Casino Moon

64

“HOW IS THAT?” said Teddy, looking at his niece’sswollen belly.

“How is it?” Carla took the teakettle off the stove and tapped her foot. “I’m fed up, that’s how it is. It’s almost two weeks to my due date, I feel like I’m about to burst, I’m thirsty and tired all the time, and I have to go to the bathroom every five minutes. Now I think I’m getting hemorrhoids. I want this thing out of me.”

Teddy was half reclining on the Spartz couch. He closed his eyes as if he had to concentrate to get the air in and out of his body.

“I’m thirsty all the time too,” he said with a shrug. “But I ain’t having any baby.”

“Fine.” Carla poured him a cup. “You wanna trade places?”

“You wouldn’t want to be where I am.”

It was just midnight and they were both watching the door. Richie would be back at any minute. After that would come Anthony, if Tommy Sick hadn’t taken care of him. Wind blew against the windows and crazed the leaves on the trees outside.

“It must be something,” he said. “Carrying around a life inside you. Taking a life, it’s nothing. It’s bullshit. Any moron can pull a trigger.”

That gurgling sound came again from down in his throat and that deep pain squeezed his guts again. “Jesus.” He sat up on the couch and waited for it to pass.

“You want I should call a doctor?”

“Nah, fuck it. It’s all right.” He put his head back on a cushion.

Then suddenly he propped himself up on his elbow and examined the couch. “Hey,” he said, stroking the fabric. “Where did this come from?”

“Oh.” Carla regarded him absently and went to the kitchen to get herself a glass of water. “I bought it from Spartz, the furniture store.”

Teddy’s mind flushed red with rage as the medication made the sweat pop out of him again. All the things he’d provided for these two and this lousy Anthony couldn’t even buy a couch for them. He was too busy ratting them out to the feds and making money he should’ve been sharing with Teddy. It was worse than a disgrace, it was an infamia. Teddy had a mind to go wait for him on the sidewalk. To deliver a good beating, slamming Anthony’s head in a car door until he fell lifelessly into the gutter. But the wide ache radiating down his sphincter and up his dick reminded him that he barely had the strength to close his own belt buckle. He’d leave all the heavy lifting to Richie and Tommy.

What was it that black kid Terrence kept saying before the fight? Old man, old man. “Old man oughta stay in the old man home.” The words echoed in Teddy’s mind and he knew all at once, he was going to die. He would go through with the radiation and maybe even the chemotherapy, but the cancer would kill him, no matter what the doctor said. Terror seized his heart and shriveled his lungs.

Suddenly he didn’t want to leave this life. It was too soon. What did he have to show for himself? There was no son to inherit what little wealth and respect he’d accumulated. His daughter couldn’t even understand he was a boss. And with Vin dead, there wasn’t even anyone to share his twilight years. Why had he killed the one friend he had left? Out of a code? Out of vengeance? For what? Vin having a son when he didn’t?

His mind began to collapse in on itself. Who would remember him after he was gone? There was Carla, standing pregnant over by the refrigerator. But she was only a girl. Teddy had an urge to go running into her children’s bedroom to wake her son Anthony Jr., just to see if there was any family resemblance between them. Some small trace of Teddy to pass on to the next century.

But it was late and he knew he’d be out of energy before he had one foot on the floor.

And now the spreading warmth around his lap told him he’d given up the bag to hold his urine too quickly. He’d pissed on the couch. He started to tell his niece what he’d done, so she’d get him a towel and a blanket. But shame overcame him and he began to cry.

“Uncle Ted, what’s the matter?” she said, coming over to take his hand.

“It’s nothing.” He choked. “Lemme be.”

A grown man pissing and crying on a couch. You began this life like a baby and you finished it the same way. But in the end, you were alone, with no one to care for you. Especially if you didn’t have children to look after you. Maybe Vin was right. They all should have made more babies.

He buried his face in his hands as his niece put her arm around his shoulder. “It’s all right, Uncle Ted,” she said. “I’m with you.”

But she wasn’t with him. And she never would be. She’d married that mutt Anthony and they were all poisoned by his tainted blood. Everything Teddy had done in his life amounted to nothing, and the dream he’d once had of controlling all of Atlantic City, the entire neon forest, was gone now.

He reclined all the way back on the couch again and closed his eyes.

“I think I’m just gonna sleep awhile,” he said. “You get me up if anybody comes in.”