The Art of Disposal (21 page)

“I'm done after this,” Bullfrog said.

“Sure you are.”

“Nah, man, I mean it. I'm tired, son.”

“What are you gonna do, work at Denny's?”

“I don't know,” Bullfrog said. “I ain't never done anything the right way.”

“You got savings?”

“A little something-something.”

“So go to Florida,” I said. “Get yourself a little mobile home. Do some fishing.”

“
Flow-ra-duh
?” Bullfrog said, like it was the name of some hostile alien world.

“What's wrong with Florida?”

“Flow-ra-duh just Kin-tucky with an ocean,” Bullfrog said, and picked at his teeth.

The big rig pulled into the lot and moaned like a tired monster. Its bright eyes stared at us for one unbearable flash, then the steering wheel screeched and squealed, the eyes peered away, and the truck turned and stuttered and died in front of the gas pumps.

The driver climbed down from the cab. Stretched his arms above his head. Lifted his plaid shirt and scratched his hairy belly. He grabbed the gas nozzle and fed it into the tank. Then he walked into the 76 station and emerged a minute later with a cup of coffee. When he was back in the cab, the truck fueled up and rumbling, I turned to Bullfrog.

“We're on,” I said, and placed my damp thumb and forefinger on the cold keys that had been hanging in the ignition for half an hour.

State route 32 is a lonely road, and I know every turn of it. Sometimes when I have trouble sleeping, I go off on a midnight drive and let the darkness pull me through the tunnels of thin gray trees, out past the covered bridge. I park, walk up to the guard rail, look down at the creek: a sheet of ice cold glass and stones, and a slivered moon, trapped on an inky backwards sky. The old covered bridge is tucked back on a road not fit for use in the modern world. When I stare at the distant bridge and shimmering pool beneath it, I can almost hear the gentle plodding of iron-shoed horses, and the laughter of long-dead children.

We drew near to the brake lights of the truck, which for many miles I'd let slip just out of reach to avoid suspicion. Bullfrog reached into the back seat and grabbed the revolver that Carlino had forced him to carry.

The truck was stopped at the crest of a small hill, its engine still running. I could hear voices, one of them the whiny sing-song of Max Finn.

Me and Bullfrog got out of the car. We eased up along the dirty big rig trailer, and when we reached the front of it, there was Max Finn in the hazy light from the beams of the crossed cars, aiming his gun at the hapless plaid-shirted driver. Carlino was talking to Max.

“He don't care about us,” he said.

“I didn't see nothin',” the truck driver said.

“He seen our faces,” Max Finn said.

“Look at this guy. He's no squealer. He just wants a cold beer. Right, Sam?”

The driver nodded like he was a kid who just got asked if he wanted an ice cream cone. Carlino slapped him on the back and laughed.

“Turn around,” Max Finn said to the driver.

“I got a wife and kid,” the driver said. “Please don't kill me.”

“
Please
don't kill him,” Max said. “Miss Manners over here.”

“We ain't gonna kill you,” Carlino said. “Just walk you out there a ways and tie you to a tree. Someone'll find you in a few hours, Sam.”

“There's a road back there,” I said, trying to calm him down a bit. “'Cyclists. Joggers. Old ladies walking their dogs. Soon as the sun comes up.”

“Go on,” Carlino said to Max. We watched them for a minute, Max Finn marching the driver in front of him like he was a prisoner of war. Then the darkness swallowed them up, and all you could see was a distant winking from Max Finn's LED flashlight.

Bullfrog was halfway into the passenger side of the big rig cab when the shot rang out and split the night in two.

I saw the white dot of the flashlight, bobbing up and down like a drunken firefly, and Max Finn came rushing out from the woods and back onto the road.

“You shot him?” Carlino said. “You killed him?”

“He seen our faces,” Max Finn said.

“Guy had a wife and kid.”

“They all got a wife and kid when you're pointing a gun at 'em. And who cares if he's got a wife and kid? Now he don't gotta worry about 'em.”

Max Finn aimed his gun at Bullfrog. Carlino pulled his piece and aimed it at Max Finn. It felt like someone had touched the wrong lever inside of a trusty old clock, and the mainspring was furiously unwinding.

“Don't you see?” Max Finn said. “This nigger takes the blame. And we take more of the money.”

“His cut is small,” Carlino said.

“So we make it smaller,” Max said.

Bullfrog stood there, as calm as the Buddha. He looked at Carlino. He looked at me. He looked at Max Finn.

“It's me or this nigger, D-T.”

“We stick to the plan,” Carlino said, looking down the barrel of his gun.

“Plans change,” Max Finn said.

“They do,” Carlino said. He fired the gun. The brief explosion lit up his face and made me think, for some reason, of Rumplestiltskin. Max Finn fell back and landed right on his ass, then tumbled over. He looked at us with half-closed eyes and a raised upper lip, and he gripped at his chest and reached into his pants-pockets like he was looking for his missing car keys. Then he fell all the way onto his back, said
ahhhhhh
, and died.

“Holy Moly,” Bullfrog said.

“Fucking weasel,” Carlino said, and spit on Max Finn's body.

“He did sort of look like a weasel,” Bullfrog said.

“Thought you liked Max Finn,” I said.

“No one likes Max Finn,” Carlino said.

“Let's get this truck to Jody's,” I said.

“What about him?” Bullfrog said.

“Back of the truck,” Carlino said.

Bullfrog and Carlino dragged the corpse around the big rig, while I stood twenty feet away down the hill, watching for headlights. I heard the rolling door go up and go back down, and when I turned around and walked back over, Bullfrog was sitting on the bumper, out of breath.

“You need to drop a few pounds,” Carlino said.

“No shit,” Bullfrog said.

“Too many Big Macs and Camels. Or wait: Kools, right? Brothers love a menthol.”

“Go eat some buhskettee and garlic bread,” Bullfrog said.

“Funny—that's what your Mom always serves me.”

“My Ma's dead,” Bullfrog said. His smile vanished.

“And I'm s'posed to care?” Carlino said.

I could hear the locust wings strumming in the trees all around us. Bullfrog grinned and tilted his head mechanically.

“Hell, my Ma ain't really dead,” he said.

“Bet you a hundred bucks she dies tonight. You just jinxed her real good, Sam.”

Carlino threw the trailer door's metal lever over and locked the clasp, and it rang out like a giant nail had just been hammered in a canyon.

“One man short,” Carlino said, chin in his hand. “We leave the cars.”

“On the edge of the road?” Bullfrog said.

“Off to the side a little. Ronnie—you cool driving the rig?”

“Used to drive a tractor on the farm,” I said.

“This ain't no tractor,” Bullfrog said.

“You wanna drive it?” I said.

“Nah. Uh-uh,” Bullfrog said.

“You ever seen a black guy driving an eighteen wheeler?” Carlino said. “Me neither.”

I pulled myself up into the driver's side of the cab, and it felt like I was a hundred feet off of the ground. I sat in the cab and watched Carlino and Bullfrog back the two hot cars off into the small ditches that ran along the road. Then they walked around the big rig, and I heard the horn of my car beep twice, as if Carlino was saying, “go ahead, Sam… let's get this show on the road.”

I threw the beast into first gear and it slammed forward and died. My foot started shaking. My forehead got hot and wet. I pictured myself old, with shattered nerves, seated in a wheelchair, looking blankly out the window of an ivy-covered rest home, with a checkered blanket thrown over my knees and a chessboard in front of me.

The truth was that I rarely drove the tractor on Carl and Stella's farm. Once or twice, maybe. Uncle Carl was more likely to shoo me away than to teach me a valuable skill. I'd walk to the top of the hill and sit down under the apple tree, and I'd watch the distant tractor, small as a child's toy, carving dark lines through the soybean fields. Sometimes Uncle Carl would stop and leave the tractor running, and he'd hop down and kick the tires, or poke a stick into a gopher hole. There were always chickadees in the branches of that apple tree, and they squeaked like a hundred shoe soles on a waxed basketball court. I guess I've always spent a lot of time alone with my eyes fixed on faraway things.

Behind me, Carlino hit the horn again as if to say, “move it Sam—didn't your old man learn you nothin' on that farm?”

I turned the key, revved the engine, and with a shaky leg I threw the beast into first gear and got it crawling up the hill. It was a relief to make it over the crest and feel the weight of the truck as I started coasting down the long grade. There's room to learn when you're coasting. I shifted the gears. I turned the headlights off and on, and hit the windshield with a dose of blue washing fluid. It took a few minutes for my leg to stop shaking.

Out on the freeway, Carlino and Bullfrog pulled alongside of me. Bullfrog did that thing that kids do when they pass a big rig: he made a fist and a rigid L-shaped arm, and then he pumped it up and down a few times, asking me to hit the horn. I obliged. We both laughed, and then they pulled ahead of me—Carlino must have hit the gas hard—and I watched the brake lights get dimmer and dimmer, until I could no longer pick them out from the other red eyes of distant vehicles.

I kept it at fifty-five miles an hour, and blew past a weigh-station. No way could we risk some do-gooder wanting to see a manifest or take a peek in the back of the rig. I reached the warehouse, feeling like a kid with a shoplifted pack of smokes in his pocket.

Eddie was there in my rectangular side mirror, and he guided me as I backed the truck into the loading dock. He wore a tweed cap, and his reading glasses far down on his nose like Santa, and he pointed left and right, or pulled his cupped hands forward, waving me on.

Most women get no respect in the world of organized crime. Guys dote on their daughters, and an hour later they're backhanding some whore's blotchy face because she's a day late with the money. It's a hard world for a woman. But every so often you get some crazy broad who really soaks up the life. She's not content to strut around in high heels and take hand-outs from wiseguys. Maybe she dates a made guy for a while, meets all the right players, and then she ditches him. But she doesn't ditch the lifestyle.

That's Creeping Jody. Her dad was part of Joey Bones's crew. When she was twenty-one she married a real greaseball named Paulie Pagani. After he smacked her around one too many times, she hit him upside the head with a frying pan. Then she hit him again and again with it, a real heavy cast-iron number. Eddie said it looked like someone had dropped a lasagna on the kitchen floor. Creeping Jody only did two years.

“Why do they call her Creeping Jody?” I asked Eddie, way back: the first time I met her.

“Some guys thought she set the whole thing up. Like Paulie was some angel, come home from a hard day's work, and there she was, hiding behind a door with that frying pan, creeping… waiting for him to walk into the kitchen.”

“And what do you think?”

“Hell, I asked her. Point blank. Up at the state prison. Right over one of them phones like you see in the t.v. shows.”

“With the glass between you?” I said.

“Yeah, the glass,” Eddie said. “Listen—Paulie Pagani was a prick. He got what he deserved. And let me tell you: she was some widow. After her two years was up, she gets right back in with us. Man, oh man. A real knockout. But tough. Like she might just kick your ass.”

“Like Joan Jett?” I said.

“Yeah,” Eddie said. “Joan Jett.” He closed his eyes and smiled, going backward in his mind to a place where his hair was dark, and his arms were strong.

“Paulie Pagani had a stash—a hundred thousand—in a fireproof safe underneath of the floorboards, back of the Totsy.”

“The Totsy was around back then?”

Eddie nodded.

“And you and Jody?” I said.

“Nah,” Eddie said. “We fooled around once or twice. I was trying to be a good family man. When Jody picked up Paulie's cash, she says to me, 'Eddie, you keep half.' And I says to her, 'fifty grand? no way, sister.' And she says to me, 'you could've lied about it… kept the whole thing… that's what Paulie would've done.' And I says to her, 'do I look like Paulie?' And she says to me, 'no, you sure don't.' And she gives me a kiss on the cheek, and then a long one right on the lips.”

“Did you take the half?” I said.

“Hell no,” Eddie said. “Jody needed that money.”

You could still see an edgy young woman somewhere under the wrinkles and crow's feet and saggy neck. Every time we did business with Creeping Jody, Eddie lit up like a fire burned in the blacks of his eyes. They were mirrors for one another: each of them reflecting back a better, younger version of themselves. Maybe that's why we need old friends.

I watched my side mirror, and Eddie's hands, and the big rig beeped like the countdown sequence of a bomb.

Carlino was smoking a cigarette and Bullfrog was talking to Creeping Jody when I hopped down from the cab. Jody walked over and gave me a big hug and a kiss on the cheek, and she lingered there, feeling the small of my back and moving up to my shoulders like she was working some dough on a cutting board.

“Easy, tiger,” I said.

“Meowww,” she said, and pinched my cheek.

“Got something to drink?”

“Scotch,” she said.

“The good stuff?”

“It gets the job done.”

The five of us went inside of the warehouse, and Creeping Jody opened the roll-up door that let in the cool night air and a clear view of the back of the big rig. In the back corner of the room, near a punch-clock and rows of worker cards on the wall, there were two card tables and a few crummy chairs. Creeping Jody went into a cabinet and pulled out a bottle of scotch and some red plastic picnic cups.