A Town Called Malice

by Adam Abramowitz

  There are chips stacked in each well of the eight-seat poker table, two decks of cards at the ready on the green felt, my father watching The Cincinnati Kid from across the small living room. His eyes rarely blink. His pupils, onyx stones. The Cincinnati Kid is one in a rotation of poker films my father seems to enjoy along with Rounders and A Big Hand for the Little Lady, the poker scenes igniting some neural connections deep inside his brain, something returning to him in the narrowing of his eyes and twitching of his fingers, as if they were attached to electrodes.

  Klaussen gestures to a seat next to my father and I nod, watching as he leans his guitar against the wall between them, my father momentarily glancing at the case before looking at Klaussen as if seeing him for the first time. And then back to the television.

  “It’s good to see you, William,” Klaussen says softly.

  My father doesn’t respond. I kiss him on the crown of his head and sit on his opposite side. He lets me take his hand between mine, his palms worn smooth and dry, slippery as talc. His lips move but no sound emanates.

  “What did he just say?” Klaussen asks, having seen my father’s lips.

  “Fucked if I know,” I say.

  “I’m sorry.” Klaussen looks away. I don’t know if he’s being polite or the sight of my father is too much for him to bear.

  Sid takes the opportunity to guide Alianna Solarte gently by the elbow, giving her the grand house tour, which in Sid’s fantasy would be cut short in one of the two bedrooms upstairs.

  “And here,” Sid narrates pictures unnecessarily, “is Zesty and Zero when they were kids.…” All the pictures have masking tape affixed to the frames, yellowed captions detailing who appears in the photos, the locations and dates; at this point the notes have lost all meaning to my dad, as far as I could tell.

  At one point, on the stairs, I catch Sid leaning in close to smell Solarte’s hair, balloon hearts practically popping out of his chest. I shake my head at him, eyes wide to warn him off, but really, she might be the perfect lady for him: Sid likes them dangerous. Which is probably why he’s so tight with Jhochelle.

  “So, skinned your knuckles?” I chin-point to an open seat, but the Rabbi ignores the hint.

  “It’s been an active few days.” The Rabbi’s smile reveals a cracked front tooth. He’s the largest man in the room but has the unease of the smallest fish in a packed aquarium. “And just to impart some knowledge so you don’t judge me too harshly, the Torah says that sometimes it is permissible to lie.”

  “Yeah? When’s that?”

  The Rabbi clears his throat. “There are certain exigencies.”

  “Such as?”

  “To keep the peace.” The Rabbi unconsciously rubs his knuckles. “To practice humility.”

  “So you were double dipping?” I say.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Doing both. You didn’t want to take credit, ’fess up for bringing my dad to temple.”

  “That was not the lie. Your father steered me towards the temple on his own accord. I just opened the door. Why do you find this hard to believe?”

  “My father wasn’t religious. I’m not even sure he was bar-mitzvahed.”

  “Were you?”

  “No,” I say, a sharp sting of regret hitting me. What the fuck? I think.

  “And your mother?”

  “Next subject,” I say. Temple Israel is a building my father had probably seen a thousand times since we’d moved him into this house six years ago. It’s a large domed temple with far too many stairs for my father to climb at the Harvard Street entrance.

  Of course there must also be a ramp that I’d never bothered to notice. But the police had said that they’d entered the temple after breaking a lock on the side door, the Rabbi most likely using a crowbar, which he conveniently had on his person. So perhaps this wasn’t my father’s first foray to the temple with him. Had he gone before to attend services? Not to my knowledge. Had he truly led the Rabbi to the side door himself, accustomed as he was from his after-hours games to use alternate exits and entrances, the Rathskeller a rare front door exception?

  “So not religious,” the Rabbi says. “But you practiced other customs, no?”

  Yes, we had customs. Poker, music, baseball, time we spent together. Was the Rabbi saying customs were a form of religion? I ask him.

  “Well.” He warms to the question, but not enough to take a seat. “They exist for a reason. Like prayers we don’t necessarily understand, but repeat time after time until the words are but a blur. We say them but we no longer remember why. Perhaps the beauty is in the blurring, the smudging; what’s lost in clarity is gained in devotion?”

  The Rabbi poses his statement as a question, but I have no answers for him. If the reason for praying is forgotten, aren’t the prayers themselves meaningless?

  Klaussen has kept Camilla Islas alive in his memory and now he wants to secure her passage to the other side in time for this year’s Day of the Dead. Does that mean that the difference between the living and the dead is only the difference between the forgotten and the remembered? When the last person who remembers my father dies, is that when he’ll truly be gone?

  “What did my father do inside the temple?”

  “He sat. We drank some wine. The walk tired him.”

  “Did he pray?” I’m thankful for the straight answer, return the gift with a straight question.

  “I’ve yet to hear your father’s voice,” the Rabbi says. “Would he know how to pray?”

  “I don’t know,” I say, but a memory floods back to me, perhaps the only discussion my father and I ever had concerning prayer. I was young, maybe eight or nine years old, and had asked how we ever knew our prayers were being heard and what happens if you couldn’t remember the words or recited them wrong. His response to all those questions was simply: Just say the alphabet, Zesty. That’s all you have to do if you feel the need to pray. God will sort out the letters.

  I don’t remember if I understood him then. I’m not sure I believe it now.

  “His lips were moving.” The Rabbi nods. “In shul. So I took the Torah from the ark and let him hold it. It seemed to mean something to him.”

  “Where did you come from again?” I say.

  “Perhaps your father is preparing himself.” The Rabbi skirts the inquiry.

  “For what?” I say, angrily, unfairly. I know what the Rabbi is alluding to. The question really is, why am I so angry about it? My father won’t live forever and he’s declining fast. It’s just that Zero and I don’t talk about the end, utter not a word about that possibility. Until yesterday. Something’s shifted beyond just living and trying our best to take care of our obligations.

  And now all conversations have ceased, the only sound coming from the clacking of the poker chips, like bone on bone, in my father’s badly shaking hands.

  “This is something you and Zero should speak about.” The Rabbi recuses himself to the kitchen.

  “My father’s not going anywhere, Rabbi,” I say loudly to his back, his large frame bringing the illusion of midnight to the short hallway that separates the rooms. “What the fuck are you saying?”

  “I did not mean to intrude.” The Rabbi stops, but doesn’t turn around. “But there comes a time for all of us. Zero speaks of this often.”

  “Not to me he fuckin’ doesn’t.” I’m enraged and swallow hard.

  “I apologize. Obviously this is a family matter. If you’ll excuse me.” The Rabbi continues into the kitchen and I can hear the back stairs creaking under his weight just as Sid and Solarte descend via the front and seat themselves at the poker table.

  “The Rabbi’s staying here?” I say to Sid. My face feels flushed.

  “Zero’s call,” Sid says.

  “For how long?”

  “Who’s to say? Talk to Zero. He’s been good for your dad, though.”

  “Oh yeah, how’s that?”

  “Breaking into the temple’s pretty funny.” He shrugs. “T
hey were both pretty fuckin’ hammered.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “Hey, listen.” Sid maintains the placid gaze of a New Age Buddha. Bedroom eyes. Basement fists. “He got Pops out and walking around and I was able to get some shut-eye. What’s the harm?”

  “The harm is I couldn’t get a straight answer out of him. Where’d he turn up from?”

  “Where do any of them turn up from? He showed up at the warehouse a couple months ago looking for work. You know Zero’s always looking for reliable guys. He checked out.” Which means Zero ran an extensive background check that included somebody also hitting the bricks for a little peekaboo coverage. “Even did a stint in the Israeli Army like Jhochelle. Fuckin’ huge for a rabbi, right?”

  “I don’t know, Sid, what sizes do they usually come in?”

  “Nebbishy?” Sid grins. “Jewy. Extra-Jewy?” Sid grabs me cat-quick and plants a rough kiss on my cheek. “Don’t get your beanie in a twist. It’s all good.”

  But is it? Only a couple of months in and he’s brawling in bars with Zero, looking after my father, and sleeping shifts at his house. Where the hell have I been? Why am I so bothered by this? Is it because this is really my role and I’ve been avoiding doing these things, shirking my duties as his only blood-related son? I suppose I should be thankful Zero has the resources to provide the care our dad requires, but I’m embittered, ungrateful.

  Klaussen seems at home, though, apparently content to sit and look at my father, perhaps familiar with some version of him from the past; this silent iteration doubtful to be his lasting memory of him.

  Never trust anyone who is uncomfortable in silence, I can still hear my father say to me, and the memory drains my heat and makes me smile. I remember long periods of silence growing up, but it never bothered me as much as it did Zero because I knew, without a doubt, my father saw me. Silence has been the coin of my family’s realm for a long time, which made me the outlier because I always seemed to have something to say. Maybe this is my true rebellion: It’s not the job, the hair, the weed. It’s my mouth, a constant distraction from the lies I try to convince myself are true.

  I watch Klaussen, looking for his lie, and see nothing. The Cincinnati Kid starts rolling credits and I turn off the TV and we all sit around the poker table, Sid absently dealing out hands of seven stud, all the cards up, everyone, including my father with his badly shaking hands, reaching into their wells and throwing chips into the center, the winner raking the pot. My father wins the third hand with a Broadway straight, catching the inside queen on the river card, a statistical improbability that’s roughly forty to one, and as poker strategy goes, a quick way to go broke. It was probably a hand he would have folded in one of his high stakes games, but who knows? Every situation is different. And sometimes you’re left with no option but to chase that inside straight, pray for Lady Luck’s mercy, for some love sprinkled in your direction.

  “All yours, Pops,” Sid says, but my father makes no move to rake the pot, the cards laid out in front of him not registering in his eyes; the value of his hand might as well be written in Sanskrit.

  It’s a moment that makes me swallow hard, a sharp sadness hollowing me out and rendering me weightless, like I could float off into oblivion if there weren’t a roof over my head. But that moment passes quickly because Karl Klaussen’s lifted his guitar from its battered case, his chair scraping the floor as he shifts to give himself some room, his fingers sliding over the frets of the sunburst Gibson, which, from the light above the table, reflects an orange and yellow dawn on the bare white wall. In a strong high voice he begins to sing the song that should have catapulted him to fame, the toll of his age and hard living only adding a layer of pathos missing from the sound captured on vinyl. Klaussen sings:

  No sense howling for the moon

  No sense worshiping the sun

  If we live to see tomorrow

  I’ll be done

  I’ll be done

  My father’s lips begin to move. And though faint and barely above a whisper, once again I hear his voice.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  We sit outside on my father’s front porch, Klaussen handing out clove cigarettes all around.

  “I want my gun back,” I say, once my cigarette is lit. “It’s not mine, but I’m responsible for it.” The smoke tastes better than I remember it, my lips sweet to my tongue. Now if I could only get somebody to confirm that.

  Sid looks in my direction and winks. He’s sitting close to Solarte, their thighs practically touching on the swing, separated only by the space of the Glock on her hip, Solarte carrying again. Is there something she’s not telling me? Sid whispers something in Solarte’s ear and she giggles like a little girl.

  Unreal.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Klaussen says. “It’s not as simple as just asking for its return.”

  “Why’s that? Obviously Moreno and his crew are working as a protection detail for you.”

  “Not for me, but yes, on my behalf.”

  “And why is it you need protection, Karl? Somebody maybe not happy to see you around?”

  “I can’t really say. I view it as an unnecessary precaution, but it’s not up to me.”

  “So who is it up to?” Solarte quits flirting long enough to join the conversation.

  “Like I said, it’s complicated, but I’ll do my best to explain. After Camilla overdosed and your dad and I did what we did…,” Klaussen sputters out, maybe due to Sid’s presence, but more likely, I think, because he’s finding it hard to give voice to what he’d done, something faraway coming into his eyes.

  I have no idea if Klaussen has ever spoken about his crime, has ever tried to unburden himself of the guilt he claims to have been lugging around for more than thirty years, talk therapy not everybody’s panacea.

  “After the whole Zeppelin debacle…” Klaussen takes a deep breath, gathering himself again. “Everything started going to shit. And why not? Somebody had to pay for not giving her family a chance to say goodbye, hold a velorio for her. This is important in Mexican culture and I’d failed her. Failed everybody.

  “Of course, I wasn’t seeing it so clearly then, I was so fucked up on alcohol and heroin. You know that saying, Zesty, that at the core, the best definition of an addict is an egomaniac with low self-esteem?”

  I nod, smoke.

  “Well, then, you have a good picture of what I was. And then throw in the local attention we were getting, the headliner status.” Klaussen takes a heavy drag off his clove cigarette, the glow flaring in his eyes. “I didn’t hold up well. None of us in the band did. You know Lorin Reese, my bassist, committed suicide after things fell apart. Chip Dwyer, our drummer, drank himself to death. Fuckin’ sad. We were so close, Zesty, so fucking close.”

  “To what? Some rock and roll wet dream?”

  “To matter.” Klaussen’s answer surprises me because I understand it core-deep. “Even on a local level, in this town, there’s nothing like it. And that was even before the real money hit. I’m talking like WBCN, local-top-ten-type fame, everyone in town glued to the radio or spinning your record. Shit, we still lived like kids. Our apartments were dives, even after the album dropped, but we didn’t care. It was all about the music. About making something that says we’re here. We exist.”

  “And the drugs,” Solarte reminds him.

  “Yeah, it caught up to almost everybody. Even to some of the guys that made it. Anyway, your dad was the only one who was holding his shit together as we were getting booed off every stage, brawling with the same cats who just months before treated us like gods. I was spiraling and your dad just got me out. Made arrangements, told me he could pull it off, but it would have to be permanent. Like forever, because the cops were all over us, these two homicide detectives.…”

  “Polishuk and Nichols,” Solarte says, obviously having done her homework.

  “If you say so. I honestly don’t remember, but I was going to go down for Camilla; they just didn’t have a b
ody yet. But who knew how long she’d stay gone, and I didn’t know if there was anything there to connect me.”

  “So you took my dad’s ticket out.”

  “Through New York. Played that show at CBGB, walked out, and didn’t see daylight again until I was across the Mexico border.”

  “And then what?”

  “From there I was on my own and I just went and did what I do. I knew Spanish, started playing on the streets, in bars. I was a full-blown alcoholic and junkie, it was just a matter of time before I took a hot shot or crossed somebody and ended up with my neck cut in some alley.”

  “Only…” It isn’t my intention to be rude, but I have somewhere to be and hope Klaussen will get to the point already.

  “My dying yet just wasn’t in the cards. I was approached by somebody who took a liking to my music. He took me in, got me clean.”

  “A narco trafficker.” Solarte sees it before I do, disdain chalking her voice. “You started composing songs for a Mexican cartel boss. Narcocorrido music.” Like the ones Klaussen played at the Hacienda.

  “Of a sort.”

  “What the fuck does that mean?” Solarte’s lost that loving feeling and now has Sid glaring at him, too, from the porch swing. “You wrote songs glorifying a Mexican drug kingpin. Which one? Is he still alive?”

  “Not a drug boss.” Klaussen only addresses part of the question.

  “What other kind of cartel kingpin is there?” Alianna Solarte spits, shooting him a poisonous glare.

  “Oil,” Sid says, all heads turning to him. “PetroNarco. Gasoline. Pipeline siphoning and distribution, but on a massive scale.”

  “And how the hell do you know that?” Solarte is practically bug-eyed, reassessing her porch swing suitor.

  “I read the papers.” He winks at her salaciously. “I’m not just a pretty face. And crime interests me.” Now Sid winks at me, but absent the lust.

  “Is Sid right?”

  “Spot on.” Klaussen clears his throat.

  “And Moreno?” Solarte asks.

  “Is an outpost of sorts.”