“I know I don’t have to hide anything,” Manglevine said. “My mind is clean.”
“Jesus, Bart, what happened to you? They’ll charge you with manslaughter. Maybe worse.”
“I needed a witness.”
When his father shook his head, Luke understood that he had gotten it wrong. Luke was the witness Manglevine intended, not him. Luke was the one who now saw.
During the drive home Luke waited for a reprimand that didn’t come.
“Are you certain he didn’t lay hands on you? There’s no shame if he did,” his father said. “It’s important you trust me.”
Luke’s eyes climbed the kudzu-smothered ridge that ran alongside the highway. Silvered by moonlight, the vines’ tresses draped down from the peak like hair from the back of an old woman’s head.
“He told me something.”
Luke’s father turned from the wheel. “About McCracken?” His teeth gleamed yellow by the light of the dash.
“No,” Luke said. “But it seemed true.”
“What did he say?”
Luke breathed through his mouth. The headlights lit up a road-hazard sign that had been bludgeoned with birdshot.
“Why did you quit as sheriff?”
Luke’s father flipped on the blinker to turn down their road. “Was tonight not enough to prove the headache it can be?” A few drops plopped down on the cab of the truck. A breeze combed through the overhead branches. Luke imagined putting his palms to the roof of the truck to feel the sprinkles vibrate against the metal.
“Listen,” his father said. “Bart always had a sincere way of putting things. He’s been cut off from the world for so long there’s no telling what he’s convinced himself of. The important thing is that you handled yourself well.”
He gave his father the nod he expected. As they pulled into their driveway, the porch lights were on. “Looks like your momma got the generator running.”
Luke turned his fork over in his plate. The last of the ice cream pooled with the remaining crumbs from his slice of peach pie. His mother took both their plates to the sink and sprayed them with the nozzle. His father had gone out to secure the shed and refill the generator to last them through the night.
“Have you ever heard of a man named James Polity?” Luke spoke to the back of his mother’s head.
She stopped at the sink, letting the water run for a few more seconds. “What makes you ask?” She turned to her son.
Luke folded his napkin, corner to corner. “I heard something once. At school.”
“That was a long time ago,” she said, drying her slender fingertips on the end of her shirt. “Such an awful mess.”
“So it’s true,” Luke said, “he killed him?”
She faced her son and sighed. “Luke, you need to understand something. There are truths you tell and truths you don’t.” She stepped forward and reached across the table to thumb her son’s chin. “James Polity is one you don’t. Do you understand?”
Luke nodded as if he did.
That night, Luke sat up in his bed. Outside the diesel generator buzzed. He flicked on his bedside lamp to give his mind sturdy shapes to settle on. The soft light shone on the half-open closet door, and he studied his belt hanging on the knob, how the buckle dangled just above the sliver of dark around the frame. Once you take the names away from things, the more jagged and alive they become. A bedroom is just another room among the rooms of other houses. Father just another word for a man who once wore a badge and a gun.
“Manglevine,” Luke whispered, and he rolled toward the window.
Fang barked from the back porch, fending off phantom threats in the dark — a raccoon sifting stray bits of trash, the stink of a creeping possum. Luke closed his eyes to the black pane and imagined the long ravine with its treetops that connected one crest to the other, their rainslick stepping stones so hazardous and thrilling to cross.
© 2017 Dominic Russ-Combs
Precision Thinking
by Jim Fusilli
This first Jim Fusilli story for EQMM is set in the 1940s in “Narrows Gate,” a fictionalized version of Hoboken, New Jersey, the author’s hometown. Narrows Gate was also the setting of his well-received novel of that title, and of the short stories “Chellini’s Solution” (chosen for 2007’s Best American Mystery Stories) and the Edgar-nominated “Digby, Attorney at Law.”
Delmenhorst Flooring had its warehouse on Observer Road in Narrows Gate, across from the clanging Erie-Lackawanna switching yard. Founded in 1921 by Hans-Josef Bamberg, a German immigrant, Delmenhorst was, for many years, northern New Jersey’s largest dealer of Armstrong printed and molded inlaid linoleum. Prior to World War II, it was a prosperous enterprise. It sold and installed quality flooring at a fair price.
Operating out of a candy store a short walk from the warehouse, Mimmo and the crew took notice. Delmenhorst trucks came and went without interference, and its salesmen called on customers throughout the county and as far west as the Pennsylvania border. To the crew, this meant its trucks could cart cigarets, liquor, auto supplies, and whatever else they boosted, and its salesmen could case homes for jewelry, silver, and furs. Since Delmenhorst also put down linoleum in the bars and clubs the crew owned, in a sense, they were already partners. The German had his hands in Sicilian pockets.
Bamberg lived on the other side of the Hudson on Riverside Drive, a big house. He took the Narrows Gate ferry twice a day. Shortly after Germany declared war on the U.S. in late ’41,
he made a one-way trip, going head over heels into the icy, choppy river. By the time his frozen body bobbed up under the West Side piers, nobody gave a damn.
The bosses put Santo Rizzato in charge of the linoleum business. From a desk in the Buchanan Bus Lines maintenance shop at the north end of the mile-square city, Rizzato managed the soldiers who ran the whores and the card games in the flophouses under the viaduct, plus he had every bus driver and mechanic paying down in slow motion what they borrowed to bet prizefighting, horse races, football, and whatnot. Rizzato carried a clipboard, which gave the crew the illusion that he was some sort of businessman. He went to work immediately, moving downtown to an office above Delmenhorst’s warehouse.
Rizzato replaced Delmenhorst’s German salesmen with locals, most Sicilians and Italians who couldn’t spell linoleum on a bet but had a genius for theft. They began to tool around the county in the company’s long Buick wagons so roomy a pair of sofas could ride in back. Those Buicks, like the trucks with Delmenhorst Flooring painted on the sides, made the crew invisible to the cops’ eyes. What they pilfered rode in broad daylight under not much more than flimsy tarps.
Soon, though, the cops started fielding complaints even from the people who hadn’t been robbed: the linoleum didn’t fit, curled at the edges, was mismatched; the whole apartment smelled like glue for weeks. The Narrows Gate cops picked up one guy, a ciuccio two years off the boat, after his Buick rolled backwards down the yellow-brick hill at Sybil’s Point and crash-landed in a park filled with mothers and baby strollers; it knocked the Good Humor man into a flower bed. In back of the Buick, the cops found a four-burner stove and two bowling balls. In a big display at the precinct, Rizzato fired the thief and promised to make good for damages to public and private property. Later at Buchanan Bus, the ciuccio was hung feet-first from an engine hoist. As the muscle went about their work, Rizzato informed them that the word pinada had its roots in Italy, a pignatta being a terra-cotta pot that breaks when smacked just so.