Dust Devil (5 page)

“
I’ve
got to run, Lucille. Alex is waiting for me at the Penny Arcade.”

To
Sarah’s relief, the hairdresser only nodded and waved. Moments
later, Sarah was standing outside the salon, fumbling in her handbag
for her tortoiseshell sunglasses. Locating them at last, she put them
on as she walked toward her Jeep. It was as she was inserting her key
into the lock of the driver’s door that her eye was abruptly
attracted by a long flash of bright color over in front of the
buildings on the south side of the square. At first, she figured it
was just Jimmie Dean Thurley’s brand-new pickup truck, which
was fire-engine red—or, rather, what had used to be fire-engine
red, since these days, fire trucks were generally a bright, hideous
chartreuse. But then she realized the vehicle was some expensive
foreign roadster, and she stopped and stated, just as everybody else
in the square was doing—because nobody in town, not even Bubba
Holbrooke, owned a car like that.

As
Sarah watched, it pulled into a parking space in front of the local
newspaper, the
Tri-State
Tribune.
Then
its engine died; its low door swung open wide, and like some predator
awakening and stretching, a tall, dark man, lean and hard with
muscle, uncoiled himself to get slowly out of the vehicle.

Like
a lover’s caress, the torrid breeze ruffled his long, shaggy
black hair; sunlight glinted off his mirrored aviator sunglasses.
Sarah could almost taste the salty male sweat that soaked his white
shirt, its long sleeves rolled up to display his bronzed forearms, in
its pocket a pack of cigarettes, which the man reached for as he
stood there staring at the newspaper building. His movements deft and
sure, he shook a cigarette from the pack and lit it with a lighter
taken from the pocket of his black chinos. He inhaled deeply, then
blew a cloud of smoke into the air.

I’m
dreaming,
Sarah
thought dumbly, frozen where she stood, feeling as though she had
just been struck a sickening blow to her head or midsection. She was
suffering a nightmare or imagining things because of her conversation
with Lucille inside the salon. That was it. That
must
be
it! Sarah told herself desperately.

Only,
it wasn’t.

In
that instant, it seemed impossible to her that it was just an
ordinary summer day, with the bright yellow noon sun beating down on
the small town, the humid breeze rustling the leaves of the tall old
trees that dotted the grassy green square and lined the wide streets.
With children playing tag and tetherball in the park, the townspeople
strolling along the sidewalks, talking, laughing, calling greetings
to one another. With traffic crawling along at its usual
Saturday-afternoon snail’s pace, impatient teenagers in a hurry
to go nowhere blasting their car horns.

She
should have had some word, some warning of what this day was to
bring, Sarah reflected dimly in some dark comer of her mind. But
there had been nothing. There
was
nothing.
Nothing except the sweet, wild, unexpected rush of heat that rose
from the core of her very being to spread throughout her entire body,
so it was suddenly as though more than a decade had not passed and
she lay naked again upon the wooded summer grass just beyond the old,
abandoned quarry that had once served as the local swimming hole—and
felt the man’s warm, welcome weight pressing her down.

Feeling
strangely as though she somehow floated somewhere beyond her own
body, watching both herself and him from a distance, Sarah
thought,
It
all began with that old lunch box.
For
she didn’t know—she had never known—that for Renzo
Cassavettes, it had begun long before that, in a rundown tenement of
the big city where he was born, and with the butterfly that had shown
him what, despite his harsh, inauspicious origins, he might someday
become....

I
do not know whether I was then a man

dreaming
I was a butterfly,

or
whether I am now a butterfly,

dreaming
I am a man.

On
Leveling All Things

—
Chuang-tzu

A
Tenement, The Midwest, Twenty-Seven Years Ago

That
Renzo Cassavettes should have witnessed the butterfly’s
emergence into the world was no more than the smallest incidence of
chance—yet it changed his life forever, as he somehow knew even
then it would, knew with a child’s pure and simple faith. Had
he been indoctrinated into the Catholic religion of his parents and
grandparents, as some few decades earlier, he would have been, Renzo
would have viewed the butterfly as a sign from God or, at the very
least, a saint. But in the eternal rebellion of youth convinced it
suffered as no other generation before it had ever done, his patents
had cast off their Madonnas, their crucifixes and their rosaries as
deliberately and determinedly as they had cast off all the rest of
the teachings; of their short lifetimes, along with the
ever-too-tight, ever-too-far-reaching familial tentacles that had
embraced, if not nurtured them. His parents had still been young
enough then to be blissfully ignorant of the fact that no matter how
long and violent the struggle to be free of that initial childhood
bonding and imprinting was, escape was never truly and wholly
possible.

There
are some things that are with you always. They lie buried deep,
perhaps. Still, they are there, the worm Ouroboros of the soul.

Renzo
had only a vague, child’s memory of his father, who had seemed
to him to tower ten feet above him, a veritable giant of a man, long
and lean and hard muscled, with mercurial moods, quick fists and a
black, surly temper worsened by drink and drugs. In Renzo’s
mind, his father hovered always on that threshold between youth and
adulthood, a bully boy playing at being a man—although no less
awesome and frightening for that. It was only in later years that
Renzo came to understand that beneath the facade of his father’s
preening and bragging, his laughter and wit, his shouting and
bravado, there had lurked a child no less small, insecure and
terrified of the world than Renzo himself had been. So it was that in
the absence of any true religion, his father had been both god and
devil to him, an Italian Adonis and Calabos rolled into one,
blessed
with dark handsomeness and bright charisma, cursed with dark hungers
and burning ambition.

In
Renzo’s manhood, the suppressed memories of his father would
sometimes come rushing to engulf him, so he would close his eyes
tightly against the sudden onslaught and will them to retreat. Still,
they would come—unbidden, irrepressible, triggered by the smell
of cheap cologne or cheap wine; by the sound of a flimsy screen door
banging shut in the summertime or of a car’s souped-up engine
revving and roaring in the street; by the sight of defiant young
punks in T-shirts and blue jeans, a pack of cigarettes rolled up in
one shirt-sleeve, bare arms sporting black tattoos, or of swaggering
young Turks in cheap, jazzy suits, aflash with the gleam of gold
chains and watches and rings. For all those things had been his
father, a small-time, big-city hoodlum who had lurked on the fringes
of organized crime, running drugs and numbers and women for what
outsiders had always called the Mafia, but that was known to those
within its own circle simply as
Cosa
Nostra—
Our
Thing.

Renzo’s
father had hungered to become a
capo,
a
don more legendary than even the fictional Don Corleone, the
Godfather of all Godfathers. How he had yearned to join the ranks of
those who, in their long, sleek black cars, pulled up in the
summertime before the sidewalk café in the elegant old plaza
of the big city, causing a momentary but taut pause in the talk and
laughter of the crowds who sipped colas and iced teas and other tall,
cool drinks in the open air. Instead, Renzo’s father had been
gunned down by some equally hotheaded, ignominious rival in the
meaner streets of the big city, ending his young, hard, fast life as
no more than another Saturday-night fatality, a DOA statistic.

In
his childhood nightmares, Renzo heard the shots, saw the bright,
macabre crimson flowers that seemed to blossom in slow motion on his
father’s chest, heard the screams and the sirens wailing in
response, saw the brilliant, incongruous blinking of the neon lights
of the bars and strip joints that lined the cracked, littered
sidewalk where his father lay, the cold, methodical flash of the
lights atop the ambulance and police cars. In reality, Renzo had
heard and seen none of what had happened that night two years ago. He
had learned of it only afterward when, scared and hiding in the nooks
and crannies of the tenement where he had lived, he had eavesdropped
on the whispered conversations of its inhabitants.

He
had been five years old then, tall for his age, but thin, his head
too large for his slender neck, his eyes too big for his pinched
face. But in later years, whenever Renzo gazed into a mirror, it was
his father’s handsome visage he was to see staring back at him:
long, thick, shaggy black hair framing hawkish, strong features—high
cheekbones and a hard, arrogant jaw; intense, molasses-brown eyes
spiked with heavy black lashes and deeply set beneath thick, unruly
raven’s-wing brows; a finely chiseled nose set above a sulky,
frankly sensuous mouth. A mouth that would mock him at those times,
that would curve sardonically at the bitter irony that his own
countenance should so constantly remind him of that other he had
tried so hard to forget.

His
father’s face he bore. But not his father’s name.

That
had come from his Greek-Italian mother—Cassavettes, her maiden
name, one of the few things she had given him, other than life
itself. For like the butterfly that so unwittingly showed Renzo that
day what he might become and, in so doing, set him on the road he was
to take in life, Sofie Cassavettes was a creature who sucked the
nectar from the heart, lush and beautiful in the way of belladonna.
At one time, she had called herself his father’s wife, although
she had held no official claim to that title. But when Renzo’s
father had lain cold, bagged and tagged in the sterile morgue of one
of the big city’s hospitals, she had, once her initial, wild
bout of weeping and wailing had ended, proved quick enough to resume
the name that was her own and to bestow it, as well, upon her son, so
the taint of his father’s life and death would not cause
trouble for them—although trouble of what nature, she hadn’t
said. Afterward, his mother had resumed the frenzied, sluttish
lifestyle his father’s presence had only partially curtailed,
taking a job as a cocktail waitress and dumping Renzo off at all
hours at old Mrs. Fabrizio’s across the hall. Into their own
apartment had come a steady procession of men—each one “Uncle
This” or “Uncle That” to the boy, although he had
known instinctively that they were no real relatives of his. He had
heard them at night, in his mother’s room, in his mother’s
bed, grunting and groaning until she had cried out—a long,
feral shriek that had embarrassed and shamed him, so he had clutched
his pillow over his head in a futile attempt to shut out the terrible
sounds.

A
few weeks ago, awakening from the nightmare of his father’s
death and feeling afraid, Renzo had crept from the lumpy sofa bed in
the shabby living room and sought his mother. Standing at the closed
door of her bedroom, he had called out to her, but she hadn’t
heard. At last, impelled by his fear and by the sudden, overwhelming
temptation of the forbidden, his heart pounding in his small chest,
he had slowly reached out and turned the knob so the door had eased
open a crack. His mother had sprawled naked on her bed, her dark
thighs spread wide, her head thrown back, her mouth open and gasping.
Uncle Vinnie had poised above her, a man-beast thrusting himself
inside her, a part of her. At the sight, a small, choked sob had
inadvertently escaped from Renzo’s throat.