by Robin Yocum
Angel’s Adam’s apple bobbed and he asked, “D-do you think that’s w-what h-hell’s really l-like?”
Duke should have known better. Angelo “Angel” Angelli was the jumpiest little guy he had ever known—seventy pounds of twitching nerve endings—and he spent a ridiculous amount of time worrying about burning in hell, the result of his loony mother forever threatening him with eternal damnation for the slightest infractions. If he didn’t eat his peas, God would punish him for his wastefulness. If his bedroom wasn’t picked up, God hated the slovenly. Angel thought God had painted a bull’s-eye on his forehead, and it was only a matter of time until the lightning bolt struck home.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, Angel looked like he had been constructed from a patchwork of spare parts. He was sickly thin and had the most enormous nose ever placed on the face of an eleven-year-old. It was wide across the bridge and knotted in the middle before diving nearly to his upper lip, and it made his mouth and eyes appear cartoonishly small. His long ears were pressed flat against his head, and he had a set of bushy eyebrows—actually, just one extended brow—that looked like a thicket of quack grass. Duke and Angel were once walking downtown when Mr. DiOrtelli was out working in the yard. He held up his hedge trimmers, snapped them together twice, and said, “Hey, Angelo, come over here and let me trim up those brows.” Angel laughed, but just to fend off the embarrassment.
Mrs. Angelli also made Angel take cello and ballet lessons. He lived in a valley where men worked with molten steel and others climbed miles under the earth to mine coal. It was a place where strength and toughness were revered, and poor Angel had to don a pair of black tights and practice his entrechat for an hour each day before he could leave the house. The boys spent a lot of time in the vacant field across the street from the Angellis’, where they played baseball most every day in the summer. It was not unusual for Mrs. Angelli to break up a game by walking onto the front porch and saying, “Angelo, it’s time to practice your cello.”
When he got nervous or upset, Angel stuttered badly, and the last thing they would hear before he walked into the house was, “B-but M-Mom, I d-don’t w-want to.”
As Duke and Moonie were walking home after she broke up one of their games, Moonie said, “My dad says if Angel doesn’t grow up to be a queer, he’s missing a hell of an opportunity.”
“Why?”
“Are you kidding? Because his mom’s always making him do that sissy shit—going to the symphony, practicing ballet, playing that fiddle thing.”
“It’s a cello.”
“Well, whatever it is, my dad says it isn’t doing him any good.”
“Can that really happen? Can you get queer by doing ballet and taking music lessons?”
Moonie shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe. I’m just telling you what my dad said.”
Duke was reminded of that summer as he unlocked the door to Duke’s Place and walked inside, carrying his dinner—a ham-and-cheese sandwich wrapped in waxed paper, and a vanilla milkshake in a paper cup from Isaly’s. Beyond the row of buildings on the east side of Commercial Street, thimble rail cars at Wheeling-Pitt were being tipped, dumping molten slag in a volcanic flow that snaked into the pit, its bright-orange flush reflecting off the low clouds. Downtown Mingo Junction was awash in a hazy orange glow that penetrated the white-soaped windows of Duke’s Place. It was one of the oddities of the Ohio Valley. The fires of the mill turned night into day, while the exhaust from the stacks snuffed out the sunlight, causing streetlights to burn at noon. A cold, hard rain had come in from the west just after dinner, washing away a patina of grit and giving the brick facades of downtown a much-needed bath. It was nearly nine o’clock. The rain had slowed, but it still danced in crooked rivulets on the glass. Rivers of filthy water continued to run down the gutters and into the storm sewers.
Duke locked the door behind him and turned on the overhead lights. He ate standing up, surveying the work that remained, including stripping the old varnish from the massive bar. It would be a late night.
Tuesday was bingo night at St. Agnes Catholic Church, and the progressive pot was at four thousand dollars, so Nina wouldn’t miss him. She and her mother would be there early to get a seat, then light one cigarette off the other and cackle about what an unfit husband he was, condescendingly referring to Duke as “the former basketball star,” or, more derisively, “the Polack.” While Duke Ducheski was held in great esteem everywhere else in Mingo Junction, he was treated with derision in his own home and looked down upon by the in-laws, who felt he was a poor provider, and not nearly Italian enough for their daughter.
For reasons that continued to baffle him, Nina got upset when he was not home right after work any other day of the week. It wasn’t as though she had a hot meal waiting for him, or was lounging around in a negligee, moist for his arrival. She hardly cooked, and they hadn’t had sex since early in the first Reagan administration. Duke was perplexed as to why she wanted to stay married to him. The only logical explanation was that she enjoyed his misery more than her own happiness.
“I think she’s a lesbian,” he told Moonie one Saturday afternoon while they were in his garage, working on the engine of an antique Indian motorcycle.
“Really? What makes you think that?”
“She never wants to have sex.”
“So, every woman who doesn’t want to have sex with you is a lesbian?”
“I didn’t say that.”
He looked up from the transmission he was rebuilding. “You didn’t have to, Bo-Peep. We’ve been friends a long time. I know what you’re thinking.”
“It’s been ten years, for God’s sake! Even if you didn’t like someone, after a decade, wouldn’t the urge eventually overtake you?”
Moonie set his wrench on the workbench and looked Duke right in the eye. “You’re asking the wrong guy, Bo-Peep. I don’t think you want to be getting marriage advice from me.”
“Good point.” Moonie’s lips quivered as he fought in vain to smother a grin. “Go ahead,” Duke said. “Out with it.”
“Did you remind her that you’re the Duke of Mingo Junction?”
Duke laughed. “The novelty of that wore off with her back in 1971.”
On their fifteenth anniversary, Duke bought Nina a gold necklace with a single, black pearl charm. He had saved to buy it and thought it was a very nice gift. She looked at it, snapped the box shut, and handed it back. “I give you fifteen years of my life, and that’s your idea of an anniversary gift?” she asked.
For a moment, Duke thought his neck and ears had actually combusted into flames. In a calm voice, but between clenched teeth, he said, “Maybe if I hadn’t spent fifty thousand dollars in psychiatry bills and paying off your credit cards, I’d have a little more money for anniversary gifts.” She forced air through closed lips, a brief exhalation of disgust, and Duke trembled from the restraint of wanting to punch her face.
Nina said, “If you hadn’t gotten me pregnant, I would have gone back to school for my senior year and been homecoming queen and gone to the prom with Zane Caldwell, and we’d be married and living out in a nice house with a swimming pool on Lover’s Lane by the country club. Instead, I’m married to a mill rat who gives me a Cracker Jack prize for an anniversary present.”
And there it was.
Zane “the Ghost” Caldwell. In high school, he had been a pasty white kid who never came out of the house, had terrible oral hygiene, had whiteheads peppering his nose and the crease of his chin, played the French horn in the marching band, and had the largest comic book collection at Mingo High School. Nina wouldn’t have given Zane Caldwell a second glance when he was in school. That, however, was before he finished medical school, got his teeth fixed, and became a successful plastic surgeon. She was married to the Duke, but she was dreaming of the Ghost.
It was at that moment that Duke decided to divorce Nina. He started squirreling away money in the trunk of the Buick. He worked every overtime shift he could get at the mill, b
artended Saturday night at the VFW, sold his baseball-card collection, and umpired Little League baseball for twenty dollars a game. He packed his lunch and scrimped for every penny he could find. It took nearly four years to save his goal of twenty-five thousand dollars.
After his initial meeting with a divorce attorney, he walked into the kitchen full of confidence and told Nina that he planned to leave her. She was making an egg sandwich. When Duke turned his head, she whipped the cast-iron skillet like a tennis racket and smacked him in the side of the head. The skillet burned his ear, and his neck blistered where the hot grease landed. He had spent his life playing sports and running with tough sons of steelworkers, but he had never in his life been hit so hard. It felt like an electric charge went off in his brain. His left, upper canine went down his throat, and the nearest incisor broke off at the root.
“Never!” she said. “I will never give you a divorce.”
It was a battle he would fight another day.
Duke sat on a kitchen chair, pressing a plastic sandwich bag of ice to the knot on the side of his head. Cara dipped a cotton swab into a jar of amber paste and gently dabbed it on the burn on Duke’s neck. Despite her soft touch, he jumped when the cotton swab made contact. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m trying to be careful.”
“It’s not your fault,” he said. “It’s really tender.”
“You’ll have that with second-degree burns.”
She finished applying the medicated balm; as she dressed the burn with a gauze pad, she said, “So, let me make sure I understand this. You live with a woman with whom you have no physical or emotional relationship. You basically tolerate each other because you’re under the same roof. Is that fair?”
“I’d say you’ve got it down.”
She bit off a piece of white tape and applied it to one corner of the gauze. “So, you ask her for a divorce, which any rational human being would agree is a good idea, since there is zero chance this ship is going to get turned around, and her response is to clock you with a skillet full of hot grease.”
“That’s it.”
Cara capped up the jar of antiseptic and set it on the kitchen counter. “You realize this is total insanity, right?”
“I do, thus the reason for seeking the divorce.”
“What if you just moved out and dealt with the nastiness later? My grandmother’s farmhouse on the other side of Hopedale is empty. Let’s just move in there and deal with it from a distance.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“You’ll think about it? That’s Ducheski code for: Please quit bothering me about this. If we move to Hopedale, I’ll no longer be the legendary Duke of Mingo Junction. I’ll have to be the Duke of Hopedale.”
“You have to admit there’s no rhythm to that whatsoever.”
“Keep it up, funny man, and see how gentle I am the next time I dress that wound.”
Cara Wilbright was the charge nurse at the Heinzmann Convalescent Center. She was a no-nonsense administrator, and their only conversations for the first two years he knew her were strictly about Timmy. Over time, as she saw his dedication to his son, there were conversations of a more personal nature.
They tried to be secretive about their relationship, but such trysts never remain as secret as you think. Duke was passionately in love with Cara and wanted to spend the rest of his life with her. They agreed to proceed slowly, and for the first two or three years, she had no desire to get married. However, they were now closing in on year five of their relationship, and her patience was wearing thin.
Cara put the last piece of tape over the gauze. “Your wife is damaged goods, Nick. She can never be fixed because she doesn’t want to be fixed. She doesn’t think she’s the problem. She thinks you’re the problem. Today it’s a frying pan to the face. What’s next, a bullet to the back of the head while you’re asleep? And don’t tell me she isn’t capable of it. There’s a bit of a family history, there.” She unscrewed the cap on a bottle of clove oil. “Open up.” He did, and she brushed the broken tooth with the oil. “You need to see a dentist.”
“I will, tomorrow.”
“No, tomorrow will be too late. You need to see one tonight. Maybe they can save that tooth. I’m friends with Dr. Brayden, the oral surgeon at the center. I’ll give him a call and see if he can meet us at his office.”
“Okay. I hurt too much to argue.”
She pulled out a chair and sat facing him; she reached out and gently put her fingers to his chin, steadying his head so that their eyes were locked. “Listen to me, Nick. I love you; I love you with all my being, but the clock is ticking. And, in all candor, I’m concerned for myself and my kids. What’s to say Nina doesn’t show up here with a gun? You need to cut that cord, and you need to do it soon. I’m not waiting forever.”
Duke was stripping a piece of the bar that featured a bas-relief of a carved lion head when a rap at the door jerked him upright and the pad of steel wool flew from his hand. It took him a moment to catch his breath, and he was grateful to be alone so no one saw him jump like a frightened schoolgirl. Through a strip of glass where the soap didn’t extend to the glazing, he could see Carmine DiBassio standing on the sidewalk with rain bouncing off his Ben Hogan hat and a brown paper bag clutched to his chest. Duke unlocked the door, and Carmine pushed his way in. “Carmine, what brings you out on such a beautiful night?”
“I was closing up and I saw your lights on—thought I’d stop by and see how things were progressing,” he said, handing Duke the damp, brown paper bag that was rolled down from the top. It clinked when he pressed it into Duke’s hands. Water dripped off Carmine’s raincoat, leaving dark spots on the dusty floor. He circled the taproom, inspecting the work, his movements as much side-to-side as forward, his arthritic hips giving him a wobbly gait. His shoes were cracked over the arch and split down the sides at the ball of his foot, the soles worn low on the outside. The damp leather absorbed the drywall dust and left a film of light-gray paste around the soles. He ran his hand along the drywall tape, pushed open the swinging doors to peek into the kitchen, looked into the dining room, then nodded his head—tacit approval of the work. “Did you talk to that bonehead buddy of yours?” he asked.
“I did. He said he’d be in touch.”
Carmine said nothing else on the matter and walked over to the section of bar Duke was refinishing. He inspected the mahogany lion head and said, “This is very nice. Where’d you get it?”
“Jimmy Harkins bought the old LaRocka Shoe Hospital in Brilliant. This was in the basement. He said I could have it if I’d haul it out of there.”
Carmine’s brows arched. “He didn’t know what he had.”
“He said it came out of a speakeasy and brothel that once sat on the wharf in Brilliant during Prohibition. The story goes that a local carpenter got to drink free and partake of the ladies in exchange for building the bar.”
Carmine nodded slowly, running his hand over the features of the mahogany lion. “She must have been quite a gal.”
“Who’s that?”
“The whore he fell in love with. Look at the detail on this wood. He was trying to drag out the job as long as he could.”
“Maybe he was just after the free booze.”
“You know better than that, Duke. It’s always about a woman.”
He pointed to the paper bag Duke had set on a two-by-ten spanning two wooden horses. “Open that up and we’ll toast to the success of your restaurant.” He pronounced it “res-ta-raunt.”
Duke opened the bag and found a half-empty bottle of cabernet and two glass tumblers. Carmine twisted out the cork and poured. “To your success, my friend,” he offered, holding up his tumbler. “Salute.” Duke clinked his glass to Carmine’s, thanked him, and sipped the wine. Carmine took a short drink, set the glass on the two-by-ten, and pulled up a step stool for a seat. “Sit down. I need to talk to you for a minute,” Carmine said. Duke grabbed a chair left from Belle’s Diner. The orange vinyl seat was ripped diagonal
ly and sponge stuffing was bursting forth. Duke sat on it backward and rested his forearms on the back.
Carmine took another drink, a healthier swallow this time, and looked at Duke while he cleaned his lips with his tongue. After a few moments Carmine said, “He’s coming after you. You know that, right?”
“Of course, I know. But I’m not interested.”
“You’re a smart boy, Duke, but sometimes you don’t listen too good. He has gambling operations in nearly every bar and restaurant up and down the river. The minute you open your doors, he’s coming after you, too.”
For a moment, Duke set the bravado aside. He was as afraid of Tony DeMarco as the next guy. “I’ll deal with him, Carmine.”
“He’s a no-good, rat bastard.”
“I’m well aware of that.”
“He can be very . . . what’s the word I’m lookin’ for . . . ?”
“Persuasive?”
Carmine saluted Duke with his glass. “Yes, thank you. Persuasive. That’s one word. Vicious is another. What are you going to do when he puts the squeeze on you?”
“Tell him to get the hell out.”
“Good in theory, but sometimes it’s not that easy. You think you know how these guys operate, but I’m not sure you understand how ruthless they truly are.”
“I’ve got a pretty good idea.”
“I don’t think you do. Let me tell you a little story.”
“I like stories.”
“You won’t like this one. It don’t have no fairytale ending. I grew up on the south side of Steubenville—dirt poor. My dad left home when I was a baby, and I grew up a wild-ass kid. When I was sixteen, a cop who was screwing my mom got me a job as a towel boy at Jake Hollowood’s Gym. He had this stable of boxers, and my job was to hold the spit bucket, wipe ’em down between rounds, stuff like that. After a couple of weeks, I told old man Hollowood I could whip any guy in his gym. Hollowood, he thinks this is hilarious, so he gives me a pair of gloves and shoves me in the ring with Bartolo Stravagi, who was a middleweight with a jaw like a horseshoe. Hollowood says, ‘Give our young friend here a lesson, Bart.’