Travelin' Man

by Tom Mendicino

  What began as a trying day is ending on a bad note. Michael’s unhappy about being forced to suffer this endurance test on the expressway. It would have been perfectly reasonable, not to mention convenient, for Frankie to spend the night with his brother’s family. And it’s out of character for him to disappoint his nephew and godson. Danny’s been begging for a new pair of Puma sneakers and Michael had proposed the three of them drive out to Foot Locker after dinner. There’s only one explanation for Frankie’s anxiety about rushing back to the city. He’s worried that goddamn little Mexican illegal is pouting in front of the television, feeling neglected and abandoned. It astounds Michael that his brother trusts the kid with the key to his house and thinks nothing about leaving him there alone.

  “We could sit here for hours,” Michael grouses. “Call him and tell him you’ll be back as soon as you can.”

  “He isn’t there.”

  “Where is he?”

  “He’s gone.”

  “I hope you told him not to come back. That little shit. I knew this was going to happen. How long did he smack you around before you gave him what he wanted? How much money did he squeeze out of you before saying adios?”

  He immediately regrets his angry, aggressive tone. He’d intended to give Frankie time to recover from the shock of being arrested before interrogating him about this fresh set of bruises and split lip. He feels as if he’s kicking a wounded puppy.

  “It doesn’t matter. He’s gone. He’s gone and he won’t be coming back,” Frankie says wearily.

  “You’re an easy mark, Frankie. He’ll be back when he needs a quick cash infusion or a roof over his head. And if he shows up again, I’ll call the authorities myself. I mean it, Frankie,” Michael swears as traffic begins to move, a crawl to be sure for the next mile or two, then slowly gathering steam as they pass the accident site.

  Michael and his wife need to start throwing age-appropriate gentlemen with steady incomes at Frankie until one finally sticks. Looking back, he should have appreciated the ten years of relative peace and quiet when Frankie was involved with that pompous alcoholic high school teacher. He should have been less critical, more welcoming of the harmless old fool. Sometimes he thinks Frankie believes he’s never really accepted his lifestyle. But Michael stopped resenting his brother’s sexuality years ago, though he still isn’t going to be marching in any parades to celebrate it. It’s Frankie’s poor choices and naïveté that make Michael uncomfortable. He wouldn’t take the odds against Frankie running into his own Tommy Corcoran some day and ending up like the ill-fated Carmine Torino. His worst fear is that this Mariano is just a test drive for a more lethal liaison yet to come.

  “I don’t know how you do this every day,” he complains, growing more frustrated by the minute.

  He’s circling his brother’s neighborhood, searching for that elusive place to park within walking distance of Eighth and Carpenter and the house where they grew up. Years of suburban living have dulled his parallel parking skills, but he manages to squeeze the car into a tight space, much to the horn-blaring frustration of the driver trying to pass him on the narrow street. He hasn’t eaten yet, having gotten the call from his colleague in the Montgomery County office before dinner, and insists they stop for a slice. Standing at the register, he hears his stomach rumble and he orders an entire pie, large, half sausage for him, half mushroom for his brother.

  “What are you doing?” Frankie frets as the girl at the cash register counts out Michael’s change.

  “I thought we’d go back to the house and share it. Do you have any cold beer? I’d settle for a Bud Lite. For me. You’ve had enough booze for one day.”

  “You don’t need to come back with me. I just want to go to bed,” Frankie insists.

  He seems a bit too despondent to Michael for the circumstances. Things are looking up now that the fucking little Mexican has jumped ship. Frankie should be jumping for joy to be rid of him. And Michael’s assured him no D.U.I. charges will be filed. No report will be made. The arrest never happened. There won’t be any points on his license or need to attend a mandatory alcohol counseling class. No one will ever mention it again. He wonders if Frankie’s on some medication that’s causing him to act strange. He realizes he has to piss too badly to wait until they’re back at his brother’s house.

  Frankie’s gone when he emerges from the men’s room. Something feels out of kilter, ominous even, and he wonders if it’s safe for Frankie to be alone. He grows antsy during the interminable wait before the counter girl announces his order is ready. He opens the box and practically swallows two slices whole as he walks back to the house. He tries slipping his key into the locked door of the private entrance in the alley on Carpenter Street, but the blade resists sliding into the keyway. The shop key doesn’t open the Eighth Street entrance either. Frankie must have changed the locks after the kid took off and forgotten he hasn’t given Michael the new keys. He sets the pizza box on the sidewalk and dials his brother’s number on his cell, but Frankie doesn’t answer. So he stands in the middle of Eighth Street and shouts his name. The lights are burning on the upper floors so he knows Frankie’s in there.

  He’s surprised some neighbor trying to sleep isn’t shouting profanities through a bedroom window. A strange, cold fist grips his heart. He tries calling Frankie’s cell one last time, then calmly, purposefully, walks around the side of the building and kicks in the back door. He runs up the stairs, taking two and three steps at time, until he reaches the master bedroom suite on the highest floor where he finds his brother slumped on the toilet, cradling his head in his hands. The ceramic lid of the toilet bowl is lying on the floor in two pieces. He assumes Frankie must have stumbled and broken it trying to break his fall. He looks so pitiful and helpless sitting there, needing comfort and reassurance and all Michael has offered is an unpleasant harangue and criticism.

  Frankie barely resists as Michael walks him to his bed. He doesn’t protest when his younger brother unbuttons his shirt, unzips his pants and takes off his shoes. He’s lying in bed, his eyes wide open, when Michael turns off the light and urges him to try to sleep. He calls his wife with the good news the parasite is gone. The bad news though is Frankie’s acting odd and Michael doesn’t want to leave him alone overnight. I love you too. Talk to you in the morning. He hopes there’s beer in the fridge and he’ll finish off that pizza if some street dog hasn’t run of with it. But first he needs to secure the back door. The tools and nails are in the basement, likely untouched since the last time he did a minor repair.

  Everything down here is just as he remembers. The damp moisture of the earthen floor. The metal storage shelves, odd pieces of furniture and broken lamps, the wide, deep freezer chest, an ancient Frigidaire model, antediluvian, but still serviceable. His eyes are slow to adjust to the harsh light of the bare ceiling bulb and he slips in a puddle underfoot, noticing an odd smell, fetid but not overpowering, the distinct scent of meat beginning to rot. There are two trash bags on the floor, not full but securely tied. He opens one and finds chicken breasts and cuts of beef soaking in water and blood. The freezer must be broken, despite its gently purring motor.

  “What the fuck are you doing down there, Mikey?” Frankie shouts from the top of the stairs, his voice shrill and twisted in his throat as he races down the steps, sweating and gasping for breath.

  “You need to replace this goddamn freezer.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with the freezer,” Frankie insists, grabbing the trash bag from his brother’s hand. “Go upstairs and I’ll clean up this mess.”

  “Let’s put this shit back before it stinks up the entire fucking house,” Michael says, opening the lid before Frankie can stop him. A blast of artic air slaps his face and he blinks and jumps back, confused, staring at Frankie in disbelief, not trusting his eyes, needing a moment to gather his wits before confirming that, yes, Frankie’s little Mexican is lying in the freezer, shrouded in frost, his twisted and contorted remains a snug and cozy f
it.

  BOOK ONE

  parenti serpenti

  1920-2007

  Papa and his wives 1920-2001

  “Please, Boo. Please!”

  “Tonight. Just for one night. You’re getting too old for this,” Frankie said, finally relenting and lifting the covers so Michael could slip into his bed. Michael ‘s thoughts were racing too quickly for his older brother to keep pace. He’d been spinning in circles since the service and funeral lunch for the stepmother he’d become deeply attached to. He should have been exhausted, but he was too agitated for sleep and began peppering Frankie with questions.

  “How come Papa talks funny?”

  He was never Dad, certainly not Daddy. A father who allowed his brats to call him Pa or Pop wasn’t worthy of his children’s respect. He was Papa, as the man who had sired him had been. His children’s few words of Italian were awkward, barely recognizable to a man who had never heard, let alone spoken, English until he was nearly nine years old. His boys understood enough of the dialect of Calabria to get the gist of his outbursts whenever he relapsed into the language of his childhood, but always responded in their own native tongue. Michael, always the more willful and bolder of his two sons, would grow up to be a resentful teenager who referred to his father in the hated American vernacular as his old man, drawing empty threats of banishment with no possibility of ever returning. Michael was defiant, unbowed. He complained that none of his friends had to live in a dark apartment above a barbershop, with holy pictures on the walls and plaster saints on every table. Michael would live with Sal Pinto if Papa didn’t want him around. And once he was gone he would never come back.

  Michael’s grandfather would have thrown Papa into the streets if he’d ever dared to challenge his unquestioned authority. This country had made his son weak, a man who allowed his children to run wild and treat him with contempt. His naturalization papers, granted after his service in the war, had made him a citizen, but Luigi Rocco Gagliano only finally, truly, became an American the day Michael turned his back on him and walked away, suffering no consequences for calling his father an embarrassment, a stupid old wop who should go back to Italy if he hated the medigan’ so much.

  “Why is Papa so mean?”

  “You’re a lucky boy Luigi. You’re going to live in America.”

  Even at the age of eight, he knew his mother was frightened and wary of leaving the only home they’d ever known. She’d been a white widow for so many years she’d began to think of herself as a maiden. She was only a girl when she married her husband, a man who’d come back to Calabria to take a bride after emigrating at seventeen. He’d returned to his life in America less than a month after the birth of his son. His letters were short, to the point, hardly filled with the romantic declarations a young girl yearned to read. But the money he earned put meat on the table and paid to repair the roof when the rain leaked through the seams. She received frequent gifts of bolts of expensive cloth and small luxury items like lavender sachets and combs and hair clips made of ivory and tortoiseshell. Luigi was likely the first boy in Italy, certainly Calabria, to own a bright red Liberty Coaster wagon, elevating his status among his cousins who vied for the privilege of pulling him through the streets of the town.

  Then, finally, instructions arrived with the name and address of a man who had booked their passage on the Konig Albert departing from Naples. She tried consoling her son who cried bitter tears as they sat in the cavernous terminal waiting to board the ship.

  “We’ll come back soon to see Nonno and Nonna,” she promised, assuming the separation from his doting grandparents was the cause of his despair.

  A man wearing a uniform and a whistle around his neck was calling names from the front of the room.

  “. . . . . Gagliano, Santamaria; Gagliano, Luigi Rocco . . . . .”

  He pulled away when his mother tried to take his hand. He wasn’t a baby. He could walk by himself. He knew she needed the reassurance of his touch and wanted to punish her, refusing to forgive her for promising the wagon to his cousin Aldo when they left for America.

  Nonno had tried to console him, promising him that, in America, he would have two or three wagons and live in a palace like the Savoy kings. His father was a rich man now, a person of stature and influence, a citizen of the United States with money to grease the palms of the right people in America and Italy to spare his son from a life under the boot heel of Il Diavolo, Nonno’s name for the godless Il Duce. But the old man’s words failed to comfort and, late in the evening of his last night in the village, Luigi climbed a steep hill, dragging the wagon behind him. He’d stood at the edge of the cliff, tears running down his cheeks as he threw his beloved Liberty Coaster from the rocky precipice and watched it disappear into the leafy ceiling of the trees far below.

  “Why does Papa hit you?”

  The stranger who met Luigi and his mother at the port when they arrived in America was a terrible disappointment to a boy expecting to be greeted by a hero. Salvatore Rocco Gagliano was barely taller than his wife and looked much older than the man in the wedding photo his mother kept on a table beside her bed. The first meeting was awkward, formal, without kisses or an embrace. They boarded a train in a town called Newark and travelled to a city named Philadelphia, arriving after midnight at an enormous building with a barbershop at the street level. S. Gagliano, Barber, Est. 1928, was painted on the window glass. Luigi awoke early his first morning in America, eager to claim the Liberty Coaster wagons his nonno had promised awaited him. His mother fed him a simple breakfast of bread and cheese, telling him to eat quickly as he was needed downstairs.

  “Do as he says Luigi. He’s your father.”

  The barber had decided his son was old enough to be put to work and ordered him to wash the shop windows with water and vinegar. Perfection was expected. Being an eight-year-old boy was no excuse for streaks on the plate glass. His efforts were rewarded with a blow that knocked him to the sidewalk. He knew his life had changed, his position in the world diminished, when his mother rebuffed his tearful attempts to seek consolation and sympathy, deferring to her husband in the discipline of his son.

  “Are all of Papa’s wives in heaven? Does Polly’s mother know who we are? What are we supposed to call her when we die and go to heaven too?”

  Luigi returned to Italy to take up arms against his own blood, fighting in the Battle of Anzio. He returned with an honorable discharge and enrolled in barber school. He assumed his place beside his father in the shop, renamed S. Gagliano & Son, Since 1928, their chairs only a few feet apart. Ten hours a day, six days a week, he suffered endless criticism about squandering his money and his time drinking alcohol with his worthless friend Sal Pinto. What had his father done to be cursed with a minchione who chose to keep company with donnaccias, unsuitable to be a wife and mother?

  The deal was brokered before Luigi met the woman who would become his first wife. The Gaglianos had known the Avilla family for generations. Pasquale Avilla’s two daughters, the loveliest girls in the neighborhood, fair-haired and blue-eyed, had survived near fatal infections of streptococcus, developing rheumatic fevers that had kept Teresa, the oldest, bedridden for seven months, and her sister Sofia, ten years younger, for nearly a year. Doctor and hospital bills had left the family deeply in debt, making the offer of money for the hand of Avilla’s eldest daughter impossible to reject.

  “She is a very pious girl,” Luigi’s father advised him on his wedding day in 1949. “Don’t tear her apart the first night with that big, fat cock you’re so proud of.”

  She’d bled for two days after their wedding night. But she seemed to take to the act quickly, even enthusiastically, until he struck her, calling her a puttana, when she made the mistake of touching his prick. Their first child was born within a year, a girl named Paulina Rosa, as useless to Luigi as her mother would become after two miscarriages and years of marriage without giving him a son.

  Desperate, she risked damnation of her immortal soul by co
nsulting the local shaman, seeking talismans to protect her from the evil eye that had cursed her womb. The baby was a boy, carried to term, perfectly formed, eight-and-half pounds. He was delivered stillborn, never drawing a single breath. Luigi would have dragged his wife from her bed and beaten her if the priest and Sal Pinto hadn’t been there to restrain him. He accused her of being a witch and a whore. God had taken his son to punish him for marrying a woman who practiced the black art of forbidden sorcery. He said she was cursed for bargaining with the devil. He refused to sleep in her bed again, barely exchanging words with her until she died, literally from a broken heart, its valves corrupted by childhood disease.

  “Do all of Papa’s wives live in the same house in heaven?”

  Luigi waited the obligatory year of mourning, then, in 1959, married Sofia, as lovely as her sister and with the same quiet, resigned disposition. Eleven months later, she delivered the long-awaited heir and, after five years, provided Luigi with another son. The second pregnancy had been difficult to achieve and the delivery of a ten-pound baby was fraught with risks. She never fully recovered from the Caesarian and congestive heart failure made Luigi a widower a second time when his youngest son was three years old.

  “Who will be my mother when I die and go to heaven?”

  Sal Pinto’s wife had a friend named Eileen Costello who had been on the New York stage; her husband had died leaving her with no money. Dire circumstances had forced her to take a job giving dancing lessons at Palumbo’s. No one could conceive of Luigi choosing a medigan’, Irish no less, a woman unafraid to speak her mind, to be his wife and mother to his boys. She’d had a mysterious past, actresses being women of questionable reputation, and had already put one husband into the ground. The women of the neighborhood, loyal to the memories of the sainted Avilla sisters, gossiped that she’d put a spell on Luigi, blinding him to the plain and unremarkable face she painted with makeup. Their envious husbands, though, lusted after Luigi’s figa and the carnal pleasures to be had between her long legs.