But I figured that I’d have to at least be neighborly, otherwise he would get suspicious. Maybe he’d start wondering why I was the only neighbor around here who didn’t want to go over and play pool with him in his fancy game room. Or watch the football games on Sundays with him. Or go to a cookout over there. I did those things because there was others involved. I felt safe in numbers. But there were a few things I wouldn’t do with old Joe Mezilli. I wouldn’t never go out on that big old boat of his. I know all about that little game. That’s what they do, them mafias. They take you out on a boat. Way out where nobody can see or hear nothing, and then they shoot you and dump your body overboard with cement shoes on your feet. I ain’t stupid.
The other thing I refused to do was take any vegetables from Mezilli’s garden. Even Timmy Peppers took some at first. He showed up to cut my grass one afternoon eating a big fat tomato sandwich. I know he ain’t never grown a thing in his life except grass, so I asked him where he got the tomatoes from for the sandwich. “Oh Joe give me a big bag full of them.” He said, with the mayonnaise running down his chin and a big dumb smile on his face. I stopped dead in my tracks. “You’d eat a tomato from that garden after what we seen him burying back there last year?” I asked. Then I got right in his ear, and whispered, “Does it taste funny, Peppers? Does it taste like a dead man?” I thought Peppers was gonna puke. He spit out the sandwich and started to hunch over on all fours with his stomach convulsing like a dog.
He looked up at me in horror. “Oh lord how did I forget?” he said. I felt like rubbing it in a little, so he’d remember next time. “Was it good Peppers?” I asked him sarcastically. “Well yeah. Actually that was just about the best tomato I ever ate.” He said. I smacked him on his head with my hand. “What’s wrong with you boy?” Peppers got wide-eyed. “Do you really think those were bodies we buried back there, Phil? Seriously? Because dang, those tomatoes were good. And he gave me cucumbers too. Great big ones. Everything he has back there is huge and delicious. Maybe they weren’t bodies at all. Do bodies make good fertilizer Phil?”
I smacked him again, just to get him to stop thinking out loud. It was making me sick. The boy is a wiz at digging with a tractor or a backhoe or cutting grass. But he ain’t smart like a scholar, and he ain’t naturally suspicious, like me. Timmy Peppers would be best friends with a commie spy and never know the difference. I try to watch out for him, but I can’t be everywhere. So he ends up doing things like helping our mob-boss neighbor bury bodies, or eating tomatoes grown on some poor sucker’s grave. God only knows where he’d be if I wasn’t there to point these things out to him.
That was in July. Peppers told me he went home and was about to throw out all the vegetables Sonny Corleone over there had given him, when he remembered they didn’t come from the garden where he buried the bodies at all. “What the hell are you talking about Peppers?” I asked him. He gave me some story about Mezilli not planting in that spot until next season. I told him “better safe than sorry Tim,” and made him promise me he’d throw all that stuff out. But who knows with Peppers? The boy likes to eat and I could imagine him digging those big tomatoes out of the garbage two hours later and frying them for another sandwich.
By September, the whole neighborhood was talking about those dang tomatoes and those cucumbers and whatever else he was growing back there. Nobody knew what it was they were really eating. Nobody but me and Peppers. And Peppers kept saying it wasn’t the same garden. It was like “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” and I was the only guy who knew what was in them pods.
I tried telling Hank Milledge, one day while we were rebuilding a leaf blower in his garage. But he wouldn’t believe me. He’d become chummy with Mezilli and he wasn’t going to believe the truth about his new buddy. People are infatuated with the mob. I see it all the time. But they don’t understand them the way I do. They haven’t studied them. Milledge asked me one time how it is I think I know so much about the mafia when there ain’t no mafia around here. “You grew up here in Lynchburg, Phil” he said to me, “You’ve never even been to New York in your whole life. What the heck do you know about those people?” “Well-sir” I said to him, real matter-of-factly, “I read somewhere that when they did The Godfather, they had to have real mob guys working with the writers, because the mob didn’t want too much information coming out. But they wanted it to be true to life.” Milledge didn’t see the connection. “What’s that got to do with anything, Phil?” he asked. “Because, stupid, it means they was telling the truth without revealing the names!” They was showing how the mob works. Don’t you see?” Milledge never did agree with me on that.
Meanwhile, Peppers still wasn’t sure those were bodies rolled up in that burlap. I kept trying to make him see the truth. The fact is he had really started to like old Mezilli. Mezilli’d been here almost a year and a half now and Timmy was making a lot of money off old Joe. He was clearing parts of his hunting land for him and tending to the yard when they went away. About six months after they buried them bodies, I asked him if he had started on the irrigation system for the garden yet. We were standing in my garage, drinking a beer and tinkering with an old fishing reel I was rebuilding. Peppers told me, “Well it’s in and finished and he done paid me for it. But the funny thing is, he ain’t used it yet.” “What?” I asked him, “What do you mean he ain’t used it yet, Peppers? He spent all that money and hasn’t used the durned thing yet?” Peppers told me that Mezilli hadn’t even tilled that ground yet! He wasn’t going to plant anything until the following year because everything in the rolls had to break down and be absorbed.
I threw up in my mouth a little.
“Peppers!” I yelled at him, “What in the sweet name of General Lee takes a year to break down in your garden? A god damned body, that’s what! You think old Luca Brazi wants to start tillin’ his ground and tear off a body part from one of his rival gangsters he done buried back there? You still wonder what it was you was burying in that garden of his? Well there’s your proof! He’s waiting for the lime to break them down altogether before he tills them under and plants his tomatoes on them.”
Peppers just stared at me. “C’mon, Tim,” I said, grabbing him by the arm, “We’re going down to the CoOp. If you don’t believe me, maybe you’ll believe Harry Majors.” Harry is the soil expert down at the CoOp. If you want to know about growing anything in Bedford County, Virginia, you ask Harry Majors.
We dropped the fishing reel and hopped in my truck. “Now, you let me do the talking, Peppers. I’ll ask old Harry without him knowing why we’re asking. We don’t want anybody getting the jump on us and exposing old Mezilli first. You hear me?” Peppers nodded slowly. He still didn’t believe me, I could tell. But this would prove it to him. Harry Majors would prove it to old Tim Peppers and then I’d have me an ally. On the drive over, I asked him about the tomatoes he got from Mezilli. “Peppers, if he ain’t even tilled that ground yet, where’d them tomatoes come from?” Peppers answered me; “He planted some tomatoes and cucumbers in big boxes and filled them with somethin’ he called mushroom soil. He said it’s the secret to big vegetables.” “Hmmm, mushroom soil, huh?” I said, mostly to myself, “That must be his code for the buried bodies…like “cans of peaches” was for Tony Soprano.”
We walked in to the CoOp and straight back to Harry at the fertilizer section. “Say Harry, what do you know, good?” I asked him casually. Harry smiled. He’s a cheerful guy. “Well hello, Phil. Hey Timmy. What are you boys doing here this morning?” he answered. Peppers started to talk, “Oh well we’re wonderin...” I elbowed him in the ribs real hard. “Peppers and me have a bet between us and we need you to settle it for us, Harry.” I said. “See, I did some fertilizing on a section of my back yard, oh about a year ago, I guess. Now, I read somewheres that you should let the fertilizer set for a while, like maybe for a year, before you till it under and plant your crops. Peppers here says you can plant sooner than that. Which is it?”
Harry scratched his hea
d and leaned on his elbow on the seed counter. “Well...” he began, “What find of fertilizer did you use? Was it just from the bag? ‘Cause you could till that under in a week, and plant in two. Now if it was compost maybe you’d need to wait for a couple of months, three at the most. Yessir, compost takes a while to break down.” Harry was just getting warmed up. He knows soil like Einstein knew atoms. “Now if you were trying to change the characteristics of the soil you might let it set longer. What are you trying to grow?”
If I didn’t reel ol’ Harry back in, he’d ramble on about dirt for a month or so. “Harry,” I said, “I dumped a whole lot of umm...natural fertilizer on my patch in the back. At the longest, how long would I have to wait? I can’t remember everything in the mix. It was something I came up with off the internet, on one of those organic gardening websites. I can’t remember what was in it but it smelled really bad.” Harry looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “You put something in your garden and you don’t know what it is?” You must be crazy.” He was laughing at me. “Okay, worst case scenario, I can’t think of a thing we have here that you have to wait more than about three months to till and plant. That good enough for ya?” I looked at Peppers and smiled. “You see...” I whispered, “Those were bodies.” We turned and left without telling Harry which of us had won the bet.
On the drive back to my house, Peppers was real quiet. I knew something was troubling him. “What’s on your mind, Timmy.” I asked him. Peppers was hesitant and looked out the window instead of looking at me when he finally answered. “Oh you know, this business with those bodies in Joe’s back yard. I guess if ol’ Harry says nothing takes a year to break down, he must be telling the truth. Why would he lie? But dang it, Phil! I just can’t believe Joe is a cold-blooded killer who buries bodies in his back yard. I mean I like the man. He’s a good daddy to them kids, and he loves his wife and all. Heck I see him at church every Sunday…a Baptist church. Ain’t them mafias all Catholics?
We must be wrong about this.”
If I wasn’t rounding the curve at Peelers Bend and needed both hands on the wheel I’d have reached across and smacked Peppers in the head again. “Peppers you’re going soft on me! The man buried things in his garden and you helped him, remember? Those things were about six feet long; they were heavy enough that it took both of you to carry them. They were wrapped in burlap. They smelled like rotten flesh, remember? And he covered them in lime, Peppers! What else could they be? And as for him being a good daddy, well hell, son, Paul Potts doted on his kids too but he was still a ruthless dictator” Peppers looked at me like a puppy, “Who was Paul Potts?” he asked. “Peppers! Dear God in heaven did you not pay attention to history class at all? Paul Potts was the feller in Cambodia that killed a couple million of his own folks. You don’t remember “The Killing Fields?”
Peppers leaned back against the window and looked out at the passing landscape. “I don’t know, Phil.” He said softly. “Heck I never did see inside any of them burlap bundles. How do we really know they was bodies?” Then he paused and whispered, “I never said they smelled like rotten flesh...”
I slammed on the brakes, and pulled off the road in a cloud of dust and gravel. “For the love of Stonewall Jackson! Boy what the hell is wrong with you? What more proof do you need, Timmy? You want them bodies to just get themselves up out of Mezilli’s garden and come over to your house, all rotten and decayed, and start telling you how he killed them...like that movie theater scene in American Werewolf in London? You need me to go to Quantico and get the FBI cadaver dogs and root around in his garden? What’s wrong with you, Peppers, have you gone crazy?”
Hell, I guess the whole dang world’s gone crazy...
The Last Ride for Nonna
We’d been in Forest for almost a year. That first Christmas came and went pretty quickly because we’d moved-in over Thanksgiving, and by the time we’d gotten unpacked and the house in order, Christmas was about a week away. We’d barely had time to decorate and put up a tree and all that. So we’d decided to go home, like I told you before.
Now, my family does Christmas like few others. Between the Christmas lights, and the food, and the music, and the relatives, we really make a month-long celebration out of the holidays. Yet for all the effort we put into it back home, I never had the room to do it up the way I’d always dreamed. The house in South Philly was narrow and tall, as all city houses are. It was hard to decorate the upper portions, and we had essentially no front yard. This year...this year I was going to really put on a show. While the kids were still young.
The other thing we didn’t get to do last year was host our annual “Feast of Seven Fishes” dinner on Christmas Eve. Now, you have to understand, this is a very big deal. Festa dei sette pesci is an Italian-American tradition with roots in the old country. Like most of the holiday traditions that aren’t directly linked to the Church, there is no official guideline for the celebration. So depending on whose house you were visiting on Christmas Eve, the table would vary in content.
At our house, the rules are relatively simple: Seven fish entrees, three of them have to be baccala, which is salted cod. The rest can be any kind of seafood. We always open with Uncle Franny’s renowned baccala stew, which is very much like Manhattan clam chowder, only with chunks of baccala instead of clams. From there we have macaroni and gravy with any combination of calamari, crab, shrimp, and sometimes plain macaroni with anchovies fried in olive oil and garlic. We usually have baked baccala, fried baccala, always some smelts, and my cousin tries to find one unique fish we’ve never tasted before to top off the menu.
We eat like kings, and we talk loud, and laugh even louder. There are always guests at the table and nobody is a stranger. Sinatra and Dean Martin sing Christmas songs in the background. We’re big Christmas music people, us Mezilli’s, and usually it’s the classics we’re listening to as we keep “la vigilia.” Dinner lasts until around eight PM when Uncle Franny leaves to go home and get ready for midnight Mass. The rest of us will hang around a few minutes longer, but we filter out a few at a time until the last ones are gone.
Angie and I really missed hosting the dinner last year, but with the move and all, it was really hard to try putting it together, and then too, convincing my family to come to Virginia for Christmas was essentially impossible. So we flew home a few days before Christmas and spent the holiday in Philly. This year, however, Anj and I had decided we were going to have it here. I also decided I was going to have as many of my family come in as I could, no matter the expense. I knew Nonna wouldn’t fly. Heck I didn’t know if I could convince her to come at all. She was eightyseven years old now, and had never spent Christmas Eve anywhere except Naples and South Philly.
I called my dad in October and ran the idea by him. “Pop,” I said, “I know Nonna won’t fly. And I don’t want you and mom driving down here with her wanting to stop every seventeen minutes to take a picture or use the bathroom again.” My dad laughed, “Oh God no!” He said. It would be like the Sea Isle Affair except it would take two days!”
The Sea-Isle Affair
The Sea Isle Affair is a legend in our family; you’ll need a little background.
See, Pop owned a beach house in Sea Isle City, New Jersey. This was his first beach house, a little cottage about six blocks from the ocean. He sold it when he bought the SeaRay, and later he bought a place in Avalon. Anyway, he decided to take Nonna to the Sea Isle house the summer after Giuseppe died. It was one of the biggest mistakes he ever made. Ever.
Nonna never did like to ride in a car. I have fuzzy memories of my grandfather driving us to Philadelphia Park to watch the horses race, and she would be in the front seat, yelling at him in Italian, pumping an imaginary brake pedal on her side of the car, and waving her hands every five minutes like we were going to crash. Making all of this exponentially more frightening for me, was that Nonno drove a 1962 Cadillac Sedan De Ville. It had bench seats and I was sitting in between them both on the front seat while my gran
dfather smoked a smelly El Producto, and my grandmother gave him the maloik and screamed Italian profanities and prayers to every Saint in the heavens.
The other thing she did was make him stop about every ten minutes. Apparently Nonna was born with a bladder the size of a shot glass because the woman can’t hold her water in the car at all. Philadelphia Park is a thirty minute drive from South Philly. Our trip took two and a half hours. So the day that my Old Man decided to drive Nonna to Sea Isle was a legendary mistake. It’s an hour and a half trip. Two hours at the most. It’s a nice drive once you get outside of Philadelphia, and you can breeze along with the music playing and be there in no time at all...if you aren’t riding with Nonna. Nonna had never been over the Walt Whitman Bridge before. Come to think of it, she probably had never been over any bridge before. She was whiteknuckling the armrest at the toll booth, and literally crying and calling the Virgin Mary the very second she felt the car start to climb the grade toward the middle of the span. She hyperventilated. She spit and coughed and clutched her heart. She crossed herself and started praying the Rosary. “Days-a no bridge!” she kept saying. “Days-a no bridge!” She grabbed my father’s arm while he was driving and she screamed “Giuseppe! Days-a no bridge! Look!” Then she finally fainted.
My mom was fanning her from the front seat. Pop had bought himself a nice Cadillac too, just like Nonno, except the STS model has bucket seats and Nonna was in the back. Pop thought she’d be more comfortable with the extra room. The problem was, Nonna couldn’t see very far up the road ahead from that back seat. As they climbed the grade toward the top of the bridge, she couldn’t see that the bridge deck continued on to the other side. From her vantage point, it looked like the whole bridge just stopped in the middle. The poor old girl was looking out the window and seeing impending death staring her in the face in the form of a two hundred foot plunge into the Delaware River. That’s what she kept screaming “Days-a no bridge!” She was warning Pop, “There’s no bridge...” only he didn’t realize it until they got to Sea Isle.
The Legend of Joey Trucks: The Accidental Mobster Page 17