by Norman Green
She could hear a tiny voice in the back of her head, shouting for her attention, “What are you doing? Are you insane?” She felt a tickle of fear in her belly, because it had been so long, and the last time had been so ugly . . . She wanted him, though, that’s what it came down to. He was tangling his fingers in her black hair, looking into her eyes. Already she could tell that he was different from anyone else she had known, he wasn’t rushing her, he wasn’t trying to tear her clothes off, and he didn’t look like some guy who’d just hit the number. She closed her eyes, ran her hands up under his shirt, trying to make her hands as slow and gentle as his. She felt two small round scars low on his back, over to one side. “What are these?”
“Oh,” he said, distracted, his eyes closed. “Those?” He had one hand on the bare skin of her back. “Those are . . .” She leaned into him. “Those are souvenirs, sweet lady luck put her hands on me just like you’re doing, she pushed me over to one side, just not quite far enough. What’s this?”
She had her cheek next to his, her chin on his shoulder. She whispered in his ear. “That’s a bra, the hooks are right under your hand. Don’t tell me you didn’t learn how to deal with those in high school.”
“I may have been out that day.”
She realized then that he was waiting for her, he was letting her drive, and when she knew that the last vestiges of her fear went away. In the space of one shallow breath she gave in, she rode on a current of sudden fever. “Pay attention, then,” she said, whispering in his ear. She leaned her hips away from him, just far enough to get one hand in to unbuckle his belt. “Let me show you . . .”
SHE DIDN’T GET DRESSED, after. She knew that she wasn’t perfect, but she was round where she needed to be round, flat where she needed to be flat, and she had worked hard to get and stay that way. She stood up, watching him watch her. She walked into her kitchen, came back with the rest of the Portuguese rosé. She sat down beside him, rubbed her hand over a long scar on the back of his arm. “I don’t think there’s enough unmarked hide on you to make a good pair of shoes,” she said. “Would you like to stay? There’s another bed thing under here that pulls out.”
“I’m a lousy sleeper,” he told her, avoiding eye contact. “I have a lot of nightmares, and I’m very restless. You wouldn’t get much rest.”
“Maybe I don’t want any rest,” she said, leaning in to kiss him.
It was almost daybreak when he finally left.
“HENRY!”
The dogs knew who he was, and they let him pass, but he started calling out as soon as he reached the top of the stairwell.
“Henry, it’s me. Henry, you around?”
“I’m here.” The answer came from one of the back rooms. “Where you at?”
“I’m following the arrows to the kitchen.”
Henry met him there. “Why all the fuss?”
Silvano was slumped in a chair. He put the sweatshirt hood back up, topped it with the hat and the sunglasses. “Didn’t want to get shot for trespassing.”
Henry laughed. “Nice, I like this look on you. You look beat, though.”
“Yeah, I am tired. I went on a date, Henry. Now my head is all fucked up.”
“Oh, my. Must’ve been good, then. Did you have a nice time?”
“Whoo, yeah. But she scares me, Henry. I don’t know if I can take the stress.”
“That’s all right, it’s good for you. Keep you healthy. You like her?”
“Hell, yes. But she’s testing me, she’s trying to find out what I’m like.”
“You figure you passed muster?”
“I don’t know, man. I don’t know anything about women, Henry. I never been married, I never even lived with a woman. In the Army, well, I don’t have to tell you.”
“No, you don’t.”
“You were married, right? How long were you with your wife?”
“Well. I guess you can’t count the war years, we got hitched just before I went off. So, middle of nineteen-twenty, say, up until she died in sixty-five.” His voice softened, talking about her.
“Wow. Forty-five years. So you gotta know a lot about women.”
“I don’t know about that. I don’t know. I would say it was myself I learned about, and the institution, maybe, not her. She kept surprising me, right up until the end.”
“No kidding. So you recommend it? The institution, I mean.”
Henry rubbed the stubble on his chin. “Depends,” he said. “You get married so’s you can get your ashes hauled nice and regular, I’d say you made a poor bargain. ’Cause it’s too hard, you know, it’s too hard to get it right. But I suppose it’s like a lot of things, you knew what was coming, you’d never leave the house. That’s why you get those hormones in your blood, so that they can override your common sense.”
“Damn. That’s hardly a ringing endorsement.”
Henry shrugged. “I don’t mean to be negative. My old lady was about the best thing that ever happened to me, but it don’t always work out that way. Plus, you gotta know, going in, that you’re gonna go through the fire. You’ll be a better man for it, after, but that don’t make it no easier. I really don’t mean to make it sound bad, though. It’s only the first ten years or so that suck. After that it gets better. Generally.”
“Jesus, thanks, Henry, I’m more confused now than I was.”
Henry was laughing again. “Well, that’s okay, that’s natural. Nobody can tell you what to do, anyhow, but I will say this much: You get to be friends, first, you got as good a shot as anybody.”
“All right. So you can’t tell me what I should do next.”
“Oh, I can tell you that. Call her up and tell her that you had a good time.”
“I told her that already.”
Henry shook his head. “That don’t count. You gotta call her and tell her again.”
“Okay. Tomorrow?”
“Yeah, tomorrow. Then, in four or five days, you gotta do it again.”
“What, are you kidding me? What can I say to her the third time that I didn’t say the first two times?”
“Listen to what I’m telling you. You don’t do what I say, here, she’s gonna think you don’t give a damn. That what you want?”
“No. No, it’s not. Okay, I’ll call her, just like you say.”
“Well, all right.”
FIVE
THE AFTERNOON SUN BLED the colors from the enormous stained-glass window and splashed them onto the white stucco interior of the church. Silvano shifted his weight on the wooden pew. Made to be uncomfortable, he thought. Elia had gotten a laugh when he’d told her, on the phone, that he had to go to church this afternoon, until he’d told her why, and where.
“Silvano, are you crazy? You’re right down in your cousin’s backyard. Did you already have this planned yesterday? Why didn’t you tell me about it then?”
“I was gonna tell you yesterday,” he told her, “but when you took off your shirt, my brain vapor-locked and I forgot. Don’t sweat it, anyhow. This is all gonna work out soon enough, and anyway, I’ll be out of sight the whole day. And listen, I just wanted to say, um, I had a really nice time with you yesterday . . .”
“Me, too,” she said. “Please be careful. And the next time I see you, after I kill you, I want you to tell me exactly how you plan to make this all work out, and whatever other little details you might have forgotten.”
“All right,” he told her, penitent. “It’s a deal.”
He leaned back and gazed at the vaulted ceiling high overhead. He was sitting on the aisle, near the back, and he was trying to ignore the hushed mumble emanating from the confessionals on the far side of the church. He could have made out the words, if he’d really been interested, but he concentrated on ignoring the sounds instead. What a terrible job, he thought, to be a priest, to be obliged to listen to the same tired infractions, over and over, the same trespasses, repeated so many times there had to be a trail leading to them, grass beaten down and stunted from being trod
by so many feet. And still worse, if you were God, imagine the constant, never-ending cacophony of all those whining voices . . . He remembered seeing a woman using a prayer wheel once. She had written her prayer on this little hoop, and she sat on the ground spinning the hoop on the end of a stick, believing her prayer to God was repeated with each spin, gimme gimme gimme gimme gimme. He’d been amused, at the time. Who would imagine a Supreme Being you could bludgeon into compliance through sheer repetition?
The mumbling ceased and the door to one of the confessionals opened. The man who came out was tall, several inches over six feet, with iron gray hair combed straight back and a pockmarked face, heavy-lidded reptilian brown eyes, a thin slash of a mouth. He was heavy but not fat. He wore a white shirt, open at the collar, and a suit that was tailored to fit him perfectly. Silvano watched him make his way slowly up the far side of the church to the front row of pews and kneel awkwardly. He didn’t quite look like the force of nature Silvano remembered, but he was still big enough, still had enough of a presence to make you take notice.
The old man finished what he was doing and struggled to his feet, leaning heavily on the railing in front of him, grunting with the effort. Silvano figured he must be having trouble with one knee, because he swung one leg stiffly forward and he walked slowly down the center aisle in Silvano’s direction. He may be old, Silvano thought, but he looks like the same guy, same face, expressionless, unsmiling, same dead eyes that took you in but told you nothing. The old man stopped eight feet away, looking at him.
“Giovanni.” Silvano had not called him “Dad” since he was six. The old man stood still, leaning on a pew, the other hand clenching and unclenching. Silvano gestured with his chin, up toward the front of the church where the old man had been praying. “You think it worked?”
Giovanni regarded him for a moment. “I dunno,” he finally said, in his raspy voice. He had always sounded like a man with a cold, as far back as Silvano could remember. He swung back into motion, covering the distance between the two of them, his stride looking more natural. He’s covering up the limp, Silvano thought. He didn’t notice me before. Didn’t know I was here. Giovanni sat in the adjoining pew on the other side of the aisle. It was about as close as the two of them ever got.
“You pray for forgiveness?”
“Sometimes.” He cleared his throat. “You still think this is all superstitious bullshit?”
Silvano shrugged. “What’s the harm,” he said, “if it makes you feel better.”
The old man looked up at the ceiling. “I was God,” he said, “I wouldn’t much like you talking that way in my own house.”
“You were God, I’d have been in the ground a long time ago.”
“Maybe not. You might be surprised. But it does make me feel better. Coming here, and all.”
“What else you pray for? You ever say a prayer for my mother?”
“Sometimes.” He stared at Silvano, not smiling. There was no apology in his face, no desire for compromise, no need for compassion or forgiveness. “Sometimes I just ask that my asshole son would come back and see me.”
Silvano watched him, watched the way his eyes would look at you and then flick away, restless, not giving you much. He wondered if there had been a challenge there, in that last look. He did not take the bait. “See? You got to be careful what you ask for.”
“I guess that’s true.”
There was no way to put it off. As far back as he could remember, he’d been trying to hang on to memories that were becoming painfully indistinct, her face, her voice, her touch. He needed to know what had happened to her, but he was afraid to find out. All these years he’d been thinking about her, and it still came down to one short and ugly sentence. “You kill my mother?”
The question hung between them in the still air of the empty church. Silvano watched the old man squirm on the wooden bench. Yeah, he thought, I got a sore ass too, but I’m not going to let you know it.
“I always wondered when you were gonna ask.”
“I know the cops liked you for it.”
“They liked me for a lot of things.”
“I seem to remember, you were always pretty good with a baseball bat.”
“I still got one, out in the trunk.”
“No shit. Didn’t you used to keep it under the front seat?”
“Still got one there, too,” Giovanni said. “Handle sawed off, so it don’t stick out.” He sat quiet for a while, and Silvano began to wonder if he was done talking. He looked over, made eye contact, looked away again. “You remind me of her,” he said. “Me and her went to high school together, did you know that?”
“You went to high school?”
“Smartass. Not all the way through, but I did go. Her old man ran all the numbers in Brooklyn, way back when. Back in the old days.”
“I heard the stories.”
“Not all of ’em, you didn’t. Everybody thought I went with her because of him. Because he was a made man. Wasn’t true.”
“No? You fall in love with her?” He felt bad for the tone he used, but he couldn’t help it, and the old man didn’t notice anyway.
“Well, I fell. Who knows what it was, at first.” He glanced over, then looked over at the stained-glass window. “She was smart, she was funny, and she didn’t take shit from anybody. Had a short fuse.” He looked pointedly back at Silvano. “She’s the one you got that from, not me. Anyway, I liked her. So we started going out, you know, it got to be a thing. You know what I mean?” He looked away again. “Maybe you don’t. It got to be bigger than like. I wanted her to stay with me.”
“And Domenic liked you, right?”
“You kidding? No man ever likes the guy his daughter goes with. You think I like that fucking Vinnie, that bum your sister married? Your half-sister. Anyhow, old Domenic didn’t much like anybody. Liked you, a little bit. That was about it.”
“You were gonna tell me what happened.”
“Was I?” Giovanni had always guarded his secrets. This has to bother him, Silvano thought, this has to go against what he believes in, even if part of him wants to tell. “All right,” the old man said, finally. “You got a right, I guess.” Somewhere in the back of the church a door closed, and the two of them sat silent, listening, but there were no other sounds beyond the faint hiss of the cars passing by outside. Giovanni shifted his weight on the pew again. “How much you remember?” he finally asked.
“Not a hell of a lot. I remember going on rides with her, until once I got lost and you took her keys away.”
“You didn’t get lost. She just forgot to bring you back. Anything else?”
Not much that I want to tell you, Silvano thought. “She was funny. She laughed a lot. Used to like to tell stories.”
“Yeah,” Giovanni said. “She sure did.” He took a cigar out of his inside jacket pocket. It was long, thin, dark brown, and he held it up to his nose.
Silvano patted the shirt pocket where he used to carry his Kools. “You gonna light that up in here?”
Giovanni glanced around, looking for the priest. “Not just now,” he said. “You ever hear of senile dementia?” His eyes flicked over to Silvano’s face, then down at the cigar again. “They probably don’t call it that anymore. Mostly old people get it. She was just twenty-six when it started. We went to doctors all over, but they didn’t have nothing for it back then. I don’t know, they got anything for it now, either.” He sighed, shook his head. He’s had a long time to get used to this, Silvano thought, but still, he could be talking about a game the Giants lost and should’ve won, twenty years ago. He’s the same as he was, a hard old motherfucker.
“I thought I could handle her, at first. Kept her home, you know, out of trouble. But she loved people, and she loved to talk. She made the old men nervous, not just Domenic but all of them, the Mustache Petes that ran the game, back then. Old bastards off the boat from Sicily. The problem was, being Domenic’s daughter, she knew too many stories, and she’d talk to anybody.�
�� Giovanni held his cigar up to the light, examining its wrinkled surface. Silvano watched his face, but he couldn’t tell what the old man was feeling, couldn’t tell if he saw sadness there or just anger, or maybe nothing at all.
“Domenic comes to me.” He looked at Silvano, made eye contact, smiled slightly. “Her father. Tells me how sorry he is, all that shit. Tells me he’ll make sure she goes easy, that she won’t suffer. I told him no. Told him that I understood the necessity. Told him I’d do it myself.”
Silvano leaned back and sighed, looked around at the church. This is why they do it, he thought, this is why they need the stained glass, the fancy building, the rituals, the guy in special robes. It’s to con you, make you think it can still work out, that it still makes some kind of sense, somehow. He looked over at his father’s face, but if there had been any compassion, any sadness there, it was gone, or else covered over so completely that no one would ever see it, because the number-one rule for tough guys, the one they all lived by was, you couldn’t give a fuck. Roll the dice, walk out of the bank with a million bucks or a twenty-year hitch at Sing-Sing, you couldn’t care which. You had to laugh the same laugh either way. “Okay,” he said. “Go on.”
“Domenic took you home with him. Kept you over the weekend. He was trying to make it easier for me, I guess. Trying to make sure I did it, too, probably. I put her in the car, we went for a long ride. She was afraid, you know, I’m not sure she always knew who I was, by that time. I drove out in the country, up into the Berkshires. In Massachusetts.”
Silvano couldn’t quite pull off not giving a fuck. “I know where the goddam Berkshires are at.”
“S’cuse me. There was a hospital there, a sanitarium, outside of Amherst. I put her in there, under a phony name. Paid the guy a fortune to keep his mouth shut. I put a gun in his mouth, too, told him he ever opened his yap, I’d blow his fucking brains out.
“There was a kid in there, had hands about your mother’s size. I cut off one a his fingers, put her wedding band on it. Walked into Domenic’s house that Sunday afternoon, laid it on his kitchen counter. He’s crying, it’s the only time I ever seen him cry, he was probably drunk. She didn’t feel a thing, I tell him, I’m trying hard not to laugh, ’cause she didn’t, you know, and I took you and went home.”
