THE SUN WAS JUST
barely making it above the horizon when I put my key in the front door of my house. The sky was as gray as smoke, with streaks of salmon shot through it.
A few hours before, I’d stopped by Frank Diamond’s room and explained the situation about his fighter using drugs again. He wasn’t happy, of course, but we both agreed it was in everyone’s best interest not to call for a public drug test. Instead, we made a deal to reinstate Elijah as the challenger in the title fight.
I watched a heron rising from a hedge on my front lawn. I was going to make it after all. I’d managed to get back into the fight game and now I stood to make enough money to pay off both Danny Klein and Teddy. I wasn’t going to end up by the side of a road with my vital parts missing. I was going to be able to provide for my family. So why did I still feel so ashamed?
The heron flew over the roof of my house. I wondered if I could still be a good father to my kids after I’d killed a man and used a woman for blackmail. It was a tough sell any way you looked at it. But at the moment, all I wanted to do was see them and hold them. Maybe that would bring me back to the way I was. I tried not to make too much noise as I let myself in.
The living room was dark except for the glowing end of a cigarette. Probably Carla, waiting up for me. Ready to give me hell because I’d left bedsheets on the sofa or, worse, because she’d heard stories about Rosemary and me. I braced for the storm.
But then the cigarette moved. It came toward me and dropped abruptly. I heard a dull muffled sound and felt a blunt massive pain suddenly spreading up my leg. I grabbed my knee and fell to the floor as the overhead light went on.
My father was standing over me, putting a cigarette out on the rug with his foot. In his left hand, he had a golf club.
“Where you been?” he said.
All I could do was moan and think about throwing up.
“I asked you something. Where you been all night?”
The golf club shook in his hand, like it was about to get used again.
“At the casino. I was just at the Doubloon Casino. That’s all.”
Vin went into the kitchen, brought back an ice tray, and threw it at me. “There, put a couple on your knee. Two days you’ll be good as new.”
I looked around, surprised Carla and the kids hadn’t come out with all the noise. But both bedrooms were still quiet and dark.
“Where’s the rest of them?”
“I told them take the night off, ’cause I wanted to talk to you. They’re at the Econo-Lodge near the video arcade, so the kids can play in the morning.”
I propped myself up against one of the old purple stuffed chairs and rolled up my pant leg. My father had hit me just below the knee, but the pain was a steady pulse I could feel all the way up to the back of my neck.
“So what’re you doing?” he said.
“Nothing.”
He touched the edge of my shoe with the head of the club. “Don’t tell me you’re not doing anything. Now why don’t we try and talk honest with each other like a father and son are supposed to, so I don’t have to kick the living shit out of you.”
“All right.”
“So what’re you doing? You getting into the fight game?”
“What? Who told you that?”
“I heard it whispered in the fucking trees,” he said. “What’s your angle?”
I shrugged like I didn’t know what he was talking about and tried to hold those ice cubes on my knee.
“Come on, I know you. You gotta have an angle on this. You shaking somebody down at the casino?”
I watched the golf club warily. “No, it’s not like that.”
My father’s face was impossible to read. The hard cast of his nose and mouth always made him look like he was in a bad mood. The only thing that told me he was feeling worse now was the position of the golf club just over my kneecap.
“It’s no big deal,” I said. “John B. asked me to give him a hand looking after his brother. There’s no money in it yet. So I’m just following through. That’s what you said, right? Always follow through when somebody tells you something.”
I saw my father’s grip on the golf club tighten. “Nah, there’s gotta be more to it than that. I didn’t raise you for nothing. You’ve gotta have an angle on a guy.”
“It’s nothing.”
I didn’t want to outright lie to my father. But if I told him anything, it would get right back to Teddy and he’d sink the whole ship.
“So how much are they gonna give you?” my father said grimly.
“It’s complicated. It’s not like walking into a candy store with a gun in your hand. It’s business. You’re dealing with major corporations and Wall Street lawyers. It takes a certain . . . finesse.”
My father looked at me in a dreamy kind of way before he raised his arms and swung the golf club as hard as he could at my right foot.
My shoe absorbed most of the punishment, but the shock waves traveled up my leg and into my crotch.
“What did I tell you?!” he shouted. “What’d I ever teach you?! Anything you make goes right into the elbow! You understand, you stupid piece of shit! Teddy gets fifty percent of everything you do. That’s the way it is.”
“But Dad...”
“Don’t ‘but Dad’ me. You’ll get the both of us put in a fuckin’ lime pit. Where’d you get the balls to do that?” my father said, his face turning red from outrage. “There’s guys been in this town twice as long as you’ve been alive and never seen a dime off the casinos.”
“That’s not my fault.”
My father gnawed on one of his knuckles. “You still owe Teddy sixty. You know, sometimes I wonder why I took you in after your real father died. I could’ve just left you in a state home, you know.”
The pain pulsed through my body again, and for a moment this idea flashed through my mind that maybe both Vin and Teddy had something to do with what happened to Mike. But it was more than I could contend with. I loved Vin. In the back of my mind, I’d been thinking I could use some of my fight revenues to help him retire down to Florida. The thought that he was in a way responsible for Mike’s disappearance would’ve melted the glue that held my brain together. So I just forgot about it. For a while.
“Look, Dad,” I said. “We’ve talked about these casinos a long time, haven’t we? It’s the modern era. We both know Teddy’s way of doing things is over. You just don’t walk up to somebody and put a gun in their face to get their money.”
“But those were the days,” Vin said wistfully.
“Well, that time is gone. Now you have corporate heads instead of
caporegimes
. It pays to be legitimate.”
“We’re a Cosa Nostra.” My father leaned on his golf club like it was a cane. “If you’d follow along and do the right thing by your padrone, you might get somewhere, and not just be another
coojine
on the street, like me.”
“So that’s what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to take a step up in the world. I mean we’ve been stuck outside the doors of these casinos since they opened up in ’78. And now that I got a foot in there, you wanna break it off. I don’t understand it, Dad. You work for this man your whole life and what’ve you got to show for it? You might as well have been working for General Motors all the gratitude it got you.”
Vin was still giving me that dubious look. “You should’ve come to me. We could’ve worked it out.”
“We still could. How’s Teddy going to know unless somebody tells him? What I’m doing with the fight at the casino is my business. Nobody else from the Family is involved. Why do I owe him anything?”
He stared off into space a moment, like he was trying to figure out a magic trick. The golf club had moved a couple of inches away from my leg.
I looked at him and tried to bend my leg. What I was feeling was all tangled and jumbled-up. On the one hand, Vin had just given me a pretty good beating. On the other hand, I couldn’t accept that he was a threat to me. My life just didn’t make sense that way. Vin was my protector. I had a blind spot about his flaws. So I worked it around in my mind this way: everything bad he’d done was because of Teddy. Teddy was the reason he’d gone to jail for killing the guy over the parking space. Teddy was the one who’d controlled him all the years since then. And Teddy was the reason he’d just hit me with the golf club. Teddy was the one we both needed to get away from.
“Listen,” I said, “don’t worry about any of that. The less you know, the less chance there is of Teddy hearing about it.”
He started to argue again, but I put my hand up. “Right here and now, I’m making you a guarantee that you’re gonna see at least a hundred thousand dollars in the next few weeks. That’s a hundred thousand you won’t have to share with Teddy. Come on. Live a little for once in your life. Be independent.”
“I don’t wanna be independent, I wanna be loyal to my
borgata,”
he flared, but there was less fire in it this time.
“Then let me be independent,” I said. “I never pledged myself to Teddy. Don’t I deserve a chance to live?”
My father rumbled like an old garbage truck, but couldn’t think of anything to say.
“Hey, listen,” I tried to cheer him. “I’ll make sure you have the best seats at the fight.”
Vin was still looking down at the golf club, like he was trying to decide if he wanted to use it again. Some kind of emotion passed across his face. A more complicated expression than I was used to seeing on him. But it was gone before I could read it.
“One other thing,” he said, putting the golf club down. “I want you to stay away from that girl you been running around with.”
“Who?”
“What do you mean ‘who?’ I know who. The blonde down at the club people been seeing you with. Teddy finds out you’ve been stepping out on his niece, he’ll cut your dick off and stuff it in your mouth.”
I dropped my eyes, feeling abashed. “I think she’s kind of done with me anyway.”
“Good,” said my father. “You shouldn’t have people talking about you like that. This is a decent family.”
THE OLD MAN’S HAIR
was a joke, Rosemary found herself thinking the next night. It stood straight up, like he’d stuck his finger in a light socket. But his face was a warning to take him seriously. Clenched jaw, missing teeth, a nose that had been broken at least a half dozen times. His eyes looked like they’d seen hellacious things. His hands looked like they’d done worse.
“I hear you been seeing my boy,” he said, leaning on her dressing table.
They were standing in her dressing room a few minutes before show time. When he’d first walked in and introduced himself, she was suspicious about how little he looked like Anthony. But then she remembered this wasn’t his real father.
“So what business is this of yours?” she asked.
“His business is my business. That’s the way it is in our family.”
He began picking up mascara and lipstick cases off her table, and looking at each of them. He seemed like the kind of person who thrived on knocking things down and putting them in his pocket.
“We had an arrangement.” Rosemary hitched up the strap of her orange bikini top. “I don’t see why that should concern anyone else.”
“He’s married, that’s why.” The old man dropped one of her lipsticks into a garbage can. “He’s married with two kids and another on the way. That’s why it’s my concern.”
“I understand that. But we still had an arrangement.”
“Your arrangement is off. Pack your bags. You’re outa here.”
With one sweep of his arm, he knocked the rest of herlipsticks and mascaras to the concrete floor. And then he looked up with eyes the color of hot coffee, almost daring her to make something of it.
Rosemary stared at him. She’d once read a newspaper story about a woman chopped up and left in an oil drum, and wondered what kind of man would do such a thing. Now she knew. What surprised her was that she wasn’t more scared. But then again, maybe somewhere between losing a child and getting into the back of Honda Preludes with strange men, she’d lost her fear of the worst that could happen.
“Does Anthony know you’re talking to me about this?”
“Anthony’s like his mother,” the old man said in a voice as dead as stone. “He flies off the handle sometimes and he needs someone to bring him back.”
“Is that a yes or a no?”
He showed her a half-smile and a few more broken teeth. “What’re you, tough? You like to talk back?” He took a step toward her and raised his arm, like he was getting ready to backhand her across the room.
“I just want what we agreed to.” She pulled out some of the bikini that was sneaking up her butt again. She wished she had something more substantial back there for protection. “A deal’s a deal.”
“Pack your fucking bags and don’t ever let me see your face again,” he said. “You can pick up your last paycheck in the parking lot.”
She raised her chin, like she was giving him a free shot at it. “It better have every dime I’m owed, or I’ll make a stink about that too.”
He laughed and it sounded like a truck stopping. “Tough broad, huh? If I’d a been twenty years younger I might’ve gone for you myself.”
She didn’t smile. “Mister, that is the scariest thing you’ve said so far.”