Skells

by F. P. Lione

  “Were you smoking?” she said accusingly to the husband. When he didn’t answer, she turned to the captain. “Was he smoking? Because he’s not supposed to be smoking.”

  The husband moaned from the floor, “Just give me a minute with her so I can kill her.”

  “You’ll kill yourself from smoking!” she yelled.

  “Ma’am, please step back. We’re gonna take him to the hospital—you can fight it out with him later,” the captain cut her off.

  She stepped back toward the door as the younger EMS worker came in with the fiberglass stretcher that would mold to the guy’s body and be secured with straps. It was good for a quick evacuation and had ropes at the end in case you need to drag someone out. The stretcher was narrow enough that they could get him down the stairs instead of lowering him out a window.

  The two EMS workers, the fire captain, and another fireman picked the stretcher up by the four ends. EMS had both sides of the front of the stretcher, with FD at the back. The younger EMS worker took two steps and slipped, taking the stretcher with him. The older EMS worker tried to hold up the front, but the weight of the body was toward the front. He lost his balance and the stretcher flew, flipping Danny face-first onto the bathroom floor. You heard the oomph of his face connecting with the floor, then he let out a high-pitched moan.

  Everyone but the wife was trying not to laugh while they picked him up.

  “You think this is funny?” the wife screamed and went over to him. She was crying hard now, calling us everything she could think of. “You’re trying to kill him!” she screamed. “I’m suing you!”

  “Hey lady, we’re not trying to kill him,” the captain said. “First of all, the floor is soaked and the tile is slippery. Second of all, we’re not the ones who blew him off the toilet.”

  “That was an accident,” she spat.

  “So was this,” he fired back.

  Hanrahan and Joe had come up behind me and watched the whole exchange.

  “They dropped him?” Hanrahan said, looking amused.

  I gave him a quick nod. I didn’t want the wife to lose it if we started laughing. Joe looked concerned as he looked at the victim.

  When they turned him over, his face was wet with water from the floor mixed with blood from his now-broken nose. He was starting to get that chalky look that comes with shock.

  “Let’s get him downstairs,” EMS said.

  The wife went into another tirade when she saw we broke the door. She started screaming about how we wrecked her apartment and anyone could come in and rob it. I figured by the time she finished suing the city, she’d be living uptown somewhere.

  I followed EMS downstairs and was standing outside the ambulance when Joe and Sergeant Hanrahan came out. The wife was inside the ambulance, yapping away on her cell phone.

  “Ma’am,” Hanrahan said, “you need to get the door and the locks fixed. It’s up to you whether you want to get your own locksmith or have the police department do it.”

  “I’ll get someone—I don’t trust you guys to do it,” she spat.

  “It’s up to you,” he said, unaffected. “You have ninety days to file a claim against the city to the Comptroller’s Office.”

  “Don’t worry, I will,” she said.

  “Your neighbor said he would stay in your apartment, or I can have one of my guys stay there,” Hanrahan added.

  “You’ve done enough, I don’t want any of you in my apartment.”

  I was beginning to wonder if she didn’t blow her husband up on purpose.

  “Noreen.” Hanrahan turned to his driver. “Go back to the precinct and get the camera. I want pictures of the wet floor, the broken door to show we needed to access the premise, and the dismantled toilet.”

  “Where are they taking him?” Hanrahan asked me.

  “Bellevue,” I said.

  “Go over there with them, make sure he’s okay. Make sure you document everything in case she decides to sue,” he said.

  “She’s definitely gonna sue,” I said.

  “Yeah, I know,” he said. “Get the old man’s name from upstairs, see if he’ll sign a statement. Do an aided card for the aided’s injury with the info from FD and EMS,” Hanrahan added, talking about the form we fill out for sick, injured, or dead people. “Do two reports: one for the accident report, one for the city-involved property damage.”

  The first report would include any city agencies involved, like the police department for Joe and I kicking down the door. The second report was for EMS and FD dropping the guy. The pictures would show that in reality it wasn’t our fault, but his wife would still get money.

  “Sure, Boss,” I said. I had gotten EMS’s info upstairs, along with the firemen’s names and ladder company, and since the wife was already with the guy, we didn’t have to make a notification.

  We went back upstairs and talked to the old man who lived next door. His name was Gaetano Mazza. He signed my memo book, saying that the door was locked, he heard the explosion, and the injured man was yelling for help from inside. Gaetano said he would stay in the apartment while the victim’s wife was at the hospital. We had given Gaetano the number for a locksmith in case the wife changed her mind and wanted help. The door would have to be fixed before new locks could be installed.

  The ambulance had already left the scene, so we drove crosstown on 34th Street and took the service road into the back of Bellevue. When we got into the emergency room, the burn victim was already in with the doctor. The younger of the two EMS guys was talking to a nurse in the hallway when we got there.

  “Meengya,” he said with feeling as we walked up. “What a night already.” Meengya is a word Italians use to show strong emotion. It’s also said when we see something unbelievable, good or bad, but mostly when we see a woman with a great body.

  We all turned when we heard the door to the emergency room open, and two cops from the 17th precinct came in with their collar. They looked disgusted. They were somewhere in their thirties and looked like they had some time on. They acknowledged Fiore and me with a cop nod. EMS was with them as they wheeled in a fiftyish white male. He was drunk and cursing, with a gash on his forehead, a busted nose, and a split lip. He had a gray pallor and was sweating profusely. His hands were tied to the gurney with sheets to keep him restrained. The cops looked harassed and tired as their collar yelled, “I know people! I’ll get your badge, I’ll get your wife—”

  “You deserve my wife,” the older of the two cops said. “Take my mother-in-law too, I’ll give you a package deal.”

  A nurse came out into the hall to see what the disturbance was. She was a big woman, light skinned, with freckles on her arms. She was wearing blue scrubs with a pin that said “Staffing Is the Issue,” and her name tag read Colleen Dewey. You could tell she was a veteran. She had that no-panic, no-emotion, “I don’t need to impress anyone” attitude that nurses get when they’ve seen it all. Contrary to what people think, the nurses don’t buddy up to us all that often; they don’t have time for it.

  Anyway, she started doing her thing when the drunk and disorderly smiled at her and said, “Wanna see my gun?” as he tried to pull his pants down. She gave him a sarcastic look and pulled the sheet up, throwing it over his head.

  He struggled his head out from under the sheet, focused his bleary eyes on her, and got this turned-on look on his face, then said, “Kiss me, you pig.”

  “Not in this life,” she said, taking his blood pressure and writing it down on the white sheet that covered the gurney.

  Joe and I choked on a laugh, and the two cops from the 17th laughed out loud.

  The nurse gave Joe and me a hard look. “Don’t you guys have something to do?”

  Joe and I looked at each other, shrugged, and shook our heads no.

  “What about you two?” she said to the cops from the 17th.

  “We’re babysitting him,” the younger of the two said.

  “You could have fooled me,” she mumbled as she walked away.r />
  The cops from the 17th were making oinking noises to her back. The drunk laughed and bobbled his head. There was a time that I would have done the same thing, or worse, but now I just tried not to laugh.

  Since we had taken most of the information at the scene and the wife was with him, we waited until Danny was stabilized and got the doctor’s name for the city involved form.

  We walked back out to the car, where Fiore radioed Central “93 Queen 3 times,” which means we did three reports.

  We took 1st Avenue to 34th Street to get across town. It was now 2:00 as we started to patrol our sector, driving east to west and back again. We handled two alarms that Central gave us. One was on 6th Avenue, the other on 37th Street, and we came up premise secure on both.

  “You ready for the big party Sunday?” Fiore asked about the engagement party my grandmother was throwing for Michele and me.

  “NO—I never wanted an engagement party. Either did Michele,” I said.

  “Why didn’t you just tell your grandmother no?” he asked, shaking his head. “If you keep letting her get away with this stuff, she’ll just keep doing it.”

  “I did tell her no. I feel like she scammed me. She called me up on my way home from work about a month ago telling me to stop there, saying she had something important to tell me. I got to her apartment and she’s making gravy, gives me a meatball right out of the frying pan, which she knows I love. Next thing I know I got a plate of sausage, eggs, and potatoes, and she’s smiling at me, looking like a sweet old granny in her housedress and curlers.”

  Joe interrupted me by laughing.

  “This isn’t funny,” I said.

  “It’s hysterical,” he choked. “Scam by meatball, I like it.”

  I gave him a blank look while he laughed it off.

  His face sobered, and he said, “I don’t know how you eat the way you do and not get fat.”

  “She told me about the party after the fact—what was I gonna do?”

  “It’s simple, Tony, tell her no. Come on, buddy, say it with me, ‘No, Grandma.’”

  “She already paid for the hall and the food.”

  “Where’d she get the money? I thought she was on a fixed income.”

  “That’s the best part. She hit the number, for like five grand,” I said.

  “The daily number, or lotto? Five grand is a lot for the number,” Fiore said.

  “No, she hit the number. In fact, she hit it twice that month; the second time was for less, but still a couple of grand.”

  “How’d she do that?” Fiore looked suspicious.

  “That’s what I said. She’s been playing the numbers for as long as I can remember, and she’d hit it at times, but mostly nickel-and-dime stuff—a couple hundred here and there, once in a while a grand. She plays it at the deli near Clove and Victory, where she always played it. So I asked what the deal is that all of a sudden she hits it twice in a month.” I shook my head at the memory. “Apparently Grandma and the lotto clerk don’t get along. My grandmother swears she saw the woman putting the horns on her, and that’s why she never won. It’s not funny, Joe,” I said when he started laughing again.

  “Tony, you gotta laugh. So what did she do, wear a horn?”

  The Italians believe the malokya, or the evil eye, that someone puts on you can give you bad luck. If you wear the red horn, or contra malokya, it will protect you. They also believe someone can “put the horns on you,” a hand signal usually given under the table or behind your back. Their hand is upside down, with the middle and ring fingers closed and the thumb, index, and pinky fingers out. I guess it looks like the sign language for “I love you,” but upside down.

  “She wore the red horn, but she said it wasn’t working and the lady must have been very evil to put such a strong one on her. She wore two horns then, a gold one and a red one, and she started winning small amounts. She said the day she won the money for my engagement party, she added a pair of red underwear, and between the underwear and the two horns the woman couldn’t touch her and she won five grand.” I shook my head, trying not to picture Grandma in red bloomers.

  “Do you think there’s any truth to that? That someone could put the horns on you like that?” I asked Joe. My family was pretty big on that kind of stuff.

  “No,” he said with a smile. “Do you?”

  “Not really—I mean I have all the medals and pins that my grandmother gives me, but I never put much stock in them. The family swears my father came home from Vietnam alive because he wore a scapula of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.”

  “What’s a scapula?” Fiore asked, puzzled.

  “It’s like a necklace, only it’s made with silk threading with pictures of saints and stuff on the ends. I don’t know how to explain it. You want more coffee?” I nodded as I drove toward the Sunrise Deli on 40th Street.

  “Yeah, I could use another cup,” he said.

  Joe waited in the car while I got coffee and a pack of cigarettes and listened to the clerk complain about a bunch of kids that keep hanging out in front of the deli. He said he thought they were dealing drugs, but they weren’t there now, so there was nothing I could do for him anyway.

  I drove to 37th Street and parked in an empty parking lot. I looked up to my left, where the Empire State Building loomed above us.

  “So what about your brother, did Granny throw him an engagement party behind his back when he got engaged?” Joe asked.

  “No, she had a small dinner with my immediate family. Remember it was my first family party without drinking?”

  “Yeah, I remember.” He smiled. “The one where you pretended to drink and tossed it down the sink.”

  “That’s the one. Anyway, Christie’s parents threw them a party at this restaurant down by the marina that the whole family was invited to. Michele and I didn’t want an engagement party, and we’re trying to keep the wedding low-key.”

  My brother, Vinny, got engaged last Fourth of July. His wedding is the first week in October, six weeks before mine, which caused even more problems with the family. They said two weddings in one year was too much and I should wait. I think they’re just hoping I’ll get it out of my system with Michele and decide not to marry her. Things got pretty ugly last Christmas when my father and grandmother let me know I shouldn’t marry a non-Catholic who has a kid and was never married.

  “I don’t know, Joe, they were never like this before,” I said, wondering why I say that every time they do something new.

  “Sure they were, you just never saw it.”

  “Why am I seeing it now?” I asked.

  “Because you’ve gotten to know Jesus, and he’s about the truth.” Joe smiled. “The truth about him and how good he is, the truth about ourselves and the people around us. The truth doesn’t have to change how you love them, just what you do about them. You’ve never challenged them before,” he said with a shrug, “and they don’t like it.”

  “How did I challenge them?”

  “You stopped drinking, you go to church—and not their church—and you’re marrying someone they don’t approve of. You’ve changed things, and I’m sure they see that as a threat,” he said.

  I thought about that. Before I met Joe, my family was dys-functional and explosive, but predictably so. I could always tell just by walking into a room how things were gonna go with them. I drank a lot then and usually boozed my way through family dinners. Now I’ve changed, and I can see it’s affected things—and not in a good way.

  I was always my grandmother’s favorite. The first grandchild and grandson, the one to carry on the family name. In Italian families, the firstborn son is named after the grandfather. My father’s father was also Anthony Joseph Cavalucci. My brother is Vinny because the second son is named for the father. My grandmother came here from Italy as a child and grew up in a traditional Italian home where men are honored and women are secondary. For as long as I can remember, I could do no wrong.

  I know Joe thinks that my grandmother is ca
lculating and manipulative, but he doesn’t understand that she just thinks this is the way things should be. Bloodlines are strong in Italian families, and she feels Michele’s son, Stevie, isn’t my blood. She’s even that way with my mother—even though my mother is related to me by blood, it’s my father’s blood that counts. Italian mothers have a sense of superiority over their daughter-in-laws because they have a blood connection to their sons that the wives don’t have.

  It’s funny that it’s so opposite from what the Bible says. Fiore knows how my family is and keeps pointing out that I’m supposed to leave my father and mother, which, trust me, is no hardship, and be one with my wife. My father never did that, and look how things turned out for him.

  My sister, Denise, has been raised that way too. I think my mother regrets it now, letting Denise grow up thinking she wasn’t as important as me and Vinny. It never seemed to bother Denise before, but lately she’s gone the other way, bashing all men.

  Denise was always like that blow-up clown I had when I was a kid. You punch it down, and it comes up smiling. She always came back no matter what anyone did to her. But she’s different now, like a light’s gone out somewhere.

  My mother, who up until last summer was a bitter, lonely drunk, is on the wagon. She went to rehab and goes to AA and stuff. It’s funny we both stopped drinking around the same time, in fact, after the same weekend. I don’t think my mom’s changing had anything to do with me, and I guess the changes in her aren’t bad. The scariest thought is that lately my mother’s the only one who seems normal.

  “Did you talk to your father yet about Marie?” Joe asked, interrupting my thoughts.

  Marie is my father’s wife, the snake he left my mother for. Except for her new surgically enhanced cleavage and the fact that she’s almost twenty years younger than my father, I don’t get what he sees in her. He was fooling around with her when he was a detective in the 5th precinct, where she worked as a civilian. She had been married to an ironworker who was also a lot older than she was. The ironworker left his wife and kids for Marie. When he picked up the signals that she was cheating on him, he was smart enough to have her followed. He caught her with my father and called my mother to let her in on it. My parents went back and forth for a couple of years, but my father always went back to Marie. They finally divorced, but the family’s still a mess.