by Robin Yocum
It was Rhino and Emilio. They walked him back to his office; Rhino sat in his chair at the desk. In his wide hands he concealed a cloth pouch, which he threw at Duke. “You staple the cash to the spot sheets. Very simple. No checks. Cash only. All bets must be clearly marked. Any discrepancies in the total on the sheets and the money collected comes out of your pocket.” Rhino’s tone was surprisingly civil and businesslike. “We’ll pick up the daily number sheets every day. Winners are paid the following day. You have all week to collect the spot sheets. Put them in that bag. Understand?”
Duke nodded, fumbling with the cloth bag.
“Good,” Rhino said, standing. “Just for the record, I didn’t believe your bullshit story for one minute. And, if I was Tony, you’d be dead right now. I wouldn’t give a shit what the chief said.” And they left.
The gambling sheets were on the bar when the noon crowd came in. Men picked them up and said nothing. Nearly every bar and restaurant in the valley handled spot sheets; why would Duke’s Place be any different?
Angel came in after getting off at the mill, saw the sheets, and immediately confronted Duke. “What the hell are you doing?” he asked. “Are you that desperate for money? How many times did Carmine warn you about this?”
He couldn’t look his friend in the eye. “Angel, it’s not something I can discuss.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
It was no secret that the mob ran the vice up and down the Ohio River Valley. Steubenville had two illegal casinos and whorehouses that lined Water Street, which ran along the banks of the river. While vice was all around those who lived and worked in the valley, the mob remained a faceless entity that operated in the shadows and had no impact on their daily lives. The exception, of course, was the occasional mishap, like Pinky Carey. There were sixty thousand men working in the steel mills in the valley, and to the majority of them the name Tony DeMarco meant nothing.
But every man in Mingo Junction knew the name of Tony DeMarco. And the name elicited fear. They knew him as the tough guy from Dago Flats who had dropped out of high school, and yet, without visible means of support, had somehow bought and refurbished a spectacular Victorian brick home on Granite Hill. While they might not have completely understood the depth of his involvement in organized crime, they knew he was not one to be toyed with, and they gave him a wide berth. Tony DeMarco and his lieutenants were the type with whom you avoided eye contact.
Thus, as Tony, Rhino, and Emilio became more frequent visitors to Duke’s Place, the locals started staying away. The dining room continued to do a brisk lunch business, and it was jammed for the Friday fish fries, but Duke could see the difference. He saw how the locals finished their beers and cleared the room when Tony or his goons walked in. Men playing pool would sometimes slide their sticks back in the wall racks and head for the door, leaving a table full of balls on the felt. The euchre players would fold their cards and leave.
Duke’s Place had become Tony’s favorite hangout, and the hub of his operation. He brazenly walked behind the bar and helped himself to beers out of the cooler, or got into the drawer under the cash register to examine the notebook in which the beer orders were kept. The first time Angel saw Tony inspecting the notebook, he said, “What do you think you’re doing? You’re not supposed to be in there.”
It must have taken every ounce of courage the former ballerino could muster to confront Tony. Duke braced for the eruption, but it didn’t come. Tony smiled and patted Angel twice on the cheek. “Not that it’s any of your concern, little man, but me and your buddy are partners, now. I’m just checking on my investment.” He slid the notebook back into the drawer. “I’m going to give you this one, but if you ever question me again, I’ll splatter that giant schnoz of yours all over your face.”
When Tony left the bar, Angel followed Duke into his office and said, “What the hell is he talking about? Partner?”
“As you might imagine, Angel, it wasn’t my choice.”
“What happened?”
Duke shook his head. “As much as I’d like to tell you, it’s best you don’t know. Right now, it’s just something I have to live with.”
Angel never brought it up again. Duke suspected he knew it had to do with Moonie’s death, and Angel certainly saw that 15 percent of the gross was missing each month.
Duke had the old wooden door of his office replaced with one made of steel with new locks, at least guaranteeing some modicum of privacy. He felt like such a coward, silently doing as he was told—an obedient dog, a slave in his own house. The name of Duke Ducheski was on the wall, but his control was slipping away. Despite the long hours he worked, Duke had trouble falling asleep each night as his brain refused to shut down. Plotting revenge and fantasizing about Tony’s death was exhausting. But, unlike the hazy dreams that filled his sleep, he knew there was no way out. Tony owned him. The payments on the gambling sheets were always ready when Rhino or Emilio came by to pick them up. The 15 percent monthly payment to Tony was slipped to him in a plain white envelope on the first of each month.
In the weeks after Tony had ordered Duke to stay clear of Cara, he saw her only a few times. She sobbed when he told her that he had withdrawn the divorce papers. At first, he tried to convince her—and himself—that the situation was temporary. She wanted to believe him, but they both knew it was over. The last time they were together was at a hotel at Station Square in Pittsburgh.
“You have to tell me what happened,” she said. “The truth. This has something to do with Moonie, doesn’t it? I want to know the truth.”
“I can’t. I don’t want to put you or your kids in danger. I’m in a jam, a big one, and I don’t know how to get out.” He blew air from his lungs to keep from crying. “In fact, I might never get out.”
She sadly accepted the end of the relationship. She said, “Nick, I’m sorrier than you’ll ever know.” She kissed him gently on the forehead and walked out of the hotel room and his life.
He had worked countless overtime hours in that filthy mill and scraped for a very long time to open Duke’s Place. Moonie had died in a pool of his own blood there. Duke wanted to make it a success and point to it as proof that he had something to contribute to society besides a jump shot. And now, within months of its opening, he had lost control. He was going to end up like Carmine—withered and defeated. That’s the way things worked with Tony DeMarco. He was like a stubborn mold. One day you see a spot on the basement wall. You bleach it, but it refuses to go away, and soon your house is condemned, eaten alive by the fungus.
If all that wasn’t bad enough, Duke also knew that he was sitting on a time bomb. Somewhere, between the surface clay and the sandstone bedrock of Mingo Junction, the head of Frankie “the Troll” Silvestri was rotting in Duke’s own bowling bag. Although he was faithfully adhering to Tony’s orders, he knew that could change in a moment. Tony could wake up in a sour mood one morning and order Chief Hinton Jaynes to go dig up the head. In fact, Duke was sure it was only a matter of time until that occurred.
Duke Ducheski was unsure of his next move, but he knew he could no longer stand still.
It was a simple, two-and-a-half-car garage—cement block and windowless—pushed hard against both the edge of the house Nina and Duke again shared and the narrow alley that separated the backyard from the parking lot of the Russian Orthodox Church. There were two entrances—a steel double-wide garage door that opened onto the curved asphalt drive that dropped to the alley, and a windowless door on which Duke had installed two deadbolts. There was nothing fancy about it, but for years it had been his sanctuary, the place where he had sought solitude and refuge from Nina.
He had built an L-shaped workbench in one corner. The walls were adorned with pegboards, on which hung his tools in neat succession. An old refrigerator rattled at one end of the bench and held nothing but bottles of Rolling Rock, Iron City, and Miller High Life.
The centerpiece of the garage was his most prized possession, and the reason he had buil
t it sans windows—a sparkling white, 1959 Buick Invicta.
It had been the only car that his dad had ever bought new, or nearly so. It had been used for six weeks by the Nazarene preacher who, in a moment blinded by the temptation of earthly possessions, bought it thinking that a man of his stature with God should be afforded the luxury of a fine automobile with fins. Unfortunately, the Nazarenes didn’t tithe like the Baptists, and the good reverend quickly realized that the monthly payments were beyond his reach, so he was forced to put a For Sale sign in the rear side window.
Del Ducheski was not a man to be envious of others. But he coveted that Buick from the first time he saw the preacher driving it up Hill Street on his way home from the dealership. When he saw the For Sale sign, he went to the preacher’s house with two thousand dollars cash, two hundred dollars less than the preacher needed to break even. The preacher moaned and groaned but finally took the offer.
Del took the keys, slid behind the wheel, and grinned as he drove down Commercial Street, watching the chrome-tipped white fins shine in his rearview mirror. It was the only time in his life that he bought anything on impulse, but he loved that car. It was a two-door hardtop, with a beige leather interior, a chrome, checkerboard grill, and slanted headlights that gave it the look of a stern, menacing face hiding a 445 Wildcat motor. Duke’s father kept it buffed and treasured it. It was his Sunday go-for-a-ride car. No food, no drink. Keep your shoes off the seat.
There were only thirty-one thousand miles on the odometer when his father died six years after Duke graduated from high school. He left the steel mill forever on a late August day after the emphysema that sapped his strength and ravaged his lungs left him too weak to walk from the parking lot to his job at the hot strip mill. He sat down on a bench, crying, feeling like he was carrying a hundred-pound weight vest and breathing through a wet bath towel. He was barely fifty years old, but his lungs, hardened and scarred by cigarettes and the grit of the mill, were useless slabs of tissue with the texture of cardboard.
He struggled to the mill office, where Angel helped him fill out his retirement papers, then he drove back up the hill and went into the house to die.
It didn’t take long.
Duke sometimes wondered if a person could simply will himself to die. From the day his wife had passed, Del Ducheski had never looked at life as a gift, but as something to be endured, each day existing to be marked off the calendar, one day closer to when he might see his lovely Rosabelle again, and they would be young and happy and without disease. That is how he spent his last days, sitting in the gloom, tethered to a green oxygen bottle by a clear plastic tube clipped to his columella, each breath sounding like a slipping transmission.
On a June evening, not one year after leaving the steel mill, Del Ducheski was sitting in his darkened living room—a bottle of beer in one hand, and a ham sandwich and a dill pickle on a paper plate on his lap—watching a rerun of Gunsmoke, when he suffered a hemorrhagic stroke that turned out the lights like a power surge fries a breaker box. He dropped his beer and slouched over; and that’s how Duke found him the next day, the bottle lying on the threadbare carpet, a piece of sandwich still in his cheek.
The remainder of his estate was paltry—a falling-down house, a few sets of cufflinks, some knives, fishing gear, a gold pocket watch that had been passed down from his grandfather, and the Buick. The car was Duke’s link to his father, a piece of Ducheski family history that tied him to the past. And thus it occupied the place of honor in the garage.
Duke was in the garage early on the first Saturday morning in May 1994, having slipped out of the house a few minutes before six. Nina was asleep on the couch and didn’t stir, even when the back door stuttered on the linoleum. Once inside the garage, he dead-bolted both locks and opened the trunk of the Buick. It was stuffed with treasures of sentimental value—scrapbooks, trophies and awards, old family photographs, his mother’s favorite quilt, her jewelry, the gold pocket watch, and pocket knives that his dad had carried in the mill, their handles worn smooth from use.
Shoving a hand into the bottom of a cardboard box that held the quilt, his varsity sweater, and a cigar box of Confederate paper money, Duke reached around until he found the tattered silk of his baby blanket. Sliding his hands between the folds, he wrapped his hand around the pistol’s ivory grips.
It was a Colt .45 semi-automatic, M1911, known as the Commander. It had been Grandfather Ducheski’s service revolver in World War I. His grandfather had boasted throughout his life that he had used the pistol when he fought in the Battle of the Argonne Forest with the 328th Infantry alongside the great Sergeant Alvin York, who had used an identical weapon. He had won the ivory grips in a poker game on the troop ship to England. The loser pleaded with Grandfather Ducheski, “But my wife bought me those grips right before we shipped out.” Duke’s grandfather shrugged and said, “Well, if you’re fortunate enough to live through the war, she’s going to be right upset when you get home.”
As Duke pulled the weapon from the depths of his baby blanket, the ivory grips were cool in his palm. He rolled the pistol in his hand, examining the fit. Lifting the revolver at arm’s length, Duke squinted his left eye and sighted down the gray barrel, setting the sights on a spot on the far wall. When the hammer snapped on the empty chamber, he flinched. Never in his life had he squeezed the trigger of an actual gun. Three more times he pulled the trigger. The snap of the hammer echoed in the quiet garage.
He closed the trunk and turned, resting his rear against the chromed fin on the driver’s side. He removed the magazine and filled it with .45-caliber shells. When the magazine snapped into place, tentacles of ice gripped his bones and clutched his soul. He tucked the gun inside his waistband, covered the ivory grips with his shirt, and walked out of the garage.
He drove the Jeep through Brilliant and out New Alexandria Road, past the Quaker State station, and toward the township dump. Off to the left was a dirt road that led to a hollow carved from the hills by the Hudson Mining Company in the 1930s. The locals called it Cherry Canyon.
As a boy, he had roamed the canyon with his cousins, Mitch Malone and Johnny Earl, and he knew it well. He drove down the dirt road until the Jeep was hidden by the scrub and weeds. He left it parked in the middle of the road and made his way down a steep path lined with bull thistles and giant foxtail. At the bottom of the canyon, the path leveled out and followed the edge of a pond that filled the canyon’s basin. The ground was littered with beer cans, blankets, and spent condoms.
The sun was cresting above the low hills to the east. The dew was heavy on the ground, and it soaked Duke’s cuffs and work shoes. The achy sound of cicadas droned through the trees that stood guard along the rim of the canyon. Duke followed the path as it snaked around the base of the cliffs, working deep into the hills. The pond was long and narrow, full of boulders and bass. He could breathe easy in the solitude and, for the time being, the safety of being far from Tony DeMarco. The sky was wide and azure, with only a few wispy, scud clouds moving across the valley far to the north. It seemed as though he was in a small vale in Wyoming or Montana, and not just a few miles from the grind of the steel mill.
Duke walked a mile or more to the far side of the pond to an area called the Flats, a low spot between the sandstone walls where the air was filled with the stench of stagnant water. He found a half a dozen beer bottles and set them on a mound of dirt, then stepped off fifteen paces. With the toe of his shoe, Duke drew a line in the dirt, then smiled at his folly. He was preparing to defend his life, yet he felt compelled to draw a line in the dirt as though it was a free-throw contest.
He pulled the pistol from his waistband, took a cleansing breath, and raised his right arm. He aimed down the barrel, flinched, jerked, and fired.
Rock exploded on the high wall thirty feet above the beer bottles. The blast echoed down the canyon, and a cloud of rock dust floated toward the pond.
“Okay, Duke, this time, no flinch. Just squeeze the trigger.”
He repeated the process, aimed, flinched, jerked, and fired.
Again, he burrowed a .45 shell high into the wall.
He smiled at his own ineptitude.
He had plenty of shells. He kept firing, and each shot moved its way down the wall, inching closer to the targets. The first explosion of amber glass occurred on his ninth shot. Duke Ducheski had never lacked for confidence and assumed he had gained control of the revolver. The next shot, however, kicked dirt three feet in front of the row of bottles, and the next clipped the limb of a honey locust.
When next he prayed, he would thank God for making Tony DeMarco broad across the chest and shoulders.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
It was just after three o’clock in the morning. The florescent haze of the lights under the bar threw only enough illumination to create reflections in the mirrors. Duke Ducheski was alone in his restaurant with only the rumblings of the steel mill to disturb the quiet. The night was a cacophony of sounds—vibrations, really—that caused the windows to hum as though the casings were home to a thousand angry bees. The blast furnace erupted, and the downtown shook—slow, but enough that you could see a ripple in your beer. Coal trains hummed behind the business district and caused ashtrays to crabwalk across the vinyl tables.
Duke sat at such a table, keeping a thumb on the plastic ashtray as a Norfolk and Western diesel streamed through town pulling a train of one hundred hoppers loaded with No. 2 bituminous coal from Powhatan Point, heading for a steel mill in Cleveland. Four amber sentinels disguised as Iron City longnecks stood guard over the table, only one containing fluid; sweat snaked down the bottle that was little more than half full. The ashtray was full of the dead and their ashes. The smoke from their still-live brother curled up around Duke’s face. He only smoked when his nerves got the best of him, and he had been firing up one after another all day. An empty Marlboro hard pack was crumpled on the table next to his pistol. He was tired, full of beer, and twitchy with nerves, and he had a loaded .45 within arm’s reach. Even in his current condition, Duke knew that this was not a healthy combination.
