The Art of Disposal (20 page)

“Yep,” I said.

“Because of a dog?”

“Eddie likes dogs,” I said.

We spent a good part of the drive discussing the upcoming camera truck robbery, and Carlino said that Bullfrog was all right, that he was more solid than Max Finn, and he could see why we did business with him, even if he was black.

“Look at you,” I said. “Nobel Peace Prize all the way.”

When we opened the front door of the house, the smell stabbed your nose like the blade of a dull knife. Carlino gagged and put his face in the crook of his elbow.

“How long's he been up here?” he said.

“Two weeks.”

“I'll wait outside, Sam.”

“Oh no you don't. Conese might run things different in New York, but around here we
all
do the dirty work.”

The basement stairs felt darker and danker than they ever had before. We rounded the corner and the light of day strained hard against the dirty panes of the windows along the basement ceiling. I heard a steady electronic humming, but couldn't place it. Then there was a loud crack, and a frantic flapping, and we both flinched.

“Goddamn bird,” Carlino said.

A sparrow had crashed into one of the tiny windows. It hopped and flapped, and continued to beat itself senseless against the glass. Carlino walked over to Eugene's workbench, hit the stop button on the boombox, and the humming of the cassette deck ended.

I walked to the middle of the dark room and pulled the short metal BB cord of that single hanging bulb. The light came on, and at that very moment an airy cry broke free from the back corner of the room, so awful and unexpected that Carlino screamed, and my arms and neck erupted with goosebumps.

Griffin Shaw, or, more accurately, a skeleton resembling him, stared at us with the eyes of a cornered possum. His mouth, hands, and arms were stained and dirty. He tried to speak, but his parched mouth could issue no further sound.

Carlino doubled over, threw up, and turned around.

Then I saw what he'd seen: the picked over corpse of Eugene the Ukrainian, lying on the floor near the cage. How exactly it had gotten over there, ten feet from the cassette deck where Eddie had put a bullet into its brain, is still a mystery. I believe that the shot didn't kill him—not right away—and that Eugene crawled about on the floor for a while, after we'd left, and made his unfortunate way over to the hungry hillbilly.

The corpse was mostly intact. Griffin Shaw had used his bare hands to pick out and dig at the best parts. The eyes were gone, and the chest was somewhat open.

Carlino dry-heaved, stood fully up, dragged a sleeve across his mouth and walked over to the cage. He pulled his .38 Smith and Wesson. Shaw turned away from it. His eyes bulged with fear, and then they closed up again, slowly, like a flower in the evening. The skeletal hands gripped hard on the bars of the cage as Carlino mercifully squeezed the trigger.

We set the fire, and we drove away, and it was the loneliest car ride I've ever known. The road was a hazy thing wrapped around me, pulling me down, down, back to the city. I looked over once and saw Carlino, really working those middle finger nails into each of his thumbs, like there might be a prize if he got through enough skin.

“One time I helped Dante hold a guy still, while Mudcap ran his right hand through a meat grinder. We put a paperback book in the guy's mouth, so's he'd have something to bite down on.”

“What book?” I said.

“The Old Man and the Sea.” Carlino lit a cigarette, and stared straight ahead. I could almost feel him thinking about Griffin Shaw's gaunt bloodstained face, and I could hear the humming of that dead cassette tape, and I could see the sparrow running itself into the windowpane.

“Over a dog?” Carlino said.

“Eddie likes dogs,” I said.

We rode in silence the rest of the way back to the city, and the night was mysterious, and I thought about giant moths with eyespots that fool predators, and I pictured hot summer days when my Grandpa Jim would step barefoot onto horned green tomato worms—which aren't really worms at all, but caterpillars that become those giant moths—and then I thought how those moths will die if you touch them and rub off the gritty cinnamon coating of their wings.

“Let's stop at Ace's,” Carlino said.

It was after hours, three in the morning; the only places pouring booze were pouring it illegally, and one of them was Ace's Card Room—of which we were silent business partners.

When we walked in, there was Greedy Pete Bruen, wasting the paycheck that should have been going to his wife and kid, looking lower than a caged ape, with one hand on his forehead and a fan of cards in the other. He looked up and saw me.

“Ronnie!” he said. “Spot me a twenty for a shot and a beer?”

“You down that much?” I said.

“I'm coming back,” he said. A degenerate gambler is always coming back.

“I can't spot you twenty,” I said, “but I'll buy you a beer.”

“What a guy,” Greedy Pete said.

I went over to the window and ordered him a tall Budweiser, served in one of those wobbly plastic cups like you get at the ball game, and I spilled some of it here and there as I bumped into losers on my way back to the table. And then I saw, in the back corner of the room, the same fat bastard I'd seen in New York, at that table outside of Calasso's.

I handed Pete his beer, and listened to him bitch about his lousy hand, and then watched him go bust when he tried to double-down.

“You know that guy?” I said to Pete. “Mustache. Fat. Back of the room?”

Pete looked over his shoulder. “What guy?”

Carlino walked up, carrying the shot and beer he'd bought for himself. I pushed him out of the way a little to get a view of that table again, and when I did, it was empty.

“Easy, Sam,” Carlino said. He did his shot, and gritted his teeth together, and said “sssszzzzzzzzzz” like it burned going down.

“You see that guy?”

“What guy?” Carlino said. He guzzled some beer.

“He's gone,” I said, looking around in every corner of the seedy smoke-filled room. “Fat guy. Mustache. Bald.”

“Not my type,” Carlino said.

“I saw that same fat bastard outside of Calasso's.”

“It's in your mind,” Carlino said. “There ain't no shortage of fat, bald, mustached motherfuckers in the world.”

“He's right,” Greedy Pete said. “Sounds like half the force.”

“Anyone like that on Frank's crew?” I said to Carlino.

Carlino thought about it, drank a few sips. “Jack Lomand, maybe.”

“Who's he?”

“Contractor. Old school. Cold-blooded. But I ain't seen him in a long time, and Frank's got no reason to send him here. Lighten up, Sam.”

Greedy Pete talked Carlino into lending him two hundred bucks, and they drank a few beers (that Pete paid for with the new loan) and Carlino played some cards. Then we split up, and I drove back home and sacked out for a good six hours. When I woke up at noon, a sparrow was sitting on my windowsill, staring at me with a steady eye as black as a bead of polished onyx.

If Eddie was scared of all the changes that Frank Conese was making, he didn't show it. One night he called an all-hands-on-deck meeting at the office to discuss the great camera robbery. Eddie waved a cigar around, and set it into the ashtray, and picked it up again and again as he spoke; but for the whole length of the meeting he never lit it, or even took it out of the cellophane.

Dan the Man should've been there, instead of at home, on the sofa, sick from chemo. I watched the angelfish drift back and forth, and I imagined him cracking some joke at Carlino's expense. “
Nice watch… your girl get that for you on the Home Shopping Network?
”

I must've drifted far into my daydreams, because Eddie slapped his desk and said, “someplace you'd rather be, Champ?”

I told him of course not. He asked me to run through the plan.

“Sure thing,” I said. “D-T and Finn-tastic are gonna have a fender bender right near the covered bridge, conveniently blocking the road. Me and Bullfrog are tailing the truck. Once we have him boxed in, boom: done deal.”

“What if some do-gooder shows up first?”

“No one uses that road. Not that late at night,” I said.

“The rodeo's in town this week,” Bullfrog said.

“I hate the rodeo,” Carlino said. “Bunch of dickheads pretending to be cowboys.”

“They might be using that road,” Eddie said.

“So we move the cars and wave 'em through,” Max Finn said.

Max Finn was short and skinny, and his nose terminated in a point so sharp it might hurt if you ran into it. He was always paying some girl to be with him, on account of being too ugly and annoying to get it any other way. I always felt kind of bad for the girls when he'd bring them into the Totsy, hanging off of his bony arm, trying not to roll their eyes.

“If any rodeo clowns show up, use your goddamn brains and deal with it,” Eddie said. “Now, once the driver stops the truck—”

“—We tell him he's done for the night,” I said.

“And if he don't want to play nice?”

“We kill him,” Max Finn said, with shiny eyes.

From there on, the plan was simple. Me and Carlino drive the truck out to Creeping Jody's warehouse and park it there over night. We unload the cameras. The next night, we dump the empty truck along a different country road (at least a hundred miles away) and forget we ever saw it.

These kinds of crimes are the bread and butter of the mob. It's what we do best: taking things away from the people who rightfully earned them. Computers, televisions, coffee, cigarettes, Armani suits, razor blades, credit card numbers. One time, years ago, Tall Terry got a tip on a shipment of commemorative Elvis Presley plates. They were God-awful, with an air-brushed King standing on a Hawaiian beach. Eddie gave one to Irene. The rest of them (twenty two hundred plates) went to a Mexican named Luis who sells hot goods for us at the flea market. He took all the risk, and we kept sixty percent of the dough. We made fifty grand on that deal.

But crimes don't always go the way you plan them.

The night of the robbery showed up, and I stopped by Dan the Man's house to see how he was doing. I was going to bring Dotty a card, but all of the cards at the grocery store had bad calligraphy and sappy doves, and rolling waves, and trite sentiments. So I went with some Asian Lilies. There's never been a wrong time for flowers.

Dotty said he was sleeping, but she'd wake him up. I told her no way; let the old fart get some rest. She asked me in, and we went to the kitchen, and I watched her saw through the stems of the flowers with a toothy bread-knife, and place the bouquet into a square glass vase with cold tap water.

“I brought him a book,” I said.

I'd picked it up at a second-hand store.
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
. Dan hadn't read any poetry, and if a man's gonna die and he only gets to read one poem before he goes, he could do a whole lot worse than Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

I hugged Dotty and left her on the front porch holding that book to her chest like it was a precious baby, and she waved goodbye like a sad mother who wished her grown son would only stay for a little while longer. Just a little while longer…

The Totsy was full of Friday night drunks, and when I eased into the booth where Carlino and Max Finn (and his newest whore) were seated, I could smell it on all of them.

“Relax, Sam. I only had three,” Carlino said.

“That's three too many,” I said. “We're on the clock.”

“We're good,” Max said. He looked at the whore. “
Real
good,” he said. The girl hugged up on him and kissed his neck, but with all of the thrill of a guy taking out the trash on a Tuesday morning. She checked her watch a lot too.

“We need to talk,” I said to Max, and slid back out of the booth, making him understand that he was supposed to follow me. I heard him say, “be right back, babe,” and it made me want to knock that razor sharp nose right off of his ugly melon.

When I had him alone in the hallway that led back to the restrooms, I slammed him against the wall and asked him how he ever got to be so dumb.

“What did you tell her?” I said; my forearm under his chin.

“She don't know nothing!” he said. I let go of him, and he rubbed his neck and panted like a dog in the desert. Then the anger showed up, and he asked me just who did I think I was anyway to be pushing him around like that? He worked for Frank Conese, and I best start remembering it.

You can't get through to a guy like Max Finn. All you can do is hope that nature takes care of them for you—and it usually does. I told him that he better hope he was being square with me; that if she knew a goddamn thing then he might as well call up her mom and tell her she wasn't ever coming home.

When we got back to the booth I told the girl it was time to be going, and she didn't look too upset about it.

“What about my money?” is all she said.

“How much does he owe you?” I said.

“Three hundred.”

“Give her the money,” I said to Max Finn.

“Are you kidding me? Not till later tonight, man. She hasn't earned it yet.”

“Oh yes she has. Just look at you.” I opened my wallet and handed her three bills. “You can pay me back,” I said to Max Finn. “Now beat it,” I said to her, and she shuffled off across the crowded tavern.

Max Finn was red. He got up in my face, but I gripped him tight by the wrists and whispered to him, “maybe I'll tell Frank Conese what a nitwit you really are, and me and Carlino'll dig you a shallow grave somewhere, huh? Frank Conese needs me. He doesn't give two shits about you.”

Max looked over at Carlino; looked back at me. My threat wormed its way through his miserable brain. I let go of his wrists. He sat back down and cracked his neck a few times.

“We good?” I said.

“Yeah. We're good,” he said.

It was nice—chatting with Bullfrog in the front seat of my parked car, waiting at the 76 station for the camera truck to pass by. I had the window down and my arm hanging out. The air was still and cool like a freshly sliced melon, and you could smell the honeysuckle from the trees that lived away from the gas station lights, where the world was dead and black.