“Leukemia,” he said, his voice as cold as wind blowing over an iceberg. “Don’t push me, Raines.”
“I was in the Med the other day,” I said. “The emergency room...”
“I heard about that, too.”
“When they finished with the X-rays and the bandages, I had a little extra time, so I visited a few people, most of them from South Memphis.”
“We’re done here,” he said.
I shook my head. “Take a ride with me.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Take a ride with me.”
He grimaced. “To the Med?”
“One hour. That’s all I’m asking. Then I go away and keep my mouth shut. You don’t have to worry about offending your Uncle Tony...”
“I’m not that worried.”
“Then it’ll save you the trouble of having me killed.”
My heart hammered and a little voice in the back of my head shouted that the only thing I was going to accomplish here was to get myself murdered, but I held my gaze as steady as I could. Then he caught me off guard.
“Tony says you lost a child.”
Even though all that was over twenty years ago, I felt as if he’d sucker- punched me in the center of my chest. “A daughter. Stillborn,” I said. “It’s not the same.”
He nodded more to himself than me. “You ride with us and I’ll give you an hour.” Then he grabbed my wrist and leaned across the booth so that a passerby might have thought he was about to kiss me. “And if you ever try to use my son’s memory to jerk me around again, I won’t bother having someone kill you. I swear to God, I’ll do it myself.”
It didn’t take an hour. After twenty minutes on the pediatrics wing of the Regional Medical Center, he grabbed my arm and stared at me with the wild, trapped eyes of a rabbit caught in a snare.
“I got to get out of here,” he said. “I can’t breathe. I just can’t get any air.”
Frankie Gee and another, younger soldier who’d come up with us turned to me as Vinnie bolted past them, his head down, his hand clamped over his mouth. When I tried to follow him to the elevator, Frankie blocked my path.
“Why’d you bring him here?” Frankie asked, his dark eyes glassy beads set in fat. “What the hell did you think you were doing?”
“Trying to save my life,” I said.
Frankie’s expression made it clear that he no longer thought of me as a friend. “Yeah, well good luck with that,” he said, but he stepped out of my way.
Vinnie Montesi sat on a brick wall just outside the entrance. A cigarette dangled from his lips, and he was frantically rummaging through his coat pockets.
“Lost my damn lighter again,” he said. “Did I have it at the Waffle House?”
I shook my head and handed him my Zippo. “You all right?”
He fired the tip of his cigarette, took a drag, and exhaled towards the gray clouds that drifted from across the river. “I spent two eternities in these frigging places. Michael was in Baptist Memorial,” he said. “But they’re all the same. They feel the same. Like hopelessness and loss and bad memories. When Mikey died, he held my hand. He was too weak to squeeze it or anything but he held on as long as he could.”
“I didn’t...”
He flicked his hand to tell me to shut up. Then when Frankie Gee and the other guy stomped towards us, ready to break the rest of my ribs, he flicked his hand again.
“Those kids up there. We gave them cancer, didn’t we? The stuff we dumped at the Park.”
“Not all of them,” I said.
“That’s why God did it,” he said. “Right? That’s why Mikey got leukemia. We dumped that crap and made a lot of people sick, so Mikey got cancer.”
“I’m not saying that.”
“Never mind that Paul Cardo’s been running this scam since the seventies or that my Uncle Tony raked in his share of the profits. I took my cut for six years so God killed my kid.” He exhaled smoke at the sky. “But what are you going to do? He’s God, right? The boss of bosses. You eat his crap and pretend you’re thankful.”
“I didn’t bring you here to hurt you,” I said and wondered if my feeling sympathy for Vincent Montesi meant I’d gone crazy or the world had turned upside down.
“You know what I think? I don’t think God waits until the afterlife to punish you. I think he does it right here.” He flicked his cigarette away. “Way I see it? Screw eternity. Right here, right now is hell.”
“Maybe not,” I said, seizing what might have been the only opportunity I had to keep myself out of that cold, dark river. “Maybe every day is purgatory,” I said, grabbing at the shadow of a rope. “Maybe it’s your chance to put right what you did the day before.”
It was pretty lame, I guess. Something I might have heard on a late-night drunk or read on a men’s room wall. But it was all I had, and I was betting my life on it.
“Yeah?” he said, frowning, wanting to believe it. “Your chance to do what? Some kind of penance?”
I knew he’d taken the bait. “Maybe.”
A smile flittered around his lips and then died. “So maybe you can set things right, get to heaven where you can see...” He let the thought fade and buried it alongside the smile. “Shutting down a business like that would cause problems. Paulie wouldn’t be happy. I’d have to deal with it.” He closed his eyes, nodded to himself. “But you know that, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Three weeks,” he said. “That’s what I need to make sure there’s nothing that could cause me or Tony any trouble. Three weeks. Then you can call the Feds, let them start getting that garbage out of there. That’s the only deal I’m going to offer.”
The people in South Memphis had been poisoned for over thirty years so I figured three weeks wouldn’t matter that much one way or the other. If saving my life — and Demond and Bop-Bop and Don Ellis’s, I told myself to feel a little better — meant that some of the guilty would go free? Well, they always do, don’t they?
“All right,” I said.
He stood then, motioned for Frankie and the other guy to head to the parking garage. There was no question about it. I wasn’t invited.
“You really believe that?” he asked. “That every day is one more chance to do penance, settle old debts?”
“I want to,” I said.
He turned away and left me alone. But that was okay. I knew what I’d just done and that people were going to die because of it, and alone seemed like the right place for me to be.
How would you want it to end? If it could turn out any way you wanted, what would be different? I wasted a lot of time asking myself those questions. In the end, this is what happened.
Paulie Cardo and his mistress were found dead in her condo. According to Nate Randolph, the girl had been shot twice in the chest and hadn’t suffered. They kept Paul Cardo alive for a while. After a couple of beers, I can tell myself that I’m not responsible, but I know better. When you suggest the idea of penance to a violent man, there’s no reason to expect that his version of penance would be anything but violent.
In a perfect world, Demond and Bop-Bop would have realized the error of their ways. But of course, that didn’t happen. Six weeks ago, Bop-Bop was arrested for slitting Demond’s throat in a South Memphis pool hall. Most likely it was over an argument about the profits from their thriving drug business, but in perverse moments I wonder if Bop-Bop didn’t finally get tired of Demond’s vocabulary lessons and decide to silence him forever.
Vinnie Montesi has put on a few pounds and looks healthier, but I’d given him a balm for his conscience, not the key to a change of life. If you buy smack or coke or rent a prostitute anywhere from Dyersburg to Biloxi, odds are you’re still lining Vinnie’s pockets. Don Ellis committed suicide when the papers broke the story about chemical dumping in South Memphis. Maybe he did it because of the guilt or because he wanted to save his sons and his ex-wife from Vinnie Montesi’s brand of penance. Whatever the reason, I like to think that in the end, Don Ellis found his courage.