“My father now,” I told her, “he’s Sicilian.”
“What do you mean, ‘my father now’?” She stopped walking. “Isn’t he your real father?”
“You know, it’s very rude asking questions like that. Something could happen if you ask too many questions.”
“Oh, I am so scared.” She opened her eyes wide.
“I mean, how would you like it if I started asking questions like that?”
“Go ahead.” She opened her arms and the wind riffled through the light hair in her armpits. “Ask away. I’ve got nothing to hide.”
“All right,” I said, seeing that she was trying to provoke me anyway. “How did you know a blow job cost twenty-five dollars when we were talking about it before?”
“Because I used to be a hooker,” she told me matter-of-factly.
I just looked out at the ocean. A tide was sweeping over the beach like a strong white arm.
“Whooaa,” I said.
“Are you surprised?”
“Well, shit.”
“It was just for a little while.” She joined me at the steel railing. “And I do not have AIDS, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’ve been tested.”
“Yeah, but how’d you end up doing a thing like that in the first place? I mean, you don’t seem like a skeezer.”
She sighed and brushed back her dyed-blond hair. “You know, you fall into these things a little bit at a time. I think a lot of it had to do with my second kid.”
Now I was really confused. She’d only shown me the picture of one little girl. “Who was your second kid?”
“The one that didn’t make it.” Her lower lip came up like a gate protecting the rest of her face. “She was born too soon. I always used to blame my husband, Bingo, because he was a heroin addict, but I wasn’t really taking care of myself in those days either. We were going to call her Melissa. Anyway, we were waiting in the hospital four days after she was born to see if she’d make it. She was a preemie and she had some terrible blood infection, you know.”
She sniffed. “I used to go to N.I.C.U. and look at her under the bilirubin lights with all those tubes running in and out of her.” She paused. “She was so little and helpless in that little glass box. It was hard to believe she was real. And I remember this sign up on the wall: BABIES ARE GOD’S WAY OF EXPRESSING HIS OPINION THAT THE WORLD SHOULD GO ON. So I made a deal with God. That if he let her live, I’d make my life over and be good all the time.”
Her jaw got tight. “And then he let her die,” she said quietly.
It was scary watching her talk about it, because she didn’t do anything dramatic like start to cry or put her face in her hands. She just stood there, with her body getting more and more tense, from trying to keep it all inside. It was like watching someone tear themselves apart without moving a muscle.
“So after that, I said fuck it.” She gripped the steel railing. “I couldn’t kill myself or let my life go all to hell, because I already had Kimmy to look after. So I just decided I’d do whatever I had to to get by and be there for her, but I just wouldn’t feel anything about it. And after that, you’ll put up with anything. I mean, if you can stand having a junkie for a husband, it’s not that far to turning tricks to support his habit and feed your kid.”
“I guess it isn’t if you don’t give a shit about anything,” I told her.
She forced herself to smile. “You know what’s funny? I used to have a whole other idea about how my life would turn out. I had all these aspirations. I thought I could be an actress or a teacher. Something where I’d get to perform. For a while, I even thought about becoming a hand and foot model, so I could be in one of those J.C. Penney catalogs.”
She had very nice hands. I hadn’t really noticed her feet.
“So do you do that anymore?” I asked. “Turning tricks, I mean.”
“No.” She frowned. “But don’t think there aren’t still people asking. The night after you stopped by, I had a guy offer me five hundred dollars to sleep with him.”
“No shit,” I said. “Who was he? A lawyer?”
“Uh-uh.” She bent her left knee and her high heel dangled off the end of her foot. “He was a fighter. I figured you might know him. His name was Terrence something.”
“Terrence Mulvehill!” My heart jumped like a fish on a line. “That’s the guy. That’s the champ. I’m trying to set it up so my guy Elijah will fight him.”
“Whatever.” Rosemary pursed her lips. “He was very nice about it when I said I wouldn’t sleep with him. And he tipped me a hundred and fifty bucks because I danced for him.”
“He gave one-fifty just to watch you dance?!” It was the first thing she’d said that I didn’t believe.
“Some people consider it an art form.”
When I started to laugh, she scowled. “Do not go judging me, Mr. Mafia. I see you’re here with me and you’ve still got a wedding band on.”
I stuck my left hand in my pocket. For all the fighting we’d done lately, I still wanted to do right by Carla and the kids. But our marriage was killing me. If things stayed the same, I’d not only never leave Atlantic City, I’d probably end up going to jail because of something her uncle got me involved in.
In the meantime, Rosemary was patting my hand on the Boardwalk railing. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to snap at you. Like I said before, none of us have lived a perfect life.”
That was what I liked about Rosemary. She’d been places. She wasn’t going to just dry up and waste the rest of her life in some obscure corner.
“Hey, I don’t even mind that you’re in the Mafia,” she said. “I could probably use the muscle sometime, being a single mother and all. ..”
“I already told you I’m not in the mob.” Though it was a hard argument to make after she’d seen the talk I’d had with Nicky.
“All right, have it your way,” she said with that crooked smile. “I wouldn’t mind it if you weren’t in the Mafia either. I think a lot of those guys are faggots anyway. The way they’re always kissing each other and worrying about their hair and nails.”
I looked down at her hand resting next to mine on the Boardwalk railing. It was a gorgeous hand, as smooth and white as marble. I could see why someone might use it in a catalog. I decided that if she didn’t move it in a couple of seconds, I’d stay.
“So are you a faggot?” she asked.
“What do you think?”
She looked at the top of my head. “I don’t know,” she said, keeping her hand where it was. “You got pretty nice hair.”
I took her by the shoulders and mashed my mouth into hers. When she started to resist, I used the weight of my body to push her up against the Boardwalk railing.
Then all of a sudden she wasn’t resisting anymore. I felt her grabbing hold of me. It’d been years since Carla held me like that. I’d gotten used to her just lying there, barely tolerating the things I tried to do. But Rosemary was different. She put her tongue right in my mouth, like she knew just what she wanted. Other guys in the Family said they didn’t like it when women got too aggressive, but here I was with maybe the biggest hard-on of my life and we were only just getting started.
The thing had a mind of its own. She reached down to touch it and I heard her moan a little. It felt as though I was holding a club between my legs. I wasn’t sure how I was going to go waddling down the Boardwalk with the front of my pants sticking out when it came time to go back to the car.
“Still scared?” she murmured.
“No, but I guess you are, you keep asking.”
Her eyes lit up and she did something that truly surprised me. She spit on her hand and reached under her skirt, so I could see she wasn’t wearing any underwear.
She touched herself as nonchalantly as a garage mechanic changing a tire. That should’ve sent me running home, but it didn’t. Blood was pumping straight from my heart to my cock.
Before I knew it, she had my zipper down and her skirt up. “Who’s scared now?�
� she was asking in a tranced-out voice. “Who’s scared now?”
She was crazy, I realized, as crazy as my father or any of the other hit men I’d known. But before I could say anything about it, she had my cock in her hand and she was guiding it quickly and easily into her. More easily than it ever went into Carla in eight years of marriage. This was different. My cock seemed to go right into the deepest part of Rosemary right away. She felt incredibly hot inside. Not just warm, but blazing like she had a boiler going. It made me think of the oath made members of the Family take: “May I burn like the saints in the fires of hell should I ever betray my friends.”
She turned me around and straddled me, so she faced the ocean and her legs hooked through the middle railing. Then she started grinding down on me. If anybody who knew Teddy or my wife saw me doing this on the Boardwalk I’d be a dead man, for sure. But the thought of death just made me fuck harder.
A seagull’s cry merged with Rosemary’s voice, asking me to give her more. If I wasn’t careful I was going to come too soon, so I tried thinking about other things.
Coffee grounds in a white garbage bag. Ice hockey. My wife’s couch in the living room. Nose hair. The way Nicky looked at me. My son’s Ninja Turtles. Smell Michelangelo.
Rosemary licked my ear and I picked her up and turned her the other way, so now I was the one facing the ocean. Thick foamy waves pounded into the shore. I looked down the Boardwalk to where the amusement pier was still going strong. I could see the green-and-yellow neon of the Ferris wheel and the switchbacks forming bold patterns against the stark black sky.
It wasn’t doing any good. Rosemary’s pussy kept getting hotter and wetter. Her voice was crying out like she was starting to come. The seagulls screeched back at her. She dug her nails through the back of my pants and into the cheeks of my ass as she drew me on and on. I felt the juice creeping up toward the tip of my cock like mercury rising in a thermometer.
“Please,” said Rosemary. “Please don’t stop.”
I exploded inside of her. The first shot was like a cannon blast, but the second was just as strong. The third didn’t have quite as much force, but the payload was just as big. And so it went with Rosemary holding on for dear life, until I was just spent and hollow.
Over her shoulder, I watched the waves roll away from the shore, carrying the sand and empty Budweiser cans out to the sea and the rest of the world.
Then I closed my eyes and my wife Carla’s face came to me, with her sad eyes and her full disappointed lips. And when I thought about her I felt an overwhelming sadness that made me want to fall to my knees and cry.
Not just because I’d let her down or betrayed her, but because after all this time and all these years, I finally knew what I’d been missing.
19
MOST PEOPLE DON’T KNOW it, but being aroundconcrete can be a very sensual experience. Watching it pour slowly down the chute. Sloshing around in it in your rubber boots. Feeling it settle. Hearing the whine of the trucks. Most mob guys only get involved in construction so they can show a legitimate source for their income, but I actually liked the work itself. There was just something satisfying about beginning a job and seeing it through to the end.
It also took my mind off all the trouble I had brewing. After the threat from Nicky, I’d had to move Carla and the kids over to her mother’s house until I figured out how to protect them. Then there was Rosemary. My thoughts kept coming back to her body like it was the melody of a song. I didn’t want to be the kind of bum who ran out on his wife, but I knew I belonged with somebody else. And on top of all that, I still hadn’t raised the money to get Elijah into the fight game.
For the moment, though, I was in some lady’s yard, installing steps from her driveway to her front door. I had my truck and four Puerto Ricans mixing cement, sand and water on the sidewalk with their shovels. Everything was going just fine until Vin came up behind me and scared me half to death.
“What the fuck?” I said, jumping back a little. “How the hell did you find me?”
“Richie had the address on a bill at the office. You know, you oughta get a beeper. Give us a way to find you.”
“Yeah, that’s all I need. First job I get in a month, you’re out here, bothering me. The lady inside sees you, she’s gonna think she’s paying for an extra man.”
In fact, she already looked like she was having a fit. Tall redhead in a New Jersey Giants jersey. She’d been standing at the screen door watching us all morning, as if we weren’t trustworthy.
I went back to stirring the soapy-looking concrete in my wheelbarrow as my father stood there looking over my shoulder.
“You sure you got enough sand in there?” he said. “You know that’s the most important thing.”
“Ah, what do you know about it? Sand isn’t the most important thing. It’s the aggregate. You got to have the right mixture of big rocks and little rocks. That’s what you don’t understand. It’s having the right balance that makes it work. Just like the casino business.”
“Wha?”
“It’s like a casino,” I said, taking off my bandana and wiping my brow with it. “If you read that article I showed you about Dan Bishop, you’d understand. You don’t make all your money off your high rollers or your slot players. What you need is a mix of the high, low, and middle.”
My father glanced over his shoulder at the lady of the house, still watching us from the screen door thirty yards away.
“Women,” he said. “I think they’re all getting too much power.”
“Just don’t blow this job for me.”
“Let me tell you something.” He spat on the grass. “You went with Teddy full-time you wouldn’t have to work like this in the first place.”
I noticed he had a brown paper bag in his hands and he was balling it up nervously.
I tipped the wheelbarrow a little and wiped my palms on the sides of my jeans. “How many times do I have to explain this to you? I don’t want anything to do with the crew.”
He wasn’t listening. He was staring at the screen door. He gripped the brown paper bag with all his might and thrust it into my hands.
“Here, take this fuckin’ thing already,” he said.
The unmistakable weight of a gun went right from my hand to the pit of my stomach.
“What’s this?”
“It’s for Larry’s son Nicholas,” he told me.
I started feeling a little dizzy.
“I’ve got nothing to do with him.” I twisted the top of the bag into a paper swirl and looked for a place to drop it. “Why’re you giving me this?”
“He thinks you did his father,” my old man explained, running his fingers through his shock of gray hair and taking a half-done cigar out of his pocket.
I rested my butt against the side of the wheelbarrow and tried not to slide in. Something behind my eyes was starting to swell. “Why’s he think a thing like that?”
“I dunno.” My father lit the half cigar. A couple of embers fell and clung to his polo shirt. “People get ideas. Teddy wants you to go with Richie, take care of it.”
I looked up at the overcast sky and the fading sun as though there was someone up there I could appeal to. “But this was your deal all the way. I’m not even part of the Family.”
My father looked somber. “Teddy wants to see you do some work.”
“So what? If Teddy wanted me to chew glass, would I have to do that too?”
All my life I’d been trying to get away from that fat fuck, and here he was coming after me again.
“Why can’t you just see the man is an asshole?” I asked my father. “He’s dragging both of us down into the mud.”
“He is not an asshole! If it wasn’t for him I’d still be boosting cars off the street in South Philly.”
“And what’re you doing now?!” I almost shouted. “You say that like your life is so wonderful now! Don’t you see it?! This whole way of life doesn’t mean anything anymore. It’s for the museums and histor
y books!”
“It means nothing, ha?!”
My father suddenly grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and pulled my head down. “Come here, you little motherfucker,” he said, ripping his shirt open with his free hand. “Look at these, look at these.”
Through the thickets of gray matted hair on his chest, I could see at least three bullet scars, not counting the nick onhis shoulder from Larry, and countless stab wounds. I looked up at the knobs and ridges on his face.
“Does this mean nothing?!” he demanded. “Is this for the history books? I took ten bullets and lived. I been stabbed by more cocksuckers than you ever shook hands with. I did five years in Graterford. And you’re trying to tell me it don’t mean anything?”
“That’s not what I said.”
“I’ve lived and I’ll die to keep this way of life.”
He stood back from me and banged his hands together, grabbing air and expelling it hard like an old steam engine.
“I never asked much from you,” he said. “I never expected your love. And if you don’t wanna follow my footsteps in the borgata, I guess that’s all right too. I’ll have to learn to live with that.” He paused and took another deep breath. “All I ask of you is that you be a man among men.”
A man among men. He might as well have struck a gong between my ears. Yes, that was what I wanted. To be a man among men. My father was like an old ape beating his chest and bellowing at the sky. He had this brutal churning force going inside of him and he was trying to pass it on to me. And the truth was that deep down I wanted it too.
The lady of the house was still gaping at us from the screen door. My father’s shirt was open and my jeans were falling down. We straightened out quickly and both started laughing like it was some big joke. She must’ve thought we were both crazy.
My father buttoned his shirt and got a long brown Ace comb out of the back pocket of his chinos. “Now Nicky has gone around making threats against the family,” he said quietly, trying again to tame his hair. “Your family. As a man, you know what you have to do.”
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