“Now, I don’t require my daughters’ husbands to be millionaires or heroes,” Gene continued. “The only things I expect from you two are happy, healthy grandchildren and the knowledge that my girls are lying down each night beside God-fearing, honest men. If you can honor those requirements, then I welcome you to the family with my blessing. If you can’t, then say so now and we’ll part as friends.”
Leo did most of the talking for both of us—gave the old man his best Eddie Haskell “yes, sir” and “no, sir” kiss-up routine until Diogenes got to the end of both his big speech and his bath. He stood up, took the helping hand Leo offered him out of the tub, and lit us all Panatela Extras. Buck-naked still. It didn’t occur to the guy to put on a robe until after the three of us were all puffing away.
Neither Leo nor I said a word to each other as we walked back through the showroom and out the door, trailing cigar smoke and getting stared at by every single employee at the dealership. When we got back in Leo’s Kharmann Ghia, I flopped my head back and groaned. “Well,” I said, “I don’t know about honest and God-fearing, but you already got the grandchildren part of the equation under way.”
“Did you check out that shriveled little weenie of his?” Leo said. “Shit, man, I’ve seen bigger ones in a bottle of Heinz baby gherkins.” Pulling out of the lot, we both broke out in that kind of laughter that almost chokes you to death. The tears fell, we laughed so hard. “If I ever get saggy tits like that, do me a favor, will you, Birdseed?” Leo managed to get out. “Take me someplace and shoot me.” Speeding along the access road, laughing our fucking heads off, we rolled down our windows and chucked those stinking cigars.
I still say it’s screwy when you think about it, though: the way Dessa and I derailed and Leo and Angie didn’t. Well, they did derail, for a while—back when that dance club Leo was managing went belly up. Le Club, it was called. The owner was this coke-headed rich boy from Fairfield who got Leo fond of blow. Rik, the guy’s name was—used to have a heart attack if someone accidentally put a “c” in his first name. That was the one time when I let my friendship with Leo lapse. I just couldn’t stomach what the coke was doing to him—the stunts he was pulling, the way he was treating Angie. Then Rik’s daddy’s accountant drove up one afternoon and went over sonny boy’s books. Next thing you knew, Leo was out on his ass.
While Leo was in drug rehab—which the Constantines financed—it came out that he’d knocked up one of the hostesses at Le Club. Even I didn’t know about that little adventure; like I said, Leo and I didn’t spend a whole lot of time together back then. The hostess—her name was Tina—had already gotten the abortion but decided to ring Angie’s doorbell one afternoon for spite. Angie got a legal separation, and she and Shannon moved back to her parents’ home. Then, three months after Leo got out of treatment, Angie and he were pregnant again. The old man had a shit fit; he’d been lobbying hard for a divorce. Instead, he ended up hiring Leo as a salesman at the dealership.
That was one of the few times I ever saw old Diogenes cave in on something. Angie had had to beg her father to give Leo that job. She argued that people can change for the better—that Leo had changed. That he was a wonderful father to Gene and Thula’s only grandchild. That if Angie herself could forgive and forget, why couldn’t the Old Man? Gene told her forgiving and forgetting was one thing and putting that hemorrhoid on the payroll was another. Then Angie delivered the clincher: if it had been Dessa asking, he’d say yes without blinking. Dessa wouldn’t have to stand there and humiliate herself like this on top of everything else she’d gone through.
Which was probably true.
“What do you think of your sister’s request?” the Old Man sat on our sofa one night and asked Dessa. Thula sat next to him, silent and sulky, her arms folded over her big belly. They’d driven over in their big New Yorker after fighting about it for a week. In sixteen years of marriage, it was the only drop-in visit Dessa’s parents ever paid us.
“I guess I vote for anything that might heal things, Daddy,” Dessa said. “But it’s up to you. Can you handle Leo working there?”
“Can I handle it? Yes. Do I want to come into my place of business every morning and face that idiot she was foolish enough to marry? No, I do not.”
I sat there and kept my mouth shut, but it wasn’t easy. Sure, Leo had his faults. Sure, he had fucked up royally. But it pissed me off when Gene called him that. We had a history, Leo and me. He had his good points, too.
“You’re not doing it for him,” Thula said. “You’re doing it for your daughter. Your flesh and blood.”
“Who says I’m doing it, period?” the Old Man shot back.
“Angie’s got a point about Leo being a good father, though,” Dessa reminded him. “He and Shannon are crazy about each other.” Dessa and I were crazy about our niece, too, though being around her was a mixture of pleasure and pain for Dessa. She’d had two miscarriages by then. Having kids was the one thing Angie could do better than Dessa. Now that she and Leo were back together, she’d told her sister, she wanted another one after this second one was born. Maybe more.
“Where would you be, I’d like to know, if my father didn’t give you a chance?” Thula asked her husband. I didn’t get the full significance of it at the time, but in her quiet way, Thula was bringing out the heavy artillery in front of Dessa and me. As shrewd a businessman as Diogenes Constantine was, his original capital had come from his wife’s family—a fact he never forgot and always, ultimately, respected.
So that was that. By the end of the month, Leo was one of “Gene’s Boys” in the full-page newspaper ads of the Three Rivers Daily Record—his wide, goofy face staring up at you from the newsprint, a cartoon bubble hovering over his head that declared the Constantine Motors motto: “Make me an honest offer, I’ll give you an honest deal!”
Leo came back carrying my coffee and sipping one for himself. Which was just about average for one of his self-improvement plans. “Goddamn you, Birdsey,” he said. “If I didn’t have to make a fresh pot and stand there smelling this stuff, I wouldn’t have wanted it.”
The sign-painter had three letters stenciled now: G-O-D.
“God?” I said, nodding toward the window. “You guys getting religion around here or something?”
“Nah. When he’s finished, it’s going to read, ‘Goddamn It, Get in Here and Buy a Car Before We Go Under!’”
“That bad?”
“Welcome to the nineties.” He leaned closer, lowered his voice. “The Old Man took a hit on his third-quarter numbers. He was on the phone half of yesterday with the regional manager. With United Nuclear closing down and Electric Boat talking about more layoffs, nobody’s buying. Everyone’s just holding on to what they’ve got. Hey, how old’s that truck of yours, anyway?”
“Eighty-one thousand miles old,” I said, “and running fine.”
“We could put you in a new Dodge or an Isuzu for—”
“Uh-uh,” I said. “Forget it.”
“No, listen. That Isuzu five-speed is a nice little truck.”
“I don’t care if it’s the chariot of the gods, Leo. I got a compressor that’s wheezing like it’s got emphysema and power-washing equipment I’ve got to replace in the next couple of years. Not to mention a brother who’s locked up with a bunch of—”
“Hey, I hear you, Dominick. But Pop and I could put you into a—”
“Uh-uh. No.”
“Okay, okay,” Leo said, palms up. “All I’m saying is if you change your mind, me and Pop’ll fix you up.”
I yawned. Took another slug of coffee. Yawned again.
“You look like shit, Birdsey,” Leo said. “You been sleeping?”
“Nope.”
“I didn’t think so. No offense, man, but you’re starting to look like a basset hound. Don’t worry. You’ll get him out of there. I’m telling you. Go see a lawyer.” He stood up again, yanking his lapels and checking himself out in the plate glass. “See, the thing you don’t get about the
se threads, Dominick, is that it’s the law of the jungle. Granted, fourteen-fifty’s a lot to pay for a suit. But if you want quality, you’ve got to pay for it.”
I looked up at him. “That’s not the law of the jungle. The law of the jungle is: Only the strong survive. Eat or be eaten.”
“Exactly!” Leo said. “Next audition I go to, the casting director walks out in the waiting room. Who do you think he’s going to notice first—all the miscellaneous assholes wearing Levis and sweatshirts or the guy in the Armani?”
Omar walked by drinking a Diet Coke. Wearing a lime-green suit.
“Yo, Omar, get over here,” Leo said. “This guy sitting here says the law of the jungle is: Eat or be eaten. What do you think?”
Omar took a swig of his soda. “Either one’s fine with me,” he said. “When’s she getting here?”
“My man!” Leo shouted. He jumped out of his seat and high-fived the guy. He’d been the hero of the sports pages four or five years back: Omar Rodriguez and his famous buzzer-beater that had won Three Rivers the state high school championship. He’d gone on to UConn; it was during the mideighties. Played for them a couple of years. It was just before Calhoun came in as coach and UConn hit pay dirt in the NCAA. If I remembered right, Omar played a season in Europe before he packed it in. Point guard, he was.
“You hear that, Lorna?” Leo said. The saleswoman across the floor looked up from her paperwork. “Omar says, eat or be eaten. It’s ladies’ choice.”
She looked down again, shook her head. “You guys,” she said.
“Cut the crap, Leo,” I mumbled. “You’re embarrassing her.”
“Am I embarrassing you over there, Lorna?” Leo called. “Hurting those virgin ears of yours?” Without looking up, she gave him the finger.
Leo turned back to me. “See, it’s the same with selling cars, Dominick. Which is why this suit’s a smart investment twice over. Joe Six-pack comes in here with his fat-assed wife and his Patriots cap, you got basically one whack at him, see? So you stand up, let him know he’s dealing with class—intimidate the slob a little with how good you look. Use the upper hand to your advantage. Shoot a little spark up the little woman’s thighs while you’re at it, too, see, so that she’s in your corner at decision time. Gives you a hidden advantage before you even open your mouth. You see what I’m saying? The law of the jungle.”
“So who does that make you?” I said. “Cheetah?”
He adjusted his tie, yanked on his shirt cuff. “Hey, what do you know, Birdseed? Like I said, you wear bib overalls.”
“And that makes you a better person than me, right, Leo?” I shot back. “The fact that you dress up for work like a high-class gigolo?”
Lorna looked over at me. I cleared my throat, looked away.
“No, Birdsey, it doesn’t make me a better person. Or a worse person, either. Because we’re all whores. Even what’s her face—that dried-up little nun over there in India, looks like a monkey. Even the Pope. Even housepainters.”
I snorted at him. “How’s a housepainter a whore?”
“Would you climb up a second-story ladder and scrape paint up your nostrils for free? For the fucking art of it? You got your bod out there like the rest of us, Numb Nuts. Don’t fucking kid yourself.”
“All right. How’s Mother Teresa a whore?”
“I couldn’t tell you how,” he said. “I don’t know the woman personally. I just know the theory’s right. That we’re all playing bang-for-the-buck. Putting whatever we got out there on the open market. I’m just being honest about it.”
A couple of racquetball games ago, Leo himself had called car sales a “whore’s game.” Had started blabbing about this top-secret book on the psychology of selling cars that no one in the business is ever supposed to talk about. Last winter, Gene, Costas, and Peter Jr. went to some “Meeting the Challenges of the Nineties” convention down in Miami—Leo got his nose whacked out of joint because he wasn’t invited—and when they came back, the three of them with their Mediterranean tans renewed, they began making changes. Pushing leasing, hiring women and minorities to sell. The Old Man paid big bucks for these “consultants” to come in and work with the new sales team. Taught them how to categorize each potential victim who’s outside on the lot peeking at sticker prices. They’ve got this system where they know before someone even walks through the door which salesperson’s going to stand up smiling with his hand stuck out, and which approach they’re going to use.
Minority customers is what Omar’s assigned: blacks and Ricans, according to Leo. He also gets sports nuts, women in their twenties, and—get this—gay guys. The obvious ones—the ones sizing up his butt and his basket when he goes back and forth to Costas’s office during the “good cop/bad cop” routine—that game they play where the Nice Sales Guy has to keep checking the numbers with the Big Bad Manager and the customer’s supposed to sit there with his free cup of styro-coffee and feel sorry for the poor guy’s humiliation. Isn’t that weak?
The consultants even worked with Leo and the others on the kind of shit they have laying around on their desks and filing cabinets. They call it “image projection.” Omar’s got two or three of his trophies sitting behind him and these autographed pictures—one of him and Larry Bird and another of him with President Bush. Leo’s got framed pictures of Angie and the kids. They face out toward the customers, not in at Leo. Lorna keeps magazines on her desk—Glamour, Cosmo, People. She’s got this picture of Michael Bolton taped to her filing cabinet.
“So who does she get?” I asked Leo. “All the women in love with Michael Bolton?”
“Nope,” he said. “I get them. Lorna gets professional white guys who think they can outdeal some dippy broad. Not that I should be telling you any of this, Birdseed. I could get in deep doo-doo for talking about it. But you should see these guys who buy from Lorna—they strut out of here with their bill of sale, cocky as hell, like they just fucked her or something. Not a clue in the world that two hours before they signed on the dotted line, we sold the exact same model with two or three more options for five hundred dollars less.”
Leo claims he’s fucked Lorna twice—once at her place and the other time in a LeBaron lease car they had to deliver in Warwick, Rhode Island. According to Leo, the two of them were sitting there in this parking lot where they’d stopped for coffee on the way to Warwick and she just started playing stroke-a-thigh with him. She was so hot for him, he says, he had to pull off somewhere on the Old Post Road and put her out of her misery. Doubtful, though. Sometimes Leo’s life sounds a little too much like a porn movie to be real. “If this stuff really happened and isn’t some pipe dream,” I told him, flat out, the day he told me about him and Lorna, “then you’re a fucking idiot. She took you back once, Leo. Twice might be pushing the envelope.”
“I’m not an idiot,” Leo told me, grinning. “I’m a sex addict. Me and Wade Boggs.”
When I got up to go, Leo walked me back to my truck. “Body on this thing’s getting some corrosion, huh?” he said, fingering the passenger’s side door panel.
“Well, stop poking at it then,” I said.
I got in. Started her up and backed out of the space. Gave Leo the peace sign and began driving out of the lot.
“Hey, Dominick!” he yelled. “Hold up!”
He came running toward me, that fancy suit of his fluttering in the breeze. He bent down to the window. “Hey, I was just thinking,” he said. “You know that visitors’ list you were telling me about? How many visitors did you say your brother gets?”
“Five.”
“Well, tell him he can put me on it. If he wants to. I wouldn’t mind going down there, seeing how he’s doing. Saying hello. I mean, what the hell? 1969, you said? I go back a few years with Thomas, too.”
I nodded—took in the gift he’d just given me. “I’ll mention it to him,” I said. “Thanks.”
“No problem, man. Later.”
See, that’s the thing with Leo: he’s sleazy and he’s
decent. He takes you by surprise. I drove away, one hand on the wheel, the other wiping the goddamned water out of my eyes. Leo, man. The guy’s a trip.
13
The Indian cemetery that abuts the sprawling Three Rivers State Hospital grounds is a modest place: a few rolling acres studded with nameless foot markers, a hundred or so gravestones. A ten-foot-high pyramid of plump, fist-sized rocks stands at the center of things. The monument commemorates Samuel, the Great Sachem of the Wequonnoc Nation, who, back in the seventeenth century, warred against the neighboring Nipmucks and Pequots and Narragansetts and cast his lot with the white settlers. Big mistake. The town of Three Rivers was incorporated in 1653 and grew steadily and legally, the law being white. Conversely, the reservation kept shrinking in acreage, the tribe’s numbers dwindling.
The cemetery’s oldest tombstones date back to the eighteenth century and are now so eroded and encrusted with parasites that trying to read them is a joint effort between vision and touch. Below the ground are the remains of Fletchers and Crowells, Johnsons and Grays—assimilated Indians, assimilation meaning that the dick doesn’t discriminate. The newer stones mark the graves of Wequonnoc war dead: veterans of the Civil and Spanish American Wars, the World Wars, Korea. During the late 1960s, when America was once again eating its young, the Indian graveyard’s final stone was erected. It honors Lonnie Peck, Ralph Drinkwater’s older cousin, killed by sniper fire in the jungle near Vinh Long in 1969.
That was the summer man landed on the moon and Mary Jo Kopechne went off the bridge at Chappaquiddick and Woodstock happened. The summer I saw Dessa Constantine jockeying drinks at the Dial-Tone Lounge and fell in love for life. Home from college after our bumpy freshman year, my brother and I had jobs as seasonal laborers for the Three Rivers Public Works Department. Ralph Drinkwater, Leo, Thomas, and me: what a quartet that was. Our duties included clearing brush out at the reservoir, pumping the sump at the town fairgrounds, and mowing the town cemeteries, the little Indian graveyard among them. Thomas’s voices had already started whispering to him by then, I think, but not so badly that you couldn’t just call him high-strung or moody and then get lost in your own more important shit. We were nineteen.