The Art of Disposal (32 page)

Then we went and paid off the winners on the numbers racket, and collected from the deadbeats who'd lost on sports. There's a lot of ticking off of boxes in black ledgers, and it all feels pretty legit until you have to sock a guy in the nose, and go wash the blood off your fist while his wife and kid sit and cry in the other room.

Well, nobody held a gun to his head and forced him to put down two grand on Lipski to win the welterweight championship, did they? No. The bums come looking for us. Then it's a big goddamn mess and a sob story when they can't pay up. Whatever problems you've got, chances are you're the one who piled them up. Some guys are born on an easy road, and some guys are born with no road in sight; but once you're in your thirties or forties or fifties, I'm done feeling sorry for you. The horse you've been riding on is your own.

It was night. Carlino had helped me move my couch and chairs and mattress and bed-frame down the narrow stairs and drive them to the storage locker. If I wanted to get my deposit back, I was supposed to steam clean the carpet, scrub the kitchen and bathroom sinks, scrub the toilet, and deep clean the oven. But who the hell wants to do all that for three hundred bucks?

Brandi's Mom looked at me, looked at Carlino, looked around at the bare apartment walls.

“What line-uh work you in again?”

“Import-export,” I said. “Sales.”

“Sellin' what?”

“Scarves. Tea. Handmade Christmas ornaments,” I said.

“Oh,” she said. She looked at Carlino. She furled her eyebrows. He smiled.

“He don't look like the sort who goes in for scarfs and tea,” she said.

“Let's move these fish,” I said.

An hour later, the guppies were set up in Brandi's bedroom. It was an odd feeling, walking around another apartment laid out a whole lot like my own. Brandi's Mom was poor, but what money she did have she spent on her daughter, and I suddenly respected her a whole lot. The kid's bedroom was the nicest room in the whole apartment. There was an expensive looking bed and blankets, and a writing area with a computer and printer.

The guppy tank looked damn good in there. Better than it ever had in my own apartment. I showed Brandi how much to feed them, and wrote down the names of a few good aquarium books to check out from the library.

Brandi's Mom walked us out into the cool night air, and I handed her an envelope with ten one hundred dollar bills in it.

“What's this?” she said.

“For fish food. And supplies,” I said.

She thumbed through the bills. “It's dirty, ain't it?”

“Gambling. Numbers. That's all,” I said.

“Prostitution?” she said, like she was a cop and I was sitting in custody.

“No, Ma'am,” I said.

“Come on!” Carlino said. He was pacing around about twenty yards away.

“Him, he looks the type,” she said. “But you: you're way too sweet to be into the things you're into, honey.”

“What am I into?”

“More than scarfs and tea.”

“Take care,” I said.

“Thanks for the money, honey. And the fish,” she said.

I'd never felt so rotten giving someone a thousand bucks. The way I had it played out in my mind, Brandi's mom would almost start to cry… she'd give me a big hug and I'd feel like Santa Claus or something. Instead, she saw right through me. My arms itched and my neck got hot. I wanted to get away from myself; to be someone brand new.

We walked to the front door of the fat cackling hillbilly broad, and rang the doorbell, and waited for her to slide out of bed like a slug.

Knock, knock, knock. Carlino rapped on the front door. I heard a kid crying in an upstairs bedroom. Then the fat broad awoke from her slumber (I imagined her as some plump white grub, asleep in the depths of a rotten log) and cried out “
whoooo is it
!” in a shrill voice, so sharp and piercing it sounded like it had gone through a cheese grater. Twice.

“Good Lord,” Carlino said.

“See what I mean?”

The door flew open, and there she was, looking uglier than I'd ever imagined. I'd only seen her from fifty yards away. Up close, she was hideous. Warts, jowls, wrinkles: you name it, she had it. And she was big. Boy was she ever big.

“Who the hell are you, and whaddayou want?” she said, and shifted back and crossed her arms across her enormous nightgowned breasts.

I guess she didn't recognize me. I'd only yelled at her the one time, behind a screen and far away from her.

“We're from the County, Ma'am,” Carlino said. “Seems to be a fairly serious gas-leak all through this apartment complex. We need to come in and check it out.”

She eyed us, and she folded her arms even more, and she squinted her beady lizard eyes. “The hell you do!” she said, and started shutting the door.

Carlino lunged at her with the force of a small car. She fell down, and we pushed our way in, and it was clear she'd have a pretty hard time of it ever getting up again.

I shut and locked the door behind us.

What a dump. A dirty couch, brown carpet, ugly pictures, and the whole room smelled like a well-used and long forgotten litter-box.

She lay there on the ground, moaning and sobbing, and saying
noooo, noooo
, and her winner husband came stumbling out of some other room, good and drunk and toting a 24 ounce can of beer.

“Whaaa do you think yer doin'… whaaa?” he said, more glazed than a fresh doughnut. I got the feeling that he wasn't sure if he was living this moment or watching it on the television.

Crack! Carlino rushed at him and punched him right in the nose, and something must have split. The blood flowed out like someone had turned on a tap. He went down, and he stayed there. His face looked like it had been hit with a bowl of tomato soup. Carlino looked as happy as a kid at the zoo. The fat cackler amped up her wailing and sobbing, so I stepped on her shoulder and told her to zip it.

Carlino walked over and kicked her once, right in the stomach, but he didn't kick too hard. It was more for the scare factor. Then he got down on one knee, lifted up her melon head by a few strands of hair, and told her to shut up.

“Here's how it's gonna be,” he said. “You're moving. Sometime this month. If I have to come back, I won't be so nice.”

“Who the hell arrrrrr you,” she said, and sobbed. “I'll call the cops!”

“Oh no you won't,” Carlino said.

I looked over at the hillbilly husband on the floor, blood on the carpet under his head. He'd passed out, but he was still alive. I could see him breathing.

“See, we got friends on the force,” Carlino said, standing up and brushing off the knees of his pants. He pulled a leg back, like he was going to kick her again, but then he stopped short and laughed. The old lady wailed. “Shut your goddamn mouth!” he said. “In fact, I'm gonna tell the cops to keep an eye on this place, and tell me whether you moved or not. You got one month, you hear? One month, or I'm sending Terrible Tom out here, and he'll kill you both. Ka-boom. You hear me, lady? You listening?”

She nodded.

“Good,” Carlino said. He looked up, toward the staircase. “Well hello, sweetheart. I hope we didn't scare you.”

The two kids, a boy and a girl, stood there looking at us. The girl had her thumb in her mouth and a blanket under one arm. The boy had a toy dinosaur. I walked over to them, and told them to go on up to bed, that we were just old friends of their parents and were only playing a game.

Carlino stooped down again and whispered, “you call any cops, and you're dead. And so are you're precious kiddies. I'll gut the little bastards. Or I'll sell them to my boy Dante, and he'll ship 'em off to a nice brothel down in Mexico. They'll raise 'em up right. You understand me, sister? One month, and you're all moved out of here.”

She nodded. I almost felt bad for her, but then I remembered her god-awful cackling, and general lack of manners and civility, and the feeling quickly faded.

“Say it!” Carlino said.

“We're moving,” she said, between the choked sobs.

“And your grade-a husband over there, he better not go and try to be no cowboy when he sobers up, right? He comes looking for us, and
thhhht
”—Carlino put his finger on his neck and drew it smoothly across like he was slicing his own throat.

I don't remember walking back to my apartment, but all of a sudden I was there, and I was grabbing two beers from my fridge, and me and Carlino were clinking the bottles together; and then I heard the water running in my bathroom sink, and Carlino shouting, “Hillbilly noses must be a tougher grade or something. Like a Ford truck: built tough.”

I plopped down on the living room floor, leaned back against the wall, drank a few cold swigs, and when I looked up at the empty kitchen I could almost see Dan the Man standing there, shaking his head, disappointed. Carlino walked out from the bathroom, his hand wrapped up in a towel. He sat down on the floor on the opposite side of the empty room.

“Terrible Tom?” I said.

“Made up on the spot, Sam. Improv.”

“Don't quit your day job.”

“Never had a day job.”

“You wouldn't really hurt a kid. Sell them to Dante?”

“Goddamn you're sensitive. I'm a Catholic, Ronnie. I ain't some Durango Beaner. You wanted me to scare her? She's scared.”

“I know,” I said. “Thanks for helping me move.”

“That's what friends are for.” Carlino tilted the bottle back and took a long swig.

Everything was different. Dan the Man was dead; Frank Conese had hired me to void Eddie Sesto's warranty; me and Carlino and Bullfrog had formed a union bent on killing Frank Conese right at Calasso's Casa Cafe; and I had finally moved out of my crummy apartment—right into a crummy motel.

At least it was quiet. I was living at the Moonbeam Motel (which looks about the way you'd imagine it) out on the old highway. The dirty 1970s shag carpet kind of made you averse to going around barefoot. I bought two pairs of flip-flops: one for the shower, and one for walking around in the room. It was a longer drive to the office or the Totsy, and coming back home every night I intentionally made it even longer by taking a zig-zagged route, stopping here and there to make sure I wasn't being followed. Every dark car made me think of guns and death.

At the office we went through the motions, the way people do when something is up but no one is going to be first to say it out loud. There's no point. Eddie sat in his room, tapping an unlit cigar on his desk for most of the day on Friday. Sometimes he'd get on his rotary desk phone and call up an old buddy in Lexington, or an ex-girlfriend in Atlanta, and say he was just calling to say hello, it had been too long; I could hear him sometimes, reliving some old days, asking how the new ones were going, and saying a long goodbye without ever saying the words.

That same evening, while I was stopped outside of the IGA grocery store, Frank Conese called me to confirm the job.

“It's a go,” I said, looking down at a crinkled Fritos bag that the wind was pushing across the parking lot. On the drive back to the motel, a deer jumped out in front of my car, and when I slammed the brakes my half gallon containers of almond milk and grapefruit juice flew off of the passenger seat and leaked all over the floor.

It was nothing serious, but my heart was telling me otherwise. I couldn't shake the idea that it was some kind of bad omen, like Bullfrog's owl.

It was just like my first job, way back when I hit Crazy Al Da Paolo. I couldn't sleep. I paced around my motel room, and I tried watching late night television, but boy has that ever gone downhill since Johnny Carson died.

I walked over to the gas station across the highway, and I bought myself two tall cans of Modelo Mexican beer and a travel size canister of shaving cream.

Back in my room, I stood there and shaved, awkwardly, under the dim fluorescent light that hung over the way too small bathroom sink. Living in a motel really makes a man feel like something has gone terribly wrong with his life. The kind of people you find hanging out around a cheap motel have weird hair and bad teeth, and they're always wandering up and down the dismal highway. One night, some poor hooker with a sunken face and a huge white purse offered to “clean me up” for a hundred bucks. I told her I was plenty clean. But I gave her a hundred bucks anyway, and told her to take better care of herself.

I drank one of the ice cold Modelos while I shaved, and it gradually got into the nerves of my brain and painted some prettier pictures for me.

Eddie Sesto. Eddie Sesto. Eddie Sesto. His name and face flickered through the front part of my brain. Even the ice cold beer couldn't make it go away.

I saw him with his thumbs tucked under those suspenders. Then I saw myself in the motel mirror, scraping off some foam on my chin. I saw him pick up Barney the pug and plant a big kiss on the side of the dog's monkey-like face, and wiggle his dark ear like it might pay out with some falling quarters. Then I saw myself in the motel mirror, pulling one side of my face so the razor could get to the sharp point at the back of my jaw.

Eddie Sesto. A guy that most of the world would only see fit for a prison cell, yet to me he was dear. I knew the real Eddie, the sweet kid under the rough-as-sand gangster. Sure, he wasn't ever going to make board member of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, but he meant well, and he was kind to the people who deserved it. As I stood there and shaved, I wondered what Eddie would do if things were flipped right now: if Frank had asked him to bump
me
off. Look what he did to Ricky Cervetti.

I rinsed my face with warm water and took a few swigs of cold beer, and then I put a new coat of lather on. A good shave requires at least a twice over. Hell, I'm so neurotic I can easily go three rounds.

But Ricky Cervetti was different. And how was he different? He wasn't me, that's how. I meant something to Eddie. Eddie'd seen fit to bring me up through the ranks, even though I was a nobody with no connections. Eddie never had a son, and the daughter he had was taken away from him; and I couldn't help but feel that Eddie maybe thought of me as his son, or the closest thing he'd ever have to one. I decided—looking into that motel mirror and pulling a razor along my right cheek—that if things were flipped, Eddie would help me out of this jam.