Damaged Goods

by Stephen Solomita

  So you take care of her, Josie had concluded, and the rest of them except for Carmine. Carmine’s not for you.

  “I brung ya these here, Jilly. Aunt Josie said they might help.”

  Jilly Sappone looked down at the small, pink tablets in Jackson Wescott’s palm and knew exactly what they were. Dilaudid was what the docs called them; pink dope is what they were called on the street. Jilly had never injected himself with heroin, because he was afraid of needles, but somewhere in early adolescence he’d learned that opiates relieved the pressure. Not that dope made him a nice guy. No, the shitstorm was always there, but when Jilly Sappone was stoned, he could sometimes decide when the winds would blow. Sometimes.

  He took the Dilaudid, popped one in his mouth, dry-swallowed, put the rest in his pocket. Drugs being as common behind the walls as out on the street, Jilly had used whatever was available whenever he had the money throughout most of his prison years. That had ended when they transferred him over to Southport. Cons in Southport didn’t mix with other cons and there was no such thing as a contact visit, so he’d learned to do without. Or, he’d tried to learn. What had actually happened was that he lost control almost every time they opened the door of his cell.

  “What else, Jackson? What else ya bring me?”

  Jackson-Davis popped the glove compartment, removed two pistols, a nine-millimeter automatic and a .38-caliber revolver, held them up for Jilly’s inspection.

  “See? I didn’t forget a damn thing.”

  Jilly took the automatic, checked the slide and the clip, then stuck it in his belt. The weight of the nine-millimeter Colt felt good, as did the touch of cool metal against his skin.

  “Ya did great, Jackson.” Jilly rubbed the top of Jackson-Wescott’s head for luck, then put the Buick in gear and pulled back onto the road. “Aunt Josie didn’t give ya no money, did she?”

  “Nossir. Aunt Josie said you was gonna ask. She said I should tell you to get your own damn money.”

  By the time Jilly Sappone pulled Carlo’s Buick to the curb, some five hours later, he was, in his own judgment, ready for anything. He’d dropped another tab of Dilaudid somewhere east of Scranton, Pennsylvania, and the drug, as it washed gently through his body, had taken him all the way down. Down to the point where he could look at the other cars on the road and not feel like an alien. Fourteen years in a world where progress meant slopping a fresh coat of institutional green paint on cinder-block walls had left him without any real sense of time and place. Sure, he was down on the Lower East Side of Manhattan again. No doubt about it, he’d driven from Southport to Ludlow Street without hesitation, knowing exactly where he was going and what he intended to do when he got there. But that didn’t mean that Jilly thought he was going home. No, home was where he’d be a month from now, when the pigs caught up with him. Home was the four walls of a prison cell, or the four sides of a coffin.

  “Hey, Jackson. Wake up, boy.”

  Jackson-Davis came out of his nap ready to fight. That was because he was confused. He raised his fists, blinked twice, then recognized his prison partner’s face. No shitstorm; Jilly’s brown eyes were dead lumps of wet brown paint. That was enough to calm Jackson down, though it had zero effect on his state of confusion.

  “This ain’t home,” he said. “I mean this ain’t where Cousin Carlo put me. This ain’t where I thought we were goin’.”

  “I know that, Jackson. We’re just makin’ a little stop to pick up some money. Plus, I gotta visit my wife, show the bitch how much I love her. You see that plumbing supply store across the street.”

  “Plumbing?”

  “Yeah, as in pipes and faucets.” Jilly looked at his partner, shook his head affectionately. He knew, from long experience, that Jackson-Davis had to be brought around slowly. If you took him through it one step at time, he’d do whatever he was told.

  “Well, I don’t see no pipes, Jilly. Them windows is so dirty, I can’t see nothin’ a’tall.”

  “How ’bout the sign, Jackson. Can’t ya see the goddamned sign?”

  Jackson-Davis turned his hurt-like eyes on Jilly Sappone. “And I ’spose you ain’t heard that I cain’t read. Like it’s some damn mystery.”

  “If you can’t read, how’d ya get a driver’s license?”

  “Hell’s bells, Jilly, what kinda license? I started into drivin’ my daddy’s plow when I was nine years old. That’s my license.” He dropped his eyes to the floor, folded his arms across his chest. He would have pouted, but his lips were much too thin to bring it off.

  Jilly reached out, squeezed Jackson’s knee. “Hey, Jackson, I didn’t mean nothin’. I knew ya couldn’t read; I just forgot for a second.” He paused, bit at his lower lip. “Things was pretty bad in Southport. I’m lucky I could remember my own name.”

  Jackson-Davis raised his eyes to meet Jilly Sappone’s. “I heard about that, Jilly. Heard Southport was a real bad joint.”

  “Ya got that right, Jackson. When you’re alone by yourself from morning to night, there’s always somethin’ gets to ya. For me it was the faucet in my cell. It leaked a little bit, ya know what I mean? Like drip, drip, drip. Only sometimes, instead’a drippin’, the fuckin’ thing boomed. Like giant footsteps bouncin’ off the walls: boom, boom, boooooom.” He put both hands on the steering wheel, pushed himself back against the seat, cocked his head to one side. “The thing about it, Jackson, was the screws wouldn’t fix the drip. Like they fuckin’ knew what it was doin’ to me. Like it was part of the package. So I had’a find some way to keep the noise from gettin’ inside of me and what I did was I thought about what I had to do if I got out. Ya followin’ me so far?”

  Jackson-Davis nodded solemnly. Jilly, he knew, loved to go on about things. Like Reverend Luke preachin’ hellfire and damnation to his Ocobla flock. What Jackson Wescott had to do was what he’d done then, sitting beside his ole ma on a folding chair. He had to wait it out. Wait for ole Jilly to get to the point.

  “Tell me something,” Jilly finally said, “ya still go out lookin’ for women?”

  “No, I ain’t. I ain’t done nothin’ like that.” Jackson-Davis tried to look indignant, like he was insulted or something. But the truth was that except for one lousy month fifteen years ago, he’d never been out on his own. Yeah, maybe he did look at women on the street and think about what he done with Betty-Ann, but then he ran back to his house and waited for Jilly. Waited for Jilly Sappone to come out of jail and tell him what was what.

  “Ya remember when I used to talk about plannin’ what I was gonna do when I got out?” Jilly slid an arm across his partner’s shoulder.

  Jackson-Davis nodded solemnly.

  “What I figured was that some of the people I used to run with owed me a little payback. Like I don’t know how much time I got on the outside, but whatever it is, I’m gonna make it so nobody forgets me. You catchin’ my drift?”

  Jackson-Davis nodded again, stared up at Jilly Sappone’s bushy beard, thought, Jilly sure does look like one of my ole ma’s prophets. Cept for the hair. Ain’t none of them prophets was bald. Maybe they was Pentecostal prophets; maybe you can’t be no Pentecostal prophet unless you got hair on your head. Course, my daddy was bald. But my daddy didn’t go for the Pentecostals. …

  “Jackson?”

  “Yeah, Jilly?”

  “Are you with me?”

  “Damn, Jilly, you know as well as me that I gotta be with you. Bein’ as how you helped me out when I first come up to Clinton, I can’t see as I have no choice. Fact is, all that’s happenin’ here is I’m waitin’ on y’all to tell me what to do.”

  TWO

  JIM TILLEY STOOD BESIDE the Roberto Clemente Boxing Gym’s single ring and half watched his adopted son, Lee, shadowbox along the ropes. A part of him evaluated his son’s quick hands and smooth, practiced footwork, deciding that, no doubt about it, Lee Tilley, at thirteen years old, had all the tools. The only question was whether or not he had real desire and that particular question wouldn’t be answere
d for several years. That was when the street kids who were stepping into gyms all over New York for the first time would have enough experience to get into the ring with Lee Tilley. In the meantime, Lee was the king of the juniors, a 115-pound. YMCA badass, “Tilley the Terrible” in PAL tournaments.

  There was no way to accelerate the process and truth be told, Jim Tilley (at least the piece of him that didn’t daydream about his son winning a world title) hoped that Lee would fail the ultimate test of boxing fitness. That one night, while he was still an amateur and young enough to find something else, Lee Tilley would meet an opponent with equal skill, that the contest would be reduced to a battle of wills, to the pure ability to endure pain and keep coming. He hoped his son would lose.

  In the meantime, Jim was free to indulge an earlier, more primitive passion—a long-term love affair with the gym itself. He could listen to the squeak of his son’s shoes on resin-sprinkled canvas, smell the sharp, funky odor of sweat-soaked leather, submerge himself in the voices calling back and forth, in the gangsta-rap tones of the street, the raspy, half-bored instructions of thoroughly disillusioned trainers. In Tilley’s mind, the gym was its own place, as exclusive as a country club. Millions of people watched boxing regularly—big fights drew worldwide audiences of a half billion—but very few of those viewers had ever stepped into a ring. Boxing wasn’t tennis or basketball; you didn’t run out to box after watching a fight the way you snatched up your racket and headed for the courts after the Wimbledon finals.

  Tilley closed his eyes for a moment, let himself drift back to a time when he’d been dubbed the hottest prospect on the amateur scene, when he’d been courted by the sharks who swim in the waters of professional boxing. Those were his glory years, before an injury ended a long amateur and very short pro career, before he’d joined the cops, become a detective. It wasn’t that he hated wallowing in the endless misery of New York City crime, just that sometimes he needed a quick vacation. He needed to inhale the odor of liniment, listen to the snap of a speed bag, watch the prospects and the opponents dance their peculiar dance.

  “Hey, Pop. Better check this out.”

  “Huh?” Tilley opened his eyes to find his son leaning out over the ropes.

  “Uncle Stanley, Pop. Somebody busted him up.”

  Tilley looked to his left, watched his old partner make his way across the gym. Moodrow looked pretty much the same, an enormous square body topped by an enormous, square skull, the skull dotted with tiny, expressionless features. Even the blood running along the back of his neck, from his scalp to his already soaked collar, seemed, given Moodrow’s determined stride and composed expression, reasonably appropriate.

  “What happened, Stanley,” Tilley said, trying to suppress a smile. “You get mugged?”

  “Ambushed is more like it.” Moodrow looked around the gym. “You seen Doc Almeda?” Jose Almeda, though he’d never seen the inside of a medical school, was the gym’s unofficial doctor. “Betty’s leaving for Los Angeles tomorrow and I don’t want her to see me like this.”

  “Yeah, Doc’s around somewhere, maybe in the office.” Tilley stepped forward as his partner turned away, examined the cut more closely. “You positive you don’t wanna go to the emergency room, get it sewn up by a professional?”

  “Almeda knows how to keep the scar tissue down. That’s his job.” Moodrow turned, began to walk away. “You wanna hear the story, Jim, you gotta keep up with me. Betty made a farewell dinner and I’m late already.”

  Resigned, Tilley trotted along behind, waited patiently until Moodrow was seated on the trainer’s table, a lump of greasy coagulant stuck to the wound in his scalp.

  “This was really stupid, Jim. I feel like a complete jerk.”

  “There’s a first time for everything.”

  Moodrow looked at his ex-partner, wondered exactly how he was going to explain his bloody shirt and bandaged head to Betty. He did have faith in Doc Almeda’s skills, had seen Almeda work dozens of times, but a big part of his reason for coming to the gym for help had to do with Jim Tilley. He wanted to run the story by his best friend, see how it played before taking it home.

  “The thing about it was it happened too fast. I didn’t …”

  “Just the facts, Stanley. Save the excuses for later.”

  Moodrow flinched as Doc Almeda pressed a square of gauze soaked with antiseptic into the wound. The reaction was pure reflex, gone almost as soon as it appeared, though the pain continued.

  “There’s not all that much to tell. I was going into the liquor store, the one on Avenue B just off Fourteenth Street, to pick up a bottle of wine for dinner when this kid bumps into me. Crashes into me is more like it. A real punk, Jim, with a shaved head and four earrings in his nose, swastika tattoos on both arms.

  “I think he expected me to fall down or something, because he looked surprised when he bounced off my chest. ‘Hey, pops,’ he says, ‘why don’t ya watch where the fuck ya goin’?’

  “Jim, I should’ve stopped it right then and there, just backed off and forgotten about it. But what I actually did was slap him in the face. That’s when his buddy sandbagged me from behind with a wire trash basket.”

  “Did you go out?” Tilley asked.

  “Go out?”

  “Out cold, Stanley. Unconscious.”

  Moodrow blinked as he tried to absorb Tilley’s question. When he finally got it, he shook his head in contempt. “Are you crazy, Jim? I already told you these guys were punks.” He stopped as if expecting a reply, then continued. “What I did was stuff the second prick into the trash can. It was a tight fit, which is why I’m so late.”

  “What happened to the first kid? The one with the earrings?”

  “When I slapped him, he took off like a rabbit. Left his partner to face the heat alone. A real punk, Jim, and what bothers me is that two years ago, he would’ve been able to look at me and know enough to back off without gettin’ his face slapped. And, me, I would’ve never let a jerk like that get under my skin. Hell, two years ago I would’ve seen them coming.”

  Tilley didn’t say anything for a moment. Moodrow was a couple of weeks short of his sixtieth birthday, the mention of which had been entirely forbidden. As was the fact that, two months before, a prostate infection had put a catheterized Moodrow in the hospital for several days.

  “Ya know, Stanley,” he finally said, “you gotta stop being so hard on yourself. Last week I got sucker punched by a mutt as I went to put on the cuffs. The asshole turned and hit me before I could react. You know what I did? I beat the living shit out of him. You know what I didn’t do? I didn’t see it as the end of my youth, the loss of my manhood.”

  It was a complete lie and Tilley knew it. He’d gotten drunk after coming off duty, pissed and moaned to his wife, Rose, for days. It was a complete lie, but James Tilley couldn’t think of anything better to say and the sight of Doc Almeda’s needle sliding in and out of Moodrow’s torn flesh was making him queasy. “Stanley,” he asked, glad to change the subject, “don’t you feel that?”

  It was Jose Almeda who responded. “Jus’ a pinch,” he said. “An’ after, you look beautiful again. Like a young girl.” Almeda, short to begin with and shrunken further by a painfully curved spine, was standing on a milk crate. He continued to sew as he spoke. “You tole me you was a fighter, Jim, so you must’a been sewed up once or twice.”

  Tilley took a stick of gum from his shirt pocket, began to unwrap it. “I admit it looks a lot worse than it feels,” he said. He popped the gum into his mouth, began to chew thoughtfully.

  “Mira, Señor Stanley,” Almeda said. “I think you are a crybaby. I would give my sight to jus’ one time put a pendejo li’ that in a garbage can.”

  Moodrow snorted. “I never said things couldn’t get worse.” What he didn’t add was that they were already worse, but that given Jim Tilley’s reception to his first story, he’d decided to save the second for Betty and dinner. “You almost finished, Doc?”

  “I’m go
nna bandage it now. Then you go home, take the penicillin I gave you, an’ stay quiet. You gotta watch out you don’t have a concussion.”

  “Don’t make the bandage too thick, Doc. My girlfriend’s gonna flip as it is.”

  Moodrow watched Lee Tilley, now wrapped in a terry-cloth robe, walk into the trainer’s room. “Christ,” he muttered, “this is gonna be worse than facing Betty.”

  For the better part of two years, he’d been lecturing the boy about fighting on the street. “Sure,” he’d explained, “somebody starts up with you, it feels good to punch him out. I’m even willing to admit that, for the most part, it’s easy, too. Only you can’t live that way, Lee. Self-defense is one thing, but you can’t solve your problems with violence. People who solve their problems with violence never get anywhere in life. It’s like an anchor.”

  “Uncle Stanley, what happened?”

  Moodrow glanced at Tilley, noted the smirk on his friend’s face, knew he’d find no help from that quarter.

  “Would you believe,” he said, “I was attacked by the entire New York chapter of the Hell’s Angels Motorcycle Club?”

  THREE

  “WHAT I HAD TO do was tell Lee the truth, Betty. Which is what I’d already told Jim. I swear, I felt like a complete schmuck.” Moodrow was sitting at a small table in his Fourth Street apartment, toying with the remains of a thoroughly overcooked leg of lamb, a bowl of pearl onions in a muddy cream sauce, and a wrinkled baked potato the size of a boiled egg.

  “How did he take it?” Betty, even as she asked the question, was trying to decide how she was taking it. She was scheduled to depart La Guardia Airport at ten the following morning, her destination Los Angeles and her cousin, Marilyn, badly injured in a freeway accident. What she needed, in her own estimation, was a farewell dinner with her lover of the last six years, quiet (or maybe not so quiet, depending on how many drinks they had before they got down to business) sex, and a decent night’s sleep. Marilyn was her only living relative; the trip would be painful, perhaps devastating.