The Art of Disposal

by John Prindle

  * * * *

  The next day I met up with Frank Conese at the same espresso bar.

  “The watchmaker,” Conese said. “Care to know why?”

  “Not really,” I said.

  “It's hard to find a watch-guy. Dying breed. I have this old, old watch… Civil War old, from way back, given to my Pop's Pop as a gift. Hadn't run in years. So I find Mister Nelson Scott, and he takes the watch in for an overhaul.”

  “Like for a car,” Mudcap blurted out.

  We both turned and stared at his big burned one-eyed face.

  “Like for a car,” Conese said, nodding the way you would when you're proud of a kid. “Don't interrupt me again. It's not polite.”

  Mudcap smiled. He didn't want it to happen, but he couldn't stop it from happening. Conese looked at me and shook his head.

  “So he takes the pocket watch. Two weeks go by. A month. I call him up. Clearly, he doesn't know who I am. And that's fine. I don't expect special treatment. But most people, well, they're usually extra-prompt with my business.”

  He drew in some smoke from the cigarette in the black plastic holder, and let the smoke drift out of his mouth and up into his nostrils.

  “Week later it's finally done. I tell him I'll stop by to pick it up, but he says he won't do business from his house. Takes me forever to nail down a time and place to meet this guy to get the watch back. But it happens. And guess what?”

  “What?” I said.

  “I get it back home, and the watch isn't running.”

  Conese stared at me, waiting.

  “That's your reason?” I said.

  “No. He blamed it on me. Said I must've dropped it. When I pay for something, I expect a certain level of customer service. And Mister Nelson Scott did not deliver. If he'd've been nicer, taken it back and fixed it right… well, he might be enjoying this fine sunny day.”

  Conese studied me. So did Mudcap. Even the barista, tamping down the coffee for the espresso machine on the other side of the glass, was staring at me.

  “Things are changing,” Conese said. “I'd like you to be a part of it. Help Carlino get… acclimated.”

  “Eddie hasn't mentioned any changes,” I said.

  Frank looked at Mudcap. Then he looked at the table, like a sad dog.

  “I'm not in the habit of talking about a guy behind his back. Talk about one person, and the guy you're talking to, he figures you'll do the same thing to him the minute he's gone. But since you brought it up—Eddie's not who you think he is.”

  “I think he's all right,” I said.

  Conese tapped the table, like he was sending a message in Morse Code. “He's not gonna hold up. Not when they're dangling that juicy carrot.”

  “Who?”

  “The FBI,” Conese said. “They're working on him, and believe me—he'll talk.”

  I saw the fat guy with the mustache looking right at me, and when I noticed it, he raised his newspaper and covered his face. Smooth. I knew what was going on. Eddie wasn't talking to the FBI. No way. But I couldn't let Frank know that I knew.

  Sometimes a boss will call you in like this, have a sit-down, ask you where you stand. Tell you there's going to be a casualty, and can they count on you to be on their side when the bullets fly. And trust me—you always say yes. Doesn't matter if you mean it or not. If you tell the guy, no thanks, I'm not interested, that's it: you just signed your death certificate. You probably won't even leave the room. Frank Conese was telling me that Eddie was out and Carlino DiTommaso was in.

  “He's a rat?” I whispered sharply.

  Conese nodded. “And you take care of rats.”

  “With pleasure,” I said.

  “Glad to hear it.”

  “When?” I said.

  “I'll get back to you. In the meantime, say nothing.”

  “Happy to help out,” I said, as politely as possible. I didn't want Mudcap stopping by my hotel room later that night; carrying me out of there folded up in my own suitcase.

  “Show Carlino how it runs. The numbers. Collections. Whorehouses. Card rooms. Maybe introduce him to Pete Bruen while you're at it.”

  “You know Greedy Pete?” I said.

  “I know a lot of people,” Conese said, fitting a new cigarette into the holder. He clicked open a silver Zippo, spun the wheel, took a long drag, and exhaled a ribbon of sad looking smoke that rushed away into the city.

  “And now I know you,” he said.

  SEIKO, LIKE WATCH

  I finished my other two jobs. One was a tall scarecrow man who I plugged in the back of the head using Dan the Man's Walther PPK. He was easy. You could see that he was a part of the life, and I never feel bad disposing of a gangster. The other was a younger kid, maybe twenty-four or so. I hit him when he was getting into his car out back of one of Frank Conese's all-night card rooms. Two rounds from the Walther, and his earthly problems were solved.

  I thought incessantly about Eddie Sesto, and I wondered why in the hell Frank Conese was putting his cards on the table. Maybe he wanted me to run and tell Eddie. Then Eddie might send us in to make the first move, against made guys, and the Corporation would be forced to give Frank the okay to wipe all of us right off the map. Like it or not, I was the middle man; and if there's one thing I hate, it's being a middle man. I thought about something my Uncle Carl said, when Aunt Stella was hellbent on painting the farmhouse a new color. She brought home four or five swatches and tacked them on the siding, and they both stood back and looked at them, and bickered under the hot afternoon sun. A week later, Uncle Carl was out there with a ladder and a few silver cans, painting the house with a fresh coat of the same creamy color it had always been.

  I asked him why they hadn't picked one of the new colors.

  “If you ain't sure what to do, don't do nothing at all,” he said.

  On my last full day in the city, I walked into an Asian antique shop called The Jade Buddha. I went in there to get away from the crowd, and because of the intricate wood wall hangings and copper statues that I saw through the window.

  The lady shopkeeper, excited to see someone, ran over as I was shutting the door; the chiming bells fading back into another long sleep.

  She followed me around the store, and if I picked up something, a little wind-chime or a teapot, she would say, “very, very good. Japanese quality. Not Chinese.”

  She said “not Chinese” with a face like she was tasting a lemon.

  She was a good foot shorter than me, and there were streaks of gray through her hair. Her black eyeliner was thick. When she spoke, or looked at me, my head got light and numb. She sat back down, but not before telling me that I should ask her if I had any questions, any questions at all.

  “Busy today?” I said, studying a small wooden elephant.

  “Not busy,” she said. She looked out through the window. Cars and trucks rattled by. Women with scarves. A hunched old man with a dog. But the chimes on the door never sang. I wondered if she sat there all day, reading her book, hoping that the chimes would sound.

  “Not busy today,” she said again.

  I looked out the window, across the street at the antique shops where people came and went; where the doors opened and closed.

  “Bad economy,” she said.

  “It'll pick up,” I said.

  “Better last year.”

  “How much for the elephant?” I said. She perked up a little.

  “Fifty dollar.”

  “Sold,” I said.

  She walked over to me, excited, nodding her head. “It's gift?”

  “Maybe,” I said. I tried to imagine Marcia and the wooden elephant. How would she explain it to Kevin? Besides that, I'd been over to her house once or twice, when he was out of town, and there's no way it would make any sense in there. That house is the very antithesis of sleek, cool, modern, or Asian. Marcia's house is an all-American dump. She's too busy doing things for herself to worry about where her kids have to live.

  “For wife?” the shopk
eeper said with a sparkle in her eye.

  “No, no. Girlfriend. Sort of.”

  “How about nice soap?” she said. “Maybe earrings. Jade. Japanese quality. Not Chinese.”

  She held a bar of soap up to my face. It was wrapped in fancy paper and had a gold seal like the Emperor himself had given it the thumbs up. I smelled it.

  “Nice, yes? Japanese quality. Not Chinese.”

  “Nice,” I said. But it made me think about Thin Y No and Cricket, and the way they had yelled back and forth in Mandarin. I wondered if Thin's Chinese family said the same thing in reverse when they showed off one of the Chinese paintings in their home… nice, yes? Chinese quality. Not Japanese.

  When they think of racism, most people think of some scraggly white hillbilly like Clayton Shaw, waging a private war against Blacks and Mexicans. But that's only part of the story. Asians have been perfecting racism for centuries. The Japanese look down on the Chinese, the Chinese look down on Koreans, and the Vietnamese? Everyone looks down on them. I once had a Korean dentist who told me to never trust a Filipino.

  “I'll take three of them,” I said.

  “Ten dollar each,” she said, turning her head a little to the side like I might just change my mind when I heard the price.

  “That's fine. After all, it's Japanese quality,” I said with a grin.

  “Your special lady… she Japanese?”

  “No. And not so special.”

  “Ohhhh. Bad times,” she said.

  I was about to say something to change her opinion of me and Marcia, but there was nothing much to say.

  “Gift wrap,” she said. “Pretty paper?”

  “Just for the soap,” I said.

  “Elephant for you. Elephant good luck. Make everything better.”

  I watched her from my side of the counter as she wrapped the elephant, first in a sheet of gold foil paper and then in another translucent white sheet with tiny cherry blossoms. She was meticulous. Very serious. Each movement deliberate. She hummed a sweet tune as she worked, and turned her head this way and that.

  She looked up at me for a second. She smiled and pushed some strands of hair back behind her ear. I swallowed. She looked back down.

  Then she placed the wrapped elephant into a white cardboard box and tied a gold ribbon around it. I watched her fingers and I smelled her perfume, and I played out a whole scene in my mind, where she walked up and locked the front door, put the CLOSED sign up, and took me into the backroom where she hopped onto an old table and hiked up her skirt.

  She looked up at me. She looked back down.

  “What's your name?” I said.

  “Seiko, like watch,” she said and blinked her eyes.

  “Pretty,” I said.

  “Elephant,” she said. She handed me the box and our fingers touched, and neither one of us moved them away.

  “Fifty dollar,” she said, but she didn't say it loud; in fact, she barely said it at all. She said it with a breathy sadness, like she was surrendering, and it sounded sweeter than a bamboo flute by the edge of a mountain stream. I breathed in those two simple words, and when I had another clear thought, which seemed like ten years later, we were kissing each other—the counter still there between us.

  Oh how it felt—like God was pinching the second hand of the universe's master clock. The shuffling of people outside, not seeing us at the back of the store; not sharing in our secret moment. Then she pulled away from me, and she looked disoriented, like she'd taken a bad drug. She put her hands up to her face and looked at me through the spaces between her fingers, like she was building a wall.

  “No, no,” she said. “You go now.”

  She twisted her wedding ring, checking its fit along the bottom of her knuckle.

  I gathered my things and started off to the front door, wondering if it had even happened at all. Some moments exist in an ether, not quite along the same everyday road, and they leave you questioning everything about them.

  I opened the door, and the chimes sang their melancholy tune.

  “Elephant!” she called out to me. “Make everything better.”

  Back on the city streets, walking to my hotel, licking the taste of her honey lip balm off of my own lips, and smelling her perfume on the backs of my hands, I wondered what would've happened, days, weeks, years from now—if we would've loved each other and died of old age in a house full of teapots and jasmine flowers. It was nothing. It was everything. You can live a whole lifetime in the matter of a few seconds, if your imagination is good enough.

  LAST SUPPER

  “Sometimes Mudcap wears a marble in that eye-socket,” Eddie said, clipping a cigar and toasting its foot.

  “You mean a glass eye?” I said.

  “No. A marble. An actual marble, with wavy lines and shit.”

  “Can he crack heads?”

  “I heard one time he put a guy into a cardboard baler, in the back of a Mom and Pop grocery store. Smooshed him.” Eddie took a puff. “Conese was good to you, eh? Twenty-five… that ain't chump-change, mister.”

  “I won't get my electric turned off, I guess.”

  “When I was a kid, my old man told me to stay away from Uncle Joe. 'Uncle Joe is family,' he said, 'and we love him—but we don't condone what he does.' My old man, you see, he worked as a letter carrier for the Post Office. He was on the level. I never seen a guy so square. So of course my Uncle Joe, wearing his suits and shiny watches, well, he looked like he had a hell of a lot more fun than my old man.”

  “Joey Bones, right?”

  Eddie nodded and ashed his cigar into a blue-glass tray. “Joey Bones. But to me he was always just Uncle Joe. Never acted like a big shot.”

  Joe Bocci was an old-time gangster, well known for his kindness. They say he never killed a guy. That's doubtful though: I've never met a mobster with clean hands. He killed guys, or had guys killed, no doubt about it; but it's a credit to his business acumen that he could perpetrate such a legend about himself. He was boss for a year or two, but he got whacked by a gung-ho De Luca member. They never found Joe's body.

  “You know why Joe Bocci got hit?” Eddie said.

  “Some kind of mutiny.”

  “Tell me about it,” Eddie said coarsely, with a flash of hatred in his eyes. He played with the brass latch on the lid of the cigar-box from Frank Conese; his lit cigar sat quietly in the ashtray, a blue line of smoke climbing up and away from it like the ghost of a snake.

  Eddie stared at that box of cigars from Frank Conese. “You know what? This worries me,” he said. He held up the box and turned it this way and that. “Frank Conese gives me a box of cigars—and not just cigars, but Davidoff Millenniums.”

  “And what's the problem?”

  “They're too nice,” Eddie said, examining the wrapper of the burning cigar.

  “They good?” I said.

  Eddie took a puff, tilted his head back, opened his mouth, and let the smoke crawl out. Then he moved his nose around through the cloud and drew in breaths of it, like a dog sniffing at a fine patch of grass. “Are they good? he says… they're Davidoffs, for crying out loud.”

  “Maybe he's making amends,” I said.

  “Or maybe he's saying goodbye.”

  Eddie's eyes grew black as coal, and he wouldn't take them off of me. I scratched my neck. Eddie set the cigar back into the ashtray and leaned forward; put his elbow on the desk and cradled his face in his open hand.

  “We're stuck with Carlino?” he said.

  I nodded. “And Max Finn.”

  “Frank tell you why?”

  “No,” I said.

  “I don't like them.”

  “Me neither.”

  “Good,” Eddie said. “Watch 'em, Champ. Like crackheads going through your garbage at two in the morning. Let 'em pick through the trash on the curb, but make sure they don't get too close to the house, if you know what I mean.”

  “Can I ask you something?” I said.

  “Shoot.”

  “
You and Frank…”

  “What about it?”

  “You know, why he—”

  “—why I never got made? That it?”

  “That's it,” I said.

  “You want the long or short version?”

  “Up to you.”

  “Short it is,” Eddie said. He puffed the cigar and looked into the ashtray like it was a crystal ball. “Back when my Junebug died, I lost it. Down the rabbit hole. That's why I don't touch the stuff no more. Me and Frank, we came up at the same time, in the same neighborhood, so he cut me some breaks. Still, a guy can only go so far—and if he goes too far, even if he backpedals, well, people don't forget. Think about an ex-con. He gets out of the joint, and all he wants is to live a clean life and take the smallest little bite of the American Dream. But do you think Mister and Misses Jones are gonna hire him? Let him move into the house next door? No way. It's hard to shake your past, Champ. The Corporation… it takes a vote on its members. I didn't make the vote. My Junebug: you know how old she was?”

  “Nine,” I said.

  “Nine,” Eddie said, like he was watching her swing on some invisible swing-set a few feet in front of him. I could almost see her going back and forth, gripping the chains, in his glossy pupils.

  “When she died, it broke my heart. That's one of those lines you hear a lot: broke my heart. And you hear it so much that it don't mean shit anymore. But when it happens to you—and I hope it never does—you'll know what it means. Like when an egg breaks. You can't fix it. And it hurts. I mean, it hurts. But you keep moving forward, and you say to yourself, well, with a pile of horse manure this big, there's gotta be a pony in there somewhere. But there ain't. When Junebug died, me and Peg—my first wife—we kind of died too. I drank. I always had a problem, but I never knew how far it could go. Guys like me, we don't just drink. We make love to the booze. We buy it roses. Meet it at cheap motels. Peg… well, she got fat and raggedy. Stood there in the laundry room, folding the clothes. That's all I remember: her standing there in the laundry room, just folding the towels and clothes. Not saying a goddamn word. She aged ten years in a year and a half. Her heart was broke too.”