Wear Your Home Like a Scar, page 9
Z-35.
But she can’t be there, because you defeated her, you stripped her of her power, you purified yourself with her blood, you think as you spin around. And slumped on the bank, threads of blood spinning along the river’s current, is the white goat.
There’s a wet thump by your feet. Juangui’s head rolls along the bank before coming to rest near the water’s edge. The reflecting moonlight makes his eyes look like bright, polished coins sunk into his skull. His mouth is open, empty, silently weeping forever.
Back to TOC
Three Large
Slumped against the counter of Reilly’s Deli, his hands pressing against the belly wound, trying to push the blood back in, Sal wasn’t thinking about much. Across the cracked tile floor, Ari was piled against the wall, the bloody cleaver clutched in his purple hand and a bullet sunk in his forehead.
“Why did you start caring?” Sal yelled at Ari.
He eased up pressure on his stomach and tried to stand, but the blood kept coming and his head started swimming so he fell back against the counter and closed his eyes, just concentrated on breathing. By now, Sal Junior and Melanie should be almost to the tunnel, on their way to her folks’ place on the shore. He hoped those two idiots actually took the tunnel, hadn’t been cheap and tried to save a couple bucks by cutting through the city. Lord knows traffic on Lombard would be murder around this time.
The breeze blew through the hole in the front door, broken glass glittered with splashes of red. A couple bills fluttered across the floor. A twinkle in the middle of the tile caught his eye. Dragging himself forward, he flung out his hand and picked up the twinkle. A gold chain hung between his finger and thumb, a Star of David dangling in the center.
Sal swallowed hard, felt the darkness spread through his skull. He wouldn’t let Ari, dead or not, see him cry.
They’d knocked on his door as he was getting ready for work, cutting the crust off his bologna sandwich. Junior sported an eye like an eggplant left out in the sun. His little girlfriend seemed unscathed but rattled.
“I’ve invited you two for dinner before.” Sal pointed at the eye, looked at the girl. “You didn’t need to clock him for an excuse to come over.”
“We need help.” Junior’s knees wobbled.
“That much, I can see.” He checked his watch, then pushed the door open and let them in.
The girl—it was either Lori or Sandy, Sal couldn’t remember which at this point—helped Junior down on the couch, swung his feet up without taking off his shoes. Sal pulled a bag of frozen peas from the yellowed fridge, tossed it to the girl. He poured the dregs of coffee into his mug, blew off the steam, and took a sip. It’d been sitting on the burner for a good three hours and was stiff enough to beat a dog with. He dropped two apples into the paper bag with his sandwich and wrote SAL in huge letters with several underscores. Just in case anyone was confused as to whose lunch it was.
Sal notched the handle of his mug behind the nub where his ring finger had been, went into the living room, and took a seat on the coffee table beside his son and the girl.
“So,” he said.
“You got any more of that coffee?” she said. There was the ghost of a scab on her lip.
“No.”
“Sal, be cool. You know Melanie.”
“No.” He tipped his mug to Melanie, thinking he’d apparently missed a girlfriend or two. “But thank you.”
The girl turned her attention back to her injured boyfriend, adjusting the frozen vegetables and whispering reassurances to him.
“Look, I’ve got work in fifteen minutes. You want to help me out here?”
Melanie started to speak but Junior grabbed her hand. “We got into some trouble.”
“You’ve said that.”
Junior worked his way up to his elbows, dragging the soles of his tennis shoes over the ratty upholstery. Sal leaned over and brushed off the dirt.
“There’s some guys—”
“Are,” Sal said.
“There are some guys who want money and we don’t have it.”
Sal sipped his coffee. “Is it their money?”
The two looked at each other.
“Okay. Is this Pimlico money or corner money?”
Junior blurted horses almost before Sal could finish his sentence, but Sal could spot the lie immediately. “I’m sorry, Sal. I didn’t want to come over like this but I didn’t know what else to do.”
Raising himself from the coffee table, Sal smoothed the wrinkles out of his wool work pants and went to put his mug in the kitchen sink. He picked up his bag lunch and returned to the two on the couch.
“I’d suggest you give them back their money before they bruise up the rest of you.” He pointed at the bag on Junior’s face. “Those are for dinner so make sure you put them back in the freezer when you leave.”
A cold hand grabbed his. He looked down at the girl’s face. Her eyes shimmered, the frigid little hand trembling in his.
“Please, Mister Sal.” Junior tried to shush her but she ignored him. “Mister Harry said he’ll kill us if we don’t bring him something.”
The paper bag crinkled in his hands. He exhaled until he thought his lungs would collapse.
“So give him what you owe or give him back his product.”
They looked at each other. Sal wanted to punch both of them in the face.
“Empty your pockets.”
She dropped some change, two bobby-pins, a stained filter and a crumpled Lotto ticket on the table.
He pointed at Junior. “You too.”
A pack of USA menthols and a parking ticket were all he had. Interesting, as Sal couldn’t remember him owning a car in at least two years.
Sal picked up the cigarettes, tapped them in his palm, then peeled back the lid, his eyes never leaving Junior’s. Inside the box, only three loose smokes and a pink lighter. No straws, no glass tubes, no folded foil.
“How much?”
“Three.”
“I’ve got fifty on me.”
“Three-large.”
“You dumbasses.” Sal laughed and tossed the pack on Junior’s lap. “I’ve got to go.”
“Dad.”
It wasn’t so much the handle that’d been dormant for so many years, the title Junior hadn’t used since the night his mother ran out of the house to go to the bar, drinking away the thought of her husband who’d made her so angry with his unexplained comings-and-goings that she had to have another three tequilas before facing him again, the tequilas blurring together white headlights and yellow dividing lines and red lights and turning them all into a shape that the responding officer said looked like balled-up paper but made of metal and glass and meat. No, it wasn’t the three letters D-A-D that cut through Sal, but the way he said it. That desperate plea, that bone-deep pain, that tone he hadn’t heard since they’d exchanged words over her casket.
“Dad,” Junior said again. “I’m scared. Please, can you talk to him? You were tight, back then, right? Like, almost partners.”
“Almost.” Sal took another few breaths while looking down at his son, that name still vibrating through him. Melanie moved her legs aside when he knelt beside the couch. “You know I stopped all that foolishness years ago and there’s nothing ever going to pull me back in.” Sal smoothed the collar of his shirt. “I’m a postman. I deliver letters and parcels. That’s it.”
Junior sniffed hard, wincing.
Sal stood again, laid his hand on his son’s shoulder.
“There’s brisket in the fridge. Looks like it’s been a while since you ate.”
“You’re just leaving?”
“I am,” Sal said. “You should too.”
“Where are we supposed to go?”
Sal paused with his hand on the doorknob. “Wherever Harry ain’t.”
Every stop on his route brought back images of Junior from the morning. Denny and Sons Glass Repair. Henry and Henry Plumbing. Sun House Florists. Hell, he even saw three businesses with Jenson he’d never noticed. When he passed by the officers scuttling around the liquor store on Conkling, he had to blink his eyes and do a double take to make sure the yellow tape cordoning off the crime scene didn’t read Caution: Estranged Son. This is just getting ridiculous, Sal thought.
Sal’d almost wished his wife had died when Junior was only a year or two, before forming the cognitive processes to understand his father was a bad man but not have them developed enough to navigate the intricacies of what constituted bad. Junior had always blamed his mother’s death on Sal, and it didn’t matter how many times he’d explained to the boy that his mother had an affinity for the bottle—though never justified nor excused his own behavior—it never made a difference to Junior, even after Sal went straight. Dad yelled, Mom left, Mom died. Junior didn’t need to finish high school to make sense of such simple logic.
Sal gave a short wave as he opened the door to Reilly’s Deli. Ari stood behind the counter, wrapping a couple inches of peppered pastrami in butcher’s paper for a shrunken woman.
“What happened across the street?”
Ari shrugged. “Someone wanted to be a hero. It makes no sense, I say. I say, they come in, you give them money, you go home to your family.”
Sal dropped a clutch of envelopes bound with a rubber band on the counter. He smiled at the woman, who adjusted the kerchief around her head.
Sal could never discuss The Argument with Junior. She was planning on leaving him for a coworker at the phone company. A stable man, a man who was around to raise a child. Sal wasn’t furious at her infidelity, but at her breaking up his son’s family. He’d figured out how to coexist with her years ago and thought she should have the decency to do the same. When he told her this, she stormed out the door, saying she was going to The Pine Box to clear her head. Junior waited for her on the steps for five hours and opened the door to an officer asking for Mr. Bleaker, instead of his mother.
“Why should a man give up what’s his to someone else?” Sal said.
“Because if you run your business right, there is always business. You run a gun wrong, there is no you.”
“Interesting business strategy.”
Ari handed the meat to the little woman and smiled goodbye. “Not business strategy, life strategy.”
He ducked into the display case, pulled out a knish and handed it to Sal.
“Many thanks, Ari.”
“You look hungry.”
Sal breathed a laugh. “Had some wild animals get into my kitchen.”
“Raccoons?”
“Worse,” Sal said. “Estranged son and his lady friend.”
Ari nodded knowingly, pulled out four more and dropped them in a paper bag. “It’s good of you to let them back in, no matter how long they’ve been gone.”
“Is it?”
Ari rolled the bag down to seal it, slid it across the counter to Sal. “My father and I had a falling out. I don’t even remember what it was about. Probably something stupid. We didn’t speak for more than thirty years.”
Sal grunted. “What changed?”
“He died,” Ari said, folding his hands over top one another. “Now I only talk to his grave.”
Sal tucked his mail bag between his body and the wall of the rowhome alley. Ari’s words echoed in his head the rest of the shift and, thinking it over, Sal figured he should at least know what Junior had gotten himself into. The kid needed to learn to sort out his own shit, but Sal couldn’t throw him out if there was a price on his head. He dug at a piece of knish dough between his teeth as he fished his prepaid phone from his pocket. Staring at the key pad, he couldn’t bring the number to mind and had to close his eyes and point his finger in the air, dialing it more by rote action than actual memory.
He hoped Harry hadn’t changed the number.
“Jones Auto Dealers.”
“Harry Jones,” Sal said. “It’s me.”
A rushing over the phone, a long exhale that could be laugh or sigh.
“Sal the fucking Beak,” Harry said. “Gimme five.”
“Four, remember?”
“Just a figure of speech, Beak. Still sorry I had to do that but—”
“Cut the talk, Harry.” Sal looked around, lowered his voice. “I heard my son is into you for three-large. That sound right?”
“Can you really put a number on everything?”
Sal could hear the smile in Harry’s voice and wanted to break the phone against his own forehead.
“Does this mean he’s using again or did he just lose a shipment?”
“It’s not the farmer’s job to know what his chickens are eating, just which ones are laying eggs and which ones are ready for the oven. And your boy?” He let out a low whistle that turned Sal’s skin cold.
The little woman from the deli passed by Sal and waved. He stared through her. “I need to take a marker on him.”
Harry’s laugh echoed in the phone. Sal could imagine his great belly rolling with each laugh.
“You know I’ll cover.”
“When you leave the life you lose the privileges,” Harry said, aftershocks punctuating his voice. “And you left in spectacular fashion.”
“Harry, come on, now—”
“You helped me build this business then you chose to turn your back on me and be a fucking regular-ass stooge.”
“I chose to be there for my son.”
“We had a deal. You know how this works, Sal.” His voice dropped, the rounded contours of mocking laughs now folded into sharp corners. “And you know what will happen, he don’t pay. To both of you.”
Something snapped deep in Sal’s gut.
“Look, you fat son of a bitch. You put one greasy finger on him and I’ll chop your arm off and shove it up your own asshole. If I even see you on my fucking street, I will wrap you in chicken wire and toss your fat ass in the Chesapeake. I don’t give a fuck what kind of history we have, you mark my words, you asshole motherfucker.” Sal’s chest heaved, his arms tingling. He felt a roiling, something hidden for years beneath blood and dirt and bile. “You go near him, I will end you.”
All he heard was nothing.
“Fuck,” he said to the emptiness.
Sal spent the waning afternoon driving around town. He started by running chaotically from spot to spot, hitting up all of the places Junior would most likely go. An aged dopefiend named Clarence said he hadn’t seen Junior in months; Sal didn’t think his long-term memory was that reliable, but Clarence hadn’t seen him today, which was all that mattered.
As the sun sank lower, scotching the sky in deep red, Sal switched tactics from a targeted search to a broad sweep, starting on the east end of the city and moving west. Slowing down when he passed alleyways. Calling out the window to corner boys. Even creeping by Harry’s auto lot on the corner of Chase and Gay. Junior and Melanie were nowhere to be found. The whole time, he oscillated between fear that Harry had tracked him down and gratitude that they had skipped town.
Maybe he listened to me for once, Sal told himself as he pulled to a stop at a red light. Wonder of wonders.
And as soon as the thought exited his mind, Sal glanced to the left and saw them, sitting in the booth of a Greek diner, right next to the window. He sunk in his seat, an equal mixture of relief and frustration.
They never learn.
Sal parked at the nearest meter and walked inside, the cloying smell of grease and residual cigarette smoke filling his nose. He surveyed their table, saw only a plate of fries that had barely been picked over and two cups of coffee. He threw down a ten, told them to come with him.
“Come where?” Junior said.
“To start,” Sal grunted as he started his car, “someplace that isn’t next to a huge-ass window.”
Back home, Sal pointed at the couch, told them to sit and not move till he came back.
“You can’t just order us around like that,” Melanie said.
Sal spun around, jaw clenched, muscle pulsing beneath his skin. Junior grabbed her hand and squeezed it, whispered to shut up.
Sal strode to his bedroom. In the back of his closet sat a wooden panel, the access point for the bathroom’s plumbing. He set the panel aside and pulled out the shoebox from beneath copper piping. Half a dozen spots decorated the box’s top, probably from the pipes sweating.
Sitting down on the bed, Sal opened up the box, withdrew his Sig P220R and a knot of bills. He wiped the gun down with his shirt, running his finger over Hell Chose Us engraved into the barrel, crossed swords engraved on the handle. Been a long time since he held it, but muscle memory took over once it was in his grip. Fingers wrapped around it, he squinted an eye, aimed at his reflection in the mirror, clucked his tongue. He double-checked the mag and chambered a round.
Harry Jones had the same gun, probably sitting in his top desk drawer that he could never open without sliding his chair back, that big-ass stomach always getting in the way.
A quick count of the bills gave up nine and change, still more than two Gs short of what they owed Harry. Sal knew his check wasn’t coming for another ten days, and Harry was not a man accustomed to waiting. Didn’t really matter anyway: even if payday was tomorrow, he was still a federal employee, paid federal employee wages.
Tucking the gun and money back in the box, he pulled out a gold chain with a Star of David pendant hanging from it, shoved the box under his bed then walked to the living room. Junior and Melanie still sat on the couch, heads close and arguing in hushed voices.
Sal cleared his throat. They sat bolt-upright, Melanie folding her hands in her lap, though he could see the residual anger in her face.
“What are we going to do?” Junior said.
Sal let the necklace dangle from his left hand.
Junior and Melanie cocked their heads, confused. “What’s that?” Junior said.
“Your granddad gave me this when I started working for the post office. His father wore it on the ship over to America, gave it to Dad before he left for Okinawa.” Sal knelt down and coiled the necklace in Junior’s palm. “I’m giving it to you.”
