Grandma cleared her throat, and he could tell she had subjects to broach. Things she needed to get out, but hoping he'd be the one to start.
It wasn't easy. The house already felt like it was pressing in on him. He could sense the remaining tensions of those who'd lived and died there. Mostly in stillness, but with loud, abandoned thoughts.
His father, a hard man of imperfect justice. His mother, a mere suggestion that dwelled in the house, unseen but still obvious, often coughing. His grandmother, a Sicilian witchy lady of sorts, a soothsayer who didn't soothe. It was her way. At nine, she'd seen the Virgin Mary in an olive grove outside Messina, in the shadow of Mount Etna. She told her local priest, who had burned her with sulfur for speaking with the devil's tongue. You heard about stuff like that and you understood why she loved chapels but hated churches.
Since then, she'd had dreams that gave her a glimpse through the thinnest part of the veil. They informed her of what was happening, who might be visiting Dane from the other side. She called it the burden but didn't treat it as such. It had been passed to him like a rock. Now he had to find out how much she already knew.
Dane still couldn't stop looking at her hair, thinking, Jesus, the hell did she do to herself?
She noticed him staring and slid a hand over the bangs, primping them. “It's magenta.”
“Oh,” he said. “Is that right?”
“Matches my nail polish. You look like you've got something to say.”
“It just takes a little getting used to.”
“You shut up.”
She uncorked a bottle of red wine and poured two glasses. He ate, sipped, and looked around the table at the remaining chairs, empty except for the muscular weight of memory.
“So, this is what I changed your diapers for?” she said, trying to sound heartbroken but not even coming close.
“What?”
“Raised you for? Fed you for all these years? So you could sit and not say a word to me, like I was the DA?”
“You told me to shut up.”
“I didn't mean it.”
“I'm just gathering my thoughts.”
She pressed a piece of sausage onto his plate, motioned with her fork for him to eat more. “You put that girl out of your mind yet?”
“It's not about that so much, at the moment,” he admitted.
“What, then? All the talk about Vincenzo Monticelli coming to put a double tap in your brain”-reaching over to thunk him twice on the head, where the scars lay hidden beneath his hairline, everybody clunking him in the head-“you can forget about it for now. You take it one step at a time, plan it through, then when you start moving you don't stop until it's finished. You can do it.”
Telling him, pretty much outright, that she expected him to go against the mob and clean house. Take them all out, one way or another. That easy. Come home afterward and she'd have garlic bread waiting.
She didn't say it without reservation, or fear, or even love. But there was a controlled fervor in her voice, the same kind that had been in his father's voice, often devoid of sentiment. His old man used to put it down on the line, with an acute conviction, and once you figured out what you had to do, no matter what it was, you just went and did it.
“It's only him and his brother and maybe a little extra muscle,” Grandma continued, spooning more ravioli onto his plate. “Three or four guys maybe. No more than, say, six. Joey Fresco and Tommy Bartone are the only old- school hitters. Maybe ten guys. You're not going up against the whole family, think of it that way. A dozen, tops.”
He used to wonder if he could do what she'd done, cleaning factory floors all day long, every day, for years. Raising a kid by herself. His father, just a toddler, told to be quiet, don't move, wait until Mama's done, staying there for sixteen hours with nothing to do. His own father dead on the job, whacked by upper brass because he didn't take enough graft, busting ass and spoiling the take for them. Under investigation, found posthumously guilty, no pension.
Every time Dane thought he was hard, he just thought about shit like that and realized how listless he truly was. The army hadn't shaken his apathy, and neither had the can. Now she's saying he's gotta go take out the local mob when all he wanted to do was flatten Vinny onto his ass. One nice shot, and then the rest, whatever happened afterward, wouldn't really matter.
“Vinny's got the edge,” he said.
“Why? Because he says he can see the future?”
“He can.”
Grandma Lucia's hands in the air, like Pepe, like Dane himself. How would they communicate if they ever broke a finger? “That he can walk three different trails and decide which to follow? Go back and forward in time? He can't see anything, Johnny. If he could, you think he'd still be in Headstone City, leading a fading mob family?”
“Grandma, I've seen him do it.”
She didn't hear him. “The Monticellis went legit and lost most of the money they made from all the illegal action. What his father earned on trucking hijacks and prostitution, him and that Berto lost on mutual funds and junk bonds.”
They drank another glass of wine together. Dane had a question he needed to ask, but his grandmother was in a fierce mood. That threw him, made it even harder to keep focus. “Has she ever spoken to you?”
“Who?”
He stared at her.
“Your mother?”
He hissed air through his teeth, thinking of Ma in the back room, seeing angels, choking on cancer, calling his name.
“Oh, that other one? Angelina? No.” Shaking her head, the pink curls bobbing left and right. Her voice lost some of its edge and took on a delicate quality. “Sometimes in dreams I hear the two of you talking, but I can't always hear the words. Only that she's giving you a hard time.”
Dane finished his dinner, picked up his dirty dishes and took them into the kitchen, put them in the sink and poured some soap and ran the hot water tap so the sauce wouldn't crust. When he got back to the table she was having more wine, her cheeks covered with red splotches. It was the histamine in the wine, it made her face turn beet red.
He asked, “Is my gun still here?”
“I cleaned it this morning and put it on your bed, wrapped in a clean rag.”
Some kids had little old grannies who did nothing but go to church and crochet. Vinny's grandmother used to listen to him play the violin and accompany him on the piano.
Dane's-she's breaking down and oiling a Smith & Wesson.38 with a four-inch barrel, laying it out on his pillow. Overhearing him talking with the dead.
SEVEN
With the night came a heavy, abiding fog rising off Long Island Sound.
The kind that seemed intent on action, wanting to chase Dane down. Throbbing as it coiled against his tires, calling him along the expressway mile by mile. He could race into the heaving clouds and hide his crimes, hunt for the ambitions he'd set aside until no one was looking. This was the living darkness that matched what was locked inside his rib cage.
Swirling gray threads swallowed the headlights, laid across the road to snare his front end. The nimbus of twin beacons looked like burning souls wandering lost in purgatory, side by side down the road. Maybe him and Vinny, after they'd finally done each other in.
Dane drove over to the warden's house out in Glen Cove, right on the north shore. He wheeled past million-
