The Exceptions

by David Cristofano

  I’m not really sure why. As her guardian, you’d think she’d want to be with a guy who’s unafraid to fully utilize a firearm.

  “I’ve never murdered anyone, okay? Besides, no family is in the murdering business, per se. It’s only used under the worst of circumstances. Like firing an employee.”

  “Permanently.” We stop and she turns to me. “Have you ever wanted to murder someone?”

  I chuckle and drop her hand, “Sure. Haven’t you? What do you really want to know, Melody? Have I ever beaten someone within an inch of his life? You bet. I’ve done what needed to be done, to protect myself, to protect my family. That’s what you do for the ones you love. It’s what I would do for you.”

  Melody flinches, refocuses on my face, hesitates before speaking. I retrace my last few sentences, unsure of what caused a reaction in her. Then it occurs to me that her brain—her capacity for mathematical processing—remapped my statements, broke them apart into smaller pieces and reassembled them in a form that was easier to solve and understand, and she deciphered this: “I’ll do whatever I need to protect the ones I love, and because I love you, I’ll protect you the same way.”

  As I open my mouth to backtrack the meaning behind my words, she says, “Tell me the story.”

  “Of?”

  “Tell me the worst thing you can tell me.”

  I put my hands in my pockets, turn my head, and recede as if being blown by a strong wind. “Why?”

  She doesn’t quickly answer, wavers like she might change her mind about going down whatever path this is. Finally, “Because I have to sort out whatever these feelings are that I have. I’m only seeing one side of you.” She bridges the gap I created seconds earlier. “I need to know what you’re capable of.”

  I don’t answer her, but I fully understand what she needs. Though she made it clear what she wants me to tell her, here are the words she left unspoken: “I am trusting you to free me, that somehow you will pull this off—but when this is over, I need to be able to discard you. Help me understand how.”

  Herein lies the direct result of caving to temptation, the wreckage caused by weakness and a lack of restraint and discipline. My heart shouldn’t be breaking, should’ve never been vulnerable in the first place. I’m thankful she spotted the problem, protected us from my worsening myopia. At some point I started convincing her that freedom included being free of me—and stopped convincing myself.

  I’m willing to give her what she needs—what I need—to keep this on course, to make this mission a success.

  “There was, uh… one guy in particular,” I say. “Turned out very badly.”

  She closes her eyes and hugs me, whispers, “Thank you.”

  I return the hug, bury my face in the crevice of her neck, and fill my lungs like it’s my last embrace before heading off to war.

  ELEVEN

  Though we are hungry, selecting a particular style of cuisine does not remain on our minds. We pick the nearest place to where we’re standing, a seafood restaurant that’s been located on the harbor for as long as I can remember, still standing from our days of coming downtown as kids. We walk in and the restaurant is large but well partitioned into cozy sections, its semicircular shape affording nice views of the harbor and city skyline for the majority of tables. The hostess welcomes us; I reach in my pocket and start peeling off bills. Melody slaps my hand and rolls her eyes.

  “What,” I say, “it’s impolite to tip a hostess?”

  The girl grabs two menus and walks all the way to the back of the restaurant, pretty much as far as you could possibly get from the windows, shows us a table right next to the door of the kitchen, adjacent to a booth with two screaming kids chaperoned by indifferent parents.

  Melody seats herself. I stare at her like she’s lost her mind. I pull out my wad again.

  “Sit,” she says.

  “See, this is what happens.”

  “Sit.”

  The hostess asks Melody, “Is there a problem, ma’am?”

  Melody shakes her head and the hostess disappears. She looks up at me and says, “It’s just a table.”

  “You deserve better. You deserve the best—”

  “Sit.”

  I regret not taking the longer walk to Little Italy, where I could be around my brethren, my culture. Pick any restaurant there and you have a fifty-fifty shot that the hostess is an elderly woman—likely the wife of the guy whose name is plastered on the sign—whose life experience brings an understanding of the needs of a young couple who appear to be dating, regardless of the truth of our circumstances. And there we would get priority everything. If Italians understand any of the essentials of life, they understand food and love.

  “Just a table,” I grumble as I take my seat. A hunk of carrot goes flying into the walkway from the booth behind us.

  We’re greeted by a server named Herman. Were this guy applying for a position at Sylvia, I’d give him the job just so I could fire him on the spot. His unkempt, ratlike look is one thing, but the bigger issue is his attention is elsewhere, like down the front of Melody’s dress—my companion is modestly endowed and not wearing a bra, which means Herman has to struggle for a glimpse; his extensive effort ticks me off. He hands me a menu without making eye contact, nearly jabs me in the chin with it, asks if he can get us something to drink, but the way he’s leaning forward and glaring at Melody’s chest I think the question might have been meant for her breasts.

  “First the table and now this?”

  “Jonathan, it’s just a—Oh, for Pete’s sake.” She turns to our server. “A bottle of Chianti. Go.” He disappears.

  “This is all wrong,” I say. “I just want the best for you, Melody. The best food, the best table, the best server.”

  She leans forward, reaches over and touches my hand. “You’re here, so it is the best table, with the best view. You see? I’m not expecting or asking for anything more.”

  In the kitchen, a tray of dishes hits the floor and the crash echoes out to our table, as well as the loud argument that follows.

  I rub my temples. “Porco mondo.”

  Herman returns with a bottle of Ruffino that’s so warm I’m convinced it was stored above the fryer. I grab the corkscrew out of his hands. “Leave us.” I open the bottle and quickly pour two glasses, hand her one, and say, “To the best table in the house.”

  She laughs and we clink our glasses together so hard we spill wine onto the table. “Porco mondo!” she says. “Whatever that means.”

  In the first gap in conversation, I offer to tell Melody the story she requested, along with the opportunity to renege; it’s not exactly the kind of thing you’d want to hear before eating.

  When we were out on the harbor, I told her there was one guy who turned out pretty bad. Truth: There were a lot of guys, really. I took my own here and there, but more often served as a deliveryman. As I sit before her now at this moment of confession, I am so thankful I never came to taking another life, so relieved that my résumé is missing that one bulleted line of experience. If she only knew how my wrongdoings paled in comparison to the rest of our crew, how far down on the scale of maleficence my actions were.

  As I hesitate to confess my worst-case experience, the story I fear may have her vomiting or running for the nearest uniformed officer, I know what she needs is to hear what a monster I am, how I have displayed my own propensity for savagery and a tendency toward evil.

  She needs me to be discardable.

  I pour more wine and take an enormous drink before I spread my history over our tablecloth like a bag of broken glass.

  Gregory Morrison. I like to remember Greg as a complete nutcase, instead of the miswired or underloved man he likely was. Greg first made himself known to me and my family when he was eight or nine—about seven years younger than I was at the time. He used to hang around some of the places we provided protection for, otherwise he would’ve simply blended into the gray urban background. Far as we knew, his family had not
hing to do with ours. His dad was a dentist in midtown, never heard that he’d gotten into any trouble.

  Greg, though, upon hitting puberty became loud and obnoxious, from a safe distance referred to most of us as dagos, wops, and guineas. We’d toss him a few Italian insults and laugh it off. But during the summer he would’ve graduated from high school, his obnoxiousness transformed into criminal activity. He became the leader of a pathetic gang in our residential neighborhood whose big claim to fame was breaking into pharmacies and stealing cigarettes and prescription drugs.

  We paid him no mind until the day Peter and I caught him and his loser friends trying to break into one of our establishments. Peter confronted the group, but there were six of them and only two of us. So Morrison rolls the dice, pretends he and his gang are going to rough us up. Peter waved him off, told them all to get lost. But this only fueled Morrison, seemed to insult him that we didn’t consider him on the same playing field—so he pushed it, and regrettably pushed Peter’s easily pressable button. It didn’t help that Pete was bored and looking for some action.

  And like all good brawls, it was not six-on-two; it was one-on-one. Peter beat Morrison something fierce, really humiliated the guy in front of his buddies. I’d seen Peter do this many times growing up, mostly for fun—but something about this time disturbed me. The entire time Peter is pounding away, Greg keeps telling Pete he’s going to get him, that this isn’t over, that he’s going to regret every blow. Were it me, I would have stopped, set Greg free, and ended the event, but Peter thought it was downright hilarious, only made him pound longer, kept going until he grew bored of that, too.

  Even as we all walked away, Greg was still rambling on through slurred speech. “You’re gonna get it, Bovaros. You’re gonna get payback,” he muttered between winces and coughs. “Gonna make your whole family pay.”

  Nearly a week later, I walked into my folks’ place and saw my mother rocking in my father’s arms, weeping like a child. My first thought was someone on my mom’s side had passed away—except my father was staring into the distance with tear tracks marking his cheeks. My next thought was that one of my brothers had died. I remember the lightheadedness and vertigo that came upon me, how I quickly moved to lean on the doorjamb.

  My father had a look on his face he’s only had a few times. In his look I read that someone was going to have to die.

  I was the first to arrive at their house that evening, the first to receive the news: Gregory Morrison had raped my mother in the parking lot of a small Italian grocery store a few miles from our home, attacked her while she was loading bags of food into the trunk of her car. The entire time, all while insulting and slapping my mother, calling her a whore, Morrison kept repeating, “Tell your boys payback is hell.”

  My father helped my mother up to their room, got her to rest on their bed. I waited outside their door. A few minutes later he quietly came out and took me aside.

  “I gotta stay with your mother,” he said. “You’re the only one who knows about this right now, Johnny.” To my recollection, my father only cried five times in his adult life: at each of his sons’ first Communions, and as he spoke those words. While he fought the tears—difficult to see on a man who’s lost no battle—he grabbed the back of my neck, gave it a tight squeeze. “You go make things right, capice?”

  I nodded, carefully walked down the creaky wooden stairs of their home, wanted to vomit at the thought of what had happened to my mother. She was—just like Melody—a casualty of being anywhere near our criminal family, another woman virtually destroyed, stripped of dignity and tossed aside, all because the leaders around her were violent, self-serving men.

  And in that moment, the violence emerged in me. A lifetime of experience instructed me the one way to correct the situation. With each step toward my car, the fright and anxiety of what had happened to my mother converted over to unabated hatred for Gregory Morrison, the formation of undiscovered wrath.

  I sped to the rathole apartment Morrison shared with two of his buddies on the Lower East Side, kicked in his door so hard the bottom hinge snapped off. Five feet away was Morrison, sitting in a torn, stained recliner, directly facing the door like it was a widescreen television, waiting. He lifted a small handgun, aimed it directly at my chest, said, “Payback,” and pulled the trigger.

  All he got for his planning and patience was an empty click. Nothing. Morrison cursed at top volume, looked down sideways at the gun, reached for the clip—of course, by this time I was in midair. I landed on him square and we both went flying off the back of the chair and onto the fringe of his kitchen, the gun flying across the room toward the window.

  Morrison grabbed his rib cage and moaned. I stood as he remained in the fetal position, picked up a wooden chair from under his kitchen table, and smashed it over him again and again until the thing had broken into kindling.

  Morrison was not the only one with patience. I sat in his roach-filled pit for over two hours waiting for him to return to consciousness. I would not allow him to sleep through his misery. He was going to be wide awake, he was going to live through the excruciating pain and suffering just like my mother had to be awake and aware through hers. He was going to remember, for every one of his remaining days, the mistake he made.

  I cannot retell how I implemented vengeance upon Morrison; for all my claims of strength, I can’t confess the truest darkness of my life. Though the images are forever clear in my mind, the taste is too bitter to pass over my tongue. I will say that Greg will never chew things easily again, will forever be taunted and teased by neighborhood kids as Smashmouth. He will never be able to provide the proper chemistry to produce children. He will have difficulty turning his head to the left and struggle with bouts of vertigo that will worsen with age.

  He will, however, get to live. And this did not sit well with my family.

  By the time I returned to my parents’ house, all of my brothers were there. After an update on the status of my mother, I gave them all the details of my experience with Morrison, every strike and blow, every word he uttered as he begged for help, right down to how I left him weeping like a little boy—alive.

  Pop and Peter flew from their chairs almost simultaneously.

  “I want him dead!” my father yelled. Peter said nothing, just reached in his pocket for his keys.

  I stopped him before he could leave the room, told everyone to sit down, explained my motivations—how I let Morrison live for a reason, that if one of us or one of our crew went and knocked him off, he’d be forgotten in a month and someone would fill his place. But by leaving a living, breathing example that people would see, day after day, a constant reminder of what happens to those who harm us, the event would never be forgotten. People would learn. After all, was this not the point of most of God’s Old Testament examples? What would be the point of wiping out Jericho, or of forty years in the desert, if there was not something to learn from it? Peter was the first to come around on the idea, liked the notion of seeing him on the street now and again, being able to give him the evil eye on a regular basis. Once my father calmed and saw the light of the idea, Gino and Jimmy fell in line.

  And then the turn of events in my life: At this moment, this very conversation where I managed to sway the angry, rage-filled determination of my siblings and father, I realized I might be able to one day sway them toward setting Melody free, that if I posed a compelling enough argument, they might be winnable. Even though I was much younger then, I knew I could make it happen—if only I could conjure a way to make everything come together, for the timing and reason to be right.

  And now here I am, sitting in a seafood restaurant with Melody, mere hours from putting a plan into play whose origin came five years earlier at the notion that keeping an enemy alive was more powerful than killing him. All I need to do is convince the same group of people of the same thing. One last time.

  I pray that one day Melody will be completely free, content and living the life she was meant to
live, and that I have this story to tell, too. That I can share the details of something beautiful, filled with hope and happiness.

  As for Morrison, he now occupies most of his days sitting at the bar of a dive in Brooklyn, cashing in his welfare checks and converting them to lottery tickets, drinking beer through a straw.

  But not all things were corrected by my actions. Fourteen months ago, after spending years mired in fear and depression, my mother died of ovarian cancer, the recipient of a painful existence better suited for every other individual in my family.

  Melody plays with the rim of her wineglass as she processes this dump of information, seems to be formulating conclusions based on details I didn’t realize I’d offered.

  She finally looks up and says, “You’re a strange hero, Jonathan.”

  Herman starts heading toward our table. I flick my wrist at him like I’m swatting a fly and he changes direction in midstep.

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “You may not realize it, but you kept Greg alive when anyone else in your family would’ve killed him. He’d be thankful if he knew.” I doubt that—although things do seem different when I view them through Melody’s eyes. She thinks for a moment and adds, “So, if I understand correctly, your worst violent act was triggered not because you were evil, but because you were human.” She studies me, keeps her eyes on me as she brings her glass to her lips and takes a slow drink of wine. “Man, if you can convince your family of something like that…”

  There could be only one way for her to finish that sentence:… then I stand a chance.

  I can’t tell if her statements are real or simply rationalizations for not letting me go, but either way I can read in her expression that I’ve let her down—not in terms of the violence, but in helping her find an easy way to discard me tomorrow. It was not the intention of my story, but clearly her look says this: Thanks for nothing.

  TWELVE