Hooligans (34 page)

“You do that, hear?” he said. “Be sure to introduce yourself again. I‟m bad on names.” And he

vanished back inside.

41 RELICS

I started back toward Dunetown but when I got to the boulevard I went east instead of going back

toward town. I really didn‟t have anything to do after I left Skeeler‟s, but I had to put some distance

between me and Dunetown. I needed a little time to myself, away from Stick, Dutch, and the

hooligans. Away from Doe. Away from them all. I was tired of trying to make some sense out of a lot

of disparate jigsaw pieces, pieces like Harry Raines, Chief, and Stoney Titan. Like Donleavy and his

sweaty banking friend, Seaborn. Like Chevos and Nance, a badluck horse named Disaway, and a

black gangster I didn‟t even know whom everybody called Nose, but not to his face. I suddenly had

the feeling that using people had become a way of life for me and I didn‟t like the feeling and I

needed some room to deal with that. I needed to get back to my safe places again, at least for a little

while.

When I got to the Strip I headed south, putting the tall hotels that plundered the beach behind me. I

drove south with the ocean to my left, not sure where I was going. I just smelled the sea air and kept

driving. Finally I passed a decrepit old sign peering out from behind the weeds that told me I had

reached someplace called East Beach. It was desolate. Progress had yet to discover it.

I parked my car in a deserted public lot. Weeds grew up through the cracks in the macadam, and small

dunes of sand had been collected by the wind along its curbs. I sat looking out at the Atlantic for a

while. The sea here was calm, a mere ripple in the bright sunlight, and the beach was broad and clean.

It revived memories long buried, the good times of youth that age often taints with melancholy.

My mind was far from Dunetown. It was at a place called Beach Haven, a village on the Jersey coast

where I had spent several summers living on a houseboat with the family of my best friend in

grammar school. I couldn‟t remember his name but I did remember that his father was Norwegian and

spoke with a marvellous accent and wore very thick glasses and that the family was not in the least

modest and that he had a sister of high school age who thought nothing at all of taking a shower in

front of us. Sitting there in the hot sedan with sweat dripping off my chin, I also recalled that I had

spent a good part of that summer trying to hide a persistent erection.

After a while I got out and took off shoes, socks, jacket, and tie and put them in the trunk. I slammed

it shut, then opened it again, dropped my beeper in with them, and went down to the beach.

I rolled my pants legs to the knee and walked barefoot with the sand squeaking underfoot. I must have

walked at least a mile when I came upon a small settlement of summer cottages, protected by walls of

granite rock that were meant to hold back the ocean. It had been a futile gesture. The houses were

deserted. Several had already broken apart and lay lopsided and forlorn, awash with the debris of

tides.

One of them, a small two-bedroom house of cypress and oak, was still perched tentatively over the

rocks, its porch supported by six-by-sixes poised on the granite boulders. A faded sign, hanging

crookedly from the porch rail, told me the place was for sale, and under that someone had added, with

paint, the words “or rent.” There was a phone number.

I went up over the big gray rocks, climbed the deck railing, and looked through the place, a forlorn

and lonely house. The floor creaked and sagged uncertainly under each step and the wind, sighing

through its broken windows, sounded like the ghost of a child‟s summer laughter.

I stripped down to my undershorts, went down to the deserted beach, and ran into the water,

swimming hard and fast against the tide until arms and legs told me to turn back. I had to breaststroke

the last few yards and when I got out I was breathing heavily and my lungs hurt, but I felt clean and

my skin tingled from the saltwater. I went back up to the house and stretched out on the deck in the

sun.

I was dozing when the woman came around the corner of the house. She startled us both and as I so

rambled for my pants she laughed and said, “Don‟t bother. Most of the gigolos hanging around the

hotel pools wear far less than that.”

She was an islander, I could tell; a lovely woman, delicate in structure, with sculptured features

textured by wind and sun, tiny white squint-lines around her eyes, and amber hair coiffured by the

wind. I couldn‟t guess how old she was; it didn‟t matter. She was carrying a seine net—two five-foot

wooden poles with the net attached to each and topped by cork floats. The net was folded neatly

around the poles.

“I was halfway expecting my friend. He sometimes waits up here for me,” she said, peering inside

without making a show of it. Then she added, “Are you flopping here?”

I laughed.

“No, but it‟s a thought.”

She looked around the place.

“This was a very dear house once,” she said. She said it openly and without disguising her sadness.

“Do you know the owners?” I asked

“It once belonged to the Jackowitz family, but the bank has it now.”

Her sad commentary told rue all I needed to know of its history.

“What a shame. There‟s still some life left to it.”

“Yes, but no heart,” she said.

“Banks are like that. They have a blind appetite and no soul. They‟re the robots of our society.”

“Well, I see my friend down on the beach. I‟m glad you like the house.”

A skinny young man in cutoffs with long blond hair that flirted with his shoulders was coming up the

beach carrying a bucket. She went down over the boulders to the sand.

“Hey?” I said.

She turned and raised her eyebrows.

“Is your name Jackowitz?”

“It used to be,” she said, and went on to join her friend.

I got dressed and walked back through the surf to the parking lot. I found a phone booth that still

worked and called the number that was on the sign at the house, It turned out to be the Island Trust

and Savings Bank. I managed, by being annoyingly persistent, to get hold of a disagreeable little

moron named Ratcher who, I was told, was “in beach property”

“I‟m interested in a piece of land on East Beach,” I said. “It might have belonged to a family called

Jackowitz.”

I could hear papers rustling in the background.

“Oh, yes,” he said, probably after turning up the foreclosure liens. “I know the place.” I could tell he

knew as much about that cottage as I know about Saudi Arabian oil leases.

“Are you in real estate?” he asked curtly.

“No, I thought I might just rent it for the rest of the summer,” I told him.

“The place is condemned,” he said nastily. “And this establishment prosecutes trespassers.” He hung

up. I stood there for a minute or two, then invested another quarter and got Ratchet back on the phone.

“Ratcher?”

“Yes!”

“You‟re a despicable little asshole,” I said, and hung up.

I drove back down toward the beach and, by trial and error, found a neglected road that led to the

house and sat there, watching the woman whose name was once Jackowitz and her young man with

the long hair, dragging their seine nets slowly along the water‟s edge, picking the shrimp arid mullet

out after each drag and putting them in the bucket. After a while it started to rain and they quit. I

waved to them as they walked off down the beach. I‟m not sure they saw me but it would be nice to

think they did and that they knew the house still meant something to someone. Finally I drove back

toward town in the rain, feeling beach-tired but recharged.

I thought about that place a lot in the days that followed, but I never went back. I didn‟t have to.

Driving back to Dunetown, I realized I had left the safe places behind forever.

42

I drove back to the Warehouse, and into bedlam.

A dozen men, including a couple of brass buttons, were jammed in the doorway. There was a lot of

shoving, pushing, cursing, threatening. The Stick was standing outside, back from the crowd,

watching the melee with a smile.

“Be goddamned,” he said as I rolled up. “Dutch‟s put the arm on Costello and all his merry men!”

I jumped out of the car and we ran into the building.

A lot of racket from the back.

A cop stopped the Stick long enough to tell him they had Costello; his number one bodyguard and

shooter, Drack Moreno, who looked and talked like a moron but had a genius IQ; two of his top

button men, Silo Murphy, a.k.a. the Weasel, because he looked like one, and Arthur Pravano, whose

moniker was Sweetheart, for reasons I‟ll never understand; and two other musclemen. In addition,

they also had Chevos and Bronicata on tap with their various gunsels. Nance was missing, as was

Stizano.

A small army of twelve, all of them but Costello raising almighty hell.

We headed for the war room, which is exactly what it had turned into from the sound of things.

The hooligans were well represented: Pancho Callahan, Salvatore, Chino Zapata, Charlie One Ear,

Cowboy Lewis, and Dutch Morehead. Everyone but Kite and Mufalatta, who seemed to have

vanished from the earth. With the Stick and me, it kind of rounded the teams off at eight to eight.

The yelling, cursing, and threats had continued down through the Warehouse and into the war room,

which was as chaotic as the floor of the stock exchange at the closing bell.

Dutch had separated the big shots and shoved them into one of the cubicles. The gunsels were all in

the war room. Dutch was standing in front of the room bellowing like a wounded whale.

“Everybody ease off, y‟hear me, or some heads are gonna get loosened!” he roared.

The room settled down to a low rumble.

With Costello‟s bunch and the hooligans, the room was full of the meanest-looking gang of cutthroats

I‟ve ever seen gathered in one place.

I was standing in the doorway, eyeballing Costello and Chevos. In all the years I had been bonded to

this gang, I had never seen either of them closer than fleetingly and from across the street or through

binoculars. Now they were both fifteen feet away. I made no attempt to conceal my contempt for

them.

Costello alone seemed calm. He was a tall man and better looking than I would have liked, his sharp

features and hard-set jaw deeply tanned, his longish black hair bronzed by a lot of sun, his lean body

decked out in a blue blazer, a pale blue shirt open at the collar, white slacks, and white loafers. He

was one of those people whose age is superfluous. There were a lot of reasons to dislike him. Only his

brown eyes were a clue to his anger. They glittered with suppressed rage. My rage was open, my

hatred obvious, but I kept my mouth shut for the time being.

Chevos stood stoically in a corner of the cubicle, alone, staring at the wall, and Bronicata was

jabbering like a monkey in heat.

The rest of the Tagliani mob was dressed casually for the beach, looking like graduates of a Sing Sing

cellblock disguised as the Harvard crew team.

The hooligans rounded out the scene. A novice would have had one hell of a time separating the good

guys from the bad.

“Kick that door shut there, Pancho,” Dutch said, and Callahan closed the door.

Everybody chose up sides and lined up against opposite walls of the room, hooligans near the door,

Costello‟s gunsels against the far wall.

Cowboy Lewis, wearing aged jeans, a faded Levi‟s jacket, a Derringer-type cowboy hat, and a

brilliant red sunburn, was carrying a large grocery sack.

“We dumped „em comin‟ offa Costello‟s rowboat,” Cowboy said, in a voice that sounded like he

swabbed his throat with number four sandpaper. I was to learn that Costello‟s “rowboat,” as Lewis

had genteelly put it, was a sixty—foot yacht that slept ten.

Cowboy carried the brown paper bag to the front of the room and dumped its contents on Dutch‟s

desk

Eight pistols of every kind and calibre, slip knives, brass knucks, two rolls of quarters, and other

assorted tools of the trade. “The heavyweights were all light,” he said.

Dutch‟s eyebrows rose with the corners of his lips.

“Neat. Did you all hear the Russians re in Charleston or some such?” he asked nobody in particular.

Nobody answered, but there was a lot of grumbling and grousing.

“Definitely concealed weapons,” said Lewis, who was nursing a split lip.

“Where‟d ya get the fat lip?” Dutch asked.

“The little asshole with the mouse clipped me when I wasn‟t looking,” he said, jerking a thumb

toward one of the goons, who was wearing a black eye the size of a pancake. “1 had to use reasonable

force to subdue him.”

The little asshole with the mouse got very tense.

“Okay, let‟s start makin‟ a list‟r two here,” said Dutch. “First off, we got concealed weapons—”

“They‟s all registered,” said one of Costello‟s rat pack, cutting Dutch off.

“Shut up,” Sweetheart Pravano said quietly. “L.C. says we don‟t say nuthin‟ to these monkeys,

period.”

Salvatore‟s eyes narrowed to slits and his fists balled and un-balled. Cowboy Lewis stared at a spot in

the corner of the ceiling and looked bored. Callahan just chuckled, and Chino Zapata took the gold

tooth out of the front of his bridgework, put it in the change pocket of his jeans, and shook out his