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“We was,” Luciano said, “the best team that ever got put together. We knew our jobs better than any other guys on the street. We was like the Four Horsemen of Notre Dame—except what would two Jewish guys be doin’ at Notre Dame?”
i. Conquest
The car slides effortlessly around the bend, coasting with the curve of the road, smooth as silk on the warmed black asphalt. It's the first pleasant day, as pale April sun tints the sky in white-grey, like the threat of a spring day on clouds that can’t forget winter’s bite. At long last, the temperature clamors up, until men remove their topcoats and roll their sleeves and breathe. It was a long winter, but spring wins out in the end, season changing to season, time holding nothing back for long. Charlie turns to the window, smoothes the white-grey silk of his tie, and sighs.
The road's empty, save for a few folks going out to lunch in the middle of their workweek—bankers and financiers, the type who get breaks, while the others keep sweating until the day’s over. Slipping down the streets of Brooklyn, Charlie watches young faces staring back at him, awed young children, clothes worn and thin and hanging from smaller frames. They stare at the expensive limousine that passes, the dark-tinted windows shielding Charlie from their view. The car turns left and the children are gone, but Charlie knows they’re hungry and they’re curious and they see the car and they wonder how any person can get inside it. He knows their questions and he knows it won’t be long until their lips are split and their knuckles busted as they claw their way towards an answer.
But the stoops and the alleys and the children and the hunger soon disappear. There’s just Charlie, a nice suit—like armor—clinging to his skin, hands clenched on his lap and twisting the ring around his finger. The harbor passes, boats and masts and crisp white sails ghosting into the horizon, slipping from the confines of the land to the distant promise of nothing but ocean before them. He watches the whitecaps on the water—breaking, tumbling, rolling—with a fixed determination to ignore the man beside him, the man whose large body and dagger smile challenge anyone to forget his presence. Charlie never can—especially not when the man reaches over, puts his fat hand on Charlie's thigh, and squeezes till it hurts.
Charlie's eye twitches and the scar jumps on his skin, but he stays still. He won't give the satisfaction; he won't feel the pain of the vice on his leg. He stares straight ahead and he doesn’t feel the pressure, the tight grasp, the threat or the ownership or the control. He won’t move.
But Joe does not like to be ignored; not by Charlie, nor by the world, by the city he tries to claim as his own. "So quiet, Salvatore?" Joe leers, closing in until Charlie can smell his breath—stale cigarettes, too-dry wine, garlic, rancor, enmity.
"I'm thinkin', Joe. Can't a man think?"
But Charlie can't do anything as far as Joe is concerned, least of all think. Thinking's dangerous. Associating with Jews is dangerous. Withholding his bootlegging operations is dangerous. Maranzano is dangerous. The only dangers in the world are the things that keep Charlie from sliding wholly and completely into Joe's grasp, that keep Charlie from being drained dry, preyed upon until there's nothing left of him. Joe calls him lieutenant, but there's no promise in it, nothing but an off-key lie to keep him close. Maranzano calls him worse, calls him son, but as Charlie's learned, that's a word with no promises at all—not even empty ones.
He bides his time. The old man tells him avere pazienza through leering teeth, his fat hands patting Charlie's shoulder, a mockery behind his eyes because he knows the boy can't wait but Joe will make him wait forever. He speaks in affectionate nicknames, pulls Charlie to his side until he can smell the stench of the stains beneath his arms, but despite all his performance, Joe can never mask his disdain. Charlie masks his own; he has more patience than Joe would ever realize.
But finally waiting has run its course. They arrive soon, the car parks, and Charlie glances down the road for just a second before he guides Joe inside.
"Come," he says, "how’s about a little lunch?”
Together they walk, Joe’s greedy hand on his shoulder, as Charlie hunches beneath his touch, lowering himself, aiming to escape the pressure of the hand and the sweaty palm and the broad reach of his wide touch.
Gerardo shows them to their table, streaks of white hairs in his funny little mustache. “The table by the window, as you said,” and Charlie thanks the man as they take their seats, unfold their napkins, and wait for their food. Meanwhile, there’s nothing for Charlie except to watch as Joe salivates over the blood they plan to spill. Maranzano’s men would be killed and the man would fall, toppled, conquered, broken as bits of marble in the dust of an unpaved road, the empire fallen. Joe’s eyes gleamed while Charlie’s burned darker; Joe could not see the lie.
He sits and he listens and he watches, eyes trained on the food torn to pieces in those jagged teeth. He drinks red wine in careful sips, watching the man guzzle, tear to pieces, consume as he sees fit. It’s all for Joe and he’ll take what he wants, spitting a shard of chicken bone to his plate where it lands with a clattering twang. He chews, he spits, he sips red wine, and Charlie watches with his hands tight around his knife and fork.
Charlie rises. He clutches the napkin in his hands—starched, crisp white linen, stained with copper orange, a drop of sauce on the immaculate surface. He folds it into thirds, careful and deliberate, and sets it atop the table, atop the white tablecloth beneath their nearly empty plates.
"Excuse me a minute," he murmurs, with a deferential nod of his brow—a gesture that does not come naturally, but he’s learned to imitate.
He's washing his hands when he hears the gunshots, falling crisp like droplets in the sink. He turns off the faucet and dries his hands. There's not a living soul when Charlie returns. A fat body lies on the floor, beside the table overturned in the scuffle. The porcelain of the dishes are broken and the tablecloth is red with Charlie's victory. Face impassive, he pulls his hat from the stand in the corner and drops it on the dark curls of his head. It falls atop the crown of his head and Charlie—straight-backed, proud, victorious—steps over the body on his way through the door.
The other, Maranzano, he hails Charlie as his son, as the victor, the champion returning from war. He speaks of Rome and Caesar and great men. "He came out conquering!" Maranzano boasts, arm wrapped around his shoulder.
Charlie smiles tight, says little, but it bothers no one, because they prefer their subjects silent. Maranzano is proud, but he has only months to live. He grabs Charlie by the wrist, hoists his arm high, calls him a champion, a gladiator, un conquistatore. Charlie doesn’t care about Rome, about this imagined history of greatness. Maranzano talks about his famed empire at length, with crisp and pointed passion, admiration, lustful emulation, yet he neglects the simplest of facts. It fell.
They will lay their plans, for months inside a dark hotel room. They will sleep in turns, one hand cradled around a gun, one hand clasping the other’s for reassurance that they are not alone. They doze in turns against the headboard, chins dropping to chests, before imagined threats and time-taught instinct shatters their rest. The coup is not complete, but it will be. It will be, as daggers plunge over and over into Maranzano’s chest—at Charlie’s behest, always on his command. It will end with a swift bullet through the lacerated body.
He’ll spare no thoughts for great men of the past, for neither Caesar nor Brutus, for they’re nothing but long ago names, etched into monuments and gathering dust as would-be rulers kowtow before their memory. Charlie was never un gladiatore, but the animals they locked in cells, starved and beat and replaced—starved into fighting, starved into tearing out throats.
He’ll never be full, but the two dead men have satiated him. But he will hunger again and there will be more. And always, he will stand atop them. He calls no fields to rest, he parts no glories—because a conqueror who stops has no where to go but down.
ii. War
He’s born with an itch in his skin. Running down darkened streets, skirting around corners, he lurks in shadows and waits, waits, waits. His fingers dance eagerly across the weapon in his hands, until Meyer’s steady touch lands light on his wrist. It’s never a restraint, but a caution, and neither of them hold back against the Irish boys when they finally appear.
The itch lives in his muscles, straining to break free. In stillness, it burns through his body, an ache in need of release, as he seeks his provocations, his opportunities, his relief. He finds it first in the pushcarts on the streets and delights as he watches the red tongues flicker and dance and twirl. For a moment, he can breathe, as the smoke curls upwards into the sky, bearing Benny aloft as he traces over the memory again and again. He’d like to stay and watch, of course, but the image is just as sweet played again to the orchestrations of feet pounding pavement, of legs that run and never tire, of the whoops that burst from his lungs and crackle in the air. Blocks away, he stops, he leaps, and he throws his head back against a cracking wall. He stares up at the sky—peaceful for only a moment—with the memory blazing in his eyes. He’ll be paid the fee next time, but that’s not what matters. The relief is enough. Although the promise of money in his pocket, food in his belly, new shoes on his feet, just makes it glow all the more brighter. At least—he learns—his talents are useful somewhere.
The war rages on, year after year, from pushcarts that splinter as tinder, to teenaged thugs whose smirks fall away as Benny holds his weapon aloft, to men jostled in trucks that hurry through the night unaware of what lurks, what waits, what never ceases fire.
“Come on,” Benny hisses beneath his breath, the muscles in his calves burning red hot as he crouches, eyes trained on the road. “What’s takin’ those dago shits so long?”
He pulls the trigger at the first glimmer of headlights, shouting with unrepentant glee as he fills bodies with bullets, watches them topple, just shadows flickering in the rapid light of gunfire. Blood bursts in blooms against the windshields, but Benny isn’t bothered as he clamors into the hijacked truck. They rattle down the road, noise clanging around his skull, but there is no itch, no clawing claustrophobic need. He cleans his gun in hurried strokes, manic as he declares, “That’ll fuckin’ teach him—and that Waxey shitter.”
“For the time being,” Meyer replies—and isn’t he always right?
It’s one victory of many, in a war that stretches around the corners of city streets, through stolen cars that race through shadows, to the smoky back rooms of delicatessens and the back booths of nightspots. They make their plans—because there’s always a new hit, a new hijacking, another racket to enforce, another guy who won’t pay up—and fight their new foes. There’s never an end in sight, but that’s the way Benny likes it. He cuts the itch from his skin with the hilt of a knife in another man’s chest, digging away his own restlessness with pointed, bloody edge. He beats the noise in his skull to death with pipe, with blackjack, with his own bloodied fists. The scabs blossom across his knuckles, burgundy and cracked and beautiful. Then he picks until they bleed, picks, and picks, and picks—at his skin, at the scabs, at the smalltime players who scoff when his father’s words fall from his mouth but they die just as easily with a gun in their moyl. There’s fire in his blood that won’t spill so easily.
Benny doesn’t think anymore about the dead men in the woods, has forgotten the rattle of the trucks over the rattle in his bones, but Meyer’s right and it’s never over. He doesn’t concern himself with the details; he just knows the tensions are growing higher and greater—just let me ice Gordon already, get it over with—until at last it reaches its end, behind bars instead of Benny’s gun. The result is equally effective, though less satisfying.
It's one fire quenched, and he thinks no more about it, until late one night when it's just him and Meyer and a few of the guys from his old neighborhood, sitting around with cigarettes and idle conversations and reminisces of the good old days and the scrapes and the bruises. But something’s off. He feels it sharp as a knife, twisting into his palm, a prick that becomes a burn. It’s nothing, Benny, calm down—until he realizes a moment too late—move, move, move! He’s across the room, towards the street, but not before he sees the flash before his eyes, red spirals filling his vision. He hits the wall—warmth dripping from his head, from his hands, red and stale and it’s not his blood, is it? Blurs, shouting, Meyer’s voice, strong hands—
Then he’s awake, upright on clean sheets in a hospital bed. He sees the flicker of worry behind the eyes as they tell him to stay in bed, rest up, get better. Do they worry for his health or for his retribution? They say he saved their lives, that they’ll take care of everything. But his head is reeling—rage keener than any bomb’s heat—as the words burn in his ears, his muscles coiled tight. The pain sears white hot—bright like the gleam on the waxed, polished floor, blinding like the starch white confines of hospital convalescence—and it’s not rest that will make the pain, make the itch, make the noise, fall silent and dead.
At night, he’s out of bed, dressed, limping and gritting his teeth, but the gun is clenched firmly in his fist and he’ll find them. He’ll find them. He’ll smoke out any hole, burn the slightest bumps in the road, because it’s low to take a guy out without even showing your face. He’ll shoot for cowardice as easily as anything else. The world spins through his vision, eluding him as shapes and streets flash in his eyes and coil like smoke. Next thing he knows, there’s blood on the ground and the bodies are dead and Benny exhales.
But the war doesn’t end—what do you mean I got the wrong guy? I know I seen that mamzer before—and there’s talks in backrooms, fervid glances thrown his way as they mutter in conversations they don’t want him to hear.
“Oh, so it’s a problem now, is it? Last I heard, I was the one savin’ your asses!” he shouts into the air, but there’s no one who says anything, except Meyer, whose eyes are dark and his face impassive.
He’ll show them. He’s always shown them—like the teachers at school, he showed them, each time he set a match to a cart and he earned his money, bringing home more than they made in a week of haranguing wild children to their seats. Who’s inept now, huh, when he’s the one making the money, when he’s the one keeping their asses safe, when he’s the one looking out for them and staying alive and thriving? Who are they to call him Bugsy, when he’s just—
“—Benny,” Meyer says, “We’ll fix this.”
He doesn’t listen—Meyer can’t be right all the time, can he? He’ll show them. There’s a spark in his gut, a flash in his bones, that he can’t escape until he finds the guy—and it’s the right one this time, Benny makes sure of it—and he fills him with bullet after bullet after bullet, until he’s lacerated and facedown on the carpet. He can breathe. The problem’s solved, isn’t it? He dumps the body. He can take care of things himself, can’t he? It’s done.
But the glances don’t stop and he knows what they say about him—in their meetings as much as in the newspapers. The heat climbs up his skin, curling around his throat as he chokes beneath it. He reels, lashing at nothing and anything—because what is there, when there’s no more pushcarts, no more micks with their pipes, no more trucks in the woods? When there’s just his friends in their suits and the pressure from all sides, the heat from the newspapers and the politicians and the others in the outfit? Bad press, Benny, that’s how you lose a war.
“There’s always another way,” Meyer assures him. “Going out west, maybe, will fix things?” There’s no question about it—not when Meyer makes a command.
So he’s off, to a new battlefield, to the scourges of Los Angeles and the gleam of starlets bedecked in jewels and stones that shimmer like battle armor. Paint the town red, that’s how the phrase goes, isn’t it? He’ll fight his new wars, on the streets, in the bedrooms, making his way with weapons forged through charm like steel, a smile that shines, quick laughter like the report of a gun.
He’ll feel the heat on his skin, burning down in brightened beams. He stands in the sun, schemes and ideas and plans unfurling in his mind. He’ll conquer the emptiness and show them all, as he wins the war against the swelter and the odds. His visions expand endlessly across the desert before him, until they’re growing bigger, blazing brighter, bearing Benny aloft in promises he cannot fulfill and sums they cannot believe.
He doesn’t heed the caution. His lungs fill with fire. It’s low to take a guy out without even showing your face.
iii. Famine
The whole city’s crying, the streets breathing out the continuous wails of frail little bodies. It exhales the sobs of kids who don’t understand, who cry when they’re hungry and cry when their fathers hit them for crying. Fathers stare at dirty hands in shame—cracked knuckles, blistered palms, filthy nails—and for what? Jobs are scarce. What they find works them to the bone, and when their pockets finally clink—barely, as they don’t have more than a pittance—they need solace.
They need their clouded minds clear, to sweep away the dust of the factories and the building sites and the assembly lines where they bleed their palms into hardened cudgels, until they’re too hard to feel the tears on the cheeks they strike. They tell themselves it isn’t selfish. The promise of winning shines brighter than the dirty pennies they slide into the machines. The thrill of the spinning wheels dizzies them; their minds reel until their pockets are empty. The pictures never align and the pieces never come together. What they were promised is gone and they return home—if they’re so lucky to still have one—with hands, pockets, and stomachs empty.
Their slim wages are gone, their children are starved, and they think that tomorrow, the next day, the day after that, they’ll win.
He sits above the noise, above the din of crying, starving children. He doesn’t care; he’s served his sentence as a child of the slums and he’s turned his back on their plight. His suit is new; it’s crisp and black, understated and elegant, in a dye so dark the man becomes a shadow flitting across the wall and into the pockets of lesser men who don’t know enough to stop. Behind his desk, always, he conducts his business, counting coin, weighing their gains, running their numbers, and always, they profit. The whole country has turned to red, but Frank—his slots and their lotteries—keeps their earnings as black as their sordid stratagem.
The Waldorf is a far cry from East Harlem, from the cramped rooms and creaking floorboards, the mattress in the corner by the window with the draft. He doesn’t even think about it anymore—tries not to, like they all do—as he fills his mind with pressing concerns, with appeals and plans and smalltalk. He runs his hands along the arms of his chair. The wood is carved, polished and dark; he curls his knuckles around it as other men talk. He always listens first, absorbing the intonations and collecting his impressions, hoarding judgment until its time for the payout.
“Do you see this shit?” they all ask one another, jabbing ringed fingers at publicity photos, at the crumpled face like a time-worn suit holding aloft an axe, while the men with their pale expressions watch on and smile. The room ripples with indignation; somebody offers a suggestion for where LaGuardia can shove his axe next time.
But Frank says nothing. There’s no real concern—after all, they’re so much larger than a few machines, than a few politicians looking to hog the spotlight—but that doesn’t stop the raised hackles of defiance. The politicians and the newspapers all cry out against them, bashing their business with words and pronouncements that whack, and whack, and whack, hammering and beating, but doing as little damage as the loss of a few measly machines. But it’s the idea of it that gets under their skin—that these smug bastards think they’re so much better, so honorable, so legitimate. They’re the same men who clap Frank on the back after warm Sunday afternoons on the course, golf clubs swung easily over their shoulders or thrust into the hands of underpaid caddies they never seem to notice. They say, “Good game, Frank,” and “Same time next week?” and they take his payoffs indirectly, reaping his benefits and his promises. Frank trusts them as far as he can hit a golfball trapped in the sandpit.
The room fills with smoke and complaints, but Frank waves them a way with one ringed finger. The gold catches the light, a simple black stone inset on the center. Everybody has their complaints about those bastards, with blood as blue as the river where they toss the machines, whose lives as no cleaner than the East River. But none of them matter, not the way Frank figures. “Sure, they’re all louses,” he’ll admit, voice like soft footfalls on gravel slipping through dark shadows. He bites into lunch ordered from their favorite delicatessen, a heaping mound of meats, breads, cheeses, pickles, pastries—the same feast at every meet, though nobody ever finishes all of it. He chews thoughtfully, rolling words through his mind, before giving a shrug of his broad shoulders. “Let ‘em think they’re doin’ somethin’ useful. They won’t know the difference.”
LaGuardia can do what he likes. He can gather his newspaper men and make a big show dumping the slots into the river, strutting about as though he fights for the people, their beloved Robin Hood fending off the greedy criminals who suck away the hard earned cash of good people. Frank only laughs; he’s worked beside politicians long enough to know there is no altruism. And what good would it do anyway? After all, there are more slots and more places besides New York. Their influence stretches all the way down to New Orleans, in the casinos with high-rollers and gilt ceilings. His fingers dig deep into the dirt of country roads, into the gas stations and diners with men who can afford neither gas nor food, but who pay anyway in hopes of winning favor with fickle chance.
The men starving on the streets will work their hands bloody, slaving hour upon hour, cogs that run until they break, bleed until they rust. They’re replaced easily and no one blinks an eye. They feel this in their souls, in their desperation, in the thin bellies of their children and the dirty clothes that hang limp from their slim shoulders. The collective mass of the city puts their shoulder to the stone and they push, and push, and push, but there is no give. There is no progress, no movement. Empty, worn, they willingly give their coins to the machines—daring to hope for some escape, desperate enough to pay all that they have for the mere chance of sparing themselves another day’s labor.
Frank’s bed will be warm as nighttime drops the city into darkness, shadows crawling across his floor as he sleeps, untroubled. LaGuardia and his ilk will continue their shows of chivalry, their bravado for their people—but they, too, will be warm in bed without a care on their well-fed brows.
Those other men mount their clubs on their backs—the only burdens they’ve ever borne—and gorge themselves on oils and wines. Those other men push back against crime as they pad their elections with donations made in cash. The slot machines sink to the bottom, broken. Submerged, the cogs turn to rust, wearing away beneath the constant surge of the river.
On Sunday, the men all gather in their crisp slacks, their faces thrown into shadow beneath the brims of their hats, as they dodge the sun that gleams across the green. Together, they play all eighteen holes, talking of business and their wives. In turn, they raise clubs above their heads and swing, while their companions for the day watch on and smile. They finish with handshakes and the promise of another game next week—but only if the weather stays this nice, didn’t they say in the paper there could be rain?
Frank’s smile is rueful. “There’s nothing good in the papers these days, is there?”
He slips a large bill into the hand of the caddy. It will keep them fed for only so long, while all the others sink and drown. He doesn’t trouble himself with the cycle, the spinning images that take, and take, and only sometimes give. After all, they’d all been hungry once.
iv. Death
The treatments and the medications bring strange dreams. Or maybe they don’t—the stress brings the dreams, a nurse with a kindly face tells him, and he doesn’t speak of them again. He knows stress—he’s felt it in his gut, in his bones, in his heart, for longer than the nurse has been alive—and this is not it. The treatments, then. Or the medication. Those are to blame.
***
The streets are dark. Nighttime was darker back then. The few lights that dot the street are not bright; they are pale at best. It’s late, it’s cold, and he hurries home with winnings in his pocket—not much, but it will perhaps by a treat, something for the table to make it nice. He hurries because there is a shadow behind him and he won’t stop long enough to see if it’s his own or if it’s some imagined adversary; he won’t ever know, as he rounds a corner and plows face-first into a broad chest.
It’s not an unusual scene. Strong arms throw him to the wall, grabbing him as he tries to flee, to scurry past. He isn’t quick enough—or his opponent is too quick—and he’s stuck. Meyer feels his size too keenly as the man—boy? it’s dark—holds him fast, spits vitriol that cuts the same in English as it did in Russian.
His back hits the brick wall, again, then again. Does the man want money or his life? Meyer wants to know many things, but that answer is not one. He is without a weapon, but he’s never needed one. The man does not expect the small fist to wriggle free and hit with such force into his stomach. The man staggers enough that Meyer could run home, short legs carrying him away from the danger, but he doesn’t flee. He doesn’t even seem afraid. The nearby stoop is decaying; the bricks have come loose, crumbling fragments falling to the sidewalk. The jagged edges cut into Meyer’s palm, the same way they cut into the man’s skull.
He washes the blood from his hands before he returns home, but he says nothing to anyone—not out of shame, but because it is unimportant. He thinks nothing of it; he’s done nothing that strangers are not keen to do to him.
The next day, he goes out, the money still in his pocket. He buys hamantaschen from the shop around the corner, and it tastes sweet.
***
Sandi comes to visit in the hospital and sits beside him, chewing too loudly on a Kit-Kat bar from the vending machine in the lobby. She asks how he feels. He’s fine, he is well, how else should he be? They want him to play his role correctly, to be sick enough that they feel good for their generosity, but not sick enough to be an inconvenience to the lives they are all trying to live. He retreats, with sullen petulance, behind the day’s newspaper. The articles are dull and irrelevant, the world passing by until its reports mean little, but Meyer reads the newspaper all the same. He always has; he does not intend to break the tradition, even though the names and figures have all ceased to be familiar.
***
On a brisk February morning, he fetches the paper. He’s younger, though not by much; his body is not quick or fast or healthy, but it still works. The pains in his stomach remind him better than anything else how far he’s come. He feels the age more keenly than success. His shadow falls across the lawn as he stoops slowly for the paper, the dim morning light turning the whole yard to bleak grey. It isn’t as bad, nor as cold, in Florida, but he feels the winters in his bones now more than he ever did.
It is the same everyday. He unfolds the paper. Teddy makes breakfast—he tells her not to bother, the pain in his stomach!, but she does anyway and he always eats because he knows better than to waste the food—while he sits in silence and reads. He remarks occasionally, on the latest report on Watergate, on the war in Vietnam, or on the weather forecast.
But not all days are the same as others, nor their stories as easy to pass along over plates of eggs. He catches a headline at the bottom of a page, beneath an ad for a crock pot cooker priced at $17.79. Frank Costello is dead at 82, more on page 19. Meyer closes the paper. He says little to Teddy, but he does not eat the breakfast she sets on the table. Instead, he sits in silence, until she clears away what he cannot stomach.
***
On a bleak January morning, Meyer goes to retrieve the paper. His steps are slowing, but they are not yet hindered. The pains are only beginning and he doesn’t complain of them, though Teddy urges him over and over to see a doctor. He will, soon. He has plenty of time for his health, but not enough time for everything else. He is only 60 and she treats him like an old man! He’s already 60, how the time flies!
Meyer does not reach the table, when he sees the announcement on the front page. The notorious crime boss is dead, the paper tells him, at age 65. He was facing arrest, so the headlines proclaim, as though that were of any importance compared to the life extracted forever in some foreign airport, full of strangers bustling too quickly to be bothered with what is lost. Meyer discards the paper on the dining room table, retreats to the bedroom, and he does not speak to Teddy for the rest of the day, nor the night. But she sees the paper and she reads and she understands, as she always does. She sits beside him in the hospital not long after, as he recovers from his second heart attack that did not kill him. Both events are unfortunate.
***
In the hospital room, Sandi crumples the Kit-Kat wrapper in her fist. Meyer cringes as the rustling noise prods with sharp pricks against his mind, diverting his attention. He sighs, folds the paper, and sets in his lap. There are no stories left to interest him.
“Do you want me to take that?” Sandi offers, rubbing chocolate off her teeth with the pad of her finger. He doesn’t respond, but she takes the paper anyway, crosses the pale hospital floor, and throws the newspaper into the trash along with her candy bar wrapper. Meyer thinks it wasteful; but what isn’t, these days? They never felt the ground dig into their palms, the world spinning as each hit drummed the staccato question of dying forgotten in the grime of the street into his body. He learned the rhythm, day after day, until it replaced his heartbeat. But Meyer was far away from it, growing farther every day—and wasn’t his heart weak? The rhythm and its threat kept them alive; look what had happened to all three when the beat left their blood?
He settles back against the hospital bed, hearing Sandi’s words without meaning, as he stares at the far wall, his thoughts stretching back. His mouth feels dry as the desert—the medication, it must be—and it tastes of iron. He interrupts Sandi, asks her to please be a good girl, won’t she get a nurse to bring him a glass of water?
As kids, their weapons were found. They were bits from around the neighborhood, defending them better than the lessons they learned at the table in cramped, stuffy homes. But no weapon could beat back the inevitable—the tightness in his muscles, the ache every day, the spin of the room when he got up too many times in the night to use the restroom, and the bitter taste as the nurse brings his medication.
Sandi returns swiftly; he downs the water faster than he realizes. The nurse titters and takes the cup, her smile as benign as it is false. She says he must stay hydrated; she says he drinks like a man dying in the desert.
But he’s nothing like that, Meyer knows. He’s nothing like a man dying in the desert, with the sand in his bones as a promise, sweeping up the vast expanse of emptiness and putting it in his pocket. It’s all just a sweet in a candy store to him—a sweet that he swipes from behind the counter and slips into his pocket, grinning when they’re back on the street as he says, “Hey Mey, want a piece?” But sometimes the owner sees through the shop window, comes storming through the front door, slapping the boy in the back of his head with a rolled up newspaper and demanding payment for the stolen candy. “Fuck off!” the boy spits. He does not pay; the shop owner hits him again. The little boy fights back, until Meyer pulls him away, and together they run.
The man dying in the desert does not fight back. His pockets are full and the owner is angry, but he doesn’t fight. He doesn’t run. He waits and Meyer will never understand why; he will never shake the feeling in his stomach—it’s the ulcers, the nurses tell him, causing him pain, but Meyer knows there’s more eating away at his gut than just that—that he never could say the right things. He could never say that he would love a piece of the stolen candy, could never say that he’s proud for what he’s accomplished, could never say, “I told them not to.” So the man dying with the desert in his pocket does not run, because of what Meyer did not say.
The man dying in the desert did not know hospital beds, ulcers, aging bones, cancer, or grandchildren. Meyer is nothing like him; he says nothing to the nurse. Meyer never says anything.
Sandi leaves. The days pass. His health grows steadily worse.
Throughout the years, Meyer saw many lives flicker out in front of him. They died on the other side of a pipe, a gun, or across town and out of sight—dead by Meyer’s words, Meyer’s orders. They were all in his control; he feels no regret. Why lament what is necessary? Yet, it’s the ones outside his control that cut the most, that burrow themselves into the lining of his stomach and gnaw at him, a dull ache, an itch he can never satisfy.
More time slips away. Teddy visits often; his children do not. He reads more newspapers, takes more medication, and watches the wall until he absorbs its neutral pallor in the dips of his cheeks.
The nurses tell him that the cancer’s spreading. They’re doing the best they can and he should remain hopeful, they say, but he sees the lies plainly in their faces. He’s dying. He knows it is necessary; he tries not to lament. After all, he thinks, wasn’t the lung cancer his decision? Meyer gave the order for death, as he did so many others, with each pack of cigarettes passed to him over the counter. Each time he selected his favorite brand, paying more and more per pack over the years, he was giving the order.
It’s good, though. He knows how to do that, how to order someone’s end. He’s glad, too, as he stares up at the pale fluorescent light above him. He wouldn’t want his death brought by anybody else.