Kiss of the Wolf (10 page)

“Fine,” she said. “You stay here. I'll drive the car up onto the grass to pick you up.” She went back into the house, probably to say good-bye and get Nina. He was left standing there with the barking dog and Bruno.

He could feel himself close to crying and fought it. “Bruno,” he said.

Bruno looked at him. “What're you, gonna
whine
about this?” he said. “What was she,
mean
to you? Don't whine to me. Those people in the house:
they
got problems.”

Bruno walked off. Todd stood there alone, with the barking dog.

What he remembered all through the ride home was the pitiful way he sounded when he said “Bruno.” He understood he wasn't thinking about Mrs. Monteleone, or her husband with his blue bathrobe, or the picture of Tommy. He was thinking about the pitiful way he sounded, and the way Bruno looked at him after he said it.

Back in his room, he bridged individual playing cards around the sleeping Audrey. Audrey was on her back with her legs folded in the air. Her head was stretched straight out upside down, and her cheeks hung down from gravity, exposing her incisors. She looked like a sleeping mad dog.

He was using only face cards, leaning them on her side by side, one by one, trying to surround her before she woke up or moved. He had his
Ad Altare Dei
booklet out and was deciding whether or not he would remind his mother. The meeting Wednesday night was at seven.

The booklet was opened to the first page. He'd filled it out when he'd gotten it.

He still owed the parish the $1.75.

His mother was in the spare room, next to his, talking to herself.

“What
was
he doing out there?” she said. “What was he doing out there without a car that time of night?”

He'd never told Brendan whether he'd give him a ride or not. He could call from up here if his mother ever went downstairs. They'd gotten him a phone for his eleventh birthday. His father had been against it.

Going for the
Ad Altare Dei
had been his idea. His mother and grandmother had gone along. Could he drop out of something like that? Could he just not show up?

His mother whacked something wooden in the next room. He heard her get up and go downstairs.

He listened to her bang cabinets in the kitchen. Audrey stirred, and some of the cards collapsed. He kept flipping through the booklet.

Reference Material

Listed below are a few books which will help you prepare for this program:

1.
Old Testament and New Testament
—Confraternity edition.

2.
Second Vatican Council:
Decree on the Church
Decree on Liturgy
Decree on the Church in the Modern World

3.
Rite for Holy Anointing
—Liturgical Press.
(One dollar.)

4.
Come to Me
—Book Two (the Sacraments and the Mass) Rev. Benedict Ehman and Rev. Albert Shamon
(Five dollars.)

He stopped reading.

He lay back on the floor, looking up at the ceiling. Sandro had finished it with an overlapping swirl pattern, like a series of waves.

He had to call. He had to call the rectory if he was not going to show up. He couldn't just stay away.

Tears came into his eyes at how complicated everything was. You just feel sorry for
yourself,
he thought. That's all you do.

He sat up again. He had to let them know if he wasn't going. He stood up and padded downstairs in his bare feet. He crossed to the kitchen and opened the cabinet nearest the phone and pulled out the Milford directory.

His mother was sitting at the kitchen table with her back to him. She didn't turn around.

It didn't look like she was making dinner. A colander and a pot were out on the counter, but that was it.

He climbed back up the stairs. His legs were tired. When he came back into the room, Audrey rolled onto her side and looked up, collapsing all the cards. She laid her head down again and closed her eyes.

He listened for noise downstairs and then dialed the number in the book for the rectory. Maybe he'd get Henry, Father's assistant, instead of Father Cleary.

He got Father Cleary.

“What's up?” Father Cleary wanted to know. “You ready for the big night Wednesday?”

“That's what I wanted to talk to you about,” Todd said. “I don't think I can go.” His forehead and underarms cooled.

“Why not?” Father Cleary asked. “What're you, sick?”

“No,” Todd said. He grimaced at having blown that excuse.

“So what is it?” Father asked after Todd didn't say anything else.

“I don't know,” Todd said.

“You don't know,” Father said.

Todd didn't answer. Father didn't say anything. He could hear a little buzzing on the line.

“I don't know if it's right for me. I don't know if I should be doing this,” Todd said.

“Oh, come on,” Father said, surprising him. “You had months to think about this. Now you don't know if it's right for you?”

“I guess I shoulda called earlier,” Todd said. He was so dying to get off the phone he did knee bends where he stood, swinging his free hand around.

“Just give it a shot,” Father said. He sounded irritated.

Todd tried to figure out what to say next.

“You don't know if you're gonna like it till you give it a try,” Father said.

Todd did a knee bend all the way to the floor. He put his free hand on top of his head.

“You do one or two, you decide you don't like it, you can quit with my blessing,” Father said. “All right?”

“All right,” Todd said. He closed his eyes. It was just like the sacrilege about Communion. “All right.”

“Wednesday night. Seven o'clock,” Father said. “See you then.” He hung up.

Todd turned the receiver around in his hands and put the earpiece against his forehead. He hung up. He could have said it was a mortal sin on his soul he was worried about, and that he'd confess it later, and then later he could have made up something.

He wandered into the upstairs bathroom and sat on the toilet in despair. The phone rang. On the second ring, his mother got it downstairs.

Back in his bedroom, he stood next to his extension, waiting, afraid to pick it up. The click would give him away. But he had to know if it was Father Cleary. He eased up the receiver.

It was Bruno. He didn't notice the click.

Bruno said, “I'm
not
gonna give it up. I am
not
gonna give it up. I told her, ‘If there's anything to find out, I'm gonna find it out.' I am
on
the
case.
”

“Todd, get off the phone,” his mother said sharply. He hung up immediately.

Outside, somebody emptied what sounded like a load of rocks into a garbage can. Todd sat on his bed and folded his hands and looked at the phone, his legs, and Audrey, curled again onto her back, snoring, her incisors still showing.

P
ART TWO

N
INA

In strangolagalli, you lose a man in your family that's it, you wear black the rest of your life. I have a great-aunt over there still in mourning; her husband died in 1944.

Sandro says this'll kill one or both of them, meaning the Monteleones. He thinks they're gonna go to pieces. I tell him maybe the husband. Maybe Tommy Senior. As for Lucia, are you kidding? She's the kind of woman, if there were no fronts on her kitchen cabinets, her kitchen would
still
look neat.

I was thirteen when my father died. He died in August in a heat wave. We sat under the grape arbor he built in the backyard and received the family. One of us had to keep running around the front to get the people arriving, because our doorbell didn't work.

It was the kinda bell you couldn't hear when you rang it, so you didn't know if it was broken and you should knock, or if you should wait to see if anybody came, or what.

My mother was in black. It was so hot the asphalt was soft, and she had a black
sweater
on. I remember flies around her head. She watched us kids play in the tomatoes. It was so hot in there among the stalks you could hardly breathe. And you got the pesticide powder from the leaves all over your hands.

The family gathered around the big cement table, and she sat off by herself. Everyone paid their respects, but nobody wanted to crowd her.

She dabbed at the top of her forehead with a napkin. She watched people come and go. She asked how we could play so hard in the heat, and made us come out of the tomatoes and sit in the shade. She said we were
pazza.
With her dialect it sounded like
pots.
She said even the animals knew better.

The grapes were in, and we ate them off the vine while we sat there. You had to be careful in the big clusters for spiders.

My sister squeezed the skins so that the centers would pop out. Then she ate just the skins.

What I never told anyone was that the week my father died I dreamt he was asking me to go get medicine for him—he couldn't get out of bed—and I wouldn't. And he looked at my face like he knew that I would've gone for my mother.

That was my secret while I sat and ate the grapes.

Poor Lucia. Perry she was proud of, but Tommy—you know. Tommy was the first.

How do we get used to this? That's the secret. How do we do it?

My mother thought here in America the big problems were always just about to get worked out. Polio, TB, influenza, bad roads, prejudice. Someone was off somewhere making new medicines, working out the answers. Our job was to sit tight and hope it happened in time. God protected babies, drunks, and the United States.

In bad times, like when my younger sister got sick with the influenza that killed my baby brother in Italy, my mother would sit in her chair in the kitchen and close her eyes and name the villages surrounding Strangolagalli. Bovile, Ciprano, Monte San Giovanni, she would describe them to herself. We'd tiptoe around the house while she talked about orchards, terraces, and fountains.

When my father died, we waited for her to do that, and she didn't.

She was spotty about Mass afterwards. When the priest would finally see us, he'd take us aside to see if we were okay. What were we going to say?

I was there when he finally cornered her. She'd managed to avoid him for a little while. He told her something about God's will, and she quoted back to him an old Calabrian saying: that God was in charge of everything, but the devil was in charge of the timing.

B
RUNO

I was raised mostly by my aunt and uncle. They're dead, too. My mother, when she went out, it was to pick up something for dinner. My father had a little den and used it.

He was apparently a massive pain in the ass even before they crushed his legs. He got a little money out of that, but how much was compensation then? He hung around the house and listened to the radio and complained. He covered his legs with a blanket even in the summer, and I had to tuck it back in when it slipped off. He drank Old Sunnybrook, this rye that took the print off coasters. The label said, “Takes the wrinkles out of your face and makes your asshole smile.” No lie. Look it up.

My aunt told me when he died, “Your father just was never happy, you know? He just never figured out how to be happy.” We're standing there at the grave site, and she tells me that.

I was fifteen years old. I felt like telling her, If we knew how to fix that, we'd all be in clover.

My aunt, the one that died, she was best friends with Lucia.

Tommy I knew from when he was a little little kid. He ran a paper-route scam from the time he was about eleven. He'd come by and collect twice for the same week, once from the father, once from the mother. He'd wait until one or the other was out.

My aunt had him figured out early, starting writing down his visits on a pad near the phone. The first time she caught him, she said, “I don't
think
so, Tommy,” and he knew enough not to push it. The second time she took him by the hair and brought him inside and showed him the list. She said that at that point he said—his head all twisted around, she's still got him by the hair, eleven years old—that it was his feeling, in a case like this, that the customer was always right.

One thing you had to say about Tommy: this was no lazy guy. This was a young man who could operate. You woke him 6:00
A
.
M
. Christmas morning and put him down in East Dipstick with seven cents, and by noon the next day he had somebody by the balls.

When he wanted to piss me off, he called me Uncle Bruno. He'd go, So you think I should go easier on 'im, Uncle Bruno? You think I should be more patient?

I'd say, Hey, a
cavone
like you, you're gonna do what you want, whatever I tell you.

Lot of people are curious as to what happened to Tommy Monteleone. Let me tell you: a lot of people.

The police, they're like having Andy of Mayberry on the case. They come into the house: Did anybody threaten your son's life recently? Okay, fine, and that's the end of that. They look at this, they look at that, have a nice day, thank you very much.

Old man Monteleone still in his bathrobe; he lost the remote, so he's poking the channel buttons on the TV from his chair with the other end of a broomstick.

One cop actually got interested in the show while the other one was talking to Lucia.

I told Lucia I was gonna find out what happened. She said, “You been a good friend a his all along, Bruno.”

That's all true. Though as Tommy would say, So what?

Friendship's friendship and a wonderful thing. But this is money we're talking about. This is
me.