Witsec (33 page)

We stayed in that damn motel for a month. It was depressing. We got bored. There was nothing to do. No toys. Nowhere to go. Finally, Sal shows up with four marshals guarding him, like he’s some big shot. He said we were going into the witness program. Anna freaked out. She wanted to go back to Brooklyn, but the marshals said we could never go back. We’d be killed. Word on the street was that Tony had a contract out on Sal. Can you imagine what it feels like to know someone is hunting for you and your kids? To know there is someone out there who wants to shoot you? The marshals told us to begin thinking of new names. They said Anna and the Captain were going to be sent somewhere away from us. They told us not to tell each other our new names, but of course I told Anna. Anna was bitter. The marshals told her they’d get her into another beauty school and help her find a job, but she hated Sal for messing up her life. Our last night together, Anna wasn’t talking to Sal, the Captain wasn’t talking to Sal, and I wasn’t talking to Sal. The marshals told us we weren’t supposed to contact each other ever again. If someone on Tony’s crew found us, they’d make us tell where the others were hiding. They
told us we could send letters to each other through them. We were to write our letter, put it inside another envelope, and send it to the marshals so they could open it and forward that letter to the right address. Me and Anna agreed that we would write and tell each other our telephone numbers as soon as we got settled. Of course it was against the rules, but c’mon, did anyone really think we were never going to see each other again?

The next morning, they left first. I hugged my granddad and kissed Anna, and John cried because she took her dog with her. That mutt and John had become good pals. I didn’t know how I felt. I had been taken from my home and now I was saying goodbye to my sister and grandfather. We weren’t leaving until the next day. Sal wanted to make love that night after the kids were asleep. I told him to forget it. All I could think about was what is going to happen to us and what a jerk he was for getting us into this mess.

N
ot far from where we was staying, there were two white towers. I asked Sal, “What are those?” They didn’t have windows so I knew they weren’t apartments. Sal says maybe they’re missile silos because he’d heard there was an Air Force base just outside town and the government had missiles hidden in silos all over the state. Sal asked someone and it turned out they were grain elevators. Right in the middle of the city—grain elevators! That’s how out in the sticks we were! We went for a car ride and I said, “Hey, you know something, there’s no subway here!” We both laughed. I mean, we’d seen the entire city in thirty minutes! Sal says to me: “I didn’t see any Italian restaurants neither. How we going to eat?” There was a white-haired man standing in the hotel wearing cowboy boots and this big silver belt buckle. I said to Sal, “Sal, that’s an Indian, a real Indian.” He didn’t believe me because the only Indians he’d seen was at the movies and they didn’t look like that, but I asked the clerk and it was one.

Me and Anna knew there was deputies listening to our telephone conversation so we didn’t say nothing about where we was. Anna says the Captain is really getting depressed. Someone had broke into his house in Brooklyn and spray-painted the word “snitch” on the front door in big red letters. When the Captain got on the phone, it was like he didn’t care about nothing. He didn’t even ask me about the kids. It was so sad. I told him he had to sell his house because the government wasn’t going to help him buy another one unless he sold the first one first. “Angel,” he says—that’s what he always called me since when I was little—“I was born in my house. Your mother was born there, too. How can I sell it? It’s got too many memories.” He asked me if I thought he was going to be able to move back home after all this trouble with Tony blew over and I said, “Yeah, why not? I’m sure you can move home,” and he seemed upbeat about that. I’m sure I made the deputies mad, but the Captain, he was almost eighty. I felt he needed something to look forward to, you know? It wasn’t like they could put him in jail or toss him out into the street if he kept his house. Besides, it was their problem, not mine.

It killed me not to be able to be there. I felt all this relocation trauma caused the stroke and I blamed Sal. It was no different from putting a gun to the Captain’s head and pulling the trigger. My last memory of him was him getting into a car with deputies at that lousy motel on the beach and me and the kids waving goodbye. He left everything he owned to me and Anna, but we had different last names now—all legally changed—so probate was complicated, especially since the deputies had to keep our new names a secret. The Captain left some certificates of deposit but we couldn’t cash them because we couldn’t prove we was related to him. Imagine, not being able to prove your grandfather is really your grandfather. The deputies didn’t know what to do either. I did get my great-grandmother’s wedding ring. Anna had it sent to me through the deputies and that meant a lot to me.

I thought the deputies had destroyed the pictures because they told us we couldn’t take anything from our past, you know, like my high school diploma. I was upset
and cried. I had no pictures of my mom and dad but the deputy says, “Oh well, it’s a good thing really, Someone might recognize them.” I thought that was the stupidest comment I’d ever heard. Who in Rapid City, South Dakota, is going to see a picture of my two dead parents and recognize them? I wondered how he’d have felt if it was a picture of his parents.

In Brooklyn, we used only cash. Nobody in Tony’s crew had a checking or savings account in a bank. The IRS could use those records to keep track of how much money you had. Sal kept cash in his pocket and I kept cash hidden around the house. Sal used to tell me not to bother hiding it because no one with any brains was going to rob us in Brooklyn. They knew what would happen to them. The deputy took us down to this bank in Rapid City and showed us how to use bank accounts. I was watching Sal and the whole time we was in this bank, he isn’t paying any attention to the deputy. He is checking out the security. I thought he was going to rob the place right then. A judge had changed our names but we still didn’t have new birth certificates or any permanent identification or Social Security cards with our new names, but this deputy talked to the bank manager and took care of it somehow. I had trouble at first remembering my new last name. Anytime anyone asked me a question about where I was from or something personal, I would freeze and not know what to say. Of course, it was easy for Sal. Oh, lying, it came easy to him.

All Sal did was complain. I was used to being home with the kids, okay, but he was useless. The kids got on his nerves. Back in Brooklyn, Sal would go out every night to different clubs and restaurants to meet with Tony and his crew. Every night except Sunday, usually. Sal didn’t know how to sit at home with his family watching TV. What bugged him the most was no respect, you know, being a nobody. In Brooklyn, if Sal walked into a restaurant, the owner came running up to say hello. There was no standing in line for Sal, and Sal never ever made a reservation. Not him. He was too important. Out in Rapid City, he was a nobody. He hated it. I got him to go with me and the kids to this real nice Catholic church once. There was a big air force base outside town so it wasn’t like the people in Rapid City had never met anyone from New York or New Jersey. Even so, Sal really stuck out. He was wearing gold chains and he liked to keep his shirt unbuttoned because he had a big, strong, hairy chest. These people were cowboys, you know, quiet and conservative. His entire personality didn’t fit with the place. Sal says to me one night: “If I had some of Tony’s crew here, we could run this city, but what would we have? Two goddamn grain elevators.” I laughed but I was having a tough time, too. I missed Anna, and to be honest, I was bitter and angry at Sal. I blamed him for busting up my family and he resented my attitude. He’d say, “Hey, you knew who I was before you married me so don’t come crying to me now.”

One afternoon I decided it was time for me to get over it. I was feeling bad for myself, I wasn’t really there for the kids. I said to myself, “This can be an opportunity.” I kept telling myself that. Me and Sal could live like ordinary people. I met this girl, Carol, at the grocery store. Our kids were the same ages. She and her husband, Dan, were good people. Dan liked to fish and he
invites Sal and John to go with him. Now, Sal had never even held a fishing pole. They go up to this creek in the mountains and Sal can see the fish swimming around but he can’t catch any. He gets so mad, he throws the pole at them! Dan falls down because he is laughing so much. Later, Sal catches one and he was like a little kid. He comes running in to show me this slimy, dead fish. Dan cleans it and we had this fish fry. It was a good time. I thought, “Hey, maybe this will work.”

T
hings got better in Rapid City once Sal started flying back to Brooklyn to testify. He’d come home and tell me what he did. He’d say, “I looked them bastards right in the face when I was testifying. I didn’t blink. When they bring Tony in, I’m going to point my middle finger at him and really get him good.” Sal would tell me he was lying about some things he testified to in court but he wasn’t worried at all about getting caught. For him, it was payback time and he wanted to please the prosecutors. He’d tell me how he and these FBI agents were making this case. It was “we” this and “we” that. All of his life he hated cops and now he’s acting like one. I said, “Sal, there isn’t any ‘we.’ These prosecutors and cops—you think one of them is going to give a damn about you once you finish talking? They ain’t gonna remember your name.” He got all pissed off. He says, “Why you trying to put me down?” Then he walked out the front door. I didn’t know where he was going. He’d stay out all night. I didn’t care. I’d call my sister, Anna. [The two had exchanged telephone numbers in violation of the WITSEC rules.] But she was very bitter about our grandfather dying and she sorta blamed me because I was married to Sal. She was doing okay without me. The deputies had gotten her into a beauty school in Philadelphia.

I began spending more time with my friend Carol, but she made me nervous, too. You don’t realize how much you talk about your past until you don’t have one to talk about. We’d be talking away about something, maybe guys we had dated, and I would have to catch myself because I was about to say something about Brooklyn. Like innocent things would throw you off, you know. I felt sure she knew I was lying sometimes. The deputy told us to say we were from Camden, New Jersey, because people out West wouldn’t know the difference between it and Brooklyn. One day Carol says, “I’ve heard of Camden because they make Campbell’s soup there.” I didn’t know. I had to go down to the library and read about Camden. We told everyone Sal was a warehouse foreman because no one knew what a warehouse foreman did. Sal could bullshit anyone anyway. It was our son, John, who scared me because he was too little to understand. When he turned five, Carol and her kids came over for a party and John and Carol’s son begin wrestling and suddenly I hear John saying, “My daddy is going to kill your daddy. He’s been in jail and a real sheriff comes to our house and gives us money.” I grabbed him and made him say he was sorry and then I said something about how he was watching too much television.