“Yeah, maybe.” Was this a boxer he was talking about?
“Well I could be getting a chance to co-manage him in a title fight this fall. At one of the casinos.”
“Oh. Huh.”
“Maybe I could get you a little work on the side, you know. Something a little more kinda dignified.”
He suddenly stopped talking, as if he was worried about offending her. She decided she really did have a little crush on him. Even if he was full of those silly dreams people talked about after-hours. She’d once dated a bartender who thought he was going to be the next Engelbert Humperdinck. He ended up stacking records in a jukebox.
“So why are you so anxious to help me out?” she said, humoring him. “You don’t even know my name.”
“It’s Rosemary. Right?”
“Rosemary Giordano.” She gave him her hand. The warmth from his palm went right up her arm and into her heart.
“Well, Rosemary,” he said, letting go of her hand and sitting back on a stool behind the bar. “You seem like the kind of person who’s had a couple of bad breaks in life.”
“Whatever. I guess so.” She checked her watch. Half past twelve. Her mother would be asleep by now. Too late to pick up the kid. Rosemary would have to sleep over there herself, with the noisy old fan in the window and the neighbors arguing next door.
“I’ve had a couple of bad breaks too,” Anthony was saying. “So I figure us bad-break people ought to stick together.”
“It’s a deal.” She stood up, making sure her handbag was closed. “As soon as you get your fight together, I’ll be there to sing the national anthem with bells on.”
“Now you’re laughing, but you’ll see. This is going to work out with the fight. I’m going to end up helping you.”
“And what did I do to deserve such luck?”
“I don’t know,” he said, suddenly turning serious. “There was something about the way you fought tonight. With so much heart.”
She looked hard at him again to see if he was kidding, but couldn’t catch a glimmer of a smile.
It was time to go. The song on the sound system had changed to a hit from a few years back. “Every time you go away, you take a piece of me with you,” it went. She didn’t want it to mean anything, but it made her think of the good times when she was married, before the eraser-mark skies and the syringes in the sink.
“The way you fought,” Anthony repeated. He touched his chest with his fist as if to say he was out of words. “I’ll never forget it.”
11
“CAMILLE, GET ME another piece of that carrot cake, will you?”
Teddy sat at the kitchen table with a forest green composition book balanced on his lap. His wife brought him some more dessert and tiptoed away like a terrorist leaving a car bomb.
“Next time bring me a slice with more icing on it.”
He ate half the piece in less than a minute and then turned to the page marked “Income.” He picked up a pen and began to write in a slow, childlike scrawl. L.S. (for loan-sharking)—$1257 for the week. Policy—$941. More than $1250 from Ralphie Sasso at the hotel workers’ union, but with Jackie from New York claiming Ralphie was his now, there wouldn’t be any more where that came from.
Teddy turned and looked at the telephone on the wall. “Come on, ring, you motherfucker, ring already.”
It was after twelve and the people from the Commission still hadn’t called back. He couldn’t believe they’d just taken away half his power without asking him. Snatching Ralphie and the union from him. He felt like he was walking around with his arms cut off.
“They wanna play games, we’ll play games,” he muttered in a grinding, vindictive voice. “This will not stand.”
“Is this about those gentlemen who came from New York this afternoon?” his wife asked.
“Yeah, Camille. They’re real gentlemen. You’re a real shrewd judge of character.”
“That was lovely hair the younger one had.”
Teddy just glared at her.
He had a momentary urge to take a leak, but decided to let it pass. He was getting up three, four times a night lately, but the stream was just a trickle. He told himself it was nothing worth talking to a doctor about.
He turned to the page marked “Disbursements” and took another bite out of the carrot cake. There were fewer names here than there used to be. Only two dozen men were left in his crew. And since he tried to have his bookkeeper Buddy Milito whacked for cheating him, Teddy had been forced to keep the records himself, painstakingly transcribing each figure from the crumpled-up slips crew members gave him into the composition book.
He paused and finished the piece of cake on his plate, noticing he’d given his niece Carla three thousand dollars in the last six months.
“Camille,” he said. “Get me another piece of cake. And bring me some grappa while you’re at it.”
“You sure you haven’t had enough?” she asked meekly.
He stared at her until she backed up into the kitchen like a dog afraid of being hit with a rolled-up newspaper.
The truth was he never got enough. Not since his days in the reform schools and foster homes. Food seemed to fill some deep gnawing need inside him. On the long winter nights, after he was first exiled to Atlantic City, he took solace gorging himself on cheese-steak hoagies the way other men stuck needles in their arms. And when things turned around and he became a boss, he indulged himself at the best Italian restaurants in town.
Still it wasn’t enough. He went back to writing on the disbursements page as his twenty-three-year-old retarded daughter Kathy knocked over something upstairs.
“There she goes again.” He grimaced. “What’s the matter with her?”
His wife brought him the grappa and another piece of cake, with her head bowed. “She’s been having spells, kind of. She keeps asking for Charlie.”
Teddy looked up at her and felt something tear in his chest. “Why’s she doing that? She fuckin’ knows he’s dead.”
“I dunno.” His wife began to cry again. “I guess she still misses him.”
Teddy took a sip of grappa and went back to writing. “Well go look in on her. Make sure she isn’t breaking any of them German car radios we left in her room.”
He shook his head as his wife floated out of the kitchen in a haze of barbiturates. If she wasn’t out of her mind on pills these days, she was crying herself blind with grief. The memory of Charlie was the only thing that mattered to her anymore.
When Teddy thought back on the boy, it was in isolated moments of not knowing what to say. To Charlie on the floor, watching TV. Charlie spending too much time alone in his room. Charlie coming home late with a split lip and bloodshot eyes.
Teddy once controlled half the unions and most of the drug trade in town, but he could never find the nerve to ask his only son if he was shooting dope. Thinking it over now, he didn’t blame himself for the boy’s suicide, but he wasn’t sure who else to hold responsible. So he settled for raging at the rest of the world a little bit every day.
Mosquitoes flew into the zapper on the porch and fried themselves. Nighttime traffic rumbled by. And the phone remained silent. The Commission people had abandoned him.
He turned back to the income page and looked in the shoebox under the table, thinking there must be more money somewhere. Maybe some slips were misplaced. He couldn’t believe they were getting squeezed this tight. He turned back to the disbursements page and saw he’d given his lawyer Burt Ryan seven thousand dollars in the last two months without Burt making a single court appearance. With the racketeering indictment due any day, that number was sure to double or triple.