The Exceptions

by David Cristofano

  Near gasping, I opened my car door and slowly entered the wet air.

  Lydia leaned forward near her husband’s lifeless body, faced her killer, closed her eyes, her hands still clinging to the top of her coat, just kept whispering, “Okay… okay…”

  Before squeezing the trigger, Ettore shot a glance my way, brimming with evil, one that could only have been read as Do you see what I am doing? This is how it’s done.

  Another muted firecracker and Lydia slowly tipped over like a melting snowman.

  Ettore dropped one more bullet into each of them, carefully stepped around the bodies before him, began his visual search for the last remaining target. But as I watched his motion, I feared I might have been a true Bovaro after all, that the genetic disposition toward violence might have been buried deep in the twist of chromosomes that made me who I am, for instead of being sickened and further weakened at what just happened, a surge of hatred and rage filled me—not toward the McCartneys, mind you, but wrath was well on its way.

  My lungs filled with ease.

  When Melody came to the front of the store, approaching the foggy glass, I saw her the same second my cousin did. He held his forearm as he leveled his sight on her.

  This is when I left our car’s side and yelled louder than I knew my voice could go.

  “Ettore Vido!”

  He dropped the Beretta to his side and looked at me like the next bullet was for me. I walked in his direction in a manner that suggested that bullet would be the only thing that could stop me. He glanced back at the window, measuring the possibility of taking her out before our escape out of town.

  “Ettore Vido!”

  Melody moved to the window, cupped her hands around the glass to focus her view of the parking lot, unable to see her dead parents below the ledge of the sill. With her perfect position, she could have been eliminated with a slingshot, never mind a weapon as accurate as a Beretta. My cousin took one last look her way, raised his arm quickly, and aimed it in the general direction of Melody.

  “Ettore! Vido!”

  Then Melody slipped out of sight.

  My cousin turned to me and held the gun in my direction, quickly walking my way and cursing his missed opportunity—but mostly me—with every step, his profanity merely foreshadowing what would become a brutal storm upon my existence.

  He held that gun steady, aimed right at my head, but I stood my ground. When he got within a few feet, his cursing now laced in spit that splashed my face, he swung the Beretta down on the side of my head and I immediately fell to the ground. Just as I was figuring out what had happened, the Beretta made its way to my skull again. And again. I touched my face, looked down at my palm covered in the blood from my head, running from a gash across my temple that I would wear the rest of my life.

  Ettore grabbed me by the arm, lifted me up, then smashed me again, this time with his glove-covered fist. I tried to regain my composure—despite the pain, I remained enraged—but I could not get my footing. When I finally staggered to my feet, Ettore grabbed me by the back of my jacket and shoved me into the front seat of our Impala.

  As bodies began to cautiously slink out from the store, we sped from the parking lot and disappeared toward Route 151, down a series of back roads until we were within a half mile of the highway. Ettore drove off the road into a field, mud splattering the windows, and spun the car around so it was facing the street again.

  He got out and looked at the Beretta with confusion—not sure why it was still in his hand. The robot did not follow his programmed instructions. He walked through the field, the cursing returned, my name embedded within each sentence.

  I kicked my door open and crawled out, blood in my mouth and eyes, the world spinning beneath my feet. Of all the habits I spent my later life trying to reject—the smoking, the acid tongue, the careless drinking—I could never surrender the anger and rage and propensity to destroy by intimate physical means. There is no necessity for nicotine, for vulgarities, for inebriation. Unfortunately, though, violence is a necessary thing.

  The pressure was crescendoing now, making its quick conversion to wrath. It was not due to some sense of shame that I was unable to follow my father’s instructions, not from Ettore’s desperate need to displace me and elevate his place in my family, not from his sheer nerve to pistol-whip me, to point the barrel of a gun in my direction. This moment clarified all that mattered to me, what would come to be the focus of my life. Ettore should never have made an attempt on Melody’s life, should never have been willing to eliminate that kind of innocence.

  I walked to the rear of the Impala, opened the trunk, slid all the bags and boxes aside, and pulled out the tire iron. I slowly limped my way to my cousin, who stood facing the open expanse of land, raising his fist to some greater power that had failed him.

  I trudged through the muddy field, my shoes filling with brown muck and slowing me even more. I approached Ettore, tightened my grip on the tire iron, and watched him writhe in the anguish of inefficacy.

  In agony, I managed to mumble, “Turn around.”

  I gave him the time he needed to understand what was coming, to know what I was about to deliver, that I would be changing the way he looked, the way he walked, and the way he would swallow for the rest of his life, that all of this was brought about by my hands.

  “Johnny!” he yelled.

  It should be noted he never pronounced my name the same way again; it forever sounded like this: “Shonny.”

  I swung against his face with all my strength, leveled him. If it might be possible to propel the soul out of a human being by sheer force, I came close to doing it here. His body twisted in nearly a full circle, a drunken ballerina, falling into the mud facedown. I left him gurgling there for a moment, then reached down, grabbed him, and flipped him over.

  “Get up.”

  Both hands to his face, he shouted, “Shonny!”

  “Up.”

  And when he finally stumbled to his feet, I swung again and cracked his right knee. Ettore was brought into this world bowlegged, but he would spend the rest of his life knock-kneed.

  I let Ettore scream it out for a minute, then stumbled over him, knelt on his chest, grabbed the tire iron by both ends and pushed the center down over his neck. The look in his eyes was pleading, for he could carry none of the grace the McCartneys did when mercy showed them no sign of arrival. His choking and gagging could only be interpreted as some form of begging.

  I leaned over him, and as the rain and my blood and my spit dripped onto his mud-covered face, I said, “Yeah, this is happening.”

  Ettore whimpered.

  Then I unleashed. “Now listen to me. You never go near the girl. For the rest of your life you never go near her. You don’t think about her. You don’t even mention her name. Don’t ever use the word melody again, capice? You like a song? Call it a tune or jingle, ’cause if I hear you say her name, I will destroy you, you understand me? And don’t think what you witnessed back at the grocery was my inability to kill, ’cause you ever go near Melody I’ll blow a hole in your chest big enough to thread with this tire iron.”

  Ettore made a feeble attempt to raise me off of him, like he was trying to bench-press an engine block. I pushed down on the tire iron and he coughed up a dark mixture of fluids.

  And here is where I may have become a true Bovaro, for I played the card: “You’re a loser, Ettore. You’re nothing in this family. I’m Tony Bovaro’s son, and we both know all I have to do is mention what you did to me today and they’ll end you. What you fail to realize is that I outrank you, and I always will. You matter as much as that Beretta. Even your mother had to have known what a loser you’d be, couldn’t even name you after a saint.” Then with one last final push: “So, here’s how it’s going down. I didn’t touch you and you didn’t touch me. This never happened. When we get back to New York, you don’t mention the girl. You can take all the credit for the killings and be the hero. As for our wounds, I don’t care what you s
ay, but that’s it, you understand? Not another word about the girl. I find out she so much as gets a hangnail, I’m coming after you and I’m bringing something better than a tire iron.”

  I pulled the steel bar from his neck, stood up, cast a gray shadow over him.

  “Not another word about the girl.”

  Ettore sputtered for some time after that, sprawled back in the mud like an abandoned scarecrow. Then, finally, “Okay… okay, Shonny.”

  To say there was a celebration upon our return would be incorrect. After all the stress and lost sleep the McCartneys caused my father, you might imagine ticker tape would have fallen from the sky, that our wounds might have been concealed by an avalanche of confetti, but that was never the way it went, even when it came to taking out the McCartneys. When Ettore and I walked into the kitchen of my parents’ recently purchased English Tudor across the Hudson in Tenafly, New Jersey, my father was leaning on the counter, wiping dry the remnants of a small bowl of red sauce with a slice of bread. The first he’d seen or heard of us since we departed, he looked up, stared at the clots and bruises on our faces, Ettore’s odd stance.

  “Hell happened?” he said.

  Ettore cleared his throat, tried not to look at me. “C’ran overush in loh ash wuhwuh leafin’.” A car ran over us in the lot as we were leaving.

  Pop approached us, looked at me first. “You okay?”

  “We’ll survive. Right, Ettore?”

  My father touched my cheek gently, looked at the scrapes and swollen flesh. His face sagged into a pout, was the closest I’d ever seen him come to expressing regret. But the years had depleted him, and the distance between regret and revenge had shortened. His expression soon turned into Bovaro anger, a burst of required retribution.

  “Not the guy’s fault. We took care of it,” I said, then, changing the subject, “Ettore’s a hard worker. Mom and Dad are out of the picture.”

  Pop took a step back and nodded, passed a subtle grin of approval. “The girl?”

  Ettore looked down.

  I answered, “I learned everything I could ever need to know from my cousin. The girl is mine. Don’t worry, Pop. I’ll take care of her. That right, Ettore?”

  My dad moved to my cousin, put his hand behind his neck. “This was clean?” Ettore nodded. Pop smiled, reached around and hugged my cousin, whispered something in Italian, likely a verbal commendation. And as my father tightened his embrace, I could see Ettore’s hands shake in agony, hear his staccato breathing.

  Ettore ended up being celebrated for his kills, marginally elevated in our family and crew, famed for doing what no one else could achieve. He had eliminated the more important of the witnesses—what juror would truly rely on what someone witnessed as a six-year-old from over a decade earlier?—and provided proof of how impervious the Bovaros were to prosecution. And from that honored moment, he became Shimmy Vido, aptly nicknamed for the way his lame leg would wiggle from side to side with every step, remembered for his acts of heroism with a life of disrespect and indifference:

  “Go send Jimmy and Shimmy down there to talk to him.”

  “Hey, Sh-Sh-Shimmy! What’s sh-sh-shaking?”

  “Throw me a beer, you friggin’ gimp.”

  As for me, I made it clear across my father’s organization that Melody was in my sights, that I would make good on taking her out, that her eventual elimination would be my absolution. That no one else was to touch her. But it must be understood that my absolution did not rest in her elimination, but in her insulation. If there existed any hope for my redemption, it had to be in becoming her shield.

  She was all mine to take care of. All mine.

  FIVE

  By the time I reached my twenty-fourth birthday, it was undisputed: I became the family member no Bovaro really understood. Most families have one member who bucks the norm.

  I became the rebel.

  As my brothers contributed more and more to my family’s burgeoning organization, I managed to keep myself involved at an arm’s length. Though I might not have always been part of the decision making, I certainly remained a participant in the conversations. In our crew, we didn’t exactly find a conference room and follow an agenda; conclusions are drawn and plans derived over a plate of veal or eggplant. And I certainly continued to do my share of the household chores; as the months came and went, so did the extortive measures, the cleansing of ill-gotten gains.

  Unfortunately, my criminal mind was elsewhere.

  I had one regret from that fateful event in Mineral Point, and that was not having gone back to look for Melody, to find out what happened to her. An impossibility, for sure—only the most foolish criminals let curiosity prod them to return to the scene of their crime—but the films my brain played of what happened after Ettore and I raced from that little town became worse and worse over time.

  You can only fantasize about something for so long before you begin devising the plan to make it real, regardless of the audacity, regardless of the consequence. Wondering what happened to Melody nearly consumed me. I left her worse off, you see, parentless and with only one way to struggle through her remaining days on earth: the government, an organization apparently ill-equipped to keep its addicted employees from being leveraged into providing sensitive data to people like… me. I imagined her everywhere—the Northwest, southern Texas, rusting Ohio and Michigan villages—and the fact that I could not verify even the most insignificant detail wore me down. Though worst of all, I became obsessed with wondering what became of her, wanting to know she was okay. I could have gone directly to Randall Gardner and demand he hand over whatever he could find on where Melody had been transported, but what would’ve been the point? At that time everyone wanted me to find Melody, to finish what Ettore and I had started.

  I’d begun taking an active role in some of my father’s restaurants, the end of our business that left the least bitter flavor in my mouth. While these establishments were being used to launder almost all of the money running through the organization, everything else about them was legit. I loved the chefs and the kitchen camaraderie; the way the entire operation ran like a well-timed engine—the bar, the hostesses, the cooks, the servers—everything coming together like a tornado forming out of turbulent air; the way my clothes smelled of garlic and basil and fry oil at the end of each day. Unlike my brothers, who were more involved in the other operations—say, carting or gambling efforts. They suffered through the onslaught of liars, threats, beatings. And trash.

  And so I attended a second-rate cooking school in lower Manhattan, a now defunct institution later converted into a pair of bars and an art gallery. My goal was twofold: (1) to enhance my ability to provide new culinary offerings; and (2) to occupy every available resource in my brain, to squelch the rising compulsion to locate Melody.

  Not much came of the culinary aspect. Nearly all of my classmates were there escaping some other oppressive thing: pressure from the do-something-with-your-life parent, drug addiction, unbearable loneliness. The result was a class of underperformers and distracted twenty- and thirtysomethings. As it turned out, I knew more about some cooking techniques than my instructors, and couldn’t help correcting them, including a fifteen-minute debate on the proper way to sauté garlic and onions. In the end, it gave me the opportunity to experiment out of my depth (learning how to make a brick roux) and to learn a few new things (the patience required to make a brick roux). A few months into class, a flirtation came my way, a sweet auburn-headed girl with a face of freckles set in celestial patterns and a voice as rich and soothing as Karen Carpenter’s. Coming in from Staten Island, she showed no visible response when I told her my full name, and that alone allowed me to open up to her. We inadvertently became class partners, worked our labs together, and developed an unspoken language of how to best work the kitchen, understanding what each other needed next, when to get out of each other’s way, when either of us needed coaching or help starting over; we became in sync in ways some married couples are never bl
essed to know. We began a casual intimate relationship that lasted a while. A season, maybe. The girl was stunning, a source of envy to any man I introduced her to, particularly my brothers, who noted the aspects of her face and body and recorded them to mental scorecards.

  Having partnered in class, we shortly partnered in everything else after that. We shared the laughter and the personal interest and the physical intimacy that typically serve as requirements for moving toward a greater commitment. But the never-discussed distance between us was exactly as wide as my failures. And as our bodies would be wrapped together in my loft above one of my father’s restaurants, I would almost always drift, my eyes turning unfocused and hazy. She would gently rub her fingers over the scars on my body, never asking for the stories that would explain them.

  And then the last night: Our bodies had just relaxed, a thin layer of cooling sweat between us, and her soft fingers gently traced the scar on my forehead, the one provided by Ettore. I stared out the window into the blur of streetlights. She stopped stroking my temple, froze for a few seconds before her body went completely limp.

  I could sense her staring at me. “Where are you?” she said.

  How could I explain? I was in the Northwest, southern Texas, rusting Ohio and Michigan villages.

  Then: “Is there someone else?”

  I let out a quiet sigh before eventually answering. “Not the way you’re thinking.”

  The end of the semester meant my less occupied mind had no excuse to remain in New York; the fantasy would be actualized.

  The mere suggestion of locating Melody—under the guise of her elimination—was welcomed by all. At this point, my father wanted everything finished on the McCartney docket, and he was becoming impatient with my insistence on doing it myself. The trip to see Randall was imminent. He’d just become a senior database administrator with Justice, which meant he could access almost any records he chose without a trace—on the back end, as he called it—one of a very few trusted technologists who could see data without officially entering into the system as a general user. Randall knew the value of his currency had improved, and he tried once—once—to raise the stakes with us, to suggest he and anyone from our crew might be peers, that our relationship should be valued mutually. This notion was quickly corrected by way of a visit to Randall’s home by me and Peter, during which Peter slammed Randall’s face down onto his computer keyboard so many times that once Randall fell back into his office chair, the Y, G, and M keys were stuck to his forehead. Our relationship, going forward, was fully understood.