The Last Kind Words: A Novel

by Tom Piccirilli

  “The kids of criminals tend to stick to their own kind.”

  “He liked to poke the monkeys with a yardstick, remember?”

  I was getting annoyed. I got to my feet and turned to him. “Forget about the monkeys. Listen, do I really need to tell you this? You boost from the fish and from the pros, not from the twitchy fuckers.”

  “He made it too easy, I couldn’t resist.”

  “You should have tried harder. He knows you worked him.”

  “He suspects. He doesn’t know.”

  “A suspicion is all Danny needs,” I said. “He’s still trying to prove himself to his father’s old associates. Taking you out would give him a little of the juice he wants.”

  Mal’s jagged features flattened a little and re-formed into a grin. “He doesn’t have the heart to move against us.”

  “He doesn’t need heart. He just needs to put one of his hitters on it.”

  “None of them are pros either. Most of Big Dan’s guys retired. Besides, we’ve got news vans covering the house all day long. You think they’re going to want that kind of coverage? In a few days Danny will forget about it.”

  “Don’t sell him too short.”

  Mal chuckled. Puffs of smoke drifted from his mouth. “Just short enough? His dealer had a three-card bottom drag and he kept folding the aces back into the deck to feed to himself. Big Dan was a psycho, but at least he always ran an honest game and I played him fair. His son’s a mook who’s already gaining a bad rep. Watch. Some of the other syndicates will come in and pull the Thompson crew apart piece by piece and Danny will wind up getting a cushy captain job in one of the other outfits. Either that or someone will plant one in his ear. He’ll wind up in Shalebrook Lake, floating with the ducks.”

  He was probably right but I didn’t like how easily he brushed the potential trouble aside. He was usually more practical than that, more cagey. He seemed to only be half paying attention, and I wondered if my father was right and early Alzheimer’s was already beginning to grind away at Mal’s memories. Being aware that you were losing your past, your own mind, must be the worst thing in the world.

  JFK broke through the weeds and stood in front of us, panting. I massaged his jowls.

  “You ever see Dale’s boyfriend over at the Fifth?” I asked.

  “That punk? What’s he call himself? Butch Cassidy? Like he never saw the movie? He’s got no idea what happened to Butch and the Kid in Paraguay?”

  “Bolivia.”

  “Yeah, whatever the fuck. He comes and goes, runs errands for the guys. Picking up dry cleaning. Running people in and out to the airport. Nothing major. He doesn’t have the heart for it.”

  “I think he might be stepping up.”

  Mal frowned, tugged his cigar loose. There wasn’t much left of it. I thought I might finally see him light a fresh stogie. “To what?”

  “I’m not sure yet. I met him last night. He offered me a job.”

  “What, a bank? He couldn’t even open a checking account, that one, much less take down a bank.”

  “A jewelry store,” I said.

  “He was just talking out his ass, trying to show off to you.”

  “Maybe. Tell me about Dale.”

  “What kind of question is that?” He stood and the entire log shook. “What do you want to know?”

  “Is she a thief?”

  He held his hands up before him like I’d just pressed a .32 into his ribs. “Hey, hey, come on now, right?”

  “Come on what? Is it a stupid question because I should know the answer is yes or because it’s no?”

  “You know your sister’s not a thief!”

  “How the hell do I know that?”

  “Because your father would never let her go down that road.”

  Clouds began to cover the sun. The wind continued to rise. It whistled through the trees so loudly that JFK perked up and looked to see if someone was calling him. “How about if you save that kind of talk for John Citizen, Mal? What else would she know? What else has she been taught?”

  “She’s a smart girl,” Mal said. “Straight A’s. She’s going to go to college.”

  “How smart? Smart enough to keep out of a big score or smart and capable enough to want in?”

  “Jesus Christ, she’s fifteen!”

  “I know that,” I said. “I want to make sure she’s nowhere near the punk when he goes down.”

  He put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed it as a sign of reassurance, but it just hurt like hell. “I think you and her need to have a real conversation,” he said. “As soon as possible. Today. But don’t brace her.”

  “I won’t.”

  Mal nodded but his mouth tightened. We were uncomfortably close to talking about things that the Rands did not talk about. It was almost enough for me to ask him what he was doing, what his own plans were. Did he ever intend on retiring from the bent life, getting off the grift, or were we all doomed to play the game until we wound up on death row or sitting around watching TV with holes in our heads? Did my father find a way out or was he just dying a different slow death, sitting on the porch drinking his beer, taking care of his family, and bored out of his fucking mind?

  An almost undetectable expression of worry crossed Mal’s craggy face.

  “Have you seen Grey yet?” he asked.

  “No.” I waited, but that seemed to be the end of it. Another storm was building. Living in the desert, I’d forgotten what it had been like to get rained on all the time. JFK crawled under the downed tree limb and poked his nose out from beneath Mal’s ankles and stared at me.

  “Something the matter?” I asked.

  Mal looked foggy, reached into his shirt pocket, and retrieved another stogie butt. He lit it, tucked it into the same corner of his mouth. “I don’t know.”

  A vein on his forehead began to thicken and throb.

  “What is it, Mal?”

  My father had said he’d found his brothers on the back lawn, looking a little lost, almost like they were sleepwalking. Was this the beginning of an episode?

  “Mal?”

  I stepped to him and gripped his elbow, and he snapped away with a tiny fraction of the force he was capable of but I was still pushed aside. He shifted the stogie to the other side of his mouth. “Don’t grab me.”

  “I’m sorry. You just looked a little out of it.”

  “I’m worried.”

  “About what?”

  “I’m getting forgetful. I sleep like shit. I wake up with the sweats and I go sit outside and then I’m suddenly freezing. I lose my way around town. Places I’ve been to ten thousand times and now I’m getting lost. I read road signs out loud to help me remember. I think I might really be losing it like Old Shep.”

  “Mal, people who are going nuts don’t think they’re going nuts.”

  “That’s what they say, but who knows if it’s true?”

  Good point, actually.

  “It’s hard to explain the way I feel sometimes.”

  “Try.”

  He held his enormous hands out before him and plied the air, trying to grab hold of something that had no form. He tried again, clutching at nothing, knuckles cracking. He let out a laugh that made my heart sink, fearing for my own future.

  “Intense dreams. Nightmares.”

  A fierce shiver ran through me. Christ, don’t tell me I was already showing signs of premature senility. Is that what had happened to Collie? Did he feel himself going crazy and just decided to go with it?

  “I’m still sharp with the cards,” Mal said, drawing a deck from his pocket. He did a one-handed quadruple cut and then walked the queen of spades across his knuckles. “I carry a deck with me just so I can see them, shuffle through them, and know that I’ve still got a tour-card draw. That I’m still good at something.”

  “You been to the doctor?” I asked.

  The cards disappeared. “Yeah.”

  “What’s he say?”

  “He’s got me on medication and a
whole health program. Valerian and kava. I drink chamomile tea and have a lot of herbal shit to take. Ginkgo biloba and fish oil. I’m supposed to eat a lot of green leafy vegetables. Me, your father, Grey. All of us. A fucking ton of salad. And your poor mother is always coming up with different healthy dressings for us. Cooking boiled cabbage. Stinks up the whole house. But we eat it. Watching Old Shep, it’s a constant reminder, what we might be like one day.”

  He was telling the truth but not all of it. I could sense his desperation. It was way back there in the hard timbre of his voice and in the way he held his shoulders. The rain came down and we let it fall on us as we stood face-to-face. My white streak of hair hung in my eyes so that I didn’t have to show him my own dread. JFK picked up on my mood and whined. He started back up the trail and we followed along almost reluctantly.

  Now I understood what was really pulling Mal apart. Not simply the fear of what might be happening to him, but the idea that it might soon be time to take measures into his own hands. That’s what he’d been groping for. He was struggling against the consuming terror that if he didn’t time it just right he might actually become too senile to remember to do the job when the time came. We’d never let ourselves turn into Gramp. We’d fight rats for poisoned bait before we let that happen. I knew I would.

  JFK hung his head out the passenger window and barked into the rain as I drove over to the high school. Mal was right—it was time Dale and I had a real conversation.

  There was much more security now than when I’d attended class here. They’d gated the area up and there was a little booth with a semaphore arm blocking the road. I had to give my name and show ID and tell my reason for being there. I said my sister was feeling ill and I was picking her up to take her to the doctor. The security guard didn’t give a shit so long as he got to mark it all down on his clipboard.

  I drove through and parked outside the main set of doors. I didn’t think I’d see Butch’s Chevy around. I hadn’t expected to. He was twenty-one and wouldn’t want to get nabbed on school property with a fifteen-year-old. I was still surprised he’d been introduced to my parents. It seemed like the kind of relationship Dale would want to keep on the sly, but I suspected that Butch had pushed the matter, wanting to show off to my father, the infamous Pinsch Rand.

  Within a few minutes the storm ended and the sun broke through again. A caravan of buses pulled up to the curb in front of the school. They blocked my line of sight. JFK was curled up and napping. I got out of the car, lit a cigarette, and took up position near the flagpole. Taped to it was a flyer stating that following the last period, open auditions were being held for A Streetcar Named Desire. It was a good guess that Dale would be there, so I steeled myself and decided to check out the auditorium.

  The bell went off and the corridors crowded with students and teachers. A din of chatter, lockers banging shut, and running feet filled the place. I was heading upstream and kept getting pressed back by the current, but eventually I got to the auditorium.

  There was a bigger turnout than I’d expected. A lot of jocks milled about in torn T-shirts, trying to ramp themselves up into Stanley-screaming-“Stella” mode. Several girls going out for the Blanche DuBois role had overdone their makeup and set their hair in wild curls. You couldn’t get away from the movie.

  I saw Dale off stage right, practicing lines with some other girl. I couldn’t tell if she was doing Stella or Blanche. A flood of warm pride filled my chest. She looked lovely, assertive, and in command.

  I went to take a seat and noticed someone in back waving at me. I squinted and saw it was my mother.

  “Ma?”

  “Terrier, come sit.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “What do you think? I’m waiting to watch my baby perform onstage.”

  I sat beside her. “It’s an audition.”

  “That’s still a performance.”

  “Does Dale know you’re here?”

  “No, of course not, she’d throw a fit.”

  My mother had come prepared. She had a little pillow for her back and a thermos of hot tea with her. She poured a cup and offered it to me. I shook my head.

  “Prepare yourself,” she said. “It could be a while before she gets called on. It takes forever in the beginning, but then the group thins out pretty quickly after that. The real nervous nellies will turn green and bow out in the first ten minutes. Once they’re gone, the talented kids really let fly.”

  “I can see you’ve attended these before.”

  She beamed. My mother’s smile was infectious. I returned it. “Third one this year.”

  “So how does she do?”

  “She’s amazing. Really quite accomplished. I don’t know where she gets it from.”

  “Grifting is just putting on a show,” I said.

  “She doesn’t grift.”

  “It’s in the blood.”

  My mother made an exasperated noise. “Stop it, you. I just wish she wouldn’t always play the smaller secondary roles. I wish she’d go out for the bigger parts.”

  It had been years since I’d read or watched Streetcar. “Are there any smaller women’s roles in this one?”

  “No, which is why I’m so excited. I think she’s finally going for the lead.” She sipped and stared at me through wisps of steam rising from her tea. “So what brings you here?”

  “I wanted to talk to her about Butch again.”

  We watched the first Stanley take the stage. He muffed his first line and asked if he could start again.

  “So is he real trouble?” my mother asked. “Butch?”

  “Semi-real trouble. You were right.”

  “So I should be worried.”

  “You should relax. She’s smart. She’ll kick him loose soon enough.”

  “And until then?”

  “Until then I’ll make sure nothing happens.”

  She had the presence of mind not to bother smiling. “You’re a good boy.”

  “No, I’m not. That’s why you asked me to check up on him. But if I wasn’t here, the way I hadn’t been for all these years, what would you have done?”

  “Your father would have paid him a visit,” my mother said. “If it was necessary.”

  “Sometimes you scare me, Ma.”

  We watched more kids foul their lines and nail their lines. A couple of them had real potential. Most of them didn’t. A few of them knew it and were just there to have a little fun. The drama-coach-turned-director tried to move them along as quickly as possible. My mother had been right about that too. The group had thinned considerably already.

  Finally it was Dale’s turn. Unlike others, who’d read from their script pages, she’d memorized her lines. She was going out for Blanche. She and one of the Stanleys were doing the impending rape scene. One part of me was glad she wasn’t doing the “I’ve always relied on the kindness of strangers” bit, which several other girls had already covered. She also wasn’t playing Blanche with much of a southern accent. Another smart move, I thought.

  My mother gripped my hand tightly, showing fierce pride. Instead of playing Blanche as a weak-willed naïve woman accidentally pushing the brutish Stanley over the edge, Dale characterized Blanche as a kind of seductress purposefully pushing the guy’s buttons. Even when she defended herself and struggled against him, it seemed only another level of foreplay. When Stanley shouted, “We’ve had this date with each other from the beginning!” and leaped at her, I almost shot to my feet.

  “She’s so good,” Ma said.

  “Yes.”

  “What’s the matter then? Your face is drawn.”

  “Isn’t Streetcar a little … adult for fifteen-year-olds?”

  “Maybe for my generation. But hers?” She packed up her items and stowed them away in her handbag. “I need to run.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t want her to see me. You should go too. She’ll get embarrassed and then overreact, trust me. Just go.”

  “I thin
k I should talk to her.”

  “Okay, but be prepared.” She kissed me on the cheek and went out through the side doors.

  I followed a couple of minutes later. JFK was sitting beneath the flagpole. I’d only closed the window halfway and he’d shrugged himself through. I stood next to him and we waited. Dale and a couple of her friends came out about ten minutes later. I tossed the butt aside and stepped up to my sister.

  She had the same reaction now that she’d had last night. Before she could snap at me, I said, “Relax. No lectures. I just thought I’d pick you up, maybe we could go out for a bite to eat or something. We could talk some more.” Her friends shored up behind her, took her body language as a cue. “Bring your posse along with you if you like. My treat.”

  I watched the irritation drain from her face, replaced by that quaint smile she’d given everyone else. “I don’t think I can today, Terry. We’re all going over to Mary’s to work on a science project together.”

  To their credit, no one broke into a grin, despite the obvious lie. A distant thrum of thunder broke across the sky and gurgled toward us.

  “Hey, Dale, save that shit for Mom and Dad, right?”

  She took a careful breath. “I’m busy, Terry. I’ll see you at home.”

  “I want to talk to you.”

  She wagged her chin toward the auditorium door. “Did you see me in there?”

  “Yes, you were good. Wonderful, really. Did you get the part?”

  “We won’t know until next week.”

  “We can talk about that too.”

  I met Dale’s eyes. I tried to let her see that I wasn’t being pushy for no reason. I wasn’t trying to come down on her. I didn’t mean to be a pain in the ass in front of her clique. JFK barked once. It broke the spell. Dale turned to her friends and told them that she’d meet up with them later on. They gave me disapproving glances and drifted off.

  It started to sprinkle again. I went back and forth from loving the rain to hating it. I lit another cigarette, and before I could put the pack back in my pocket Dale reached in and grabbed one and waited for me to light her up. I did.

  I searched my sister’s face for the little girl I’d recognized last night at the lake. I didn’t see her anymore. She appeared harder to me today, more adult. Maybe she always would, now that I’d seen her turn Blanche DuBois into a wild temptress.