Tom Piccirilli - Headstone City

The brisk wind heaved through town, seeking your broken bones, cooling the metal in your head, the fractures in your skull that would never heal, where your thoughts would always seep.

Grandma stood framed in the front gate of Wisewood, waiting like she was going to catch a bus. Dane pulled up, rolled the window down, and she told him, “Go park the car at the house, we're going to visit your parents.”

“Grandma-”

“Come on, let's go.”

“Why walk?” he asked.

“It's important.”

Maybe it was, he couldn't tell anymore. Besides, he wasn't sure he could drive through the cemetery, and try to buck his pattern around town. “Why?”

“There are things that have to be done.”

“Oh Christ,” he said. He drove down the block and parked the GN in the driveway and jogged back to her. He was tired as hell from working all morning on the limo's dented back bumper.

She stood set like marble. When he got close enough her hand flashed out and grabbed his arm, as if she feared he might run away.

You could forget you were in a cemetery when you walked through Wisewood. The park landscaping made it seem like a retreat where you'd come to read poetry, make chicks, dream about the faces of your children. You became a part of history there, connected to the past of Outlook Park, Meadow Slope, and Headstone City. You became one with the dead, and through you they met the world you helped create.

They walked the rutted paths they knew so well, no different than going to the bakery or the butcher shop. Instead of passing your neighbors on the street, you wandered by the weathered, eroded faces of granite seraphim and martyrs.

Dane felt himself drifting back to his childhood, the pull always there. Grandma Lucia had to pull him closer so he didn't run into the peaked headstones and jagged tree trunks. They stepped together over a gnarled clutch of wildflowers growing defiantly along the curb.

Johnny Danetello, he's waiting for his death to find him.

The swords of the archangels were painted fiery red in your catechism books, but it didn't burn like that pink hair.

“That dead one, she still bothering you?” his grandmother asked.

“Not so much lately. You still dreaming of her?”

“No,” she said, shaking her head, the pocketbook swinging, catching Dane painfully in the ribs. “The other one.”

“JoJo?”

“I only wish.”

“So which, then?”

“The one who's buried nearby her… what's his name, the Jewish fishmonger?”

“Aaron Fielding.”

“So pushy, how he fights his way in.”

“Do you know why?”

“Not yet. I don't like him doing that. Where's it say I have to put up with that? I refuse to listen. He wants my attention, he can go about it by showing some manners. This is how it's done? They want you to notice, so they just bully right in?”

Next time, Dane thought, I'll make sure I make the time for him. These dead, they'll take you right down with them if you turn a deaf ear.

The smooth thrum of a finely tuned engine made them both look to the narrow roadway. Grandma swung her chin and let out a prim grunt of dissatisfaction.

Phil Guerra's '59 sky-blue Caddy drew up beside them. The Magic-Mirror acrylic lacquer finish blazed in the sunlight and almost managed to snap Dane's attention from his grandmother's hair.

“It looks like a rocketship with those pazzo fins on it,” Grandma said.

“It's supposed to.”

“You men, every one of you likes this thing, but I say it's ugly. You ever decide to boost cars again, you should start with that one.”

“I think I just might,” Dane told her.

“Ah, Jesu, when's he going to get rid of that rug? Like something you keep at the front door to wipe your feet on.”

Phil parked up ahead, near Dane's parents' graves, and waited while Dane and Grandma walked the rest of the way down the path. Phil opened the door and got out, wearing aviator glasses, his caps too white in the middle of that artificially tanned face. He acted like he was leaning back against the car, but Dane noticed he wasn't really touching it. Looking cool but afraid to mar the shine.

“This one's wife,” Grandma whispered. “She always smells like gin and she cheats at bingo.”

When Dane was a kid he used to go to the bingo parlor with her all the time. The biggest payout was something like $25. “How the hell do you cheat at bingo?”

“She tries her best. Yells out ‘Bingo!' and half the time the numbers don't check out. She disrupts the game. She's always talking, gossiping, bothering the other players. Butting into everyone's business, looking at their boards. It's a mental assault, what that woman does. A psychological tactic.”

Jesus, Dane thought, these old ladies take their shit very seriously.

He stood close to her, feeling the stolid weight of seventy-eight years of firmness and consistency. She took his hand and squeezed it. The fact that her father, husband, and son had all died in the line of duty seemed a fact of duration. As if her endurance drew murderers to try their hand against her blood. The death of cops hovered around her, the way it did around Phil Guerra, the man who'd killed Dane's dad.

Under her breath she said, “When you start moving you don't stop until it's finished. You can do it. Understand me?”

“What?”

Look at how much you're still a little boy. Walking and holding your grandmother's hand, feeling small in the eyes of Uncle Philly.

Dane had a moment where he thought maybe he'd missed out on the anniversary of one of his parents' deaths. Or maybe forgotten a birthday. Was visiting their graves so important today? Dane looked at his grandma and she was smiling with a false geniality. She said, “Nice to see you, Phil.”

“I stop by when I can, Lucia. It's good to remember.”

“Yes, it is.”

“My own mama taught me that.”

“A kind and decent woman,” Grandma said.

“I visit her and my dad when I can. Some of the rest of the family.” He sniffed. “Cold today.”

“It'll be a bad winter.”

“That's why me and Mabel are going to Florida. I'm getting out. We've been here too long.”

Dane looked into his grandmother's face, wondering if this was why she'd brought him here. To listen to this one little fact about Phil leaving. Telling him in her way that the clock was ticking. You have to take him out soon if you're going to do it. Before he finally escapes.

You'd think you'd have fewer questions the older you got, but it only seemed like you wound up with more. One leading into another.

They stood there and prayed in front of his parents' graves, his grandmother muttering in Italian. While Dane had his eyes closed, Phil put his arms around him. Drew him in close, pressed his cheek to Dane's the way the Mafiosi in the fifties would kiss somebody right before they punched his ticket.

“I miss them,” Phil whispered.

A wedge of hate snapped loose inside Dane's body and lodged in the back of his head. He thought of how easy it might be to reach over and grab your partner's gun, hold it up to his temple, and pull the trigger. No brawling, no real force necessary. One swift motion and all the brains go out the other side, you don't even get any blood on your slacks.

You stared at the graves and the graves stared back.

“I'll drive you both home,” Phil said, showing those teeth.

Dane thought his grandmother would shrug off the offer, but she said, “ Grazie, va bene. This wind, my arthritis is acting up.”

So now Dane had to watch his grandmother clambering into a '59 Caddy, squeezing herself into the back because she'd never sit in the death seat. Whenever Dane drove her someplace, she'd perch directly behind him, talking in his ear the entire time.