Tom Piccirilli - Headstone City

Looking at the pictures used to calm him, even get him mellow sometimes. But if he kept at it too long, the assault of the past shoving at him too hard, it made him even more edgy. He turned and saw the muscles in Grandma's jaws clenched tightly and thought maybe the same thing happened to her.

“I've been dreaming about that JoJo Tormino,” she told him, organizing her pocketbook, taking out her bingo chips, the blotters, the used-up sheets and boards. “Always dressed so nice, with a fresh flower in his lapel. Never went by without saying hello. You didn't tell me you were there when he got clipped.”

Why hadn't he said anything about that? He'd walked into the house and she'd yelled about the biscotti, and he'd turned around and walked out and gone to another bakery to get them, the pignoli cookies, sfogliatelle, and cannoli. He came back and they had dinner and he never mentioned talking to JoJo while the man died in front of him.

“He's still got a heavy heart that won't let him rest,” Grandma said, patting his wrist, telling him something more in her touch. That Dane shouldn't go out the same way, or he'd just hover around the neighborhood forever, like so many of them. If he could lighten his load any before the curtain, he would.

“He had some unfinished business,” Dane said.

“That JoJo,” she said. “I always liked him. He didn't go out alone, did he?”

“No.”

“How many did he take down?”

“All three shooters.”

“Dio!” Grandma giving a smile, showing her admiration for that. Dying with a gun in your hand, a bloody carnation on your chest.

Dane figured he'd keep the rest of the story to himself, about the ring and swearing an oath to tell Maria Monticelli that JoJo had always loved her. If Grandma dreamed about it, then fine, but he didn't have to let her know every goddamn thing.

She said, “The.38, it's still under your pillow. I think you should start carrying it. Now that you're walking in on hits, it'll be safer for you. And I shouldn't have to say these things to you. You should know them already, if you want to stay alive.”

“You're right. I will.”

“I told you already, have some of the licorice. Your breath.”

Grandma picked up his empty glass, started for the kitchen, and stopped short. She looked at the video box on top of the television, turned it over in her hands.

She hit the play button on the machine and the movie started from where he'd left off twenty minutes ago, right at the end of the pole-dancing scene. Glory Bishop panting, her hair a wild wet tangle, jugs dripping sweat.

“Madonna!” Grandma Lucia shouted, throwing a hand over her eyes. “What's this you got? A porno movie?”

“It's an action flick with a racy scene in it. I drove her out to Long Island, that actress, yesterday.”

“This putana ? This is the clientele you're picking up now? Escorts? You're gonna get arrested again.”

“She's a real actress.”

“Yeah, I'm sure the Academy Award committee is gonna shortlist her.” Walking out of the room, crossing herself, and talking over her shoulder. “You think she'll do that dance at the Oscars?”

He stared at Glory Bishop on the screen, watched her doing her thing again, and thought, Oh, Holy Jesus Christ. It got him going, imagining her in a hot tub with another woman. He rewound the scene and watched it again, and once more.

An intensifying ache expanded within him, trying to free itself with such influence that Dane had to hug his guts in while he shrugged back a grunt of despair. Abruptly, Angelina was sitting beside him.

“You should visit me,” she said. “It'll make you feel better. You don't have anything better to do most days anyway.”

Chewing his tongue and tasting blood, he tried to say her name but couldn't do it. There were a great many words of power in life-common ones, familiar ones somehow too hard for him to speak. He wondered how you did it, died with style, drinking coffee and a sucking wound in your chest.

“You need to go, Angie,” he said, urging her on, trying to shove her through the veil. “You're not doing either of us any good. I don't want you here anymore.”

“Of course you do.”

“No, really.”

“What do you think, I'm gonna play the harp, Johnny? You think that's what it's like over here? You want me to tell you how it is?”

“No.”

“I didn't think so.”

Angelina enjoyed taunting him the way the last person to leave a party cherishes the power of staying too long. She slid up against him, put her head on his shoulder, her hair covering him the way he dreamed of Maria's hair draping over him, even though he couldn't feel it. They sat there watching Glory Bishop distract the terrorists with her tits, the government assassin in the back of the room screwing around with his high-tech laser scopes and shit.

“It's okay,” she told him. “I can make it all right, if you'd only let me help. We're gonna get through this.”

“I'm not so sure most of the time,” Dane said, quietly, hoping his grandmother didn't have her ear against the wall.

His regrets seemed to have sinuous limbs that reached into places where the living couldn't fit. The girl here, always around him. “They're going to come for you soon.”

“Your brothers and the Monti crew?”

“Berto thinks you've been out long enough now. They've been spreading the word around the neighborhood. People are waiting to see what happens.”

“I still don't know why they haven't made their move yet.”

“They're weak,” Angie said with a cute giggle. “And JoJo single-handedly killing three hitters who ambushed him has sort of set them back. They're scared of you. They think you might've learned all kinds of assassin stuff in the army.”

“They watch too many movies,” he said, with the government assassin movie playing out on the television, Glory working her way to her one big action hero line. “What's he got planned for my spectacular exit?”

“I don't know.”

“Vinny isn't saying?”

“Vinny doesn't say anything.”

That didn't sound right. “What do you mean?” Dane asked, but Angie just stared affectionately at him, like she was watching a dog trying to perform a difficult trick.

Berto didn't have much of an imagination, so he'd leave it to Joey Fresco or Big Tommy Bartone. Those guys knew how to whack somebody and make the rest of the town grimace.

“Your mother,” Angie said. “She wants me to tell you something.”

Stopping there, staring at him with sad but loving eyes, waiting to see how it affected him. How important it might be to speak to his mom again.

What the hell did it say about you when the dead looked at you like they wanted to cry?

He knew some guys who walked out the door at sixteen and never looked back. Others, in the joint, who'd whacked their parents for insurance or in a lunatic rage. One huge Nazi Lowrider by the name of Buford, telling his story in the cafeteria one afternoon. Explaining how he'd never gotten over the fact that his mother had thrown all his comic books away. He's thirty-five and firing machine guns with all the other white supremacists up in Michigan. They have a bonfire afterward, where they bring their children out and everybody dances around to kill-the-Jew songs with German lyrics. One of the kids is about eight, wearing a swastika on his sweatshirt and a baseball cap with the Batman symbol on it.

Buford left the rally, drove back down to Indiana, walked into his mom's place, and put nine rounds into her face.

There were insignificant microtraumas that could eventually turn your conscience to dust.

Dane still couldn't get beyond his mother's death and never would, he realized. There was an unmined anguish there that he needed for some reason. Maybe it made him more human when he needed to be that, and more inhuman when he had to become something else.