“Be careful,
signore
,” the bartender said.
“What?” Bodie said.
“
Assassino
,” the bartender whispered, pulling his finger across his throat. “How you say?
Hit man
.” The man at the end of the bar looked up, and his eyes met Bodie’s.
Bodie thought for a minute about Mary Lou. He tried to summon the picture that had so consumed him just a short while ago, of this dark man’s body between her thighs, his face against her breasts, but all he could really see were the sinews in DiMaria’s neck, and the sweat glistening on DiMaria’s forearms, and the outline of something hard and possibly metallic under the silky white fabric of DiMaria’s shirt. DiMaria nodded at him, and Bodie’s blood ran cold. He looked away, did a quick reckoning. He’d survived Vietnam, he reasoned, and he was having too good a damn time in Naples for it all to come to an end right here. He backed out of the bar and went home to Mary Lou, Jimmy, and the small, wriggling family of rats.
If Bodie’s extramarital indiscretions had proven distasteful to Mary Lou, his failure to summon the
cojones
to defend her questionable honor now proved positively odious. She stayed in Italy just long enough to deliver the baby, whom she named Biaggio Antonio Dunkirk, a moniker intended to do one thing and one thing only: drive Bodie Dunkirk frigging nuts for the rest of his days. Then she returned to West Virginia alone with her two boys, whom she raised in the distracted, resentful manner of a woman who’d given up too much, too soon, and who was smart enough to realize she’d never, ever get it back.
“It’s like I never had much of a family,” Biaggio had said that night on the steps of the trailer. He and Frank were sharing a six-pack, watching a raccoon family at the edge of a thicket of scrub. “Not like you here,” he said, gesturing to the house.
Frank had snorted. “Some family,” he said.
Biaggio had looked at him sternly. “It’s a family, Frank,” he said. “It’s more than a lot of people got. Trust me.” Then Biaggio’s eyes grew soft and distracted as his gaze fixed on the raccoons under the trees.
That was years ago—five? Ten? It was hard to recall. Today, the haze was hot over Aberdeen as they stood in the driveway, and Biaggio’s T-shirt was already dotted with sweat across his chest.
“Goochie, Goochie, Goochie,” Biaggio said, crouching down and wrapping the dog in a full embrace. Gooch’s legs went out from under him, and he lay back rapturously in Biaggio’s arms, thumping his tail wildly, looking at Frank accusingly.
You never treat me like this
, he was saying.
“Oh, get up, you two, before I hurl,” Frank said.
Biaggio planted a fat kiss on the top of Gooch’s head, then stood up, took a deep breath, and raised his eyebrows at Frank.
“We got a problem,” he said. He nodded at Aberdeen meaningfully.
Frank regarded him. “We?”
“Well,
you
,” Biaggio conceded. “It’s the ladies. They’ve gone nucking futs again.”
The morning sun was brutal, already. Frank felt it on his arms and face, a summer sun, aggressive and unflinching, as they walked together up to the house, Gooch, the bastard, favoring Biaggio’s side and still shooting sidelong looks at Frank. Biaggio moved with a strange springing gait, nearly on his toes, with his eyebrows raised and his shoulders hunched forward. He always looked as though he was ready to jump into a sprint, running toward or away from something, though Frank never knew quite what. Biaggio was big, solid-shouldered, tall. He could have been intimidating, if he were a different sort of man.
“I heard the hollerin’ starting early,” Biaggio said. “They been goin’ at it a while, Frank.” His brow was knit. “They are righteously pissed off this time. It’s about the Steinway.”
“So I heard,” Frank said.
His mother’s Steinway. It was a beautiful instrument, or had once been, rather, before the ravages of time and neglect had taken it over. The piano had been passed down in Arla’s family since before the turn of the century, and he knew that when her parents died it was one of the few things she’d insisted on saving from their Davis Shores home before the auctioneers liquidated the estate, before what little was left of the old Bolton money began its steady, slow leak through the Bravo family coffers. A full-size upright, deep mahogany so dark it was almost black, the piano had a beautiful, ornate shape and had, at one time, a rich clear tone. Arla had grown up practicing scales and banging out overtures in her parents’ living room overlooking the Matanzas, though as an adult she rarely played anymore. Instead, she had put all her children through piano lessons, had presided over their practice sessions with a fervor bordering on compulsion, even though Carson and Sofia were hopeless at the keyboard, and it had been only Frank himself, and Will, who had taken to it with any level of appreciation and who had developed any skill. But for all her attachment to the blasted, blighted Steinway, which Frank knew was one of Arla’s few remaining vestiges of the life of privilege she’d once known, the piano had never been maintained. Even during the years of lessons it had never been tuned, never been regulated, never had its decrepit old hammers adjusted or even inspected, for that matter. Eventually the house termites had annexed the instrument, and the Steinway had sat, moldering and austere, in the living room at Aberdeen for as long as Frank could remember. And for nearly the same amount of time, Sofia had been hell-bent on getting rid of it.
And here was a battle of wills most powerfully matched. Both blessed with a towering height that might have been called statuesque on some women, Frank’s sister and his mother were capable of wicked outbursts of temper and, more problematic, complete and utter lapses of reason. The condition was made more intimidating by the fact that both Arla and Sofia were still, by any measure, beautiful women, though Arla’s age and her physical condition had, through the years, skewed her charms, made them fit less snugly, less comfortably. She had the look of a woman whose beauty was fading fast, and worse, who knew it. But it was Sofia, really, who threw the equation out of whack here at Aberdeen. When she was a child, people said she was willful. When she was a young woman, people said she was moody. Now that she’d hit her forties, they said she was crazy. Beautiful, but crazy.
And she
was
odd. The mood swings, the bitter rages, the panic attacks. When his sister was younger, Arla, and even Dean, before he left, give him some small credit, had tried to work Sofia through it, had taken her to counselors and doctors and support groups and all the rest. But after each attempted treatment she’d return home exhausted, defeated, more anxious than ever, and Frank had had the feeling that perhaps it was cruel to ask her to try, to ask her to become something she was incapable of becoming. And then came the final one-two punch—that horrible night of loss, all those years ago, followed by Dean’s last valediction down the long driveway of Aberdeen. It had become clear to Frank—painfully so—that Sofia would handle those particular blows with even less competence than the rest of the family, which wasn’t saying much at all. She was supposed to be on medication. He had a feeling, lately, she wasn’t taking it. He sighed. Leave her be, he thought. She’s doing the best she can.
Frank and Biaggio arrived at the porch, where Frank and Carson, years ago, had built a ramp to one side of the steps to help Arla when her gradually increasing weight, combined with her disabled foot, had begun to make stairs nearly impossible. The interior stairs were still a problem, of course. But Arla had worked out a system—down once in the morning, up once in the evening, with the morning descent steadied by two sturdy banisters, and the evening ascent fortified by more than a few glasses of Carlo Rossi Chablis.
“So, you expecting a big crowd for fireworks tonight at the restaurant?” Biaggio asked. But before Frank could answer or climb the porch steps, something hit him, hard, on the shoulder. He recoiled, and the stack of magazines that had been pitched from the second-floor window above the front porch, Arla’s window, splayed open and skidded across the walkway.
Good Housekeeping. Family Circle
.
Better Homes and Gardens
.
“Shit,” Frank said. He rubbed his shoulder and looked up, just in time to see a second bundle of magazines hurtling from the same window. He stepped back, butting into Biaggio, who was standing slack-jawed, staring up at the open window. A thatch of red hair appeared behind the curtain, paused, and then ducked back out of sight.
“Mom!” Frank said. “What in the hell are you doing?”
As if in answer, a pile of books housed in a deteriorating cardboard box sailed out of the window and onto the walkway. Frank and Biaggio took another step back from the house. The books hit the pavement and slid out of the box, fanning along the path.
The Thorn Birds. Shogun. The Winds of War.
The books were moldy and dog-eared. Frank would bet they’d been in the box a quarter century. At least.
“Mom! Will you cut that shit out before you kill us?”
“It isn’t me, Frank,” Arla called from inside the bedroom. “It’s her!” And then Sofia appeared in the window, her face flushed, her red hair wild around her shoulders.
“Leave that crap down there!” Sofia shrieked. “Don’t you dare bring it up here again! Frank! Tell her!”
Frank turned to Biaggio, who stood completely still, watching Sofia with what appeared to be a mixture of adoration and terror.
“Well, ain’t this a hell of a way to start a Saturday,” he said to Biaggio. “And Independence Day, at that. Huh.”
“Well, it’s like I told you,” Biaggio said. “You got a situation here.”
“Don’t I always,” Frank said. Biaggio knelt and began gathering up books. Frank shook his head, stepped over the mess, took the ramp up to the front porch, and entered the house, where he was immediately confronted by the huge Steinway, which had evidently been dragged from its old placement in the living room and now sat directly in the main hallway, at the base of the stairs, effectively blocking all passage from the front door to the back of the house. He paused for a moment, considered this. The Steinway had to weigh close to five hundred pounds. Which meant that Sofia was operating this morning in some sort of brute rage, to have managed to drag or push the thing into its current position. Good God. He gave the piano a test shove, but it didn’t budge.
He leaned against the wall, in no particular hurry to go upstairs and enter the fray, which now, he realized, would mean having to climb over the Steinway. He glanced left, into the dim living room, where an ancient sofa and love seat, mustard yellow, formed an L around the room’s primary focus, a pressboard entertainment center featuring a midsize TV, a needle-less phonograph, and a collection of Hummel figurines encased in hinged glass cabinets. Above the entertainment center, a three-foot taxidermied largemouth bass gulped for air on a wooden mount, its eyes bulging, horrified, and Frank looked at it for a moment. He’d been with Dean, and Carson had, too, the morning their father had caught the bass in a brackish tributary off Pablo Creek. They were little, maybe five? Maybe six? Will had been too young to come along, and Frank remembered Dean’s joy at pulling in the bass, his own excitement and fear when the fish flopped about in the bottom of the little boat, Carson’s eyes ablaze when he hit the creature on the head once, twice, three times, until Dean took the bludgeon out of Carson’s hand and laughed, patted both boys on the head, said
Look at that sumbitch, boys!
He remembered Arla’s revulsion when they brought the fish home and, days later, his own confusion when she presented it to Dean, taxidermied and preserved. She smiled, proud, forbearing, when Dean hung it there in the living room. Frank remembered that, Arla’s face that day, how she watched Dean pounding the nail into the wall, how she steadied the little footstool beneath his feet.
There weren’t too many physical reminders of his father still around the house these days, but there were a few: the sealable plastic margarine tub converted to a sugar bowl to thwart the tiny kitchen ants; the thin segment of twine dangling from the ceiling in the third-floor bathroom that kept the water from the roof leak contained to a manageable stream rather than a corrosive metastases of dampness; the dusty set of
Encyclopedia Britannica
Dean had discovered in the trash behind Utina High and insisted on salvaging, even though the set was missing
B, CA–CH, SA–SM
and
V
and therefore was likely to be as much of an annoyance as a study aid the night before a big report was due. But most of Dean’s belongings had been filtered away through the years, his clothes given away by Arla, his Rayonier pay stubs confiscated by Carson, who’d undertaken an angry and vengeful audit of his father’s discarded effects one year. Dean’s books and magazines had gone to mold and were eventually lugged out to the trash. Dean’s tackle box and fishing poles had been pilfered and picked over by Frank himself. And yet here hung the stupid bass, all these years later, Dean long since gone. Frank had offered to take it down more than once. “It’s ugly,” he said to his mother. “You don’t want to look at that.” But Arla had resisted. “I don’t mind it,” she said. “I don’t know. I sort of like it.”
Today, in the living room, the ironing board stood in its usual place in front of the west-facing window, and three plastic laundry baskets of carefully folded clergy vestments were lined up in a row on the floor. Since she quit coming to the restaurant regularly years ago, Arla had methodically built up a small, strange business as a laundress of vestments and church linens, a sideline she started when the kids were still small and had continued all these years, servicing, by now, all seven Catholic parishes in St. Augustine. Frank and Carson used to help with delivery and pickup, but with Biaggio on site these days the logistics had grown considerably easier. Biaggio picked up the bundles of soiled linens from the churches between moving jobs, brought them to Arla at Aberdeen, and delivered them back to the churches a few days later washed, pressed, and packaged in crisp brown paper, a handwritten invoice taped to the side of each bundle. Frank had grown up with the faint smell of altar wine and priests’ aftershave hanging in the living room, a musk of incense and candles shaking loose from the corporals and purificators Arla pulled from their baskets, the smell of detergent mingling with the steam rising from her ironing board as she pressed the manuterges flat, coaxed the wrinkles from the vestments, robes, and stoles.