Headstone City

by Tom Piccirilli

  He wanted to visit his parents in Wisewood, but with the gardens dying at the approach of autumn, the scent of rotting roses and carnations eddying through the busted floor vents, he found himself passing the entrance leading to their graves.

  Instead, he took the long way around and drove the GN down the half-mile square between Outlook Park and the rest of Headstone City. It seemed to be the only way he could move through the neighborhood, this direction, every time.

  Staring up at brownstones carved with the faces of the seven deadly sins. Before he'd joined the army he used to see himself in lust. Afterward, more like envy.

  Now it was the hang of sloth's relaxed face that reminded him of his own features, the nearly grinning mouth, the semidazed eyes.

  He had to do something about that too. His list was getting longer. He had to get moving.

  It felt right being back behind a wheel, the thrum of the engine working through his chest. A union of precision between reflex and skill and tuned machinery. As always, he thought about taking it up onto the highway. Imagining the open miles of parkways leading to the Verrazano Bridge, Staten Island, and from there to Jersey and the rest of the world.

  But if he got rolling he might never stop. The urge to run was powerful but futile, and it was always there.

  Coming around the far edge of Wisewood, he turned the corner, passed the gates, and parked in front of his grandmother's house.

  Soon, he hoped, he'd be able to visit his mother and father again. At least on foot. But it wouldn't be for a while yet, and he'd probably never be able to drive it. He was a neurotic bastard, just like Pepe had said. The pattern was too powerful, always drawing him the same way through the neighborhood. No matter how many times he tried it, he always passed up their graves, then had to lie about it later to whoever might ask.

  The heady aroma of fresh-cooked pasta swept over him on the front stoop, and he walked in without knocking. He was home, and with the place came another embedded pattern he would never emerge from.

  “That you?” Grandma Lucia yelled from the kitchen.

  “It's me.”

  Like if it wasn't him somebody else could just say, It's me, and that would be all right too.

  She plodded out into the living room, carrying seventy-eight years of brass and reliability. Thick and stoop-shouldered, but with large, powerful arms that had spent sixteen-hour days toiling in post-WWII sweatshops down in lower Manhattan, scrubbing factory floors. She'd buried her father, her husband, and her son—all police officers who'd died in the line of duty before they hit thirty—and she just kept struggling forward year after year despite the assaults of the world.

  Her presence drew up against him as inflexible as a natural force of the earth, like a thunderstorm. She'd dyed her hair pink and he couldn't stop looking at it. Holy Christ.

  “Where the hell's the cannoli!” she shouted.

  Eyes wide, feeling that tickle of anxiety he always got when Grandma Lucia used that voice. It was about the only thing that could really get to him anymore. “I forgot.”

  “You get so many calls in prison you can't remember me talking to you?”

  Mother Mary, that hair, it was searing his retina. “It's been a busy day.”

  “Fine, they were for you anyway.” She pulled the drapes back and stared at the Buick. “That an '87?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It's garbage. You got it from Morales, didn't you.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What'd you pay?”

  “It's kind of a loaner, but he wanted a grand for it.” Saying it with a quiver of shame, knowing Pepe was his only friend, but the guy had still tried to rob him. “I'm working at Olympic again.”

  “You got ripped off. He probably gave you the shit Long Island run too. Didn't you learn anything in the slam?”

  He thought about it. “No.”

  “Come sit down in the dining room, I made ravioli.”

  There wouldn't be any small talk. There never had been in the Danetello household. You said your piece, told your story, made your point, then shut the hell up. The silence tended to throw visitors off, especially around the holidays. They'd come in and nobody would be talking, and they'd think the family had been fighting.

  Instead, there'd been a precision of conversation. Clipped and sharp, but usually funny. Brutal in the way it carved away the fat and got to the heart of matters. Little laughter when he thought about it, but that didn't mean there'd been bitterness. Or even anger, really. At least not before Ma got sick.

  Dane found that there had always been a strange equilibrium between calm and violence. Or maybe it was just him.

  Grandma cleared her throat, and he could tell she had subjects to broach. Things she needed to get out, but hoping he'd be the one to start.

  It wasn't easy. The house already felt like it was pressing in on him. He could sense the remaining tensions of those who'd lived and died there. Mostly in stillness, but with loud, abandoned thoughts.

  His father, a hard man of imperfect justice. His mother, a mere suggestion that dwelled in the house, unseen but still obvious, often coughing. His grandmother, a Sicilian witchy lady of sorts, a soothsayer who didn't soothe. It was her way. At nine, she'd seen the Virgin Mary in an olive grove outside Messina, in the shadow of Mount Etna. She told her local priest, who had burned her with sulfur for speaking with the devil's tongue. You heard about stuff like that and you understood why she loved chapels but hated churches.

  Since then, she'd had dreams that gave her a glimpse through the thinnest part of the veil. They informed her of what was happening, who might be visiting Dane from the other side. She called it the burden but didn't treat it as such. It had been passed to him like a rock. Now he had to find out how much she already knew.

  Dane still couldn't stop looking at her hair, thinking, Jesus, the hell did she do to herself?

  She noticed him staring and slid a hand over the bangs, primping them. “It's magenta.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Is that right?”

  “Matches my nail polish. You look like you've got something to say.”

  “It just takes a little getting used to.”

  “You shut up.”

  She uncorked a bottle of red wine and poured two glasses. He ate, sipped, and looked around the table at the remaining chairs, empty except for the muscular weight of memory.

  “So, this is what I changed your diapers for?” she said, trying to sound heartbroken but not even coming close.

  “What?”

  “Raised you for? Fed you for all these years? So you could sit and not say a word to me, like I was the DA?”

  “You told me to shut up.”

  “I didn't mean it.”

  “I'm just gathering my thoughts.”

  She pressed a piece of sausage onto his plate, motioned with her fork for him to eat more. “You put that girl out of your mind yet?”

  “It's not about that so much, at the moment,” he admitted.

  “What, then? All the talk about Vincenzo Monticelli coming to put a double tap in your brain”—reaching over to thunk him twice on the head, where the scars lay hidden beneath his hairline, everybody clunking him in the head—“you can forget about it for now. You take it one step at a time, plan it through, then when you start moving you don't stop until it's finished. You can do it.”

  Telling him, pretty much outright, that she expected him to go against the mob and clean house. Take them all out, one way or another. That easy. Come home afterward and she'd have garlic bread waiting.

  She didn't say it without reservation, or fear, or even love. But there was a controlled fervor in her voice, the same kind that had been in his father's voice, often devoid of sentiment. His old man used to put it down on the line, with an acute conviction, and once you figured out what you had to do, no matter what it was, you just went and did it.

  “It's only him and his brother and maybe a little extra muscle,” Grandma continued, spooning more ravioli
onto his plate. “Three or four guys maybe. No more than, say, six. Joey Fresco and Tommy Bartone are the only old-school hitters. Maybe ten guys. You're not going up against the whole family, think of it that way. A dozen, tops.”

  He used to wonder if he could do what she'd done, cleaning factory floors all day long, every day, for years. Raising a kid by herself. His father, just a toddler, told to be quiet, don't move, wait until Mama's done, staying there for sixteen hours with nothing to do. His own father dead on the job, whacked by upper brass because he didn't take enough graft, busting ass and spoiling the take for them. Under investigation, found posthumously guilty, no pension.

  Every time Dane thought he was hard, he just thought about shit like that and realized how listless he truly was. The army hadn't shaken his apathy, and neither had the can. Now she's saying he's gotta go take out the local mob when all he wanted to do was flatten Vinny onto his ass. One nice shot, and then the rest, whatever happened afterward, wouldn't really matter.

  “Vinny's got the edge,” he said.

  “Why? Because he says he can see the future?”

  “He can.”

  Grandma Lucia's hands in the air, like Pepe, like Dane himself. How would they communicate if they ever broke a finger? “That he can walk three different trails and decide which to follow? Go back and forward in time? He can't see anything, Johnny. If he could, you think he'd still be in Headstone City, leading a fading mob family?”

  “Grandma, I've seen him do it.”

  She didn't hear him. “The Monticellis went legit and lost most of the money they made from all the illegal action. What his father earned on trucking hijacks and prostitution, him and that Berto lost on mutual funds and junk bonds.”

  They drank another glass of wine together. Dane had a question he needed to ask, but his grandmother was in a fierce mood. That threw him, made it even harder to keep focus. “Has she ever spoken to you?”

  “Who?”

  He stared at her.

  “Your mother?”

  He hissed air through his teeth, thinking of Ma in the back room, seeing angels, choking on cancer, calling his name.

  “Oh, that other one? Angelina? No.” Shaking her head, the pink curls bobbing left and right. Her voice lost some of its edge and took on a delicate quality. “Sometimes in dreams I hear the two of you talking, but I can't always hear the words. Only that she's giving you a hard time.”

  Dane finished his dinner, picked up his dirty dishes and took them into the kitchen, put them in the sink and poured some soap and ran the hot water tap so the sauce wouldn't crust. When he got back to the table she was having more wine, her cheeks covered with red splotches. It was the histamine in the wine, it made her face turn beet red.

  He asked, “Is my gun still here?”

  “I cleaned it this morning and put it on your bed, wrapped in a clean rag.”

  Some kids had little old grannies who did nothing but go to church and crochet. Vinny's grandmother used to listen to him play the violin and accompany him on the piano.

  Dane's—she's breaking down and oiling a Smith & Wesson .38 with a four-inch barrel, laying it out on his pillow. Overhearing him talking with the dead.

  SEVEN

  With the night came a heavy, abiding fog rising off Long Island Sound.

  The kind that seemed intent on action, wanting to chase Dane down. Throbbing as it coiled against his tires, calling him along the expressway mile by mile. He could race into the heaving clouds and hide his crimes, hunt for the ambitions he'd set aside until no one was looking. This was the living darkness that matched what was locked inside his rib cage.

  Swirling gray threads swallowed the headlights, laid across the road to snare his front end. The nimbus of twin beacons looked like burning souls wandering lost in purgatory, side by side down the road. Maybe him and Vinny, after they'd finally done each other in.

  Dane drove over to the warden's house out in Glen Cove, right on the north shore. He wheeled past million-dollar estates that compelled men of meager salaries into jealous rages and flipped them over the big edge.

  All you had to do was stare up at the third-floor windows, look at the wide expanse of lawn and trees in the yards, the three-car garages, to know why there were guys guzzling whiskey in the local hole in the wall. Their bitterness crawling over them like heat rash, a loaded shotgun in the trunk. It had nothing to do with women or champagne or even money. It was a balance of power.

  Some Wall Street whiz with capped teeth changing the fate of the economy, and you over there with your finger on the trigger.

  The warden's place was huge. One of those new, moderate mansions built to look like some Georgian manor. Maples trimmed so the branches dangled like willows or cypress. Big columns out front, an old-fashioned lantern hanging way above the front door and lighting it the way curators lit Renaissance art in museums.

  Being in charge of ten thousand social and moral rejects had its upside. You couldn't feel pity for a guy who had to work behind bars all day long if he got to come home to this.

  Pulling up at the curb, Dane tuned the radio into a fifties station and sat back. It was his father's music, which rooted him to his blood. His own life might be adrift, but still he was connected to the foundation of his forebears, going back in a line through the years. You had to take what you could get, even if it was only a dead man's stability.

  Propping his fist under his chin, Dane stared at the windshield and remembered what it was like to become one with the glass, and the pain. Advancing through one and into the depths of the other. His scars pulsed. The metal plates warmed.

  Music filled the car and swelled within him, pressing out everything else. His thoughts began to slowly pour away as he settled further into the seat.

  It took a while, but eventually the voices on the radio acquired a different tone and began speaking in languages Dane didn't understand. The music faded until it became nothing but static intermittently broken by distant cries and appeals. Mournful, occasionally frantic.

  Dane shut it off and turned to look through the passenger window, knowing what he would see.

  The warden—Robinson Howards III—naked in the hot-burning light high above his doorstep, coming straight for the car. Skin glistening pale and mottled pink. His gait awkward, like he couldn't get his arms and legs moving together, head lolling. He got in the backseat, reached to close the door but it was already shut. Dane snapped on the interior light and leaned over so the warden could see his face.

  “John Danetello,” Howards said, accepting the situation without question. Then his features contorted, the confusion setting in. “What are you doing here? How did you find my home?”

  “Everybody knows where you live, warden.”

  “What?”

  It was true. The leader of the Aryan Brotherhood had hired a sleazy private eye a year or so ago to track Howards and a few of the guards. Insinuating that the brotherhood was going to knock off a few bulls and the warden himself in a cutthroat show of power. It didn't matter, because the Nazi Lowriders punked out and never did make a move. They spread the home addresses around, hoping the Mexican Mafia or the Black Guerrilla Family would do the deed and they could still take credit for it.

  Dane knew the area pretty well. Some of the Monti associates lived nearby. Years ago, Vinny used to take him out there for big family parties. Vinny would go off to a cabana and screw around with some mob accountant's daughter while Dane sat poolside, wearing sunglasses, maids bringing him pink drinks with lots of fruit in them. He'd watch a hundred people he didn't know swimming, playing croquet in the four-acre backyards, and talking tax shelters.

  Afterward, Vinny would come out with the girl looking a little rattled, and he'd give Dane a wink and grab the foofy drink out of his hand and go, “The fuck is this? Melon balls with tequila? Hey, you're gonna get burned without any sunscreen on, man. You want her to rub you down?” The girl smiling but a touch scared, Vinny's glass-eyed gaze pinning her to a lawn
chair. Her sweaty, mussed hair sticking to the side of her face.

  Howards looked down at himself in the back of the Buick, noticing his shriveled pecker but not feeling the cold. “Why am I here?” he asked.

  “I wanted to talk with you,” Dane said, and pulled away from the curb. He drove slowly along the roads closest to the water.

  “Make an appointment. Have I been hypnotized?”

  “No.”

  “Drugged?”

  “No, warden. We're on a night ride together.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Relax and find out.”

  Dane couldn't get into it too quickly because the warden never allowed anybody else to speak. He'd have to blather on for a while and, after he wore down a little, he'd act like he'd been giving the other guy a chance to talk the whole time, and say, “Well?”

  Stroking his slight trace of beard stubble, Howards stared out at the fog undulating across the Sound, swarming around the car. “It's dark. And I find myself sitting in the back of a GM with you. And I'm most certainly naked. This is quite literally the stuff of nightmares.” It struck him as funny and he let go with a confused smile. “I'm occasionally plagued by dreams of being gang-raped by prisoners.”

  “Put your mind at rest about that,” Dane said.

  “Are you going to kill me, Mr. Danetello?”

  “No.”

  It was the “Mister” that always got to Dane. The guy saying it more like he was a high school principal trying to shake up a kid caught in the hall without a pass. Dane hated and enjoyed it at the same time, in about equal parts, but he wasn't sure why.

  “You're not really here, warden.”

  “I'm not?”

  “No. You're still at home in your bed.”

  “How ridiculous. Your psychiatric examination results showed you were a borderline schizophrenic, but I never saw any evidence of that until now.”

  It actually annoyed Dane, hearing that sort of shit about the psych tests. The cons who talked to the doctors usually fooled them into an early parole, saying how they were cured, they just wanted to give something positive back to society. Then on the morning of their release they went and took out a whole family with a meat cleaver. They go right back into the can and the doctors start flipping through their files trying to figure out where they went wrong.