Dominic turned face-front again.
“Anyway, I tell this P.O. of yours, ‘Off my back.’ He still calls. Why? ’Cuz you’re not spending six weeks in some halfway house he’s probably got a piece of, if you know what I mean.”
“I appreciate what you’re doing,” Abatangelo said. “And I’ll call him. Today.”
Dominic shook his head. “I’m not doing this for you, you know. I’m doing it for your mother, God rest her soul.”
He led Abatangelo three blocks through North Beach. Traffic sat stalled on Columbus, horns blared, the sidewalks thronged with bobbing crowds. Abatangelo found himself clutching his paper sack, a yardbird reflex.
Dominic resumed: “Don’t mind Nina, okay? It’s just, I mean, not to make you feel bad, but near the end, your mother lived like a squirrel. And what there was to get, your sister got. Feds took your share. Agents came to probate court, served their papers, it was all written down, boom boom boom. Not that there was much to get. Bloodsuckers came out of the woodwork, their hands out, bills you wouldn’t believe. Poor woman. You coulda maybe thought about giving her a little of that money you made, know what I mean?”
“She wouldn’t take it,” Abatangelo said. “And by the time she was sick, I’d been tagged. They seized everything.”
Dominic snorted. “Like you didn’t have a secret stash somewhere.”
“Not secret enough.”
Dominic studied him. “Some criminal mastermind.”
They stopped in front of a grocery called the Smiling Child Market. Tea-smoked chickens hung in the window and Chinese matrons rummaged through sidewalk bins for dragon beans, lo bok, cloud ear mushrooms. Just beyond the door, the owner stood at the register, wearing a red cardigan and a wisdom cap. Behind him an ancient woman, dressed in black, sat on a dairy carton feeding glazed rice crackers to a cat.
“Jimmy,” Dominic called out, “Jimmy, dammit Jimmy, over here. This is the roomer I told you about. We’re going up, that good?”
The grocer smiled an utterly impersonal smile. In the stairway, searching his pocket for the keys, Dominic told Abatangelo, “His name’s Jimmy Shu. He don’t know where you been, which is good. Never tell a Chinaman everything. He’ll never trust you again.”
Upstairs, the hallway was dark and redolent of ginger and curry and chili oil. The clamor of North Beach filtered through the window at one end, Chinatown the other. Dominic fiddled with the keys in the dim light, holding them near his eyes, then opened the apartment door. They greeted a clutter of take-out cartons, ravaged napkins and tangled rags.
Dominic said, “Hey hey, this was all supposed to be, well, gone, you know?”
He kicked a welter of paper into a heap near the wall, wiping his head again and then his throat. “Christ. Fucking skinflint Jimmy Shu.” He let loose a burdened sigh. “Let me show you the back,” he said.
In the rear there was a foldaway bed, a table, a radio. Abatangelo found himself imagining Shel sitting there, on the bed, smiling up at him.
Dominic said, “Simple and small. Hope it don’t remind you too much of prison. I’ll get a broom, a pan, get the front cleaned up.”
“Dominic, slow down. Go back to the bar. I’m grateful.”
Dominic stood still for the first time. He nodded thoughtfully a moment, then looked up into Abatangelo’s face.
“Your mother was a very dear woman,” he said. “Don’t think she didn’t miss you. Her only boy, in prison. For drugs, Christ. It broke her heart. You broke her goddamn heart.”
Abatangelo reached out for the old man’s shoulder but Dominic recoiled. He wiped his mouth and looked at his feet. “I’m gonna say this,” he said. “Say it once and that’s it. And I won’t regret it.” He looked up. His chin bobbed angrily. “Nina’s right in one respect, you know? If your father had been a better man, eh? Instead of a piece of shit. Maybe none of this woulda happened.” He let the words hang there a moment, nodding to himself as though, in hearing the echo in his mind, he felt certain the words were true. Finally, he turned to leave.
“Dominic? One last thing.”
Dominic stopped. “Yeah, sure, what?”
“Not to take advantage,” Abatangelo said. “But I need a car.”
From the hallway Frank stared at the door to the guest room. Shel had holed herself up in there again, right after fixing lunch. He listened for sounds from inside, thinking: She’s gonna brood the rest of the day away. Gonna sit there and stare at the wall and run through her smokes. All she needs is a record player and a bunch of sad songs.
He shivered a little, wondering what it was that had come over her. Had she found someone else? Didn’t she realize that whatever he did, everything he did, he did for her?
Well, all right then, he thought. It’s up to me. Get our asses out of here and start up new. For all her moody sulking, for all her wandering off sometimes in the middle of something he was trying to tell her, she was still the one good thing in his life. She deserves to get out of here as much as I do, he told himself. She deserves better.
He left the house, started his truck and drove out to the highway, heading for West Pittsburg for his meet with the twins.
Secretly, he knew part of the reason behind his plan was to make amends. He hadn’t been entirely honest. Even with all the things she’d figured out, forced out of him, there were still a million left to tell. All the times he’d said he was going out to a construction site to pound nails or hoist Sheetrock, he was actually walking bogus picket lines in the valley, shaking down contractors. If he wasn’t shaking them down he was ripping them off, stealing equipment, tools, hardware, even trucks.
On occasion he manned a crank lab, sucking fumes, standing watch. Once the batch was cooked he’d help dump the dregs, trying not to get poisoned for the privilege.
He’d be gone for as long as a week sometimes, telling Shel they were in Fresno or Merced or Oroville. It was during those prolonged periods away that he binged. Sometimes it took a couple of days to get straight enough so he could walk back in without giving the whole charade away. Sometimes he wondered if she was even paying attention. That hurt. And when he hurt, he wanted to party. Roy Akers obliged; he was more than happy to keep Frank zoomed out of his skull.
Frank was so behind on his nut now the whole thing was way out of hand. Shel knew he owed money; she had no idea how bad it was. And he didn’t dare tell her. Regardless, on top of everything else, he was nabbing cars for Roy now, like he was in fucking high school. Which was one of the reasons he got talked down to by absolutely everybody, treated like a grunt. I’m sick of the Akers brothers strutting around like they’re the kickass of crime, he thought. Time to make a little score, blow on out of Dodge.
Me and my redhead nurse.
At West Pittsburg he got off the freeway and onto surface streets again, heading toward the water. On Black Diamond Street, a rotting whitewashed billboard displayed a spray-paint chaos of gang names and street handles: The Jiminos, Vicious Richie, Hype Rita, the Beacon Street Dutch. Broken bodies lined the street, grinders, rappies, honks, a line of vacant-eyed women eager to work twists. Party balloons, emptied of hop, lay scattered down the sidewalk.
Reverend Ben’s sat at the end of a cul-de-sac named Freedom Court. The sign above the doorway read:
REVEREND BEN’S APOLLO CLUB
UPLIFTING REVIVALS
GIANT TV
SHUFFLEBOARD
Frank pulled behind the building and parked. The tar paper roof bristled with cattle wire. Candy wrappers and a discarded tampon littered the gravel.