This was where I came in. I slipped the boat into gear and slowly pulled forward. Now he was pulling against the Emily A as well. So long as I didn’t move her too quickly, the fish would tired and surface. Ten minutes later and I saw him shimmering in the sunlight about three feet down, about three hundred feet off the stern. “He’s up, Cuz! Getting ready to jump!” George knelt by Phil’s right ear. “When he jumps, Phil, you drop the rod tip. Leave it down until you see the splash and he is back in the water. If you pull back while he’s in the air, he’ll spit that hook out!” George was good at this.
Phil did as he was told and the big monster jumped about fifteen seconds later. He was beautiful! About seven feet of blue marlin, probably four hundred pounds or more. As soon as he splashed down, Phil pulled back and within another twenty minutes we boated him. Actually, we got him to the side, snapped a bunch of pictures and pulled a scale with a pair of pliers. We tagged him and cut the line away from the hook. The hook would dissolve in a week or so and he’d be fighting someone else soon.
Phil was ecstatic. He’d never caught anything this big and he talked more than any time since I’d met him. “Ya’ll see that feesh?!” He said gleefully. “That was the biggest feesh I ever caught!” Phil was happy. Which was good because now that he caught himself a fish, it was someone else’s turn in the chair and he was back on chum duty.
He didn’t seem to mind it a bit. Catching the first fish of the day seemed to really rejuvenate Phil, and he was chumming and talking up a storm.
Every time someone would hook up with a fish, Phil would cheer and hoot and holler. By the end of the first day, Phil’s marlin was still the biggest. He was having a good time and so were the other boys. By evening, we’d boated four fish; two marlin, a tuna, and a Mahi Mahi. The Mahi stayed on board and we filleted it right there and had grilled Mahi for dinner.
We had a serious card game going after dinner and George decided to pump Phil a little more with the mob stories from back in the old neighborhood. He told him stories about people even I’d forgotten about. People like “Bobby Knuckles” who lived around the corner from
Georgie’s parents.
Bobby was probably the stupidest man in Little Italy. Tragically he was also the only guy in the neighborhood with a patch of grass in his backyard, which –in turn- required him to own, and actually use a lawnmower. I’d be kind and say Bobby wasn’t very bright, but I’d be lying by omission. Bobby Knuckles was really stupid. He had this beat-up old lawnmower that his old man had gotten from saving S and H Green Stamps. He cut the back yard with it each week, even though he could have done the whole job with a weed-whacker in less than ten minutes. He was constantly running over stuff with the mower back there. His dog’s bones, his kid’s baseball gloves. Honest-to-God, he ran over his kid’s glove. How did he not see that?
Anyway, he had this little row of hedges along the back of his yard that separated it from the service alley. They were ewes, or something. I just remember them being low and ugly. So Bobby Knuckles decides they need to be trimmed; only he doesn’t have hedge trimmers. Neither did anyone else on the block, because they all had fences in their back yards and not hideous bushes. So since he can’t borrow hedge clippers from anybody, Bobby Knuckles decides to use the lawnmower. He fired the thing up, and stood in front of it and lifted it up to use it as a hedge trimmer. Yeah, no kidding, he was going to trim hedges by holding a lawn mower over them and lowering it down. Well, as you can imagine, this was an insanely stupid idea, but then, Bobby Knuckles was pretty darned stupid. The stunod lost his footing while holding the lawnmower under the base. Then he lost his fingers down to the second knuckle on both hands. His wife Marie was running around trying to bandage his hands and collect the fingers from the bushes he was trimming. Their big slobbery dog, “Rocky” had one of them in his mouth like a bone, and Marie almost got bitten trying to pry it loose.
She managed to get his hands bandaged and got the fingers bagged up and put on ice. Getting an ambulance to their house through the double-parked locals on 12th street was another battle. They finally got there, and by that time the crowd had gathered. Mrs. Begnetti was peeping through her blinds and Father Franco was on the steps trying to calm Marie. Somehow the surgeons at Thomas Jefferson found a way to reattach all but one of his fingers…the one his big stupid dog had gnawed on. The surgery left his knuckles enlarged and grotesque and they only bent about halfway, and so he got his nickname… “Bobby Knuckles.” Now, Bobby Knuckles was a bag man for Lito DiStefano who was, in turn, a middle reliever for one of the crime families in Philly. We called them “middle relievers” because they weren’t very far up the food chain. They weren’t Captains or Capos, just guys who had risen a step above the run-of-the-mill grunts who did the bidding of the bosses. Guys like Bobby. Bobby was a collector. He went out every Monday with a list of guys who owed money to Lito and he shook them down for what they owed, plus his own fees for not breaking their thumbs. Sometimes he went ahead and broke their thumbs and then charged them a fee not to “make it a leg next time.”
Mostly he just scared people, because the grotesque scars from the reattachment of his fingers, plus that one missing digit, made him a pretty scary guy. He was scary in the way that really dumb guys are scary. He was a mouth breather. He stood there staring at you when you talked to him with his mouth hanging open and you could hear him breathing like a scuba diver. We all figured it was because he was too stupid to blow his nose. The people in the neighborhood eventually lost their fear of him, mostly since we were all smart enough to not get in bed with Lito or his goons. The couple of times anyone on the block got in trouble with gambling debts, me or Pop would pay it off quietly and have the guy work Saturdays on the trucks until he paid it back. So Bobby Knuckles plied his trade elsewhere, and on the block he was just one of the neighbors…albeit a creepy one.
Anyway, my cousin George was regaling Phil and the other guys with tales from Little Italy and funny stories about our family. The boys were eating it up. Old Phil was asking a lot of questions about the mob. Did we know the Scarfos or the Testas or the Brunos? Really? I thought to myself. The Testas? Angelo Bruno? I’m forty-four years old, for God’s sake. Those guys were killed in the mob wars when I was like, twelve. Plus I’m not Sicilian and most of the mob guys were. Phil was really getting on my nerves now with the mob innuendo.
We played cards and told jokes until almost midnight. The boys all decided to get some sleep and George and I went out on deck to chit chat before turning in. I planned on sleeping on deck again and so I told the other guys “goodnight.” George and I stayed awake for a while talking and planning the next day’s fishing. Before turning in, I remembered a little chore I needed to take care of. “Cuz,” I said to George,” Can you come up and help me with something before you turn in?” “Sure thing,” George said, setting down his beer. I turned to the rest of the guys and said “Fellas, chow is 4AM. Lines in the water at five. So get some sleep.”
About an hour later, Georgie and I walked up on deck and around to the side entry to the engineering room. The storage deck is next to the engine compartment on my boat and you can get to it without cutting through the staterooms if you need to. “Cuz, I have that one nasty deer down there and I just remembered it’s still in the bag. We need to dump it in the drink before it stinks the boat up something awful.” One of the four deer carcasses I brought along was actually a big old buck that I had hit with my old pickup, on the road out by my hunting camp and I found him dead by my barn the next morning. It was too cold to bury him because the ground had frozen and so I stuck him in a Kevlar bag and placed him in the old freezer I had out there, intending to bury him in the spring. I had forgotten about him and we had a power outage over the winter and he’d gone bad in there. Then when the power came on, he froze again so I had no idea he was spoiled.
I thought I would just bring him along for an extra carcass in case we needed it. That was a bad move because he thawed out on the drive to t
he boat and he stunk to high heavens. The Kevlar kept it under control but I knew it was bad. So I decided to dump him in the ocean.
George and I walked down the three steps to the engineering area and I opened the locker where the two remaining deer carcasses were stored in the silver Tyvek bags. “It’s the bigger of the two, George,” I said, pointing to the bag on top. George grabbed one end and I grabbed the other. We wrestled the bag through the doorway and around the very tight turn near the bow end of the stateroom. You have to be careful walking along the galleyway because it’s only about a foot wide. George and I worked our way along the catwalk toward the stern of the boat so we could lay the bag down, open it up and remove the deer.
“Cuz this thing is heavy, and he stinks like a sewer!” George said. “How much did he weigh?” “I don’t know Cuz,” I said, “I hit him with the truck out by the hunting camp last winter. He didn’t die right away so I shot him to end his misery. But he was an old man I know that. I guess he’s what…two-hundred pounds?” George huffed and puffed, “Oh he’s every bit of that.” He said. “I can lift about a hundred and fifty by myself so he’s all of two hundred and then some.” At one point I slipped a bit and banged against the stateroom window, but I didn’t think anyone was awake. We managed to get the bag to the stern behind the fighting chairs of the boat and I started to unzip it. The stench was unbearable.
“Cuz,” I said in resignation, “I’m not even going to try to save this bag. This thing stinks to high heaven. Let’s just throw him overboard,” George and I slip the bag over the transom and watched it bobbing in the moonlight. We waited. And waited. Finally George said, “Cuz he’s not going to sink. You didn’t gut him did you?” “No,” I said, “I wasn’t going to eat him, he was road kill. Why bother?” George chuckled, “Well not that it matters, but with his guts still inside, the gas has built up and he’s going to keep floating like that. I guess that’s okay, but I wouldn’t want someone finding this bag drifting and opening it up. Plus, unless you want to go another 25 miles away, his floating in the water will kill the fishing for us tomorrow” “That’s a good point,” I said, “I’ll take care of this. I went into the stateroom quietly and grabbed my .45 out of my duffle bag. Back out on deck I got up on the transom while George held a spot light on the deer in the Kevlar bag. “I hope I don’t wake the fellas,” I said. I fired at the bodybag, BAM! BAM! BAM! Three good shots with the .45 should do it. I thought to myself. George and I waited on the transom watching the silver Kevlar bag. “Well if hitting him with the truck didn’t do it, three shots from a forty-five sure did!” George said with a laugh. “I just hope he sinks, so the crabs can eat him.” I answered. George and I watched for a few more minutes and finally the silver bag sank below the surface of the moonlit Atlantic Ocean. “I guess the boys were pooped and slept through that.” I told George, “Okay Cuz, I’m heading to bed.” Georgie and I washed our hands and I climbed up to the bridge to get some sleep. We had another full day of fishing in the morning and I was anxious to get some more fish on the line.
Things That Go Bump In The Night
Below decks in the stateroom, Phil Lowery snapped the blinds closed quickly. The darkness hid his fear, and the pale whiteness of his features as the blood drained from his face. “Milledge!” he hissed at his friend sleeping in the bunk next to his. “Milledge wake up!” Phil pushed and prodded his friend until he awoke. “Huh?” Hank Milledge grumbled, “What’s that you say Phil?” Lowery was trembling in the darkness. “Hank I seen ‘em! I seen ‘em just whack a man and throw him overboard!” Hank
Milledge sat up in his bunk and rubbed his eyes. “Phil what the heck are you talking about? Who?”
“Mezilli!” He spit out, “Old Joe and his goon cousin just dumped a body overboard. They even shot the poor bastard so he’d sink! I just seen the whole thing!”
“Phil, calm down. Tell me what you’re talking about.” “I seen the whole thing, Hank. They went down to the hold and they got that other body bag…the one Joe very specifically told me not to touch yesterday. They were toting it to the stern and one of them banged the window right over my bunk. It woke me up, and so I looked out the window to see what the racket was. I heard them talking. Mezilli killed this poor bastard out at that hunting camp he owns. He ran him over with his truck, Hank! The heartless sombitch called him “Road kill!” Road kill, Hank! How evil can a man be when he runs another man over and just calls him road kill?”
Phil was on a roll now and if I didn’t reel him in he’d be off on a tangent from now until Christmas. But there was something different this time. Phil usually had the facts all wrong or he’d seen something that really wasn’t there. This time it seemed different. He was very matter-of-fact and to be honest…very believable. He continued; “Him and his cousin were talking about running this poor man down out at the hunting camp. If you ask me, I think it must be that “Crusher” fella I heard him talkin’ on the phone about with some other mobster up in Philadelphia. Remember? I told ya, this Crusher fella was apparently an old hitman and he was long in the tooth and he must have worked for Mezilli at one time but he was employed by the current mob boss up there now.” Phil was shaking and I gave him a little glass of water to help him get his bearings.
Phil continued; “I told ya, about eight months ago I was returning that leaf blower I borrowed and I overheard him saying how this fella “The Crusher” was old and ready to retire. He was apparently a very dependable hitman for the Mezilli mob but his time had come. The new boss in Philly called Joe and asked him if he wanted to do the honors or if he just wanted them to do it back there and cut him up in a scrap yard. Honest to God, Hank! They was gonna cut the man in pieces in a scrap yard! Anyway Mezilli told him to have him shipped down to his hunting camp and he would take care of him out there. I guess the poor fella got there last winter and maybe he tried making a run for it and your buddy Don Corleone must’ve run him down with his truck.” Phil was nearly hyperventilating now. He was near hysteria, but his story was fascinating and I was listening intently. He went on; “I reckon he stuffed him in that other body bag and brought him out here with them three deer to disguise it. Him and his cousin just dumped him overboard and shot him so he’d sink! I told you! Didn’t I tell you? He’s a mafia!”
Phil was beside himself now. A strange mixture of pride and fear. Pride in the fact that he was right all along and now he’d finally gotten proof. Fear in the way you fear the beautiful girl saying “yes” to your request for a date. “You got her now, big-boy, whatcha gonna do with her?” I had to admit; for the first time since Joe had moved to our neighborhood and Phil had begun this crazy witch hunt of his, I was beginning to believe him. Something about the way he told this story was different from the others. He had facts in order and he’d actually seen and heard something for once. Up until now it had been blurry pictures of rolled up burlap or my dog pissing on him. “Phil,” I said quietly, “You just get some sleep and tomorrow we’ll check some things out on the sly.” Phil looked at me puzzled. “You mean you finally believe me?” He asked. “Well I believe something has you mighty worked up right now, Phil. We’ll start there. Now go to sleep.” I replied. I had to admit, Phil really had me thinking.
When we woke up the next day, Phil leaned over to me and, with a strange, satisfied smile, said “I have proof!” “What?” I asked, “Proof,” He said, “I have proof of what I heard last night!” Phil was smug when he said this but we walked to the front of the boat and Phil pretended to be taking pictures with his cell phone. When he was convinced nobody could hear us talking, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a tiny micro recorder. “Hey that’s Timmy Pepper’s recorder!” I said. Peppers used that thing a hundred times at my house while he was cutting my lawn. I’d recognize it anywhere.
Phil panicked. “SHHH!” he whispered, “Hank shut the hell up! You want Mezilli to hear us?” I looked around; the guys were all on the far end of the boat, with the cabin between us, a distance of over fifty f
eet. On top of that, we were out at sea and the noise of the breeze was drowning out any conversation farther than five feet away. But I know how Phil is about secrecy and spyin’ and such, so I played along. “Why do you have Pepper’s recorder, Phil?” I asked. Phil smiled and pressed
Play. “You just give a listen.” I heard Phil throwing up and Gladys knocking on his bathroom door. “Phil, you alright in there? You better hurry or you’ll miss your fishing trip!” Then Phil wiped his mouth and barked at her; “I’m fine!” Fix me a bicarbonate and find my sunglasses.” Phil snapped the button and muttered under his breath. He forwarded a little until he stopped at a point in a conversation where Joe was talking to his cousin; something about burying bodies in concrete and their uncle being involved.
“Phil,” I said, “They said it was their uncle! Not them. And George even said he wondered of the story was true. This ain’t proof of nothin’!”
“It proves they have mafias all through their family!” he hissed angrily. “Dammit man what if that story is true? The man even said he’d heard it verified by someone else. What else do you need…pictures?” Then Phil forwarded it a little more, he stopped once at the place where he was puking over the side of the boat and the seagulls were buzzing his head. “God damn this thing!” He winced. He stopped it again and I heard some muffled voices, a bumping sound, and a splash and then –clear as day- I heard three gunshots. “By god…you did hear gunshots last night!”
Phil straightened up. “You’re damned right I did!” Phil was unstoppable now. He had proof and he had someone actually believing him. That was gas and matches if you know Phil. “They dumped that poor Crusher fella overboard, and then they shot him just for good measure!” Phil said triumphantly. “Joe Mezilli is a heartless, clod blooded damn killer…and I told you all along. Now do you believe me?” I didn’t want to believe it. I like Joe. But I know what I heard. “I believe I heard gunshots Phil. I believe you heard something more. I think that’s enough to check him out.
The Legend of Joey Trucks: The Accidental Mobster Page 27
