B009XDDVN8 EBOK (30 page)

“You protected me?”

“Not you. Something else.”

“What about our share, man?” said Richie.

“Our share of what, Richie?” said Tony. “It wasn’t your money either.”

“But it sure as hell wasn’t Frenchy’s. If he wants to keep us quiet, he needs to pay.”

“Truth is, I don’t know if there was ever any money to take,” said Tony, looking now at his cigarette as it smoldered. “I always thought my brother made off with it long before, and then called
in the cops to arrest his butt and get him off the street. It’s something he would have pulled. A few years in jail and the rest of his life to spend like a fool, no matter what happened to me. That would explain why he’s disappeared off the face of the earth; he’s spending his cash in every whorehouse in South America.”

“But the guy who is looking for Moretti offered up a reward,” said Richie. “We can split it, Tony. You and me.”

“Blood money, dude.”

“As long as it’s J.J.’s blood,” said Richie.

“Guys like that,” said Tony, shaking his head. “I been around enough to know that guys like that don’t leave loose ends.”

“I can take care of myself,” said Diffendale.

“Like you were taking care of yourself at the bar when Moretti here put a gun in your face? You get guns put in your face enough times, one of them is bound to go off. My advice, Richie, is to forget all about our friend Moretti here. Anything else won’t end well. Now get on home to your wife.”

Richie sneered at me before he stomped out of the room; I pointed my finger at him like the barrel of a gun. Tony shook his head as if saddened at the very state of the human race.

Tony Grubbins was nothing like I had expected after twenty-five years. Sure, he was raw and huge and scarred and imposing, the kind of guy if I saw him in an alley I’d throw my wallet at him and run the other way, but there was something in his manner that I found shocking. As if the hate that had been his defining trait as a boy had somehow been burned right out of him. As if he had somehow evolved, evolved in a way I hadn’t been able to.

“Richie always had issues,” said Tony.

“So why’d you let him hang around with you all those years?”

“Every dog has fleas. What are you doing here, Moretti?”

“Someone killed Augie looking for the money,” I said. “And now they’re coming after me. And my family. I thought you were behind it.”

“And what were you going to do about it?”

“I was going to do something.”

“Die, most likely.”

“Or make a deal.”

“With what? That gun of yours? Do you even know how to shoot it?”

“It’s got a trigger.”

“And a safety, which was on,” said Tony. “And a chamber that needs to be primed, which it wasn’t. That gun was as dangerous as a mug of milk in your hand.”

“Do you really not care about the money?”

He stared at me for a long moment as he finished his cigarette. “Let’s just say if someone did steal it, he did me a favor.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Yeah, well, you didn’t live with my brother. You kick a dog enough, he just lies down and licks your hand and takes it. But when a stranger shows up, he becomes the most vicious son-of-a-bitch watchdog you ever saw.”

“But you’re not that dog anymore,” I said, not a question, instead a puzzled declaration. “If it’s not you, then it’s your brother.”

“How does that follow?”

“They called me Frenchy.”

“Frenchy, huh? Derek would have known you by that name.” Tony leaned forward on the desk, let the smoke wash over his face like a veil. “So,” he said, his hushed voice wide with apprehension, “Derek’s back.”

“You look like the scientist in a Godzilla movie.”

“I feel like I’ve been slugged.”

“Do you have any idea where he is?”

“None.”

“Who would?”

“You don’t want to go there, trust me.”

“I’m running for my life. My family’s in hiding. I don’t have a choice. I need to find your brother.”

“You’re saying all this as if I give a crap. Why on earth would I want to stick a shovel in the dirt and dig my brother up from wherever the hell he’s buried himself?”

“Because he’s doing to me what he did to you.”

“Then do like I did: fix it yourself.”

“I need your help.”

“What you need to do is to go home.”

“You owe me.”

He laughed at that. “What could I possibly owe you?”

“You terrorized me, you beat me up, you threw a football at my face, you scarred my life. You owe me something.”

“I threw a football at your face?”

“You don’t remember?”

“No, but I’m sure you deserved it.”

“And you killed my dog.”

He looked at me, looked down at the desktop, rubbed his beard. “Yeah,” he said finally, “I always felt bad about the dog.”

I
WAS ANGRY
as a scorpion when it all went down,” said Tony Grubbins in his husk of a voice. We were now in his pickup truck, well south of Pitchford, heading deep into the heart of Philadelphia. For some reason Tony had agreed to help me discover where I might find his brother, and I didn’t think it was only because he had killed my dog thirty years before. “I was ripped away from everything I had ever known. For my own good, the judge said. But they couldn’t find a relative willing to take me. So they put me in the group home, where Corky and the Fat Dog found me. First chance I got I stole a cycle and roared out of there.”

“Where were you going?” I asked.

“It didn’t much matter.” He laughed a little. “And once I got there I kept on going. All I had was the anger, but it was better than a truckload of Red Bull at keeping me fueled.”

There was something about this current incarnation of Tony Grubbins that made me doubt one of my most cherished certainties. I never believed that people changed. Their relationships changed, their luck, the size of their investment portfolios or the value of their real estate, even their habits, but the inner person, the continuing monologue that droned on and on through the entirety of a life, that didn’t change—at least mine never did. That’s why we could always recognize the kid in the adult. Richie
Diffendale was still the same owl-eyed brat, Augie had always been the same self-destructive sardonic daredevil, I was the same calculating resentful snit. But this man sitting next to me seemed a living refutation of what I had taken for comforting fact. Simply sitting next to him was disorienting. “What the hell happened to you?” I had asked him, a little amazed. This was his answer.

“And it wasn’t just the things that had been done to me by my brother that caused the anger, it was also the things I had done. I had become as much an animal as he was. That’s what happens when you get beat on every day of your life: you find places to release the pain. In the schoolyard, on the football field, in the backseat of a Chevy with insecure girls. And that’s the way I still was, when, in the middle of the desert, I ran into Nat.”

It was in a bar in Nogales where Tony had beaten the crap out of some migrant who had accidentally caused him to spill his beer. Nat was old and gray and missing half his teeth, but his eyes remained sharp enough to see Tony clear. With the blood still drying on Tony’s hands, Nat pulled him aside, bought him a drink, made a proposition. They were holding unsanctioned prize fights on the other side of the border—no rules, bare fists—and they were looking for Anglos who could take a beating. The money was good, but for Tony the violence was better. He signed on right then, and was in the ring the next night.

It was a raucous crowd of Mexicans and dissolute Americans, all being worked on by bookmakers and prostitutes, by tequila boys moving through the stands and selling shots. The girls parading around the ring with numbered signs indicating the round were topless, the canvas floor of the ring was stained with blood and urine. Fighters came back into the basement dressing room with their noses flattened, their ears hanging, deltas of blood streaming from their foreheads. This wasn’t boxing, this
was cockfighting without the birds, pure barbarism untouched by art. For Tony Grubbins, running from something and running to nothing and angry at the world, it was perfect.

If I’m embellishing, humor me. Tony’s story has expanded and grown in my mind’s eye since first I heard him tell it. I take it out now and then like a golden coin and twist it in my fingers, rub its cold hard surface with my thumb, smile at its shine. For me, it is no longer just this tale I heard in the midst of danger, it is part of me. Every once in a while a story hits so deep it buries itself in your bone.

“Work fast and don’t show fear,” said Nat before the first bell that first night over the border.

“What’s fear?” said Tony.

“Now you’ve got it,” said Nat. His voice was high and scratched with age, the caw of a raven. “Don’t play around in there. Start pounding and don’t stop until you put him down.”

Whatever crimes Derek Grubbins had committed against his brother, he had sure taught Tony how to fight. The first opponent Tony faced was a hard-muscled Mexican with scars on his chest and hate in his eyes. Tony worked him over without an ounce of pity, all while Nat was barking out, “Put him down. Put him down.” Tony busted the Mexican’s nose, smashed him to the canvas with an elbow to the neck, split his head wide open, and then split the purse with Nat. That night he pissed away most of his share in a brothel with a whore named Lita and was good to go the next morning.

After that, Tony and Nat made the circuit, leaving blood and broken bodies in every hectic city or small village they passed through. The mobs that came to see him fight dubbed him El Rubio Salvaje, The Blond Savage. He used to start slow on purpose, hands at his side, letting his opponents hit him at will. He liked to feel the blows to his face, he liked to taste his own blood, he liked to let the hopes of the crowd rise. It put him in the mood to wreak destruction. Then Nat would yell out in that raven’s caw,
“Put him down,” and Tony would do just that. It didn’t matter if the other fighter was bigger or faster or more experienced. Tony was always angrier. He fed off the catcalls and boos that rained down, along with tomatoes and raw eggs, while he meted out his punishment. “Put him down.” Broken ribs. “Put him down.” Broken jaw. “Put him down.” A nose smashed to jelly. Tony goaded the crowds, spit blood at them in the middle of his fights, cursed them in the crude Spanish slang he was learning from the whores. It was glorious.

El Rubio Salvaje.

And then one night in Guaymas, they matched him with a kid who wasn’t a fighter. One look and Tony knew. Nat knew, too. But there was blood to be spilled and a purse to be won. Tony started with his hands by his side, letting the kid hit him, and he barely felt the blows. When Tony finally raised his hands and laid a fist on the kid’s jaw, the kid went down like a sack of rice and Tony raised his arms in angry triumph. But the kid climbed back to his feet and took a swing, wild and unbalanced. Tony hit him again and down the kid went. “
Estancio abajo
,” Tony said to him.
Stay down.
But the kid had something in him, ugly and fierce, just like Tony had something in him, ugly and fierce. The kid climbed up, smiled a bloodied cracked smile, and took another swing.

“The pug’s got heart,” said Nat between rounds.

“But nothing else,” said Tony.

“Put him down.”

“If I finish it, I’ll kill him.”

“Do what you got to do,” said Nat, “but put him down.”

When the bell rang, the kid, both eyes already half-closed, came right out swinging. Tony pushed him away and clocked him at the parting and the kid fell. And then got right back up and came again at Tony. And as Nat was yelling at Tony to put him down, the kid punched Tony in the face.

“So what did you do?” I said.

“I murdered him,” said Tony Grubbins in the truck that night in the dark heart of Philadelphia. “It was like I had no choice. I held him up on the ropes and I beat him to death. Like I wanted to beat my brother to death, or the judge who sent me away, or the cancer that had killed my mother, or you and Augie and Ben, all of Pitchford, all of Pennsylvania, the whole damn country, anyone who had anything to do with my godforsaken life. And when it was over, when he was on the canvas, one leg shaking, and I had climbed the ropes to bellow at the mob, the crowd wasn’t throwing eggs and tomatoes anymore, it was throwing chairs and bottles, knives. And I welcomed it all.”