For that he offers me $11,000. I accept.
That's where my head is when I pull up to a remote corner of the Fresh Kills Landfill, not far from the South Mound, at 2:46 a.m. on Saturday, April 7, 2001. I am going to tell my brother that he has to leave the United States of America for the rest of his life, and that I will give him $8,000 with which to do so, and that we will never see each other again. And that if he comes back to this country and I find out about it, I will kill him.
You may notice that $3,000 of my fee is unaccounted for in my plan. Hey, every job has expenses.
I see Manny lurking in the dark, right where he said he'd be when he called from the pay phone on Forest Avenue. I pop in two sticks of Doublemint and get out of my car. I am driving a gray 1983 Chevy Citation, which I got for $700 from some guy named Honest Achmed in Yonkers. It's the perfect kind of car for this line of work: just old and cheap enough to be ignored, not old enough to be considered classic yet. And easily disposable.
"Thanks for coming." Manny is wired. His voice is pulled taut.
"No problem. Tell me about the last three days." Frantically, kinetically, he recounts the saga from his point of view, leaving nothing out. I am amazed that he can still think coherently, but his tale makes sense. And, from what I know from my employers, it's all true.
I look at him, trying to keep a poker face. "So what are we going to do about this situation?" I am calm, and he sees it. That makes him more tense. He always hated that I knew how to keep my cool when he didn't.
"Do you think I fucking know? Why the fuck do you think I called you?"
"Manny—"
"Don't Manny me, dickhead. Just help me." He is trying to be menacing, which he knows doesn't work with me. He just sounds pathetic.
I lay it out for him. Leave the United States, go somewhere, don't come back. Or choose what's behind Door Number 2, which will only end badly.
"Wait. What?" The realization is dawning for my dimbulb brother. "You're working for the fucks who are coming after me?"
"Yeah, Manny, and if it were anyone else working for those fucks you'd be lying on the ground already with a bullet in your brain."
"Fuck you."
"Fuck you. You want a chance to get out of this alive?"
"Lemme get this straight," Manny says. "They hired you to kill me? You took a job to kill your own brother?"
"It doesn't have to be this way. Just say yes. Just walk away. This is the moment where you get to change things. You can do anything you want. You just can't stay here. Don't be a dumbshit. Just this once, don't be the dumbshit you've always been."
"No," he says. "Fuckfuckfuckfuck. They send my own big brother to kill me." He is flop-sweating, almost crying. I notice that he is wearing a Members Only jacket. I thought those disappeared around the time the first George Bush was elected president.
"Look, Manny. You're a cocksucker. You've always been a cocksucker. I can't say I love you, but we have a lot of history and a lot of blood. You're my brother. Let's at least try—"
That's when things go south. Something changes. Manny stands up straighter. I know this moment. It's the one where people realize the end is racing toward them, so they have nothing to lose. This is the about-to-die version of beer muscles.
Manny reaches into his waistband and pulls out his gun. "I'm not going anywhere, motherfucker. But you are." He aims the Kel-Tec at me. "Later," he says, and fires.
Fuck, I think to myself. I'm smarter than this. I can't believe it.
His shot misses. To this day, I have no idea how.
I move quickly, instinctively. I leap at Manny, punch him in the throat even as I bring my steel-toed boot down on his left ankle. The gun bounces away. He goes down instantly, gasping. I marvel at how much his face looks like my own, but without the intelligence. It's like he's a clay dummy molded and sculpted and fired in the kiln to resemble me, but without any of the life. I think of when I was nine and he was five and we slept in the woods behind the house one night. I tried to protect him by beating a rabid squirrel dead with a tree branch. He asked me, eyes shining, if we could find another squirrel and do it again.
I head butt him. His eyes, decidedly not shining, loll and sink back into his head. I kick him in the nuts. I hear a sound like a beach ball deflating. He waves his arms, lashing out in semiconsciousness, and connects with my left ear. I go down and see stars, my mouth open against the ground. Stuff goes into it, and I taste the garbage of New Yorkers in my mouth. I spit frantically, crawl to my knees, and go right back at him.
Fuck you, you fucking spoiled brat, I think to myself. I've been putting up with this for too damn long. I lean down, head butt him again, and then bite off his right ear. I spit it out in his face. I realize I am crying.
I also realize, through my haze of anger and tears, that the Rubicon has been crossed. There is no going back.
My baby brother is still gurgling when I take a decaying single-serving milk carton off the ground, crumple it up in my hand, and shove it into his mouth. I grab his chin and ram it upward into his skull repeatedly, which has the odd effect of making him look like some Warner Bros. cartoon character chewing a particularly recalcitrant piece of beef jerky. I can hear his jawbone squeaking. Inside his mouth, lit by the moon, I can see the words 2% milkfat.
Manny strains to breathe. I am picturing, in my mind, Joe Pesci's final scene in Casino, when he is buried alive in the desert. Manny and I watched that movie on video the last time we hung out a few months back.
I spit out my wad of Doublemint, pull it into two pieces, and shove one up each of his nostrils. That does the trick. Airflow is now nonexistent. As he pushes to clear the airway and take in oxygen, his face turns red, then purple. His left eye blows out and goes dim, taking on the look of a built-in eye patch. Arrrrrr, I think to myself, making the pirate noise in my head.
Like I said: fucking hilarious.
I spot the Kel-Tec on the ground a yard or two away. I grab it, anchor my heel, and fire down at him. His head explodes at my feet. Brain on my boots. The shot has knocked the gum out of his nose, and he makes one final, inadvertent exhale.
"You asshole!" I yell, spitting in what's left of his face. "Couldn't you have just this once listened to me? Couldn't you have just fucking said yes?"
No one hears me. I have just killed my brother. I feel . . . nothing. I feel absolutely nothing.
I black out. When I wake up, it is thirty-five minutes later. It is still dark in the landfill. It still smells. My brother is still dead, lying next to me.
I climb to my feet, reach into Manny's pocket and take out the key to the rental car. I shamble over and open the trunk of Manny's Impala. Josephine and Conrad Spencer stare up at me with unknowing eyes, supine, the lump of the spare tire under rough felt between them. The smell is almost unbearable.
I lift up Manny's body, carry it to the trunk, and place it between the two people he killed. I do so gingerly; he is, after all, my brother.
* * *
Turns out I was Manny's moment of clarity, and he chose the hand and the lotion. Offered the grand buffet, he went with the chicken and broccoli. Maybe it was gonna be this way no matter what. Maybe my parents just did him too much damage. Maybe it's true what they say: garbage in, garbage out.
I, however, am still alive. And I need to get out of the country's biggest dump and deal with the mess that my brother made and that I have to clean up.
That I can do. I know what Manny does not—that when it comes to dumping bodies, Suffolk County is the new black. In the new millennium, everyone who's anyone is getting rid of their dead people there.
How could Manny have known? He was too phobic to take the tunnels into Manhattan and Long Island, too stupid to even consider there might be a new frontier beyond the ones he spent his life haunting. The closed-minded fuck couldn't even consider there might be another way to do things. Just like Dad. "Oh, I couldn't possibly stop taking the pills. There's no other way, boy." Assholes.
I park the Citation where it won't be seen and wipe the steering wheel and driver's area free of any prints. I get into the Impala and make my way to Richmond Avenue, then I-278 East and the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge beyond. I am careful to use my turn signal and not speed; no sense getting nailed on something stupid at this point in the game. Dawn is starting to break. I love the Verrazano and the chance to see lower Manhattan at dawn. The Twin Towers are always so beautiful just before the sun starts to rise.
I pass through Brooklyn, pass through Queens. I get on the Utopia Parkway and hit the gas on Manny's rented Impala, humming "Undercover Angel" as I drive east toward Suffolk County. Maybe I'll stop in and see my big sister in Yaphank while I'm out here. She and I have always been close.
V. ME, HAPPILY EVER AFTER
I can't believe my brother is dead ten years. Seems like yesterday. I have lots of fond memories when I think of him, ones that predate the day I pocketed the money that finished him off. Family's like that, though. No matter what, in the end you still feel connected. Nothing feels better than blood on blood.
These days, I run a legit business—data processing for corporations that need to outsource it. It's pretty good—I have twenty-three employees who call me boss—yet I sometimes miss the roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-dirty flavor of my former job. But being a thug for hire is, I suppose, a game for the young.
Funny thing, though: the money I got from getting Manny out of the way started me down this path. After that I got better at killing, more nimble, and I really started to rake in the cash. I innovated. Within months, I was the first in the business to use a GPS to plot the distance between burial sites, the first to use tasers for more efficient and cleaner torture, the first to understand how the Internet can be used to mine data and make contract killing more efficient. Change is everywhere these days, and people who don't adapt will die. Figuratively speaking.
* * *
I got out in 2004 when I met the woman who would become my bride. She has no idea what I used to do for a living. Today we live on Staten Island, on a little hill where you can see the bottom of Manhattan. The Towers are gone from the view, of course, but still—I can't imagine being anywhere else. It's right in the middle of things, but it's remote too. We have two boys, six and two, the same age difference as me and Manny. They're good kids, but sometimes they fight. I hate when brothers fight.
I do think this park they're building where the landfill once stood will be cool. I'll probably even take my kids there. History is history, even when you can't talk about it. Even when it involves fratricide. I like to think that I did Manny a favor, got him out of an unresolvable situation—and a life—that he simply couldn't handle. This is rationalization, I know. But that's what killers do. We rationalize. It allows us to pretend we're regular members of society. I've just managed to do it longer than most.
You could argue that people never change. I would disagree. Because the day I killed Manny changed my life. I didn't know it then, but I know it now. It was a horrible thing that taught me how to improve myself. These days, I almost never feel like a killer anymore. I owe that all to Manny.
Now and then, there are moments in a man's life that offer up complete clarity. They're rare, and rarer still is the ability to recognize them. It is only the truly intelligent, self-aware man who finds himself in a moment of clarity and actually sees it for what it is—and moves forward in a productive way.
I am that kind of man. My brother, as I stated earlier, was not.
DARK WAS THE NIGHT, COLD WAS THE GROUND
BY SHAY YOUNGBLOOD
South Beach
The sound was soft at first, a scratching that seemed to be part of the hip-hop song blasting from the open windows of the vintage bronze Mercedes as it pulled up next to the white Lincoln I was sitting in.
An unnaturally tan, pear-shaped man, wearing a plaid golf hat and sunglasses, stepped gingerly onto the gas station's oil-stained concrete in a pair of shiny penny loafers. He wheezed as if he had asthma and tucked the tail of a pink, buttoned-down shirt into the waistband of a pair of gray sweatpants, which were stained at the knees. I saw that the muffler of the wide four-door model car was almost touching the ground.
The man grunted and stretched his arms out as if he'd been driving for a long time. He turned in my direction and sniffed the air with a grimace. The wind had shifted and the aroma from the nearby Fresh Kills Landfill, also known as "the dump," wafted over the top of a long line of leafy green trees, cleverly planted to camouflage the rolling hills of garbage facing the Staten Island Mall. The man slammed his car door shut, turned on his heels with a military twist, and marched into the store. Although there was a driving boom box beat thumping out of the windows, I was sure now of a dissonant muffled tapping coming from the sagging trunk of the Mercedes.
It was club night and my new friend Francesca "Frankie" Dacosta had stopped at the gas station near her house on the western shore of Staten Island to buy a six-pack of peach wine coolers and a bag of ice. I had met Frankie a few days before, at the grocery store on Forest Avenue. I was standing in the produce aisle holding a large bunch of collard greens. My fingers felt the leaves as if they were braille, as if some message decoded along the thick stems and fine veins could explain why Raymond, my husband of forty-two years, was gone. It was so unfair. He had been hammering a nail into the wall so we could hang the framed photo of our last trip to the Grand Canyon when he fell to the floor. The doctor said a blood vessel had burst in his head. Six months and one day after we both retired from thirty-seven years of teaching in the New York City public school system, we thought our lives were just beginning.
I sat up night after night for two weeks listening to Blind Willie Johnson's sorrowful blues, a moan accompanied by bottleneck guitar, raw emotion that echoed my grief, Dark was the night, cold was the ground . . . I didn't want to die, but living without my Raymond took the sweet out of everything.
Frankie turned a corner in the supermarket and saw me standing in the produce section holding the collard greens like a wedding bouquet. Silent tears poured down my face onto the front of a red silk blouse that had been my husband's favorite.
"I wanted to take a picture, but my good sense took over and I gave you a pack of tissues and took you home with me," Frankie told me later.
* * *
I opened the passenger door of the Lincoln and was about to get closer to the sound when Frankie came flying from the store like she was being chased by demons out of hell. The loose black shift she wore was hiked up above her pale knees and she pressed the sack of wine coolers to her chest. She tossed the bag of ice onto the backseat, barely missing my head.
"Get in! Lock the doors!" She barked commands and I followed orders. Frankie jumped in the car and hit the power lock three times. She pressed another button and the windows rolled up at lightning speed.
"You're sweating. What's going on?"
"There's a really creepy guy in there. He's trying to get the attendant to give him half a gallon of gas in a mayonnaise jar, thirteen matches, and six yards of silver masking tape."
"Sounds like he's making a recipe or something."
"Or something." Frankie wiped sweat off her upper lip with a handkerchief.
"I think there's a body in the trunk." I rolled the window down a few inches. "Listen."
"That's crappy music." She waved the handkerchief in front of her face.
"Listen," I shushed her. We both heard a loud thump.
Just then the driver of the Mercedes strolled out of the store cursing the gas attendant's mother. I rolled up the window and looked over at Frankie. Then my head snapped back toward the Mercedes when I heard a crash. The man had thrown the empty mayonnaise jar against the side of the building before getting back in his car. The Mercedes took off, leaving behind a trail of smoke, the smell of burning rubber, and the echo of screeching tires.
"He's headed toward the dump. Should we . . ."
Frankie pressed her lips together and s
hook her head. "Marie, honey, this is Staten Island. We should be blind, deaf, and dumb." She brought two fingers to her lips, closed her eyes, and pressed her other hand to her ear.
"Maybe it was a big dog," I said, sure it wasn't.
"Yeah, and maybe it won't snow this December," Frankie countered, pulling into Friday evening traffic on Richmond Avenue.
"What if it's somebody you know?"
"I don't know the kind of people who'd be locked up in the trunk of a car, do you?"
"He was acting so crazy. I just know he's going off to do something bad."
"He's a bad man. What do you want to do about it, Marie?"
"We didn't do it already, so I guess we leave it alone."
"Thank you. Enough already about that bum."
We stopped talking about the guy, but I couldn't stop thinking about him.
We took the long way to Frankie's house. She liked driving through Todt Hill where the wealthy lived. Frankie said Paul Castellano of the Gambino crime family had lived in a house that was an exact replica of the White House, down to the flagpole flying both the American and Italian flags. I read somewhere that Todt was a Dutch word for dead. There was a large cemetery nearby and I also took note that there were no sidewalks or public transportation in the neighborhood.
On the day we met, Frankie invited me to her South Beach home and a meeting of the Staten Island Ward Widows of America. After her husband Ignacio died, Frankie had painted every room in her house bright yellow—with the exception of the bedroom, which she painted red velvet. Frankie had a sweet tooth, and sleeping alone for seven years hadn't made her any less lonely for companionship, or desserts. Although the widows took turns making dessert, Frankie had a great recipe for cannoli, which was to die for.
"Marie," she said, "for you, I'm making cannoli. I want to bring some sweetness back into your life."
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