The Bookie's Daughter (19 page)

The Loogie Man nodded his head, temporarily defeated.

“Come on,” Al called to me. “Let’s go home.”

We walked the short distance home in silence, each lost in our own thoughts. I was rather miffed that the Loogie Man was not carted off in handcuffs but knew any further argument with Al on the subject would be fruitless.

Returning to the store, we found my mother, who had been babysitting my youngest cousins, in a tizzy. “What happened? Where have you been? The kids are hungry and want their pizza.” Seeing the blood on Al’s face, she decided to leave the conversation for another time. “Come on kids, let’s go out to eat. You too, Heather.”

“No,” I replied. “I have to help Daddy get the poker tables set up.”

Bonnie looked up at Al. “I’ll expect an explanation tomorrow and I am sure you can set up the game yourself. Heather is coming with us.” Al conceded with a shake of his head and my mother pulled me towards the door.

Returning home later that night, I helped my mother ready my cousins for bed. Desperately needing some alone time to contemplate the day’s events, I then went to prepare a steamy bath. Realizing I had left the book I was reading in the store, I slipped out of the apartment to retrieve the novel. As the poker game in the basement had already started, I did not expect to find anyone on the storefront level. Not wanting to disturb the players below, I quietly unlocked the door and slipped inside. I made my way through the dark, reached beside the cash register, and found my book. Turning to leave, I was startled to hear raised voices coming from the back room.

“No, Al! This is my problem now! That animal doesn’t deserve a sit down! His sins are double: for spitting on your daughter and for striking me. He will pay the price!”

Not wanting to get caught, but curious as to where this conversation was going, I crept closer to the back room door and tripped over a case of soda that had not made its way to the basement. Hearing the crash, my father ripped open the door. “Who’s there?”

Mortified at being discovered, I replied from the dark, “It’s just me, Dad. I came to get my book.” I could hear him whispering as I turned and made a hasty retreat toward the door, quickly slipping out and locking the door behind me.

Back in the apartment, I ran a bath and settled in—novel in hand—for a nice, long soak. A hot bath and a good book were just what I needed. Reading had always been my way of escaping the chaos of life with my parents, and this day’s events needed to be washed away more than most. As was my ritual after extremely high stress days, I would devour one or two books while soaking in the tub for hours on end, hoping to lose myself in someone else’s adventures. This was my way of coping. At least temporarily, it took my mind off the daily stresses of being an Abraham on the Avenue.

The next few months were blissfully free of any further sightings of the Loogie Man. Then one day my mother entered the store wearing a broad smile. “I have some information that may interest you.” There was a look of glee on her freckled face. Settling into a chair behind the sales counter, she imparted the latest news about the Loogie Man.

Although I do not remember the exact details, it centered around a drunken brawl at a Pittsburgh city bar. During the course of the fight, the Loogie Man sustained injuries severe enough to end his dreams of glory on the body building stage. Stunned, I sat and listened as my mother finished her story, knowing the implications and feeling dread in the pit of my stomach.

“Mom, did Dad do this? I wanted the Loogie Man to pay, but this kind of cruelty makes us as bad as him. Daddy always says ‘two wrongs don’t make a right.’ How can I live with someone’s blood on my hands?”

Cool as a cucumber, Bonnie walked over to me and said, “No, you’ve misunderstood. This is what happens to someone who attacks a connected man. Once he threw that punch, his fate was made. He’s lucky to have gotten off so easy. Rest assured he will never bother you again. I just thought you may like to know.”

And that was that.

I have often pondered the events of those few weeks of my thirteenth year. Why me? A few years before, I barely escaped several encounters with Damian Doom, a pedophile, and then came the Loogie Man, a sociopath at the very least. Why did I attract such monsters? I had friends who were prettier and more personable than I was, yet they did not seem to have these problems.

It would be years later that I would realize that part of the answer could be found in the old real estate adage, “Location, location, location.” The location of the family store, the seedy characters that my father’s business attracted, and the countless hours I spent on the street looking for the boys in blue had greatly increased my exposure to such predators. I was not shielded from danger, as most children my age. Instead, I was exposed to all sorts of predators, most of whom found me within a few yards of my home.

I was happy to have the Loogie Man behind me and was still blissfully unaware of the monsters to come. In some ways, my experiences with Damian Doom and the Loogie Man helped to prepare me for a future fraught with danger. As Jeannette’s economy took a sharp downward spin and my father’s gambling addiction led him toward the abyss, the situation at home would deteriorate further. Even seedier characters would be drawn to Clay Avenue. I would find myself reeling from a succession of close encounters with unspeakable monsters to come.

“
We anoint their fuses with a tiny amount of fire, 
and they come alive, playing out their life span in a matter of seconds.

In those few seconds a crack in the universe is opened, 
giving us a glimpse of the energy locked within all matter.”

Bob Weaver

Sleep was something of a scarcity in our house. My mother sat up most nights smoking, watching television, and talking on the phone. She was constant presence in our bedroom, having moved out of the room she had shared with my father years before. Bonnie’s night owl habits made getting the rest we needed next to impossible. As morning approached, she would finally drift off and we would get a few precious hours of rest before having to get up for school, go to work, or make a run with our father. Al’s sleeping habits were just as bad. Unlike his wife, however, Al loved the morning. It afforded an excuse to start the day off with a gigantic breakfast—fuel to face the day’s outrageous adventures, which often began with a run for merchandise.

Runs usually began in the early morning hours between five and six, but if the merchandise was illegal, they could occur at any time during the night. My sister and I made many midnight runs with Al. We became accustomed to the spur-of-the-moment mad dashes to meet up with “night crawlers” or “sneaky thieves,” our code names for the strange creatures who peddled their wares under the cover of darkness.

One such creature, Shemi, would appear at ungodly hours. Sometimes, he would materialize at our apartment door and my father would wake us to unload his van into the store. Other times, Shemi would arrange a meeting in a parking lot of an abandoned business or in a wooded park located on the outskirts of Pittsburgh. Shemi, if that was his real name, was a tiny, nervous man who walked hunched over, not due to a physical ailment but to avoid having to look anyone directly in the eye. Having never seen him in the daylight, I probably would not have recognized him without the glare of the streetlights or moonbeams bouncing off his shiny, bald head. He kept his face in shadow, so I often found myself speaking to the top of his gleaming head, or more specifically, to a strange hairy mole that sat slightly off center from his crown.

Shemi was always looking over his shoulder. He spoke in a strange halting way, almost as if he were making things up as he went along. “You remember me; I’m ah…ah…ah…Shemi. You’re Big Al’s daughter, yes? No…no…no…Don’t tell me your name. Ah…ah…ah…nice to meet you again. Be…be…be…careful with those…ah…boxes. Don’t let anyone…ah…smoke around them. Quickly now, let’s move…this…along…ah…ah…ah…quickly.” Yet, Shemi did not actually have a stutter, as his halting speech would suddenly disappear when bargaining with my father over the value of his questionable merchandise.

Shemi was particularly irritating to my sister who called him a “sneaky thief,” even though both my father and Shemi always denied his merchandise was stolen. Vanessa would ask him straight out where he had stolen the merchandise from, and he would deny the accusation vehemently. “Why don’t you ever come during the day?” Vanessa would ask. Shemi would rock back and forth looking at his feet as if trying to come up with an answer.

I decided that Shemi was either a thief or vampire. Once I asked him which identity he preferred, which infuriated my father. Al would inevitably rescue Shemi from his hostile daughters, ordering us to get to work unloading and reloading the cargo du jour. His merchandise varied, but included shoes, purses, antifreeze, toilet paper, radios, televisions, whisky, shampoo, perfume, laundry detergent, and during the early summer season, my father’s favorite: fireworks.

Shemi’s fireworks were not top shelf and usually fell in the realm of “class C” or consumer fireworks: bottle rockets, Roman candles, firecrackers, fountains, and smoke bombs. We sold volumes of class C fireworks, which moved quickly on the retail market, but my father was always on the lookout for pyrotechnic merchandise with bigger explosive power.

Shemi was a cream puff compared to the ridge runners who created some of the most beautiful and dangerous fireworks money could buy. These self-proclaimed rebels lived in the mountains of West Virginia where, removed from society, they were free to formulate and create their own personalized brand of moonshine, fireworks, and ammunition. A strange and complex family made up mostly of young freckle-faced girls, they ran a contraband empire from atop of their isolated mountain. Most of the time, the Boomer clan would journey to Jeannette to push their wares, but on a few occasions I accompanied my father to their mountain lair.

My first expedition to the Boomer compound began on a steamy spring morning pregnant with the promise of blistering summer months to come. Armed only with a map scribbled on a brown paper grocery bag, Al and I journeyed south into the mountains of West Virginia. After a three-hour ride, we made a final dusty turn at the “ole, gnarly tree stump that looks like a toad,” and came to rest in a small clearing. As instructed during a phone conversation earlier with Captain Morgan Boomer, the patriarch of the Boomer clan, Al blew the horn three times, waited three minutes and repeated. All the while, he tried to suppress his daughter’s fit of hysterics, which began with the weird and wonderful “ole, gnarly tree” directive.

Within minutes of the final triple honk, I heard the low humming of an engine off in the distance. Still caught up in the absurdity of the moment, I exited the car and surveyed the surrounding woods, but found no trail for passage. Barking at me to get back in the car, Al explained that he was given strict instructions not to get out of the car until we made contact.

This, of course, renewed my fit of laughter, but seeing the pleading look on my father’s face, I complied. Returning to the car, I could not help but wonder where the day would lead and what Al had gotten us into, this time.

With the window down, I could hear the sound of an approaching vehicle but still could not discern the direction from which it was coming. Suddenly, a large section of brush began to lift off the ground, unveiling two redheaded teenage girls who looked like the long-lost kin of the Hatfields or the McCoys. Shoeless and dressed in ill-fitting, shorn jeans that barely contained their burgeoning curves, the girls finished clearing the path, which was creatively hidden by brush and vines that had been artfully attached to the camouflaged gateway. The gates did not open sideways as expected but swung up like garage doors to reveal a hidden, dirt “highway.” After clearing the roadway, the teens made their way to our car and greeted Al. My father did not bother with introductions as the girls cut short the greeting and signaled for us to follow them.

As I exited our car, a giant
Mad Max
-like vehicle emerged from the camouflaged gateway. A frame more than an enclosed vehicle, it consisted of a series of steel bars in the shape of a box and its engine was completely visible. It was extraordinarily long and had three rows of makeshift seats. Driving the vehicle was a girl no more than thirteen years old, covered with soot and sweat. A cigarette dangled from her pink lips.