“You and me after this is all over, bitch,” he’d said. “We gotta go another round in the sack.”
61
JOEY SNAILS BROUGHT THE car to a full stop right outside Anthony’s house on Texas Avenue. There was a roll and a thump in the trunk and Teddy, sitting on the passenger’s side, gave a look back. Then he reached around to unlock the back door and Richie Amato, who’d been waiting for them on the sidewalk, got in.
“I can’t believe you whacked Vin,” he said in a dazed voice.
“I can’t believe I carried the body downstairs by myself,” Joey Snails whined.
“Will youse two shut up?” Teddy admonished them. “You sound like a couple of Girl Scouts, for fuck’s sake.”
“Yeah, but this was Vin!” Richie protested, sliding in behind Teddy. “He lived and died for you, Ted.”
“He hadda go,” Teddy said numbly. “He kept sticking up for that mutt. Hadda go. It was the only way.”
He sounded like he was trying to convince himself as much as the two younger men. A couple of brown leaves fell from the trees overhead and brushed the windshield. The three of them fell silent for a minute.
“You shouldn’t have done it,” Richie murmured. “The old man was the best thing that ever happened to you.”
“Oh, what are you?” Teddy turned around. “You gonna be a rebel too? Am I gonna have to discipline you, Richie?”
“No,” Richie pouted.
“All right.” Teddy faced front again. He let out a deep breath and sagged back in his seat.
The downstairs lights in Anthony’s house were still on. Through one of the front bay windows, Carla could be seen putting the kids to sleep.
“I think I’m gonna go inside and sit with my niece awhile,” he said in a weary voice.
He looked back at the trunk. “You all right to take care of this thing?” he asked Joey and Richie.
“Yeah, I guess.” Richie swallowed hard. He still seemed to be in a state of shock.
“Come back later to pick me up, after you get rid of him,” said Teddy. He was on automatic pilot too. His instructions were without thought or inflection. He rolled down the window and spit in the gutter. Then he put his hand over his stomach as if the effort had cost him too much.
“What if Anthony comes back here?” Richie tried stretching his arms, but wound up punching the car’s ceiling.
“He probably ain’t coming back until this fight’s over. And if he does come back, he’ll have Tommy Sick with him.”
“And what happens if he don’t have Tommy with him?”
A car swept by and its headlights shone in the rearview mirror. Teddy barely recognized his own eyes, looking small and furtive.
“You shoot him right in the face, so there’s no question,” he said, feebly making the sign of the gun with his hand. “Don’t worry about him giving you any problems. He ain’t half the man his father was.”
62
“THREE MORE MINUTES, CHAMP, and you got ’im,” said John B. “Three more minutes and you got it won.”
Elijah turned on the stool to face his brother. His eyelids were so swollen they looked like pursed lips.
“Three minutes,” his brother repeated above the crowd’s ceaseless noise.
“That bullshit,” Elijah somehow managed to say through a grotesquely swollen jaw. “I gotta knock him out.”
John B. shook his head and squeezed another wet sponge over his brother. “Say, you better not talk so much, bro. You liable to hurt your jaw some more.”
It didn’t matter, P.F. thought as he came up the steps to the ring, using his security badge to get access. For the last five rounds, Elijah had taken a relentless pounding, interrupted only by the occasional low blow he’d dealt Terrence. Even if his jaw wasn’t actually broken, he’d been behind on points most of the night, and as he prepared to go out for the twelfth and final round, it was obvious he’d need months of reconstructive surgery.
He stood slowly, as if he was reconsidering how he’d spent the last forty-three years.
The crowd’s din, merely deafening before, approached a new unbearable pitch for the last stage of the slaughter.
“You can still quit,” John B. told his brother just before the bell.
Elijah didn’t bother looking back. He staggered forward and touched gloves with his opponent one last time.
Terrence began the round the way he’d ended the last one, trying to unhinge Elijah’s jaw from the rest of his face.
Only this time there was a difference. Elijah was talking to him, taunting him, challenging him.
At first, all P.F. could see was the jaw opening and closing slightly. But as the fighters moved nearer to his corner, he began to catch a few of the words.
“You ain’t nothin’,” Elijah somehow growled in a muddy, distorted voice.
Terrence, breathing heavily, with the first-round cut closed above his eye, reared back and hit Elijah with a jab that would’ve put the lights out in a pinball machine.
But Elijah merely bounced into the corner above P.F. and the others. “You ain’t hurt me yet,” P.F. heard him mutter.
Whomp. “Fuck you,” said Terrence, hitting him with the jab again.
Knowing ringside microphones would pick up anything they said, the fighters began to talk more and punch less.
“You a pussy, Terry,” said Elijah, miming the part of a punch-drunk fighter with wobbly knees, getting a laugh out of the crowd.
Terrence came back with a furious left hook. Elijah deflected it with both gloves.
By all rights, he should have been down four rounds ago, P.F. thought. It was only a thin membrane of humanity that kept him standing. And P.F. wished that in his own moments of weakness he’d had a fraction of Elijah’s fortitude.
“Shut up, old man,” Terrence said. His uppercut caught the tip of Elijah’s nose and seemed to drive the bone a little closer to the brain.
Elijah turned his head just enough for P.F. to see he was smiling through the blood. Maybe a demented reflex.
“Who you think you fighting?!!” he glowered at Terrence. “What’s my name?”
WHOMP. The jab tore into bone and nose cartilage again.
“Ah, that ain’t nothing. What’s my name?”
Whomp. A body shot drilled into Elijah’s right kidney.
“WHAT’S MY NAME?!”
Whomp! Terrence opened up and hit Elijah with the right cross again, but the old fighter countered with a left hook that drove the kid out into the middle of the ring. The crowd was on its feet.
“WHAT’S MY NAME, MOTHERFUCKER??!!”
By now they’d both abandoned any semblance of defense or strategy. They were standing head-to-head, trading blows, like beasts battling in a primordial swamp. Each shot went straight to the head, a brandished club finding its target each time. The crowd was caught up in the blood mania, its sound ricocheting off the walls and filling P.F.’s ears, like voices coming from inside his own head. Terrence clapped Elijah on the ear with a muffled right hand. Elijah punished him with a driving left under the chin. Terrence countered with a twisting right to the midsection. Elijah mashed the kid’s eye socket with a left and a halo of sweat exploded from the back of Terrence’s head.
“THAT’S WHO I AM! THAT’S WHO I AM!” Elijah kept saying every time he hit him. “THAT’S WHO I AM!!!”
And just when it seemed they’d finally exhausted themselves and couldn’t go any further, the bell rang.
Elijah immediately began to drop where he stood. Whatever spirit had been animating his body was now gone. His brother John rushed forward and caught him in his arms just before he hit the canvas. P.F. never had a chance to help him. Though he weighed less than his brother by some thirty pounds, John hoisted Elijah onto his shoulder and as tenderly as a mother holding a child he began to carry him back to his stool in the corner. As he turned, P.F. could see John crying uncontrollably as Elijah hung limply over him.
Above the cresting roar of the crowd, he could
hear John’s voice saying, “I love you, my brother. I love you.”
63
AS SOON AS THE final bell sounded, I was on my feet, trying to shove my way through the crowd so I could stand beside my fighter in the ring. For years I’d thought someone like Frank Diamond or Dan Bishop would show me how to rise above and act like a man among men. But it was Elijah who’d done it. All I wanted at that moment was to shake his hand.
But as I began to climb the steps to the ring, I happened to glance over my shoulder and see Tommy Sick coming up the aisle toward me. I pictured him working me over with an acetylene torch and giggling, “I’m sick! I’m sick!” At the last possible second, though, a security guard grabbed him and started to escort him out.
I hoisted myself through the ropes and went looking for Elijah. The inside of the ring was like a slaughterhouse. Blood was splattered on the blue beer-company emblem in the middle of the mat. The rest of the canvas was still slick from whatever other juices Elijah and Terrence had spilled.
Now all the celebrities and VIPs came flooding in. It was like a billowing yeast of people. Here was the junk bond king, there was the movie star. I found myself pressed up against a United States senator from the West Coast. We were all hemmed in together like cattle in a small pen. And for a split second, I felt like I finally belonged. Because of Elijah, I’d been elevated into the company of winners. We weren’t going to get the decision tonight, but the fact that he’d gone the distance was enough. Frank would have to give us a rematch and money for the options. I was finally respectable.
I caught a glimpse of Elijah and John B. through the crash of bodies and began moving toward them. There were twice as many people as there should have been in the ring. Reporters, high rollers, board chairmen, and various other hustlers and con artists. Their dry, pampered smell was already drowning out the sweat that came off the fighters.
The microphone began to descend from the ceiling as I tried to squeeze between Sam Wolkowitz the cable TV guy and Eddie Suarez, the bagman for the boxing federation. I saw John B. still hugging Elijah and trying to pull the robe over his shoulders. I heaved myself toward them as a voice to the side of me asked to see what kind of access badge I was wearing. I turned and saw a security guard with huge pockmarks on his face. In the confusion, I’d lost the badge, but screw him. I’d earned the right to be here. When he reached for my shoulder, I gave him a shove and kept moving forward.
And then I got hit.
I never saw the guard frown or even draw back his fist. He just walloped me. The punch caught the right side of my head and rattled my brains. I went reeling sideways and fell against the senator. He stepped neatly out of the way, and I hit the floor hard, landing on the back of my head. For a few seconds I blacked out. When I came to, I was staring up at the colored lights and florid faces. I felt like I’d been shattered into a thousand pieces and put back together the wrong way.
Someone grabbed me by the arms and someone else got my legs and before I knew it, I was being carried out of the ring. They deposited me on one of the ringside press tables. I lay there stunned and paralyzed, like a deer strapped to the top of a station wagon, while the ring announcer read the judges’ scores and shouted: “THE WINNER AND STILL CHAMPION TERRENCE THE MONSTER MULVEHILL!!”
The crowd’s cheers made the blood swirl in my brain. I closed my eyes again. It could have been for two minutes, it could’ve been ten. I was vaguely aware of hundreds of people climbing over me, and occasionally treading lightly on a limb.
By the time I opened my eyes again, the arena was mostly empty. There were already maintenance men in orange uniforms sweeping up. It was as if the circus had just left town. I struggled to sit up and figure out how to use the rest of my body again. Everything seemed strange and unfamiliar. I looked at my hands, trying to remember what time I’d said I’d meet Frank in the dressing room to get the rest of the money. All I could think of, though, was Vin holding out his arms and saying “I been your father” on the Boardwalk. But that was part of another life. I couldn’t go back to that anymore.
The clock above the ring said it was ten to midnight. An old black janitor with a face as withered and sad as the fall leaves outside was mopping the canvas. I got slowly to my feet and looked around for the red exit sign that would lead back to the dressing rooms.
64
“HOW IS THAT?” said Teddy, looking at his niece’sswollen belly.
“How is it?” Carla took the teakettle off the stove and tapped her foot. “I’m fed up, that’s how it is. It’s almost two weeks to my due date, I feel like I’m about to burst, I’m thirsty and tired all the time, and I have to go to the bathroom every five minutes. Now I think I’m getting hemorrhoids. I want this thing out of me.”
Teddy was half reclining on the Spartz couch. He closed his eyes as if he had to concentrate to get the air in and out of his body.
“I’m thirsty all the time too,” he said with a shrug. “But I ain’t having any baby.”
“Fine.” Carla poured him a cup. “You wanna trade places?”
“You wouldn’t want to be where I am.”
It was just midnight and they were both watching the door. Richie would be back at any minute. After that would come Anthony, if Tommy Sick hadn’t taken care of him. Wind blew against the windows and crazed the leaves on the trees outside.
“It must be something,” he said. “Carrying around a life inside you. Taking a life, it’s nothing. It’s bullshit. Any moron can pull a trigger.”
That gurgling sound came again from down in his throat and that deep pain squeezed his guts again. “Jesus.” He sat up on the couch and waited for it to pass.
“You want I should call a doctor?”
“Nah, fuck it. It’s all right.” He put his head back on a cushion.
Then suddenly he propped himself up on his elbow and examined the couch. “Hey,” he said, stroking the fabric. “Where did this come from?”
“Oh.” Carla regarded him absently and went to the kitchen to get herself a glass of water. “I bought it from Spartz, the furniture store.”
Teddy’s mind flushed red with rage as the medication made the sweat pop out of him again. All the things he’d provided for these two and this lousy Anthony couldn’t even buy a couch for them. He was too busy ratting them out to the feds and making money he should’ve been sharing with Teddy. It was worse than a disgrace, it was an infamia. Teddy had a mind to go wait for him on the sidewalk. To deliver a good beating, slamming Anthony’s head in a car door until he fell lifelessly into the gutter. But the wide ache radiating down his sphincter and up his dick reminded him that he barely had the strength to close his own belt buckle. He’d leave all the heavy lifting to Richie and Tommy.
What was it that black kid Terrence kept saying before the fight? Old man, old man. “Old man oughta stay in the old man home.” The words echoed in Teddy’s mind and he knew all at once, he was going to die. He would go through with the radiation and maybe even the chemotherapy, but the cancer would kill him, no matter what the doctor said. Terror seized his heart and shriveled his lungs.
Suddenly he didn’t want to leave this life. It was too soon. What did he have to show for himself? There was no son to inherit what little wealth and respect he’d accumulated. His daughter couldn’t even understand he was a boss. And with Vin dead, there wasn’t even anyone to share his twilight years. Why had he killed the one friend he had left? Out of a code? Out of vengeance? For what? Vin having a son when he didn’t?
His mind began to collapse in on itself. Who would remember him after he was gone? There was Carla, standing pregnant over by the refrigerator. But she was only a girl. Teddy had an urge to go running into her children’s bedroom to wake her son Anthony Jr., just to see if there was any family resemblance between them. Some small trace of Teddy to pass on to the next century.
But it was late and he knew he’d be out of energy before he had one foot on the floor.
And now the spreading warmth
around his lap told him he’d given up the bag to hold his urine too quickly. He’d pissed on the couch. He started to tell his niece what he’d done, so she’d get him a towel and a blanket. But shame overcame him and he began to cry.
“Uncle Ted, what’s the matter?” she said, coming over to take his hand.
“It’s nothing.” He choked. “Lemme be.”
A grown man pissing and crying on a couch. You began this life like a baby and you finished it the same way. But in the end, you were alone, with no one to care for you. Especially if you didn’t have children to look after you. Maybe Vin was right. They all should have made more babies.
He buried his face in his hands as his niece put her arm around his shoulder. “It’s all right, Uncle Ted,” she said. “I’m with you.”
But she wasn’t with him. And she never would be. She’d married that mutt Anthony and they were all poisoned by his tainted blood. Everything Teddy had done in his life amounted to nothing, and the dream he’d once had of controlling all of Atlantic City, the entire neon forest, was gone now.
He reclined all the way back on the couch again and closed his eyes.
“I think I’m just gonna sleep awhile,” he said. “You get me up if anybody comes in.”
65
“I DON’T SEE WHY you find this so unusual,” Frank Diamond said.
“It’s not unusual, it’s irregular,” explained the F.B.I, agent named Wayne Sadowsky.
“Look,” said Frank. “You’ve been my case agent, investigating me for six years and you’ve never found anything. I’m a law-abiding citizen making a valid complaint. I’m entitled to have you investigate it and take action, as you would with anyone else.”
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