Devil's Redhead

by David Corbett

  Sure, he was a shadow now of who he’d been. A loser in a tailspin. Cut him loose, she imagined people telling her. She couldn’t do it. Because in her mind’s eye, she saw the hand with the knife was not her own, and the life plummeting into the abyss wasn’t Frank’s. It was hers.

  Once, during one of her trips to ER with Frank, a doctor had taken her aside, grilled her a little. Saying she should stop worrying about Frank’s head and deal with her own, he prescribed intensive therapy and pills. Once he left her alone, she balled up the prescription slip and ash-canned it. She knew girls in their teens and twenties for Christ’s sake, hardly enough of a life to bitch about, already swearing by Prozac or Zoloft or some other pharmaceutical cousin, tossing them down like they were Rolaids. Like any emotion south of chipper was death itself. Not me, she told herself. I ain’t depressed, or at least no more than anybody would be on a good dose of what I’ve been through. I’m just stuck. Badly positioned in the swirl of things. Nothing to do but soldier on.

  If I could just find the steam.

  As if all that weren’t enough, now Danny was out. A tangle of wants she’d thought no longer existed had begun to surface, just in time for the third anniversary of Jesse’s murder. Frank would be going off like a bottle rocket sometime soon. You had to laugh, she thought. That or get “depressed.” And hell, what’s depression anyway but the thing that happens to you when you decide not to go totally fucking nuts.

  “What’s the joke?” Frank asked from behind.

  She turned around, startled. Fresh from his shower, he’d dressed and combed his wet hair away from his face. He looked like a boy.

  Jesse.

  “Nothing,” she said. “I was just thinking to myself.”

  “Talking to yourself,” Frank corrected. “First sign of being crazy.”

  Sleeves rolled up and shirttail out, he went to the fridge, collected a beer, twisted the top off and tossed it in the trash. Putting the bottle to his lips he slid into the breakfast nook and eyed her. She served him up a bowl of soup, cut his sandwich in half, placed it on a plate and came to the table.

  As soon as she set down his lunch he curled his arm around her hip, pulled her to him and, lifting her T-shirt, ran his free hand across her belly. He kissed her navel, closed his eyes and placed his cheek against her skin.

  “God I love the way you smell,” he said.

  “I thought you were hungry.”

  He flinched at her tone, withdrew his cheek and lowered her shirt.

  “Frank—”

  “Can I tell you something?” he said, vexed. “You been drag-assing around this house the past I don’t know how long. Mumbling to yourself like Popeye.” He picked up his spoon, toyed with his soup. “Feel like I’m here all by myself.”

  “Given who we owe for being here,” she said, “I’d say merely talking to myself requires a special courage.”

  “Now, now, now. Like we had a choice. Got evicted last time, right? Lucky Roy had this place.”

  Luck has nothing to do with it, Shel thought. Frank had met Roy Akers on a construction site, or that was the story at the time. It wasn’t till later, after considerable prodding, Shel learned that Roy and his Arkie transplant brothers weren’t nomad carpenters trailing after new construction up and down the valley. They were jackals. Crankers. Thieves. Shakedown artists. Worse, they owed their ability to operate to a ruthless, cagey old wolf named Felix Randall. No one in the Delta so much as felt an untoward impulse without paying Felix Randall for the privilege.

  “Don’t kid yourself,” she said. “We’re just here to keep the lights on, ward off snoops and squatters.”

  “Yeah, well, hey,” Frank said with a shrug. “Rent-free.”

  “No such thing as rent-free, Frank. Sure as hell not with the likes of Roy Akers. We’ve had this discussion.”

  Frank sighed. “While we’re on the subject of ‘we’ve had this discussion,’ remember that little talk we had a while back, about what we’d do if we came into a little money?”

  He toyed with his sandwich, wearing an odd smile. His eyes zagged.

  “What talk?” Shel said. “When?”

  Frank shrugged. “Maybe I just thought about it. You know, like a little windfall.”

  Shel sat down across from him. “What are you driving at?”

  “Pull up stakes,” Frank said. “Haul ass outta here. Money in our pocket and gone gone gone.” He tasted his soup. “Any event, an opportunity’s come up. Nothing major. But it could give us just that kinda chance.” He glanced up, offering a wink and a smile. “You and me. You and me.”

  Shel froze. “Roy know this?”

  Frank pursed his lips and waved his spoon back and forth. “Our little secret.”

  “You trying to get yourself killed?” She reached across the table and grabbed his wrist. “Promise me, Frank. Don’t get clever. Frank, look at me.”

  Two months earlier, she’d almost fled in the night. Shaking Frank awake, she’d told him, “I’m going. Come with me.” Frank’d stared up at her, gripped her sleeve, and said, “Whoa, wait, stop. Please. Not that simple.” There was panic in his eyes when he said it, a look she didn’t want boring into her back. At which point she realized there’d be no walking out alone. Blame conscience, she thought, or habit, or that deadening haze inside your mind, whatever. The truth remains: You’re staying. You’re staying because, without you, Frank will crumble. And in that state he will undoubtedly do the very thing the Akers brothers will kill him for.

  “Frank, I said look at me.”

  Frank, smiling, prodded a wedge of meat with his spoon. “Chicken rice, mighty nice.”

  CHAPTER

  4

  Walking through the Tucson air terminal, Abatangelo fought intermittent bouts of vertigo adjusting to the speed of things, the freedom of movement, the colors. The presence of women. Erections surged and waned with an unsettling lack of discrimination. He ordered a cup of hot tea and sat by himself in the lounge, waiting for his flight.

  He suffered a recurring premonition that something was about to go wrong. Any minute someone would press his face in close, a hand’s width away—You know me, right?—and then the rest of it going off like popping lights, the drawn weapons, the cries of Down on your face and Show us your hands—as though this day of all days could be involuted, drawn back upon itself and wrung inside out, like some topological oddity. He’d wind up right back where he’d started, forever.

  He sipped his tea and listened for his flight number on the intercom.

  Once on board his flight, he reached into his pocket and took out Shel’s letter. He already had it memorized, and so he didn’t so much read the words as just let his eyes trail across her loopy script. As he did, he listened for an echo—the memory of her voice, as though she herself were reciting the words. It was a pleasant illusion, despite what much of the letter said. The final paragraph, in particular. His eyes invariably settled there, as though it were some sort of mistake.

  Got a new life now, out in B.F.E. with a man named Frank. It’s heaven on earth, except when it’s not. Like I said, it’s complicated. To tell the truth, I could stand to see you. I miss how sane things used to feel with you around. But hey, I wouldn’t know what to do with sanity if I owned it.

  Love you, Shel

  Sanity, he thought, gently folding the letter closed. I could stand to see you. As the plane descended into San Francisco, the stewardess cautioned against opening the overhead bins too quickly. He thought for all the world she added, “The continents may have shifted during flight.”

  He took a cab to the corner of Union and Columbus, where Napolitano’s Bohemian Café sat in the shadow of the cathedral. Inside, crowd noise mingled with the shriek of the espresso machine. Berlioz’s Le Damnation de Faust provided background as bald men reading European newspapers shared tables with black-clad students. A woman in a business suit played pinball in her stocking feet.

  Abatangelo approached the bar and sat beside two sec
retaries who smiled but did not engage. One of them reminded him vaguely of Shel and he suffered an immediate, embarrassing ardor for her. Behind the bar, his reflection in the mirror peeked through tiers of wine bottles. He made a halfhearted truce with what he saw and gestured for the bartender.

  “Dominic here?”

  The bartender paused for a moment. “You’re Danny A,” he said.

  Abatangelo shot a sidelong glance at the secretaries.

  “So?” The bartender shrugged, brought down a bottle of Bardolino and poured Abatangelo a glass. “Ben tornato.”

  As Abatangelo tasted the wine, an unbidden smile appeared. He waited for something bad to happen.

  “You want a sandwich,” the bartender said, recorking the bottle, “we got fresh-baked focaccia, put some salami on it, coppa, meatball, we got pizza, espresso, cannoli, you name it. Dominic said make you at home.”

  “He’s not here,” Abatangelo guessed.

  “Sit tight, he’ll be back soon. He knows you’re due.”

  With that the bartender drifted away. Abatangelo squared the stool beneath him and settled in to wait. Beside him the two secretaries chattered feverishly, smelling of rain and perfume and chardonnay. Shortly, a commotion broke out from the rear of the bar, and Dominic Napolitano swam through the storeroom curtain, followed by a gray-haired, barrel-bodied woman. This was Nina, his wife. She brayed at his back: “How much? I got a right to know, you piss it away, I gotta right. How much, huh?”

  Dominic shouted back, “Go ahead, bust my balls, the whole damn world can hear, what do I care?”

  Dominic, looking up, spotted Abatangelo and blinked as their eyes met. He ambled forward and extended a meaty hand. He had small blue eyes and a nose bespotted with large pores. His short white hair accentuated the spread of his ears.

  “Nina, look. It’s Gina’s boy, God rest her soul.”

  Nina Napolitano stayed where she was. “That ain’t Gina’s boy. That’s Vince’s boy.”

  “Nina, don’t—”

  “If this was Gina’s boy, he’d a been at her funeral. But I didn’t see him at Gina’s funeral. I didn’t see him nowhere, never. Not when she lived in that apartment all by herself. Not when she got sick, not at the hospital. Musta had plans.”

  Dominic came around the bar and took Abatangelo by the arm. “Come on,” he whispered, “I’ll show you where you stay.”

  Nina glared at the two of them as they made their way out through the crowd. She shouted from the bar: “You, the degenerate. Don’t come back to my place till you visit the lighthouse where we spread your mother’s ashes, you hear me?”

  On the sidewalk Dominic took out a handkerchief and patted his bare head. He walked with a low center of gravity, gap-legged, with an arm-pumping swivel above the waist and his chin jutting out.

  “Your P.O.’s been calling, driving Nina nuts. I swear to God—wants to know your address, ETA, where you’re working, yadda yadda. I tell him, Look, I’m just the home monitor, you wanna talk to Daniel, he’s smart, he knows he’s gotta connect within twenty-four hours. You wanna talk to his boss, now or whenever, call Lenny Mannion.”

  Dominic turned toward Abatangelo.

  “You should do that, too, incidentally. Call Lenny, I’ll give you the number. You can start whenever, he runs a little portrait shop. School pictures, families, babies, you know? It ain’t art, but it beats washing dishes and kicking back to some asshole for the privilege. And Lenny’s sticking his neck out. I mean, an ex-con, babies around, teenage girls. Know what I mean? No offense. But anybody finds out you been inside, he’s explaining till he’s dead.”

  Dominic turned face-front again.

  “Anyway, I tell this P.O. of yours, ‘Off my back.’ He still calls. Why? ’Cuz you’re not spending six weeks in some halfway house he’s probably got a piece of, if you know what I mean.”

  “I appreciate what you’re doing,” Abatangelo said. “And I’ll call him. Today.”

  Dominic shook his head. “I’m not doing this for you, you know. I’m doing it for your mother, God rest her soul.”

  He led Abatangelo three blocks through North Beach. Traffic sat stalled on Columbus, horns blared, the sidewalks thronged with bobbing crowds. Abatangelo found himself clutching his paper sack, a yardbird reflex.

  Dominic resumed: “Don’t mind Nina, okay? It’s just, I mean, not to make you feel bad, but near the end, your mother lived like a squirrel. And what there was to get, your sister got. Feds took your share. Agents came to probate court, served their papers, it was all written down, boom boom boom. Not that there was much to get. Bloodsuckers came out of the woodwork, their hands out, bills you wouldn’t believe. Poor woman. You coulda maybe thought about giving her a little of that money you made, know what I mean?”

  “She wouldn’t take it,” Abatangelo said. “And by the time she was sick, I’d been tagged. They seized everything.”

  Dominic snorted. “Like you didn’t have a secret stash somewhere.”

  “Not secret enough.”

  Dominic studied him. “Some criminal mastermind.”

  They stopped in front of a grocery called the Smiling Child Market. Tea-smoked chickens hung in the window and Chinese matrons rummaged through sidewalk bins for dragon beans, lo bok, cloud ear mushrooms. Just beyond the door, the owner stood at the register, wearing a red cardigan and a wisdom cap. Behind him an ancient woman, dressed in black, sat on a dairy carton feeding glazed rice crackers to a cat.

  “Jimmy,” Dominic called out, “Jimmy, dammit Jimmy, over here. This is the roomer I told you about. We’re going up, that good?”

  The grocer smiled an utterly impersonal smile. In the stairway, searching his pocket for the keys, Dominic told Abatangelo, “His name’s Jimmy Shu. He don’t know where you been, which is good. Never tell a Chinaman everything. He’ll never trust you again.”

  Upstairs, the hallway was dark and redolent of ginger and curry and chili oil. The clamor of North Beach filtered through the window at one end, Chinatown the other. Dominic fiddled with the keys in the dim light, holding them near his eyes, then opened the apartment door. They greeted a clutter of take-out cartons, ravaged napkins and tangled rags.

  Dominic said, “Hey hey, this was all supposed to be, well, gone, you know?”

  He kicked a welter of paper into a heap near the wall, wiping his head again and then his throat. “Christ. Fucking skinflint Jimmy Shu.” He let loose a burdened sigh. “Let me show you the back,” he said.

  In the rear there was a foldaway bed, a table, a radio. Abatangelo found himself imagining Shel sitting there, on the bed, smiling up at him.

  Dominic said, “Simple and small. Hope it don’t remind you too much of prison. I’ll get a broom, a pan, get the front cleaned up.”

  “Dominic, slow down. Go back to the bar. I’m grateful.”

  Dominic stood still for the first time. He nodded thoughtfully a moment, then looked up into Abatangelo’s face.

  “Your mother was a very dear woman,” he said. “Don’t think she didn’t miss you. Her only boy, in prison. For drugs, Christ. It broke her heart. You broke her goddamn heart.”

  Abatangelo reached out for the old man’s shoulder but Dominic recoiled. He wiped his mouth and looked at his feet. “I’m gonna say this,” he said. “Say it once and that’s it. And I won’t regret it.” He looked up. His chin bobbed angrily. “Nina’s right in one respect, you know? If your father had been a better man, eh? Instead of a piece of shit. Maybe none of this woulda happened.” He let the words hang there a moment, nodding to himself as though, in hearing the echo in his mind, he felt certain the words were true. Finally, he turned to leave.

  “Dominic? One last thing.”

  Dominic stopped. “Yeah, sure, what?”

  “Not to take advantage,” Abatangelo said. “But I need a car.”

  From the hallway Frank stared at the door to the guest room. Shel had holed herself up in there again, right after fixing lunch. He listened for sounds from insid
e, thinking: She’s gonna brood the rest of the day away. Gonna sit there and stare at the wall and run through her smokes. All she needs is a record player and a bunch of sad songs.

  He shivered a little, wondering what it was that had come over her. Had she found someone else? Didn’t she realize that whatever he did, everything he did, he did for her?

  Well, all right then, he thought. It’s up to me. Get our asses out of here and start up new. For all her moody sulking, for all her wandering off sometimes in the middle of something he was trying to tell her, she was still the one good thing in his life. She deserves to get out of here as much as I do, he told himself. She deserves better.

  He left the house, started his truck and drove out to the highway, heading for West Pittsburg for his meet with the twins.

  Secretly, he knew part of the reason behind his plan was to make amends. He hadn’t been entirely honest. Even with all the things she’d figured out, forced out of him, there were still a million left to tell. All the times he’d said he was going out to a construction site to pound nails or hoist Sheetrock, he was actually walking bogus picket lines in the valley, shaking down contractors. If he wasn’t shaking them down he was ripping them off, stealing equipment, tools, hardware, even trucks.

  On occasion he manned a crank lab, sucking fumes, standing watch. Once the batch was cooked he’d help dump the dregs, trying not to get poisoned for the privilege.

  He’d be gone for as long as a week sometimes, telling Shel they were in Fresno or Merced or Oroville. It was during those prolonged periods away that he binged. Sometimes it took a couple of days to get straight enough so he could walk back in without giving the whole charade away. Sometimes he wondered if she was even paying attention. That hurt. And when he hurt, he wanted to party. Roy Akers obliged; he was more than happy to keep Frank zoomed out of his skull.

  Frank was so behind on his nut now the whole thing was way out of hand. Shel knew he owed money; she had no idea how bad it was. And he didn’t dare tell her. Regardless, on top of everything else, he was nabbing cars for Roy now, like he was in fucking high school. Which was one of the reasons he got talked down to by absolutely everybody, treated like a grunt. I’m sick of the Akers brothers strutting around like they’re the kickass of crime, he thought. Time to make a little score, blow on out of Dodge.