by Lamb, Wally
I walked up the six cement stairs to “Papa’s little piece of the Old Country.” That’s what she always called it. According to Ma, Papa had loved to sit out here among his grapes and chicken coops and tomato and pepper plants—to sit in the sun and sip his homemade wine and remember Sicily. . . . Maybe that was why she’d heard him crying that last day as he sat up here, finishing his history. Maybe, at the end of his life, the “Great Man from Humble Beginnings” had wept for Sicily.
I remembered the way Thomas and I had played up here as kids. Saw us pogo-sticking around the yard, staging massacres with our plastic cowboys and Indians, chasing garter snakes into the stone wall. Every June, when the honeysuckle bush blossomed, we’d suck nectar from the blossoms. One small drop of elixir on your tongue per flower—that was all you got.
I walked over to the picnic table Ray and I had built one summer. The seat had rotted at one end. I ought to come over some morning and just haul the thing away to the dump for him. Maybe next spring I’d get over here and plant a garden—work the soil, bring this old yard back from the dead. Ray had let this go, too; I’d never seen the backyard so overgrown. The grapevines were all but choked off with weeds. The dead grass was knee-high. Probably hadn’t been mowed once all summer. Probably loaded with ticks. What was the deal on Ray? . . .
I thought about what Ma had told me that time—the day she’d gone upstairs and come down again with that strongbox. With Papa’s story. She’d come out here with his lunch, she told me. Had found him slumped in the chair. . . . And while she waited for help—waited for the ambulance to get here—she’d gone around picking up the pages of his life story. . . . One of these days, I was going to pursue it: find that bitch Nedra. Get my grandfather’s story back if she hadn’t already destroyed it. She’d told me her ex-husband was a honcho down at the state hospital. Maybe I could track her down through him. He probably had to send alimony someplace, right? And if that didn’t pan out, maybe I’d go see Jerry Martineau over at the police station. Because it was theft, what she’d pulled, not to mention breach of contract. . . .
The summer the Old Man had died up here was the same summer Ma was pregnant with Thomas and me. Pregnant by a guy whose name I was probably never going to know. And what about him? Had he known about us? Why had she kept him from us? Whose son was I?
And who, for that matter, had Papa been? In my mind, I saw and felt again those legal-sized pages I had lifted out of the strongbox that morning: the first fifteen or twenty typed and duplicated with carbon paper, the rest of it written in that sprawling fountain-pen script. She’d saved her father’s history for me, she said. Thomas could look at it, too, but Papa’s story was mine. . . . And I saw Nedra Frank’s Yugo sliding diagonally down the street in the middle of that snowstorm. Saw her driving away for good. Talk about shitty luck, getting mixed up with that one. Talk about “losing something in the translation.”
Once all this Hatch stuff was over with, I’d track her down, even if Martineau couldn’t do anything for me. Even if I had to hire a freakin’ private detective. Because when you thought about it, she’d stolen my grandfather from me. It was a theft that went way beyond the lousy four hundred bucks I’d advanced her. . . . And maybe I’d try to find out about that stenographer, too. That Angelo guy who’d worked here that summer. Ma had said he was cousins with the Mastronunzio family. I knew a Dave Mastronunzio at Allied Plumbers. Maybe I’d start with him. Start somewhere. Maybe.
Maybe not.
12
Any sane man would have called it quits at that point. Would have said, “Okay, that’s enough crap for one day,” and driven home and crashed. But who ever said sanity ran in our family? Exhausted and antsy, I swung left and drove over to the dealership to see Leo.
Constantine Chrysler Plymouth Isuzu. “Make Gene’s Boys an honest offer, they’ll give you an honest deal.” Yeah, sure. If honest deals were the way Diogenes “Gene” Constantine, my ex-father-in-law, made his money, then I was Luke Skywalker.
Leo was out on the lot, holding a single red carnation and helping a middle-aged redhead into a white Grand Prix. “Well, good luck with it now, Jeanette,” he said. “Thanks again for the flower.”
“Oh, it was nothing, Leo. You’ve just been so sweet. I wish I could have bought two new cars instead of one.”
“You just give me a call if there’s anything I can do for you in the future. Okay?”
Jeanette revved her engine like one of the Andrettis. “Oops, sorry,” she giggled. “I’m still getting used to it.”
“That’s okay, Jeanette. You’ll get the hang of it. You take care now.”
She put the car in gear, rolling and bucking away from us. “Good riddance, Jeanette,” Leo said, his mouth frozen like a ventriloquist’s. “You fat-headed douche bag. I hope the engine drops out of your goddamned Grand Prix.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “No sale?”
“The bitch was this far from signing on the dotted line on a white-on-white LeBaron. That thing was loaded, Birdsey. Then I take one stinking day off to go into the city and she buys that showboat from Andy Butrymovic over at Three Rivers Pontiac. You know Butrymovic? Fuckin’ weasel. Fuckin’ Polack bastard.”
Entering the showroom, we passed a sign-painter who was whistling and stenciling the plate-glass window for some new promotion. “So what’s the flower for?” I said. “You get Miss Congeniality or something?”
He snorted. “Something like that.” Snapping the stem of the carnation, he tossed it into Omar’s wastebasket. Omar’s the newest salesman at Constantine Motors. Black guy or Spanish or something. Now there’s something you wouldn’t have seen ten years ago, or even five: my ex-father-in-law hiring minority salesmen. You wouldn’t have seen him hiring women, either. Now there were two.
“How’s your brother?” Leo asked. “Angie said they checked him in down at Hatch? What’s that all about?”
I told him about Thomas’s commitment the night before. About the knee to the groin I’d taken and the advice I’d just gotten from Lisa Sheffer. “He gets to list five visitors,” I said. “They run a security check on everyone he puts down. Then they frisk you, make you go through a metal—”
“Lisa Sheffer, Lisa Sheffer, “ he said. “I know that name. Have a seat.”
I sat down opposite him at his desk. That’s a bone of contention with Leo: the fact that he’s been at the dealership all these years and the Old Man still has him parked out there on the showroom floor. Dessa and Angie’s cousin Peter joined the business about four or five years after Leo did, and he’s already got one of the private paneled offices off the floor. Peter’s been named Leasing Manager and leasing’s the new big thing.
The veneer on Leo’s desk had buckled a little and was coming unglued at the corner. It happens with that cheap veneer shit. You should see the desk in the Old Man’s office suite. It’s big enough to land planes on. Leo flipped through the Rolodex on his desk. “Lisa Sheffer, Lisa Sheffer. . . . Here it is. Lisa Sheffer. She test-drove a Charger with me about six months ago. Nurse, right?”
“Psychiatric social worker.”
“Little skinny broad? Short hair, no tit?” I thought about Sheffer’s reprimand to me: how she was a woman, not a “gal.” She must have really bonded with Leo.
“You know what I’d do?” Leo said. “About your brother? I’d hire a lawyer and have him start talking police brutality. Have him bring the doctor’s statement and those medical pictures and everything. Maybe you could cut a deal with them—promise ’em you won’t go to court if your brother gets transferred back to Settle. Then you know what I’d do? After you got him out of there? I’d turn around and sue the state’s ass off anyway.”
“You would do that. Wouldn’t you, Leo?”
“You bet your left nut I would. What are they going to do? Complain that you welched on an under-the-table agreement? Better to be the screwer than the screwee.” He stood up. “Hang on a minute, will you, Birdseed? I’ll be right back. I gotta go
check something in the service department.”
In a way, selling cars was the ideal job for Leo. Professional bullshitter. He’d been bullshitting me since the summer of 1966, when I sat across the aisle from him in remedial algebra class and he got me to believe he was second cousins with Sam the Sham of Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs. Their hit song “Woolly Bully” was popular that year—the year I was fifteen. It came cranking out of my red transistor radio all summer long while I mowed lawns, solved for x, and lifted weights—curling and bench-pressing in an effort to transform myself into Hercules, Unchained. Leo told me that he’d been to Sam the Sham’s apartment in Greenwich Village for a party and that a Playboy bunny had sat in his lap. That his uncle was a talent scout out in Hollywood. That his mother was thinking of buying him a Corvette once he passed algebra and got his license.
He was paunchy and chip-toothed back then, a middle-aged-looking sixteen-year-old who could make our fellow algebra flunkies suck their teeth just by walking into the room. Sometimes I’d watch him with a kind of grossed-out fascination as he’d pick his nose, examine what he’d come up with, and then wipe it under his desktop. He made life miserable for our teacher, shaky, old, semiretired Mrs. Palladino. Leo would raise his hand for help on some problem he couldn’t have given a flying leap about solving and Palladino would come hobbling up the aisle on her bum leg. Then, right in the middle of some explanation Leo wouldn’t even bother to listen to, he’d cut a fart—a “silent-but-deadly” so foul that everyone within a twenty-foot radius would start groaning and fanning their worksheets. Poor Palladino would stand there, droning on in good faith and trying, I guess, not to pass out from the stink.
Leo got away with plenty that summer, up to and including passing the course by snatching the mimeograph stencil of the final exam from the teachers’ room wastebasket. But the following fall, his luck ran out. Neck Veins, the assistant principal at JFK, caught him red-handed one afternoon stretching Trojans over the heads of the athletic figurines in the main corridor trophy case. Neck Veins: I forget the guy’s real name, but when he screamed, the veins in his neck would bulge out like electrical cables. Neck Veins nailed Leo. Had him apologize over the PA during morning announcements to all the former and present student athletes whose victories he had mocked. Then he made him run laps after school every afternoon for two months. Leo’s mother, who had just become Three Rivers’ first city councilwoman, dragged him once a week to a “specialist.”
After all that running and counseling, Leo dropped thirty pounds and grew his hair long. By springtime, he was lead singer for this garage band called the Throbbers. Now girls liked him. Skanky girls at first, and then more and more popular ones, including Natalie Santerre, who everyone thought looked like Senta Berger and who Leo claims to this day gave him a BJ the weekend before her family moved to North Carolina. The Throbbers played the usual covers: “Wild Thing,” “Good Lovin’,” “Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown.” Leo was a real ham; whenever they did that Question Mark and the Mysterians song, “Ninety-six Tears,” he’d drop to his knees and act like he was blowing a gasket because the girl in the song had left him. The band fell apart after a while, but by then Leo had become addicted to the attention—to standing up there on a stage. He majored in acting at UConn, dealt a little weed on the side, and was, during his junior year, stud enough to have bonked all three of Chekhov’s Three Sisters over the course of a two-month rehearsal. According to Leo, that is, who you’d never mistake for a reliable source—particularly on the subject of his sex life. He played Snoopy during his junior year in You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. That was the highlight of Leo’s dramatic career: Snoopy. Dessa and I had been going out for about six or seven months by then. (Dessa didn’t like Leo that much; she tolerated him.) When she and I drove up to see You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, we brought Dessa’s sister Angie along. Angie had dated my brother just before that—a two-month disaster I don’t even like to think about. But anyway, for better or worse, Angie sat that night in the audience and fell in love for life. Dessa and I got to hear all the way home how adorable Leo looked, how funny he was, how Angie had laughed so hard at one point, she’d wet her pants. After Leo found out about his one-woman fan club, he asked Angie out. They went at it hot and heavy all that summer—the summer of 1971—then seemed to cool off. But the following Christmas, when Dessa and I told them we were thinking of getting engaged after graduation, they told us that Angie was pregnant. Shit, man, if Angie hadn’t miscarried, that kid would be what by now? Eighteen?
That whistling sign-painter had finished his first letter on the plate glass: a blue “G,” as tall as Joy. Leo came walking back across the showroom.
“Hey, I forgot to tell you,” I said. “Guess who I saw down there at Hatch in the middle of everything else last night? Ralph Drinkwater.”
“Drinkwater? No shit. God, I haven’t seen Ralph since . . . when did we have those summer jobs?”
“Nineteen sixty-nine,” I said. “The summer we landed on the moon.”
“So how’s he look? Ralph?”
“Not that different, really. I recognized him right off.”
“Jesus, remember that bag job we pulled on him? With the cops?”
“The bag job you pulled on him,” I said. “You were the one who sat there in that station and told them—”
“Oh, yeah, Birdsey, you were Mr. Innocent that night, right? Hey, not to change the subject. What do you think of this suit?” He got up from behind his desk, turned to the side, and strutted back down to that white-on-white LeBaron. Virgins is what Leo calls the floor models. The suit was tan, double-breasted. Looked too big for him in my book.
“I picked this up in New York yesterday when I auditioned,” he said. “Armani—top of the line. I felt like celebrating because things went so well.”
Leo and his auditions. For all the tryouts he’s rushed to New York for over the years, I’ve only seen him on TV in two things—a Landlubber’s Lobster commercial that ran sometime back in the mideighties and this public service thing for AIDS prevention. In the restaurant ad, Leo played a wholesome dad taking his happy family out for seafood. The thing starts with a close-up of Leo, bug-eyed and looking like he’s having an orgasm. Then the camera pulls back and you see a waitress tying one of those plastic bibs around his neck. There’s this motherfucking monster of a lobster in front of him. The rest of the family looks on, smiling like they’re all high on something, even Grandma. The other ad—the public service thing—is something they still run every once in a while at two or three in the morning, usually when I’m riding the Insomnia Express. Leo plays a dad in that one, too—shooting hoops with his teenage son and talking man to man about responsibility. At the end, Leo says, “And remember, son, the safest thing of all is waiting until you’re ready.” Leo and Junior smile at each other, and Leo takes a hook shot. There’s a close-up, nothing but net. Then Leo and the kid high-five each other. The first time I saw it, I laughed out loud. For one thing, Leo couldn’t make a hook shot to save his ass. Back in high school, he made up a story about a damaged left ventricle and conned his way out of gym class for two years in a row. And for another thing, Leo talking about abstinence is like Donald Trump talking about altruism.
“So get this, Birdsey,” he said. “I buy the suit, have them alter it, and I get back home around midnight. The house is dark, Angie and the kids are asleep. So I nuke myself some leftovers, flip on the tube, and there’s Arsenio wearing the exact same suit I just bought. Arsenio, man! Recently voted one of the ten best-dressed guys in America. It’s an omen.”
“An omen?”
“That I’m going to get that part. How much do you think I paid for this baby, anyway?” He stroked a jacket sleeve, pivoted to the side again. “Italian silk,” he said. “Go on, take a guesstimate.”
“Hey, Leo,” I said. “I’ve got one or two too many things on my mind right now. I don’t particularly feel like playing The Price Is Right with you and your new suit.”
>
“Go ahead. Guess!”
“I don’t know. Two hundred? Two-fifty?”
He snorted. Jabbed a finger upward.
“Three-fifty?”
“Try fourteen-fifty, my man.”
“Fourteen-fifty? For a suit?”
“Not a suit. This suit. Feel it!”
I rubbed the end of the sleeve between my thumb and finger. “Yeah?” I said. “What? It feels like a suit.”
He picked a little imaginary lint off the jacket. “Hey, what do you know, Birdsey?” he said. “You work in overalls. By the way, did I tell you this audition’s for a movie, not a commercial?” He sat down again and leaned back, balancing himself on the back legs of his chair. “Nothing big-budget, but it’s a credential, you know? A stepping-stone. Psycho flick—probably right to video here in the States with limited release to the foreign markets. Korea, Hong Kong—places like that. They eat that slasher shit up over there.”
“You already told me it was a movie,” I said.
“I didn’t already tell you. When did I tell you?”
“I don’t know? At racquetball?”
“I just went to New York yesterday. We played racquetball the day before yesterday.”
I was starting to feel a little woozy. “Oh, yeah, that’s right. Angie told me, I guess. Hey, you got any coffee around here?”
“You know we got coffee. Black, right? When did you see Angie?”
“I didn’t see her. I talked to her last night when I called looking for you.”
“What did you want?”
“Huh? Nothing. I just wanted to tell you about my brother. Black, two sugars.”
“Hey, did I tell you I’m off coffee? I been reading this book called Fit for Life. Angie got it for me. We’re getting one of those juicer things, too. This book says caffeine’s as bad for you as poison. Refined sugar, too: a real no-no. But anyways, you know what this movie’s about? There’s this weird broad, see? And she’s both an artist and a female serial killer. First she gets screwed over by all these guys, okay? Has all these traumatic experiences. Then she snaps. Starts murdering all the guys that dumped on her and painting these weird pictures with their blood. So all of a sudden, the art critics discover her, see? She starts getting real big in the art world, only nobody knows what she’s using for paint, okay? Or that she’s painting pictures during the day and killing all these guys at night. I read for one of the victims—the first guy she offs—this art professor who wants to dick her in exchange for an A. I think I got a good shot at it—a callback, minimum. ‘Very nice,’ the casting guy said after the reading. ‘Very nice.’”