01 The Big Blowdown

by George Pelecanos

  Reed stepped up in front of Karras. The others fanned out.

  “Reed,” said Karras. “I thought I recognized your heap.”

  “It’s mine all right. You always were the bright one.”

  “You guys are out of your neighborhood, aren’t you?”

  “We caught last call over at the Neptune Room. I just pulled over to drain my lily.”

  Karras moved his chin in the direction of the little guy in the tall hat. “What was he doin’? Shakin’ it off for you?”

  “Funny boy.”

  “Yeah, I’m funny.” Karras sighed, looked in Reed’s porcine eyes. “You’re in my way. I gotta be getting on.”

  “Sure,” said Reed, and he took a step to the side to let Karras pass.

  Karras moved forward, dropped the bag of chocolates just as he saw Reed pivot and then the right coming straight in. He didn’t have time to ball up against the sucker punch, didn’t have time to raise his arms. Reed buried his fist in Karras’s stomach, kept it there.

  Karras went to one knee, fought for air. He coughed once, managed to bring some in.

  “Joe,” said Karras.

  Reed laughed.

  Karras heard footsteps behind him, felt two men lift him from beneath his armpits. They were alongside him then, dragging him forward toward the alley.

  “Joey,” said Karras. He watched the sidewalk rushing away from him.

  Reed straightened his tie. “I gotta get somethin’ out of the car.”

  The men took Karras into the alley, stood him up against the bricks. The light from the streetlamp blew down, illuminated half of him, left half of him in darkness. The two men stood at the head of the alley, blocking his way. Dorsey’s orchestra was playing from the Packard, something with a more hopped-up tempo, the horns flying around and then kicking in. Karras relaxed, tried to catch a rhythm in his breath. He heard the car door slam shut.

  Reed, the small man and the medium man were coming forward. The two others moved aside and disappeared. Reed held some kind of fat stick in his hand. No, it was a bat.

  “Time to play,” said Reed. He stood in outline against the light, his shadow falling in on the stones of the alley.

  “I’m through,” said Karras.

  “You’re through when we say you’re through.”

  “This about Georgakos?”

  “Georgakos? Yeah, I guess Georgakos tore it. But you been beggin’ for this, Karras, for a long time.”

  “Why the bat. Reed? If you been wantin’ a piece of me for so long, why don’t we do it right?”

  Reed’s sharp teeth gleamed in the light. “On account of it’s a special bat. I took a lathe to it, and I filled the dugout part with somethin’ heavy. Then a nice cork on top to keep the heaviness inside. I want to try it out, see how special it can be.”

  “Come on, Reed,” said Medium. “Let’s get this done before someone comes along.”

  “I’m just givin’ it a minute. I’m waitin’ to see if his buddy comes back.”

  “You know he ain’t coming back,” said the half-pint.

  “No,” said Reed, with a chuckle. “I don’t believe he is.”

  Karras was sick of listening to Reed, sick of looking at his face. He had been through worse, and he had been through it with tougher men. He smiled at Reed, put some poison in the smile.

  “Fuck you. Reed. Fuck you and all of you.”

  “I guess I’m up,” said Reed. He raised the bat.

  Karras brought his elbows in tight at his stomach, tucked his chin, buried his face between his fists. For a moment, he caught a flash in his eyes as the bat passed across the light. He heard a great popping sound, felt his left leg go out from under him, felt a slice of pain shear into his spine and explode at the back of his head as he floated down. He landed on his back on the stones, felt nothing of the contact. He heard the bleat of his own voice echo in the alley.

  “Jesus,” said Medium. “Look what you done to his knee.”

  Karras rolled over on his side. The action sent another jolt up his spine. His stomach convulsed, bugged his eyes. An acid, steaming mix of booze and beer slopped from his mouth.

  “Watch your shoes, fellas,” said Reed. “Don’t want to get any of that on you.”

  Karras watched his fingers claw at the stones of the alley. He saw the nail of his forefinger peel clean back, the blood pinkening the raw skin underneath. There was no pain there; it was as if he were watching the hand of someone else.

  “Come on,” said Medium. “He’s had enough.”

  “Hey, Coach,” said Reed. “I get three swings like everybody else, don’t I?”

  Karras looked up, watched Reed raise the bat over his head, gripping it like a club.

  “Uh,” said Karras.

  He saw the little man turn his head away, the tall hat turning with it, the bat slashing through the image as Reed brought it down. He would remember that hat. And Dorsey’s trombone. The sound of the horn was the last thing he heard for some time after that. Dorsey’s horn, and a splintering sound. Jumping, happy music, and a sickening crack in the night.

  FOUR

  * * *

  Farrell Pennsylvania

  1948

  Chapter 15

  Michael Florek woke up around nine-thirty, looked across the room. The bed where his sister slept remained made up, untouched from the night before. It had been that way for several days. For the past year or so, it had not been unusual for Lola to stay away from home overnight, especially on weekends. Michael’s mother knew what she was up to; so did Michael, and so did plenty of the folks around Farrell and in parts of Sharon. It was no secret to anyone anymore, and in time even the sting of embarrassment began to fade. But if Lola would be away for more than a day or so, she’d always call, leave word with one of the kids. No one had heard from Lola in the last five days.

  Mike Florek sat up, stared at the unmade bed. There had been a blue and black afghan blanket on the bed for the past three years, but now the blanket was gone. He used to sleep with Lola in that bed when he was a kid. He would have liked his own, but there were four kids and both his mom and dad back then, two-and-a-half bedrooms for the six of them. At around twelve years of age Mike began to wake up in the middle of the night with a hard-on, pressed as he was against his sister’s back. He knew then that a change in the sleeping arrangements was well overdue. His old man died of a cancer in the chest at around the same time, died young like plenty of the guys who worked at the mill, so the two younger kids moved into his mother’s room and Mike got his own bed. Mike and Lola had shared the same room since.

  Mike went out to the living room, saw his mother putting what was left of a chicken into a boiling pot. She could stretch a chicken out all week. The apartment was quiet, what with his kid sister gone for the day, at the high school getting things decorated for the game, and with Louis, his younger brother, into the Army now and gone three months. Lola might have made a little noise if she had been around. That Lola could laugh and she could talk, and she could make a little noise.

  “Mornin, Ma.”

  “Michael.” His mother winced, turning up an arthritic elbow as she pushed the chicken down into the pot. Her hair had fallen down in clumps about her plump face.

  “I’m just gonna clean up. Ma.”

  “You slept plenty late. I’m going to need you to go down to the butcher this morning.”

  “I won’t be but a little bit.”

  He went into the bathroom, stripped off his pajama top. In the mirror he tried to flex an arm, got barely a ripple. He looked at his bird-cage chest, the scary-sharp blades of his shoulders. Almost six feet, but he barely weighed a hundred and fifty pounds. Twenty years old, and still he hadn’t put on any weight.

  Mike washed his face, squeezed some Ipana out onto a brush and cleaned his teeth. He shook some West Point tonic into his palms, rubbed them together, and ran his fingers through his hair. He gave his hair a center part and combed the sides out and back. Then he return
ed to the bedroom, dressed in trousers and a sweater, and put his mackinaw jacket over that. It was November and already plenty cold.

  “I’m leavin’. Ma,” he said as he walked past the kitchen.

  “Here.” She crossed the room and pressed a couple of soggy bills into his hand. “Pick up some of that special sausage they got down at the Colonial, okay? We’ll have a good supper tomorrow, for Sunday.”

  Florek looked at his mother’s face. The teeth in her mouth were near rotten and so spaced out that her tongue made sloppy sounds against them when she talked. And her eyes, once fierce in their blueness, were faded now and drooped at the corners. He could see that she had been crying, too.

  “All right. Ma. I’ll be back in a little while.”

  He left the apartment and went down the stairs to the street. They lived above a bakery off Broadway in downtown Farrell, had lived there as long as Florek’s memories stretched back. That part of Farrell, where all the ethnics lived, straddled the line with the downtown section of Sharon. Italians, Poles, Slavs, Germans, Hungarians, Bulgarian-Macedonians, Greeks—if they had an accent, they lived downtown. Some of them had businesses, and most of them worked in the mills. They all had their own associations, as well—the German Club, the Greek Club, like that. The Protestants and the Presbyterians—his father used to call them “the White People,” with that thick Polish way of his—all lived up around Highland Avenue, on the high ground, where those who had money and power always seemed to settle in any town Florek had ever seen. The White People also worked in the mills, but in clerical and management positions. They didn’t smell like Florek’s father used to smell when he came home from his shift. They lived longer lives.

  From the street, Florek could see the stacks of Sharon Steel down along the Shenango River, loosing steady blankets of charcoal-gray smoke into the air. At night, the molten sparks from the smokestacks lit up the sky. The mills had killed his father, he was sure of that. But he found a kind of beauty in the fiery orange line stretched out every night across the evening sky.

  He walked over to Broadway, passing churches and taverns. Florek had seen a “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” in the funny pages once which said that Farrell had more churches and pool halls, per capita, than any other town in the USA. They might have added basketball hoops to the list; hoops were nailed up on telephone poles all over town. Maybe that’s why Shenango Valley teams were among the very best in the country. Some of the old-timers complained about all the hoops, but Mike Florek wouldn’t have taken down one of them. He liked everything in Farrell just the way it was, the way it had always been. He knew he’d never leave his town.

  Florek saw Anthony “Snake” DeLuca walking toward him on Broadway. DeLuca was a senior at Farrell High who ran with a bunch of hep guys. The rumor was that DeLuca and his boys were jazzing some of the student teachers who had come from Westminster College in Wilmington, PA, to instruct at the high school. Florek didn’t doubt it; New Wilmington was a dry town, and DeLuca had probably introduced the girls to Farrell’s bottle clubs. You put a little liquor into a nice Protestant girl and…well, Florek didn’t actually know. He didn’t know much of anything when it came to girls. He had heard, that’s all.

  “Hey, Mikey.”

  “Hey, Snake, how you doin’?”

  “On my way to work.” DeLuca ushered at the Capitol, the town’s A-house. His brother Nunzio worked at the Colonial, which played B-movies and oddball pictures. Florek had seen all the movies by a guy named Preston Sturges at the Colonial. That Sturges character, he shot pictures that really made Florek double over, laugh down deep in his belly.

  “Got a matinee today?”

  “Sure.” DeLuca smiled. “How’s your sister Lola?”

  Florek didn’t like the smile, or the look in Snake’s eyes. He kept his mouth shut about it, though. Snake DeLuca might have been a high school kid, but he had it on Florek by thirty pounds, and the extra weight was strictly muscle. On DeLuca’s weakest day, he could take Florek down.

  “I gotta get on.”

  “Take it easy, Mikey.”

  Florek walked on. He passed a workingman’s hotel that housed single guys and immigrants without families, mill workers all of them. He passed Bessie Barnes’s whorehouse at 518 Broadway, where as a kid he had once stolen a peek at the girls lounging around in silk dresses and feathered, fancy hats. Lola wouldn’t have had anything to do with a setup like that. With Lola it was something else.

  Florek stopped in the California Confectionery, where he worked as a soda jerk, to pick up his pay. His boss fixed him a banana split, which he ate while sitting at the counter. It wasn’t much of a breakfast, but it was free, and it would do. Florek’s friend Eddie Monetti told him that Johnny the Greek, who controlled the rackets in town, owned a piece of the confectionery. Mike Florek never asked his boss if this were true. His old man had always told him to keep his nose out of those kinds of affairs, and Mike didn’t care to know.

  The Colonial Market, owned by a couple of Greeks named George and William Tsimpedas, sat on Broadway at Adams, next to the Colonial Bank, which had gone down in the Depression. George Tsimpedas used the bank for storage now, flour and rock salt and the like. During the war, the market held the sole rationing license for meat, so the Colonial had become the place to go for chicken and beef and pork. People stuck with them, as Tsimpedas had the best butcher in town in Andy Langal, a knife artist like no one in Farrell had ever seen.

  Langal was in the back of the market when Florek walked in. He was a large-boned Pole with typically big hands. Florek could see him back there, gloves on, standing next to the smoker. He came out after a while and stood behind the glass counter.

  “Young Florek.”

  “Andy.”

  “What can I get ya?”

  “Some of that special sausage you got. About a pound of it, I guess.” Florek dropped the tone of his voice. “Is it fresh killed?”

  Langal spread his hands. “What, has it ever not been fresh?”

  “I guess not, no.”

  It was a dumb question, and Florek was sorry he asked it. The meat was always fresh in this place, and George Tsimpedas went to Youngstown three times a week to make sure the produce was fresh as well. Florek knew all of that. He was just trying to act like a guy who wouldn’t get taken for a ride. It never came out right when he tried to act hard.

  “Here ya go.” Langal handed him the sausage wrapped in butcher’s paper.

  “Thanks, Andy.”

  “You owe a balance?”

  “You better go ahead and check.”

  Langal went in the back again, returned with a figure. Florek settled his account from his own pay. His mother had floated what she owed Tsimpedas for the last three weeks.

  “Take it easy, Andy.”

  “You too, young man.”

  On the walk back to the apartment, Florek tried to think about what had happened to Lola. He couldn’t blame it all on the soldiers or the war, because Lola had always been the type to look beyond Farrell with wide-open eyes. But the war had started all this bad business with Lola, in a roundabout way. The war had played a part in it, that much he knew.

  When the Army needed a disembarkation point for its soldiers, they built Camp Shenango between Sharon and Greenville, acres of barracks and new roads. Almost immediately, the towns and boroughs of the Shenango Valley changed. Sharon restaurants began to make good money selling whiskey to the soldiers, and the entertainment and bar dollars flew into the township of Brookfield and the strip at Masury, just over the Ohio line. The soldiers brought in girlfriends and wives before their ship-out dates, and many of those women stayed around. Florek had heard stories of drunken women, of gang bangs and pass-arounds. Everything was loose, wide open, different than what the hardworking mill workers and business owners of the towns were used to. But the war and the camp were a boon for the local economy, and the attitude in general was that nothing was too good for the soldiers. Hell, the Army had even flown in
Judy Garland for a special show.

  Lola had met a soldier in her senior year, a special soldier, she said. On the night after the soldier left for Europe, Florek found Lola crying in their bedroom. The soldier’s buddy had phoned her that day, told her that his friend had recommended he call, and that she be “nice to him” too. Lola had met him, and when she asked him to slow down, he had gotten rough with her in a frightening way. It made Mike Florek angry, but realistically, what could he do? He knew he wasn’t going to take on any soldier. So he let it go, and then Lola made the same mistake, over and over again. She kept making mistakes, and the people of Farrell began to talk about her as someone who would continue to make mistakes, and by the end of the war she was sitting in bars in Masury on Saturday nights, waiting for the next mistake to walk through the door and have a seat on the stool to her right. If she was going to do it anyway, if this pattern was as unavoidable as it appeared to be, why not make a few bucks from it and just enjoy the ride?

  That was the way Lola saw it, anyway. It was a cockeyed way of looking at things, but Florek knew that’s the way she reasoned things in her mind. When you share the same room with someone all your life, you get to know them pretty good.

  Mike Florek entered the apartment, put the sausage in his mother’s hands. They stood there in the kitchen, unspeaking, looking into each other’s eyes. Florek had unzipped his jacket when he walked in. Now he ran the zipper back up along its track.

  “I guess I better go see about Lola.”

  His mother nodded. “Yes, Michael. Go see about your sister.”

  “I’ll be home around dinnertime, Ma.”

  “Go on, boy. You go on and go.”

  Florek went into his bedroom, rummaged through his dresser, withdrew Lola’s high school graduation picture. She had inscribed a short note to him on the back. There was a copy of the photograph, minus the note, in Lola’s own dresser. He slipped the photograph into the side pocket of his mackinaw. He found the car keys where his mother always left them, in a handpainted dish that sat on a small table by the door. He left the apartment and went down to the street.