by Norman Green
“Ah, well, I suppose we all have our uses,” he said. “You didn’t want to go down to Red Hook last night, am I right? Not after what happened. You thought it’d be safer to come here instead.”
“If I thought those guys had been after me, coming here would have been just as risky,” she said. “But compared to you and Caughlan, I’m pretty small potatoes. I figured someone’s probably trying to get to Caughlan through you. Or else, someone from your past wants to remind you how much they love you.”
“Your potatoes,” O’Hagan said, “take a backseat to nobody. Which way to the bat’room?”
“Straight down the hall,” she told him.
“If I’m not back in a day or so,” he said, “send for an ambulance.”
“If what you drank yesterday didn’t kill you,” she said, “you’re probably gonna live forever.”
He stood up carefully, straightening his legs first, then his back, then his neck, then he tottered off down the hall. Al stared across the room at the Aegean as the sound of running water temporarily drowned out the other noises in the building. You could go, she told herself. A week on a beach, somewhere in Greece. Maybe two weeks.
Yeah. By yourself.
Bad enough, being all alone on your home turf.
Gearoid was back a few minutes later. “You didn’t tell me,” she said. “What’s your take on last night?”
“Well, I don’t know how many enemies you’ve got,” he said. “I’ve got a few meself, but it’s a safe bet Caughlan has us both beat in that department. You talk to him yet?”
She hadn’t thought of that. “No.”
“All right,” he said. “I’ll make the call. I’ll have some of his people meet me down by my place. If someone’s laying in the weeds, we’ll turn them up. I’ll give you a call after, let you know what happened.”
“All right,” she said. She remembered something Stiles had said. “Gearoid, tell me something. What’s the black Irish?”
“You know, I never heard of that until I got over here,” he said. “What is it about Americans, everybody needs to know what color you are? Like baseball. They all want to know what team you root for.”
Alessandra didn’t know what to say to that, so she kept silent.
“The story goes, when the feckin’ Brits sunk the Spanish Armada, some of the Spanish sailors made it to shore. They say it was the mixing of them with the natives that started the black Irish.”
“You believe that?”
“Makes for a good story, don’t it? But there’s no telling if it’s real or not.”
“I guess I heard it wrong. I was under the impression it was a class thing.”
He gave her a sidelong glance. “Well, if a man has one pig and his neighbor has two, that makes his neighbor a rich man, don’t it? Ireland is a desperate poor country. Them that survives is the ones who bit and scratched the hardest.”
“No different anywhere else,” she said.
“I suppose not,” he said. “We got no monopoly on misery or hardship. But maybe we been at it longer, you know what I mean? It’s like when you leave your stewpot on the stove too long, there’s a lot that boils off and is lost, and in the end all you got left are the hard lumps on the bottom.”
Al thought about survival on the streets of Brownsville. Don’t turn this into a contest, she thought. There’s no prize if you win. “So you come from a long line of hard lumps, is that what you’re telling me?”
He laughed at that, then winced at the pain in his head. “I don’t know too much about what I come from. Me mum was a long-sufferin’ woman, I know that much, and me stepdad was a flinty old bogtrotter. I can count on one hand the times I seen him smile.”
“You lost me,” she said. “What’s a bogtrotter?”
“Farmer,” he told her. “Cow shit on his boots, you’d say over here.” He looked at her, then over at the Aegean. “And one hard lump he was.”
“He’s gone, then.”
“Yeah. Him and me half-brother, both.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” she said. “Do you miss them? I never had a brother or sister. My father’s almost all I have left.” And I get precious little of him . . . But at least he’s there. At least he’s still alive.
“Ah, I don’t know if I miss the old bastard, exactly. Me and him never got on. I was never what he wanted. I t’ink I spent half my life trying to impress him and the other half trying to piss him off.”
“Did you ever do it?”
“Piss him off? Royally.”
“No, impress him.”
“Never came close.” He looked uncomfortable, glanced at his watch. “I really need to get going. T’anks, Al, for looking out for me last night. Hadn’t been for you, I’d have been a dead duck.”
“My pleasure,” she said. “There’s a car service one block over, on Clark.”
“Thanks again, Alessandra Martillo.”
“You’re welcome, Gearoid O’Hagan.”
The male nurse on Tio Bobby’s ward was just the sort of guy her uncle loved: anglo, thin and fussy, blond and blue. She stood in the doorway of her uncle’s room, looking at the empty chairs around the bed, her uncle’s still form under the blanket. He had lost sixty or seventy pounds since he’d been in this place, but he was still far from small, and of course the rest of his persona was firmly in place. The tattoos, the beads woven into his beard, the heavy silver jewelry he wore on his fingers, they were all unchanged. He had a quarter inch of iron-gray stubble growing out of his skull, though she still couldn’t get used to that. She turned to see the floor nurse floating in her direction.
“Where’s Anthony?” she asked him.
The nurse peered past her into the room. Alessandra barely felt the hand he laid across her shoulders, but she allowed the man to steer her away from the door, over to the duty station. “Roberto’s family came,” he said, and suddenly he had tears in his eyes. “They said Anthony has no legal standing. Can you believe that? He and Roberto have been companions for twenty-eight years, but now they want him to leave. They say he has no right to be here.”
“Nothing those people can do would surprise me,” she said. “Where are they?”
“A whole conglomeration of them took over the day-room,” he told her. “They’ve got Anthony in there now, they’re browbeating the poor thing unmercifully. They want him out of the hospital, and they want him out of Roberto’s house. They’re telling him the house is in Roberto’s name. Anthony hasn’t got any rights at all, and they’re going to get a lawyer, and, and . . .”
“Calm down,” she told him. “You got any papers anywhere?”
“What kind of papers?”
“Anything. Give me something with a lot of text on it.”
He fished around on the desk and in the trash, came up with a half dozen sheets of white paper covered with type. “Will these do?”
“Perfect,” she said. “Stack them up neat, put a staple in the corner. Now fold them up nice and stick them in an envelope.”
He did as she requested, then handed her the envelope. “What are you going to do?”
“Run them off.”
“How do you propose to do that?”
“You ever see those little dogs they use to keep the geese off the golf courses? All they do is run around barking.”
He looked at her, doubt plain on his face. “I’ll be in the kitchenette,” he said. “I can hear everything from there.”
She could hear them, louder as she walked down the hall. She opened the heavy wooden door and looked into the room. There were eight of them, some she recognized and some she did not, but they had Anthony backed into the far corner of the room, over by the window. They look just like crocodiles, she thought, waiting for him to try and cross the river. She took one step forward, then stopped and slammed the door shut as hard as she could. The impact and the noise stunned them all into momentary silence, then they turned to face this new threat, leaving Anthony forgotten on his window ledge.
<
br /> Her father’s sister Magdalena was the first to speak. Alessandra considered her a repulsive human being, not just because she was short, fat, and ill-tempered, but because she used a series of imagined illnesses and ailments to manipulate her brood and to avoid contributing anything to the world other than the sound of her complaining. “Alec,” the woman said, spitting out the word. “You got no bidness here, you—”
“Shut your ass up,” Alessandra said. She did not even glance at the woman, she stared at Magdalena’s husband. As always, she was surprised that he had not killed himself by now. His capacity to absorb abuse was truly impressive.
A young man she did not recognize crossed the room. “Don’t you speak to my aunt that way,” he said, and he grabbed her by the elbow and yanked her toward him. She did not resist the motion, instead she went with it, pivoting on one foot and using her momentum to drive her knee into the man’s midsection, just above his belt. She could hear Magdalena shrieking in the background as she continued the move, spinning up close, but she pulled her elbow back. She’d been ready to hammer it into his jaw, but she saw that it was not necessary, he was already done. He released her, staggered back, went down hard on the concrete floor.
“And he’s down,” she said, mostly to herself. “Didn’t last the first round.” Magdalena was still squalling, and Alessandra turned on her. “I told you to shut your dripping hole!” she shouted, and then she turned and looked at her silent uncle, Magdalena’s husband. She knew that what few active brain cells the family possessed were in his keeping. She held her envelope aloft. “You see this? This is a will. Tio Bobby gave it to me before he got sick. He’s leaving everything to me. The house in Queens, the motorcycle shop, all the bikes. You hear me? You wanna know what he left you? The sweat off his balls.” They all gaped at her, and she stared back. Where were you, she wanted to ask them, where have you been all of this time? Why is it the only times I ever see you, you’ve got your hands empty and your mouths open? But then the pain she kept hidden threatened to break loose, the anger and the sorrow over all the years of isolation and rejection wanted to spill over into the room, and she could not allow it. She would never give them that. She turned away, faced the door.
“We gonna go get a lawyer,” Magdalena said. “We gonna take you to court, you’ll see. We gonna—”
“You do what you want.” She still wasn’t ready to look at them. “But any lawyer who would take your pathetic ass for a client must be an idiot.”
“Al?” It was her uncle. “Al?”
She turned to face him. “I will consider splitting the estate with you,” she told him. “But if you let that bruja go to a lawyer, I will fight you until there’s nothing left. The abogados will get it all.” The two of them stared at each other. “Half for you, half for me. You wanna give something to the rest of these pigs, you take it out of your share. But you get them out of this hospital right now, and you leave Anthony alone, or else nobody gets a thing. Nobody but the lawyers.” She nodded at Magdalena. “And you keep her goddam mouth shut.”
He looked at her, thought about it, then nodded once. “Come on, everybody, we’re leaving now.” Alessandra watched them shuffle out of the room. Her uncle was the last to go.
“You could have waited until he was dead before you started digging the grave.”
“It ain’t like that, Al. Mag just gets upset. She’s afraid . . .”
“You need to give her the strap,” she told him. It was their private little joke, they had been passing it back and forth for years. “That woman needs a good beating.”
He surprised her. “Maybe she does.” He turned to go, then paused, his hand holding the door open. “I’m sorry about Roberto. I know you loved him.”
She was surprised at how much that hurt. He loved me first, she wanted to throw it in his face. He’s so much more than all the rest of you . . . She couldn’t, though, she still wasn’t sure of her grip on her emotions. “Thank you,” she said. When the door closed behind him, she turned and looked at Anthony, a finger to her lips. He nodded his understanding. The two of them sat down at one of the tables.
Anthony could have been father to the nurse she’d met out on the floor, the two of them looked that much alike. He leaned across the table, took her hands in his. “You’re shaking,” he whispered to her. “My God, you must be human after all.” He cocked his head, eyed her doubtfully. “Roberto never said anything to me about a will.”
She shook her head and whispered back. “They’re just papers from the garbage.” Anthony’s pale and drawn face opened up and cracked into a smile, his eyes went wide, he leaned back in his chair and laughed silently. “Just a bluff,” she told him, keeping her voice low. “It’ll never hold up. They know me too well.”
“I don’t care about the house.” Anthony was telling her the truth, he always did. She had never understood the man, never thought he cared much for her, but the two of them had declared a truce long ago, mostly because each of them knew Tio Bobby loved the other. “If all you’ve done is buy me some time with him, that’s enough.”
“I’d hate to see them put you out on the sidewalk.”
“Well, thank you. But don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.”
The door opened and the nurse came in, glowing, and he sailed across the floor. Alessandra rose to meet him and he threw his arms around her. “Good Lord, what a performance,” he said, squeezing her. “That was wonderful.” He released her, and they both sat down. “Well, they’re all gone. I watched them go down the elevator.” He and Anthony began competing for the right to tell her all about the new and experimental medicine the doctors were giving Roberto, and how it was going to strangle the thing that was growing in his stomach before it could finish killing him. She swallowed her sorrow one more time and tried to listen.
She didn’t really understand it, wasn’t sure if it was fueled by sorrow or loneliness or deprivation or maybe just adrenaline left over from earlier that evening. She preferred to think of it as simply the stirring of one of her inner demons, one that she resisted well enough most of the time. Occasionally, though, something broke free, and then it wasn’t a matter of yielding to temptation or giving in, it felt more like she was overwhelmed, swept under, carried off.
The place was a dump, a little hole-in-the-wall joint in Hackensack, just yards away from where the railroad tracks spanned busy River Road over a crumbling concrete overpass. The place had a pool table, though, and just enough light to shoot. She ignored the loser smell of stale beer and sweat.
She played a couple of games, abandoning her usual finesse and control. The game was not the point, not tonight, and she didn’t care how hard she slammed the balls home. She drank Bloody Marys as she played, felt the alcohol feeding the beast, dissolving the adhesions that normally kept her in her place.
And is that a crime, she wondered. Is it necessary to keep yourself under such tight control all the time?
There were eight guys in the joint, not counting the bartender, and they all came up and had a go at her. She dispatched them easily, even playing as carelessly as she did. There was one guy who could shoot a little bit—he might have been decent if he’d worked on his game, and if he were sober . . . He was a white guy, wore a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, tie unknotted, still threaded through the button-down collar, sport coat thrown across one of the chairs in the back. He looked like he worked in one of the big office buildings a block away on Main Street. He came back for a second game; she let him break. He was trying hard, she could tell, she watched him sink a few balls, and then she walked past him, brushed up against him as he lined up a shot.
“Excuse me,” she said. “Sorry.”
He turned to look at her. He was maybe thirty, junior exec type, decent shape, sculpted goatee on his chin. Starting to sweat. “No problem,” he said. He turned back to his shot, but she had rattled him and he missed badly. She laughed softy, walked past him again, close, again, but not making contact. She leaned ov
er the table, pretended to look for a shot. She felt his hand on her ass, warm, not quite steady. Afraid, she thought. Hungry.
We’re perfect for each other.
She stood up slowly, toyed with the cue as she looked over her shoulder at him. His face was pale. He swallowed, then smiled uncertainly as he let his hand fall away, but he didn’t retreat. She felt her skin burn where he’d touched her. Like a male spider, she thought, he has to dare to be killed, and eaten. He has to want it that badly . . .
She laid her stick on the table. “Let’s take a walk,” she said. She tugged once on the loose end of his tie, turned her back on him, and walked out.
He followed her into the night.
“My car’s over here,” he said, trotting to catch up, jerking a thumb at the half-lit parking lot. She ignored him, walked up to the railroad tracks, turned, and followed them onto the overpass. She stopped right in the middle of the bridge over River Road.
“You like the danger,” he said, one eye on the cars roaring past beneath them. She leaned her butt against the pipe railing, her back to the traffic, avoided his lips as he leaned in to kiss her. He was up close, though, and he pinned her against the rail, his hands on her hip and her chest. She grabbed his shirt and yanked it out of his pants. “Oh my God,” he said, and he pulled her dress up around her waist, found nothing under it but her. “Oh my God,” he said again, husky. “Jesus.”
She writhed in his grasp, then she pushed him back off of her and ripped at his belt, tore it out of the loops and flung it away. She bent down swiftly and jerked his pants and underwear down around his ankles. His penis popped out, hard, bobbed up and down in her face. She stood up again, pulled her dress back up, hopped up onto the railing. She wrapped her legs around his waist as he entered her, gave in to it, rode the wave until it threatened to crest. Then, gripping him tightly, she lowered her feet to the ground and stood up to him, face to face. He continued thrusting, but slower now, easier, because his penis was bent at an uncomfortable angle.
“What,” he said, his breath ragged. “What do you want to do . . .”