Dennis Lehane - Prayers For Rain

Particularly for brunch, I thought.

“Thanks, hon,” Bubba said. “You look dynamite, by the way.”

“Aw, thanks, sweetie. Ain’t you a caution?” She turned away from us and almost ignited sixteen pounds of another woman’s hair with her cigarette before the woman saw it coming and leaned back.

Bubba and I worked our way through the rest of the crowd and out through the back. We closed the door behind us and waved at the clouds of smoke filling the back deck.

Out here, it was strictly men, and a master blaster propped up on the deck rail played Springsteen, another honorary goomba, and most of the guys were fatter than the ones inside, stuffing their mouths even now with cheeseburgers and hot dogs piled high with peppers and onions and relish chunks the size of bricks.

A short guy worked the grill, his jet-black pompadour adding three inches to his height. He wore jeans over white running shoes and sported a T-shirt emblazoned with the words WORLD’S GREATEST DAD on the back. A red-and-white-checkered apron covered the front of him as he worked a steel spatula over a two-tiered grill stuffed from end to end with sausages, hamburgers, marinated chicken breasts, hot dogs, red and green peppers, onions, and a small pile of garlic chunks in a nest of foil.

“Hey, Charlie,” the short guy called out, “you like your burger black, right?”

“Black as Michael Jordan,” a greasy sea of flesh called back as several men laughed.

“That’s some black.” The short guy nodded and lifted a cigar from an ashtray beside the grill and popped it in his mouth.

“Stevie,” Bubba said.

The guy turned and smiled around his cigar. “Hey, Rogowski! Hey, everyone, the Polack’s here!”

There were calls of “Bub-ba!” and “Rogowski!” and “Kill-a!” and several men slapped Bubba’s broad back or shook his hand, but no one acknowledged my presence, because Stevie hadn’t. It was as if I wouldn’t exist until he said so.

“That thing last week,” Stevie Zambuca said to Bubba. “You have any problems?”

“Nope.”

“That guy was talking shit? He give you any headaches?”

“Nope,” Bubba said again.

“Heard that suit in Norfolk is looking to give you grief.”

“Heard that, too,” Bubba said.

“You want a hand with it?”

“No, thanks,” Bubba said.

“You sure? Be the least we could do.”

“Thanks,” Bubba said, “but I got it covered.”

Stevie Zambuca looked up from the grill and smiled at Bubba. “You don’t ever ask for nothing, Rogowski. It makes people nervous.”

“You, Stevie?”

“Me?” He shook his head. “No. It’s old school, far as I’m concerned. Something most of these fucking guys could learn from. Me and you, Rogowski, we’re almost all that’s left of the old days and we ain’t that old. The rest of these fucking guys?” He looked back over his shoulder at the fat farm on his porch. “They’re hoping for movie deals, shopping book ideas to agents.”

Bubba glanced at the men with complete disinterest. “Freddy’s got it bad, I hear.”

Fat Freddy Constantine ran the mob here, but word was he wouldn’t be around much longer. The guy favored to take his seat was currently grilling sausage in front of us.

Stevie nodded. “His entire prostate’s in a biohazard bag at Brigham and Women’s. I hear his intestinal tract’s next.”

“Too bad,” Bubba said.

Stevie shrugged. “Hey, it’s nature, right? You live, you die, people cry, and then they think about where they’re gonna eat.” Stevie shoveled five burgers onto a plate the size of a gladiator’s shield, followed them with a half dozen hot dogs and some chicken. He held the plate over his shoulder and said, “Come get it, you fat fucking humps.”

Bubba leaned back on his heels and dug his hands into his trench coat as one of the blobs took the plate from Stevie’s hand and walked it back to the condiment table.

Stevie closed the grill cover. He placed the spatula on the grill tray and look a long puff on his cigar.

“Bubba, you go mingle, get something to eat. Me and your friend going to take a walk around the yard.”

Bubba shrugged and stayed where he was.

Stevie Zambuca held out a hand. “Kenzie, right? Walk with me.”

We walked off the small porch and down into the yard, made our way between empty white tables and lawn sprinklers that were shut off, down to a small garden encased in brick that hosted a sickly array of dandelions and crocuses.

Beside the garden was a wooden porch swing hanging from metal posts and a rod that had once supported a clothesline. Stevie Zambuca sat on the right side of the porch swing and patted the wood.

“Have a seat, Kenzie.”

I sat.

Stevie leaned back and took a long toke from his cigar, blew the smoke back out as he lifted his legs off the ground, held his heels over the grass for a moment, seemed fascinated by his white running shoes.

“You known Rogowski, what, your whole life?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“He always crazy?”

I looked up at Bubba as he crossed the porch and fixed himself a cheeseburger at the condiment table.

“He’s always followed the beat of his own drummer,” I said.

Stevie Zambuca nodded. “I heard all the stories,” he said. “Lived on the streets since he was, what, eight or something, you and some of your friends used to bring him food, shit like that. Then Morty Schwartz, the old Jew bookie, took him in, raised him till he died.”

I nodded.

“They say the only things he cares about are dogs, Vincent Patriso’s granddaughter, the ghost of Morty Schwartz, and you.”

I watched Bubba take a seat away from the rest of the men and eat his burger.

“Is that true?” Stevie Zambuca asked.

“I guess,” I said.

He patted my knee. “You remember Jack Rouse?”

Jack Rouse had been the kingpin of the Irish mob until he disappeared a few years back.

“Sure.”

“He put a hit on you not long before he disappeared. An open hit, Kenzie. And you know why it didn’t go down?”

I shook my head.

Stevie Zambuca tilted his chin up in the direction of the porch. “Rogowski. He walked into a card game filled with capos and said anything happened to you, he’d hit the streets armed, kill every soldier he saw until someone killed him.”

Bubba finished his hamburger and carried his paper plate back for a second. The men near the condiment table drifted away and left him alone. Bubba was always alone. It was his choice but his price, too, for being so unlike the rest of his species.

“Now that’s loyalty,” Stevie Zambuca said. “I try and instill that in my men, but I can’t. They’re only as loyal as their wallets are thick. See, you can’t teach loyalty. You can’t instill it. It’s like trying to teach love. Can’t be done. It’s either in your heart, or it ain’t. You ever get caught bringing him food?”

“By my parents?”

“Yeah.”

“Sure.”

“You catch an ass-whipping?”

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “Several.”

“But you kept stealing food from your family’s table, right?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Why?”

I shrugged. “It’s just what we did. We were kids.”

“See, that’s what I’m talking about. That’s loyalty. That’s love, Kenzie. You can’t put that in someone. And,” he said with a stretch and a sigh, “you can’t take it out, either.”

I waited. The point, I was pretty sure, was coming.

“You can’t take it out,” Stevie Zambuca repeated. He leaned back and put his arm around my shoulder. “We got this guy does some work for us. Sort of like private contracting, if you know what I mean. He isn’t employed by the organization, but he provides things sometimes. You follow?”