I hate to start off by calling my own flesh-and-blood, my only
sibling, a no-good cocksucker but my brother’s a no-good, fucking
cocksucker. I hadn’t seen him in ten years since his transfer to
Dannemora in upstate New York for armed robbery. I went only
because of guilt. You see, our father was a bona fide psycho with
delusions of grandeur. By the time I was seventeen, we’d been
living in Montreal for five years and everything was going downhill
fast, especially the old man’s mental state. It’s one thing to
believe you’re a deep-cover intelligence agent waiting for a dangerous
assignment to Islamabad, but it’s another thing to believe that the
CIA has ordered you to train up your two sons to be ace spies.
What
started out as harmless lunacy took a grim turn, and we’d get
clobbered if we came back without the right answers to whatever we were
supposed to be doing on these ridiculous “missions.” Because I
was older and bigger, I took the brunt of it. My father might have
been crazier than a shithouse mouse, but he was built like a brick
shithouse, and he punched like George Chuvalo. Mostly what I did was
steal so my brother and I could eat. Fuck the old man—he lived
on unfiltered Gauloises and gallons of coffee. He rarely slept. I
didn’t care about him. He was nothing but a joke—a sad,
twisted fuckup whose brain got stuck at a crazy angle. But when fresh
bruises started landing on top of old ones, I said fuck this, and began
planning my escape. I was big enough by then to live on the
streets. Stevie was only thirteen; he was baggage. I couldn’t
take care of both of us so I just lit out one night, climbed down the
fire escape into the alley off rue Saint-Amable, and said au revoir to
that shithole apartment and never looked back. Somehow I got a tip
from a guy in a bar and went sailing on the Great Lakes as a deckhand.
I
spent eight years on the boats, making good money, letting my mind heal,
and reading everything I could get my hands on. I never gave my
brother or father a single thought until we were on a short coal run to
South Chicago, and I read in the back pages of the Tribune about
an attempted armed robbery at a Brinks depot in Rochester, New York.
My brother’s name listed as one of the three men arrested.
When
the season ended in mid-November, we tied up in Ashtabula, a rinky-dink
little port town, where I bought a ramshackle old house in the harbor
and stayed there when I wasn’t on the boats or lying on the beach,
which was what I normally did in the off-season. Like my snowbird
crewmates who weren’t married or tied down to a girlfriend somewhere,
we made a beeline to South Florida or somewhere warm for the winter
while the lakes were frozen over. I was living free, spending my own
money, and thinking about making the ore boats a career. I was
even planning to take the licensing test for a third-mate’s position.
Then
it all went to shit because I looked my brother up in prison.
He
told me our father was probably still dribbling and shuffling around
like some of the other old derelicts wandering around Old Montréal.
He said the homos had bought up most of the block where we used to live
and opened up boutiques and art galleries. He said we
couldn’t afford to live there now. In my mind it was still full
of dope fiends, and hardnosed characters like the tough gang of boys we
hung out with near the St. Lawrence. Stevie left when he was
sixteen but he got caught up in “gunpointing” people. I left
and never intended to see him again.
Then
some pro bono lawyer got his appeal overturned.
“Meet
my cellie, bro,” Stevie said.
My
brother had done some lifting in prison but he hadn’t filled out and
he was a good three inches shorter than my six feet. He wasn’t
intimidating with his loony ink designs with Nazi bullshit in gothic
lettering. It was the shock of swiveling my head from him to scope
the massive, bulked-up, bullet-headed giant he was calling his cellie
and who seemed to take up every foot of space in my small kitchen. For
every one of my brother’s tattoos, Robert Calderone had three or four:
shamrocks, triple 6’s, weeping clowns, numbers, naked women, and
enough German script on his back and shoulders to cover a chapter of Thus
Spake Zarathustra.
Did
I mention he had eyes like a pig? For all his great size, Calderone’s
eyes were tiny black dots, and when he scrunched up his broad forehead,
they almost disappeared. If you could piss laser-straight into a
deep snowbank, that’ll give you some idea. The scariest part about the
man wasn’t his twenty-inch biceps or his thickened deltoids from
iron-slinging in the joint; it was those miserable eyes that bored into
you and took your measure in a way that wouldn’t flatter your ego.
I’ll be honest: he scared the shit out of me, and I took a
backward step. In my years of knocking around on my own, I’d run
across some tough men. It’s that quiet, averaged-size loser at
the end of the bar drinking alone who could twist a knife in your
abdomen and pull out your intestines between drinks that you have to
watch out for.
But
Calderone had size to go with whatever it is that makes us respond to
something frightening beyond our normal range of experience.
Putting it simply, if you thought you were a tough guy because you were
a linebacker on your high school football team or you did some boxing in
the ring when you were younger, if you were to spend five minutes in a
room alone with Robert Calderone, you’d come out with your asshole
puckered in fear and he wouldn’t have had to threaten you or lay a
hand on you the whole time. The kind of scary that caused his Aryan
Brotherhood members in Dannemora to make him their designated enforcer.
When
my brother got half-drunk on my beer, he told me that the day he picked
up scuttlebutt Calderone was being transferred to his cell from SHU,
where they confine the troublemakers and psychos, he started giving away
his stuff because he was sure he was going to die. Calderone made his
rep through his skill at getting to people in or outside the prison
walls. If he wanted you dead, he’d arrange to get transferred to your
cell and garrote you in your sleep. It was Sayonara,
motherfucker, the moment he showed up, Stevie said, and he had no
idea how he had offended the Brand to get himself a death sentence.
For two weeks, my brother celled with him, and every night he expected
to be his last.
It
turned out Calderone did arrange the transfer from the segregated unit.
He heard my brother was a short-timer because of that miraculous
overturning of his conviction, and he knew he was being returned to
general population for the few weeks he had left to serve on his own
sentence. The laughable part, Stevie said, was that he had just
crossed the border from Nuevo Laredo where he was working as a killer
for the Jiminez brothers. He had put five decapitated heads on a
bar down there to leave a message to the rivals of the Jiminez clan.
With his Mexico earnings, he’d made a big dope score in Albuquerque
and was running it to New York City high on amphetamines when his semi
clipped a family Hyundai on the Dewey thruway. He got five years
for vehicular homicide for killing the family but nothing for the dope,
which they couldn’t prove was his.
What
Calderone wanted was a partner. He knew my brother did takedown
robberies, and he knew Stevie had a brother who owned a house, which
just happened to be located in the very town where a certain bank was
located that Calderone’s outside associates told him was ripe for a
heist. Calderone was no genius but how smart do you have to be to
see that all your ingredients are right there? My lakeside digs
were convenient, but I was expendable. Inside of thirty minutes,
Robert Calderone sat me down at my own kitchen table and gave me the
word: I’m in on it with them or I’m dead. I glanced at
my brother—that is, I tried to—and I have the flash memory of that
lip-curling smirk on Stevie’s face before my lights went out.
When
I came to on the floor, Calderone was looking down at me and scowling.
One of his size 13, triple-E Harley Davidson boots was pressing me down.
“I’m
in,” I said between cracked teeth and bloody lips. You’d have said
the same.
* *
*
“Motherfucker,”
Calderone said when he saw the road she lived on was at the end of a
cul-de-sac.
The
bank manager’s house was a new two-storey redwood bungalow overlooking
Lake Shore Park and the marina. This section of the harbor was
being gentrified for the professionals in town. The street was all
doctors, lawyers, and accountants.
“What
about her family?” I asked.
“The
bitch lives by herself,” Stevie snickered. “She eats a box
lunch.”
How
he obtained that information probably didn’t come from his computer
classes at Dannemora but I didn’t ask.
We
were in my car because Calderone and my brother got to town on a
Greyhound. Between the two of them, they had about four thousand
dollars. That’s big money in a commissary account where you’re
extorting nickels and dimes from the other cons but it won’t buy many
Escalades on the outside.
Robert
got drunk, and he wasn’t a nice drunk, either. I did everything but
tiptoe around him, but like the alpha dog he was, he wanted more than
token submission. He wanted to see me docile and afraid. My
brother had long assumed the position of remora to the shark, so he was
immune from the abuse Robert dished out. I don’t mind being
called a “jizz-gargling faggot motherfucker” in my own house.
I don’t mind being told to fetch a beer now and then. And I
didn’t say anything when he picked up my coffee table and threw it
through the back porch window. But, by God, I do mind seeing a guy
take out his cock in my living room and piss all over my new sofa.
That upsets me.
My
mistake, however, was in thinking that I could get the drop on Calderone
by sucker-punching him. I had my right hand wrapped around a
railroad spike and wore my glove for the speed bag. He and my
brother came back about two in the morning from the town’s last strip
joint, the only one sleazy enough to survive in depressed times. I had
seen the girls in The Rare Cherry before. Those skags made the
Palm sisters look desirable.
Robert
came in, roaring drunk, with one under each arm. I heard the sounds of
my brother vomiting on the porch behind him. A glass pane
shattered. Then I heard giggling. Then they were all
stumbling around in the kitchen. I heard the squeal of the
refrigerator door being opened.
“Looka—look
who’s here,” he said when he saw me step into the light.
“Fuckin’ brother of my pal Stevie. Hey, motherfucker, what’s
up?” His eyes glittered like a cat’s watching a mouse approach.
He
held the girls loosely. They gaped at me with the same stupefied
expression as if a Martian had just walked in. The one in the
halter with the butter-yellow hair and black roots tucked her breast
back into her top and weaved forward, about to fall onto the bottles of
tequila and beer that were lined up like soldiers on parade.
I
used the distraction to angle closer to Calderone with my protected hand
tucked against my thigh. Stevie lurched into the
doorway, groaning. Calderone’s face was a sheen of sweat and his
bald head was stippled with blue-black stubble; the fumy reek of these
four exhalers in the confined space was enough to gag a maggot.
Calderone
said, “Haw, look it ‘im, fucker’s shit-faced and he ain’t had no
tequila yet, girls.”
I
made a move toward my brother, whose eyes were so filmed over that he
didn’t recognize me. I pivoted, wheeled around toward Calderone,
and swung from the hip at his jaw.
It
sounded good. It felt good too—if swinging an axe at a tree and
feeling that ripple from your wrist to your shoulder socket is all that
good a feeling.
But
it didn’t do what I expected. I expected Calderone to breech
like a dolphin coming out of the water and then fold back on himself
like a big rag doll. Then I’d put my foot under his chin and
say, “Get out of my house, fuckface, while you still can . . . ”
When
I woke up in the downstairs bedroom at daylight with most of my clothes
ripped and my head throbbing because somebody had replaced it with a
Nerf ball.
I
staggered into the kitchen barefoot. I was barely able to see out of one
eye and half my face felt like a potato peeled with a dull spoon. Broken
glass everywhere, stale beer, vomit smells. Both tequila bottles
were empty and someone ate only half the worm at the bottom of one.
They’d been practicing knife throwing at my cupboards. My
refrigerator door was off its hinges and I heard the racing thrum of the
motor fighting a losing battle to restore its equilibrium. Some of the
cupboard doors swung open and I could see the broken plates and glasses
in crushed mounds. Somebody had flung a shoe into one.
I
went to search the rooms upstairs and found my brother still passed out
in the guest bedroom, where I had on occasions ensconced a woman after
some bar trawling. He had smears of yellow vomit still on his chin
and he looked ninety years old.
“Nice
work, Dad,” I said and walked off sown the hallway with one hand on
the wall to steady me. Calderone was in my bedroom with his two
girls. Their arms and legs were entwined around each half of him.
The room stank of stale perfume and semen. But I would have to
revise my appraisal of the Cherry girls. The girl on Calderone’s right
had lovely breasts in full display. Calderone’s mouth was
half-open but he didn’t look as wrecked as my brother’s grim visage.
I detected motion beneath the covers and thought for a split-second one
of the women was giving him an early morning handjob—all at once
Calderone’s hand whipped off the sheets. His darkened beard
shadow surrounded the white teeth bared in a grimace of contempt for the
voyeur in the doorway, me. His erection bobbed about like a
windsock in a gale. A filament of silver jissom whipped around the
glans like a loose guy rope to a dirigible gone amok. Calderone
bared his teeth even more in a wolf-like grin. His two women had
popped open an eye to see what the fuss was all about.
“You
fucking animal,” I whispered and limped off in my cowardly retreat.
That
day was spent recovering—my from my wounds and those two from their
drunken orgy. The women had dressed by two in the afternoon and
took off. They didn’t even look at me when they passed me on the
stairs. I was a prisoner in my own house. Rather than ask
for permission to leave, I stayed indoors and sulked.
Call
me a fatalist, but I slept a long, dreamless sleep and awoke Sunday
morning to the gong of church bells.
Calderone
and my brother acted as though nothing had happened. It was as
eerie as a Noh play. I was shuffling and moaning around the house
but everything was copasetic as far as they were concerned.
Nothing at all was the matter. They were oblivious to all my grunt
s of pain. When Calderone drilled a sortie of farts into my
La-Z-Boy, he and Stevie laughed like schoolboys. Around eight
o’clock they went out to do another surveillance. The dirty
blonde from The Rare Cherry dropped by before they left, no doubt to
babysit me. The cell phone never left her hand and she watched me
everywhere I went. When I went into the bathroom to urinate, I saw
her shadow behind the door jamb, so I nudged it all way open. She
smiled. “I’ll suck it when you’re through pissing with
it,” she said. “I won’t tell Robert.”
I
said, “Don’t do me any favors.” What a lame-ass I was.
I wasn’t in that much pain but the needle of her compass shifted true
north right after I said, her smile disappeared under a frosty glaze,
and I never managed to catch her eye to apologize.
They
came back a little after nine o’clock with two more girls, Miss Halter
Top from the other night and a new stripper from the club, a brunette
with a pretty face and hip-huggers so low her yellow thong was
constantly on display. Calderone couldn’t keep his hands off her
ass all night. They drank and partied until three a.m.
Calderone’s smutty notion of humor, I suppose, but it was grotesque
and humiliating to be subjected to the grunts of women performing on
each other and on Calderone, the degenerate ringmaster of this sex
circus, barking out sexual commands and smacking flesh with his open
palms.
I
sank my teeth into the pillow and bit down hard. I rolled over
away from the noise and tried to smother the sound like a worm in a
cocoon of blankets. Despite the pain in my face and stomach, I
roared into it every filthy word I had ever learned as a Great Lakes
sailor. It took sometime to get them all out and by then, I was sick to
my stomach and exhausted from the effort. I counted down the
minutes, then the seconds, until Calderone and my brother would be
leaving. I thought of the bank manager, that poor muffdiving
professional woman in her navy-blue business suit had no idea what
monstrous thing was about to happen to her.
I
felt no pity. I had all I could worry about just a few feet away
from my bed. He was at that moment slapping some girl’s backside
with hard, ringing slaps and ordering her to “suck harder, suck
harder, bitch.”
The
next day a hungover Calderone stopped in front of me and asked me what
the fuck I was watching that was so fucking interesting. I said,
“You wouldn’t understand.” Then he picked up my set and
threw it through the living room window.
“How’s
that for understanding, motherfucker?”
I
said nothing. I remained where I was as if the television were
still there gaping back at me. “You dumb fuck,” Calderone said
and walked off to get another beer from my destroyed fridge.
All
I wanted after Montreal was a normal life.
* *
*
The
air had an iron chill to it but there was no snow on the ground.
The roads would be clear and everybody in town who had a job to go to
was getting ready with their usual doses of caffeine, pills to wake them
up, Prozac to calm them down, various sorts of tranquilizers to mellow
them out so they didn’t kill anybody before their nine o’clock break
time arrived.
My
eyeballs felt as if they’d been rolled around on sandpaper before
somebody popped them back into my head. My brother was high on
something, and I hoped it wasn’t angel dust because a nude, screaming
accomplice wasn’t going to make things any easier for me. Calderone
was resplendent in his usual garb: greasy levi’s, filthy biker
boots, black leather vest, a belt with a death’s-head buckle the size
of a canned ham, and a black woolen watchcap over his head. I was
hoping I’d be so nondescript next to him that any witnesses would be
too mesmerized by the sight of him to notice me. Stevie had
already developed a sheen of sweat on his forehead and seemed sunken
inside his black hoodie.
I
drove to her house and parked at the end of the street near a fence that
was more decorative than useful. We all converged on her like
flies to a corpse as soon as she shut the door behind her. Stevie
had the gun, a small automatic, and braced her first; she
jumped—literally—when she saw him appear out of nowhere. I was
beside her by then, and Calderone loomed in front of her like a big
thundercloud. I thought she’d faint in my arms when she saw him.
Stevie
had her keys while Calderone and I escorted her right back into the
house like two bouncers walking out a drunk. Her legs splayed out
when we dumped her on the couch. So far, so good—then the woman
in her white bathrobe came walking into the living room from nowhere,
saw us all there with her, and screamed in a voice so loud I thought the
plate glass windows would shatter. No one thought she’d
have company.
She
turned and ran. Stevie, closest, had her by the back of her
terrycloth robe but she slipped out of that like a banana popping out of
its skin and the next thing we heard was a door slamming.
Calderone charged down the hallway after her. Stevie stood there
dumbfounded, holding the bathrobe, as if he were trying to puzzle out
why she wasn’t still in it. It was like one of those dreams
where you’re stuck fast in mud or cement and you can’t run away from
whatever’s chasing you.
We
heard crashing sounds and then a loud thud like a fifty-pound sack of
rice hitting the floor.
Our
target, whose name happened to be Angela DeRosa, sat mute on the couch
while all this was going on. She was white-faced but composed.
Calderone came back into the room dragging the woman, caveman-style, by
her thick chestnut hair. He threw her at Angela’s feet.
Her nude companion moaned and tried to clutch at her knees, sobbing, but
Angela kept her body still and her legs primly together and never once
took her eyes off Calderone.
“What—what
do you want with us?” she asked him.
Change
of plans. Stevie improvised his fucked-up plan with a new
element—kidnapping. I’d escort Angela to the bank and wait for
her to bring out the money. She knew Calderone was in her house
with her lover and any hesitation, any failure on her part to convince
her staff we were serious about hurting the woman, and she’d come back
to a dead body. Calderone made the point his own unique way. He
turned the prone woman over and pushed her hands away from her crotch
and said, “You do what I say, bitch, or I’ll stretch your
girlfriend’s little pussy here so far out of shape you’ll be able to
stick the biggest rubber dick you got in her and it’ll never touch the
sides.”
Stevie’s
job was to follow them and call Calderone if anything didn’t look
right at the bank. This way, Stevie said, nobody does a thing,
everybody stands around with their thumb up their ass while she calmly
collects the money and hand delivers it to us. Calderone growled
that it was risking everything “on the taste of some bitch’s
cunt.”
They
write books and sing songs about sure-fire plans in life and love going
sideways. They don’t write enough about how some fucked-up plans
succeed despite the lack of attention to detail. My brother and
Calderone had the devil on their side that Monday. The bank guard
was late because he was involved in a minor traffic accident and had to
go to the emergency room, the one teller who despised her boss and would
have defied orders not to call the police called in sick with a case of
menstrual cramps, and the police cruiser that normally did a circuit of
the strip malls where the bank was located had an emergency call to the
other side of town.
It
got even better: Dunbar’s made a pre-Thanksgiving delivery that
exceeded my brother’s expectations of the haul. Instead of a
couple canvas bags of money worth forty, fifty thousand, Angela came out
with four bags of cash in small denominations that totaled
one-hundred-eighty thousand dollars. Not a dye pack anywhere.
Suddenly
my brother was sitting beside me in the car. His gun was waving
about.
“Don’t
be stupid now, Angie,” he said. “Wait the full twenty minutes
like we said or your girl back there will get jackhammered in every hole
before he cuts her throat.”
“Drive!”
Stevie yelled at me.
I
started back to my house with the bags of money for the three-way split,
which I knew was not going to happen. What I didn’t expect was
what Stevie said next, “Fuck him, let’s keep going!”
When
we got to my place, I was about to get out when Stevie put the gun to my
head. He said, “Payback’s a bitch, bro.”
I
waited for the sound of my brains to come rushing through the exit hole
in my forehead like a pulpy stew. Would I even hear the shot, I
wondered, or would my brain be a dead receiver by then? Nothing
happened. He had that shit-eating grin on his face.
“The
old man’s dead,” he said.
I
nodded my head slowly, not yet sure I had a grip on myself to speak.
I
killed him two days before my sixteenth birthday,” he said.
“Bang, bang—like that. Two in the back of the head while he
was sitting there looking out the window.”
“You
hated him that much,” I said weakly, my voice cracking.
“Naw,
wasn’t like that, bro. Wasn’t like that at all. His
brains were gone. He was too weak to lift a finger. I coulda
kicked his ass with one hand behind my back. You shoulda stayed a
little longer, brother mine,” he said.
“I’m
sorry I left, Stevie. It’s bothered me a long time,” I said.
“Yeah,
well, fuck you,” he said but there wasn’t much heat in it.
“What
do we do now?”
“We
do?” Stevie said and that lopsided grin was back. “We don’t
do shit, motherfucker. I do,” he laughed.
“What
about Calderone?”
“Fuck
him,” Stevie said. “He’s up that lezbo’s ass by now. He
won’t even hear the sirens.”
“Oh
shit,” I said.
“While
they’re lining up outside her house in their bullet-proof Ninja gear,
I’ll be a hundred miles away.”
“What
about me? They’ll be lining up outside my house pretty soon too
or am I part of the distraction too?”
“Get
out of the car,” he said.
I
got out and stood there looking at him while he shifted over to the
driver’s seat. The gun stayed on me—so much for brotherly
love.
He
said, “I was you, I’d start runnin’ like a motherfucker.
Here’s few bucks to get you going.” He tossed a packet of
money out of the car at me that landed at my feet: twenties.
He winked at me and he was gone.
I
didn’t have time to stand there cursing and brooding over my fate.
I had to haul ass fast. I had to scramble into the house, grab
whatever clothes and gear I could shove into a bag and start running for
deep cover.
You
can’t tell me my brother hadn’t been planning this the whole time he
was in stir. My new life stretched out in front of me like the
frozen, blank landscape we traveled through. I was a nobody,
starting over again, and I had nothing but my wits and my freedom to
depend on.
“Whatcha-all
smilin’ at there, my friend?”
My grizzled truck driver was staring at me with a wad of tobacco
in his mouth.
“I
was just wondering,” I said, not really sure what I was going to say
to this stranger, “whether all the problems in life end when they
finally stretch us out on that stainless steel table.”
“Shit,
no, man,” he said and swirled the lump from one side of his cheek to
the other. “Then you got all your got-damned sins coming home to
roost on your sorry ass. It could be just the beginning of some
very bad shit.”
A
Dolly Parton tune came over the radio just then. He cranked up the
volume.
“I
love that damn gal,” he said and winked at me—just as my brother had
done only a couple hours earlier from my driveway. “She got them
big ole tits.”
I
got off at the end of Route 90 in Seattle and was almost used to his
foul body odor by then. Then I worked my way down the coast along
I-5. I’ve been living in San Diego for five months now, if you
can call sleeping on a flea-infested beaches and dumpster diving for
rotten scraps of food living. I can’t get a library card to get a fake
ID or register in a motel longer than a night or get a job because I
can’t afford the chance of my name winding up in a data base. I look
at guys for their tattoos, dreading the shamrock and three 6’s.
I think back to that semi driver’s words to me and I realize he was
right: “Hell, it ain’t never goin’ to end.”
Copyright 2007 by
Terry White
Terry
White teaches at a community college in northeastern Ohio. He has
been writing noir fiction for the past five years.
