Devil's Redhead

by David Corbett

  Me and my redhead nurse.

  At West Pittsburg he got off the freeway and onto surface streets again, heading toward the water. On Black Diamond Street, a rotting whitewashed billboard displayed a spray-paint chaos of gang names and street handles: The Jiminos, Vicious Richie, Hype Rita, the Beacon Street Dutch. Broken bodies lined the street, grinders, rappies, honks, a line of vacant-eyed women eager to work twists. Party balloons, emptied of hop, lay scattered down the sidewalk.

  Reverend Ben’s sat at the end of a cul-de-sac named Freedom Court. The sign above the doorway read:

  REVEREND BEN’S APOLLO CLUB

  UPLIFTING REVIVALS

  GIANT TV

  SHUFFLEBOARD

  Frank pulled behind the building and parked. The tar paper roof bristled with cattle wire. Candy wrappers and a discarded tampon littered the gravel.

  At the doorway Frank hit a stench of gummed-up liquor wells and rancid rubber. As his eyes grew accustomed to the change of light, the barroom came into focus. A large empty room with scattered metal chairs, cracked linoleum, bare bulbs screwed into wall sockets for light.

  No giant TV. No uplifting revival.

  The bartender, with the chest and arms of a man twice his height, watched Frank wander for a bit. He wore a tight knit shirt and had a shaved head. This, Frank guessed, was Reverend Ben.

  Two old men sat with their drinks at the bar. Frank got a feeling of slick, good-natured harmlessness from both, which reassured him. The nearest one farted loudly, and the other looked around in mock astonishment.

  “Low-flying duck,” said the first.

  “You got mail,” said the other.

  The rest of the room was empty. No twins, not yet. Frank ordered a beer and sauntered toward the jukebox, eyeing the hand-scrawled selections. Hop Wilson’s “Black Cat Bone.” Sonny Terry’s “Crow Jane.” John Lee Hooker’s “Crawling King Snake Blues.” Reading the handwritten titles, he couldn’t help feeling that, if he put a quarter in, he’d choose exactly the one song they’d hate him for.

  One of the old men drifted up behind. He waved his hand at Frank as though to say: Go on.

  “Don’t be pretending you know those tunes,” he said, entering the jukebox glow. He wore a bow tie and a white shirt. His cologne overwhelmed the stench of the bar. He leaned down, staring into the bright machinery. “Slip in your quade.”

  Frank took out a quarter and did as he was told.

  “Pick this,” the man said, pointing out a song. His hands were large and fluid, the fingers thick as rope. Albert King, “Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven.”

  Frank hesitated.

  “Go on, won’t electrocute you.”

  Frank punched in the code. The man said, “Then this,” pointing out another song. Elmore James, “Shake Your Moneymaker.” The man stood back and smiled.

  “Feel better already, don’cha.”

  The first song started out slow and raw. The old man recoiled softly, closing his eyes and working each arm as his hips rocked back and forth. Turning back around to his friend, he sang loud when the verse started, his voice a roar, like a preacher’s.

  “Everybody wants to laugh

  Nobody wants to cry

  I said everybody wants to laugh

  Ain’t nobody wants to cry

  Everybody wants to get to heaven

  But nobody wants to die.”

  He turned back around to Frank for affirmation, but Frank just stood there. Shel usually handled these sorts of situations for him. Feeling a sudden visceral need for her there, Frank imagined her taking form by his side, like a ghost.

  The old man shook his head and ran a thick finger under each eye. “Forget it,” he said, and humped back to the bar.

  It took another ten minutes for the twins to appear. They came in one after the other, ducking into the bar with an uneasy familiarity. Their names were Bryan and Ryan Briscoe. They were identically towheaded, sloe-eyed, small and freebase thin. Frank called them Chewy and Mooch, to keep them separate in his mind.

  One of the twins approached the center of the room with an expression of mock horror, his arms spread wide as though to embrace a missing thing. This was the wiseass, Mooch. He fell to his knees and cried out, “Reverend Ben! The snooker table! How could you?”

  Reverend Ben traded glances with the two old men at the bar. Nobody looked happy.

  “What is this,” Reverend Ben said finally. “National Skanky Hustler Day?”

  Mooch rose to his feet and went to the bar, impervious to the contempt. He took out a tangled wad of cash, unraveled a bill and smoothed it out on the bar. “Drinks for everybody,” he said. “Gonna miss this place. Chump City. Made a lot of money here.”

  The other twin approached Frank. This was the sad one. The nervous one. Chewy.

  “We made it,” Chewy said.

  The twins were a sight to behold, Frank thought. Youngest issue of the Lodi Briscoes, purveyors of quality feed. The twins were the family fuckups. Frank had made their acquaintance one night as they were hustling pool in a Manteca roadhouse. They had quite a little racket: Chewy suckered the marks in, knocked off to the can, then Mooch came out and finished them off. The brothers took their winnings in cash or blow. From the sounds of things, they’d played this room as well. Amazing, Frank thought, they made it out with their asses intact.

  “How’d it go?” Frank asked.

  Before Chewy could answer, Mooch came up from behind with three beers. He handed them around, grinning.

  “Got three trucks,” Chewy said. He pulled up a metal folding chair and sat. Mooch remained standing. “All parked out in Antioch, where you said.”

  “We did a follow-in out at the Red Roof in Tracy,” Mooch crowed. “Some salesman. Took his wallet and his sample bag and tied him up with duct tape. Sells ball bearings, you imagine? Went on out, used his plastic and rented us three big shiny white trucks.”

  “Rented?” Frank said.

  “Well, yeah,” Chewy said. He had yet to drink from his beer.

  “It’s cool,” Mooch said. “They can’t trace it to us, I told you.”

  “They can trace it to your follow-in,” Frank said. “Your salesman, he’ll hang a visual on you two. You kinda stand out, know what I mean?”

  Chewy leaned closer and spoke softly. “It just seemed too much a risk to steal three trucks, Frank.” He licked his lips and swallowed. “You know, like three on a match?”

  “Who’d you rent from?”

  “That guy in Clayton you mentioned,” Chewy said. “Lonesome George.”

  Frank froze. “Why him?”

  “Why not?” Chewy answered. “No offense, but you’re making me very nervous here.”

  Lonesome George DeSantis had operated at least a dozen rental agencies, one after the other, until the Insurance Commissioner got wise to his claims record. Lonesome George’s renters tended to have accidents. They tended to have their cars rifled, too, or stolen outright. Now he operated through a straw man. Since he had his shop in east Contra Costa County—CoCo County as the locals called it—Lonesome George kicked back to Felix Randall to keep his operation afloat.

  “Why him?” Frank repeated. “Why Lonesome George?”

  Mooch leaned down, close to Frank’s face. “Like my brother said, you gave us his name. You said he was a player.”

  Frank turned to face him. The boy’s eyes jigged and the skin around the sockets was waxy. A user’s pallor. Frank said, “If I told you to come over to my house, fuck my old lady, it’s cool. Would you do it?”

  “Hell, yes,” Mooch said. “You got a first-rate old lady.”

  Chewy said, “Tell me what’s wrong, Frank.”

  Frank kept his eye on Mooch. “You want a shot at my old lady?”

  “He didn’t mean anything,” Chewy said. “Frank, what’s wrong.”

  “No, I want to hear this,” Frank said. “Mooch, you want to splay old Lachelle Maureen? You’ve met her what, twice? Or am I wrong about that?”

 
“Frank—”

  “Answer my question, Mooch.”

  Mooch took a step back. Eyes to the ceiling, he murmured, “Oh, man,” and drank from his beer.

  “Look, Frank,” Chewy said, “I admit, you didn’t tell us outright, you know, ‘Check out Lonesome George.’ But we thought, hey, you brought him up, you told us who he was and all. Now, I mean, if he’s gonna make us …”

  Frank closed his eyes and put his thumb and forefinger to the bridge of his nose, pinching hard. A riot of dots materialized on the backs of his eyelids.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “Forget it.”

  “Frank …”

  “Forget it,” Frank said, louder this time. He stood up. To Chewy, he said, “Drink your beer.” He turned to Mooch then, and gestured for him to come close. Mooch took one step forward, no more. Frank reached across the space between them and put his arm around the boy’s shoulder. Whispering, he said, “What you just did? Don’t do it again. Understand?”

  He met the boy’s eyes. They were wild with cocaine, vaguely insolent, uncomprehending. Frank removed his arm and headed for the door.

  “Hit the hump, boys. Time to do the deed.”

  Frank went to his truck, started it up, and left with the twins following behind. As he drove back out through West Pittsburg, he found himself not thinking about the fuckup brothers or even Lonesome George. He was thinking about Felix Randall.

  One of the last of the old biker chiefs, Felix controlled the Delta underworld from his salvage yard out near Bethel Island. He’d suffered a little in stature when the Mexicans made inroads during his last stint in prison. To make matters worse, he’d been diagnosed with throat cancer while at Boron. They transferred him to Springfield for the tracheotomy, which the prison doctors botched. Despite his ruined larynx and his years off the game, now that he was out again he was hell-bent on proving one thing: He ruled the Delta. Not the Mexicans, not the Chinks or the Vietnamese, not the rival biker gangs. Him.

  Frank’s connection to Felix was through Roy Akers and his brothers, who conceded to Felix’s control. They paid their tithe to a pair of enforcers named Lonnie Dayball and Rick Tully. Others had proved slower studies. They had to see their crank labs fireball, or their chop shops bombed, or their indoor pot farms raided by county narcs tipped by Felix’s people to realize: You Do Not Sideball Felix Randall. A few guys died, learning that.

  Only the Mexicans stood up to him now. They had labs up and down the valley, Fresno to Redding, and the Delta was no exception. With what they paid the illegals who manned those labs, you could cop an ounce of chavo crank for almost half what Felix was asking. Moving up the wholesale chain, the prices got even more ridiculous. Frank, whose mother had been part Mexican and had driven into Mexico routinely to score cheap speed, saw a little humor in this development. He doubted anyone else in his circle shared this view.

  Only a few weeks ago, one particularly unlucky mojado had been dragged from a lab out on Kirker Pass Road, stripped naked by Day-ball and Tully and the Akers brothers and fastened to a eucalyptus tree with cattle wire and molly screws. Gaspar Arevalo, age seventeen, from the state of Sonora, so the reports went. He was dead by the time the paramedics figured out a way to get him down.

  CHAPTER

  5

  Abatangelo drove Dominic’s car south from San Francisco along the coast toward the Montara Lighthouse. Beyond Devil’s Slide the beach was windy, fogbound and desolate beneath shallow cliffs. Seagulls swept low across the hazy winter surf, struggling inland across low dunes scruffed with ice plant.

  He turned into the parking lot and killed the motor. The lighthouse was open for tourists, and a half dozen of them stood in the glass-rimmed beacon, peering out into the fog. Several backpackers crouched at the door of the hostel, queued up to claim a cot for the night.

  The lighthouse had always been one of his mother’s favorite landmarks. She’d come down here often to walk the beach and listen to the surf and smell the salt air. At times he’d wondered if he hadn’t inherited some of his fondness for the sea from her.

  Out of the car, he stood for a moment at the edge of the gravel lot, surveying the beach. So where had the ceremony been held? The coast stretched cold and dark in both directions. The ocean seethed in a winter chop.

  For the first three years of his imprisonment, Abatangelo had been badgered at least twice a month by agents trying to get him to roll on his old crowd. The younger agents had been especially full of themselves. They cracked bad Italian jokes and said he could help them. He knew the scene as well as anyone, where his partner Steve Cadaret might run in Asia, who’d he run with, who his suppliers in Bangkok were, which wholesalers stateside had not yet been tagged. If he confided these things—off the record, naturally—at most before the grand jury (a secret grand jury, mind you), they could move him back to the coast. Maybe work a cut in his time. Spring his old lady.

  They offered him thirty grand and called it Good Faith Money. They told him if they supplied an attorney for him, he had to talk, they’d get a writ ad testificandum, it was “a sort-of-addendum to the Sixth Amendment.” They told him if he didn’t cooperate they’d get him holed away in Ad Seg forever. In the end, sensing a soft spot, they routinely circled back around to what he came to refer to as The Shel Beaudry Gambit: Play ball, your old lady walks.

  “Come on,” they chimed, “you love her, right? Do anything for her, right? We don’t want to make you a hostile witness. We want to make you happy.”

  It was a marvel to watch how much they hated you for not giving in to their insulting maneuvers. They knew you loathed them and they couldn’t stand that. They were the heroes, the high-minded brothers of your teenage sweetheart. They were only as vile as they had to be, dealing with the likes of you.

  When Abatangelo’s mother fell ill, the agents gave up on The Shel Beaudry Gambit and turned to The Dying Mother Ploy. A trip to see her could be arranged, if, well, guess. Once, an agent delivered to him six months’ worth of letters he’d written to her, none of which had been posted. “You misplace these?” he asked, dropping them on Abatangelo’s bunk. “I got a better way to reach out and touch old Mom if you’re ready to act smart.”

  It was insane how badly they misread him. The brinkmanship only deepened his resolve, and so his mother’s final days came and went without his being able to work so much as a call to the hospital or the funeral home. His sister never forgave him for that. Her letters stopped, and she returned his unopened; he no longer even knew where she was. But once Regina Abatangelo was dead, the badgering stopped. The government finally decided he was unworthy of further attention. The once-friendly agents advised the Bureau of Prisons to make sure Abatangelo served every last day of his ten-year term.

  He headed down the sandy cliff on a pathway lined with bollards. Come sea level he marched north along the water. Seagulls gathered in swelling numbers, picking through litter. As he neared a group they fluttered up lazily, circled low across the surf, then came back down again. The last time he’d been on a beach was when he’d been arrested, and despite the unpleasant association, he felt a pleasant honing of spirit with the tang of salt and kelp in the air. As soon as parole conditions permitted and he had the money saved, he intended to buy a boat, live on it, sail it down the coast with Shel as his mate. They’d live on what they caught over the side with a drag, coming ashore only to snatch fresh water and barter for supplies.

  But we’re not here to reflect on all that, he reminded himself. We’re here to remember Mother.

  He tried to picture her, but the scenes that came to mind were hazy and unpleasant. His mother had been an unhappy woman married to a man born to perfect other people’s unhappiness. Vincenzo and Regina. The glib deadbeat and the suffering saint. They had two children, Daniel and Christina. There. Take a snapshot, carry it around in your wallet. Remember.

  He tried to bring to bear the good things, the remarkable things. His mother at one time invested the whole of her heart in Dan
and his younger sister, wanting them to regain the station in life she’d surrendered by marrying their father. At least once a week the three of them visited the Museum of Art, or the Palace of the Legion of Honor. Twice a year she treated them to the opera. She instructed them on the reasons why Verdi’s Otello surpassed Shakespeare’s. She explained to them in whispers the meaning of words like coloratura, bel canto, entr’acte.

  Shortly these memories blended together until every recollection resembled the next. Then the one he always tried to avoid rose up.

  It happened on a Sunday. They were just sitting down to afternoon supper when steps clattered in the hallway. Someone pounded hard on the door. His father went white and gestured for everyone at the table to be still. The pounding came again, harder, and a voice called out, “Vince, don’t fuck around, we can smell the food, you asshole.” Christina began to cry. Her father shot to her side and cupped his hand across her mouth, so hard the rest of her face flared red. She grabbed at her father’s arms, gasping, beginning to sob, and he jerked her head to remind her, Be still. Everyone stared at the door. “Have it your way, Vince,” the voice in the hallway called out. “Comin’ in.” Vince Abatangelo let go of his daughter, looked around helplessly, but only managed to edge backward, further into the room, as the first blows hit. The door cracked open on the fourth kick. A hand reached through the gash in the wood and unlatched the bolt, the door opened. There were three of them. The one who did the talking removed his hat, nodded to Gina Abatangelo, then said, “Didn’t have to be this way, Vince. Get your coat. Joey wants to talk to you.” Joey was Joey Twitch Costanza, the local shylock. The men he’d sent were collecting on a juice loan made to cover gambling debts. Once he realized he wasn’t going to be beaten in his own home, Vince Abatangelo’s mood transformed into one of groveling good cheer. He introduced his family, asking the men if they didn’t want to sit down. “Nick, we’re just about to eat. Sit.” He was told to get his coat. The one who did the talking nodded to Gina Abatangelo again—to say what? We’re sorry? Don’t wait? They led him out and closed the shattered door behind them. Soon their steps were on the stair, and the sound faded into the street noise. Christina sat simpering in her chair. Their mother stared at the door, hands to her face. Abatangelo could still remember the meal: ziti with summer sauce, pettile e fagioli, braised veal.