Tom Piccirilli: Headstone City

“So, this is what I changed your diapers for?” she said, trying to sound heartbroken but not even coming close.

“What?”

“Raised you for? Fed you for all these years? So you could sit and not say a word to me, like I was the DA?”

“You told me to shut up.”

“I didn't mean it.”

“I'm just gathering my thoughts.”

She pressed a piece of sausage onto his plate, motioned with her fork for him to eat more. “You put that girl out of your mind yet?”

“It's not about that so much, at the moment,” he admitted.

“What, then? All the talk about Vincenzo Monticelli coming to put a double tap in your brain”-reaching over to thunk him twice on the head, where the scars lay hidden beneath his hairline, everybody clunking him in the head-“you can forget about it for now. You take it one step at a time, plan it through, then when you start moving you don't stop until it's finished. You can do it.”

Telling him, pretty much outright, that she expected him to go against the mob and clean house. Take them all out, one way or another. That easy. Come home afterward and she'd have garlic bread waiting.

She didn't say it without reservation, or fear, or even love. But there was a controlled fervor in her voice, the same kind that had been in his father's voice, often devoid of sentiment. His old man used to put it down on the line, with an acute conviction, and once you figured out what you had to do, no matter what it was, you just went and did it.

“It's only him and his brother and maybe a little extra muscle,” Grandma continued, spooning more ravioli onto his plate. “Three or four guys maybe. No more than, say, six. Joey Fresco and Tommy Bartone are the only old-school hitters. Maybe ten guys. You're not going up against the whole family, think of it that way. A dozen, tops.”

He used to wonder if he could do what she'd done, cleaning factory floors all day long, every day, for years. Raising a kid by herself. His father, just a toddler, told to be quiet, don't move, wait until Mama's done, staying there for sixteen hours with nothing to do. His own father dead on the job, whacked by upper brass because he didn't take enough graft, busting ass and spoiling the take for them. Under investigation, found posthumously guilty, no pension.

Every time Dane thought he was hard, he just thought about shit like that and realized how listless he truly was. The army hadn't shaken his apathy, and neither had the can. Now she's saying he's gotta go take out the local mob when all he wanted to do was flatten Vinny onto his ass. One nice shot, and then the rest, whatever happened afterward, wouldn't really matter.

“Vinny's got the edge,” he said.

“Why? Because he says he can see the future?”

“He can.”

Grandma Lucia's hands in the air, like Pepe, like Dane himself. How would they communicate if they ever broke a finger? “That he can walk three different trails and decide which to follow? Go back and forward in time? He can't see anything, Johnny. If he could, you think he'd still be in Headstone City, leading a fading mob family?”

“Grandma, I've seen him do it.”

She didn't hear him. “The Monticellis went legit and lost most of the money they made from all the illegal action. What his father earned on trucking hijacks and prostitution, him and that Berto lost on mutual funds and junk bonds.”

They drank another glass of wine together. Dane had a question he needed to ask, but his grandmother was in a fierce mood. That threw him, made it even harder to keep focus. “Has she ever spoken to you?”

“Who?”

He stared at her.

“Your mother?”

He hissed air through his teeth, thinking of Ma in the back room, seeing angels, choking on cancer, calling his name.

“Oh, that other one? Angelina? No.” Shaking her head, the pink curls bobbing left and right. Her voice lost some of its edge and took on a delicate quality. “Sometimes in dreams I hear the two of you talking, but I can't always hear the words. Only that she's giving you a hard time.”

Dane finished his dinner, picked up his dirty dishes and took them into the kitchen, put them in the sink and poured some soap and ran the hot water tap so the sauce wouldn't crust. When he got back to the table she was having more wine, her cheeks covered with red splotches. It was the histamine in the wine, it made her face turn beet red.

He asked, “Is my gun still here?”

“I cleaned it this morning and put it on your bed, wrapped in a clean rag.”

Some kids had little old grannies who did nothing but go to church and crochet. Vinny's grandmother used to listen to him play the violin and accompany him on the piano.

Dane's-she's breaking down and oiling a Smith & Wesson.38 with a four-inch barrel, laying it out on his pillow. Overhearing him talking with the dead.

With the night came a heavy, abiding fog rising off Long Island Sound.

The kind that seemed intent on action, wanting to chase Dane down. Throbbing as it coiled against his tires, calling him along the expressway mile by mile. He could race into the heaving clouds and hide his crimes, hunt for the ambitions he'd set aside until no one was looking. This was the living darkness that matched what was locked inside his rib cage.

Swirling gray threads swallowed the headlights, laid across the road to snare his front end. The nimbus of twin beacons looked like burning souls wandering lost in purgatory, side by side down the road. Maybe him and Vinny, after they'd finally done each other in.

Dane drove over to the warden's house out in Glen Cove, right on the north shore. He wheeled past million-dollar estates that compelled men of meager salaries into jealous rages and flipped them over the big edge.

All you had to do was stare up at the third-floor windows, look at the wide expanse of lawn and trees in the yards, the three-car garages, to know why there were guys guzzling whiskey in the local hole in the wall. Their bitterness crawling over them like heat rash, a loaded shotgun in the trunk. It had nothing to do with women or champagne or even money. It was a balance of power.

Some Wall Street whiz with capped teeth changing the fate of the economy, and you over there with your finger on the trigger.

The warden's place was huge. One of those new, moderate mansions built to look like some Georgian manor. Maples trimmed so the branches dangled like willows or cypress. Big columns out front, an old-fashioned lantern hanging way above the front door and lighting it the way curators lit Renaissance art in museums.

Being in charge of ten thousand social and moral rejects had its upside. You couldn't feel pity for a guy who had to work behind bars all day long if he got to come home to this.

Pulling up at the curb, Dane tuned the radio into a fifties station and sat back. It was his father's music, which rooted him to his blood. His own life might be adrift, but still he was connected to the foundation of his forebears, going back in a line through the years. You had to take what you could get, even if it was only a dead man's stability.

Propping his fist under his chin, Dane stared at the windshield and remembered what it was like to become one with the glass, and the pain. Advancing through one and into the depths of the other. His scars pulsed. The metal plates warmed.

Music filled the car and swelled within him, pressing out everything else. His thoughts began to slowly pour away as he settled further into the seat.

It took a while, but eventually the voices on the radio acquired a different tone and began speaking in languages Dane didn't understand. The music faded until it became nothing but static intermittently broken by distant cries and appeals. Mournful, occasionally frantic.