The Art of Disposal

by John Prindle

  “How fine?” I said.

  “You ever been down along eighty-fifth street?” Greedy Pete said.

  “Not if I can help it,” Carlino said.

  Greedy Pete chuckled. “I steal some shit from Eddie's house. Some jewelry. Now it's a burglary, you see? I take a few samples from the house. Hairs, fibers, blood. Whatever. Few days from now, I find us a winner. A coon. Maybe he gets busted for crack, or for backhanding his old lady—they do that a lot, you know?—and, lo and behold, what do we find when we toss his room? Evidence that links him to the unsolved murders at the Sesto house. Case closed.”

  Greedy Pete smiled and poured another dollop. He licked the edge of the glass like a reptile.

  “You're a real gem,” Carlino said. “No wonder cops get a bad rap.”

  “I don't like it,” I said. “Some guy in prison for something he didn't do.”

  Pete set his glass down hard on the counter. “Some coon who would've ended up there for something or other anyway.”

  “Can't we just torch the place?” Carlino said.

  “Right here, in a decent neighborhood? The firetrucks will be here before the place is hot enough to pop a kernel.”

  It was good to get his opinion on the matter; after all, he was a cop, in the very loosest sense of the word. But we should have erased him a long time ago. Bought cops are dangerous. That gold badge makes a crooked guy crookeder.

  “We got cars to get rid of,” Carlino said to Greedy Pete.

  “Yup,” Pete said. He belched and hiccuped.

  “With your help.”

  “Ehhh, I don't think so,” Pete said. “It's late. I got a wife.”

  “Congratulations,” Carlino said.

  “Ha,” Pete said.

  Pete's wife was one of those Badge-Bunny, Holster-Humpers. She made the rounds before she sacked up with Pete. She was married when they met, and she and Greedy Pete had a thing going for quite a while before her chump husband died in a “hunting accident.” Who knows if Greedy Pete was really involved, but it makes for a hell of a story.

  “I mean it,” Carlino said. “You're on the payroll. There's work to be done.”

  “And I did it,” Pete said. “I'm like a consultant. I consulted.”

  “Yeah, a real miracle worker: that's what you are.”

  “I take a pinch from Eddie's snuff-box, true enough. But the key word there is Eddie. And I don't see him anywhere.” Greedy Pete made a show of raising his hands up to the sides of his mouth to make a circular loudspeaker. “Hey Eddie, you here?” he called out. He raised his eyebrows. “Nope, he ain't here.”

  “You're a riot,” Carlino said.

  “Shut your wop pie-hole. I work for Eddie. If he needs me, he knows where to find me.”

  The room got quiet. Pete's right hand walked slowly toward his belt, where he had that Ruger in a black fabric holster. Carlino looked like a baker studying a cake that had fallen. He scratched an eyebrow.

  “There's nothing worse than a dirty cop,” he said. “Some of the guys in my old neighborhood, they went on to be cops. Real cops, I mean. The kind that help old ladies get cats out of trees. Go to pancake breakfasts at the local high school. I never had a problem with an honest cop. He does his job and I do mine. But a dirty cop? No integrity. No character. One time, had to be five or six years ago, I helped Mudcap chop up a dirty cop into five equal pieces. It was messy work, but I loved every minute of it.”

  Greedy Pete flipped open the buttoned holster strap that covered the top of his Ruger. I opened my own jacket and put my hand on the cold grip of the Walther, but Greedy Pete looked over at me and said, “Uh-uh… that's about far enough.”

  I paused. I heard the treefrogs outside, chirping a sweet melody of eternal rest.

  “I know Frank Conese,” Greedy Pete said.

  “Me too,” Carlino said.

  “You're gonna die, amigo.”

  “Amigo,” Carlino said, and snickered. “Maybe you kill me, but what about Ronnie? You fast enough to take out the two of us?”

  “With my eyes closed,” Pete said. But I saw his hand tremble, and his forehead was damp.

  Carlino rushed him, Pete drew the gun; Carlino grabbed the gun-hand and pushed it up toward the ceiling, and after some redfaced heaving and hoe-ing, the Ruger SR9 fell from Pete's hand. No shots fired. Carlino punched Pete in the face, two sharp jabs, and the skin split under Pete's right eye. He howled like an animal. Carlino forced him down to the kitchen floor, picked up the Ruger, and pistol-whipped Greedy Pete so many times that it sounded like there were roofers at work. When Carlino stood up, and wiped his bloody lip on his sleeve, Greedy Pete was dead; or, if he wasn't, he sure wished he was.

  Carlino looked at me, shook his head, leaned over and rested his hands on his thighs; he breathed in and out like he'd just run three miles.

  “Thanks, Sam.”

  “I was ready to jump in,” I said.

  “Yeah. You were all over it.”

  Carlino washed up in the kitchen sink. I walked over and kicked Greedy Pete, gently, the way you might try to wake up a kid in a sleeping bag. Nothing. And boy was his face ever on backwards. It looked like someone had stuck a couple of swollen eyes into an uncooked meatloaf.

  I went and took a leak in the downstairs bathroom: the same one where me and Eddie and Dan the Man had voided Ricky's warranty. It was a quaint little room, with a baby blue bathmat and toilet seat covers, and a stack of crossword puzzle books right next to the shitter. I kept seeing Ricky lying there on the bathroom floor along the tub, and I had to blink my eyes a few times to push away his ghost.

  We wrapped up Greedy Pete, the same as we had the others, and we loaded him into the trunk of Eddie's black 1959 Studebaker Silver Hawk. Real cherry. Mint. That was Eddie's Sunday driving car. He babied it. That Silver Hawk looked like it had come right off of the showroom floor and through some time-warp. It was still out there in the garage, and that fact alone made me scared for Eddie. The car keys were hanging on the hook in the kitchen. I couldn't imagine him leaving town without that car. And Irene's VW Bug was out back in the car port. Had Eddie simply walked away? Gone off in someone else's car—or been forced into one? Eddie Sesto had vanished like a wisp of cigar smoke.

  I backed the Silver Hawk out on the street, and then I went and got that black spider of a car parked down the way, which was really Jack Lomand's Lexus (I found the keys in his coat pocket) and I backed the Lexus into the garage and shut the door again so we'd have some privacy to do our grisly work. We loaded the other two bodies into the Lexus.

  I called up Gideon Cash and told him to meet us out at the crusher. Then me and Carlino flipped a quarter to see who would drive what car, and I got stuck with Lomand's Lexus, while Carlino got the cherry Studebaker Silver Hawk. Lucky bastard.

  “Love me this car,” he said as I handed him the keys. “But I'd paint it red.”

  “You got no taste,” I said. “There's only one color for a car like this. Black.”

  “What's wrong with red?”

  “Everything. Let me tell you something Eddie once told me. Take any car, any car at all, and the odds are good it'll look better painted black.”

  “Or red.”

  “You got no taste,” I said.

  We split up and headed off to Love's Auto-Mall.

  Night, and the curving yellow thread of the highway line. The steady whirring of tires. I turned the radio on and found 89.1, and they were doing their Blues Hour, and I caught the Lonnie Mack version of Memphis,Tennessee.

  The gate at Love's was unlocked. I hopped out and pushed it open. Carlino came roaring up in the Silver Hawk, and he gave it some gas and made it growl. We rolled along the gravel road, our headlights bringing to life—and then extinguishing—a tower of tires, a pile of bumpers, a rusted oil drum, a stack of two by fours, an upside-down STOP sign; and then it was Gideon Cash, raising his scarecrow arm, his head down.

  We got out, and Carlino lit a smoke. Gideon prepped the cars. Then he we
nt to work on Jack Lomand's Lexus, with the bodies of Irene Sesto and the car's mysterious owner in the trunk. He pressed a button, pulled a lever, and the machine started squeezing. The Lexus popped and wheezed and moaned and cried. Carlino dropped his cigarette butt and ground it into the dirt with his heel. Then he pulled his piece and held the barrel to the back of Gideon's head.

  “Him too, right?” Carlino said, looking over at me.

  “Goddamn it,” Gideon said. He closed his eyes.

  The giant mechanical crusher reached the bottom, pushed hard against what was left of the car, and the press lurched back up again.

  “No,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “He's all right.”

  Carlino nodded. Lowered the gun. “The governor says it's a state of execution.”

  “Stay of execution,” Gideon said.

  “Maybe I should call the governor back,” Carlino said, and tapped Gideon on the back of the head with the butt of the gun. “One more to go, Sam.”

  Gideon loaded the Studebaker into the press, and Carlino walked over and touched one of the Studebaker's fins, and said, “it just ain't right. This is a sweet ride.”

  Then we heard a supernatural moaning, like the car was trying to talk to Carlino.

  “He's still alive,” Gideon said, wide-eyed.

  “Not for long,” Carlino said.

  “Open it,” I said, taking out my gun.

  “Don't waste a bullet,” Carlino said.

  “I won't do it,” Gideon said.

  “Step aside,” Carlino said. “Lever, button; or button, lever?”

  “Button, lever,” Gideon said, turning and walking away from the machine.

  Carlino helmed the controls, rubbed his hands together, and said, “watch me crush the competition!”

  I believe in quick and painless deaths. Even for Greedy Pete Bruen. I guess Carlino DiTommaso is of a different mind. I watched him press the button, pull the lever, and stare with joy as the crusher did its terrifying job. His eyes were icy black stones. I feared for anyone who crossed him. I could see him at the top of the Conese Family, ordering hits on his enemies like it was nothing more than asking for extra anchovies on a slice of pizza pie.

  BURIED WITH A COIN UNDER YOUR TONGUE

  There was an outhouse back behind the old farmhouse where I grew up. We had a modern bathroom, built as an afterthought into a corner of the basement near the washer and dryer, but it was the unofficial domain of Aunt Stella. Me and Carl used the indoor bathroom in the winter-time, when the fields were white and bare, and the faraway hopping crows stood out like periods at the end of a sentence. We used it for showers. But on nice spring and summer days and nights, we used the outhouse.

  Uncle Carl had a kerosene lantern to illuminate the outhouse. It irked me that I wasn't allowed to use it, but I can't say I blame him. Only a knucklehead would give a kerosene lantern to a kid. When you get a little bit older, you realize the grown-ups from back when you were a kid weren't as dumb as you thought they were.

  So Carl got me a battery powered headlamp, the kind you use for frog-gigging, and we left it hanging on the coat-hook near the front door.

  It was really something to wear that headlamp and stand over the outhouse hole that dropped straight down into the darkest hell. I'd pee and aim the light down into the echoey cavern, where the falling stream splashed like rain against the great wet mound of toilet paper, mud, and waste.

  One night I saw something at the bottom of the hole. A black sort of bug that wriggled over the mound of paper, through the patchy dark.

  And there were more of them. I peered into the hole and watched them traverse the mound of soggy paper like it was some charming mountain town and they were the locals who knew each peak and valley; each road to get from here to there. Even in the blackest of earthly hells, there was life: creatures who lived in the filth, and went about each day, each week, each year, in their own dank universe. They seemed an industrious and happy lot, not knowing where they really were, or what they really were. And at night in my bed, when I'd stare out through the ceiling, out beyond the moon and Mars and to the furthest edges of the universe, I'd imagine us tiny people down here, hiking on beautiful mountains, rafting down crisp autumn rivers, not knowing that they were just the filth and waste from some grander cosmic being.

  “Weevils,” my Uncle Carl said, and spit some tobacco juice over the front porch rail and onto the hot dried mud, when I asked him what they were.

  Carl didn't know squat about the natural sciences, but that never stopped him from giving you an answer. They weren't weevils at all. What they were I still don't know. Some kind of larvae maybe. Something passing its days and nights until it could grow and change and fly up and out of the bright hole and into the light and air and sun…

  “Weevils?” Bullfrog said, as I finished telling him and Carlino the story. “That's just nasty. You growed up using an outhouse? That's some hillbilly shit right there, son.”

  Carlino laughed. Then he put on a twangy country voice. “Boy, yer gonna do some prayin'… and you better pray good.”

  We were sitting at Bullfrog's apartment. One of his runners, a guy named Skeet, had hooked him up with three capsules of potassium cyanide, from a guy who knows a guy who's a pharmaceutical rep. Bullfrog held up a glass vial with the capsules in it. “This is the dank, right here. Five hundred milligrams a piece. You take one-a these, and you'll be seein' planet earth from the clouds in thirty seconds.”

  Carlino had worked out a sit-down with Frank Conese, at Calasso's, for me to plead my case on the botched Sesto contract. The plan was in place. Leila was getting twenty-five grand for the simple job of breaking the tabs and putting the powder into the drinks of Dante, Mudcap, and Frank Conese.

  “You know this Leila?” Bullfrog said, pouring Porfidio tequila into squat chunky glasses and passing them out to us.

  “She's cool,” Carlino said.

  “What if she chickens out?”

  “If anyone's chickening out, it's you,” Carlino said. He picked up a dime from the glass coffee table, propped it upright between his left-hand thumb and his right-hand index finger, and flicked it so it took off like an engine. It turned into a see-through marble and traveled in a lazy circle until it sputtered and drooped and crashed, and became a flat dime again.

  “What if they don't order drinks?” Bullfrog said.

  “Frank always gets an espresso,” Carlino said.

  “What if he don't this time?”

  “He will.”

  “But what if he don't?”

  “Frank Conese drinks espressos. All day every day.”

  “You ever killed a guy—with a knife, I mean?” Bullfrog said, looking at me.

  Leila was supposed to tape three chef's knives to the bottom of the back room card table; on the side we'd be on.

  “No,” I said.

  Bullfrog lifted his glass and tossed the tequila back. “What if they just straight-up kill us, as soon as we walk into that back room?”

  “Then our troubles are over,” Carlino said. He tossed back his own tumbler of tequila. His open mouth was a straight line, all teeth, and he let out a long breath.

  “This shit better go,” Bullfrog said. “I don't wanna be dead. Or in jail.”

  “Hey, that reminds me,” Carlino said. “What's white and goes to prison?”

  Bullfrog shrugged.

  “A black guy's mail. Boo-yah!”

  “Yeah—well what did the barber say to the Italian?”

  “What?” Carlino said.

  Bullfrog turned his palms up, crinkled his face, frowned like Edward G. Robinson, and went into a bad Vito Corleone impression. “You want I should cut your hair, or just change the oil?”

  “Dumb,” Carlino said.

  “You're dumb,” Bullfrog said, and reached for the tequila bottle.

  He poured us another round. Carlino lit up a smoke. I absentmindedly shuffled a pack of playing cards, tapped them on the coffee
table, cut them, and drew cards off the top of the deck. I was seeing if I could sense what card would come up next. Jack of hearts. Ten of clubs. Six of diamonds. Four of spades. I'd imagine it, and then I'd flip the card to see if I might have any special powers I didn't know about. But I was always a few numbers off, and a red or a black away.

  * * * *

  One of the only things I have from my biological mother is a notebook. One of those cheap, ruled, marble-patterned jobs you can get for a buck thirty-nine at your local Walgreen's.

  She wrote some verse in there. She was no Yeats or Dickinson, but she could string words together. She also did some doodling, mostly the same picture, over and over, of this cartoon dog staring straight at you. Underneath of the first one, it reads: this is the dog my Daddy tot me to drawl.

  I never said she could spell.

  I flip through that notebook every so often, and wonder what life would've been like had she never met those demons that got into her arms and nose; and what if I would have lived with her, instead of with Aunt Stella and Uncle Carl, and she would have given me ice cream money, and jigsaw puzzles, and taken me to Pearson's Field to fly a kite?

  But when I start to think like that… that's when I go outside of myself and sort of hover there, and I'm afraid that I might lose hold of the string to pull myself back. It's dangerous, thinking too much about the past—even if it was just a few days ago. And it's dangerous to think too much about the future. There are two thick slabs of inaccurate fantasy on either side of your timeline, and they want nothing more than to pull you right into their tempting gooey centers. You have to be vigilant; you have to stay firmly in this moment—right in this minute you are living now. It's all you've got.

  I checked into my room in New York. It was the Hyatt, and it was a major rip-off at three hundred bucks a night. When I got into my room, the first thing I did was strip down and jump into the shower. I take showers the way some people take aspirins: three a day. But when I got out, there weren't any towels. I moaned and groaned, walked around wet and cold, and finally used a t-shirt to sort of pat myself dry. I got dressed, and then I took the elevator down to the lobby and gave hell to the poor guy at the front desk. “Three hundred bucks a night,” I said, “and no towels?”