Headstone City Read online

  It almost made him laugh. “No one is. You've just got to be less dirty than the guy next to you.”

  “I was, but they're still on me.”

  “Maybe.”

  All that talk and she'd never once mentioned her husband's name.

  Dane settled back and she did the same, and the mood grew comfortable, kind of friendly. He double-checked his map and the address on the sheet as he pulled into the village, then drove around the traffic circle and up to Montauk Manor.

  A ritzy old-fashioned hotel built a century ago, where some investors owned suites and rented them out like time-shares. Middle of October, with the hint of winter rolling in off the ocean, the place looked pretty empty. He wondered who she was meeting and felt an unexpected pang of jealousy.

  He got out and opened the limo door for her. She fumbled for her purse and he said, “It's already taken care of.”

  “You deserve a tip.”

  They'd shared a little too much and he couldn't take her money, not like a chauffeur, which is really only what he was. Hour to hour, Dane kept forgetting.

  Glory Bishop took a few steps toward the fancy front doors of the hotel, then turned and gestured for him to walk closer. He came around the car and she said, “I've got a friend's premiere to go to Saturday night. You want to come?”

  “I thought movie premieres were in Hollywood. Where they talk about your dress the next day, say who looked like shit on the red carpet.”

  “No, this is an independent feature done mostly in the city.”

  He looked at her, trying to decide if she was asking him on a date or whether she was being nice and just wanted to hand out free tickets. Maybe so he could bring Pepe, her number one fan, and she could watch him squirm when she made eyes at him.

  It took her a second to let out an authentic smile, not the shining artificial kind celebrities gave the media. Dane liked it, but still said nothing.

  She told him, “You'll like the movie. It's got a lesbian scene in it. Two hot chicks making out in a hot tub.”

  “Are you one of them?” he asked. There went his mouth again.

  Tongue flicking over her top lip, trying to see how easy it might be to get him agitated and start him down the road to infatuation. “Come watch the movie and find out.”

  TEN

  Back from a weekend pass, with the moonlight flowing over him and pooling, silver and bone white, into his cupped hands, Dane would lie in his bunk with the rest of the squad smelling like beer and the cheap perfume of town whores. He'd shut his eyes tightly against the thrust of his own memories.

  They weren't particularly bad ones. Not like he was always thinking of his father with his head laid open like an oyster, or the couple of times he'd seen violent shit in the street when he was a kid. Black guys clubbed to death for walking into the neighborhood. A bag lady frozen in an empty lot one winter, after the dogs had gotten at her.

  He'd had warmth and occasional laughter, but somehow the past became the province of wreckage and remains. He had no control over it. Start fantasizing about Maria Monticelli's hair pouring over his chest, and the next thing he's thinking about his mother choking in the back room, or the girl who didn't dance with him in the ninth grade, the rage as harsh and alive inside him as it had been the day she turned him down.

  He drank too much but never managed to get drunk. It made him a little stupid, and he wound up doing things like stealing jeeps and driving over to the target range. He'd wait out there until they'd start shooting. Rifles, grenade launchers, or 20mm chainguns. While he waited under the jeep, on his belly in the dirt while the explosions heaved fire around him, he'd think to himself, I'm not suicidal. I'm not really sure what this is all about.

  Now he was sitting on his grandmother's couch, those same webs of memory tugging too much into his head at one time. He sort of just awoke from time to time, staring at the television and drinking 151 rum, hating the taste but still hoping it might quell his noisy mind.

  Grandma walked in, smiling, her pocketbook swinging on her arm, jingling a plastic container full of pennies. It was bingo night and she must've hit on one of the round-robins, the way she was grinning.

  Her fingertips were stained red from the dye she used to blot numbers. She'd been playing for maybe fifty years, and still, every time, she got her hands covered like she'd found some guy in an alley with his throat cut and tried to staunch his arterial spray.

  See, like that. You think about your grandmother playing bingo and now JoJo Tormino is dying in front of you again, and the boy with the sick brain whose skull sutures are tearing apart. You feel the hot wind of another memory coming in fast. Ma in the kitchen putting icing on your birthday cake. Six years old, you got the little pointy hat on, the rubber band holding it tight to your head and cutting into your chin. Ma using a rubber spatula to finish covering up a chocolate angel food cake. The phone rings and she turns to answer it, the smile seared onto her face, the fear always there that the caller will tell her Dad is dead. That same hideous smile every time the fucking phone rang.

  He threw back his drink and let the ice rest against his teeth for a second. Since he'd gotten back to the neighborhood he'd been moving fast without any focus. He had to work on that too.

  Grandma Lucia spent ten minutes washing her hands but couldn't get them entirely clean. She sat beside him, sniffed, made a face, and said, “Che puzz! Rum. It'll make you sick.”

  “I'm okay.”

  “You drunk? If you get sick, don't throw up on my nice rugs.”

  The rugs might be nice, but they were mostly covered by plastic runners. He didn't think he could hit the carpet if he tried. “I'm just trying to wind down.”

  “There's licorice in the candy dish. Have some. It's good for you.”

  “All right.”

  “You're like your grandfather, you should stick to wine. You drink wine and maybe you chuckle every now and again, remembering something funny. Maybe sing some opera. You drink anything else, and you start thinking too much about your troubles. Just like your grandpa, he'd sit around the house with a bottle of amaretto and mope and fume. He'd shine his shoes until they shone so bright they'd blind him. Liquor doesn't do for you what it does for everybody else. It closes you up even more inside.”

  “That's what I'm hoping for.”

  “It shouldn't be. You can never get so closed up that you don't hear your own thoughts. What's'a'matter for you? Try more wine. You might laugh a little.”

  The two of them stared at the shelves of photographs hanging over the television. Different kinds, going back to the late 1800s. Old Italians who had been dead for Christ knew how long, with names he couldn't pronounce. Black-and-whites of his parents in the sixties, his father looking hep cat cool, hair greased into a DA when it was already out of style. Dad had held on to something long gone, the same way Dane now did. It gave them more common ground.

  Looking at the pictures used to calm him, even get him mellow sometimes. But if he kept at it too long, the assault of the past shoving at him too hard, it made him even more edgy. He turned and saw the muscles in Grandma's jaws clenched tightly and thought maybe the same thing happened to her.

  “I've been dreaming about that JoJo Tormino,” she told him, organizing her pocketbook, taking out her bingo chips, the blotters, the used-up sheets and boards. “Always dressed so nice, with a fresh flower in his lapel. Never went by without saying hello. You didn't tell me you were there when he got clipped.”

  Why hadn't he said anything about that? He'd walked into the house and she'd yelled about the biscotti, and he'd turned around and walked out and gone to another bakery to get them, the pignoli cookies, sfogliatelle, and cannoli. He came back and they had dinner and he never mentioned talking to JoJo while the man died in front of him.

  “He's still got a heavy heart that won't let him rest,” Grandma said, patting his wrist, telling him something more in her touch. That Dane shouldn't go out the same way, or he'd just hover around the neighb
orhood forever, like so many of them. If he could lighten his load any before the curtain, he would.

  “He had some unfinished business,” Dane said.

  “That JoJo,” she said. “I always liked him. He didn't go out alone, did he?”

  “No.”

  “How many did he take down?”

  “All three shooters.”

  “Dio!” Grandma giving a smile, showing her admiration for that. Dying with a gun in your hand, a bloody carnation on your chest.

  Dane figured he'd keep the rest of the story to himself, about the ring and swearing an oath to tell Maria Monticelli that JoJo had always loved her. If Grandma dreamed about it, then fine, but he didn't have to let her know every goddamn thing.

  She said, “The .38, it's still under your pillow. I think you should start carrying it. Now that you're walking in on hits, it'll be safer for you. And I shouldn't have to say these things to you. You should know them already, if you want to stay alive.”

  “You're right. I will.”

  “I told you already, have some of the licorice. Your breath.”

  Grandma picked up his empty glass, started for the kitchen, and stopped short. She looked at the video box on top of the television, turned it over in her hands.

  She hit the play button on the machine and the movie started from where he'd left off twenty minutes ago, right at the end of the pole-dancing scene. Glory Bishop panting, her hair a wild wet tangle, jugs dripping sweat.

  “Madonna!” Grandma Lucia shouted, throwing a hand over her eyes. “What's this you got? A porno movie?”

  “It's an action flick with a racy scene in it. I drove her out to Long Island, that actress, yesterday.”

  “This putana? This is the clientele you're picking up now? Escorts? You're gonna get arrested again.”

  “She's a real actress.”

  “Yeah, I'm sure the Academy Award committee is gonna shortlist her.” Walking out of the room, crossing herself, and talking over her shoulder. “You think she'll do that dance at the Oscars?”

  He stared at Glory Bishop on the screen, watched her doing her thing again, and thought, Oh, Holy Jesus Christ. It got him going, imagining her in a hot tub with another woman. He rewound the scene and watched it again, and once more.

  An intensifying ache expanded within him, trying to free itself with such influence that Dane had to hug his guts in while he shrugged back a grunt of despair. Abruptly, Angelina was sitting beside him.

  “You should visit me,” she said. “It'll make you feel better. You don't have anything better to do most days anyway.”

  Chewing his tongue and tasting blood, he tried to say her name but couldn't do it. There were a great many words of power in life—common ones, familiar ones somehow too hard for him to speak. He wondered how you did it, died with style, drinking coffee and a sucking wound in your chest.

  “You need to go, Angie,” he said, urging her on, trying to shove her through the veil. “You're not doing either of us any good. I don't want you here anymore.”

  “Of course you do.”

  “No, really.”

  “What do you think, I'm gonna play the harp, Johnny? You think that's what it's like over here? You want me to tell you how it is?”

  “No.”

  “I didn't think so.”

  Angelina enjoyed taunting him the way the last person to leave a party cherishes the power of staying too long. She slid up against him, put her head on his shoulder, her hair covering him the way he dreamed of Maria's hair draping over him, even though he couldn't feel it. They sat there watching Glory Bishop distract the terrorists with her tits, the government assassin in the back of the room screwing around with his high-tech laser scopes and shit.

  “It's okay,” she told him. “I can make it all right, if you'd only let me help. We're gonna get through this.”

  “I'm not so sure most of the time,” Dane said, quietly, hoping his grandmother didn't have her ear against the wall.

  His regrets seemed to have sinuous limbs that reached into places where the living couldn't fit. The girl here, always around him. “They're going to come for you soon.”

  “Your brothers and the Monti crew?”

  “Berto thinks you've been out long enough now. They've been spreading the word around the neighborhood. People are waiting to see what happens.”

  “I still don't know why they haven't made their move yet.”

  “They're weak,” Angie said with a cute giggle. “And JoJo single-handedly killing three hitters who ambushed him has sort of set them back. They're scared of you. They think you might've learned all kinds of assassin stuff in the army.”

  “They watch too many movies,” he said, with the government assassin movie playing out on the television, Glory working her way to her one big action hero line. “What's he got planned for my spectacular exit?”

  “I don't know.”

  “Vinny isn't saying?”

  “Vinny doesn't say anything.”

  That didn't sound right. “What do you mean?” Dane asked, but Angie just stared affectionately at him, like she was watching a dog trying to perform a difficult trick.

  Berto didn't have much of an imagination, so he'd leave it to Joey Fresco or Big Tommy Bartone. Those guys knew how to whack somebody and make the rest of the town grimace.

  “Your mother,” Angie said. “She wants me to tell you something.”

  Stopping there, staring at him with sad but loving eyes, waiting to see how it affected him. How important it might be to speak to his mom again.

  What the hell did it say about you when the dead looked at you like they wanted to cry?

  He knew some guys who walked out the door at sixteen and never looked back. Others, in the joint, who'd whacked their parents for insurance or in a lunatic rage. One huge Nazi Lowrider by the name of Buford, telling his story in the cafeteria one afternoon. Explaining how he'd never gotten over the fact that his mother had thrown all his comic books away. He's thirty-five and firing machine guns with all the other white supremacists up in Michigan. They have a bonfire afterward, where they bring their children out and everybody dances around to kill-the-Jew songs with German lyrics. One of the kids is about eight, wearing a swastika on his sweatshirt and a baseball cap with the Batman symbol on it.

  Buford left the rally, drove back down to Indiana, walked into his mom's place, and put nine rounds into her face.

  There were insignificant microtraumas that could eventually turn your conscience to dust.

  Dane still couldn't get beyond his mother's death and never would, he realized. There was an unmined anguish there that he needed for some reason. Maybe it made him more human when he needed to be that, and more inhuman when he had to become something else.

  “What does she want?” Dane whispered. “Why doesn't she visit?”

  “She can't. Because you need her too much.”

  He watched Angie, wondering if he really could keep her sane in hell, or if she'd gone over the edge. Or if it was just him. “Of course I need her.”

  “Too much. If she came back, it would ruin you. Who you are and what you've got left to do. You're always this close to death.”

  “Hey, Angie, you think you're telling me something new?”

  He could see his ma, languishing day by day, for years. Withering in darkness, tormented by her own body. It made him want to drive a fist inside her and squeeze out whatever was doing this to her. His mother, torn in half, peeling away from the inside out. Dad unable to bear witness, working longer and longer hours.

  You can give yourself blood poison by tearing open your scabs. You dig into a scar long enough, it'll crawl forward on its own, cover you up until your mouth, nose, and even your eyes are sealed.

  “You should go,” he told the dead girl he'd sort of killed.

  “She wants you to know—”

  “I don't want to hear.”

  “But you do, Johnny, you really do.”

  He glared at her, a gir
l who'd spoken her last words to him, and kept right on speaking them.

  “I don't give a shit, Angie. That's enough.”

  Glory blowing the guy off the bridge with the rocket. “I'm gonna rock your world, baby!”

  “You ever gonna go back to Bed-Stuy and settle the score for me?” Angelina asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “When? When are you gonna do it, Johnny? Please tell me. Tell me!”

  The current of the past took him again and rolled him along. Drawing him one way and then hurling him another. It brought him back to the last time he'd seen her alive. A red awning over the door. Flower boxes filled with petunias. The cop with his hand up.

  ELEVEN

  He hadn't been a very good cab driver either, because he didn't gun it up and down the streets driving like a maniac, rushing all day long trying to make a buck. You'd think it would've played into his strengths, his instincts, being a driver and always digging the speed, but it just didn't work like that.

  Fatigued most of the time for no reason but his own inertia. Bodies at rest tend to stay at rest. It was either a Newtonian law or somebody in a mortuary talking about the plastic-faced cadavers laid out on gurneys.

  The Olympic Cab & Limousine Company would've fired him after the first week, except the guy in charge at the time knew Dane had a tenuous connection to the Monticelli clan and didn't want to kick him free. Not until he had a clearer idea of how much trouble he could expect from it later on.

  If a fare brought Dane back over the bridge to Brooklyn, he'd take his time returning to Manhattan. He'd cruise around Headstone City for a while, take a long lunch break, and wander the neighborhood. Head over to the Grand Outlook Hall, walk the galleries, and consider his options.

  There weren't many left. He thought he might join the force. Or maybe take up Vinny's offer to become a Monti lieutenant. It was mostly for show anyway, he wouldn't even need to wear a piece if he didn't want to. Just carry Vinny's coat for him, hold the doors open.

  Neither choice appealed to him much, but then nothing really did.

  His own apathy weighed on him like a sack tied to his back. He could sometimes see the shadow of the bitter old man he was going to be someday. The old prick wishing he could go back and kick his younger self in the ass. Get him moving in the right direction and avert more tragedy.