“It’s too dangerous.”
“I can help you. I need to help you,” he said, his words both a promise and a plea.
The idea of help was so foreign to me, so utterly unavailable, that I had forgotten how badly I yearned for it. There was nothing adventurous about the bloody web I was caught in, nothing exciting about the black void my family had disappeared into. I was trapped all alone inside my reality and had ceased hoping that it would ever be any different. But now Doug was offering to pierce that sick bubble and join me. I doubted that he could help-I doubted that anyone could help me besides myself-but I didn’t want to be alone anymore. “You can’t tell Max anything.”
“I won’t, I swear.”
“As long as I’m confessing, I. . I think I might love him. Maybe.”
“Yeah,” Doug sighed. “Me too.”
There was a pause between us, and I glanced at Doug inspecting the devil mask. “Doug. . are you gay?”
“I don’t know yet. I might be,” he said. “Age sixteen totally sucks when it comes to absolutes.”
“But you just said you love Max. That sounded pretty absolute.”
“No I didn’t. I said ‘me too,’ in agreement with your ‘maybe.’ What I meant is that I have a somewhat murky and as yet undefined feeling for him.”
“But you also like him as a friend, right?”
“Of course! You and Max are my. .,” and he stopped before saying “only friends,” and stared at the floor. When he looked up, there was certainty in his eyes, and he said, “If I were the sidekick, do you know what my advice would be?”
“What?”
“That it’s time to confront your enemies. You’ve been chased enough,” he said. “Remember when we watched Shane? How Alan Ladd finally straps on his six-shooter and faces down the bad guys who have been giving the innocent farm family shit for two hours? Remember The Pope of Greenwich Village with Mickey Rourke?”
“And Eric Roberts,” I said, seeing what he was leading to.
“At the end, Mickey Rourke walks into the mob boss’s private club and tells him to go bite himself because there’s nothing else he can do. But at least it’s something.”
I thought of Uncle Buddy at my house and Detective Smelt at Twin Anchors.
They didn’t know where I was but I knew where they were.
Just like that, Doug had given me an idea.
Maybe Batman was onto something with the whole sidekick thing.
20
The morning officially began with sunlight tiptoeing through the caged windows of the warehouse, throwing crisscross shadows on the cement floor, but by then I’d been up for hours. Waking early is what I do and who I’ve become out of fear and necessity. My brain, which clicks off at night like a low battery and pops back on when it’s recharged, is especially active at the very start of a day. Conscious while the rest of the world sleeps, I make decisions, filter facts, and steel my gut for what lies ahead.
Today I began at four a.m.
I did a hundred push-ups on the cold floor and a hundred sit-ups.
Afterward I cracked the notebook, searching for guidance.
First I learned that the Bird Cage Club, where I was scheduled to meet Knuckles and his counterpart, Strozzini, was located at the very top of an old skyscraper in the Loop, on the thirty-third floor. It provided a general location (but oddly, no address) and a warning-never enter through the main entrance, only through a Capone Door hidden in the adjoining barbershop. Next, I studied the chapter titled “Loro-Them,” which explained in detail the many different groups regarded as a threat to the Outfit and how to avoid or neutralize them. It includes sections on the police (“Bribing a Cop”), the FBI (“Planting a Mole”), methods to avoid prison sentences (“Feigning Insanity and Faking Cancer”), dealing with rats (“Dead”), and on and on. Each section echoed Doug’s advice-when all else fails, take the fight to loro-them.
At seven a.m. I was parked down the street from my house.
Balmoral Avenue was deserted and the streetlights buzzed off.
The.45 was freshly loaded and I flicked the safety on.
The homes on my street are too tall and far apart to travel from roof to roof, like at the bakery. Cutting through the backyard meant an exposed patch of grass, and besides, there was no way I was going through those dark cellar doors again. In the end, there were no safe options to approaching the house-it was all risky-so I lifted the gun, crossed the street, and walked up to the front door. I was prepared to kick it off its hinges and enter swinging, but there was no need-it pushed open easily. I hadn’t been inside my home since I’d fled from Ski Mask Guy in the pouring rain. Now I had a gun, and more than that, a dangerously low tolerance for bullshit. Uncle Buddy and Greta had taken over our house-our damn house! — and they were now going to tell me everything they knew about my family, or else. Any anxiety I’d felt about shooting that freak had vanished like smoke up a chimney.
I entered imitating a cop flick, looking left to right with the.45 raised in both hands, and froze.
What I saw was a funhouse deja vu of the last time I walked through the door-complete disarray-except that there were no longer any signs of violence. The shades were drawn, curtains pulled, and the odor of old socks and dead cigarettes was pervasive. Yawning pizza boxes and greasy carryout cartons competed with crushed beer cans and empty liquor bottles, with ashtrays overflowing on every surface.
Just like last time, noise cut through the gloom.
It was clearly a voice; talking, stopping, repeating itself.
There was desperation in it, and it was on TV.
I walked over to the big flat screen where I’d watched so many movies with my family and recognized the scene immediately-one man, lanky and drawn, spread out on a chaise lounge, raging helplessly at a smaller, darker man who stood by watching coolly. The DVD was stuck, playing over and over again, with the man on the chaise saying, “I’m your older brother, I was stepped over!. . I’m your older brother, I was stepped over!. . I’m your older brother, I was stepped over!. .”
I lifted the remote control and pushed a button, the scene went forward, and the smaller man said quietly, “It’s the way Pop wanted it.”
The lanky man clawed at the air around him, jittery and pissed, saying, “It wasn’t the way I wanted it! I can handle things! I’m not dumb, Christ, like everyone says! I’m smart. . and I want respect!”
That scene in The Godfather, Part II, is the reckoning between the younger brother, who has taken control of the Mafia, and his older brother, who was passed by-the exact opposite of my dad’s and Uncle Buddy’s relationship. There was a stink of fantasy to it, as if my uncle had been obsessively staring at what he hoped for. I turned it off and the screen went black, further darkening the room. In the sudden quiet I heard the tink of cutlery. I checked the gun and moved toward the kitchen door, which I opened silently to Uncle Buddy sitting alone at the table, shoveling cereal into his unshaven face. A box of Froot Loops sat to his right, a half-drunk bottle of vodka to his left, and a burning cigarette in an ash-packed coffee cup before him. I pointed the gun at him and the motion drew his attention. He looked up, bleary-eyed, and said, “Greta left me.”
I held the kill-shot position just like I’d seen in movies, uttering the only thing that occurred to me. “Greta’s smarter than I thought.”
Uncle Buddy nodded slowly. “I deserve that,” he muttered, in a voice that was sincere and bitter and completely wasted. “I ruined it. I ruin everything.”
“Where are my parents and Lou?”
“You know what Greta told me before she took off? She said, ‘Even if you had gotten your hands on that notebook, you would have screwed it up!’ She spit at me and said, ‘Your old man and your brother were right, Benito. . you were born to mix dough!’” He took a swig of vodka and said, “So, anyway. At least she gave me the ring back. I wonder where I put it. .”