybody suing the company because the work environment is, you know, whatever they call it, 'predatory.' "

"Hey, I'm not the one wearing suggestive T-shirts."

"I'm just saying, Sal, let's keep it professional around here, okay? Keep the shop going like it is."

"No problem with me, Jer," he says. "It's Jack you should worry about."

"What? He's fucking around?"

"I wouldn't know about that," Sal says. "I just think he's running Battle Brothers into the ground."

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"What are you talking about? It seems like we've got more work than we can handle. Seems like the trucks are always all out."

"Sure they are. We're doing nice business, just like we have the last five years. But that's the
old
work. The dirt work. We get decent margins there, but nothing fantastic. You know that."

"Sure,"

"The new stuff is what's the problem. See all those new workstations and plotters?" he says, pointing to the six custom maple-wood desks with large flat-panel computer monitors and a huge plotter for making large-format prints. "That's Jack's design operation. He and Eunice spent top dollar on that equipment and software, almost seventy grand. We could probably design fighter jets on those things. But we've only been using one of the terminals, and half-time at that. The high-end construction and renovation work is out there, but we're not getting it. People know us as landscapers and stonemasons, not kitchen and bathroom designers. Jack's idea that he could become this supercontractor for the whole tristate region is an interesting idea, but he's spending all his hours driving to Cheesedick, Connecticut, to do an estimate and getting squat. I think he's finally landed a couple jobs, but I think he had to lowball to get them, and after looking at the bids I won't be surprised if we lose twenty-five or fifty grand on each. And do you know how much this new office and showroom wing is costing us? Five hundred grand, and counting."

"Jesus. I had no idea."

"But that's not the worst of it, Jer. I hate to tell you this, but I'm pretty sure Jack's been borrowing against the business. I think he's been trying to hide it from me but I got some state-A L 0 F

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ments by accident about interest payments on a big note against the property, and then another on the business itself."

"How big are they?"

"They add up to a million and a half."

"Anything else you want to tell me?"

"That's it. Though I can't promise that these aren't just the ones I've gotten wind of. I don't know what he's doing, Jer, but I think you better talk to him."

"Yeah. I will."

"Jer?"

"Yeah?"

"What's your line on me and Miss Curry Pot?"

"Way long. I'd keep it platonic for now. Okay, Sally?"

Sal smirks, and heads to his office through the frosted-glass door that is the partition between this expensive sleek new world and the grubby oil-streaked one of old. On the computer I type in the address of Sir Harold's site and actually have to pause before tapping the Enter key.

The news is good. He emerged from the storm shortly after I'd last looked, and is flying high again, his path only slightly altered, and just a few hours shy of schedule. The electronic message board for him is lit up with hundreds of emphatic postings, such as "Fly, Harold, Fly!" and "Tally Ho!" and "You Can't Keep A Good Man Down," and though I'd like to add my two cents to the feel-good kitty (mostly if not exclusively for the psychic benefit of us onlookers), I can't quell this steady pulsing dread that trouble still lies ahead for him. Because when you think of it, the truly depressing thing is that the trouble will probably not be a limitation of Sir Harold himself or his wondrous technology but just the fact of something as guileless as
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the winds, and the weather, these chance clouds that should de-termine a person's ultimate success or failure. This is why I fly my
Donnie
only when the sky is completely clear, with no threat of weather for at least another day, as I want no obstacle or impedance to a good afternoon's soar. Of course this also means I've never ranged too far from here, never hopped from small airfield to airfield the way most guys have on weeklong junkets to Florida or California, never flown after dusk in the watery blue light or through the scantest rains; I have to wonder what will happen if I ever do find myself in an unforecasted fog, how well if at all I'll work the controls and fly solely by instruments, if I'll be able to forge through the muck and break back into daylight.

And as I pad into Jack's plush office and sit in his broad leather desk chair that seems to promise only good fortune and prosperity, I feel somewhat bereft (and not because of any monies he's maybe lost or losing), for I don't quite know what I'll say to him, or more specifically, what I'll say that won't deeply cut or insult him or make him talk to me even less than he already does. If, as I've noted, the main problem with Jack is that he too much needs to impress, the very close second problem at this point is that he knows that's exactly what I'm thinking whenever I step into his cavernous home or visit one of his jobs or come calling around here. And perhaps over time it's this already anticipated turbulence that brings a family most harm, the knowledge unacknowledged, which at some point you can try and try but can't glide above.

six

OW AND THEN, clear out of the blue, just as he did when I first

N arrived at Ivy Acres this afternoon for an early dinner visit, Pop will tell me, "Bobby was the one who should have married Daisy."

At the moment, he's dozing hard, his mouth laid open, unhinged, his eyes pinched up like something really, really hurts.

I shouldn't rouse him.

To be honest, I used to burn inside whenever Pop said that.

Mostly because I know how dead wrong he'd be, if that had ever come to pass. Bobby met Daisy maybe twice before he left for basic training in the fall of 1968. That summer he was playing in the instructional league in Puerto Rico but got sick of the heat and the bugs and the food, and like a dope signed up for the Marines instead of seeing what might have come of his raw talent for the game. Bobby and Daisy got along instantly, Bobby taking her for a ride in the gleaming emerald green '67 Impala convertible that Pop had bought brand new for himself. I
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remember them coming back with ice cream cones, with both of them, ego-typically, sporting triple dips. After a brief stint at Camp Pendleton he was shipped to Vietnam, stationed who knows where, serving six months of duty until the night he was separated from his Marine platoon during a chaotic firefight and never heard from again. They searched for his body over the next few days and found his helmet and a bloody boot, but then the whole division had to quickly pull back under an intense VC counterattack and naturally the next thing that happened was a carpet bombing of the area, which obliterated everything living or dead. After the war he was on the long roster of MIAs submitted to the Vietnamese government during prisoner and bodily-remains exchanges, but even Pop knew that that was pretty much the end of the story for Robert Henry Battle of Whitestone, New York, and never fought the reality or was one of those people who made pilgrimage to Vietnam or agitated for more efforts from the government.

I think Pop made the best of the situation, at least for himself, for while he didn't have Bobby's body he could entertain the notion of Bobby Ongoing, which was unassailable and ever-evolving. Not that Pop was under any delusions that he was still alive somewhere, but he could imagine Bobby growing older, Bobby maturing and marrying, Bobby as a father and the scion of the family business, all this without interference from any Bobby Actual, whose presence, like all our presences, would have been an inglorious mitigation. Ma, of course, was inconsolable for a long time; she wouldn't talk much when she and Pop came over and just trudged about the kitchen wiping surfaces or occupied herself with pressing my shirts down in the basement or sweeping the patio. In her own house she wouldn't let anybody into Bobby's room, not even Pop, until a leak in his A L O F T