Teddy took part of a clam into his mouth and spit the rest of it into his bucket. “I don’t know. Maybe a building fell on him. He wasn’t too cautious, you know. Mike.”
P.F. remembered. The smiling tan face. The shoes that he couldn’t afford. And the payoff Paulie took to stop investigating his murder. Thinking about it was like picking at an old scab.
“I wouldn’t go around asking too many questions about that,” Teddy warned him with hard, slitted eyelids. “It might reflect badly on you, if you know what I mean.”
Joey leaned over and asked Richie if he thought a buffalo would make a good coat.
P.F. put up a hand like he was trying to slow traffic. “I just came by to see what you knew about Larry,” he said. “I remembered he was a friend of yours and thought you might have something to add to the investigation.”
“And I already told you. I don’t know nothing about nothing.” Teddy went back to concentrating on his clams.
“Beautiful,” said P.F. “No wonder you go around confused all the time.”
14
VIN HAD FINALLY ARRANGED for me to pick up theweekly envelope from the roofers’ union, but I wanted nothing to do with that. I was determined to raise the boxing money legitimately. What I found out, though, is when you try doing things in a legitimate way, people can get hurt too.
A week after I’d seen Elijah Barton at his house, I was home having dinner with my wife Carla. The kids were in the next room, watching some piece of mayhem on the VCR. He-Ra the Slaughterer or She-Man the Magnificent, one of those superhero cartoons about people getting their skulls crushed. I was eating the Spaghetti-Os that Carla had heated up—little ringlets of death—and thinking about how I’d improve my diet once I started to make some real money.
Then out of the blue, Carla looked up and said, “I got a call from Mr. Schwarzberg at the bank today.”
We’d barely spoken since that blowup we’d had about the couch. I just sat there, stupefied.
“Yeah, what’d he want?”
“He said you were talking to him this morning about us getting a second mortgage.” She opened her right hand like a fan. She’d painted all five nails fire engine red.
The house we lived in wasn’t what you’d call spacious in the best of times. But now I felt the off-white ceiling getting a little lower.
“Schwarzberg called you about the mortgage?”
“Yeah,” she said. “You didn’t say nothin’ to me about that.”
She took out an emery board and began filing her fingernails with it. I felt sick. Not just because chipped bits of fingernail might go flying in the red sauce, but because it was the type of thing her mother might do. Marie the cow.Teddy’s sister. Filing her nails over a steaming plate of linguini while her husband Jack droned on about scamming auto insurance companies.
“Well, we haven’t been saying much of anything to each other lately,” I said.
Even though we’d been fighting, I hadn’t quite lost all the feeling I had for Carla. Maybe because we’d been through so much together. She turned sideways in her chair and rested her hand on where the baby’s spine would be.
“And what kind of second mortgage you think we’re gonna get?” she asked as if she was just curious.
“I don’t know. I thought we could maybe renegotiate a home equity mortgage. See how it goes. What’d we start off with? A house worth fifty-five thousand dollars? I figure it’s worth almost twice that now.”
Her face got all knotted up and for a second I thought the baby must’ve kicked her in the kidneys. Something about having this third kid had really put the years on Carla. All of a sudden she was starting to look like her mother, heavy under the chin and sad around the eyes.
“What’re you, crazy?” she said. “You think this house is worth more now than when we bought it? You take a look outside lately?”
Our house was a blue two-story with a red triangular roof and a brown porch in what used to be a beautiful neighborhood. Years ago, it was all Italian, maybe a couple of Jews, and not a single piece of trash on the street. People used to be able to leave their doors unlocked at night. Now vandals regularly broke into the abandoned houses on the block to steal the plumbing fixtures and sell the parts for scrap. Some of the other houses were falling apart because the old Jews who used to live there moved down beach to Margate and rented their places to four or five Asian or Puerto Rican families at a time. When you walked by, you’d see the broken windows and the children scrawling graffiti on the walls.
“You never know. Things could turn around.”
Carla dropped her fork and her cheeks started to get all red and puffed again. “Anthony,” she said, “the man told me you wanted a loan of thirty-five thousand dollars.”
I was hoping she wouldn’t find out about that. The guy at the bank said he’d call back, but I’d been counting on picking up the phone myself.
“Listen, if you didn’t spend money like we were at a county auction, I wouldn’t have to do this. It’s only ’cause we don’t save like we should. That’s why I need the money right away.”
She deflected the lie like a champion turning away a weak left jab. “What’re you telling me? You’re in so deep to a bookmaker you gotta borrow thirty-five thousand dollars?”
Her nostrils were flaring, like they always did when we were arguing. I decided I wasn’t going to knuckle under, though.
“Never mind what I need it for,” I said. “You wouldn’t understand anyway.”
“Anthony, they’re gonna charge like eight and a half percent interest!” She leaned forward, pressing the baby in her stomach against the table. “You’ll be dead before you finish paying off the interest. We’ve barely made a dent in the fifty-five we owed them in the first place.”
I suddenly had this vision of us sitting in this same kitchen fifty years in the future, all old, worn-out and toothless, with the kettle on and the ceiling falling in on us. Her in her mother’s housecoat, her flabby arms hanging out like dead flounders. Me in the same cheap moth-eaten suit. Talking about the good old days that weren’t actually that good.
“You just don’t understand the way things could be,” I said, raising my voice. “You were the one saying I was stuck in the rut. Now I’m trying to get us out of it and you’re slapping me down.”
She put a hand on her forehead. “What’re you saying?”
“I’m saying I need this money to start up a new business.”
“What new business?”
I wasn’t going to tell her about the boxing and let her call me crazy or stupid. It was too early and I needed to work some things out. So instead I shifted the subject. “I can’t go on the way I was,” I said. “Construction is dead in this town.”
“But if there ain’t no more construction, how can our house be worth more?” she asked, half rising in her seat tomake the point. “Don’t you get it? If you’re saying Atlantic City is dead, our house can’t be worth any more than we paid for it. We haven’t got the assets. What’re you gonna tell the bank appraiser when he comes to our house?”
It occurred to me that we’d been talking about one thing when we were trying to say something else completely. We weren’t fighting about the mortgage. We were fighting about trying to stay alive inside. Rosemary was actually a few years older than my wife, but in some way, I was drawn to her because she was still fighting and hadn’t given up yet. But when I looked at Carla in her old tank top and her mother’s bouffant, I thought of a soldier raising the white flag. She was already starting to sink back down into herself.