Casino Moon

27

I BROUGHT CARLA and the kids home that night, but I was so nervous that every time the phone rang, I thought the police were going to come through the line, and arrest me in my kitchen for killing Nicky. So I had my heart in my hand when I picked up the receiver the next morning.

It turned out to be Elijah Barton’s brother John B.

“I was talkin’ to the man,” he said, in the usual half-swallowed voice he used when the subject wasn’t his brother the champion.

“Who?”

With John, “the man” could have meant Jesus Christ or the head of the World Boxing Federation.

“Mr. Suarez,” he explained. “He say we better come up with that money soon or somebody else gonna have the chance to fight for the title.”

I remembered the leathery skin and the paisley ascot. Suarez was the guy we’d met at the Doubloon conference a month back. The one who’d asked for the “contribution” in exchange for getting Elijah ranked in the top ten. Scumbag. Without that ranking, we had no shot at talking to Sam Wolkowitz the corporate guy and making our deal to fight on television. I saw my brave new world of spacious boardrooms and designer suits washing away with the nine o’clock tide.

“Tell that greaseball to go fuck himself.” I picked up a bread knife from the kitchen counter.

For a second, I was taken aback. It was Vin’s voice coming out of my mouth. I wondered if I’d become more like him by virtue of killing somebody. But I told myself it was just the pressure. I put down the bread knife and tried to sound more reasonable. “Exactly who does Mr. Suarez think is going to fight their guy, if not Elijah?”

“They been talkin’ about Meldrick Norman,” John B. mumbled. “He’s ranked number four among the light heavyweights.”

“But he’s a nobody! He’s a tomato can! He doesn’t have a fifth the name recognition that Elijah has. How could they give him the shot instead of us?”

“It’s that kind of business.” John B.’s voice cracked mournfully on the line. “You got to give in order to get.”

I hung up on him and started pacing around. My whole world was falling in on me. My marriage was dead. I had a murder on my conscience. And my one chance to pull out of the tailspin and finally pay off that fat bastard Teddy was fading like the fog off the ocean. My mouth was dry. I opened the refrigerator to get something to drink, but all the orange juice was gone. I’d heard Carla go out the door a half hour before, saying she was going shopping. But I needed something now. There was a can of Budweiser on the door, though. Sensuous water beads slid down its side just like they do on a beer commercial.

Without even thinking, I opened it and took a swig. The clock above the sink said it was about nine-thirty in the morning. I’d never had a drink this early in the day before. Drinking when the sun was up was for cretins like Joey Snails, I thought. But the beer felt good going down my throat and cooling my belly. By the time I’d finished it, a kind of peace had settled over me for the first time since I’d killed Nicky. I wondered if this was why people became alcoholics. I closed my eyes and relaxed awhile, listening to the hum of the air conditioner in the living room. A 5400 BTU Carrier my father took off the back of a truck in Mays Landing. Maybe one day I’d be able to buy the family a new one with my own money.

I started to hear a high-pitched squeal. Sort of a piercing sound that went right through your eardrum and into your teeth. At first I thought it was the air conditioner. But then I realized the sound was coming from the back bedroom. Maybe someone had broken in through one of the windows. An F.B.I. man or a friend of Nicky’s. I tried to remember ifI had that gun in the house, the one I’d used on Nicky. But it was still locked away in the glove compartment of my car, waiting to be tossed off the Brigantine Bridge. My only weapon was the empty Budweiser can in my hand. I crushed it and got ready to grind it into someone’s face.

But when I stepped into the bedroom doorway, all I saw was my son, Anthony Jr., sitting in front of the Macintosh computer. Carla must have left him here, figuring I could look after him while she took Rachel shopping. The squealing sound was coming from Anthony’s hearing aid. He had it turned up too loud again, and it was feeding back like a heavy metal guitar player’s amplifier.

He looked up at me with those big brown eyes. “Dad-dee, I DEE-stroyed the world,” he said. “Now I’m sad.”

He was using that game, Sim City. The one where you play God, creating the economy, the environment, and everything else between heaven and earth. Except without his older sister around to control things, little Anthony usually got too excited and would let a rainstorm wash civilization away.

“I’m hun-GRY,” he said with that overemphasis he had because of his hearing problem.

“Come into the kitchen, I’ll get you some breakfast.”

He padded in with me, holding my hand. It was a good feeling, being able to have my family home because Nicky was out of the way. But between the fight and Rosemary, I’d been so preoccupied lately, I’d barely noticed Anthony. So now I felt guilty for being a bad father.

“What do you want to eat?” I threw away my can and lifted him up to the cupboard. “Count Chocula or Trix?”

“The COUNT!”

“All right, the Count.” I pushed aside the Trix box with the white rabbit on it. “Forget the rabbit.”

“Screw the rab-BIT!”

I just looked at him for a second, realizing he must’ve heard talk like that from my wife or me. I decided it would be better not to say anything.

I put him down and mussed his hair. I had a feeling he actually wasn’t that hungry; he probably just wanted to be with me. I put some milk in a bowl and gave him a spoon.“Pour your own poison.” I sat him down at the breakfast table and handed him the cereal box.

He filled the bowl to the brim with little brown balls and smiled at me gratefully. “Sugar puh-lease?”

“That’s good,” I said. “You say please and thanks. You get farther in this world being polite than you do being rude.”

I saw him put his tablespoon in the sugar bowl and swing the heap unsteadily toward his cereal. His tongue was sticking out a little because he was concentrating so hard. He really was my son, I thought. Not just the way he looked like me, but the way he was so determined.

“D-ad,” he said. “Why you sleep in a di-fferent room from Mommy now?”

“She snores too much.”

He ate a couple of spoonfuls of his cereal and thought about it.

“There was some-THING else I wanted to ask you.” He tilted his head a little to the side, like he was trying to figure out the right way to get the next question out. “Why are all Ninja Tur-TLES green?”

I reached over with a napkin and dabbed his mouth where the milk was leaking out. “I don’t know,” I said. “Don’t ask too many questions. It might not be good for you.”

The phone rang again but there was no one on the other end. I hung it up quickly, feeling a cold finger on the back of my neck. Anthony Jr. put a little more sugar on his cereal and ate a couple more spoonfuls, without taking his eyes off me.

“You know, I shouldn’t have said that before,” I told him. “Ask me anything you want. It’s good to be curious.”

“O-KAY.” He chomped loudly on his cereal. “Then why, why, why do we have to have egg-onomics?”

“You mean economics?”

He nodded slowly, giving me that wide-eyed expectant look. He was so smart sometimes. The only thing holding him back was that hearing problem. I wondered if there was some renegade gene in Teddy’s family. Between his daughter Kathy being retarded and his son Charlie committing suicide, I thought there might be something wrong that Carla, as his niece, passed on to our Anthony.

My little boy carefully put his spoon down on the table and leaned forward so he could hear exactly what I was going to tell him. I loved him so much that it killed me to think he was going to have a hard time later in life. I knew we were going to have to send him to some kind of special school. And that would cost money. Money that I didn’t have now. I had to keep going with this boxing business. I didn’t want my Anthony to grow up thinking his old man was a failure, who couldn’t provide for him.

“Economics is just a way of keeping score of who’s up and who’s down,” I told him. “It changes all the time.”

“Oh.”

He watched his cereal and didn’t say anything for a long time. I was sure he was going to ask me whether I was up or down. But instead he picked up his spoon and began eating again.

After three mouthfuls he stopped and looked me right in the eye. “Da-DDD, I just thought of something.”

I knew he was about to give me a live report right from the bottom of his heart. There was no faking with this kid. He could devastate you with an innocent question or a frown. Maybe he was about to ask me if I was going to leave his mother. I got ready for him to let me have it with both barrels.

“What?” I asked.

He took a deep breath. “Maybe all Nin-ja Tur-TLES are green because they all want to be the same.”

“Yeah, maybe,” I said, feeling a bubble of relief rising in my stomach. “Probably makes life easier that way.”