Sweeney on the Rocks

by Allen Morris Jones

  They come to sit on folding chairs on Cal’s porch. It is on this porch, pine boards still bleeding drops of sap, that they have pronounced judgment on national politics, Kanye and Kim, on female CNN anchors. What they have not done, of course, what they have both assiduously avoided, is talk of their own childhoods, mothers, fathers, first jobs, graduations. For years Sweeney’s resisted the urge to confide. I mean, where do you even start?

  Startling, how a friendship could thrive in such thin soil.

  Cal sits with a gray cash box, making change and flirting with women in summer dresses, expounding to Sweeney on the apocalypse. “I been thinking about putting in a bomb shelter. I’m no prepper, but I mean, you need to be ready. Know what I’m sayin’? Get your brass you can recycle, lead bars, gallon cans of smokeless powder. Caps. Jars and lids for canning. A good seed vault. Passive dehumidifiers. A good root cellar. You need…”

  His mind elsewhere, Sweeney interrupts. “I got a hypothetical.”

  “Lay it on me.” Hypothetical. An entrée into any number of decent chats over the years. Sweeney and Cal both with an interest in the criminal mind. A hypothetical assassination, terrorist plot, bank heist. How’s a guy get away with it? How’s he get caught?

  “So an ex-criminal, maybe somebody from LA or something, right? Hiding out in Montana. Pulp Fiction meets Lonesome Dove.”

  “Farfetched, but yeah, okay.”

  Sweeney sneaks a sideways glance. “Guy comes home one day, finds a body delivered to his house. Waiting for him on his front porch.”

  “Past catching up to him kind of deal?”

  “Maybe, maybe not. He wouldn’t know. He’s isolated.”

  “So where’s the hypothetical?”

  “Yeah, okay. You take a guy, no resources, cut off from all his old connections. Does he run, does he stay, does he fight it out?”

  “Depends on what he’s got to lose, I guess.”

  “Maybe more than he thinks.”

  “No man is an island, right?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Well, everybody’s got more to lose than they…” Cal shifts in his seat. “Is that Marilyn?”

  A sheriff’s cruiser pulling into the driveway, idling past the parked cars.

  “Looks like it.” Sweeney hunkers down low. “For my sins.”

  Marilyn steps out, leans her forearms on the open door. Busty in khaki brown and a gold star. Mirrored sunglasses and red hair pulled back tight enough to thrum. “Hey Cal. How’s the yard sale?”

  “Not bad. Another day like today, I’m going shopping for a Cadillac.”

  “I’ve always seen you in a Lexus.” To Sweeney, she says, “Feel like going for a ride, slick?” She ignores the half-dozen or so browsers around here, all of them conspicuously minding their own business.

  “In that? Uh uh.” Sweeney hates cop cars like he hates taxes and higher math. You can’t argue with it.

  “Com’on hotshot.”

  He pulls out his truck keys. “I’ll follow.”

  “Get in. Or.” Her fingers jingle-jangle the cuffs hooked to her belt.

  Sweeney’s eyes bounce back and forth. He finally nods. Steps down toward her cruiser.

  “Just climb on in the back there.”

  Backseat of a cop car. No handles, windows permanently up and locked, a screen which, from Sweeney’s personal experience, it’s impossible to kick your way through (a problem of leverage). Not to mention the stink. Lysol over a foundation of urine and vomit. He says, without much hope, “I’d rather not.”

  “Oh Sweeney,” she grins too many teeth at him, “you can’t charm your way out of this ride.”

  “Arrest me, then.”

  “Don’t tempt me. I lie awake nights.” She’s never made an empty threat in her life. “See that there….” She steps closer to lower her voice. “On the front seat?

  Sweeney puts his nose to the window, cups a hand against the glare. Sees a stamped and canceled manila envelope, unflapped. Her name above the copshop address.

  She says to his ear. “That’s your ticket to Deer Lodge, you don’t cooperate.”

  Resigned, he grabs the rear door handle. “That day I married you? Worst day of my life.”

  ~

  Twelve years ago this August, him and Marilyn sat in a steel gray limousine, chilled as produce in a drawer, watching as every soul they knew in the world lined up for their paired funerals.

  Through the open door of the church, he glimpsed a cascade of roses, an avalanches of lilies. He’d have maybe expected a dozen cousins, ten or twelve high school drinking buddies. Not this receiving line, not this neighborhood parade halfway around the block. I mean, damn.

  Maybe it made sense. They’d died young, right? And tragically. Young and tragic makes good box office.

  It put a lump in his own throat, especially when he saw his mother. If he’s to be damned for any sin in his life (putting them in alphabetical order would take time and a half), it’s for giving his mother this grief. Hunched in her dark finery, clutching a trembling bouquet of baby’s breath. They brought her a chair, and she sat shaking hands, lifting a cheek for kisses.

  Beside him, Marilyn sniffled.

  “Jesus, woman.”

  “I know, but.”

  Their limo was an indulgence, a whim he’d paid for out of his own pocket. How often you get a chance to see your own funeral? The Fed, disguised as a chauffeur (if you call a borrowed hat and a pair of sunglasses a disguise), was short tempered, spending his Saturday driving an ex-con around. He looked at Sweeney in the rearview. “She’s not falling apart back there, is she?”

  “You should see the opportunity here. Look at that line. You got your felons, you got your parole violators, a couple arsonists.” His cousin Eddie was all three. Twenty years before, Eddie had shown Sweeney how to slimjim pinball machines. Now he stood thin and pale, sideswiped by grief.

  Sweeney said to Marilyn, “He looks good, don’t he?”

  “Who?”

  “Eddie.”

  The Fed turned interested. “Eddie Adamo? Is he, what, that guy with mustache?”

  “None of your business.”

  Sweeney’s tone pissed him off. “All those folks crying and carrying on? I roll your window down, there’s two or three probably wouldn’t mind seeing you go tits up for real.”

  Good point. Jimmy Basconti, Mike Harmon…

  Sweeney poured two bourbons from the fold-down bar. Handed one to Marilyn. “Step on it, son. Airport.”

  ~

  Back in Brooklyn, Marilyn had been a petite, fragile kind of thing. A gum chewer preoccupied with her nails. Poisonous in her barbs, able to flay him to the bone with a single sharp word. In retrospect? We’re all just trying to get to there from here. She had her own struggles. Hanging out with the wives of Sweeney’s compadres, talking jewelry, sex, shopping. Her own disappointments.

  But now, where had she gone, that mean-eyed little firecracker? Some part of him wants to start excavating, find his wife buried under the layers of sheriff’s deputy. You could imagine this woman running a chainsaw, cutting firewood. A sunburn in lieu of makeup. A couple of simple sapphire earrings. Skin peeling off her nose and a galaxy of freckles across her cheeks. Similar constellations presumably still across her breasts. You expect redheads to be lighthearted, fun-loving. But with Marilyn? Those two words never seem to enter the conversation.

  They sit at the back of Brownie’s cafe, insulated by the invisible, ten-foot buffer that comes courtesy of her uniform. They have their mugs of coffee and the manila envelope.

  Not quite lunchtime, Brownie’s is still crowded. Run by Haight Street expats, their namesake desserts, prominently displayed under glass, are crusty, melt-in-your-mouth little pieces of heaven. The illicit versions, Sweeney knows from personal experience, are kept in foil in the basement freezer.

  Incongruously, the restaurant’s clientele consists mostly of railroad retirees and ranchers, old men who hold their newspapers with the stubs of missing
fingers.

  Marilyn notes Sweeney’s plaid shirt, tattered jeans rolled at the cuff, the belt tightened an extra notch. “Still the same old snappy dresser.”

  Then the waitress is at his elbow. “Warm up your coffee?”

  “Thanks, Pearl.” After the waitress leaves, he says to his scowling ex-wife, “You’re prettier every time I see you, I swear.”

  “So here I am on my way to work. Just another average day. Looking forward to a few speeding tickets. Maybe breaking up some domestic abuse…”

  “Every ex-wife’s spesh-ee-al-ity.” Among their rituals of disdain, here’s Sweeney rejecting the dim coals of his own slow-smoking fondness. You ignore it like you ignore the smell of mice under the floorboards, hoping it’ll go away.

  She opts for a cop’s blank stare. “And so I get into the office, and what do I find in my morning’s mail but this…” She pushes the envelope across the table. Sits back. “I blame you for ruining my day. My life, my career, god knows what else.”

  When he goes to open the envelope, Marilyn puts her hand over his. The waitress is back, adding another quarter inch to his coffee. Flirting. “Heard you went to Bozeman yesterday.”

  “Oh?”

  “Kinsey saw you in the mall.”

  “Just going to that Barnes and Noble.”

  “What are you reading? I picked up that new James Lee Burke? It was almost…”

  Marilyn says, “Thanks for the coffee, Pearl.”

  Pearl touches Sweeney’s shoulder. “You have you a good day, Ted.” Glances at his ex, who has forgotten the politics of women.

  “You still got a way with the locals.”

  “Open the envelope.”

  “Birthday present?” He slides out a sheet of white paper. “You keep forgetting, but I always knew…” He turns the page over. Sees a photo printed on a laser printer. Could have been the same printer that produced the images in the briefcase. A gray-toned digital snapshot of the body. His body. The dead wop. Posed in Sweeney’s living room. Charlie Russell on the wall, TV in the corner. Whoever had the camera, they were sitting on Sweeney’s sofa. Where Sweeney had sat not a dozen hours ago, smoking a cigarette. Under the photo, written in blue ballpoint and careful, block letters, Sweeney’s old name.

  Sweeney slips the photo back into the envelope. “Anybody else seen this?”

  “Yeah, you bet. I made copies and tacked them up on phone poles around town. Jesus.”

  He pushes the envelope back to her. “It’s okay.”

  She leans forward. “Don’t tell me it’s okay,” she hisses. “Don’t you dare tell me it’s okay. How is this in any way, shape or form okay?”

  She’s as angry as he’s ever seen her (which is saying a lot). A bright red flush rises up from her collar. Her ponytail starts to work loose. A frizzy halo.

  Sweeney glances around. Sees coffee cups paused midsip, forks poised above free-range eggs. A small slice of the infinite multitude of people who all live secure in their illusions of justice, of right and wrong. Happy to believe that there is a cosmic scale, that “things will work out,” that as heroes of their own ongoing triple features, they will all triumph in the final act.

  Him and Marilyn, they know different.

  He stands, tosses bills on the table. “Let’s take a walk.”

  ~

  Blind love. She’d been so beautiful. The feel of her small smooth hand when he’d slipped the ring on her finger. A siren to his passing ship, the rocks upon which he’d slung his hull. It all went bad, sure, but he still had that feel of her hand.

  Couple years after their wedding, she’d said, “You got a heart like a sieve, Cosmo. Everything runs right on through.”

  “Yeah, but I got a dick like a can opener.”

  At the start, his fierce, post-adolescent fumblings had brooked no argument. Contorted with ankles and elbows against headrests and window knobs, it’d been all, no no no, then yes, yes, yes. The waters of the Hudson a dark ocean out the back window. A good Catholic girl with a taste for guilt, retribution, she wanted the opposite of safe, predictable. After date one, she’d been the one to suggest date two.

  But in Montana, Sweeney had gone tame, had become something less like a downed electrical wire sputtering sparks and more like a dog coming to you with a stick. She’d been the one to suggest divorce. “It’s not like it was, honey.”

  Sweeney now has a couple of stale bagels from the counter, and they stand on the weathered dock in Sacajawea Park, tossing crumbs to geese. “I didn’t kill him.”

  “Never said you did.”

  “Came home last night, he was in my chair just like that picture. Somebody broke into my house, crowbar work. Left him for me like that.” He tosses another piece of bagel. The geese squabble before the largest of them scoops up the soggy crumbs. “Old folks were in Bozeman. Didn’t see a thing.”

  “Where’s the body now.”

  “Probably somewhere around about Big Timber.”

  “Jesus, Sweeney. You dumped it?”

  “What else?”

  “You could have called the marshalls.”

  “I’m not moving again.”

  “How about the state police? Or me? Just a thought.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “You dumb wop. The things you still don’t know about this town.”

  “Just think about it for a second, okay? I mean, Jesus, Rachel.”

  “Who’s Rachel?”

  Her old name. A slip he hasn’t made in years. “Yeah, sorry. Damn. This thing’s got me rattled.”

  After a moment, “Any idea who he was?”

  “Nope.” Another chunk of bagel. “Looks a little familiar, though. Something about him.” Sweeney briefly considers bringing up the briefcase. The photos. Decides for a hundred thousand reasons to keep them to himself.

  “Yeah, I thought the same thing.” She sighs through her nose. “So we’re blown, then. It’s over.”

  “We don’t know that. Somebody’s sending a message, we just can’t read it yet. That’s what I figure. But if this guy’s from the families, whoever killed him is likely from the families, too. Which means that New York knows we’re alive, which means the Russians know, which means we should be dead already. And we aren’t. Which means we got a puzzle on our hands.”

  “Sheeyit.”

  Hearing his own affected expression in her mouth, the pipes of Sweeney’s heart sigh out a few brief notes of nostalgia. “Maybe it’s a partner dispute. Like they were here to tag me, and one partner changed his mind. They fought. Then, etcetera.”

  “I was going to run for sheriff next year.”

  “Charlie’s retiring?”

  “Running for state senate. I’m trying to take his place. Give me some of that bagel.” She tosses a pinch of bread. “Was. Was going to take his place.”

  “Good for you.” He means it. Does a quick tally of the advantages behind having his ex-wife as Park County Sheriff.

  She asks, “So what are you going to do?”

  “Did it already. Get rid of the body. Now wait and see what happens.”

  “Where’s my kneecap breaker, the guy who kept a pipe wrench in his trunk?”

  “Buried under pink marble in Newark.”

  She chews her lip, not quite conceding the point. “Okay,” she finally says. “They’re messing with you, which means they’re messing with me. So let’s just think a minute here.” She tosses the entire bagel into the water, soliciting a brief, fluttering rumpus among the geese. “First, it takes balls to put a body in a chair like that. You’ve got to have a pair, right?” She raises her fist. “But you’ve also got to know when your two old geriatrics are going to be gone. Which means watching the place, keeping an eye out. You seen anybody hanging around? Any cars, trucks, hunters with binoculars?”

  “No. I wondered about that, too. And no. Nada.”

  “Okay, so somebody at least not bad at surveillance. Staying inconspicuous. Also, somebody, safe to say, that didn’t like that g
uy in your chair none too much.”

  “Safe to say.”

  “Okay. So what we’re going to do. First thing, I’m going to find out who the Italian was. Find out who he ran with. Second, you’re going to browse the bars, look for, you know, fedoras. Anybody you might recognize. Third, you’re going to read some newspapers online, some New York Times, some Post. Browse some chat rooms. See what’s been going down back home. See what the families are up to.”

  He could almost kiss her. “All right.”

  “You got anything that might have the dead guy’s prints on it?”

  He thinks about it. “Shotgun. He had a sawed off .410 in his lap. It’s under my couch.”

  “A .410? Good lord.”

  “Yeah, right? It’ll have prints, though.”

  “Okay, get it to me. I’ll say I found it in a parking lot. Sawed off enough to be illegal?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Meantime,” she grabs him by the arm, shakes him. “Meantime, hey Sweeney? Lose the puppy dog eyes. I mean, Christ. Be a man.”

  ~

  When Sweeney was a kid, wise guys were well on the wane. They didn’t know it, Sweeney and cousin Eddie, but they were coming late to the party. The tide was ebbing, pulling away from the pilings to reveal a beach wrack of retro-chic cement shoes, quaint pinky rings heavy as brass knobs, gnawed missiles of damp, dark Cohibas, money clips etched with the Virgin Mary. Paul Castellano got his ticket punched on the upper east side and opened the dam on a flood of RICO wiretaps. The good days were gone and maybe they weren’t coming back. The Italianos, La Cosa Nostra, the muscle, the well-tentacled men’s club of thousand dollar shoes and cashmere scarves, the embodiment of swaggering entitlement, of insulated privilege and petty hijackings, money laundering schemes and protection schemes and numbers schemes, of gears over gears, of a hierarchy of favors and obligations as intricate and messy as spider webs tangled around a broom… it was all going the way of the dodo, analogue in a digital universe. The Feds and RICO. The exiled Russian yids down on Brighton Beach. The Dominicans up in Queens. Irish Westies on the docks and greasy cocksuckers from Albania that spoke no English past the hallowed seven epithets, unwashed dealers from Columbia, as boneless and lethal as coiled snakes. They were all converging on the twitching corpus of the five families, buzzing like houseflies.