The Family Hightower

by Brian Francis Slattery

Petey calls home every few weeks, even though half the conversations end in arguments. He lies about where he’s living. Says he’s in Cincinnati with a few of the guys he met in rehab. Says he’s in Pittsburgh, working as a security guard. Says he’s thinking of moving to New York, and Terry can understand this. He’s been on the interstate through Youngstown, seen the highway signs pointing to New York already, even though it’s almost four hundred miles away. Go east, and it’s the next big city; the way the highway has it, it seems sometimes like New York’s the only big city, though Terry knows that isn’t true. Hong Kong and Tokyo can make New York seem bucolic, and he hasn’t been to Mexico City, Beijing, São Paulo, has only heard what they’re like. Then there’s the rest of the world, the big cities of Africa—and this is the late 1980s, when there are still more rural people than urban. That’s going to change in a matter of a couple decades, it’s all only going to get crazier. When the satellite images of the world at night come out, we’ll all be able to see just how we light up the planet, like one big city, and quite a few places burn brighter than America does.

  “Want to party?” Petey says to Curly. It’s 1989, in the neighborhood of Ohio City, on the corner of Bridge Avenue and West 28th Street, Cleveland. The prostitutes are out and trying to reel in customers, but there’s that charge in the air that happens when men are more in the mood for fighting than fucking. It’s already a bit loud on the corner; the dealers are having a good night so far, but it’s going to turn bad, end in sirens and screaming, a couple people going to the hospital and one going to the morgue, all because a man can’t help himself.

  “You paying?” Curly says. “I don’t have the bread for that.” Remember, Curly’s there for crack, Petey for cocaine.

  “Sure, I’m paying,” Petey says. He shoves his hand in his jacket pocket, pulls out a thick wad of bills. Counts out twenty fifty-dollar bills, licking his thumb as he does it. Curly doesn’t know if he looks more like a gangster or an accountant. Petey approaches one of the dealers, who seems to know him. They shake hands like old men, and Petey nods, hands him the money. Gets a big bag that he slides into his coat pocket. Walks back over to Curly, tilts his head.

  “What’s up,” Petey says.

  “That’s a lot of coke you just bought,” Curly says.

  “They cut you a break if you do it that way.”

  Curly’s looking for Petey’s car, is already imagining what kind of ride a man like this must have. He’s surprised to see him heading straight for the glass door of the apartment building on the corner.

  “You live right here?” Curly says.

  “Sure. Why not?” Petey says.

  “You just don’t seem like the kind of guy who lives around here.”

  “And what do you mean by that?”

  “Sorry,” Curly says. “Nothing.”

  Petey gives him a look that Curly can’t read, and for a second Curly thinks he’s blown it. But he hasn’t.

  “I’m Petey,” Petey says.

  “Curly.”

  They shake hands, each one not sure why he trusts the other so much, though they do. Curly takes another look at the cracked parking lot of the supermarket across the street, the wooden houses around him. A third of them are abandoned, and Curly imagines someone’s already stripped the copper out of them. He hears that people steal the busts from the Cultural Garden on the east side now, and he always imagines the conversation at the scrapyard being awkward. How do people say they managed to come across a three-foot-high statue of Chopin? I just found this in my backyard. It used to be my grandmother’s. The scrap dealer must be a master of deadpan. I’ll give you fifty bucks for that, he says, knowing they’ll take it and be grateful that he’s not asking any more questions.

  “You coming?” Petey says.

  “Yeah. Yeah,” Curly says.

  You could say that this is the conversation that kills Curly, though it’s a lot more complicated than that; by 1995, so much binds Curly and Petey together that it’s too late for Curly to get out. But in 1989, it isn’t. In some other version of the story, the one that isn’t the truth, Curly isn’t there to call Granada and warn the wrong man, and so drag the entire Hightower family back into the world some of them thought they’d left behind a generation ago. In that story, Curly lives a lot longer, and Petey dies a lot sooner. So you could say that Curly makes a trade, gives away the rest of his years for his friend’s. The question of whether Petey deserves them isn’t for us to judge.

  So. By 1989, Petey’s a small-time crook. Not as big as that roll of bills he pulls out of his pocket makes Curly think he is; some of that is his inheritance talking. He hasn’t blown through it—he’s smarter than that. But he’s still just a middleman, connecting a few of the young and wealthy of Cleveland to the drugs they want. Sometimes he doesn’t see the people involved, isn’t sure what’s passing between them. It’s just a series of phone calls, a few lines of jargon mixed with ambiguous phrases that sound like come-ons in soul songs. I got what you need. Your ship just came in. All the time, though, he’s thinking about how to move up in the world he’s in. How to turn the cash he’s sitting on and his willingness to break the law into the kind of life you only read about in books, or see in the movies. A private island somewhere. A mansion, a yacht. A helicopter pad—why the hell not? Dinners and parties, long hours in the sun. He always pictures someone with him, too, a woman, though he can’t say for sure what she looks like, or how much she knows about what he does.

  Curly’s hanging from an even lower rung on the chain. He delivers packages, runs errands. Sometimes stands outside a door and watches the street for the cops. He never sees anything. He drives a van from Youngstown to Parma, doesn’t know what’s in the back. But it’s all with the Ukrainians. Those are his people, that’s his strength, and all of it makes the small crimes he commits part of a much larger thing. Curly spent every Sunday morning in the pews at St. Josaphat as a kid, knows how to make the food, sing the songs. He can speak the language that he doesn’t know is a dialect until the fourth wave of immigration starts in 1991, and people from Kiev and Odessa arrive to tell them they’re using a lot of Polish and English in their Ukrainian. There are words in Ukrainian for all that stuff, you know, the Ukrainians say. Well, teach them to us, the Ukrainian-Americans say. The speed that Ukrainians pulled English into their spoken language—ice cream, ambulance, bootlegger, like hell, shut up, you bet, have a good time—is just one sign of how fast they adapted, but also how much they kept. How much they’ve hung onto, over the decades, so that when the fourth wave shows up, it’s like a meeting of long-lost cousins. A shared history, a shared understanding of the world. The same urge to spit whenever someone mentions Stalin. The same tired shrug at how hard life is. Of course it is. As if a hundred years were a day, though it’s been a big day.

  Taken apart, Petey and Curly aren’t much. One’s got a pile of money and no real connections. The other’s got connections everywhere he turns, but no money. Together, though, they’re an interesting pair. A little too interesting, Kosookyy thinks. He’s the current big man on Cleveland’s local version of a Ukrainian organized racket, the guy who’s been employing Curly for years at a couple dozen different jobs of varying degrees of legitimacy. He loves Curly, you understand. About Petey, he’s not so sure.

  “Did you know I knew your grandfather, Petey?” Kosookyy says. Peers at them both through thick glasses that make his eyes look bigger than they already are. The hair on his head’s almost gone, just a few stray strands around his ears, the back of his head. “I used to see him when he visited his brother in Tremont. I was just a kid, then, but even then I could tell,” squinting his eyes, wagging a finger, “that he was someone who did things. A lot of things. I remember he was the kind of guy who could put on an accent, like an actor. He could speak that waspy English like the newscasters speak. And he could talk like Marlon Brando in The Godfather. But the Ukrainian his mother ta
ught him stayed perfect, all those years. He was that kind of guy. Though I’m sure you remember that, too.”

  Kosookyy’s trying to play up the Ukrainian connection between their families, to get Petey to feel something toward him; to feel something for Petey himself. But Petey’s two generations removed from that, Kosookyy reminds himself. Two generations and too much money. Give a guy too much, and he can forget where he came from, forget who he is.

  “He died before I was born,” Petey says.

  Kosookyy’s mouth shuts tight, and he nods. Somebody didn’t raise this kid right, he thinks. If they did, he would understand what I’m trying to do. They throw away their culture because they think they have so much money, they don’t need it anymore. They never stop to think about whether their kids’ll need it later, when they’re out of the picture. “I see,” he says. “Still. There’s a lot you can do for us. The White Lady says I shouldn’t get you involved,” he says, assuming Petey knows who the White Lady is. Petey doesn’t. Kosookyy goes on. “But I’m not listening to her right now. What can we do for you?” Petey just smiles at them, and Kosookyy knows he’s already lost him.

  “You guys do international stuff?” Petey says. “I’m looking to go international.”

  Kosookyy frowns. “No, no. There’s plenty right here to keep us busy.”

  “You been reading the paper, right?”

  Kosookyy thinks about smacking him, thinks better of it. “Yeah,” he says. “I’ve been reading the paper.”

  It’s February 1990, and the Ukrainians in America are already talking about what happens when Ukraine is its own country again, at last, at last. Goodbye and good riddance, Soviet Union. Independence is still almost two years away; it doesn’t happen until December 1991. But there are so many signs. There have been hunger strikes, the digging up of mass graves in Bykivnia, hundreds of thousands of bodies, atrocities beginning to be brought into the light. Older men crying over brown bones; they’ve always known something bad happened, always, no matter what their leaders told them. Now the first elections in a lifetime are coming in March and Rukh, the opposition, won’t go away. They organize a rally to mark Ukraine’s first independence in 1919 that draws enough people to make a chain from Kiev to Lviv. It’s happening, it’s all happening. Independence is coming. You can buy a typewriter in Kiev now that has the three characters on the keyboard that separate Ukrainian from Russian. You see the blue and yellow flags wherever you go. And so many people are so hopeful, over in Ukraine and in the United States. Though Kosookyy isn’t one of them. He can smell chaos coming. People, people and money and everything, are going to move through Ukraine, across Western Europe, to the United States and Canada, like a dam bursting. There’s a serious buck to be made in that, every time a box crosses another line on a map, every time someone takes a step, and Kosookyy knows that, for the men chasing that cash, the money’s going to matter a lot more than the people. And the law isn’t going to be able to keep up.

  So in March 1994, when Petey asks Kosookyy if he knows who the Wolf is, Kosookyy first takes a breath. Peter and the Wolf, ha, he thinks. Then shakes his head, nice and slow, as if by doing it, he can get Petey to see what he’s thinking—don’t get involved—and just walk out the door without a word. But Petey doesn’t move.

  “I don’t know him,” Kosookyy says. “Maybe even better to say that I know enough not to know him.”

  “I hear he’s got a little racket going of some kind.”

  “I don’t know how little it is,” Kosookyy says.

  “Do you know what it is?” Petey says.

  “No,” Kosookyy says.

  “Come on.”

  “I don’t, Petey.”

  “Don’t all you guys know each other?” Petey says. By you guys he means mobsters. Organized criminals. He’s putting way too much weight on the word organized, Kosookyy thinks. As if they’re all in one big speakeasy and everyone already knows everyone else who comes in. The kid thinks it’s a world of secret handshakes and code words, a shared history no one else knows. One big dysfunctional family. The problem, Kosookyy thinks, is that Petey’s only half right. The old crime organizations are like that, and they’ve been like that for so long that the police and the FBI know who everyone is. They know who’s a mobster and who isn’t. They know who’s in and who’s out, even have a sense of what kinds of crimes they’re committing—the gambling, the extortion, the protection rackets, the money laundering, the loan-sharking. The feds can draw a map of the United States according to the turf each syndicate covers: the United States of Crime. Kosookyy likes to think that there’s a folder with his name on it in a filing cabinet somewhere in the offices of the FBI’s Cleveland division. He wonders how much they’ve got on him, how much they know, how far back it goes, because he’s been involved for a long time. But he never doubts that the folder exists, along with hundreds of others, on him and his friends and acquaintances, all the little criminals. It’s like that for every organization in town, the Italians, the Irish, whoever else. A hundred tiny, squabbling families, too busy with their own problems to have very much to do with one another. They’re living side by side in the same city, but they’ve all got their heads down, working a million little hustles. It’s small-time stuff, Kosookyy thinks. It has to be. If it’s a bigger deal, then what’s he doing still living in Parma, right? There’s no great criminal conspiracy; the only time they ever come together is on paper, in the offices of the police and feds, the people trying to bring them in.

  But the new criminals are different. Kosookyy knows so little about them, has seen just glimpses of their operations. Enough to be worried, though. Enough to be scared. Which is why, when Curly calls to tell him that Petey’s met a guy, that he’s going to Kiev, and Curly’s going with him, Kosookyy tells him not to go, even though he knows it won’t make any difference.

  The deal is pretty simple. Petey’s got the money but can’t speak the language, and Curly’s the only person in the world Petey trusts to speak for him. Part of that trust involves blackmail: Each of them knows enough to put the other guy away for decades. But it’s more than that. For each of them, so much has come and gone—the parties, the jobs, the girls, the dealers, the times they’ve both almost been arrested but weren’t because they kept their mouths shut—but the truth is that their friendship sneaked up on them. Neither of them can remember when or how it was they got so tight. There was just some morning that they both knew. Each of them knows how the other likes his coffee, how stiff they like their cocktails. What brand of booze they drink. Curly knows that there’s no point in discussing anything serious with Petey before eleven in the morning and that he’s terrible at doing his laundry; he wears cologne to hide the fact that he’s wearing dirty clothes. Petey knows that Curly doesn’t sleep very well and has something close to a fetish about keeping his shoes polished. They’ve shared an apartment, three different apartments, for twenty-two months, have an easy silence between them you see in people who’ve been together longer than that. Why don’t you check with your wife to see if it’s okay, their other friends say when they ask one of them out. Petey hasn’t seen his parents for over a year, his siblings for longer than that. His extended family is a fading memory. Curly’s all he’s got. And while Curly’s still a family man, still goes to church on Sunday mornings and dinner on Sunday afternoons, he knows he wants more, and Petey’s his only way out. They know that an associate of the Wolf runs a restaurant on the East Side, a little dinner place that doesn’t look like much. The meeting is quick. They talk about how Petey’s interested in investing. Good, the restaurant owner says, in a halting Ukrainian. We are always looking for new sources of capital. He eyes them, waiting for them to speak. They don’t.

  “Fine,” he says, as if they’d just agreed to something. “I can give you a good rate of return. Very high.”

  “What’s the nature of the investment?” Curly says.

  “What
do you care?”

  Petey laughs. The restaurant owner doesn’t.

  “You won’t know what you’re investing in, you understand?” the owner says. “None of us know.”

  “None of you know? Someone must know.”

  “Someone must,” the owner says, and lets that hang in the air.

  “All right,” Petey says, “all right. Though we would be interested in going to Ukraine.”

  “Why? It’s easier just to stay here.”

  “We want to see what we’re getting into.”

  “You mean you want to meet the Wolf?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “There is almost no chance you’ll meet the Wolf.”

  “Have you ever met him?”

  “Yes. Three times. It was a different person every time. You still want to go?”

  Petey nods. The restaurant owner shakes his head.

  “Fine,” he says.

  They begin to go over details, of who Petey and Curly will be dealing with when they go, how to move money from place to place, from account to account. Indications of the restaurant owner’s seriousness. Petey and Curly are expecting more somehow, more of a show of being let into something, of being made members. It doesn’t come, and they should see that as their first warning that they don’t understand what they’re involving themselves in. But they don’t. Instead they’re off to Kiev within a month with a phone number the restaurant owner gives him. They’ll take care of you, the owner says, without a trace of warmth; it’s professionalism and nothing else.

  Chapter 3

  Petey and Curly fly into the airport outside of Kiev in the early morning. It’s a gray building, smaller than Petey thought it would be. Half the lightbulbs in the ceiling are out. Someone’s done up the signs for the customs lines in rainbow colors. Petey and Curly have to fill out a lot of forms for their belongings to get them into the country; if not for Curly, Petey’s not sure how he would have managed it. They pay a bribe. Then Curly calls the number the restaurant owner gave him from a pay phone, and they get picked up in a spiffy new black SUV with tinted windows. The driver looks and talks as if he’s been awake all night. They glide out of the airport parking lot and onto the highway. All around them are sedans with dull colors that rust has faded even more, minibuses with stained curtains hanging in the windows, their mufflers coughing out exhaust. They reach a stretch of road that shoots straight through forest, and the driver puts his foot on the gas, leaves it there until the car is going about a hundred miles an hour. Through the rearview mirror, Petey can tell the driver’s nodding off. Nobody says a word for a few minutes. They fly by the bus stations the Soviets built on both sides of the highway; it’s easy to think that whoever in the Politburo built them wanted to build villages and towns around them, too, but never got around to it. So there they sit, monuments to the insanity of central planning—or, I guess, if you’re a diehard Marxist, its unrealized potential, though there aren’t many of those left. The truth confounds both lessons anyway; sure enough, there are a couple people waiting at every other station, three men walking along a trail in the woods to reach another one. Where those people are coming from, where they’re going, what they’re doing getting on a bus on a highway in the middle of the woods, Petey can’t begin to guess. He’ll never get a grip on this place. Which is why, when it decides to take him out, he won’t see it coming.