that was his last name. Wayne Sadowsky. The name flashed in P.F.’s mind like a half-screwed in light bulb. Big, pastyfaced Southern kid with huge linebacker shoulders and a brown perm that sat like a sick poodle on top of his head. He moved poorly, though, like he’d once been badly injured.
“Why don’t you-all just back off now, Officer Farley?” Sadowsky said, his accent rich with the kind of snide condescension young federal agents reserve for older local cops. “This here is going to be a legitimate investigation.”
Yes. Number 54, Wayne Sadowsky, out with a groin pull.
“Wonderful,” said P.F. “I’ve no need to engage in weenie-waggling with you anyway. You can have your grubby little case all to yourself.”
He scratched his crotch with regal indifference and started to walk away.
“Hey,” Stevie Ray called after him. “What about them five dollars? I wouldn’t forget it, man.”
“Ask your new friend with the federal government,” said P.F., glancing back at Stevie Ray and then Sadowsky. “They’re always ready to help out a man in need.”
The agent took Stevie Ray’s arm and pulled him away. The medical examiner’s guys finally slammed the van doors on Larry DiGregorio. And the strip of casinos on Pacific Avenue kept shining like a golden chain extending into the night, dividing Atlantic City into a realm of light on one side of the street and darkness on the other.
3
AFTER SEEING WHAT my father did to Larry, all I wanted to do was come home and have a quiet night with my family. But it was like trying to sit down to a normal meal after looking at the inside of somebody’s stomach.
Almost as soon as I walked in the front door, with Larry’s smell still on my hands, I got into a fight with my wife.
“I have a surprise for you,” she said.
“Holy shit! What is it?”
“What do you mean, ‘what is it?’ It’s a fucking couch. What does it look like to you?”
Twice I walked around this thing. It took me about two minutes each time. It was enormous. All done up in peach with these soft brocade pillows and a fringe hanging off the end that reminded me of the shawl my mother used to wear. It looked like the type of thing you’d lie down on before you died.
In fact, if Larry DiGregorio had any luck at all he would’ve been lying on a couch like this instead of the back- alley Dumpster where we’d left him.
“Where’d you get this thing from anyway?”
“From Spartz, two weeks ago,” said my wife. “They just delivered it.”
My face fell. “Why’d you go there?”
“What do you mean, why would I go there?” said my wife Carla, who was five months pregnant and had a voice that made the neighbors pull their windows down. “It’s a fuckin’ furniture store.”
At the same time, both of us seemed to realize our two kids were in the other room, playing with the computer. Carla put her hand over her mouth, like she was ashamed of what she’d just said.
“I thought we were going to wait a while,” I said, trying to lower the temperature a little. “Save some money, so we could afford one of those nice Scandinavian couches Dave D.’s gonna be getting in.”
“I already went by Dave D.’s and he didn’t have nothing I wanted,” Carla whispered. “Everything he’s got is made out of tan leather. It’s like a fuckin’ furniture store for fag bikers. I wanna wear leather, I’ll go ride a motorcycle. I wanna sit on the couch with my baby, I don’t sit on leather. Especially in the summer when it gets all sticky and I wanna wear shorts.”
I looked at her stuffed into her mother’s striped Capri pants and purple halter top, and wondered what had gone wrong with our lives.
I’d started going with Carla back in high school. I’d had a couple of other girlfriends before her, but neither was Italian, so my father and Teddy poisoned me against them. “You shouldn’t have outsiders around the house!” Instead they asked me to take out Carla, who was Teddy’s niece. Right away, we hit it off. There was a special connection between us. Psychosis I think is the word. She was the only girl in my grade who wore tattoos and motorcycle boots. The two of us were the class misfits. It was her and me against the world.
But then I went off to college and things changed. I started reading books and hanging out with a different crowd, people who were going into the kind of professions where you negotiated with a telephone instead of a crowbar. And Carla stayed home in Atlantic City and became more like her uncle’s niece. Right then was when we should’ve broken up. But when I came back to town on Christmas vacation sophomore year, Carla took me for a walk on the Boardwalk and told me she was pregnant. And that was all she wrote. We were stuck together even though we didn’t belong together anymore. It was nobody’s fault.
“You shouldn’t have gone to Spartz,” I told her.
“Why not?”
“You should’ve waited. By summer, maybe one of those contracts would’ve come through for me, and we could’ve gone to Ikea and redone the whole living room.”
“But I can’t stand to wait,” she said, putting her hands on her hips. “I’m already dead on my feet from carrying this baby around.”
“It would’ve just been a couple of more months.”
“That’s what you always say. There’s always a break just around the corner. But you know what your problem is, Anthony? You only talk to people you already know. It, it’s ... what’s the word I want?”
“Like incest.”
“It’s retarded,” she said. “You talk to the same people, you go to the same places, your life’s in a rut. You’re not going anywhere.”
“Oh that’s not true,” I said, taking off my jacket and checking the sleeves to make sure none of Larry’s blood got on them. “I’m always trying to get out. Don’t you see me working morning, noon, and night trying to get out and make a name for myself?”
“You’re only doing that to get away from me,” she said, changing tack.
One minute I was hanging out with the same people all the time. The next I was trying to get away from her. I couldn’t win with Carla. I guess we were just clawing at each other because we were unhappy and didn’t know what else to do.
“You still should’ve waited,” I said, kicking one of these little green Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle dolls the kids left lying on the floor like claymore land mines. I’d finally saved enough to afford some toys and already they were out of date. “We could have had something modern in the house.”
“Instead of what?” Carla was starting to raise her voice and her belly was beginning to shake.
“Instead of the kind of thing your Uncle Ted and Aunt Camille have.”
It was a low blow but Carla took it better than I expected. She went over and stroked the end of the couch like it was a new cat she’d just let in. And what made that worse was that our walls already smelled from cats.
“Well maybe if you’d go work for my uncle full-time we could afford something nicer,” she said softly.
“I’m not gonna do that,” I muttered.
I was already in too deep with her uncle. When my father first gave me the sixty thousand dollars to go to college and start my business, he didn’t tell me it came from Ted. Now the debt was hanging over my life like the Goodyear blimp.
“So how much is this going to cost us anyway?” I asked, giving the couch a little kick on the side.
“Just forty-five a month.”
“Oh.” I felt like I’d been kneed in the groin. “What’re you telling me? What’re you doing to me? I’m gonna have to make payments on a couch I don’t want?”
“Maybe if you’d come with me just the once, we could’ve picked something out together,” she said. I saw water forming in the corners of her eyes.
