Bomber's Law (40 page)

“So, what I think is that what I was doin' for the first hour-and-a-half or so with this little prick was confirmin' his suspicions that even though he didn't know me, never heard of me before, hadn't known that I was comin', or what to talk about, I was in fact another one of those guys that he didn't even know, hadn't even ever heard of, who was gonna hurt him some where the bruises wouldn't show, and who could do it, too.

“So the first order of business that we had ahead of us, from the minute I walked in, was to establish in his mind that he had no choice at all: he had to talk to me, and give me at least part of—and a very big part, too—of what I came to him to get. It's very important, to a guy like Ernie is, that if you want something from him, that it will endanger him to give, you first
enable
him to give it. The way you
enable him to give it is by first convincing him that what he's afraid will happen to him, if he does what
you
want him to—what someone else will do to him for doing that for you—is nowhere near as bad as what will happen to him, what
you
will do to him, if he
doesn't
help you out. And furthermore: that what he fears that someone else will do to hurt him, if he does what you want, is nowhere near as certain to happen, and anyway won't happen as soon, as what he fears that you'll do.”

“So first you ease his pain, by giving him a good heavy dose of it,” Dennison said.

“Exactly,” Dell'Appa said. “At least that's the way Gayle looks at it. What I have to do, to get a guy to talk to me, who doesn't want to talk to me, and who knows his peer group would tell him right off the bat that he
shouldn't
talk to me, is transform him from my worthy opponent into my helpless victim. If he's got any choice, he knows very well, the code says he can't talk to me, no matter what I offer him. But, if he's my victim, he's got no choice, and then he can take with complete impunity any reward that I offer. Or so he can rationalize, anyway.

“So,” he said, “here we have Brother Nugent now, squirmin' and writhin' around somethin' fierce, because of course now that he's mentioned it out loud, his bladder feels like it's gonna
burst.
Instead of doin' his best to ignore it, how really bad he has to go, he's gone and told me about it, and naturally that's made it worse. Now it's the only thing he can think about. If there'd been a sink in the room, and I could've held his hand under warm water, he would've told me atomic secrets and how to get three well-balanced meals for four well-nourished adults out of one pound of day-old chopped liver.”

“Hell, everybody knows that,” Dennison said.

“Sure,” Dell'Appa said, “well-nourished adults won't eat chopped liver, no matter how many times it's served to them. They can and they will, go hungry three meals, before they will eat that chopped liver, because they know then you'll get the idea, give up and throw the stuff out, and give them something to eat. But anyway, okay then, he was satisfied. He had no choice anymore. I'd convinced him I'd beaten him. It was okay to give up.

“ ‘Joey and Ev've got their own breeding kennel they run, this farm down in Mansfield they bought. Well, Olivia Rollins, Ev's
daughter there, it's really her that runs it. She's the one, there, that lives at the place, and does almost all of the work, but their money is what's behind it. And Livia's really good with those dogs, boy, even if she is a dyke. Kind of a shame, too, if you ask me—she's really a good-lookin' broad. Her girlfriend, though, Mandy, there, she isn't. She's not a good-lookin' woman. She's not good-lookin' at all. Livia must really likes dogs, boy. She takes care of the dogs all day long, and then her girlfriend at night is a dog, and she is: Mandy looks sort of like
you.
' ”

“Mercy,” Dennison said, “now there's an unfortunate woman indeed, a truly unfortunate girl. Bad enough to be openly queer, all the grief that that's bound to bring on you, but then also to resemble you?”

“That's what I said to him, myself,” Dell'Appa said. “ ‘Cripes. God help that poor miserable woman—she's got a real cross to bear.' He looked a little disappointed, like what he'd had in mind was to piss me off.

“ ‘Yeah,' he says, ‘well, Olivia that summer there, after Joe came back from where he went, when I stayed with Danny there, that time, Olivia, she had some kind of accident. Dislocated her shoulder or broke her arm, maybe; I forget just what it was. Some kind of a swimming-pool accident, I guess, fell off of a divin'-board, something—I don't really know it was that, I mean; I just know it was something like that. Anyway, what it was was, she couldn't lift nothin', couldn't lift nothin' up for a while. Which, when you're takin' care of dogs all the time like she was, there, she hadda, it wasn't just somethin' that she liked to do, you know, there; this was her regular fuckin' job she did there. Her way, makin' a livin', okay? That Joe and her old man, I thought at the time, they were all the ones financin' her there—this's long before I ever meet Doug, there, and find out he's in with them, too—gettin' her started in, onna career, right after she got out of college. Right after she got out of school.

“ ‘Well, anyway there, she did have this kid already, a kid that come in all the time, helpin' her feed them and stuff. They had quite a few dogs there, Ev and Joe did. So she needed the kid to help out. It's not only that those dogfood bags can be heavy, they are: go fifty pounds at least, all right? You buy the big bags, you got lots of dogs,
because them racing-dogs, they eat a lot. And so, liftin' them, you're a small woman anyway, this isn't no June-weekend picnic, even when your arm is all right. Now Mandy, there, she could've lifted them all right, I think. Mandy looks like she could lift a car up, so you wouldn't need a jack if she was with you and you got a flat you hadda change, but she's not around the place much most days except weekends, so she wasn't that much help. She's got her own job, too, I guess. I don't know what it is. Workin' on construction, prolly, usin' jackhammers and stuff.

“ ‘And then all of the other stuff, too, that Livia hadda do: muck out the kennels and so forth, the runs, and brush them and give them their baths there. 'Cause hey, these're valuable dogs you've got here. These dogs're worth lots of money. You can't just let your investment in them go to hell there; you got to take care of your dogs, just like you would anything else. But you see what I mean, this's lots of work, keepin' dogs like Olivia is, and it's not easy work, either.

“ ‘They used to have six or eight dogs, I guess there, running at any one time, Joey and Ev Rollins, I mean, and then they've also, they've got some they're schoolin'; some that they're breedin'; some that got too old to race, they retired them and bred them until after that they even got too old to fuck much. But one reason or other, quite a few of them,
quite
a few of their dogs, when they got too old she just didn't do it, do what they always do. Livia didn't have them put down.

“ ‘ “Well, I didn't want to,” this's what she told me, at least. Because I asked her there, see, I see this, she isn't getting that done. Why she wasn't puttin' them down. “That's the reason I'm not,” she tells me. “I am the honcho running this business here. I'm the managing partner of this here entire operation; I am the resident HNIC—I'm the Head Nigger In Charge. I also own part of it, myself, and all of the other investors, all of them also approved. So I think if all three of them say we agree, we're going to keep some of our dogs around because we feel like it, even after they've stopped making us money, because they've always been good dogs for us, and we can afford to be good, too, my bet would be: we're gonna do it. We ought to be able to do that, I think, and my dad and Short Joe, and Dougie, him too, they all agreed with me on that. So we decided
we would. And that's the whole reason for that. We own this business, and we run this business; our very own private business we've got here. We can do as we fucking well please.”

“ ‘Olivia's really a nice woman,' Ernie said,” Dell'Appa said. “Ernie gets very earnest when he talks about his Livia, almost eloquent. I think that's why it bothers him that Livia does not seem to him to be at all of the heterosexual persuasion. He knows it, she's not, but it hurts. ‘I know she's a dyke, and her wife or her girlfriend, whatever two broads call each other, her girlfriend looks just like a damned cop, a big fuckin' cop and a mean one.' ”

“My-my,” Dennison said, “his bladder may've been full and his stomach empty, too, but he certainly wasn't giving up on getting to you, was he now?”

“Ernie was getting noticeably desperate,” Dell'Appa said, “moving around so much he looked like he was trying to bore a hole in the chair, usin' his ass for a drill.”

“Not a tool well-adapted to the task, I would say,” Dennison said.

“Not at all,” Dell'Appa said. “And he did seem to've resigned himself to doing this thing that he really didn't want to do, given the fact that it could be in fact pretty dangerous to sink Short Joe Mossi. So I'd already made up my mind that when I'd gotten enough out of him at least to get a search warrant for Everett Rollins's office—and when he said that, ‘Dougie,' I thought I was probably gettin' pretty close there, I'd let up a little on poor Ernie there just a bit, and let the kid go take a leak. Under a guard's watchful eye, of course, with no chance at a phone or to chat up his pals. And then too, another factor also of importance, I was reaching the point, too, where even though I'd tapped a kidney on the way in, well, I wasn't close to desperate but I sort of had to take a piss myself.

“But that didn't make Portia right; Portia was still dead wrong: the quality of mercy certainly
is
strained, at least until you talk. He was getting no lunch, nothing to eat, until I'd gotten everything I'd come for. Prison food's not that good anyway, and besides,
I
wasn't hungry. I'd had a full breakfast, before I left home, bacon and waffles with syrup, stuffing my gut to beat the band. I figured it might come in handy, as indeed it was doing. So I said to him: ‘Ernie, if I could prevent me from taking a leak, when I really did have to take one, I
certainly wouldn't annoy me any more'n I really had to, until I let me get out to the bathroom. So since you have to piss, and I
am
stopping you, I'm really surprised that you're doing that, and giving me little cheap shots. Doesn't seem very smart, from where I sit.'

“ 
‘Yeah,'
he said, slight note of contempt there, and still pretty combative, but obviously swayed by my logic, ‘Well, I think she's got a very good heart. When I'm goin' down there to help her out there, the five afternoons and then weekends, I'm still drivin' the cab over Reno's? Well, I'm still a young guy and I'm not in bad shape, but that's a long drive, down to Mansfield and back, and I'm doin' it every day. Drivin' down there as soon's I get up inna mornin', and then drivin' back up again, afternoons, and I'm drivin' the cab all night too. I admit I was gettin' pretty-near beat. It was really knockin' me out. And Olivia, she could see this. Even though she has got her own troubles there, she is hurt and she can't do her work, got her own troubles to think about there, which is why I am doin' what I'm doin', that don't mean she still can't see that I am really
beat.
This is beating the shit out of me. But she's got some compassion, you know? And this, this is unusual.

“ ‘Like, what most racing-dog people usually do—as soon as a dog's gotten the point were he's no good for nothin' no more, not that this means he's really real old, like you would look at him and you would say “Hey, now that's a really old dog you got there,” you know, like you would. You can tell that by just lookin' at them, their nose-hairs, the fur that they got on their muzzle, there? It's all turned all white, they're so old. And like that, that kind of thing. You can tell just by looking at them, that a dog is twelve or fourteen, and that's pretty old for a dog. But a good racing dog, a competitive dog, well, three years's gettin' up there, gettin' kind of old, and then,
four
years, well, I mean, like,
forget
it—by then it's all over, it's time; you gotta face up to it: four years is
old, really old
, for a greyhound to be. So, and there's some women that I guess adopt them, they got this farm that they run, and they put the retired dogs up for adoption, free, no charge for them. For people that don't have a dog of their own at home but they've got kids who want a nice dog, a dog they can play with, you know. And who also I would assume live some place 'way out inna country, dog like that needs a place he can run. But most
racing-dog people, what most of them do is they just have their too-old dogs put to sleep, except for their personal favorite ones, big winners that won lots of races—them they might keep around.

“ ‘The others, though, all of 'em, five out of ten of them at least, for them it's automatic: the old vacuum chamber: put 'em in, take the air out, and
boom
: that's the end of them. They went to sleep. Well, it's not really cruel, you look at it the way that most people who do it, who're actually doing it, look at it. You got to do that, you're runnin' a business, every dog eats a certain amount, and then you got the shots and that stuff? It all costs money, you know. And, hey, all right, huh? You're runnin' a business here, not just playin' with doggies,
“Oooh, lookit dah cute little puppy,”
that kindah kid-shit, fuck that kindah shit, this's
your
way of makin' a livin'. From breedin' and raisin' the dogs, and then racin' them with other dogs, that is how, all right? That is what you are doin'. Not from you're lettin' 'em geddup in your lap, an' then lick all over your face, always tellin' them: “
Hey
, geddoffa couch there, yah gettin' doghair all over”—no,
that
isn't why you're doin' this shit; you're doin' this shit to make money. Well, then, shit, then what it is—what it's gotta be, really, you wanna keep runnin' it there—it's just like what any business'd be: you got to make money off it. Off what you're supportin', what you're payin' the money out, that brings more money back in. Or else, if you don't, there won't be none for you, after you get through with all of it, payin' your overhead, takin' care of expenses, like every businessman has to.