ever betray my friends.”
She turned me around and straddled me, so she faced the ocean and her legs hooked through the middle railing. Then she started grinding down on me. If anybody who knew Teddy or my wife saw me doing this on the Boardwalk I’d be a dead man, for sure. But the thought of death just made me fuck harder.
A seagull’s cry merged with Rosemary’s voice, asking me to give her more. If I wasn’t careful I was going to come too soon, so I tried thinking about other things.
Coffee grounds in a white garbage bag. Ice hockey. My wife’s couch in the living room. Nose hair. The way Nicky looked at me. My son’s Ninja Turtles. Smell Michelangelo.
Rosemary licked my ear and I picked her up and turned her the other way, so now I was the one facing the ocean. Thick foamy waves pounded into the shore. I looked down the Boardwalk to where the amusement pier was still going strong. I could see the green-and-yellow neon of the Ferris wheel and the switchbacks forming bold patterns against the stark black sky.
It wasn’t doing any good. Rosemary’s pussy kept getting hotter and wetter. Her voice was crying out like she was starting to come. The seagulls screeched back at her. She dug her nails through the back of my pants and into the cheeks of my ass as she drew me on and on. I felt the juice creeping up toward the tip of my cock like mercury rising in a thermometer.
“Please,” said Rosemary. “Please don’t stop.”
I exploded inside of her. The first shot was like a cannon blast, but the second was just as strong. The third didn’t have quite as much force, but the payload was just as big. And so it went with Rosemary holding on for dear life, until I was just spent and hollow.
Over her shoulder, I watched the waves roll away from the shore, carrying the sand and empty Budweiser cans out to the sea and the rest of the world.
Then I closed my eyes and my wife Carla’s face came to me, with her sad eyes and her full disappointed lips. And when I thought about her I felt an overwhelming sadness that made me want to fall to my knees and cry.
Not just because I’d let her down or betrayed her, but because after all this time and all these years, I finally knew what I’d been missing.
19
MOST PEOPLE DON’T KNOW it, but being aroundconcrete can be a very sensual experience. Watching it pour slowly down the chute. Sloshing around in it in your rubber boots. Feeling it settle. Hearing the whine of the trucks. Most mob guys only get involved in construction so they can show a legitimate source for their income, but I actually liked the work itself. There was just something satisfying about beginning a job and seeing it through to the end.
It also took my mind off all the trouble I had brewing. After the threat from Nicky, I’d had to move Carla and the kids over to her mother’s house until I figured out how to protect them. Then there was Rosemary. My thoughts kept coming back to her body like it was the melody of a song. I didn’t want to be the kind of bum who ran out on his wife, but I knew I belonged with somebody else. And on top of all that, I still hadn’t raised the money to get Elijah into the fight game.
For the moment, though, I was in some lady’s yard, installing steps from her driveway to her front door. I had my truck and four Puerto Ricans mixing cement, sand and water on the sidewalk with their shovels. Everything was going just fine until Vin came up behind me and scared me half to death.
“What the fuck?” I said, jumping back a little. “How the hell did you find me?”
“Richie had the address on a bill at the office. You know, you oughta get a beeper. Give us a way to find you.”
“Yeah, that’s all I need. First job I get in a month, you’re out here, bothering me. The lady inside sees you, she’s gonna think she’s paying for an extra man.”
In fact, she already looked like she was having a fit. Tall redhead in a New Jersey Giants jersey. She’d been standing at the screen door watching us all morning, as if we weren’t trustworthy.
I went back to stirring the soapy-looking concrete in my wheelbarrow as my father stood there looking over my shoulder.
“You sure you got enough sand in there?” he said. “You know that’s the most important thing.”
“Ah, what do you know about it? Sand isn’t the most important thing. It’s the aggregate. You got to have the right mixture of big rocks and little rocks. That’s what you don’t understand. It’s having the right balance that makes it work. Just like the casino business.”
“Wha?”
“It’s like a casino,” I said, taking off my bandana and wiping my brow with it. “If you read that article I showed you about Dan Bishop, you’d understand. You don’t make all your money off your high rollers or your slot players. What you need is a mix of the high, low, and middle.”
My father glanced over his shoulder at the lady of the house, still watching us from the screen door thirty yards away.
“Women,” he said. “I think they’re all getting too much power.”
“Just don’t blow this job for me.”
“Let me tell you something.” He spat on the grass. “You went with Teddy full-time you wouldn’t have to work like this in the first place.”
I noticed he had a brown paper bag in his hands and he was balling it up nervously.
I tipped the wheelbarrow a little and wiped my palms on the sides of my jeans. “How many times do I have to explain this to you? I don’t want anything to do with the crew.”
He wasn’t listening. He was staring at the screen door. He gripped the brown paper bag with all his might and thrust it into my hands.
“Here, take this fuckin’ thing already,” he said.
The unmistakable weight of a gun went right from my hand to the pit of my stomach.
“What’s this?”
“It’s for Larry’s son Nicholas,” he told me.
I started feeling a little dizzy.
“I’ve got nothing to do with him.” I twisted the top of the bag into a paper swirl and looked for a place to drop it. “Why’re you giving me this?”
“He thinks you did his father,” my old man explained, running his fingers through his shock of gray hair and taking a half-done cigar out of his pocket.
I rested my butt against the side of the wheelbarrow and tried not to slide in. Something behind my eyes was starting to swell. “Why’s he think a thing like that?”
“I dunno.” My father lit the half cigar. A couple of embers fell and clung to his polo shirt. “People get ideas. Teddy wants you to go with Richie, take care of it.”
I looked up at the overcast sky and the fading sun as though there was someone up there I could appeal to. “But this was your deal all the way. I’m not even part of the Family.”
My father looked somber. “Teddy wants to see you do some work.”
“So what? If Teddy wanted me to chew glass, would I have to do that too?”
All my life I’d been trying to get away from that fat fuck, and here he was coming after me again.
“Why can’t you just see the man is an asshole?” I asked my father. “He’s dragging both of us down into the mud.”
“He is not an asshole! If it wasn’t for him I’d still be boosting cars off the street in South Philly.”
“And what’re you doing now?!” I almost shouted. “You say that like your life is so wonderful now! Don’t you see it?! This whole way of life doesn’t mean anything anymore. It’s for the museums and history books!”
“It means nothing, ha?!”
My father suddenly grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and pulled my head down. “Come here, you little motherfucker,” he said, ripping his shirt open with his free hand. “Look at these, look at these.”
