Tony Partly Cloudy
Read Tony Partly Cloudy Online
Authors: Nick Rollins
TONY PARTLY CLOUDY
A Novel
by
Nick Rollins
Advance praise for
Tony Partly Cloudy
…
“Consistently engaging… Rollins’ novel at times defies genre expectations… serves up a smart mix of calm and uneasiness, particularly in scenes involving members of the mob.”
— Kirkus Reviews
Table of Contents
“Tut-tut, it looks like rain.”
~ A.A. Milne
October, 1979
“TONY BARTOLICOTTI, I’M NOT GOING TO TELL YOU AGAIN – stop singing that freakin’ song!”
“But I like that song, Papa,” Tony said. It was one of his favorites, about how much fun it was to stay at the YMCA. “And I thought you and Mama liked my voice. You always say I sing like—”
“Like an angel,” Tony’s father said, hefting a cooler full of ice onto the kitchen table. “Yeah, Tony, I know. Your voice, I like just fine. It’s that song. It’s just not... I mean, little boys shouldn’t sing... well, it’s like this, see?” He paused, trying to figure out how to explain his disapproval of a seven-year-old boy singing a song by a bunch of
finocchios
dressed up like firemen and cowboys.
Tony’s mother stepped in to rescue her floundering husband. “Tony, why don’t you sing something else? Your papa just... well, he just doesn’t like all the same songs you do.” As she spoke, she took inventory of the items she still needed to load into the car for their trip.
Tony thought for a moment, then beamed as his mental jukebox offered him a new selection: that guy with the big nose, whose blonde hair always stood up so funny. Perfect.
“If you want my body, and you think I’m sexy, come on baby let me know,” Tony sang as he loaded the shiny red cans of C&C Cola from the fridge into the Styrofoam cooler.
“Jesus Freakin’ Christ,” Tony’s father said. “Aren’t there any freakin’ songs anymore that aren’t about—”
“Francis!” Tony’s mother cut him off.
Father and son both fell silent, having learned long ago that the maternal use of full Christian names was not a sign that boded well. Whenever
Tony
became
Anthony
, Tony’s quality of life declined sharply.
“You know we don’t talk that way in this house, Francis,” Tony’s mother said. Rosa Bartolicotti stood a foot shorter than her hulking husband, but there was no question about who was in charge of this household. On the street, Frankie B was a daunting figure, a six-foot four-inch, 300-pound bomb with a smoldering Marlboro for a fuse. But at home, he was indisputably second in command.
Frankie protested feebly. “Well at least I said
freakin’
– I mean, that’s better than the alternative, am I right?”
“What’s the alternative?” Tony asked.
“Never mind!” both parents said in unison.
They continued with their preparations in silence, until Frankie spoke. “We’re just about ready. Tony, go tell your Nona Maria we’ll be leaving in five minutes.”
Tony bolted from the kitchen, but slowed to take a detour toward the front door. Opening it, he stepped outside onto the porch and looked up at the sky. He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply through his nose. After a few moments he let the air escape his lungs, gave the sky a dubious look, and walked back into the kitchen.
“Papa,” he said, “I think it’s going to rain.” Tony’s expression was grave, his brow furrowed. He got this way when he talked about the weather.
“Whaddaya talkin’ about?” Frankie said. “It’s clear as a bell out there.”
Tony had never understood what a bell had to do with the way the sky looked, but he held his tongue while his father continued.
“Besides, I checked the forecast. They said it might get cloudy over Hartford, but other than that, it should be smooth sailing. Forget about it. Now go and get your grandmother like I asked you, chop-chop.”
Tony turned and scurried out of the kitchen. But on the way to Nona Maria’s bedroom, he stopped by his own to grab his waterproof windbreaker, the one with the hood that zipped inside the collar.
♠ ♥ ♣ ♦
“How far is it?” Tony asked, once the Mercury was on the Throgs Neck Bridge. His father and mother sat in the front seat, while he and his grandmother shared the back, the cooler lodged between them.
“We’re talking two and a half, three hours, tops,” Frankie said, “depending on whether this freakin’ traffic ever lets up.”
Rosa shot her husband a look.
“What?” he protested. “I said
freakin’
, didn’t I? Jeez, cut me a break, would you?”
Rosa rolled her eyes and crossed herself, a gesture she made frequently in her husband’s presence, as if to indicate she was either asking the Lord for forgiveness, or patience, or both.
They stopped at a gas station just outside Hartford, and Tony sprinted for the restroom, pulling the hood of his jacket over his head as he ran.
“I told you we shouldn’t bring all that soda pop with us,” Frankie said to Rosa while they waited for Tony to return. “Here we were making such great time, even with the rain and all.” The weather had gotten steadily worse, the sky a roiling ominous gray mass that spat rain down on them intermittently.
Rosa gibed her husband. “Clear as a bell, I thought you said.”
“Well it was, back in Brooklyn. And I said it might get cloudy when we got into Connecticut.”
“This is cloudy all right.” A crash of thunder punctuated her reply. “I’ll feel a lot better when we’re safe inside the museum.”
Shifting in his seat, Frankie took his glasses off and began polishing them with his shirttail. Rosa recognized the move: a nervous habit he employed when he was bargaining for time.
“Francis...” she began.
The car door slammed, and Tony was back in his seat. “All set,” he announced.
Nona Maria, who had been dozing, opened her eyes and smiled at the boy. She reached over and affectionately smoothed his hair, tousled from the hood of his windbreaker.
“Francis...” Rosa repeated. “I was saying that I’ll feel better when we’re safe inside the museum...”
Tony spoke up. “Oh, it’s not an inside museum, Mama. I mean, there is an inside, but most of the good stuff is out on the airstrip.”
Rosa stared at Frankie. “What?” The word was drawn out, indignant and unbelieving.
“Rosa, honey, what he means is—”
“Mama, they got like thirty airplanes out there. No way they could fit all those planes inside a building! I mean, they got a
Douglas C-133
!” The boy spoke the plane’s name with reverence. “That thing can carry
tanks
and stuff. It’s got a wingspan of 169 feet—”
“179,” Frankie corrected.
“And they only ever made 50 of them,” Tony continued. “And one plane can hold the same amount of stuff as 22 boxcars. And—”
“And it’s
outside
?” Rosa demanded. “Let me get this straight. We’re going to a museum – which just happens to be an
outdoor
museum – and we’re going in the middle of this downpour?” The sky cooperated by providing a dramatic flash of lightning at that instant. Neither Tony nor his father was surprised – that was the sort of power this woman wielded, at least in their eyes.
Tony tried to brighten the conversation. “Well, maybe it won’t be raining by the time we get there,” he offered.
“Tony,” Rosa said. At least she hadn’t said
Anthony
– this meant there was still hope. “We’re nearly there. The museum is probably only fifteen minutes from here. I doubt all this will blow over,” she said, gesturing toward the sky.
Tony looked out the window at the rapidly moving clouds. The rain stopped for a moment, and he rolled the window down, craning his neck for a better look. Rosa glared at her husband, who still hadn’t spoken.
“So we’re almost there, Papa?” Tony asked. “You mean, we’re really close?”
“Yeah, Tony, it’s like your mama said. Fifteen minutes, tops.” Not sure how meaningful minutes were to a seven-year-old, Frankie elaborated. “It’s about as far as when we go to Coney Island.”
Tony’s brow wrinkled at this news. He looked back out the window, eyeing the clouds. Without turning back to face his parents, he spoke, his eyes still locked on the skies above. “We shouldn’t go there. It’s going to get bad. Papa, we should turn around. It’s going to get real bad.”
“Aw, Jesus,” Frankie said, “again with the freakin’ weather forecast.”
Seeing his wife bristle, Frankie spoke more calmly. “Tony, it’s going to blow over. We’re almost there – we drove all this way.”
But Tony was shaking his head. “This is bad, Papa. Real bad. We need to get out of here.”
“You should listen to the boy. He has the Gift.”
The voice from the rear of the car startled Tony’s parents. They turned to face Nona Maria, who was watching Tony intently, stroking his cheek as she spoke.
“The boy knows the weather. He has the Gift. Is the gypsy blood.” Ignoring his grandmother, Tony was frozen in concentration, staring hard at the sky.
Frankie rolled his eyes. “Oh, Christ. Don’t start with that gypsy crap again. The closest you ever got to a freakin’ gypsy’s blood was—”
“Francis!” But this time Rosa’s admonishment went unheeded, and the three adults fell into a cacophony of rapid-fire English and Italian, everyone speaking simultaneously, punctuated by wild hand gestures and melodramatic facial expressions. It was their way; it was how they fought. As the quarrel began its inevitable crescendo, it was cut short by an unearthly high-pitched shriek.
It was Tony. He was looking at them now, not at the clouds, and he was screaming.
“We gotta get out of here!” Tears streamed down Tony’s face, and fear cracked his voice. “We gotta go NOW!”
His shaking hands fumbling with the handle, Tony frantically cranked his window shut, as if in a race against some unseen intruder.
“Listen to the boy.” Nona Maria spoke softly. “He knows.” Frankie and Rosa stared at her, then at Tony.
“Papa, pleeeeeeeeease...”
Frankie had never seen his son like this, and he found it more than a little scary.
“I don’t freakin’ believe this,” he said, as he threw the car into gear with a defeated swipe of his hand. Wrenching the wheel around, he punched the gas, and the Mercury lurched out of the parking lot. Frankie steered the car back onto the highway, but this time going south. Back the way they came.
The rain was unlike anything Frankie had ever seen, far worse than anything he’d ever driven through. It came without warning – it wasn’t there, then it was. The sound was deafening as the rain pelted the car horizontally, allowing only brief moments of visibility between swipes of the windshield wiper blades.
Several times Frankie wanted to pull over to sit the storm out. But he knew that would bring on Tony’s hysterics again, and that prospect seemed even worse than the rain. The boy was right behind him, clutching the seatback and leaning in close, as if trying to coax the car forward with the incline of his body.
Finally it let up. The rain dwindled to an occasional sprinkle, and the sky lightened perceptibly. Frankie began to relax, and Tony loosened his death grip on the seatback and eased back into his seat next to his grandmother, who had once again dozed off. When Frankie heard Tony opening the cooler for another soda, he knew they were out of the woods. He toyed with the idea of suggesting that they turn around again, and head back toward the museum. But he thought better of it, instead saying, “How about some music?”
“Yeah!” came Tony’s voice from the back. “Turn the radio on!”
Frankie clicked the radio, and the car was filled with sound.
It’s fun to stay at the Y... M.C.A!
It’s fun to stay at the Y—
“Jesus Freakin’ Christ!”
“Francis!”
♠ ♥ ♣ ♦
They saw it on the ten o’clock news that night.
Tragedy stuck this afternoon near Hartford, where a tornado touched down on Route 75 shortly before 3:00 P.M.. Details are still coming in, but the city of Windsor Locks has reportedly sustained the most severe losses, with damages reported to local businesses, homes, and even an area cemetery. There are two confirmed fatalities, and over 400 reported injuries, with numerous patients listed in critical condition in local hospitals. But the worst property damage was reported at the Bradley Air Museum, the nation’s fourth largest aviation museum. There, an airstrip where thirty planes were on display was completely devastated by the storm, leaving hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of historic aircraft twisted and mangled on the tarmac.
Connecticut, a state not known for tornadoes, was completely unprepared for this freak twister, which was apparently masked in a torrent of low rushing clouds and heavy rain that prevented radar stations from detecting it. This is only the second fatal tornado Connecticut has experienced this century, with previous fatal storms in the 1800’s attributed to the absence of any forecasting or warning mechanisms. Already the estimated property damage caused by this storm indicate this may be one of the costliest tornadoes in US history.
Tony was already in bed. But Frankie, Rosa, and Nona Maria all saw it. The three sat frozen in the living room, stunned into silence. It was Rosa who spoke first, her voice uncharacteristically soft.
“Jesus Freakin’ Christ.”
“Rosa!” Frankie had never heard her use such language, but he spoke in surprise, not anger.
Nona Maria nodded slowly, her eyes flashing in reflection of the television’s flickering glow.
“Is like I tell you,” the old woman said. “The boy has the Gift.”