SALTINO
BOBBY stood over an open hole, slumped in a posture you might naturally associate with mourning or grief. It was an old hole, one previously filled, and his sagging shoulders were actually the result of fatigue from having dug the hole—redug it, albeit using heavy equipment—his head bowed only so that he could look avidly into the hole: he was not mourning and he was experiencing no grief, although there was a body in there. The body was all that remained of what had filled it. The rest, all the dirt, was piled beside it. There was still a body in the hole. Bobby was happy because his expectations were fulfilled.
I knew Bobby for a long time and I can state this with confidence. Bobby was a man whose expectations were met in such simple ways—by his finding things where they belonged, or in the possession of the people with whom they belonged, or, conversely, by his finding them in the wrong place or with the wrong people and thereby confirming his suspicions; for suspicion always was a driving force in the mind of Bobby Argenziano. It was the suspicion of a greedy creature—one hesitates to say a primitive creature, although as you can see I have barely hesitated before going ahead and saying it; the suspicion of a primitive greedy creature who took no measure of his need before going ahead and doing what he deemed necessary to his survival, no matter how excessive it may have been in relation to that need.
Yet, despite everything’s being in its ordered place, even as Bobby’s expectations were met in this instance, his suspicions were aroused as well. How could I be out there in the world if I also was down there, in the hole he dug for me after firing a bullet into the back of my skull? It was a mental adjustment I daresay it would have been difficult for even the most open-minded among you to make, and as for Bobby, let us say that he was not the adaptive type, at least not in that respect. To draw upon the terminology of game theory (a set of concepts with which I had not the slightest familiarity during my lifetime, I regret to say), we might suggest that Bobby viewed human interplay in its essence as a zero-sum game, and one that he, as a constant or serial participant, wanted therefore to win at all costs. And he consequently incurred such costs numerous times, although it might be said of his kind that they can afford them. It might also be said, not inaccurately, that I was of his kind. Most others bear such costs much less lightly than Bobby and his kind, our kind, Bobby’s kind and mine. Most others find the very thought of such costs overly burdensome, and so they shoulder different burdens—burdens of responsibility, burdens of obligation, burdens of duty, burdens of guilt for falling short, burdens that they find it natural or decide to assume. Whereas Bobby and I, and those of our kind, declined to accept such burdens, and accepted instead those costs that to us feel light, or inconsequential. Although I am living proof (as it were) that such costs are in fact high, grievously high.
I wanted to suggest that Bobby did not adapt to conditions that had the effect of changing the nature of the game, especially if such changes made the game more complex than he had bargained for, given the zero-sum outlook he brought to the complexities that are a constitutive part of life. Bobby felt no guilt over my death, felt no responsibility for my life, which was, at the moment of truth, in his hands, and which he took without hesitation, having reckoned that my death was an essential part of his plan. The amount of reassurance that Bobby could derive from the presence of my body in that hole he dug was diminished by the possibility, however remote, that I might be out there—out here. I should note that Bobby was superstitious. He was full of fear. He was no more afraid of the physical body, the corpse, in the hole he dug than he would have been afraid of a side of beef, nor was he afraid of the deserted grove where he stood. But the unknowable did frighten him, as well it should have.
What’s unknowable? Nearly everything is unknowable. The desire of our time is to compile a total inventory, an accounting of all there is to know, but I’ve come to realize that the more data we acquire, particularly about one another and about our soiled behavior—from discreet whispers picked up with long-range microphones to intemperate moments memorialized globally and instantaneously at the touch of a button, from financial records that can be used to triangulate upon a hypothesized truth to graphic videos of compromised flesh that make any need for hypothesis obsolete—the more we discover that the only thing we can ascertain is that we are all capable of the most exquisitely unpredictable behavior. To rely on probability is always to guarantee surprise. Call it the epistemology of intelligence gathering: the future will always, finally, be immune to prediction. But none of that is what Bobby would have referred to as the unknowable. Bobby’s head was filled with the usual jumble. The jettatore, the blazing Catholic hell, the chainsaw-wielding maniac: stories he’d heard that tickle instinct and massage credulity outright. Bobby didn’t even bother taking stock in probability. He stockpiled objects and the means to acquire them. It’s why he committed his crime and it’s what he took solace in afterward, assuring himself of his immunity from judgment. A materialist, basically, like all the rest of you.
The need for my death arose solely from convenience, Bobby’s convenience. I didn’t know anything. I couldn’t have known anything, because I was incapable of suspecting anything of Bobby. Others, yes. Women, I always suspected of ulterior motives and untrue deeds. That was prejudicial. Men with whom I served time in prison. That was necessity. My mother. That was conditioning. (What grief she caused, right up until the end! Bobby himself called to tell her I was missing and even he was shocked by the callousness of her response: as far as the killer was concerned, the mother’s indifference went against nature.) And many other individuals and groups for reasons that ran the gamut from prejudice to necessity, from whimsy to the paranoia to which I was not unsusceptible on some of my more memorable days, having been conditioned to it by the best, by the old woman who still lives and rages, alone and unrepentant in the backwater parishes of Bay Ridge.
But not Bobby, whom I loved and thought of as a brother, a big brother, despite his being younger than I. I would not have suspected, I would not have known, and had I known I would not have betrayed him. And Bobby had to have known that, because, after all, didn’t he know me? But that wasn’t his concern. My death and disappearance were a part of his scheme from the beginning: missing, there was no need to look any further for the money. If I turned up dead, it could be surmised that I had been murdered for it. He left my car on the beach road. He went home.
There was desperation involved, Bobby’s desperation—not, strictly speaking, a mitigating factor, although I might have understood, and forgiven, had I been given the chance to understand or not to, and to forgive or not to, while such things might still have mattered to me. But I wasn’t given that chance. And now that it has stopped mattering to me, now that the question of survival, having been removed from the equation, from my equation, is a matter of indifference to me, I could see that with the money he’d wanted so badly he now lived better than he had—but how much better? Did he sleep better, did he digest his food better, did his body trouble him with fewer aches and pains? Did it heal his diseased heart? It was the acquisition, having the money, that gave him satisfaction; that shored up his defenses against the darkness that always comes with wanting. Things got dark for Bobby when he wasn’t acquiring something, someone.
Unfortunately for Bobby, while he wasn’t a savage, his tastes were underdeveloped. About as far as he got was mastering the menu at Highlands. I mention that only because you’ve seen him there, rehearsing his courtly spiel. It takes effort for a man like Bobby to learn how to passably pronounce “Armagnac,” to learn how to dress, although he never quite lost that look of the bespoke primitive, straining at the seams. Fat Mike, one of our associates at South Richmond, saw him wearing a cashmere golf sweater once and said he looked like someone had shoved a salami into an argyle sock. It was a good joke. We laughed a lot at South Richmond—which is, in case you’ve been wondering, a storefront on Hylan Boulevard in Staten Island. The proverbial empty storefront. Folding ch
airs, card tables, and lots of laughs, nearly all of which would forfeit their humor in translation.
OH, AND WHY don’t I sound the way I did when I was living? Ah, the dialect of the streets. It would certainly be more colorful, more in line with expectations. But—you have to understand—these aren’t words. These are the harmonic thrummings of the music of the spheres, physically imperceptible to human hearing. Except through the intercession of the creator. Make of that what you will.
BOBBY BROUGHT ME to Manitou Sands after I was released from Dannemora. He found me at my mother’s. There I sat, in the front room, looking across at the day care center, the saloon, the storefront MRI clinic, pondering my unsupervised life, if that is an accurate term for the life I was living under my mother’s roof. Well, it is: my mother sought not to supervise me, only to impose her peculiar Weltanschauung upon me and then to turn me loose on the world to see how her ideas, having taken root in me, would burst into flower. At least, that’s how it worked when I was a child. My mother’s special contempt for other human beings—their enthusiasms, their tastes, their ambitions, their beliefs, their appearance, their origins—found its fullest expression in me in the form of antisocial behavior, which was duly punished, of course, frequently by my mother. She talked the talk, as the saying goes, but for the most part kept herself in line, and she could hardly approve publicly of my having demonstrated my faith in her rhetoric by acting upon it. Yes, ultimately she put that much store in appearances, and hated the world all the more for it. I saw freedom on the other side of her lessons, but she herself saw them only as proclamations issuing from her bondage. Odd. I could see her inertia plainly only as an adult, an adult with some sense of what it was to have experienced life. She was inert, noisy but inert. Her tune had not changed at all. You had only to crank her up and she began to sing it.
What sort of freedom? The freedom of not caring.
I am not blaming my mother. My mother did what she had to do; she was at the mercy of forces tracing their spindly route back through the usual multigenerational history of frustration and oppression. All the worst brutality begins across the threshold of home. But she didn’t lay a finger on me, not after I got bigger than she was, which didn’t take long.
And yet there I was in the front room. Days, I would watch the patients on their way into the MRI clinic. Frail people and strong people, people who’d been living with illness for years and people who seemed blindsided by its unannounced arrival. I saw people who’d never left the neighborhood, and were stamped with its stunting imprint, and people who obviously had recently arrived; bought one of the big houses on Colonial Road or Narrows Avenue and, having thus established a beachhead in their lives, thought they were all set for a long campaign. I saw anxious sons, daughters, wives, husbands on the sidewalk outside, smoking, pacing, talking on the phone. The place had a cheery sign; it strove for the mien of a drive-in oil change franchise. Mornings, I would watch the day care center. Nights, the saloon. I waited.
I was never a planner, but to wait is to plan, or it is itself a sort of plan. Actions move us swiftly into the irrevocable, but to wait keeps the irrevocable at a distance. I realize that this attitude defies conventional wisdom, but what had conventional wisdom ever done for me, other than to absorb me into its patterns and rationales (I embodied the cautionary tale)? To learn patience was to remove myself entirely from the story. I reassured myself: when it’s cold out, I’m warm. When it’s wet out, I’m dry. When I’m hungry, I eat. When I want to bathe, there’s hot water. These and similar needs met, the only other thing I needed was the window, and to wait. Who needed to act? I watched the actors; the day care, the bar, and the clinic embodied the entirety of life, framed in that window: in the mornings, they kicked and screamed, at night they behaved like fools, and during the day they came, pale and sweating and full of terror, out of the hammering confinement of the clinic.
Then one day Bobby appeared on the stairs, carrying a white box from the bakery tied with red and white twine. We embraced, we kissed, we sat. Bobby had come up in the world: he didn’t hesitate to tell me what my eyes already had. The jacket, the slacks, the loafers, the watch. The subtle haircut. That he would even know where to go to get his hair cut like that: would you? He’d come up in the world and now, he announced, he was in a position where he could do a favor or two for an old friend in need. In short: Michigan, and Manitou Sands. I left with him within the hour, leaving the unopened pastry box for my mother to remember me by.
I would have sworn that Bobby and I worked closely together, that we were close, had I been asked, but no one would have asked me, because the question would not have occurred to anyone. I was obviously a factotum. I had a title, I had clothes, both of which were intended to stir faint echoes of the title and clothes Bobby possessed, as my specific responsibilities were intended to stir the faint echo of the authority Bobby wielded. Certainly I was feared, but I was not respected, and never in my natural life was I able to tell the difference. I fetched things, stood off to one side, carried money, beat people with my hands and feet when asked. I would have been happy to spend my life that way. Each day, the same as the last. There was nothing beyond Michigan and Bobby: nothing bigger, nothing waiting, nothing to come, nothing to catch up with me. So it seemed.
Yet the present is always the secret encampment of unintended consequences. Sedate as a neutered tomcat, it never occurred to me to rue the day, as the saying has it. Yet to rue the day doesn’t begin to cover it. One would have to rue every day, every one that came before and every new one as it arrives and all those to come in anticipation. Only in death is there time to rue life as fully as life deserves. But I get ahead of myself.
OUR MONEY CAME from two streams. The original of the two was a laundry operation. Money from illegal sources was painstakingly changed into legal winnings. This took time, and patience, and it was not ideal, since the winnings were subject to taxation. Naturally, the government’s lawful share was found, on the scale of dreams, to be disproportionate. Whose dreams? What dreams? Dreams of capital flowing unfettered, unimpeded, from its dreamy sources to the parched and dreamy basins it filled and brought to blossom. The everyday dreams of people everywhere. Does taxation ever find a place in those dreams? Does even the most liberal of minds, in its uninhibited moments, dream of higher taxes? These are rhetorical questions. And there were other, unofficial tariffs; doubtless you can easily imagine all the ways in which various officials were induced to turn a somewhat myopic eye to our activities. It was Bobby’s job now to increase our margin. His solution was simple: he began to make money disappear during the minuscule interval when it has stopped existing. There is always an instant, as money changes hands, when it slips into limbo. It nearly always reappears, recognizable though slightly redefined—mostly in terms of whose property it has become—but its bardo is a moment of opportunity for those who know how to enter it. Why should Bobby and I have been afraid of the space between money’s death and rebirth? The sanctity of property rights, of generally accepted accounting principles? We’d killed people; laughed at the concept of the immortal soul. This was nothing. It was a coin trick.
Yet what I felt when I went into the cage was that it was I who made the money take form—I made gestures, I spoke words, and the money was suddenly there, body and blood. And with that miracle in my mind, I toted it back to New York, puffed up as any magician. To spend it, to steal it—that never entered my mind, not once. Not only because it would have been impossible for me to be disloyal to Bobby, but because it was pleasure enough to have created the money, to have brought it out of the shadows of its liminal existence. But Bobby didn’t see it this way. As far as he was concerned, the money was always money, as good as what it could buy. It belonged to no one, it belonged to luck, it passed into and out of various hands, and to put it in the hands of South Richmond Consultants, to call it theirs, suited Bobby, at first. Everyone was satisfied, even the Indians. Bobby’s suits, his car, his privileges at th
e hotel, improved, as did mine in their faint echo of his.
IT MAY INTEREST you to learn that Indians, Native Americans, have a long and rich history of gambling, and that, contrary to certain strands of received wisdom, the advent of casinos on Indian land and under Indian management and supervision is hardly another unwelcome instance of outside culture intruding upon and perverting Native American ways. Games of chance, guessing games, games involving hoops, sticks, bones, dice—fortunes, almost necessarily consisting of the most personal of belongings, including wives and children, were lost to these games; Indian folklore relates numerous tales in which bereft losers, men down on their luck, as the saying has it, seek out or benefit from supernatural intervention in order to recover these lost chattels. And, often, more: that’s the familiar element to these stories, the one that resonates with the contemporary sensibility: the winners want more; that famous and apocryphal Indian who wants for nothing because he only takes what is enough, who gives according to his abilities and receives according to his needs, is nowhere to be found in these authentic tales of being human. All this and more, the Indian says, having regained his beloved wife, his daughter: he takes the other man’s wife, even though he thinks she’s ugly, he takes the other man’s daughter and puts her to work, he takes his saddle horse and hides and baskets and beads and shells; the Indian’s supernal virtue is absent from these stories, if it ever was there to begin with. In them, the Indian stands forth as human: an appetite, a desire for intoxication of all kinds, an erect penis. Only a nation Puritan to its very roots could, once the living threat at the edges of its settlements had been vanquished and pacified, cast that threat in its own image: the Puritan Indian, the self-denying Indian, the Indian who happily goes without is America’s first great literary invention, one never to be topped.
The Fugitives Page 29