by Robin Yocum
Duke had been at the court for a half hour and was just working up a good sweat when he heard the sound of gravel crunching under tires. Moonie pulled into the parking lot in his 1983 Ford Fairmont—his beater car. He exited and slowly limped toward the courts.
“Hey, buddy,” Duke said. “Welcome back. Where’s your motorcycle? You ought to be taking advantage of the sunshine.”
Moonie didn’t answer. As Duke’s old friend got closer, he could see that Moonie looked pale and tired. His cheeks were sunken, his pallor the color of cigarette ash, and the tendons between his neck and shoulders stretched like bridge cables.
“Jesus, Moonie, you look whipped. It must have been a hell of a week in Vegas.”
“I didn’t go to Vegas,” he said. He broke eye contact and grabbed the end of a picnic table and eased himself onto the seat. Duke tucked the ball under an arm and walked toward him. “I gotta talk to you, Duke. I need your help.” Moonie’s voice cracked, as though he was on the verge of tears, and he began to shake—a nervous, uncontrollable quiver.
“What’s wrong? Where’ve you been, Moonie?”
“I’ve been holed up at the Arlington Motel, that little place on Route 22, just outside of Tonidale.”
A chill raced up Duke’s spine and exploded into his shoulders and neck as he realized that Tony DeMarco’s suspicions may have been right. “Why? Were you hiding?”
Moonie nodded. “I’m in trouble, Duke. Big-time trouble.”
“Do you still have your room there?”
Moonie nodded.
“Can you make it back?”
“I think so.”
“Okay, let’s go. I’ll follow you.”
The Arlington Motel was a run-down, rent-by-the-hour shack just over the Pennsylvania line, east of the West Virginia panhandle, and not twenty-five minutes from the playground. In its day, the Arlington had been a nice motel with a pool in the middle of a horseshoe court of rooms. When the new four-lane road bypassed the Arlington, business dropped and the motel was sold several times, falling further into disrepair with each successive sale. The pool had been filled, and a weedy thicket of dandelions and foxtail grew inside a chain-link fence that was entwined with poison ivy. The frame building was sagging under its own weight; it was in desperate need of a major overhaul, or a bulldozer.
Duke followed Moonie into the room and winced at the pungent odor, a rancid combination of blood, decaying flesh, human tang, and greasy fast food. “Goddamn, Moonie, how can you stand it in here?”
“You’ll get used to it after a couple of minutes.”
“I hope not.”
A heap of gauze and towels, fouled with the brackish crimson of dried blood, were heaped in the trash can in the corner. The bedsheets, too, were stained with blood. The flea market–grade furniture was littered with bandages and tape, salves and creams, scissors and cotton balls, and a week’s worth of empty beer cans and fast-food bags. This was a highly unusual environment for Duke’s usually fastidious friend.
“Christ almighty, Moonie, what the hell is going on?”
“I need help, Dukie.” His strength seemed to be waning by the minute. He limped to the side of the bed and gingerly sat on its edge. He unhitched his pants and pulled them down to his knees. His right thigh was swollen, bruised, and covered with gauze and an elastic bandage. Body fluid and blood were dried on the beige elastic.
“Have you been to the doctor?”
“No.”
Duke recalled his friend’s unnatural fear of needles. During the construction of Fort Logan, Moonie stepped on a honey-locust thorn—as big as a sixteen-penny nail and needle sharp—and ran it through his foot. It exited the top of his PF Flyers, an inch behind his middle toe. Angel gagged and about fainted at the sight of the bloody protrusion, which came up through a shoelace. Moonie sat on the hillside, held his breath, and pulled the thorn free. He made us promise not to tell his mom, because even though he was the toughest kid in our class, he was terrified of needles and afraid she would make him get a tetanus shot. Instead, he tried to doctor it with some spit, gauze, and duct tape. Three days later, he had a roaring infection and ended up in the emergency room, loony with fever and a foot swollen three times its normal size. He was then the recipient of a battery of injections, one of which, of course, was for tetanus.
Slowly, Moonie unwrapped the bandage, revealing black and green and purple skin, in the middle of which was a badly infected wound.
Duke held his hands before his face in a prayer-like clasp. “Is that a bullet hole?”
Moonie nodded.
In a painful instant, Duke realized that Moonie’s right leg was the least of his problems. Moonie lifted his shirt and peeled away a gauze strip that was held down with athletic tape. A partially healed cut extended across his chest, several inches below his nipples. The line was red and swollen and, Duke assumed, also infected.
“I thought I could doctor these up and get back to normal if I took a week off work and took care of it myself. They’ve just gotten worse, and I’m supposed to be back on the job in the morning. I don’t know what to do.”
“You’ve got a bad infection there, Moonie. If we don’t get you to a doctor, you could lose that leg.” Duke stepped to the edge of the bed and leaned down for a closer look. The rancid odor of rotting flesh was overwhelming. “Wait here.”
Duke walked across the parking lot to the pay phone outside the motel office and made a collect call to Cara. “You never call collect,” she said. “What’s wrong? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. It’s Moonie. Look, Cara, I hate to ask you to do this, but I desperately need you to come to the Arlington Motel in Tonidale.”
“Up by Pittsburgh?”
“Yes, and I need you to bring enough medical supplies to treat a couple of badly infected wounds.”
“What kind of wounds?”
“Please don’t ask me any questions on the phone. I’ll explain when you get here. I’ll be in room twelve.”
She agreed, although reluctantly. It would take her an hour, since she had to run the kids over to her mother’s. Duke was grateful, especially considering the fragile state of their relationship.
When Duke got back to the motel room, Moonie was still sitting on the side of the bed, rocking. “Cara’s coming up, but you’re probably going to end up in the hospital,” Duke said.
“I hope not.”
Duke grabbed a cooler—the green Coleman that Moonie took on his fishing trips—from the corner of the room, and took a seat five feet from Moonie. “Okay, partner, start at the beginning.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Eight days earlier, Moonie sat in a booth at the Oasis, slowly rolling an Iron City longneck between his palms. Between his elbows on a paper plate the size of a saucer were two pickled eggs that he had plucked from the jar on the bar. He was carrying a knot in his gut that was making it difficult to choke down his beer. Moonie’s gaze traversed between the black-and-white broadcast of the eleven o’clock news in one corner of the bar and a beer sign in the other, where light scrolling behind a black screen gave the hypnotic illusion of exploding fireworks. He had seven dollars in his pocket and $14.59 in his checking account. Twenty-one dollars and fifty-nine cents, and it had to last him until Friday. He was, by his own painfully honest assessment, an imbecile. He told himself as much earlier that evening as he was leaving the horse track after his “sure thing” finished a strong eleventh. He sat in his car, thumped his head twice on the steering wheel, and said, “Moonie Collier, you are a flaming dumb-ass.”
Now there was no way out of his debt to Carmine except to sell his most prized possession—the Indian motorcycle that he had painstakingly refurbished. Outside of his house, it was his only possession of any value. He owed Carmine two thousand dollars. Monday morning, first thing, he would go in and tell Carmine that he would have the money by week’s end. There were several co-workers in the mill who would be interested in buying the Indian. He was in such desperate financial
straits that he would have to take whatever they offered, which was certain to be far less than the bike was worth, but more than enough to cover his debt to Carmine.
In a lifetime of bad bets, none was as bad as the $1,250 he had plunked down on Muckraker’s Pen. Moonie had pooled what he had left from his previous check, combined that with $812 he had in his savings account and the loose bills and change he had been stuffing into an old water jug at home. It was, after all, “a sure thing.” Moonie had reacted in typical fashion to a tip he had received from a fellow electrician at the mill. The co-worker had told him about Muckraker’s Pen, which was being handled by a new trainer, who was the friend of the co-worker’s cousin. “The odds are gonna be high, and this bad boy is gonna smoke the field,” he had told Moonie, who had been salivating over the potential winnings for a week leading up to the race.
Muckraker’s Pen left the gate a seventeen-to-one long shot, and he didn’t disappoint. He was running sixth into the first turn, eighth down the back stretch, and tenth heading into the final turn. He faded down the stretch and nosed out You Betcha for eleventh place.
This was the first time that his gambling habits had really gotten Moonie in trouble. He had gotten into hock with Carmine numerous times, but he had always been able to get himself back in the black, if only temporarily. He had no money left to gamble, and he knew he was out of time. Carmine had his limits, and Moonie knew he was pushing them.
It was just after 11:30 when the door to the Oasis opened and Frankie “the Troll” Silvestri limped in. The silhouette of a misshapen head on a too-small body was cast against a moonless night. For a moment, the Troll stood in the doorway, a dirty, tan raincoat hitched at the waist; the blue duffel bag at his side. Moonie lowered his head and watched the carbonation bubbles make their way up his beer bottle as the Troll passed—his horrid body odor lingering—and made his way to the office behind the kitchen, where a safe containing the wagers were kept. Moonie shifted sideways in his bench and watched highlights of college football games on the sports news. A few minutes later, the Troll emerged from the office, limped quickly through the bar, and left.
There are moments when a person’s life is forever changed in that millisecond of time between when a misguided neuron flashes an electrochemical signal from the frontal lobe and the body takes action. This is the instant when fate and unintended consequences are set in motion. The snowflakes atop the mountain intertwine, catch a tiny gust of wind, roll, and manifest themselves into a thundering avalanche.
In the case of Theodore “Moonie” Collier, this defining moment occurred when his brain told him to set his beer on the table and follow the Troll out of the Oasis.
There was an awful roil in Moonie’s belly—four beers, pickled eggs, a knot caused by a bad night at the track and the realization that it was going to cost him his beloved Indian motorcycle, and an acidic burn caused by misguided anger at Duke. He always thinks he’s so damn smart, Moonie thought as he slipped out of the booth. Moonie could handle his own affairs. He didn’t need Duke Ducheski telling him what he could and couldn’t do. If he wanted to work for the Antonelli family, then, goddammit, he would go work for the Antonelli family. He was, after all, still the strongest son of a bitch at Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel. He would work hard and keep his mouth shut. What other qualities did you need to be a bagman? So long as he didn’t have to kill anyone, why shouldn’t he work for the Antonellis? It would be a good job. And it might get him off the hook for the two bills he owed.
Those were the thoughts pulsing through Moonie’s meager brain when the door of the Oasis closed behind him.
Moonie walked across Commercial Street and kept his eye on the Troll, who opened the trunk of the Lincoln and dropped the duffel bag inside. Out of habit, the Troll stood by the door of his car for a few seconds and surveyed the landscape, then slipped behind the wheel and drove south, out of town. Although a car got between them, Moonie could see the taillights of the Lincoln as it went through the S turn at the south end of the business district. He kept his Ford Fairmont several hundred yards back. He would wait until the Troll made his next stop so he could talk to him in private. He didn’t want anyone—Duke, in particular—to see them talking. Maybe, Moonie reasoned, the Troll could get him access to Antonelli.
The Troll drove through Deandale and south on old Ohio Route 7, never going more than thirty miles an hour. As Moonie suspected, the Troll turned right on Georges Run Road and headed west on the winding road toward New Alexandria. Moonie lagged back. A light rain had started coming in from the west, providing him additional cover. Two miles beyond New Alexandria was the La Casa Grande—“the Grand,” to the locals—a cement-block beer joint that sat near the entrance to the Adena Valley Mining Company’s Mine No. 7. The Grand did a huge business from the coal miners, and it was the Troll’s last stop of the night.
At the top of New Alexandria hill, just beyond the sprawling cemetery that covered the entire northern hillside, the Troll turned the Lincoln to the right, away from his usual route to La Casa Grande, and hit the gas, his taillights quickly disappearing over the hill towards Goulds Creek. Moonie did the same.
Despite the mist, the Lincoln kicked up enough dust on the gravel road that Moonie could follow his trail until the air cleared near the entrance to the old Tarr’s Hill Mine, a deep-shaft operation that closed in the late fifties.
“Where in the hell is he going?” Moonie asked aloud. He stopped the car, turned down the radio, and rolled down his window, listening into darkness. He could hear nothing beyond the clattering of his own engine.
Making a move that someone with more brains and fewer beers might not have made, Moonie pointed his Fairmont up the old dirt road, which was barely more than a path worn through the woods by coal trucks, but now maintained by the traffic of young lovers seeking privacy. Dewy weeds drooped from both sides of the muddy roadway and slid along the sides of the car like so many paint brushes. The sides of the path were rutted and deep; the center was covered with high grass and weeds that appeared in the headlights, then rolled under the bumper. Honey locusts and maples and oaks sagged overhead, creating a dark tunnel of vegetation.
The road ended at a wooden bridge that spanned the Indian Hill & Iron Rail tracks, a short-line railroad that shuttled coal cars between the power plant in Brilliant and Broadway Station. The road split beyond the bridge, with one leg going hard north to the old mine and the lower leg snaking east, around the hill, to the abandoned sand quarry where Moonie had swum as a boy. As he came out of the clearing, Moonie could see the Troll’s Lincoln on the quarry road just beyond the bridge.
Moonie pulled up on the bridge, edging forward until his rear tires rested on the wooden timbers. He hit the high beams and stared at the abandoned car through the light rain. After a few minutes, Moonie turned off the engine and lights, opened the driver’s-side door, and stood, keeping one foot on the bridge and the other inside the car. There was no sign of the Troll.
It then occurred to Moonie that he had probably followed the Troll to a rendezvous spot. What had he been thinking? It was a very bad decision to follow the Troll, and Moonie decided to back out of the mud road and go home. He would sell the Indian motorcycle and be done with it. It was in that instant, just before he stepped back into the car, that the pungent odor of the Troll hit him, and Moonie felt the barrel of a revolver press into the base of his skull. He groaned, bracing for the moment when a bullet would enter his brain.
“Trying to rob me, motherfucker?”
Moonie didn’t move. “No, sir.”
“Don’t lie to me. Why else would you be tailin’ me?”
“I . . . I just wanted to talk to you. That’s all. I wanted to ask you for a job.”
The response surprised even the Troll, who snorted. “A job . . . what kind of bullshit story is that?”
“I’m serious. I want to work for Mr. Antonelli, and I thought you could help me out, you know, talk to him for me, put in a good word, or something.”
“Yeah, I’m going to help you out.” He pushed the revolver harder into Moonie’s head. “You’re that Moon Pie, ain’t ya? I thought I saw you at the Oasis. I looked at Carmine’s books tonight. You owe us a lot of money, fat boy. What were you going to do, rob me and pay Mr. Antonelli back with his own money?”
“No, really, listen, honest to God, I wasn’t trying to rob you. I just wanted to get a job and . . .”
“Enough of the bullshit. Pull your keys out of the ignition and very slowly set them on the roof of your car.” Moonie did as he was ordered. The Troll snatched the keys with his free hand and shoved them in his pants pocket. From the bottom of Tarr’s Hill, Moonie could hear the howl of a train whistle as it echoed through the hollow. The bridge vibrated as the grind of the diesel strained against the grade. “Start walkin’. Get over there by my car.”
“Really, Mr. Silvestri, I just wanted a job.”
“If that’s true, you’re a moron.”
Moonie took a frustrated breath and exhaled. “Yeah, so I’ve been told.”
Moonie was smart enough to know the Troll intended to kill him. As they walked across the bridge toward the Lincoln, the Troll pressed the barrel of his gun into Moonie’s spine. Moonie remembered from his self-defense training in the army that you should never hold a gun against a prisoner. This can enable a captive to make a move faster than you can squeeze the trigger. It was his only chance. Several feet from the car, as his left foot hit the ground just beyond the bridge, Moonie spun to his heel and jabbed with his right hand. The blow glanced off the Troll’s ample forehead. The Troll fired. Flames shot from the barrel of the .44 Magnum, exploding like a cannon near Moonie’s right ear and rupturing his eardrum. Moonie grabbed the gun with his left hand and twice pounded the Troll’s nose with his right fist. It squished like eggs hitting a floor; the cartilage cracked, and blood spilled from the nostrils.