The Art of Disposal

by John Prindle

  “I heard how blues and pale greens are soothing colors,” Mudcap said.

  “Maricón,” Dante said.

  “Shut up, both of you,” Frank said.

  “Boss,” Carlino said.

  Frank gave Mudcap a subtle look, and Mudcap got up from his seat, walked over to Carlino, grabbed his shirt collar and punched him in the eye, hard, pop-pop, like an angry drunk might do to his wife. Carlino, who'd clearly taken more than a punch or two in his life, didn't say a word. He just wiped his face with his shoulder as Mudcap returned to his seat. Carlino's eye swelled up and turned black and blue, fast, like you were watching a time-lapse video.

  “We clear?” Frank said.

  “Clear,” Carlino said.

  Leila walked into the room, and her head dropped to one side, and she put on a smile like you'd see in a magazine.

  “Drinks?” she said.

  Frank ordered his usual espresso, with a shot of tequila on the side. Mudcap and Dante ordered Modelo beers in bottles. Bullfrog and Carlino ordered Heinekens. I ordered a San Pellegrino. Frank shook his head and said I might just die tonight, and didn't I want something a little bit stronger; and I told him I wasn't planning on dying just yet—there'd be plenty of days left for me to drink whatever the hell I wanted.

  Leila nodded and smiled, and looked like a bad extra on a movie set, trying her very best to act like this was any other day.

  “You all right honey?” Frank said. “Just some old friends talking. Nothing to worry about. Come here for a second.”

  She walked over and stood next to him. He put his hand along the small of her back, and then let it slide down over the curve of her right buttock. I watched her eyes roll upward, and she swallowed and gritted her teeth. When he'd had a good long feel, he gave her butt a pat. “Now get us our drinks, sweetheart.”

  “Yes. Sir,” she said, and flared her nostrils.

  “I pay her a lot,” Frank said when she was gone. “Who says money can't buy happiness?”

  But it doesn't buy loyalty.

  Frank opened a silver cigarette case and fitted one into his plastic holder, and I thought of Hunter S. Thompson and wondered why he blew his brains out. Mudcap struck a match and held it to the tip of the smoke, and Frank puffed away. In the small orange glow of the dying match flame, Mudcap's marble eye turned into the iridescent yellow eye of a cat.

  “You've got half an hour to sell me your version of the story,” Frank said. “And if I'm not buying it, you're all going on a long ride, out to a lovely rock quarry. Kind of barren. Lonely. And just so we're clear: that's a one way ticket.”

  “You think I'd turn on you?” Carlino said.

  Frank smoked and stared at Carlino, and didn't say anything.

  Leila walked in, confidently, carrying the tray full of drinks. Now she seemed like a leading lady instead of an extra, and a damn good looking one at that. For a minute she reminded me of Marcia, but only in her boldness and mesmerizing gait; Leila was younger, somewhat androgynous, and far more exotic. She went up to Mudcap and Dante, behind Frank's chair. When I glanced at Mudcap, his one good eye was working its way from her feet right up to the chainlink silver belt that hung loosely on her miniskirt.

  “Like what you see?” she said.

  “You make me wish I had two eyes,” he said, and took the Modelo beer from her hand.

  “What turned you dyke, anyway?” Dante said.

  She set his bottle of beer on top of the low bookshelf he was leaning against.

  “Dumb macho beaners like you,” she said.

  “Ohhhhhh!,” Carlino said. “Ka-bam, ka-boom.”

  “Watch it, poot,” Dante said, looking at Carlino with narrow eyes. “You ain't part of the club no more.” Then he looked back at Leila. “I bet I could flip you back the right way,” he said, and touched her arm.

  “Hands off,” Frank said to Dante.

  “Your hands wasn't off.”

  “My hands are more important,” Frank said. “Leave the poor girl alone. One creepy old man's enough for any broad to endure.”

  “Amen,” Leila said.

  Everyone laughed, but on our side it was quick and nervous.

  “Anything else?” Leila asked, looking around the room.

  She stared right at me, and I saw an actual shine to her eye, and it said, “it's done, it's done, I did it. Let's pray it works.” She couldn't wait to see the painful fruit of her labor.

  “We're good,” Frank said. “Beat it.”

  She did, and she closed the door behind her. I watched and listened to Mudcap's thumb, tapping on the edge of the bookcase like a dull slow heartbeat.

  * * * *

  If you've ever been on a job interview—the kind with multiple stiffs seated around a table asking why you'd be right for the job and saying tell us a little bit about yourself, and the air feels thick and the conversational pauses are way too long, and you can feel your forehead starting to sweat—then you know what it felt like to be in that card room at the back of Calasso's.

  I listened to Frank, but barely heard him. He was saying a whole lot of this and a little of that: about how he'd trusted me and been good to me, and how I'd failed him at the only job that really mattered; and how could he have a guy like that working for him? He couldn't, that's how. No, I'd picked my side, he said, and after he'd been so kind as to give me an easy way out of the whole restructuring mess with Eddie Sesto's crew.

  He should've just sent Carlino and Max Finn to wipe out the whole lot of us, he said. Yeah. Now look at the mess he had to deal with. It's not easy running a business like ours, he said. If you had to do it for a week, you'd be dead or you'd run away screaming from the stress of all the boneheads that spilled shit and waited for you to come by with a broom and a mop to clean it up.

  Then I heard that guy who sounds a whole lot like me—muffled and as wet as a fern—and he was answering Frank's inquiries, and he was doing an all right job of it, saying how he simply waited a little too long; Eddie got the slip on him; the Sesto house was empty when he went over there; and as far as he knew, Eddie Sesto was either dead or three states away by now.

  Then I snapped back, and the voices cleared right up, and it was me who was talking, and I said, boldly, with crinkled eyebrows:

  “How's about Eddie being a rat, huh? What a crock. The closest Eddie Sesto's ever been to the government is that time he took Irene to Washington D.C. to see the Lincoln Memorial.”

  It's funny how a guy like Frank Conese, with a bachelors degree in dishonesty and a masters in backstabbing, can sit there and lecture you on ethics. And without a hint of irony. He just smiled at me, sly as a snake on a hot stone enjoying the sun.

  “And who the hell is Jack Lomand?” I said. “I don't much care for babysitters. And while we're at it, how's about that punk hood-rat you sent to Eddie's office, you know—to clean up the mess?”

  Frank grinned. “You didn't do your job.”

  “Neither did he,” I said. “I'm still alive.”

  I heard Frank's sonorous voice buzzing around the room like a horsefly, and his hands were going this way and that, but all I could focus on was the espresso sitting right in front of him, sending up curls of steam; foggier versions of the nearby blue smoke from his cigarette in its ornate holder, burning neglected in a clear glass ashtray. Take a sip, Frank. Take a goddamn sip.

  “Eddie was clean,” I said. “You lied.”

  “Corporations get restructured,” Frank said.

  We stared at each other, and I went far into the irises of his steely gray eyes. He was a businessman, one hundred and ten percent. If there was a real emotion living somewhere in his eyes it was only a crazed and stubborn will to power, relegated to the bloodshot edges.

  I reached a little way under the table to feel around for the knives.

  And boy did I ever find one.

  You always know when you get a bad cut. Even a slip of the razor while you're shaving has a certain feel to it. I'd found the edge of a chef's knif
e, and, reaching with a full curiosity, I'd run my thumb right along it.

  But I kept my eyes on Frank, and I brought my balled-up hand back into my lap, and I told myself not to look down at it. A deep cut only hurts when you look right at it. Until you look, it's just a sharp sting; an airy feeling that something that should be closed has opened up. I stared at Frank, and I watched him smoke. The room slowed down and tilted, and I studied the silent talking mouths of Bullfrog, Carlino, and Frank. In the background, Mudcap and Dante stood like menacing statues at the mouth of some haunted river.

  And still Frank hadn't touched that goddamn espresso. Leila had made a white heart on top of the foam, and I stared at that heart, and I watched the curls of steam, and I squeezed my fist and felt the slick wetness of blood. When I was a teenager, I tried to open a stubborn jar of peanut butter. I twisted and twisted with all of my might, and when the lid finally gave way, so did the top half of the jar. My thumb got cut to the bone.

  The room sped up. Frank's voice burst through like a radio, when you've finally nailed the station after tuning it uselessly back and forth.

  “…a knife, right in my back, Carlino.”

  “Boss—”

  “And after everything? After I helped you with that Dominick problem?”

  “And I owe you,” Carlino said. “Look. Ronnie here, he didn't do nothing. Well, all right, all right: he might've messed things up a little. But we can fix it, boss. You let us back on the street, and we'll track down Eddie Sesto like a pair of bloodhounds. You got my word.”

  “Your word has dropped considerably in value,” Frank said.

  I squeezed my hand, and the slickness of the blood felt like something greasy and stillborn. Dante raised his beer bottle and toasted Carlino.

  “To mí amigo, Carlinito. Truly a legend in his own mind. Heh, heh, heh.”

  Dante downed half of the cold Modelo. He raised his Glock and aimed at Carlino.

  “Heff-ay. Can we do this thing or what?” he said to Frank.

  Frank drew a final hit from his cigarette, plucked it from the holder, and smooshed it into the ashtray. His espresso remained untouched: the perfect cream heart rode on the surface, unbroken.

  “They're all yours,” Frank said, like he'd decided to part with a few trinkets for a slightly lower price than he'd hoped to get.

  “I'll make it quick for you, poot,” Dante said to Carlino. “But you,” he said to me, “I might take me a little while to kill you, wair-o. Slowwwww. Like Tortuga. Eh, heh, heh.”

  He dropped his gun. His face went pale. The poison hit him. The beer bottle, held precariously in his fingertips, swung around in lazy circles. He looked like a guy with a horrible flu, about to throw up and rushing around to find the nearest trash can. He let out a low groan. The beer bottle fell to the floor and shattered. Frank pushed himself away from the table, aware that something terrible had begun.

  “Now!” Carlino said, and we stood and flipped the table up so it formed a little wall, and the chef's knives were there, taped on the bottom, one of them red with my blood.

  Carlino ripped off a knife. Bullfrog ducked, like he was hiding in a trench in the middle of a World War. A gun fired and tore into the drywall behind us. I pulled off a knife and stood straight up, and there was Frank Conese, weaving back and forth like a dancer who'd forgotten his routine. Dante gripped his stomach and coughed, and spit dribbled from his mouth.

  I lunged at Frank, and tried to stab him. But he moved to the left, like a boxer, and knocked the knife from my hand. Carlino had told me how Frank spent some time on the ropes when he was a teenager—and it showed. He was fast and strong for an old man. But I swung a punch and landed it. He doubled over and held his knees, and Mudcap was right there behind him.

  Mudcap leveled his piece right at me, and I stared down the barrel into a black circular afterlife that looked mighty uninviting. I dropped to the floor right when the bullet cracked and boomed and tore through the leaves of the ficus plant in the corner.

  Surviving gunfire is mostly a matter of luck. You can hide from it, you can rush right into it, but if a bullet finds you, it finds you. You hear old war stories about guys running straight through a hail of bullets without a scratch. It makes you wonder about fate and luck and divine intervention. Soldiers who served with Hitler during the first World War considered him good luck. Whenever he was around, no one got hurt. He was immune to gunfire. It makes you wonder: if there really is a God, what kind of God would see a young Hitler safely through the first World War?

  When I looked up, Carlino was stabbing Mudcap in the gut and pushing him down to the ground. Once he got him there, he buried that knife into him again and again. Mudcap grabbed the offending blade and shredded his hands in the process. His shirt flooded, like a white cloth dropped on a spilled puddle of wine.

  One time I saw my Grandpa Jim kill a catfish that didn't want to die. He hit it upside the head. He held it by the tail and hit it against a tree stump. But still it wouldn't die. Finally, he took a hammer and drove a nail right through its slimy head and into an old plank of wood. And still the catfish kept on living.

  Carlino was a wild-eyed ghoul, laughing like a guy just buttoned into a straitjacket. Long strings of his hair came uncombed and hung down, oily, like Shemp from the Three Stooges. Carlino must've stabbed Mudcap a good fifteen times, but he wouldn't die.

  Then Carlino punched the side of Mudcap's head so hard that his marble eye launched right out of the socket and rolled across the floor.

  Frank Conese came at me and fired his gun. I heard Bullfrog cry out. I lifted one of the chairs and swung it hard at Frank. It connected, and the gun flew out of Frank's hand and into a metal filing cabinet a few feet away. But this wasn't Frank's first street brawl.

  Out in the nine to five square world, you might have some college grad overseeing a whole crew of workers building a rail-line, or a sewer system, and the big-cheese hasn't even scrubbed any dirt out from under his fingernails. He starts right at the top.

  Not in the mob. In the Corporation, the highest guy up was once just some soldier on a street corner, roughing up deadbeats and knocking in teeth. Everyone starts at the bottom. Even a guy whose Pop was the boss: he still does some time on the street.

  Frank threw a punch at me, and boy did it ever connect. I saw an infinite black space with a dozen blue and green stars falling gently through it, and I strolled around in that dark meadow for a while, seeing my Grandpa Jim waving to me, and the old frog pond, and Blind Shannon walking along the edge of the road with her white stick.

  When I pulled myself back out of that heavy ether, I felt the burn of short carpet on my back, and a ten ton weight on my chest. Frank Conese was on top of me, wrapping his smelly hands around my neck. His fingernails were pungent with sweat and garlic.

  I punched at Frank, and I landed a few, but they were weak. And I thought how if Frank came out of this thing the winner, one of his lackeys would be hacking me up like a killed deer, or dropping me into the river with concrete blocks tied to my feet. I wondered what kind of fish would get rid of me. Perch. Bluegill. Catfish. One nibble at a time: my carcass reduced to bones.

  I forced my fingers between Frank's hands and my neck, and I scratched the hell out of my neck in the process—and bent one fingernail, too. It hurt like hell.

  Then I prayed for Carlino or Bullfrog or Leila to show up and save me, but all I could see was that brass owl sculpture, out of focus, staring at me with an utter lack of concern.

  Across the expanse of short carpet, I saw Mudcap's lost lonely eye, a few feet away like a kid's marble shooter without any smaller ducks. From my vantage point, low to the ground, the marble was a huge planet, and I could stare right through its burnt orange and yellow streaked core, where a small and psychedelic Carlino DiTommaso had finished murdering Mudcap. He stood up and slicked back the strands of his wandering hair.

  Then he stomped over toward me, knife in hand, ready to bury it into Conese's back. I watched his feet
, and I tried to call out and warn him about the marble, but I couldn't produce much of a sound. Conese was putting his heart and soul into choking the life out of me.

  Carlino's huge feet came closer, and he stepped right onto the marble which promptly flung him backward; the marble shot over and hit the wall behind me, and Carlino tumbled back and conked his head on the edge of the bookcase.

  I hadn't seen or heard from Bullfrog in what felt like years. He'd been shot—that was that, I thought. Poor Bullfrog. It was just me and Frank Conese. And he was winning. I pushed with all of my strength, and I swung at his face a few more times, but he was large and all of his weight was on top of me, and all I could see was the blue stubble of hair on his Adam's apple, and all I could smell was the sweat and the day old garlic on his hands.

  For a moment I saw Emily, standing in the kitchen of our old apartment, laughing at some joke I couldn't remember, dicing up a pile of fine garlic for a pasta sauce. She'd use four or five cloves. Smell is a powerful thing, more so than sight or sound, and it stirs up forgotten memories.

  I snorted and fought for quick breaths, but things were going dark around me. Still, you never give up. Just the way Mudcap had gripped with fearsome indifference against the sharp edge of the knife in his belly, instinct compels you to fight.

  Then I saw that brass owl, flying silently toward me, so bright and golden it looked like some treasure from King Tut's tomb; and attached to the brass owl was a large brown hand with pale half-crescent moons near the base of the fingernails. The owl hit Frank Conese's head, flew back a few feet, struck again, and a spatter of hot blood showered my nose and lips. The full weight of Conese slumped down on top of me; at the same moment I drew in the longest sweetest breath, and my head cleared, for Conese's hands had come undone from my neck. Bullfrog stood above me, holding the brass owl in his hand.

  “You all right, son?” he said.

  I couldn't speak. My throat was tight. But I was sure glad to see him. Bullfrog kicked Conese's corpse off of me, and extended his hand. I took it, and floated up, and felt like I was ten feet tall just standing up again.