You'd Better Watch Out

by Tom Piccirilli

  YOU BETTER WATCH OUT

  By Tom Piccirilli

  Smashwords Edition published at Smashwords by Crossroad Press

  Copyright 2011 by Tom Piccirilli

  Copy-Edited by Neal Hock – Cover Design by David Dodd

  Cover Image by Andrew J. McKiernan – http://www,kephra.com.au

  LICENSE NOTES:

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  OTHER CROSSROAD TITLES BY TOM PICCIRILLI:

  NOVELS:

  Short Ride to Nowhere

  Nightjack

  NOVELLAS:

  All You Despise

  Fuckin' Lie Down Already

  Loss

  The Fever Kill

  The Nobody

  The Last Deep Breath

  Frayed

  UNABRIDGED AUDIOBOOKS:

  Nightjack – Narrated by Chet Williamson

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  YOU'D BETTER WATCH OUT

  My father had always been shitstorm crazy violent, but they finally put him away for it thirteen years ago, after he’d swallowed my mother’s tongue, when I was eleven.

  You could ask anyone in the neighborhood the kind of man he was. They all hated him and wished him dead, but no one ever lifted a finger, a fist, or a 12-gauge against him. He was a dirty cop who skimmed on the mob’s protection racket and kept the local shop owners hard under thumb. If anyone new to the area came to him for help he turned their name over to the wise guys. The next day we’d all gather in front of some store on fire and listen to the owner wail in the middle of the street as the flames ate his merchandise. Or his wife. Or his kids.

  My father moonlighted as extra muscle for Johnny Iacobuzio, who we all knew as Johnny Booze. It was an open secret even in his Brooklyn precinct, the most corrupt one in the city. It was the station that perfected the “Brooklyn Bounce,” a term applied because of the money and drugs that would disappear out of the evidence locker.

  Lots of cops were on the take, but only my old man would strip off his blues and later go out with Booze’s boys and heist a truckload of flat screen TV’s or pack his throw-down weapon for some back alley drug deal. Even dirty cops put the blue before the long green and made sure the badge came first, but my old man never looked at it that way. Even the other cops hated him.

  On Thanksgiving or Christmas or even Easter, Johnny Booze would load up his Mercedes SUV with top-shelf liquor, and hand it out all over town. To the church, the firehouse, the police station, even the old folks home. Johnny Booze knew if you wanted to win over the people all you had to do was keep them loaded.

  My father used to abuse my mother and me regularly. It was so commonplace that I don’t think any of us put much into it anymore. My mother and I suffered in silence, and my old man would fume and glare and lash out at us the same way, silently. We lived in a house of private quiet pain. I would hear my mother grunt in their bedroom and never know if he was slapping her or fucking her. In the morning she always looked equally bruised.

  She never tried to lighten my load. She never made promises that we would one day escape the brutality of my father. She never told me that I would one day make it out of the neighborhood and do something with my life. It wasn’t her fault. The possibilities of life had been torn out of her kick by kick. While I sat at the kitchen table and did homework she would sew the buttons back onto his shirts that had been ripped loose by his whores. I would catch her jabbing the needle into her thumb and the two of us would watch her blood well. She never cried and neither did I.

  Once, Johnny Booze’s bagman stopped by the house to drop off my father’s weekly cut and took her by the hand to the bedroom. I don’t know if what he did to her could be considered rape since she never fought or cried or showed any resistance. I listened to him grunting and calling her a fucking bitch with every thrust. I wondered who he hated so much. If it was his wife or his mother or some puppy love who’d broken his heart when he was a youth. “You fucking bitch! You fucking bitch!” I suspected my mother found some kind of solace in his emotion-laden malice. I stood in the hall and glimpsed his face in the bedroom mirror. It was red with fury and he was sweating wildly. His throat was covered with twisting black, bulging veins. She held his face in her hands and stared into his eyes.

  I thought I understood why such obvious viciousness would appeal to her. It was open. It was honest. It was human. Unlike my father’s hate.

  When the bagman left the house he handed me a hundred dollar bill and said, “Buy your mother something nice with this.”

  I tried. I walked in and out of the neighborhood stores wondering what she would like. Nothing made any impression on me because my mother hardly made one. Clothing, makeup, shoes, jewelry, food—none of it mattered to her. I walked into a toy store and looked around at the games and gadgets and didn’t care enough about any of it to even spend the money on myself. I remember standing outside on the curb in the breeze and letting my hand drift open as I watched the C-note dive toward the asphalt and suddenly swoop upwards and out into traffic. It fell onto the other side of the street and kicked around in the gutter. I didn’t bother to watch where it went.

  Every week for the next couple of months the bagman showed up early with my father’s money and took my mother in the bedroom and screwed her. I listened to him call her a fucking bitch.

  Eventually my old man finally crossed the last line. It was Christmas morning and my mother had gotten up at dawn and spent the hours fixing a ham, baking cookies, and making last-minute arrangements to the decorations and the wrapping of presents. Despite her lack of will and brooding eyes there was always something about the holidays that managed to stir her from her cocoon of intensely black depression. The bagman came over and tried to fuck her but apparently couldn’t get it up. I heard him cursing louder than usual.

  “It’s your fault,” he said. “You did something to me.”

  “I’m sorry,” she whimpered.

  “Sorry? You’re sorry? You bitch. You rotten bitch.”

  The bagman must’ve worked muscle for Johnny Booze as well because he knew how to inflict pain without leaving marks. Not that it would’ve mattered much. My mother was already scarred and bruised and battered. But the bagman spent some time on her and I listened at the doorway as she coughed and groaned and squealed, but never very loudly.

  I waited for her to call my name. I held on to a knife she’d left out to cut the ham. It wasn’t a particularly big blade and didn’t have to be. I thought, All she has to do is show some resistance. All she has to do is speak my name. All she has to do is plead with him, beg him to stop, scratch his face, and I’d drive the knife in under his ear. People were always talking about the best way to incapacitate and kill a man. My father expounded with his drunken friends at length. He acted out scenes in the living room showing the correct way to press a pistol barrel against someone’s temple to avoid blowback. How to stab someone so they’d die immediately, or take hours crawling through their own filth.

  But my mother said nothing, didn’t defend herself at all, accepted his fists and fingers, his slaps and pinches.

  When he
was finished I put the knife back and stood by the Christmas tree. I stared at the angels and thought of blood. When the bagman left he handed me two C-notes and said, “Merry Christmas, kid. Make sure you buy your mother something nice. And get yourself a little something too, right?”

  “Right,” I said.

  This time I unscrewed the plate to an electrical outlet in my bedroom and stuffed the bills inside the little niche. One of these days, I knew, I would have to get the hell out of here.

  Late afternoon my old man walked in from a night of whoring, smelling of sweat, sex, blood, and perfume. He wasn’t drunk like usual. He seemed edgy as hell. I got the feeling that someone had told him the bagman had been in the house a long time. I thought maybe Johnny Booze had done it just to get rid of my father. He’d been growing more and more violent and unstable in recent months. The other cops had started turning their backs on him. I overheard his phone calls and knew my old man had been slipping.

  He walked to my mother. He said, “Have you been fucking some other man?”

  My mother said, “Yes.”

  She folded the knife and fork and held her chin up as she stared into his eyes. She had absolutely no fear. A charge burned through the air. We could all feel it. We all knew what was about to happen. My father shut his eyes and screwed up his face and hung his head. He raised his massive fists up as if to damn God. It was a Biblical moment in its own way. The house seemed dry as a desert, with the dust of a thousand generations settling on our neglected, cheap furniture.

  Even then I wondered why he acted the way he did at that moment. Why he may have cared so much or pretended to care so much. It all seemed like such a sham.

  He glowered at me. “Did you know?”

  I said, “Yes.”

  My mother glanced in my direction and smiled. It was such an unfamiliar sight that it was the first time in years that I felt genuine terror.

  My old man looked into my eyes and understood that I knew what had been happening all along. He took one step in my direction and my mother took him into her arms. She hugged him tightly and tried to quiet his fury by shushing him and patting his back. She twined herself about him and he took her in his arms and pressed his mouth over hers and gave her the most passionate and loving kiss that I’ve ever seen.

  Then he gripped her by her ears and pulled her even closer, his mouth starting to chew, her eyes going wide as the scream erupted in her chest but had no way out. He continued to seal his lips over hers even as he bit off her tongue and forced her to choke on it. Her blood had nowhere to go so she gagged on it and snorted it out her nostrils.

  Finally my father let her go, his mouth still working as he swallowed. My mother fell to her knees with the black pulsing blood flowing down her chest. She smiled with red teeth and said a word that might’ve been my name.

  She flopped over onto her back and rolled almost under the Christmas tree as she started to go into shock. I’d been rooted to the floor by the weight of foreknowledge. Everything that had just happened seemed to have been fated to happen as it did, with me a nearly active part in my mother’s butchering.

  Then the spell was broken and I ran to her and did my best to help her however I could. There wasn’t anything to do. A strange noise fluttered from her throat. It could have been laughter. I tried to stick my hand in her mouth to put pressure on the wound but she kept turning her head away from me as her body trembled and her eyelids quivered. It didn’t take long for her to die.

  I think I was sobbing. My face felt wet and my vision was unfocused as if I was looking at it through a wet lens. I stared at my old man as all the strength went out of him at once. He got himself a bottle of beer from the fridge and washed his mouth out of the taste of my mother’s tongue and spit the beer on the floor. He fell heavily into the kitchen chair in front of the ham and he took up the utensils my mother had left there. He slowly cut himself a hunk of meat off and ate it hungrily, greedily, and noisily. But not so loudly as to drown out the pathetic noises of my mother’s death.

  I used the phone in the bedroom to call 911.

  I drew the back of my hand against my eyes and the tears were gone. I was very calm. I explained exactly what had happened and gave our address. My voice wasn’t a voice I recognized. A strange and eerie cold descended on me.

  I knew with a deranged kind of clarity that he hadn’t wanted to kill my mother. I knew that he’d actually wanted to kill me instead. I couldn’t completely put together his reasons, but his rage was an insane thing and I’d never really comprehend it. My mother had saved my life by moving into my old man’s path.

  I sat on the bed while my father ate our Christmas day ham in the kitchen. When he’d finished I heard him light a cigarette as whirling red light and sirens filled the windows and the rest of the world.

  ~ * ~

  The fucker almost skated on an insanity plea.

  He had a lot juice with the system. Despite all the forensic evidence he never cracked and confessed. The DA couldn’t make much of it stick. There was only one eyewitness. Me. I took the stand against my father and swore on the Bible that he’d murdered my mother. My old man stared at me from the defense table and tried to drive a psychic knife of hate into my heart. When I’d finished my testimony I got off the stand and walked back to my seat. As I passed his table my old man hissed, “I’ll be out in ten. I’ll see you then.”

  I was eleven. My voice hadn’t dropped yet. I didn’t have a whisker on my chin. I hadn’t kissed a girl. I hadn’t learned to tug my pricklet. I’d watched my mother die crawling in her own filth, trying to say my name with the nub of her torn-off tongue. Black blood had pulsed from her mouth and she kept spitting.

  But I was my old man’s son. I had the same hate inside me. I contained a similar rage. I was already growing jaded and could feel myself caring less about everyone and everything around me. I already had the talk down.

  I grinned. It was his grin. I said, “Don’t be in a rush. The day you come home is the day you die.”

  The papers loved it. So did the defense team. I didn’t react the way a normal eleven year old kid would. They said I was lying. You could tell just by looking in my face. Where were the tears? Where was my little boy charm? The ladies in the jury didn’t want to wrap me up in a bundle and take me home. They were scared of me. My father earned points off me, but it wasn’t enough. They led him out in chains and a clock started ticking down in my head.

  I was packed into the system but Johnny Booze worked it out that my foster family would be Tony and Theresa Mara. Tony made small book for Johnny Booze out the back of his candy store. Theresa was a holy roller in the Catholic church who went to Mass three times a week. They had a teenage boy of their own, Jojo, and a daughter a year younger than me, Angelina.

  Jojo was a psycho in training. He was known around the neighborhood for bullying school kids and teachers and extorting cash and favors. He’d started off killing cats with his pocketknife and had worked his way up to slashing anyone who stood up to him. He liked the forehead. It was a good move, I knew. You bleed a hell of a lot and the blood runs into your eyes. Minimal damage for maximum effect.

  I knew psychos. I knew manipulation. And I knew when I was being tested. Johnny Booze had put me in this house to show him what I could do. I wondered how long it would take.

  Jojo acted friendly, almost brotherly, for the first couple of months. It was long enough for me to get a sense of his moods, when he might jump and when he might sit back and enjoy himself. He did a lot of pills, weed, and occasionally meth. When he was cranked he was at his best behavior. The meth mellowed him. The weed made him paranoid and pale. His parents never tried to rein him in. They were weak people, without bitterness or kindness. They were shadows who moved through their own home hardly speaking, just waiting for the day to die.

  By then I was already in love with Angelina.

  But every boy was. She was lovely in the way that everyone could instantly recognize. Intensely long black
hair, Mediterranean dark skin, eyes that were warm with kindness and innocence but blazed with a sharp intellect. She spoke little but had a strong presence that immediately made me understand she was always aware of me, always there for me. We held hands when no one was looking. I averaged a stolen kiss a month, at first.

  It wasn’t a crush for me and it wasn’t budding adolescent hormones. I knew then that I’d one day marry her.

  She had little say about her family. She dealt with them only as much as she had to and kept apart the rest of the time. She was a loner by nature, the same as me, and that drew us to one another. We spent most of our time together, sharing space quietly. Reading, doing homework, watching movies, walking to and from school. I liked to watch the side of her face as we strolled through the neighborhood. The curve of her jaw, the soft blonde hair beneath her ear, the way her dimples came and went depending on her expression.

  Older boys were already hitting on her. I wasn’t a threat so they ignored me. If anyone got grabby she’d give them hell. She was tough and had a mouth on her when she needed it.

  Jojo made his move on me on a biting cold March afternoon. I was surprised it had taken him so long. I’d been watching him closely and knew he’d started breaking into pharmacies to steal prescription pills. He popped anything he could find without checking the labels. He’d moved up to stealing cars and sexually assaulting pubescent girls. He’d taken to giggling almost nonstop.

  I was with Angelina at the corner ice cream shop. We were sitting together in a booth at the back. She’d bought an egg cream and here were two straws in it but I wasn’t drinking. I was staring out the plate-glass window watching Jojo drive up and down the block in a stolen ‘72 Mustang that was more rust than anything else. The engine coughed on only four valves. He chirped the tires every time he came around the corner. I wondered if Angelina had any idea of what her own brother planned to do to her.