hands appeared on the boards and then the other.
'Now, by God,' his father breathed. He stood above his huddled
son like a giant.
'Oh, Daddy,' Jacky mourned for both of them. And for a moment
his father paused, his face sagged into lines of uncertainty, and
Jacky felt a thread of hope.
Then the face drew up. Jacky could smell the beer, and his father
said, 'I'll teach you to sass me,' and all hope was gone as the foot
swung out, burying itself in Jacky's belly, driving the wind from
his belly in a whoosh. as he flew from the tree-house platform and
fell to the ground, turning over once and landing on the point of his
left elbow, which snapped with a greenstick crack. He didn't even
have breath enough to scream. The last thing he saw before he
blacked out was his father's face, which seemed to be at the end of
a long, dark tunnel. It, seemed to be filling with surprise, the way a
vessel may fill with some pale liquid.
He's just starting to know what he did, Jacky thought incoherently.
And on the heels of that, a thought with no meaning at all, coherent
or otherwise, a thought, that chased him into the blackness as he
fell back on the chewed and tattered grass of the back lawn in a
faint:
What you see is what you'll be, what YOU see is what you'll be,
what you-
The break in his arm was cleanly healed in six months. The
nightmares went, on much longer. In a way, they never stopped.
THE OVERLOOK HOTEL, THIRD FLOOR, 1958
The murderers came up the stairs in their stocking feet.
The two men posted outside the door of the Presidential Suite
never heard them. They were young, dressed in Ivy League suits
with the cut of the jackets a little wider than the fashion of the day
decreed. You couldn't wear a .357 Magnum concealed in a
shoulder holster and be quite in fashion. They were discussing
whether or not the Yankees could take yet another pennant. It was
lacking two days of September, and as usual, the pinstripers looked
formidable. Just talking about the Yankees made them feel a little
better. They were New York boys, on loan from Walt Abruzzi, and
they were a long way from home.
The man inside was a big wheel in the Organization. That was all
they knew all they wanted to know. 'You do your job, we all get
well,' Abruzzi had told them. 'What's to know?'
They had heard things,, of course. That there was a place in
Colorado that was completely neutral ground. A place where even
a crazy little West Coast hood like Tony Giorgio could sit down
and have a fancy brandy in a balloon glass with the Gray Old Men
who saw him as some sort of homicidal stinging insect to be
crushed. A place where guys from Boston who had been used to
putting each other in the trunks of cars behind bowling alleys in
Malden or into garbage cans in Roxbury could get together and
play gin and tell jokes about the Polacks. A place where hatchets
could be buried or unearthed, pacts made, plans laid. A place
