The Art of Disposal (11 page)

Eddie said goodnight to us, patted us on the back, and told us how proud he was to have guys like us around. Guys you could trust. Outside on his fake grass-turfed front porch, I peeked back through the slit between the curtains of the living room window, and saw him sitting on the edge of his recliner, head in his hands, his body kind of heaving up and down.

Dan the Man drove Ricky's Park Avenue. He had to push the seat back pretty far and adjust all the mirrors. I thought about that drive I'd taken with Ricky in the very same car, and how he'd given Santa Claus twenty bucks—and how Santa said
God Bless You
to him.

Sometimes the fresh memories are the worst. It's best when they fade, when you have to really struggle to re-assemble the face, the mannerisms. For the first few months, it's far too easy to conjure up the ghosts. You feel like a stage director, running through the same precious scenes, again and again, until you have them just right.

The world felt especially dark and pointless. I'm sure to someone else right at that moment, it was a real swell night; maybe to some high school kid, parked on a hilltop with his hand in his girl's pants, and her lips on his neck. That's the thing about the world: there are millions of versions of it, all of them happening at the same time.

I tipped my head to the side and rested it on my fist, and watched the yellow line. The road was wet, and the wetness looked good on the black of the road. It made the tires of the Park Avenue hum. I thought about Ricky's kid, and that “video game machine” his old man had given him for Christmas. The kid was probably sitting at home with sore thumbs, clueless that his dear old dad was never coming home again.

Then I drifted, and the name Ricky made me think about Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball. I used to watch Lucy, but it never mesmerized me quite like Ward and June Cleaver did. Still, there's no denying the genius of Lucille Ball. One of the great ones.

And thinking about the great ones, I couldn't help but think about
the
Great One, Jackie Gleason. I love
The Honeymooners
as much as I love the
Beaver
. I used to count down the minutes until eleven pm, up in my bedroom at Stella and Carl's farmhouse, as I twisted the rabbit ears until Channel 3 came in…

Drum roll… fireworks exploding… cityscape… Jackie Gleason's face on the moon… announcer's voice: “Jackie Gleason! The Honeymooners… with the stars Art Carney… Audrey Meadows… and Joyce Randolph.”

Audrey Meadows was something else. She was the first television woman who was tough and bold, and there's nothing hotter than a broad who stands up for herself. And I dare anyone to come up with two better onscreen pals than Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton.

I was lost in all of these thoughts—Ralph and Ed and The Raccoon Lodge; how Fred and Ethel didn't like each other in real life; how Lucy and Desi could never stay away from each other, even after they split—when I first saw the red and blue lights in the side mirror.

The cop car was coming up fast. I sat up straight and chewed a fingernail. Dan the Man adjusted the rearview, and swallowed like a guy about to go on a job interview.

“He'll pass,” I said.

“No one else out here.”

“Something bigger, up the road.”

“Let's hope,” Dan said.

But the lights caught up and hovered there behind us, and the sirens chirped like some terrible spaceship. Dan the Man took a while to slow down, like he was using every last second to come up with a plan. The Park Avenue dipped down on my side as we finally came to a stop at the edge of the road.

“Stay cool,” Dan said.

I stared straight ahead, and I wondered if this might be my last night as a free man. I thought how I'd never make it in prison. I'm not so tough without a gun. If I ever did get sent up, I decided I'd just eat a bullet like Hemingway.

There was a rap on the window. Dan the Man rolled it down.

“Howdy,” the cop said. The dark purple sky and line of black trees behind him washed all detail from the figure.

“Evenin',” Dan said.

“This your car?” the cop said.

“Friend's letting me borrow it,” Dan said, kind of uneasy.

The cop leaned down and shined his flashlight into the car. It hit right in my eyes, and I winced. He held the beam there.

“Ronnie?” he said.

“Pete?”

He tipped his cap.

It was Greedy Pete Bruen, and I was never so glad to see him. He's a smug son of a bitch, but I could have shaken his hand right then I was so happy.

“Was I speeding, officer?” Dan the Man said, not meaning a word of it.

“No, no. Nothing like that. I seen the car, and I thunk to myself, 'hey, that's Ricky Cervetti's car. I wonder what he's up to out here on this lonesome road.'”

“Just business,” Dan the Man said.

“Seems to me he ain't on no kinda business at all.”

Dan the Man reached in his pocket and pulled out a thick wad of hundred-dollar bills. Then he licked his thumb. “Let's get this over with,” he said.

“Now, now. Just you wait a minute. Maybe that ain't what I meant at all. Maybe I'm just worried sick about Ricky.”

“Ricky skipped town,” Dan said.

“Shame,” Pete said. “A real shame.”

Dan coughed and rubbed at the side of his neck. “Ten of these,” he said, thumbing through the bills. “Will that ease your mind?”

Pete straightened up a little, and the keys on his belt jingled around. “Are you attempting to bribe an officer of the law?”

“That's rich,” Dan said. “Fifteen.”

“Well now, fifteen… fifteen,” Pete said, like he was chewing over an especially deep passage in a book. He shined the light right into my eyes again.

“Eddie's been good to you,” Dan the Man said. “Don't be a dumb piece of shit.”

Greedy Pete Bruen laughed. Then he flipped his mag-lite around and clonked Dan the Man on the side of the head with the butt end of it. It was just a soft tap, but Dan bit his lip and I saw the whites of his eyes in the blue darkness of Ricky's car.

“Shouldn't talk that way to a cop,” Pete said.

“Shouldn't hit one of Eddie's guys neither,” Dan said.

Pete Bruen turned the beam off and put the mag-lite back in the holster on his thick black belt. With the flashlight off, the highway looked so dark and strange that for a minute I had a vision of him pulling out his piece and wasting the two of us. I even imagined the headline and the photograph of our corpses in the morning paper.

“Twenty it is,” Pete said.

“Fifteen,” Dan said.

“Well now, my hearing ain't too good. And I got mighty attached to that number—twenty—it's got such a nice ring to it.”

Dan the Man counted out twenty hundred dollar bills and slapped them into Greedy Pete's sweaty paw.

“Someone tell you we'd be here?” Dan said.

“Nope. This here's just a case of being in the right place at the
wrong
time. Drive safe fellas. The roads are mighty wet.”

We stayed parked as Greedy Pete Bruen eased out and drove up the road, flashing the cruiser lights and chirping the horn like some eighth grade kid who'd stolen a cop car. I saw the brake lights of the cruiser, winking out on the small horizon between the black trees, and Dan the Man finally pulled back onto the road.

“Better Pete than a real cop,” I said.

“What a prick,” Dan said.

Greedy Pete gets a nice little stipend from Eddie to ignore our drug and shy operations, and to make sure our whorehouses don't get shut down. In the movies, they make it seem like dirty cops are as common as crows on a wire, but it's not that way at all. Most cops are upright citizens. But your Pete Bruen's, they figure the world's always had whorehouses, gambling, drugs—there's no harm in making a few bucks on something that can't be stopped.

“Money well spent,” I said.

Dan the Man turned and looked at me, his mouth half-opened and crinkled like a dried up flower.

“My money,” he said. “Your wallet ain't light.”

“Driver pays the ticket,” I said.

“You do the talking then—at Eugene's.”

I pictured the ice blue eyes of Eugene the Ukrainian. He was tall, and he had a bird-beak nose that was far too big for his rat-like cranium and soft chin.

“I'd rather give you the thousand bucks,” I said.

When we got rid of Moe, it was what we call a half job. Eugene charges five hundred bucks to rent out his basement chop shop. We do the dirty work, and he sits upstairs and watches the television—and usually eats a big bowl of soup. The guy is always eating some kind of nasty homemade stew, and the house always smells of garlic. Eugene burns the body parts and scatters the coals in different plots of his ten acre woodland, or melts them down in a barrel of acid.

But Eugene the Ukrainian will do the whole job for an even two-grand, and sometimes it's worth paying for a professional.

“Wish we could dump it and run,” Dan the Man said as we turned onto Huckleberry Lane.

“No doubt,” I said.

“Eddie. He worries more than a Jewish mother.”

“I wouldn't trust Eugene either.”

“Because he's Ukrainian?” Dan said with one eyebrow raised.

“Because he's a nut,” I said.

It got foggier the higher up we drove, and the road constricted like a dying vein. The trees looked more and more like the monsters I'd dreamed up as a child. I felt like that Harker guy, going up to Dracula's castle in a horse-drawn carriage.

“You can see why they believed in monsters back in the olden days,” I said as the Park Avenue eased through a particularly creepy stretch of road.

“That shit's real,” Dan the Man said. “If Hansel and Gretel would've knocked on Eugene's front door instead of that gingerbread house, it might've turned out worse.”

We rode the rest of the way in silence. I looked for owls but never saw any. I thought about what Dan meant, how we were going into the house of a real monster, and it got me thinking about the difference between man and beast. A bear will maul a guy, toss him around like a toy, eat little bits of him here and there—but he doesn't know what it means to have the same thing done to him. He can't put himself in your shoes.

Then the house was there in front of us: a run-down cabin with 55 gallon oil drums in the yard and moss for a roof. Dan put on the parking brake.

“You do the talkin',” he said.

We carried Ricky up to the front porch and laid him down. I rang the bell.

The door swung open. Eugene had been right there waiting for the sound. He had a bowl of soup in one hand (of course) and there were splotches of it here and there on his dirty white t-shirt. He ran a hand across his mouth, wiped it on his pant-leg, and offered me the offending appendage.

“Hallo, hallo!” he said in his thick accent.

All I could do was stare at the large hand, bony and white, and it felt like time stopped as I forced myself to reach out and shake it.

“Zuh verks?” Eugene said as we dragged Ricky's body into the house. “I talk to Eddie, and he say for zuh verks.”

“Yeah, the works,” I said, barely able to contain my disgust. I looked over at Dan the Man and he nodded and pushed his lips out a little, and I could almost hear him laughing.

“Vee sit down for to drink,” Eugene said, unfolding an arm like he was a realtor showing us the finer parts of the house.

There was a deep-set brick fireplace that looked like a portal straight to hell. There were stacks of old newspapers and National Geographics all along the baseboards. There were deer antlers (and full heads) on the walls, and a stuffed squirrel and bobcat on the mantelpiece.

I hate taxidermy. It's unholy to keep something from rotting away. When I was five, my foster parents had to up and leave a little truck stop while we were on vacation. There were animals on the walls, and when my Mom explained what they were doing there, I threw a fit and bawled until we were back in the car.

Me and Dan the Man sat down on the couch. I reluctantly made eye contact with an undead deer looking down at me. Eugene disappeared into the kitchen, and emerged a few minutes later with three cans of Olympia beer.

Dan cracked his open. I told Eugene I wasn't thirsty, and slid mine back to his side of the table. “Huh,” he said with a smile. “I heff to drink two.”

He tipped one back, and his Adam's apple pumped in and out as he guzzled the whole beer like he was filling up the gas tank of a car. When the can was empty, he crushed and tossed it into a tall cardboard box that lived between the stacks of old newspapers and magazines. There was a clink and a rattle, like the can had come to rest in a mass grave of fallen brothers.

“So that's where they go,” Dan the Man said.

Eugene didn't say anything. It was hard to tell if he was mad, or if he just didn't get the sarcasm. He belched and opened the second beer.

“Eddie is doing vell?” he said between sips.

Dan the Man looked over at me and raised his eyebrows.

“Happy as a baby,” I said. “And how have you been?”

“Could not complain,” Eugene said. “And no vun is listening to me any-vays.”

“Not with
that
accent,” Dan said quietly.

“How long will this take?” I said.

“No need to stay, friend. I do by myself. Good job.”

“I'd love to take you up on that,” I said, “but Eddie's a stickler.”

“Huh,” Eugene said. “Huh. Eddie bossing you round.”

“You said it. He's cracking the whip on this one.”

“Eddie crocking veep. Ha. Eddie crocking veep on you too, friend?” he asked Dan the Man.

“I ain't your friend,” Dan said. “Maybe you should quit jerking us off up here and get to work downstairs. We're paying customers.”

Eugene looked like a guy whose heart just broke in two. He took a deliberate sip of beer, and stared at us with the milky-cataract eyes of an old mutt.

“
You
carries heem down,” he said to Dan.

“Me carry him down?
Me
carry him?” Dan the Man said. He set his beer on the coffee table, leaned forward, and pointed at Eugene. “Listen creep, I carried him into your house. I'm payin' you cash to do a job. So hop to it, brother.”

The two of them stared at each other like a couple of baboons vying for control of a new territory.