Tom Piccirilli: Headstone City

“He's waiting for you.”

Fifteen years old when she'd bought it two years ago, but still appearing so full of life, with that overwhelming hipness of youth. She was dressed the way she was the day she OD'd: oversized black sweater and blue jeans, no makeup, her dark hair falling straight back over her ears, the slightest curl of bangs up front.

Heat flooded his stomach and got his skin dancing. He started breathing heavily, and when his breath reached her she closed her eyes and lifted her face to meet it. Her bangs stirred and wafted. She smiled and he swallowed thickly, again and again.

Jesus. He realized he still wanted her. What the hell did that say about you, when you were aroused by the dead? Or was it only because she looked so much like her older sister, Maria?

“Angie-”

“You don't have to be embarrassed with me, Johnny.”

“I'm not.”

“There's no shame in it. You keep me sane in hell.”

It made him chew his lips, hearing that. He sat on the floor across from his bunk, staring at her. If only he'd driven faster, or hadn't run over the cop.

But why stop there? If you're going to go back, go farther. If he hadn't given in and agreed to take her to Bed-Stuy in the first place. She'd talked circles around him until he'd cracked. It hadn't been difficult. If only he'd cared a little more and been a lot smarter. He shouldn't have been so pathetic, but that's what the familiar streets had done to him. What he'd allowed them to do. What they were still doing, even in prison.

“Will you visit me in Headstone City?” she asked.

“I don't think so. It's best if I'm not seen there.”

“You live there.”

“I mean at your grave.”

“Nobody visits. They act like they miss me so much, but nobody takes the time to say a prayer or bring a shitty plastic flower.”

“I'm sorry, Angie.”

“Johnny, I need you.”

Something began to soften in his belly then, and he felt himself going with it. A weakness that had always been there but was broadening, intensifying. Maybe he was about to cut loose with a sob. Twenty minutes ago he was almost ready to cut throats, and now this fragility and brittleness. He wanted to ask her if she held him responsible the way her family did. It was a question he'd never asked her before. She didn't appear to want to make him feel guilty, didn't try to get her claws into him, the way she had in life.

Dane heard the bull coming for him, turned to watch as the guard stepped up to the cell door. “Danetello. Let's go.”

He stood and the guard escorted him down the tier, through the gen pop, across the courtyard, and back into the visitation quad, where all the new cons first set foot in the can. The warden was nowhere to be seen. They handed him a ream of paperwork, but nothing for him to sign. The clothes he came in with had been pressed and folded into a pile that lay on the counter. He reached for them, and another guard said, “Hold it.”

“What's the matter?”

“You've got a phone call, if you want it.”

“Why wouldn't I want it?”

“Most cons who get this close to the outside on the day of their release don't turn around and go answer the phone.”

Dane figured it was his Grandma Lucia, jonesing for sugar. He went back and took the call. His grandmother said, “Stop off at the bakery and get some cannoli and biscotti, will you, Johnny? And don't let the girl put you off. She's dead, that one. She doesn't know what she's talking about.”

TWO

This town, it took your blood and replaced it with cement, asphalt, and pigeon shit. You became a part of it as much as the steel and iron, all the bone meal sprinkled into its cornerstones. No matter who you were, you got hard.

Brooklyn, New York.

Fourth largest city in the United States, cradle of roughnecks and Nobel Laureates, center of America's most diversified gathering of angry cultures.

You knew it, and it knew you. Every dark corner, edge to edge. Handball and knock-hockey in Highland Park. Nights sleeping in a tent under Stoney Bridge out near the reservoirs. Stickball on Schenck Avenue, the street tar on top of the old cobblestones getting soft in the August sun. You could lift it with a spoon. Watching a parade curbside on Flatbush Ave. Playing pinball and having an egg cream at Louie's candy store. A shot of syrup, a dollop of milk, and a steady stream of seltzer. The foam would rise to the rim of the glass but never overflow.

Louie wearing a black merchant marine wool cap, even in the summer, never taking any shit off the kids. Once, Roberto Monticelli walked in and, because his voice had changed and he'd grown a few inches that year, tried to get protection money out of Louie. Kept making vague threats about arson, using a big word like “accelerant” and asking, Hey, anybody smell smoke? Louie smacked him in the mouth, took him outside, pried up a manhole cover with a tire iron, and threw Berto down into the sewer. About the funniest thing Dane had ever seen in his life.

The Don never came after Louie for retribution. You didn't fuck with the corner candy stores. They meant too much to the neighborhood.

A century ago Headstone City had been known as Meadow Slope, one of the richest areas in Brooklyn. Industrial-age barons, moguls, and merchants pursued their brazen luxuries in the new era of abundance. They'd ride their carriages from Manhattan to Outlook Park and attend masquerade balls thrown along the Mile, where the wealthy built their extravagant Victorian mansions. You could see it if you put your mind to it. The fashionable elite strolling the vast gardens and embracing the celebrated performers of the day.

Politicians and businessmen wanted a hub for cultural pursuits, where the masters of fine art could lord it over the laborers who greased their axles or fetched their tea. Local entrepreneurs constructed Grand Outlook Hall, an Italian Renaissance gallery. Five lavish stories and 150,000 square feet, a shrine to the arts that became the jewel of the Meadow Slope community. Back in the day it was considered the equal in beauty to the Academy of Music, Botanic Garden, and Grand Army Plaza.

The marble corridors, rich oak and mahogany paneling, ballrooms, opera house, chandeliers, and terrace nurseries brought the rich and prominent flocking. They'd come in their top hats and tails, ladies dressed in Parisian gowns, to hear the star entertainers.

During prohibition, opera connoisseur Al Capone frequented the Hall and had his own balcony seat in the ballroom. One of Al's cronies from Chicago, guy with the stupid name Peachy Fichi, tried to whack him in the loge, but Al hid behind one of the brass statues until he could get his pistol out and return fire. You could still see the bullet holes in the garlands of gold-leaf molding. Neither Al nor Peachy could shoot worth a shit. After reloading three times each, they both ran for it.

The bus let Dane off at the corner in front of the Grand Hall. The mid-October wind braced him, leaves skittering against his ankles. He allowed two teenage couples coming out of the parking lot to precede him onto the street. Guys in tuxes and the girls in silk dresses and mink stoles. Dane asked, “Who's on tonight?”

“Kathryn Mondiviaggi,” one of the kids said, his bow tie just a little askew. His cheeks sprouted crimson from the chill. “In the revival of La Traviata. ”

“I heard Sophia Campescio sing it on her last tour, about twenty years ago,” Dane told them.

“Really?”

“Michael Finelli played Alfredo Germont.”

“Oh, he's so handsome,” the kid's date said, moving closer and speaking with a hushed tone, as if to a conspirator. This was how the real fans talked about opera, in close, like it was somehow gossip. She had a smile that caught Dane low and almost made him flinch. Her hair flowed back and forth, reaching for him. “Even more so now, with the white patches in his beard. Truly debonair.”