The Family Hightower

by Brian Francis Slattery

  “Take your daughter Sylvie,” Joe Rizzi says. “Maybe they’ll find her hand down in the Flats somewhere. Or a leg on the beach. Or they’ll find the rest of her body just bobbing along at the mouth of the Cuyahoga. The head? Maybe they’d just find that in a trash can somewhere. And they’ll just blame it on the Butcher. Nobody’ll know it was me. But you’ll know. And you won’t be able to say a thing. Which, you know, means I get one for free. Free? What am I saying? You’ll pay me for the privilege.”

  And that’s it, the code’s broken all the way, because a threat like that is going way too far. See, organized crime in Cleveland is bloody: They stab each other, shoot each other in the heads and stomachs, and over time, they escalate to car bombs. In 1976 there are thirty-seven explosions in Cuyahoga County, twenty-one of them in Cleveland. Shondor Birns and his Lincoln Continental are blown to pieces in 1975. In 1977 John Nardi’s torn apart in his Oldsmobile by a shrapnel bomb of nuts and bolts set in the Pontiac parked next to him. Danny Greene’s detonated in the parking lot of his dentist’s office by a bomb in a Chevy Nova. It’s a massacre. But you could also say that they keep it in the family. Nobody’s killed who isn’t involved. When someone gets it, everyone knows why. There’s a reason, a logic to it; stay out of the racket and you’re safe. When the new crime syndicates start in the 1990s, that’ll all change, because those rackets won’t be based on anything human, not family or friendship, history or culture. Follow the market, make money any way you can: Those will be the only rules, and the new criminals will follow them all the way. The police’ll find people shot, drowned, drugged, dismembered. Their bodies hollowed out, all their organs removed. Everything used until it’s used up. It’ll be just like the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run, but they won’t call it sick or psychotic then. They’ll just call it business. So you can say Joe Rizzi’s crazy, or an idiot, or a sociopath. But in 1947, he’s also the future.

  It’s the eighth round of the fight, and the people are getting what they came to see. But what comes next happens so fast that Peter Hightower and Joe Rizzi—along with dozens of other people who were looking the other way for that second —miss it. That includes the reporter for the Los Angeles Times, there to cover the hometown hero. The left hook that lifted Doyle off his feet, crossed his eyes and turned his face gray must have been as clean and perfect a knockout blow as was ever landed, he writes later. The writer can only say must have been, for, truthfully, he didn’t see it. The round was drawing to an end and I had turned my head to pick up a piece of paper on which were scribbled some notes when that ripping left cut Jimmy down. There’s a picture that’s taken just after the punch, from behind Jimmy Doyle. Jimmy hasn’t hit the mat yet. He’s halfway down, pivoting backward on his heels, his arms out in front of him, his trunks filling with air. He looks like he’s underwater. You don’t have to see his face to know it’s bad, because you can see Sugar Ray’s. Robinson’s hands aren’t up anymore—that’s how fast that punch must have been—and his body’s still ready to fight. But his expression tells you everything. His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, like he’s going to say something. Like he knows what just happened.

  Jimmy Doyle falls to the mat. Everyone who missed the punch is watching now. Doyle’s manager hollers at him to get up. The referee starts the count, but he knows something’s very wrong and beckons the manager into the ring with the other hand. Jimmy’s sucking in air, loud and hard. Robinson’s manager shouts for the ref to call a knockout, and he does, puts Robinson’s glove in the air. But everyone’s looking at Doyle. His cornermen lift him. It’s like he’s dead already. Now there are twelve guys, more, in the ring, circled around Doyle. Two of them are doctors. For fifteen minutes, Doyle is just there, in the middle. He doesn’t move.

  “Be seeing you, Petey Ukeleley,” Joe Rizzi says.

  At last, at last, the ambulance arrives, and they carry Doyle out on a stretcher. In the hospital they discover he’s got a blood clot inside his skull. At three in the morning they cut into his head, look inside, and find out it’s a lot worse than that. For twelve more hours, Jimmy Doyle’s still fighting, even as the doctors and nurses run out of ways to help him and call in the chaplain. He’s pronounced dead in the afternoon. When he dies, there’s talk of trying Sugar Ray for involuntary manslaughter, which could put him away for years. The charges are dropped after a quick investigation determines that Jimmy Doyle came into the fight with brain injuries from an old fight. His number just happened to come up against Robinson.

  It’s the market for violence, and we’re all involved: the mob, legitimate businesses, all of us. It’s all for the money. People don’t want to see a man die, but they do want to see a fight, and they pay to see it, and everyone who’s involved in that racket takes their cut of the spoils. It’ll mess Sugar Ray up a bit, because it’s something, getting paid to beat someone to death with your own two hands. In the investigation, the coroner asks him if he knew Jimmy was in trouble during the fight. Getting him in trouble is my business as a boxer and a champion, Sugar Ray says. But as soon as the investigation is over, he announces that he’ll hold a series of fights to raise money for Jimmy Doyle’s family, and he does it. Two of those bouts end with Sugar Ray’s opponents—Sammy Secreet and Flashy Sebastian—knocked out on the mat. They hold the last fund-raising match in Los Angeles, Jimmy Doyle’s hometown. At the end of it all, Jimmy’s mother has enough money to keep her solvent for life.

  But that’s not quite the end of it for Robinson. Years later he’ll say that the night before the fight, he had a dream that he killed Doyle in the ring, just like it happened. I got up that morning and I told the commission that I wasn’t going to fight, he’ll say. They said why and I told them what I had dreamed, you know. They told me it was just a dream. They called a Catholic priest and a minister, and they came and they talked to me. They told me to go ahead with the fight. And just like I dreamed, I hit him with a left hook and he died right there in the ring. And almost as soon as those fights for Jimmy Doyle’s mother are over, he starts giving money away, showing up at orphanages with presents for the kids. Hitting the market back, though he knows there’s no way to knock it out.

  Chapter 13

  “What’s wrong?”

  It’s October 1947, two months after the Sugar Ray Robinson fight, and Caroline’s been asking this question a lot. Her husband isn’t insomniac; he doesn’t pace in the halls or lose his temper. Peter’s too good at what he does for that. But there are a couple phone calls he says he needs to take at home. His voice drops a little more than usual. There’s a shakiness in his appearance, a little less directness. And he spends more time with his children, watches out for them more. Sylvie, Rufus, Muriel, and Jackie don’t ask why; they just love it, the attention, the games, the joking around. They laugh as if they’ve been saving it up all their lives. Caroline comes in from the kitchen one evening, just before dinner, to find the five of them in the parlor pretending to be orangutans, like the ones you see at Monkey Island at the Cleveland Zoo. Sylvie, Rufus, and Muriel are perched on the ridge of the back of the couch. Jackie’s standing on the coffee table. Peter’s in a crouch; he bangs his fist against the floorboards, and the children clap and hoot, while Peter thinks of his own father, bearlike, roaring. And on the other side of the room, there’s Henry, old enough to know better, just standing there. He looks at his mother, and Caroline can see on his face what he’s thinking: What is going on around here?

  She assumes that it’s just about business; maybe things are going south for them at last, because for Cleveland it’s as if the Depression never quite ended, and she knows that, for all his financial cunning, her husband’s money never quite left the town. Their fortunes rise and fall together. She can see it all around the house, in the paint peeling in the corner of the ceiling, the dust in the rafters, the loose shingles on the roof. She can see it all over the city, in the shantytowns, the tenements, the lines for soup kitchens, little children holding their parents�
�� hands. The people shuffling down the sidewalk, asking for something, anything. In the city, there are more people than jobs. There’s not enough for everyone, and it’s making things ugly. The people fleeing the city—let’s just call it like we see it, okay?—the white people leaving don’t want the black people following them. Caroline’s heard about what’s happening in Woodmere from Cecily. Black families are buying land and trying to build houses there. First, someone keeps trying to burn the places down before they’re done. When that doesn’t work, they use the law, ordinance after ordinance, fee after fee, to keep the families from building. The families are angry; they know what’s going on. This is my lot and my property, a man named Eddie Strickland says to a reporter from the Call and Post, and I’m going to build a home on it or die in the attempt. He doesn’t die. But he doesn’t get his house, either. They arrest him for illegal use of lumber. It’s a bad move, hitting Negroes like that, Cecily says. One of these days they’re going to hit us back. And you know what? We’ll deserve it.

  Cecily’s being dramatic, but Caroline doesn’t disagree with her. She’s forty years old now, starting to look back as much as forward, and the curve of her life and the city she lives in is clear to her. The teens and twenties were such a rush; it was so easy to imagine it would all just keep going, until it didn’t. Now it’s hard not to see how out of balance things are getting. So many people need so much, and they don’t know how they’ll ever get it. She and her family have so much, and they don’t know how to keep it. And nobody, but nobody, has just enough; or if they do, they don’t know how to recognize it. It’s an American thing, she knows that, but sometimes when Caroline’s alone with her husband, after the little ones are asleep and Henry’s up in his room, she wants to turn to him and ask him all the questions he doesn’t have answers to. Did we have to go so far? Did we need to get so much? Was it necessary to hurt so many people along the way? They have too much now, way too much, she thinks, and it’s killing her. Because she can’t let go of the idea that, once, maybe for just a second, they had it—enough, everything they needed and nothing they didn’t. It must have been before the office in Terminal Tower, before the house, back when they were courting, because that’s when they were happiest. The past few weeks, she’s thought that maybe it was that night at the Allen Theatre, the streetlights blurred with fog, Lon Chaney on the screen in front of them, Phil Spitalny waving his arms in the pit. William and his girl—whatever happened to her?—right next to them. Her hand in Peter’s. It was all promise and contentment that night, her family all around her and her man at her side. Did they feel like they did because they had all that they would ever need? And if Peter had known that, could he have stopped? She can’t help but imagine it now. A conversation between Peter and William: That’s it. I’ve made my fortune. William patting him on the back, shaking his hand. Congratulations. Welcome to the family. Then a dinner, or a cocktail, somewhere on the East Side with a man in a sharp suit. I’m out, I’m done, Peter says, and hands the man an envelope stuffed with cash. Paid in full. The man squints. Why do you want out now, when you’re doing so well? Peter says it plain: I’m getting married, having a family. I don’t want them mixed up in this. Then the man frowns and nods. How could anyone argue with it? Everything would have been different after that, Caroline thinks. No house in Bratenahl. No long hours away from it, either. He could have been whoever he wanted to be then, all the time. There would never be any need to tell her anything about who he was before he met her; though after he was out, he could tell her everything.

  “What’s wrong, Peter?”

  She’s standing in the front doorway. He’s going out to the car. He stops, turns.

  “It’s nothing I can’t fix,” he says.

  “You have to tell me what it is.”

  “No I don’t. I’ve always said I never give you details, remember? It’s safer that way, for you and the kids.”

  “Why are you bringing up the kids now?”

  “So that if something goes wrong, you’ll be able to stay with them. Someone has to raise them.”

  “You’ve never talked like this before, Peter.”

  He blinks. “No? I must have just thought it to myself, all this time.” He walks back to her and puts his arms around her. Kisses her forehead. “Please don’t worry,” he says.

  He’s just a couple days from his third meeting with Joe Rizzi since the boxing match. The first time, in early July, Joe’s waiting for him in the lobby of the Terminal Tower building, and Peter glares at him as he gets off the elevator. He walks out of the building pretending not to know him. Joe catches up to him, puts his hand on his shoulder. The tone of voice a little wounded.

  “Hey, what are you—”

  “Don’t touch me,” Peter says. “Don’t even look me in the eye.”

  “What’s the big deal?”

  Peter walks another two blocks, turns into an alleyway, then lets Joe have it.

  “Look at you,” he says. “The way you look. The way you’re dressed. The way you talk and smell.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Now look at me. Do we look like we belong in the same world? People know who I am, Joe. If they see you with me, they might start asking the kinds of questions that will make what you have on me academic. If you’re going to blackmail me, at least have the courtesy to do it right.”

  Joe doesn’t have anything to say to that.

  “All right,” Peter says. “Follow me. At a distance.”

  Peter takes a right onto 9th Street, one hand holding a briefcase, the other with his hand in his pocket. A straw fedora on his head. Following behind him, Joe can only see the brim, the bob of the head. They reach Erie Cemetery, the place where Lorenzo Carter and all the people who made this town are buried, and Peter walks around to the back wall, where there are fewer people. Stops and takes out a cigarette; he’s almost a third of the way done by the time Joe’s in earshot. Then, without putting it down, he opens his briefcase, just wide enough to pull out a thick envelope.

  “Here,” Peter says. “Your first payment.”

  Joe starts to open the envelope.

  “What are you doing?” he says.

  “Making sure it’s all here.”

  “Right here?”

  “Yes, Peter. Right here. You want to stand in front of me while I do it, that’s fine with me.”

  “Next time, I decide where we meet and when,” Peter says.

  “Sure. We’ll try it your way.” Joe enjoys saying that; he likes that Peter isn’t used to having anyone tell him what to do, and now Joe gets to do it.

  “Thanks, boss,” Peter says.

  “Don’t mouth off,” Joe says.

  Now it’s obvious that Peter’s angry, and Joe smiles. “Relax,” he says. “I’ll call you when I need you.”

  Joe Rizzi’s price goes up after that. Peter first seethes at him over the phone, then gives in. They meet again at Edgewater Park in late August, early on a Sunday morning. This time the envelope comes out of a jacket pocket, thicker than before.

  “What are you doing with all this money?” Peter says.

  “Same thing you did with it,” Joe says.

  Then there’s the third meeting, at Edgewater Park again, another Sunday morning. Peter gets there before Joe arrives. It’s the first time he’s sat still since he can remember. The day is clear and bright; he can tell it’s going to be warm. The Five-Mile Crib gleams offshore in the morning light, looking like a ship coming in. It’s the intake for the city’s water system, and Peter, almost against his will, finds himself thinking of the people who died building it. The multiple gas explosions that killed fifty workers in all. The five men who died in a fire; the three who drowned trying to escape it. The one who died trying to rescue them. It’s the memory of his father getting to him, again. He isn’t sure what Mykhaylo Garko looked like anymore. But the idea of him, the way that he d
ied and the stories of how he lived, still visit him. What would he think of me? Now Peter invents a man, tall and skinny, with an expressive face, like a comedian. Sometimes the man smiles. Sometimes he dances. Now and again he frowns. This is not the boy I would have raised. This is not the boy Galina raised. Today he’s giving Peter a slow shake of the head, his lips drawn tight. You knew this would happen in time, didn’t you? You should have gotten out sooner, when you had the chance to make it clean.

  This whole idea of the self-made man, the guy who leaves all his past behind and rises into the financial firmament. He’s hated it from day one because he’s always seen how it’s either shallow or a lie. Some of the people on top are so afraid of the world, and at the same time, get so upset over nothing. A botched dinner reservation. A slight mistake on a bill. A spot on their suit lapel. These things can ruin an entire day for them. He has never understood how that happens. Maybe it’s because they stop hearing the word no; the money props open doors for them that people without it don’t have a chance to unlock, and after a while, they’re so used to seeing all the doors open that they have no idea what to do when one of them’s closed, or broken. It looks like anger, but on the inside, it’s bewilderment, confusion, resentment that their lives are still outside of their control, that the world, the truth, has punctured the fiction they made for themselves. So up go the walls around their houses, here come the private security guards. Out they go to a place far from the city, or up to some secluded office, where no one can see them. Or when they go out and see other people, they play the whole thing down; they’re chummy with their hired help, a little too magnanimous with cabdrivers. They think they’re still one of the boys. They’ve forgotten how transparent they are. Maybe people envy them, want some of what they have. But there’s also contempt, that grown men could let their money turn them into babies.