Gangster Nation

by Tod Goldberg

  “You all right for a second by yourself?” Levi asked.

  “I’m fine,” Caroline said.

  Levi left Caroline at the table to do the thing he always did: He went into the men’s room and checked all the stalls, made sure no one was in them, then cased the rest of the place, acting like nothing was wrong, he was just the kind of guy who liked to get the lay of the land. He looked like active military, what with the haircut, the square jaw, and the way he stared you in the eye with a strange, unblinking intensity even if you were just telling him what the specials were.

  After a minute alone—which was golden—the bartender noticed Caroline and came around with two menus, set them down in front of her. “Get you something to drink?” he asked.

  “Scotch,” she said.

  “What about for your dad?” This wasn’t their first time in the Branding Iron. Caroline figured that by the time spring rolled around, if they were still living out here, she wouldn’t even need to place an order. She’d walk in and they’d just hand her a drink.

  “Water,” she said.

  “It’s New Year’s Eve,” the bartender said. His name was Hank. Said so right on his shirt.

  “He’s working.”

  “Tough job,” Hank said, and gave her a wink. “Steak?”

  “Medium rare,” she said. “And a grilled cheese with fries, to go.”

  “Piece of cake, too?”

  “Yes,” Caroline said. “The chocolate.”

  Hank came back a moment later with a generous pour of Johnnie Walker over two ice cubes. Caroline gave it a sniff, to see if her nose worked, if she could recognize all the notes. Not tonight. Maybe not ever. She took a sip, felt the liquor burn that spot on her gum line that was still sensitive, then swallowed it down, waited for that familiar rush of warmth. Caroline didn’t drink much, never at home. Used to be she’d have a sip of wine at bedtime, so she could sleep, but she needed to be alert. She always needed to be alert. Even out here.

  But it was New Year’s Eve, and on New Year’s Eve, she had a scotch. That was tradition.

  One of the men got off his seat at the bar, smiled kindly at Caroline, then headed to the jukebox, put on something twangy, passed Levi as he ambled back to the bar. It must be halftime.

  “He say something to you?” Levi asked.

  “No,” Caroline said.

  On the TV, a marching band morphed into a cougar. How nice that would be. Snap your fingers and transform yourself into something different all together.

  “I wanted to revisit with you the idea of getting the boy some help,” Levi said.

  “It’s New Year’s Eve,” Caroline said. “Can’t you give it a rest? For one night?

  Levi took a sip of water. “There are no nights off,” he said.

  “Is that why we’re here?”

  “No,” Levi said, but Caroline doubted that. Get her someplace comfortable, but out of the house, away from her son, act like normal people for a bit. See if it made a difference. “There’s a program down in California. At Stanford. Started by some researchers trying to help kids from Rwanda process what they have been through. They’ve been pretty successful, I’m told.”

  She swirled the ice around her glass. “He’s not some lab rat,” Caroline said.

  “I know that,” Levi said. “And now that I’ve spent some time with him, I want you to know what a fine job you’ve done with him. But, ma’am, we’re not qualified to deal with this.” This. Her son was a “this.” At least he called her ma’am. “It would be a month to start. We’d bring you down on weekends.”

  “Not acceptable,” Caroline said. She swallowed down the rest of her scotch. “I’m going to get a refill.” She got up before Levi could respond, set her glass on the bar, motioned Hank over. The woman on the jukebox was singing about how if she had her way, she’d be in your town, and Caroline wondered if that wasn’t how it always was: You always wanted to be somewhere different. That love was invariably about how much missing you could tolerate. In the last three years, Caroline hadn’t spent a single day without her son. That wasn’t going to change. No man, no government, no university research project was going to stand in her way. She knew he needed help. She knew that. Hell, she needed help. The things she’d seen. But that didn’t mean they needed to be apart while it happened. Above all else, they wanted information from her. She’d give it a bit at a time, so as to maintain her leverage. As long as she had that advantage, any decisions about her son had to go through her.

  She looked over her shoulder. Levi had his back to her, watching the door. Always watching the door.

  Hank came over and poured her another couple fingers, dropped two more ice cubes in the glass. “Think the Cougs are going to pull it off?” The Cougs. That must be Washington State. They were down 20–17.

  “For sure,” Caroline said.

  The halftime show on the TV gave way to a news break. The woman on the screen was in her forties, attractive in an unremarkable way, the kind of woman her husband used to call “weathergirl pretty.” Tonight, she appeared grave. A graphic popped up on the screen, blood red. Subtle. GANGLAND KILLING?

  “Can you turn the volume up, Hank?”

  He pressed a button on the remote and Weathergirl Pretty’s husky voice flowed out over a clip of cops standing in front of a church, body bags in the distance, surrounded by banks of snow.

  “More information is coming to us about the grisly discovery in Portland last week of five bodies left in the parking lot of First Baptist Church, near Troutdale. Police have identified the body of an adult female as Sharon Cupertine but aren’t releasing the names of the four minors believed to be found with her, pending identification. This already unsettling scenario is made more troubling by Cupertine’s connection, it appears, to a notorious crime family . . . halfway across the country. Dale Hwang reports from our affiliate in Portland.”

  Caroline felt Levi’s presence before she even saw him. He was beside her in a second.

  “Come back to the table,” he said quietly.

  “No,” Caroline said.

  “I was going tell you,” Levi said. “I was going to tell you tonight.” And then he ordered a scotch, too.

  It was close to eight when they finally got back to the cabin on Loon Lake. Levi and his wife, Maryann—who had watched her son for the last few hours, and who wasn’t really Levi’s wife—retired upstairs. Though retired wasn’t right either. One of them was always awake. The cabin across the way contained another husband-and-wife team—Uncle Gus and Auntie Donna—who spelled Levi and Maryann periodically.

  “I brought you a piece of cake,” Caroline said to the boy. He sat at the kitchen table working on a jigsaw puzzle of the moon. He looked up at her casually, as if she were a stranger. And God, maybe she was. She’d cried all her makeup off.

  “You said I was getting grilled cheese,” he said.

  She’d eaten the grilled cheese herself, in addition to the steak, once she realized they wouldn’t be going home for a while. Called and had Maryann make him some noodles and olive oil. The pot was still on the stovetop. She’d wash it in the morning.

  Her head throbbed and her eyes ached. In the other room, Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve was on the TV. It was almost tomorrow in New York. It was almost an entirely new year, somewhere else. Always somewhere else. Her mind felt like a broken electrical line, snapping on the ground, sparks flying.

  They’re all dead, Levi told her. We think we know who the shooter might be. A former FBI agent who attempted to kill Ronnie Cupertine. They found his gun. They had his name. They didn’t know where he was. He could be coming for her next. She had to expect that her husband was dead, or would be soon.

  “You’re the only child on the planet upset to be getting cake,” she said. She took it out of the foam container and put it on a plate, grabbed two forks, then sat dow
n beside her son, but he didn’t seem interested. He’d constructed half of the moon in her absence, the Sea of Tranquility nearly complete. She watched him search for a piece, his tongue pressed between his front teeth. When he found the one he was looking for—they all looked the same to Caroline—he pressed it into place.

  She took his hand, stopped him from putting his next piece down.

  “What?” he said.

  His skin was so smooth. She brought his hand to her mouth, kissed it. Reached over and touched the boy on his cheek, brushed his bangs away from his face. Caroline had known her husband for his entire life. She remembered him at seven. Remembered him at ten, at fifteen, at thirty-five . . . and then nothing else. He was frozen in her mind at thirty-five, walking out the house in a dark suit, promising her he’d be back that night with some cough medicine. She and her son both had a fever and a cough, a terrible spring flu, and so her memory feels like it was filmed underwater, everything slow and hazy until the police showed up, and then, for the rest of her life, everything had existed at hyperspeed.

  In her memory, he told her that he loved her, but now she wasn’t so sure. He didn’t do that when he was leaving to do a job, because by the time he was out the door, he was that other person. The Rain Man. Like she was this other person now. Caroline Evans. She didn’t even get to pick her name. That’s how it worked, she supposed. If you were good enough or bad enough, one day you woke with a new name and it was yours.

  But William. He was still William. He would always be William.

  She should send him away.

  She should let them fix him.

  She should stop whatever was inside him now, so that someone else wouldn’t do it for her.

  The therapist from the FBI told her that William displayed a “slight deficiency in empathetic responses” and yet was “acutely aware of his own emotional well-being,” which was just a fancy way of saying he felt, all too often, like “some kind of freak.” The shooting, she was told, hadn’t been emotionally taxing on him because, as the therapist said, “he felt he was doing the right thing.”

  What if he was?

  She let go of his hand and he went back to his puzzle, found another piece, placed it right where it belonged.

  “William,” she said, “look at me.” William Cupertine looked up from his puzzle. “I want you to tell me what you remember about your father. Tell me everything you remember.”

  He squinted, as if he were staring into the sun, and Jennifer Cupertine tried to not see her husband in his face, tried to find some element in him that was from her genetic code, something to give her some hope.

  “I don’t remember anything,” he said.

  She knew he was lying.

  •

  The private rooms on the top floor of the Summerlin Hospital looked east toward the Las Vegas Strip, so at night, if he was semi-lucid, Rabbi David Cohen could just make out the glow of the city in the distance.

  Sometimes he thought that city was Chicago and he was flying in from Detroit or New York, coming in for a landing at O’Hare.

  Sometimes he thought he was flying the plane into the IBM Building.

  Sometimes he thought he was the Prophet Ezekiel and that he had been sitting on the banks of the river Chebar for seven days and seven nights, looking upon the face of God; that the lights of the Strip were the winking eyes of the Lord, telling him: I don’t want wicked people to die. I want them to turn from their evil ways and live.

  Most of the time, he still knew he was the Rain Man, a hit man for the Family, who needed to keep his fucking mouth closed. Like he had any choice. It was wired up like a bridge.

  Tonight, New Year’s Eve, all he knew was that he was in excruciating pain. He fumbled for the buzzer on the side of the bed, and in a few minutes a nurse came in, but by that point he was grunting out in pain, tears running down his face, not that he could feel them. The only sensation he had in his face was a radiating white agony. He imagined this was what it would feel like to survive a shotgun blast. At this point, it would be a relief.

  “Easy there,” the nurse said. “Easy, Rabbi. Come on. We been through this now.” She adjusted the bag that dripped into his arm and in a few seconds he was rolling. Dilaudid. He loved that shit back in the day. Clean, smooth, none of the rough edges heroin had, which always left him feeling paranoid at the end of a night, looking to fuck somebody up. The nurse propped a pillow under his head, which relieved some of the pressure, and raised him enough to see out the window, the horizon aglow. It was only a bit after 8 p.m. By midnight, there would be thousands of revelers in the street. Fireworks. Bands. Neil Diamond taking the stage.

  And then Rabbi David Cohen remembered what he was forgetting, that motherfucker Casey Berkowitz, that other motherfucker with the 23rd Psalm on his arm. That sucker punch. Sharon Cupertine and the kids. David had been in the hospital for almost ten days now. How many surgeries? Four? Five? He’d lost count and it didn’t matter. He’d probably lose count again in a few minutes, because he was hitting that pain button now, rolling, nodding, forgetting about it.

  “I’m going to let Dr. Melnikoff know you’re awake,” the nurse said. “He’s doing his rounds, so I’m sure he’ll be up to see you soon.”

  She walked out, and for the next fifteen minutes, maybe it was twenty, could have been forty-five, David watched the lights from the Strip shimmer and fade, shimmer and fade. There was a rap on the door and in came Dr. Melnikoff, white coat, blue shirt opened at the collar, black slacks, like he was going out after this, and maybe he was. The man had debts to pay, after all. “This is a welcome sight,” Dr. Melnikoff said. He picked up David’s chart from the end of the bed and read it. “Your blood pressure is good now, Rabbi, that’s a relief.” He closed the chart and then stepped to the side of David’s bed, learned down over him. “I’m going to touch your face, Rabbi. I’m going to try not to hurt you. Do you understand?”

  David tried to nod his head.

  “Good.” Dr. Melnikoff spread open David’s lips and shined a penlight into his mouth. “Good,” he said again. “You are healing nicely, Rabbi. The bleeding and the swelling have both come down considerably in the last two days, which is why we lessened your anesthesia and why you’re likely feeling more pain. Are you in much pain, Rabbi?”

  David nodded again.

  “In an optimum situation,” Dr. Melnikoff said, “I think we would have dealt with your infection for another two weeks, but an optimum situation was not what we were presented with. So, we’ve adapted.” He ran his thumbs beneath David’s eyes. “Do you feel pressure here?” David did not. He shook his head. “That’s very good.” Dr. Melnikoff shined the penlight into David’s eyes. “We may dial back the Dilaudid just a slight bit,” he said, “but we’ll wait until after New Year’s Eve.” He slipped the penlight into his pocket and then pulled over a chair. “Rabbi Cohen, I want you to know that when you see yourself, you may be surprised at first, because the face you recognized as your own is no longer. It was not possible for us to rebuild what was, as you know, shoddy construction. The infection that you had made everything below your eyes like quicksand, and the gentleman who struck you did the rest. It was essential that we fix everything at once, and that means the changes you are going to see will be profound. Your jaw, your chin, your orbital region, and your nasal cavity all required substantial work. Where I could, I reused your own tissue. Where I could not, we used cadavers and synthetic materials.” He leaned back in his seat, crossed his legs, tented his fingers. “We are not done, I’m afraid. This will be a process that takes time. Do you understand?”

  David did. He’d spent six months getting his new face. He’d been through this before.

  “All that to say, Rabbi,” Dr. Melnikoff said, “I am exceptionally pleased with how you have turned out. Do you want to see?”

  “Yes,” David tried to say, but nothing much came out. The
Dilaudid had him flying now.

  “Good,” Dr. Melnikoff said. He looked at his watch. “I have one more patient to see and then we’ll get you in front of a mirror. Until then, maybe hit the button a few more times and enjoy the view.” He pressed a button on the side of the bed and David rose up at a forty-five-degree angle. Suddenly he could see everything, not just the horizon.

  Dr. Melnikoff walked out, or maybe he flew, because one moment he was beside David, the next he was gone. The nurse was standing there again. “You have a visitor. Are you up for it?”

  David nodded once, or maybe he nodded five times, because he was back on that plane, flying into Chicago, and in just a few minutes he knew he’d be seeing Jennifer and William. He could see her face so clearly now, right in front of him, could count the tiny freckles across her nose, could feel her lips on his, could smell her hair. It was New Year’s Eve, so they’d open up a good bottle of scotch, the Johnnie Walker Black or maybe that nice Macallan, and they’d sit in front of the fire, a blanket over them, William asleep in his playpen, because he’s just a baby, and then David knows he’s in a memory, but he doesn’t care, and David would have to wake Jennifer up at midnight to kiss her, and in the morning he’d do it again, to make sure that her first memory of the new year was being loved, by him.

  And then he was in minyan, Temple Beth Israel filled with the dead. Row after row of the men he’d killed and the woman he’d murdered. I will seek that which is lost and will bring again that which is driven away, he said, and will bind that which is broken, and will strengthen that which is sick. I will destroy the fat and the strong. I will feed them with judgment.

  “Now, he can’t talk,” the nurse was saying. David turned his head to the left and saw that she was back in the room, this time with a man he’d never seen before. He was big, well over six foot, and broad across the shoulders like a power forward. He smiled and nodded solemnly at the nurse, and David saw that the man had a deep dimple in his cheek. “He’s in a lot of pain right now, so he’s flying pretty high tonight. He might not make a lot of sense.”