Chump Change (6 page)

I heard Rocco groan as the force of the turn slid him and his gopher across the rear cargo area and bounced him off a wheel well.

We screeched west on Beverly Boulevard with forty-five seconds to go, while Fab continued to mouth his count down. My kid brother was still confident of a record run.

With thirty seconds left, we wheeled into the automatic ticket-dispensing lane at Cedars’ parking lot entrance. As it turned out, however, we were fucked. In front of us was a twenty-year-old mint condition Caddy driven by an elderly, fat man who had not pulled close enough to the ticket-giver machine to grab his stub.

I could see Fab’s jaw muscles tighten in rage as the short-armed, old guy struggled, without success, through his open window to reach the machine. Finally, carefully, the old poop had to open his door and stretch to grab at the pink cardboard ticket.

Seven. Six. Five. Fabrizio slammed both hands on his horn and held it down. The noise of the horn was magnified by the low ceiling of the building.

Once, in St. Adrian’s bar in New York City for the bribe of free drinks, a barmaid from Kentucky had mimicked to me the long, low mooing sound a steer makes when it is dying from a sledgehammer blow to the head. Fab’s horn in the parking building sounded to me like that imitation.

It shook up the old guy in the Caddy, but he got himself together and pulled into the garage.

“Almost,” my brother snarled as we pulled up and he extracted his own ticket from the machine. “Crap!”

“Let’s
do
him, Fab,” I whispered. “We’re both half-Italian. Go ahead. I saw your pocket knife in the glove compartment. I’ll watch your back. We’ll follow the old asshole and cut his neck open and let Rocco lick the blood off the leather seats. The old fuck is probably here wasting Medicare money anyway. We’ll be doing the government a service. Bet his fuckin’ stupid ninety-year-old wife is wasting our tax dollars too, taking up a perfectly good bed in the ICU.”

“Shut up, Bruno. It was just a game.”

“Yeah. Right.”

Fab would not enter the hospital accompanied by our father’s dog, so I had to agree to come back later and bring Rocco in by myself. I left him in the back of the dark station wagaon coveting the decomposing rat carcass.

M
OM WAS THIRD GENERATION
C
ALIFORNIAN.
G
OLD
R
USH
people. Her English ancestors arrived in America in 1635. They settled in Rumney, New Hampshire and were shipbuilders and sea captains. Mom graduated from Stanford with honors three months prior to her sixteenth birthday. Now sixty-six, she still reads five books a week and talks to her best friend on the phone every day in textbook German. She’d also learned Italian and French from books and had become a published poet in San Francisco before she reached legal drinking age. And somewhere along the line, she’d formed an addiction to needlepoint.

As a little kid, I was sure that she knew everything about every subject, but I realized later that what she knew best was how never to disagree with the volcanic Jonathan Dante.

When Fab and I walked back into the waiting room, Mom was on the same couch, in the same spot where we’d left
her ten hours before. Agnes and my sister Maggie were sitting on either side of her.

She’d been working on one of her English countryside cottage pattern needlepoints, which, for a long time, was the only pattern I thought needle point came in. Every room in the Point Dume house, except the kitchen, was filled with countryside English cottage pattern needlepoint pillows.

“I brought Rocco to see the old man,” I said to her, sitting down with Fab on a couch across from Maggie and Aggie. “Maybe it’ll help bring him back if he senses that his dog is in the room near him.”

“That wasn’t a good idea, Bruno.”

“How’s he doing?”

“Weaker. We’re just here waiting. Are you drunk?”

“No.”

“But you’ve been drinking, haven’t you?”

“I drink, Mom. You know that I drink.”

“The security people took that homo and his friend away. He was on drugs, you know.”

“I know.”

“Where are you keeping the dog?”

“In the car.”

“Just leave him there, Bruno. I don’t want you involved in any more trouble. You’re unstable. Agnes tells me that your problems are worse than ever. You’ve been back in that treatment center again—until just a few days ago.”

“Agnes has no right to puke up details about my fucking life without my fucking permission. Especially with my father dying in a fucking room down the fucking hall.”

“She says that they’ve diagnosed you now as a chronic
manic-depressive. Your alcoholism is acute. You’re suicidal. Is it true that you stabbed yourself in the stomach again?”

“I was in a blackout.” “Why don’t you stop, for Chrissake? Your father quit, didn’t he?”

“I’m tapering off. Can we change the subject?”

“Agnes wants to divorce you, and I can’t blame her. I don’t think you’re crazy, Bruno. For your father, for me, make an attempt to pull your life back on track before you wind up with AIDS or brain dead in a prison somewhere?”

“Is there a rule that no dogs are allowed in the hospital?”

“Of course there is. This is a hospital. Have some black coffee, dear. Clear your mind.”

When I got to the closed door of Dante’s room, my fear rendered me unable to push it open. I was suddenly filled with the idea that he was already dead. I began to shake again. And sweat. Panicking.

Changing direction, I stumbled and walked as fast as I could down the corridor, making my way toward the cool darkness and safety of the garage, my head hammering.

After endless lefts and rights in the hallways, I got through the hospital’s double-doors to the parking lot and breathed in the gas fumes and fresh air. The coolness helped to steady me until I could find a quiet spot between two parked cars where I knelt down and slammed almost the whole pint of Jack that I had in my coat pocket. Again I breathed deep. In and out.

In a few minutes the head banging slowed enough for me to light a cigarette. Then I waited some more, hoping to feel
the “click” from the Jack. I lit a second cigarette and smoked that too. No “click” happened, but gradually the edge was coming off.

I finished the bottle and scooted the empty under the dark green Benz I’d been leaning on. My shaking had stopped and I could stand, so I began searching in the garage for my brother’s Country Squire where I’d left my spare pint of Jack Daniels’ and my father’s dog.

I found the car quickly enough, but forgot that all the doors would be locked. I didn’t want to return to the waiting room, so I sat on the back bumper trying to decide what to do. The realization came that anal Fabrizio must have a hide-a-key somewhere under the car.

I was right. Feeling around under the bumper, it took a minute or two until my rattling fingers found a small metal, magnetized container with the spare keys in it.

Unlocking the passenger door, I looked through the back window and saw Rocco asleep with the dead lump of mangled hair and bones still between his legs.

He was awakened by the interior light, which went on when I opened the car door. Rocco raised himself to the level of the top of the back seat, where I could see his wide, shark-shaped head and the gopher once more dangling from his mouth. Then the impounded smell of the decomposing carcass hit me and my throat gagged shut from the intensity of the stink.

It was impossible to enter. I had to swing all the doors open and hold my breath long enough to climb in, start the engine, hit the air conditioner’s fan button, then hop out to breathe again.

When the rancidness was mostly gone, I was able to sit inside. I located my spare bottle of Jack from under the seat and took some long pulls, waiting once more for my pulsating brain to get quiet. My thoughts were always the enemy. That, and the headaches.

I needed time by myself, to escape. To take Fab’s wagon and get a hotel room and be alone. A quick check of my pockets told me I had sufficient money for several days. I’d find a porno movie and hang out and let the mouth of some stranger suck me off in the dark. I’d wait until Dante was buried deep, then go back to New York. Or somewhere. Wait until this shit was over. Just be anonymous. Not think. Not feel.

The booze had relaxed me enough to formulate that simple plan. First, I’d take Rocco into the hospital and deposit him at the old man’s bedside. There was no harm in that. Benny Roth and Fabrizio could deal with the dog by themselves.

When my head pounding had decreased, I made my move. Getting Rocco out of the back of the wagon was pretty easy. As before, he snarled and tried looking vicious, but I used the cheddar cheese hunks to distract him from the gopher, then snatched the dead fucker up by the tail.

Once I had the corpse away from the dog, I used the plastic supermarket bag to roll the body up, soaking it generously first with splashes of whiskey that countered its rankness. The result was satisfactory enough to make the thing less disgusting. Rocco dutifully followed me across the parking lot, then to the automobile entrance of the garage, always pressing his nose as close as possible to the bag containing the gopher.

Once inside the doors, we stopped at the first long corridor. I knew that, by having him with me, I would be breaking somebody’s sanitation rule, or pissing somebody off, but I had had enough Jack in me not to give a shit.

When the coast was clear, we started down the hallway. I gripped the bag with both hands high on top of my butt, so Rocco would stay directly behind me, bobbing up and down after the out-of-reach carcass. Part-way down the second corridor, a night cleaning lady with a pinched, get-even-looking Filipino face, rolled her cart out of a patient’s room and spotted us. She paused to make up her mind what to do. The look she hit me with required a defiant counter-glare. Luckily, she backed down and the dog and I continued to the end of the hall.

That was the only incident.

When we had made it as far as the closed door of the waiting room, I stopped to peek through the window. Dr. Macklin was sitting next to Mom in a private-looking discussion, while the rest of the family waited across the room on other couches. No one saw me. I was full of booze, but I knew that if they did, my escape plan would be screwed. Rocco and I kept moving to the door numbered 334. Jonathan Dante’s room.

Having the dog with me this time, gave me the courage to not turn back. I got to the door and again waited. Finally, my body trembling, I thrust myself into the room.

At the bed, I again looked closely at my father’s gaping mouth as it continued to force air into the hollow body. He seemed to be dissolving in front of me, his breaths more shallow and further and further apart. It was macabre.

I didn’t want to stay. I wanted to leave the dog and close the door behind me and never come back. But I knew this would be my last chance, so I sat down on the chair next to the bed and took his cold palm in mine.

Oddly, he seemed to be repaying my grip, and I was startled by the strength of the pressure in his hand. Half of me dreaded the loss of my father, while the other half agonized over his suffering. I shut my eyes and spoke loud enough so that if God or some spirit were in the room, it could hear me. “It’s Bruno, Pop,” I said. “I’m here…Just let go. For Jesus’ sake, haven’t you had enough?”

Somewhere in the caves of his mind, he must have felt the words because it was then that his breathing did stop. His grip on my hand continued for a few more seconds, but I knew he was done. I closed my eyes again because I couldn’t bear to look.

After a long silence, I opened them and saw what I feared—his face going completely white. Translucent. The blood draining away from the front of his torso. Suddenly, Rocco was standing at the end of the bed. The dog knew. I was sure. For the first time, he’d stopped coveting the fucking gopher and his black eyes were looking from my father’s lifeless face to mine, as if we knew an answer.

I let go of the hand and lowered Dante’s wrinkled arm to rest on the bed covers. “He’s dead, Rocco,” I said. “Pop’s dead.” The bull terrier looked like a dirty white marine coming to attention, stiffening his body, listening to my words.

I would not be able to leave him alone with his dead master. Not now. I had no heart for it. In the confusion that was to come, there would be no one who would care for him.
He was alone, too, like my father. He would have to come with me.

In the bathroom I found a white cloth hand towel I used to wrap up Rocco’s dead rodent for transportation, so that the dog would follow me back out of the building to the car in the parking lot.

Opening the towel, my hands shaking again from the desperate need of a drink, I quickly put the stinking, little carcass in one corner and started folding it forward, the way a deli guy rolls up a sandwich in waxed paper.

I was about to leave with Rocco and the wrapped gopher as a lure, when a perversity grasped my brain. Across the room I recognized my wife’s purse among the other handbags. I remembered that, in a wallet inside the purse, she kept several credit cards which still bore the raised letters that spelled out the name Mr. and Mrs. Bruno Dante. It was true that our marriage was over. That was what made it easy to convince myself that the one final accommodation—the use of a credit card from her purse—would be my last requirement of her as a wife. The reasoning for the act was simple, it was: “fuck her.”

I opened the purse and sorted through the wallet with the see-through plastic sleeves where she kept all her credit cards, until I found a bright gold new VISA CARD among the others. I slipped it into the top pocket of my jacket.

As I returned the wallet to the handbag, another idea came to me. I should leave her an exchange, a memento, something for something. So into the purse, I dropped the towel containing Rocco’s gopher. Then, with my index finger and thumb, I pulled a corner of the towel that forced the cloth
to unravel dumping the smelly little body into the center of the bag. She and the PE Teacher boyfriend could use it as a dildo.

Getting Rocco back out to Fabrizio’s car without the gopher was not too difficult, since I had bypassed trying to get him to cooperate. I just carried him.

We traveled over halfway to the garage until he got too heavy. Then I took a clean sheet from a linen cart and fashioned it into a kind of harness around his neck. I was then able to pull and haul him the rest of the way into the garage.

I had never stolen anything from my brother before. I told myself that as soon as the dog and I had a room someplace, that I would call Fabrizio and let him know where to pick up the car.