Sweeney on the Rocks Read online

  “Yeah. Nice, right?” Tan, calfskin upholstery. “Smells like a shoe store.”

  “Niiiice.” Eddie being grumpy and ironic.

  “I like my car.”

  “It draws attention. I keep telling you, less attention the better. Yeah, stop here.” A metal door covered with swirls and loops and angles of a fresh, artful graffiti.

  Sweeney helped him scroll up the door. The van filled the entirety of the shed. Eddie said, “Okay, right. Follow me up behind. We’re going to Hoboken…”

  “The fuck?”

  “Yeah, what. I didn’t set the meet. Follow me up behind. When you see me flash my brake lights five or six times quick, you find a place to park. We’ll leave your car a few blocks away.”

  Forty-five minutes later, Sweeney climbed into the van beside Eddie. “Little cautious aren’t we?”

  “These guys are a taaaad unpredictable.”

  Eddie idled past chain link and razor wire into a building supply warehouse. To their left, stacks of plywood, two-by-fours, treated railroad ties. To their right, a series of bay doors. Eddie flashed his brights. “That look like a number ninety-nine to you?” He honked once. The noise was startling. Vapor lights for ambience and a mist off the Hudson.

  Sweeney gave his two cents, “I got a bad feeling.”

  “Yeah, that fog. Gives you the heebie jeebies, don’t it?” He hummed the theme from Jaws, then showed white teeth in the dim dark. “Lighten up, man. It’s a done deal.”

  The door scrolled open, and a figure waved them into the bay. His other hand, the thumb was hooked under a shoulder strap for a rifle. He looked like ex-military. Haircut high and tight, fatigues tucked into boots. “Uh, Eddie…”

  “Easy, cousin.”

  As the door scrolled down behind them, three heavies eased up from the shadows, two with repeaters (Sweeney, who had an eye for ordinance, recognized AK-74s), another with a Remington 12 gauge pump. A fourth stepped into the headlights wearing Gap khakis and a button-down Oxford. “Gentlemen!” he said pleasantly. “So glad a see you!” A smile polite as the Hamptons, but there was jailhouse ink on his knuckles.

  Eddie exhaled soft, “We’re gonna need a bigger boat.” Added loud, “You Sergei?”

  “I am Foma. I am taking the role of Sergei. He is sick.” Foma’s accent was guttural and phlegmy, full of the Ukraine, Chechnya, the Russian Tea Room.

  “You got our money?”

  “You have these chips?”

  “In the back.”

  “Then yes, we have the money. It is not here, however.”

  “That’s a problem.”

  “No, no, no problem, not at all. You leave now, you come back later. Sergei give you your money.”

  “We’re gone. Cosmo, back in the van.”

  Foma said something in Russian, and the machine guns came alive. Rack, lock, load. “No. You leave now. You walk. Walk home.” He waved his hands. Shoo.

  “You’re making a mistake, friend.”

  “I make no mistakes. Never, no. Friend.”

  Eddie and Sweeney had put up their hands, but now Eddie made a move, attracting the guns. “Just finding my cell phone.” He drew it slowly out of his overcoat. Dialed a number. Pressed send. “Bytchkov,” he said. “Yeah, hey. It’s me. No, Sergei’s AWOL. Some guy here named Foma. Foma, I said. I don’t know. What I do know though is, is he’s stiffing us. Yeah, just a second.” He walked toward Foma, holding the phone out before him “Bytchkov.”

  “Bytchkov.” He spat to the side, cussing in Russia. “Dolboeb. Jerkoff. I no talk to him.”

  “Trust me, friend. Take this call.”

  “Fuck you. And Bytchkov too.”

  Eddie said, “Breetvah.”

  And like that…all the sound got sucked out of the room. This cavernous garage. Water dripping. The hollow ping of a radiator. It went quiet like the moment in outer space when the booster engines fall off. Sweeney’s own heavy breath filled his ears. The Russian stood looking at the phone. “Breetvah.” His voice flat, his accent filling the word full of new vowels. “You know Breetvah?”

  “I work for him. Bytchkov does too.”

  “Pozdravlyayu.” His tone dry.

  “Spasiba.”

  Sweeney, speechless: When did Eddie learn Russian?

  Eddie held out the phone.

  The Russian spat again, ignoring the phone. “So yes then we give you your money.”

  “Good.” Eddie put the phone to his ear. “We cool.” Hung it up.

  “You tell Breetvah, you tell him Foma from Chelyabinsk, you tell him that we are…” he clasped his hands together, “… we are brothers of the blood, yes?”

  “Sure, yeah, I’ll mention it.”

  Eddie and Sweeney walked back to the Caddy with Sweeney carrying a nylon grip full of non-sequential twenties and hundreds. He found himself wobbling with the knock-kneed gait that comes when a rifle scope may even now be zeroing in on the back of your head.

  Eddie was unusually quiet. “You’re pissed.”

  “Fucking-a.”

  Nothing more passed between them until they were in Sweeney’s car. “Normally,” Eddie said, “I like to see you pissed. My cousin, I tell people, I say, he’s got three gears. Reverse, neutral, and pissed. But you being pissed at me? Not so good.”

  “My cousin, I tell people, I say, I trust him. We got no secrets.”

  “Really?” Eddie was touched.

  “Who the fuck is Breetvah, Eddie. For that matter, who the fuck’s Bytchkov?”

  “Bytchkov’s the guy who turned us onto the deal. He gets a cut.”

  “You telling me we’re paying up to Russians? Russians, Eddie?”

  “Chill, man. Jesus. Take a breath. Look at your face. No, I’m just saying he turned me onto the deal. I’ll show him gratitude, but we still earn for Anthony.”

  “The Russians, Eddie? I’ve heard stories.”

  “Yeah. They’re true.”

  “You should have told me. That’s all.”

  Eddie found a pack of smokes. “You mind?” He already had one lit. Kicked back in the seat and put a not-very-clean brogan up on the spotless dash. Took a moment to admire his smoke. “You play by the rules too much, Cosmo. Mostly, that’s a good thing. You keep my ass in line. But if I’d told you we were playing with the Russians, you’d have bitched and moaned and backed out, and we’d be thirty grand poorer right now. Sometimes, my cousin, you just need to say fuck it. Roll the dice down the table. Am I right?”

  “Who’s Breetvah?” Sweeney could still taste his own outrage.

  “Supposed to be this badass in Jersey City, running Brighton Beach from afar. Nobody I know’s ever seen him, but they all toss his name around. Bytchkov told me to use it I ever got in a pickle.”

  “They bought it pretty quick.”

  “They respect badasses. The only thing they respect. It’s kind of refreshing, in a way, hanging out with the Russians. You always know where you stand.”

  Which was true, as far as it went. Where you stood, however, was usually knee deep in concrete above a rising tide of shit.

  ~

  Most of us have an adolescence with at least a little romance, some teen years with a few memories of illicit love. A roll in the hay back when it felt like you were getting away with something. It’s you and your love against the world. At the time, those days were incidental, but now, they prop up everything else.

  Aggie never had that adolescence. And you know? Maybe she’s stronger for it. By god, she is strong. Strong enough to make the necessary decisions.

  Such as: This.

  Trundling their slow way west, Aggie’s about ready to strangle her daughter. “Get your feet off the dashboard.”

  Hair down in her face, concentrating on her cell phone, texting, Elizabeth sighs the heavy sigh of every teenage girl beset. Drops her feet off the dash.

  “Who are you texting?”

  A long, sullen moment. Then, “Dylan.”

  Her boyfriend of the moment. “Any
thing interesting?”

  Elizabeth shows her the digital face of her phone: “Off 2 boring Fairmont with A. Gawd! Kill me now!”

  “I don’t know where you got all that meanness. It wasn’t from me.”

  Aggie still thinks of herself as a ranch girl. No matter that from middle school onward she lived in a clapboard shack on the east side of town. A poor neighborhood with gravel streets. She had her daddy’s love (all hugs and scratchy kisses) but he was a man who limped through life on a pair of matching Achilles’ heels: Jim Beam and new John Deere machinery. Neither failure is healthy for a ranch, but together they are catastrophic. At age thirteen she stood watching a moving company wheel her piano out of the front door, jostling it hard enough to drop a side panel flat in the dust, revealing the hammers and strings. She went from having her own horse to not being able to afford a decent bike.

  When she was a sophomore, Aggie and Henry Applebaum went to second, third, fourth base, all during one confused showing of Gladiator. Of course she caught pregnant, and two years later, his shrill, bird-beaked mother was standing in their doorway with Henry’s luggage. “I knew you was like this. Trashy. Knew it. From the start. Trapping him like you done. Now the Army’s got him, they’ve got…” she teared up, “they’ve got my boy.”

  Aggie was still in her waitress uniform, smelling like bacon grease, too tired to put up a fight. “The Army?” First she’d heard about it.

  Her apartment was on the second floor, and in the days, weeks, months to come, she learned the lonely sound of tired heels on metal stairs, the painful ache in her shoulders of carrying a baby up to reheated meatloaf.

  Husband number two, Neddie (ne, Nacho), drank Coors from the can and dropped five dollars a night into poker machines. A big tipper with all the right things to say, he had honey on his tongue and a condom in his wallet. He sweet talked her until she became Aggie Medina, which meant a whole new set of life experiences. Tortillas, pico de gallo, broken toes, a snapped collarbone.

  The same week she walked out on Neddie, she found her job at the library. In the world she very much wants to inhabit, coincidence is just another name for answered prayers.

  Enter Sweeney. How many potential husbands do you find volunteering at the soup kitchen? Sweeney in soiled jeans, a Mariners cap, sitting on his open tailgate, smoking. A cold day in October, and a fresh apple-crumble pie steamed at his hip. “Baked it myself.” Lanky in a way you don’t often see anymore. “Those guys over there,” he twisted his head toward the homeless by the cinderblock wall. “Old coffee-grounds-beard and his buddy, Chief I-ain’t-got-no-chin, they been looking at me like I owe them money, waiting on this pie.”

  “Well, I got the keys.”

  “I’m Ted.”

  “Aggie.”

  A comfortable handshake. Calluses and heavy skin. The hand of a man who worked for a living.

  Things progressed until Aggie started trying on the last name, seeing how it fit. Aggie Sweeney. Heya Mrs. Sweeney, how are you. Make the reservation under Sweeney. Aggie Sweeney.

  But then…

  Then a month ago, a bookish eighth grader in a straw cowboy hat, a kid named Perry Gustafson, came up to the Information desk. “I’m, uh, doing a report on, like the Sopranos? Real life mobsters?”

  She’d previously avoided the mobster shelf. Had maybe been a little hoity-toity about her self-education. Somewhere between the impossible Kant and overrated McLuhan, between Dickens and Dick Hugo, that’s where she’d staked out her territory. Gangsters? Not her bag.

  But the kid had gotten her hooked. Books, websites, articles. Don’t ask her why, she just became fascinated. All these oblivious, urban provincials, these wise guys, these arrogant schmucks who thought they were entitled to leech off hard-working Americans…Who were these people?

  Then three weeks ago, here’s a New York Times photo on microfiche. An FBI stakeout. A sidewalk, a restaurant, a cluster of Scorcese types on the alert for hidden cameras. And in the shadows, under an awning…

  Couldn’t be.

  But it was. Stockier, younger, but there were those same scars around the eyes, the same crook to the nose. Teddy.

  Teddy, the exception? No. Turns out he’s every man in the world. Worse than most.

  Coming into Bozeman, she puts her blinker on. Takes the first exit.

  Elizabeth says, “You need gas or something?”

  “I’m meeting somebody.”

  “Who?”

  “Somebody.”

  She finds a spot on Main Street. Parks next to what used to be the Cowboy Café but is now a women’s boutique. Hundred dollar bras. “By Appointment Only.” On the street, young mothers with cell phones and strollers, businessmen in khakis and open collars, college kids emerging from coffee shops.

  Aggie in Pamida sneakers and her daisy-patterned Penny’s bag. She is so tired of being broke. So tired of envy. She says to her daughter, “You wait here. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  The girl shrugs, texting. Whatever.

  Just down the block, at one of the benches in front of Daily Brew Coffee, a middle-aged man, middle-height, middle-everything, sits inconspicuously dressed in tan leather shoes and light summer pants, a suit jacket slung over the bench and a loosened tie. Legs stretched out, reading a newspaper. She’d wanted stereotypes. Slovenly and unbathed, a leer and gold chains. But instead he’s got this elegant face, tidy eyebrows. Politely bemused. Hair swept back from the brow and a dusting of gray above the ears. Reading glasses on the end of his nose.

  She is not treacherous, she is not unfaithful.

  The man sees her, folds away his paper. Tucks the glasses into his shirt pocket.

  He holds out his hand. “Aggie?”

  ~

  He’s almost to the point where he can look at his favorite chair and not see a body. As they move from the kitchen to the living room, Sweeney puts Tina in his recliner with a gesture. “Make yourself comfortable.”

  Sweeney, on the couch, snaps his fingers for Zeke. He plays with the dog’s ears, guilty. He’s been falling down on the job, dog-owner wise. Tina’s been talking about everything she’s going to do with her diamond money. Letting the fantasies just spin out of control. “Plus, not to mention, I’ve never been to Europe. Prague, Budapest. Turkish bathhouses. Maybe I’ll buy a little island in Greece. Never drink a cheap beer again.”

  “And after that? After you’re all done with your traveling. What’s up then?”

  “I’ll figure something out. Go shopping.”

  “Shopping. That’ll be fun for, what. A couple weeks?”

  “I get it, yeah. Money can’t buy happiness. Whatever.”

  “You can’t live in New York. You know that, right?”

  “Plenty of cities in the world.”

  “Well, the best of them is dead to you. So you and me, we’re in the same boat.” Sweeney looks pointedly around his living room. The dust motes suspended in beams of light. The cobwebs clotted with dog hair.

  “Yeah, no. I’d shoot myself in the head.”

  Which is mean spirited enough to push him to his decision. Appreciate it but no, have a nice life, good luck, I’m not that guy anymore. This is my home. Home. He’ll never fit in, he’s always going to be the odd guy out, but it’s what he’s got. It’s at once a revelation and a capitulation. Early in the fall, after the tourists flee ahead of winter, he recognizes at least one out of every three vehicles parked on Main Street. Faced with the potential loss of it, he feels an actual fondness for how the three hardware stores each sponsor a softball team. “Listen,” he says, “I’ve been thinking maybe this isn’t….”

  She twists around in her chair. “Is that a car?”

  Sweeney watches as the bubbles of Marilyn’s prowler float above the waterline of his shrubbery.

  In the time it takes for Sweeney to privately issue an unconditional surrender to the universe, to resign himself to the undertow of bad news pulling him down by the heels, Marilyn has parked and is knocking her knuck
les against the door. Calls out a polite “Helloooo? Ted?” She lets herself in. Materializes in the living room, big as life, staring across at Tina. “Oh, hello.”

  And now here’s Sweeney, saying, with a final dose of despair, “Marilyn, this is Tina, old pal from Brooklyn. Tina, Marilyn.”

  ~

  Ex-wife on his left (the woman with whom he thought he’d grow old), ex-mistress on his right (the woman whom he thought would keep him young) and as far as Sweeney knows, they’ve never laid eyes on each other. Yet, look at them: Passing hard judgment, cheap shoes to tacky lipstick. Bristling. Hiding snarls.

  “Anyway,” Marilyn finally says, using the word as if she’s clearing her throat. Sweeney notes a manila folder in her hand. “Ted. I brought this for you. We should, uh…” she waves toward her car.

  “Yeah. Tina? You mind?”

  Tina toasts with her beer can. Slumps back into the chair. Focuses on her phone. “Meetcha.”

  Leaving the house, Marilyn’s says, “Classy.”

  “Eddie’s wife.” Which of course is only half the story.

  Sweeney takes another two full steps down the path before he realizes that Marilyn’s lagging behind.

  Standing back there with the manila folder. “I thought… Shit.”

  “You okay?”

  “Did she tell you about him?”

  “Who? Eddie? Tell me what?”

  Marilyn glances back. They hear the distant digital sound of Tina’s cell phone. It trills out a high octave version of the theme from “Rawhide.” At once oddly appropriate and utterly incongruous.

  Maybe it’s the proximity of Tina—another chicken in the rooster house—but Marilyn now does something so entirely out of character he’s left speechless, mouth moving like a guppy’s: She forces herself into his arms, nestles her check against his neck.

  She’s still familiar to him. All these years later, she’s still as right as a seed in soil, a wrench over a bolt. Smooth and warm. Her hair smells like apple shampoo and sunlight and sweat, a hint of the industrial disinfectant they use to clean cop cars.

  She lets herself linger for a few moments. When she pulls away, she’s left the manilla envelope against his chest. “Eddie, sweetheart.”