Tom Piccirilli - Headstone City

She'd taken off her shades and Dane could see a mischievous glint in her gaze, maybe because he was talking to her without judgment. Maybe something else they'd eventually get around to. She seemed pleased with herself, playing up to him.

The tabloids and newspapers must be putting her through the wringer, printing her nude pictures with little black x's over the nipples, showing how degenerate she was. “If it's not cost-effective for them, the feds will have to pack up their shit and go on to the next case. If they're even watching you at all.”

“Feds never give up,” she said, like she knew it for a fact. “I've learned that much. All they've got is time. I saw that when they kept coming after my husband, going through every piece of scrap paper, reel of film, interviewing hundreds of members on his film crews.”

“If you're really clean, they'll eventually veer off.”

“I'm not that clean,” she said.

It almost made him laugh. “No one is. You've just got to be less dirty than the guy next to you.”

“I was, but they're still on me.”

“Maybe.”

All that talk and she'd never once mentioned her husband's name.

Dane settled back and she did the same, and the mood grew comfortable, kind of friendly. He double-checked his map and the address on the sheet as he pulled into the village, then drove around the traffic circle and up to Montauk Manor.

A ritzy old-fashioned hotel built a century ago, where some investors owned suites and rented them out like time-shares. Middle of October, with the hint of winter rolling in off the ocean, the place looked pretty empty. He wondered who she was meeting and felt an unexpected pang of jealousy.

He got out and opened the limo door for her. She fumbled for her purse and he said, “It's already taken care of.”

“You deserve a tip.”

They'd shared a little too much and he couldn't take her money, not like a chauffeur, which is really only what he was. Hour to hour, Dane kept forgetting.

Glory Bishop took a few steps toward the fancy front doors of the hotel, then turned and gestured for him to walk closer. He came around the car and she said, “I've got a friend's premiere to go to Saturday night. You want to come?”

“I thought movie premieres were in Hollywood. Where they talk about your dress the next day, say who looked like shit on the red carpet.”

“No, this is an independent feature done mostly in the city.”

He looked at her, trying to decide if she was asking him on a date or whether she was being nice and just wanted to hand out free tickets. Maybe so he could bring Pepe, her number one fan, and she could watch him squirm when she made eyes at him.

It took her a second to let out an authentic smile, not the shining artificial kind celebrities gave the media. Dane liked it, but still said nothing.

She told him, “You'll like the movie. It's got a lesbian scene in it. Two hot chicks making out in a hot tub.”

“Are you one of them?” he asked. There went his mouth again.

Tongue flicking over her top lip, trying to see how easy it might be to get him agitated and start him down the road to infatuation. “Come watch the movie and find out.”

Back from a weekend pass, with the moonlight flowing over him and pooling, silver and bone white, into his cupped hands, Dane would lie in his bunk with the rest of the squad smelling like beer and the cheap perfume of town whores. He'd shut his eyes tightly against the thrust of his own memories.

They weren't particularly bad ones. Not like he was always thinking of his father with his head laid open like an oyster, or the couple of times he'd seen violent shit in the street when he was a kid. Black guys clubbed to death for walking into the neighborhood. A bag lady frozen in an empty lot one winter, after the dogs had gotten at her.

He'd had warmth and occasional laughter, but somehow the past became the province of wreckage and remains. He had no control over it. Start fantasizing about Maria Monticelli's hair pouring over his chest, and the next thing he's thinking about his mother choking in the back room, or the girl who didn't dance with him in the ninth grade, the rage as harsh and alive inside him as it had been the day she turned him down.

He drank too much but never managed to get drunk. It made him a little stupid, and he wound up doing things like stealing jeeps and driving over to the target range. He'd wait out there until they'd start shooting. Rifles, grenade launchers, or 20mm chainguns. While he waited under the jeep, on his belly in the dirt while the explosions heaved fire around him, he'd think to himself, I'm not suicidal. I'm not really sure what this is all about.

Now he was sitting on his grandmother's couch, those same webs of memory tugging too much into his head at one time. He sort of just awoke from time to time, staring at the television and drinking 151 rum, hating the taste but still hoping it might quell his noisy mind.

Grandma walked in, smiling, her pocketbook swinging on her arm, jingling a plastic container full of pennies. It was bingo night and she must've hit on one of the round-robins, the way she was grinning.

Her fingertips were stained red from the dye she used to blot numbers. She'd been playing for maybe fifty years, and still, every time, she got her hands covered like she'd found some guy in an alley with his throat cut and tried to staunch his arterial spray.

See, like that. You think about your grandmother playing bingo and now JoJo Tormino is dying in front of you again, and the boy with the sick brain whose skull sutures are tearing apart. You feel the hot wind of another memory coming in fast. Ma in the kitchen putting icing on your birthday cake. Six years old, you got the little pointy hat on, the rubber band holding it tight to your head and cutting into your chin. Ma using a rubber spatula to finish covering up a chocolate angel food cake. The phone rings and she turns to answer it, the smile seared onto her face, the fear always there that the caller will tell her Dad is dead. That same hideous smile every time the fucking phone rang.

He threw back his drink and let the ice rest against his teeth for a second. Since he'd gotten back to the neighborhood he'd been moving fast without any focus. He had to work on that too.

Grandma Lucia spent ten minutes washing her hands but couldn't get them entirely clean. She sat beside him, sniffed, made a face, and said, “ Che puzz! Rum. It'll make you sick.”

“I'm okay.”

“You drunk? If you get sick, don't throw up on my nice rugs.”

The rugs might be nice, but they were mostly covered by plastic runners. He didn't think he could hit the carpet if he tried. “I'm just trying to wind down.”

“There's licorice in the candy dish. Have some. It's good for you.”

“All right.”

“You're like your grandfather, you should stick to wine. You drink wine and maybe you chuckle every now and again, remembering something funny. Maybe sing some opera. You drink anything else, and you start thinking too much about your troubles. Just like your grandpa, he'd sit around the house with a bottle of amaretto and mope and fume. He'd shine his shoes until they shone so bright they'd blind him. Liquor doesn't do for you what it does for everybody else. It closes you up even more inside.”

“That's what I'm hoping for.”

“It shouldn't be. You can never get so closed up that you don't hear your own thoughts. What's'a'matter for you? Try more wine. You might laugh a little.”

The two of them stared at the shelves of photographs hanging over the television. Different kinds, going back to the late 1800s. Old Italians who had been dead for Christ knew how long, with names he couldn't pronounce. Black-and-whites of his parents in the sixties, his father looking hep cat cool, hair greased into a DA when it was already out of style. Dad had held on to something long gone, the same way Dane now did. It gave them more common ground.