“I mean… you’re telling me you do?” I sputter.
The woman, whose name is Mildred, looks at me sharply. Shit. I probably shouldn’t have said that. I’m just supposed to be covering this story, after all, not inserting my opinions into it. Even so, I’d been expressing some skepticism about this so-called miracle a minute ago, and she was not happy with me at all.
“Sure I do.”
The man dips his head in a brief nod.
He gives me a smile that somehow looks so genuine it can only be fake.
Then, as I watch in stupefaction, he looks reverently down at the ground, lifts a tattooed arm and actually crosses himself.
A loud snort escapes me before I can stop it. Okay, now I know he can’t possibly be serious.
Mildred gives me another glare. Then she turns to offer a denture-perfect smile at the dark-haired con man. “Thank you,” she says sweetly to him, a simper on her face.
“You have got to be kidding me,” I mutter. I can’t figure out why this guy is humoring these two. It cannot be healthy to actually pretend to believe them. They’re obviously touched in the head. Or else they’re just trying to get their fifteen minutes of fame. Either way, this isn’t a news story, no matter what my editor says. And this guy is not helping me by pretending it is.
“You don’t see it either?” the dark stranger asks my photographer Jake, cocking a brow. But Jake just raises his hands in a don’t ask me gesture, his camera in one of them.
“Hey, I’m just here to take pictures,” he objects.
Coward.
The woman’s son, Eddie, pipes up now. “We come out here yesterday, just like usual, just like any other ordinary day,” he tells the man, an earnest look on his face. “And there it was, big as life. A miracle, right in our own backyard!”
This is almost word for word what he said to me just a couple of minutes ago. It’s obvious from the way the sentences rush from his mouth, the same inflections as before, that he’s practiced them many times. This is a quote Mildred and Eddie have come up with, which they mean for me to put into the story verbatim.
I roll my eyes so hard, I think I just saw my brain. “Is that right?” I snark. “Just like that?”
But now that they have a more sympathetic audience, my sarcasm seems to bounce right off them. “Yes indeed!” Mildred supplies, tilting her face slightly upward now, toward the sky. “The Lord has truly shone His light on us!”
I cut my eyes at the stranger, half-expecting him to say, “Amen!” But to my relief, he stays silent.
With the handsome stranger here, his dark, smoldery eyes on me, my irritation at the whole situation is starting to turn into a strange sense of embarrassment. Suddenly, more than anything I just want this interview to be done, so I can escape the penetrating weight of his gaze, which is making my face flame hot.
I look over at Jake, who is staring intently at the screen of his camera, as if he’s ready for this to be over, too.
Unfortunately, the best way I can think of to finish this quickly is to treat the damn interview as if it’s legitimate. Which is what I’m supposed to be doing anyway. After all, Frank expects me to write the article, and he’ll just make me re-write it if the tone makes it clear I’m mocking the subjects.
So dammit, let’s just get this over with.
Sucking in a deep breath, I turn to Mildred and Eddie, pointedly pretending the dark stranger is invisible. I proceed to ask them the rest of the questions I prepared: Why do you think God has chosen your back lawn as the site of this miracle? What do you think the message is? Did you tip Jesus for mowing your grass, or dock his pay for missing some spots? (Okay, I didn’t ask that last one.)
When I finally have enough info to gracefully end the interview, I turn to Jake and tell him to snap some photos of Mildred and Eddie in front of the apparition, and to try to get at least a few shots where the face in the grass is visible. But before he can get the two of them into position, Mildred holds up a dimpled hand.
“Eddie, you go on inside and change your shirt. That one’s got jelly on it,” she says briskly, pointing. “I’m gonna go fix my hair.”
The two of them amble inside. Jake wanders off a few feet and starts to fiddle with his light meter, squinting at the grass and squatting as he contemplates angles.
This leaves me alone with the stranger — who for some reason is still here, smirking at me.
“So, come on. Now that they’re inside, you can’t tell me you seriously believe this, can you?” I challenge, rounding on him and trying not to let my eyes stare at that sensual, curved mouth of his.
He shrugs. “No. And they probably don’t either. But what’s the harm?”
“What’s the harm?” I bristle. My four years of journalism school rise up inside me in indignation. “Are you saying it’s fine to just print lies in a newspaper?”
But the stranger just starts to chuckle — a deep, rich sound that starts my heart thumping it my chest.
“Darlin’, half the other crap in that paper’s probably bullshit anyway. At least this story will make some people laugh.” He shrugs. “Go on. Brighten up ol’ Millie and Eddie’s day. What’s it gonna cost you?”
“My journalistic integrity,” I mutter.
“This ain’t the Daily Planet, Lois Lane,” he murmurs.
The stranger’s words touch a raw nerve inside me. A sensitive place that he can’t possibly know about, of course. But it hurts all the same.
No, the Post-Gazette is not the fictional newspaper in Superman. And I’m sure as hell not Lois Lane. The dark stranger’s meaning is clear: I’m not a real journalist. Just some two-bit hack, writing a silly article that practically no one will read, in a paper that gets subscribed to more for its coupon section than anything else.
“Thanks for reminding me of that,” I say acidly.
He blinks, then cocks his head at me. I see a flash of something in his eyes — something close to an emotion I recognize all too well.
Pity.
Oh, no. No. Unacceptable.
The stranger opens his mouth to say something, but I beat him to it before he can apologize or something mortifying like that.
“Okay, since you’re such a believer,” I toss back. “Give me a quote for the paper.”
“What?” he frowns.
“Go on,” I repeat, pulling out my note pad. I make a show of poising my pen above the paper. “Give me your name and age, and tell me what you think of this modern-day miracle that’s appeared practically in your own backyard.”
“I’m not gonna give you a quote,” he mutters, shaking his head.
But now that I’m on the offensive, I’m not going to let him off that easily.
“You said yourself it’ll brighten people’s day.” I take a step closer, feeling a surge of vindication. “Come on. Brighten someone’s day.”
“Nope.”
“Why not?”
His expression, which had been tinged with amusement at me, grows hard, closing off right in front of me. “Let’s just say, being in the paper has never been an ambition of mine.” He pauses. “And I don’t believe in miracles.”
He turns on his booted heel, and before I can say another word to him, he’s taken off across the open lot toward the house he came from.
I watch him, my mouth still half-open with an unuttered retort. I notice his broad back, and the way the gray Henley shirt he’s wearing stretches across his shoulders. I register the flex of his thighs as his legs move. How rock-hard his ass looks, even through his jeans. How the way he moves reminds me of the way wild animals move. Like a lion, maybe. A predator, for sure.
Mesmerized, I don’t stop staring until he disappears inside.
Behind me, a screen door bangs open. “All-righty!” Mildred calls out in a singsong voice. “We’re ready!”
She’s applied some makeup around her eyes, making her look a little like a wrinkled raccoon, and put on some strong floral perfume as well. I have no idea why, since the
perfume isn’t going to show up in the photos, but I’m not going to ask. Behind her, Eddie has changed into a shirt that looks almost identical to the one he had on before, minus the jelly stain.
“Jake.” I turn toward him. “I’ll leave this part to you.”
He looks up from his camera, blinking. “Got it. Okay, folks, let’s start over here.”
I go over by the side of the house and sit down on their back stoop to watch Jake shoot the photos for the spread. As I do, I find myself glancing repeatedly toward the house on the other side of the vacant lot.
The stranger appears again in my mind’s eye. The tattooed arms. The coal-black hair. Those mocking eyes, deep and impenetrable as a well.
I’m not normally a girl who’s moved by a pretty face. I learned early on in life that the better looking a man is, the more he can coast on those looks. And the less reason he has to be anything other than a general dick to anyone.
But the man who just walked away from me is handsome in a way I’ve never seen before. Whatever it is, it’s not only physical. There’s a cocksure confidence about him that doesn’t seem to come from the way he looks at all. Almost like he doesn’t know he’s good looking. Or rather, that he doesn’t give a shit.
Maybe I’m imagining that. Hell, I probably am — after all, I don’t even know the guy. It’s probably just wishful thinking. Which makes no sense, because he’s nothing to me. And more than likely, I’ll never see him again.
A cloud passes above us, momentarily covering the sun. The brief chill makes me hug my arms to my chest.
When Jake is finished taking photos, I say goodbye to Mildred and Eddie after answering their many questions about when the paper will run their story. Jake and I drove here separately, and I tell him I’ll meet him back at the office later.
As I pull away, I can’t help but feel a little disappointed that I never managed to get a quote from the dark stranger for the feature. Not because I needed it for the story.
But because I never got the quote, I never learned his name.
In spite of myself, I glance back one last time at the house he disappeared into.
My dud of a heart does a little hop-skip in response — its extra beat mirroring the flutter of desire in the pit of my stomach.
I know, I tell it silently. I know.
5
Dante
Dom is still crashed out in my spare bedroom when I get back to the house. I bang around for a while, trying to wake my brother up. But he’s out like a light.
The fucker has always been this way. I know there are people who claim they can sleep through anything, but in Dom’s case it’s actually true. Once when we were kids, there was a water leak in the pipes to the upstairs bathroom. This was after we moved to Ironwood, so it was just Ma and us boys. Ma didn’t know anything about plumbing, and she didn’t notice anything was wrong until the leak got so bad underneath the flooring that the old clawfoot bathtub went crashing through to the bedroom below in the middle of the night. Dom was in bed, not ten feet from where the bathtub landed downstairs.
He slept through the whole fuckin’ thing.
I can’t help but laugh at myself for my shitty attempts at trying to wake him. I should know there’s no way — short of shooting him in the leg or something — that he’s gonna open his eyes before he’s good and ready. He’s the most stubborn motherfucker I know.
Even unconscious, Dom has always had a special talent for pissing me off. The youngest of the five of us boys, he was always hanging around me since I was the closest to him in age. Antony, five years older than me, and the twins Marco and Matteo, a year behind Antony, always had other, more grown-up shit going on. So I was stuck with an unwanted tag-along — a year younger than me, and at least twice as irritating.
Dominic knew I hated it when he attached himself to me like a barnacle. But he also knew I couldn’t do much about it, because our ma had decided I was his designated babysitter whenever our parents weren’t on the scene. “Look after your brother, Dante!” was the constant refrain she would yell from the kitchen, whenever I tried to escape the house on my own.
So yeah. Look after him I did. As the only Italian family in Ironwood — hell, probably one of the only Italian families in southern Ohio — it was true that us brothers had to stick together. And Ma was bound and determined to make sure we did.
After all, she was the one who moved us here in the first place, from Cleveland. It happened six months after our father was killed. I was five, and Dom had just turned four. Ma never told us what happened exactly. Who killed our dad, or why. But in a way, she didn’t have to. As we got older, the reason we left Cleveland became clear. Ma didn’t want us growing up around what took our father from us. She didn’t want it to engulf her young boys as well.
The Cleveland crime family. The mob. Or what was left of it, anyway.
When my brothers and I were born, organized crime in Cleveland, Ohio was already past its heyday. At its peak, Cleveland was third only after New York and Chicago in terms of mafia presence and influence. The crime syndicates founded by the Lonardo and Porrello families grew up into major organizations in the nineteen-twenties and thirties. The syndicates that split into factions organized around different mob bosses up to and through the seventies, were already in decline in the eighties — before being torn to pieces by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies. By the time my brothers and I came into the world, there were only a few made men left out on the street.
But the mafia started to slowly rebuild in the nineties and into the 2000s. It’s less visible now, sure. But it’s still there. For boys and young men who are long on ambition and short on morals, there are still opportunities to be had in organized crime — and a dream that someday, the Cleveland crime family will rise again. A phoenix of violence and crime, emerging from the ashes.
Which is why Ma got us out. She never told us any of this, of course. But as we grew older, we eventually pieced it together, from snatches of stories we heard about our Great Uncle Nunzio — and from the occasional trips we took back up to Cleveland in the summers to visit family, where talk of the glory days was the subject of late-night, alcohol-fueled conversations among the old-timers.
Ma brought us five boys to the wilds of southern Ohio as a young widow and mother to get us away from what she saw as the near-inevitable destiny that would await us if we stayed put. She did her best to put all us boys on the straight and narrow.
And in exchange, as we got older, we did our best to keep her in the dark about our more unsavory activities.
Ma’s not around anymore to see the shit we get into. Since she died, there’s no one left to hide it from.
She never knew that Antony isn’t really in real estate.
She never knew that Marco and Matteo’s construction company ain’t all about construction.
She never knew I’m in an outlaw MC.
And even though Dominic disappointed her again and again, she never found out he wasn’t a traveling salesman like he told her. Or that the kind of trouble he has a knack for getting himself into means he never sticks around one place for long.
It’s always been hard to keep track of my youngest brother. Half the time, he’s got a new phone number or something, so you can’t get hold of him even if you want to. When Ma got sick years ago, Dom was AWOL. We couldn’t find him for months, and none of the past contacts any of us had for him could tell us a damn thing about where he might be.
Ma always had faith that he’d come back in time for her to see him once more before she died. She told us that God wouldn’t take her before she could say goodbye to her baby boy.
Ma always had way too much faith in miracles.
Antony finally managed to track Dominic down in time for the funeral. He showed up late to the service — hungover, high as shit on something that made his pupils look like pinheads, and in a suit that looked like he’d slept in it. He barely stayed until the end, skipped the burial itself, showed up late
r at the family gathering at Ma’s house, a half-empty bottle of vodka in his fist.
I almost sent him to an early grave, right beside Ma’s plot. Before Marco and Matteo pulled me off him, that is. And convinced me that Ma would want us all to have each other’s backs now that she was gone.
Since then, Dom only seems to show his face to one of us brothers when he needs something. Last time, he turned up on Matteo’s doorstep, asking for five-thousand dollars and saying it was for some business venture. Turned out, he had lost big on some deal and owed money to some guy in Cleveland whose name he wouldn’t tell us.
And now, here he is, snoring like a fuckin’ train in my spare room. Telling me he’s back in Ironwood to stay.
From the looks of him, he drove all the way the fuck here from God knows where in the middle of the night.
I peer out the window again, at Dom’s expensive-looking SUV. And think about the fact that all the possessions he brought with him to start a new life in Ironwood fit into one beat-up looking duffel bag.
Something tells me there’s more to my brother’s decision to come back home than he’s letting on.
But I’m his brother. I’m a D’Agostino. So it’s my job to fuckin’ help him. For Ma’s sake.
I think I’m gonna be stuck here waiting around for Dom’s lazy ass to wake the hell up all fuckin’ afternoon. But thank Christ, I get a call from a civilian buddy of mine who’s building his own house, asking me to come out to take a look at an electrical problem he’s having.
In addition to being the Enforcer for the Ironwood Lords of Carnage MC, I’ve got myself a business as a licensed electrician. I’m my own boss, no other employees. Been doing it about five years. The work suits me, and so do the hours and the independence. I tell my buddy Bret I’ll be right over to take a look. I figure I’ll head over to the clubhouse after that to grab a beer or two before church.
The site Bret’s building on is out in the country, on a patch of land he inherited from his dad. The ride over there on the bike clears my head a little from thinking about my fucked-up younger brother. Bret’s electrical issue turns out to be a pretty easy solution, and one he’s already pulled the permit for. I talk him through it, offering to come back and help with the installation if he needs it.
Iron Heart (Lords of Carnage Ironwood MC) Page 3