So Ray knew already. That much was over with.
I found him in the back bedroom, tangled up in his blanket, snoring away in the semidarkness. He’d begun sleeping downstairs after Ma died. His official reason was that there’d been a prowler in the neighborhood—someone had jimmied open the Anthonys’ cellar door across the street. But I was pretty sure that wasn’t really it.
After Dessa left me, one of the toughest things I had to get used to was her empty side of the bed. I’d find myself falling asleep down on the couch in front of the TV just so’s I wouldn’t have to go upstairs and deal with that empty space. Not that it was something you could have ever talked about with Ray. He had to sleep downstairs with a crowbar under the bed so he could fend off burglars. Be a tough guy instead of facing whatever he was feeling about the death of his wife.
If Ray was sleeping days, then the shipyard must have him work-
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ing nights again. You had to hand it to him, really. Sixty-seven years old and the guy’s still working like a plowhorse. I stood there, staring at him. The midafternoon sun came through the open blinds, striping his face with light. With his mouth open and his teeth out, he looked older. Old. His hair was more white than gray now. When had all this happened?
Growing up, I had wished my stepfather dead so often, it was practically a hobby. I’d killed him over and over in my mind—driven him off cliffs, electrocuted him in the bathtub, shot him dead in hunting accidents. He’d said and done things that
still
weren’t scabbed over.
Had made this place a house of fear. Still, seeing him like this—white-haired and vulnerable, a snoring corpse—I was filled with an unexpected sympathy for the guy.
Which I didn’t want to feel. Which I shook off.
I went back into the kitchen. Found a piece of paper and wrote him a note about Thomas. I explained what Sheffer had said about the fifteen-day paper, the security check they had to run on visitors, the upcoming hearing in front of that Review Board. “Call me if you have any questions,” I scrawled at the bottom. But my guess was that he wouldn’t call. My guess was that Ray had already walked away from this one.
On the way back out to the truck, I passed those garbage pails again. Then I stopped. Grabbed one handle in each hand and walked them up the front stairs and around to the backyard. Saved him a trip.
Our old backyard . . .
I put the cans down and walked past the two cement urns where Ma had always grown her parsley and basil. Fresh basil. God, I loved the smell of that stuff—the way it perfumed your fingers for the rest of the day. . . .
Dominick? Do me a favor, honey? Go out back and pick
me some
basilico
. Half a dozen leaves or so. I want to put some in the
sauce. . . .
I walked up the six cement stairs to “Papa’s little piece of the Old Country.” That’s what she always called it. According to Ma, Papa had loved to sit out here among his grapes and chicken coops and I Know[169-263] 7/24/02 12:37 PM Page 176
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tomato and pepper plants—to sit in the sun and sip his homemade wine and remember Sicily. . . . Maybe that was why she’d heard him crying that last day as he sat up here, finishing his history. Maybe, at the end of his life, the “Great Man from Humble Beginnings” had wept for Sicily.
I remembered the way Thomas and I had played up here as kids.
Saw us pogo-sticking around the yard, staging massacres with our plastic cowboys and Indians, chasing garter snakes into the stone wall. Every June, when the honeysuckle bush blossomed, we’d suck nectar from the blossoms. One small drop of elixir on your tongue per flower—that was all you got.
I walked over to the picnic table Ray and I had built one summer. The seat had rotted at one end. I ought to come over some morning and just haul the thing away to the dump for him. Maybe next spring I’d get over here and plant a garden—work the soil, bring this old yard back from the dead. Ray had let this go, too; I’d never seen the backyard so overgrown. The grapevines were all but choked off with weeds. The dead grass was knee-high. Probably hadn’t been mowed once all summer. Probably
loaded
with ticks.
What was the deal on Ray? . . .
I thought about what Ma had told me that time—the day she’d gone upstairs and come down again with that strongbox. With Papa’s story. She’d come out here with his lunch, she told me. Had found him slumped in the chair. . . . And while she waited for help—waited for the ambulance to get here—she’d gone around picking up the pages of his life story. . . . One of these days, I was going to pursue it: find that bitch Nedra. Get my grandfather’s story back if she hadn’t already destroyed it. She’d told me her ex-husband was a honcho down at the state hospital. Maybe I could track her down through him. He probably had to send alimony someplace, right? And if that didn’t pan out, maybe I’d go see Jerry Martineau over at the police station. Because it was
theft,
what she’d pulled, not to mention breach of contract. . . .
The summer the Old Man had died up here was the same summer Ma was pregnant with Thomas and me. Pregnant by a guy I Know[169-263] 7/24/02 12:37 PM Page 177
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whose name I was probably
never
going to know. And what about him? Had
he
known about
us
? Why had she kept him from us?
Whose son was I?
And who, for that matter, had Papa been? In my mind, I saw and felt again those legal-sized pages I had lifted out of the strongbox that morning: the first fifteen or twenty typed and duplicated with carbon paper, the rest of it written in that sprawling fountain-pen script. She’d saved her father’s history for
me,
she said. Thomas could look at it, too, but Papa’s story was mine. . . . And I saw Nedra Frank’s Yugo sliding diagonally down the street in the middle of that snowstorm. Saw her driving away for good. Talk about shitty luck, getting mixed up with that one. Talk about “losing something in the translation.”
Once all this Hatch stuff was over with, I’d track her down, even if Martineau couldn’t do anything for me. Even if I had to hire a freakin’ private detective. Because when you thought about it, she’d
stolen
my grandfather from me. It was a theft that went way beyond the lousy four hundred bucks I’d advanced her. . . . And maybe I’d try to find out about that stenographer, too. That Angelo guy who’d worked here that summer. Ma had said he was cousins with the Mastronunzio family. I knew a Dave Mastronunzio at Allied Plumbers. Maybe I’d start with him. Start somewhere. Maybe.
Maybe not.
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12
f
Any sane man would have called it quits at that point. Would have said, “Okay, that’s enough crap for one day,” and driven home and crashed. But who ever said sanity ran in our family? Exhausted and antsy, I swung left and drove over to the dealership to see Leo.
Constantine Chrysler Plymouth Isuzu. “Make Gene’s Boys an honest offer, they’ll give you an honest deal.” Yeah, sure. If honest deals were the way Diogenes “Gene” Constantine, my ex-father-in-law, made his money, then I was Luke Skywalker.
Leo was out on the lot, holding a single red carnation and helping a middle-aged redhead into a white Grand Prix. “Well, good luck with it now, Jeanette,” he said. “Thanks again for the flower.”
“Oh, it was nothing, Leo. You’ve just been so sweet. I wish I could have bought
two
new cars instead of one.”
“You just give me a call if there’s anything I can do for you in the future. Okay?”
Jeanette revved her engine like one of the Andrettis. “Oops, sorry,” she giggled. “I’m still getting used to it.”
178
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“That’s okay, Jeanette. You’ll get the hang of it. You take care now.”
She put the car in gear, rolling and bucking away from us. “Good riddance, Jeanette,” Leo said, his mouth frozen like a ventriloquist’s.
“You fat-headed douche bag. I hope the engine drops out of your goddamned Grand Prix.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “No sale?”
“The bitch was this far from signing on the dotted line on a white-on-white LeBaron. That thing was
loaded,
Birdsey. Then I take one stinking day off to go into the city and she buys that showboat from Andy Butrymovic over at Three Rivers Pontiac. You know Butrymovic? Fuckin’ weasel. Fuckin’ Polack bastard.”
Entering the showroom, we passed a sign-painter who was whistling and stenciling the plate-glass window for some new promotion. “So what’s the flower for?” I said. “You get Miss Congeniality or something?”
He snorted. “Something like that.” Snapping the stem of the carnation, he tossed it into Omar’s wastebasket. Omar’s the newest salesman at Constantine Motors. Black guy or Spanish or something. Now
there’s
something you wouldn’t have seen ten years ago, or even five: my ex-father-in-law hiring minority salesmen. You wouldn’t have seen him hiring women, either. Now there were two.
“How’s your brother?” Leo asked. “Angie said they checked him in down at Hatch? What’s that all about?”
I told him about Thomas’s commitment the night before. About the knee to the groin I’d taken and the advice I’d just gotten from Lisa Sheffer. “He gets to list five visitors,” I said. “They run a security check on everyone he puts down. Then they frisk you, make you go through a metal—”
“Lisa Sheffer, Lisa Sheffer, “ he said. “I
know
that name. Have a seat.”
I sat down opposite him at his desk. That’s a bone of contention with Leo: the fact that he’s been at the dealership all these years and the Old Man still has him parked out there on the showroom floor.
Dessa and Angie’s cousin Peter joined the business about four or I Know[169-263] 7/24/02 12:37 PM Page 180
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five years after Leo did, and he’s already got one of the private paneled offices
off
the floor. Peter’s been named Leasing Manager and leasing’s the new big thing.
The veneer on Leo’s desk had buckled a little and was coming unglued at the corner. It happens with that cheap veneer shit. You should see the desk in the Old Man’s office suite. It’s big enough to land planes on. Leo flipped through the Rolodex on his desk. “Lisa Sheffer, Lisa Sheffer. . . . Here it is. Lisa Sheffer. She test-drove a Charger with me about six months ago. Nurse, right?”
“Psychiatric social worker.”
“Little skinny broad? Short hair, no tit?” I thought about Sheffer’s reprimand to me: how she was a woman, not a “gal.” She must have
really
bonded with Leo.
“You know what I’d do?” Leo said. “About your brother? I’d hire a lawyer and have him start talking police brutality. Have him bring the doctor’s statement and those medical pictures and everything.
Maybe you could cut a deal with them—promise ’em you won’t go to court if your brother gets transferred back to Settle. Then you know what I’d do? After you got him out of there? I’d turn around and sue the state’s ass off anyway.”
“You
would
do that. Wouldn’t you, Leo?”
“You bet your left nut I would. What are they going to do? Complain that you welched on an under-the-table agreement? Better to be the screwer than the screwee.” He stood up. “Hang on a minute, will you, Birdseed? I’ll be right back. I gotta go check something in the service department.”
In a way, selling cars was the ideal job for Leo. Professional bullshitter. He’d been bullshitting me since the summer of 1966, when I sat across the aisle from him in remedial algebra class and he got me to believe he was second cousins with Sam the Sham of Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs. Their hit song “Woolly Bully” was popular that year—the year I was fifteen. It came cranking out of my red transistor radio all summer long while I mowed lawns, solved for
x,
and lifted weights—curling and bench-pressing in an effort to transform myself into Hercules, Unchained. Leo told me that he’d I Know[169-263] 7/24/02 12:37 PM Page 181
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been to Sam the Sham’s apartment in Greenwich Village for a party and that a Playboy bunny had sat in his lap. That his uncle was a talent scout out in Hollywood. That his mother was thinking of buying him a Corvette once he passed algebra and got his license.
He was paunchy and chip-toothed back then, a middle-aged-looking sixteen-year-old who could make our fellow algebra flunkies suck their teeth just by walking into the room. Sometimes I’d watch him with a kind of grossed-out fascination as he’d pick his nose, examine what he’d come up with, and then wipe it under his desktop. He made life miserable for our teacher, shaky, old, semiretired Mrs. Palladino.
Leo would raise his hand for help on some problem he couldn’t have given a flying leap about solving and Palladino would come hobbling up the aisle on her bum leg. Then, right in the middle of some explanation Leo wouldn’t even bother to listen to, he’d cut a fart—a “silent-but-deadly” so foul that everyone within a twenty-foot radius would start groaning and fanning their worksheets. Poor Palladino would stand there, droning on in good faith and trying, I guess, not to pass out from the stink.
Leo got away with plenty that summer, up to and including passing the course by snatching the mimeograph stencil of the final exam from the teachers’ room wastebasket. But the following fall, his luck ran out. Neck Veins, the assistant principal at JFK, caught him red-handed one afternoon stretching Trojans over the heads of the athletic figurines in the main corridor trophy case. Neck Veins: I forget the guy’s real name, but when he screamed, the veins in his neck would bulge out like electrical cables. Neck Veins
nailed
Leo.