by John Prindle
“Enough aquariums?” Martin said.
“Hell, I probably paid two months of your rent,” I said.
Me and Martin had known each other for years, but only through business. I'd pumped thousands of dollars into his pet store. He'd never seen where I lived, and didn't know a thing about me except that I was a salesman. It's always weird when someone you know from one scenario is suddenly thrust right into another. They almost seem like a different person. Set and setting. Context. Alter it and everything changes.
“Howdy Vern,” he said, leaning over and looking into the big aquarium. Vern opened and closed his mouth a few times, and pushed his nose down into the gravel and threw some around like he was working on a landscaping project.
Martin bumped my arm and pointed at the apartment door, still open. Brandi was standing there looking at us.
“I seen you taking out bags of garbage earlier,” she said. “You moving out?”
“Yep,” I said.
She looked down and kicked her foot at the hallway carpet. “Lucky you.”
Martin looked at me. I looked at him and shrugged a little. I asked Brandi to come on in, and then I asked if she wanted an aquarium.
“For reals?” she said. She took out a pack of chewing gum, and offered a piece to me and Martin. I said no, but Martin took one. Brandi smacked her gum when she chewed it.
“I ain't never had a Muh-querium,” she said.
“Too hard to take them with me,” I said.
“So I'm taking them,” Martin said.
“Where you moving to?” Brandi said.
“I'm not sure.”
“Ain't you s'posed to find a new place 'fore you move out the old one?”
“Guess I'm doing it backwards,” I said. I walked over to one of the ten gallon tanks with my finest guppies. “This one's yours if you want it.”
Brandi smacked her gum. “Let me ask my Mom, 'fore I say yes.”
“Downstairs neighbor still bugging you?”
“I ain't never heard no one so loud.”
“I'm gonna have a little talk with her before I leave,” I said.
“What'd they do?” Martin said.
“Long story,” I said.
“Loud story,” Brandi said and giggled.
“You stop by tomorrow night, and we'll see about sending you home with these guppies. They're prize-winners.”
Brandi left. I drained off the rest of the water in Vern's tank. He wasn't too happy about it, and he was big enough to let you know. Martin handed me a bucket, and I coaxed Vern into it. He was almost the size of the bucket. Then we filled it up with some of the water from the tank, and Vern seemed glad to at least be back in deeper water, even if he could only swim in circles.
We spent the rest of the night making back and forth runs to Martin's Pet Shop. My tiger barbs looked good back in the For Sale section, and I again made Martin promise not to sell them to any teenage knuckleheads.
The pet shop mascot, an iguana named Hank, sat on his electric hot-rock and watched us walk around. Sometimes he'd raise his head and bob it up and down like he was pleased with our work. Hank had it made. He was so tame that Martin seldom kept him in his enclosure. He had free run of the shop, but mostly he just sat there on his hot-rock and watched the people come and go. I liked Hank. He had the disposition of a house cat.
“Later, Hank,” I said, scratching the top of his head. “Keep it real.”
Hank closed his eyes while I scratched, and when I took my hand away, he bobbed his head again, up and down, like I'd just pressed the start button on some strange machine.
I went home and passed out, and was blessed to find only darkness where usually were dreams; and when I woke up and walked groggily around the dark and mostly empty rooms, it seemed I had never really lived there at all, but had awoken in some scary place and needed to find a way out. The clock read 4:45. It was still the tail end of night, and the world outside was dark and cool and damp: the kind of night when cats creep along wooden fences. The light was on in my one remaining aquarium. I went over and watched the billowy tails of my guppies drift along like colorful scarves. Then I went to the kitchen and got to work with the grinder and the coffee pot.
For just a second, I was angry with Martin. How could that guy take Vern and all of my other fish and not even pay me a dime? And then I let go of it, because it was ridiculous. Martin had offered to give me money, several times in fact, and I insisted he take them for free. I was just sore because I loved those fish, and my world was empty without them.
I ground the coffee beans. Then I felt pretty good, because Vern would have a good life there at the front of the pet store, and kids might even learn something from him. I pictured Vern shoveling big scoops of gravel with his nose, and looking out through the glass with those button-black eyes.
Just as I was pouring the hot water over the grounds, my phone rang. I didn't know where it was, and I didn't feel like finding out, so I let it go to voicemail. I finished making the coffee, took one good sip, and someone was pounding on my front door.
I got my Walther and crept over to the side of the door. “Who is it?” I said.
“Santee Claus,” Carlino's muffled voice said.
I flipped the lock, and Carlino walked right in—no invite—and studied the coffee mug in my one hand and the Walther in the other. “Glad you're up, Sam. You got more coffee?”
I shut and locked the door, walked to the kitchen and got him a mug. He sat on my couch and drank a few sips. “Love what you've done with the place,” he said as he looked at the stacked boxes and all of the emptiness around them. “Frank gave you the job?”
“At the funeral.”
“When's he want it done?”
“Saturday,” I said.
“What are you gonna do?”
“Why are you here so goddamn early?” I said. I wanted to be alone with my coffee and my iridescent guppies. My eyes were barely open. I didn't want to talk about Eddie Sesto. I was edgier than a duck in a gun shop.
“I can't sleep,” Carlino said.
“Lay off the yay-yo.”
“Two weeks clean,” Carlino said, and set his mug down. “Look. We need a plan, and it better be tighter than a nun's backdoor.”
“Eddie won't leave town,” I said.
“Pffft. Baby-Boomers,” Carlino said. “They all think they're John Wayne or something.”
“What would you do?” I said.
“I'd do the job. Then we move on Frank when the shit's cooled down.”
“That's not an option,” I said. “Not Eddie.”
“You'd be doing him a solid. Putting him out of his misery.”
“He's not in any misery,” I said.
“He will be soon enough,” Carlino said, and ran his fingers over his gold chain. “It sure would make things a hell of a lot easier.”
We sat there quietly for a minute.
“When Frank finds out you didn't go through with it, that's it—you're done, Sam. And if Frank gets a whiff of this mutiny, I'm done too. And I don't wanna be done. Fucked up as this world is, I've gotten pretty used to it.”
We drank coffee and talked up our plan, and the sun came up, and at around seven-fifteen there was a soft knocking on my front door. I got up and took the Walther, and Carlino set his coffee down and pulled his piece. He cracked his neck. He nodded.
Never look through the keyhole. A bad guy can wait for the glass to go dark, and then he knows that you're home; or worse, he can shoot you right through the door.
I opened the door, just the wee-ist bit, and through the sliver of brand new daylight I saw one of Brandi's eyes and mascaraed lashes.
“You awake?” she said.
“Sort of,” I said. I looked back at Carlino, nodded, and he put his gun away. “Give me a minute,” I said to Brandi. I shut the door, stashed my Walther in a box full of magazines, and opened it again.
Brandi walked in, wearing a black mini-skirt and thigh-high socks. Carlino sat u
p like a prairie dog looking out of a hole.
“This is my cousin, Carlino,” I said. “He's visiting from New York.”
“Y'all don't look like cousins.”
“She ain't as dumb as she looks,” Carlino said.
Brandi started to say something, but she quickly lost whatever it was she'd come up with, and she stood there confused, knowing she'd been insulted, but not sure what, if anything, could or should be done about it.
“I asked my Mom, and she said yes. About the fish tank.”
“Cool,” I said, wondering why I said it. Every time I'm talking to someone under the age of twenty, I have this irresistible urge to say the word cool, like it's gonna help me win them over or something.
“Time to go play school,” Brandi said.
“Can I play too?” Carlino said.
“I'll bring the aquarium over tonight,” I said.
“What grade you in?” Carlino said, standing up and walking over to us.
“Tenth,” she said.
“Right on,” Carlino said, and grinned and nodded his head.
Brandi eyed him suspiciously; blew a bubble and popped it loudly. “Bye bye,” she said to me, and blinked her eyes a few times as she walked past.
I shut the door. Carlino tapped out a cigarette from his pack.
“Mmmm,” he said.
“She's fifteen, man.”
“Amen.”
“You ever do time?” I said.
“I might: for a few nights with that.”
“All I'm giving her is a tank full of guppies.”
Carlino lit the smoke. “Givin' her a 'tank full of guppies, eh? Isn't that what they call it when you forget to pull out?”
I ground some more coffee beans, Carlino had a few smokes, and we worked on our plan. I cracked the windows and looked outside. It was raining a gentle drizzly rain, the kind that seems to freshen up the whole town.
“You hear from that dyke at Calasso's?” Carlino said.
“Not yet.”
“Well goddamn. What if she don't get back to you?”
“She will.”
“And Bullfrog's getting the cyanide?”
“He knows a guy,” I said.
We headed off to do collections, since Eddie's “week-on-the-house” had just expired. We stopped at Rocky's Pub first. He's an old-timer, and he knows how the game works. Be square with us, and we'll be square with you. It's always the younger guys, the guys who think they're tough—they're the ones who cause trouble. Rocky? He made us a fresh pot of coffee, and had the cook whip us up a little something for breakfast.
Then we went and paid off the winners on the numbers racket, and collected from the deadbeats who'd lost on sports. There's a lot of ticking off of boxes in black ledgers, and it all feels pretty legit until you have to sock a guy in the nose, and go wash the blood off your fist while his wife and kid sit and cry in the other room.
Well, nobody held a gun to his head and forced him to put down two grand on Lipski to win the welterweight championship, did they? No. The bums come looking for us. Then it's a big goddamn mess and a sob story when they can't pay up. Whatever problems you've got, chances are you're the one who piled them up. Some guys are born on an easy road, and some guys are born with no road in sight; but once you're in your thirties or forties or fifties, I'm done feeling sorry for you. The horse you've been riding on is your own.
* * * *
It was night. Carlino had helped me move my couch and chairs and mattress and bed-frame down the narrow stairs and drive them to the storage locker. If I wanted to get my deposit back, I was supposed to steam clean the carpet, scrub the kitchen and bathroom sinks, scrub the toilet, and deep clean the oven. But who the hell wants to do all that for three hundred bucks?
Brandi's Mom looked at me, looked at Carlino, looked around at the bare apartment walls.
“What line-uh work you in again?”
“Import-export,” I said. “Sales.”
“Sellin' what?”
“Scarves. Tea. Handmade Christmas ornaments,” I said.
“Oh,” she said. She looked at Carlino. She furled her eyebrows. He smiled.
“He don't look like the sort who goes in for scarfs and tea,” she said.
“Let's move these fish,” I said.
An hour later, the guppies were set up in Brandi's bedroom. It was an odd feeling, walking around another apartment laid out a whole lot like my own. Brandi's Mom was poor, but what money she did have she spent on her daughter, and I suddenly respected her a whole lot. The kid's bedroom was the nicest room in the whole apartment. There was an expensive looking bed and blankets, and a writing area with a computer and printer.
The guppy tank looked damn good in there. Better than it ever had in my own apartment. I showed Brandi how much to feed them, and wrote down the names of a few good aquarium books to check out from the library.
Brandi's Mom walked us out into the cool night air, and I handed her an envelope with ten one hundred dollar bills in it.
“What's this?” she said.
“For fish food. And supplies,” I said.
She thumbed through the bills. “It's dirty, ain't it?”
“Gambling. Numbers. That's all,” I said.
“Prostitution?” she said, like she was a cop and I was sitting in custody.
“No, Ma'am,” I said.
“Come on!” Carlino said. He was pacing around about twenty yards away.
“Him, he looks the type,” she said. “But you: you're way too sweet to be into the things you're into, honey.”
“What am I into?”
“More than scarfs and tea.”
“Take care,” I said.
“Thanks for the money, honey. And the fish,” she said.
I'd never felt so rotten giving someone a thousand bucks. The way I had it played out in my mind, Brandi's mom would almost start to cry… she'd give me a big hug and I'd feel like Santa Claus or something. Instead, she saw right through me. My arms itched and my neck got hot. I wanted to get away from myself; to be someone brand new.
We walked to the front door of the fat cackling hillbilly broad, and rang the doorbell, and waited for her to slide out of bed like a slug.
Knock, knock, knock. Carlino rapped on the front door. I heard a kid crying in an upstairs bedroom. Then the fat broad awoke from her slumber (I imagined her as some plump white grub, asleep in the depths of a rotten log) and cried out “whoooo is it!” in a shrill voice, so sharp and piercing it sounded like it had gone through a cheese grater. Twice.
“Good Lord,” Carlino said.
“See what I mean?”
The door flew open, and there she was, looking uglier than I'd ever imagined. I'd only seen her from fifty yards away. Up close, she was hideous. Warts, jowls, wrinkles: you name it, she had it. And she was big. Boy was she ever big.
“Who the hell are you, and whaddayou want?” she said, and shifted back and crossed her arms across her enormous nightgowned breasts.
I guess she didn't recognize me. I'd only yelled at her the one time, behind a screen and far away from her.
“We're from the County, Ma'am,” Carlino said. “Seems to be a fairly serious gas-leak all through this apartment complex. We need to come in and check it out.”
She eyed us, and she folded her arms even more, and she squinted her beady lizard eyes. “The hell you do!” she said, and started shutting the door.
Carlino lunged at her with the force of a small car. She fell down, and we pushed our way in, and it was clear she'd have a pretty hard time of it ever getting up again.
I shut and locked the door behind us.
What a dump. A dirty couch, brown carpet, ugly pictures, and the whole room smelled like a well-used and long forgotten litter-box.
She lay there on the ground, moaning and sobbing, and saying noooo, noooo, and her winner husband came stumbling out of some other room, good and drunk and toting a 24 ounce can of beer.
“Whaaa do you
think yer doin'… whaaa?” he said, more glazed than a fresh doughnut. I got the feeling that he wasn't sure if he was living this moment or watching it on the television.
Crack! Carlino rushed at him and punched him right in the nose, and something must have split. The blood flowed out like someone had turned on a tap. He went down, and he stayed there. His face looked like it had been hit with a bowl of tomato soup. Carlino looked as happy as a kid at the zoo. The fat cackler amped up her wailing and sobbing, so I stepped on her shoulder and told her to zip it.
Carlino walked over and kicked her once, right in the stomach, but he didn't kick too hard. It was more for the scare factor. Then he got down on one knee, lifted up her melon head by a few strands of hair, and told her to shut up.
“Here's how it's gonna be,” he said. “You're moving. Sometime this month. If I have to come back, I won't be so nice.”
“Who the hell arrrrrr you,” she said, and sobbed. “I'll call the cops!”
“Oh no you won't,” Carlino said.
I looked over at the hillbilly husband on the floor, blood on the carpet under his head. He'd passed out, but he was still alive. I could see him breathing.
“See, we got friends on the force,” Carlino said, standing up and brushing off the knees of his pants. He pulled a leg back, like he was going to kick her again, but then he stopped short and laughed. The old lady wailed. “Shut your goddamn mouth!” he said. “In fact, I'm gonna tell the cops to keep an eye on this place, and tell me whether you moved or not. You got one month, you hear? One month, or I'm sending Terrible Tom out here, and he'll kill you both. Ka-boom. You hear me, lady? You listening?”
She nodded.
“Good,” Carlino said. He looked up, toward the staircase. “Well hello, sweetheart. I hope we didn't scare you.”
The two kids, a boy and a girl, stood there looking at us. The girl had her thumb in her mouth and a blanket under one arm. The boy had a toy dinosaur. I walked over to them, and told them to go on up to bed, that we were just old friends of their parents and were only playing a game.
Carlino stooped down again and whispered, “you call any cops, and you're dead. And so are you're precious kiddies. I'll gut the little bastards. Or I'll sell them to my boy Dante, and he'll ship 'em off to a nice brothel down in Mexico. They'll raise 'em up right. You understand me, sister? One month, and you're all moved out of here.”